Blogs for the Week Ending 26th July 2013

The Echo Chamber

Please feel free to reblog this post on WordPress and to include @TheEchoChamber2 in your #ff’s on Twitter today.

These posts appeared on the Echo Chamber blog in the last 7 days:

• Kids are failed by The System, not their genes July 26, 2013
• Surviving outside the classroomJuly 26, 2013
• Twitter July 26, 2013
• When 140 Characters Isn’t Enough: Why are young people today so sensible? July 25, 2013
• Ofsted on Local Authorities – what lessons should we learn? July 25, 2013
• Performance Related Pay: Be Sure the Behaviour Nut’s Cracked! July 25, 2013
• Life of an Educator by Justin Tarte: Read my blog, not my resume… July 24, 2013
• Scepticism not cynicism: what made my teacher training so good? July 24, 2013
• Calamity Teacher: Stole(n) July 24, 2013
• Outside In July 24, 2013
• Frightened People Ticking Pointless Boxes July 24, 2013
• How many Education Secretaries can you recognise? July 24, 2013
• Let’s Game…Or Not? July 24, 2013
• Lies, Damned Lies…

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Kids are failed by The System, not their genes

I have argued before that the usual left/right distinctions can be meaningless in education. Instead of a left/right spectrum I preferred this 2-dimensional version

which separates the issues of what should be taught (the content axis) and who it should be taught to (the entitlement axis). Lazy thinking (shown by those who look only at positions on the red line) suggests that a traditional curriculum should be accompanied by an elitist view of who is to learn it, and an egalitarian belief that everyone is entitled to a high quality education should be accompanied by trendy beliefs about content and pedagogy which completely undermine any notion of what a high quality education actually is. Normally this “red line” thinking results in smearing supporters of a knowledge-led curriculum and traditional teaching as right-wing advocates of inequality by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the top-right quadrant.

Yesterday, it led to confusion over the bottom-left quadrant. Two right-wing publications (the Telegraph and the Spectator ; there may have been others) celebrated the work of Robert Plomin who was apparently visiting the UK and popping in on the DfE. An American psychologist, Plomin was reported to have concluded that GCSE results depended more on genes than teaching. These conclusions were music to the ears of those of an anti-egalitarian bent. We no longer have to worry about policy or poverty causing educational failure if it is genetically determined. We no longer have to worry that privilege (say, a place at Eton) provides access to educational advantage if it is of limited effect compared with genes. We can even dismiss differences in attainment between races and classes if they are a result of a genetic legacy rather than social disadvantage. I’ll return to the issue of how Plomin’s data should be interpreted later, but the interpretation the man himself gives places him firmly on the bottom half of my diagram. What was missed, however,  was that far from being a conventional educational conservative in the bottom right quadrant, his views on the curriculum were anything other than conservative. According to the abstract quoted in the Spectator article, Plomin and his co-authors have concluded that:

We suggest a model of education that recognises the important role of genetics. Rather than a passive model of schooling as instruction (instruere, ‘to build in’), we propose an active model of education (educare, ‘to bring out’) in which children create their own educational experiences in part on the basis of their genetic propensities, which supports the trend towards personalised learning.

This is hard to distinguish from educational progressivism. The genetic twist has caused some confusion. Try replacing “genetics” and “genetic propensity” with “class” and “background” and you’d have a sentiment consistent with many a supporter of progressive education. Try replacing “genetics” and “genetic propensity” with “motivation” and “children’s interests” and you’d probably mop up the rest of the progressive educationalists. Plomin is in the bottom left corner of my diagram, rejecting traditional education. Being off the red line means we wouldn’t identify him with today’s supporters of progressive education and we don’t immediately recognise his position; it is rare these days. It would have been common before the second world war when a concern with the genetic material of society was as much a mark of the “progressive” left as the far right with which we tend to associate it today. Diane Ravitch’s book “Left Back” locates the American educational reforms based on psychometrics firmly within the progressive tradition in education and in that era there were no shortage of political “progressives” who advocated both progressive education and eugenics.

