That glass ceiling! Part 2

[var123]

Continuing the discussion about artificial limits placed on G&T children, and the resulting impact on their health and happiness (not to mention futures).

Do they really matter less because they have a perceived "advantage"?!

original thread here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/gifted_and_talented/2507232-The-glass-ceiling-for-very-able-children?

I've got to say that while I don't always agree with bobo, she has a point here. A sensible, progressive curriculum and good text books don't replace the need for good teachers, BUT they certainly limit the risk of that an incompetent/uninspired teacher, or the temporary absence of a teacher, will have a significant negative impact on a child's education.

Bobo, in one way I agree with you - in the sense that IF a textbook culture would ensure that politicians, advised by respected pedagogical and subject experts,

• laid down a single, detailed national curriculum that is genuinely progressive in all subjects AND
• fixed testing and assessment AND
• removed the freedom to alter this curriculum from academies and free schools

then it would in many ways be the lesser of two evils. Several things made the textbooks that we were trialling for Maths useless for us:

• The fact that the curriculum is not well-planned and not yet embedded
• The fact that testing and assessment is a moving goalpost
• The fact that they were rushed out for publication due to short timescales and thus were poor quallity in terms of their pedagogical approach, activities etc

If a, say, 5 year period of stability was guaranteed, then textbooks would become a good investment. However, that seems genuinely unlikely!

(I also think that in an inspection / accountability obsesssed culture, what is thought to be 'outstanding teaching' has become almost mythic, and definitely does NOT include doing exercises from a textbook)

Children like doing exercises from a textbook, providing they are well designed and allow them to demonstrate progress. Lots of computer games work on the same principles...

If you can get the public back on side, by turning around the public image of teachers which often does not reflect reality, then the politicians will think twice about bashing you with more assessments and measurements. Then you can start to shrug off some of the OTT things you get asked to do, and next time your pensions are raided (for example) the public will be fighting your corner for you.

How do you mean "genuinely progressive"? What is that?

Var, what I mean is, has a sensible progressive structure in which new knowledge is built on old knowledge. Not a random ragbag of 'stuff'. At the moment, the curriculum in some subjects is so lacking in detail that no progression is built in at all, and some is 'a pile of stuff we think that children ought to know about'.

If you can get the public back on side, by turning around the public image of teachers which often does not reflect reality, then the politicians will think twice about bashing you with more assessments and measurements.

Why would think this? The public in general are very much in favour of assessments and measurements of public services. As teacher says, we are an inspection and accountability obsessed culture, not just in education but particularly so in education.

Our universities spend a significant fraction of their time and resources preparing for research assessments, made every five years or so. The research assessments are based on simplistic criteria and the results aren't considered meaningful. The results don't even affect university's finances much but we have to go through the charade all the same.

Our incoming minister for universities and research, who incidentally has no science education post O level, has now proposed a teaching assessment framework. (This was blocked by the Lib Dems and David Willetts in the previous government.) We already have one of the most inspected university systems globally - complicated vetting of assessments internally, external examiners, inspections by QCA - but we are to get yet more teaching assessment, on criteria which will be adjusted to ensure that top universities come out top, regardless of their actual quality of teaching. And there has been no acknowledgment that it is virtually impossible to actually assess teaching of very high level specialised courses.... the assessment criteria mist well use what the league tables use - students' opinions, although this is not demonstrably correlated with quality of teaching and indeed can be fudged by lowering standards, grade inflating.

Meanwhile academics have seen massive jumps in students numbers combined with cuts in support staff, so big increases in workload, virtually frozen pay for the last 8 years and massive cuts to pensions in post 92 universities. There is absolutely no sympathy from the public, who only talk about the 9k fees.... as if we, the academics, receive them personally.

Bobo, I am not disputing that - my lower ability Maths group LOVE doing repetitive exercises, as it gives them a feeling of achievement and security. However, a textbook would usually have not enough questions of the same type for them, and far too many for the more able, who grasp a concept very quickly and need deeper 'thinking' problems to apply their new knowledge to.

Equally, i am sure that in the first part of the thread, there was an outcry from the parents of very able children who felt that the work they did in class was 'repetitive and boring and did not teach them anything'. How does a textbook for a single year group address the needs of a 1 in 1000 outlier, as those taking part in that thread were requesting?

Irrelevant really but goes to the funding thing- there can be 20 students in my dD's tutorial groups at university. 20! In a tutorial!

Suirely a textbook, with its fixed exercises and limited spread, is much more likely to entrench the glass ceiling, rather than enable it to be broken?

In primary when I was a child, we had individual maths workbooks that each of us worked through. The class was never 'taught', we simply 'did Maths' page by page from the book. Each of us would be doing a different thing - so once i finished the 18 stage Maths scheme, I was given dustier and duster books from the back of the back cupboard until they could find no more. We marked them ourselves, as the answers were in the back of the books...many people simply copied the answers.

English comprehension was on a very similar system - coloured cards out of a box, easy ones at the front, hard ones at the back. Again no actual teaching at all, just 'doing'.

