Primary Teaching Skills

Prof E C Wragg, E. C. Wragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134888962
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Primary teachers have always been required to master a wealth of knowledge and professional skills and recent debate has led to pressure for ever higher levels of competence. Ted Wragg's book provides a comprehensive guide to the skills needed by today's primary teachers. Separate chapters cover such central demands of the job as explaining new topics, asking stimulating questions and settling down with a new class and one is devoted to the particular problems of supply teachers. Based on extensive research in classrooms over the last three years, Primary Teaching Skills will enlighten and entertain both student and novice teachers and their more experienced colleagues at all stages of their professional development.

Chapter 1
Skilful teaching

The need for skilful teaching

Primary teachers have always needed a wide range of subject knowledge and a large repertoire of professional skills. Teaching young children to read and write, to understand the world around them, to grasp and be able to apply fundamental mathematical and scientific principles, to use their developing intelligence and imagination, to live and work harmoniously with others, all these require that an effective teacher should possess knowledge and understanding of the content of the subjects and topics being taught, as well as the ability to manage a class, explain clearly, ask intelligent and appropriate questions, and monitor and assess learning.

There are many factors which have combined, during the last few years of the twentieth century, to demand from teachers even higher levels of professional competence. They include the rapid growth in the acquisition of knowledge, the changing nature not only of adult employment, but also of recreation and leisure, the increased public pressure for accountability, the development of new forms of educational and information technology, and the broadening role of the primary teacher. Any single one of these individual issues would require a radical review of the teacher’s professional role, and of the nature of professional competence required to accommodate change and improve practice. In combination they represent an overwhelming pressure for improvement by all practitioners, even the many who already manifest a high degree of skill in the classroom.

In the nineteenth century teacher training institutions were known as ‘normal schools’, on the grounds that there was some single ‘norm’ endorsed by society. The function of a training establishment was to perpetuate this stereotype, and a ‘Master of Method’ was employed in the model school to ensure that each new generation of teachers was poured into the same approved mould (Rich 1933). Today the factors mentioned above combine to require levels of skill, understanding, imagination, and resilience from teachers which go infinitely beyond the rudimentary common sense and mechanical competence fostered by the normal schools of the last century.

The massive explosion of knowledge gathering during the last fifty years has produced banks of data in such profusion that no human being is now capable of grasping more than the tiniest fraction of their contents. There are examples of computer-stored research data, such as the Lockheed Dialog system, which contain research reports in hundreds of fields, and the largest files in subjects like chemistry and biology can disgorge millions of abstracts.

It is not only in the pure and applied sciences that knowledge has burgeoned, but also in several other areas of human endeavour, including the humanities, with thousands of new books and articles in many fields being published each year. In addition to this formidable advance in the discovery of new information there has been a considerable development of new skills. Transplant and bypass surgery, for example, unknown only a few years ago, have become a standard part of many surgeons’ professional armoury.

The implications for teachers of this knowledge explosion are clear. If you cannot know everything, you must know something. Hence the many efforts made either at regional or national level to determine the content of education— what children of a particular age or level of ability ought to learn, or by teachers themselves at local level to shape and implement a coherent curriculum. Secondly, if you cannot know or learn everything, you must be able to find out for yourself, and this is why the process of learning has become important, as well as, though not instead of, the content. Thirdly, since their pupils can acquire only a tiny fraction of the knowledge and skills currently available to humanity, teachers must develop teaching strategies which not only transmit information, but also encourage children to learn independently and as a member of a group. Although no committee would ever have composed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it is also unlikely that any individual could have sent a rocket to the moon. A great deal of human achievement will in future be the result of teamwork.

Alongside the demands placed on teachers by the expansion of knowledge and skills are those caused by the significant social changes in recent years which are taking place on a scale unparalleled in any period other than wartime. During the 1970s one million jobs disappeared from manufacturing industry in Britain, and millions more were obliterated during the following two decades. Most were unskilled and semi-skilled forms of employment which will probably never return.

Faced with youth unemployment on a large scale, many teachers, especially in inner-city schools, found during the 1980s and 1990s that traditional forms of motivation, such as urging pupils to work hard at school so that they would obtain a good job, no longer had the appeal they once enjoyed. Disaffection over the apparent futility of learning can even be experienced by quite young primary pupils. It offers another formidable challenge to the professional ingenuity of the teacher.

