Anyone got any opinions on the Michaela School?

[noblegiraffe]

My Twitter is currently full of talk about Michaela as the teachers there have released a book today and are holding a conference explaining what they do. It's a no-excuses school where kids walk the corridors either in silence or chanting Shakespeare, behaviour is expected to be perfect including no slouching. Everything possible is done to reduce workload of teachers - no marking in books, lessons are all joint planned and taught uniformly, no differentiation, they write their own textbooks.

Does anyone's kids go there? Anyone decide against sending their kids there? Does anyone know how it is viewed in the local community?

Wow. It sounds amazing. I totally buy the idea of getting them so drilled with the routine stuff so that basics like getting into the classroom, handing out books etc takes up little time and headspace.

I'm a real cynic and am so hacked off with so much of the twaddle that is spouted in schools in the name of progress, but I'm pretty inspired when I read about how these people explain to the pupils why the school runs the way it does.

I guess it's by being disciplined, efficient and systematic with teaching them the actual knowledge that you make room for the subsequent time for thinking, questioning and analysing.

and they won't admit anyone who won't agree to abide by the school rules.

what does that actually mean in practice though? They are a state school and have to have fair and transparent admissions criteria? So that sentence is nonsense isn't it? If it isnt nonsense then the school is clearly selecting a certain type which makes its job a lot easier!

Yes I don't see how that's really relevant. Most state schools have 'Home School Contracts', where the parent and child has to sign to say they'll support the school and abide by the rules. Doesn't mean diddly squat, obviously!

I don't like it.

But I can't explain why very well... I think it's probably because it seems to didactic to me. I also like creativity and group work.

There are some nice ideas. But how feasible is it really to have all children eating the same meal, at the same time, in the same space, in most schools. Never mind there being enough adults available to sit one with every 10 students or so.

I also find the way it's presented on social media, the blogosphere and in the media as a bit "cultish". Especially when there isn't any actual proof yet that the pupils are doing any better than any other. Whenever anyone questions the methods, or notes their unease (and, afteral it's a normal human reaction to feel unease with something you have no experience of) then the reaction is roundly that "you are wrong, our way is the way forward, here is yet more carefully selected evidence to back up our standpoint".

There isn't actually much room for discussion.

"the science one seems very unambitious (to me as a layperson). They emphasise learning knowledge before experimentation and there seems to little consideration in learning skills like applying the scientific method and scientific enquiry (it maybe that this is a demand of the National curricula so not specific to this school so please clarify)

I'm a science teacher and have been reading their blogs about how things work there with interest. I have a lot of thoughts about this, sorry this is long:

There's a pendulum in science education that swings between Content and Skills. (Right now in most English schools running the national curriculum, it's mostly over in the Skills end but I think it is swinging back towards Content? I teach in an IB school and the pendulum is right the way over to Skills at the expense of Content)

The reason it swings back and forth is because no one really knows how best to get the Scientific Method over. Should you start in primary school and set students challenges to find things out through experiments they designed themselves or should you give students essentially experiment "recipes" until they understand enough science in order to plan an experiment?

The advantage with prioritising skills is that students will have a greater facility with the concepts of variables and experimental control but the disadvantage is that if students don't understand the underpinning science, there might be too much going on to be able to learn anything at all.

It's like, telephone numbers are only a certain number of digits long because you can only remember so much new stuff at once. If your teacher expects you to understand the names of some chemicals, the signs of a chemical reaction, the equipment, the procedure AND what a fair test is plus how to make observations, you're going to come unstuck.

You might be able to do the task but at the expense of making long-term memories.

Plus, as humans, we think concretely until about Y8-9 and then abstract thought starts to take over. There's no set timetable or anything, and it's not related to how smart you are, it just happens when it happens.

Concepts like accuracy vs. precision, variable control, hypotheses (et al) are quite abstract. Expecting everyone under Y10 to be able to understand and have fluency in this area is a big ask. It can mean that students think they are no good at science and write themselves off, when all it was that they just needed to level up cognitively.

Michaela's approach appears to be to concentrate on building a content base for understanding scientific concepts and THEN when they understand the science, I guess they will teach them enquiry (maybe at A level?)
This seems to be a lot more brain-friendly and I think they might have the right idea.

BUT as a science teacher, I believe in gently scaffolding the scientific method from the start. There are sets of lessons you can do to bridge the gap from concrete to abstract which have some great evidence to suggest that they work to a high degree.

