Is it just me, or do secondary school children make a heck of a lot of posters? Now, I’ve got nothing against posters per se, but why do we seem to have decided that poster making is the best way to demonstrate knowledge and understanding? I suspect it may be because deep in our blackened, embittered hearts, we secondary school teachers think somehow that making posters is fun.
Further, many secondary teachers have a bit of a warped view of what goes on in primary schools. We have a tendency to assume that the primary curriculum is – at least to some extent – baby stuff. We see the function of non-specialist primary teachers as being more about child care than teaching. And we assume that new Year 7 students aren’t up to much, so out come the colouring pencils and the Pritt-stick in order to make them feel more at home.
The one massive advantage primary teachers have is that they know exactly how their students have been asked to express their understanding of curriculum content over the year. If for any reason they’ve asked the class to make posters, primary teachers will know how many times, and how recently this will have happened. They have the capacity to say to themselves, maybe one poster a term is quite sufficient, thank you very much.
When children arrive in secondary schools they disperse to the winds. It’s very hard to keep track of how much writing and what type of task children are asked to produce. If a Year 7 students has let’s say 10 different teachers all of whom are have lowish expectations of what they’ll be able to do, then it wouldn’t be that surprising if many Year 7 children were asked to produce 10 posters a term. I don’t care how great you think posters are, this is too many! If you’re looking for a way to alienate otherwise supportive parents, set posters as homework.
There’s another related problem with the poster-based curriculum and it is this: posters are, by their very nature, a visual medium. They’re meant to be eye-catching from a distance. They are not meant to contain paragraphs of densely typed text. Here are some posters:
They are masterpieces of design. They communicate a simple idea as efficiently as possible with the maximum economy of language. As such, maybe they are worthy of study in art or design; maybe historians do need to look at propaganda posters; maybe it’s worthwhile for geographers to look at tourism posters. Maybe.
This, on the other hand, is crap:
Teachers have a choice: we can either commit curriculum time to teaching students how to make posters or we can spend that time teaching the richness and beauty of our subjects. If we don’t teach students how to make posters they will make crap posters. They will fill them with crap writing, and because practise makes permanent, they will be practising writing badly and get better at being bad at writing. This is not desirable.
Instead, we should teach our students how to express themselves like subject specialists. History teachers should teach students to write like historians; science teachers should teach students to write like scientists; English teachers should teach students to write like writers or critics.
And to those teachers who scream out, “But making posters is fun!” Not ten times a term it isn’t. If you’re unable to make your subject intrinsically interesting, then maybe you’ve no business teaching it.
And before you ask, don’t get me started on leaflets!
UPDATE: Some of the more baffling objections to this post have been handled very adroitly here by Toby French. Before issuing an incensed “Yeah, but-“ have a read of Toby’s post cos it’s pretty much precisely what I’d say to you.
I couldn’t agree more! My son was asked to make a poster about soup for his homework last year – no further hints or tips – just make a poster about soup!
We’ve already had one on crumbles. Yes really.
D&T teachers who teach graphics are particularly annoyed and frustrated by other subjects which set ‘poster tasks’ without any thought of just how difficult it is to produce a good poster. The combination of images, few words, the clarity of a key message, an understanding of the audience is no mean feat. If you really do want to set a poster task and as a history teacher I might want to get pupils to design a recruiting poster for Cromwell’s Army then a first port of call would be to have a discussion with the D&T teacher.
I am a D&T teacher and fully agree with this response. The poster task is frequently dumbed down and not used to essential learning tool.
Also I would say that primary teachers don’t overuse posters as we do think about writing across the curriculum carefully. So we are more likely to ask for an information text in Science, leaflet about a geographical location, poster about e-safety, re-telling a story in RE, etc. We really don’t do posters that often!!! We would get crucified in a book scrutiny if we did…..
Posters are great for conceptual development. I’m writing a blog on story boarding I’ll publish today which will develop this idea.
To be clear, does this mean you think more posters in Year 7 is a good thing?
No but as you point out a good poster is a significant intellectual challenge. The problem is, as is so often, in education that the teaching approach is done badly. A way of masking poor writing. I work in FE i know full well that in secondary school there is a lot of bullet pointing poster writing and lots of other techniques used as proxies for learning because I see the consequences.
That does not reflect on the teaching approaches themselves but on the fact that the underpinning fundamentals of pedagogy are not properly understood. If you want to get across one abstract and complex concept a poster is a great idea because it leverages the visual memory and also forces a real focus on context and language. You have to really think about language to produce a minimalistic representation of a complex concept
In reality only the most able can produce good posters. .
