DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
EDUCATION & LEARNING IE102 2004-2005
Section B The nature of children and
education.
Aims & leaning
outcomes
We start by looking at how
children learnt in traditional
societies before the
introduction of mass education. The argument here is that the psychological
processes of learning
evolved in this sort of
environment, which preceded the educational developments in this country
discussed by Wendy Robinson, and is still prevalent, or has only just
disappeared, in many
The social, especially
nonverbal, skills
involved in teaching are
rather different to those involved in normal social interaction and we will
look in some detail at the signals involved in conveying authority and control,
in conveying meaning (which differ with age and between cultures and therefore
involve the possibility of misunderstanding with younger children or where
teacher and pupil are from different cultures), and in showing interest and
involvement. Pupils, of course, also produce signals, and these can relate to
differences in behaviour related to their sex. An area which is of particular
concern to new teachers is proximity and touch; this relates to the messages
conveyed by space and distance between teachers and taught and to classroom
design, especially the design and effectiveness of open-plan classrooms.
We next look at of studies
of classroom interaction , and consider how recent developments in educational
'reform' have drawn on educational research, not always in the ways in which
the researchers intended. The ORACLE research of the early eighties suggested
that teaching 'style' was important, and indicated that more traditional
class-teaching based methods than were then used in some classrooms were more
likely to be effective. Alexander and Galton have
been able to follow up teaching practice before and after the period of reform
and assess the extent to which the reforms have affected what teachers actually
do in the classroom. ORACLE and other research suggested that whole-class
teaching was more effective, especially for communicating complex ideas, and
this has led to the current emphasis on interactive teaching, especially
in English and Maths.
Theories of learning have
been critical to educational policies, including those discussed by Jonathan Solity. Is the child an autonomous learner, in which case
the school needs merely to provide the conditions in which learning can take
place? Do children have fixed but different ability, in which case the school
needs to find what this ability is and then provide the level of education
appropriate to that ability? Or does ability depend on the quality of
education, in which case it is vital to ensure that all schools provide
children with education of high and measured quality?.
In the second half of the last century, greater emphasis was placed on the
effects of the environment on development, and thus on the value
added by schools. In the
last ten years, school performance has been assessed by league tables; to allow
for the differing ability of intakes children have been tested at entry and
again as they pass through the school, but the usefulness of these measures
depends on the accuracy of testing
and assessment, which we
therefore need to consider before going on to look at value added. The pioneering research study on school effectiveness at
secondary level was that of Rutter and associates on value
added. This approach has
also been used in assessing primary schools, but has remained controversial at
policy level because of the difficulty of assessing the relative contribution
of school and of home background. We conclude by looking at the recent problems
of teachers'
workloads and
performance-related pay; the increase in assessment at all levels has greatly
increased the paperwork in teaching. Retention of teachers is an increasing
problem and pupil behaviour, bureaucracy and the stress of having to deal with
repeated government initiatives has contributed to an increasing rate of loss
from the profession, to the extent that there has been an increasing concern
over teacher supply.
Library
references.
This is a reference list, not a reading list, and
where possible several alternative references are given which cover the same area,
as it is often difficult to find a particular reference in the library at short
notice. This section of the course is designed so that it is not necessary to
read a specific reference in order to answer a given question, except where
reference is made to large-scale studies such as ORACLE etc. where multiple
copies are kept in the library.
You will get credit for
finding appropriate references which are not on the list. You will get even
more credit for more original sources such as journal articles or non-standard
sources such as newspapers and electronic references. However you are not required
to use these sources, and it is possible to write
a perfectly satisfactory answer without them.
CORE REFERENCES FOR THIS COURSE
SECTION
Pellegrini,A. & Blatchford, P (2000) The Child at
School: Interactions with Peers and Teachers.
The most
useful reference relating to children's contribution to the educational
process.
Muijs,D. & Reynolds,D (2001) Effective
Teaching: Evidence and Practice.
Bourne,J (1994) Thinking through Primary Practice
The most
useful references relating to the practice of teaching, though Bourne
(obviously) does not cover secondary work such as Rutter.
Bourne provides useful
summaries of the older classroom research: Gipps
(Chapter 3) relates teaching to theories of learning; Bennett (Chapter 4), Galton (Chapter 5) and Campbell & Neill (Chapter 6)
give summaries of their work. We will also use the chapters in section VI (on
pupils' understanding of school processes) and IV (on assessment)
Hay McBer
(2000) "Research into Teacher Effectiveness".
An easily
readable summary of official views about effective primary and secondary
teaching. Full
information on the Hay McBer report is available at http://www.csv.warwick.ac.uk/~edraa/haymcber.htm .
Wood,D. (1998) How Children Think and Learn. (Second edition)
The most useful reference
for sections of the course related to learning and intelligence.
ESSAY TOPIC for 1500 word essay
Discuss the processes
involved in classroom interaction.
The overall mark will
reflect how important each section is, any major omissions and the points
raised below.
You should have:-
A clear introduction which
indicates what the essay will cover. This is especially important if (as
recommended) you restrict your focus to one aspect of the subject - indicate,
in a sentence or so, why you chose it and where it fits in the subject as a
whole. Otherwise you appear ignorant of the wider picture.
A
structure in which individual sections follow on from each other and form a
clear argument without repetition. The quality of the case you make accounts for the majority
of the marks - you are NOT expected to agree with the course 'line'. Every
piece of evidence you cite should be referenced unless it is common knowledge
or derives directly from your own experience - see below. Try to avoid
being derivative (basing your writing too closely on the text of your
references). For this subject, use quotations sparingly.
A
conclusion which does not repeat or introduce new material at the last moment.
About 4
references.
Minor defects in presenting the references do not matter. The same quality
essay will get about half a grade more if it is based on a good range of
well-presented references than if it is based on one or two incorrectly
presented ones.
Always cite the reference you
actually read (e.g. if you read about Mortimore in Muijs & Reynolds, cite Muijs
& Reynolds).
The easiest way of citing
references is as follows, but if you are used to using a different method, feel
free! In the text refer to authors thus; 'Muijs &
Reynolds (2001) claim...' or 'Mortimore (Muijs & Reynolds 2001) considered...' The reference
list should be alphabetical, with references cited giving author, date, title,
place of publication and publisher, as in the course list. For Web references,
the last item should be the website http reference - thus, if you are citing
Hay McBer, reference it as above, finishing with the
website you used (it is on the DfEE website, as well
as the course website).
Suggested approaches
The essay is intended to
focus specifically on the processes of classroom interaction - for example
control, showing enthusiasm, working with individuals, questioning etc.
Given the length available,
you should pick a particular process, a particular age-group and perhaps a
particular subject, e.g. how to convey enthusiasm about reading to young
children, how to make transitions between lesson segments effectively in the
secondary classroom, difference between boys and girls in interactions in
science lessons etc. As mentioned above, make clear how (and why) you are
restricting your focus.
COURSE OUTLINE, 2004-5
I have numbered topics as
follows; 15/t is the Tuesday lecture in week 15, 15/f the Friday lecture.
15/f Teaching and learning in traditional societies
By the end of this session
you should know:-
16/t Cultural learning
By the end of this session
you should know:-
16/f Play
By the end of this session you
should know:-
17/t Genetics and development
By the end of this session
you should know:-
17/f Sex differences in behaviour
By the end of this session
you should know:-
18/t Classroom interaction; focus and flow
By the end of this session
you should know:-
18/f Dominance and control
By the end of this session
you should know:-
19/t Gestures and meaning
By the end of this session
you should know:-
19/f Interest and involvement
By the end of this session
you should know:-
20/t Pupil signals
By the end of this session
you should know:-
20/f Proximity and touch
By the end of this session
you should know:-
· That effective teachers make
considerable use of them despite current legal constraints on their use.
21/t Space and open-plan
By the end of this session
you should know:-
21/f Quality of Pupil Learning Experiences
By the end of this session
you should know:-
22/t ORACLE
By the end of this session
you should know:-
22f&23t Value-added
By the end of this
session you should know:-
23/f Performance
management for teachers
By the end of this
session you should know:-
· That the aim of performance
management is to get teachers to change in ways desired by policy-makers by
financial incentives;
· That the extra bureaucracy involved
is widely resented by teachers, many of whom also object in principle;
· That performance management does get
teachers to consider more carefully what they do, but that it is very difficult
for experienced teachers to change their established teaching habits to fit in
with the demands of performance management.
24/t Teacher workloads
By the end of this session
you should know:-
24/f
25/t
25/f
SEMINARS
There will be four
seminars; you will need to attend in alternate weeks. The seminars are designed
to help you in clarifying your understanding of topics covered on the course,
in developing an understanding of what is expected of you in writing the essay involved
in this section, and to give you an opportunity to see some video material
which is not readily covered in the lectures.
SEMINAR 1
TRADITIONAL
SOCIETIES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR MODERN SCHOOLING.
We will look particularly
at elements of traditional socialisation, using a video. Some may have
implications for children in modern schools; gender roles, informal learning
via play and informal learning from parents. Most educationalists dealing with
young children favour child-centred methods with the opportunity for
self-directed, playful learning; Tizard (1976) sounds
a cautionary note here. Tizard again, with Hughes
(1984), has shown that many teachers' suspicion of parents' ability to educate
their children is misguided; parents have always been the first educators of
their children, and can still achieve things which schools cannot readily do
because of their shared and detailed knowledge of their children's experience.
The aim of this seminar is
to encourage a critical attitude to some of the generally accepted views in
education, and to explore further the idea that children may be predisposed to
learn in certain ways. Other references in these sections of the reading list
are also useful, besides those mentioned.
SEMINARS 2 & 3
CLASSROOM INTERACTION AND ITS VARIATION ACROSS CULTURES
These two seminars are
based on tapes collected by Robin Alexander in his study of primary education
in five cultures, published as Culture and Pedagogy (2000); we will be
looking at tape clips, mostly of language and maths lessons, in the
SEMINAR 4 ESSAY PLANNING
This seminar is intended to
allow discussion of the essay topics and will be open-ended to meet the needs
of individual tutorial groups.
TEACHING AND LEARNING IN
TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES, AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS.
Traditional societies have
relatively simple and slow-changing technology, and people tend to stay in the
group where they were born. This places much greater emphasis on social skills,
which are relatively ignored in conventional education, though there is
evidence that they are crucial to lifetime success. The main argument of this
section is that in traditional societies children
learn skills by seeing them used in context, instead of the more abstract
presentation of knowledge characteristic of Western education. They also learn
many skills from each other, as well as being influenced by prominent adults.
This links to the importance of social influence and social processes in the
classroom, and to two aspects of the Piagetian
approach. As will be discussed in the lecture on Piaget, his theory argues that
children initially need to learn from direct experience. Though Piaget was not
influenced by work on traditional societies, his work was based on close
observation of children's autonomous activities, which are broadly similar
across cultures, and subsequent work indicated that Piaget's stages of
development occur in the same order and with similar timing across cultures and
even among great apes. The video used in the first seminar indicates the
similarity of many learning experiences for children in traditional societies
to those encouraged by Piaget's work, and the contrast between the
sophisticated social skills in these societies and their simple technology.
See Pellegrini
& Blatchford (chapters 2-3), which refers to aspects of
children's natural learning situations and Muijs
& Reynolds chapter 1 and Wood chapter 4 which give examples of
the support and structuring which help children learn in modern societies.
WAGNER,D.A.
& STEVENSON,H.W. (1982) "Cultural Perspectives on Child
Development".
HOSTETLER,J.A.
& HUNTINGTON,G.E. (1971) "Children in Amish Society"
GLADWIN,T.
(1970) "East is a Big Bird"
The last chapters of these
two books contrast the types and aims of educational processes which occur in
the Amish (a traditional agricultural society), and in the teaching of
navigation in the Pacific islands, with those of modern education. The
references are old because it is no longer possible to study the sort of
traditional society they describe.
PLAY AND CULTURAL LEARNING
There are two ways of
learning new skills - by individual experience or by copying others (cultural
transmission). Play is the 'natural' way for children to learn - surprisingly
it has many features in common with scientific experimentation. The alternative
is to learn by copying other people - this often requires the social skills
discussed previously in connection with traditional societies to persuade those
who have worthwhile knowledge to share it.
Unfortunately the valuable
account of cultural transmission, by Boyd & Richerson
is very mathematical so it is not included on the reference list. Their main
ideas are:-
1) Choosing from cultural alternatives from one's own experience
("direct bias") has heavy costs in time etc. especially due to
"noise" in environment such as the effects of historical changes or
weather - at least as far as long-term decisions (choice of occupation, partner
or major activity) are concerned. Better to imitate others, especially if the
environment is fairly stable. There is therefore a strong tendency to
conformity, which is less valuable in modern conditions, where it may lead to
following fashions which are not in fact good guides to action. However for
short-term behaviour, and especially where individual abilities make a great
difference, there is no substitute for direct experience via play.
Play involves two aspects -
the expenditure of time and energy and the use of this time and energy to explore
both all aspects of the situation and what the individual can do with that
situation - in other words the 'control rules'. Because on environmental noise,
the situation has to be explored many times on order to be sure it is
thoroughly known; this gives the characteristic purposelessness of play.
Formally play behaviour is similar to scientific experimentation, which also
involves expenditure of time and effort to long-term rather than immediate
benefit. It runs the same risk of 'patent thieves' who could watch and copy the
discoveries made by a player. Theoretically play should only be viable under
two conditions;
the discoveries of play are very
personal, so others do not benefit from copying because their individual needs
are different, or;
play is so inefficient in leading to
discoveries that others would do better to go and make their own discoveries
than to imitate a player.
This has implications for
the use of play or discovery methods in education; they are likely to be less
efficient that methods (2) and (3) except for young children who are learning
individual skills, especially 'implicit' skills (like riding a bicycle or
writing, which can only be learnt by doing them).
2) Copying culturally successful individuals ("indirect
bias") gives the chance of moving directly to using the most successful
patterns of behaviour. The problem is that it is difficult for a novice to be
sure quite what contributes to the success. The best tactic is to copying
everything the high-status model does - this can lead to the novice copying indicator
characters - normally characters connected to, and an index of success but
they may be purely conincidental, leading to
"runaway" to baroque non-functional cultural features (such as
super-yachts). The culturally successful may have influence at a cost to
activities such as looking after their own families - this leads to the
apparently paradoxical situation where the most influential shapers of society
are copied by the children of others but do not have children of their own.
