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It’s very hard to disagree with this, Richard. I spoke recently to someone who teaches at a primary school in northern Tasmania, who stated more or less that “say what you like about the Essential Learnings, it’s made every teacher in this state think about what they do.”
It probably has achieved this noble goal—but arguably teachers could have been made to do this without totally redesigning (I won’t dare say dumbing down) the educational landscape along with it. It’s also alienated parents and the business community and a report in today’s Mercury suggests that teachers are being reduced to tears by shortcomings with SARIS, the IT program used to input reports against the ELs.
The problems with the implementation of this radical reform may fade with time, and there are grounds to accuse The Mercury of conducting a smear campaign to embarrass the DoE, or the government, or both. But for now, some vital questions will remain unanswered: why completely reform the practice of our schools so radically, and jeopardise the loyalty of key stakeholders (such as parents and the business community) to do it? What price reform?
I concur with you, Richard, in that we now have to live with this (whether we like it or not, and indeed many do not) because too much has been staked on it in the high echelons of beauracracy. Of course, we should all be mushrooms. Life would be simpler for those at the wheel of the Juggernaut that way.
Posted by on 20/09/05 at 05:50 AMThe ELS are nothing but state-sanctioned child abuse & so is the ‘Whole Word’ ‘teaching’ of reading.
They are linked, because kids who were never taught phonics were also never taught any content, & the ELS is just a gigantic cover-up of a criminally dumbed down education ‘system’, cloaked in impenetrable jargon.
The jargon is there to hoodwink & intimidate, & the person who has been most hoodwinked & intimidated by her incompetent minders, who have either never taught or never will again, is Paula Wriedt herself.
Posted by on 23/09/05 at 08:17 AMDon’t hold back, Peta! Let ‘em have it. I will have to pull you up on the phonics vs. whole language issue though. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that ‘content’ can and is taught through a whole-language approach; if you like, I can get you in touch with Mem Fox, who will explain much better than I ever could. Or I could relate my own experience: I do not recall ever receiving any phonics instruction during my formative schooling. I certainly received plenty of ‘content’.
Perhaps I’m an aberration.
It is simply that phonics lends itself to empirical study and therefore results are easily quantifiable, meaning that its impact on learning to read is fairly clear.
My argument is, and has always been, that the effective teacher will draw on elements of both in a stimulating and engaging literacy program. To reduce the debate to a simple right-wrong dichotomy serves no one and achieves very little.
Posted by on 24/09/05 at 08:27 AMYes, you are an aberration, Cameron, & you are also old enough to have been given content, by old chalkies such as myself.
The ‘facilitators’ who pass as teachers are giving an entire generation nothing but air & self esteem: a fatal combination. Have you read Kevin Donnelly’s ‘Why Our Schools Are Failing’? It’s in the Lonnie library.
Also, I recommend ‘All Must Have Prizes’ by Melanie Philips, which tells the whole sad UK story of dumbing down, which, of course Tas copied.
I’m afraid that quoting Mem Fox to me is like a red rag to a bull, & the ‘we use a range of strategies’ line is enough to give me heart failure. There is little or no phonics taught, so there is no ‘range’, & why should there need to be when phonice worked for decades & produced literate, independent thinkers, who were able to function competently in the workforce at much younger ages than kids today?
Read Byron Harrison’s ‘Reading Through Tears’. He says it all much better than I, and he has done the research that I respect, for decades.
Posted by on 25/09/05 at 09:29 AMI won’t dare say that Kevin Donnelly is part of the problem, here, Peta! It’s enough to say that, like Mark Twain’s premature demise, the notion that our schools are failing is greatly exaggerated, I suspect.
For your information, I emailed Donelly about a month ago, to get his responses to a few questions I had. I was curious, and I happened across a posting of his on a blog somewhere, so clicked the link and up popped his email address. His response was very interesting, and he sent me a couple of articles he’d written, which are both very good. I am very wary, though, of what I have heard others refer to as a ‘dangerous intellectual nostalgia’. Do you, Peta, suggest that we should return to the days of chalk and talk, a top-down one-way flow of information in the classroom, or even--and this is enough to give me heart failure--rote learning? I worked with a SOSE teacher not so long ago, in a school not far from where I currently sit, who operated this way, and this is what it produced: boredom. Utter, total monotony. No engagement, no colour, nothing: students nodded off in the back row while the air became heavy with fact after pointless fact.
Admittedly, that is an extreme case from a teacher who should have retired long before this particular lesson. This issue is far too complex to reduce simply, but basically we have to try and prepare students for their future, and their future is differnet from the one that faced me when I left school, and the future for the generation after that will be different again. Students need skills, they need to find their voice, they need to be equipped morally as well as intellectually to make a decision that will set them up on a career path of their choosing. As I said recently in another post on this site somewhere, all teachers have to do is work a miracle or two, somewhere between Playschool and the Pub. Much, much easier said than done, and teachers with any integrity will find ways to work those miracles in spite of The System that often works to limit rather than expand curriculum opportunities.
Otherwise, I’m sure we can agree to disagree!
Posted by on 27/09/05 at 06:25 AMDon’t fall into the Ed Dept sneer trap of implying that everyone who disagrees with the latest fad is advocating mere transferrance of facts.
That’s intellectually dishonest & you’ve got a much better mind than that.
You forget that I, & hundreds of other chalkies of my vintage, have had to sit through hundreds of hours of insulting seminars, given by jumped up nobodies, all with a miracle teaching method to bore us with.
What became of these wonderkinds? Who cares, & the same goes for their unworkable fads.
