Learning and Teaching in the Primary Classroom

Maurice Galton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781446231203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Providing a framework for understanding the individual needs of pupils, this book describes how you can tailor your teaching methods to maximise learning. You will learn how to take account of your pupils? knowledge, skills and attitudes when selecting and applying principles of instruction, in order to make learning in your classroom as successful as possible.

Packed with informative case studies and classroom examples, this book explores how learning is conceptualised, direct instruction, interactive teaching, teaching as scaffolding, and how to overcome obstacles to learning.

This is a must-read for all practitioners and students of primary education who wish to understand how to best apply theories of instruction, and provide effective, dynamic teaching.

Chapter 1

Primary Teaching in Contemporary Settings

Let us begin with brief descriptions of two recent visits to primary school classrooms that took place in the second half of the spring term. In the first school the Year 6 children have just been informed about the allocation of places in the local secondary schools to which they will transfer next autumn. Some of the class are clearly upset because they have not been given their first choice school and will therefore be separated from close friends at the start of the autumn term.

In this school it is readily apparent that there is an extremely strong emphasis on attainment in literacy and numeracy. On one of the Year 6 classroom walls a large triangle with several horizontal lines inserted is mounted. Above the diagram the title reads ‘How many of these can you use correctly?’. On the smallest line, near the apex of the triangle, is written ‘a comma = Level 1’. The next line states that ‘comma + full stop = Level 2’. The third line has ‘comma + full stop + speech marks = Level 3’. The class is divided into three groups. On the first table, which is set aside for those who already have reached Level 4, a former member of staff, recently retired, has been brought in for the second half of the year, and is working quietly with children on the use of speech marks. On the second table, children who are at present rated at Level 3 but thought to be able to reach a good Level 4 by May, are having work handed back to them by Mrs Clarke, the class teacher. She explains to one boy that linking several adjectives in his description would move his piece of writing into a Level 4 category and, as an example, suggests that he changes the sentence ‘He walked along a narrow path’ to ‘He walked along a narrow, tree-lined, grassy path’, remembering at the same time to add the commas. To a girl on the same table, she suggests that it would be a good thing to include some reported speech in the opening paragraph of her story so that she can demonstrate her knowledge about when to use speech marks. Under her guidance the girl adds an opening sentence:

‘I think it’s going to be a fine day,’ said Tania’s mother, looking up from her newspaper.

The third group, whom Mrs Clarke later describes in conversation as ‘the no-hopers’, is being looked after by a classroom assistant. These are children who will not reach Level 4 by May and are engaged in learning a list of spellings and the meaning of the words. Mrs Clarke says this is ‘pretty much her standard lesson.’ At the end of the visit the headteacher speaks admiringly of the improvement in the Year 6 national test scores since Mrs Clarke came to the school three years ago.

In another Year 6 classroom, not five miles away, Mr Vincent, the class teacher, has arranged the desks in two U-shapes. Children sit in friendship groups unless Mr Vincent decides that the chosen membership does not facilitate good working habits, in which case children are moved to another group. Because my visit is part of research into transfer from primary to secondary school, Mr Vincent decides to use the idea of transitions as a stimulus for the lesson. He tells the class that they are going to think about the future. Pupils are to construct a timeline of how they hope to develop as people over the next 20 years.

Before the class begin their task, Mr Vincent illustrates what he wants each pupil to do by telling them about his own youthful wishes and future hopes. He tells them that at their age he had three big ambitions: to go to college and be a teacher; to play football in a professional team and to go to Australia. Sadly, he has only managed to fulfil two of these three goals so far. He asks the children to guess which of his ambitions he has yet to achieve. One boy calls out to the accompaniment of general laughter:

‘Professional football player. You were useless trying to save our penalties last week.’

The children then spend time in the groups discussing various ideas before they are instructed to draw their own timelines and to write their accounts with reasons for their choices. There then ensues a lively class discussion where each pupil is asked to share their ideas with the rest of the class. Mr Vincent makes great efforts to open up the discussion by not always responding immediately whenever a pupil finishes speaking. Sometimes, however, he is drawn into making a response by the surprising nature of the answers. For example, Donna tells the class that her three ambitions placed on her timeline are, first, to go to college, second, have two children and third, to get married.

Mr Vincent: ‘Don’t you mean getting married and then having two children?’
Donna (with great firmness) ‘No. I don’t.’

Afterwards Mr Vincent explains to me that although he was influenced in his choice of topic by the research theme, he often chooses to do things ‘out of the blue’ and not to follow the normal literacy hour lesson. In the course of this conversation he expresses the view that:

‘I don’t think it is helpful for children of this age to have their creativity and imagination stifled by having to follow set prescriptions. Learning is best done by doing. And I don’t think that banging on about full stops and commas and different kinds of writing genres helps children to develop their minds.’

This opinion is in sharp contrast to Mrs Clarke’s view. She likes the literacy hour because it gives a firm structure to her teaching and the pupils know what they have to do to succeed. Furthermore, some of the materials produced by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) are very useful because they:

‘Save you the trouble of having to plan lessons. It cuts out the need to think and allows more time for marking.’

