Not another national strategy (thank goodness)
Photo by Alexandru-Bogdan Ghita on Unsplash
When the national strategies first appeared in England around 20 years ago I was cautiously optimistic. I say “cautiously” because I knew from experience of being an ICT advisor in London that when the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority published the Primary ICT scheme of work, along with sample units, many teachers assumed that both the scheme and the units were mandatory. They weren’t: they were intended as examples, the expectation being that teachers would then use them, along with their imagination, to create their own ICT scheme of work and their own units of work.
Perhaps my experience was unusual, but even years later I was coming across schools who were still using the QCA units, by which time they’d become stale, and old-fashioned if not quite out-of-date.
I don’t blame schools for erring on the side of caution. For years it’s been the case, or at least seems to be the case, that satisfying Ofsted inspectors who may not know anything about ICT or Computing is a safer bet than trying to be innovative.
My caution turned to alarm when, at a publishing conference, I got chatting to someone who had been asked to contribute lessons for the literacy hour. Not lesson plans, but lessons, fully scripted. She refused, and I suppose lots of other people must have refused because as far as I know no scripted lessons appeared, “just” a scripted lesson structure in which lessons were divided into chunks of time regardless of the circumstances of the pupils, teachers or their school.
But think about that for a second. The “powers-that-be” require would-be teachers to have a degree, possibly a post-graduate certificate in education, to have passed a test showing that they have met a set of teacher standards, and undergo a probationary period. And then if the proponents of scripted lessons had their way these highly qualified teachers are told to follow a lesson plan so detailed that even the words used in instructions have to be read out verbatim.
Surely that sort of thing can be proposed by departments of education only for one or more of the following reasons:
Arrogance: we know better than expert educationalists because we went to school too.
Dim-wittedness: Highly intelligent and creative people (teachers) would welcome the opportunity to have all decision-making based on their expertise taken away from them.
Ignorance: we have no idea of what teachers actually do apart from acting as child-minders so we don’t need experts in the classroom, just people who can read from a script.
Well, fortunately the scripted lessons didn’t happen, but in my opinion the Key Stage 3 ICT Strategy was almost as bad. While some of the materials were excellent, the whole enterprise was spoilt by two things.
First, the strategy itself seemed like a huge job creation scheme to me. The Key Stage 3 co-ordinator in school “reported” to the Local Authority Key Stage 3 co-ordinator, who reported to a regional Key Stage 3 co-ordinator….
Second, the lesson plans were a form of death by PowerPoint, with instructions like “After 7 minutes go to slide 4…”
There was also the 3-part lesson, which I lampooned in an article in 2004, in which I wrote the following:
The idea of the 3-part lesson is not exactly new. Long-in-the-tooth educationalists will recall the original description of the 3-part lesson:
“First I tells ‘em what I’m going to ell ‘em, then I tells ‘em, then I tells ‘em what I told ‘em”.
To be fair, and also boringly pedantic and modern (which is probably a tautological statement in itself), the first part of that is a declaration of lesson objectives rather than of intended learning outcomes. Even so, you can see the similarities between this “old-fashioned” approach and the current “conventional” wisdom.
I wouldn’t mind – in fact, I think the formalisation of the concept of the 3-part lesson is very useful. But there is no consistency. The 3-part lesson has developed into the 4-part lesson, and I’ve recently come across a project that promotes the idea of the 6-part lesson, and a school which bases all its lesson planning on the model of a 7-part lesson.
None of these goes far enough.
I propose the 3000-part lesson. Based on the “ideal” lesson time for discrete ICT of 50 minutes, the 3000-part lesson would itemise exactly what was to happen in each second of the lesson. Nothing would be left to chance.
I do have some philosophical questions though. For example, part 1 of my ideal lesson is “Preparing to change the mind set of the pupils entering the classroom”. Should this be counted as part 1 of the lesson or, because it actually starts before the lesson, is it more legitimate to regard it as part 3001 of the previous lesson?”
Please send your answers on a self-addressed postcard.
I was reminded of all this recently when looking through old Ted Wragg articles. He also wrote diatribes against lessons that had to be “delivered” according to a set structure regardless of local needs.
I mention all this now because I’ve been reflecting on how amazingly well schools and teachers have responded to the pandemic. To some extent this was despite the ineptitude of the Department for Education, but I’m coming round to the idea that it was also partly because of their ineptitude. Given how the DfE at one point announced that live lessons were best, based on no evidence that I could discern and at the same time that Ofsted said live lessons are not always the best, imagine how awful it could have been had they decided to produce a national strategy for teaching online.
I suspect that nobody at the DfE knows enough about technology or teaching to think of proposing such as thing. If so, then ignorance on the part of the DfE really is bliss for the rest of us.
