As 2016 ended, we found ourselves mourning the loss of what seemed like an unfair and disproportionate number of good and influential people. Among them, hardly noticed amid the more glittering celebrities, was the teacher Michael Armstrong, who died in March, aged 81.
Though I could hardly claim Mike Armstrong as a friend, I did meet him in the 1970s, and spoke to him on the phone later in life.
He was close to my own age, and I came to regard him as a role-model whose qualities and achievements remained frustratingly beyond the reach and capability of a jobbing chalkface worker like me.
I saw Mike as the teacher’s teacher – researcher, visionary, believer in the importance of creativity, with an unfailing faith in the capacity of the child to become, with sensitive yet purposeful teaching, a truly independent learner and thinker. His obituary in The Guardian says he “championed progressive teaching methods”, but in reality he was not so easily stereotyped.
I first met Mike Armstrong when he was teaching in the mid-70s at Countesthorpe College, a new-build Leicestershire comprehensive which set out to challenge and remodel, not least in its innovative layout, virtually all of the assumptions which then dictated how secondary schools worked.
The vision was of a learning community, teachers and students working together in small “schools within schools”, within which students had a great deal of autonomy. I think often of Countesthorpe, and its teachers, particularly when I encounter yet another of today’s eternal and wearying spats between “traditional” and “progressive” educators (“trads” and “progs”).
For its many critics, Countesthorpe then was a byword for anarchic progressivism. Anger – and there was plenty of that – focused, predictably, on the trivialities, including the fact that many teachers and students were on first-name terms.
And yet there was never any doubt that the fundamental aims at Countesthorpe were firmly traditional. Long before we had a national curriculum, Countesthorpe was committed to a common curriculum embracing the traditional forms of knowledge.
The difference lay in that students were encouraged to pursue their studies each their own way. Writing, with colleague Lesley King, in principal John Watts’s 1977 book, The Countesthorpe Experience, Mike Armstrong describes his belief in learning as a product of a conversation between learner and teacher.
“We began to see that the context we needed in order to make a success of student autonomy was one in which teachers and students could take part in a kind of continual conversation with each other – not a dialogue, discussion or argument but something more free-ranging, intimate, expressive and egalitarian, that is to say a conversation.”
At the time I was teaching in a determinedly conventional and authoritarian comprehensive school, and rather than bang on to colleagues about my admiration for the Countesthorpe vision, I invited Mike Armstrong to speak to the staff.
So far as I remember, every staff member, certainly including all the senior leadership team, turned up after school to hear him. Such was Mike’s personality, that everyone enjoyed his presentation, though the overall response was, as you’d expect: “Sounds great, but can’t see it working here.”
Our head’s comment personally to me afterwards sticks in my mind still: “I think he’d do well anywhere. He’s just a damn good schoolmaster.”
I think it’s fair to say that Mike ultimately became frustrated at Countesthorpe. The context and priorities of a big comprehensive got in the way of his ideas. In particular, he mentions the then conventional academic/pastoral “split” which more or less dictated that, for example, a school would have a deputy head (pastoral) and a deputy head (academic), and that teachers would angle their careers in one direction or the other. With hindsight, it was an illogical structure that has largely disappeared.
At any rate, Mike came to believe that only in the primary sector could he achieve what he desired, and after a period of research at a Leicestershire primary, he became head of Harwell Primary in Oxfordshire, combining his always innovative work there with a stream of lectures, contributions and articles which continued to enhance his global reputation beyond his retirement from school, and well into the current decade.
Of Mike’s legacy, what sticks with me is his belief that learning emerges from teacher-learner conversations carried out at length on equal terms. These conversations, far from downgrading the role of the teacher, serve to reveal the individual learning needs of the students, to which the teacher must then respond, adding enrichment and expertise. It is an approach not only traditional in the sense that it would be recognised in any period of history as true educational discourse, but also progressive in that has to be restated and revived by every generation of educators.
I believe, too, that somewhere along the line we have missed the boat on the idea of “small schools within a big school”. Coventry city, for example, built comprehensives with separate house blocks. With imagination, each block could have been “home” to a safe community of learners and teachers. As it was, the perceived demands of specialisation had children chasing all over a huge scattered campus, wasting time and getting into mischief.
So, I’d say, if you think the prog/trad divide is easy to fathom, and that you are firmly on one side or the other, then take a little time to look at the life of Michael Armstrong, who was by no means alone in possessing a vision that continues to transcend the glib labels.
Start with his obituary and if you can find a copy of The Countesthorpe Experience, edited by John Watts, (Unwin Education 1977), so much the better.
- Gerald Haigh was a teacher in primary, secondary and special schools for 30 years, 11 of them in headship. You can find him on Twitter @geraldhaigh1. His previous articles for SecEd can be found via http://bit.ly/1UojJ5B
Further information
Michael Armstrong obituary, The Guardian, May 2016: http://bit.ly/2jRv7gW