Page 45
Staffroom confidential
Continued from page 44
Reader’s rant
Just ask the teacher
Over the last 20 years there has been an intense, politically driven focus on education, with a particular emphasis on improving the quality of teaching. This is currently judged by Ofsted chiefs to be “good but not excellent”, necessitating ever more inspection – however unpopular with teachers and their unions.
Actually, there are significant differences of opinion about what constitutes great teaching, with traditionalists putting the emphasis on the teacher and the child’s knowledge of content, and progressives emphasising the process of learning and the acquisition of skills.
We should make more use of international research. Perhaps the fact that in Finland methods run counter to the British approach is too hard for our politicians to swallow. The Finns use little testing and have no national inspectorate.
Why not ask the teachers themselves? To this end I conducted a survey of 50 teachers last year. Two-thirds of them were critical of the formulaic and frenetic multi-part lessons, ‘all singing and dancing’, yet full of ‘debilitating analysis’ and monitoring.
Many of us, my survey showed, teach such over-busy lessons only because of pressures from above. The modern lesson has become an overloaded affair, not even liked by the pupils, because the key requirements of an ‘outstanding’ lesson have changed several times but teachers have been afraid to discard the no longer fashionable elements.
From my survey there is consensus about the qualities of the best teachers and their rank order: passion for and knowledge of subject, a caring personality and the imagination to target students’ understanding through varied activities. One respondent commented that “leading by learning” has always been essential to effective teaching.
As Ofsted doesn’t accept these priorities, it might be questioned whether its pronouncements on teaching should be given such weight. If it helps students to feel they ‘own’ their learning, teachers too need to ‘own’ their teaching. They are right to be unhappy with an Ofsted-led process that fails to look at progress over several lessons, the overall nature and quality of the relationship between teacher and pupil and the flexibility of a teacher’s response.
Interestingly, Finnish teachers have considerable latitude to choose their preferred teaching methods. Perhaps if we all migrated to Finland Mr Gove might get the message.
Quentin Deakin, by email
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