Views & Opinion Education – the true wealth of nations Comment by TONY CANN, Founder of Learning by Questions
In the 1990’s, I was one of two industrialists that took part in a working party to look at teacher workloads. I was shocked to learn that, on average, less than half the working time of teachers was actually teaching. A big chunk was lesson planning and marking. At the time, my company TDS was making large screens for engineers to create digital drawings, and I thought we could use the same technology and software to create something to help teachers. We did just that and created interactive whiteboards (IWBs). This
gave teachers the ability to use and share electronic resources and the wonderful things they could find on the newly minted internet. This, I hoped, would vastly reduce preparation time for teachers and increase engagement with pupils through the variety of stimulus it offered. In 1995, we sold 50 IWBs. The following year that doubled, and it doubled every year for the next 12 years. By the time I stepped away, we had sent out over two and a half million boards to schools all over the world.
However, while teachers liked the IWB’s, the effect in reducing workload was a lot less than I had hoped. What is more, learning in the classroom only improved by about 5%, which I was incredibly disappointed about. You could never say that the boards were a failure, but they were the stepping stone I needed. Working with millions of schools gave me an extraordinary vantage point from which to see what was really needed in classrooms. The idea of using technology to inform teachers of the effectiveness of their teaching in real time began to form. Alongside the IWBs, we developed devices that would convey to teachers information from students in real time. At the time, these were known as ‘clickers’.
During this period, there was a definite trend towards using data to inform teaching, but teachers were still using written tests to measure performance and create teaching and learning strategies. These tests had to be created or found, distributed to the class and marked. The result was that the workload of teachers vastly increased, and so did the pressure.
If that were not enough, the curriculum also expanded at this time because the modern workplace required much more knowledge and skills. It continues to do so, and this combination of data informed teaching and an expanding curriculum places more stress on teachers, making potential brilliant educators more difficult to recruit. There has also been a general shortage of science graduates entering teaching. This combination of subject knowledge as well as mental and physical stamina is an extraordinary ask, and the teaching profession simply hasn’t been supported or rewarded the way it should be.
The best graduates need to go into teaching. The stress that the pressure puts on teachers is reflected in the turnover and loss to the sector. Teachers want and need
a life outside of the classroom in order to be well-rounded people, but working excessive hours with the stress caused by management pressures and bad student behaviour has taken their toll. Covid has multiplied the effect exponentially.
It is unlikely that salaries will rise as the budgets for schools will not. Changing from Local Authority control to MATs might help at a
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literal cost, and have other benefits, but I believe it will also increase the pressures on teachers. The only solution I can see is that we need to use technology better. This is the conclusion that industrial sectors have come to (and pillar institutions like the NHS) and it is the solution for Education too. The technology must have teachers at its heart though, as the act of teaching requires encouragement and guidance. Children are not machines, and they need clever and compassionate human beings to support them. The edtech sector has grown massively since those early IWBs, but, ironically, it has not been particularly inventive in my opinion. New products have simply added to our current way of teaching. They do work, but they do not offer the full promise of revised pedagogies that remain under the control of teachers. Edtech applications which help but revolutionise the teaching process end to end are much more difficult to create, and they are unsurprisingly slow in their adoption. It’s only natural. When we’ve been busy doing something one way for a long time, we can be reluctant to change. An experienced teacher who has taught successfully one way for many years and has all their material and reaches the required standard is reluctant to change to a different pedagogy, even if it offers improvements equivalent to smaller classes and greater individualisation and lower workloads.
The applications themselves are also difficult to create as they need to fit and be adaptable in the complex world of the classroom and school. But the development of these applications offers the solution and the way forward. We can reduce preparation time, almost eliminate marking time, provide assessment data and, perhaps more extraordinarily, increase individualisation approaching the equivalent of smaller classes. Teachers can satisfy both the most able and less able. Every class has a range, and teachers can meet the needs of every child avoiding any blanket approach or the need to concentrate on one group over another. And the teachers can also gain time to deal with the mental health issues of so many children. My experience has been that students using technology in the classroom deeply enjoy getting instant feedback and the ability to move at their own pace privately. The added individualisation that’s possible through teacher-controlled technology will further encourage them. If you’ll forgive an old industrialist for the jargon, there’s clear evidence that careful use of technology in the classroom has the potential to increase productivity and improve outcomes, whilst making the teaching profession an enjoyable and satisfying one again. Modern life requires improved abilities. It is not just the ability to understand, but the ability to understand and act quickly. Today’s industries have less layers to their workforces. Everyone needs to be equipped not only to fulfil their role within the process, but to contribute to improving the processes themselves. This will provide benefits to their lives outside the workplace too. We need, therefore, to equip our children for the future. We need to grasp the opportunities that technology offers and encourage investment. The costs are low. A typical edtech application that can make a considerable difference might cost annually less than 0.2% of the cost of schooling for a primary school student, and the additional cost of equipping a student with a
device less than 2%. The benefits in many areas will be many times this cost over the school year but gigantic over the lifetime for the students and teachers.
John Ruskin said that the wealth of a nation is the total skills and knowledge of its inhabitants. Let’s go for it.
February 2024
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