Developing Teacher Expertise

Exploring Key Issues in Primary Practice

Margaret Sangster, Margaret Sangster

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441176936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

What are the issues that education raises for you? Beyond the technical skills and knowledge aspects of education, teachers and student teachers face questions which challenge their beliefs and approaches to their teaching and learning. This book contains a series of short articles each of which encourage you to reflect on your own practice and challenge your beliefs about how and what you teach. Questions explored include: When does inclusion become exclusion for the rest of the class?
Do interactive whiteboards support or reduce creativity in the classroom?
Is drama a luxury in the primary classroom?
Should we be teaching other languages to children under seven?
Learning outside the classroom, is it worth it?
What makes a reflective practitioner? Essential reading for those training to teach children aged between 3 and 11, as well as practicing teachers looking to develop their practice.

Part I

The Learning Environment

1	Do schools work – a challenge to the institutionalization of learning?
2	When does inclusion become exclusion for the rest of the class?
3	Does differentiation make it easier for children to learn?
4	Why aim to create independent learners?
5	Why and how can we engage children with their learning?
6	Can we use the built environment to support children’s learning?
7	What do we understand from using images in the classroom?
8	Do displays contribute to children’s learning?
9	Do interactive whiteboards support or reduce creativity in the classroom?
10	Is learning outside the classroom worth it?
11	What is the value of encouraging talk in your classroom?
12	Does rewarding children lead to independent learners?

It is important that teachers set up a good learning environment for the children in their class. This will involve the physical setting, the social and the emotional setting as well as providing intellectual stimulus. Part I contains chapters that reflect on some of the ways in which the learning environment can be established and influenced by the teacher.

Do schools work – a challenge to the institutionalization of learning? Rebecca Austin

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What are you really good at? Is there a sport at which you excel? A language you speak fluently? Are you really knowledgeable about a particular topic? Are you creative? Are you an independent thinker? Are you self-motivated?

Did you learn any of this in school?

I am willing to bet that if you are truly fluent in another language you have learned it most through regular use outside school lessons; if you are good at sport that this, too, has been achieved through extracurricular activities such as membership of a club or group. Your hobbies and interests outside school are probably what you have most enthusiasm and interest in learning more about and getting better at – even if interests are triggered by something at school, the pursuit of those interests probably happens outside school. And what of those ‘life skills’? Can you pinpoint school as the driving force behind your capacity to be creative, independent, self-motivated?

Then what did you learn in school?

Ivan Illich, in 1971, suggested that: ‘Pupils do most of their learning without, and often despite, their teachers’ (p. 28). Your responses to these questions may well bear personal testament to this. Illich’s book is called Deschooling Society and he is one of a number of scholars who believe that schools are not fit for purpose; that our current approach to schooling is stuck in its beginnings in Victorian society and that children are being failed (and therefore labelled as failures) by a system that paradoxically claims to be (and, indeed, should be) empowering (see Holt, 1964; Claxton, 2010; Robinson and Gerver, 2010; Kohn, 2011).

In 1916 John Dewey wrote Democracy and Education. In it, he described the need for societies to pass on the skills and knowledge that they accrue. Initially, in simple cultures, says Dewey, these skills and knowledge can be learned incidentally through interactions with others within the usual life of the society. You learn to hunt by going hunting with others; you learn to build by building with others; you learn to talk by talking with others. You also learn the value and worth of these activities and why you need to know how to participate in them. However, Dewey suggests that, as societies become more complex, a formal system of education is required to transmit the ‘resources and achievements’ (p. 5) that have been amassed over time. The problem, as Dewey saw it, is that transferring learning to a formal context such as a ‘school’ detaches it from the ‘personal and vital’ (p. 6) aspects of learning as a natural part of social life.

In addition, over time, schooled learning or ‘being educated’ becomes an end in itself (Article 28 of the United Nations Convention on Children’s Rights (1989) states:

‘All children have the right to a primary education, which should be free’ and the outcomes of education – such as levels in national tests (SATs) and GCSE and degree certificates – become a means by which the success of schools, institutions and individuals can be measured and judged. High value is placed on these measures of educational achievement and testing thus becomes one of the most important political tools that governments can use to push forward educational agendas – because governments, too, are judged by the educational success of those they govern (Ball, 2008). Children are then inevitably positioned in a deficit model – any who do not achieve what they should by the age they should, as dictated by the institutionalization of learning, are not successes. For John Holt, however, schools fail pupils far beyond the failure to enable them to succeed in tests. Most children, he says:

fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use during, the first two or three years of their lives. (1964, p. 1)

The politicization of education, including the emphasis on testing, has had a profound effect on what happens in classrooms. Activities undertaken in school are frequently remote from activities undertaken in the real world and the process of learning is made abstract and de-contextualized. Children are given worksheets on ‘calculations with money’ rather than being given money to spend; they play in sand and water trays as a substitute for a visit to the beach; they write because they are told to, not because they have something to say (Grave, 1994).

