Must-Watch Video: http://youtu.be/quYDkuD4dMU
And some quotes:
"It is not teachers who produce learning, it is students. Indeed, students are the only people in schools who can produce – or decline to produce – learning. Students are workers. Students, not teachers, are the real workforce of schools.
If we look at students as workers and producers, something otherwise hidden swims into view: the nub of it all is the daily work, the labour process, of students. That is where it goes right, or wrong. Consider, as I have belatedly done, not what I was doing in Grade V in 1964 but what Frank Gagliado [a struggling student] was doing. His working day was just as the anthropology of the classroom would lead us to expect: working mostly by himself rather than with others, mostly listening not talking, mostly following instructions rather than figuring out what to do next and how best to do it, mostly having to stop before he’d got the hang of the task and start the next before he knew how to, mostly not really succeeding, often really failing, in his own and his peers’ eyes, all day every day for twelve years. You wouldn’t do that to an adult worker. Why do it to a young one?"
And another:
"An alternative, recently arrived in the political arena, is not more teachers but better ones, the “teacher quality” solution. If we set aside the condescension of the phrase, the fact that it has all been heard before … there is an important underlying truth: highly effective teachers can move students along at two or three times the typical rate. But there is another truth, usually ignored by those pushing the “quality” barrow: highly effective teaching is hard to do, hard to learn, and hard to find. It is exceptional. The proposition that we can make classroom maestros the rule rather than the exception by tinkering with pay structures, teacher education, bonus schemes and the like is implausible. It is also misdirected. Surely there is something fundamentally wrong with a unit that functions well only in the hands of a maestro? And therefore something wrong with reforms that leave unchanged the “organisational facts of life” to which teachers adapt?"
Recent Comments