Learning Journal

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?