In educational settings the
high-status model should be the teacher, but other high-status members of
society (e.g. nowadays on television) are likely to be similarly influential.
3) Copying majority ("frequency-dependent bias")
frequently best as the majority are a more reliable sample than the successful.
Co-operation / conformity may be simple universal rules ('rules of thumb')
which normally ensure this is done adaptively but can lead to imitation of
self-destructive behaviour (kamikazes are a notorious example but there are
many parallels). This propensity to conformity is reflected in people's
willingness to accept local rules and discriminate on favour of their own
in-group and against out-groups - both well-documented in social psychology.
In educational settings the
'majority' is most likely to be the peer-group, and evidence is accumulating
that other children have stronger influences on children's development than
parents.
Pellegrini & Blatchford
chapters 4 & 5
discuss play in modern contexts and the implications of breaktime
organisation. Muijs & Reynolds chapter
13 discusses play as part of early education. See also Wood.
FORTES,M.
(1938) Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland.
IN Bruner,J.S., Jolly,A. & Sylva,K. (eds.) "Play
- its Role in Development and Education" Harmondsworth;
Penguin
LEACOCK, E. (1971) At play in African villages. IN Bruner et
al. (above).
Two papers on play in
traditional societies showing the quality of learning which children achieve.
LANCY,D.F.
(1984) Play in anthropological perspective IN Smith,P.K.
(Ed.) "Play in Animals and Humans".
Discusses whether play can
in fact be shown to promote learning.
In traditional societies
sex-roles are very clear-cut and conformity to the appropriate sex-role is
critical for acceptance into the society; the pattern of conformity to
sex-roles can be argued to persist into modern educational settings, with
potentially destructive effects e.g. girls avoiding science because it is seen
as inappropriate, or boys avoiding education altogether as it is seen as 'cissy'.
At school age sex
differences could be due to social influences; much of the literature describes
aspects such as differential treatment by staff, different option choices etc.
This lecture concentrates mainly on biological influences, which are less dealt
with in the educational literature.
Main questions are:-
how do children arrive at the sex-typed
behaviour we normally see?
how much of their behaviour is genetically
controlled or predisposed and how much of this behaviour is of educational
significance?
how much do children (especially older
children and adolescents) fail to use abilities for social reasons? Do these
social reasons have genetic bases?
3 main possible routes for
the development of sex differences:
1. Differences due to reinforcement by
parents and teachers, together with media influences.
2. Differences primarily due to hormonal
and biological influences. These could be direct, as for hormones, (see below)
or could be what Morris calls 'discovered actions' E.g. boys stronger;
therefore in aggression boys more likely to be successful and this will
reinforce their aggression. Thus different structure leads to different
behaviour without direct genetic influence.
3. differences
due to cognitive processes of gender identity and modelling. In other words
children select from the models available to them in line with their view of
themselves. E.g. Hargreaves asked primary age
children to fill in squares to make drawings as if they were the other sex. The
children could do so - in other words they knew perfectly well what was the
appropriate behaviour for the other sex, they just didn't want to adopt it.
Archer suggests that differentiation between the sexes relies on the in-group /
out-group discrimination mechanism which appears in many other areas of
behaviour; this mechanism would account for the historical and cultural
variation in gender roles, but with differentiation universal - no culture has
sustained unisex roles without gender discrimination.
Children prefer same-sex
playmates immediately on advent of social play; children of 10-22 months look
more at children of the same sex than those of other when shown
head-and-shoulder photos (adults cannot distinguish these better than chance;
girl toddlers are more advanced and accurate). They do not differentiate
pictures of themselves from pictures of other children of the same sex, but would
seem to be capable of distinguishing groups on cues which are not available to
adults. Bower found that toddlers distinguished peers on stills by their
clothes, but if they saw cine films they could tell the correct sex of
cross-dressed children. They could also make the distinction if they saw only a
pattern of lights, from reflectors taped to the child's joints in low lighting.
Again adults could not make these distinctions better than chance. Children at
this age are particularly sensitive to patterns of movement (the ability also
applies to recognising facial expressions) - adults have lost this ability in
favour of being able to discriminate spatial patterns better. This is what
would be expected if there was a biological basis to sex differentiation.
By 22 months children can
label pictures with sex-appropriate terms; work on hermaphrodites indicates if
their gender identity is changed after about 2 they are very unwilling to relabel themselves.
All this gives children the
opportunity to model themselves preferentially on adults of their own gender
and to induct themselves into same-sex peer groups. This strategy of "find
someone of your own sex and copy them" gives considerable flexibility in
learning whatever sex-typed behaviour occurs in a particular culture, while
ensuring that children reliably assign themselves to the correct sex.
Other work shows some
aspects of adult sex-roles appear in childhood well before their functional use
in adulthood. Specific baby-talk (eye-contact, high pitched voice, exaggerated
speech, head tilt) shown by children from about 6 on; girls do it more at all
and earlier ages, and differences especially evident in hunter-gatherers where
babies carried so they are at a convenient level for girls to practice on.
Also some evidence that
girls are better at tutoring young children they are familiar with, from 4
(earliest tested) on, than boys.
Certain
sex differences apparent at birth. Mother-infant pair have begun to
develop an individual style by one week, and after this stage cultural effects
(e.g. role expectations, reflected in clothes colours). Upbringing styles
differ according to sex, and this at least partly due to differences in babies
e.g. Moss on crying. At early stage amount of comforting by mother proportional
to amount of crying by baby, but by about three months, this has stopped for
boys but not girls (who are less irritable and more responsive to comforting).
Result is a drift of heredity-environment interaction.
Differences in adults
greater than in children, and tend to make men more efficient athletically than
women, but their metabolism is less efficient, though more rapid. Rate of development slower, reaching greatest disparity at puberty;
at one stage girls usually heavier and stronger than boys of same age.
At same stage girls usually well ahead in school subjects and discrimination
against girls was necessary to achieve sex balance in grammar schools in period
of 11+; there is currently concern about the educational under-achievement of
boys, which may be partly due to their realisation that employment prospects
are poorer for them than girls as new job opportunities stress social skills or
dexterity rather than strength. As well as developing more slowly than females males are more vulnerable to developmental damage,
partly because they take longer to pass through each vulnerable stage, e.g.
premature birth has more serious effects on them.
Schools can be among
socialising influences and may be more sexist than parents, who will often
accept non-stereotyped interests in their own children. On other hand
well-established that girls and boys differ in activities chosen in free-play
situation, and Brophy and Good found differences in
teacher's behaviour to school-age children chiefly related to differences in behaviour
of sexes. There tends to be more positive interaction between the teacher and
girls (especially high achievers) and more negative teacher-boy interaction.
At school age main
differences are greater verbal ability and manipulative skill of girls, and
their general advancement over boys, which is about 9
months at school entry, and up to 2 years at puberty. Girls
therefore likely to be the higher achievers in any subject with a verbal
content. In reading, girls tend to recognise words by sound, and could
do better at phonic methods (difference persists in undergraduates); boys
recognise by shape and may be better suited by look-and-say or similar. Boys in
general better at spatial and mechanical tasks; tend to be more creative,
divergent thinkers and able to break set (i.e. think analytically); more
exploratory and prone to fiddle around with things. All these mean boys tend to
do rather better at science subjects, especially if taught by discover-type
methods. Girls tend to like to have theoretical understanding before attacking
practical work, and therefore do less well in these, or require so much
preparation it is not really discovery any more. However these subject
differences are too great to be accounted for by the actual psychological
differences between the sexes, and girls do much better at science in cultures
such as
At school sex-typing is
less apparent in single-sex schools where girl scientists and boys taking arts
are not discouraged by going against the social pressure of their friends but
students from mixed and single-sex schools do equally well in getting
university degrees. Girls tend to make subject choices earlier than boys,
especially girl scientists; scientific choices usually before or sometimes after
puberty (arts and social science choices more around puberty, when social
pressure higher).
There is a great deal of
literature in gender effects on education.
MCGURK,H.
(1992) "Childhood Social Development"
RIDLEY,M.
(1993) "The Red Queen" Harmondsworth:
Viking. (Chapter 6 on)
Biologically
based accounts of the differences between the sexes and their development.
Effective teaching depends
largely on two skills - being able to keep order and being able to convince the
class that what they are learning is interesting. The latter has become more
difficult since the standardised National Curriculum.
Muijs & Reynolds chapters 4-6 cover classroom
management and climate. See also the Hay McBer
report for the official view of what works.
Two vital points in
effective classroom control are;
Firstly, nonverbal signals
of dominance are 'statements of intent'. Dominant nonverbal signals are only
the promise of action and it is therefore important both to be aware of signals
which 'promise' dominance and of the necessity of actually delivering these
promises. Confident individuals proceed immediately to do what they plan; decisiveness
is an essential element of control and indicates that ostensibly controlling
actions are not merely bluff. Two necessary aspects of planning are good
organisation of the lesson, including any materials needed, and good knowledge
of the school's backup system. This relates particularly to
Secondly it is particularly
important to look at first encounters - once teacher and class have built up a relationship, their reactions to each other will depend
partly on their shared history. Experienced teachers generally use interesting
material which makes it easy for the class to succeed and to be praised for
doing so, together with dealing firmly with misbehaviour to establish 'case
law'. They usually aim to get the relationship with the class established
first, before becoming seriously involved in teaching the curriculum material.
If the teacher's first task
is to establish a productive working relationship, many members of the class
see their first task as to explore the teacher's weak points; usually this
takes the form of a challenge to dominance but pupils can be more subtle in
progressively organised classrooms by distracting the teacher into friendly
conversation. Their advantages over the teacher include more time to observe
because they are not trying to teach - and because they do not usually feel the
need to work much either!
They also gain from
alliances between pupils which allow 'divide and rule' tactics to split the
teacher's attention, as well as backing each other up in disputes. These
alliances may seem permanent, but Furlong showed that they were fluid, members
joining or leaving the ' interaction set' depending on the teacher's success in
evoking their interest or controlling them. A pupil who made a tactical mistake
might be deserted by normal allies - on the other hand a successful disruptive
incident could recruit virtually the whole class, including normally
law-abiding individuals. Furlong found that normally disruptive class members
were more likely to be co-operative if material was clearly structured and
presented in small steps so that they could see they were making progress.
Discipline problems are
likely to be much reduced if the lesson structure is motivating and rewarding -
this involves two separate aspects:
1) clear
structure - largely dependent on good knowledge of your subject matter and how
it relates to pupils' existing knowledge.
2) nonverbal signals of
enthusiasm - here it is relevant to look at politics and advertising which have
the same problem of selling suspect 'products' to reluctant consumers.
Gestures, facial expression, and tone of voice are critical.
Much of the difference
between an enthusiastic and a lack-lustre presentation is due to the
'punctuation' of the spoken message by nonverbal signals which indicate the
speaker's involvement and help structure what is being said for the benefit of
the listener. The main channels are;
changes of intonation (tone of voice) which
separate out information according to its importance and indicate what is new
and what repeats previous knowledge. Effective speakers often manipulate
intonation - for example by presenting controversial information as if everyone
agreed on it, or (especially used by teachers) presenting the same information
repeatedly with intonation which indicates it is new each time.
gestures which indicate either;
how the listeners are to interpret the
accompanying speech - for example that it is a new piece of information, or
that it is the completion of an explanation. These gestures can vary between
cultures, so pupils from other cultures might not understand the potentially
helpful gestures.
illustrations which supplement the accompanying
speech; they can either repeat what is being said in visual form or carry the
information themselves (the classic example being the fisherman showing the
size of the one which got away). Speakers can control a listener's attention by
transferring information to gesture so the listener has to look at them to
understand the ambiguous speech.
REFERENCES (for this and
following lectures)
For full
information and references on classroom processes go to http://www.warwick.ac.uk/~edraa/1yrnvc.htm
WRAGG,E.C.
(1994) "Class Management"
Mainly secondary-oriented
WRAGG,E.C.
& BROWN,G. (1994) "Explaining"
BROWN,G
& WRAGG,E.C. (1994) "Questioning"
WRAGG,E.C.
(1984) "Classroom Teaching Skills"
Mainly
primary oriented, from a widely respected expert in the area.
ROBERTSON,J.
(1996/89) "Effective Classroom Control".
ROGERS,B
(1995/1991) "You Know the Fair Rule".
Bill Rogers has also done
VIDEOTAPES: (all about 40 minutes duration).
ROGERS,B.
(1990) Consequences Newbury, Quartus
ROGERS,B.
(1990) Positive Correction Newbury, Quartus
ROGERS,B.
(1990) Prevention Newbury, Quartus
DOMINANCE, CONTROL AND
ATTENTION
Dealing with confrontations
is perhaps the most difficult task in the eyes of an inexperienced teacher; and
no teacher, no matter how experienced, can avoid confrontations for very long.
When confrontations do occur, they can present the teacher with a major problem
because handling them successfully requires skills which are seldom exercised
in normal social life.
In adults most mild
confrontations - at least between relative strangers in a public place, which
is the equivalent of the classroom situation - are dealt with verbally, and the
demands of politeness require that they do not really come out into the open.
Usually one party gives way at an early stage. Privately the opponents may have
extremely strong views on the matter, but they are either suppressed, or are
expressed in an oblique and rational way. In such confrontations disagreements
are seldom carried to outright rejection of the other's point of view. Most
overt confrontations between adults involve people of approximately equal
status (e.g. two motorists arguing after a car accident), rather than one
person asserting authority over another, so a new teacher is likely to lack
experience in the skills of ordering people about!
Nor can the teacher base
her technique on the children's conflict behaviour. In the last resort their
arguments are settled by fighting. Playful rough-and-tumble, especially among
boys, and verbal insult, especially among girls, may be conspicuous especially
in early adolescence as children bargain for status and friendship. Although
the teacher needs to be able to communicate with the children in terms they
understand, she cannot use these tactics unless she is on very good terms with
the class. Older boys, for example, may be quite happy to accept horseplay from
their friends while rejecting it from her. Satisfactory reaction to a challenge
from the class requires an understanding of dominance and the way it is
expressed behaviourally.
Dominant does not
mean domineering.
