Teaching and Learning in the Primary School

ANDREW POLLARD, Jill Bourne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134851515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This sourcebook offers a unique summary into all that was important in primary education during the 1990s. It provides almost fifty key readings on the field which are grouped around six major topics:

* learners
* teachers
* classrooms
* curriculum
* assessment
* school and education policy.

Over half of the readings focus on real life cases - such as pupils, teachers, classrooms or schools - as a means of conveying some of the interpersonal subtleties of teaching and learning in primary schools. At the same time, these cases highlight important current topics and debates in primary education and often provide insights into practical ways of meeting the challenges which are posed. Other articles are more explicitly analytical and provide conceptual frameworks, overviews or critiques of their fields.

This is an excellent resource and guide for primary school teachers, and students studying on PGCE courses.

Part I
Learners

Chapter 1
How children learn… and fail

John Holt

This chapter contains extracts from two classic books on learning. John Holt looks at learning in the classroom context from the perspective of the learner and draws attention to the ways in which the school can be a ‘place where children learn to be stupid’. He argues that school routines can create contexts in which children can feel so afraid to make mistakes that they learn to make themselves dependent on the teacher. They begin to lack confidence to trust their own perceptions, to correct their own mistakes. In this fear of ‘failing‘, they do not see school as a place where they can put their own knowledge and curiosity to work, but become ‘frozen‘ in what Holt calls a ‘school stupidity‘. Holt calls for schools to try to make themselves places where children are encouraged to be independent, to say ‘I see it, I get it, I can do it!‘

What we must remember about the ability of children to become aware of mistakes, to find and correct them, is that it takes time to work, and that under pressure and anxiety it does not work at all. But at school we almost never give it the time. When a child at school makes a mistake, say, in reading aloud in a reading group, he gets an instant signal from the environment. Perhaps some of the other children in the group, or class, will giggle, or cover their mouths with their hands, or make a face, or wave their hands in the air—anything to show the teacher that they know more than the unfortunate reader. Perhaps the teacher herself will correct the mistake, or will say,‘Are you sure?‘ or will ask another student, ‘What do you think?’ Perhaps, if the teacher is sympathetic and kindly, as many are, she will only smile a sweet, sad smile—which from the point of view of the child is one of the severest punishments the school has to offer, since it shows him that he has hurt and disappointed the person on whose support and approval he has been trained to depend. At any rate, something will happen to tell the child, not only that he goofed, but that everyone around him knows he goofed. Like almost anyone in this situation, he will feel great shame and embarrassment, enough to paralyse his thinking. Even if he is confident enough to keep some presenceof mind in the face of this public failure, he will not be given time to seek out, find, and correct his mistake. For teachers not only like right answers, they like them right away. If a child can’t correct his mistake immediately, someone else will correct it for him.

The result of this is a great loss. The more a child uses his sense of consistency, of things fitting together and making sense, to find and correct his own mistakes, the more he will feel that his way of using his mind works, and the better he will get at it. He will feel more and more that he can figure out for himself, at least much of the time, which answers make sense and which do not. But if, as usually happens, we point out all his mistakes as soon as he makes them, and, even worse, correct them for him, his self-checking and self-correcting skill will not develop, but will die out. He will cease to feel that he has it, or ever had it, or ever could have it. He will become like the fifth-graders I knew—many of them ‘successful’ students— who used to bring me papers and say, ‘Is it right?’ and when I said, ‘What do you think?’ look at me as if I were crazy. What did they think? What did what they thought have to do with what was right? Right was what the teacher said was right, whatever that was. More recently I have heard much older students, also able and successful, say very much the same thing. They could not make any judgements about their own work; it was up to the teachers to decide.

One of the most important things teachers can do for any learner is to make the learner less and less dependent on them. We need to give students ways to find out for themselves whether what they have done is correct and makes sense.

The other day I decided to talk about what happens when you don’t understand what is going on. We had been chatting about something or other, and everyone seemed in a relaxed frame of mind, so I said, ‘You know, there’s something I’m curious about and I wonder if you’d tell me.’ They said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘What do you think, what goes through your mind, when the teacher asks you a question and you don’t know the answer?’

It was a bombshell. Instantly a paralysed silence fell on the room. Everyone stared at me with what I have learned to recognise as a tense expression. For a long time there wasn’t a sound. Finally Ben, who is bolder than most, broke the tension, and also answered my question, by saying in a loud voice, ‘Gulp!’

He spoke for everyone. They all began to clamour, and all said the same thing, that when the teacher asked them a question and they didn’t know the answer they were scared half to death. I was flabbergasted—to find this in a school which people think of as progressive; which does its best not to put pressure on little children; which does not give marks in the lower grades; which tries to keep children from feeling that they’re in some kind of race.

I asked them why they felt gulpish. They said they were afraid of failing, afraid of being kept back, afraid of being called stupid, afraid of feeling themselves stupid. Stupid. Why is it such a deadly insult to these children, almost the worst thing they can think of to call each other? Where do they learn this?

Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time; some of them almost all the time. This is a hard fact of life to deal with. What can we do about it?

