At university I studied History as part of my Bachelor of Education course and, as you could imagine, one of the units was about the history of education in the UK. One of the criticisms of the education system at the time was that teacher’s pay was linked to student outcomes and that when they knew the school inspector was soon to visit, drilled their class to be able to ‘perform’ well on inspection day. Some teachers found themselves at the mercy of students they had been dismissive of or cruel to and who realised that they could get their own back on inspection day.
Education reforms did their best to end that system but any education system that is results driven is bound to suffer the same malaise. We’ve seen it in the UK system where any head’s job description looks for strong data analysis capability for Heads of Teaching and Learning have got to endlessly pore over assessment results to identify the need for intervention and even children who have ‘passed’ an assessment are targeted for more challenge. In doing so, we treat students almost like livestock fattened for market and ignore the pleasure gained from learning and implementing it in our lives.
In recruitment I’ve seen good teachers reduced to automatons who are proud of their 8s and 9s or As and A*s and equally proud of the constrictive way they’ve got there; revision, exam practice and model answers. Can we please step back and ask ourselves first, is this ‘teaching’ and secondly, are young people ‘learning’?
Many years ago I had a conversation with one such teacher who promised me they could get all their class to pass, many with high grades but the plan was to constantly practise past papers. In the first year, their plan worked, in the second year the examining board changed the question style to overcome this and the students, exiting the examination hall were distraught that the questions they had so eagerly practised had not come up. needless to say the exam results were poorer that year. Reflecting on this together I posed the shocking suggestion that maybe the students should just be taught the curriculum, along with a sprinkling of exam technique and a dash of context, encouraging them to develop an internal bank of information and skills that was comprehensive enough to be tuned to providing a high-quality answer to any examination question they might face. The initial response was ‘What if they don’t learn the right things?’ but that’s why we have a curriculum with learning outcomes, rarely is a student going to be asked a question on a topic that’s not in the syllabus.
Eventually, with my promise that if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t blame the teacher, they relented and taught with more freedom, responding to the needs and demands of the students, enjoying their teaching more whilst students got more enjoyment from their learning. They had a broader knowledge and understanding of the topics and could expound on them with ease, clarity and depth and, to our relief, achieved the high grades we had hoped for them.
As teachers, we need to have faith in our professionalism, our knowledge and skills and our ability to educate our charges. It works! Zakharov and Carnoy, in the July 2021 edition of the International Journal of Educational Development, noted that whilst teaching to the test can work for some students in some subjects where they fared no worse that if they had not been drilled, teaching which covered outcomes yet in an engaging and comprehensive way with room left for contextual knowledge had a far greater short term and long term impact on student performance in exams and in their lives.
So, teachers, have faith in yourselves and your abilities, eschew data driven teaching and learning and give your students what they really want and what they’ll use to great success.
