Pupils are human - any catch-up plan must respect that

Algorithms certainly seem to make life easier – but they’ll never know your pupils better than you do, writes Jon Severs
12th March 2021, 12:05am
Covid Catch-up In Schools: The Best Place To Start Is Teachers Getting To Know Their Pupils Again, Says Jon Severs

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Pupils are human - any catch-up plan must respect that

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/pupils-are-human-any-catch-plan-must-respect

Algorithms are keeping me up at night. Yes, they smooth my path with autofill and take the stress out of search, but the coders are running short of things to optimise and so efficiencies are harder won. Increasingly, they are only finding one bug left in the system: us.

And so they are tackling that, too. App by app, they are influencing our behaviour to make us a more efficient line of code: scything off our quirks, smoothing out our processes, narrowing our choices. Up until recently, we hadn’t noticed. But, as the writer Clive Thompson has explained, we are becoming wiser to the fact that all this extra time we’ve been handed does not come for free.

“We don’t quite know what to do about it,” Thompson writes in his book Coders: the making of a new tribe and the remaking of the world. “We still like the convenience, the way software constantly claims we can do more with less. But the doubts are prickling at our skin.”

This prickling is something I have felt listening to policy talk recently. The government has promised us “catch-up” - a remediation of time. Children have missed out on their education entitlement, it is believed, and we should ensure they get it back.

The complexity of Covid ‘catch-up’

The trouble is, you can’t just start where you left off. For every lesson in which you revisit a missed topic, you have to add the lesson you would normally have been doing to the end of the catch-up list. You’re on Escher’s stairs - running up but finding yourself never reaching the top.

Now, you could add time; the government has floated the idea of longer days and shorter holidays repeatedly. But realistically, the logistics are too complex to make that a reality for the majority (though I expect to see it for a minority), and it screams of a distraction tactic.

Instead, the explicit signs of a time-saving algorithm are emerging. In his recent speech to the Foundation for Education Development (FED), education secretary Gavin Williamson spoke of the need to create a more efficient dispersion of expertise through MATs and its “system of hubs”, to have “traditional teacher-led lessons with children seated facing the expert at the front”, and of the need for “an environment which makes it easy to behave and hard not to”.

Yes, they’re the same things the government has been advocating for some time, but repackaged as the solution to the current situation. Now, the rhetoric is: unless schools do these things, they will fail in what Boris Johnson has called our “biggest national challenge”. Take the algorithm, save the kids. Simple.

Fortunately, there are those prickles on the skin. In the tech world, we now know that extra time comes at the cost of autonomy. Worse, the results are not as perfect as promised. We see this when we spend 45 minutes trying to find something to watch on Netflix; when we see the same ad popping up every day; and when Spotify suggests we listen to Pitbull (just me?).

It is the same in education: we know the deal being offered will require many teachers to change in unnatural ways. And we know the payoff will not be as advertised: plenty of teachers and pupils will thrive working to Williamson’s list, but plenty won’t. Moreover, the “others” doing their “other things” at the top of their game will be getting the same results in the same time as those dutifully following Williamson’s code to the letter.

You can’t game human behaviour. We’re too complex, erratic and nuanced. To really understand us, you need to get beyond our data, ignore the algorithm and really get to know us. Indeed, if we really want to help pupils “catch up”, really getting to know them again is probably the best place to start.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 12 March 2021 issue under the headline “In a world shaped by algorithms, we must hang on to our humanity”

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