Tests, Tigger and the ‘Hand Signal TM’… Three ways to torture your students

Posted in ClassroomSolidarity's blog on ,

It’s 2.30pm on Friday - just half an hour before the end of a tiring week - and Year Ten are predictably restive. You need to move the lesson on but all attempts to settle the class have failed. Detentions are issued, individuals spoken to and you even attempt the trick of starting to explain from the board in the hope that they’ll all realise what you want them to do. Nothing works. You’ve got one last trick up your sleeve (literally): the ‘Hand Signal TM’. You stand with palm held aloft (in the manner favoured by one or two 20th Century fascist dictators) and wait – the idea being that the class will automatically fall silent. A couple of students glance at you with a distinct air of embarrassment whilst the rest carry on as before. One … two … three minutes pass as the class continues to resist your Pavlovian idiocy. It’s now 2.50pm (just ten minutes left) and you realise that the ‘plenary’ needs to be organised. The hand is lowered and you give out the ‘Weekly Reflection Sheet TM’. Going from table to table you realise that although they’ve been a bit noisy most of your students are actually working. All that time spent in ridiculous gesticulation at the front of the class was even more futile than you first thought. Now you’re supposed to stop them working to ‘reflect’ on the week at school. You fill in a form yourself: “This week I learnt how futile and humiliating most of these new behaviour ‘strategies’ really are and now know that the £200,000 spent by the school in consultancy fees would have been better spent on something else … like more teachers.”

“I’m a Tiger” shouts the bearded, middle-aged man at the front of hall. “Gggrrrrrrrrrrr” responds the audience of teachers. “Are you a Tiger?” the man asks one woman. “I’m … I’m a tiger” she stutters and her face flushes. “She’s one of our group! She belongs here! She loves this place!” he responds. “I’m a donkey” exclaims the head of sport – the hall bursts into laughter. Tiger-man is not amused. “It’s that sort of thinking that drags everyone else down. Yes you are a donkey, you’re just like Eeyore”. “This is a load of old Pooh!” responds our sports teacher. The assembled teachers are then told that there are different types of people, different types of learners. What a revelation. Some are indeed like Eeyore, others like Tigger and some like Pooh himself. What teachers have to do is encourage our students to be like Tigger – not as ditzy as the bouncing feline but as enthusiastic about life and school – and to feel part of ‘the group’. To move them into Tigger-type enthusiasm we must first know their learning styles: auditory, kinaesthetic, visual … the list goes on. Tiger-man quickly scrawls a picture of the human brain on a flip-chart and starts circling the different ‘active-centres’ corresponding to different types of learner. We’re informed that to get the most out of our students we must take into account their ‘learning style’, position on the ‘Pooh Bear’ mood spectrum and craft individual lessons to suit. After about twenty minutes of this pseudo-science someone asks what evidence exists to back up his claims. “This is all cutting edge thinking based on the latest findings from ‘brain-science’ … there isn’t actually any published research … but this is what makes it so exciting” Tiger-man enthuses. How exciting!

Three weeks to go until Year 9 take their maths SAT. They’ve gone through the KS3 curriculum, done the ‘Booster Sessions’, been subjected to motivational sessions from the LEA numeracy consultant and now all that’s left is to coach them on the most important skill of all: how to answer a SAT question. You’ve been informed that the biggest barrier to success at KS3 is the inability of many students to satisfactorily answer exam questions! They can do the work in class – teachers have evidence to prove this – but fail to understand what the questions mean. As exam questions tend to get recycled with only minor modification from year to year, all that’s required to overcome this ‘major problem’ is to coach students on a fairly narrow array of problems. So you go about preparing three weeks worth of lessons, sort out the exam questions you’ve been told to concentrate on and think to yourself: “can I really distil three years worth of teaching into three weeks? If this works, why not just give kids SATs three weeks into Year 7 and be done? Why can’t my students answer exam questions … is it a problem with children or with the exam? Can SATs really measure learning?”

The three scenarios above are based on real events in real schools. If they don’t yet sound familiar, they soon will. ‘Behaviour Management’ (dressed up pop-psych mumbo-jumbo) is an idea that is being sold to schools at an increasing rate. Profit making companies (some linked to universities, most not) are queuing up to sell their version of ‘cooperation’, ‘community’ and ‘classroom management’. In most cases the training amounts to little more than stating the obvious (“students like to feel safe”, “if you’re not consistent then students won’t know what to expect” …) and learning a few ‘strategies’ like the ‘Hand Signal TM’ (these are all trade marked … seriously). The outcomes of these new strategies are measured by a few self-serving surveys that, not surprisingly, tend to show continual improvement. Private companies are hardly going to conclude that what they’re selling is a load of old $%$^%$*£. Some students just find the whole thing hilarious but the principle that we can train young people to behave like a hungry animal is abhorrent. Such an explicit system of triggers, rewards and punishment reduces human relationships to a mechanical set of procedures. Skilled teachers don’t need a check-list approach to relating to students. We establish mutual respect and trust based on our skills as thinking people. If a school does have discipline problems then it’s no good just blaming unruly kids or ‘bad teachers’ – how about looking at the curriculum, social conditions, resources and class-size?

Personalised learning based around the ideas of learning styles and personality types is hokum written in the name of a basic truth. Yes, all students are different but when was this ever not the case? Any good teacher uses a variety of learning techniques in every lesson. Group work, kinaesthetic activities, writing and speaking happen in every single lesson. To insist that particular students can only work and learn in one particular way is an ideological crutch for the return to more vocational courses and the creation of a two-tier system. The ideas are largely without a theoretical base and are presented in such an outlandish way that most teachers find them laughable.

Testing, testing, testing … Students have always sat public examinations but the introduction of SATs, continual testing and assessment continues to have a destructive impact on how we teach. To pretend that all of these tests have some intrinsic significance is just one more fantasy indulged in by successive governments. When you come to realise – or are told outright – that students must be coached to pass specific types of exam then the whole testing regime becomes an even more cynical exercise.

The issue of SATs and over-testing has been with us for some time now (introduced when this teacher started secondary school) and we must continue to expose the idiocy of subjecting young people to the extreme pressures of tyrannical testing. The other ‘initiatives’ represent new ways to regulate both learners and teachers and involve whole new layers of paperwork, useless preparation and monitoring. If government thinks it can distil the essence of quality education into these sorts of framework then they’re either mistaken or plain stupid. The introduction of behaviour management schemes and ‘personalised learning’ into our classrooms should be vehemently fought by all teachers, parents, carers and students. We need a national campaign to expose the dangers of these ideas and to continue the fight against over-testing. If rank-and-file members of the NUT won’t start such a campaign, then I’m not sure who will.

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Comments

Submitted by Janine on Fri, 28/07/2006 - 11:44

My seven-year-old son is just like Tigger. This drives his teachers round the bend, since he finds it very hard to sit still and concentrate and gets bored easily. So they are trying very hard to *stop* him bouncing around. He used to love school, but doesn't any more.

If he were in a class of say, 18, rather than 27, then he could get more individual attention, would be less likely to get bored, and the staff could probably allow him to bounce around for at least part of the day, meaning he would be happier and get more out of school.

Or am I missing something?

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