Employers, meanwhile, able to erect artificial barriers when applicants for jobs vastly exceed the actual vacancies, may require high GCSE grades for posts previously taken by the less well qualified, A levels where GCSE was once sufficient, and a degree in what was formerly a non-graduate profession. This spiralling demand for qualifications puts yet more pressure on teachers to use their skills effectively during the compulsory years of schooling, especially in the early years when firm foundations should be laid. In our increasingly technological and bureaucratic society those who leave school under-educated, for whatever reason, are at risk, likely to be unemployed, or fall victim to loan sharks and the other predators in society.

The more optimistic scenario, that labour will shift out of the factory and into the leisure industry, that people will have more free time in future and be relieved of the tedium of monotonous jobs, that early retirement will give a boost to community and lifelong education, is no less demanding on teachers’ skills. To enjoy leisure, adults must have learned how to use it fruitfully. Citizens in the twenty-first century are more likely to be willing to learn throughout their lives if they have been fired and enthused, rather than rebuffed and demoralised, in school. The quality of personal relationships between teacher and taught, therefore, is a direct result of the interpersonal skill of the teacher, who usually sets the tone in a class, or has to take the initiative to improve relationships should they go awry. A notion of teaching skill that embraced only the transmission of knowledge would be a poor one in such a context.

Furthermore in the twenty-first century many people will work in service industries, and others will run small businesses. This shift out of the factory and into closer contact with people, rather than machinery, requires a high degree of imagination, inventiveness, drive and interpersonal skills. Again a sound basis for those qualities can be established in good primary schools, and teachers who nurture them should be greatly valued.

Public pressure for accountability has increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and it is an international phenomenon. Uncertainty over employment, scarcity of resources and demands for proper scrutiny of any enterprise receiving funding, public or private, have combined to provide a widespread call for a high degree of competence in the teaching profession, with particular focus on the primary phase, from parents, politicians, and the press. This has been mirrored in Britain in the various Acts of Parliament which have introduced requirements on schools to publish information about themselves, carry out the appraisal of teachers and heads, teach a national curriculum, and apply national tests to children aged 7 and 11, the scores from which can then be published and compared with those of other schools. This is not the place to go into the pros and cons of the measures taken by British governments during the 1980s and 1990s, as I have done that elsewhere (Wragg 1988, 1990, 1991). It is cited here as an example of a further external pressure on schools for highly skilled teaching.

The development of new technology such as the micro-computer, forms of teletext, the interactive video disc, direct broadcasting by satellite and cable television offer a further challenge to primary teachers. One important feature of some of the more recent forms of technological development is that the micro-computer and the interactive video disc in particular, offer an interactive facility on a scale not previously available, changing the position of the teacher as the single authoritative initiator of, or respondent to, enquiry. In 1985 and 1986 the BBC Domesday Project involved 14,000 schools using modern technology to survey the whole of the United Kingdom, in celebration of the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday book. Pupils who took part were mainly aged 9 to 13, and two significant interactive video discs were produced as a result.

Such developments test the flexibility and adaptability of teachers, who need to be able to modify their teaching styles to accommodate some at least of the many new developments which have a potential to improve learning. Indeed, broadcasting technology itself has made teachers more vulnerable than ever before. The teacher attempting to teach the topic ‘Insects’ to a primary class fifty years ago would not have been compared with anyone other than another teacher. Today she will be compared with the finest television presenters in the world, whose programmes on insects enjoy multi-million-pound budgets and access to the very best of wildlife film available.

Even if primary teachers were able to concentrate entirely on their classroom role as transmitters of knowledge, skills and values to the next generation, the assignment would be a formidable one. However, the role of the teacher has broadened during the last decades of the century. The real or imagined ills of society are often attributed, rightly or wrongly, to schooling. Teachers can find themselves playing many roles, such as social worker (dealing with children whose families experience economic and social deprivation), jailer (coping with children reluctant to come to school), administrator (handling the increasing bureaucracy surrounding curriculum and assessment), public relations officer (meeting parents, members of the community, dealing with local meetings), and numerous others. Teaching is certainly not a job for the faint-hearted.

In many countries changes in birth rates have led to concomitant changes in school size and in the age distribution of the teaching profession. The rollercoaster graph of annual birth cohorts is followed by a related graph of teacher recruitment. In Britain and other industrialised countries like Germany, the birth rate fell dramatically for over a decade and then rose again. A British peak of nearly a million births in 1964 was followed by a thirteen-year decline of a third. The consequence of this was that primary school populations fell by over a quarter during the first few years of the 1980s, leading to numerous primary school closures and mergers.