The teacher
need first to distinguish between dominance and threat;
confusion between these two is at the root of many of the problems which
inexperienced teachers encounter. Dominance is the ability to control or
influence the behaviour of others. Threat is behaviour which indicates
that there is a risk of physical attack or sanctions (i.e. an escalated
confrontation) unless the opponent gives way, though mild threat indicates the
risk is not immanent. Dominance does not imply a confrontation; in fact
if dominance is well-established, the subordinate will give way without any
confrontation. Threat indicates dominance is not fully established, and the
more extreme the threat, the greater the risk to dominance.
There are two implications
of this for the new teacher. Firstly, dominants behave in characteristic ways;
if the teacher behaves like a dominant, she is likely to be treated as one.
Children devote a lot of time to learning social skills and rules, and if she
can play these rules she will be an effective operator. She must behave as a
dominant when she is not being challenged as well as when she is. This is the
'getting attention' behaviour described below. Secondly, she must manipulate
the classroom interaction so that disputes are, as far as possible, on
unimportant issues where it pays neither party to threaten a serious confrontation.
This will often mean dealing with a problem at an early stage; once either
party has committed themselves and stands to lose face, a dispute is no longer
'unimportant'. If she can establish dominance at a low level she will be at an
advantage in any future more serious dispute which cannot be avoided.
Rules, whether they are
imposed from outside or the teacher formulates them specifically for her own
classroom, can be used to depersonalise confrontations between child and
teacher. Effective teachers present rules as something above both teacher and
child, which both have to obey, or as a bargain which both have to keep to. The
situation ceases to be defined as a confrontation between teacher and child,
which the child might be able to win or negotiate his way out of; she now
appears to be as much bound by the terms of the rule as the child. If she
disciplines him it becomes joint obedience rather than personal malice.
Sometimes she may wish to present herself as a friendly and sympathetic
character by 'colluding' to bend the rules. It is important to note here that
the rules are still defined as being in force; this is not the same as
colluding to break them.
If a rule is to be
presented effectively in this way, the teacher must appear to be bound by it
consistently; homework must, for instance, be required on every occasion. A
lengthy discussion should not happen every time; it rapidly loses its impact,
and the lesson can be used more productively. On future occasions a briefer
restatement of the rules should suffice.
Withdrawing
to a one-to-one confrontation.
Straight criticism of
children's conduct or work, and overt anger, also have a place in classroom
management; the teacher must be able to show anger in situations which
genuinely require it. However occasions requiring anger should be rare, and
calm but relentless firmness is the best aim. She must be prepared to escalate
firmly at an early stage in initial encounters, before things have got out of
hand. Once control has been established, she can afford to ignore closed
challenges. However if she meets a serious open challenge (dealt with in
a later lecture) at any stage, she must face it, and often this is best done on
a one-to-one basis, so that the child does not have the support of his peers,
and she do not have to perform in front of a potentially hostile audience. No
audience means a lower risk of social humiliation, and therefore reduces the
severity of the challenge for both sides. One-to-one confrontations are closer
to the inexperienced teacher's general social experience and to be preferred
for this reason as well.
GESTURES; OR DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN?
Experienced teachers use a
great variety of gestures when talking to classes (and are often appalled to
see themselves on video). All these gestures appear in normal conversation,
especially when one speaker is putting forward a difficult or forceful
argument. It is also possible to see older children start to use them as soon
as they find themselves putting a public case to the class as a whole (provided
they are not inhibited by the novelty of the situation), or when discussing
something avidly with their friends. (Full development of gesture use is not
completed until twelve or so, and preschool children tend to pantomime rather
than using gestures).
There are several types of
gestures. The first type, generally called 'emblems', such as the V-sign, have
a generally known equivalent verbal meeting, and, being mostly insult signs,
should have little currency in orderly classrooms. More important in classrooms
are gestures which serve to illustrate, amplify and punctuate speech. These
gestures confirm what the teacher is saying, firstly by showing the shapes or
movements of objects (iconix), secondly by
miming the concept she is talking about, or her educational intention (metaphorix) and thirdly by directing the
children's attention to salient parts of the message (beats). In McNeill's view
all three types of gestures originate from the same thought processes as
speech; the message is then processed through verbal and nonverbal channels,
which may confirm and duplicate each other, or provide complementary
information. In other words, her gestures give her class a second chance to
receive her message. If she is uncertain, her gestures can cut her off from her
audience; and if their cultural background is very different to her own, they
may have problems with her gestural language as well
as her verbal language.
Children's gestures do not
reach the fully adult form until after twelve, though most of the adult
features are present by nine or ten. Children of this age are likely to be more
influenced by gestures than younger ones, who respond more to the words.
Five-year-olds' gestures indicate the child's high level of involvement in what
he is talking about, reflecting the egocentric state of his thought processes;
older children and adults use more abstract gestures, indicating detachment
from the topic of discussion (McNeill 1986). Younger children act out their
topic; older children and adults observe it.
Iconix merge into pointing and miming in
younger children. They demonstrate where something is, or show the shape of
something, either concrete, like the First World War trenches, or more
abstract, like the 'shape' of an equation. In some cases, such as the trenches
just mentioned, much of the meaning may be transmitted through the gesture. Metaphorix signify abstract ideas, such as
mathematical concepts, which cannot be directly represented as physical forms,
but are nevertheless illustrated by spatial analogies. Most importantly in the
teaching situation, these gestures point out to the class how they should react
to what the teacher is saying by showing them the kind of information she is
trying to communicate to them. She offers ideas to the class or reach out to them, holds ideas up for the class to see,
opens the door to a new idea, breaks through a barrier of possible confusion or
emphasises the precision with which an idea must be grasped.
In the same way, effective
teachers use facial expressions to signal to the class how they should react to
the material the teacher is discussing; when it is interesting they raise their
brows, when it is difficult they concentrate, and at exceptionally difficult
points they look puzzled. Again there is evidence that expressions are used in
the same way outside the teaching situation. A puzzled expression is used in
conversations to convey that the speaker still wishes to hold the floor, and is
silent because she cannot think of the right word, not because her contribution
to the conversation has ended. The puzzled expression serves to show the
listener that a contribution to the speaker's chain of meaning may be
acceptable, but a deviation to the listener's interest will not be. In the less
equal social situation of the classroom, these expression
serve to alert the class to attend to her definition of the situation.
Gestures are also used to
punctuate and shape conversation; McNeill calls these gestures beats.
Beats are jerky movements which are made at the ends of phrases - corresponding
to the punctuation marks in writing and serving the same purpose. In
conversations between adults, gesture can be used to regulate the attention of
the listener to the speaker. By gesturing, the speaker ensures that the
listener's attention is on her before she delivers her verbal message, avoiding
the risk that it will be missed or that it will have to be repeated. This
function can also be served by verbal markers; in the classroom these, together
with other conspicuous means of getting attention, are more commonly used than
in ordinary speech because of the difficulty of organising the joint attention
of a whole class.
However in informal
conversations, self-directed gestures can serve to break off interaction,
especially when the hand grooms or covers the face - grooming to other parts of
the body does not seem to have this effect. (This is a less extreme version of
the cut-off used, as its name implies, when one wants to avoid a
situation completely - a familiar example being when people hide their faces from
something horrifying on television). Such signals, which we found were more
frequently shown by ineffective teachers, were literally acting as barriers
between them and their classes. However self-directed gestures can have a
positive function too. Teachers not infrequently use these gestures when
questioning children, and they may serve to clarify
that responsibility for continuing the classroom dialogue is being passed over
from the usually dominant teacher to the child. By cutting off her own signal, the
teacher can give her pupils a space to make their contributions.
As mentioned above,
children's gestures develop in phase with their speech and young children do
not understand the more abstract adult gestures. Their understanding of
gestures develops in parallel with their production. Perhaps fortunately for
teachers, children's potential to be influenced by gestures because they
understand them develops in parallel with the teacher's need to overcome their
resistance to learn! An inexperienced teacher need not therefore worry about
her ability to produce these gestures and expressions; she will already have a
complete repertoire from her existing conversational experience. Further, the
signals happen so rapidly that they are not normally under conscious control.
Their satisfactory appearance depends on her being at ease both with her
subject-matter and her class so that she start to
gesture spontaneously to fit her expansive mood. Lack of gestures indicates
lack of involvement with and mastery of the ideas being communicated and thus
gives a clear signal to the class that she is not on top of her subject. If she
is uncertain she will tend to show the barrier or displacement signals
described in the previous chapter, closing in on herself when she should be
opening out with gestures.
CONVEYING INTEREST AND
INVOLVEMENT
Learning is an invisible
process which occurs inside children's heads; the teacher can only get access
to it indirectly, by asking questions or looking at written work. It is also
impossible, with a class of average size, for her to monitor continuously what
each child is doing, whether she is trying to teach the whole class or
individuals. She cannot force children to learn; she can only persuade them
that the work they have to do is a more attractive alternative to the other
ways they could spend their time, such as checking their pens or fingernails,
discussing last night's video with their friends or seeing how far they can tip
their chair without overbalancing. With some classes, some children, or some of
the subject-matter she has to teach, the best she may be able to do is to make
the consequences of these alternatives sufficiently unpleasant that the work is
done merely because it is the least of a choice of evils. However this is at best
a wearing strategy demanding constant vigilance and offering little
satisfaction. Arousing the class's interest is both practically and
intellectually far preferable, if it can be achieved.
In order to do this the
teacher must do four things. Her manner must convey that the material is
interesting and worth making the effort to try to understand; she must relate
the material to the children's existing experience so that they can assimilate
it to their previous knowledge; and most important, she must reward them rather
than criticising them when they try to contribute to the learning process.
Finally, she must not disrupt their learning by unnecessarily breaking off
teaching and starting disciplinary confrontations when there is no serious
threat to the classroom order. While these tasks are common to whole-class work
and work with individuals, they are achieved differently in the two situations.
Much of the art of presenting material interestingly and intelligibly depends
on planning decisions made before the start of the lesson,.
We raise this merely to make the point that only in the most work-oriented
classes can she rely on children being prepared to put up with present boredom
in the hope of future enlightenment. Generally each step in the subject must be
presented so it interests the children now, which depends largely on
clear presentation and questioning (Brown & Armstrong 1984, Brown &
Edmondson 1984). Clear planning and ordering of topics can assist this, but
much depends on presentation.
What effective
teachers did.
The most striking feature
of the effective teachers was their enthusiasm and decisiveness. The enthusiasm
might seem overdone, but thirteen-year-olds do live in a more vivid world than
adults and what might seem restrained to an adult audience seems downright
boring to them. A less exaggerated response would be appropriate with older
classes.
We found that over the
lessons as a whole, effective teachers used a wider variety of facial
expressions, gestures and tones of voice (intonation). The difference was
particularly marked for illustrative gestures and animated and imitative
intonation which made the lesson material more interesting and vivid for the
class. We also found the effective teachers looked intently at the class more
than others, and used head movements (head forward, head cant and head dip)
which are signals of involvement with a speaker: they thus showed their keen
interest in what the children had to say when they contributed to the lesson.
Effective teachers smiled more, and used more joking intonation; their lessons
were more fun to be in. Very much the same picture occurred during the actual
educational talk (though not the joking), but effective teachers spent more
time discussing hypotheses than the ineffective ones - in other words their
lessons were more intellectually stimulating. The ineffective teachers may have
been unable to do this because they could not command the attention of the
class for a long continuous period; they were also spending more time dealing with
materials and in unclassified talk. (Rapid and efficient
organisation of the class was recognised by Kounin
(1970) as a mark of the effective teacher.) This was indicated by the
effective teachers' greater use of controlling signals, such as the batons and fend , which showed their decisive approach. Teachers must
be in control of their classes as well as interesting them, and these
behaviours are the way in which the effective teachers convey this.
Talking
to individuals in the classroom.
All teachers go round and
ask children about their work; the popular teacher indicates, by her behaviour
as she goes round the class, that she is interested in the children first and
their work second. As she move around, talking to
children, she have a chance to show her appreciation of them as individuals.
Children's feeling of social worth is very important to them, especially at
secondary-school age, and they are forced to make an assessment of their social
worth in terms of school work on very limited evidence, simply because her
attention has to be split between so many of them and she therefore have so
little time for each individual. If a child not only receives very limited
individual attention from you, as is inevitable, but when she is with him half
her attention or more is taken away by distractions elsewhere in the class, he
will decide that she have little interest in him as a person. He may well
reciprocate by losing interest in her and what she have
to offer. Though we have referred to the child as 'he' so far, this is
especially a problem for girls, who are both more likely to be ignored because
they are less obstreperous, and tend to feel more her disregard more keenly (Stanworth 1983). It is obviously highly undesirable for
girls to be ignored in this way, but research shows that teachers find it
extraordinarily hard to distribute their attention evenly, despite efforts to
do so. This is an even more likely problem if her control of the class is still
tenuous, as she will be forced to give most attention to those who are most of
a risk to her control. Once again these are likely to be boys.
We have already mentioned
the ways in which she can show her attention and interest when children respond
in a class session, and many of these signals are similar to those which are
appropriate on a one-to-one basis. However, her closeness means that her
signals to children come across as more intense than when she is standing eight
or ten feet away in the whole-class situation, and she can therefore tone down
the signals she give. For example the extreme 'catching' posture used by some
teachers when talking to the class appears animated in a public context but
would be over the top if she is talking to a single child or a small group.
There are a range of
signals used in normal social conversations which indicate attention to the
companion; many of them appear in children's conversations. They are also
appropriate for her to use when she is talking to children. In conversations,
people orient their bodies towards each other and away from other; though, as
we shall see, the teacher cannot do this to the extent of losing awareness of
other members of the class. Their gaze is on each other or the shared object of
their attention (Streeck). If the child is the main
speaker in a one-to-one classroom conversation (for example, if he is answering
her questions) she should look at him for most of the time; otherwise he will
think she is being inattentive. Equally, if she is explaining something, she
should expect him to be watching her face, or the materials she is explaining,
most of the time.
Listeners also show their
attention to speakers by nodding or producing noises of attention such as
'ah-hum' as the speaker makes points, thus reassuring the speaker that her
message has been taken in. This pattern refers to conversations between equals,
where the speaker needs 'permission' from the listener to carry on, and will
usually stop if lack of this feedback shows the listener is getting bored. When
the teacher is talking to children, their subordinate position means she needs
to give this feedback, to 'permit' them to continue talking. At least
initially, she would not expect to allow them to make this feedback to her, as
they would now be controlling her! At this early stage, conversations should be
one-sided - unless she is dealing with sixth-formers - with any feedback from
the child showing respect rather than condescension. However, when the
classroom relationship is well-established, genuine discussion between equals
may be possible, with the children controlling the discussion as well as her.
