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There are no Shortcuts in Good Teaching Practice

Teaching to the test and education 'as the crow flies' misses the point of education itself, and can have dire results, says David Bunker…

David Bunker
by David Bunker
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It isn’t easy, educating. There are very few shortcuts and precious little ground can be gained without a decent amount of perseverance. Even more frustratingly, taking what might seem like a direct route towards an educational goal is often fraught with problems.

In Making Every English Lesson Count Andy Tharby introduces such a problem by calling it the ‘as the crow flies’ error. He describes how English teachers desiring to improve students’ reading ability, often ‘make a beeline to teaching generic reading skills’.

On the face of it, this approach seems like the most direct and efficient. But, because it ignores the fact that students need ‘domain-specific knowledge’ before practising these skills, it fails to achieve the desired outcomes.

Where else, I wonder, might teachers be guilty of the ‘as the crow flies’ error?

A good example might concern the idea of building positive relationships with new classes. As important as relationships are, aiming for these directly can have terrible consequences. This can be especially true of NQTs.

As an NQT myself I can clearly remember being told how important establishing positive relationships were. So, to gain these as quickly as possible, I started in my new school with a string of ‘getting to know you’ activities and games. The consequences were dire.

Sure, I knew quite a bit about my students’ hobbies, their likes and dislikes, but I hadn’t made my rules and standards clear from the outset. For months afterwards I battled against the terrible first impressions I set, gradually regaining a sense of order.

As a former NQT mentor and current Head of Faculty, my advice to new teachers during the first few months is always the same: focus on establishing classroom routines and expectations of behaviour and effort. With these things in place, positive relationships will soon follow.

Seemingly not the most direct route, but certainly the most effective.

As well as building positive relationships, building students’ self-esteem is another worthy educational goal that easily succumbs to the ‘as the crow flies’ error.

Want to build a child’s self esteem? Then surely the best way is to praise them frequently and cut them some slack? Wrong. Well, mostly wrong. These types of strategies may have a short-term pay off, but only at the sacrifice of far superior, long-term gains.

To really build a student’s sense of self worth, I think you have to get them producing outstanding work.

This may take weeks, or probably months. Months of unswervingly high expectations, months of explanations and modelling, months of feedback and practice. But there are few greater feelings as a teacher than being able to heap genuine praise on a student who has completed work that they may previously have thought impossible.

It’s a more meandering route, but importantly a more meaningful one.

The biggest ‘as the crow flies’ error though, so large it’s probably more akin to a flying albatross, is the idea that the most direct and efficient way to get students better at exam questions is to simply make them do lots of exam questions.

Again this idea may seem fairly intuitive. If you know that students have to answer a question of a certain style in a few years, why not spend lots of lesson time answering those questions in the years leading up to the exam?

Of course, we also have schools desperate to use data to track the progress of their students, often through completing exam-style questions.

Before you know it, we have students sitting exam style questions and mock papers way before they enter year 11, in some schools sitting exam style questions in every single year, from year 7.

Now, I am not waving a placard bemoaning schools for being exam factories. I am unapologetic about doing everything I can to make sure my kids can at least pass their exams. But simply repeating lots of exam questions just isn’t the best way to achieve this aim.

For starters, exam questions only test you on a small sample of a wider domain of knowledge. And given that we can’t see the sample that will be tested in advance, teachers should be spending a significant amount of their time developing their students’ knowledge.

This means careful teaching, lots of revisiting, lots of testing, and lots of time to explore, discuss, debate and question. This doesn’t just mean lots of exam questions.

All of this may not seem very uplifting. If so many of the things we hope to achieve in education aren’t best achieved by following the most direct road, where does this leave us?

Well, I think it leaves us in a position where we should embrace the beautiful, mind-boggling complexities of education. After all, if we really want to build positive relationships, boost children’s self esteem and help them fulfil their potential in exams, it’s well worth a little extra effort.

David Bunker is an English teacher in central Bristol who blogs at mrbunkeredu.wordpress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Mr_Bunker_edu.

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