In defence of Mr Brainy

Last week, Michael Gove made a wide-ranging and passionate speech at Brighton College addressing what it means to be an educated person.

Unfortunately, the media reaction focused upon a single reference to a GCSE history lesson teaching the Third Reich through Mr Men characters. The education community are up in arms, but their response is paradoxical. Some have defended the merits of such teaching methods, others have argued such teaching methods are not widespread.

The latter argument is the easiest to dismiss. The Mr Men example was taken from the website activehistory.co.uk. It promotes ‘active’ teaching methods for learning about the past, and is arguably the most popular online resource amongst British history teachers. It contains many other examples of infantilising, anachronistic approaches to history teaching. To dispel the illusion that the Mr Men example was some unfair aberration from the otherwise quite sensible teaching of history in British schools, here is list of the top ten inane history lessons I have encountered in two years as a history teacher. I may add, these were all pitched at pupils between the ages of 11 and 16:

1. Study the Battle of Hastings through re-enacting it on a field with softballs.
2. Study the Doomsday Book through completing a survey of pupils’ possessions in the classroom.
3. Study King John through composing a song defending his kingship, in response to ‘The Phoney King of England’, a song from a Disney cartoon.
4. Spend three lessons making castles out of cardboard boxes.
5. Study Henry VII by asking ‘Was Henry Tudor a Gangster?’.
6. Study the marriages of Henry VIII by role-playing an episode of Blind Date.
7. Make pupils gather under their desks in order to experience life on a slave ship.
8. Study the Industrial Revolution by acting out pitching inventions on Dragon’s Den.
9. Create a facebook page for Adolf Hitler, circa. 1921.
10. Make plasticine models to represent Hitler’s main aims as Führer.

My indignation at such teaching methods may lead you to dismiss me as a blimpish killjoy. However, in my experience pupils are equally indignant at being so patronised. For the most part, pupils want to be taken seriously. Many commentators have defended the validity of ‘active’ teaching methods. According to the child-centred orthodoxy, such learning activities engage pupils, and enhance their learning. In reality they are time-consuming and superficial, and rarely hold a candle to confronting a topic head on.

One of the best critiques I have read of ‘active’ teaching methods comes from Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia. He writes that all lesson planning should take into account the following cognitive principle – “memory is the residue of thought”. According to this principle, Willingham criticises an American history lesson about slaves escaping via the underground railway, in which pupils bake the sorts of biscuits eaten by fugitive slaves during their journey north. He writes, “[the] students probably thought for forty seconds about the relationship of biscuits to the Underground Railway, and for forty minutes about measuring flour, missing shortening, and so on.” Active teaching methods such as designing Mr Men characters from the Third Reich are meant to engage pupils with the past: in reality, they distract them from it.

Aside from their ineffectiveness, what is most disheartening about active teaching methods is that they imply history is insufficiently interesting to be taught in its own right. Many teachers seem to believe that without, games, activities, and contrived ‘contemporary relevance’ history is boring. How can the unfolding story of mankind possibly be boring? A good history teacher makes the story of mankind interesting in and of itself. Those who resort to creating facebook pages, making models, dressing up, cookery classes and Mr Men – and in doing so betray the integrity of their subject – are quite simply cheating.

Children with SMBD

Below is a wonderful cartoon that appeared in Prospect magazine this month. Republished with permission.

Gove listens

Whoever said Gove does not listen to teachers? At the Spectator education conference last week, he mentioned an article I wrote for the April edition of Standpoint magazine.

Here is the video of his speech. Watch from 12:28.

The Standpoint piece he refers to can be found here. In it, I argue that the excuses culture that burdens British schools originates in a ‘sociological view’ of education. For generations, teachers have been told that socio-economic background has an irreversible effect on the academic prospects of a child. As a result, this message becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy in our classrooms. A culture of ‘no-excuses’ is the only way that we can counter this soft bigotry of low expectations.

Dear Blogger

The following post is an email that I received last week from a fellow teacher. The content will be familiar to many: pressure to adopt child-centred teaching methods; disillusionment with PGCE course; atrocious behaviour in schools; excuses making from school senior management. This email sews it all together in a particularly moving way. It is distressing to think how many talented and enthusiastic teachers have been driven out of the profession, or into the independent sector, by their unwillingness to yield to the child-centred orthodoxy. It has been posted on my blog with her permission.

