Every year, like the dark monsoon clouds, new educational reforms arrive. Typically text-books change (new minister), languages come and go (Marathi is in as-off today), exams change (from no-exams to weekly exams), evaluation rules change (marks or percentiles or grades ?). Add to this the large annual churn of teachers and things can get very dizzy for children.
How does one draw any conclusions about education when nothing seems to be ever constant ? I guess words "new reforms" says it all - meaning we are dumping "old" reforms. We don't even know if those worked or not.
In last few decades many educational theories have done 180 degree turns. Here is one example. For years educationists promoted idea of different learning-styles (the literature is vast). Children have different learning -styles, so there have to be teaching-styles and evaluation-styles. This spawned an industry of text-books, tool-kits and experts. Now it seems, the evidence for 'learning-style' learning isn't quite there. A new study shows that teaching-styles have no effect on the actual amount of learning that happens amongst different children (Paschler et al). Give it another year and the new study will also spawn an industry with its own experts.
The problem is - we are theorizing faster than we are collecting evidence. And we are marketing faster than we are theorizing. There is too much focus on class-rooms. Class-rooms have become cutting-edge labs for all sorts of experiments. Educationists are quicker to take new results and create policy-advice out of it. Education, of all the fields, requires a very long baseline and control population (I would say half-a-generation at least). But no one has patience or time to verify anything here.
I think schools are suffering from too many Educationists and too few teachers. A good teacher is an intuitive educationists. A good teacher develops views and techniques over many years. He/she knows how to balance different approaches to teaching (if only we would leave him/her alone).
Who are these educationists - are they self-proclaimed, self-funded educationists, or funded researchers by profession? In the latter case, who is funding them and is that the reason for product and market oriented (and hence, result oriented) research? I am not aware of how this research happens i.e. do researchers go to schools (real labs) or students go to researchers' schools (virtual labs)? How if research and researchers are brought to actual schools (including their assured sources of funding)? In other way, how if these researchers, research students are made teachers who have to simply teach like any other teacher in the school and as part of their research just produce their observations and experiments without theorizing them? Could a model be built around such concept say teach for India?
ReplyDeleteOne reason for this trend is the pressure to publish quick results in cognitive sciences, social sciences and psychology.
ReplyDeleteNo sooner some new thing seen in class it get published. It becomes the in-thing to do.
Instead, a bottom up approach would be to observe all good and great teachers in class. What are the things that they do in class which makes their teaching successful ? Are there common principles to the way they teach ?
A good teachers behavior actually has a long baseline - because he/she has evolved it based on what works in class and what doesn't. So it is time-tested. An educational theory for good education should be based on such studies.
I am glad to note that there is one book which has done exactly this work. Look-up - "Teach like a Champion" by Doug Lemov.
What Lemov says is, most things that a good teacher does has unfortunately remained under the radar of most educationists.