How real is your classroom? What is possible?

Popular culture, electronic communication forms, social networking, television and games consoles – those things that consume children’s real lives are barely touched on at school – these are not seen to be the things that constitute learning in school (Lambirth, 2003) and they are certainly not on the testing agenda. But they are the fibre of children’s existence in the world – haven’t they the right to learn about, with and through them (Marsh and Millard, 2000)?

As well as what is taught, schools situate these learning experiences within a false reality, with concomitant rules and expectations, particularly related to how children should behave and act. All children need to adapt their behaviour to fit with the requirements of school and for some children this means learning a whole new set of rules or ‘ways of being’ (Meek, 1991). Children who challenge or question the rules are frequently seen as troublemakers or a problem in school because they don’t fit school’s rigid structures and because schools don’t meet their needs. Schools take the world and all its wonders and squeeze it into the constraints of a curriculum that dictates what children should learn, at what age they should learn it and how and where they should learn it (Robinson, 2011). No wonder, for some or perhaps many children, this does not lead them to inspired learning or docile participation.

Alfie Kohn writing about ‘feel-bad’ education wonders what historians will make of contemporary approaches to education:

What were we thinking, they will ask, shaking their heads, when we begrudged children the right to spend their days in a place which provides deep satisfactions and occasional giggles? How did we allow this to happen? (2011, p. 151)

What do you want for the children in your class? How will you, as a primary school teacher, make school work for the children you teach?

References and further reading

Ball, S. (2008) The Education Debate, Bristol: The Policy Press

Claxton, G. (2010) What’s the Point of School? Rediscovering the heart of education, London: Oneworld Publications

Dewey, J. (1916/2004) Democracy and Education, New Delhi: Cosmo Publications

Grave, D. (1994) A Fresh Look at Writing, Portsmouth: Heinemann

Holt, J. (1964) How Children Fail, New York: Dell

Illich, I. (1971/2002) Deschooling Society, London: Marion Boyars Publishers LtdKohn, A. (2011) Feel-Bad Education: contrarian essays on children and schooling, London: Beacon Press

Lambirth, A. (2003) ‘“They get enough of that at home”: understanding aversion to popular culture in schools’, Reading, 37, 9–13Marsh, J. and Millard, E. (2000) Literacy and Popular Culture: using children’s culture in the classroom, London: Paul ChapmanMeek, M. (1991) On Being Literate, London: Bodley Head

Robinson, K. (2011) Changing Education Paradigms, RSA Animate (video) available at: http://ahrengot.com/opinions/our-school-system-is-broken/ (accessed August 2011)

Robinson, K. and Gerver, R. (2010) Creating Tomorrow’s Schools Today. Education – our children – their future, London: Continuum

When does inclusion become exclusion for the rest of the class? Maggie Evans

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In England, where children with additional needs are educated has always been a topic for debate. From Warnock (HMSO, 1978) onwards, government policy has been consistent in requiring all schools to be inclusive, while recognizing that there will be some children for whom specialist provision is more appropriate. The interpretation of this thinking has varied from place to place and the picture across the country is of a wide variety in the amount of specialist provision on offer and the amount of support offered to mainstream schools and individual teachers. Some special schools have closed, others have changed designation and private providers have, in some areas, started to offer alternative establishments. Between 1979 and 1991, the number of children in special schools fell by nearly 30 per cent. It can be difficult for teachers to see how the inclusion agenda works in his/her classroom, taking into account national directives, local authority initiatives, their own school ethos and parental wishes. Some parents of children with additional needs are desperate for specialist provision for their children, other parents are equally desperate to keep their children in mainstream education.

What is your experience and view of education being wholly inclusive?

The Audit Commission (2002) found that in England and Wales, the proportion of children with statements in mainstream showed huge variations: in England, 15 per cent of primary schools had 3 per cent or more of pupils with statements, in Wales the figure is 27 per cent. The same report noted that a pupil with a statement in Lambeth was more than six times as likely to be in a special school than a pupil in Newham (10 miles away). Classroom practice in these two boroughs of London might, therefore, look very different, one from the other. Conclusions reached from these data might, however, lead thinkers in different directions:

Some highly inclusive schools have a lower level of statements than one would exp...

Table of contents

• FC
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: The Learning Environment
• Part II: The Curriculum
• Part III: The Wider World
• Part IV: Teachers’ Professional Status
• Endnote
• Index