Targets

Good shot! Right in the bullseye; you’ve killed it.

Group targets, table targets, individual
targets, planning targets, targets displayed
on the wall and sticky target labels
on evidence folders (Breath slowly now!).

All Learning Intentions and Success Criteria
should be differentiated and linked
to individual pupil targets.
And recorded as ‘I can…’ and

‘What I will do next’ statements
after review at the end of the lesson
in Reflection Time.
Teachers should provide pupils

with target bookmarks and
little cardboard bracelets of targets
in the off chance their targets,
God forbid!, slip from their minds.

All this helps our infants formulate their
‘What I have learned’ statements:
What have I done, How did I do it,
How do I know, What will I do next.

How can I improve?
How can I improve?
Take that question into therapy
at seven years old!

Good practice indicates that teachers
should produce interim targets
for children’s learning, and share
these targets openly

in a variety of ways
that will be ‘meaningful for them,’
which last statement I presume to mean
that we finally arrive at the butts.

There is a methodology using targets
that is capable of reviving
those children lost to childhood;
Let’s start at 20 lb draw and see how it goes.

My father always taught me to put myself into the body of the bow, and not pull with the arms as the French or Italians do.

Shirley Clarke: Specialist in Failure

also specialising in bad haircuts this
multi-millionaire purveyor of misery through
educational trickery passed off as excellence
and sold to the most gullible, our HTs
and Directors of Education.

Familiar to our monkey ancestors
a simple idea of assessing your pupils
and here fashioned into a club which
with simian enthusiasm she
and her troop batters us

into submission again and again
and….again; books, videos,
training programmes and lecture tours
all nicely costed to ensure
her stash targets are met

without doubt proven excellence
in cashing in.

It’s cleverly done, the careful editing
in good old Church of England schools
the willing stooges parroting their faith
to get on the curve and in Shirley’s good
books,.. and payroll.

Her story; starts off as a good idea
but then seeing the coin to be made
selling universal elixir and fake treasure maps
to simpleton councils and HTs
she quickly morphed,

as they all do, into a 100%
fake reformer, naturally on joining
that gang of freebooting captains
she became a government adviser;
no more proof needed then!

Granted, she knows her snake oil
from her hair dye bottle
but this knowledge alone does not explain
the success of her travelling fair
depending, as it does, on everyone else’s failure.

For this confidence trick to work
years of training are required in
undermining teachers’ confidence
in their own skills and judgement.
Reduced to tears

and maxxed out working memory
piling insecurities atop each other
provides the guarantee that no-one
will have the bottle to call time
on this smirking pied piper

unless and until, as you will be,
finally cornered by the snapping hounds
of endless assessment and ever improving
attainment, and unable to multi-task
yourself out of the coming

mental shredding
you lash out in desperation:
Shirley, you’ve done your job on me.
I don’t know whether I’m coming or going
and accept I’m rubbish at teaching.

Now, get the f… out of my classroom!