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Authoritarian Men, Changing Minds On Marking, and Our Winners!

2 March 2020

1. Why are men less positive about restorative justice?

This week we couldn’t help noticing that male teachers were a little less positive about restorative justice approaches within behaviour management policies.

First up, they were more likely to feel restorative justice is unhelpful in keeping schools free of disruption.

…And male teachers were more likely to express negative views about restorative justice approaches – with a much stronger belief that it undermines teacher authority and worsens teacher-pupil relationships.

These gender differences reminded us that male teachers have often expressed more authoritarian views about behaviour policies when we have asked other behaviour questions in the past.

For example, they are more like to believe in no-excuses behaviour policies or to sanction pupils for not doing homework or being late.

But is this just because male teachers are more likely to be in secondary schools or are more likely to be senior leaders? To check, we created a single score for how authoritarian each teacher appears to be based on 11 questions we’ve asked about behaviour management beliefs.

This allows us to see whether male teachers still have a more authoritarian stance towards behaviour, even after we’ve controlled for their other teacher characteristics.

We ran a test (a regression) to see if the male-female difference still held, even when controlling for age, seniority, experience, subject, phase and demographics of school.

The result? Gender still has an effect on the likelihood of a teacher having an authoritarian attitude once other characteristics are held equal, but the effect is only about half as large.

It’ll be no surprise to most of you that primary teachers are FAR less authoritarian than secondary teachers. But you might be intrigued to know that maths secondary teachers are more authoritarian in their stance than any other subject!

For those interested: the full results of this poll are here.

2. Have teachers changed their mind about marking?

Last week, we asked two questions to find out how teachers feel about marking.

First, we asked how much you would mark if no-one were monitoring you. Since 2017, this is our fourth time of asking this question and each time a few more teachers are prepared to admit that they wouldn’t mark anything, if all that mattered was managing pupil attainment and your own workload. (This isn’t because our sample is changing – the shift occurs even if we restrict the sample to those who answered on all four occasions.)

Primary teachers were by far the least likely to say they would carry on doing all the marking they currently do – suggesting they are under the most pressure from external forces to mark work which they think is pointless.

What’s most striking is that only 12% of teachers said they would do no marking if given a free choice, yet 44% of teachers think that if they didn’t write any comments in student books, then pupils would still learn just as much anyway!

If this is true: why wouldn’t more teachers stop marking?!

Do share thoughts on social media (we are @teachertapp on twitter) or email us hello@teachertapp.co.uk, or send your thoughts via the app feedback button (top left of the menu).

3 Winners! 🎉

Over the past few weeks we’ve had a heap of competitions running.

Congratulations to the winner of last month’s brand tracker lottery Leane Wale at Cardinal Wiseman Catholic School – a £300 set of CPD books is on the way to the school this week 🙂

Also, well done to Jemma Malik at Faringdon Community College who won the retweet contest, and a HD HUE Visualiser is winging its way to her school along with a £50 John Catt Voucher.

Finally, the winners of the half-term quiz each won a prize box. Including a mug, torch, and digital pen pot with clock & alarm so you can be reminded each day at 3.30pm of Teacher Tapp!

4. Finally, we know you love the daily tips, so here they are for last week