In a recent radio programme, Ofsted’s former chief inspector, Chris Woodhead, was asked by the broadcaster Jeremy Paxman about the essence of the teacher’s job. His reply was that the teacher’s job was “to tell children information.”` Apparently, for him and others, teaching involoves imparting knowledge from the teacher’s head into the pupils’ minds. It is a simple one-way process.
Offering a different take on the matter, the author Mark Twain once remarked: “If teaching were as simple as telling, we would all be a lot smarter than we are.”
We have all been in lessons in which we thought we had spoken clearly, yet the children emerge none the wiser. For this very reason, our job is not to “tell” children anything - it is to encourage learning by active engagement. During the past decade, the growth of an accountability culture has made active learning much harder.
Politicians have been intent on showing that that public money is well spent. Schools have had to think less about what pupils have learnt and more about how best to prove that they have been teaching.
By this point, policy documents abound and pristine schemes of work choke the filing cabinets of most departments. Figures, targets and profiles proliferate as we generate data that can be number-crunched by computers.
League tables have encouraged us to force children through exam hoops rather than provide a stimulating learning environment. The two approaches may not be mutually exclusive, but neither are they wholly compatible.
Gathering data is important, and it is vital that we have coherent lesson plans. But there must be time to reflect and time to revise schemes of work in line with the outcomes of our practice. Yet such reflection has been suffocated in the relentless drive to prove that we have covered the curriculum and met the targets. As a result, I believe we have lost sight of the very thing that drew us into the teaching profession in the first place.
Successive governments have bought into Mr Woodhead’s notion of teaching: tell teachers what to do and standards will rise. But if it were as simple as “delivering” the lesson and going home, it might be much less tiring than it is. And it would certainly be a much duller experience. Surely the unexpected is what makes teaching so interesting, those times when ideas take off in directions we hadn’t bargained for.
The ability to adapt and be flexible when we teach, to respond to our pupils’ needs from moment to moment - this is surely the single most important attribute of the teacher. Yet where is this notion reflected in the lever-arch files that drop with depressing regularity on to teachers’ desks?
The biggest fear of all is that we might begin to enjoy being told what to do, and become dependant on government circulars that “tell” us how to do the job. Not only is our autonomy rapidly waning, but the dynamism that once led us all to learn from our mistakes, to adapt and improve our practice, is also in serious jeopardy.
Bureaucracy isn’t just dull - in today’s climate, it is leading us further into our malaise, into believing that “thinking” is just too much effort.
This is indeed a dangerous idea.
Bethan Marshall lectures in English at King’s College, London
