The third EF Podcast is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, Shirley Lawes and Dennis Hayes discussing the TLRP's 'Ten Commandments of Pedagogy' and other current education stories. Listen out for two new features - the educational 'Hero and Zero' of the month, and Tuck Shop, where the latest daft idea in education is exposed.
Download mp3 (26:29) (128kb)
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Education is not sustainable according to a new book reviewed here by Dennis Hayes
Austin Williams, director of the Future Cities Project, architect, illustrator, author, and host of the innovative and entertaining ‘Bookshop Barnies’ is something of a renaissance man. His latest book, The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability,* provides a defence of reason, truth and progress that the early humanists would be proud of; but it is no return to tradition. It is an almost unique attempt to reconstruct the drive for a new enlightenment in the twenty-first century. Its style is witty and ironic. Williams does irony very well. One academic described his book as a ‘polemic’. Intended as faint praise, it backfires. ‘Polemical’ books are the thing that academia fears most: books produced by intellectuals outside of universities that have something interesting to say rather than the unreadable research academics produce for the Research Assessment Exercise.
Williams, according to Philippe Legrain, has a ‘gift for lobbing well directed grenades’ and readers will enjoy his ironic explosion of the puffed-up and doom-mongering ideas of the irrational and hysterical individuals who issue quasi-religious edicts about how mankind is an excrescence on the planet, but won’t argue their case.
The enemies of progress that are intellectually coalescing around the reactionary, backward-looking notion of ‘sustainability’ are not just irrational individuals. The enemies of progress are ideas: localism, nihilism, pessimism, primitivism and misanthropy. These ideas spread self-doubt, confusion and fear. In Chapter 4 ‘The Indoctrinators’, Williams uses example after example to show how education about sustainability has become a matter of manipulating children’s minds by scaring them with stories of environmental devastation and destruction that cannot be questioned. The consequence is that ‘critical thinking has been redefined…around the ‘givens’ of sustainability and environmentalism’ (p 74). He agrees with Mick Hume in the claim that Education, Education, Education has been redefined as Indoctrination, Indoctrination, Indoctrination. Because of the sustainability agenda teachers are being transformed into indoctrinators, teaching truths that cannot be questioned.
No sooner was Williams’ book on the shelves than Ofsted issued a report on Schools and Sustainability** calling for all schools to be ‘sustainable’ by 2020. They bemoaned the fact that ‘Work on sustainability tended to be piecemeal and uncoordinated….rather than being an essential part of the curriculum.’ What was needed was a ‘whole-school approach’. There is no question here of a critical – that is educational - approach. Ofsted’s chief inspector, Christine Gilbert, has an entirely instrumental attitude to the question, praising teachers who use ‘stimulating discussion and activities to engage pupils in issues relating to sustainable development’. No more critical thinking then. Gilbert is right though, too many teachers are more concerned with giving children some subject knowledge and teaching them how to think critically and don’t see their job as brainwashing future generations. They remain, for the moment, educators.
Where Williams is wrong is in seeing the transformation of education into indoctrination as ‘underhand’. If this is ‘underhand’, it is hard see what an open-handed approach would be.
In summary, Williams is in favour of the car, roads, cities, planes, travelling as far as you want on holiday, eating food flown in from all over the world and enjoying it out of season (so **** off, Gordon Ramsey). He is for allowing the unqualified development of China, India and the Third World. He wants us to reach for the stars rather than the recycling bin.
Engaging children in stimulating and critical discussion about the human potential these things express would be a start on really defending standards in education. A copy of this book should be sent to every school in the UK. What about that, Christine?
*Austin Williams’s The Enemies of Progress: The Dangers of Sustainability, is published by Societas/imprint academic, Price £8.95, May 2008
**Ofsted’s Report Schools and Sustainability: A Climate for Change, was published on 21 May 2008
Asking ‘Where are the Great Minds?’ makes us all emotional, argues Mark Taylor
It might be expected that, given the state of educational policies today, one would jump at the chance to join in further criticism of the ‘factory system’ that is so regularly complained about. When Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, asked ‘Where are the great minds that have influenced the test-ridden system that passes for education today?’ * it seemed like just such an opportunity.
