Tapu Misa: Just because kids are taught doesn't mean they learn

COMMENT

I was searching for enlightenment, as one does on a wintry afternoon. An experience at my child's high school had made me wonder about the quality of teaching. How could you measure it? What made a good teacher? And how could I tell whether my child was learning - and what?

That new website of the Qualifications Authority wasn't much help. It was meant to provide comprehensive information about my child's high school, how it ranked compared with other schools and how the students did under NCEA.

But after an afternoon spent boning up on the relative merits of unit standards, achievement standards and the national qualifications network, I was no wiser.

Was the school doing a good job? Were the children learning as well as they ought to have been? Who could tell?

It had all become far too complicated. I should have known from the school reports. When I was at school, it was a single sheet with grades you could understand. As, Bs, "could do better" or "would benefit from more regular school attendance".

Sure, they were limited and ultimately unfair, but they were also simple and unambiguous, much like the school system - you passed or you failed, end of story.

Now my children bring home reports as lengthy and detailed as any annual report. One, from intermediate, was five foolscap pages long. It broke down maths into algebra and geometry - fair enough - and social studies into things like "processing information" and "framing questions".

It avoided simplistic notions of success or failure. There were no grades, simply levels, which stretched through several years of schooling. Where was my child positioned on this continuum? This was for the teacher to know and me to figure out.

Still, this was to be preferred to the mini-report card which came home last term. All "very good", it declared, though it failed to say what "very good" meant. In the end, neither told me what I wanted to know.

But enlightenment came after all, in a research paper by Graham Nuthall, emeritus professor of education at the University of Canterbury, which turned all these notions of achievement and learning on their head.

It told me I was wasting my time trying to figure out what made a good teacher because basically what the education system regards as good - and that includes the Education Review Office, educators and most politicians - doesn't bear much resemblance to what really matters. And that's the business of learning.

According to the professor, the practice of teaching, as we commonly understand and talk about it, is not about learning.

We've been seduced by superficial indicators of so-called excellent teaching - good class management, for example, and bright-eyed, interested and well-behaved kids sitting up straight and paying attention.

As one high school principal told Nuthall, teachers assume that when they're teaching, students are learning.

The professor's findings, based on 40 years of internationally lauded research, provide persuasive evidence that this is far from the reality. In fact, the whole learning process is so haphazard that it's a wonder children learn anything at all.

Nuthall has found, through painstaking and minute observation of students whom he videoed and interviewed, that most students already know about 40 to 50 per cent of what teachers intend to teach them.

That students learn just as much from average teachers as experienced, award-winning teachers. That so-called low-ability students learn just as much as high-level students when exposed to the same experiences. That all students, no matter what their ability, needed to experience information at least three to four times before it was imbedded in their knowledge.

As well, he says, most teachers know little about what goes on in their classrooms (sexism and racism were alive and flourishing even when the teacher actively promoted inclusive learning activities).

Not that he blames the teachers. They simply teach the way they've been taught. Their teaching practices are also bolstered by a web of supporting beliefs or myths that justify the way these rituals are played out, the most significant being academic ability.

Nuthall's findings challenge the myth that inherent ability - intelligence - is the reason some children do better than others. Students succeed, he says, because of their own motivation and cultural background. Children who perform best are those who go into the classroom with a larger store of background knowledge, which makes it easier for them to connect what they are learning to what they already know.

But teach all children well, he says, and ability and background become irrelevant. If a school is effective, all children are successful regardless of their background.

It's a scary proposition. Imagine how much better all our kids could be doing.

It also makes all this obsession with exam pass rates deeply irrelevant. Nuthall believes in slowing down and spending more time on a topic rather than jumping on to the next thing. He sees little point in students cramming knowledge for exams that's soon forgotten and does little to reflect true learning.

A friend's 14-year-old son couldn't agree more. He couldn't see the point of preparing for NCEA level 1 exams. "Why do we need to do all this?" he asked. "Shouldn't we be concentrating on learning?"

Good question.