Towards a Better Future

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Chapter One: Teaching and Learning An important consequence of the points sketched in outline above is the discontinuity between the kinds of teaching and learning that are pursued at primary level and those pursued at second level. Recent studies of national samples of second-level schools carried out by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in association with the NCCA highlight some serious concerns here (Smyth et al., 2004; Smyth et al., 2006). These prominently include: the negative effects of the discontinuity between primary and post-primary; a decline in students’ positive attitude towards school during Second Year and into Third Year; a disengagement from learning by students that is associated with heavy reliance on practices like ‘teaching from the book’ and lack of constructive feedback to students. Teaching and learning at the Senior Cycle remain heavily influenced by perceptions of what the Leaving Certificate assessments are deemed to reward, with resulting negative effects on the purposes for which teaching and learning are themselves pursued. This point was underlined in the 2014 research report Predictability in the Irish Leaving Certificate, commissioned by the State Examinations Commission at the request of the Transition Reform Group, which was established by the Minister for Education (Baird et al. 2014). Although this research (carried out by researchers from Queen’s University Belfast and Oxford University) was concerned mainly with issues of predictability in the Leaving Certificate exam, it also produced findings on teaching and learning more widely at Leaving Certificate level. These findings confirm some long-standing criticisms of prevalent practices in the Senior Cycle, including: an over-emphasis in some subjects on knowledge recall to the detriment of higher-order skills; a narrowing of the curriculum scope in the subjects that were analysed (English, Economics, French, Design & Communication Graphics); the prominence of ‘mock exams’; and a thriving grinds industry (45% received some private tuition in 2013). The following overall comment by the researchers on the dominant practices of teaching is revealing: Teachers did agree that they taught towards the format, structure and style of examination questions and shared their understanding of the messages given within mark schemes of what responses are required and what is of value. They indicated that how they end up teaching can seem like spoon-feeding students but they are conscious that ‘students want points, parents want points.’ Many teachers showed us their own analysis of the types of questions that come up year on year and they felt they were fulfilling their duty as teachers by sharing these analyses with students (Baird et al. 2014, p.84). — 3 —
Towards a Better Future: A Review of the Irish School System PURPOSES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING: CONTROVERSY AND COHERENCE In Ireland as elsewhere, when teachers are asked about their purposes, about what has brought them into teaching, they rarely if ever reply in such utilitarian terms as those cited above from the Predictability report. More characteristically, they report that they want to make a difference for the better in the lives of their students; that they wish to help students to reach their potential as human beings; that their work as educators will help to strengthen community, cultural and civic life (Lawlor, 2014, Ch.5). A critic or sceptic might claim that such motivations assume too sanguine a view of teachers’ scope for agency; that such optimism fails to recognise the social and historical constraints in which teaching is embedded; that the institutionalised interests, which invariably secure a decisive say in the control of schooling, are being disregarded. Moreover, clearly there is abundant evidence on which such criticism can draw, both in historical and in empirical research studies. Rather than defeat the purposes of improvement, however, such evidence needs to be explored with discernment, incisiveness and a keen sense of the practicable. Only thus can the attractions and dangers of a fool’s paradise be kept at bay. Before proceeding further, the issue of tensions between teachers’ scope for agency on the one hand and the weight of inherited traditions and institutionalised powers on the other needs some preliminary investigation or clarification. On such clarification depends much of the coherence of teaching itself as a social good and a defensible practice. The idea that the guiding purposes of formal education are to be decided chiefly by those who have secured a position of institutional power became deeply lodged in Western civilisation. Educational historians have traced the beginnings of the long ascendency of this idea to the early 9th century (Boyd & King 1999; Bowen, 2003). Early versions of the idea were championed by the institutional churches; more recent ones have become manifest in an international educational discourse about the needs of economy and society. For all its apparent naturalness, however, this idea is a distortion and an impediment. It defines formal education as an essentially paternalistic undertaking. In its preoccupation with controlling the right contents for curricula, it cloaks some of the most important consequences of teaching, even from teachers themselves. It deprives teaching of the coherence and integrity that should properly belong to anything called a practice, and to the practitioners of that practice. In short, it tends to make formal education a vehicle for one or other dominant ‘ism’. For instance, the guiding purposes of education can be seen to be placed in very powerful hands – and cast very differently – if we take the following illustrative examples from the history of Western education: European countries in Medieval Christendom; European countries after the Reformation; England in the mid-19th century; Ireland in the later 19th century; Eastern European countries after the Second World War; Ireland in the early period of independence; England after the Education Reform Act of 1988. In each of these examples, one can identify a — 4 —
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Towards a Better Future

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