Primary School Teaching and Educational Psychology

David M. Galloway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317870319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing upon extensive research, David Galloway and Anne Edwards analyse the increasing pressures on teachers from the national curriculum and other recent legislation. They look carefully at childrens' learning and behavioural difficulties and show how educational psychology can extend our understanding of teacher's day-to-date work in the classroom. Primary Teaching and Educational Psychology is a refreshing and at times controversial examination of primary teaching and the application of educational psychology. It will be essential reading for trainee teachers and will stimulate more experienced teachers to re-evaluate their current practices.

Chapter 1
Getting started: understanding children’s needs

Introduction

It is difficult to talk for long about teaching, educational psychology or any other work with children without thinking about their personal, social and educational needs. Indeed professionals working with children exist to meet their presumed needs. Parents, too, often agonise over what would be best for one or more of their children. Yet there is no more agreement about the nature of the needs of primary school children than about the needs of any other age-group. Different people emphasise the importance of different needs, depending not on any absolute psychological or educational truths but on their own background and priorities. Thus one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of schools (HMI) might talk about the need for a 'broad and balanced' curriculum, a child psychiatrist about the need for teachers to provide their more vulnerable pupils with a warm, supportive relationship, and a politician, with an eye on the law and order vote, about the need for discipline.

This book is about the application of psychology, and in particular educational psychology, in primary schools. It assumes that ideas developed by educational psychologists have some value in helping teachers to understand children's needs. Yet teachers could reasonably claim to be bewildered by the range of needs they are expected to meet. They could also claim that the concept of need is itself hopelessly confused. For example when adults say that children need affection, do they mean that parents ought to show affection, that children have a right to affection, that this is a universal psychological requirement, or all three? This chapter will examine what we mean when talking about children's needs. We shall then look at two ways of understanding children's needs and finally consider their relevance for infant and junior school teachers.

What do we mean when talking about children’s needs?

Since the 1988 Education Reform Act Britain has had provision for a National Curriculum. This summarises what the Department of Education and Science (DES) thinks children need to, or should, learn in the years of compulsory education. The National Curriculum represents one view of children's needs. Another 'official' view is represented in the Teachers' Conditions of Service document (DES,1988a) which requires teachers to have regard to pupils 'general progress and well-being'. Clearly, this implies that teachers' responsibilities for their pupils extend beyond the curriculum to include their welfare or pastoral needs.

This is all pretty remote, though, from the concerns of parents as their children start school at the age of 4 or 5. Parents may initially define their children's needs in terms such as: (a) being happy at school; (b) feeling cared for, secure, looked after; (c) making friends; (d) learning 'good' behaviour and attitudes; (e) making progress in the '3 Rs', if not in other areas of the National Curriculum.

Yet even this is pretty remote from the immediate needs both of children and of teachers as children start school. To see other ways of defining children's needs we have only to ask what their own and their teachers' first impressions may be at the start of the year. Children's first impression are likely to depend largely on the familiarity of the new environment. In turn this may depend on whether they have visited the school previously and met their teacher, whether a parent stops with them for part or all of the first few days, whether they already know other children, whether they know where to hang their coat, where to go at play-time, where the loos are, and so on. In other words their immediate needs are for security and stability. How far these needs are met will depend partly on the school's policy, partly on the individual teacher and partly on their parents.

Our own children attended six different infant schools. At one of these all parents were expected to visit the school with their child and to spend time with them in the classroom. At three this was accepted though not actively encouraged; at a fifth it was tolerated but discouraged, and at the sixth a hand-written notice at the entrance from the playground proclaimed: No Parents Beyond This Point. Significantly, this notice was largely ignored by the minority of middle-class parents but successfully intimidated the majority from working-class and ethnic minority groups. Thus all children learned that parents varied in their power to provide security.

Teachers too, have an obvious need for stability and security. At the start of the year their priority is not just to get to know the children. They have to observe whether children appear used to working and playing together, or seem alert, interested and keen to take part while others are identified as needing a close eye kept on them, because they do not follow instructions, appear tearful, or quarrel with other children. In other words, teachers' immediate priorities are with classroom organisation and management as well as with the learning activities they aim to provide.

