Like many trainee teachers in the latter 2000s, I was forced to watch Sir Ken Robinson’s ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ clickbait TED Talk.
“Of course schools kill creativity,” we are expected to chorus with gleeful anti-intellectualism. “Aren’t maths and English dreadful?”
He tells the story of choreographer Gillian Lynne, who in the 1930s was taken to a doctor due to fidgeting at school. The doctor observed this little girl dancing to the radio and declared: “She is a dancer! Take her to a dance school.”
When I hear that now, I am horrified. The doctor figure, and Sir Ken, and all of us who credulously bought into that story, are complicit in limiting children to one thing: the thing they can already do.
There are clear echoes in attitudes that disadvantaged students aren’t worth supporting with GCSE resits. As though a sixteen year old’s fate is sealed.
In my youth, nobody ever declared that I was a dancer. Teachers looked at the bespectacled asthmatic with the weird hair, reading about dragons and said, “He is a nerd!”
Uncoordinated, clumsy and weak, it wasn’t worth teaching me to be better at PE. But all these years later I am making time for dance almost every day, and I’m very slowly improving.
How that happened is completely applicable to those we might otherwise write off from ever enjoying or being good at English and maths.
When I traded the 20,000 steps per day of teaching for the vegetative existence of a civil servant, I invested in Just Dance – a video game that tracks your movement, awarding points for matching the routine on screen.
Even though I was very, very bad at it, it was still fun. I kept at it.
GCSE resits can learn a lot from Just Dance.
When I first loaded it up, Just Dance didn’t force me into an initial assessment and then limit me to ‘Baby Shark’, it encouraged ambition.
The game is a master of modelling and aspiration. As you play, you mimic the professional dancer on screen, and imagine that your skill, rhythm and athleticism are a mirror of what you’re seeing, which they almost certainly are not.
It is exactly how students should see resit teachers: exemplifying confident, joyful expertise in English and maths and inspiring them to follow.
The game is a master of modelling and aspiration
Just Dance uses praise at every opportunity and refines marginal gains into an addictive motivator. Every day I find myself chasing new high scores on tracks I’ve been dancing to for years. There’s always something to celebrate.
We need to capture that unrelenting focus on praise and progress in resits classrooms. It might not be practical to set off actual pyrotechnics every time a student stretches themselves, but authentic praise from an enthusiastic teacher will feel like fireworks to them.
Over time in Just Dance, you progress through something approximating attainment grades for each song, from ‘one star’ through to ‘Megastar’. I didn’t see the glittery pink of Megastar in my whole first year with the game. Now I’m disappointed when I don’t see it.
Which isn’t to say it’s suddenly easy. I’ve still only scored a grade 3 (stars) on C’mon by Ke$ha, despite probably sweating more than the pro in the panda suit on screen. What’s worse is that in my absolute favourite, I wanna dance with somebody, I fail one of the special moves every single time.
Let me admit something else. At a work social not long ago, that song came on. I did not leap onto the empty dance floor. This is not a movie.
We don’t need to expect that of resits either. Getting a student to boogie their way from a grade U to a 1 and have a good time is sometimes what resits is. So too is the student two-stepping their way from a low 3 to a high 3 with an attitude that says “I’ll get ’em next time”.
So I’ll keep returning to Whitney Houston, day after day. I don’t see it as “torture”, or even as “demoralising”.
It keeps me engaged, it builds my confidence, and I’ll keep making progress until I smash it. That is what resits should be.
Ahaaaaa but, (to absolutely batter this metaphor into the ground) if Just Dance had been teaching what you *need* to dance, rather than just mindlessly repeating the same “steps” over and over again, then you **would** have got on to the dancefloor because you would have been confident enough to do so. All you’ve done here is get good at a repetitive but otherwise meaningless task, you haven’t learned how to apply it in (for want of a less awful phrase) the real world. Just Dance is the perfect metaphor for GCSE resits, but not like you think, my friend!