Cargo Cults in Teaching
Cargo Cults
Cargo Cults are ‘an adherence to the superficial, outward
signs of some idea combined with ignorance of how that idea actually works’. They
were (supposedly) originally seen after World War II when pacific islanders started building airstrips on their islands
to attract back the allied airplanes that brought western goods to the troops
previously stationed there.
Success Criteria
A few years back, I was involved in some workshops based on
Assessment for Learning, run by Shirley Clarke. They were great: a large group
of teachers worked to develop their practice. One of the ideas that really
stood out was ‘Success Criteria’. This seemed to take on a life of its own in
many schools. Soon everyone was using ‘Success Criteria’, sometimes because
they had seen other teachers doing it and liked the idea, sometimes because the
school had adopted it as a ‘thing we all do’. In some schools, all lessons
needed to have Success Criteria, displayed on the board, written in the
planning and copied into the children’s books.
I have nothing against Success Criteria in themselves. A
list of what makes a good piece of writing, calculation or science
investigation might well be handy. But that wasn’t what Assessment for Learning
was about. It wasn’t the Success Criteria that made the learning better, it was
the creation of the Success Criteria
by the learners that made the
learning better. In most cases, if you could see the success criteria on the
board or in the planning it was a pretty good sign that they had been created
by the teacher, and not by the children.
Success Criteria had become a cargo cult. Schools were
telling themselves (and each other) that they were ‘doing’ AfL because they could
see the outward signs of it in their classrooms, without the principles being
embedded or even in some cases, understood.
APP
I have a confession: I loved APP, Assessing Pupil’s Progress
to its friends. Before APP, we had a simple way to level children. We looked at
the level descriptors in the back of the National Curriculum, and had a guess.
Or we looked at the child’s previous level judgement, added on a bit to
represent an appropriate amount of progress and submitted it.
Again, I was involved in some early work in developing APP
in my school. You would choose a few select and representative children,
usually 3, and form very accurate and precise judgements about their work using
a detailed grid of attainment statements and examples. You could then use them
to benchmark the other children in the class by making comparative judgements.
What I loved about this approach was that though gathering
the evidence for those three children was extra work and quite time-consuming,
it made the levelling of the rest of the class so much simpler. Even better you
could validate your judgements by simply comparing your benchmark children to
someone else’s – if you agreed about a couple of examples, you could rest
assured you were in sync.
But when I visited other people’s schools, they had done
something quite different. They had decided not to have 3 benchmark children,
but 6, doubling the workload. In some schools, they had abandoned the benchmark
children and started using the approach with the whole class. I even saw APP
grids stuck into children’s books!
What had begun as a clever way to increase the accuracy and
reliability of teacher judgements had become a massive exercise in ignoring
teacher’s judgements and replacing them with a massive box ticking exercise.
Teachers liked the grids, so they focused on them – they missed the point. The
grids became a cargo cult.
Cargo Cults in teaching
Whether it’s green pen for marking, lolly sticks, working
walls, coloured hats, or whatever craze is sweeping your school, teaching is
full of cargo cults. Heads like to bring in the new thing, teachers like to do
what they’re told. Change in education is time-consuming and difficult. Making
superficial changes is easier, and if it has little or no impact, never mind –
the next one will be along in a few months.
What about Teaching for Mastery
It can’t have escaped your notice that Mastery is
everywhere. The daily promotional literature that arrives in my pigeon-hole has
had the ‘perfect for the New National Curriculum’ stickers peeled off and
‘perfect for Mastery’ put on its place.
But teaching for Mastery is going to be hard. It is a set of
principles, some of them implicit in the Mathematics National Curriculum, some
of them developed by the NCETM. It is not a pedagogy, it is not off the shelf
and it is not a scheme of work. It will look different in your school from
mine, and that’s OK.
But in 3 years time, there will be a lot of people saying
‘we are doing Mastery’, when they have adopted some superficial outward signs
with no real understanding of the principles behind them. Signs like:
- Whole class teaching
- Putting desks in rows
- Using coloured counters
- Stem sentences
- White Rose planning
- Children standing up to answer questions
- Little or no differentiation.
And then we will wonder why it didn’t work.
Please don’t get me wrong: all of these are perfectly valid,
and will probably do no harm (except the last one). But they are not going to
help all children achieve Mastery of mathematics on their own.
