Breda O’Brien: Ireland about to take a wrong turn on education

Pisa, the OECD summary of how well 15 year olds perform in science, maths and reading, has found that enquiry-based learning does not result in higher grades. Yet Ireland is about to embrace skills-based and enquiry-led learning, just as other countries like Sweden are seriously questioning it.

Pisa 2015, Volume 2, Policies and Practices for Successful Schools concludes: "Perhaps surprisingly, in no education system do students who reported that they are frequently exposed to enquiry-based instruction (when they are encouraged to experiment and engage in hands-on activities) score higher in science."

It gets worse. “After accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, in 56 countries and economies, greater exposure to enquiry-based instruction is associated with lower scores in science.”

Guide on the side

It sounds heretical, doesn’t it? Huge numbers of educationalists have embraced a model of discovery learning, whereby the teacher is the ‘guide on the side’ and the students discover material for themselves.

Along with this student-centred learning focus has come a hatred of memory work, usually dismissed as rote learning, and contempt for the curmudgeonly, cranky teacher who raises any questions about new educational initiatives.

As usual, Ireland is coming late to the party and embracing what they consider to be new with evangelical fervour, blithely unaware of the serious questions raised in other countries.

For example, in Sweden, University of Gothenburg professor of pedagogy Jonas Linderoth has said an apology to teachers is required for the way researchers and academics have downgraded the teacher's role for two decades, resulting in Sweden's disastrous educational record.

“The age-old form of instruction, in which someone who knows something explains it to someone who doesn’t, came to be associated with abuse of power and blind discipline,” he says.

However, the ideas embraced with such enthusiasm back then “stand in almost direct contradiction to what constitutes successful teaching methods”.

Wellbeing

Sweden is not Ireland, but such observations should raise some questions about proposed educational changes. For example, 400 hours at Junior Cycle level are to be dedicated to a new subject called ‘wellbeing’, in contrast to 240 hours for maths and 200 hours for subjects such as history and geography.

Wellbeing appears to be a mash-up of the subjects currently known as physical education, social, personal and health education and civic social and political education, along with some aspects of guidance. And if time allocated is an indicator, it is twice as important as history, or indeed, almost any other subject.

Similarly, in the new Junior Cycle there is talk of balancing knowledge and skills, as if when you increase one you decrease the other. The two cannot be separated.

As American cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has said, "Data from the last 30 years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable; thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care most about – critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving – are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge stored in long-term memory [not just found in the environment]." If you know five plus five equals 10 without having to count on your fingers, you have more brain space available for more complex computations.

Curtains for Shakespeare

As a teacher of English, I remember the last Junior Cert reform. One commentator mordantly pointed out that Shakespeare was optional in the new format English exam, but analysing an advertisement for curtains was mandatory.

Well, in the new exams, neither Shakespeare nor the curtains may be on the paper. Students will have absolutely no idea what will be examined.

For example, they could study one of Shakespeare’s plays in great depth, but there is no guarantee that there will be a question on Shakespeare on the paper, or indeed one on poetry, or on fiction. This is to prevent predictability, but the weaker students will suffer most.

English will have one two-hour exam instead of two exams over five hours.  The Leaving Cert exam remains exactly the same at two exams over six hours.

Only three subjects will be examined at higher and ordinary level at Junior Cycle: English, Irish and maths. Everything else will be at common level, and no exam will be longer than two hours.

Foundation level has been abolished, which again disadvantages the weakest students. All of this is to allegedly reduce high-stakes in testing and thereby reduce stress.

Sage on the stage

For the record, I don’t like the ‘sage on the stage’ teaching model. The best classroom experiences are teacher-led but with a high degree of interaction and creativity.

Speaking of ‘sage on the stage’, one of the most popular internet formats, the Ted talk, consists of an expert speaking alone on a stage to a passive audience (aside from rapturous applause). Ironically, some of those Ted experts are denouncing exactly that form of education.

One of the reasons ASTI teachers declined to accept the Lansdowne Road agreement was because it committed them to accepting educational reforms they knew would be reversed in 10 years’ time, but not before immense damage had been done to students. That concern has been lost in the important attempt to restore equal pay to lesser-paid teachers.

Teachers want reform, but they don’t want a botched reform, or one based on educational ideas that are already highly controversial and being phased out in other jurisdictions.