The tyranny of the exercise book

One of the things I’ve loved about being aware of the online education world is the number of sacred cows that have been demolished over the last decade or so. Multi-coloured pen marking! Ka-pow! Learning Styles! Splat! Getting to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy as quickly as possible! Thump!

So, with that in mind, I’m going to vent a bit about exercise books.

Exercise books have become a key component of the de-skilling of the profession over the last 10 years or so, in my view. Increasingly, they have become a tool to control teachers rather than just a place where students do their work. Many of the other idiotic policies that still permeate a large number of schools all rely on the exercise book, and they have become a huge distractor from the core business of good teaching and learning.

I am not saying we need to get rid of exercise books. Far from it — they are still by far the most efficient tool (in terms of cost and practicality) for students to use to complete their work. I have blogged before that I really like booklets, but my reprographics budget can’t handle all that printing (so we are going to back to exercise books with slimmed down booklets that are more akin to a textbook). What I do think needs to happen is that their importance in the learning process needs to be de-emphasised.

In my time as a teacher, the ‘book scrutiny’ has become a key part of Quality Assurance processes and Appraisal judgements and so on. It has been decided that exercise books can show us many, many things, including:

· How much progress a student has made over time.

· How effective and how high quality a teacher’s marking and feedback is.

· How students have reflected on their work and then improved it (DIRT).

· The quality of the taught curriculum.

· How much students care about their work (e.g. via presentation or ‘book pride’).

This has led to teachers treating exercise books as though they are something to show an outside observer, rather than something that is between the student and the teacher. The exercise book has become more important for the senior manager, than it has for the two people with the most input into what goes into it.

We’ve seen some daft policies emerge as a result of this. For example:

DIRT completed in different coloured pens.

The idea of a student acting on feedback to improve their work isn’t in itself a bad idea at all. The problem is that we now have a race to prove that we have done this, by making the student do the DIRT in a different coloured pen. That then means the goal is to ensure that there is as much of the different coloured pen in the exercise book as possible, rather than worrying that the improvements requested have taken place. Even the senior manager isn’t that bothered — the Assistant Head with a Maths background line managing the Geography Department is just looking for lots of the different coloured pen, not the quality of improvement of the work on rock formations. We’ve got them to redraft the exam question we did badly, after we told them the answers, and, hey presto, they’ve improved the work! Doesn’t matter that we need to get them ready for the exam which has previously unseen questions, of course! I’m pretty sure that a lot of the time spent doing DIRT would be far better spent actually just teaching the kids stuff.

Lots of time wasted by students gluing templates, or feedback sheets, or other bits of paper into student books.

We want to show that we are doing more than just ‘answer some questions based on this bit of text’, so we put the questions into some visually attractive boxes to make it look like we’ve done a jazzy task. We want to give the impression we’re doing different sorts of feedback, so we make them all stick in lists of targets which they then highlight the correct one of, even though the targets themselves are fairly banal or meaningless to the student. The sheets being stuck into a book become the evidence the teacher needs to prove to their senior manager that they are doing x, y and z. Even better is when you’ve forgotten to trim the sheets in advance so the students faff around a bit longer cutting tiny slivers of paper off so they fit the exercise book which is not quite A4 size, and then you get the confetti on your floor at the end of the lesson. Even things like the title and the date get obsessed over — even worse is when this is then picked up by senior managers and book scrutinies because they can’t think of anything else to give feedback on. I’d be fascinated to see the extent of correlation (especially for boys) between the presentation quality of exercise books and the quality of the GCSE grades attained.

Furthermore, and I’ve really noticed this since going to booklets, how much time was I wasting before standing at the photocopier printing out 4 sheets per lesson sometimes and then chopping them down to the right size. And then you’ve forgotten one that you needed to print out! Or you’ve left them in the office — which is of course is a real risk in our current world of revolving classrooms. I dread to think how many hours I have spent over the last few years standing at the photocopier.

Obsessing over work presentation rather than work quality and content.

Don’t get me wrong, we need to be able to read the students’ work. However, I’m convinced that focusing on presentation of work tends to be one of the things that causes problems for boys in many of our secondary school classrooms (I don’t know why it is, I just perceive that the average boy has worse presentation and handwriting than the average girl). So many students spend so much time on the presentation of their books when they’d be better off focusing on the quality of the work. Some students get really fussy about crossing things out and making mistakes, that they’d rather leave the mistakes in than cross it out and start again. But, hey, guess what, thinking is messy — especially if you’re being given suitably challenging work! We need to be better able to cope with scruffy work in my view. I also think we over-rate how important student books are to their own revision. I’m not saying they aren’t useful to some students — but for many, especially those who are lower attaining, they are far better using a well curated revision resource prepared by the teacher, rather than relying on their own notes from maybe a year or two ago. I mean, how many Year 11 students actually still have their old Year 10 exercise books (or Year 9 if you’re a three year Key Stage 4)?

I guess my point is that the exercise book has become a giant proxy for things we think we can see, or that we’d like to see, but can’t. All we can see are proxies for learning, like task completion, rather than actual learning in the long-term. Task completion, however, does not necessarily equate to good grades. I just feel like that because exercise books are something that can be easily controlled by ‘outsiders’ to your classroom, whether that be senior managers or OFSTED, they have become a substitute for focusing on the things that really matter to school improvement, like investing in your teachers’ CPD, or sorting out issues around low-level disruptive behaviour. It’s much easier for managers to say students aren’t achieving well because DIRT isn’t happening (which is the teacher’s fault) rather than because behaviour in the school is average-to-poor.

Exercise books have become the responsibility of the teacher so much that many are afraid to let those books go home for fear that they’ll never come back, and that they’ll start to have gaps in them that might be picked up on in work scrutinies of the future. This to me seems perverse and means that the responsibility that students have for their own learning has further reduced.

The COVID crisis has meant we have to do things differently. In many ways this has been highly welcome, even if it really shouldn’t take a deadly global pandemic to bring this thinking about. Maybe we should think about whether students should use folders and lined paper, rather than books. Maybe we should say to teachers, ‘stop photocopying things for kids to stick in — it doesn’t make much difference for the time spent doing it!’ Maybe there’s a wellbeing win to say to teachers that they no longer need to worry about the demoralising stack of exercise books sat in the boot of the car staring at you over the half-term holidays. Particularly now, as we move to more online platforms for the submission of work and we have to deal with significantly worse student attendance meaning exercise books become even patchier, we need to start moving on from thinking the exercise book is the be all and end all of student learning.