I can accept that posters can leverage visual memory and force a focus on context and language – but the time occupied with design concerns is just as likely to distract. The danger is that the visual nature of posters will make students remember the process of designing the poster but forget the content they were supposed to be learning. Maybe it’s true that only the most able can produce good posters but many able children resent the time spent on bubble writing and colouring in.
You are describing the difference between good and bad teaching and not the issue of posters.
No, I’m saying that in the vast majority of cases even if posters are done well they would still represent a wasted opportunity.
Have to agree to disagree.
How about we both undertake a challenge to search the three best reasons we WE are wrong and then compare notes? I’ll try to prove your position, you try to prove mine. We might learn something. Interested?
Up for anything not sure how it would work. How about we both do 3 arguments for and 3 arguments against our own positions and see how it works. In other words outline our positions and then explore their potential weaknesses. We might end up in exactly the same place.
Actually research scientists make a lot of posters! Posters are widely used in the academic community and most scientific conferences include poster presentations! Research posters summarize information or research concisely and attractively to help publicize it and generate discussion. (http://guides.nyu.edu/posters) so time spent by a science teacher in poster making techniques is justified. (It does have to be done properly I grant you)
Right. So this is an argument for more poster in year 7 is it? Do research scientists have to do courses on poster design?
Hi David
As always thought provoking.
As Liz said, research scientists have a tradition of using posters to summarise their research and yes, many undergraduate / postgraduate courses have sessions on “poster design” – (see http://colinpurrington.com/tips/poster-design)
Here in secondary science we have a culprit – BTEC Science, which has become known as the “death by poster course”. I suspect they are used to mitigate lower literacy, resilience and stamina of the learner. Sadly though instead of being academic, they are often “copy this from here to here and jazz it up a bit” kind of posters.
As part of instructional writing, the poster does have a place as this is how many people consume their information. The rise of the infographic demonstrates that there is a market for such concise summaries. BUT learners need to be taught domain specific skills to actually construct such beasts – bunging them some coloured pencils, A3 paper, scissors and glue is not sufficient.
It’s amazing how many times I’ve observed a class “doing posters” and when I asked what evidence said poster provided for learning taking place (without having a debate about “visible learning” 😉 ) in the end, the teacher’s have been sketchy over their reason for using posters, other than “it gets them engaged”. I once followed a learner over the course of two days – and on the second day he was expected to engage in poster making in 3 out of 5 lessons on the same day!.
Thanks for this Glen – can you shed any light on why we want academics producing posters? This sounds like a baffling use of their time.
No it isn’t an argument for more posters in year 7 simply a statement of fact to keep the conversation balanced. Gen’s comments are spot on.
Agreed. Academic posters are actually nothing like the examples you gave in their design; they’re like an overview of a topic and a summary of key findings on A1, and contain a fair bit of detail (but less than a 15-30 page paper). “The poster session” is a key staple of the conference circuit. Those who wish to present a poster stand by theirs as others circulate around, asking questions about anything they find interesting or suspect. (Somehow, it feels like there’s a lesson in that idea…)
The point about graphic design is an interesting one. One standard task for year 7 scientists is to produce a poster of lab safety rules- would you say there was merit in getting students to focus on a poster to represent a single rule in an eye-catching way?
I recently asked my year 10s to produce what you might call a poster on the electromagnetic spectrum in pairs on A3. The point wasn’t so much to create something for display as to process quite a bit of information, but which I think might meet my need for display work without doing something brainless for the sake of it.
To be clear though, I can readily see a problem in what can easily be a totally brainless activity rolled out en masse across the curriculum.
I felt my post already sought to provide balance by pointing out that posters can be great. But I’m gobsmacked to find out that academics are obliged to spend time making posters. I’d really appreciate some explanation as to why this might be worthwhile.
The academic poster is used at conferences so delegates can browse large numbers of studies quickly. The authors stand with the poster to answer questions from anyone who wants to know more. The poster is likely to contain the abstract, key figures and a reduced version of the sections one might expect in a publication. In my field, physics, it works very well.
1. Easy way to get ‘research in progress’ out there.
2. Better at presenting visual information than papers.
3. Because of space limits forces you to only address key points (but unfortunately lots of academic posters overly wordy)
4. Compared with papers less work.
Posters are frwquently used for MSc/PhD students or postdocs which is unfortunate, because it gives impression only for newbees.
