Classrooms Observed (RLE Edu L)

The Teacher's Perception and the Pupil's Peformance

Roy Nash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136468100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this study – the outcome of three years' participant observation in local authority primary and secondary schools – the classroom teacher is shown to have a far greater impact upon and responsibility for his pupils than is generally admitted. The teacher's perceptions of the children in his class are demonstrated to have a more important bearing on the pupils' attainment than the major factor of their social class. In carrying out this research, Roy Nash has moved outside the mainstream tradition of educational psychology to take into account the methods of anthropology and sociology. He shows, by looking at the actual behaviour of teachers and children in classrooms, and by following the pupils from several different primary schools through to the same local authority secondary school, how the teacher's expectations for his pupils can act as self-fulfilling prophecies. The author's illuminating research is illustrated with tables and with three Appendices.

Chapter 1Introduction

No researcher starts his work with a blank and open mind. My approach to the study of learning in schools has been influenced by two important experiences, first my undergraduate studies in the social psychology of education and second, my experiences as a schoolteacher.

At university I was taught the traditional empiricist methodology of British social science: the procedures known to economists as the input-output model. In educational research this has usually meant measuring a number of input variables, for example, IQ or social class, of a sample being subjected to different educational environments, for example, streamed, non-streamed, selective or comprehensive schools, and measuring the changes in the output variables. Let us suppose that we want to know whether anxious children learn better in structured or unstructured classes. Following this model we would take a sample of children defined as anxious and after half had spent a year or so in structured classes and the other half a com parable length of time in unstructured classes we would ad minister a number of standard tests and see what differences the two treatments had made. The great weakness of this model is that though we might be able to conclude (if that was the way the results went) that anxious children learn better in structured classes, we would have little idea why. In order to discover that we would have to pay some attention to the different contexts of learning provided by structured and unstructured teaching methods.

Studies of this sort have revealed a number of determining factors almost all of which have been closely correlated with social class membership. The gross facts presented by, among others, Gurney-Dixon (CAGE Report, 1954), Growther (CACE Report, 1959) and Floud, Halsey and Martin (1957), are obvious enough-the lower a child's parents’ social class the poorer the child's attainments and the earlier his age of leaving school are likely to be. Unfortunately, because it totally ignores learning processes within the school, this research cannot explain the causal relationship reflected by the correlations. Early educational research tended to focus not on the school, where education is supposed to take place, but on the home. Fraser's (1959) study identified the most important factor determining a child's progress at school as ‘parental encouragement’. Douglas (1964), Wiseman (1964), Mays (1965) and Douglas, Ross and Simpson (1968), all following in the methodological footsteps of this earlier work, also investigated the relationship between the home and the school and found similar results. Klein's (1965) more sophisticated socio logical analysis suggested that the causal relationships between socio-economic variables and attainment might be due to subcultural differences in children's levels of aspiration and in their ability to postpone gratification. These dispositions, it was argued, may have their origin in the distinctive child-rearing and socialization practices of different social groups. The role of language in structuring the cognitive patterns of children of different social origins has been recognized as important, and Lawton (1968) has drawn attention to the phenomenon of discontinuous socialization experienced by the working class child entering the middle class environment of the school. Sociological investigations of the school by Jackson and Marsden (1962), Jackson (1964) and Hargreaves (1967) have shown the system of norms and values through which they are ordered to be essentially middle class.

This is the conventional wisdom of British educational sociology. These are the studies and the methodological assumptions that students in universities and colleges of education are taught. Once the student is thoroughly familiar with these his intellectual socialization is complete. It will not be surprising that my first attempts at research were squarely in this tradition.

For nine months I taught English in a large comprehensive school and the research which has grown into this book really starts from that time. I began with a questionnaire study. Two hundred and twenty first-year pupils completed a brief questionnaire which I had designed mainly, I think, to prove to myself the power of the traditional variables. And I did. Significantly:

1  More low-stream (classes E and F) than high-stream (classes A and B) pupils said they would leave school as early as possible.

2  More high-stream than low-stream pupils said they were happy at school.

3  More children who said they would stay on at school said they wanted to work in clerical or professional jobs.

4  More children who said they would stay on at school said their friends would also stay on.

5  More children who said they intended to work in clerical or professional jobs stated that their friends intended to do similar work.

I learned two things from this study. The first, that children in the higher streams had higher aspirations and made friends with others like themselves, I should have already known. The second was rather less expected. These children were just twelve years old. They had been in their secondary school for less than three months before being given the questionnaire and yet already the impact of anticipatory socialization for their eventual socio-economic roles had been decisive. I concluded that if school experience had any part in this process then the primary school must be at least as important as the secondary school.

