Child-Centred

21 Apr 2016

Analogies and Realities

Teachwell Progressive Education Child-Centred, Education Policy, Teachers 5

The problem with Tim’s comparison of the traditional vs progressive debate with the French Revolution is that the analogy is based on a lack of knowledge and understanding of both.

UPDATED: (His comments below state that such a comparison was not his intention, the link to the blog is above).

Traditionalists were not one of the ‘factions’ that started the ‘revolution’ in education alongside the progressives.

The analogy only makes sense if describing a situation in which different factions within the progressive movement were all turning on each other. For example, if the debate were between those inspired by Dewey, as opposed to Freire, Piaget or AS Neill. Or maybe those who advocate for discovery learning, project based learning or flipped classrooms. This isn’t happening.

Any comparison between traditionalists and the Ancién Regime does not stand except for the fact that they did not want the system to change, and the neo-trads are not equivalent to those supporting Napoleon (though Gove was short, I guess).

As for the references to ‘terror’ – hardly. Bullying, for sure, but that was the only way that progressives have been able to impose their will over the decades.

As Jarlath O’Brien pointed out on his blog about inclusion, we do already have a range of schools, whether we agree with this situation or not.

I wouldn’t argue that progressives want a one-size fits all system, simply schools that will give them the autonomy to do what they think best but without any kind of accountability imposed on them. Therefore a system with both traditional and progressives schools will not do because in theory it restricts their ability to teach how they want where they want. Parental choice only seems to crop up when criticising overly traditional schools.

The two arguments I have heard from the progressive camp are:

a) What about parents in areas with only one local school?

b) Schools should engage with parents.

Both of these arguments are an attempt to suggest that progressive schools are the ideal default option.

A progressive parent living in a village with one traditional school is facing the same issue as a Jain living in a village with one local C of E school. A choice has got to be made. As for schools engaging with parents, there is a limit to that too. A Catholic school does not have stop saying prayers because an Atheist parent objects.

No analogy is perfect but the truth is that some of the objections to traditional schools simply deny the reality of the system that already exists. I have seen progressive Headteachers ignore the wishes of parents who wanted the school to firm up on discipline. It’s disingenuous of those who criticise Michaela, for example, when they equally don’t budge on their behaviour policy. It’s true that progressivism is less coherent than traditionalism in education but that is because of the lack of intellectual and rational thought at its heart. It’s just a hodge podge of different ideas which are valued purely for the fact that they are different to traditional methods.

The recent jitteriness from progressives really makes me wonder what it is exactly they have to be afraid of, other than the fear that they will be subjected to the same treatment as traditionalists in the past. A system where schools are open about how they educate children – like School 21 and Michaela, actually means that teachers are less not more likely to be treated badly because of the way they teach.

5 Apr 2016

Mixed Ability Classes

Teachwell Conferences, Progressive Education, Traditional Education Child-Centred, Methods, Primary School, Secondary School, Teachers, Theory 0

One of the 5 big debates chosen for the Debating Education event at Michaela Community School last Saturday, was whether mixed ability classes worked. While I discussed this in brief in my blog about the whole event, I feel that it is an issue worth exploring.

The evidence against setting includes:

the bottom set suffer from low self-esteem,
they do not learn from their peers,
they lose hope and motivation,
behaviour management becomes a nightmare,
those who are placed in multiple lower sets end up seriously disengaged from the education system.

It was clear that Bruno Reddy’s knowledge of mixed ability groups was confined to that of secondary schools. In particular, his suggestion that children be placed in mixed ability classes but be grouped by ability and or receive additional support during other lessons, is a common choice in primary school’s already.

So how does mixed ability work in a primary classroom? Essentially, one has a few choices in terms of how one seats a mixed ability class. If the tables are in groups then it is usually the case that children with similar abilities will be sat together. What this actually does is recreate the sets at classroom level. This has spawned the practice of sitting the lowest ability and SEN pupils on a table which becomes the ‘TA’s group’. This creates a culture of dependency among those children. If they are lucky, a teacher will wean them off this constant support but not all are so lucky.

Oh and children know the groups are based on ability. I recall a new Year 4 child being shown around my class by a buddy. She went straight to the list of reading, writing and numeracy tables, and asked her how the tables were ranked. So much for using neutral names for groups.

Other means have been tried such as sitting children in non-ability groups and pairs but the issue remains. Why? Because they know. They only have to glance at the person next to them to see if their work is harder/the same/easier. Of course there is the worksheet with ‘increasing’ questions of increasing difficulty but unfortunately, there too, it’s clear who has completed more of the sheet.

Open-ended? What numbers are on their question? Or maybe that should be mixed too, in which case we can hope that the child struggling to add two 1 digit numbers will not notice the child who can add 3 digit numbers with ease. Maybe they will miraculously learn from their peers and close this gap. Of course we come to deliberate mixed ability pairings so that the more able can teach the less able. Instead of making the lower ability children dependent on TA’s we make them dependent on other children instead.

