Daily Mail article:
Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.
Assuming this is accurate - so are they condemning them to boredom? Are they refusing to allow them a chance to develop their potential?
Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.
Are teachers in the UK trained to handle mixed ability classes I wonder? I spent nearly five years of secondary education in the UK system. I attended a comprehensive school in which from the first year students were streamed. Until year 4 of secondary schooling I was in the “bloody awful at maths/science and good at literature/arts” group in the grammar stream. That must have made the workload a bit easier for teachers.
As a child in primary school I was asked by my English teacher to help others with reading. I didn't feel dragooned. Maybe some children need to understand that helping others isn't a bad thing.
Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.
I'd suggest what might be more usual is that the children in the middle get ignored while bright children or ones that need help get more attention. I can see where the article is focused though. If that attitude is held by most teachers in the UK then it needs to be corrected because it's not helpful.
If ideology is getting in the way of good educational practice then that's a problem.
Sorry, but it is not only the UK. We in the US suffer from the same epidemic.
1.At a recent meeting of the New York Teaching Fellows program (“Teach for America”: provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually) , Sol Stern found the one book that the fellows had to read in full was Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.
This book has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs. In 2003, David Steiner and Susan Rozen published a study examining the curricula of 16 schools of education—14 of them among the top-ranked institutions in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report—and found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the most frequently assigned texts in their philosophy of education courses.
2. The pedagogical point of Freire’s thesis : its opposition to taxing students with any actual academic content, which Freire derides as “official knowledge” that serves to rationalize inequality within capitalist society. Freire proposes instead that teachers partner with their coequals, the students, in a “dialogic” and “problem-solving” process until the roles of teacher and student merge into “teacher-students” and “student-teachers.”
3. Freire’s strictures reinforced another cherished myth of American progressive ed—that traditional teacher-directed lessons left students passive and disengaged, leading to higher drop-out rates for minorities and the poor. That description was more than a caricature; it was a complete fabrication. Over the last two decades, E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge schools have proved over and over again not only that content-rich teaching raises the academic achievement of poor children on standardized tests but that those students remain curious, intellectually stimulated, and engaged—though the education schools continue to ignore these documented successes.
Pedagogy of the Oppressor by Sol Stern, City Journal Spring 2009
Sorry to give you so much homework, but if you have the time, 'give it a read.'