The direction my thinking was taking me was already clear. With my dissatisfaction with the existing methodologies and my belief that children's attitudes towards school learning are formed in the primary school, logic determined that I spend my first period of research in studying the contexts of learning in primary schools.

At this stage I was unaware that in the United States class room observation is a field of its own. Much of my inspiration came from the teacher John Holt (1966 and 1970) and the anthropologist Jules Henry (1963) whose descriptions and analyses of classroom life seemed to me to be getting at the really crucial processes of the school. Both writers are concerned with the quality of the interpersonal relationship between the teacher and the pupil; how the teacher's expectations for his pupils can set up self-fulfilling prophecies so that their success or failure may be determined by the ideas she has about them, and how the implicit cultural meanings of the curriculum are transmitted. My own teaching experience showed me that in schools all was not what it seemed to be. Three incidents in particular influenced my thinking. The first alerted me to the dangers in assuming that the official perception of the school, even at the level of verifiable fact, will be accurate. The other two describe formative researches which suggested to me not only that a close examination of the contexts of learning in school were necessary but provided me with a possible research method:

1    A document issued to new members of staff in July 1969 read: ‘Allocation to a class within each band (of ability) is arbitrary, and within bands, classes should be of comparable ability.’ To support this theory the seven first-year classes were called 1/A1, 1/A2, 1/A3 (band A), 1/B1, 1/B2, 1/B3 (band B) and 1/C (remedial band). In fact, the mean verbal IQ scores for these seven classes proved to be: 102, 98, 94, 91, 88, 82 and 77. Had the children been banded as the school says they were the figures should have been: 98, 98, 98, 88, 88, 88, and 77. One can only conclude that the children were streamed and that, for some reason, the school did not want the fact known.

2    The parents of children about to enter the school were assured that: ‘During the first two years or so a common curriculum is followed to enable transfers between streams to be made easily.’ Following a ‘common curriculum’ usually meant that the lower stream classes copied from the blackboard notes prepared for an ‘A’ class in a previous lesson. At the end of the year a boy in class 1/B3 (i.e. the ‘F’ stream) handed in to me his geography exercise book. He had written:

NEW Foundland

Newroundland lies off the East Cost of Canada at the mouth of the St Larance River it is shaped like a tiage and ints capital city is St Johns on the East coast East of the country is an area of very shallow sea called the Grand banks a great danger to shipping round the coast rare the Icebergs which float down from Greenland between march-and July, another danger is fog which is often found the shortest North atlantic sea route between Canada and Europe is linked at gander Airport.

New Developments

there are two new developments which have meant the opening up of the country and more jods for the peopel
1. A big mining area h opened up around Benhans silver lead zinc gold are mined
2. There is a great paper industry at corner Brook and at Grand Falls near Cander. The forests are newsprint sent For use all over the Americas. As a result of this opening up of the interior a valuable farming colon is now established behind Corner Brook conrects

How much of this the boy understood is a question best not asked. However, we may note that his interest in what he is doing is so low that he cannot copy correctly the words, ‘coast’, ‘triangle’, ‘its’, ‘are’, ‘connects’, ‘developments’, ‘jobs’, ‘people’, ‘has’, ‘Gander’ and ‘colony’. The misspellings of the words ‘its’ as ‘ints’, ‘connects’ as ‘conrects’ and ‘development’ as ‘development’ are especially interesting since they suggest that he copied the words precisely as he saw them on the board. Obviously he has perceived the letter ‘m’ in ‘development’ as ‘ni’, a fairly simple error to make if one is merely copying as this boy was. All in all, counting omitted and needless capitals, missing words (possibly phrases), stops and commas, this ‘copied’ piece contains forty-two errors. Lest it be thought that this was a particularly lazy boy I will mention here that he came top of his class at the end of the year.

3    According to the English syllabus to which I was supposed to work my teaching was to have limited aims: ‘full stops, capital letters, elimination of “daisy chain” sentences; and later letters and form filling should take priority.’

The following areas were to be ‘attacked relentlessly’ through-out a child's school life:

(a)  the use of the comma instead of the full stop,

(b)  failure to indent,

(c)  failure to paragraph,

(d)  failure to use capital letters properly,

(e)  failure to use speech and quotation marks properly,

(f)  failure to use proper headings.