To preserve the quality of
individual dealings with her pupils, she must show what Kounin
(1970) calls, with vivid but unlovely jargon, 'overlappingness',
the ability to deal with an incident without losing track of what she was doing
previously, as well as 'withitness', the ability to
detect incidents in the first place through 'eyes in the back of her head'. Withitness is perhaps even more important in this context
than in whole-class situations.
THE
MEANING OF PUPILS' NONVERBAL SIGNALS.
There is some evidence that
pupils adopt habitual expressions according to their ability, regardless of
whether they had actually understand what they are
being told. In one experiment low achieving pupils looked as if they had not
understood even simple filmed material, while high achievers acted as if they
had comprehended material which was much too complex for their age-group. By
behaving in this way, children 'tell' even a teacher who is unfamiliar with
them what their academic status is. Additionally, some pupils get a
disproportionate amount of praise from teachers because they are highly
rewarding to talk to - and teachers, being human, like to talk to people who are
responsive. While these are not immediate class management problems, teachers
need to bear in mind, the manipulative effects, intentional or otherwise, of
pupils' signals.
Distinguishing open
and closed challenges
It is vitally important for
teachers to be able to distinguish the two challenge types - open and closed.
The significance of these movement types are not always understood by teachers
and open challenges may be mistaken for mere inattention. An inexperienced
teacher may think she sees trouble, but not being quite sure, leave it, reluctant to get straight off to an unnecessarily
irritable start with the class. Soon enough she will be only too sure that
something is wrong. Closed challenges are 'closed' because they will die away
if left alone, while open challenges will escalate if left alone. They then
become overt threats to teacher authority, which the challengers no longer
respect.
Open and Closed
challenges
Deviancy, defined as non-compliance with
rules, may take potentially harmless forms; teachers vary in how much attention
they pay to these, depending on their own style and the school setting they are
working in. Disruption however usually requires teacher action as it
represents a challenge to authority. We can therefore distinguish open challenges
which as their name implies 'are intended to enrage the teacher and entertain
the whole class' (Macpherson 1983) in contrast with closed
challenges which are 'not directed to the class as audience and not
intended to enrage the teacher'.
The term 'closed challenge'
is intended to imply that these deviancies are conducted within circumscribed
limits, are not likely to escalate abruptly (though if completely ignored for
long periods they may build up) and do not constitute an immediate challenge to
teacher authority. They represent a self-contained or closed deviation
from the task in hand. All she need to do is to
monitor them and to be seen to be doing so. The children will return to their
work often without noticing that she has been aware of what they are doing.
Experienced effective teachers noticed incidents of this type when they viewed
videos which they had been unaware of at the time because they were involved
with other children. These closed challenges had died away by themselves
without teacher and pupils ever having been engaged. If the children do notice
that she is aware of them, this will often be sufficient to call them back to
their work. Actual intervention may be counter-productive.
The teacher needs to
distinguish open challenges, which she must tackle, from closed, which
she should let alone, if she does not wish to make her self unpopular with the
class by nagging. We give a short checklist here, and explore some of the
distinctions - posture, gaze and control checks - in more detail below.
Open challenges are usually characterised by:
1. High level of control
checks - the deviants are aware of the risks and
very careful to minimise them by keeping a close eye on the teacher.
2. Variation in gaze
direction (the children look round the class to locate the teacher and
potential allies).
3. Visual involvement of
peripheral pupils, who are attracted by the incident and distracted from their
work.
4. Postural changes to
reduce the chances of discovery.
5. Low task involvement.
6. Increased noise level.
7. As
the open challenge moves into overt disruption, willingness to argue with the
teacher or each other.
In general open challenges
are premeditated, either directed against her as the teacher or the order she
should be maintaining e.g. kicking another pupil, or taking another pupil's
equipment. They can be distinguished from overt disruption, where pupils
have decided that she can no longer maintain authority, and they therefore no longer
need to try to conceal what they are doing, and are prepared to confront her
directly. Normally, potentially disruptive children will first try her with
open challenges; if she does not deal with these satisfactorily they will move
to overt disruption. However particularly difficult children, especially in the
middle secondary years, may not go through the initial period of 'testing the
water' by open challenges, moving straight to disruption. This is more likely
if she does not make the initial contact with the class satisfactorily.
Closed challenges, on the other hand, are limited to
the participants involved and normally do not tend to spread. Here the
characteristics are:-
1. Limited gaze direction
(only at the other pupil involved), with no attempt to recruit other members of
the class.
2. Directed conversation
(only to the other pupil involved).
3. Relaxed posture (leaning
on desk or chair).
4. Few,
or no control
checks - the children are not trying to keep an eye on the teacher to avoid
detection.
5. Rapid head and arm
movement - gesturing in relation to their conversation, for example.
6. Increased smiling.
7. Sporadic involvement in
the work.
Pupils involved in closed
challenges seem almost detached from the direction and pace of the lesson and
their activities are rarely teacher directed. Their deviancy is also limited in
scope and direction, restricted to the other pupils involved - for instance,
sharing a joke. These incidents seldom evolve into disruption which carries a
high risk to her authority, providing she does not 'stir' them up.
Three subtle differences in
pattern between closed challenges and open challenges are worth watching out
for:- a) posture, b) gaze direction and c)
control checks. We will look at each of these in more detail.
a) Posture refers to
the head and body position relative to normal sitting posture. Open challengers
show much more variation from normal posture, particularly in head position.
Often they will be seen with head low to the desk, sometimes shielded by an
arm, bag or the back of the pupil in front. They often sit much lower than
usual in their seats. Both these postures conceal their activities from the
teacher. Alternatively they may be perched on the edge of the chair, poised to
change position in the event of her unwanted attention. Closed challengers
usually adopt a more normal seated posture. They are less concerned to conceal
what they are doing.
b) Gaze direction is
more erratic and peer directed in open challengers. The child appears to be
rapidly checking each aspect of his surroundings so he has as complete
information as possible before making the next move. On the other hand plain
inattention by closed challengers is often marked by a non-directional, blank
stare, often directed with some inanimate object or scene out of the window!
Open challengers look more to their peers. This seems to serve two functions.
In addition to seeking approval by holding the gaze of others they can also
recruit a ready assistant if necessary to off-load blame onto or share blame.
This reduces her chance of identifying the correct culprit as both will deny
responsibility for the deviant act. Caught in the cross-fire of denial and counterdenial, she has a good chance of retiring confused
but wounded.
c) The third category, the control
check, is more noticeable and easier to associate with open challenge to
teacher authority. Control checks are used to assess the chances of success and
are recognisable as rapid and therefore rather furtive-seeming glances
to check where she is. Such 'inappropriate' levels of alertness are important
indicators of actual and impending disruption. The control check is shorter
in duration than an 'ordinary' look round the classroom and tends not to follow
her movements (this type can also be called a 'flick check'). When spotted, the
pupil making the check usually diverts his eyes instantly, avoiding meeting her
eye. Often he switches to apparent intent and studious concentration. Only when
personally questioned will he make eye to eye contact.
Sometimes the control check
may be longer, if the child needs to track her intentions more accurately, but
in this case it is still recognisable by the direct gaze at her, in
conjunction with a rapid gaze-aversion if spotted. This should be taken
as a danger signal - why otherwise would the child be so keen to avoid being
seen watching? The start of a long control check is also rapid, but is less
likely to be seen - if it is, the check will become a short one!
By contrast, when a pupil
making a closed challenge looks round, the check is slower both in starting to
look at her and in looking away. Again there is less concern to avoid being
detected.
PROXIMITY AND TOUCH
Seating arrangements such
as a circle or horseshoe of chairs are often suggested for lessons where
everybody in the class is actively involved, for instance discussions, music or
language work. Here the seating arrangement and positioning of the children is
being used to convey a expectation for the lesson process, and teachers will
often move the furniture between or within lessons to fit the work she plan to
do. (Incidentally, her right to rearrange the furniture again indicates her
superior status relative to the class). By contrast, both in
Classroom arrangement
designed to facilitate particular kinds of class interaction is a 'fossilized'
example of the way social interaction is influenced by distance. People space themselves out in characteristic ways in normal
interaction. The normal spacing of 2-5 feet which people adopt when
talking to friends or acquaintances, sitting or standing, is termed 'social
distance'. Teachers are likely to sit or stand at this distance in the staffroom;
children will adopt 'social distance' in the playground or classroom when
talking to each other, and it is the distance to which children will approach
when they are talking to the teacher in the corridor or at her desk or table.
People who are closer than this, in 'personal distance', run the risk of
bumping each other accidentally, and unless they have an intimate relationship,
they tend to move further apart.
Personal distance increases
as children get older. Young children are much more inclined to stand close to
each other or to adults, and they are more willing to touch or be touched by
them. Because of its implication of intimacy, personal distance intensifies any
conversation where it is used, whether aggressive or assertive or helpful and friendly.
One sign of the teacher’s control over the classroom is that she always has
freedom of movement so she can adjust her distance from children and invade their personal distance if she wants to, whereas she
often denies them freedom of movement.
Without indulging in a
disgraceful scrum, there is no way in which a class of thirty can all be within
social distance of the teacher; many must fall outside this range, into 'public
distance'. At this distance a more measured and less subtle type of communication
becomes necessary. This becomes very clear in large open spaces such as playing
fields, but the influence is already apparent in the ordinary classroom. People
who want to hold an ordinary conversation cannot easily do so at public
distance and have to move to social distance, but the constraints of public
distance are no problem when talk is directed at a group in general, and not
any specific individual.
The effects of distance do
not however apply equally to all members of the class; children are inevitably
at different distances. If the teacher spends much of the lesson near her
blackboard or desk, a child in the front row of the classroom may usually be at
a social distance from her, while one at the back will seldom be out of public
distance. Research since the 1920s has suggested that classrooms contain an
'action zone' where the teacher directs most of her attention and from which
most of the class response comes. That some children receive vastly more
attention from the teacher than others has been well documented. Adams and
Biddle claimed that in a conventional classroom, with the teacher at centre
front, her attention was concentrated on children in a kite-shaped area in the
centre of the classroom. Those at the rear corners of the classroom got little
attention; this is relatively easily related to their distance from the
teacher. At first it seems puzzling that those at the front corners of the
classroom also got little attention; but observations on university seminars
provide an explanation. Students or children out of the teacher's main line of
sight (in this case those sitting at the ends of a table on either side of the
teacher) are effectively 'further' from her than those who are constantly under
her eye; being looked at only occasionally from a close distance is equivalent
to being looked at often from further away! Classroom folklore confirms the
semi-immunity of the seats which are literally 'beneath the teacher's notice'.
Subsequent research has indicated that Adams and Biddle's 'kite' is rather
idealised, and that the distribution of attention, while always uneven, can
take different shapes, depending on the layout of the classroom, the subject
being taught, and, no doubt, the particular children being taught and the
cliques they fall into.
TOUCH
Close encounters with
children on an individual basis may involve touch, which many teachers feel is
a fraught area. Concern about child abuse has led to educational programmes
designed to teach children to recognise and deal with unwelcome touches, and to
concern among teachers that any touch may be interpreted as unprofessional
conduct; there are now government regulations on what constitutes ‘appropriate’
touch. Many authorities, such as Marland advise
'never touch a child in affection or anger'. What is permissible, and
children's willingness to be touched, changes rapidly with age, which is a
further problem if she is dealing with several age-groups. The permissible and
inappropriate uses of touch can be understood by reference to its meanings.
Outside the classroom, touch is an inevitable part of three types of
interaction: nurturing (e.g. mother-baby or rescuer-injured person); aggression
(e.g. fighting); and sexual. Milder forms of these three interaction types are
touch used to convey affection, control, and flirtation.
Touch is such a valuable
way of showing appreciation of children and concern for them, however, that it
would be a pity if teachers felt compelled to avoid it altogether. Relatively
few teachers touch even younger secondary-age children, though some individuals
use touch quite extensively in these contexts, without apparent difficulty; it
is of course much more frequent in the primary school, especially with infants.
In classrooms at the younger end of the secondary age-range and with top
juniors, where there is a good relationship between teacher and class,
supportive use of touch causes no problems where it arises naturally as part of
the interaction, for instance when getting children's attention when they are
moving around doing independent practical work, or moving or praising a child
who is doing written work. Where the relationship between
teacher and class is uncertain, or with older children, touch may be resented.
SPACE AND OPEN-PLAN
Seating position and
lesson involvement, cause or effect?
The little research
evidence on seating position which is available is somewhat equivocal. Macpherson, working in Australian secondary schools, found
that the most dominant and disruptive children in the class chose their own
seating positions so as to be as far as possible from the teacher.
Middle-ranking children sat between them and the teacher, with the
lowest-ranking (and most work-oriented) children closest to her. (As the
teacher was based in one corner of the classroom, the 'hostile tribes' were
concentrated in the other corner). When the teacher countered
this arrangement by moving to the back corner opposite her desk and doing as
much of her teaching as possible from there, the seating arrangement suddenly
reversed itself. The dominant children took over the previously despised
seats by the teacher's desk, driving the least powerful members of the class to
the back corner, so they were once more under the teacher's eye. Here, clearly,
seating arrangements reflected children's relative ability to control their
interaction with the teacher.
A rather different picture
emerges from work with primary children. When children's seats were swapped by
the experimenters children who were moved forward
worked more and were rated as more attentive and likeable by the teachers. One
explanation may be that once children learn what the reputations of particular
classroom positions are, they have to live up to their position in classroom
society, whether they chose it for themselves or had it chosen for them. This
may apply more to younger children; work with university students suggests that
by this age individuals have strong preferences and resist attempts to change
their style, whether they are active participants who normally choose central
seats or low participants who choose peripheral seats.
The effect of seating
position may be as much on the teacher's perception of children and her
expectations of them as on the children's actual behaviour. There is some
evidence for this from a study on primary children in
Seating arrangements:
tables and rows.
