Do private schools have better teachers?

[hercules1]

Read this on a different thread and it has peed me off a bit. I know lots of really good teachers who don't and won't teach in private schools. I've also known some teachers leave the state system to go to the private as they could no longer cope within the state.

Private doesn't equate with better teachers Of course it means lots of other things and I am sure there are lots of excellent teachers in the private system but no more so than the state.

from 2007 lol

Numpty

Although now it has been resurrected I am sure people will be along to add their two' pennorth soon...A debate like this will run and run, I imagine mumsnetters in 2061 will STILL be debating it.

An inner London state school teacher who teaches at a school with a mixture of children from middle class and poor children with immigrant non speaking English children said that one of the main differences in teaching was that private school teachers do the old fashioned "chalk and talk" - and state school primary teachers use interactive white boards that make the lessons more appealing to children who find concentrating difficult - they can show films, stuff from the internet and have them come up to the front and use it like an ipad to play educational games. She felt that things had to be exciting, like a video game to get the children to have any interest in a lesson, but that children at private schools are expected to concentrate and just learn from writing on a blackboard. I think she was impressed at the higher concentration standards that were expected of the private school children, and felt things were dumbed down for the state school kids. But whether it is harder to get kids from wealthy homes to sit in a class with just a blackboard and learn and therefore the teacher must be using good teaching skills to engage them , or whether it is a better teacher who is trying to engage kids who don't get so much encouragement and learning at home with an interactive white board - I'm not sure. Would be interested to see what other teachers think. She said if she went to a private school she'd be an IT wizard compared to the private school teachers, but she didn't see that as being a better teacher. I've looked at both private and state schools and I find it interesting how the state schools show you all the stuff you can do on the white boards as an impressive thing, and the private schools don't seem interested in having them and are happy with their teachers doing chalk and talk.

The thing is that there is a pressure on state school teachers to make the lesson exciting ALL the time. This is why i abhor the use of the interactive whiteboard and ipads.

No there isn't forehead! Honestly, my Head would be perfectly happy for me to bore the wotsits off the blighters so long as they all hit or exceed their targets.

An IWB is a jolly useful tool, that's all. Some teachers use it a lot more than others. I find mine especially useful for rather prosaic things like emailing a copy of the annotations for a poem to a student who's off ill.

'Abhor'ing the poor thing is a bit fairly daft. There's nothing you can't do on an IWB that you could do on a blackboard, if you wanted to go strictly trad throughout...

forehead,

I teach in a school where a lot of the children have very little in the way of 'life experiences': some have never been to the nearest city (10 miles away), others not seen the sea / been to a castle / been inside a theatre / been to a zoo / been to a museum / met a person of another colour / heard a native speaker of another language etc etc.

Obviously, we try to redress at least some of these through visits and trips BUT with an IWB it is possible to bring some of those experiences a little closer to the children than would be possible using just a blackboard or a book.

In other schools, it might well be possible to say 'Imagine you are at the seaside - what descriptive words might you think of' (or whatever...what a boring task... but you know what I mean) and know that the children in the class have an actual memory or experience to draw on for their ideas.

Like raven, I also find my IWB extremely useful to be able to 'flip back' to saved ideas or material from a previous lesson 'You remember we found out everything we already know about magnets and wrote them on the board and x asked this question here? Today we're going to use that as a starting point...' etc

An IWB doesn't make a good teacher - and certainly doesn't make a bad teacher into a good one. It is, entirely separately, a sometimes useful, stimulating and engaging tool. 'Chalk and talk' CAN (doesn't necessarily) lead to a style of didactic teaching which sees passive children as 'vessels to be filled with facts' (so can bad use of enless IWB presentation files). Interactive tools can (don't necessarily) allow children to be more active - and that may help some (not all) children to learn more. Me, as a child, I loved 'chalk and talk', nothing better. But equally I have seen how more interactive, partipative, active teaching and learning (NB not just interactive gizmos) help some children to learn more quickly and retain more of what they have learned.

Chalk 'n' talk does not allow children to think; as teacherwith2kids says, vessels to be filled with facts, and exam success is measured on who can remember the most