Articles – Page 11 – Shooting Azimuths

The internet isn't going anywhere

As anyone who owns a laptop knows, you don’t really notice the internet until it isn’t there – until there is no wi-fi available or you’re out of 3G coverage. At this point your computer becomes a glorified typewriter and you suddenly realise your laptop is not as useful anymore.

The internet has reached such ubiquity that, much like electricity, we take it for granted.

Our students have been quick to exploit this ubiquity by incorporating the internet into the way they communicate and into their leisure activities. To them the internet is not so much an alternative cyber world, but rather an extension of the real world.

As a result, our students skills sets are changing right in front of our eyes faster than we can say digital natives.

Teachers, however, have been by and large slow to incorporate the internet into teaching and learning. Contrary to what one might initially assume, what prevents them from using the latest technologies isn’t lack of skills. More often than not, what really prevents teachers from using technology in the classroom is the fact that many of them remain pedagogically unconvinced of its benefits.

There are many reasons for remaining unconvinced – some very valid and others less so. But what these teachers all have in common is this: they have all failed to realise that the internet isn’t a transient fad they can afford to ignore.

The internet is here to stay.

What do you think?

Photo by mikeleeorg

In Education, Educational Technology

The wood for the trees

This cannot go on. Our school exams are running the risk of becoming invalid as their medium of pen and ink increasingly differs from the way in which youngsters learn.

Earlier this week The Independent published extracts from an interview with Isabel Nisbet, chief executive of the UK’s exams watchdog Ofqual, in which she argued that exam preparation would “become a separate thing to learning” for our “more digitally aware pupils”.

In Education, Educational Technology

Magic bullets It’s not about the tech, it’s about the teach

One of the things that worries me most about the use of technology in our classrooms is, well, how technology centred it all can be. Many of us fall in the trap of viewing particular technologies – a pile of netbooks or a bunch of iPads – as the solution to all that is wrong with education.

I was recently listening to a speaker from Apple who proudly gave an account of how some universities in the US and a school in the UK had given an iPod to every single one of their students.

He spoke as if the act of giving iPods away itself was the catalyst that would see education shift from 19th century style chalk-and-talk impartation of knowledge to 21st century style teaching and learning – whatever that may be.

Besides a suspiciously sudden increase in the numbers of iPods on sale in eBay, predictably little evidence was forthcoming to indicate that such a gesture actually impacted students’ lives beyond the short term.

Apple is just a case in point. Speakers from Microsoft, Adobe, Smart, Promethean… will all try to sell you their technology as the technology that will effect change.

In fact, it is you or I who will effect that change, not the technology. Yes, technology can be the driver of change, but only if people like you and me use it effectively.

I am often asked how I would use iPods in the languages classroom – often by the same people who first tell their students to keep their own iPods in their lockers and then splash out thousands on school iPods.

The answers invariably comes as a surprise: I don’t use school iPods, instead I make sure that my students have remote access to our resources and, crucially, are able to create and publish their own content – regardless of the platform.

However, these days iPods are so last year. iPads are now all the rage.

Throwing iPods or iPads at our students may well enthrall them for the first month or so and may even solve some problems, but it almost certainly also generates problems of their own. You’ll just be swapping one set of limitations for another. There simply is no magic bullet.

Would I welcome having a classroom full of iPads? Of course I would! But I’ll always keep in mind that what technology I use is not the most important factor.

As Ewan McIntosh once very aptly put it: It’s not about the tech, it’s about the teach.

Photo by eschipul

In Education, Educational Technology

Failing standards

I am fortunate to be able to travel and meet fellow teaching professionals, a few of whom still seem to enjoy taking every opportunity to bemoan their students for not achieving the high standards that was expected of themselves, often harking back to a legendary bygone era in which all children were model students and society’s treatment of teachers was akin to that bestowed upon doctors or lawyers.

Standards have slipped apparently. Year sevens can’t spell. Year eights can’t concentrate. Year nines can’t keep quiet. Year tens can’t take school seriously. Year elevens can’t write essays. Year twelves can’t stay awake. And year thirteens are lazy.

Year sevens may struggle with the spelling of the odd word and txt speak may show its unwelcome face occasionally, but children age eleven can these days do all sorts of things we could have never dreamt of. Which is really not that surprising, as the world they live in is quite different to the world we grew up in.

The challenges we faced then were different to the ones they are facing now. Yet we expect the same standards that were applied to us back then to be applied to our students. This is nonsense.

Leaving to one side whether such bygone era ever existed, or whether it is true that children were once able to concentrate through boring lessons but are no longer, one can’t help but wonder: Why are we holding our pupils to fifty year old standards? Why do we force them to learn the way we learnt? By doing this, are we not condemning the vast majority of them to failure? And lastly but crucially, are they failing by our standards or, rather like I suspect, are we failing to set the right standards?

