Educational fads of the moment

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Ex-teacher here and the changes to assessment and streaming at DD's school 'to ensure the school is following the latest research' have brought back memories of the numerous new initiatives I had to adapt to using over the years.

AIBU to ask you to tell me about your favourite and least favourite teaching fads? Which ones were a waste of time and which have proved their worth.

I thought phonics was one of the few evidence based teaching methods?

Habits of Mind, Blooms Taxonomy, the fucking Plenary! Does anyone remember the three-part plenary?

One bugbear I have now is cursive writing. So many children in Yr 2 still unable to write anything meaningful as they cannot get to grips with it and are using all their brain power in the process of joining up the letters. Much better to print, you can join up later. I was taught that way and can't recall having any problems starting to join age 8. DS (9) also taught to print first, he is LH and hated putting pencil to paper, however printing helped to begin with and now he has beautiful joined handwriting (began joining in Yr2).

On the fence with phonics, I taught my son this way and it worked very well, school did whole word recognition through bloody Kipper, Biff and Chip so he got a mixture of both.

Fed up of Rights Respecting, grammar obsession in primary and don't get me started on mastery

I did like The Big Write though with its candles, music, special pencils and a biscuit It was very hygge. And the kids did produce much better writing (although hellish to mark).

I think this thread alone shows how difficult it must be to form educational policy, and to be left with something that pleases every stakeholder.

Some people hate phonics, group work, encouraging girls into stem subjects, cursive writing, spelling tests, Singapore maths, rote learning of times tables, accelerated learning, posters for homework, worksheets for homework and so on - and others swear by them.

GIRFEC. The concept is basically impossible to achieve.

I've recently left the profession because there is just so much bollocks and not enough teaching!
The final straw for me was when the Executive Head (yes you did read that correctly) told me to smile when I was disciplining one of the children in my class!🙄
Interestingly her child was one of the most obnoxious and horrendously behaved children I've ever met.

Ah yes, phonics and spelling. First learn to write words out how you say them. Then spend the next several years trying to correct all that as you find out the many illogical ways in which English words are spelt.

The worst trend at the moment is the ridiculous amounts of grammar they have to learn. Don't get me wrong, when I was at school we didn't do enough grammar, which didn't exactly help when learning other languages. But now it has gone far too far the other way.

I’m adaptable and very creative but I left teaching when the changes stopped being fun and became a ball ache. I realised I felt like a teaching dinosaur at 33 after 12 years of loving it. I became a teacher of a different sort - that doesn’t involve dancing round the latest theories - and now I just do what I always enjoyed - teaching without the bumpf.

It’s not a but something that I find irritating and I probably am BU. My ds is in year 2 and part of the class homework is tracing over numbers to learn to write them the right way round. He learnt this in reception and has had no problems since.

Children learn at different paces and whilst I am all for this being taught in class I can’t help but wonder why it has become homework. Surely it would be more beneficial to set different homework for those who know the correct way to help them in other areas they do struggle with?

As long as it doesn't contain Biff, Chip and Kipper...

bigbluebus I googled earlier for books in ITA. It looks like they're written in very old english rather than 1960's english!

*fad

PLTS
Kagan
VAK
Three part lesson

I thought phonics was one of the few evidence based teaching methods?

I think pollymere may be referring to the ITA reading system, which used a special alphabet and completely phonic spellings of words... but kids generally struggled to transfer from it to normal spelling, so it was discarded:

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1523708.stm

Learning Journey.....bleugh

I was stunned one day when I was listening to a 4/5 year old read and she pointed to a word and remarked "that's a split digraph". I'm ashamed to admit I had to google it to see if she was right. WTF is wrong with a 'magic e' - sounds so much better and served me well! It made me wonder what the hell they are teaching them at school now and grateful that my own DS is now 20 and I no longer have to keep up with all this stuff.

Lollipop sticks!!!

I heard once about a sneaky kid who removed the lolly stick with their name on from the teacher's pot so they never got picked. Genius.

Can't remember the name but the usual days training crap with lots of videos of american psychologists pointing out the obvious. Then the outcome was at the start kids know nothing, then you teach them and they know a bit more, then a bit more and so on. There were some cut out shapes to play with.

My hubby also a teacher had some crap about having a monkey and a computer in your brain and sometimes they dont work together...a good days training.

The worst training days are the cheapskate ones where you're put on a table with a bunch of random colleagues and some post-it notes and you're supposed to brainstorm 'how to improve the literacy skills of white working class boys' while the table next to you has 'How to increase resilience in Y7' then you have a carousel where you look at each other's solutions.

I'd rather actually be told by an expert what the research shows works in these scenarios, thanks.

Oh yes, those carousel INSET activities are a complete waste of time. I'd much rather have time in my own classroom. It just goes to show that the organisers couldn't be bothered to plan anything,

I will add Learning Objectives/Intentions (I can't remember which one we are allowed to use at the moment)
Success bloody Criteria

It all makes me wonder how on earth we learned anything at school in the 70s without all this shite

As a language teacher, I was delighted to hear they were going to teach grammar at primary. But the way it's being done is dreadful! I wanted kids to arrive at secondary knowing the parts of speech and understanding that there is more than 1 past tense. I neither know nor care what a fronted adverbial is; I don't care if they haven't heard of the subjunctive!

It really annoys me when fads come back a second time as well and you're sat there thinking, "Well this didn't work last time, I wonder if they've changed anything," which they haven't.

My aunt taught ITA - apparently it was fine if you had time to do the whole course but if you didn't, you were scuppered.

Glad I got out a couple of years back and am now tutoring. One of the last things that annoyed me was having to put the tables in groups rather than in rows. I want the kids facing the front, thank you very much. They sit 2 to a desk, so they have a partner for pairwork; if I want groupwork, rows 1 and 3 turn round and work in 4s with the people behind them.

Agree re attendance awards. By the end of the month DS2 will have clicked up 6 medical appointments, all of which are in school time because that's when the clinics are/specialist is available. He can't achieve 100% attendance because he has 3 conditions that necessitate appointments.

Ha ha I was going to say ITA! My brother had to do it and I was 2 years younger and so glad I didn't have to! He did OK though. Mind you, Mum taught me to read with a kit called 'teach your baby to read' which as far as I remember was full words - cat, dog etc, and I could read well by three. But I'm lucky that I've always found literacy very easy, all kids are different. To a PP, who said that 9 year olds should be fine with capitals and full stops etc, I have to say my dd has no SEN and is awful at all of this! She's not stupid but does rush things, and modern grammar (fronted adverbials!!!!) is a step too far. I do agree we should master the basics first!