Waiting for the Go! sign
I was led to Prof Paterson’s article (Potholes in the road to excellence; TESS 11 May 2007) from Jim McDougall’s blog but I hadn’t read it until now… I’ve been too occupied completing the inevitable pile of paperwork that accumulated at this end of the final term while I was engaged with active, happy, enquiring 9 and 10-year olds who needed to have me available to them, not immersed in testing them or record-keeping. So here’s a practitioner’s view.
In his acid criticism of ACE, Prof Paterson asserts that “Most worthwhile human activity is quite unenjoyable for most of the time…” What a miserable existence Professor Paterson must lead! All of my pupils and I, would say we worked hard this year, but we would also say we mostly enjoyed the process, and I think that’s because we were motivated by the challenges we set ourselves. I resent the dismissive sneer which implies that a link between learning and good fun somehow devalues it. Is fulfillment only “worthwhile” if we have suffered to achieve it? If we’ve enjoyed it, is it not worthwhile? One small example:by making learning seem to be fun, several 10-year old boys were transformed from non- or reluctant readers to enthusiastic ones. Not worthwhile obviously to a policy maker, but immensely satisfying to me, their parents, and most of all, of course, to them.
Shouldn’t we be teaching children that there are ways of making a rough road more tolerable? Like: find someone to tackle it with you, or who has done something like it before; prepare well; find out first where it is you want to go, and also consider alternatives that occur to you as you go; aim high and set yourself smaller targets along the way, and congratulate yourself when you achieve them; if you hit a barrier, don’t give up, know where to get help and seek ways around it; be able to look back and assess honestly where you came from, how far you got and how you could get here more effectively the next time? Isn’t this the sort of thing that we teachers, as relatively successful learners, have all learned and try to pass on?
Don Ledingham, on his blog, talks about a kind of “groupthink” and expresses the hope that “we could engage in a rational dialogue about the development without anyone who puts their head above the parapet being castigated as a reactionary or traditionalist who is afraid of progress.” I agree with some of Prof Paterson’s reservations in the context of the AifL movement. In my opinon, it is still in thrall to certain self-proclaimed “experts”. However, slavishly embracing their edicts is just as unwise as to admit that you aren’t.
I am glad though to see ACE allowing “the timetable” to disappear from my plans, though we all knew it was a fiction to start with. Of course there needs to be structure and balance, but, in Primary at any rate, a timetable gets in the way of this, rather than enabling it. I welcome the potential of ACE to bring more honesty to planning, including Personal Learning Planning. Further, I hope this is the kind of autonomy HMIe will encourage, one which acknowledges and even seeks links and overlap between disciplines. Professor Paterson considers this process actually damaging to education, however it causes me endless and very observable delight when the children make these connections of their own accord.
And what are Prof Paterson’s desired “independent criteria of accomplishment” really? In the Primary arena, would he mean things like National Assessments? Hahaha. Certainly plenty of opportunity there for children to learn to cope with failure, as he so much desires. I want to be given ways to count what is valuable, not shown that my employers value only what is countable. I hope that ACE will remove the possibility of any teacher ever again being presented (as I was last year, through the “work” of a so-called “Quality Improvement Officer”) with an Excel spreadsheet showing how his/her class’s National Assessment statistics compare with others in his/her school and Authority, without that QIO ever having stepped inside my classroom, or having talked to me or any of the children in my classes. As far as Excel and statistics go, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Professor Paterson considers that ACE is “A curricular reform that threatens to destroy an inheritance by ignoring it, venerates autonomy and spontaneity above all else…”
Or…is it in fact just ever so slightly threatening to those who have for too long dictated, from well beyond the playground gates, what practice should look like, ignoring the professional judgement of its best practitioners with its “we know best” attitude? Isn’t that the inheritance that has been ignored – experienced, thoughtful, reflective teachers who are constantly reviewing their practice in the light of interactions between themselves, their professional development and individual children? The sort of teachers, some of whom are now recognised by the tag “Chartered”. We welcome the autonomy and yes, respect, that ACE promises. And as for spontaneity…isn’t it time that a bit of independent thought was once again encouraged in our classrooms. After all, isn’t it the fostering and valuing of Scots’ creativity that has produced the most notable, some would even say worthwhile, educational, intellectual and cultural advances?
Dorothy
I found your comments on ACE very perceptive, and enjoyed your critique of Prof Paterson’s article in the TESS. You draw attention to the tension (gulf?) between classroom practioners and academics, which seems to have existed for a long time. To be fair to Prof. Paterson , I believe he has often stood up in defence of teachers and was hugely critical of HMI and SQA over the Higher Still debacle of 2000, for example.
I think one of the challenges for ACE that perhaps was implicit in his essay, will be how we help our pupils negotiate the transition from the kind of interdsciplimary, cross cutting approach of Primary and early secondary you are describing to the formal, subject-based-and SQA assessed- upper secondary curriculum. The Highers will remain the benchmark, amd entry point for University for senior school pupils, no matter what happens lower down in the school. This will pose considerable demands on school timetables, to ensure that most appropriate pathways from, say P6 to S6 are established.
Thanks for your kind comments.
I wasn’t attacking Prof Paterson or his reputation, only what he said in that article.
Doesn’t a thoroughly cross-cutting approach enable learners to appreciate the relevance or usefulness or value of subject disciplines, and become aware of their personal strengths and vocations? Once they know why they need to learn something, aren’t they more likely to learn it? Works for me.
The demands at the moment are all from the Upper Secondary eg give us pupils who can understand simultaneous equations, and who are ready to write copious notes about the Industrial Revolution and by the way, why haven’t you taught them to behave?
In an ideal world, I’d make my own demands of Secondary – stop expecting me to hone my pupils so they are ready for your methods. How about, instead, you begin to take account of the enthusiasm, curiosity and eagerness to learn which I send you, Higher benchmarks notwithstanding?
[...] Dorothy Coe, , has picked up on the comment I made on “ACE” in which I referred to an article by Professor Lindsay Paterson in TESS, which criticises some aspects of “A Curriculum for Excellence” Her comment is worth reading and it has prompted me to look further at the kind of curriculum design (architecture)we want to develop in our schools. In my reply to Dorothy I made the point about how schools should manage the transition from the kind of general/integrated curriculum of Primary and lower secondary to the subject specific demands of an SQA led examination system of which the Highers are, largely, the end product. The SQA has just completed a seried of stakeholder meetings to flesh out its idaes for an examination system for S3 and S4 while various schools have explored new models of timetabling, some with apparently greater success than others, acording to the HMIe. [...]