My own son, now six, could browse and install apps intuitively on my phone before he could read. He regularly uses a computer unaided to play educational games and do his maths homework and do basic browsing. He is able to dextrously handle and successfully operate all the electronic equipment I own, often with incredibly creative results (I’m thinking of my digital SLR and my Flip camera in particular). On the other hand, he is only just started learning to write in joined up letters.

He has also recently learnt to cycle at a local beauty spot. Learning to use all the tools he will need to live a fulfilling life does not and should not stop him from playing outdoors and learning to be sociable offline as well as online. Believing otherwise is just a load of tosh. Our standards must change.

As ever, your thoughts are very welcome.

In Education, Modern Foreign Languages

Is it time to change History? How students perceive languages may be biased by other subjects

The issue of Modern Foreign Languages take up has hit the news almost daily since the GCSE results were published last Tuesday. The fact is that numbers are in decline with no sign of abatement. Regardless of whether you have strong feelings or not about the place of languages in secondary education, hardly anyone would argue that this decline is good news for the education of our children.

There has been a significant amount of soul searching in the national papers in the past seven days about just why the United Kingdom appears to be so uninterested in learning other languages, an attitude which was formalised by the government when they made languages optional at Key Stage 4.

The government actually replaced compulsion with a statuary entitlement to study foreign languages, which means that secondary schools must still offer a language to all pupils who wish to take one, although this is blatantly ignored by an increasing number of head teachers in the state sector. But never mind that.

As well as poor decision making at government level, the decline in interest for learning a foreign language has principally been blamed on the dominance of English as a world language – the everyone speaks English anyway argument – and the relationship between the inherent difficulty in learning another language and falling standards – the not everyone can learn a language argument.

However, in my view, any feasible analysis of why the UK as a whole remains apathetic towards learning other languages must take into account the general attitudes and their consequences in the wider context of the National Curriculum.

Let’s take a closer look at History for example.

The teaching of History is rightly an essential part of the curriculum because “History fires pupils’ curiosity and imagination, moving and inspiring them with the dilemmas, choices and beliefs of people in the past”, according to the National Curriculum website.

History also “helps pupils develop their own identities”, and this is the idea I would like to explore further, as I believe our History shapes not only our identities, but also our perceived place in the world, our attitudes towards other countries, their inhabitants and, of course, their languages.

I therefore will argue that the teaching of History should accurately reflect the reality of the place of the United Kingdom in the international context and that it fails to do so.

Britain today is an integral part of Europe, the continent that we live in, and the European Union, a fact that is almost altogether left out of syllabuses all the way from Key Stage 3 through to A Level.

It all begins to go wrong at KS3 when the only mentions of Europe in the syllabus are in relation to “studying the causes and consequences of various conflicts” from the Napoleonic Wars to the World Wars, including a healthy dose of genocide.

At KS4 things don’t improve much. Having looked at the AQA History Specifications A and B (Specification C is exclusively devoted to British History) the theme of studying European nations from the perspective of conflict continues.

In Specification A, for instance, students are required to study Medicine through time and one of the following: the American West 1840-1895 or Britain 1815-1851 or Elizabethan England 1558-1603 or Germany 1919-1945. There is also a coursework component in which students can chose a Modern World Study. By the way, no topics related to the place we live in – the European Union – are suggested for the coursework component.

In Specification B, although one of the 12 options in Section A of the coursework section is entitled Britain and the European Union, the theme of conflict continues with mentions of, of course, both World Wars, as well as France, Germany, Russia as competing world powers. There is no actual exploration of the European Union or of Britain’s place within it.

Perhaps, you might think, the European Union is a complex and sometimes controversial issue that is best studied in more depth at A level.

You’d be wrong.

The AQA GCE History specifications only mentions Europe in the context of the middle ages and the crusades. We continue to see mentions of individual European powers: Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, Italy’s mussolini, (curiously not Spanish Civil War). All still in the context of conflict and almost always cast in the role of enemies.

In Unit 3 Aspects of international relations 1945-2004, where we should expect whole sections dedicated to the birth of the EU, there is not a single mention of it, however plenty of USA (friend) vs the URSS (enemy).

Under The making of Modern Britain 1951-2007, there is one reference to the European referendum of 1975 in the context of Mrs Thatcher’s “special relationship with the United States”.

The very last bullet point in Unit 3 looks at Britain’s position in the EU under Major and Blair, quickly followed by, again, “Britain’s special relationship with the United States”.

In fact the European Union is only referred to as such just twice in the whole specification, although it does mention the European Community under a 23 word paragraph entitled European Dimension, ignoring the fact that the European Community transformed itself into the European Union in 1993, 17 years ago.