Of course, this all means that while a certain type of right-winger, presumably reflected in the sympathies of the Telegraph and the Spectator, had every reason to love the anti-egalitarian implications of what Plomin said, even though there really was little in it that would chime with Michael Gove’s educational policies which have tended to emphasise the importance of both traditional education and academic education as a universal entitlement (i.e. the top right corner). Moreover, the idea that schools and teachers have far less influence than genetics would also lessen the appeal of policies such as free schools, academies, league tables or even performance-related pay. There’s little point judging schools or teachers on results, or putting resources into new types of schools, if it is accepted that genetics is far more important in determining outcomes. Gove has remained loved by educational conservatives largely because he has been so hated by educational progressives and neither group likes to acknowledge any position off of that red line. But Plomin and Gove are at opposite corners of the diagram and neither are on the red line on which “normal” education debate in the media takes place. Inevitably this led to some confusion and I had a great time on Twitter yesterday, after @toryeducation tweeted a link to the Spectator article, explaining just how much Plomin’s views disagreed with, or undermined, Gove’s.

With regard to my views on Plomin’s research, his genetic determinism strikes me as very similar to the economic determinism we get from the political left. It is simply not enough to say that using present data and statistical techniques based on correlation we can conclude what can or cannot be changed. We can only say that, at present, there is greater correlation (controlling for other factors) with one factor than another. If at present our schools aren’t making much difference then it doesn’t mean they never can. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine some interventions that if put in place would make genetically similar children get widely different results thereby completely changing the relative effects of environment and genes found in the data. The data doesn’t even imply that the causation works directly from genes to results without involving any environmental factors. If identical twins are treated more similarly than non-identical twins by parents or schools then the effects of that treatment may well be similar where there is genetic similarity, but that does not mean the genes have directly caused the effects. It is very easy to assume that if statistical techniques are sophisticated enough then they eliminate all the issues of correlation versus causation that we argue over in simpler statistical models, yet correlation is the basis of all these methods and, as ever, it does not imply causation. I don’t believe genes are destiny any more than social class is. If teachers are currently not making enough difference to our students to show up in this data then I suggest we try to make more difference, not give up on that possibility.

And now I need to find just where I put my copy of Gattaca.

Lies, Damned Lies and Things You are Told During Teacher Training

This is intended as a short warning for those who have just started, or are just about to start, being trained as a teacher. I don’t want to tar all who train teachers with the same brush, but certain claims are all too commonly made to those training which should be treated with scepticism or even outright denial. I’m not going to argue against them here, just suggest that if you hear any of these you look into it yourself.

I’ll start with those I find most dishonest.

1) The effectiveness of phonics is not supported by the evidence. People are still being told this. Sometimes it’s obscured by talk of “mixed methods” or phonics methods which aren’t synthetic phonics, but basically it is a lie. There is nothing else in education research to compare with the overwhelming evidence for phonics. Some denialists are just misled, but many, particularly those in universities, appear to be just lying. Argue with them and they will soon resort to the same weasel words and half-truths that homeopaths and other pseudo-scientists use.

2) The evidence shows mixed ability teaching is more effective than setting or streaming. The sad fact, and this is an indictment of education research generally, is that there hasn’t really been much in the way of decent evidence on this question. Most studies are just garbage (although I quite like this one); some, like Jo Boaler’s, are more propaganda than evidence and provide a case study in how not to do research. The meta-analyses I’m aware of vary between finding effects indistinguishable from 0 and a small positive effect for setting but every trick in the book is used to claim otherwise. Don’t believe it.

3) Certain psychological theories from 50 years ago or more are still authoritative. I’m no expert on psychology but even looking at Wikipedia is enough to reveal that none of the following are particularly widely accepted in psychology now:

• Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956)
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1943)
• Piaget’s theories of development (1920s onwards)
• Vygotsky’s theories of development (1920 onwards)

Yet, to varying extents, all four still seem to be in common currency among educationalists. Now. of course, it is in the nature of an applied discipline that theories can gain a life of their own but too often these are treated as sources of uncontested, basic information about the psychology of learning. There are more dubious theories out there (multiple intelligences, VAK, behaviourism) but more tends to have been written about what is wrong with them, whereas the above theories are not so much debunked as left behind in favour of better theories by the psychological mainstream but preserved in the amber of education where no idea ever dies out as long as it has enough jargon to fool the uninitiated.