Available research on the
effect of seating arrangement in junior schools (Wheldall
& Glynn summarise this work) suggests that children's application and
output of work improves when they are moved from table groups to rows and
deteriorates when they return to tables. This applies for both normal children
and those with special needs. One problem here is that these studies were
short-term (a week or two in each condition) and the differences may mainly
reflect the novelty of the seating change. However similar studies of mixed and
single-sex groups found that juniors worked better in mixed-sex groups whether
these were an experimental novelty or their usual seating pattern - in other
words moving children who normally worked in mixed pairs to segregated seating
led to a decrease in performance. The opposite effect occurred with secondary
pupils. This reflects the change in children's preferences from same-sex to
mixed-sex informal groupings with age.
Seating positions also
provide an informal sociogram (a sociogram
is a diagram of cliques, friendships and antipathies within a group). Seating
choice will fit friendship patterns more accurately for high-status members of
the class who will displace low-status members and isolates: this is fortunate
as the higher-status ones are more likely to cause the teacher classroom
management problems. As long ago as 1966 it was found that college students'
prejudices related to sex and race were reflected in the way they segregated
themselves in the classroom. When prejudice reduced, so did segregation. There
is a similar tendency to segregate into clusters in dining-hall queues and the
playground.
Actual choice of seat is a
relatively static index of feelings, but children show their degree of
involvement on a moment-to-moment basis by mutual orientation and eye contact. Streeck analysed in detail a mixed-sex group of 7-9 year
olds. One child had been given a task by the teacher and had to get the rest to
carry it out. When the children were working as a group they formed one
cluster; if they were all listening to one child all turned to focus on her,
while if they had split into pairs to work the pairs oriented towards each
other, cutting off other members of the group. The teacher's assignment of a
leadership role to one child sometimes differed from the children's existing
hierarchy, and then, especially, much of their time was spent sorting out who
was in charge. The course of these arguments was clearly reflected in their
postures. When the task was finished the group as a whole would 'open up' to
the outside world by leaning back in their chairs and looking round. Seating
postures and arrangements offer useful cues which the teacher can use to check
what is going on from across the room; they can be taken in relatively quickly
and she does not have to be able to hear what members of the group are saying
to get a general picture of their level of cooperation and involvement with
their work.
Space and acoustics
A major problem with large
spaces such as open-plan schools is that reverberation (echo) time increases
with the volume of the room - in large rooms the echoes of previous sounds interfere,
which works well for music but not for speech. Sound also travels much better
in open space, and light room dividers have a negligible effect compared to
walls, so the background noise is much higher. As the intelligibility of speech
diminishes as the square of distance, this means that it is impossible for the
teacher to be understood if she tries to speak to a large group of children. As
a result, teachers in open-plan schools tended to use individualised rather
than whole-class teaching, which appears from research to be more effective, as
we shall see in later lectures. The situation is made more by the hard surfaces
in most classrooms, which encourage echos, and the
fact that small children produce more noise than adults, and absorb less!
Bennett's open plan
study (1980)
Bennett was concerned by
transition time, and especially ways in which concentration of children broken
up by interruptions - most seriously those imposed by teachers and
organisation. He found time involved averaged 61% for infants (school range
53-70); averaged 66% for juniors (school range 58-75). 22.2% of infants' time
(average - range 12-27%) transition; 16.4% non-involved; for juniors figures
are 13 (9-17) & 20.6. i.e. at least 1/3 (infants 2/5) of school week not
usefully spent in his view (this includes shoe-lace tying etc.) There were
differences in the length of the school day/week (similar figure, somewhat
higher, for pre-schools).
He found engagement in work
tended to be lower for "basics" maths and language (around 2/3
nominal time +) than environmental studies, PE RE aesthetics (80-90+%) - this was confirmed by Alexander's work ten years
later, in a different authority. He suggests that teaching organisations
unsuited to the buildings may be a disturbing factor; e.g. involving moving
children around the building for different activities.
Considers teachers have the
major influence on running of the school, though buildings can make school
easier or less to run similar design buildings often used in different ways.
Standard of understanding by architects of users' needs very poor, e.g.
circulation problems unsupervisable areas (especially
in practical areas). Also noise and distraction problems,
often due to inadequate space. Failure of architects
to revisit buildings in use and learn from them.
There has been some
previous research on classroom design which tends to support Bennett's views,
indicating that achievement is better and friendships more successful in
conventional box classrooms. The problems of dealing with open-plan are
accentuated by the lack of training available to teachers in how to use these
designs, both before they start teaching and in-service (70% had had no I/S
training) and inadequate consultation about the designs, leading to niggling
practical problems. ORACLE also found open-plan less effective.
THE QUALITY OF PUPIL
LEARNING EXPERIENCES
This study of infant
children followed on from Bennett's earlier work where he had become concerned
about how much time children were spending learning constructively. There was
particular concern that in classrooms where children received individual
instruction, as in many open-plan schools, the teacher could not keep effective
track of what children were doing because there was too much going on. They were
particularly interested in whether children in the usual grouped seating
arrangement gained the benefits claimed from co-operative groupwork.
The researchers followed through the complete process from the teacher planning
what work a child should do to her giving it to the child, and then watched the
child to see how it was getting on with the work and what problems it had,
followed it when it went to consult the teacher, recorded their conversation,
and then checked afterwards to see if the child could now cope with the problem
which had previously been giving it difficulties. In many cases they found the
consultation with the teacher had not helped at all, and the original problem
persisted or had got worse. The difficulty was that teachers were too keen to
teach and did not spend enough time finding out exactly what the problem was;
these rather young children could not explain their problems clearly and did
not have sufficient knowledge to realise where they were going wrong. This is
another example of the problems caused for effective teaching by the pressures
caused by the conventional staff-child ratio and the influences of the
children. At the end of the session they checked with the teacher to see what
she thought the child had learnt, and with the child to see what it thought.
When we remember the
importance of peer relations to children it is likely that children will take
the opportunity to talk to each other if the layout permits it, and seating
across a typical sized table is the best position for conversation! People of
all ages prefer to face each other to talk and a table places them at the
distance they would normally choose if they had freedom of movement. Obviously
the teacher can hope that this conversation will be about the work, but she
will have to produce stimulating work to ensure that it is and even then she
will probably have to keep a careful eye on proceedings. Bennett & Desforges' work in infant classrooms suggests that
children's genuine attempts to help each other can often have very limited
value simply because by definition they have not yet achieved a full grasp of
the curriculum area they are dealing with and the blind tend to lead the blind
astray. Children could be helpful to each other, though often their well- meant
efforts to help each other were counter-productive, as they gave each other
wrong spellings, misleading information and so on. This effect will probably
occur at any age, though as children become more critical and more aware of the
deficiencies of their own knowledge they may be more cautious in offering
advice. Older children are also much better aware of the relative cleverness of
different members of the class, and will probably temper their acceptance of
suggestions by their knowledge of the source. Bossert
found that in classes where emphasis was placed on academic performance
children would only sit with others of similar ability, probably for this
reason.
A major problem, probably
resulting from this ignorance of what was actually going on, was teachers'
inability to match work to children's abilities, so that the work given tended
to be pitched to the average child, boring more able children and
overstretching the less able. Pacing of work was also poor, with abrupt jumps
to work which was too difficult when new topics were introduced, followed by
excessive and unchallenging practice work. As a result in more recent years
there has been much greater emphasis on differentiation of work by
ability in initial teacher training.
Alexander's work has shown
that children spend their time less effectively when engaged in the activities
which take up most of the school day such as English and mathematics - a
potential problem given that the trend in the National Curriculum is to
increase time spent on these basic activities at the expense of other subjects
which engaged the children's attention more. He has also shown that the effect
of the National Curriculum and testing was to increase the amount of time spent
on individual work with children when testing them, contrary to the intention
of the originators of the National Curriculum who wanted less individualised
work - though whole-class work also increased.
FOR A SUMMARY of this
and other work look at Bourne (in core references)
BENNETT,N.,
DESFORGES,C., COCKBURN,A. & WILKINSON,B. (1984) "The Quality of Pupil
Learning Experiences"
ALEXANDER,R.
(1995) "Versions of Primary Education"
FOCUS & FLOW
Quick decision - a
necessary skill for teachers:
The teacher has 70-140
interactions with children per hour, which inevitably are short and do not make
it easy to provide balance.
Jackson & Lahaderne showed that child-teacher interaction rates vary
from less than one an hour to once every 5-10 minutes, the lower figure
apparently being what is inevitably if teacher and child are in the same room.
If all children interacted at the highest rate class size could only 10-12, and
if at the lowest rate over 100 - i.e. though the objective class size may be
the same for both children the subjective size in terms of what they get from
the teacher is very different. Boydell has shown that
most attention is given to particular types of children - bright active
children who are rewarding to deal with and who get mainly work-oriented
interaction and troublesome children who get control-oriented interaction but
some work-oriented interaction to try to get them occupied. These are mostly
boys. Most children tend to fall into an inconspicuous middle group who do not
get so much attention.
Hick's Law proposes that in
a choice situation the reaction time is proportional to the log of the number
of the choices, i.e. to the number of decisions to be made, though above a
certain number reaction time does not increase. More complex decisions require
a longer choice time, but extended practice can reduce the choice time so much
that there is scarcely any difference between simple and complex choices.
In the case of skills (and
this probably includes the perception of pupils for disciplinary purposes)
behaviour which originally required conscious attention can be relegated to
special-purpose sub-conscious channels, which can process it very much more
rapidly than the single general-purpose channel of which we are conscious.
Given the work of Kounin indicating the requirement
for fast-decision making and effective lesson control in the classroom,
information is likely to be suppressed either by not being taken in or being
processed through a practised lower-level channel (hence the value of expectations,
discussed below). The teacher cannot afford to spend a long time pondering over
every decision: indeed the work of Sutcliffe and Whitfield suggests that many
decisions are made on an intuitive basis and that experienced teachers tend to to make many null decisions.
Disruptive behaviour by
boys tends to be noticed and dealt with more than that by girls which may
encourage them to repeat it more to get further attention, and certainly gives
them a different classroom experience to the girls.
The situation could be
compounded in a free-activity classroom where the boys are more assertive than
the girls, though at the earlier ages girls tend to approach the female teacher
more than the boys and are not discouraged from doing so - whereas boys are
made to occupy themselves.
Teachers tend not to be
aware of their differential attention or to be able to do very much about it if
they are aware, though it has been shown with 5 year olds that they distribute
their attention more evenly as the year progresses, presumably as they get to
know the children better. The same work has shown that the amount and quality
of interaction goes down as class size
increases - by quality the length of conversations and the amount of
interactions which are replied to - but not in proportion to group size, i.e.
teachers can compensate to some extent. Work with university students has also
shown the the proportion who are involved in
discussions goes down as group size goes up, the absolute numbers staying
roughly constant.
EXPECTATION
Given the problems of
grasping what is going on in the classroom, i.e. in processing information;
teachers have to have expectations so they can react quickly, as this is
necessary for effective control and interaction.
Teacher expectation effects
attracted a lot of attention after Rosenthal & Jacobson's "Pygmalion
in the Classroom" and over 60 studies had been done by 1974. R & J
showed that children who were described to their teachers after an intelligence
test as potential intellectual bloomers did better on a retest at the end of
the academic year than control children. In fact the test used was one for
general intelligence and the two groups were randomly selected children of
equal ability. The study was very widely publicised, and it was assumed that
teacher expectations were universal, were self-fulfilling prophecies and were imposed
on the children because of the teacher's domination of the classroom.
However even R & J's
study got the effects only with grades 1 and 2, not so much in grades 3-6, and
more with girls than boys. Subsequent experiments to replicate the results have
not usually been successful, mostly because the study was so well known that
teachers tend to be suspicious and it is not ethical to give teachers low
expectations, only high ones. However teachers do have existing (naturalistic
expectations in both directions and studies using these have unequivocally
demonstrated that at least in some teachers self-fulfilling expectations exist.
Expectations can exist not only between individual but between streams and work
such as that of Douglas in the 1960s indicated that children of initially
similar ability placed in different streams diverged towards the expectations
of their streams, and that teachers will report explicit expectations differing
according to stream. (These reports for secondary school but effects also in
primary school e.g. 3rd years). Such expectations may be communicated directly
to the children, e.g. for showing up the higher streams by comparison with
existing low streams or previous years' high streams.
Nash found in the classroom
that teachers would allow higher expectation children more licence in
misbehaviour and the way they could do their work, while speech to low
expectation children was less helpful - for instance they were constantly
chivvied and if they could no understand the work they ere just told to go and
read th book again and try to understand it. In at
least one school (M.Ed. report) the absence rates in the top streams equalled
those in the bottom streams (intermediates being less) but the staff were not aware of this, because the top streams had
good excuses and only the bottom ones therefore seen as delinquents. This
brings in the general question of teacher reactivity.
It is felt by Brophy and Good that the pace of
classroom life is such that many teachers can only react to and try to
keep some control over events and not to control them. they
oppose this to proactive teaching where the teacher tries to take
control of what is happenened and mould the children
in desirably ways. Such teachers may have expectations but work to ensure they
are not fulfilled, in such a case if a poor child does not improve despite the
teacher's efforts, no blame can be placed on the teacher's expectations. Such
behaviour is only possible for teachers who are able to reduce the information
load sufficiently to monitor the effects of what they are doing. This may be
assisted if they are able to place clear expectations in the minds of the
children and get them to act in accordance with these so their behaviour is
more predictable.
Children have expectations
too - first-grade American children imagine there is bias between sexes in the
teaching of reading where observations show no such bias exists. Scottish
children who were used to formal teaching misbehaved with informal teachers
because they considered these teachers were failing in their teacher role by
expecting the class to exercise self-discipline.
Moskowitz and Hayman
have shown that teachers who are particularly popular with children spend a lot
of time at the beginning of the year defining to the children what they intend
to cover during the year, how they expect to teach it and generally what their
expectations are. Torode found in Scottish schools
that teachers with good discipline clearly communicated their expectations and
punished deviations. M & H found new teachers usually started teaching
straight away without communicating their expectations, and were essentially reactive
or over-reactive, as they came under the control of the class. Nash in
Support for a view of
teachers a reactive rather than proactive has come from studies related to the
supposed poor performance of boys during the earlier grades in
Girls attract less teacher attention,
probably because they re quieter. At later ages school requirements become more
compatible with boys' abilities and less compatible with girls' activities but
again this seems more a reflection of the characteristics of the children than
due to the behaviour of teachers.
In general expectation
effects are most marked in short-term studies, especially where classroom
behaviour or child attitudes have been looked at. They are much less marked in
longer-term studies and when product variables (achievement) have been studied,
and it seems likely that in general their importance and prevalence has been
over-emphasised. They do however have considerable implications e.g. if
external examinations are replaced by those set and monitored by class teachers.