Seldon thinks that there are new ‘great minds’ with ‘great ideas’ that should be given more attention than the ‘arcane discourses’ of educational philosophers and dull exam-focused bureaucrats. They are: David Hargreaves (‘personalised learning’), David Hopkins (‘system leadership’); Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (‘assessment for learning’); Ken Robinson (‘creativity’); Tony Buzan (‘spiritual intelligence’ and ‘mind maps’); Martin Seligman (‘well-being’, ‘resilience’); Arthur Costa (‘habits of mind’); and Howard Gardner (‘multiple intelligences’ and ‘five minds’).
Despite Seldon’s assertion, one would have to be in a very isolated school today not to have heard of the ideas of personalised learning, emotional intelligence, multiple intelligences or assessment for learning. They are very much in the educational mainstream. It is such ‘great minds’ that have actually created the current confusion and anti-intellectual atmosphere in schools.
All the ideas of these ‘great minds’ can all be summarised in two sentences. First, they are against the idea of the collective transmission of accumulated human knowledge to individuals in the form of subjects. Second, they are for the redefinition of ‘intelligence’ in the form of personal feelings and experiences. The unhappy consequence is a refusal to teach children in a systematic and disciplined manner.
In supporting these ‘great minds’ in their promotion of psychological and other processes, dispositions and states of being, instead of an education through subjects, Seldon performs an educational disservice to pupils who are desperate to get the high quality knowledge of the world on offer in many of Britain’s private schools like Wellington.
Seldon complains of pygmies getting in the way of the giants he wants to see dominating schools. No comment.
*Anthony Seldon ‘Influence of the giants simply isn't big enough’, TES, 2 May 2008
Mark Taylor explains why one distinguished educational thinker is talking ‘Pollocks’ about educational change
In the first of a new series of talks run by the Learning Skills Foundation*, David Hargreaves, research director of the Specialist Schools Trust and ‘personalisation’ guru, outlined his latest thoughts on education. Beginning with a re-statement of his assessment of the problems of the 19th century ‘factory system’ we have inherited, and the need for more customised education, his focus was on how ‘personalised learning’ now required ‘system redesign’ as a necessary stage in transformation. What is system redesign? Hargreaves sees it as a ‘complex fusion’ of mass customisation and peer
production through innovation networks based on the ‘co-construction’ of learning by previously distinct sectors of teachers and pupils. This ‘system redesign’, he argues, points to five significant consequences for schools. First, a merging of primary and secondary sectors; second, the development of more permeable year groups in a shift away from age-related learning; third, the disappearance of the Key Stage system of assessment by 2020; fourth, the introduction of competence based school days; fifth, the collapse of the traditional division between schools and workplaces and the restructuring of larger schools into smaller ‘home units’.
The talk centred on the development of the internet as an example of the new type of co-constructed learning that is leaving traditional teaching behind. For Hargreaves, educationalists who want to reap the harvest of innovation must capture the tendency by young people to create their own systems. He celebrates not just ‘student voice’, but goes ‘beyond’ it in order to create ‘student leaders’ in every school. The ultimate result will be a system of ‘flatter leadership’ distinct from the traditional ‘hub and spoke’ school model.
Perceiving these changes as liberating, Hargreaves next considered who will lead them and run tomorrow’s schools. It is ‘Generation Y’, otherwise known as anyone born after 1980, or anyone familiar with blogging or Facebook rather than television. In short, the old hierarchical leadership model of teachers and students co-ordinated by government must be replaced by an unco-ordinated one based on babyboomers, Generation X and Generation Y which is left alone by government. And how will it all finally look? Hargreaves asks us to picture a ‘Jackson Pollock painting’ more than a traditional organisational flow.
