Just Let Our Teachers Teach

I am really enjoying Sam Strickland's (@Strickomaster) book 'Education Exposed' . It just screams common sense. As a fellow Principal, I can only but concur with everything Sam documents and purports in this fine read based on his experiences as a school leader and as a passionate educator. Like many education books these days, you can adopt a 'dip-in, dip-out' approach to its reading. I was, as a result, immediately drawn to the section entitled 'The Teacher is the Expert'.

In this section, Strickland debunks the myth that teachers should be 'guides on the side', a role espoused in educational systems which place the facilitation of learning and the enjoyment of learning before the imparting of knowledge. In such educational systems, knowledge is often secondary to the development of so-called generic or transferable skills. I say 'so-called', because I am not convinced that such 'generic' skills exist (skills are actually very domain-specific). They are most certainly not transferable. In such education systems, knowledge is deemed to be 'interchangeable', and a potentially delusional notion reigns that transferable skills across domains are the priority.

Sadly, the education system in which I operate in Northern Ireland is one such education system. Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities (TSPCs) are meant to diffuse every lesson. Teachers are meant to have learning intentions which incorporate TSPCs. Active learning is the order of the day. Teachers are meant to facilitate lots of 'collaborative' learning, group work and 'hands-on' activities including cue cards, cut-outs and other such resources and realia which allow students opportunies to infer meaning, 'discover' knowledge and engage in their own research (often without the information literacy skills and the base knowledge which will allow them to determine whether the information they are using is high-quality and accurate). Teachers standing at the front of the room for extended periods of time and imparting their knowledge is frowned upon.

My own staff will know that I rally hard against this notion of teachers as 'guides on the side'. I much prefer my teachers to be 'sages on the stage', imparting the expert knowledge they have acquired after many, many years of fruitful study to students in well-disciplined classroom environments. Explicit instruction should be at the fore. This does not mean a return to the 'chalk and talk' of the 1960s, but rather the teacher leading learning from the front, with well-planned use of retrieval strategies, worked examples, effective modelling, high-quality questioning, lots of deliberate practice and robust feedback.

As I said in our recent Open Evening to prospective parents - I believe in the best use of taxpayers' money. For me, that involves teachers simply being allowed to teach from the front - without the  multifarious distractors they are meant to employ in each lesson - Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities, 'active' learning activities, superficial plenaries at the end of lessons (just why do we ask our students to remember something they did 15 minutes ago in the lesson??) etc etc.

The focus in our lessons should be on knowledge. If that knowledge is part of a highly effective curriculum progression model, it will ultimately give our students the edge in later life, and has greater potential to afford our children the cultural capital which will enrich and enhance their lives and life opportunities more than any skills-based curriculum ever will. In turn it will help to eradicate the Matthew Effect - the notion that the 'rich' get richer and our more disadvantaged students get 'poorer'. And in such a knowledge-rich education system, the teacher is key, core, and the clear expert.

Who on earth thinks it is a good idea to have students, who primarily do not possess appropriate levels of subject knowledge, 'teaching' each other and trying to learn from each other whilst the teacher is delegated to 'facilitator' on the side? Why on earth do we emphasise so-called '21st Century' thinking skills and personal capabilities?. If such skills do exist (and the jury's out), they are almost certainly biologically primary. This means our mental make-up, as human beings, predisposes us naturally to acquiring such skills, a little like learning how to speak. They cannot be 'taught'. However what our curriculum designers and educational authorities often fail to understand is that schools are not biologically primary institutions. They are biologically secondary. We come to school to learn hard things, like learning how to read. In secondary school, those 'hard things' entail the core and powerful knowledge of domain disciplines. This in turn, leads to domain-specific skill. And once again, it is the teacher who is the key player in all of this.

In my last blog post, 'Why memory really is the residue of thought', I mooted that the key and core goal for our planning as teachers is to determine how we will ensure that our students are thinking hard in our lessons about what we want them to, ie the essential, core and powerful knowledge we wish them to acquire. For me, like Strickland, this is not framed through numerous 'learning intentions' which include skills and capabilities in order to please the Inspectorate or A. N. Other, but through a singular, knowledge-driven 'hook' question which allows our students to understand exactly what the prime, core focus of that lesson is.

And the teacher is the key driver in ensuring that students are able to answer that 'hook' question. That doesn't mean our students sit passively for the entire period, but rather that highly effective exposition by the teacher is supplemented by strong approaches to questioning, modelling, scaffolding, retrieval, practice and feedback.

And the perception which has been allowed to filter down and fester from educational authorities that too much 'teacher-led instruction' is wrong has hampered strong pedagogy in the classroom. And that must change. Let's not forget Rosenshine's findings that the most effective Maths teachers undertook approximately 23 minutes of  a 40-minute lesson in 'teacher-led' instruction mode, including whole-class explanation, checking for understanding and guided practice through worked examples and high-quality modelling. The less effective teachers spent just 11 of those 40 minutes in such a manner.

Too often we are encouraged as teachers to employ active teaching and learning strategies early and frequently, acting as facilitator. We are asked, in turn. to encourage our students to 'think like historians' and 'think like scientists', often when they have nowhere near enough subject knowledge necessary to do so. Too often we are told to encourage our students to find things out for themselves and 'research', often when they don't have the necessary base knowledge to do so. What we could teach them explicitly in 15 minutes therefore turns into an hour-long 'debacle' of slow and rather painful knowledge acquisition. Painful, because quite often as Strickland explains, teachers are left to unravel and unpick the misconceptions which arise in student 'knowledge' when they are left to find things out for themselves.

So, please, just let our teachers be teachers. Let them do the job which many of us went into the profession to do, notably to pass on our knowledge and passion for a subject domain to children. And the most effective way to do this is by having our teachers at the front of the room, teaching. This will accelerate the amount of knowledge our children acquire, which in turn will lead to success, and that in turn will lead to motivation. Because success breeds motivation. Motivation does not breed success, as our current education system seems to believe, hence why lessons are meant to be 'engaging', 'fun' and 'enjoyable'. Nonsense. I don't necessarily enjoy going to the gym, but when I taste the success of my hard work in the gym, I am motivated to go back. Our lessons, too, should be challenging and should ensure our students struggle in a healthy manner. This is what will allow our students to experience success, which in turn will heighten their motivation and enjoyment. It will give them the edge and again, the knowledge of the teacher is core and key to this.

That's why I believe the teacher is the expert, not the guide on the side. Bravo, Sam Strickland!