Why Is Risky Teaching Better Than Cruise Control?
A lacklustre syllabus
Schools can and do work minor miracles with students. Particularly with those students who are more likely to underachieve. Teachers work incredibly hard to motivate students to ‘get’ their subject, and to understand it well enough to pass GCSEs with good grades. What usually works less well however, is what is done for those students who already ‘get’ a subject. Who possibly already love it and are already exceptionally good at it. The syllabus certainly doesn’t demand anywhere near enough from these students, and GCSE can often be a pretty simple exam for them. Way too simple. And sadly, they are not really encouraged to explore it in more interesting, complex ways. Often because of the justifiable fear of their teachers that their students may actually be marked down in an exam if they come at a question from too interesting a perspective.
So what happens to those students who already ‘get it’?
With the best will in the world, many teachers still do not see their needs as a priority. The most able tend to be put on a back burner. They are often required to go through the same step by step teaching as all of the other students. Covering work they already know. With frequent repetition. Not only doesn’t it stretch them, it can have far more worrying tendencies. Such as boredom on an industrial scale. And a lack of teacher agitation and student aspiration for high performance to genuinely master the subject. And often, as a result, complete disengagement. They are effectively high performing and honed engines that are being given low grade fuel.
Just to clarify at this point. These ‘cruising’ lessons can be witnessed in top independent and high performing grammar schools as well as in comprehensives. In fact in more privileged settings, lessons can too often lack the drive and focus that is the norm in schools serving more disadvantaged schools. For one obvious reason. Get the lesson engagement wrong in a tricky school and you get crucified, so it’s in your interest as a teacher to ensure that you get a class on board. Perhaps the biggest difference in more advantaged schools is not the teaching, but the peer pressure that keeps some of the most able students engaged and on track in these schools. It isn’t stated often enough, but a whole group of highly able and motivated students in a class can lead to some pretty complacent teaching. But the love of the students for the subject is often undiminished because they can feed off their peers.
Cloying teaching
There is a peculiarly cloying brand of teaching that seemingly treats the most able as being highly delicate and fragile orchids who require special tending. There are some very able students who fall into this category. They can indeed certainly be afflicted by insecurities and doubts, and these doubts can sometimes be given greater impetus because the students are smart enough to see themselves and others quite clearly. But it is a very different thing to therefore treat all of these able students as if they have Dabrowski-type intense behaviours, overexcitabilities and supersensitivities. Many able students love the battles to know and defend, the occasional intellectual dog fights. They enjoy risk (look at what else they can choose to experiment with at this age) and may have far less fear of failure than their teachers.
Burn out versus lack of ignition
There is also, on similar lines, a legitimate fear amongst many teachers about the dangers of ‘hothousing’ students. We all acknowledge the dangers inherent in students being pushed too far and too fast in school (or quite often at home) so that they lose interest in a subject that they previously loved. The fear expressed is often in terms of students ‘burning-out’. To use an analogy, the blend of fuel used for F1 racing is tuned for the demands of different circuits – or drivers – or even different weather conditions. More potent fuels give noticeably more power but that needs to be balanced against the danger of engine wear. There is the obvious danger that the wrong fuel applied at the wrong time might have severe consequences for the overall performance.
Our students are not being ‘over stretched’. Rather they are existing on distinctly depriving diet of GCSE dross completed with a lack of excitement and challenge. The failure across much of the system is that students have no fires lit anywhere near them. Put simply, the lack of ignition is a far more serious problem in UK schools than the risk of burning out. As a result students are less likely to feel the sense of flow that comes from real engagement, and they are therefore less likely to acquire the necessary work habits and enquiry skills that they require to get them through University.
Risk and more risks
Bringing on the most able requires teachers to demonstrate flexibility, open-mindedness, and a willingness to listen and learn equally as much as it requires exceptional subject knowledge. But taking risks has to be the genuine hallmark of the truly great teachers, and for that to work they need to have the confidence not just in their own abilities, but also the belief that their students will be able to survive and thrive in a more rarified, free wheeling and demanding atmosphere than that which is normally found in classrooms. Gelb pointed out that ‘Over seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity…(teachers) who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up…’ As teachers, we all want to protect the students in our charge. But the culture within so many schools has become obsessed with preciousness and protection. If we teachers don’t take the risks, then inevitably our students won’t either. The greatest risk in education and for the future is not taking risks. We need our students to challenge inert ideas, to relish encounters with uncertainties – with complexity and ambiguity – and see them as dynamic processes which lead them to raise new questions, meet unforeseen problems, and to regard old problems from a new angle. We need to foster their ability to abandon ingrained assumptions and open themselves to new paradigms and adapt their thinking to take into account a world of accelerating change, globalisation and technological innovation. Teachers must believe how far and how fast able students can go if no limits are put on them, and understand that they can assist the roller-coaster ride, even if they themselves may need to leap off before the end.