Hargreaves develops a useful picture of where the ‘system’ may be going – or unravelling. However, there are many problems with his analysis. The first concerns his own refusal to admit responsibility for the changes he describes. As an architect of the specialist school system, he is remarkably unwilling to see how much current ‘innovation’ derives from his own attack on the traditional system. He lacks awareness of how far the ‘factory system’ has already become the future. The fact that that the education system is still considered to be failing reflects badly on him and not just on the 19th century. Secondly, the key feature of the current system is not, as he thinks, internet-led innovation. Rather, it is the absence of confidence in intellectual authority. The failure of educators to take responsibility for defending subjects as creative triumphs of intellectual development is seen by Hargreaves as evidence of innovation. But it is not. It is merely a readjustment to the collapse of intellectual authority he caricatures as a factory system.
The resulting ‘anti-system’ could end up fomenting a privatised form of charismatic or revelatory leadership by the young instead of defending public knowledge through the impersonal intellectual leadership of traditional subjects. This will leave many schools without a disciplined intellectual core around which to teach the truth as best we know it and to show that every child has a personal stake in universal knowledge. And the unquestionably brilliant potential of the internet may be reduced to little more than cobbled together celebrations of folk wisdom. No educator should have a problem with enabling the young to become leaders or to use new technology, but not at the expense of the disciplined subject knowledge they will require to do so properly – and properly creatively.
Many of Hargreaves’ ‘insights’ are attempts to rationalise and romanticise the breakdown of traditional subject-based education and the failure to replace it with anything of substance - except ‘the internet’. But he has failed to perform the central task of any educator, that is, to offer a system that enables children to judge and think critically through their subject knowledge about the world they are growing up in.
*David Hargreaves: Who runs schools and who should run schools? Learning Skills Foundation Lecture, April 23 2008. http://www.learningskillsfoundation.com/
Friday, 11 April 2008
Michele Ledda thinks Nintendo in the classroom is a no brainer
A new scheme involving 900 children across 16 schools in Scotland aims to test the effectiveness of Dr Kawashima’s More Brain Training computer games in improving pupils’ behaviour, concentration and achievement in maths tests. The games involve a number of mathematical, linguistic and other problem-solving activities ‘designed to exercise the brain by increasing blood flow to the pre-frontal cortex.’
The scheme follows a small trial carried out by Derek Robertson, of Learning and Teaching Scotland, the authority responsible for curriculum development. Thirty pupils were made to play More Brain Training games on the hand-held Nintendo console for 15-20 minutes every day for ten weeks before the start of the lessons. They were given maths tests before and after the trial, which showed a 10% improvement.
Robertson is very enthusiastic about the scheme. "Game-based learning can provide dynamic and culturally relevant contexts that engage, motivate and challenge today’s young learner," he told the Times.
Anything that helps children learn should be welcomed, but there is a problem. Whatever the scientific merits of the trials - and Robertson has been honest about the limitations of his first experiment - we cannot motivate pupils to study mathematics through a scientific or technological fix.
In 2006, former education secretary Alan Johnson had great hopes for an experiment carried out in County Durham* which would test the effectiveness of fish oil supplements in boosting 'youngsters' brainpower and improve behaviour in the classroom.' Johnson told the Sunday Times: "The government is committed to ensuring that children are provided with healthy food and the nutrients they require during the school day, not just to aid their physical health but to ensure they can study hard and behave well." Now we have an attempt to use the therapeutic and motivational effect of computer games to achieve the same goals.
The problem of pupils' motivation and behaviour does not lie in the brains of modern children, which are not physiologically different from those of their ancestors. Nor does it lie in the impact that modern technology has on children's lifestyle and 'culture' (Robertson calls the current generation of school pupils 'digital natives').
The so-called 'problem of motivation' is an expression of an entirely adult problem that keeps being displaced onto children.
