Learning Journal

Let us enter into Bloom's affective domain for this week's 'Learning Journal with Tom'.
In my final lesson before packing up for the end of term break, a group of students came over and we got chatting. One of their friends has, sadly, left the course because he got an E in his exam and didn't like the subject anyway. Otherwise, they were all very happy and enthused, and felt as if they could do better next time, even though their own grades had been quite bad. I sympathised with them and supported them when they said that they felt as if they knew much more now, because the more of the syllabus they covered the more it made sense. But, most happily, one of the things they mentioned was what a good teacher they thought I was.
Haha! Phew!
I would not be on the course if I did not think that I could be a satisfactory teacher - not just up to FENTO standards, but also up to the standards of students. I myself have had too many unpleasant teachers to want to be one of them. It's something of a combination of assumed authority, qualities of a dictator, and ignorance of students that makes a truly despisable teacher. Teachers need, to be found pleasant, to be in touch with their students and give them some respect. And it was undeniably heartening that my strategy of respecting my pupils has paid off. Although I don't feel that I can take responsibility for the leaving of the most awfully inattentive students, because they jacked it in all on their own.
Respect is certainly something that I feel for my students, and I give them all the help I can, while also explaining to them how much I expect them to be able to do; simultaneously supporting, praising, and pushing. If they need a few words of advice, such as 'yes', 'no', or 'humperdinck', then they get it. If they need to understand a tricky concept, such as reliability in psychological experiments, I give them a textbook and read it through with them. And if they want me to write their whole report for them, as one student did... well, you do your best to convince them that it is better done under their own steam.
Yet, respect is one thing, and 'unconditional positive regard' another. I see UPR as a covert form of abuse. Can it be really meant, or is it just an acted facade of facilitatoriness? Is it merely a form of permissive, laissez-faire management that makes it easier for yourself as the teacher? I think respect must engender an unlimited amount of positive regard for positive things, but not unconditional regard. To go down the UPR route is to deny people volition, or so I believe - a million forms of "whatever you do I accept, because I don't think it's your fault". I don't think I could ever say that to my students, unless something really wasn't their fault. In learning, you have to be ready to engage with your flaws, whatever they are. In teaching, you have to be ready to negotiate those flaws and talk them through. And some flaws just don't deserve positive regard, because some things should not be permitted, for as a psychologist, I reckon that people are massively complex. We present so many aspects of ourselves in different situations. It is not harmful to point out one aspect and let your student know that you cannot endorse it. UPR is merely a tactic of delaying change and enforcing conformity to an attitude of uneasy, unmeant compromise, where problems don't have to be addressed, just covered up.
Respect is acknowledging your students as they are, allowing them to talk and act for themselves, and doing your best to help them through whatever trials and tribulations they come across. UPR is smothering them with a blanket form of dismissive uncaring. And perhaps that's the root of my respect, I value each of my students and want them to value themselves. But value, to be positive, has to allow a negative. I'm afraid that I am committed to wanting to inspire some form of growth, even if it means registering an unhappiness, rather than blindly believing that everyone will go along fine in the end and nothing needs to be acted on, just because it allows you to sit back and say everything is A-OK. This is why I didn't do a counselling masters and came on this course instead.
So, hurrah for respect!

A main issue on my course, one that often comes up within my peer group of practising trainee teachers, is that of transmission teaching. The teacher as a beacon emitting morse code, telegraph wires of communication tentacling out to caress each learner, learners receiving electronically. Or, as is more often the case, beeping an SOS and falling down the stairs like toy robot.
Is this what teaching has been reduced to? Everything we seem to do, every single task, appears to relate to either the tranmission of or testing for a chunk of knowledge. A group discussion might seem to be perfectly educational, but really it is a form of assessment, rather than something designed to improve the learner. All sorts of tasks might seem clever and pretty, but really not be all that educational. It all comes down to lecturing, questioning, consolidating. Perhaps we need to inspire a critical pedagogy, something radically different, to counter this.

I dearly wish that it were different. That there was the scope within the syllabus to allow for true differentiation - the addressing of each individual students' interests and needs. What about being able to choose three topics to be examined on, say out of a dozen or so, and then being able to find resources to complete coursework on the issues and learn through doing and intrinsic motivation? What if we gave the students that power? "Ah," some might argue, "but then the students won't know what they are supposed to." Supposed to? What is a psychology student supposed to know? Methods are evidently important, but the two sides of Quantitative and Qualitative are pitted against each other in a political imbroglio, making a technicist assumption of what should be most important not at all value free. There are general debates within the field, sure, but currently these are taught as somehow floating above and free of course content! The nature/nurture debate, problems of ethics, the question of whether psychology is a science... embed them in the work, ask the students to consider these as they pursue areas of interest, and I believe they will be learned.