Dear Blogger,

I would like to thank you profusely for saving my life yesterday – or, at least, raising my spirits.

I am a rookie – NQT (FE) and have just completed three weeks’ supply teaching at a London comprehensive – my first school post – History KS3.

Yesterday, I was told not to come back because of the behaviour problems in my classes. Although this dented my ego, it also provided a massive relief.

I was schooled at a London comprehensive in the late 80s, and, although the education/teaching was almost comprehensively bad, the behaviour was nothing like what I have just witnessed.

It was my first time entering a school since I had left, so I suppose I was in for a shock.

I was educated in the traditional way. My idea(l) of teaching is where the teacher teaches from the front, and the students listen, read and write. I secretly disagreed with everything my PGCE taught me and found it very difficult to adapt to the new style – especially devolving authority to the students through group work, which makes them even more unruly and loud.

In my school in the 80s, there were behaviour problems but these were limited to one or two students in a class or the bottom sets. Apart from that, we generally worked in silence. We never questioned the teacher or answered back – even when they did things like fall asleep at the back of the class (supply teacher – the kids worked on in silence, fearing he was dead) or leave the class for a cup of tea and the newspaper in the office next door (terrifying science teacher). We never complained, even when we were badly-taught. There was no-one to complain to. I am glad that teachers are more accountable now.

Corridors were orderly. One of our teachers made us line up six inches away from the wall before letting us in. We had to be utterly silent. He measured the distance with a ruler. In general, we read books, answered questions, got on with it. We had enough motivation to rise above teachers who ranted and raved all lesson and refused to teach the syllabus, teachers with no powers of explanation who made everything foggier and  shouted at you when you didn’t understand, teachers with high absence rates and tedious monotonal delivery who never set/checked homework, teachers with impenetrable foreign accents, teachers who taught babyish material (Maths at primary level at secondary school) and teachers who taught to the lowest ability (one unforgettable hour listening to an explanation of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to a student who didn’t understand that it was just a road). We were not streamed  except for English and Maths – which was another cruelty.

Such was my compulsory schooling and I felt, for the most part, cheated, deprived and angry. The anger was hidden in the coma-like tedium, ‘asleep with my eyes open’, of my schooldays. I had reared myself on a diet of Enid Blyton and fantasised about a school with a glorious uniform, order, decorum, academic rigour and standards. I dreamt of being required to reach my potential instead of having to hide or deny it. In later years, I visited public schools, with buildings like castles, and my feeling of envy was still there.

I think we survived our teachers because we were motivated kids with hope for our future. We taught ourselves from books when necessary.

Our school had no drama or music departments, barely any sports, and no extra-curricular activities.

But that was a different world.

I was shocked to see that acceptable behaviour in a modern comprehensive included running and screaming in corridors, punching other students without being told off, climbing stair railings like a monkey. In the classroom, the students talk constantly, answer back, shout, walk around.  All this is accepted by the teachers and SLT. There are no sanctions except detentions, which the students don’t mind. They talk to the teachers as if they are their equals and argue when challenged – loudly, constantly. They have no respect, deference or fear.

They also have the attention span of a gnat and cannot apply themselves to a task without constantly needing attention. They can be quiet for a minute at the most.

When I complained about bad behaviour to a member of the SLT, she focused on what I could do to ‘engage’ them more. I was surprised at this, having assumed that the children were at fault and not me. ‘Less text,’ she advised. ‘They are intimidated by words. Don’t ask them to read or write – they can’t. Don’t talk – they can’t listen. Use lots of pictures – they can discuss these in pairs. Use a cartoon for a starter. Stick information around the room so they can walk around and point to it. Show film clips. Change activities every few minutes so they don’t get bored. Use games, competitions, wordsearches, crosswords, a buzzer, the countdown clock. Make everything extremely easy so they are not threatened.’ She also came into my class, tried to coax the students into liking me (‘we have to give new people a chance’) and ignored the students who shouted at her, argued and walked around the room while I was talking.

