Towards a Better Future

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Chapter One: Teaching and Learning ENHANCING THE ENVIRONMENTS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING Practices of teaching that seek to promote a high quality of educational experience need to be alert to the unintended as well as the intended consequences of teachers’ actions. Let us recall here the extract from the Predictability report quoted earlier. This reveals that many teachers at the Senior Cycle of second level are discomfited by the consequences of some of their own regular practices (e.g. spoon-feeding and teaching-to-the-exam). It should not be assumed, however, that the prevalent approaches to teaching at primary level are free from shortcomings of this kind. Inspectors’ reports on primary schools in recent years have urged the necessity for greater attention to evaluation of the actual consequences of teaching, particularly in the assessment of English lessons (DES, 2013, p.45). Recent efforts to address this issue at primary level are considered in Chapter 4. In connection with this alertness to unintended consequences, it is worth citing a key insight from Dewey, which is pertinent to practices of teaching at all levels: Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the form of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or the lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. (1938/1996, p.48) Unless the kind of attentiveness Dewey highlights here becomes a central part of the discipline of teaching, many of the best opportunities for enhancing teaching itself are likely to be bypassed. To recognise this gives to self-evaluation an importance in teaching that it has very largely lacked historically. Such a recognition, moreover, properly gives a secondary, or supportive role to evaluation by others, whether by colleagues or by inspectors. Equally important, it provides an agenda for selfevaluation that has not been too familiar, especially where professional development has been mainly understood as the upskilling of a teaching force. We will return to the issue of evaluation in the next section, but prominent on the proper agenda of professional development would be the uncovering of hidden as well as overt influences in teaching and learning. Such professional development would accordingly promote a capacity to build learning environments with features like the following: that are non-coercive in character; that are inviting to newcomers; that help to uncover one’s previously undiscovered potentials and limitations; that characteristically subject to scrutiny both received wisdom and unacknowledged assumptions; that embrace developments in ICT, but with a discerning eye for their pedagogical promise; that seek new ways to advance higher levels of proficiency so that enquiry can more — 9 —
Towards a Better Future: A Review of the Irish School System fruitfully proceed; that promote through concrete learning experiences themselves a deeper understanding and tolerance of human differences; that encourage the unfolding of a vibrant sense of personal identity, while supporting a similar unfolding among fellow-learners; that cultivate an ethos of community where diversity is also affirmed. This list of features of an enhanced educational practice is of course far from exhaustive. However, it highlights the myriad influences that come and go with endless play – to paraphrase Wordsworth – in educational experience daily. Influences that are strongly at play in either in the background or the foreground can, moreover, work harmfully as well as constructively. Discerning the more important ones in any particular instance calls attention to the kinds of perceptiveness and adroitness on the teacher’s part that help to make educational experience truly fruitful. It is also important to mention here that where daily practice becomes preoccupied with just one or a few prominent features – e.g. with the measurement of achievements in tests and exams – the other factors at play do not thereby fall dormant. For instance, attitudes that are divisive or invidious could be learned very powerfully, and inconspicuously, while all overt efforts are devoted to the promotion of demonstrable cognitive advances. It is all too rarely acknowledged that the long-term ethical significance of education lies more in the quality of these daily experiences than in the contents of a particular body of ethical teachings on the school curriculum. It is in the tenor of these experiences, moreover, that that the real significance of the classical Greek notion of ethos can be found in education. To become aware of this is also to realise how mistaken it is to associate the term ethos mainly with the powers, privileges or prerogatives of any of the patron bodies in education. Against such commonplace errors, Dewey’s insight cited above has a compelling force. THE EVALUATION OF LEARNING The evaluation of learning in Irish schools is customarily associated with two distinct but complementary functions: (a) the carrying out of assessments and examinations, (b) the work of the schools Inspectorate. Depending on how adequately examinations or assessments are conceived, or how broadly or narrowly the work of inspectors is understood, evaluation can be an informative, an ambiguous, or even a misleading affair. In this connection, Chapters 4 and 5 provide an illuminating account of different forms of assessment and a review of developments and current issues of concern in the assessment systems at primary and post-primary level. Chapter 8 on the Inspectorate highlights some historically characteristic approaches to inspection and traces some welcome developments in the nature and scope of inspection practice, especially in recent years. However, let us assume for a moment that the formal systems of assessment and of inspection are all in good order. Even then, the combined fruits of assessment and inspection would still provide a far from complete picture of the benefits which evaluation, as a crucial dimension of educational — 10 —
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Towards a Better Future

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