Classroom Teaching Skills

EC Wragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134955602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Reports on the research findings of the Teacher Education Project, analysing classroom case studies which looked at students as good and bad class managers, at students' very first encounters with classes and at their handling of classes.

1 TEACHING SKILLS

E.C. Wragg

A Time for Skilful Teaching

Teachers have always been required to have professional skills, but there can have been few periods in our history when they have needed to display the degree of competence required in the uncertain world of the 1980s. In the nineteenth century training institutions were known as ‘normal schools’, on the grounds that there was some single ‘norm’ endorsed by society. The function of a training establishment was to perpetuate this stereotype, and the Master of Method was employed in the model school to ensure that each new generation of teachers was poured into the same approved mould (Rich, 1933). Today there are several factors which combine to require levels of skill, understanding, imagination and resilience from teachers which go infinitely beyond the rudimentary commonsense and mechanical competence fostered by the normal schools of the last century.

The massive explosion of knowledge gathering during the last 50 years has produced banks of data in such profusion that no human being is now capable of grasping more than the tiniest fraction of their contents. There are examples of computer-stored research data, such as the Lockheed Dialog system, which contain research reports in over a hundred fields, and the largest files in subjects like chemistry can disgorge in excess of 2½ million abstracts.

It is not only in the pure and applied sciences that this expansion has taken place, but also in many areas of human endeavour including the humanities, with thousands of new published books and articles in many fields being added each year. In addition to this formidable advance in the discovery of new information there has been a considerable development of new skills. Transplant surgery, for example, unknown only a few years ago, has become a standard part of many surgeons' professional armoury.

The implications for teachers of these rapid developments are clear. Given the tradition of localism in England and Wales, whereby individual schools have a considerable degree of freedom to devise their own curricula and teaching strategies, albeit subject to the scrutiny of their local authority, teachers need considerable skill to select topics, activities and ways of working from the vast array of possibilities. Furthermore, since their pupils can also acquire only a tiny fraction of the knowledge and skills currently available to humanity, teachers must develop teaching strategies which not only transmit information, but also encourage children to learn independently and as a member of a group. Although no committee would ever have composed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, it is also unlikely that any individual could have sent a rocket to the moon. A great deal of human achievement will in future be the result of teamwork.

Alongside the demands placed on teachers by the expansion of knowledge and skills are those caused by the significant social changes in recent years which are taking place on a scale unparalleled in any period other than wartime. During the 1970s one million jobs disappeared from manufacturing industry in Britain, and another million had been obliterated within the first two years of the following decade. Most were unskilled and semi-skilled forms of employment which will probably never return.

Faced with youth unemployment on a large scale, many teachers, especially in inner-city schools, find that traditional forms of motivation, such as urging pupils to work hard at school so that they will obtain a good job, no longer have the appeal they once enjoyed. Disaffection over the apparent futility of learning reported by numerous adolescents offers another formidable challenge to the professional ingenuity of the teacher.

Employers, meanwhile, able to erect artificial barriers when applicants for jobs vastly exceed the actual vacancies, may require O levels for jobs previously taken by the less well qualified, A levels where O levels were once sufficient, and a degree in what was formerly a non-graduate profession. This spiralling demand for qualifications puts yet more pressure on teachers to use their skills effectively during the eleven compulsory years of schooling, or whenever else they have contacts with people who need to learn. In our increasingly technological and bureaucratic society those who leave school under-educated, for whatever reason, are at risk, likely to be unemployed, or fall victim to loan sharks and the other predators in society.

The more optimistic scenario, that labour will shift out of the factory and into the leisure industry, that people will have more free time in future and be relieved of the tedium of monotonous jobs, that early retirement will give a boost to community and life-long education, is no less demanding on teachers' skills. To enjoy leisure adults must have learned how to use it fruitfully, to be willing to learn throughout their lives it helps if they have been enthused rather than rebuffed and demoralised in school. The quality of personal relationships between teacher and taught, therefore, is a direct result of the interpersonal skill of the teacher, who usually sets the tone in a class, or has to take the initiative to improve relationships should they go awry. A notion of teaching skill that embraced only the transmission of knowledge would be a poor one in such a context.