In sum, posters can be ok but only when serves one of those purposes AND there aren’t too many.
To be clear (having read Mr Histoire’s post), I don’t think the discussion of posters in academia constituted an “objection” to your claims that 1) many posters are crap and 2) year 7s are asked to do it too often.
I think Liz Coppard’s point was essentially to offer an example of “a poster” containing information, whilst the examples you offered essentially contained slogans. If there is some cerebral content to their construction, then the question is: when, if ever, is it a good idea to represent that information in a visual way on a large piece of paper rather than their books?
Clearly, nobody seems to think bubble writing has educational value. But when I picture the electromagnetic spectrum, I visualise a television set at one end and a mushroom cloud at the other. Graphics like http://www2.lbl.gov/images/MicroWorlds/EMSpec.gif have educational merit; literally every science teacher teaching this topic will show their students a diagram like this.
Here’s an example of why posters are used by scientists. They are used to summarise research and allow for discussion of ideas with peers. It’s generally considered very useful part of scientific research http://www.sfn.org/annual-meeting/neuroscience-2015/abstracts/presentation-formats/posters
I’m suddenly feeling smug that I’ve never asked my students to make posters.. though my school is really strict on students following ‘academic pursuits’ and would frown heavily on my if I tried it..!
Good for them!
I don’t like posters. Personally, I find that higher achievers will cram lots of facts in and manage to write lots, but the lower achievers will just spend their time trying to do bubble writing and drawing pictures. I try to get everyone to write short reports and, if they’ve written enough, edited and copied it out in best handwriting, THEN they get to draw a picture. That way, lower achievers, some of whom have many elaborate tactics they deploy to weasel their way out of writing anything, are incentivised to write.
Whilst I agree that ‘Hey kids, lets make a poster’ has been the go to activity for many a slack teacher, I think the modern, digitally-inspired equivalent – the infographic – has a lot of potential as a rigorous, meaningful endeavour. Researching, fact-checking, attributing, summerizing, editing, analysing, sequencing, prioritising and then effectively presenting carefully distilled graphic and written information as a self-made resource encompases a lot of valuable skills appropriate to the modern workplace. Taught creatively it could even become a deeper, more thorough and visually appealing form of concept mapping, which Hattie’s research suggest is well up there in terms of affect size. As Bananarama once said: “It ain’t what you do, its the way that you do it.”
You’re right – btw, the full Cole Porter lyric (Bananarama only sand on Fun Boy Three’s cover of an Ella Fitzgerald hit) is “It ain’t what you do, its the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.” Of course it’s true that posters could be done well but even if they are, I still think wastes an awful lot of time that could be spent thinking about curriculum content without the distraction of aesthetics.
‘The Distraction of Aesthetics’ – love that, definitely going to make it a poster for my room 🙂
Posters for the first weeks in Year 7, then as the year progresses they move in to the equally over used and potentially damaging production of slideshows to show their learning.
I remember reading a few years ago – and unfortunately subsequently lost the link – some research into the effects of ICT on literacy. The effect was negative, with overuse of slideshows to show learning as one of the explanations. Students were practising using bullet points and summaries rather than more eloquent descriptions.
From an ICT view the presentations are poor. From a subject view the answers lack depth. However I’m sure the children look like they are engaged – and how much fun are all those animations and transitions!
Just you wait until you get the ‘make a model of blood’ homework. The you’ll be glad of a poster…. 😉
Look at the US websites for teaching resources and be glad you are in Britain! Sometimes I think that’s all the homework they give to kids or rather their parents …
Me too. I am NOT building a castle out of cake. I’m just not. (Husband is still wondering what mark he got for his shrink-formed blood cell…)
[…] as ever, David Didau has rekindled this debate (though I don’t think it is a debate) with this […]
I asked my undergraduates in Media & Cultural Practice to design a poster giving the essence of debates on our topic (the attention economy).. Some were excellent in the way they summarised key issues and used the visuals to suggest the relation between them. I think poster design can help students to organise their ideas before writing an essay.
I don’t think there’s a great deal to derive from this that isn’t implied in the recent Ofsted KS3 ‘wasted years’ report, which is notable for having obtained a large number of children’s opinions to support it’s claims.
Courtesy of top set English Y8 Sprogette spent a week-end morning completing yet another pointless poster which had bleep-all value except as a time-consuming way to redundantly frame a tiny, bite-sized piece of real work: six short lines.