The National Curriculum also involves considerable amounts of recording and
public reporting by teachers, which may increase the effect of expectations.
The emphasis of the National Curriculum on repeated and supposedly objective
testing makes comparative performance much more salient, and there is research
going back many years by Bossert to show that under
these circumstances children prefer to work with others who match them in
ability, rather than on the basis of other interests etc.
ORACLE
The Oracle project was
based at
Observations
on 58 teachers in 19 schools in 3 LEAs. 8 pupils were observed in each class, giving total
of 489. Observations carried out 1976-7 and subsequent years; there has been a
follow-up 20 years later. This is described below as ORACLE 1996.
The final two pieces of
work to come out of the 1970s ORACLE were a study of transfer to secondary
schools and an in-service training project designed to encourage teachers to
make more use of group work in the secondary school. The secondary study
included both systematic observation and more detailed observation of how
schools imposed their ethos on children.
The study found that
children adopted new styles in the secondary school, in response to the
different demands of the secondary organisation. As secondary teaching involves
more formal work, with all children working at the same task, it was no longer
possible for children to adopt the intermittent working style which had been
characteristic of many primary classrooms. Instead the two major styles (there
were others such as the "fusspots" who were very similar to the
attention seekers of the primary classroom) were EASY RIDERS AND HARD GRINDERS.
Hard grinders worked assiduously, doing whatever the teacher required to the
letter. This often resulted in their completing the work well before the rest
of the class, and the teacher then had to give them time- filling work to make
up the time until the rest of the class had finished, to allow the whole class
to go on to the next phase of the work in unison. Easy riders gave the
appearance of working busily, but span the work out by doing it slowly or
spending a lot of time on administrative tasks like getting materials,
sharpening pencils and so on. The most interesting point here was that these
were not fixed characteristics; as in the primary school the children changed
their style to fit the teacher they were working with, but in the secondary
school where they moved from subject to subject during the day, they adopted
different styles in different classrooms. The ORACLE team called these the
pupil "persona". They found that there was very little overlap
between the personae children adopted in English and Science, and further that
boys and girls adopted the personae which would be expected from the sex-stereotyping
of the subjects. Again the social factors which allow children to work against
the teacher are apparent here.
The groupwork
project arose because the original research showed that teachers were not using
the potential of children's groups to get children to work together. While
children were sitting together they were just working in parallel, not
co-operating. The project trained a group of teachers to work with groups, and
then tried to get them to pass on their knowledge to a second batch of
teachers, as if the innovation was to be successful, it had to be able to be
passed on between teachers. However they found that while the first group was
reasonably successful, they were unable to pass on their skills and group work
did not persist; teachers used it initially on a limited range of tasks and
then dropped it when they went on to other curriculum areas.
ORACLE 1996
Galton's recent follow-up study used, as far
as possible exactly the same observational methods (the curriculum area being
studied and social groupings were observed in more detail), tests of basic
skills (updated to remove out-of-date words - it was not possible to test study
skills) and schools as in 1976. One study area was replaced by one closer to
ORACLE 1996 has found that,
compared to the 1976 results, teachers spend more time talking to children and
less in silent interaction (surveillance, marking and preparing materials);
they are working harder by 1976 standards - so are pupils who spend more time
involved with tasks (though some of this is as listeners to the teacher's
presentations to the whole class). It is likely that the marking and
preparation is being done out of school (as was found by Campbell
& Neill - see later).
Apart from the extra workload involved, this means that the teacher has even
less chance to catch and correct children's errors at an early stage than at
the time of Bennett & Desforges' study. This may
be one contributory factor to the decline in standards discussed later.
More time is spent talking
to the class as a whole and this time is largely spent telling rather than
questioning. Galton's concern is that telling is
well-suited to passing on factual information, but there is a lack of consideration
of what tactics are most appropriate to make children think through methods of
devising flexible tactics for solving problems in the future. He considers that
education in
By contrast, class teaching
exposes such children to failure in public. Factual class teaching, which is
now much more common than in 1976, has another disadvantage; pupils find it
boring, and primary pupils are now using the tactics which were used only by
secondary pupils in 1976 to spread out their work. Pupils were matched where
possible to the 1976 styles; of those who could be matched, the commonest style
(36% of those who could be identified - the percentages in the book are lower,
as they are percentages of the whole sample, including children who could not
be matched to any style) were 'ghosts', equivalent to the 1976 easy riders.
They spin out tasks by spending as much time as possible on routine. This is a
new, and to Galton rather worrying, continuity
between primary and secondary school which was not present in 1976. Another
'secondary' style were 'hard grinders' (26.4% of those
who could be identified) who were more absorbed in their task than the 1976
solitary workers. The second largest group (32.2%), which could be matched to
their 1976 counterparts, were intermittent workers. They spent more time
working that the 1976 intermittent workers, reflecting the more demanding
nature of the 1996 classroom especially during class sessions; but it appears
that they take advantage of groupwork to chat. They
can get away with this because with less silent interaction (surveillance) the
teacher is too busy to notice. There was a small group (4%) of 'eager
participants' who differed from the 1976 attention seekers by waiting for the
teacher to come to them rather than chasing after the teacher.
Compared to 1976 there is
much less difference in the distribution of pupil styles across teacher styles
(though, as in 1976, pupil styles change to match teacher styles rather than
vice versa). This is because the 1996 teacher styles are much more uniform -
all include class teaching except for the 'group instructor' style. We can now
look at these, less distinct 1996 styles. Though ORACLE 1996 matches them up
with similar names to the 1976 styles, almost all (26 of 29) closely resembled
the 1976 class enquirers, and 14 closely resembled the 1976 group instructors;
only one closely resembled the 1976 individual monitors. They also closely
resembled (27 out of 29) the 1976 style changer group
(infrequent/rotating/habitual changers), as all now used a similar combination
of class teaching and individual or group work. The final 1996 grouping was
15 (half the group)
class/group instructors (a combination not found in 1976)
6 class enquirers
3 group instructors
5 individual monitors (but
used a rather mixed style).
As has been mentioned,
these styles were much less distinctive than in 1976 and no attempt to match
pupil performance to teaching style is reported.
We now turn to pupil
outcomes in maths, language and reading. Complicated and technical efforts were
made to ensure that the tests were as comparable as possible - because they
show a decline in performance in many areas, though not all, since 1976 - and since
the PRISMS study of small schools done by the ORACLE team in 1984. This is
unexpected as in the 1970s children were seldom tested - in the 1990s, with
frequent NC testing, they should be better at tests! ORACLE looked at three
possible explanations;
that the fall was due to 'trendy
teaching' - rejected because the observations showed that class teaching, and
didactic explanation, had increased;
that it was due to boys'
underperformance. Though girls did better, especially in language, and the
difference was more marked than in 1976, this was not the whole explanation.
There was little difference in the observed treatment of girls and boys, though
boys got more individual help from male teachers (who are now rare in primary
schools because of concerns about child abuse);
that it was due to the National
Curriculum. This appears the most likely explanation because the areas where
children have done as well or better are those stressed by the NC (punctuation
and other basic aspects of writing, basic arithmetic, shape measures etc.) They
are doing less well in less easily measured complex skills such as
comprehension of English, spelling and maths problem solving. It seems likely
that these areas are now less emphasised. Time allocated to English and maths has
declined because science has now been added to the core subjects (Campbell
& Neill also found this). In addition, because of the move from topic-work
to single-subject didactic teaching, children get less opportunity for reading
and writing in the other subjects. The virtue of topic work was that several
skills were practised 'invisibly' in the course of doing the topic.
The ORACLE team felt that
teachers were under such pressure that they stuck with 'safe', known practice
even where it was counter-productive, as in the arrangement of classroom
seating. Most primary classrooms have children seated round tables in groups,
though they work individually. Despite a large amount of research indicating
that seating in rows is more effective for individual work, because children
distract each other less, few teachers make
appropriate or flexible use of classroom layouts. The conclusion of ORACLE is
that many of the pressures, from the NC and from OFSTED for testing, literacy
and numeracy hours etc. push teachers towards
teaching low-level skills, though there has been an increase in the small
number of open-ended questions. Curriculum policy does not take into account
the potential of new developments such as IT.
See summary of Galton's earlier work in Bourne.
GALTON,M.,
HARGREAVES, L., COMBER,C., WALL, D & PELL A (1999) "Inside the Primary
Classroom - 20 Years On"
GALTON,M.
& WILLCOCKS,J. (Eds.) (1983) "Moving from the Primary Classroom"
Chapter 2 provides a
summary of the primary-school work, Chapter 3 systematic and Chapter 8 more
subjective accounts of how the children adapted to the secondary school. The
book contains references to the two earlier books on this important project,
which provide fuller information for anyone who has a special interest in primary
education.
INTERACTIVE TEACHING
The emphasis in the
Literacy Hour and Numeracy Hour on interactive
teaching derives from a long research tradition going back to at least the
1960's; references are given in chapters 1-3 of Muijs
& Reynolds. Some of the major points are supported by ORACLE and Mortimore, and also by psychologically based research on
information processing. There is a great deal of psychological research which
suggests that people can only hold so much information in mind at a time (the
normally quoted figure is 7 +/- 2 items - i.e. people can remember a telephone
number only if it is 5-9 digits long). More complex information can be managed bu splitting it up into larger chunks, each chunk becoming
an item. For example, by splitting the dialing code
for the University, 02476, off a University number, the remainder, e.g. 523
836, is within memorisation capacity. More relevantly, mathematics educators
consider that true mathematics understanding depends on 'procepts'
- process concepts - process concepts by which a process such as Pythagoras's
theorem, vectors or differentiation can be treated as a single 'item' in a
higher-level mathematical process, so that very complex mathematical thought
can occur by dealing with each of the consituent
ideas, in themselves complex, as an 'item'.
The implications of this
for the teaching process are that both teachers and children need a clear
structure if they are to be able to process ideas readily within the 7 +/- 2 limit. This is an especial problem for younger children -
their limited experience means that they have not yet been able to build up
'chunking' skills such as mathematical procepts -
indeed 'learning to learn' mainly involves being able to deal with patterns
such as words or pictures as a single item rather than looking at each letter
or part of the picture as a separate item (see Wood chapter
). This makes clear structure especially valuable for younger children,
as Muijs & Reynolds mention. Clear structuring of
the lesson has been seen as valuable since the pioneering work of Gump, who
stressed the importance of 'segments' of the lesson and transitions between
them - experienced teachers use 'markers' - signals which often have no meaning
in themselves but aim to attract attention to the real message which is coming
next. This ensures that the class realises that there is a change to a new
activity and does not get confused as to what they are expected to do. Clear
signals, for example, of how long it is to the end of the session, allow the
class to plan their work and avoid children deciding not to start work because
they are unsure as to whether they will finish it. This avoids the risk of
children being criticised by the teacher for not doing what they should when it
is not in fact their fault - they do not know what to do. Evidence up to
secondary level indicates that children prefer clear and not too challenging
tasks - this allows them to be sure that they are doing something at which they
can succeed. Thus the division of the literacy hour, for example, into
differentiated sections, makes it easier for children to identify what they are
doing, and provides relatively low-level tasks at which they can succeed
easily.
The Department for
Education & Science has produced information on requirements, guidance and
lesson plans and materials for teachers on the Web: - look at
http://www.standards.dfee.gov.uk/
and follow the links to Literacy and Numeracy
A potentially negative
implication of the '5 + / - 2' information processing limitation is that
teachers, especially, have to have expectations to be able to cope with the
complexity of the classroom situation, though children also have, at least by
junior age, firm expectations of what teachers should do. There is potentially
a risk that greater emphasis on the public performance required in the literacy
and numeracy hours will lead to children becoming
discouraged by public failure. As national planning makes the hours relatively
rigid teachers (e.g. in
It had long been apparent
that people varied in ability, and the success of Darwinism in the 19th.
Century suggested that this variation might be inherited. During this period, Mendelian genetics was rediscovered (it had originally been
discovered in the mid-19th. century but the knowledge had been lost); it was
rapidly applied in agriculture, leading to great improvements in crops and
livestock. During a period of rapid technological progress and scientific
optimism, it was believed that education could be put on a similar scientific
footing.
If, as was believed at the
time, inheritance was genetically fixed, and could be tested effectively, it
should be simple to assess pupils' likely educational progress and to assign
them to the type of education most suitable to their abilities, to the benefit
of both society, which would educate children effectively and without waste,
and to that of the children themselves, who would not waste time on an
education ill-matched to their individual needs. Testing (the 11+) for grammar
and secondary modern schools went on well into the 1960s, when doubt about the
accuracy of the testing methods led to their abolition and the introduction of
the unstreamed comprehensive system.
In the 1920s it was
believed that genes controlled the development of the brain and thus
intelligence directly. Piaget considered the child as constructing its own
knowledge through experience, and the current view is that the genes provide a
range of alternatives from which one alternative is selected by experience and
then built on. For example, children are pre-adapted to learn language and can
pick out meanings in speech and construct their own generalisations from them;
chimpanzees raised alongside children lack the genetic ability to pick up
language at all. Once language is acquired children then build on their ability
to understand the culture which surrounds them.
Genetic and social
influences on development
Genetically based
inheritance requires that behaviour (or structure) has at least some genetic
basis. If behaviour depends purely on individual experience highly successful
individuals may have offspring who do not repeat their beneficial experiences,
and are eliminated.
Evidence to support a
genetic basis for IQ came from a long series of experiments on heritability
- the proportion of variation which was explained by genetic variation.
Particularly interesting were groups who shared genes but not environment, such
as twins raised apart, or environment but not genes such as adopted children.
However such groups are relatively scarce and there were many difficulties from
a scientific point of view. For example adoption agencies try to match children
to families with similar backgrounds, which is highly
desirable for the children but does not allow genetics and environment to be
separated clearly. All studies of heritability suffer from the problem that
heritability depends on environment. The more variable the environment the
greater the total variation and therefore the lower the amount of variation
caused by genetic differences and therefore the lower the heritability. This
means that older research, no matter how well carried out, is of limited value
because the social environment has changed.