Now all three of the above are, in my view, beyond the pale. Other things you might hear while being trained as a teacher are more within the realm of opinion, but you may find that you don’t get to hear other opinions or even any acknowledgement that there are any cases where popular assumptions should not be made. I’m not going to claim any of the following are necessarily false but none of them should ever be assumed to be true without qualification:

1. Children learn better when they are happy.
2. A good lesson is entertaining.
3. Good lessons result in good behaviour.
4. Behaviour is determined by the relationship between student and teacher.
5. Lessons need a variety of activities.
6. Learning will result from discussion between students.
7. Children are more interested in topics relevant to their lives.
8. Knowledge and understanding can be distinguished and taught separately.
9. Children like using technology.
10. If you teach well, your students will like you.

While these statements are not necessarily false (some are too vague to ever be disproved), I would expect an experienced teacher to be able to think of a dozen examples (or more) of cases where they didn’t appear to be true. Nevertheless these are often claimed and often, and this is more likely to be absorbed by a trainee, implicitly assumed to be true.

Blogs for the Week Ending 19th July 2013

The Echo Chamber

Please feel free to reblog this post on WordPress and to include @TheEchoChamber2 in your #ff’s on Twitter today.

These posts appeared on the Echo Chamber blog in the last 7 days:

• Why Blogs and Who Needs Them Anyway? July 19, 2013
• Following up on Free Schools & Transparency July 19, 2013
• Embedding Grammar; Developing Subject Specialists in English. July 19, 2013
• The Long Road To The 1944 Education Act – Part 2 July 19, 2013
• Reform Math: An Isolationist’s View July 19, 2013
• Opportunity Cost July 19, 2013
• Poor Quality Discourse: Schank on Hirsch and Willingham July 18, 2013
• Assessment, Standards and the Bell Curve July 18, 2013
• Rate my learning: Why levels had to go, and bands are no big deal – Tom Bennett July 17, 2013
• edapt | News | Blog: What did I learn on Teach First? July 17, 2013
• Mobile Phones in Classrooms (Thomas Philip and Antero Garcia) July 17, 2013
• What to believe & what…

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Weasel Words #3: Skills

Some concepts, like knowledge, are very useful in education. Others, like self-esteem, are invariably harmful and used to justify  failure to educate. However, there is another category of concepts. There are also ideas that frustrate debate through sheer ambiguity; that allow arguments to rest on equivocation. These are the Weasel Words.

A lot of the reaction to Daisy Christodoulou’s recent ebook has centred on the question of whether there is a conflict between teaching skills and teaching knowledge. Is it a genuine conflict, a misunderstanding or a false dichotomy deliberately used to mislead or confuse? I have given my views on this previously:

… I think I have made a case in favour of knowledge. I have also critiqued quite a number of alleged skills which are taught in the place of knowledge. However, I can’t leave it at that as it is quite common for people, having set the question, to accept that knowledge is still important, but to claim that it is a false dichotomy and that we should actually be teaching both. On the face of it there is a certain amount of truth to this. We cannot avoid accepting that students should be developing skills of some description. When I endorsed the teaching of knowledge I was not endorsing rote, I was endorsing the teaching of knowledge which was to be used and understood. This can be termed as “skills”. I also accepted that there was a place for learning the arts, which again can be termed as “skills”. However, we should hesitate to accept at face value the arguments of people who say “teach both” as if they were two separate things, because they can then advocate occupying children with pointless activities or games and call it “skills-based” teaching.

Knowledge versus skills is not a false dichotomy; it is a badly expressed one.

