The classroom - where teachers and pupils get together

Each child has an idiosyncratic learning style, and the teacher has to handle each style. Each teacher uses an enormous range of teaching strategies some of which come into play during the course of the day, ranging from the didactic (bossy chalk-talk) to the maieutic (child-initiated). A myriad of group-learning techniques also form part of this long chain, which well-trained teachers know how and when to use.

Teacher-pupil interaction (aka teaching), I predict, will occupy a major portion of future teacher-preparation courses, as it should now. Let me refer you to Australian M.J. Dunkin whose study of classroom practices is esteemed world-wide. In Researching Teaching he draws attention to the distribution of school time and its relationship to pupil control: their agitation on wet and windy days; their concentration mode at the end of the week, or year; why schools teach maths in the morning, and leave art and physical education to the late afternoon; the millions of little things that matter in the intense social-teaching-learning relationship.

Dunkin says, “Few attempts have been made to document these ‘truths’. These are all examples of the context of the classroom upon the processes (e.g. smiling, listening, problem-solving, distracting, answering, asking, demonstrating, commending, cajoling, questioning, supporting, expounding, correcting, distributing, frowning) that occur within it. These are context-process relationships that could be examined. Such relationships reveal influences upon classroom events that environmental factors, physical and temporal, have.”

If we believe in revolutionising schooling, we could start conversations about a school structure that starts from these sorts of observations, and not from the presumptions of those who have only experienced crash-bang-wallop techniques in their own youth. Note that the controllers of our present model, still believe in Edwardian techniques that David Copperfield and Tom Sawyer endured: chalk-talk techniques, then test, test, test and punish malingerers. Australia recently introduced the latest version of this kind of belief; and called it NAPLAN.

Q. Are you saying that you would not have external testing of any kind?

A. None! Certainly no blanket (state nor nation-wide) testing as is conducted now Such use of standardised tests is both useless and damaging, as is being demonstrated in the US and UK.

At the same time, ACER has a fine reputation for test construction and its tests could be purchased by schools (ACER is a business, doing very well at present) to get a sense of culturally-comparable and locally-desirable standards in those part of the curriculum that are testable. They could be woven into a school’s evaluation program and used to good effect, but they would be only a minor part of a shared evaluation design. It’s so important for the child be in control of the sharing of its progress with its parents and teachers. The tests as tests only have mild value.

The NAPLAN tests, presently in vogue, are dangerous because they, unfairly, ignore the social and temporal conditions within each school. They can be accurately described as unnecessary, immoral, costly, unreliable and destructive of curriculum spirit and school time. It is astounding that anyone, even with a limited experience in schooling, would support their use. The Federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, claims that parents love the idea because so many of us rushed to check the curious and unreliable My School website. It didn’t do anything for me at all and her lackadaisical “evidence” discouraged me. If I wanted to check out my child’s progress, I’d ask her teacher and hang around the school a bit more than I do now. I’m sure my child would respond positively, to my interest.

Ms Gillard is quite paranoiac about blanket testing to the degree that she and her cohort ignore the urgent, necessary and easily-undertaken changes that need to be made to schooling for all the Australian school children whose present confused arrangements don’t seem to worry anyone in authority. They are too obsessed with testing and ignore the obvious:

• All Australian school children should start schooling at the same age. How about they all be allowed to start school in the year that they turn seven years of age?
• The number of year levels that constitute primary schooling should be set in cement. Seven years is the undoubted best. Stop mucking around with terms like kindergarten (NSW, ACT); preparatory (Vic, Tas, Qld); transition (NT); pre-primary (W.A); and reception (SA) for the first year at school. Call it Year 1 and get on with it for these first seven years of compulsory schooling.

Q. If the tests are so damaging, how come the principals of schools haven’t told us so?

A. Australian principals of all kinds are wonderful people, so easy to get along with, and so easy to control. They are not great students of important current issues. They are busy at school. They are obliging and courteous towards their superiors and if a super-ordinate suggests that they should not comment publically about contemporary issues, they take that as an instruction. I’d be surprised if more than 20 per cent have read The Cambridge Review or Death and Life of the Great US School System. One would hope that every secondary school principal has read the Australian publication, C. Bonnor’s The Stupid Country. I have asked a few influential principals why they haven’t explained the “whys and wherefores” of testing per se clearly to parents and offered a personal opinion. On each occasion I have been told that they are not allowed. Please don’t laugh. It’s serious.