IT’S my fault. Don’t worry, my shoulders are broad. Most of my life, it seems things have been my fault. The Vietnam War was my fault, even though (like the rest of my constituency Labour party young socialists) I was dead against it. I was white and western, after all.
For much the same reason, responsibility for world poverty, famine, disease and over-population is delivered to my door. Slavery was my fault, I freely admit, and now I’ve got to pay for it, notwithstanding the fact that my ancestors were living as farm labourers in semi-serfdom.
So you can see that being told that the reason FE students fail to stay on their courses or pass their exams is my fault, is pretty small beer. And, as with those other things, the fault is not just mine - it is shared around among a lot of us.
The finger pointing in this instance comes from researchers John Maynard and Paul Martinez in their study for the Learning and Skills Development Agency, Pride or prejudice - college teachers’ views on course performance.
I haven’t read the whole report, only the overall findings. That’s the problem with being an FE teacher - you don’t get time for the whole of anything.
Anyway, the gist of Maynard and Martinez’s findings is that there are two types of teacher. For the sake of convenience, we will call them the thoroughbreds and the donkeys.
The thoroughbreds are the good guys, demonstrated by the fact that on the courses they teach, the students stick around and pass their exams - that’s high rates of retention and achievement to you and me. To quote M and M, the thoroughbreds all had “remarkably similar attitudes and strategies”.
Not surprisingly, they are strong on commitment and integrity, listen to what their students have to say, and support them in the key areas that are likely to promote learning. In other words, they do what one expects conscientious, student-centred teachers to do.
Interestingly, M and M show just how distant educational researchers can become from the subjects of their studies, when they comment on the “contradictory views” they found among the thoroughbreds: “Teachers of courses with the highest retention and achievement often claimed negative factors were affecting them when, statistically, their retention and achievement figures had remained unchanged over the period in question”.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that these teachers might be achieving good results in spite of such “negative factors” as increasing workloads, burgeoning bureaucracy and continuing demands from above. Might it just be that they are simply working harder to compensate for the 101 silly things that someone who doesn’t teach any longer thinks it important for them to do?
Thus, the students are happy. The managers are happy. The writers of educational studies are happy. But the teachers are not happy. Neither are their partners, families nor anyone else they can find to bore the pants off at social gatherings. That’s why they burn out, break down or retire early to Bournemouth to open boarding houses named “Dun Form-Fillin”.
Like the thoroughbreds, the donkeys are a pretty homogenous bunch as well. Their approaches are characterised by myopia, complacency and negativity. They tend to stereotype their students and refuse to take any responsibility for their poor performance.
Whether the donkeys really are complete asses, however, must be open to question. They are apparently bright enough to realise, according to M and M, that college quality systems are “processes without purpose or systems for the sake of having a system”.
All of which neatly brings us back to the issue of fault and blame. The unmistakable subtext of M and M’s study is that it is teachers alone who determine success or failure in the classroom - a refrain that is no doubt sweet music to a government that has forgotten its sociology and considers that Slough comprehensive should do as well as Eton College given that they are neighbouring schools.
The tone of the publication is more than a little irksome, too. I can’t help detecting a certain smugness in the way the conclusions are delivered; and for some curious reason the phrase “a scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties” comes to mind while reading it. If there really is such a clear divide between the damned and the saved, how does that account for those awkward people who have experienced both good and bad results in recent times?
Have my “attitudes and strategies” been yo-yoing about all over the place without my realising it? Or could it simply be that there are, after all, factors which determine student success other than the mindset of the individual teacher?