Modern approaches to
development stress the 'bootstrapping' processes involved, by which the first
stage provides foundations for the child to react to environmental stimuli
which influence the genes controlling the second stage, and so on. (At the
earlier stages the 'environmental' stimuli may be largely from within the egg
or the mother). The early stages of the bootstrapping process, especially, are
affected by emergent processes due to the physical nature of the
materials of the embryo. These ideas have several important effects:-
The final form of the child
may be more complex (contain more information) than the genetic instructions
which produce it, the remaining information coming from the interactions of the
developmental process.
Individuals will vary
because the genes only give general instructions, but the precise final form
depends on information added during the developmental process.
The effect of the
developmental processes is to offer a limited set of choices which control the
way in which the brain uses experience to organise itself. Development consists
largely of selection among pre-existing alternatives rather than instruction
by the environment to a system which has no built-in information. The
skills of human babies may be emergent; a relatively small amount of
genetic pre-specification which matches reliable features of the environment
serves as a foundation for complex abilities to be learnt.
One major environmental
effect may be the child's position in the family. Dunn and others have found
that sibs raised together may be less similar than those raised apart. The
explanation is that children raised together compete for their parents'
attention; successive children can do so most effectively by choosing different
niches and stressing different abilities. First-borns tend to identify with
their parents and be relatively conservative, supporting the existing order;
second-borns more nonconformist and innovative; later
children fit into the 'gaps' between their older sibs.
WRIGHT,L.
(1997) "Twins"
DUNN,J.
(1984) "Sisters and Brothers".
The concept derives from
VAT - in other words it attempts to assess what a school adds to the abilities
children had when they entered, to separate the effect of home background or
previous education from that of the school itself. Value added contrasts with
'raw scores' - supporters of value added feel that raw scores disadvantage
schools which take children from difficult backgrounds. The disadvantage is
that trying to calculate added value is extremely complex; as Gray & Wilcox
indicate, the more accurate the information
on pupils at entry, the less
effect the school is seen to have. A particular problem is attributing the
variation between schools to causes at different levels; for example
differences apparently due to schools may actually be due to differences
between children; the methods used to assess this are multi-level analysis,
specifically structural modeling, where it is
possible to attribute specific causes and effects. Recent work has confirmed
the within-school factors identified by Rutter and Mortimore, listed below, but it can be difficult to work
out what the direction of influence is; for example if the head spends little
time on discipline in effective schools is this because the limited involvement
causes the effectiveness or is it because when the school is already running
smoothly, the head's task is easier? Further, effects in a school which is
already working well may be quite different to the interventions which would be
needed to 'turn round' a poorly performing school,
Classic studies of
'value added'
Both the Rutter and the 'School Matters' study were done in
The studies included 12 secondary and 50 primary schools,
all inner-city ILEA schools. Critics have pointed out that the population were
atypical in that inner-city children are likely to have more serious
deprivation than the school population as a whole, and the study contained
relatively few small schools compared to the situation in rural areas.
Data was collected on:-
background of individual pupils and achievement
at entry to school;
Outcomes, assessed by
reading, mathematics (standardised) creative writing and oral skills in School
Matters and by examination results in Rutter
teachers' ratings of behaviour, children's
attitudes to school etc., attitudes of others to them and attendance records;
interviews with heads and teachers on school
and classroom policies; records of classroom layout
observations of behaviour
As might be expected, the results are very complex. However strong school effects were found both on academic outcomes
and on attitudes and behaviour. However schools which did well on
academic outcomes did not necessarily do well on attitudes and behaviour.
Different academic outcomes, such as reading and mathematics, tended to be
related - schools which did well on one tended to do
well on others. This supports the current view in the DfEE
that 'failing schools' fail all their children. There were some associations
with attitudes, but these tended to be weak.
Class, sex and ethnic group had strong effects on
outcomes, but effective schools were effective across all groups - they did not
favour only one type of child. The differences between groups at entry tended
to persist through the school, so that within a school children did not become
more equal. However disadvantaged children at an effective school could
outperform advantaged children at an ineffective school. The main emphasis of
the report was therefore to select the factors which made schools effective.
The "key factors" were separated into given
factors, which were outside the immediate control of the staff and factors,
which could be controlled by the staff.
Beneficial given factors for School Matters were:-
combined schools (as against separate infant
and junior schools);
voluntary-aided (church) schools;
small (less than 160) schools;
small classes (below 24)
good buildings etc.;
stable senior staff (lowish
turnover - head in post 3-7 years)
stable classteacher
(no change during year).
This research contrasts
with Rutter where school factors were found less
important; the difference is almost certainly due to the statistical effect of
the larger number of schools in the School Matters study. Though given factors
were important, the authors thought school and class policy were more critical.
School
policy.
1) Purposeful leadership by
the head. This involved a suitable combination of assertiveness by the head,
while allowing staff room for independent action. Heads had guidelines for
curriculum, record keeping and INSET. All teachers were involved in
decision-making. This result parallels Rutter's, and
also American research.
2) Involvement and
delegation to deputy head. Stability of deputy head was also beneficial. This
result parallels more detailed case studies, such as that by Nias at Cambridge, but there is relatively little other
research.
3) Consistency between
teachers in following school guidelines was important - otherwise pupils tend
to divide and rule. This again is consistent with Rutter,
and other research, including in
Classroom factors
4) Structured sessions
within which pupils had autonomy in detail. Some schools allow children to plan
and choose their own order of activities over a day or week; these seemed to be
less effective. Smoothly organised classrooms (cf. Kounin)
were also more successful. Various research since the 1970s is consistent with
this finding.
5) High-level teacher
input, including challenging talk. They found more challenging talk during
whole-class teaching (as did ORACLE) but do not stress this. Enthusiastic
teachers and bright classrooms did better - directive teachers did worse.
Classrooms where teachers spent more of their time discussing work and less on
routine were also more successful; also those where there was orderly activity
and a moderate noise level - too much noise made it difficult for children to
concentrate. However, all these may be secondary effects of the teachers'
ability to keep order, which is a prerequisite for being able to show interest
and enthusiasm. There is a considerable range of research supporting these
findings.
6) Limited focus within
sessions, without too many activities going on at once which disperses the
teacher's attention, did better. There was less noise and distraction. However,
children would be working at their own level; but the common theme allowed
teachers to draw all children's attention when something interesting happened.
This parallels previous mention of the requirements for simple and rapid
decision-making, and ORACLE strictures on open-plan and mixed-age classes. This
point does not seem to have been studied in previous research.
7) High levels of
communication between teachers and pupils were important (this parallels the
ORACLE class enquirers, who also had high levels of talk to their children).
They found talking to the whole group effective in increasing contacts.
However, they do not advocate traditional class teaching, and claim not to have
detected specific teaching styles. This may be due to the types of analysis
they used; they do not seem to have done any cluster analysis which would have
identified styles. On the other hand, it is unlikely that children whose
experience of teachers is limited are going to be very aware of styles. Their
attention is far more likely to be on whether the teacher uses particular types
of behaviour, such as frequent questioning (paralleling the remarks above on
the spin-off effects of the teacher's ability to keep order). ORACLE seems to
be the main other research supporting this finding - other research has tended
to stress time on task.
Factors at both class
and school level.
8) Good record-keeping
seemed important. This is supported by a range of research, much in
9) Informal involvement of
parents, through helping in the classroom and at home, consulting with class
teachers and easy access to the head, were important. Formal PTAs had less
effect. the importance of parents has been supported
by Tizard (e.g. Tizard
& Hughes) and Hargreaves at secondary level.
10) A positive ethos, both
inside the classroom and in staff-child interaction outside (e.g. at lunchtime
and on trips) was important; there also needed to be good and helpful working
conditions for teachers, including time off for lesson preparation. This
finding is consistent with the stress on ethos by Rutter,
and with a range of research, much in
GRAY,J.
& WILCOX,B. (1995) "
The original research
studies were:-
RUTTER,M.,
MAUGHAN,B., MORTIMORE,P. & OUSTON,J. (1979) "Fifteen Thousand
Hours"
MORTIMORE,P.,
SAMMONS,P., STOLL,L., LEWIS,D. & ECOB,R. (1988) "School Matters".
Wells: Open Books. Pages 248-262, and also summaries on pages
204-5, 217, 218, 264-5.
TEACHERS' WORKLOADS AND POLICY CHANGE
Research background -
the emphasis on time
Bennett's 1978 paper' A
Dream, A Belief and A Model' developed the basic idea that progress is directly
related to active learning time.
Bennett pointed out that
there was considerable variation in:-
Quantity of schooling -
e.g. length of school/day/year - interruptions e.g. strikes, elections -
absence due to illness and truancy
Curriculum allocation e.g.
up to 10 times variation in time given to basics - observed in open-plan study
language 4-12 hrs/week,. environmental
studies 0-7 hrs/week.
Active learning time
average about 2/3 time but range more than 20-90%; concerned by amount of time
spent on routine and especially transition between activities.
Comprehension - requires
clearly sequenced material matched to requirements of child.
Feedback
- immediate feedback effective - praise with low achievers; criticism and
setting of high standards with high achievers. Gold stars also effective.
He concluded evidence
generally in favour but more needed.
Suggests implications for
teachers:-
Consideration should be
given to time allocation related to curriculum intentions.
Homework can be used to
increase quantity of schooling.
These ideas underlie
much of the emphasis on time in the National Curriculum.
His argument supports the conclusions
of Kounin about importance of smooth running of classroom. He was concerned by
transition time between segments and queuing for teacher attention (also found
a problem with individualised instruction by ORACLE) He was not impressed by
effectiveness of grouping (cf. ORACLE).
The effects of
accountability
An effect of the
educational reforms has been that paperwork has greatly increased and this has
had the effect of increasing total workloads. In the earlier stages of the
National Curriculum, the planning of different subjects was done in isolation;
each subject committee asked for the maximum for its subject, leading to an
unmanageable total demand, especially in primary schools, where organising
children, dressing them and so on take considerable amounts of 'evaporated'
time. In the early 1990s, a diary survey showed that workload was increasing
year by year (a decade later (2005), teaching hours are continuing to increase
for teachers of young children). Initially, the main increase was for teachers
who were responsible for Key Stage testing, but later it affected all teachers.
The Dearing Report and
subsequent government action moved to restrict the area covered by the
curriculum and concentrate on the basics, partly due to research which showed
that teachers' workloads were increasing to an unsustainable level and that a
high proportion of this extra time was involved in preparation and
administration rather than in contact with children. However changes at primary
level have been in the direction of further reducing teacher autonomy by
setting up a centrally controlled system of literacy and numeracy
hours. Further control over teachers is being imposed by performance-related pay,
with the effect of requiring teachers to conform to imposed
criteria.
CAMPBELL,R.J.
& NEILL,S.R.St.J. (1994) "Curriculum Reform
at Key Stage 1: Teacher Commitment and Policy Failure".
PERFORMANCE-RELATED PAY
The 1999 Green Paper on performance-related
pay was an attempt to address the serious problem that the pay scales available
to classroom teachers were limited: as a result the only way skilled teachers
could move up to higher pay scales was to move into management and administrative
jobs where they had less involvement with the classroom. There was an obvious
paradox in a situation where an experienced and effective teacher had to give
up teaching to earn more, after reaching the top of the classroom pay scale
around 30. However the proposals ran into deep unease among teachers, because
of the lingering memory of the 19th-century system of payment by results (where
teachers' pay depended on the test results of their classes - raising all the
problems with testing described above).
The Green Paper proposed a
system by which teachers would have to provide evidence of effective classroom
performance to pass the threshold to allow them to a higher range of pay
scales. There would also be payments to all staff in a department which had scored
well in inspections; this proposal was much less popular than the corresponding
proposal for
Professor Denis Marsden of the London School of Economics conducted a ‘before
and after' study of the introduction of the performance-related pay policy; his
report can be found at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/industrial/teachers-study/threshold/dp-2.pdf
He points out that if the
policy is to be accepted, it has to be seen as fair, but this runs into the
problem that, as mentioned above, teachers are strongly opposed to the idea of
performance-related pay. Currently the proposal is that teachers can apply to
pass the threshold as many times as they want (like the driving test) but it
will be essential to ensure this applies in practice. Critical to the argument
is whether teachers are extrinsically motivated (i.e. by pay) or intrinsically
motivated (by their professional satisfaction in doing the job). The evidence
suggests that most teachers are highly committed and a punishment-oriented
scheme is likely to be counter-productive. Extrinsic motivation would imply
that if management paid more for what it wanted, it could get it; but even if
teachers have their own priorities and are intrinsically motivated, they may
pay attention to what management is prepared to pay for, in the third of their
work hours outside school (cf. Campbell & Neill, above). There is some
evidence to support the view that ambitious teachers see teaching skill and
in-service training as contributing to teaching effectiveness. Evidence also
suggests that across-the-board increases act to retain existing staff and do
not create opportunities for new recruits. There is also evidence that the new
scheme appeals to younger teachers, who are the group most likely to change to
a career outside teaching.
Wragg et al. surveyed the adoption of
performance management across a range of countries; in many cases schemes were
abandoned because of the expense (as mentioned in the previous paragraph,
schemes potentially involve paying teachers for skills which many would aim to
develop spontaneously on the grounds of their professional self-esteem). The
rapid imposition of performance management in the
Teachers varied in their
response to PRP. Most accepted the financial incentive, because they saw it as
their only chance to get a pay rise. Almost all of those who applied for the
Threshold got it, but they felt the bureaucracy was unnecessarily time-wasting.
Those few who
were not successful were extremely bitter, either blaming the hierarchy for not
giving them the support they needed or becoming profoundly demotivated
and dropping out of teaching. Some rejected the Threshold on principle, even
though they were aware of the potential financial benefits, felt capable of
passing the Threshold, and were encouraged by their managers to do so. Some of
these ‘caved in’ at later rounds of PRP, because of financial pressures, and
felt demotivated because they had betrayed their
principles to do so.
An important point (linking
back to the lectures on the Quality of Pupil Learning Experiences and ORACLE)
is that because of the rapidity of classroom processes, it is very difficult
for experienced teachers to reflect and change their classroom practice; it
involves ‘unlearning’ millions of classroom experiences. Thus where there
complaints about classroom performance, they usually involved older teachers,
who had settled into routines which were unsuited to dealing with the changes
resulting from the National Curriculum. Younger teachers had been trained by
methods which were more closely matched to current requirements, and therefore
found it easier to adapt their style to fit.
