Teachers

5 Apr 2016

What Difference Do Words Make?

Teachwell Education Debate, Education Policy, Political Parties, Teaching and Learning Education Policy, KS1, Primary School, Teachers 0

My only experience of marking SAT’s papers was illuminating. We mark blind so I had no idea whose paper was being marked or where they were from but one thing was clear – who was middle class and who was from a more deprived background. Middle class pupils, even when they got the answers wrong, were able to articulate their thoughts and ideas far better than their poorer peers, who were answering correctly! This is no surprise to me in theory, as it is well known. However, I would argue there is still something quite shocking about seeing it for oneself. The sheer difference between intelligent children who are poor and their not-so-bright middle class peers was greater than even I had imagined. Seeing it repeatedly whilst marking hundreds of papers was an experience that most teachers don’t gain.

It hit me more forcefully than ever how important modelling good spoken and written language really is. I have known teachers who excuse poor spelling, grammar and punctuation, arguing it doesn’t really matter if a child does not know where to put full stops. I never held much truck with that. How could they improve their writing or even write articulately if they did not possess a secure grasp of the basic units of writing – the difference between words, phrases and sentences?

Even more heartbreaking was the fact that not knowing this meant children missed out on marks in their SATs due to copying out whole sentences for answers instead of the correct phrase. At the age of 11, being asked to copy out a phrase should not be a difficult task if you are a child with no problems related to learning.

Even if we remove all testing from primary school, these issues remain and we need to figure out how to tackle them. Less teacher talk is not the answer! If anything children need to hear correctly formed sentences being spoken on a regular basis. Teaching Assistants also need to be in on the act. We can’t counter poor English at home with mixed messages at school. My main concern is how we start children off because, even in Year 1, I think that opportunities for speaking and listening are reduced in order to produce writing in books for scrutinies and Ofsted.

The new curriculum for Year 1 is clear:

write sentences by:
saying out loud what they are going to write about
composing a sentence orally before writing it
sequencing sentences to form short narratives
re-reading what they have written to check that it makes sense

Children need to do this, poorer children all the more. Yet the pressure to produce writing for the sake of it is not the only reason these goals may be undermined. Most primary schools I know of are still sticking with the old literacy strategy (see picture below):

Why so many genres? I know many of my ex-Year 1 colleagues were frustrated by all of this and so was I both in Year 2 and in later years, when children came to me with neither a secure grasp of the sentence structure or the features!

I would love to see a set of teachers from EYFS, primary, secondary and sixth form sit down and come up with a better plan for genres as I do believe focusing on them and their features robs us of precious time. Which genres are essential and need to be embedded, and when? Broad and balanced can and does mean different things in different year groups already. If children were focusing on maximum of say 5 genres in Year 1 but really embedding them, then they could move to Year 2 secure and ready for a new challenge. Teachers could interleave and embed the previous year(s) genres and build on them.

If we are to get it right for the poorest children, we need to stop wasting their time flitting around genres, give them the opportunities to speak and increasingly write in sentences and really secure these right from the start. The ability to articulate orally and in writing is vital if children are to succeed and cannot be left to chance.

This post was first published on the Labour Teachers website.

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.