Bad Education

The Guardian Columns

Phil Beadle

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781845906832
• eBook ISBN: 9781845907501
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Phil Beadle has been described as The scourge of education policy makers and A prolific writer of articles challenging the status quo in education. Bad Education is an anthology of his best columns. Written in his trademark, simple, luminous and down-to-earth style, this collection is a wry look at more or less every element of educational change over the last five years.

Pedagogy

Let’s Plaster On a Fake Grin and Trawl through This Sorry Sack One More Time

When asked the name of the greatest man who ever lived, some would reach in the direction of Shakespeare, others might point towards Abraham Lincoln. Still more would go for Gandhi. A greater number, of course, would find even Gandhi’s achievements pale when set against those of Sir Sidney James of the Carry On movies. I have a new candidate for this pantheon: Daniel Corbett.

Daniel Corbett is the BBC weatherman whose hands perform an entrancingly eloquent, disembodied ballet as he rhapsodises about cold fronts coming in from over the Pennines. There is a lot any teacher can learn from Daniel Corbett, not least through importing his techniques at that point when they share lesson objectives with the class. Rather than just trudge through the usual, perfunctory, tired and nasal monotone, ‘Today, blah blah your lesson objectives blah blah blah,’ Corbett’s genius has injected new verve and passion into my presentation of these. I’ll launch into his patented right-hand ‘circle and flourish’, the like of which you would normally expect from the multi-ringed hand of a French courtier, as I present to the class those most sultry and seductive of words, ‘Today your lesson objectives are …’

I do this, not only in tribute to Corbett, but also to hide the fact that importing the phrase ‘lesson objectives’ from the teaching manuals into the classroom is a bit dumb. During an inspection kids are meant to be able to tell OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) inspectors what their lessons objective are. I’ve actually heard a conversation between one of my pupils and an OFSTED inspector.

‘What’s the lesson objective young man?’

‘It’s the thing the teacher has to put on the board, that we have to copy down because he can’t be bothered to do a proper starter activity.’

‘No, but what is an objective?’

‘I told you … It’s the thing … the teacher … puts on the board. Strewth. Where did they get you from?’

‘What are you learning today?’ is another question entirely, and is likely to achieve a more satisfying response.

‘What are we learning today? Oh we’re learning about plate tectonics and oxbow lakes and the symbolic significance of the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf and the caves in Forster’s Passage to India. You know, sir, I still have trouble in accepting Woolf as a feminist writer. But I can see you’ve got somewhere else to go to. There’s always another teacher’s career to be ruined. And it doesn’t matter how poker faced you are, we know you’re here to judge us, and assign all the work this brilliant human being has done in the last three years to change our lives for the better a near arbitrary and completely reductive grade.’

Teachers are meant to share lesson objectives at the beginning of each lesson, so that children have an explicit awareness about what it is that they are going to learn. That way, so the theory goes, they are involved in meta-cognition: thinking about learning, which is, apparently, a good thing for schoolchildren to be doing nowadays. Not actually learning, but thinking about it.

There are further controversies about lesson objectives, and the approach to these, from what I’ve seen, varies from school to school. In the school in which I spent most of my career we were expressly forbidden from using the verb ‘know’ in setting learning objectives. Woe betide the teacher who wrote, ‘By the end of this lesson you will know something you didn’t know before’ on the whiteboard; he would be told off in a right royal manner. This foxed me. What’s so wrong with knowing stuff? Isn’t transmitting knowledge what we are paid to do? We’d be given voluminous lists of acceptable and unacceptable verbs to pin up on our classroom walls. ‘Draw’ was OK. ‘Extrapolate’ too. ‘Learn’, though, was most decidedly not.

It took me several years to work out why knowing and learning things in schools had been subject to such an evidently paradoxical pogrom. It was to encourage independent learning, this week’s new fascism. You can ‘know’ something through the teacher talking about it for a whole hour. You can even ‘learn’ it that way. You can’t draw it though. Know and learn were verboten in lesson objectives because it was tacit acceptance that the kids didn’t have to do any work in order to know things, that you can transmit knowledge perfectly well through front of class teaching, and front of class teaching as all teachers now know, is very wrong indeed.

In some schools lesson objectives are differentiated, giving distinct likely levels of attainment by the end of the lesson. This works on a some–most–all formula. Some will be able to draw an archaeopteryx, most will have made some kind of mark on the paper, all will at least have picked up the pencil. For me, this way of doing things, though probably sound in principle, is a bit too nakedly open about the fact that the most one member of the class can manage is the odd dribble in a bucket.

The biggest question for me though with lesson objectives is why we have to share them at all. I can see why they have to be set. Without defining what the children are going to learn, you can just go through a series of unconnected exercises that pass the time quite adequately with no learning happening all year. But why the dictate that children must know what these are at the beginning of the lesson? Why can’t we ask them to guess what they are going to learn, or tell us what they learnt at the end of the lesson? Why can’t it be a surprise? Why all the ‘if you don’t do it this way you are an inadequate’ strictures?

I dare any teachers reading this to try a week where you don’t share lesson objectives at all with the pupils, and see what difference it makes to their learning. Letters, containing the phrase ‘Sod all’ to P. Beadle, care of Education Guardian.

Multiple Intelligences

John White, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, has recently published an essay calling Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory into question. Many of us in schools across the country use Gardner’s theory as a guiding mechanism behind our classroom practice, and if Professor White has exposed it to be without foundation, then the world collapses and we are exposed as the frauds we’ve always suspected ourselves to be.

