Day Two of the Education Festival dawned rather too early; I was camped out in my van and could have done with another hour or so before the hordes descended. By the time I was decent, and had scoffed a quick breakfast in the almost oppressively convivial surroundings of the Master’s Lodge, I was ready to rejoin the fray.
My first stop was a debate rather pointedly entitled, What’s Wrong With English Schools? or something equally foolish. The panel was ably chaired by veteran debater Clair Fox and consisted of everyone’s favourite campaigning headteacher, Geoff Barton; grammar grandfather Nevile Gwynne; the Teacher Development Trust’s poster boy, David Weston, and Special Adviser to the PM, Shaun Bailey. The lack of any kind of agreed terms made the debate somewhat superficial and everyone quickly reverted to type. Geoff repeated his complaint that Gove doesn’t like schools like his because they’re not academies, and that we need to stop wasting time piddling around with the curriculum and start improving the quality of teachers; Nevile wanted to burn all teacher training institutions to the ground; David agreed that improving teaching through effective CPD would be a jolly good idea, but thought that we should only set fire to the worst ITT providers as some are doing pretty well. Shaun felt that we should stir some love into mix. Inevitably, I’ve caricatured these positions, but we really didn’t learn an awful lot. After proceedings had been opened up to questions from the floor, I tweeted that the problem was that we probably won’t ever agree on how to improve education because we don’t agree what it is for. As if she could see straight into my soul, Claire repeated this nugget 30 seconds later and we all shuffled off.
What with all the hobnobbing and what have you, the only other morning session I saw was David Starkey’s. I had only gone along because another speaker had mysteriously failed to materialise and had fairly low expectations. But the pint-size pitbull was on top form. He echoed many of my own thoughts stating authoritatively that we need to teach students “stuff” and even nodded approvingly towards “the cognitive psychologists”. He argued that creativity depends on having a head full of valuable knowledge and that this is the very essence of how we stand on the shoulders of giants. All this was a precursor to a discussion of ‘British values’, and just as it was looking to be a disappointingly uncontroversial outing, he did managed to make some dubious comments about Islam towards the end. Hey ho.
The afternoon mainly consisted of me. I had two gigs back to back. First of all I squeezed back into the same under-sized Mandarin Centre room I was in last year to launch an assault on what I’ve taken to calling the Cult of Outstanding. Briefly, my thesis is that so-called ‘outstanding’ lessons aren’t all that. If you’re interested, my slides are here:
I then hurried down to the sweatbox of RM Books tent to have a chat about my book, The Secret of Literacy. This was a small, but enthusiastic audience and it was a lovely opportunity to just chat about some of my ideas and answer questions. I laid out the same arguments as I did in this post:
- If we teach in the medium of English then, whether we like it or not, we’re teaching students to use English. But that doesn’t mean we teaching them to use it well.
- Explicitly teaching academic language is the only we to guarantee less privileged students can be academically successful.
- Improving students’ ability to write, also makes them better able to think.
And that, as they say is that. I’m sure something else must have happened, but the rest of the day has disappeared in something of a fog.
My most abiding impression of the weekend is that despite the mighty efforts of some to sweep away the deep divisions in education there’s no getting away from the fact that our profession is a hotly contested ideological battleground. It’s a sad truth that as long as we continue to agree on what education is actually for, there will never be peace between the warring tribes of teachers.
But consider this: none us believes ourselves to be wrong. Everyone I met or came into contact with at Wellington (with the possible exception of Katie Hopkins) has what they consider to be the best interests of young people at heart.
My own belief is that the purpose of education is to make children cleverer. It depresses me that I write this in the knowledge that such a simple statement will probably be scorned, warped and dismissed with others who take a different view characterising me as anything from ignorant to stupid to evil.
Part 1, in which I recap my debate with Dylan Wiliam, is here.
Hello. As always, well worth reading even -especially?- at 1.15! I would be interested in reading more about your thoughts on what being cleverer means. What does it mean to be clever (as opposed to knowledgable- or is that a false dichotomy?)? Is there a difference between being ‘clever’ and ‘clever at’? This is certainly not posted in scorn but out of genuine interest
Can I please echo Frank’s questions in the comment above? I was on the periphery of the twitter conversation about this which seems to have prompted your final paragraph. At the beginning of a spin off chat, mainly about fellow tweeps’ own children, I described ‘clever as a weasel word’. I said this because it is/has been used to represent a great many things by different people. It is not a word with a single stable meaning which can be relied upon. As a result I have an additional question – how can you tell if someone is ‘clever’, or has become ‘more clever’? As opposed to being or becoming more successful at what you have taught them. I’m not being disingenous ; I really don’t know what you want to convey by using the word ‘clever’ in your core vision. Thanks
For me, the purpose of what we do is to facilitate independence.
