Education

Indicators of an Effective Teacher?

Digging through one of my boxes of stuff, I found this copy of Elizabeth Perrott’s 1982 Effective Teaching, a book I’d bought and intended to read but had put away for the future. It’s a weirdly prescient book: outling many of the approaches to teaching that are currently being promoted in schools. According to the book, Perrott was the director of the International Microteaching Unit at the University of Lancaster. I guess the term “microteaching” captures the general pedagogical approach to classroom practice in schools at the moment.  I’m particularly taken by the question of what are the indicators of…

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Talk for Learning

Notes from A Dialogic Teaching Companion by Robin Alexander (2020). Chapter 2 – Talk for Learning In this chapter, Alexander explores the relationship between talk and the development of a child. He examines the shift in the 1970s between the child as “lone scientist” to “apprentice”. The persistence of recitation and the typical oral classroom interactions are explored. Alexander goes on to explain the research-supported positive benefits of classroom talk. Much of the chapter is given to the way in which talk has been stigmatised by politicians and has been now largely removed from the school curriculum, despite the evidence…

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Prologue to A Dialogic Teaching Companion

Notes from A Dialogic Teaching Companion by Robin Alexander (2020) Chapter 1 – Prologue In the Prologue, Robin Alexander gives a case for teaching talk as an essential tool in teaching and learning. He describes the positive value of dialogic teaching and asserts that there is a strong evidence base for using dialogic approaches. He presents his involvement with oracy since the 1980s. Alexander goes on to consider the broader civic value of dialogic teaching in what he terms a “collision of discourses”. Alexander broadly identifies the benefits of dialogic teaching for students and teachers. ” Dialogic teaching is both…

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“build a ladder of opportunity so that the able can get ahead”

Provocative New Statesman article by Adrian Wooldridge which insists that the key to the “reinvention” of the Labour Party is by going back to basics – appealing to the “new working class that is growing alongside the old one” – and reinstating a belief in meritocracy, “the belief that individuals should be treated according to their own merits rather than their family connections or membership of various pre-determined groups, and that the state’s job is to build a ladder of opportunity so that the able can get ahead regardless of where they are born”. Wooldridge almost exclusively focuses on education…

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To Coalition and Beyond: Back to the Future?

Notes from English and Its Teachers by Simon Gibbons (2017) In Chapter 6, Simon Gibbons brings the book up to date (to 2017 which – after Covid 19 and the lockdowns – seems an age ago). He presets a largely bleak and somewhat dispiriting picture of current English teaching in schools which Gibbons feels has suffered under 20+ years of direct government intervention. He points out some small attempts at presenting alternative approaches to teaching English – Looking for the Heart of English, John Richmond’s proposals and a (new) National Writing Project – but the his summation of the state of…

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Writing Wrongs, TES

Great article in this week’s TES about the teaching of writing. Liz Chamberlain (Open University) and Rob Drane (English subject lead at the University of Cambridge) argue that writing is being taught in primary schools causes “a disconnect between how we view writing in the real world, and how writing is taught in schools. And, in some classrooms, this is having a detrimental effect”. Chamberlain and Drake assert that the complexity of writing is too frequently reduced to separate components/threads – transcription, composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation – when it is actually a “complex and personal process”. They refer to…

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New Labour, New Policies

Notes from English and Its Teachers by Simon Gibbons (2017) In Chapter 5, Gibbons focuses on New Labour’s impact on English. The Labour government sought to tackle the underachievement of poorer children. This was when I started teaching and remember all too well the exhausting period of the National Strategies. Gibbons examines how schools were directed to look at boys’ performance, the radical impact of the National Literacy Strategy on primary schools and its KS3 counterpart (objectives-led lessons with a focus on non-fiction genres). The impression given is that the £4 billion Strategy had limited impact. Finally, Gibbons presents the…

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Problems in English

Notes from Making Meaning in English by David Didau (2021) Chapter 2: Problems in English This chapter defines English as a “folk discipline” where its teachers have limited understanding of effective approaches. Didau dismisses “skills-based” teaching and, instead, proposes a “knowledge-based” approach. He also shows concern that students practise the wrong things. Much of the later part of the chapter involves examples of approaches to teaching aspects of English. Didau focuses on the issue that “we don’t have a codified body of knowledge of how to achieve these aims” of how English should be taught. He suggests that “English has…

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What is English for?

Notes from Making Meaning in English by David Didau (2021) Chapter 1: What is English for? This chapter presents the current state of English, drawing on its history as a school subject to explain how and why English seems “lost” as a school subject with teachers ignorant of its past and the triumph of pragmatism (functional) English over any progressive or idealistic aspirations for the subject. It’s effective in showing how confusing central government has been on teaching. (It’s interesting that Simon Gibbons or Margaret Mathieson aren’t in Didau’s bibliography as they present the history of English teaching from different…

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Introduction to Making Meaning in English

Notes from Making Meaning in English by David Didau (2021) Introduction David Didau offers a third way that appears to reconcile the traditional and progressive strains within English teaching. He notes how English does not have an agreed body of knowledge or purpose. Didau believes that changes to the academic study of English have impacted badly on it as as school discipline as has a loss of agency (and conviction) by its teachers. His proposition is that English should be reimagined and its focus on teaching children how to determine significance. Didau begins be pointing out that “The anxiety that…

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