If imparting real love & real knowledge of one’s specialist area of expertise (as distinct from airy fairy post- modernist ‘essential’ ‘learnings’ (sic))is ‘nostalgia’, then western culture is in deep, deep peril.
Posted by on 27/09/05 at 08:46 AMI would strenuously avoid falling into any trap set by the DoE; in my current position, nestled safely in my little corner of academe, I am fortunate in that I can see with some objectivity what the Dept is doing (or not doing, as the case may be.)
Given that I don’t technicially work for them anymore—and will not, ever again, hopefully—I can lay the boot in. (Having said that, I am deeply disappointed that the Faculty of Education has uncritically jumped on the ELs bandwagon; I must, it seems, rebel in quiet ways.)
In sum, my take on the ELs is this, for the record: in theory they are built on some effective and engaging pedagogies, such as Teaching for Understanding, which has emanated from the work of people like Howard Gardner and Tina Blythe. Gardner’s work has its champions and its critics.
My concern with the ELs is on two fronts, however: firstly, it has not been ‘sold’ to parents or business leaders in the community in any effective way.
It’s one thing to say that parents and business leaders were consulted (during a process that the DoE labelled ‘co-construction’, whatever the hell that means) but it’s another to have parents and business leaders jumping up and down, as they are now, saying ‘we don’t get it; what does this report tell me?’
Part of the blame—a lot of it, actually—can be laid at the feet of those DoE bireaucrats who couched the ELs statements in such gut-rendingly AWFUL obfuscatory language—language which, I can only surmise, was designed to alienate the ignorant or, dare I say it, uneducated.
Teaching, or education, is and should be a people profession: you don’t involve people in what’s happening by building a Berlin Wall consisting of convoluted sentences and technical theoryspeak that will only baffle them.
My other central concern, and is there I’m sure we will find some agreement Peta, is that ELs do not belong in secondary schools or colleges.
High Schools and colleges must begin the process of preparing students for active and fulfilling involvement in society, and this has been seriosuly undermined by the adoption, at a couple of high schools in Launceston that I could name, of a timetable consisting of blocks of ‘inquiry learning’ which, as I observed on one visit, involved a room full of students on computers searching the internet for something.
Being teenagers, they were in fact digging up sites revolving around hot guys, or cars, or hot guys in cars, or chicks in bikinis. I will proudly be the first person to tell you that this is pretty bloody ordinary. One teacher described it to me as babysitting. It is totally airy-fairy and I can’t possibly see how it will help students figure out what the hell they want to do after they leave school and need to make their own way, as it were.
Of course there are ways of teaching content that are engaging and I am not advocating that this should involve a mere transferral of facts. I can still tell you all about Boule de Suif, Peta, or Chekhov’s short stories. Or the nihilism of Fathers and Sons. This stuff spoke to me back in Year 12 and it’s partly why I became a teacher. (It’s mostly because I was too lazy to study Medicine, and too ugly to become a model. I look awful in Speedos, just awful.)
There’s a whole other argument we could have about the teaching of literature and how it has been hijacked by the post-modernists ... but I do have work that I should be doing ... society, arguably, has become postmodernist; shouldn’t schools try and reflect that?
Remember, I also sat through my share of patronising seminars. I only had nine years of it, and I do hope it’s all behind me. (Dale Spender was the worst, advocating the Death of the Book in 1996 ...)
Finally, a looming dilemma for me is the education of my three-year-old boy, and his sibling, who is due to arrive at the end of March next year. I am an advocate of public education—but this has been seriously challenged by recent developments. As a matter of principle I would refuse to send him to a private school, as I have difficulty with the idea of preaching one thing and not practising it myself. Hypocrisy has its limits. Yet the essential question remains: where will he receive the most effective education?
I will be interested to see what happens if the Libs get in next year; will Gutwein bite the bullet and roll the ELs back? Interesting times, Peta. Stay tuned.
Posted by on 28/09/05 at 02:23 AMAgree with you about all this.
The never-ending bandwagons keep rolling along largely because the Bathurst street bureacrats are very dumb people &, if they ever taught, were very bad at it.
That, plus a string of out of touch ministers, equals constant tinkering, constant fads, & a long queue of people who think all change is good (because there’s a promotion in it for them).
I have been asked (usually in despair) by countless parents, where should I send my child, given that the state system is rotten & undisciplined? My answer? Swallow your principles, if you’ve got the money, & send them to private schools, or Catholic. If not, then educate them at home, yourself.
They couldn’t possibly get a worse education at home than they very very likely will in some sink hole high school
Posted by on 29/09/05 at 01:20 PMSuggesting home education would be better than high schools is an emotive and questionable direction I believe. Surely developing social skills by working with peers from all backgrounds and beliefs is very important for our children. I doubt private schools can deliver this either which is at the core of their problems.
As for the Essential Learnings....to suggest all teachers have been buliied from above is plainly ridiculous. I for one attended quite a few curriculum consultation sessions. I did this because as a Fingal Valley HPE / Music teacher in early years I was frustrated by the narrow foci of literacy and numeracy and believed the areas of social and environmental responsibility were being sadly overlooked.
Now finally, in the ELs Social Responsibility and World Futures has equal standing with Communicating (i.e. Being Literate and Being Numerate) ...surely this is not all bad. No point having highly literate and numerate future leaders who continue to destroy this great state at the current rate based on their belief that a healthy economy will solve social issues ...when it appears that the benefits never reach those who need it.
Posted by on 20/04/06 at 09:06 AM