It seems I would only be happy with a radically different form of psychology teaching, one that would be more difficult for the examining board and for the teaching centre to cope with, one that would require interested and engaged and differentiating teachers who keep up to date with outside events and their students. Yes: one that would create high standards. My problem is not that I find the standards of today too high and demanding, "all that paperwork, all the assessment". I find them irrelevant and, if anything, far too low. One does not prove the ability to be educatable / have been educated through passing A-Level psychology. The qualification is not valid as a signifier for anything but regurgitation. It does not even help one to have it if one wants to do a psychology degree - those on my degree who had done a psych A-Level found stepping beyond the meagre boundaries of their knowledge quite demanding, and had to be repeatedly told that would have to submit to being retaught.

Yes. That's it. A-Levels need to follow onto the degree as well as be generally useful and cause the learning of 'transferable skills'. We need a genuine progression of learning and education, rather than what we have now, which is more a long system of grading students. And for what? Why must we divide young people into so many different groups, of fail and pass, of A B C D E and U, of A-Level and GNVQ? Why not just educate them?

How have I developed my planning and teaching over the course?
Forgive me, of course, my learning journal, for not addressing these concerns all that thoroughly. I suppose that the essence of my reflection is not really at all of myself and my practice within my placement – perhaps an obvious flaw and error – but for me my main interest is to catalogue my own thoughts regarding the system of education itself, the placement of my students within it, and how staff react to all this. This belies my own interests in education, not just as an educator but also as taking a wider view. It should not be surprising that I aim to, one day, do a PhD on poverty and disengagement, inclusion and ‘class consciousness’.
Regarding my lessons, then, to look back I certainly feel as if I have made some progress. In terms of content, I am trying to loose the balloon teaching from the anchors of the syllabus, and fly above it by considering the articles of knowledge more deeply and connectedly. This, of course, becomes harder and harder as strikes and others delays reduce remaining teaching weeks, causing grand ideas to stumble due to simple lack of time. My activities are improving – a movement away from the frankly useless gapped handout, to sets of group and individual activities such as discussions, debates, presentations, roleplays, question sheets, narrative-writings, various tasks, jigsaws, and etc. I am finding more and more ways of relating course content to activities, in an attempt to defeat the ills of teaching by transmission, and its flipside, learning by consuming fact nuggets (and its evil twin sibling, drop-out through absolute boredom).
The bestly improved item is my planning. Previous plans have been three sheets of printed paper – my first observation of this second semester was six. I found more things to say in differentiation, more ways of differentiating in planning and in lesson, and it all comes down to understanding more about the individuals in the group and what they want from a lesson.
I feel as if I am doing all these things, but I am not really interested in writing about them. I am more interested in writing about what my classroom practices reveal about the state of education generally. For example: why is it so hard to unbuckle lessons from overviews of course content through lecture-handout-questions, and develop and facilitate the opportunities educational experiences? What is it about the system that makes it seem rational for the teacher to do a bare minimum and just provide pedagogical materials that condense fact and ask the students to do little more than acknowledge they have read it by answering questions? I would say that it is never enough to give out a piece of textbook writing and ask the students to consider an essay question on these issues. Yet, frankly, the course seems designed to encourage this. Remember the facts, write them down properly, and you’ve passed. The spectre of assessment chases away noble thoughts of improvement and makes the students scared of ‘unnecessary learning’. This is a problem many of my colleagues have; student interest is focussed on passing and not learning.
I find I have to bring in education under the cover of darkness, like a Guantanamo detainee being bundled up in a hood and forced along barbed-wire corridors. And EdExcel don’t help, because they ask for such specific and uninspiring and unrelated things, as if they don’t want the students to be learning about psychology, just demonstrating a willingness to conform to a system. Am I merely testing my students for acquiescence?
What I want to consider is whether it should be like this, how it got like this, how to make it something else. I suppose I do not write about my classroom practice very often in this learning journal, but then again, so little is really asked of me when it comes to teaching. The real task of any teacher, I would contest, is to challenge the students, the staff, the college, those who set the curriculum, the educational system, the government, and anybody else in hearing range to find ways to make teaching and learning better. What happens in the classroom is placed under such an unbelievable set of limits, and these limits must be contested. That is when true reflection about teaching could take place – when the resources and rules allow for all sorts of methods that can do more than just meet limited content outcomes, and the teacher can teach and the learners can learn all in their own ways and time and fulfil their own interests and abilities. I am sure that I can teach functionally, mechanically, taking part in an assembly line of knowledge. What comes next is breaking free of this.

Amid differing tales of failing / passing the first observation of the second semester, I have planned a Magnum Opus of a teaching session.
Well, by this I mean that my plan is extraordinarily good – for myself, you must understand – and it fills me with an odd sort of pride, perhaps Homepride, when I look at it. Hurrah!
The only thing I am worried about is whether the lesson itself will be passable. Are there enough teaching methods? Will the differentiation pull off? Am I touching on those strange skills criteria that don’t appear to make sense?
The lesson was almost entirely planned last Friday, so at least I started early and have had time to think it through while making adjustments. Now there is a quick quiz involving Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, which will be sure to rock everybody’s world.
Otherwise, I am making headway on my Curriculum Development work, having found an enormous amount of articles and webpages and even a few textbooks. I wonder what I will be doing over easter?