From this parent’s perspective posters are definitely a symptom of secondary teachers babying and patronising their younger children. It has been very frustrating to witness primary upper-KS2 ramp up the academic side and nudge them towards greater responsibility/maturity as preparation for secondary, only for too many secondary teachers to throw so much genuine progress away. Although they’ll meekly do the poster stuff to keep you happy, amongst the children I know the genuine ‘fun’ seems to occur in conversations where they gleefully rip into teachers who assign them tasks they think are belittling. Of course adults are their most significant out-group so they’ll always find reasons to celebrate our collective idiocy, but unless there is a credibly serious purpose you’re not doing any of us any favours with these endless posters.
[…] Is it just me, or do secondary school children make a heck of a lot of posters? Now, I’ve got nothing against posters per se, but why do we seem to have decided that poster making is the best way to demonstrate knowledge and understanding? I suspect it may be because deep in our blackened, […]
Couldn’t agree more! I teach year 6, my husband is Deputy in another local junior school and my daughter has just gone up to secondary school. She is already on her FOURTH poster homework – two of which were for the same teacher! However, our two main feeder school secondary heads are very receptive to the idea of raising expectations in year 7. Last year, joint maths and English work moderation took place between the Juniors and Secondaries. The secondary staff were openly shocked at the amount of work, level of work, and presentation of work that the junior children were capable of producing. One secondary school head also invited the year 6 leaders to observe year 7 lessons. The content and challenge of lessons observed was the same as lessons we teach in year 3 and 4! This same secondary head (whose school my daughter is at) has now “borrowed” my husband on one day a week secondment to raise standards in year 7. So hopefully, not too many more poster homeworks will be coming our way!!! We understand the problem because children arrive in year 3 like pre-schoolers – how did they ever achieve their KS1 results when they can’t even sit on a chair? The answer is that they have simply “lost” a lot of their skills because of 3 things: 1. The effect of moving schools (I once read that this causes an average 6 month regression) 2. The summer holiday effect (which our standardised data shows can also cause a 6 month regression) and 3. The fact that years 2 and 6 tend to have a less academically rigorous last 6 weeks (post SATs) when children can enjoy some of the other curriculum areas which get swept aside in the pre-SATs run-up. We now give our year 3s a half a term of basic skills and expectations revision with the aim of most of them regaining their KS1 SATs standard by November.
It’s a bit like walking round a school and seeing loads of newspaper displays about such news-worthy events like pollination/how volcanoes work etc. I’m assuming that the form isn’t the real learning point though; perhaps there is an attempt to make the process of demonstrating some kind of understanding less laborious and – yes – “fun”. This might be misguided, naive or whatever but I’m fairly sure that students who trot out endless newspaper stories/posters etc. might be wasting time learning how to think like historians/scientists etc. Perhaps there is an assumption that kids know how to write newspapers (they really don’t because they never – ever – read them) that means teachers can get away with this stuff. I’d rather see a marked essay in draft form on a wall display; I think it says more about the nature of learning in a school.
[…] This post explores the overuse and efficacy of making posters in lessons. […]
In school pupils don’t make posters. They make bits of paper with words and maybe a bit of design. Posters are one of the hardest of advertising creative to get right because they depend on impact and strength of visual measure – they are there to persuade not to show knowledge. What pupils are usually asked to do is summate their knowledge and understanding in a way that looks a bit like a poster/print ad but is judged totally differently. (Ex trainee teacher, ex adman/madman). All this is perfectly reasonable as long as the judgement is based on the knowledge/understanding being exhibited not on any artistic or persuasive criteria. My observation would be that pupils spend so much time mucky about with artistic representation that their time would be better spent on thinking and writing.
[…] missed the point. 20th September A response to those criticising David Didau’s piece on posters. I was subsequently misquoted by another, much more widely read, blogger in order to […]
Well said.
Over the years in high school maths I’ve felt obliged to get them to make a poster (on anything they like as long as it’s mathematical). This is in order to tick a box of having students work on the wall. So wow what an opportunity kids to demonstrate your maths … It can be a puzzle, an equation, a sequence, an area…..Despite my explicit suggestions often the best students can come up with is ‘maths is fun’ because they think that is expected and the odd bit of 2+ 2=4 etc. Often I am too embarrassed to display something especially if, through too much concentration on colouring perhaps, the student has misspelled a word like PARALELOGRAM. Anyway that’s all in the past. These days I tend to resist whims of those above me. I would not use lesson time in this way. Nor a homework.
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