It is a problem of authority, of not knowing what to do. Teachers do not think they have the authority anymore to tell children that it is important to learn maths, English, history, or any other subject. They no find it increasingly difficult to define what is good for their charges and to decide, among other things, what an educated citizen should know by the age of eighteen.
The crisis of authority is not peculiar to teachers. It affects all adults in positions of authority, such as parents, teachers, doctors and, perhaps most of all, politicians, including those who devise education policies.
In this context, trying to borrow the authority of science or technology as a substitute for adult judgment can only exacerbate the problem, by showing pupils that we don’t really believe in knowledge and we are trying to piggyback maths onto computer games. A moral problem cannot be solved by a technological fix. We should instead devise a human-centred solution. We need teachers to regain control of teaching and believe both in the importance of their discipline and in the ability of their pupils.
Children can only be motivated if they see that adults have the confidence and authority to tell them what it is they need to know.
For details of the Durham experiment, and more, listen to BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
The scheme follows a small trial carried out by Derek Robertson, of Learning and Teaching Scotland, the authority responsible for curriculum development. Thirty pupils were made to play More Brain Training games on the hand-held Nintendo console for 15-20 minutes every day for ten weeks before the start of the lessons. They were given maths tests before and after the trial, which showed a 10% improvement.
Robertson is very enthusiastic about the scheme. "Game-based learning can provide dynamic and culturally relevant contexts that engage, motivate and challenge today’s young learner," he told the Times.
Anything that helps children learn should be welcomed, but there is a problem. Whatever the scientific merits of the trials - and Robertson has been honest about the limitations of his first experiment - we cannot motivate pupils to study mathematics through a scientific or technological fix.
In 2006, former education secretary Alan Johnson had great hopes for an experiment carried out in County Durham* which would test the effectiveness of fish oil supplements in boosting 'youngsters' brainpower and improve behaviour in the classroom.' Johnson told the Sunday Times: "The government is committed to ensuring that children are provided with healthy food and the nutrients they require during the school day, not just to aid their physical health but to ensure they can study hard and behave well." Now we have an attempt to use the therapeutic and motivational effect of computer games to achieve the same goals.
The problem of pupils' motivation and behaviour does not lie in the brains of modern children, which are not physiologically different from those of their ancestors. Nor does it lie in the impact that modern technology has on children's lifestyle and 'culture' (Robertson calls the current generation of school pupils 'digital natives').
The so-called 'problem of motivation' is an expression of an entirely adult problem that keeps being displaced onto children.
It is a problem of authority, of not knowing what to do. Teachers do not think they have the authority anymore to tell children that it is important to learn maths, English, history, or any other subject. They no find it increasingly difficult to define what is good for their charges and to decide, among other things, what an educated citizen should know by the age of eighteen.
The crisis of authority is not peculiar to teachers. It affects all adults in positions of authority, such as parents, teachers, doctors and, perhaps most of all, politicians, including those who devise education policies.
In this context, trying to borrow the authority of science or technology as a substitute for adult judgment can only exacerbate the problem, by showing pupils that we don’t really believe in knowledge and we are trying to piggyback maths onto computer games. A moral problem cannot be solved by a technological fix. We should instead devise a human-centred solution. We need teachers to regain control of teaching and believe both in the importance of their discipline and in the ability of their pupils.
Children can only be motivated if they see that adults have the confidence and authority to tell them what it is they need to know.
For details of the Durham experiment, and more, listen to BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Defending abstract knowledge does not make you an epistemological dinosaur argues Mark Taylor
In an interesting debate at the Royal Society of Arts*, sociologist Michael Young made a rarely heard point, namely that the teaching of knowledge matters. More importantly, he pointed out that knowledge is neglected because policymakers assume that there is no connection between knowledge and the needs of the economy. In consequence, the educational system has become a vehicle for a kind of mass vocationalism, based on targets, league tables and outcomes, which have changed the character of schools into places that are no longer distinctive for attempting to give children knowledge that they cannot acquire elsewhere.
