It is hard to fault David Cameron’s comment that, when a child steps through the school gates for the first time, the most important thing is who the teacher is.  To have a teacher who understands the child’s emotional and intellectual needs, and appreciates the journey that the child is embarking upon, is what every parent hopes for as they nervously wave goodbye.

What makes a good teacher is not so easily defined.  Nor for that matter is there as much clarity as is needed about how a balanced education depends upon the child’s quality experience in home, community and school.  Children need good parents, good neighbours, as well as good teachers.

In his recent speech Cameron unpacked his proposals for education.  He promised to create teachers as good as the Finns, by ending the current system whereby people in England with third-class degrees can get taxpayers’ money to enter post-graduate teacher training.  I’m just not sure how Cameron (more specifically Michael Gove the Shadow Secretary for Education) can make such a cast-iron linkage between the nature of good teaching, and a first-class Honours Degree, and between bad teaching with a third-class degree.  As a former headteacher I have seen some appalling lessons delivered by people with first-class degrees who can’t communicate, and brilliant lectures delivered by people with pass-degrees but the ability to understand how children’s minds work.

Quality education is everything to do with teachers, not much to do with structures, and very little to do with buildings.  Teachers do what they believe in extraordinarily well, but what they are told to do merely to a mediocre standard.  Productive pupil/teacher relationships are based on explanation, on talking things through, and seeing issues in their entirety.  Which is why teachers not only need to know a lot, but be wise enough to draw upon only that which is necessary for the learner to know at that stage.  To achieve that teachers need both technical subject knowledge and considerable expertise in both pedagogy and child development, combined with the old-fashioned avuncular skill of a brilliant storyteller.  In my albeit limited experience of being a headmaster of a major secondary school I found that too many high-flying academics lacked the ability to speak at an appropriate level to young people to capture their imagination.

If David Cameron is to quote Finland in the future he must tell the whole story.  It starts with an explanation that Finnish society is more strongly bonded within itself than is the case in England.  Part of that is economic; the income of the richest fifth to the poorest fifth in Finland is only 1-3.7 while in the United Kingdom it is 1-7.2.  The Finns explain their success by quoting the Czech philosopher Commenius whose book The Great Didactic said “Following in the footsteps of nature (learning) will be easy if it begins before the mind is corrupted, if it proceeds from the general to the particular; from what is easy to that which is more difficult; and if a pupil is not overwhelmed by too many subjects, and if its intellect is forced to nothing to which its natural bent does not incline it.”

In terms of their pedagogy the Finns believe that emotional development precedes intellectual growth, and so insist that every teacher hold both an Honours Degree in an academic discipline (which is what Cameron understands) as well as having completed a three-year Pedagogic Degree, also at Honours level (which Cameron either doesn’t understand or doesn’t think he has the political clout to achieve).  In practice, Finnish teachers have to combine what the English see as the separate expertise of primary and secondary practice, and apply such insights when teaching pupils of any age.  The English have to do the same, or nothing in the classroom will change.

See Action 6 of Briefing Paper and Chapters 8 and 9 of Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

1. Making the Connections, and Closing the Gaps – Is it really that hard?
2. Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible
3. Teachers in Technology Initiative

Human behaviour fascinates us as much today as it did the philosophers of old.  Yet it is only recently that scientists have begun to unravel just why it is that we think as we do – and why that thinking can go badly wrong.  Drawing together the research from the bio-medical, cognitive and social sciences (something made possible within the past 20 years through functional MRI scans at one level, and theoretical studies in complexity and systems thinking at the other) it is becoming possible to detect the ‘grain’ to the individual human brain.

The structure of our brains today, rather like a cross section through the trunk of an ancient tree, are much conditioned by adaptations made in the distant past to changing environmental factors.  For example having been walking upright for some 2.5 million years human spines are still not quite adapted to being vertical (consequently we suffer from bad back problems), and we each still have an appendix though a shift in human diet a hundred thousand years or more ago should have made this organ redundant many generations back.

The survival of the human species depends on good thinking, rather than strong muscles.  It is on the ability of each new generation to learn as much as it can from its ancestors, and then to go on beyond the limitations of its parents’ thinking, that our species’ survival depends.  Just as dissecting the bone structure, muscles and nerve systems of a leopard’s legs explain why it is such a splendid hunter, so the new brain-imaging technologies make it possible to appreciate how humans have emerged to be the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.

