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.

Handwriting as opposed to printing is much faster, surely? So there's less of a block between thinking a thought and getting it onto paper.

Not a teacher btw.

The grammar obsession looks dreadful. I have no idea what a lot of grammatical terms mean because I was never taught them - I didn't need to be taught them! The few I know I picked up learning verb tables in French. Never did me any harm

I end up asking some Year 7s to avoid cursive writing as I just can't read it and neither can they!

There are definitely some children who never master cursive handwriting, just as there are children who never master long division or whatever, but I don't think that should stop schools from aiming for beautiful, legible writing that aids speed, spelling and creativity.

Definitely do not see any benefit to a child being able to master labelling a determiner.

What fucks me off is managers who don’t have a clue what their own beliefs about education are, and so jump at every passing trend.

When I did NPQH we had a whole module on moral purpose. I must have been the only bugger listening.

Our school has a very high %age of low ability kids. One of the things we try to do is help them have neat legible handwriting. The employment market is tough enough as it is without having writing nobody can read........

should we have a new thread for 'educational initiatives that are genuinely excellent if done properly, but fairly useless if done badly'?

^ This. I am so fed up of doing INSET training on something that looks like it may work but it has just been given to tick a box and fill in a day and there is no plan to roll it out across school and so a few teachers do it in isolation and so it will never work. In 60 mins a week or a fortnight there is no time to teach new way of learning and the content.

Yep, double and triple marking is worth while but there is no time to keep up with it across all classes.

The only thing that has ever helped ds2 with his hand-writing was the teacher who asked the kids to read out their own work in Year 2. Only took a couple of times of him not being able to read it before he learnt to slow down and actually make sure his writing was legible.

Anyway my pet hate is inspirational curriculum's. If the topic was not to their liking then turned my two off lessons for the entire term which was the opposite effect to that intended.

Why are these ideas always applied in such a stupid clunky manner in teaching? Teachers and senior educators are bright people, can they not see how to use ideas subtly?

Resilience and growth mindset are both useful ideas for teachers understanding those kids who are perfectionist and afraid to try things outside their comfort zone and how to help encourage them. But the whole class clapping mistakes and banging on about these ideas to the kids is awful!

These ideas should always be a way to help teachers behind the scenes, not told to the kids. The kids aren't studying pedagogy.

My bugbear is phonics with nonsense words. There are enough unfamiliar real words in English, what's the benefit of sounding out nonsense. Kids should be able to say c-i-t isn't a word, not just blindly "read" cit. reading shouldn't be so separate from building vocabulary and understanding words.

“Growth mindset” seems to be a current fad.

The nonsense words are just the aliens names surely?

Oh ok.

"I can honestly say, my whole career I have have worked with peers on my 'level'. And a whole lot of peers far more clever, talented and ambitious than me. FAR MORE."

Which means they are working with someone less clever than them. Someone they have to carry perhaps?

The nonsense words have a very practical reason. The phonics test is specifically testing phonic knowledge, not vocabulary.

Children don't skip grades because there is more to education than intelligence or example how to build friendships and social skills and need to be with their age group to do this.
Children also have to learn to work as part of a group/team as they will need to be able to work with people through out their careers

I can partly see the point about not skipping grades, but I think making ALL four year olds start reception in September is insanity, and downright cruel.

In other countries if your child is born in the latter third of the year, they get the choice to start the following year. With a phased Sept/Jan/Easter start this just makes SO much more sense to me.

My school allows repetition and skipping of years. In year 9 at the moment I have every age from 12 to 16....!

I don't think accelerating through the years works unless there's a long term plan, agreed by every school involved in that child's education.

I have only known one child for whom that was appropriate, a genuine one-in-a-million mathematical genius.

Clever, competent children can easily be stretched and challenged with their peers without racing through the curriculum.

And group work has its place, along with paired work, along with individual work. All children are different, and for every child who hates group work there is one who thrives on it. For some, the challenge is working with peers who aren't as smart as them, and showing patience and compassion. For some the challenge is speaking up with ideas, or making themselves heard and understood. All good life skills, practised whilst reinforcing the work at hand.

I hope some of the positivity has gone now. Dd had to start every day at primary school with a round of applause (as if they'd just done an aerobics class) and shouting how great they were.

On the windows and doors were slogans such as "Anyone can achieve anything!" "You're the star of your life!" "I believe in me!" I really wanted to rip them down. All this pumping up - and puffing up - was a long way from a more reasonable "try your best" philosophy. No one wants to deflate a kid, but it all had the insidious implication that everything would come to he/she by right.

Tess, there are numerous studies into the neurological benefits of handwriting over typing, and these benefits are compounded by cursive writing rather than printing.

Could you link? I'm interested, and also somewhat dubious.

it is important because an examiner will give up on their work in the end if they can't read it.

As I said upthread. And printing is far easier to read than cursive. (And I'm an examiner.)

Handwriting as opposed to printing is much faster, surely?

As I said upthread, I found the opposite to be true. Writing in cursive requires contrived links between letters - with different links for different combinations. I suppose one could get used to it, but what would be the point, when printing is easier to read?

On handwriting, back in the day of KS3 SATs, if students did no joining at all, they were penalised. But I never taught a child who didn't join the odd pair of letters (ng, say or he) somewhere on the page. And that was enough.

The links between letters aren't really contrived if you're adept at it though. Printing to me is like one-handed typing - you have to lift your hand to get from one letter to another.

I remember reading years ago about why they spend years in France copying swirls and zigzags to master pen control before learning how to write, which seems to make sense.

I'm absolutely not a teacher (or French) though so could be talking out of my arse.

Fronted adverbial, what the heck are they teaching them these days? Never heard of it! Nine and ten yr olds do not need this.

I had to look up "fronted adverbial" the first time I met the term - about a week ago.

And get this - I think I've written one! What do you think of this, primary teachers?

Frantic, I started to run again. (It's from a book I wrote.)

"Frantic" is certainly at the front and it's followed by the specified comma.
It's not an adverb (would need to be frantically).
But it does add something to the verb (to start).

So, is this an example of a construct Y4s are expected to take apart? I had never met the term when I wrote this - it just sounded right.