Here I wish to look at this more closely by focussing on the extent to which our interpretation of the word “skills” define this debate and how a clear statement of what is meant by the word would help avoid some disagreements.

The first sense in which the word “skills” seems to be used, is a broad one. Almost anything a person is able to do, or at least anything they may be able to do as a result of learning, can be termed a skill. From this perspective it is hard to deny that schools should teach skills; to advocate skills is simply to state that education should enable students to do things. It is hard to conceptualise a clear conflict with knowledge from this definition, because even the driest academic knowledge can usually be applied to doing something, even if it’s just the learning of more academic knowledge. This lends itself easily to the position that the whole debate is a false dichotomy and everyone really agrees. Even an advocate of the most academic variety of education would never deny that students need the “skills” of being able to read, write and add up. However, the problem with this definition is that it resolves the debate only by brushing it under the carpet. A broad enough definition of skills will make everybody an advocate of skills, but it makes conflict about which type of skills inevitable and just as controversial as the debate it seeks to avoid. A further problem is that if being able to do something counts as a “skill” then almost any activity can be painted as the acquisition of a skill. Let kids play, then they are learning the skill of playing. Let them chat then they are learning social skills or speaking skills. Let them teach themselves then they are learning the important skill of being able to learn. Much of the pointless and unproductive activities students waste their time on in school are justified in these terms. We still have a disagreement here, over teaching, curriculum and methods, we have just renamed it so both sides can be seen as being on the “skills” side. Worse, if people change the definition of “skills” part way through an argument then they can use general acceptance of “skills” under this definition as grounds for advocating skills of another type.

A conception of skills which will make the differences clearer, is that of generic abilities which are not dependent on particular academic disciplines. This is where the conflict is most heated. Whereas the first understanding embraced almost anything, this one excludes almost any academic skill that can actually be nailed down and identified precisely. Terms like “social skills, thinking skills, creativity, problem-solving and communication skills” are perfect examples of this type of thinking. Every single one of the above is entirely dependent on context. There is no single set of social skills which is equally applicable to meeting the Queen and making friends laugh in a pub conversation. There are no thinking skills that apply equally to higher level mathematics and understanding Albanian. There is no capacity for problem-solving which applies equally to splitting the atom and working out who should play which position in your football team. As for communication, what would that be without content? It is under this definition that there is real and genuine conflict. Despite the serious lack of evidence that any teachable, transferable skills exist this is the standard excuse for forcing out content from academic disciplines. The idea that you study a subject because of abilities, dispositions or even virtues (such as “resilience”) which are more generally applicable is not harmful when used to justify studying a particular subject (although I am often sceptical about such claims) but it is toxic when used to evaluate one’s mastery of the subject or when the latest fad in skills, perhaps independence or cooperative learning, becomes the point of a lesson. To call this debate a “false dichotomy” is to hide from the real debate in education. This is the key dividing line and with this definition of skills there is most certainly a skills versus knowledge debate.

Thanks to these two different understandings of what skills are – one in which advocating skills to express only the blandest of uncontroversial statements and one in which it is to advocate a particular ideological position in the most heated part of education debate – it is tempting to think that the word “skills” is best avoided. It can only lead to confusion in which the two positions outlined above are confused, often deliberately, in order to obscure genuine conflict.

However, I think there is a third understanding in which the word is genuinely useful, although it is rarely explicitly stated. If we understand skills to be those abilities which are acquired through practice we probably come closest to how the word is used in real-life outside of the education debate. We can also see why it might be natural to refer to some of the outcomes of academic learning, such as reading and writing, or fluency with knowledge, as skills, without accepting that, say, there is such a thing as generic “thinking skills” or “social skills”. The linking of skills to practice undermines the idea that skills can be taught out of context as most practice takes place within a context, while still making it clear that there is more, even to academic subjects, than memorising lists of information. It also allows us to realise that the mix of skills and knowledge can vary drastically between school subjects and between parts of a subject depending on how important practice is. This may also be an important dividing line between academic disciplines and other school subjects. It also makes a nonsense of the idea that a skills-based curriculum can be expected to be academically rigorous or entertaining. Practise can be tedious and there is little that practise in an academic discipline can achieve without adequate knowledge to support it. If an activity is meant to help students learn a “skill” then the question to be asked is what are they practising. If there is a clear and precise answer and it is relevant, then teach that skill. If there is no answer, or the answer is so vague as to undermine the whole idea of practice, then the chances are the activity is a waste of time. I hope that it is with this definition  that, at the very least, we can have some idea of how skills and knowledge actually interact.