Philosophers caught glimpses of this long ago: “I learnt most not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me,” reflected St Augustine 1,500 years ago acknowledging the interdependence of mental and emotional development.  A thousand years before that Confucius had said,

“Tell me, and I hear

Show me, and I understand

Let me do, and I learn.”

The medieval craft tradition in England required craftsmen to induct their young apprentices – be they lawyers, silversmiths, clerics or linen workers – into the ‘know-how’ of their craft.  This represented a structured progression (in a Confucian sense) from ‘telling’, to ‘showing’, then to ‘doing’ so that the apprentice could eventually demonstrate that Jack was now as good as his master.  Such apprenticeship was a mechanism by which youths could model themselves on socially approved adults and provided safe passage from childhood to adulthood in psychological, social and economic ways.”

Apprenticeship was an education for an intelligent way of life; it was a context-rich way of learning that integrated thinking and doing, theory and practice at every stage.  It was ‘hands-on’, and it was as much about the contribution that needed to be made to the common good as it was to the success of the individual.  Through constant interaction with practitioners, this enabled adolescents to learn how to become functional adults in home, community and the workplace, and do wisely and responsibly whatever it was that they would eventually have to do.  In contrast today’s classroom instruction involves an enormous amount of ‘telling’, a much smaller amount of ‘showing’, and in most instances very little ‘doing.’  In comparison to apprenticeship, classroom practices are essentially a cheap, but not very efficient, way of learning.

An Apprenticeship Model of Learning (AML) has now to apply the same principles, but in the context of modern communities.

AML is based on the understanding that, over vast periods of time, the guiding principle of our distant ancestors that empowered them to make enough good decisions to survive long enough to procreate which has, over countless generations, made us the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.  Over that vast period of time the ‘guiding principle’ of those distant ancestors (if evolutionary processes can accurately be described as such a term) has given young people the ability to select, out of a number of potential strategies, those which would be the most appropriate to solving particular tasks.  To do that children need to have learned a range of skills, and to have the ability to survey their future alternatives with a mixture of emotional and intellectual skills.

AML involves frontloading the system by providing generous resources to the youngest children so that their education can start a dynamic process whereby they are given such a mastery of a range of skills in their early years that they are progressively weaned of their de­pendence on teachers and institutions.

AML would seek to strengthen the role of the family and the community as the starting place for the apprenticeship model of learning so as to integrate young people fully into the life of a community so giving them the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with others as appropriate and using a range of resources and learning situations.

AML has to train teachers to so understand children’s instinctive needs that, like their col­leagues in Finland, they combine a fine subject knowledge with the wisdom to draw upon this as appropriate to take a child – as in apprenticeship – to the next level of understanding. While quality education is everything to do with teachers it is constrained by inappropriate structures of schooling.

In England that means ending the split between primary and secondary schools (and between two different ways of thinking about education); it means a revolution in teacher education, and a rebirth of the historic partnership on which a balanced edu­cation has to depend – on the interdependence of the home, the community and the school. Only when this is done will there be sufficient thoughtful, knowledgeable members of the community to restore the control of the educational process to democratically elected local representatives.

No related posts.

William Hogarth’s set of four satirical cartoons, Canvassing for Votes, published in 1758, showed prospective parliamentary candidates pouring beer down the throats of their constituents in the expectation of buying their votes.  We smile tolerantly at such stupidity, and reassure ourselves that nothing so stupid could happen nowadays, thanks to the rules that apparently govern parliamentary elections and electioneering expenses.

But we are not that clever, nor are we above making false promises.  Regrettably we are no more honest, it seems, than in Hogarth’s time as was shown earlier this year in the Cash for Honours scandal, and more recently in the abuse of parliamentary expenses.  Every generation needs a Hogarth to show up the shallowness of political sound bytes as we prepare for the final sprint to the 2010 Election.  Elections are won or lost by a party’s ability to capture the floating voter.