A third factor to be considered is the development of new technology such as the micro-computer, forms of teletext such as the Prestel system, direct broadcasting by satellite and cable television. One important feature of some of the more recent forms of technological development is that the micro-computer, Prestel and cable television in particular, offer an interactive facility on a scale not previously available, changing the position of the teacher as the single authoritative initiator of or respondent to enquiry. Such developments test the flexibility and adaptability of teachers, who need to be able to modify their teaching styles to accommodate some at least of the many new developments which have a potential to improve learning.

A fourth factor requiring some degree of attention to improving teaching skill occurs as a consequence of the rapidly declining school rolls during the 1980s, especially in the secondary sector. The birth-rate fell dramatically from its 1964 peak until the end of the 1970s, and it was known in 1980 that for every four children in a primary school there would be only three by 1986, and that for every three pupils in a secondary school there would be only two by the end of the decade.

In inner-city and some rural areas the decline in pupil numbers has led to school closures and a loss of morale amongst a teaching profession used to extrinsic rewards, such as rapid salary and status improvements during the period of expansion of the 1950s and 1960s when the teaching force doubled in size. One way to reduce, if not avoid, falling morale when promotion prospects are less in evidence than they were formerly, is for teachers to take pride in honing their professional skills, and a number of in-service courses in recent times, especially certain school-based ones, have attempted to facilitate professional development and self-appraisal for experienced teachers. This theme will be taken up again in Chapter 10.

The 1983 White Paper Teaching Quality, though it did not give detail about all the factors mentioned above, recognised the importance to our society at its present state of evolution of having a highly skilled force of professional teachers who are able to nurture and facilitate learning for the next generation, as well as for adults who wish to continue their education. It was decided in the Teacher Education Project to study certain significant aspects of a number of skills displayed by teachers, and to develop training materials which would reflect what was learned from observing experienced practitioners, as well as stimulate trainee and experienced teachers to analyse and determine their own strategies.

Identifying and Defining Teaching Skills

There is less dissent about what constitutes effective teaching in discussion between people outside the profession than there is in the research and evaluation literature. Good teachers, it is commonly held, are keen and enthusiastic, well organised, firm but fair, stimulating, know their stuff, and are interested in the welfare of their pupils. Few would attempt to defend the converse: that good teachers are unenthusiastic, boring, unfair, ignorant, and do not care about their pupils.

Once the scrutiny of teaching is translated into the more precise terms demanded by the tenets of rigorous systematic enquiry, the easy agreement of casual conversation evaporates. The books and articles on effective teaching are numerous, and Barr (1961) summarising a massive amount of American research, concluded, ‘Some teachers were preferred by administrators, some were liked by the pupils, and some taught in classes where there were substantial pupil gains, and generally speaking these were not the same teachers.’ Biddle and Ellena (1964), reporting the Kansas City role studies, found that there was not even clear agreement amongst teachers, parents and administrators about the role teachers should play.

More recently, even the attempts to see consensus in the research literature have been criticised. For example, Gage (1978), summarising research studies which had attempted to relate teaching style to children's learning, concluded that in the early years of schooling certain kinds of teacher behaviour did show some consistent relationship to children learning reading and arithmetic. From this he derived a set of prescriptive ‘Teacher should’ statements, like ‘Teachers should call on a child by name before asking the question’, ‘Teachers should keep to a minimum such activities as giving directions and organizing the class for instruction’, or ‘During reading-group instruction, teachers should give a maximal amount of brief feedback and provide fast-paced activities of the “drill” type’.

Critics of such prescriptions argue that much of the American research is based on short-term memory tests, that formal didactic styles of teaching appear to be more successful, and could too easily be perpetuated as the best form of teaching. Longer-term objectives which teachers might have are less frequently measured, so that the music teacher who hopes that children will have a lifelong interest in music is less likely to be investigated than the one who merely wants children to recall sonata form or define a triad in a short memory test.

