innovatED - Issue 2

Educational Fads
20 Years of educational fads
Ross Morrison McGill
Ross is the Managing Director of @TeacherToolkit and was nominated as one of the ‘500
Most Influential People in the Britain’ by Debrett’s for his influence on education. Ross is
also an award-winning teacher, author and blogger. He is frequently asked to speak at
national conferences across the UK and is asked to reflect on educational developments in
various newspapers about education policy.
Over the last 20 years teachers in the UK have been exposed to so much education hearsay – information
received from other people which cannot be substantiated – and gimmicks, fads and myths we’ve all had to
endure in our schools. What follows is a list of 20 fads, in no particular order and sadly, not exhaustive!
Definitions
Hearsay: A member of the school leadership team attends a conference led by the government or a watchdog organisation. After hearing what the
apparent organisation was looking for to a) raise achievement or b) improve teaching, the aforementioned senior leader would race back into their
school and instruct all teachers to do the following the very next day! This meant an entire change of pedagogy and approach in the classroom for every
teacher.
Myth: Once the above ‘hearsay’ had caught on and was performed in military precision for observations and the like, visiting teachers would observe
what they see, read or hear and return to their own institution and say: “You should see what they are doing at X school, every teacher is
teaching/marking/planning/analysing in this way and it looks great. Several months later, the school is inspected and OfSTED like what they see;
published their report and quote “X school marks books effectively and all students respond to feedback in a way that aids rapid progress.” Before you
know it, what was said at the original meeting becomes one person’s interpretation and has now become a myth that travels up and down the country.
Fad: As a result of the above mentioned myth, the trend soon catches on and schools, school leaders and all teachers are now jumping through hoops,
performing teaching/marking/planning/analysing in a particular way for the observer or for student progress. This has now become a ‘fad’ that
everyone must be able to do.
Gimmick: Soon the fad because over-egged and flaws in the idea are exposed in inspections, from peers, online or in publications. What was once know
as an ‘OfSTED fad’ has now become a ‘gimmick’ and less than half the number of schools have stopped wasting time on ideas that a) have teachers
jumping through hoops or b) have no correlation to research, effect size or evidence on student progress.
1. Learning styles:
… audio, visual and kinaesthetic learning styles. Research from both ends
of the spectrum state that there is no such thing as ‘learning styles’ (Riener
and Willingham 2010) .
The result? Gimmick.
2. Lesson objectives:
The framing or copying of lesson objectives in still commonplace today;
“All students will; most students will; some students will …” meant that
teachers had to record three variations of their lesson aims on to lesson
plans and on to the blackboard/whiteboard (depending on how long you
have been teaching). The intention meant that you were planning to
‘predict’ differentiation from various outputs from groups of students,
despite having 20-30 students in every class that would produce that
number of varied results. Debra Kidd recently renounced this as a waste
of time in her book.
The result? Fad.
26 | Issue 2 | innovatED | www.independentschoolsportal.org