We are often wrong, every one of us. That’s not a criticism, it’s a function of the daily challenges thrown at us by this messy, complex, often topsy-turvy world, and a reflection of our wonderfully human fallibility: to err is to be human.
So why would those of us involved with education escape this tendency to get things wrong? We don’t; we have gotten a lot wrong over the years, often in response to some new quick-fix fad or Government diktat or the breathless rush to try to make things better in school; here are some things I can think of that we’ve probably gotten wrong over the years.
- ‘Personalised learning’ – the idea that teachers should tailor their lessons to meet the needs of each individual student in the class. We are teachers, not magicians.
- Teaching needs to match individual students’ ‘learning styles’. First, what exactly is a learning ‘style’? Second, see point 1 above. But more importantly, everyone knows – or should know – that teaching techniques need to fit the material to be covered – a geography teacher teaching map skills, a music teacher teaching keyboard, and a history teacher teaching the causes of the Great Fire of London will choose teaching techniques that are relevant to teaching that content, not to individual students’ so-called learning styles. The vast majority of us learn in very similar ways, anyway.
- ‘Discovery learning’. Yes, we could hang around while our science class tries to uncover Newton’s First Law of Motion, or our Languages class guesses how to say the numbers 1-15 in Spanish, or our DT class discovers the best safe way to deploy the circular saw – Yikes! Or we could just tell them, explain, model, demonstrate, check they’ve got it, let them practise and so on. In the ‘real’ world, discovery is often a good thing, especially for babies and very young children, but for the stuff we have to teach at school, explicit instruction is by far the best way to do it.
- Self-directed learning is best because if learners construct knowledge for themselves they are more likely to retain it: an awful lot of research has been done in this field in the past 20-30 years, and it points very strongly to the fact that whilst experts often benefit from self-directed and inquiry learning, novices don’t – novices need to be taught explicitly. In schools, students are novices for the vast majority of the time.
- The teaching of facts is low-level and often a waste of time: someone better tell most examination boards then, because all subjects in schools are assessed by activities designed to determine what young people know and can do. Try to get through the GCSE science curriculum without learning any facts and you will soon know what’s sticking to you.
- The belief that we can observe ‘learning’ happening. We can’t. We can observe performance – if I tell you three times that the capital of Madagascar is Antananarivo and you repeat it back to me three times – ‘Antananarivo! Antananarivo! Antananarivo!’ – that is not evidence that you have learned it. This hinges on our definition of learning – a good one is Sweller’s ‘an alteration in long term memory’. If you can tell me in three days and three months and nine months’ time that Anatananarivo is the capital of Madagascar, THEN we can say that you’ve learned it. Learning can’t be observed ‘live’ unless, for example, we are watching students being tested on old material.
- Teachers should let students put up their hand during whole-class questioning: yes, absolutely, if what they only want is to hear from the confident and the keen, but if they are asking the question to get EVERYONE thinking and EVERYONE trying to answer, then they need something better. I have always been persuaded by Dylan Wiliam’s great soundbite, ‘Allowing hands up makes the smart kids smarter’.
- If a student misbehaves in class, it must be poor teaching and that’s the teacher’s fault: most misbehaviour in lessons consists of chatting and other off-task behaviour and most of the time it happens because a student has exercised a choice. Children and young people are as capable of doing the wrong thing as the rest of us – maybe more so because they are still finding their way in the world, learning how to do things and so on. The vast majority of the time, if a student misbehaves it is their responsibility, it is not the teacher’s fault.
- Lessons should be ‘fun’: If we go to see a comedian or watch a film or a sports fixture, we want to be entertained. Schooling is different; it’s about learning. And learning is hard, a lot of the time. Doing hard things can be fun but often it isn’t fun in the moment. Take learning to play the violin – there is just no way of avoiding the many hours of practice, repetitively scratching away on those strings, if we are to get any good at it. The notion of ‘fun’ is of course very subjective – if we choose two random students in an English lesson and ask them to write a story, one of them may say ‘Yippee!’ while the other may well cringe; my ‘yummy’ porridge may be your ‘icky’ gruel. In my experience, there is a lot of enjoyment to be gained from being successful at school; if we can help young people to learn well and be successful, they will almost certainly feel good about that – that’s what we should spend our energy on.
- A one to one device transforms learning: I ask, how exactly? Learning happens in our heads, not in any device. Ipads and Chromebooks and the like are very unlikely ever to transform learning in schools. Used well, they can enhance it – if I already have 5 tools in my toolkit and I add a sixth, maybe that sixth tool will give me a better toolkit and help me to do better work. One to one devices can have their uses, but those who talk about them being transformational are, for now at least, misguided I think.
