Richard Eno

Richard Eno

Richard is from Folkestone but was educated in Winchester. He has been teaching since 1999 and been involved in education management since 2006. He teaches A Level Film Studies, a subject he has remained passionate about. His favourite filmmakers are David Lynch, John Waters and Woody Allen. He currently works for Totton College in Hampshire. He is not related to Brian Eno.

Wednesday, 22 October 2014 09:00

The Pedagogic Oath

I was watching a TV show with a medical aspect the other night; in it the doctor wanted to treat a patient whom the other characters didn’t like because he was a terrorist or something. The doctor said he had to treat the patient because he had vowed to ‘Do No Harm’, and not treating a patient goes against the Hippocratic Oath. My mind wandered during the TV show, as it often does when I’m at home in the evening, and I started to think about why teachers don’t have an equivalent. What if we had something similar, that we vowed to uphold even against conventional morality? What might it look like and how would it work in practice? What if we had The Pedagogic Oath?

Of all the buzzwords and key phrases that have been thrown at us in recent years, it is ‘High Expectations’ and ‘Stretch and Challenge’ which have plagued me the most. Who doesn’t have high expectations of their students? And just what is the difference between ‘stretch’ and ‘challenge’?

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