Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

when they work with a good coach, (2) when they have the chance to collaborate and (3) when time and care is spent choosing the best among them to become educational leaders in their own right.
    I don’t think anyone could argue with such findings when looking at the current paradigm. A teacher, a classroom, a class of children. If this is the way you work then, in the spirit of the way I am asking questions of you in this book, to what extent are you developing as a professional to be the very best professional you can be? Do you demand of your senior management team the very best INSET they can offer you? Do you walk out when it is below par, when you have a ‘guess speaker’ (that is to sayyou have to try and work out what they are on about) and demand your money back or do you sit there muttering under your breath as you do your marking? Do you keep yourself up to date with educational research, much of which could or should be related to neuroscience? Do you demand the opportunity – and seize it when it happens – to work collaboratively whenever possible? Do you make the most of every opportunity to both coach and be coached?
    But that is all to do with the current way of looking at education. What about, in keeping with the title of this book, the new way of looking at the setting up of the educational system? What about the nature of schools themselves? What about the physical architecture of them? Are you contributing to the debate – and the growing number of examples of good practice – about empowering students to be less reliant on knowledgeable teachers as the source of their learning? Are your students able to, allowed to and encouraged to, use technology to become independent learners in your classroom, not to mention use it as a means of bypassing the class teacher who is not up to scratch, who is part-way through what the McKinsey report refers to as ‘40 years of poor teaching’? Bear in mind, too, that the report found that students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are ‘twice as likely’ to end up with a teacher with less than three years’ teaching experience compared to their richer neighbours. This is where Web 2.0 innovations such as Curriki 9 can help, online resources from the best teachers in the world made available to all teachers in the world and all for free.
    When I was a tutor, my students were all complaining about the quality of teaching offered by their English teacher who was, by anyone’s standards, a remarkably awful teacher. All I could do was to encourage them to do whatever they could to bypass her in order to access the learning they needed in order to pass their GCSE examination. But this was in the early nineties and it was easier said than done. With the advent of the newly wired-up society, the democratization of knowledge and the growing pressure to democratize learning, there is no reason why this could not be achieved today. We will always need great teachers because they inspire us in as many ways as they teach us. But we no longer need to accept poor quality ones. I met a teacher in Northern Ireland once who spent an entire lunchtime telling me how great his colleagues were at teaching but for these awful children who just ‘weren’t learning’. (My guess that he was the rep for the biggest teaching union proved to be correct, by the way.) This is what I call the ‘crap trap’, that it’s not me doing badly, it’s them. But, as we explored earlier, your job isn’t to teach them, your job is that they learn. For every handful of teachers telling us why these children just won’t learn, there is always one just getting on and doing it, bringing thebest out of the same young people and doing it wonderfully. Bill Gates said recently, on the subject of teachers:
    We need to give all teachers the benefits of clear standards, sound curriculum, good training and top instructional tools. But if their students still keep falling behind they are in the wrong line of work and they need to find another job.
    (
Fortune
, 18/12/08)
    Poor teachers do damage as they fail in the job they are being paid for. But the good ones, they change everything. What’s more, the future of the world depends on them. That’s why I need a teacher when I’ve got Google.

Postface
    Education isn’t everything. For a start, it isn’t an elephant.
    (Spike Milligan)

Bibliography
    Abbot, J. and Ryan, T. (2000)
The Unfinished Revolution: Learning, Human Behaviour,