Posts Tagged ‘ Education policy ’

Every teacher has their ideas on effective teaching and trying to reach the student. We as instructors do with what we have to make education as rewarding as possible for our students. Our schools set the policy we must adhere to and follow without question(sometimes). But as soon as the class begins, the students become my responsibility and I will teach the most effective way I can….using all resources and methods I can find to challenge the students to continue their education even beyond the school years.

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Dr Anthony

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This article titled “Robert Winston sawing a pig is fine – but give me a trained teacher any day” was written by Suzanne Moore, for The Guardian on Saturday 5th March 2011 09.00 UTC

As our faith in politicians declines, our faith in “experts” soars. Experts, you see, are individuals not bound by party or institution. Or so they often pretend. The nanny state, as it was called, was actually preceded by the nanny culture in which we all sat upon a permanent naughty step.

Popular culture provided us with experts in everything from how to dress, to how to clean our houses, have sex and of course how to eat. These experts went on to make fortunes and are now somehow guiding lights in social policy, the cooks in particular. Heston Bonkers Blumenthal is doing a Jamie Oliver and trying to reform the way we eat in cinemas or on submarines. I’ll pass on this week’s Edible Sperm Shake, ta, Heston. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingly–Posh is doing good with fish quotas, and now bouncing back is hyperactive Jamie Oliver. You have to hand it to him. He is a one man Big Society.

He is a brilliant proselytiser for causes dear to his heart, but now he has become a kind of Essexed-up Michael Gove, I am alarmed. His new series is called Dream School: Brat Camp in a school. With celebs. And Jamie’s struggle. Doubtless, he will soon reform the NHS. “Quadruple heart bypass? Easy mate! Bish bash bosh. Drizzle some oil on it.” I jest, but to say that education is a massively complex subject about which he knows little is not to acknowledge that he cares. But is that enough?

We are certainly failing, as Jamie said. Too many kids still leave school without even five GCSEs. His discussion of his own lack of qualifications was illuminating. Like him, I left school at 16 and often resent that the entire debate on education is conducted by people who did very well in the system. I understand why some kids hate school, as I did, and know what it’s like to come from a place where education is not seen as valuable.

Once again though, what many hate about school is brought back as a radical teaching method. Uniform! The academies do it. The policing of uniform is a full-time job. Educational policy now looks to a rose–tinted past. Grammar schools gave the working-classes mobility (there is much new evidence to contradict this but it is roundly ignored) and then along came awful comprehensives with hippy, pupil-centered learning, mixed-ability classes and no discipline.

Labour messed around with targets and literacy hours and basically lied. Or so the narrative goes. The answer is to go back to the old ways. Desks. Uniforms. Zero-tolerance approach to discipline. The superstar academies select and throw out kids who don’t conform. Those kids still have to be educated somehow. Or do we just give up with them?

Jamie’s Dream School is a dream academy unbound by curriculum and having only 20, not 30, kids in the class. Will these stroppy kids be “inspired” by celebrity” intellectuals”?

Actually the whole project is a vast insult to the teaching profession in that it assumes that subject expertise is enough to teach. Never mind teaching as a skill based on training and experience. I don’t think I can cook as well as Jamie Oliver because I don’t share his background and knowledge about food. Teaching teenagers, I know, is extremely difficult sometimes. Having taught at graduate level and in art schools, I have first-hand experience of how hard it is to hold the attention of those who think visually but aren’t keen on reading.

The energy required is enormous. Even an hour in my youngest’s class wears me out. Cutting stupid cardboard with stupid scissors that don’t cut. Yet I see good teachers break the class into groups, how they reward good behaviour, ignore attention–seeking, but so often are trying to fill in the gaps that are missing at home.

This is why teachers are trained. This is why they need to know about cognitive development, different learning methods and strategies for dealing with difficult behaviour.

This notion of teaching as a skill has bypassed these Dream teachers. They are do-gooders, egos on display . . . or are they being paid a fat fee? As Cherie Booth is to appear, I assume the latter. The kids are obnoxious but clearly engageable. The girl boasting of her ghetto credentials simply went over Simon Callow’s head. Rolf Harris was amiable but ineffectual. Robert Winston was heroic with his Super Mario moustache and gave them rats to dissect, then stunned them by sawing up a pig. An innovative approach.

The reality now is kids don’t do such dissections because there is not the money. The stark raving loony brat of the show was of course David Starkey. Like many who propose strict discipline, he had no idea of how to achieve it. He told the kids they were failures, called one of them fat and then refused to come back. Way to go Starkers!

There will be those cheering on his refusal to go down the touchy-feely route, but that is to miss a valuable point. You cannot teach a child how to manage its own behaviour if you cannot manage yours. Yes, this is a distracted generation, always texting, unable to concentrate. Yes, they are rude and spoilt, but why are the very methods that failed them being used again in this televised and highly funded Pupil Referral Unit?

Next week the scary Alastair Campbell is teaching. What? Dissembling? Dismantling the BBC? I am not sure of his subject, but at least he has championed comprehensive education and knows that education is now a battle of ideologies. The kids simply sit at the back and watch the adults arguing.

I don’t suppose anyone reads Paulo Freire any more with his old-fashioned theories, flowing from Rousseau to John Dewey, that children are not “tabula rasa“, that this banking view of learning in which we deposit facts into empty passive minds is not the answer. We learn through being active participants. Once we know this we can indeed pursue lifelong learning. Maybe Starkey could have done some homework.

The wonderful Mary Beard, who also took part in Dream School, is actually a teacher, albeit at a much higher level, and had the modest aim of getting the kids interested in Latin. Her verdict will not push the right buttons these days. What would have helped these kids the most? “Not, I suspect, a raft of new education initiatives, not any major structural reforms. Just a bit more money in the system . . . to give teachers and kids a bit of space, to fund a little more individual attention, and to pick up those falling through the net.”

That’s not rocket science is it? Certainly not. That’s way too expensive! No, let’s spend the money on faith schools and free schools or just only care about our own individual kids and go private. The dream of good schooling, an affordable degree and a decent job at the end of it remains exactly that right now: a dream.

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