Blogs for the Week Ending 12th July 2013

The Echo Chamber

Please feel free to reblog this post on WordPress and to include @TheEchoChamber2 in your #ff’s on Twitter today.

These posts appeared on the Echo Chamber blog in the last 7 days:

• Where lesson observations go wrong July 12, 2013
• Impromptu post – Maths on Sports Day? July 12, 2013
• Lunchtime Maths! July 11, 2013
• Controlled Assessment StrategiesJuly 11, 2013
• The Woman Who Is Kicking the Hornets’ Nest July 11, 2013
• Inclusion: Are we getting the Balance Right? Part two: The Gateway Project July 10, 2013
• It’s not “scientific evidence-based policy” until…. July 10, 2013
• Season Review 2012-2013, part 2July 10, 2013
• Programming from Memory July 10, 2013
• Packing July 10, 2013
• Blog Post 4: Summer Institute is WELL AND TRULY under way!July 10, 2013
• Gove – not all wrong July 9, 2013
• Another year in the life of an English teacher « David Didau: The Learning Spy July 9, 2013
• Transition day July 9, 2013
• Should we force kids…

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Discussing the 7 Myths About Education

If you have had the misfortune to follow me on Twitter recently then you may have seen me getting very frustrated about how those with opposing views have reacted to Daisy Christodoulou’s recent e-book, “7 Myths about Education“. The most common response was to dismiss either the myths or the debate without any solid argument beyond a complaint about false dichotomies, often without reading the book. Others have launched apparently hate-filled, personal attacks which I have yet to see anybody from that side of the debate condemn.

So, I was really relieved to read this post from Debra Kidd (yes, that Debra Kidd) which engaged directly with the content. Please read it, as what follows won’t make much sense without it. I wrote a response to it in the comments, but as there may have been points in my response worth discussing in more detail, I present it here as well:

I genuinely think this is the first attempt to directly argue against the content of the Seven Myths book rather than find excuses to dismiss it, and as such is very welcome. Would you mind if I reblog it on The Echo Chamber? That said I think this misses the mark badly on most of the key points.

Philosophy.

“Poisoning the well” is not a valid argument. If there was cruelty in the systems key progressive thinkers were reacting against, that does nothing to validate the systems they were arguing for. We can no more justify progressive education by saying some traditional educators would beat children for academic failure than we could justify traditional education by observing that A.S.Neill would expose his genitals to small children and engage them in conversations about masturbation. No educational ideology can be judged by the worst possible examples.

With regard to the philosophical framework itself, I think that progressive education is wider than 7 Myths lets on. Rousseau’s liberalism, Dewy’s pragmatism and Freire’s Marxism do not paint the whole picture. Bertrand Russell was one of the strongest proponents of progressive education but doesn’t really share any of those perspectives. There are versions of progressive education based on thinkers ranging for Plato to Popper. It has been advocated by fascists, Marxists, libertarians and liberals. One short-lived progressive fad, the Initial Teaching Alphabet, was invented by a Tory MP. The picture in 7 Myths can be criticised for not being broad enough as it focuses only on particular key figures.