Teaching dichotomies

The point in starting with these two brief vignettes is to highlight a fundamental weakness in the current debates on pedagogy. For as long as the subject of teaching methods has been discussed, and you could read a text on educational psychology in the 1960s and not find the word ‘teaching’ mentioned in the entire index, the tendency has been to polarise issues in terms of two extreme positions. Initially, teachers were said to adopt traditional practices, which it was claimed were based on the behavioural theories of Skinner, or they espoused a ‘child-centred’, ‘progressive’ approach which took its inspiration from the earlier ideas of Rousseau and Pestalozzi that were later grounded in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget by the likes of Susan and Nathan Issacs. At various times this debate about the effectiveness of these teaching methods might have been conducted using alternative terminologies such as ‘transmission v. discovery’ approaches or, more recently, ‘active v. passive’ learning. But the underlying assumption with all these dichotomies appeared to be that there was a clear choice to be made and that a teacher must belong to one camp or the other. When most teachers responded by claiming that they used a mix of the two approaches, it was rare to find among practitioners anyone able to explain the rationale for choosing one approach rather than the other on a particular occasion. Furthermore, for many experienced primary teachers and a good number of those responsible for their initial training, such questions about a theoretical basis for the choice of teaching method was a non-issue, since the second ‘law of pedagogy’ was often expressed by the view that:

‘There is no one best way to teach so that teachers choose approaches that they feel comfortable with and which work.’

A scientific approach to teaching?

The above justifications for everyday practice, however, do not operate in other disciplines, particularly in the physical sciences. It is true that in science there are heated debates over the rightness or wrongness of theories, as for example about the origins of the universe, and in much the same way educational psychologists will dispute theories of learning. Part of the outcome of such debates in science, and indeed all disciplines, is to develop new paradigms which will subsume different theories of an earlier generation. But this approach to theorising applies to what one might term ‘big science’, and involves the most creative thinkers who are working at the frontiers of their specialism. The world of science (and psychology), however, is made up of many other practitioners who are not such expert thinkers and innovators. These people are content to fill in the contours in the hinterland rather than working at the frontiers of knowledge in their specialism. In doing so they make use of any appropriate existing theory or model which solves the problems they have to deal with. Such scientists are likely, for example, to use a wave theory when dealing with problems concerning the transmission of sound in the atmosphere but a particle approach when the problem involves the transmission of heat by conduction. They leave it to the more advanced thinkers to use increasingly sophisticated models in order to produce more rounded ‘intellectually satisfying’ solutions. Thus there is a clear distinction between the use of what may be termed ‘working theories’ which can be used to solve a myriad of problems that explain everyday phenomena operating at a macro level and the search for ‘unifying theories’ that are required to make sense of our universe at a sub-atomic, micro level.

The tendency to use a ‘working theory’ approach most often occurs in the case of practical applications. In the same way this book will propose that pedagogy can also have a ‘scientific basis’ but that teachers need only to adopt a ‘working theory’ approach when seeking to use ideas about learning as a rationale for choosing one teaching method rather than another. A dilemma such as whether to favour a ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’ stance is therefore to be regarded as a non-question (even if it were possible to define such broad all-embracing constructs in precise operational terms). Neither is it useful to attempt, as has New Labour with their literacy and numeracy strategies, to create an all-purpose, all-embracing unified approach that combines the presumed strengths of different methods in the way that whole class interactive teaching attempts to do. The perspective that will be adopted here is that the most appropriate strategy is to take a ‘horses for courses’ approach in matters of pedagogy. In choosing a particular teaching method we should do so because it works in relation to the tasks which we wish children to perform. Teaching a class the basis of English grammar requires a different teaching strategy to that used in helping pupils to become creative writers. In each case we need to draw on different theories (or models) of learning in our search for the most appropriate teaching approach.

In constructing a scientific basis for teaching, we can obviously make use of theories of learning derived from psychology in the main, but we need also to couple this knowledge with empirical data mainly derived from classroom observation studies. Interestingly, just as there has been a tendency to polarise the debate about effectiveness of different teaching approaches, so too there has been a similar heated debate about whether teaching is, uniquely, an art or a science and, if the latter, open therefore to systematic enquiry. For Woods (1996) it is indisputably an art. Those who take this position adhere to the view that teachers develop their practice mainly through a process of intuition (Claxton 2000) coupled with regular periods of self-reflection, rather than by making use of theoretically-based knowledge, or what Schon terms technical rationality. According to Schon, ‘problems of real world practice do not present themselves to practitioners as well formed structures’ (1987: 3–4). In recent years, therefore, the notion that there is an objective body of knowledge about teaching that can determine effective practice has come under increasing criticism from a variety of perspectives, although as Furlong (2000) argues, the lack of any consensus regarding an alternative approach has helped to create a crisis in teacher professionalism.

New Labour, new pedagogy?