Young cautioned against assuming, in response to this change, that schools are democracies or that they should be used to resolve authority issues in the wider society. To understand the place of knowledge in schools today we need to understand that knowledge is both context-dependent and context-independent. With that distinction in mind, he counselled against conflating these two aspects of knowledge in schools, and noted that context-independent knowledge - in the form of abstract ideas - must sometimes be taught counter to the experience of the child. Indeed, the teacher must impose it on the child.
With arguments like these Young comes across as an epistemological dinosaur - if a welcome one - in the present climate of anti-intellectual governmental and academic approaches to education. These approaches were partly expressed in the response of Geoff Stanton. Stanton, in seeking a defence for the anti-knowledge shift observed by Young, claimed that vocational pedagogy is ‘more complex’ than its academic equivalent. It appears that the more the curriculum loses its previous connection (however poorly taught) with academic subjects, the more observers like Stanton claim that new methods are more sophisticated than previous ones. But Stanton’s defence really only justified the replacement of properly examined academic knowledge with the messy and ever-growing range of self-assessed ‘subjects’ currently being thrown at schools. In this sense, Young is indeed right that schools are losing their previously distinctive educational place in society and, with ‘subjects’ as diverse as ‘parenting’, ‘family learning’, ‘happiness’ or ‘health and beauty’, it is increasingly hard to know where school begins and family ends. Clearly, therefore, vocational pedagogy conflates educational process and content and mystifies the crucial fact that all schools ought to provide a rigorous education in academic subjects which - given that all topics of study have underlying academic principles - would then enable progression to their vocational applications to be made.
So has Young got it right in defending knowledge? Not quite. In focusing so much on knowledge per se, as opposed to subject knowledge of different academic disciplines, Young ends up debating the knowledge content of almost everything, rather than defending the distinctive subject content of a general academic education. Philosophically, this may be inevitable, but pedagogically it is problematic, because it allows the acceptance of the potential ‘subject’ in every newly assessed form of modern behaviour. So, instead of challenging the current approaches to education as he would wish, he ironically opens the theoretical door towards a defence of them. For example, in saying that the knowledge base of beauty therapy must be taught as seriously as that of physics and chemistry, he implicitly weakens a defence of an academic curriculum for all pupils, and ends up in the thick of the current contorted ‘debates’ about how many new undisciplined experiences can be thrown into the curriculum to make it ‘relevant’ to the 21st century. After all, through Every Child Matters, the government has transformed ‘enjoyment’, ‘engagement’, ‘health’ and ‘happiness’ into forms of knowledge which they seem to think can be measured. Indeed, the government appears to have a more radical approach to knowledge than some of the social scientists Young criticises.
Although knowledge should be defended in the form of the subjects that explain the world to us, if it is defended at too abstract a level, it parrots in the secondary sector the post-modern confusion evident at university level. The result is the increasing elevation of cross-curricular thematic learning and experiences above the teaching and applying of the core principles of individual academic subjects. Pupils who learn in this way are in danger of turning up at university intellectually confused and lacking in the real subject knowledge they need to challenge their tutors. This is the opposite of what Young intended. He forgot that even the defence of knowledge is context-dependent.
*What are schools for? A debate between Michael Young and Geoff Stanton, RSA, 30 January 2008: http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=2451
Young cautioned against assuming, in response to this change, that schools are democracies or that they should be used to resolve authority issues in the wider society. To understand the place of knowledge in schools today we need to understand that knowledge is both context-dependent and context-independent. With that distinction in mind, he counselled against conflating these two aspects of knowledge in schools, and noted that context-independent knowledge - in the form of abstract ideas - must sometimes be taught counter to the experience of the child. Indeed, the teacher must impose it on the child.
