Teacher knows best
Anastasia De Waal, 9 April 2010
Prospective teacher x is promptly ushered from one panel of judges to another. And as if his day couldn’t get any worse, this panel of spotty-faced teenagers sitting slumped in oversized armchairs whilst sharpening their fangs on the edge of Key Stage 3 geography textbooks, would rather hear about favourite TV programmes and base their decisions seemingly exclusively on aesthetics.
This is the result of a 1990s initiative to cultivate a “student voice,” and boy can we hear them now.
Having sat on a pupil interview panel some ten years ago, I relished the responsibility of posing grueling questions to nervous NQTs. But, whilst I practiced my interview technique, the quivering wreck sat opposite was slowly undermined. My pick of the candidates didn’t end up working at the school, and I resented being taught by someone I had previously written-off as unqualified. With hindsight I realise my criteria were unfair. To be quite honest I was hoping Tony Robinson would walk through the door of my history classroom, Rolf Harris take my art classes and a David Beckham look-a-like accept the P.E post. Interviewing would-be teachers is a privilege I shouldn’t have been afforded.
Student opinion panels for teacher interviews run the risk of undermining the authority of teachers before they’ve even met their tutor group and taught their first lesson.
At their annual conference last weekend, the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (Nasuwt) accused schools of trying to ‘democratise’ the relationship between teachers and children. Sadly exercises in pupil playacting are one of a number of child-centered approaches that destabilize the very idea of the teacher and their function within a school: to teach. Instead of playing a never-ending game of catch-up with the changing demands of children, teachers should be curious characters, their role in the school should be specific and stable and they should remain, even if answering the questions, in charge.
By Annaliese Briggs
Surely your experience just shows that your panel wasn’t given appropriate training or terms of reference. Your school didn’t educate you properly before throwing you in to a very difficult and sensitive situation.
Involving pupils in the interview process isn’t about democracy, it’s about education and management (democracy involves power and pupils have no power in this situation, the decision is taken by adults). As you said, you learnt something from the experience (even without adequate preparation), and the school should have learnt something too: the views of one of the key groups the candidate will have to interact with. You would hope the adult interview panel also discussed with the candidates how they felt about the pupil interview panel and that these answers would be revealing of how self-aware candidates are about how students perceive them.