Gardner’s theory has been virulent in schools. For those not in the education sector, Gardner proposes that intelligence is not limited to what we might call IQ, but is a collection of seven, eight or nine different intelligences. Logico-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, intra-personal and inter-personal were the first batch. These have since been joined by naturalist and (perhaps) by existential.

In short, just because you’re not good at maths and English it doesn’t mean you’re thick: you might have some other special ability, and this might usefully be termed an intelligence.

It’s an immensely seductive measure for those of us working with students who find areas of the curriculum difficult to access. Helping a student discover what they are good at (or think/hope they’re good at) and giving this the term ‘intelligence’ can have a marked effect on a child’s self-esteem.

Some schools have even gone so far as to have ‘smart’ (or ‘smarts’) cards printed for students. A weird variation on donor cards, these say, ‘Hi. I’m Mike, and I have high quotients of musical and logico-mathematical intelligence.’ On seeing this, a teacher would know to avoid Mike as one would a leprous dog, since he likes nothing better than singing songs about sums, and is a nutter.

Professor White’s arguments are many and complex. Loosely though, he suggests that Gardner’s definitions of the varying intelligences have little to do with scientific fact, and are more the result of Gardner’s own artistic judgement, superimposing his own previous studies in the arts onto Piaget’s theories of development. The Professor also suggests that Gardner’s criteria for defining an intelligence have been plucked from the ether; and the intelligences themselves don’t even have to fulfil all such criteria.

He makes a compelling case. I too have had less academic worries than Professor White’s about some of Gardner’s theories: the definition of naturalistic intelligence for instance. Liking bunny rabbits and kittens is not a form of intelligence; more likely the obverse. Also, what is the difference between intra-personal and existential intelligence? Are the intra-personally intelligent deep thinkers and the existentially intelligent, like, really, really deep thinkers?

The notion of kinaesthetic intelligence is too broad. Anyone who’s ever seen Frank Bruno poured into a tutu during panto season will tell you a boxer and a dancer aren’t the same thing. Yet Gardner’s theory will tell you that they possess high quotients of exactly the same intelligence.

When one comes to assessing students’ intelligences with web-based tools, you often find these are creakier than an exam invigilator’s Hush Puppies, and the questions you are required to answer are facile. Engaging in regular sporting activity is no measure of one’s ability at it, and being asked whether you like ‘all kinds of animals’ is a question more suited to CBeebies than a serious scientific assessment.

White argues that Gardner’s theory is developmentalist; that it proposes the existence of two polar states for each intelligence, the initial and the mature. The initial state is one’s (alleged) genetic capacity for a certain intelligence; the mature state is less easily defined and, since there’s no consensus as to how one would define it, relies on reference to cultural production. Gardner would argue that Keats, for instance, as a poet, would be an example of a mature linguistic intelligence.

But judging the maturity of this or that person’s intelligence on the basis of their achievement or place in a near arbitrarily constructed canon is faulty. As is the notion that humans have a limited capacity set by a genetic code. Children are not hard-wired at birth. You can learn things. Jacqueline du Pré may not have been a particularly natural cellist, but you can bet your bum she practised a lot.

At its worst multiple intelligences can be used to deny the need to work at things. And, as such, can end up being just as reductive a form of labelling as the previous forms its application in schools seeks to overthrow. ‘I don’t have to work hard in maths, I’m musically intelligent.’ I’ve even used it myself at home to justify lassitude. Claiming I don’t have any visual intelligence has got me out of decorating the front room for a whole year now; it sometimes even gets me out of tidying up.

So there is much in Professor White’s essay that makes sense. Where I baulk though is at any suggestion that schools should be throwing out effective practice because it is built on theoretical sand. Professor White says, ‘If the intelligences are not part of human nature but wobbly constructions on the part of their author, educators should treat them with caution.’

It all depends on whether you as an educator protect notions of truth as being utterly sacrosanct. The aforementioned Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ contains the final couplet, ‘ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ This always struck me as romantic juvenile twaddle; and, to pervert a journalistic maxim, you should never let the truth get in the way of a good lesson.

Multiple intelligences works best as a model through which you can construct a really interesting lesson, or as a fairly advanced form of differentiation. Rather than getting the pre-literate students to fill out endless and pointless word searches and cloze procedures, get them to dance about it, sing about it, talk about it, think about it.

And whilst it may not be scientific fact that these intelligences exist, humans do possess different competencies. Judging an illiterate kid as thick, when in fact he can take a car engine apart and put it back together from memory, not only maims him – for life – but it is factually incorrect. Multiple intelligences may just be a sticking plaster to put on the gaping wounds of social exclusion, but it’s the best thing we’ve got to hand as teachers.

As Gardner himself says, ‘So long as materials are taught and assessed in only one way, we will only reach a certain kind of child. But everything can be taught in several ways. The more that we can match youngsters to congenial approaches of teaching, learning and assessing, the more likely it is that those youngsters will achieve educational success.’

So, is the theory of multiple intelligences flakier than a seven-day-old almond slice with dandruff? Quite possibly. But who cares?3

The Marshmallow Test

You pick up some odd pieces of knowledge as a freelance educationalist. Fascinating facts I have learnt this week are that hamsters are colour blind, the French for toad is crapaud and that the marshmallow has been around, in one form or other, for over two thousand years.

Which leads me to the partial theme of this month’s column: the marshmallow test. In his book Emotiona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Bad Education
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• The Learning Environment
• Performance
• Pedagogy
• ICT
• People and Personalities
• Literacy
• Literature
• Politics and Policy
• Class
• References
• About the Author
• Also by Phil Beadle
• Copyright