However, you have replaced it with an even narrower picture. Traditional education is not simply about taking exams. I’m struggling to imagine any real justification for crediting Descartes with traditional education. Was nobody taught knowledge before him? Did nobody have any ideas about teacher expertise or teacher authority before him? Almost everyone before him seems to have been traditionalist, except Plato who for some reason you put in the same tradition. Perhaps you think traditional education is about rationalism, and therefore Plato and Descartes are responsible as rationalists? But this makes the picture in 7 Myths look broad by comparison. Traditional education can claim ideas from Catholicism and Classicism (but not Plato). Romanticism may be seen as largely on the side of progressive education, but Arnold is a significant exception. Twentieth century philosophers who criticised progressive education include Gramsci, Oakeshott and Arendt, none of whom are really in the tradition of Descartes, but a strong argument can be made that Dewey and Russell were. I think you have found a mote in the eye of 7 Myths while missing a beam in your own.

Science

You seem to be under the impression that science is about quoting the names of scientists. Daisy loses because she (according to you, although not the case in reality) cites only Willingham, and you cite loads more people (although I wonder how many would agree that they do oppose Willingham). Apart from being the very opposite of how science should work, this means you simply have ignored the actual arguments from cognitive science presented in 7 Myths or, for that matter, in Willingham’s work. Have any of your names actually directly condemned any of those ideas? More importantly have they presented evidence against them? Or is this all just your interpretation?

And if we must argue from authority, by my count precisely 0 cognitive psychologists have criticised 7 Myths. Meanwhile Steven Pinker seems to have endorsed it.

OFSTED

Examples of progressive education are everywhere. The book could have gone to 8000 pages if it attempted to survey every influential example. For somebody who got thousands of people to endorse an argument for a progressive curriculum it seems odd that you would reject this proposition. If 7 Myths used only the most influential examples then OFSTED rightly tops the list. If you wish to argue that OFSTED has little influence then go for it, but I don’t think you are going to get very far with it. I also think you have a point that some students will try to do intelligent, academic work even when given largely empty tasks by their teachers. However, what students do despite their teachers is hardly an endorsement of the methods of their teachers. Is it, say, an endorsement of groupwork to notice that sometimes individuals do excellent work in a “groupwork” lesson by ignoring the rest of their group?

Experience and Professional Judgement

You appear to have confused illustrative examples with evidence. That said, the book is in my view persuasive because so many teachers have had similar experiences. Should we all assume that where we have seen progressive education failing it’s because those particular practitioners were not good enough? And for that reason nobody should mention those experiences when explaining their case? But if so, then I think you need to explain your use of the example of how your mother was treated from this blogpost. Or are you really intending to argue that your examples illustrate what was common in the system, whereas those in 7 Myths only illustrate isolated examples of failure?

Overall I welcome your attempt to engage, but I feel you have mainly attempted to present an alternative narrative not identified any error of reasoning or fact within 7 Myths. Is there anything that is actually wrong and there is evidence to suggest it is wrong?

Blogs for the Week Ending 5th July 2013

The Echo Chamber

Please feel free to reblog this post on WordPress and to include @TheEchoChamber2 in your #ff’s on Twitter today.

These posts appeared on the Echo Chamber blog in the last 7 days:

• Emaths – An Ofsted Outstanding Mathematics Lesson July 5, 2013
• Just Teach Us July 5, 2013
• Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 4: PractiseJuly 4, 2013
• Things I Wish I had Known pre-Teach First July 4, 2013
• Lubuntu – a Phoenix event July 4, 2013
• What is the best way to utilise your time at playtime? July 4, 2013
• The School Holiday Debate July 3, 2013
• Inclusion: Are We Getting the Balance Right? Part One: The B-Unit July 3, 2013
• Teaching cycle stage 3: ScaffoldJuly 3, 2013
• I Used To Think … And Now I Think (Part 2) July 3, 2013
• Just do what you said you would (Behaviour) July 2, 2013
• Some knowledge-skills interplay.July 2, 2013
• Let The Private Schools Take 25% At Random July 2, 2013

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The History Teachers We Don’t Hear From

During the debate over the new National Curriculum and again during the “Mr Men” controversy, those of us on Twitter were treated to a pretty continual series of assertions that history teachers are fully signed up to the “skills” agenda of the current curriculum. At times it felt as if Matthew Hunter was the only dissenting voice. However, in schools I have found it fairly easy to find history teachers who believed the curriculum lacked a solid requirement for knowledge. Two history teachers have been having a conversation in the comments on a post I reblogged recently that (if you haven’t read it already) really deserves a look.

