20 years of educational fads

[Piggywaspushed]

This article on Teacher Toolkit is actually two years old so I am sure we could update it! (SLANT anyone??) but it appeared on my Twitter feed and I thought MN might find it diverting:

www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2016/07/10/education-fads/

loving that triple marking is declared a fad.

Send to all your SLTs! I dare you!!

We never had those. At my place laptops are still considered a bit faddish.

All my GCSE candidate's work is submitted by e-portfolio and has been for at least 10? years. It's one of the sensible things I have got past SLT.

I can imagine at GCSE it can be really useful. In a primary with very dodgy access to IT and an expectation that it runs alongside books, it was just a nightmare.

I cannot wait to read this. So pissed off with education at the moment.

elephant the student e-portfolio was supposed to be some electronic repository of their greatest educational moments, like a good essay or something. I’m sure that employers were supposed to be interested in seeing them, but sadly they never happened.

Noble I had mentally blocked that initiative . DS1 was very pleased with the unused RoA folders I was able to recycle his way though.

The last school I worked at before this one had each child in the class sitting in front of 3 paper cups in traffic light colours.

They were supposed to show the green one if they were meeting their objective, the orange if they would get there with some help and the red one if they were not meeting the objective.

There was soooo much wrong with that.

1. Small children and lots of paper cups. Need I say more? Cup pyramids, cups with pencils jabbed through them. Fights over cups, thrown cups, lost cups...aaaargh! (I always ended up collecting them all in and never giving them back until the next observation/learning walk.

1. The head was adamant that the children should never use the word 'feel' they could not say 'I feel confident' or 'I am good at this work', when questioned in an observation, they had to reply with 'I am meeting my objective' or 'I am not yet meeting my objective' as if a 5 year old has any concept or interest in that at all.

1. I like to have a dialogue with my children. What is wrong with putting up a hand to ask for help? No. 'Where's your red cup?'

1. Observation judgements largely based around the children's use of cups. Too many children on green at the beginning of the lesson doesn't show progress. If they are not all green at the end, why not? (Usually because someone has nicked someone else's green cup or has stuck it on their head, up their nose, into the recycling bin by mistake...

Oh. The fucking cups.

So glad to be out of that school!

That sounds like a nightmare, brainache!

I remember seeing something about lolly sticks for picking on kids where one of the pupils snuck into the classroom and stole the lolly stick with their name on from the mug so they never got picked. Genius!

Shanghai maths! Let’s teach maths like they do in Shanghai!

Do you mean where teachers only teach two hours a day and spend the rest of the day marking, planning, observing and doing intervention?

Oh, no, it’s a new textbook. That’ll have the same results.

I am never leaving my current school. We have happily bypassed a whole load of fads that other schools have adopted. I can't believe the cups!!

Yes noble, we had a whole county thing about Shanghai maths. But the teachers who came over from Shanghai said it would never work here because the teachers here don't have time to do all the interventions they do there. 2 hours a day, teaching 2 parallel classes, and having time to intervene before the next lesson with anyone who is struggling.

Haha! Noble
I used Lolly Sticks a couple of times before deciding they were shit.

I want to ask particular children particular questions - because that is real, dynamic assessment for learning.

Using lolly sticks totally took away my control of that situation.

Kudos for the child taking their stick out!

This thread is making me glad I am not in UK teaching any more. FFS it's ridiculous. Funnily enough there is no scientific evidence behind most of the fads. Brain gym argh. Learning styles even more argh. Flipped learning g is good though, especially at A-level. Yes it's homework but it's done the other way round. Hope it's not a fad because it's a much better way of teaching. Not sure it would work in primary though. I live in Australia. They are behind UK in terms of fads but they are still jumping on the jargon band wagon.

And the Shanghai maths thing proves it. Those that must be obeyed want a quick fix on the cheap. When it wouldn't really be broken if it were just left alone...

My Year 7s absolutely hate flipped learning. It seems to be a thing in our maths dept atm. They regularly complain to me, their English teacher, about it. I think it's because I'm quite vocal about my hatred for homework at KS3, other than reading, practicing new maths briefly, and learning vocab in MFL.

I must be doing flipped learning wrong because any description I have seem is the same as homework.... go home and do some work.... bring it in next time....??

I remember the cups ! Never used them but we did have red, orange and green pages and a mini whiteboard in student planners.

... although I must say most of these frivolous, factually dubious but sometimes fun fads have been replaced in many schools (mine included) by incessant marking to track progress and feedback on every -single-sodding piece of work they do. By the time you've done that, it's time to do the next piece of work. Got no idea how you are meant to teach anything new in between. I am always approximately four weeks behind.

What is flipped learning??

My understanding is it is doing work at home instead of school....

The fine print says this is flipped because your next lesson relies on them having done it.

This is how A level English has run for year (reading anyone? critical research?). I sent half my class away least week because they hadn't done their reading. I explained flipped learning to them and they said ' so... homework?'

As I understand it, normal learning is the teacher teaching the kids stuff, then they go home and do homework practising it.

In flipped learning, they teach themselves at home, then spend the lesson practising. Except they can’t, because if they could teach themselves successfully then they wouldn’t need teachers, would they?

So basically flipped learning is setting the kids a mymaths homework to go through the lesson on solving quadratic equations and expecting them to be able to solve quadratic equations next time they come in. Hah.

We used to do a thing a bit like this with A level where they'd read the article at home, underline key scholars/points/ and come ready to discuss - instead of doing it all in the lesson. Was brilliant for ethics and prep for uni seminars. We didn't call it anything fancy and I can't see how it would have worked with other topics never mind subjects- pe come in having learnt how to play....

Thank you for cheering me up with tales of some really daft initiatives! Love the cups story, brainache.

I do a lot of flipped learning at A Level but it is just homework under another name...but pre-reading homework specifically rather than practising homework. It does mean kids can have a chance at working at own pace when they first encounter an idea/concept but that does depend on them actually doing it...

The thing is stick and aracena , I found that many students didn't actually come in prepared to discuss at all . they spend the lesson winging it or riding on others' coat tails. This is the biggest change in attitude at A level 9Englsih anyway) in the last 15 years. You mean we have to read a book? At home??

And yes I imagine A level English has usually relied on kids coming to class having already done something.

I kind of want to invent a fad just to become rich overnight....

Oh cross post.

My A level RS sets were awesome but the culture had been built up in the school (grammar school) so they were already "there" with coming prepared. But grammar school so different kids and genius of a hod (not me!) who really was amazing and I couldn't keep up with!