A rapid expansion in the recruitment of teachers during the 1960s and early 1970s was followed by a decline in the 1980s, when many primary trained teachers failed to find a job at all until the later years of the decade as schools expanded once again. By 1990 three out of every five primary teachers were aged over 40, leading to reduced promotion prospects and falling morale. On the positive side, there was a great deal of professional experience available, which certainly helped considerably when the national curriculum was introduced in 1989. The negative aspect, however, is that after years of repeats of favoured teaching strategies, it is not always easy to make changes when they become necessary.

One way to reduce, if not avoid, falling morale when promotion prospects are less in evidence than they were formerly is for teachers to take pride in honing their professional skills, and a number of in-service courses, especially certain schoolbased ones, have attempted to facilitate professional development and selfappraisal for experienced teachers. This theme will be taken up again in chapter 12.

It was not possible in the Leverhulme Primary Project at Exeter University to investigate and analyse all the vast complexity of skills mentioned above as necessary for teaching the present and future generations of young children. It was decided, therefore, in the strand of the project which I directed, to concentrate in particular on class management, but also to investigate such key skills as explaining and questioning, as well as teachers’ subject knowledge and the strategies teachers employ when they are on new or unfamiliar ground. The matters of subject knowledge and student teachers are also taken up in more detail in the other major strand of the Leverhulme Primary Project, directed by Professor Neville Bennett, and reported in the companion volume to this one, Learning to Teach (Bennett and Carré 1993).

Identifying and defining teaching skills

The Leverhulme Primary Project took place at Exeter University during a period from the 1988 Education Act to the General Election of 1992 when debates about educational standards were commonplace and sometimes acrimonious. For the reasons cited earlier in this chapter there is understandable concern that the levels of attainment of children should rise to help them meet the increasing demands of life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even if the quality of teaching improves, it may not improve far or fast enough to match the escalating demands on teachers.

Unfortunately the accompanying debate about teaching competence has too often been oversimplified and caricatured as ‘traditional’ versus ‘progressive’, ‘formal’ versus ‘informal’, ‘phonics’ versus ‘real books’, when the reality of classroom life is that many teachers prefer to use a mixture of methods rather than fill out a single stereotype. The Leverhulme Primary Project was based on the premise that all teachers have to manage a class of children, however differently conceived their styles of class management may be, and that such professional communication skills as questioning and explaining are witnessed in every primary classroom.

There was, therefore, no conscious favouring of any single style of teaching. Individual researchers do, of course, have personal preferences and prejudices like other people, but wherever possible we tried to push these to the periphery and concentrate on interpretations of what we saw and then both report these as research findings as well as develop teaching materials and ideas, an empirical approach in the main. Our intention, however, was that teachers should be able to read, in the books on research findings, about what we had discovered, and that, in the accompanying workbooks on professional skills, such as Class Management (Wragg 1993), Questioning (Brown and Wragg 1993) and Explaining (Wragg and Brown 1993), trainee and experienced teachers would be encouraged to analyse and determine their own teaching strategies, rather than merely copy someone else’s preferences. In the various strands of the project we observed over a thousand lessons, conducted more than a thousand interviews with teachers, students and pupils, gave tests to over a thousand teachers and pupils, and analysed over two thousand questionnaire responses. Some of the samples were carefully selected national ones with balanced numbers of teachers from large and small, urban and rural, northern and southern schools, others were more rough-and-ready, opportunity samples of teachers willing to be observed, or agreeable to being interviewed at length.

There is less dissent about what constitutes effective teaching in discussion between people outside the profession than there is in the research and evaluation literature. Good teachers, it is commonly held, are keen and enthusiastic, well organised, firm but fair, stimulating, know their stuff, and are interested in the welfare of their pupils. Few would attempt to defend the converse: that good teachers are unenthusiastic, boring, unfair, ignorant, and do not care about their pupils.

Once the scrutiny of teaching is translated into the more precise terms demanded by the tenets of rigorous systematic enquiry, the easy agreement of casual conversation evaporates. Biddle and Ellena (1964), reporting the Kansas City role studies, found that there was not even clear agreement amongst teachers, parents and administrators about the role teachers should play.

