The Great Debate initiated by James Callaghan in 1977 that had its first fruition in 1988 as the Baker Education Act is still going on. There has been a greatly heightened consciousness on the subject over recent years and especially since Michael Gove became Secretary of State and Katherine Birbalsingh dropped her whistle-blowing bombshell at the last Conservative Party Conference. Since then everyone it seems has something to say about our 'broken system' from Jamie Oliver to academic luminaries, not to mention the hundreds of hours of vox pop. I come to the question from an international educator's perspective and having specialised in epistemology, chemistry and physics, I feel I have something worthwhile to add to the debate.
The central tenet of this piece is that the pedagogical process is a creative one and that this is largely missing in the British state system. It will cite Radio 4's Saturday Live, Start the Week, the BBC News website, the New Scientist website and the TES website.
In the last Saturday Live with Fi Glover,
12/03/11, the interview with Sir Ken Robinson dealt, to a great extent with creativity in education in general and specifically for this country. His idea that if you do what you love, you are in your element and if this is what you do to earn a crust, then you will never work again. In other words, one's natural calling; a vocation. This is in accord with my own feelings about teaching. I used to describe my occupation as a lucrative hobby; I was paid 60k p.a. as a classroom teacher and I had an unbelievable amount of autonomy to apply creativity and fun to my lessons in comparison to that which operates in British schools.
12/03/11, the interview with Sir Ken Robinson dealt, to a great extent with creativity in education in general and specifically for this country. His idea that if you do what you love, you are in your element and if this is what you do to earn a crust, then you will never work again. In other words, one's natural calling; a vocation. This is in accord with my own feelings about teaching. I used to describe my occupation as a lucrative hobby; I was paid 60k p.a. as a classroom teacher and I had an unbelievable amount of autonomy to apply creativity and fun to my lessons in comparison to that which operates in British schools.
Sir Ken went on to ask the quasi-rhetorical question, “How do we get this creativity into our education service?” and cited Finland's individual approach and Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence. He expressed concern over current moves to make the service look more like the 19th C, whereas we should be applying ourselves to the 21st C so we need products of our system that are confident and adaptable. In making direct reference to the E Bacc (Bacc. is the usual diminutive, not Bac.), that it is a catastrophe that it should omit arts courses and that it is based on the old fallacy that the arts contribute very little to the economy and that it was the product of the troubled imaginations of politicians that getting the basics right (English, math and science) will get everything else right.
The noble baronets reservations of the E Bacc. Where echoed in another BBC piece on the ASCI conference where the attendees sported badges with 'I failed the English Bac.' This reminds me of the Bart Simpson badge, 'underachiever and proud.' I do not really understand what all the furore is about, except that propensity in some to love being outraged and incensed. What I do object to is the name. If it would be a true baccalaureate, it would have an arts subject and the standard would be a lot higher, since a C at GCSE is not a very high level.
Andy Burnham was at the conference and took a load of badges back for the Shadow Cabinet, which seems to set the tone for glorifying ignorance just as the set of reforms did in precious Labour administrations. He said that the E Bacc. Was a throwback to the 1950s and was very unfair. There's that word again, 'unfair'. It is the current paradigm to equate plumbing with brain surgery; that there must be a degree for everything and that all degrees are the same to give people the allusion of equality, while being sold a bill of goods. We need plumbers and plasterers and electricians and … as much as we need brain surgeons, lawyers (no, wait, let me think about this one), academics, artists, musicians, scientists, mathematicians et c. And we should give all the opportunity to achieve highly by overcoming obstacles from nature and nurture, but to say these academic achievements are of equal value is unfair and destines many for settling for less than they should. The idea that the E bacc is a throwback to the 1950s is unfounded and presumes that the teaching of these subjects would be less creative than they are now. I think that would be very hard, according to what Noble Bart went on to say.
Noble Bart also seemed to tacitly criticise the current system for its standardisation and conformity. Commenting on discussions with scientists, he claimed the curriculum was wringing the creative life out of their discipline, but went on to say that the same could be true of artists. He went on to assert the need for greater balance in education since we do not need a country full of statisticians and scientists, citing the the opportunities afforded by dance, theatre, music and design technology to inculcate creativity. It could be inferred from this that greater creativity in math and science would be effected by this.
There was a curious piece in the TES that seemed to bear out Sir Ken's point here. The piece was responding to Jamie Oliver's Dream School where the respondent seemed to bear out the modern teachers formulaic, standardised and conformist notion of education devoid of creativity reference was made to four part lessons and AFL strategies. So, a lesson has to have four parts and one can enumerate specific off-the-shelf strategies for formative assessment? Oh dear.
Reference was made in the piece to Michael Gove's determination to apply higher standards for teachers and Sir Ken's response to this is that we all remember our great teachers and that they were for us critically important and great teachers are critically important generally. He went on to say that teachers often feel that they don't have the opportunity to be creative in their classrooms and that the government holds all the cards. He suggested that since the Secretary of State is not at the back of the classroom, then teachers do have the scope for education. This seems to contradict an earlier statement in the piece about standardisation and conformity. Further, I was shocked to read a teacher's blog making the point about lazy, uninspired and uninspiring teachers. I was shocked, because, whatever the faults of our current system, one of the reasons for the reforms that have led to our current system was to eliminate these sorts of malpractices. In the state schools in which I have done supply, I have found that the regimes have been highly prescriptive and standardised to the point that it makes a mockery of the idea of individualised education, so actually the Secretary of State is in the classroom by proxy.