The learning of grammar by rote was also advised: ‘It is particularly recommended that the learning – by rote or otherwise – of the verbs mentioned in this scheme be insisted upon: this will avoid many difficulties in the higher age groups.’ These things were to be ‘hammered in’ and ‘relentless and varies’ (sic) attacks on errors and ‘howlers’ were to be made. This programme was designed and intended to impart taste: ‘We want every child to use his own judgement, to weigh evidence impartially, to discriminate between the true and the false, the meretricious and the genuine, the shoddy and the worthwhile, the transient and the eternal.’ However, this sort of writing was to be deprecated: ‘Ornate or “pretty-pretty” writing should be discouraged.’

I disregarded this syllabus and instead did my best to en courage the children to get all the practice they could in simply writing. It is interesting to compare the work of the boy whose geography work we have just seen with writing done out of interest:

Adventure Story

My friend Jack went on a holdiday to the sea side and enjoyed it very much. One day he made up his mind and joined the Merchant Navy as a Boy Sailor He went to Training School and then when He has passed all his exams he joined a big cargo ship. He has visited all the big ports and. life to him is a big Adventure when I am older I too would like to go to sea and Jack joined the HMS Ajax and one day a ware come and Jack was killed the ship went down and every one was killed it was the best out.

This story contains ten errors. There were another eight but he corrected those himself – he made no corrections to the copied piece. Since there are no words the ratio of errors to words is about I : 11 representing an increase in accuracy in doing his own work of more than two and a half times.

Experience, then, and much of the literature, persuaded me that studies of children's responses to the processes of school, whether responses of learning success or failure, of adjustment or maladjustment, cannot be investigated without a personal understanding of the contexts in which these processes occur. To me it is axiomatic that the best place to carry out research into classroom learning is the classroom. With these feelings I felt it appropriate to spend my first year of research in a primary school.

Although essentially a preliminary and exploratory study – not one designed to test rigorously defined hypotheses – there were certain loosely formulated guiding presumptions which may be stated. My interest had two facets: interpersonal perception in the teacher/pupil relationship, and the classroom as a cultural system. My approach to interpersonal perception was particularly influenced by work into expectancy fulfilment and one of my first concerns was to develop a technique of revealing the ways in which teachers perceived their pupils. The method I eventually adopted will be discussed in chapter 3, but before relating this it will be best to introduce the primary school in which I spent my first research year.

Chapter 2Children and their
class positions

There were several criteria influencing the choice of a school in which to work. Principally I wanted a small, unstreamed primary school in a socially mixed area. There were two reasons for believing a small school to be most suitable; first, I wanted the study to include all children of certain ages and with the limited time available one class of each age seemed sufficient. Second, large staffs tend to split into separate groups often along lines of age, political beliefs or teaching style, and since it seemed essential to be on good terms with all teachers this was a factor that weighed quite heavily in my thinking. Co-operation from everyone in the school was essential. I intended to be in the school over a long period of time (it proved to be almost an entire school year) for sometimes four and sometimes five days a week, carrying out a programme which by its very nature required a great deal of freedom to come and go as and where I pleased without very much explanation of my precise aims. A streamed school promised to introduce complications, which were not ones I wanted to study, and which might have obscured aspects of the teachers’ perceptions which were my main interest. A mixed area seemed most appropriate mainly because I had a suspicion – little more than a hunch – that with young children social class differences are difficult to identify at classroom level and that the labels ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ perhaps acted more as ‘prophecies’ for later responses than as meaningful descriptions of currently present behavioural differences. It would have been impossible to test this in a school where the pupils were all from one class background.

In the event the primary school adviser for this area found me a school which fitted my requirements almost exactly. It is a small, two-storey, half-prefabricated building about fifteen years old, situated on a local authority housing estate on the southern outskirts of the city. There are approximately four hundred pupils aged between five and twelve years. The children are mainly from working class homes, but about 15 per cent have parents employed in clerical or professional occupations. The school is staffed by eleven class teachers and a headmaster. There is a full-time adjustment (remedial) teacher, a teaching auxiliary, and part-time teachers of sewing, singing, and (for part of the year) art; speech therapists and psychologists from the Child Guidance Centre are occasional visitors. The janitor and his wife are important figures and there are almost always two or three students o...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Tables
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Children and their class positions
• 3 Teachers’ perceptions of their pupils
• 4 Social measures and classroom measures
• 5 The development of a research plan
• 6 From primary to secondary school
• 7 Pupil behaviour and teacher perception in secondary school
• 8 The perception of pupils by primary and secondary teachers
• 9 Academic self–perception
• 10 Friendship cliques in primary and secondary school
• 11 Conclusion
• Appendix A A scale for measuring institutional control in schools
• Appendix B The personal construct systems of three secondary teachers
• Appendix C Social class and IQ measurement
• References
• Index