In the 1970s and 1980s some of the attempts to see consensus in the research literature were criticised. For example, Gage (1978), summarising research studies which had attempted to relate teaching style to children’s learning, concluded that in the early years of schooling certain kinds of teacher behaviour did show some consistent relationship to children learning reading and arithmetic. From this he derived a set of prescriptive ‘Teacher should’ statements like ‘Teachers should call on a child by name before asking the question,’ ‘Teachers should keep to a minimum such activities as giving directions and organising the class for instruction’ or ‘During reading-group instruction, teachers should give a maximal amount of brief feedback and provide fast-paced activities of the “drill” type’.

Among the criticism of prescriptions based on summaries of recent findings is the proposition that much American work in particular is based on short-term tests of memory; that formal didactic styles of teaching often show up better on short-term measures and could, therefore, easily be perpetuated; that the ‘gains’ of method A compared with method B are often slight. This last argument is skilfully countered by Gage (1985) in his book Hard Gains in the Soft Sciences. He shows how significant policy decisions, in fields such as medicine and public health, are often made on a degree of statistical ‘superiority’ that would receive little attention in educational research. He quotes examples of trials of beta blockers and low-cholesterol diets to reduce the incidence of heart attacks, which showed only 2.5 and 1.7 per cent differences respectively between experimental and control groups’ mortality rates, but which nonetheless led to significant changes in public health policy and practice.

Doyle (1978) observed that reviewers of research into teacher effectiveness ‘have concluded, with remarkable regularity, that few consistent relationships between teacher variables and effectiveness can be established’. Even reviewers of the same studies have sometimes reached different conclusions about them (Giaconia and Hedges 1985). Some investigations have used meta-analysis (Glass 1978) to aggregate studies and identify trends and effects, but the conclusions are often mixed, and sometimes, especially when pioneers of some new approach conduct research into their own practice, a noticeable Hawthorne Effect occurs. That Kulik et al. (1979) found consistently higher learning gains in classes using the Keller Plan (a form of teaching which involves pupils completing individual assignments) compared with control groups is not an argument for saying that all teachers should copy the approach. Teachers often aspire to achieve a mixture of shorter-term (complete a worksheet, learn a principle) and longer-term (develop a sustained interest in music, lead a healthy lifestyle) objectives.

The difficulty of identifying and evaluating teaching skills and their effectiveness is neatly illustrated by an interesting experiment at the University of Michigan. Guetzkow et al. (1954) divided first-year students on a general psychology course into three groups. The first group was given a formal lecture course with regular tests, the second and third groups took part in tutorials and discussions. At the end of the course the lecture group not only outperformed the tutorial discussion groups on the final examination, but was also more favourably rated by the students. So far this represents a victory for lecturing and testing on two commonly used criteria: test performance and student appraisal.

The investigators discovered, however, that the students in the discussion groups scored significantly higher than the lecture groups on a measure of interest in psychology, the subject being studied. They hypothesised that though the lecture-group students gave a favourable rating of the teaching they had received, this may have been because they had less anxiety about grades for the course through their weekly feedback from test scores. It was decided to monitor the subsequent progress of all the groups. Three years later not one student in the lecture group had opted to study the subject further, but fourteen members of the two discussion and tutorial groups had chosen to major in psychology. Thus on short term criteria the lecture method was superior, but taking a longer perspective the discussion method appeared to motivate students more powerfully, and ultimately some must have learned a great deal more (McKeachie 1963).

Defining teaching skill in such a way that all would agree, therefore, is not a simple matter. If we were to say that teaching skills are whatever strategies teachers use to enable children to learn, then most people would want to rule out intimidation, humiliation, the use of corporal punishment or other forms of teacher behaviour of which they personally happen to disapprove. It is perhaps easier when seeking a definition of teaching skill to describe some of the characteristics of skilful teaching which might win some degree of consensus, though not universal agreement.

The first might be that the behaviour concerned ‘facilitates pupils’ learning of something worthwhile’, such as facts, skills, values, concepts, how to live harmoniously with one’s fellows, attitudes, or some other outcome thought to be de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Skilful Teaching
• Chapter 2: The Management of Teaching
• Chapter 3: First Encounters with a Class
• Chapter 4: Systematic Studies of Class Management
• Chapter 5: Managing Children’s Behaviour and Work
• Chapter 6: Supply Teachers
• Chapter 7: Pupils’ Views of Management
• Chapter 8: Explaining and Explanations
• Chapter 9: Teachers’ Questions
• Chapter 10: Teachers’ Subject Knowledge
• Chapter 11: Student Teachers’ Professional Skills
• Chapter 12: Training Skilful Teachers
• Bibliography