SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Two Bad Policies and Two Good Articles About Them

Readers might find the following couple of articles very interesting since so much of education policy and teacher training revolves around them. 

The first is a very good piece by teacher and author Michael Zwaagstra (who SQE readers may recall was a guest speaker at our 2010 AGM) of What’s Wrong With Our Schools.  Michael’s latest is a review of no-zero policies in Canadian school boards, Zero Support for No-Zero Policies.   You may remember the grief that one Edmonton high school teacher went through when he gave a student a mark of zero.  Michael finds that there is little evidence that these policies lead to student success, and they may actually harm their post-school experiences.  They also affect the professionalism of teachers to assess grades. 

The second article comes from the UK, but could have been written in Canada and is on a topic that SQE has written about so many times I’ve lost count.  Child-centred Learning Has Let My Students Down is an excellent article by teacher Matthew Hunter. (I note that Mr. Hunter has to use a pseudonym.)  He argues this philosphy of teaching, pervasive throughout North America as well as the UK, is not working especially for the most vulnerable students.  He also slams teacher-training as source of the problem:

      “The faults in this pedagogical outlook are normally obvious to those who have not been through the indoctrination of teacher training. By moving the onus of authority from the teacher to the child, we neglect our responsibility for teaching, which is to prepare a child for the adult world. If a child directs his own learning, his potential for   advancing from the condition of childhood is unsurprisingly diminished.

      “As Keynes might well have written, practical teachers who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct educationist. The great tragedy of this process is that once released from the ivory tower and transferred to the classroom level, child-centred education becomes less a philosophy, and more an excuse for slack, ineffective teaching. If a teacher does not have a responsibility to direct the pupils’ learning, then this is a ready justification for the directionless, chaotic atmosphere in so many of our nation’s classrooms. On the ground, child-centred learning is an ideology of low expectations.”