I was astounded. How can you learn history without reading, writing or listening? I had been giving the students GCSE textbooks to work from, because I thought they were so easy. ‘Don’t,’ she advised. ‘They are too hard.’

Meanwhile, the clever kids do their work in five minutes while the others are playing football at the back of the room or engaged in a tussle on the floor. They suffer silently, as they always did in comprehensives, denied hope, aspiration or a decent education. They put up their hands to ask for more work but you are too busy trying to control the unruly elements to respond.

It reminded me of the childish me – dreaming of books and books, fantasising about learning Latin and Greek, and British history in chronological order, so I would know which King or Queen did what when, so I could form the past into a coherent story or plan and know my position at the end of it. Who was Charles 1st? I’d wonder. Who was Oliver Cromwell and who were the Tudors? What did the Romans do? I’d heard about these people but knew I’d never find out at school. My childish self would have been appalled by cartoons at the age of 12. I was struggling to grow up and I wanted knowledge about the world. I wanted to hear about it from someone who knew.

My own world was restricted, stultifying, working-class. No-one was educated or erudite. School could have provided a route out of the dull confines of suburban life, where people only talked about what had happened to them, never about ideas, history, literature. School should have stimulated the intellect and imagination. I wanted to learn about different worlds from the one I lived in, perhaps escape to one of them, one day.

However, at least we were literate. At least we were required to read novels by Hardy and Thackeray at 14, not look at cartoons and play games with buzzers. School was not expected to be fun – learning is boring and repetitive sometimes. At least tasks lasted more than five minutes so you could get your teeth into them. As a child, I stubbornly refused to do groupwork. I wanted to learn from the teacher or a book, not waste my time listening to kids who knew less than I did. I also refused to help the lower-ability kids (mixed pairings are lauded for differentiation purposes). I felt cheated – I was there to learn, not to do the teacher’s job for them.

Harold Wilson thought comprehensives would be a ‘grammar school education for everyone’. That never happened. We sank into an undifferentiated swill of mediocrity and gloom. I still think that everyone deserves a good, solid, old-fashioned education.

Recently, I taught Functional Skills to bricklayers. Seventeen years old and they didn’t know about nouns, verbs, irregular plurals, apostrophes. I taught them from the front of the class, demonstrating on the whiteboard. They then practised, on paper, with admirable concentration. They learned and felt triumphant. They were not academic under-achievers after all. They had untapped potential. Bricklayers should be as literate as anyone else. I am glad that I sent them into the world equipped with the essentials of grammar, spelling, punctuation.

I remember myself at 12, in my shiny new too-big blazer, excited at the prospect of ‘big school’. ‘Now I’m going to really learn,’ I thought, ‘I’ll find out who Shakespeare was and how his mysterious language worked. And one day I’ll go that big office called ‘university’.’ In my hand, I held three brand new Bic pens, in different colours (a new luxury). They gleamed, as did my future. ‘With these pens, I can do anything,’ I thought. ‘I can learn everything’. My dreams were betrayed, as were thousands of other kids’. Kids with different dreams are also betrayed by the comprehensive system.

Getting back to the present, I was fired yesterday from my London comprehensive. I told a 13 year old girl to be quiet. She was outraged: ‘You can’t tell me to be quiet!’ I told her again. She stomped out of the classroom saying, ‘I’m going to complain about you and get you sacked!’ Later on, I could hear her crowing outside my door: ‘I’ve written lots and lots about you!’ She was fearless, assured of her power. I was dismissed. She had achieved her objective. The kids rule the roost. Apparently, they had been complaining to the Head about my strictness all week.

I don’t mind being fired. It is not a place I can work. I don’t agree with the ethos of child-centred learning and ill-discipline. I think children should be punished, not rewarded, for misbehaviour. I don’t think teachers have to be popular to be effective. I had begun to dread seeing those rude, argumentative children every day. But I am from a different world.  And I won’t be working in a comprehensive school again.

I had meant to write to thank you for your blog, which heartened me yesterday. Instead, I’ve written my life story with a bit of polemic thrown in. I hope you get something from reading it.

Asha.

At Last: Gove Goes For the Culture of Excuses

“However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness.”

Davies Giddy MP, 1807

“The academic, subject-based curriculum is a middle-class creation . . . whose effect, if not intention, has been to make it difficult for many children not from a middle-class background to adjust to a highly academic school culture.”

