Comprehensive school teaching - is it really this bad?

[jackstarbright]

I have just found this very disturbing article published in the Reader a few months ago. It's Gabriella Gruder-Poni's essay, 'Scenes from a PGCE'. here.

It provides one woman's view of teaching methods in a comprehensive school. Any comments?

All my most fuckwitted students could spot a sonnet. That's a D grade skill. For a C, you'd want them to be able to formulate a coherent explanation re: why they think the poet has chosen to use that form.

I use PEACE, not PEE. (Point, Evidence, Analyse, Cross-reference, Evaluate). Sounds like yet more death by acronymn, & I do tell the brightest that they shouldn't use it mechanically, but it does encourage less basic analysis & fits in with recent examiner advice to 'say a lot about a little, not a little about a lot'.

have checked, wa spranma

Raven - my poor Yr 11s are absolutely sick of hearing me say that!

I don't teach English, but I do teach my Psychology student that any argument they make should be evidence-based, and I also introduce them to techniques that help them to structure an argument. I use PEE among other things. I really don't see how this is either undesirable or teaching to the test. I'm teaching them to make a good and convincing argument. Obviously making irrelevant points backed up with spurious evidence that is poorly explained is deeply unsatisfactory, but that isn't a problem with the technique itself.

Sorry but it all sounds so mechanical and deliberate. Why don't you teach them to just to enjoy themselves and experiment a bit.

poinsettydawg - I don't see quattrocento's point either (and I do appreciate your support on this thread - never thought PEE would be so emotive! Wish my students got so worked up about it! ). I thought that the point I was trying to make is exactly that: to get to the heart of a text and dissect it rather than to simply identify techniques. Ironic really that the sonnet is mentioned since I am currently marking an AS exam where one of the poems on the paper is a sonnet and the number of students who write 'This is a sonnet' and then retire from the field obviously expecting plaudits and praise...

pranma - obviously good English teachers don't teach students to write essays like that - for a start, if they merely restate either the quotation or the point as is the case in your example, that's not PEE at work anyway but something else entirely. And please don't engage in debate with me if you find me rude; I am more than happy with that outcome.

swedington - is the mechanical and deliberate directed just at PEE/English here or are you applying that to teaching in general? Because it is no more mechanical and deliberate than teaching mathematical or scientific formulae, for example.

But if you are saying that no subject should be taught in this way and that students should enjoy themselves and experiment a bit in all subjects then I accept your point. It seems a bit hypocritical, however, to condemn just English for teaching in this way.

swede, I get the impression you know very little about teachign writing. Writing is hard - ask anyone who's any good at it, never mind those who aren't.

Children often see writing as a huge mysterious beast that they have no chance of understanding. Breaking writing down into easy-to-understand areas, providing frameworks, demonstrating how to put all those aspects together again is an absolutely vital part of teaching. Vital.

It is perfectly possible to teach all of that, and to teach all of it well, while encouraging creativity.

Yay to Pointy.

Do you think it's the only thing we do swedes? Of course we experiment. Literally in fact. And we discuss the work and share and test out ideas. But it's also my responsibility to teach my students how to write a persuasive argument.

Exactly, pointy! Thank you for putting it so clearly!

I try to stay out of these weird and wonderful teachign threads on mn but sometimes it all gets too much.

Are there lots of teachers on this thread?

If so would you mind looking at my thread in Education about explaining my son's ed pysch report.
Thanks.

Swedington: 'Sorry but it all sounds so mechanical and deliberate.'

Yes, it does. But not having a clue where to start is limiting, too.

If you PEACE (or even PEE) your GCSE essays, then by the time you do a degree those 'rules' are internalised & you don't have to do it consciously any more, or at all, if you can write better without.

My more able GCSE students are there now - they know that they can fall back on that structure if they're finding a section of an essay difficult, but if they're on a roll, I'm certainly not going to stop them.

The average IQ is 100. The " fuckwits who couldn't recognise a sonnet at twenty paces" are probably most of the children in the country. They can't all be geniuses and plenty of the non clever ones are at private schools too. It doesn't sound like too bad a tool. You need to teach them things - like read the question and answer all parts, not just regurgitate. etc.

I remember one of my A level English questions from 1979. It was is "Tess as moral fable". I went to a private school where very few girls went to university. I remember after the others who all would have got Cs or less (and plenty failed) basically having written everything they knew about the book (and I am sure that was not the teacher's fault). Telling people to think about questions, have introductions, endings, etc - there needs to be some teaching. We had a really good English teacher. I remember her even now.

I'm sorry. I know nothing about teaching as a profession. I'm just being loose with my impression of what that must feel like as a student. I was taught grammar, spelling, meter and verse etc and the rest was all experiment and discussion. And my son, who is 17, says his experience is similar to mine. But he did IGCSE English lit and lang. I suppose we are back to the fact that I don't think the purpose of education is teaching people things in order for them to regurgitate them later.

My sons study lots of things at their school in subjects which they will never be examined.