In all this, teachers are using their professional knowledge to formulate and test theories about children and groups of children. They may not do this consciously, but teaching cannot take place without assessment, and assessment takes place at several different levels (see Chapter 8). Children lack professional knowledge but they too are starting to 'weigh up' their teacher and other aspects of the classroom environment: 'What happens if I go on playing in the home corner when she says it's time for lunch? What happened when Jamie threw some water on the floor?'

Children's own answers to their questions will influence their perception of the classroom, whether they feel it is a safe, interesting, happy place to be, or unpredictable and unfriendly. For teachers the position is more complex. Their sense of security will be affected by a variety of factors, varying from the nature of their contract, the quality of support from the head and from colleagues, and the amount of resources available. It is also affected by their own success in classroom organisation and management. This is partly a question of organising the available resources in a way that arouses the children's interest and partly of organising the children themselves so that they benefit from the learning experiences provided. Failure on either count will be evident in the children's behaviour, as they feel increasingly unsettled, restless and unsure of themselves. Teachers depend for their job satisfaction and their self-esteem on seeing children making progress within the classroom environment they have created. It follows, that there is a close relationship between teachers' definition of their pupils' needs and the needs of teachers themselves.

Needs, wants and rights

Teachers identify children's needs informally through discussions with each other and by developing their own categorisation systems. These are no different in quality from the informal categorisations used in any social relationships and may identify children in terms such as 'bright', 'disruptive', 'difficult home', 'needs watching' and so on. In the same way, people may classify their neighbours by occupation, by hobby, by political inclination, by whether they have children, by the behaviour of their children ('the ones with the whining 2 year-old') or by whether they are interesting to talk to.

Teachers also use more formal procedures to define children's needs, ranging from hearing them read, to administering standardised tests purporting to measure intelligence and educational attainment. Clearly these are assessment techniques as well as aids to identifying and understanding children's needs. The point is that logically we cannot talk about children's needs not being met without having first made an assessment that they lack something important to their development. Similarly, in claiming that we are meeting a child's needs we claim that we are providing the things we consider important to his or her development.

The important issue here is that the things a teacher considers most important to a child's development may not coincide with what the child's parent considers most important. Different people give priority to different needs. This is partly a matter of professional affiliation. Teachers can no longer work in isolation, if indeed this was ever the case. They are accountable to their head teacher, and through the head to the school's governors and to their employers, all of whom have more or less clear expectations as to what pupils should be achieving at school. Some of these expectations are now enshrined in a national curriculum. Inevitably they affect how teachers define children's needs. Other professionals such as social workers or doctors have different responsibilities and are accountable to other bodies. Consequently they define children's needs in different terms. Thus, a social worker might emphasise the importance of parenting in the early years, while a social psychologist might be concerned foremost with the child's developing awareness of being part of a social community.

In each case the assessment of what children need is based on what the person concerned 'wants' for the child. It also implies that the person thinks that children have a right to have their needs met. Hence, in talking about children's needs we are making a value judgement about what we think should be provided for children. Unfortunately there are two complicating factors here:

1. There is no agreement within the teaching profession, nor between teachers, other professionals or the government on what constitute children's rights. In passing the 1988 Education Reform Act the government implicitly stated that parents have a right to know what their children will be taught. The introduction of the National Curriculum reflected the government's assessment that schools were providing an inadequate education for a very large minority of pupils. In claiming that educational provision was inadequate, the government was making a value judgement. Virtually all teacher associations disputed this value judgement, and consequently saw no need for a national curriculum. Teachers, parents or government committees may claim a 'scientific' basis for their concerns about children's needs, as in the Warnock Committee's, claim that 20 per cent of pupils may be expected to require some form of special educational help at some stage in their school career (DES, 1978a, see Chapter 3). Ultimately, though, these claims come down to a value judgement on the part of the individuals or groups concerned. This is no criticism. Teaching is not value free and never can be. Moreover, as public employees, teachers are accountable to parents, governors and employees, and consequently cannot have complete autonomy in defining children's needs.
2. The second problem is more complex. Teaching is a social activity, and teachers are accountable for the behaviour and progress of the class as a whole. In saying that a boy needs to learn to sit down, or that a girl needs to learn not to shout out, teachers are likely to be making a statement about their own need for control as much as about the child's need to learn an important social skill. This problem becomes even more acute in the case of children whose behaviour or educational progress gives cause for exceptional concern. The problem may lie in the resources available in the classroom, in the methods the teacher is using, or in the overall management and organisation of the classroom. The temptation, though, will be to define the problem in terms of the needs of an individual child or group of children. In other words needs are individualised: the child is said to have special needs as a way of avoiding recognition of the professional needs of the teacher. There are two implications. First, children's needs have to be seen in the context of the classroom and of the school. Secondly, if children are thought to have special needs, or even ordinary needs which are not adequately being met, this may have implications for the resources available to teachers and/or for their teaching methods.