I think teachers need to be clear what they expect to get out of a practical: do they want to teach a skill or do they want to teach a fact. They can't do both. And a lot of teachers (myself included), try to get a two-for-one out of experiments and it rarely pays off.

Michaela might be on to something and I am watching with interest. I think it's interesting that they go into topics in so much depth and have fewer of them per year. It makes their curriculum look sparse but some of the stuff even the youngest students are expected to retain is at A level standard.

Wonder Thanks, I found that really interesting and informative.

titchy - I suspect it means they will admit anyone who meets the admissions criteria, but permanently exclude those who don't follow the behavioural expectations. If they don't care about ofsted, I doubt they're that fussed about their exclusion rate (I've not looked into what it is though)

Interesting, Wonder. I wonder how they approach other subjects. I'm a linguist with a passion for proper grammar teaching. I'm guessing they'd be pretty keen on that.

Wonderflonium
Thank you for such a detailed explanation and to others for related comments. My sense is that my son's school assumes (and probably rightly so, given the intake) a great deal of previously/independently acquired core knowledge; so can focus on the research and analytical skills.

Whether you can teach creative problem solving is one thing, I believe that school students should be given significant opportunities to practice it, to develop skills in analysis, research, collaboration, resilience, etc. I was very interested in the idea that abstract thought kicks in about years 8-9 and so presumably it is at this point they need to be developing these skills.

Certainly, when I was studying overseas (admittedly a long while ago), a repeated criticism of the Chinese, Malaysian and Indian students we worked with was that they were inexperienced in these areas and needed a lot more support (and this was attributed by the students themselves to their largely rote-learning based schooling)

Wonder Bit of a diversion but thanks for that post. DD's weakest subject is science and your post was incredibly enlightening. She's fine at remembering the facts but really struggles when a question asks her to do something like devise an experiment. It's been difficult to know how best to help her but now I think she'd be best focussing on the factual knowledge and let the skills develop over time. Thank you.

As a primary science specialist, I'm not sure I totally agree. Children are definitely able to design simple experiments at primary age. Obviously you need to build it up from KS1 and you might not necessarily focus on every bit of the experiment every single time, but it is possible.

Some of the most memorable lessons I've taught have been when the kids have gone a bit off topic and asked a question or raised something that's not been on the plan and I've asked them to work out how to find out if their ideas are correct.

I agree about not making the experiment and the knowledge the focus of the same activity though. And directed experiments definitely have their place.

Interesting that at least one other poster thinks it can't be done (or has seen it said that it can't) to an existing school. Some of their ideas are brilliant, but I do wonder about others.

One of the things about the "private school ethos" though is regarding the arts. Most private schools have thriving arts departments with phenomenal facilities, great quality music AND drama and loads of extra-curricular activities for children to get involved with. Does Michaela? Extra Curricular appears to consist of 4 things - debating, maths, reading and football. Where's the down time?

I know I'm biased, because I'm a drama teacher, but many of our top actors came out of public schools because of the myriad performance opportunities on offer to them at school.

I'm trying to imagine some of my more challenging Y11s being told that they now need to walk silently through the corridors and shout appreciations for teachers and other students at lunchtime. They'd die laughing, then say 'I'm not doing that'.

It'd have to be introduced from Y7 (get 'em young), but if you have other year groups in the school not doing it, then it would fall apart.

Exactly Evil. But I think the same may apply to some existing grammar. The private school I went had no shortage of extra curricular and excelling in any of those was seen as equally prestigious and was encouraged as excelling in academics.

My friends children went to a super selective grammar. They had similar opportunities, but it was almost seen as secondary to the academics. They definitely lost interest in her eldest when she decided she wanted to go to an art school rather than university.

The OP may be interested in this:

blog.bodil.co.uk/seven-principles-of-maths-at-michaela/

I think it's fascinating. I can't wait to see their results and I expect they will be incredibly high.

They wouldn't be able to achieve the behaviour they do without students buying into the system. Their relentless "you're the best!" "Hold your head up high!" etc, coupled with their "we love you!" "You're the best students ever!" makes these kids incredibly proud and "part of" something special.

Trying to achieve silence in corridors where the ethos is already set would be impossible.

Their boot camp is, I think, an excellent idea which could be replicated. But you can't turn around a school very easily if there are snarly rude older kids because Year 7 model themselves on them.

Michaela's approach appears to be to concentrate on building a content base for understanding scientific concepts and THEN when they understand the science, I guess they will teach them enquiry (maybe at A level?)

