Teach Secondary Issue 13.4

EveryBody (MollyForbes,Bloomsbury,£14.99) It’s hard to shake the sense of unease that comes fromseeing the growing popularity in recent years of self-help books and lifestyle guides aimed at adolescents. It’s a pointed reminder that formany reasons, today’s kids really aren’t alright – but perhaps we should be grateful that there are informed experts prepared to acknowledge the complex struggles teens now face in themodern world and provide friendly roadmaps. Body image is an area that Forbes can certainly speak to, as founder of the Body HappyOrganisation community interest company and an organiser of body image workshops in schools across the country. Every Body sees Forbes provide her teenage readers with a comprehensive, yet approachable overview of the various issues tangled upwith body image over the course of nine chapters, touching on matters relating to confidence, bodily autonomy and personal boundaries with an engaging and reassuring authorial voice. Given the potential scope of its subject matter, Forbes does a good job of keeping her advice focused and grounded – even when, as in a chapter titled ‘Filtered Body’, she ventures into areas relating to technology use andmedia literacy that could easily formthe basis of dedicated volumes aimed at the same audience. Howdidyoudecideon the eight ‘learning failures’youdiscuss in thebook? I spent a good deal of time exploringwhat issues weremost common in schools and speaking to leaders, teachers, as well as digging into relevant research evidence. In truth, it wasn’t too difficult to select the eight most common failures. Pupils strugglingwith gaps in their background knowledge, not workingwell independently or lacking motivation are all long-standing problems. Doyou seeany indication that attitudes and discussions around failure in schools are improving? Schools and teachers have always had the scrutiny of accountability looming over them, whichmeans that sharing failures isn’t commonly supported or rewarded.Andyet, I think everyone now recognises the teacher recruitment and retention crisis, and that we really need to care and support the teachers we have. Being honest and supportive of the challenges of the job,while helping teachers understand howto quickly overcome failures, offers the double bonus of creatingmore supportive environments for teachers and also increasing the number of pupils succeeding.We aremaking progress. Didwriting thebookcauseyou to reappraise anyaspects ofyourownpractice? I endlessly considermypastmistakes and failures. I think of pupils I taught over the years a lot – where are they now?What could I have done differently, or better?Abig realisation whenwriting the bookwas that I didn’t have the best understanding of howto develop pupils’motivation. Crucially, I knownow just howunprepared I was to teach high needs pupils.Whenwriting about attention in the book, and exploring issues for pupils withADHD, for example, I realised just howmany small failures I could have prevented, and howmany small, but valuable successes I could have supported. Ifyoucouldchangeoneaspect of the schools accountabilitysystem, whatwould it be? Professions likemedicine or aeronautics have systems for exploring and fixing failures.After an air accident,you open the ‘black box’, explore the issues and ultimately learn from them. In education,we don’t dare talk about what goes on inside our black boxes. I thinkwe could evolve an accountability systemthat balances creating safe schools with the equal priority of supporting schools.We should look to improve, and notmerelyprove. AlexQuigley is a former teacher,author, educationconsultant andheadofcontent andengagement at theEducation Endowment Foundation; formore information,visit theconfidentteacher.com ON THE RADAR Meet the author ALEX QUIGLEY LikeaGirl (RebeccaWestcott,Scholastic,£8.99) The pitchmight be ‘deputy headteacher writes hard-hitting YAnovel about the dangers social media presents to teens’, but this is no exercise in finger-wagging sermonising over storytelling.Our first-person narrator is taciturnY9 running enthusiast Eden,who crosses the radar of three of the most popular girls in school and is challenged to perpetrate a series of pranks on her classmates – and if she doesn’t? She becomes the target.The book ably conveys the love/hate relationship teens have with social media, the vernacular and back-and- forth rhythms of whichWestcott vividly captures in her frequent uses of transcript text. Based in part on a survey of teens’ online experiences, it’s a novel built around some perennial YA touchstones – severed friendships, personal betrayals, simmering resentments – but which grapples with the messy, complex realities of very online adolescence in a clear-eyed, non- judgemental and thought-provoking way. WhyLearningFails (AndWhatTo DoAbout It) (AlexQuigley,Routledge,£9.99) You don’t have to go far these days to find people angrily condemning some aspect of the education profession for its failings.These criticisms can span the ideological spectrum, targeting policymakers right down to frontline practitioners, andwill often descend into a fruitless railing against wider systems and pressures beyond anyone’s control – even the government’s.What makes Why Learning Fails so appealing is Quigley’s determination to cut through the noise and hone in what can be done to repair and strengthen the business of teaching and learning in schools right now , through recourse to research evidence and suggested changes in daily practice. Structured around eight chapters, each dedicated to a specific ‘learning failure’ (including ‘Patchy prior knowledge’ and ‘Faulty planning strategies’), there’s an rich array of elegantly presented insights, practical advice and revelatory lightbulbmoments packed into its 162 pages. 45 teachwire.net/secondary B O O K R E V I E WS