Professor John White, 2007

Although two centuries and the political spectrum divide these two quotations, they are united in an important sense: both deny the ability of poor children to benefit from an academic education. The first quotation comes from a Tory MP speaking against the 1807 Parochial Schools bill. The second comes from a man at the heart of today’s education establishment, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, University of London. His is a different sort of bigotry, one that comes with the gentle inflection of liberal sympathy, but is no less socially damaging. “The soft bigotry of low expectations” is a phrase many, including the Education Secretary Michael Gove, have used to describe such thinking.

Read the full article on the Standpoint website here.

An open letter to the President of the Historical Association

The following is in response to a letter written by Professor Jackie Eales published in this month’s issue of Standpoint magazine, which can be read here. In it, she criticises an article I wrote for Standpoint about history teaching, which can be read here.

March issue of Standpoint where Professor Eales’ letter appears

Dear Professor Eales

When I criticise progressive education, I tend to find that apologists for the status quo respond in one of two ways. Either they defend the value of progressive education, or they deny that progressive ideas are really that widespread. In your letter to Standpoint criticising my article, you take the later approach.

You write that my “analysis of what is wrong is based largely on personal experience”, and imply that the only evidence I use is “a single anecdotal source”. Here I must disagree. I quote from the Schools History Project (SHP) publication A New Look at History, the 2007 National Curriculum, a report by Professor Robert Tombs, and a national survey into the level of historical knowledge amongst 11 to 18-year olds. You may believe this is “insufficient reference to the facts”, but it would be difficult to fit more into a magazine article. Had I had more space, the following evidence could have been marshalled to further my case.

• OFSTED (dubbed the ‘Child-Centred Inquisition’ by a fellow teacher blogger) repeatedly endorses progressive teaching methods at the expense of traditional teaching. The 2011 report History for all described ineffective history lessons as those where pupils are “expected to listen to the teacher for too long” and lessons are “too focused on content”. Throughout, it promoted skills-based history teaching, concluding the best lessons were those that “developed pupils’ skills in research, analysis, evaluation and communication”.
• GCSE examinations are strongly swayed towards assessing historical skills. Knowledge and understanding have become relatively unimportant. The OCR History A GCSE, for example, has a whole paper dedicated to source investigation, making up 25% of the pupils’ final grade. Knowledge and understanding are so unimportant in this paper that ‘Background Information” is given in the exam for the pupils to use.
• Perhaps the most popular website for accessing history resources, activehistory.co.uk, hosts countless history lessons of the type I describe. To give a flavour, one suggestion is to teach year 11 pupils about the rise of Hitler by reimagining Hitler, Hindeburg and Goering as Mr Men characters.

I refuse to accept that my experiences are some sort of aberration from the generally quite sensible teaching of history in British schools.

In your letter, you defend the SHP from my criticisms. You write that the organisation advocates “a synthesis of historical knowledge and understanding”. Whilst the SHP have moderated their position on the skills/knowledge debate since the 1970s, much of the time they simply pay lip service to the importance of knowledge. Their textbooks, examinations, and training all betray a marked preference for skills over knowledge. To quote from their website, “The Schools History Project believes that historical enquiry, the analysis of evidence and creative forms of communication should form the bedrock of the school history curriculum.”

Lastly, you accuse me of “attacking the work of thousands of [my] colleagues”. This is unfair. I do not attack my colleagues, I attack the ideas they are made to subscribe to. The dedication and industry of Britain’s history teachers is undeniable, and in my short time as a teacher I have encountered some inspiring professional role models. However, they do well despite the bad ideas they are given about how to teach history, not because of them.

As you are President of the Historical Association, my rudimentary skills of source analysis tell me you are probably biased towards the status quo. My experiences are real and, much as you deny it, so is the wider situation I describe. All is not well in the state of British history teaching. Complacency and denial are not helpful.

Yours faithfully,

Matthew Hunter

Why are independent schools so much better than state schools? #2

My most popular blog post ever in terms of hits is a piece I wrote last May, entitled ‘Why are independent schools so much better than state schools?’ I questioned the assumption that independent schools do better solely because they have more money, and pupils with a higher level of ‘social capital’. Whilst these factors are influential, they are far from the whole story.