Consider education.  Do the politicians need the votes of the teachers or the parents?  It is simple if you do the sums.  There are probably 20 times as many parents (an average of say 1.25 parents to every child) as there are teachers/teacher assistants/administrators and other support staff.  It is all too obvious.  To say something that appeals to parents which might reduce their level of anxiety and lighten their consciences, would win many votes, but to remind parents about their responsibility to prepare their children for school, and then to consistently back up the agreed and stated policies of that school, would make a massive impact on who gets the teacher’s vote… but it would probably have relatively little impact on the parents.  At the time of a general election to be critical of teachers wins votes: to suggest that schools should take on ever more of what earlier had been the responsibility of parents, wins still more votes.

At the State Opening of Parliament on the 18th November the Queen declared “Legislation will be brought forward to introduce guarantees for pupils and parents to raise educational standards.”  The proposed Bill claims to provide guarantees for parents and pupils, and will set out what they can expect from a twenty-first century school system.  It is said that families will be made more aware of what they are entitled to expect from the schools.  A new school report card will be introduced.  But, of course, there is very little about what school teachers have the right to expect from parents.  There are few votes in that.

And that is the problem.  Twenty-first century politicians are no better than their eighteenth century predecessors in failing to recognise that what the country needs of its elected leaders is leadership.  Leadership requires moral courage to do the right thing in the long-run, and does not fall for the offer of a free drink.

See Actions 3, 4 and 9 of the Briefing Paper and
Chapters Eight and Nine of Overschooled but Undereducated

No related posts.

The papers are again full of what qualifications youngsters should have before training to be a teacher, and then what assessment tests should be applied (and how often) to keep them up to the mark.  Just what is it that we think that teachers should be able to do, and how should they do it?  In a poem by Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, written in 1771 but little remembered today, there is the following, touching and evocative description of a school master of yesteryear.  1771 was sixty years before Parliament made its first grant towards the cost of schooling, and ninety-nine years before the Education Act of 1870 established a national system of schools.  How well do we measure up to this description in the 21^st century?

There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule,
The village master taught his little school;
A man severe he was and stern to view;
I knew him well, and every truant knew;
Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
The day’s disasters in his morning face;
Full well they laughed, with counterfeited glee,
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;
Full well the busy whisper, circling round,
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned;
Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault;
The village all declared how much he knew;
‘Twas certain he could write and cipher too;
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And even the story ran that he could gauge.
In arguing too, the parson owned his skill,
For even though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around,
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

It is not known if Goldsmith modelled his “sweet auburn, loveliest village of the plain” on any actual place, or the school on one he really knew.  We do know, however, that the most active organisation in England creating schools was the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) set off in 1699 which had established, in collaboration with local well-wishers, literally thousands of small schools of the kind Goldsmith described. 385

See Parts Six and Seven and Actions 5 and 6 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Occasional Pieces: Teachers Good and Bad
2. Martin Pritchard, Educational Consultant, former Secondary School Assistant Head
3. Towards a School Beyond Boundaries

A most helpful Report has just been published by the Think Tank Politeia about teacher recruitment, employment and retention.  The Report is edited by Sheila Lawlor the Director of Politeia, with additional comments from Professors Burghes of Plymouth and Howson of the Education Data Surveys, by Dr Marenbon of Trinity, Cambridge, John O’Leary, former Editor of The Times Higher Educational Supplement, and Chris Woodhead formerly Chief Inspector of Ofsted.

The aim of this Report is to improve the country’s recruitment and retention of teachers and to provide the most academically able and professionally competent new recruits to the profession.  The Report compares the arrangements in the United Kingdom (specifically England) with certain European countries, with the United States and New Zealand but, maybe significantly, not with Finland which for years had headed up the OECD tables for standards in numeracy and literacy and operates an all-through school from the age of seven to 16 with the most minimal of state direction of its curriculum.

The Politeia Report is a well written, authoritative document, illustrated with many tables of comparative educational statistics on school structures, administrative arrangements, staff-pupil ratios, pupil numbers/enrolment and – of particular interest – the relationship of paraprofessional teacher assistants to fully trained teachers.  It is here where one of the findings of the Report is most stark: in recent years there has been a massive increase in teacher assistants who now account for 43% of all the adults in English classrooms (301,000 teaching assistants to 403,000 teachers).