New Labour has sought to deal with this crisis by promoting what has come to be generally known as ‘evidence-based practice’. One ex-government spokesman, Michael Barber (2002), the former head of the Standards Agency, argues that teaching moved through four main cycles during the second half of the 20th century. The first of these cycles, covering the period up to Mrs Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in 1979, was largely based on teachers’ personal intuitions (or as some have claimed, personal prejudices) and was one of uninformed professionalism. This was replaced during the 18 years of Conservative rule by uninformed prescription, where, for example, the so-called integrated day was always bad and organising teaching by subjects automatically good. When New Labour came to power in 1997 it was therefore necessary, according to Barber, to correct the errors of the previous government so that a period of informed prescription was necessary. In the main this involved a somewhat rigid imposition of the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools. Now, however, with the decline in standards halted, it has been possible at the start of the new millennium to enter a period of informed professionalism where teachers can access, through the Internet, relevant Ofsted reviews and the latest EPPI (Evidence for Policy and Practice Information) surveys in order to inform their classroom decision making.

It is a reassuring view of the present situation but, unfortunately, one without much foundation. As Everton et al. (2002) demonstrated, there tends to be a gap of nearly 10 years between teachers’ awareness of research and its publication. Furthermore, it is not clear why research which is methodologically strong and which is consistent in its results, the kind which is rated highly in EPPI reviews, appears to hold less attraction for teachers than other offerings such as learning styles, or left brain–right brain training procedures such as ‘Brain Gym’ for which the research evidence is far less strong or negligible. In any case, the debate between those who view teaching as mainly an art based on intuition and reflection, and those calling for a scientific approach to be determined from evidence-based practice, often fail to recognise that they are referring to different levels of decision making when teaching a given topic to a particular class.

Any theory must have general applications: if it were too specific it would be of little use. In teaching, as in many other practical applications where one is not in total control of the situation, the application of any set of principles (the theory) therefore must be varied to suit the particular set of circumstances defining the given context. For example, there is a body of research strongly supporting the principle that pupils need thinking time when faced with challenging questions. Consider a novice teacher who attempts to put this principle into practice by pausing for at least three seconds after formulating the question and is faced by a barrage of children with their hands up shouting out ‘Ask me, sir! Ask me!’ Quickly losing control, he is told by his teacher mentor that it is essential not to let the pace of the lesson drop off and that questioning should therefore always involve rapid exchanges between teachers and pupils. Elsewhere, in another classroom, a more experienced, reflective practitioner has enacted the same principle by telling her pupils that there are lots of answers to the question she has posed and that she wants them to talk for a few minutes among themselves before she will listen to their responses. The resulting discussion is lively and pupils show evidence of higher order thinking. The difference in approach was not only determined by the depth of the second teacher’s knowledge (either from intuition or from previous experience) that longer pauses would result in disruption, it was also conditioned by the nature of this teacher’s relationship with her pupils (developed over time) in that she was reasonably sure the class would concentrate on the task when they were told to talk among themselves. The novice teacher would have been unlikely to have been able to guarantee such certainty and would therefore have been reluctant to relinquish control of the situation. As argued by Anderson and Burns (1989) in their Preface:

Contrary to some people’s opinions, evidence does not speak for itself. The translation of evidence into thought and action requires people who understand both the research and the classroom.

This viewpoint reflects the distinction formulated by the psychologist, Nate Gage, over 30 years ago when he argued that pedagogy was the science of the art of teaching (Gage 1978). In any discipline there must be principles based on theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence. But such principles need to be adjusted to meet the particular conditions in which teachers find themselves.

The science of the art of teaching

Robin Alexander (2000) introduces a further caveat into this debate. He contests both the rather rigid notion of teaching as a science adopted by those such as David Reynolds and others in the school effectiveness movements (Reynolds 2000) who appear to believe that pedagogy can be reduced to a series of laws. However, Alexander also rejects the view of Woods (1996) in arguing that teaching should be regarded solely as an art. He prefers instead the ideas expressed by Gage, that there is a scientific component which consists of general principles that then have to be situated in the context of individual teachers’ classrooms. As such it must encompass the kind of knowing and understandings about matters such as the balance between group work and whole class teaching in the course of a lesson. Alexander, however, argues that these latter decisions are much more to do with the accumulated wisdom which teachers acquire as they gain experience that allows them to make judgements about the fitness for purpose of particular actions within a particular context. This kind of knowledge Alexander terms craft knowledge. Desforges offers a similar perspective but observes that since much of this professional knowledge is ‘generated behind the closed doors of an individual teacher’s classroom it is rarely written down and consequently it is difficult to articulate’. He contends that:

Schools could be even more successful than they are now in promoting achievement if we could all learn to share and use the knowledge we have now about learning. I recognise that there is a vast body of knowledge about learning evident in the everyday practices of teachers. This knowledge is difficult to get at and so it is difficult to share. There is also a small but strong body of scientific knowledge about learning to be gleaned from research. This knowledge is easy to get at but difficult to apply. The trick we need to perform is to bring the practical knowledge an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Primary teaching in contemporary settings
• 2 New Labour: New beginning?
• 3 Learning for teaching
• 4 Teaching for transmission and understanding
• 5 Making pupils metacognitively wise
• 6 Group work in the primary classroom
• 7 The social and emotional aspects of teaching and other matters
• References
• Index