Independent schools: elimination is not the answer, emulation is.

The gulf in achievement has as much to do with philosophy as it has to do with finance. Whilst independent schools by and large uphold a ‘traditional’ idea of education, the state sector is burdened with the destructive shibboleths of ‘progressive’ education. Admittedly, my only evidence for this was an anecdotal account of having been educated at an independent school, before becoming a history teacher at a state secondary school. I wrote,

“At the school I attended, there was a strong behaviour policy and senior staff who were respected, even feared, as authority figures. The secondary school where I teach is the educational equivalent of a failed state: rules exist but are not enforced, and pupils daily exhibit atrocious behaviour safe in the knowledge that consequences are unlikely. At the school I attended, we were pushed to succeed with plenty of homework, regular assessment and (often) unforgiving reports. At the school where I teach homework is non-existent, assessment is slack and reports are not allowed to harm the self-esteem of the pupils.”

Since writing that, I have been introduced to a report which provides more solid evidence for such an argument. Dr Jo Saxton, the author of Twenty-Two Things Excellent Schools do, has collected information about the teaching methods shared by seven high performing independent preparatory schools around the country. I would recommend any interested teacher to read the whole report, but here are some highlights:

• “Through everything ran the understanding that education was first about content, accuracy and high standards, and only then about skills. What I saw was schools giving primacy to knowledge.”
• “Without exception, the schools employed synthetic phonics to teach reading.”
• “Times-tables were memorised and practiced frequently: times-tables were learned by rote and frequently tested (in innovative as well as conventional ways!).”
• “Testing: forms of formal and informal testing and examination were used.”
• “All of the schools placed high value on good behaviour, rewarding both academic and sporting success, and directing competition to reward groups over individuals. Every single one of the seven schools used a vertical ‘House’ system (where each child belongs to one ‘house’ for their whole life at the school), to support and link these elements.”

Such practices are by no means unique to the independent sector. However, ‘progressive’ practices do dominate the state sector, and those schools that contradict them are counter-cultural. Michael Wilshaw’s much feted former school Mossbourne Academy has frequently been compared to a private school, for its emphasis on uniform, discipline, competition and hard work. To his credit, Wilshaw is not shy about recognising that state schools must learn from the independent sector. Last month he wrote, “The independent sector has been very good over many years at guiding character and giving pupils a sense of self-esteem…. we need to develop that same character- building in the state sector.”

Despite all this, apologists for the status quo in state schools still argue that these differences in pedagogy and philosophy are unimportant, and socio-economic background explains everything. However, if apologists are to really follow through on such logic, they must also believe that independent schools would in fact do even better if they adopted the lax discipline, skills-based learning and anti-didacticism so common in the state sector. This strikes me as preposterous.

Worse still, is the argument that what works in independent schools cannot be applied to state schools. This was evident in a monstrously condescending article written by Barbarra Ellen in the Observer last month. She argued against introducing competitive debating to state schools, writing “you can’t just put debating societies into state schools and declare the problems of social inarticulacy and lack of confidence miraculously solved. This would be like Sellotaping a dog’s tail on to a cat and willing it to wag.”

She went on to write that ‘debating skills’ would get you glassed in the average British pub, and the “moppets on X Factor” seem to be pretty confident speakers anyway. The soft bigotry of low expectations does not even come close to describing such thinking. I run a debating club at the inner-city school where I teach, and see first hand the wonderful benefits it brings to the pupils. Without wanting to sound hysterical, Ellen should be ashamed with herself for promoting such inverse snobbery.

In 1973 the Labour Shadow Education Secretary Roy Hattersley addressed a conference of independent school heads. He warned them “I must, above all else, leave you with no doubts about the serious intention initially to reduce and eventually to abolish private education in this country.” Thankfully, we now seem to be taking a more constructive approach to the superiority of private education. Wellington College has set up an academy, Eton are soon to do so, and in Newham a group of pupils are soon to take their AS levels at a selective sixth form college sponsored and staffed by a collection of independent schools. Apologists for state schools must swallow their pride and accept that in terms of pedagogy and philosophy, they have much to learn from the independent sector.