At times like this it’s hard to know which is the reason I find myself drifting more and more toward what some would argue to be a ‘traditionalist’ approach to education. Am I getting conservative as I amass experience, or am I getting wise to the propaganda-like face of educational sensationalism, if indeed there is such a thing? Here is one small anecdotal experience that, like many others in recent months, has me posing this question to myself and wondering how my own teaching philosophy might look in another 5 years time.
There is no denying that when you want to learn something you approach the experts in the field and so my own personal, professional development in the area of educational psychology has, in the last 12 months, taken me on a fascinating journey through the pages of some brilliant books - both directly and indirectly linked to this topic. From David Didau through to Daisy Christodolou, there is a wealth of well-informed and balanced commentary that complements an ever expanding smorgasbord of peer-reviewed material out there. And when personal preferences are brushed aside in favour of evidence based research, it becomes increasingly apparent that there is a convergence of thinking toward what I would consider some pretty old school ideas. Ideas that perhaps bring the basics back into focus somewhat, like individual writing, direct instruction, and memorisation of information (though of course not at the expense of other teaching methodologies).
One example is the criticism of the ‘21st Century Skills’ movement that would, in some circles, be seen as downright sin to not actively and explicitly ‘teach’. Afterall, our students need to be ready for the 21st Century as they are hardly about to go back in time when they graduate! Yet these skills really to not differ at all from those our students required in all of the centuries up until now, and nor are they likely to change even as the world around us does. Yet the example that prompted me to actually open the blog and write about it (instead of planning for tomorrow) was from reading a chunk of Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson’s ‘What Does This Look Like In The Classroom: Bridging The Gap Between Research And Practice’. This particular chapter pressed the importance of evidence-based interventions and pedagogies that have been properly conducted and analysed, to avoid the term ‘research tells us that..’ being thrown around and getting us into trouble. Of course we all know that having more people say the wrong thing doesn’t make it less wrong, yet places like the Twittersphere are abound with concepts that are peddled and shared for the simple reason that they are peddled and shared; a closed-loop system of educators informing one another without real question. After all, these are professionals we are talking about who have valid and trustworthy things to say. Yet I freely admit that I only just recently learned that Howard Gardner never actually carried out a single experiment on Multiple Intelligences or that Dr Benjamin Bloom never intended for his taxonomy to reflect the bottom layer as ‘lower order’ or of less significance to the higher levels. Indeed this was something that most likely came into existence through someone’s PowerPoint on the topic, yet is the first think I think of when I hear of ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’. Of course this is in addition to the fact that the entire taxonomy was not based on empirical evidence or the relative wealth of understanding we have about cognitive science today.
So I put the book down and for a change of scenery loaded up YouTube for a dose of Google’s nice Edu In 90 Podcast, which turned out to be a summary of the recent Economist Intelligence Unit Research Findings. In this summary, the large sample size and geographic coverage were implicitly touted as strong indicators of the validity of the section of research which asked educators believe it takes to prepare students for the workplace. Whilst extensive and well presented (I had actually already thumbed through the full report when it first came out), it intrigued me that such an emphasis was placed on what teachers thought, as if they (/we) are experts on the needs of the workforce (of which they/we are only a small component of). Yes it’s true that teachers are experts in pedagogy and their subject areas, but are teachers really the right people to be identifying what students need beyond education? Is that not a question for wider society that teachers ought to then be responsible for synthesising into their role in said society? It seemed to me that this ironic situation was exactly what Hendrick and Macpherson were warning against and, packaged in a slick Google branded (and of course well-intended) message, why would it not be taken seriously? I may be reading too much into this example, then again how could I be expected to teach my students to think critically if I am not doing a bit of it myself?
Perhaps it’s both. Perhaps I am getting both older and wiser, and perhaps they are inseparable. But at least I am not getting stale, for by giving myself permission to question what I see and by allowing my teaching philosophy to be adapted based on what evidence exists out there, I am learning. And that’s all that matters at the end of it.
Hendrick, C. and Macpherson, R. (2017). What Does This Look Like In The Classroom: Bridging The Gap Between Research And Practice. Woodbridge, UK: John Catt Educational Ltd.