One of the ways the rich and higher status groups remain that way is by creating membership 'rules' for entry to that group. Education is one of those, explicit and implicit. The PEE debate going on here is precisely evidence of the divide between status groups. The upper middle classes hate it, because they would rather the knowledge and its techniques remained implicit, where their children could access it within privileged and separate environs. But teaching research and development seek to make these skills explicit so they are more accessible to all. This, of course, is something those who wish to protect their status find threatening, even if they don't recognise it as such.

They rely on rather old-fashioned ideas of 'intelligence' and 'proper' subjects because the tacit knowledges about how to get/do these things are built into upper middle class family life and grammar/private schools. Rather like the bright but lazy student who still gets a First despite doing 'no reading' and never showing up to a lecture and apparently absorbing nothing. Incredibly frustrating for other students who graft because they think he 'has done no work'. Whereas actually, he is just more skilled than they at absorbing things rapidly, recalling them, composing himself under stress and knowing how the system works. And crucially, his public performance is effortless. In reality, it is not, but he is skilled in presenting his 'inherent' intelligence to the world.

The reason people are enraged about PEE (for example) is because it undermines the idea of being better than someone else, assuming, in fact, the almost everything can be taught. And lots of people hate the idea that teachers might know this, especially those in the state sector.

I love teachers for this very reason: they unlock things in people they didn't know they had.

IMHO where teaching seems to have gone wrong is when teachers starting targeting the outcomes of education (ability to analyse,listen, critique, distil, explain and evaluate) as primary goals in themselves. So, when teachers focus lessons around pupils' opinions where all opinions around are equally valid - rather than teaching the grammar, history, poetry etc upon which informed opinions must surely be based.

'Educating' children by focusing on the how examiners are told to mark at this paricular point in history is unlikely to unearth the fundamental truths in a Shakespeare play or a Shelly poem or a period of history.

This corruption of education is, I fear, as true is independent schools as it is in many state schools each sector driven by an increasingly functional view of the purpose and benefits of education.

Swedes - I think my students feel pretty good when they produce a piece of writing that is coherent and convincing. I know I did when I was studying. You are I think deliberately misrepresenting what people are saying when you talk of 'regurgitating information' and we talk about teaching an important skill that can be applied outside our own course.

And wilf - I think I love you...

I use PEE (and other techniques) to avoid that 'all opinions are equally valid' thing though zanzibarmum. So I'm not quite sure what you mean.

Wilf - It's a nice theory. My parents are immigrants. I went to a state school.

I don't see why skills teaching is the same as regurgitating information; I'd have thought it was the opposite. A lot of my MA/PhD teaching was of this kind and I don't think that was dumbing down.

Looking at the scholarly articles I have read over the last weeks, the way they are organised seems pretty close to PEE to me- just because they haven't got PEE written all over the margin doesn't mean they are not using a technique.

In the olden days- i.e. any time before the 20th century- everybody took it for granted that teaching rhetoric (how to organise stuff and set it out on the page) was a massive part of education. I have never seen Cicero refer to this as dumbing down.

bloss, I agree with you on the uselessness of educational theory. It won't surprise you to hear that Mr. F talked a lot about constructivism; you're absolutely right about the ideas behind his article abstract. However, one of the reasons why I decided to do an education degree in Britain rather than in the States was that I thought such a course would involve less theory and more practice in Britain. And so it did: the theoretical part of the PGCE, useless though it may have been, was small. The problem was that the practical part of the course was worse than useless.
And while I agree that teachers must enjoy working with people, subject knowledge is just as important, and is often neglected or taken for granted. By the way, during the PGCE we had a class on "what is English"? No consensus emerged, but Mr. F was adamant that, whatever it might be, it was not about reading literature, discussing it, or writing about it. So I suppose that taking subject knowledge for granted would be a step up from such nihilism.

Pranma writes, "In this country we look to build up a child's voabulary through reading and speaking and listening so that words used are understood." That would be nice if it were true, but in the classes I observed over the year, there was very little reading, and no speaking or listening that would expand anyone's vocabulary. If anything, I was occasionally scolded for using a word that the students might not know ? for using it, not for not explaining it. Ideally, perhaps, all students would be voracious readers, and would have well-read parents with large vocabularies (which is not the same as "middle-class"). But they aren't and they don't, and so the deliberate study of vocabulary is a good example of the way in which school can make explicit and learnable what would otherwise remain implicit and seem impenetrable. (ht Wilfsell) And actually studying vocabulary can help even students who are already voracious readers, if it's done well, ie, if it includes etymology and usage.

As for PEE, any formula can be misapplied. PEE, for the most part, made sense to me, but there were other prescriptions that teachers repeated as if they were gospel that were just strange. One in particular that I remember was that good writing had to feature a mix of long and short sentences.

"IMHO where teaching seems to have gone wrong is when teachers starting targeting the outcomes of education (ability to analyse,listen, critique, distil, explain and evaluate) as primary goals in themselves."

The transferable skills of analysis, listening, critique, distillation, explanation, evaluation etc are the ones that will be useful in the RL of work. One of the things I like about modern education at its best is the explicit teaching of those skills.

Wilf - I agree with Swedington - it's a nice theory. I'm as upper middle class as they come with generations of public school/classicists/Oxbridge behind and around me!