I’m holidaying with the family, as one does. I have also brought along my work (?), as one does. There is a huge backlog of “current” posts to write, together with a bunch of background inquisiting of The Usual Villains, which cannot wait. And, in a few minutes, it’s time to go snorkel some fish. Busy busy. I will try to knock off a quick one.
This one comes courtesy of Greg Ashman, whose substack post yesterday alerted us to a recent AARE post by Linda Graham, Education Professor at QUT. Readers may recall that we have already met Graham, when she contributed to and then cheered on some smug thuggery of Jenna Price’s. Here, Graham is writing on AERO, currently the battleground of an idiotic social media battle due to some idiotic survey being conducted by leeches for hire, KPMG.
The AERO fight is over the usual: evidence-based this or that; pushes and counter-pushes on explicit teaching; the directing of teachers how to teach, and thus the directing of education academics how to teach teachers; and so on. The entire thing bores me, and if there are nuances to this current battle, I cannot be bothered determining them. In the main, I’ll trust Ashman to get it right. But there are couple of things in Graham’s post that got up my nose; I’m gonna pick my nose.
Firstly, and as Ashman notes, Graham is largely concerned with AERO’s attacker’s attackers. Graham notes “interesting patterns” in the counterattacks:
One pattern is where the concerns [with AERO] are re-articulated and then dismissed as “misunderstandings about” or, elsewhere, “resistance to” evidence-based practice. It’s a short walk from there to the other pattern, whereby education research and the academics who produce it are caricaturised as ill-informed or worse. …
This discourse conflates the re-circulation of zombie products, programs, and ideas (aka Brain Gym, and “VAK” Learning Styles) with current education research, researchers, and university Initial Teacher Education. Writ large. …
Never is solid evidence provided to support claims of charlatanry. We’re just inundated with the same claims time and again.
This substantial portion of Graham’s post is the strawiest of strawmen: As Ashman pithily notes,
The charge is uselessness, not charlatanry.
Greg is nice(-er), and one might take this further. One might argue that when such uselessness is dressed up in regal academic garb then it can reasonably be judged has having reached the levels of charlatanry. But let’s leave the judgment as one of uselessness and move on.
After off-loading her straw, Graham gets on to criticising AERO.
But [the authors of a previous AARE post attacking AERO] are right on another level too. While their appeal to professional judgement has elsewhere been dismissed with the old “choose your own adventure” chestnut, professional judgement is critical in classroom teaching because nothing works for all students, all of the time.
Graham then points to her own research, on the benefits of “enhancing the accessibility of summative assessment task sheets”, but with a big caveat:
But how to achieve this? We *could* develop a stack of accessible assessment task sheets and even create a commercial enterprise to pump it all out, pronto. Teachers won’t have to do a thing, we contribute to solving the workload problem, and we earn precious research income for all our effort.
Wrong. If we did that, we would rob teachers of the knowledge and skills they need to design accessible assessment. Knowledge and skills that they can later draw on to create modules in their school’s online learning management system or when developing learning resources.
We would also rob them of the creative and intellectual pleasure that can be found in the creation of said learning materials.
We would risk de-professionalising teachers more than they already have been by canned curriculum resources that promise to save teachers’ time, but which are inflexible, not appropriate for students with disability, and difficult/time-consuming to adjust.
Professor Graham, with all due respect, you have not a damn clue what you are talking about.
I know many teachers who would kill for decent canned curriculum resources. I would kill for decent canned curriculum resources. I just spent three of my goddam supposed holi-days creating exercise sheets for my classes because there was absolutely nothing decent to simply grab. I would have loved someone to have “robbed” me of the “knowledge and skills” I thus gained, and “the creative and intellectual pleasure” I thereby experienced.
As I have made very clear, I am no fan of either over-egged sciency “evidence-based” claims or, in particular, arrogant over-prescription nonsense. I am suspicious of AERO, I can barely read the smug pseudo-researchy support of CIS and their ilk, and I believe that well-meaning and well-doing contributors, such as Ochre, could provide a much better and more generally useful product if they were less scripty. I’m no great fan of any of the dogs in this fight; they are all at least a little mangy. But the mangiest of all are clown academics preaching on “the creative and intellectual pleasure” and whatnot that teachers gain from being up until midnight producing materials that in a sane world they would simply be able to grab from the shelf.
Back to the fish.
So, is the issue solvable with a decent set of textbooks or is the issue non-solvable since the curriculum documentation prevents such textbooks from ever being written?
(Genuine question, sarcasm was not intended but traces may remain)
Yes, and yes.
There’s no proper way to solve this without ditching ACARA’s appalling curriculum. But a reasonable and absolutely necessary stop gap is to have much better materials for what we have.
And the point of this post is there zero excuse for applauding the lunatic situation of teachers trying to do this themselves.
OK, but who is doing the applauding, really? From these bits of “research” it seems like it is the teachers themselves more often than not (with mixed motivations perhaps, which is another story entirely!)
Really?
To be clear, *I* have concerns with aspects of the AERO-Ochre crusade, because I see them being overly prescriptive, and with the danger of it all being mandated rather than simply offered. But that aside, and on the basic point of trying to produce good curriculum materials so that teachers do not have to do it themselves, who, other than academic clowns, is arguing otherwise?
It is an insane situation, where thousands of teachers reinvent thousands of wheels. The academics’ argument is that the teachers’ students are all different, and thus the teachers’ wheels should all be different. But the kernel of truth in this is used to create a mountain of madness. The students are not *that* different most of the time. And, to the extent that they are different, it is way way easier to tweak a given and good wheel than to try to make one from scratch.