Wragg et al. followed up what had had
happened when teachers were dismissed for poor performance; they interviewed
the teachers themselves, headteachers and school managers, and local authority
and union representatives. They found that both head-teachers and other
managers, and teacher union representatives, put the interests of pupils above
those of teachers; union representatives would often try to persuade their
members to negotiate the best exit package, thus supporting the school
managers’ position rather than supporting their member all-out. Teachers
WRAGG,E.C., HAYNES,G.S..,
WRAGG,C.M. & CHAMBERLIN,R.P. (2004)
“Performance Pay for Teachers”
TEACHER RETENTION
Smithers & Robinson (2001) 'Leaving
Teaching' suggest younger teachers are more likely to leave the profession if
they can; they are particularly concerned that little more than half of
final-year teacher training students end up teaching in maintained schools.
About 12% of final-year B.Ed. or PGCE students leave
without qualifying (there are, of course, losses in the previous years of the B.Ed.) and about 30% of those who qualify do not get
teaching jobs. This means that though about as many students enter the final
year as vacancies occur when teachers leave teaching or new posts are created
(~30,000) the annual net shortfall is about 7,000. In addition, about 18% of
those who take jobs leave teaching within three years. The profession is not
renewing itself, as 60% of existing teachers are over 40, with nearly 40% in
the 40-9 age band (many in their 50s have taken or are about to take
retirement). The main problem is the numbers of teachers, especially younger teachers,
who are leaving - the 40-9 age band is in fact the least likely to leave. Older
teachers tend to take early retirement, younger ones leave to travel, to the
independent sector, or to other education-related jobs (the large number of
these jobs being created as a result of government initiatives is,
paradoxically, making the teacher supply situation worse). Many leave without
any clear plan as to what they will do next - they are simply keen to get out
of the profession at any cost. Most teachers give negative reasons for leaving,
rather than positive prospects for what they plan to do next. The reasons for
leaving were workload, especially among primary teachers, unacceptable pupil
behaviour, especially among secondary teachers, and the relentless deluge of
uncoordinated government initiatives (a major problem in this area is that the
people responsible change annually, and each 'new broom' feels it necessary to
alter what was being done before). Stress was also important, especially for
primary teachers, and other factors such as status, the management of the
particular school and difficulties with parents were also mentioned. When asked
what would tempt them back into teaching, a fifth of leavers said no incentive
would tempt them back; the others said the conditions (workload, pupils,
government innovation etc.) would need to improve radically - but (much higher)
pay was seen as more important, reflecting that teaching had become more like
working in industry, and should be paid accordingly. This is consistent with
the reasons which many leavers gave for why they had entered teaching in the
first place - that they wanted to work with children and to do something
worthwhile. Most now feel that the profession no longer offers them the
satisfactions which made them join it. Smithers &
Robinson suggest the government now needs to organise an independent review,
like the Houghton Report of the 1970s which was instrumental in recruiting the
large number of teachers who are now reaching the age of leaving the
profession.
Unacceptable pupil
behaviour was one of the factors mentioned above which drove many teachers to
leave the profession; the evidence is that low-level but persistent disruption
is a major stress for teachers. Continuous low-level harassment, in
a climate where senior staff, outside authorities and parents
were frequently unsupportive or hostile, sapped teachers' morale,
distracted them from teaching and in some cases was driving them to leave the
profession. The major influence on low-level 'frequent disruption' was the
effectiveness of support to classroom teachers; written-in comments indicated
senior staff often gave poor support because of their preoccupation with
bureaucracy and the need to maintain numbers on roll in the school; pressure
from local authorities to avoid exclusions was a contributory factor. More
serious incidents such as violence from pupils and threats from parents, were less frequent but highly disturbing to
teachers, who felt they were being blamed in a climate where parents were
unprepared to take responsibility for their children. In many cases these
problems were reported as being due to a minority of children who absorbed a
disproportionate amount of staff time and effort; policies of inclusion for
such children were widely criticised for creating a
climate where no effective sanctions were available to deal with such problems.
There were highly significant differences between phases,
with almost all behavioural problems significantly
more frequent in secondary schools.There was no
significant difference between phases in threat of violence from parents.
Two age-groups must cause particular concern - experienced
middle-management teachers, who, as is apparent from the written-in comments,
carry much of the burden in practice for dealing with difficult behaviour, and
younger teachers who are deciding to get out of the profession while they still
have the opportunity to develop a career in a more pleasant working
environment. This pattern is consistent with other surveys of teacher stress.
Problems were not confined to 'difficult' inner-city areas but extended to
'quiet' rural locations - but that in both types of area within-school factors,
especially the attitude of senior management, could be critical in the effectiveness
of school discipline policies. The individual characters and personalities of
senior staff were most commonly mentioned in written-in comments but many
respondents felt that the inability or unwillingness of senior staff to assist
was due to their placing priority on maintaining enrolment, avoiding exclusions
(and sometimes sanctions from local authorities related to these) or dealing
with bureaucratic and paperwork demands. This suggests that evidence for
accountability can interfere with the actual effective functioning of schools;
it may also be that the current demands for senior staff to show accountability
may discourage effective disciplinarians from taking on these posts. Some
respondents indicated that they had previously held senior positions and had
now moved to less demanding positions. To reduce 'frequent disruption' it may
be necessary to make more careful selection of appointments, where possible, at
local level, and, at policy level, to reduce the bureaucratic pressure on
senior staff which favours paper demonstrations of
performance at the cost of actual effectiveness in school management.
TEACHING
ASSISTANTS
Teaching assistants are paid at a lower level than teachers, and have
received a below graduate level training. However, as we have seen, many
classroom processes happen so rapidly that teachers react at a subconscious
level, and evidence is that parents, even in traditional societies, can respond
to children in a contingent way which teachers cannot do because of the
staff-child ratio. The evidence is that children receive a less contingent
response n the traditional classroom than they would in more informal
situations. In addition, the pressure of OFSTED and the National Curriculum on
teacher training institutions has caused traditional disciplines such as the
psychology and sociology of education to be omitted from teacher training, so
student teachers in some respects get less assistance with understanding
classroom processes than they did in the past. Thus younger teachers have less
professional classroom management skills than in the past, and the answer may
be to decrease the demand on them by decreasing the child/adult ratio.
Increasing the number of adults in contact with children and diversifying their
skills may
Currently (early 2005) the workload agreement reached between the
Government and all teacher unions, except the National Union of Teachers,
remains controversial. There have been threats to withdraw from the agreement
by unions representing both headteachers and the TAs themselves. The aim of the
workload agreement is to transfer responsibilities from classroom teachers to
(less expensive) teacher assistants, for two purposes – to give teachers
non-contact time for preparation etc. and to cover for when teachers are not
available due to other commitments or illness; this has, obviously caused
concern especially among supply teachers, who are liable to be replaced by
school-based TAs. Many headteachers feel that locally-based TAs are likely to
be more effective at covering classes when their regular teacher is away than
supply teachers who do not know the conditions in the particular school. The
chief concern among headteachers, especially in small primary schools, is that
the amounts of money available for restructuring do not allow the employment of
useful numbers of support staff; some primary heads are proposing to break the
law by allocating the money to reducing class sizes as they feel this in more
in the interests of their pupils. The main concern for Unison and its TA
members is the lack of a national pay structure and the low level of pay in
relation to the commitment and responsibility involved. The following sections
are based on surveys of opinions of members of the NUT in early and late 2002.
Teaching Assistants were first introduced in primary schools, and
primary teachers continue to receive more assistance from TAs than their
secondary colleagues, both in total time, and for most individual subjects,
with the exception of Modern Foreign Languages. TAs are
most used to assist with the National Literacy and National Numeracy
Strategies in primary schools, and with IT and science: in secondary schools
aspects of English and mathematics other than literacy and numeracy
are also relatively important.
In primary schools, TAs tend to be deployed to help whole year or
ability groups and the most serious problem teachers encounter is lack of time
to plan with their TAs. In secondary schools, TAs are deployed relatively more
to help individuals or small groups and teachers find variations in TAs’ skills
or abilities a relatively more serious problem, because of the higher academic
level at which secondary schools work.
In early 2002, TAs were most frequently deployed to serve a particular
function (e.g. working with subgroups in the class) across subjects, a pattern
characteristic of primary schools; in secondary schools specialist TAs (e.g.
for Modern Foreign Languages) worked across different situations (in the class
with the whole class or subgroups, or with children withdrawn from the class)
in specific subjects.
Teachers commented that TAs vary considerably in ability, and that,
given the inadequate pay which they receive, they could not be asked to take
responsibility without teacher supervision. Some teachers commented that they
could not cope, especially since the advent of increased inclusion, without the
help of their TAs. Overall, the tone of comments about
TAs was positive; adverse comments usually related to individual TAs rather
than TAs as a whole.
Whereas primary teachers received more assistance from TAs, they
received less administrative assistance, than the larger and more bureaucratic
secondary schools. Most teachers felt they need about 1-3 hours per week more
administrative assistance than they were currently getting, with secondary
teachers feeling they needed more than did their primary colleagues. Secondary
teachers also tended to be more dissatisfied with the level of support they
were getting, across a range of individual tasks. Dissatisfaction with the
current level of support was greatest for low-level administrative bureaucracy
(processing materials etc.) This was a particular cause of concern for teachers
in a previous survey, and the position did not appear to have improved since.
While most teachers have highly positive relationships with their TAs,
the discussion raises cautions about the extension of TA recruitment to make up
for shortfalls in teacher recruitment. The analogy made by the Government
between the education and health services ignores differences in the type of
decision-making and time-sensitivity of support in the two services which make
delegation from doctors to nurses an inadequate precedent for delegation from
teachers to TAs. The least popular of the policy proposals
was for TAs to cover for teacher absence – 87% were opposed. The most popular
proposal, supported by 52% of respondents, was for TAs to provide pastoral
support to pupils.
In a survey in late 2002/early 2003, the four core proposals – that
support staff should provide administrative support to teachers and learners,
that they should assist teaching and learning in classes when teachers are
present, that they should lead some teaching and learning in their own right
without teachers being present, and that they should cover for teacher absence
– received radically different responses. The first two were the most popular
of all the proposals included in the questionnaire, the last, covering for
teacher absence, the most unpopular. The proposal for
support staff to lead teaching was fourth most unpopular – only the proposals
for more managers without qualified teacher status from outside education and
for the appointment of teachers without qualified teacher status were less
popular. Teachers were outraged, given the rigorous regime of training and
inspection which they have endured over the last decade, by the suggestion that
unqualified people can do the job equally well.
A striking finding was the relation between the two proposals related to
teaching and learning – the popular proposal that support staff should assist
teaching and learning with the teacher present, and the much less popular
proposal that they should lead teaching and learning in their own right. Though
these proposals differ so much in popularity, their relative popularity among
groups of teachers is similar; both are relatively more accepted by the
teachers who already work with support staff in teaching roles in the classroom
– special school, primary and under-5s teachers. Though this suggests that
experience of working with support staff would lead to greater acceptance,
respondents voiced concerns about the variability in competence of support
staff, and their inadequate pay and opportunities for training. The proposals
made by the Government for more systematic training of support staff must be
implemented; more experienced staff voiced concerns about a return to the
situation before all staff responsible for teaching had to be trained. There is
little point in the current rigorous regimes for teacher training and
inspection unless the quality of training provided for support staff is equally
carefully monitored. Otherwise there is little prospect that the progressive
improvements in educational achievement, which the Government is aiming at,
will be achieved. Further weight is given this point by the hostility to these
proposals being greatest in grant maintained schools, academies and CTCs – the types of institution which were set up as
flagships of educational excellence. Here staff might be expected to be most
supportive of policy initiatives – and indeed they supported most other groups
of proposals. Their strong opposition to the proposals for support staff to be
involved in teaching and learning indicates educational concerns, not Luddite retrogressiveness, lie
behind teachers’ attitudes.
The most popular group of proposals, especially among staff at
sixth-form colleges and in secondary schools, were those for support staff to
undertake a variety of technical support roles (attendance clerks, ICT
technicians, health & safety/site managers, exam officers, timetabling
officers and invigilators). In these large institutions, which are teaching at
high academic levels with relatively mature students, there is a need for
support staff to take specialist roles, and sufficient work to justify their
employment.
Teachers were more concerned about roles involving responsibility for
children (behaviour managers, cover supervisors, covering for teacher absence,
learning mentors, and careers advisers). However sixth-form college
and secondary staff were again the most positive about these proposals, for the
same reasons as previously.
Specialist teaching ancillary staff roles (music and drama specialists,
sports coaches, and language assistants) were popular, though teachers of these
subjects voiced concerns about them. These proposals formed a group together
with that for high level teaching assistants.
Proposals for support staff to take senior managerial roles (human
relations/ personnel managers, business managers, facilities managers and lead
behaviour managers) evoked mixed views. They were also most popular in
sixth-form colleges and secondary schools, again reflecting the size and
complexity of these institutions, though primary heads saw a need for this type
of assistance as the role of head has become more diverse and demanding.
The most unpopular group of proposals was that proposing to introduce more outsiders into
teaching (appointing staff from further education, sixth form colleges and
independent schools without qualified teacher status, a fast track for proven
leaders from outside education, and appointing more managers from outside
education without qualified teacher status). They were especially unpopular
with teachers in mid-career – those who would be expecting to make the move to
senior positions and who would be supplanted by these incomers. There is a risk
that the morale of these established teachers will be damaged, and even that
they might be driven to leave education. Education can ill afford to lose this
generation of potential leaders, given the age profile of the profession, with
a large proportion of teachers due to reach retirement age in the next decade
or so. This group of proposals was also an exception to the general pattern for
a trend with age; for the other groups of proposals younger teachers were
usually more positive than their older colleagues, but the mid-career teachers
who were most concerned about this group were also in favour
of many of the proposals for using support staff to take administrative roles
which would support.
Supply and agency teachers were particularly concerned about almost all
the proposals, especially those which would permit support staff to take over
duties currently performed by these staff. Part-timers were also concerned. As
teachers often work on a part-time or supply basis during periods when family
or other commitments prevent them from taking full-time work, with a view to
resuming full-time work when circumstances permit, if support staff are used to
replace part-time or supply teachers, these teachers may lose contact with
teaching, and will be lost from the future pool of ‘returners’.
These views about the roles of teachers and assistants need to be
compared with other countries, which have a different attitude to the
instructional and pastoral duties of the teacher. In the