Teaching is to Emancipate

David Noble set up a great little experiment today using ipadio, an audio-over-IP application server, to host a virtual end of year education conference he dubbed TeachMeet Mobile. Using the mighty power of twitter, he drummed up some speakers for a one-hour reflective which is available to hear live here and after the event here.

My own contribution rides on the back of Drew Buddie’s review of how far the use of ICT in education has come in the last ten years and is meant to be a bit of a foil to any exuberance we might feel about being so far ahead of ourselves. My simple and short point is simply this: I am not convinced that the young minds we are preparing are best served by what I see as an endemic dumbing down of the curriculum. This isn’t a Scottish problem, it’s all over the place and has been brought about by an avalanche of change – in political thinking and correctness, in public funding of state provision, in weak social (read “non”) science research, in promotion of managers of expediency to positions where leadership are required, not least the head teachers of state schools, and the very curriculum itself, diluted to the point of homeopathic uselessness by feeble regression to an exponentially weakening mean level of ability.

The words of the new curriculum are laudable: I hear paraphrases in the modern idiom of the seven liberal arts and sciences and slogans such as “science at the heart of Curriculum for Excellence”, but until a fundamental return is made to decent standards of behaviour, literacy, parenting, leadership and public service provision, no progress will be had without those of us called mavericks being heard.

Love it or hate it, change to the Scottish curriculum is coming. One aspect of the change is the new pre-certificate level curriculum for pupils from Primary through to S3 – called “a Curriculum for Excellence”. It is defined, following some hard work by a small number of educators and some consultation, as a collection of outcomes and experiences. There’s a lot of information on the LTS Website and every teacher has been given their own personal copy of the outcomes – all of them – in a lovely green folder.

There are a number of issues with what is expected to happen as a result of this expensive distribution: there seems to be an expectation that a brand new curriculum will magically appear because we have all been given this resource. Extra days of CPD have been funded by the Government but the two this writer has had have vanished into the ordinary business of delivering the existing curriculum. The green folder in the picture has yet to be opened in the context of sitting down and developing the curriculum.

It, or rather the more convenient online version, has, however, been studied as it has evolved. The intentions of the new curriculum seem to be to provide a highly rich, unique and valuable learning experience, matched to the individual needs of each pupil. About time. Increasing time pressures on educators have been undermining the quality of what can be done in school and I am surprised I don’t hear more people repeating Churchill’s complaint that, “my education was interrupted only by my schooling”.

From the outcomes and the Introductory Statements, it is clear that teachers in Scotland are going to have to use every bit of the freedom we enjoy to use all of our skills, expertise and experience in the classroom. Not only that, but to provide these experiences in the flexible, challenging and engaging manner now demanded, we will need a level of subject knowledge significantly above the one we are teaching at. This is excellent: with all due respect to my colleagues, biologists can rarely teach resistance well, although they can often meet the outcomes. I know that as a physicist, my teaching of classification lacks the sparkle of the same outcome taught by a biology graduate who knows the importance of it in the later development of the subject.

I also know that in my classroom, the students benefit most when I am charged up myself about the topic we are discussing: especially where I am doing the learning too. This is most likely to occur in my case when I am considering some (off-topic) aspect of that which we are studying, such as the human story of triumph and disaster exemplified by John Logie Baird’s so-called invention of television (he didn’t) or the gut-wrenching injustice of the theft of the idea by RCA from Philo Farnsworth (he did) and his subsequent death from alcohol abuse, described in video by his sisters. When the students recall the outcome “describe picture build-up in a TV”, they do so by thinking of the 14-year old Farnsworth being struck with inspiration on his tractor, plowing the fields in Utah. This kind of learning and engagement is what I believe aCfE to be all about and can only come from the depth of knowledge and engagement in the subject that the graduate teacher of that subject has.

The new curriculum is strong on the development of “cross-curricular” links. In science, of course, this becomes awkward and difficult outside of one’s subject area because the cross-curricular links for biology (physical education, home economics, eco-schools, health and wellbeing, and so on) are substantially different to those for physics (technical studies, mathematics, geology, geography, music, and so on) and similarly for chemistry.

To meet the expectations that Curriculum for Excellence has to offer, the three discrete sciences must be taught by their respective specialists. If the difficulties of timetabling and staffing can be overcome, this will deepen and consolidate the knowledge and confidence of those lucky pupils exposed to this from the earliest stage, and the yield will be in their attainment at Higher and Advanced Higher, with the onward benefit to the prosperity of Scotland.

Science is dead. Long live the sciences!

Sorry to those whose comments I have inadvertently deleted from this site. It happened whilst dealing with spam.

Speaking of “whoops”, we are all shocked and suprised at the suspension of a nearby head teacher who has been charged with offences involving child pornography. Whatever the truth behind the charges, people will suffer as a result (if they have not already) and that is tragic. At the funeral of a friend yesterday where questions hung in the air related to the care and attention he received at the hands of other public sector workers, I wondered how much lower public service standards can fall before the public we serve notice. Education, health, police, justice, national, devolved and local government all provide a poor service for what seem to me to be common and self-perpetuating reasons: amongst these over-regulation, administration, corruption and plain stupidity in their implementation.

Come the revolution, brother…

Congratulations to Lindsay Roy, my old boss from Kirkcaldy High School and winner of last night’s parliamentary election in Glenrothes.

Without being partisan about it, I am glad in particular that the SNP got smacked hard for their contempt for the people of Glenrothes: their attitude to education being underlined by the constant presence of their (very) loudspeaker van, which in the past week has disrupted teaching in my classroom at Glenwood High School on numerous occasions.

We shall see how Lindsay tackles this latest significant challenge.

It’s funny how things change. Kirkcaldy High School’s rector, Lindsay Roy, has shattered staff morale at the Prime Minister’s Alma Mater by announcing that he is seeking nomination as the Labour Party’s candidate in the by-election for the Westminster seat forced by the death of John MacDougall.
I can’t pretend to know Mr. Roy’s mind, nor be in his confidence but I have been fortunate enough to have been the beneficiary of his support and advice both during my time at Kirkcaldy and since. What I know of him is his capacity for work, his organisation and dedication to the task. These are the qualities that have brought him the success he has had in starting the turn-around at Kirkcaldy High in the few months he has been there. Facing his staff this week must have been for him like strangling an unwanted puppy.

See also The Times, The Guardian and The Courier.