As a scientist, I don't understand how you can separate really understanding science from (thought) experiments and enquiry.

The National Curriculum teaches some basic science concepts in KS1-KS3 and some more advanced (often rather abstract) concepts. From interacting with my DC's school, even high achieving kids (level 6+ at end of KS2) don't have a deep understanding of many of the latter concepts and can't apply them very well. True understanding of a concept requires applying it e.g. thinking about what would be the outcomes of (thought) experiments, thinking about experiments one could do to investigate further.

More challenging science exam papers such as the Common Entrance papers do test whether kids understand the concepts by presenting them with experiments they haven't seen before or asking them to come up with experiments to test something.

Rote learning of content without teaching any kind of enquiry skills, planning experiments, thinking about the outcomes of experiments doesn't make much sense. (On the other hand, countries which do teach science this way tend to have larger fractions of students going on to STEM at university than we do. Perhaps this is simply because STEM is more valued in these countries though.)

I know what you mean user, which is why I make sure I have a sprinkle of enquiry all the way through the younger years and scaffold the skills up at the same time as content.

But, as a scientist, it's certainly not how I was taught! My school did content-content-content until we absolutely had to design an experiment for GCSE coursework (and then they gave us a lot of exemplars so we didn't have to actually understand experimental design).
I remember a student teacher asking us to design an experiment in Y9 and I remember not having the faintest clue where to start, hating her etc.

You are right that truly understanding something requires applying it but maybe it's running before you can walk if you don't have enough background knowledge?

Would I be a better scientist if I had been taught the way I teach? I think so, or I wouldn't do it but how my teachers handled my scientific education didn't do my understanding of enquiry any harm, either.

It's an interesting question!

I have noticed that people in my generation are a lot more suspicious of the scientific method, judging from how they handle science in the news like vaccines, mobile phone masts, possible carcinogens etc so maybe it's a bad idea to leave enquiry to A level.
If you didn't DO a science A level, then you've been taught that science is a pile of unassailable facts. It must be terrifying for people with that mindset when scientists "change their minds".

Is n't this whole approach more akin to the Chinese system than British private system? This may be a more efficient way of learning information especially for a range of abilities and I am guessing the MFL approach is like the way I was taught languages, emphasis on grammatical structure plus lots of vocabulary and putting them together to construct sentences. I would be worried though about suppressing questions once discipline had been established.

Wonderflonium interesting point, ideally there would be a course on how to recognise bad science before DCs gave up age 16.

how my teachers handled my scientific education didn't do my understanding of enquiry any harm, either.

But we as a society have absurdly low participation rates in STEM at university level. One shouldn't just look at whether those who carried on with science were harmed but also at whether better teaching methods would have encouraged more people to continue with science.

(I'm not sure about the answer to this, but we certainly seem stuck in a damaging feedback loop - parents don't value science and didn't study it at university, so they and the rest of society give pupils the message that STEM isn't necessary so participation rates in engineering etc stay low.)

I think the attitude to science does come partly from parents - but bear in mind, STEM subjects can be a hard sell! And in my experience from university onwards, people are always claiming that STEM subjects are better than arts and humanities, because you'll get a well-paid job. In reality, we have brilliant engineering training in this country but the jobs are often abroad. Lab work is very badly paid and very competitive and jobs in financial services, for example, don't specify which degree. My friend who did classics has a good job as an accountant. Her dh did a microbiology degree, got a couple of rubbish science jobs and then luckily made a successful career in the civil service - for which he didn't need a science degree! We could definitely do with more interest in STEM, particularly from girls, but I think as a society we also need to think about the rewards we give for doing these subjects.
However, I am always whispering 'engineering' to my dcs whenever the subject of careers comes up and I would be delighted if they went for it!

There are plenty of highly paid engineering jobs in this country. Overall we are a huge importer of STEM skills.

Of course some lab jobs are not paid terrifically well, and neither is academia. But there are lots of well paid STEM jobs too. Most of my PhD students start jobs outside academia on six figure salaries....

BTW many highly paid jobs in finance e.g. quantitative analysts do require STEM.

I think something is terribly wrong with the way science is taught at school and actually appointing well qualified science teachers seems nigh on impossible. My dd hates science at secondary. There is very little hands-on stuff and just pages of writing notes which she doesn't really understand. She used to be interested but something is putting her off, so much so that any vaguely scientific programmes on TV are turned off, doesn't want to go to the science museum etc. An able child who would be a great addition to STEM is veering towards languages and history... it's frustrating...