Independence is the greatest gift in life.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that the only way to facilitate independence is to teach for it. I’ve blogger on this here: https://www.learningspy.co.uk/category/teaching-sequence/
Thank you, David
I always read your work and derive great reassurance and inspiration from it.
Just keep up the good work, sir. May you always speak from the heart / mind …even if on occasion you yourself (or others) conclude you were a ‘little wrong’ on some issues. At least you’re not afraid of admitting it.
Rgds
Muhammad Imran
(A teacher of RE for 8 years who is doing his first year as an English teacher, and who loves the job but is finding it tough going.)
Thanks Muhammad – good luck with teaching English for the first time – let me know if I can help 🙂
Surely the point of education is to increase knowledge base (or make people cleverer) as the more you know, the more situations you are better able to ‘handle’. Knowledge is the foundation of independence, a simple and obvious statement is without the knowledge of reading, there is no way you can ‘tap into’ the accumulated knowledge in the books of the planet.
Well, that’s certainly what I think.
I was thinking today about how I use the word ‘clever’ when referring to a pupil. I think that what I usually mean is that they understand/are able to use the knowledge I teach quickly, as compared to their less clever classmates who take longer to understand.
I agree – to me, ‘clever’ is a matter of processing speed – and perhaps by extension, quantity and breadth of processing done. Whether it can be increased by training is a moot point; maybe people can be taught to use what they have better, but whether it is unlimited, I doubt. There is plenty of data to suggest that human processing speeds are limited.
But education has to be about more than just making people ‘process’ things quicker – even a very high speed computer can be prone to ‘garbage in, garbage out’ syndrome.
Thanks for engaging with the challenges of defining ‘clever’ gentlemen. It remains a very problematic word for me. As someone who has been lucky in the academic lottery, my success has been largely do to the rapid processing you describe. I also liked to please and I fitted in. At college and then in adult life I then had to unpick my youthful assumptions about what ‘clever’ traditionally looks and sounds like in terms of a performance for others, usually those who have taught us or examine us. Such a definition is not nothing but it’s not everything and it leaves an awful lot out. Any simple definition also makes invisible the systemic inequalities culturally positioned within society and education. I was firmly reminded of this aspect yesterday evening when listening to Darren Chetty present his excellent paper The Elephant in the Room : Picturebooks, Philosophy for Children and Racism at the Institute of Education. I strongly recommend reading it. Though through technical ineptitude I’ll have to post the link in a second comment!
And here it is http://icpic.cmc-uct.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Chetty%20The%20Elephant%20in%20the%20Room%20%E2%80%93%20Picture-books,%20Philosophy%20for%20Children%20and%20Racism.pdf
This article is also excellent, about the absence of diversity in classrooms and the impact of that on children’s narrative choices
http://mediadiversified.org/2013/12/07/you-cant-do-that-stories-have-to-be-about-white-people/
Both essays provide food for thought regarding claims that ‘cleverness’ and academic success can be discussed in a ‘culturally neutral’ way.
Diane, thanks for those links. I agree wholeheartedly that ‘cleverness’ should not be presented as an uncomplicated concept and that it is, in fact, very problematic. Like you, I was lucky, was ‘quick’, eager to please and, although from a humble background in many ways, from broadly the right class to make progress with those qualities and end up at a good uni. I thought I was pretty clever. Then, teaching in south London I discovered a world of cleverness that I didn’t know existed and that most *definitely* is not recognised by system as it stands. I’m concerned that a lot of the debate that takes places via Twitter does not address issues like this in enough depth.
[…] esteem. We do it because we think it’s important. But what is education for? In my last post I suggested that for as long as we disagree on the purpose of education we will never agree on how […]
Hi Em. I teach in south London too! Are you a member of LATE? We have lots of in depth discussion about important issues, far removed from the biff baff boff of twitter debate. Tweet me @dileed if you would like to connect or go to http://www.late.org.uk/ We have a Conference on Saturday 😉
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Hi Diane, thanks – yes, I know about LATE’s conference but, unfortunately, I’m no longer in London and have two small children who require my attention on Saturdays (I work full-time)! Otherwise, I would have been there with bells on.