Let’s take the gimmicks out of learning
From Angry Birds to purple marking pens, primary school teacher Kevin Mclaughlin lists the biggest obstacles to getting results for his pupils
During the 20 years in which I have been teaching I have seen many initiatives come and go in the primary education system. Some have been good (evidence-based research), some have been not so good (the current fixation on marking), and some have been, quite frankly, dangerous (learning styles).
These initiatives have usually been introduced in good faith and schools have felt obliged to put them into practice. Unfortunately, much of it is just fluff, and it has got in the way of what truly matters – what we want our children to learn.
I used my session at the Festival of Education to demonstrate what schools could be concentrating on that would help improve learning outcomes for their students. There are four areas that I’d like to change.
MARKING AND FEEDBACK
Over the past five years, teachers have become slaves to various coloured pens and a school marking policy that dictates their use. Teachers now spend a disproportionate amount of time marking work instead of planning and teaching better lessons. Respected educationalist Dylan Wiliam says students should spend longer responding to your marks than you spend writing them, but this is not the case. A typical primary school teacher will spend up to two hours marking every school night, with a few additional hours thrown in during the weekend to catch up.
The students on the other hand spend less than a minute writing a reflective comment, using purple pen, that does nothing to improve learning but is a surefire winner to demonstrate evidence of the school marking policy. How do we improve this? It’s quite simple really. Bin the school marking policy and create a feedback policy built on research and evidence. Instead of teachers being slaves to marking, they can concentrate on the important stuff like teaching and use written marking only when it will make a genuine impact to improve a child’s learning.
An excellent approach is being used at the celebrated Michaela Community School in London where books are read through and notes are made concentrating on spellings students are getting wrong, things at which they’re all doing well, and the main issues they need to improve. These are covered at the start of the next lesson. This approach means students spend more time reflecting on feedback than a teacher does creating written comments.
PERFORMANCE-RELATED PAY
“Performance-related pay is a joke. It doesn’t work in schools and it has not improved the education of one single child. It is a demeaning and punitive system used by pseudo leaders to control their staff,” says a good friend and ex-head teacher – and she’s right. It was a business initiative hammered through the front doors of schools up and down the land. Suddenly teachers had to achieve performance-related targets based on figures dreamt up by management. Every school knows which of its teachers needs to improve. Concentrate on those and leave the rest of your staff to teach.
LEARNING CURVES
“One of the perpetual cycles in education is harnessing whatever is popular in youth culture at the time to ‘engage’ students,” says Carl Hendrick, head of research at Wellington College. Many teachers now have a similar point of view, and pedagogy guru Jennifer Gonzalez wrote a fantastic post about spotting the gimmickladen lesson. Children were learning about Ancient Greece over five days, including making a Grecian urn during three of them. At the end of the unit she asked what the class had learned. They knew very little about Ancient Greece but knew how to make a Grecian urn. My own Grecian urn was when I once used Angry Birds as a catalyst for a work unit on literacy. The learning outcomes were not good.
So how do we get rid of the gimmicks and fluff ? Ms Gonzales says: “If students spend more time on work that will not move them forward in the skill you think you are teaching, then it may be a Grecian urn. And it may need to go.”
WORKLOAD
Many teachers leaving the profession do so because of the workload. Both the DFE and Ofsted recognise there is a problem but schools seem reluctant to do much about it. Teachers are spending an inordinate amount of time marking, planning and creating and inputting data. I believe schools need to do something now rather than waiting to see what happens.
Schools can begin to tackle this issue very simply by ridding themselves of their marking policy and focusing on effective feedback, stop making teachers jump through performance-related hoops, end the slavery to data management and create systems of assessment that work for the school. Finally, they should create a system of genuine improvement in schools where teaching skills are developed and learning becomes the focus.
Kevin Mclaughlin is a primary school teacher, artist and musician. He is also a Google Certified Innovator, Apple Distinguished Educator and was recognised as the Learning Technologist of the Year (2010) by the Association of Learning Technology.
Teachers have become slaves to coloured pens