It would then appear that throughout the whole of secondary education and A Level when other European countries are studied it’s almost exclusively in the context of being at war with them, with few mentions of recent European history beyond the Cold War years.

Yes, I hear you say, but all those conflicts did happen and must therefore be studied.

Of course, I simply point out that our more recent History which explains the current place of the United Kingdom in Europe and the world is being ignored. We are churning out children who only have the vaguest notion of being in something called the European Union, who think all Germans are Nazis, that France and Spain are bent on invading England and that Americans are just like us except the funny accent (although it is obvious to anyone who has travelled in Europe that Britons share more in common, culturally speaking, with say the Dutch or the German).

Given the, in my view, excessive importance placed on the United States throughout the stages of education in the UK, it is perhaps not surprising that we rely on America for our news, as they share a language with Britain and a History which is taught here (not there!) as common.

Which is why we’re more likely to hear of a tornado in Alabama in the six o’clock news than a huge forest fire in Spain or why everyone knows the ins and outs of American politics but can’t name the current presidency of the European Union (Spain, by the way). But never mind that.

Perhaps what is surprising is that, after a childhood filled with negative undertones and associations about practically every country in continental Europe, there are still people who wish to learn a European language.

Is it time to change History? What do you think?

In Education, Modern Foreign Languages

The languages class divide How optional languages in the state sector may be disadvantaging students

GCSE results were published yesterday. For the 23rd year running, the trend was an improving one, with more pupils getting better grades. It’s not all good news though. The statistics also confirm a continuing decline in take-up in foreign languages: the number of students taking a language has dropped by a third since the government made them optional at GCSE six years ago.

Having said that, there are places bucking the trend where languages are still flourishing. Amongst the proverbial ivy and oak panels, the house ties and the straw hats, the study of foreign languages is still thriving in British private independent schools.

Since languages were made optional in the state sector, take up has nose dived to an all time low, with languages disappearing altogether from some schools at the hands of head teachers who saw an opportunity to save cash for a more popular performing arts and media centre.

Some head teachers, however, had no option but to abandon languages altogether at Key Stage 4 and beyond due to appallingly low take-up. Some students in the state sector really could not wait to get rid of a subject they perceived as hard, pointless and boring as hell.

However, private schools in the UK have tended to retain languages as compulsory to GCSE (age 16), with some doing the International Baccalaureate studying a compulsory language all the way to university entrance age, thus creating a de-facto class divide: those who can afford a private education are learning other languages, whereas those who cannot are not.

In my own school, a private independent school for boys, one language is compulsory to GCSE but many students choose two and, in some cases, even three. Our results at GCSE this year have been our best ever and we are looking at a healthy take up in languages post GCSE, when they become optional.

We often talk in terms languages becoming optional for children, however parents have an important role to play. As Head of Modern Languages, I seldom find myself having to justify the position of languages in our curriculum, whereas colleagues in the state sector are always struggling to find new ways to convince parents that speaking and understanding one or more foreign languages may be advantageous for little Kieran’s future.

Wealthier parents, it would seem, are more likely to understand the value of widened horizons and international communication. It would also appear then that the more privileged your background is, the more likely you are to be studying languages in the UK.

Faced with rich and famous people able to speak other languages – from politicians to pop singers, from famous actors to stand up comedians- it is tempting for a language teacher bent on selling his subject to uninterested teens to conclude that speaking a language is the reason why such people are rich and famous in the first place.

This is why modern languages departments in schools across the English speaking world often tout long lists of celebrities who speak or otherwise have a connection (often tenuous) to a foreign language. The problem is that they all ignore the even longer list of rich and famous people who don’t speak any languages at all.

Being able to speak a language is therefore often wrongly hailed as the cause of being wealthier, whereas the fact is that being able to speak languages other than your own is merely an indicator of your socio-economic status and, therefore, of your relative wealth.

What is really going on is that wealthier people often receive a better education which often happens to include at least one foreign language. The state sector in most cases does provide a good education, however, the fact is that the private sector provides a better one, which is why those who can afford to send their kids to private school. Simple supply and demand.

But we shouldn’t, in my view, begrudge the private sector for providing a better education to their pupils, who then grow up to be better off and able to send their own children to private school, thus perpetuating the cycle.

Instead, rather than looking at why the private sector often provides an education that is classed as excellent, what we should be looking into is why the state sector is not.

Optional languages in the state sector are not the cause of a relatively poorer education, but rather a symptom of a wider malaise. If the wealthier pupils are perpetuating their own cycle, the state sector is also perpetuating a self-fulfiling prophecy in which pupils from less fortunate backgrounds are denied the opportunity to improve their socio-economic standing.

The class divide lives on.

Photo by Jimmy Sime 1937