I like to think that I can decipher the room a bit more professionally and from the three rooms I could see into, there was almost no ICT or evidence of it visible. Instead the rooms displayed the top three indicators that someone somewhere had given up inspiring students, and instead settled,(Probably not without a fight) for processing them instead.
If you have at least two of these in your room, is it time to change?
1: The immaculate project pages covering a whole wall by a student from at least 3 years ago which sets an impossibly high standard for all the others, and inevitably involved them spending many many times the allotted hours on their coursework, just to achieve that last 10% of marks. Why we parade these 'perfect' projects I do not know, they set an impossibly high bar for the average student and emphasise the prettiness of work over its function to inform. A decade ago an exam board told me that fancy borders gained no marks anymore, yet the person they sent round to assess some students work that year in a school I visited, waxed lyrically over a similar project by a student, condemning another years cohort to hours of wasteful decoration on an already tight timetable.
2: The poster which came with Blueprint or another technology magazine, usually showing a cutting edge or classic piece of design. Blutak'd to a wall, it is pointed to for inspiration but forms no coherent part of a display, has no further explanation and usually no student inspired work branching from it. Favourites are the Charles Eames Lounger or classic chairs, The London Underground Map and cutaways of the 'new' Mini. Hanging forlornly they're yellowing edges communicate much more than their intended message. Dyson posters, a product of extreme levels of design, prototyping and state of the art manufacture utterly unavailable in schools, are becoming a new category of these iconic wall hangings
3: A selection of badly made, poorly designed projects which needed a bit more effort and thought but have become part of the carousel of experience. Nowadays this is often a token electronics project, represented by two pieces of hardboard screwed at right angles to each other with a 'steady hand game' hot glued to it, behind a hand written background
Some will find this post depressing, thinking that I am unaware of the lot of teachers, the tests and timetables and issues involved in modern teaching seem to become more onerous every year, but think about why you went into teaching! Perhaps tidying those books, refreshing those posters, changing those projects a little could change your attitude and working environment as much as your students... and would that be a bad thing?