With arguments like these Young comes across as an epistemological dinosaur - if a welcome one - in the present climate of anti-intellectual governmental and academic approaches to education. These approaches were partly expressed in the response of Geoff Stanton. Stanton, in seeking a defence for the anti-knowledge shift observed by Young, claimed that vocational pedagogy is ‘more complex’ than its academic equivalent. It appears that the more the curriculum loses its previous connection (however poorly taught) with academic subjects, the more observers like Stanton claim that new methods are more sophisticated than previous ones. But Stanton’s defence really only justified the replacement of properly examined academic knowledge with the messy and ever-growing range of self-assessed ‘subjects’ currently being thrown at schools. In this sense, Young is indeed right that schools are losing their previously distinctive educational place in society and, with ‘subjects’ as diverse as ‘parenting’, ‘family learning’, ‘happiness’ or ‘health and beauty’, it is increasingly hard to know where school begins and family ends. Clearly, therefore, vocational pedagogy conflates educational process and content and mystifies the crucial fact that all schools ought to provide a rigorous education in academic subjects which - given that all topics of study have underlying academic principles - would then enable progression to their vocational applications to be made.
So has Young got it right in defending knowledge? Not quite. In focusing so much on knowledge per se, as opposed to subject knowledge of different academic disciplines, Young ends up debating the knowledge content of almost everything, rather than defending the distinctive subject content of a general academic education. Philosophically, this may be inevitable, but pedagogically it is problematic, because it allows the acceptance of the potential ‘subject’ in every newly assessed form of modern behaviour. So, instead of challenging the current approaches to education as he would wish, he ironically opens the theoretical door towards a defence of them. For example, in saying that the knowledge base of beauty therapy must be taught as seriously as that of physics and chemistry, he implicitly weakens a defence of an academic curriculum for all pupils, and ends up in the thick of the current contorted ‘debates’ about how many new undisciplined experiences can be thrown into the curriculum to make it ‘relevant’ to the 21st century. After all, through Every Child Matters, the government has transformed ‘enjoyment’, ‘engagement’, ‘health’ and ‘happiness’ into forms of knowledge which they seem to think can be measured. Indeed, the government appears to have a more radical approach to knowledge than some of the social scientists Young criticises.
Although knowledge should be defended in the form of the subjects that explain the world to us, if it is defended at too abstract a level, it parrots in the secondary sector the post-modern confusion evident at university level. The result is the increasing elevation of cross-curricular thematic learning and experiences above the teaching and applying of the core principles of individual academic subjects. Pupils who learn in this way are in danger of turning up at university intellectually confused and lacking in the real subject knowledge they need to challenge their tutors. This is the opposite of what Young intended. He forgot that even the defence of knowledge is context-dependent.
*What are schools for? A debate between Michael Young and Geoff Stanton, RSA, 30 January 2008: http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=2451
'Being the best' for children means being an educated, and not a just a trained, teacher says Dennis Hayes
There is a new OfSTED consultation paper on improving inspection of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) which is an odd title as the TDA – the Training and Development Agency for Schools that funds what OfSTED inspects – only talks of Initial Teacher Training (ITT). Some university departments talk without hesitation about training teachers while others cling to the word ‘education’ in the titles of their programmes. One national body representing university departments of education calls itself the Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). Another body representing the unions and professional associations calls itself the Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teachers (SCETT). So are today’s teachers educated or trained? Before anyone gives the easy answer that induction into a profession requires both education and training, let me make a clear distinction between the two.
Teacher Education can be easily distinguished from Teacher Training. Teacher education is built around the study of ‘educational theory’ or what the disciplines – psychology, philosophy, sociology, history – tell us about education. Educational theory in this sense is essential to pedagogical and professional understanding. Teacher Training – as devised and required by the TDA - constructs initial professional development around the achievement of competencies or standards and has often only fashionable and faddish notions such as ‘learning styles’ or ‘multiple intelligences’ as ‘theoretical’ content. Structuring any course around ‘objectives’, whether you call them ‘competencies’ or broad ‘standards’, transforms that course into training.