 

From Heather F:

Some people questioning whether there is a strong emphasis on skills at the expense of knowledge in British education seem like the sort of naughty child that used to run rings around me when I was a new teacher. They know perfectly well they did something wrong, know that I know, but think part of the game is to make me prove it to their satisfaction. Other people are more genuine and so below are some my experiences of the way in which skills are often considered as separate, rather than being drawn from an essential base of knowledge in the British education system. Sorry this is so long.

In schools’ history the separation of skills from knowledge is quite old. I finished training as a history teacher 19 years ago at the Institute of Education. Our course emphasised that the role of history was to develop skills such as critical analysis and I left fired up with a Jesuitical zeal to save the education of children through teaching skills in History (I’m not joking.) My training was progressive for the time and my tutor had developed the first skills only (no knowledge required) GCSE History document paper. That tutor is now in a top position, examining History with the Edexcel exam board. Because in History there is no core knowledge that the discipline is built upon, knowledge was largely portrayed as a means to a skills based end. I remember being very excited to teach the skill of essay writing to year 7’s using scaffolding but I could not understand why I seemed to need to ensure the children knew a lot to make the exercise worthwhile and yet this was not advocated. I would almost guiltily gloss over the fact I had got the old detailed textbooks out to help prepare the kids.

History textbooks have over the years become increasingly content light (not really debatable). They ask big questions (to develop analytical skills) but expect children to answer them with very little context. Textbook writers could only believe this exercise was meaningful if they don’t see that the amount of context a child is able to bring to bear on an issue is the real measure of their success in answering the question. Answers to these sorts of questions are judged using national curriculum levels which, for example, list an apparently increasingly sophisticated understanding of ‘causation’ when in fact it is the material the student studies and the depth they study the material in that creates the difficulty. Of course our current history curriculum contains knowledge – the issue is that it is written with the assumption that skills can be taught directly and the content is little more than a vehicle to teach the skill, hence limited content to answer challenging questions.

The last changes to exam mark schemes are one of the most concrete ways to demonstrate the conscious decision of the last government to view skills as separate from, rather than arising out of, a grasp of the content, by splitting the assessment of skills from that of knowledge. I teach Political Ideologies to A2 students. While I was on my last rather long maternity leave A Level specifications changed to emphasise acquisition of skills. I prepare students to answer essay questions such as,

‘Socialism is defined by its opposition to capitalism, discuss.’

The weaker students would answer by giving descriptions of the different sorts of socialism and then they would say in passing how each strand of socialism viewed capitalism. My aim as a teacher was to try and improve their understanding so they could get beyond this. Able students would be able to really actively compare types of socialism and explain why they had different approaches. I have done years of external examining and was used to marking essays using a set of level descriptors that had some flexibility but were built on the assumption that meaningful analysis comes from a foundation of secure knowledge and by definition is not frequently evident in ‘C’ grade answers.

Anyway, I returned from maternity leave to find the essay titles were the same but mark schemes had become skills based, one set of levels for content and 3 other sets of levels for various types of analytical skills shown by the student. Three quarters of the marks are now for a discrete ‘analysing skill’ that actually has no separate existence. A typical ‘C’ grade student still cannot do lots of meaningful analysis because it requires fluent grasp of the detail to analyse it but now, to score their C grade, they must show ‘C’ grade analytical skills, separately from their ‘C’ grade knowledge. Teachers and textbooks routinely provide students with lists of arguments they can make in essays to help them do this. It is a delusion to believe that these students are now genuinely analysing rather than describing, they are parroting arguments they could not have developed themselves and often barely understand (despite my best efforts.) A level history has the same problems, and I have no time to begin to tackle the assumptions behind source work assessment. Suffice to say that the OCR chief examiner told us on a course that a good analytical Physics student should be able to score as much as a C on the AS sources paper using their generic analysis skills. My impression is that many A Level papers have moved too close to becoming themed critical thinking papers. At GCSE teachers also spend hours drilling in exam technique but don’t necessarily realise how much of this torture is because of skills based mark schemes. The irony of these mark schemes is that they actually promote the rote responses they are actually against and university admissions tutors bewail and they also often lead to unpredictable marking.