Of course there is the argument about different subjects – but I wonder which. Reading? Will still read at different levels. Writing? I have some sympathy for this in terms of generating ideas but the reality is that those children who struggle to write need, even for a short time, a curriculum which reflects this. Scaffolds, paired writing, group writing, scribing are no substitutes for actually being able to write.

As for additional support in other lessons, children are openly pulled out of class and who is this hidden from? The children in the groups? The children left in class? How many of those children have to be in these catch up intervention groups year after year? This means that they miss out on music, history, PE, etc. They are unable to lay a foundation in these subjects and this catches up with them at some point too. The real tragedy is that we know that some children will learn literacy and numeracy skills through these subjects better than in lessons dedicated to them respectively. In fact, these subjects may be their forte in the first place.

So after all these myriad attempts what benefit do we really get from mixed ability classes? What benefit do the children get? Is setting really any worse than missing out on other subjects in order to catch up?

Oh and did I mention – the children know anyway.

This post was originally published on the Labour Teachers website.

5 Apr 2016

Gramsci and Education

Teachwell Education Policy, Progressive Education, Traditional Education Child-Centred, Education Policy, Methods, Teachers 0

In a twitter chat a few weeks ago, a tweeter, who was neither a scientist nor a teacher, insisted over and over again that children should not be taught knowledge in science uncritically. He kept repeating the point. No matter how many times it was pointed out to him that we had to teach them something, get them to understand it and then critique it, if that was appropriate at that point in time. But he was having none of it. If knowledge was taught, it had to instantly be criticised also. There was also the whole ‘I learnt by doing practicals so that is the only way to learn knowledge’ thrown in for good measure. The progressive ideological foundations underpinning his arguments got me thinking about Gramsci.

I don’t hear much from the progressive education camp about Gramsci. It seems his incarceration for a decade by Mussolini for his insightful Marxist inspired writing is not sufficient to be considered left wing. Yet, it was while he was in jail that Gramsci wrote his notebooks, containing among other opinions, his ideas relating to schooling, (the basis for Ed Hirsch’s work).

To summarise for those who have not come across Gramsci:

He believed strongly that the intellectual had a place in all arenas of life. This did not mean everyone should be an academic but that everyone could participate in intellectual activity. Intellectual activity could enable the transformation of both individuals and society but in order to do so one needed to understand the society and culture one was part of.
Gramsci ‘s critiqued the progressive education reforms in Mussolini’s Italy by Croce and Gentile centred on the knowledge-lite curriculum whose buzzwords were ‘educativity’ and active education.
He believed that this new type of education system did nothing other than reinforce the existing power structure where the powerful and elite would maintain their ‘cultural hegemony’ precisely because the poor were cut off from it.
He thought that it was necessary “to create a single type of formative school (primary-secondary) which would take the child up to the threshold of his choice of job, forming him during this time as a person capable of thinking, studying and ruling – or controlling those who rule”.
Thus, he was advocating an education system which would produce intellectuals within all strata of society so that it was no longer the privileged domain of the elite.

The single greatest failure of left-wing educationalists, who support and promote progressive education, is not acknowledging the impact of knowledge on the individual. One cannot challenge from a position of ignorance.

If I were to teach the way that the tweeter had suggested then how would that work in practice? I chose the example of rocks as it was one of the last units I taught.

Teacher: There are three types of rocks – igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic but you shouldn’t accept this uncritically. Why might it be wrong to classify rocks in just these three categories? How many types of rocks do you think there are? Which theory is more accurate the current rock classification theory or your rock classification theory?

Child 1: ?????????????????? (silence, looks around and hopes others will answer the question)

Child 2: I know rocks are all hard but they come in different colours so there should be grouped into colours so there are 100’s of types of rocks.

Child 3: I think it’s wrong (in head because I want to please you and make you think I understand you but I don’t even know what you are talking about in the first place).

If we don’t know, we can’t think about it. If we are not able to think about it, we can’t really consider alternatives. If we can’t consider alternatives and weigh up the different ideas we can’t formulate our own views or indeed start down the path of creating our own alternatives.

Alhazen would have been unlikely to notice the contradictions and problems in Ptolemy’s planetary hypothesis if he had spent his time bogged down trying to critique every single piece of factual knowledge referred to. Additionally reading and understanding Ptolemy’s work did not seem to brainwash him into acceptance. Equally, being taught that the planetary system was geocentric did not prevent Copernicus from eventually coming up with a coherent Heliocentric model of the universe.

The idea that a traditional education can brainwash people into accepting knowledge, ideas and theories is reductionist and ignores the reality of the development of human knowledge and ideas in the first place. So as far as I am concerned, it is not problematic to teach children in an age-appropriate way and introduce them to more critical concepts later so long as we aren’t actually creating misconceptions and errors. That is the problem with the progressive tendency to devalue and distrust the teaching of knowledge. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, one ends up writing in a pit of one’s own ignorance.

This post was originally published on the Labour Teachers website.