What teachers get today is this training and, as if to make the implications of this clear, the government has even removed ‘education’ from the titles of the government department dealing with schools for the first time since 1870.*
But what children deserve are teachers who are educated. New teachers’ obsession with practical matters and ‘getting the buggers to behave’ is the result of the philistinism of ‘teacher training’. What else is becoming a teacher about when nothing theoretical appears on the PGCE curriculum?
Many teacher trainers – let’s use the correct term - might believe that the government’s new proposals for a master’s level qualification for all teachers might signal a change of direction**. A master’s level qualification taken over a period of time might enable a generation of teachers to study theory and be educated as professionals. This was always the sanguine intention of those who wanted a longer period of initial professional development. What teachers will get is a Master’s degree in Teaching and Learning (MTL). Much of the detail, beyond the title of the award, is not worked out but it will not be a Master’s degree in education. It looks like an extended set of competencies is going to be required.
I am not collapsing, unlike some of my colleagues in university- and college- based teacher training, into the philosophical fantasy of nominalism – the idea that if we give something the name ‘education’ it will become a reality. The real task is not changing what things are called, but it is to bring back teacher education. That is why getting into an abstract debate about what practical ‘pedagogy’ teachers need to supplement theory avoids the main problem when attempting to 'be the best'. All teacher training is now entirely practical and it’s just not good enough for our children. The message to the children's secretary is to be the best, to be the ‘Education Secretary’, and put the education back in to preparation for teaching and into our schools.
*The Manifesto Club petition to the PM to put ‘education’ back in the titles of government departments takes up this issue. Read about it here, and sign it here.
**The DCSF document 'Being the best for our children: releasing talent for teaching and learning', was published in March 2008. Read it here.
Teacher Education can be easily distinguished from Teacher Training. Teacher education is built around the study of ‘educational theory’ or what the disciplines – psychology, philosophy, sociology, history – tell us about education. Educational theory in this sense is essential to pedagogical and professional understanding. Teacher Training – as devised and required by the TDA - constructs initial professional development around the achievement of competencies or standards and has often only fashionable and faddish notions such as ‘learning styles’ or ‘multiple intelligences’ as ‘theoretical’ content. Structuring any course around ‘objectives’, whether you call them ‘competencies’ or broad ‘standards’, transforms that course into training.
What teachers get today is this training and, as if to make the implications of this clear, the government has even removed ‘education’ from the titles of the government department dealing with schools for the first time since 1870.*
But what children deserve are teachers who are educated. New teachers’ obsession with practical matters and ‘getting the buggers to behave’ is the result of the philistinism of ‘teacher training’. What else is becoming a teacher about when nothing theoretical appears on the PGCE curriculum?
Many teacher trainers – let’s use the correct term - might believe that the government’s new proposals for a master’s level qualification for all teachers might signal a change of direction**. A master’s level qualification taken over a period of time might enable a generation of teachers to study theory and be educated as professionals. This was always the sanguine intention of those who wanted a longer period of initial professional development. What teachers will get is a Master’s degree in Teaching and Learning (MTL). Much of the detail, beyond the title of the award, is not worked out but it will not be a Master’s degree in education. It looks like an extended set of competencies is going to be required.
I am not collapsing, unlike some of my colleagues in university- and college- based teacher training, into the philosophical fantasy of nominalism – the idea that if we give something the name ‘education’ it will become a reality. The real task is not changing what things are called, but it is to bring back teacher education. That is why getting into an abstract debate about what practical ‘pedagogy’ teachers need to supplement theory avoids the main problem when attempting to 'be the best'. All teacher training is now entirely practical and it’s just not good enough for our children. The message to the children's secretary is to be the best, to be the ‘Education Secretary’, and put the education back in to preparation for teaching and into our schools.
*The Manifesto Club petition to the PM to put ‘education’ back in the titles of government departments takes up this issue. Read about it here, and sign it here.
**The DCSF document 'Being the best for our children: releasing talent for teaching and learning', was published in March 2008. Read it here.
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