This makes me think about written work. Some say that children get security from large amounts of written work. Maybe. But suppose every teacher in the school were told that he had to do ten pages of addition problems, within a given time limit and with no mistakes, or lose his job. Even if the time given was ample for doing all problems carefully with time over for checking, the chances are that no teacher would get a perfect paper. Their anxiety would build up, as it does in me when I play the flute, until it impaired or wholly broke down their co-ordination and confidence. Have you ever found yourself, while doing a simple arithmetic problem, checking the answer over and over, as if you could not believe that you had done it right? I have. If we were under the gun as much as the kids in our classes are, we would do this more often.

Perhaps children need a lot of written work, particularly in maths; but they should not get too much of it at one time. Ask children to spend a whole period on one paper and anxiety or boredom is sure to drive them into foolish errors. It used to puzzle me that the students who made the most mistakes and got the worst marks were so often the first ones to hand in their papers. I used to say, ‘If you finish early, take time to check your work, do some problems again.’ Typical teacher’s advice; I might as well have told them to flap their arms and fly. When the paper was in, the tension was ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about flunking the paper, but it was a fatalistic kind of worry, it didn’t contain the agonising element of choice, there was nothing more they could do about it. Worrying about whether you did the right thing, while painful enough, is less painful than worrying about the right thing to do.

To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid. A dismal thought, but hard to escape. Infants are not stupid. Children of one, two, or even three throw the whole of themselves into everything they do. They embrace life, and devour it, it is why they learn so fast and are such good company. Listlessness, boredom, apathy—these all come later. Children come to school curious; within a few years most of that curiosity is dead, or at least silent. Open a first or third grade to questions, and you will be deluged; fifth-graders say nothing. They either have no questions or will not ask them. They think, ‘What’s this leading up to? What’s the catch? Last year, thinking that self-consciousness and embarrassment might be silencing the children, I put a question box in the classroom, and said that I would answer any questions they put into it. In four months I got one question—‘How long does a bear live?’ While I was talking about the life-span of bears and other creatures, one child said impatiently, ‘Come on, get to the point.’ The expressions on the children’s faces seemed to say, ‘You’ve got us here in school; now make us do whatever it is that you want us to do.’ Curiosity, questions, speculation—these are for outside school, not inside.

Boredom and resistance may cause as much stupidity in school as fear. Give a child the kind of task he gets in school and, whether he is afraid of it, or resists it, or is willing to do it but bored by it, he will do the task with only a small part of his attention, energy, and intelligence. In a word, he will do it stupidly—even if correctly. This soon becomes a habit. He gets used to working at low power; he develops strategies to enable him to get by this way. In time he even starts to think of himself as being stupid, which is what most fifth-graders think of themselves, and to think that his low-power way of coping with school is the only possible way.

It does no good to tell such students to pay attention and think about what they are doing. I can see myself now, in one of my ninth-grade algebra classes in Colorado, looking at one of my flunking students, a boy who had become frozen in his school stupidity, and saying to him in a loud voice, ‘Think! Think! Think!’ Wasted breath; he had forgotten how. The stupid way—timid, unimaginative, defensive, evasive—in which he met and dealt with the problems of algebra were, by that time, the only way he knew of dealing with them. His strategies and expectations were fixed; he couldn’t even imagine any others. He really was doing his dreadful best.

We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do even for an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any. Not I, certainly. Yet children have far less awareness of and control of their attention than we do. No use to shout at them to pay attention. If we want to get tough enough about it, as many schools do, we can terrorise a class of children into sitting still with their hands folded and their eyes glued on us, or somebody; but their minds will be far away. The attention of children must be lured, caught, and held, like a shy wild animal that must be coaxed with bait to come close. If the situations, the materials, the problems before a child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation or threats will bring it back.

A child is most intelligent when the reality before him arouses in him a high degree of attention, interest, concentration, involvement—in short, when he cares most about what he is doing. This is why we should make schoolrooms and schoolwork as interesting and exciting as possible, not just so that school will be a pleasant place, but so that children in school will act intelligently and get into the habit of acting intelligently. The case against boredom in school is the same as the case against fear: it makes children behave stupidly, some on purpose, most because they cannot help it. If this goes on long enough, as it does in school, they forget what it is like to grasp at something, as they once grasped at everything, with all their minds and senses; they forget how to deal positively and aggressively with life and experience, to think and say, ‘I see it! I get it! I can do it!’

Chapter 2
Towards a sociology of learning in primary schools

Andrew Pollard

This chapter considers children as learners within a social context. Beginning by drawing contrasts between psychological and sociological approaches to learning, it goes on to argue that many recent policies focus too much on curriculum and teaching and pay insufficient attention to social factors in learning. This is illustrated with reference to a longitudinal study of pupil learning in an infant school.

The chapter strongly implies that primary schoolteachers should try to understand and work with each child as a whole person, being aware of the cultural influences which are reflected through family and peers. No primary schoolteacher deals simply with some asocial category of ‘pupils’: each child has particular circumstances in their lives and such experiences will affect the approach which is adopted to school learning.

LEARNING IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

A review of the sociology of pr...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION: TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE 1990s
• PART I: LEARNERS
• PART II: TEACHERS
• PART III: CLASSROOMS
• PART IV: CURRICULUM
• PART V: SCHOOLS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTES ON SOURCES