As I understand it, there are moves afoot to make the minimum qualification for a PGCE a II.II ( a Desmond, as we used to call it) and a III (the gentleman's degree) is below par. I think this is too persciptive. I have known teachers with masters, Ph.D.s all categories of degrees and little of their qualifications makes a difference to the quality of their teaching. I have known Ph.D.s that had no idea how to teach. One in particular, when asked by her students to explain a concept again, because they did not get it, just repeats herself and does not find what the problem is and address that by approaching the topic from a different angle. This is a creativity in action. On the other hand, I've known truly inspirational teachers with gentleman's degrees who are immensely knowledgeable and who bring that wealth to their teaching again creatively, by drawing parallels to other spheres of knowledge, conjoining two or more intellectual paradigms to produce novel thinking and thereby are effortlessly innovative.
This is not to say that teacher selection should be made more rigorous. If an applicant has a gentleman's degree, then investigate through an academic reference if there were mitigating reasons for this category other than lack of diligence or ability. I would also advocate that teachers work for a number of years in something other than education prior to applying for initial teacher training. The selection process should be a lot longer. In my case, I had to spend two weeks teaching lessons before starting my course and I was observed every time. This process would be very telling whatever the applicants' paper qualifications. It would also be cheap. Curiously enough these points were raised by Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa in a NYT piece.
I also think that the assessment criteria should be sharpened up, part of which would include a creativity component, e.g. come up with different ways to approach given topics in the same way as ToK is partly assessed in the IBDP by the breadth and depth of approaches. There should also be exams for those to teach secondary school that they know that which they are supposed to teach. As a rule of thumb, I would consider a Higher Level paper fair if I could do it in a third of the time students had. Less than that then it was an easy paper, more than that, it was a tough paper. This idea could be used to test the knowledge base and analytical skills of prospective teachers. At the moment, there are only two criteria for this assessment for teachers.
On Monday's (14/03/11) Start the Week, Andrew Marr talked with Brian Greene, Brian Cox and Angela Saini on science, its importance, popularization and education. The scientists view was that today, one cannot be considered educated if you have no science and that science is the most important thing that we do, but that our current system does not inculcate understanding or respect for the process of evidential reason and peer review and that these are hard things for people to understand, since, in education the details are focused on too early, one has to remember a large body of 'facts' and that there is no focus on the big picture that popular science is so effective at doing.
Andrew Marr said that he had been bored rigid in science.
I can only agree, having studied and taught the curricula offered in the UK that it lacks vision, but it is possible to bring it alive for everyone and make it fun. The bigger picture is what I would refer to as the conceptual framework. 'Facts' happen along that are to reinforce the conceptual framework. For example, the curriculum for chemistry I wrote for IB MYP (subtitled, Why Stuff Is the Way It Is, How We Use It and How We Use the Knowledge of Stuff to Make New Stuff) that I wrote for 9th and 10th grade (years 10 & 11) starts with the formation of the elements in stars and novae; how do we know this? Well, from the light given off. Do some flame tests for characteristic colours of some elements to get the picture. Bring in a bit of history with Lavoisier and Proust with appropriate practical work and the student has their own data and forms the idea of relative mass. Move along to Boyle, Charles and Avogadro and you have relative atomic mass, the mole and the fundamentals of all chemistry. The course brings in history, literature, music and art, it is entirely heuristic and has a real rational flow. There is no rote learning of facts; the students work things out from experimental data, while having the freedom to ask questions at any time and have the right to have that question answered, if necessary by abandoning the planned lesson and doing an impromptu one. I have often felt that these impromptu lessons are the best. The course continues with compounds, formulae, bonding and The Periodic Table of the Elements, reactions and reactivity, organic chemistry, biochemistry and industrial chemistry. It is possible to get the hook in very early and establish the big picture into which the rest of a course fits, after all we are causality seeking machines and we have an emotional need to know.
The assembled scientists also claimed that the vast number of teachers had no real experience of science and that government has a key role in bringing professional scientists into the system. Here again, I have difficulty with this notion. Do they mean that secondary science teachers do not have science degrees? All of us do. Perhaps they might mean primary teachers. From what I have read in primary science books, what primary teachers say they do in science and from the absurd notions that many students bring from their primary science, they might have a point. As far as professional scientists that have come from research labs that have come into teaching, they are not any better as teachers because of their research experience. Many have come into teaching because of family reasons, e.g. wanting to have the same holidays as their children, or were made redundant et c., but not for reasons that they would be in their element, doing something they love, for its intrinsic value and therefore have no reason or impulse to be creative.
The same goes for ex-bankers and soldiers, although, a military school for expulsees (pardon the neologism) would be effect and cheap – a school with military discipline and military sanctions, but with psychologists and professional, dedicated teachers.
Towards the middle of the debate, the scientists seemed to change their tone, “Science and the arts are the pillars for life.” Well, I wholeheartedly agree. The production of art is uniquely human and we always have done it. Why we do it is debated as much as what it is, but perhaps Oscar Wilde nailed it with, “All art is quite useless.” In that it has no practical value, but is bursting with spiritual an emotional value and in this way we know we are alive.
Where do we go from here? Well, keep the debate going and sign up for for a such as http://education.ted.com/
To return to Sir Ken and Saturday Live, he wants, as we all do confident products of our education system. We have that in spades, but they are confident in their ignorance. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the ignorant have no doubt, while the clever are full of doubt. This video clip amply illustrates the point.
Here's more from Sir Ken: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
and:
Here's more from Sir Ken: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
and:
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