Graham’s article is the perfect example of a defence of education academia shooting itself in the foot.
Does it not suggest that teachers are coming to these conclusions themselves? That may be cherry-picking the data a bit, or I may have just completely misunderstood it all.
But yes, I agree that the education-academics are almost unanimously saying that good teaching requires every teacher to invent their own stuff (do sport teachers need to design new games, I wonder, in the eyes of the edu-acs?). I’m a bit worried though that it seems more and more teachers are singing from the same song sheet.
I really hate pronouns. What is the “it” in your first paragraph?
In any case, I really don’t care. I am not going to refer to much less bow to the supposed wisdom of teachers, because I do not now believe in it. If some or many teachers are willing to buy into this particular madness, that does not make it one iota less mad.
I was unclear before, allow me to re-phrase. The various articles, papers etc seem to be championing the idea of teachers working harder to produce individual work because it is better for students.
I am not convinced this is the case at all, nor should the practice be encouraged.
My worry is that too many teachers have subscribed to the idea and even if a really good textbook was to come out of the ether (say if the Maths Masters chose to turn their attention to the project… not sure where they would find the time of course!) I am not convinced this would have enough uptake to have been worth it.
Back in the 1800s, universities had recommended reading lists of textbooks for students sitting the matriculation examinations. The books are still useful more than 100 years later (and so are the exam papers, to a lesser extent).
OK, sure. Academic clowns are advocating this. Anybody else?
If they are lucky, they will reinvent the wheel. Inexperienced teachers frequently take jobs in schools where there are only one of two teachers in their faculty. The chances of a new teacher in such a school, esp. one who may have gone to the regions b/c they didn’t get a job closer to home, producing resources that match those produced by an experienced teacher at a top school are low, understandably. Useful resources help the students understand and master what they need to succeed in a course.
The students from all schools, however, must compete in the same final exam, and for university courses, or jobs in the same job market. Their parents of students have similar aspirations as well. By making quality resources freely available I am guessing AERO and Ochre are hoping to reduce this disparity.
Thanks, Jim, and very important points. Undoubtedly, the majority of reinvented wheels are highly elliptical. And I am sure that you are correct, that AERO/Ochre are driven as much or more by concerns for equity, rather than concerns for efficiency.
Let me offer two comments on competition.
First, it is notable that the number of applicants for university places in Australia has been decreasing in recent years.
Second, furthermore, about 60% of Australian students enter university as undergraduates without an ATAR.
Great post. I’m on holiday with my family in Japan and am definitely not working. Work less and fish more if you can.
Perhaps I’m lazy, but I would kill for great quality “canned” resources. I find the academic handwringing over teachers not having to make our own resources patronising and paternalistic (and like a cracked bell, the academics in question don’t ring true).
By the way, you probably need to copy-write some of your turns of phrase. I have utilised several unattributed when talking to colleagues (sometimes to their delight. “Numeracy sludge” springs to mind).
Thanks, Aaron. “Copyright”, but in any case the Martyisms are free: pissing off the right people is plenty reward enough,
When planning what to have for dinner tonight, I have several options. I could start with fresh ingredients and create a meal. I could heat up left-overs from a previous dinner. I could buy a ready-to-go meal from the supermarket and heat it up. I could use that most useful item in the kitchen – the telephone. I could go to the pub around the corner.
Yes …
I also think that having solid resources available to all is good for equity. Currently I guess some students have access to good teachers and resources.
But if a good textbook is available to all then (I think) motivated or mathematically inclined students at all schools will be better equipped to make use of that than what they have access to now.
Textbooks set an expectation of what all students are meant to be able to do. I have heard this put forward as a downside by teachers (because students who are way behind will become disheartened). But I think it gives the students some knowledge and power over the situation as well.
I don’t think it is fair to make students completely reliant on their teachers.
Thanks, wst. All simply common sense.
There are plenty of shelves and an abundance of stuff to grab. But …
Who should be commissioned to create *the* shelf-grabs?
How does the mass become convinced to grab from *the* shelf?
The rope has become so frayed, it is very hard to imagine how it can become whatever the word is for the opposite to frayed, in a timely manner.
All good points, Anthony. It hardly helps that we’re screwed every which way from Sunday.
Obviously what is fundamentally required is sane guidance and regulation and oversight, emanating from sane authority. The fact, for example, that a second rate organisation such as Cambridge can publish their horrendous textbooks and that schools then blithely use the textbooks as if they are not horrendous is horrifying.
But we’re not gonna get that sane guidance any time soon. Until then, the very least we can do is to encourage the good guys to produce good stuff. Something which Professor Inclusive apparently seeks to actively discourage.
Your (Anthony’s) second point is the key here – unless promoted by an authority of some form, I doubt the masses will ever be convinced.
And the really good teachers probably already have their own shelf-full.
According to Victorian law, education in government schools should be free – and mathematics is one of the subjects stipulated in the Education and Training Reform Act 2006 for which this is the case. I doubt that parents would agree that their child’s education is free when they complete the booklist at the beginning of the year. The cost of text books is an issue for me.
Last term, I visited one government school that deals with this issue as follows. (BTW, this is not a flash school by any means.) They have a 4-year contract with the publisher for access to online copies of their mathematics books for all students.
I had a quick look at one of the texts and I could work with it.
The question of whether you could work with it is neither here nor there.