Just an IT Teacher

by rocket ship

In a conversation this morning after a game of squash with a Geography teacher from a large sixth form college, he told me how due to recent poor results in his department, the management of the school have insisted on him returning to, what I would call, spoon-feeding.

He went into detail about how the management had looked at where the students were struggling (whether this was student voice or not I don’t know) and found that a lot did not have good notes, structure or organisation of information they needed for when it came to revising for the exam or completing coursework. Hence, the solution in their eyes is for the teacher to do this for them. This means the teacher is:

• Providing exercise books for students to take notes in during lessons and insisting they do that to the point of- “this is important write that down”
• Providing sheets of information for the students to notate/highlight/complete
• Having students glue these sheets into their exercise books

At this point I think it is worth me emphasising that this is A Level Geography we are talking about here, both AS and A2. These are 16 to 18 year olds who will likely go on to University.

I was shocked and still am. When I asked what he thought about how it will affect their learning skills, their independent learning growth, their ability to organise their studies and develop techniques for dealing with the demands of HE course, he knew that was he was doing was going to have a serious affect on their future but the college were only interested in results. Their view is that these results add up to funding and without funding the college dies.

As a determined advocate of independent learning and empowering young people, I suppose my shock is to be expected. Yet, I am not only concerned about the short-sightedness of the college’s approach and how their actions, I am convinced, can only have a detrimental affect on the students, I am also wondering if there are a couple of deeper issues here. To this end, here are a couple of questions nagging at me:

• To what extent are Government cuts and funding restrictions leading to cut throat approaches to education?
• Are post 16 students continuing to, or in fact struggling to a greater extent, with independent learning and study/organisational skills due to the failings of the system up to KS5, to provide a good grounding in these areas?

Maybe I am in a minority as regards the concerns I have with the approach depicted in this post but I have little doubt there are others who will see these methods as questionable. When I look back at a debate I had with Doug Belshaw on Flipped Learning on his blog, the views of Guy Claxton in his work and in a presentation I watched last night from LWF 2012 by Kerri Facer where she said that it is a vital schools work as communities together and not in competition, I am sure it is not just me.

To my mind, education is more than just what grades a student comes out with. I struggled at university because I was not ready and I knew very little of how to learn, why I was learning and what learning actually meant. I was spoon fed in education and have had learn to learn since. Surely it cannot be true that “it’s the results that matter”?