There was once an interesting experiment at the University of Michigan which illustrates neatly the dilemma of trying to elicit what forms of teaching are most effective. Guetzkow, Kelly and McKeachie (1954) divided first-year students on a general psychology course into three groups. The first group was given a formal lecture course with regular tests, the second and third groups were based on tutorials and discussions. At the end of the course the lecture group not only outperformed the tutorial discussion groups on the final examination, but was also more favourably rated by the students. So far this represents a victory for lecturing and testing on two commonly used criteria: test performance and student appraisal.

The investigators discovered, however, that the students in the discussion groups scored significantly higher than the lecture groups on a measure of interest in psychology, the subject being studied. They hypothesised that though the lecture-group students gave a favourable rating of the teaching they had received, this may have been because they had less anxiety about grades for the course through their weekly feedback from test scores. It was decided to monitor the subsequent progress of all the groups. Three years later not one student in the lecture group had opted to study the subject further, but 14 members of the two discussion and tutorial groups had chosen to major in psychology. Thus, on short-term criteria the lecture method was superior, but taking a longer perspective the discussion method appeared to motivate students more powerfully, and ultimately some must have learned a great deal more.

Defining teaching skill in such a way that all would agree, therefore, is not a simple matter. If we were to say that teaching skills are the strategies teachers use to enable children to learn, then most people would want to rule out intimidation, humiliation, the use of corporal punishment or other forms of teacher behaviour of which they personally happen to disapprove. It is perhaps easier when seeking a definition of teaching skill to describe some of the characteristics of skilful teaching which might win some degree of consensus, though not universal agreement.

The first might be that the behaviour concerned facilitates pupils' learning of something worthwhile, such as facts, skills, values, concepts, how to live harmoniously with one's fellows, attitudes or some other outcome thought to be desirable. A second quality could be that it is acknowledged to be a skill by those competent to judge, and this might include teachers, teacher trainers, inspectors, advisers and learners themselves. We shall see in Chapter 4 that pupils can be shrewd in their appraisal of the teacher's craft, and that the ability to explain is often highly rated by them.

For it to be a recognised part of a teacher's professional competence the skill should also be capable of being repeated, not perhaps in exactly the same form, but as a fairly frequent rather than a single chance occurrence. A chimpanzee might randomly produce an attractive colourful shape once in a while given a brush and some paint, but an artist would produce a skilfully conceived painting on a more regular basis. Teachers who possess professional skills, therefore, should be capable of manifesting these consistently, not on a hit-or-miss basis.

One frequently cited observation on skills is that of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949) who distinguished, in his book The Concept of Mind, between being able to state a factual proposition and perform a skilful operation. The difference between knowing that and knowing how is the difference between inert knowledge and intelligent action. Unfortunately, some competent teachers are not especially articulate about their skill, and it would be a mistake to assume that it is a prerequisite for skill only to be recognised as such if the person manifesting it is capable of explaining and analysing it in textbook language. The intelligence of an action may perfectly well be explained by another, and the behaviour is not necessarily unintelligent or shallow if its perpetrator is tongue-tied about it.

One problem encountered in defining teaching skills is that though in some contexts the term ‘skill’ has good connotations, attracts adulation, is a gift of the few, the result of years of practice or the mark of an expert, in other circumstances it is looked down upon, regarded as mechanical, the sign of a rude technician rather than an artist. We tend, for instance, to admire a surgeon's skill or that of a tennis player. Both may have had the same years of dedicated practice, but the intellectual nature of the knowledge and understanding required by the surgeon is vastly more exacting than that required by a sportsman.

Where the imagination is involved, even more fine distinctions exist. A sculptor would probably be disappointed to read a report that describes his latest masterpeice as a piece of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Teaching Skills
• 2. Class Management During Teaching Practice
• 3. Teachers' First Encounters with their Classes
• 4. Pupil Appraisals of Teaching
• 5. Asking Questions
• 6. Explaining and Explanations
• 7. Classroom Organisation and Learning
• 8. Analysing the Cognitive Demand Made by Classroom Tasks in Mixed-ability Classes
• 9. The Nature of the New Teacher's Job
• 10. Training Skilful Teachers: Some Implications for Practice
• Appendices
• Notes on Contributors
• Index