Can we talk about ‘psychological’ needs?

We believe that educational psychology does have some value in helping teachers to understand their own experience in school and also that of their pupils, even though changes in teacher training have unseated it from the central position it once held (DES, 1989a). This is quite different, however, from claiming that it is possible to identify psychological needs as opposed to personal, social or educational ones. A conventional definition of psychology is the study of behaviour. We cannot talk about personal, social or educational needs without implying that we think children or people in their environment should behave in certain ways. Even if we define psychology as the study of the mind, it is logically impossible to think of psychological needs which do not imply some form of behaviour. The behaviour may not be directly observable, for example, thinking or reflection, but it is still behaviour.

Psychologists live and work in a social world as well as observing it. Unfortunately, they sometimes make the mistake of trying to identify children's needs in isolation, away from the context in which they are living, working and playing. It does not follow, however, that needs identified in the course of an educational psychologist's one-to-one interview with a child can usefully be described as psychological needs. The reason is simply that any identified needs will have implications for the child's future behaviour and, almost certainly, for that of teachers or parents. It follows that the needs identified by psychologists, like those identified by teachers, imply an interaction between children and the people in their environment.

Two ways of thinking about children’s needs

A hierarchy of needs?

Maslow (1970) argued that people have a hierarchy of needs from the basic needs for food and drink to 'self-actualisation' or the sense of self-fulfillment that comes from achieving one's full potential. This hierarchy is summarised in Table 1.1. Maslow argued that people are only motivated to achieve higher level needs when lower level needs have been met. In fact this is not always the case.

Table 1.1 Summary of Mastow's Hierarchy of Needs

Highest Level:	'Self-actualisation'; the sense of self-fulfilment that comes from achieving one's full potential.
	Aesthetic appreciation Intellectual challenge and achievement Self-esteem: the need for approval and recognition Sense of belonging/membership of family, class, peer group Safety: the need to feel physically and psychologically secure
Lowest Level:	Survival: basic needs for food, drink, etc.
	Adapted from Maslow (1970)

Neither children nor adults always progress up the hierarchy in an orderly way. For example, primary children who place themselves in dangerous situations, for example walking across an electrified railway line or, more conventionally, seeing who can climb to the highest point of a tree, may be placing their need for approval and recognition from other children before the need to feel 'physically and psychologically secure'. Nevertheless, two examples will illustrate how failure to meet lower-order needs on Maslow's hierarchy may affect pupils' progress, resulting in frustration for pupil and teacher alike. In both cases no amount of curriculum development or attention to teaching methods would have made much difference.

1. Jenny frequently had a runny nose. In the infants school a box of tissues was an indispensable part of her teacher's classroom equipment. She was described as being 'in a world of her own' and had a reputation for not listening to instructions. She had to be told everything twice. When she was 9 her mother took her to the doctor because she was unusually 'chesty'. The doctor confirmed that she had an infection, but also diagnosed catarrhal deafness, often known as 'glue ear', associated with colds, minor infections and hay fever. There were times when she had no hearing loss. Yet her tendency to 'switch off' rather than concentrate in order to hear what the teacher said, continued even when she was physically fit. Since she started school her education had been affected by her hearing loss. By the time it was diagnosed, secondary problems of loss of motivation had developed.
2. The third and fourth year classes in a senior school were based in terrapins in the school playground and had a long-standing reputation for being hard to teach. When they moved classrooms and left the terrapins teachers noticed after a few weeks that they had become much easier. Three years earlier a teacher had complained about the noise and flicker from the ancient strip-lights in the terrapins. The head had forwarded the complaint to County Hall but nothing had been done and the head had not persisted.

Maslow's hierarchy has limited ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor's Preface
• Authors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Disclaimers
• Note on Authorship
• Dedication
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Getting started: understanding children's needs
• 2 Similarities and differences
• 3 Special educational needs
• 4 Interaction in classrooms
• 5 How do children make sense of the information around them?
• 6 Classroom management
• 7 Personal and social education
• 8 Assessment and evaluation
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index