I must ‘share’ this headlining quote by NUT leader Anne Swift, commenting at Easter on the proposed new curriculum. She asserted that action was needed to protect children from the “grad-grind of a pub quiz curriculum”, saying children could use Google to access facts. “I fear this proposed curriculum will mean teaching children to learn facts by rote, with inspectors turning up to test the children’s knowledge of the continents, chronological order in history and the times tables.”

Enough said…

 

The response from misty1515:

Heather, you write so well and describe the situation so accurately. I am also a History teacher and I agree with everything you have said here and on other comments section on this blog.

I started to write a response to Tim Taylor’s comment on the website but didn’t post it in the end because something else came up! But you have said everything for me. The move away from content and knowledge is visible in my 12 years of teaching. A levels courses have moved from 6 to 3 units and GCSEs from 6 to, in the case of an Edexcel exam I did, 3 topics. The sources paper could have been an English exam. At GCSE, as long as they pupils could comprehend the source and may be comment on how they differed, they could get a C grade and higher. The idea of historical context when analysing docs had gone out of the window. It was the same with the last year 12 source based paper, with pupils being given the information about the background of the author of the text etc. They didn;t have to know it, it was given to them. The source analysis does become learning by rote. You are right.

Don’t get me started on the textbooks either. The KS3 and GCSE books are an embarrassement (Was Henry VII a gansgster anyone?) although the books used for A level are still pretty good.

When I was still teaching in the UK I really felt that History stood out as the last subject with at least some content left despite the dumbing down I have described but I found the pupils were becoming increasingly resistant to revising and having to ‘know’ stuff for an exam because it wasn;t really happening in other parts of the school.

The situation is quite different here in France!

 

Heather F.’s Reply:

Thank you Misty. I agree entirely about source work. I think a reason exams in many subjects have become so technique driven is that when you set out to assess generic skills through a subject rather than subject competence, you are forced to specify how those skills might be displayed in the markscheme so those markschemes become very prescriptive. So for AQA GCSE the either/or question on paper 1 is designed to assess the ability to describe, explain, assess and compare. However, the students need to be drilled to understand what those terms mean for AQA. Every exam board I have taught also has a different understanding of what it means to discuss the usefulness and reliability of a source. Whatever a student’s actual grasp of the detail and ability to describe, explain, assess and compare they won’t conform to the markscheme expectations, and get the marks, unless they are drilled. That is why teachers pay to go to exam board training as technique is crucial. From my experience examining I can see that showing students the framework through which they should demonstrate their competence in the exam is necessary but the more specific your assessment goals the more unreasonable the drilling must be.

I also agree that in some ways History stands out as a content rich subject compared with many. My students certainly complain they have much more to revise for GCSE than for most of their other subjects (apparently Biology is the other main subject that has lots of content). In fact the amount of content for the AQA GCSE course meant that we could never really ensure good understanding and retention and added to my feeling that a detailed grasp of the content was not valued by the examiners.

 

 

Just Google it

The Modern Miss

If your flatmate asked for help in locating a green sweater that she had somehow misplaced, you’d be able to help her look for it in a genuinely useful way. You know what a sweater is, you know what green is, and you know where it’s likely to be, or at least, you know where it’s highly unlikely to be – it won’t fit into the butter dish, for example.

But what if she asked you to help find her almposh?* It’s a bit harder to help, as you don’t know what it is. Is it edible? Soft? Hard? Large? Small? Will it fit into an envelope? Could it have slipped down the drain? What colour is it? What does it do? How will you know you’ve found it, if you don’t know what it is?

You have good finding skills, but you lack the knowledge of what you’re…

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