Do i think that was good pedagogy? Good use of the teacher's time? Did we really learn as much as we could? Those who were stuck lined up by the teacher's desk, sometimes for half or more of the lesson - there was a strategic point to join the queue which guaranteed that you would never see the teacher and could spend the maximum time not doing any work at all.

teacher - my DD at her French school has a maths text book (logical, progressive) with exercises that reinforce each lesson as it goes and a second book, a sort of workbook, with the same progression of topics in the form of lots of exercises of a wide range of difficulty. These get set for homework. There's always one really difficult problem that only DD and two other DC manage (sometimes). Several DC choose to do extra simple exercises (perhaps with parental support) to gain extra practice before tackling the exercises set for homework. It's quite flexible and allows DC who need extra practice to get it within the same textbook series ie same logical progression.

I think the public like testing and measurement because it makes them feel safer, and basically there is a lot of public doubt about education and what is happening to young people before they become adults.

Teachers as a group are not trusted and politicians - who don't seem to be able to think beyond 18 months (and then its only if they try really, really hard as 7 days if their usual horizon!) take advantage of this popular mood to take pot-shots at teachers.

Look at the doctors when they went on strike. A lot of people were shocked that they'd strike but the overwhelming opinion was that if they are unhappy enough to strike then they must have valid concerns and the politicians needed to sort it out asap.

I think that the point I am making is that exercises (like those found in a textbook) form part of my teaching. Some do come from textbooks. But the point is that the exact exercises each child is given to do will be closely matched with what they need to do next, based on their work the previous day, or based on their answers during the initial teaching phase of the lesson. The starting point, and the speed of progression, is varied, and there may be some children on a particular day who don't do those exercises at all - instead doing an open-ended problem-solving type activity or spending the entire lesson with the teacher or another adult or with practical equipment to address a specific misunderstanding or gap.

Var, so what would make you trust teachers (I am looking for suggestions that remove, or at least do not increase, the current overburden of individual scrutiny and institutional accountability)? How can we turn it around for you?

As an insider, i can tell you that the very large majority of teachers are trustworthy, hard working, dedicated but somewhat overworked individuals, who juggle competing priorities to the best of their ability all day long and much of the night. What will make you believe that too?

I trust those teachers who give my DC a clear, progressive path to well-articulated objectives. Homework and tests with clear parameters that test understanding of the tools and/or knowledge imparted by the teacher.

I don't trust teachers when I don't understand what they are getting at. I am clever and well-educated. If I cannot understand it quickly, there is a problem. This has always been proven to be true, btw!

Bobo, but that is at an individual teacher level.

The main public view seems to be 'my child's teacher may be OK, but I don't trust teachers in general' - so it is how we can turn round the public perception of the profession as a whole that is the more intractable problem.

By incentivising all teachers to do what I wrote below. Which requires a good NC, text books etc.

Parents are deeply confused about what schools (which they equate with teachers - I know it isn't that simple) are trying to achieve.

But Bobo - the NC, and therefore the lack of textbooks, is not the school's fault, but the politicians'. How have we got to the position where the government creates the problem but the public blames the teachers and schools?

Because the teachers/schools are the ones responsible for delivery. And, TBH, if the teaching profession as a whole were better at communicating a vision that parents could understand it would get more support. Good PR goes a long way.

As an insider, i can tell you that the very large majority of teachers are trustworthy, hard working, dedicated but somewhat overworked individuals, who juggle competing priorities to the best of their ability all day long and much of the night. What will make you believe that too?

That's an interesting question, not sure what the answer is.

Personally, my default mode is to trust teachers in general and believe they are trustworthy, hard working, dedicated but somewhat overworked individuals, unless proven contrary. So far, in my limited experience, it hasn't happened. My trust in teachers has not been broken by my experiences with DS's teachers. Things that helped to cement the trust were the fact that I could see they knew exactly who my child was (with strengths and weaknesses) every time we had a parent's evening or received a report. Also that whenever I felt the need to enquire about something I was always made felt welcome and that we were all in this together. I have never had other people's experiences of teachers being defensive or wanting to make me feel bad or see me as a pushy or hot housing parent because of how DS is.

German teachers in France were under serious threat recently but Germany paid for PR and the situation has been reversed.

Btw, my DCs have exactly what you describe, in all subjects. They only have a couple of textbooks. There are ways other than textbooks to deliver what you want.

It's a bit like the uniform thing - 'we want children not to be bullied for what they wear' being conflated with 'we have uniform so that children don't get bullied about what they wear'. it is, as discussed exhaustively, a false correlation. A clear progressive curriculum, with well-thought out schemes of work, well designed homework with clear objectives is what is wanted - to say that a textbook is NECESSARY to achieve this is a false correlation. It might have been used to achieve this in your experience - but that does not mean it is necessary, any more than those whose children attend schools which wear uniform and also have very little bullying around what people wear can really say that uniform causes that lack of bullying.

Teacher - slight tangent here but I was wondering how much instruction teachers get about gifted children during their training?

Textbooks (which live at home, not at school) are reference material and practice material.