The Report is much concerned with what it sees as the progressive lowering of standards forced on schools by the rapid turnover in staff.  This leaves policy makers with the dilemma of either leaving teaching posts unfilled, or appointing staff with less appropriate qualifications.  The situation has been getting progressively worse; some 20% of those who train as teachers do not even enter the profession upon qualifying, while between 20% and 30% of those who start to teach resign within three or four years.  Government is now training (at great cost) some 38,000 teachers a year, just under 10% of the total teaching force.  This suggests a ‘professional life’ of little more than ten years on average, or only 25% of the average person’s working life.  No other country, especially the European countries, comes close to this level of attrition.

The Report investigates the varying terms and conditions of service in different countries; the starting and finishing salaries of teachers, and how they relate to pensions; and the differing levels of rewards and incentives.  It goes on to spend much time looking at how success should be measured.  The Report, however, fails to ask the basic, and very personal, question: why do so many young people enter the profession with enthusiasm, but after a few short years leave it disillusioned?  It then raises a supplementary question – why do half of secondary headteachers take early retirement?

The individual Commissioners attempt to answer parts of these questions from their own, often subject-based, perspectives.  While David Burghes approaches this specifically from a mathematics perspective, he is quick to pick up the damage done to the professional teachers’ autonomy by the minutiae of prescription issued by governments complicit in a policy which makes it possible to recruit emergency and trained teachers who then depend on such spoon feeding.  Both Burghes and Marenbon hint at what is called an “undereducated profession”, and they are most right to do so.

Tight control, regulation and prescription, do not attract men and women whose training has equipped them to make better decisions on the ground than could ever be made by a bureaucrat defining in advance something to be applied nationally.  Consequently, many of those who leave the profession early reflect bitterly that if they are not to be allowed to think for themselves, then there is little wonder that they don’t encourage pupils to do so.

The Report, perhaps taking its cue from the generally backward-looking views of Chris Woodhead, is limited by its attempt to fit its reforms within the present structure of schools, rather than seeing that the assumptions which underpin that system are now the basic cause for so much of its dysfunction.  Early on the Report notes that Pupil-Teacher Ratios in the United Kingdom are lowest at upper secondary level and highest at primary level, with a more extensive differential between the two than almost any other country.  This requires the reversal of an upside-down and inside-out system of education, and the recognition that it is ultimately the responsibility of teachers to wean children of their dependence of the system.  “It is a bad teacher whose pupils remain dependent upon him,” (Nietzsche)

Although never expressed in these terms in the Report, this surely reflects the later 19th century belief that, as inheritance was largely believed to be inherited, it was appropriate for primary schools to keep children in sufficient good order for the natural cream to float to the surface so that once in secondary schools, those more able could be fast-tracked through to the higher levels of tertiary education.

Such a set of assumptions about the nature of intelligence so disturbs today’s teachers that they are often in revolt about the way in which heavy levels of prescription simply keep today’s ‘bandaged-up’ structure going for just a little longer.  “I don’t want to waste my life applying further sticking plaster,” they say, “though I fear what may happen to my own children in the future.”

“Teachers Matter” is a most useful analysis of part of the present problem – but it is only part of the story that an incoming government will have to tell when it takes up office in Westminster.  Such Members as will have been elected to serve the country then will have to be wise enough to act on Einstein’s belief that you will never solve a problem by using the same techniques that created the problem in the first place.  Those who read the Politeia Report should also read the Initiative’s Briefing Paper for Parliamentarians if they are to know what to do to give England the education system its children need.  It should also be vice versa.  We all need both perspectives.  We all have to think smarter, not just harder.

Everyone really must realise that there is  much more to education than the efficient teaching of subjects at both primary and secondary level – critically important as they are in their own right.  This will require every teacher to have higher qualifications in English, mathematics and science, together with a far better perception of learning theory, of child/adolescent development, and of the proper relationship of formal learning with informal experience.  Members, as with teachers, parents, administrators and the general public need to reconsider the claim made in 1959 by the Crowther Report “until education is conceived as a whole process in which mind, body and soul are jointly guided towards maturity, a child’s personality will not necessarily be developed.”

See Actions 1, 5 and 6 of Briefing Paper which sets the nature of teaching within the context of English society at large

Related posts:

1. Kamrat: The Story of a Virtual Multicultural Learning Community in Israel
2. Occasional Pieces: Teachers Good and Bad