Never mind the quality

While waiting for my flight home from Cyprus last week, I did an impromptu interview for some colleagues from Pakistan in the departure lounge. They quizzed me about my views on quality in education, and recorded my responses on video. They intend to share the video online once all the airport public address announcements have been edited out. In the meantime, here's the essence of the interview:

My view on quality in primary education is that it cannot solely be measured through standardised testing or other performance related metrics. These are used by governments as measures of whole school compliance to policies rather than as measures of how individual children are learning. Standardised testing is a device to control schools and systems. It has never been about learning. The quality of personal learning gain can only be measured through authentic forms of assessment, and the more individualised these are, the better. I suggest ipsative assessment which involves measuring a student's learning against their own previous achievements. This is a much fairer method, and has the potential to inspire learners rather than show them how big a failure they are. The Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) schemes already practiced in some UK schools are exploiting this potential, and it's a more equitable method of assessment than the old norm or criterion referenced forms that are still being used by many schools throughout the world.

How do we ensure quality learning in education? The best way I know how to do this is to provide space for children to express themselves creatively. Children need to be given licence to ask questions, no matter how ridiculous or bizarre they are, to explore outrageous possibilities, to exercise their imagination and to create something they can be proud of. The lack of expressive subjects such as art and music in the English Baccalaureate (EBAC) subjects is a travesty, and should be redressed as quickly as possible.

Children also need to be given space to make mistakes without any condemnation. Alvin Toffler once declared: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Too often 'success' culture has been so deeply ingrained within the fabric of school life, that there is no room for failure from which we can learn.

If children are able to control what they learn and create things, their interest will grow, and if they are interested in the subject they will learn. They don't always have to be happy or comfortable for quality learning to occur. Sometimes discomfort, dissatisfaction or a lack of closure will spur them on to achieve even more in learning. Children need to be given tools to help them to learn, and then they need to be left alone to use the tools in the best ways they can find toward deeper learning. Better still, allow them to use the tools they are already familiar with.

Standardised curricula are bad news for schools. More trust needs to be invested in young people to be responsible for their own choices. Too often when teachers are pressured, they tend to revert to methods they are most familiar with. Often, these methods bear no resemblence to the needs of contemporary society, because it has moved on from the time they were themselves in school. Often we forget that teaching today is about the children, not the teachers. It's not our learning, it's theirs, because as the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore once warned: 'Do not limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in a different time'.

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Never mind the quality by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.