EDUCATION NEEDS TO BE SIMPLE, FOCUSED AND ENGAGING

In this day and age, increasing educational complexity overlooks two vital criteria: ‘simplicity’ and ‘focus’. We need to keep education simple in terms of clarity of message and focus on upholding young people’s key learning and developmental needs. Simplicity and focus need to be absolute priorities. Unfortunately, governments and educational systems have discounted these critical teaching and learning principles.

Nor should the use of technology supplant the prime teaching role of teachers.

Too often, we can’t see the wood for the trees. Embedded within Curriculum Frameworks are key learning principles to which teacher attention is drawn. Those requirements should underpin planning, preparation, and teaching, followed by testing, measurement, and data analysis, leading towards follow-up. However, key learning strategies and straightforward focus principles are set to one side, with teachers being ‘invited’ to unceasingly explore the veritable Cybernet forest of educational resources and alternative methods for their usage.

The depth and density of resources and support materials are mind-boggling. There is also a considerable amount of reduplication or, at best, only minor changes from one precept to the next. Trawling through an infinite resource selection is inordinately time-consuming. The journey often reveals little more than teachers already have in their resource collections.

I’d suggest to teachers surfing the web looking for resources, that they record time started and time finished. They will often find that many, many hours have been spent searching for resources, time committed going well beyond the teaching value of what they download.

Imprinted into the minds of teachers is the imperative that they give of their absolute best, to bring children out the other end of the teaching / learning journey having been enriched. For some reason, possibly a lack of self confidence or by not questioning the suggestion of leaders, the search for resource materials and teaching advice occupies a significant amount of teachers time.

What seems to count

I believe that teachers are often frightened that what they do in terms of teaching, will be insufficient. It seems they feel the weight of accountability, believing people are regularly scrutinising, ready to pounce, criticise and condemn if things are not good enough. They appear to rejoice little and worry a lot about whether their contribution is or isn’t appreciated. This means that they become super self-critical and very rarely take time to rejoice and celebrate their teaching successes.

In Australia the Melbourne Declaration of Education was agreed by Ministers of Education and Education Department CEO’a in 2008. In the very first part of the declaration is a statement exhorting teachers to be holistic in their approach to teaching and learning processes. While academics are highly stressed, so, too, are the social, emotional and moral / spiritual aspects of development. This declaration follows on earlier COAG statements of principle and intent, but in practice this is often set aside.

It seems that teachers are urged to turn their attention away from this position and toward the point of recognising far more limited aspects of development as having greater priority.

In particular, the focus seems to be narrowly focussed on testable aspects of literacy and numeracy, with little else counting as being of educational relevance. In Australia we have what might be termed ‘Four May Days each year’, coinciding with the nation-wide NAPLAN testing for children in years three, five, seven and nine. Tests are taken over three days with a catch up day being allowed for students who have missed out on sitting tests on the designated days. Comparative data comes back to schools, comparing them on the outcomes of these tests against all other schools. That information goes on to the ACARA managed ‘My Schools’ website, which records information relating to outcomes for children in all Australian Schools for public digestion.

From there, media picks up on schools that are well below average, to well above average across the spectrum of tests and years. They then produce colourful tables showing schools from very deep pink (well below average) to very deep green (well above average). Some newspapers delight or have delighted in talking about “Seas of Red”, allowing readers to draw a personal metaphor about what often seems to be the more occasional “Oasis of Green”.

The focus most certainly remains firmly fixed on the importance of teaching, strategies and data collection leading toward the annual NAPLAN program. Data is upheld as the number one Australian educational priority.

The emphasis and the ownership of this testing regime is vested in the Australian Government which insists the program is an absolute universal system priority. It has cost hundreds of millions of educational dollars since its inception in 2008.

This paper is not a forum piece in which further discussion of NAP testing should take place. Rather, I am seeking to show that macro determined programs coming from the Australian Government can and do have the effect of taking us away from a focus that aligns with holistic development and the preparation of children for the whole of life. ‘If literacy and numeracy challenges are satisfied, then the educational job is done’, seems to be an underpinning paradigm.

It is a pity that in this day and age ‘learning in the hands of students is often dismissive of this type and level of engagement. I wondered how appreciative those in high Australian Government places might be of a program like this – or whether indeed they would see it as being relevant!

Classroom Priorities and Teacher Focus

‘Learning in the hands of students’ is just that! It’s about putting into the hands of children technologically developed gizmos that enable them to communicate ‘by finger’, engaging in everything from games and internet study to the transmission and receipt of messages . . . and so on. The onus and emphasis is more and more on technology and less and less on skills that used to be considered important.

What doesn’t happen in modern learning contexts, is taking into account of the need for children and students to be listeners, speakers, readers, and writers. Primary communication skills are often muted.

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The sending of texts, e-mails and, more recently, Facebook engagement, Twitter entry and other device-supported communication has now taken the place of old-fashioned listening and speaking.

Increasingly, reading and writing are also being committed to the technological domain. We have entered the world of the e-book, tablet reading and keyboard or Siri writing. In some American states and European countries handwriting texts are no longer prescribed, with tablets being the new way forward.

I am personally saddened by the fact that education for children seems to be distancing itself from primary communication skills. The ability of people (young and old) to look each other in the eye, speak up with confidence and to listen without interruption is nearing extinction. If young people are to develop skills and confidence in communication, we will need a return to the era in which these communication skills were considered paramount. There needs to be a rebirth of primary skills in these areas.

I am not suggesting that there is no place for technology in the classroom. What has to be avoided is the situation where technological takeover depersonalises both communication and teaching-learning contexts. These days huge amounts of learning originate online, generated through the computer via the Smart board then outreaching to students. Teachers meantime busy themselves in rubric recording of data that offers comment on the perceptions of what children are learning. This is hardly about teaching and learning in a primary context of engagement. It takes from, rather than from adding to enriching the education of children. It is about secondary engagement (through technological tools and measurement), diminishing prime focus on direct teacher and pupil teaching and learning contexts.

Concluding thought

In our age of modern education, it is of concern that tools which can support teaching and learning are taking over. Resources in cyberspace surely should be no more than just that – resources – to be drawn on carefully and possibly scarcely. We can overdo it on the research and downloads, particularly when so much of what’s out there is essentially reduplicative of what has gone before. The tools we use for data access and to facilitate teaching can be enriching but again should not be replacing that idiom of relationship contact which develops between children and teachers during prime learning time.

Self study should not focus on downloading material to be incorporated into texts and assignments through cutting and pasting. Research can be diminished and understanding lost if this becomes the major way of constructing essays and papers.

Surely education should be reminiscent of and carefully reflective about development and preparation of young people for the whole of life. Part of this is a need for them to be in command of support devices, with teachers ensuring the ‘human side’ of education does not sell out to technological trappings.

‘Keeping it simple’ and ‘keeping it focused’ has served us well in the past; these precepts should not be discarded by Governments and education systems in the 21st century.

Henry Gray

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