Teaching Assistants

14 Feb 2016

Maslow’s Hierarchy – Critique Part One

Teachwell Behaviour, Education Policy, Progressive Education, Teaching and Learning Child-Centred, Children, Discipline, Early Years, Methods, Parents, Philosophy, Primary School, Teachers, Teaching Assistants, Theory 6

I’ve been meditating on this all day. What is my problem with excuses? Why not just let a child off the hook if they have problems? Give them a break? Just understand that it is different for them because their home life is horrible and they just want to be safe and loved? If they aren’t fed and clothed then how can they be expected to behave? If they are witnessing abuse at home then how can we expect them to follow class rules?

It seems the main justification each time is that the child behaves poorly as a result of problems at home then they need to be able to express those negative emotions where they feel safe and we should understand that. We should also accept that the reasons for this and the fact that the child’s behaviour is unlikely to change while they are in the environment they are in. Instead, as teachers, we must look at our behaviour and see how we trigger the child’s emotions and act accordingly – the walking on egg shells approach.

Of course, the ‘there are excuses’ school are all about the emotion. Emotions before morality and spirituality is enshrined into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

This diagram that is widely used is not his visual representation of his ideas. It attaches weighting to the different needs that he doesn’t.

By FireflySixtySeven [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The fact is that this is an equally valid visual representation of his ideas:

As is this:

And this:

The red of the physiological does a great job of highlighting it’s importance – danger – needs attention, far more than the cool blue at the top. So what does it look like reversed?

All these diagrams demonstrate how the organisation and presentation of ideas affect how we interpret them. The diagram directly above is nothing like the commonly used one, yet it is not wrong!!!

It is not Maslow I have the issue with here but those that have manipulated the visualisation of his ideas. We can all play that game so maybe we need to look at his ideas more honestly, in light of what he says, rather than a simplified diagram.

29 Jan 2016

How ‘Progressive’ Education Patronises the Poor

Teachwell Progressive Education, Social Class Accountability, Child-Centred, Children, Discipline, Philosophy, Prejudice, Primary School, Secondary School, Teachers, Teaching Assistants 0

My article for Spiked Online.

The only responsibility schools have to working-class kids is to give them a good education.

Source: How ‘progressive’ education patronises the poor

1 Dec 2015

Why Don’t Intervention Strategies Use Progressive Methods?

Teachwell Progressive Education, Teaching and Learning Child-Centred, Children, Methods, Primary School, Secondary School, Teachers, Teaching Assistants 1

If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.

Ignacio ‘Estrada

Hands up if you have worked, or are working, in a school that has Estrada’s quote proudly displayed as an inspirational poster?

Well, inspirational for the progressive teacher maybe. I always saw it as a lament aimed at anyone who dared still use traditional methods; we should all know by now that children simply don’t learn that way. Instead, we should know to teach them using progressive methods because that is the way they learn.

If this is true, then why don’t intervention programmes use ‘child-centred’ progressive methods. Now there are interventions that promote themselves using progressive terminology, which is understandable in the current educational climate, especially in primary schools. But these words just hide the reality of highly structured, explicit/direct instruction programmes they are.

Take ‘Speed Up,’ which markets itself as a ‘kinaesthetic’ programme to develop handwriting (I’m not sure how handwriting can be anything else). I taught it as an assembly time intervention for six months. It involves exercising the relevant muscles through press ups for example. Then explicit instruction and modelling, then practice, practice, and yep you guessed it, more practice. While I had to adjust timings, I did follow the methods to the ‘t.’

Numbers Counts, a widely used maths intervention in primary schools, is another case. Its website states clearly children will engage in ‘active learning.’ I observed my TA (at the time) teaching this intervention on some occasions while on PPA.

By ‘active’ it meant participating and that the children sometimes play games, (they also write cute postcards about what they had learned, which they give to the teacher or their parents). This is very much a direct instruction programme focused on closing gaps in knowledge. The lessons plans are highly detailed, and they need to be followed step by step. The children repeat and reinforce the knowledge they learn until they are secure.

If discovery is better than using traditional methods, then why is it not the basis of this intervention? At most there are four children in a group with one adult, much better odds of being responsive to each child and facilitating their learning.

All the successful interventions I have seen/used follow the same pattern. Explicit/direct instruction and modeling, followed by children repeating, reinforcing and practicing until they get it.

This begs the question:

Why don’t we just cut out the (intervention) middle man and teach using traditional methods in the first place?

It seems insane to show using progressive methods and then, when these methods fail, send children to learn via traditional methods in an intervention group. What a waste of time, energy, effort and money.[/vc_column_text]

Let’s update the quote shall we:

“If a child can’t learn the way progressive ideologues believe we should teach, maybe we should ignore them and teach traditionally because that is the way children learn.”

Tarjinder Gill