Delivering curriculum: the false portrayal of equity

I have, on reflection, been bored to tears by quite a lot of the teaching I have needed to observe over the last 3 years as a so-called teacher educator. This is in no way a reflection on the teaching students that I have observed. Nor does it say anything about the host of wonderful teachers who serve as mentors to our lovely student teachers.

I have written about this before, often, but it continues to exercise me. In our own teaching at UEL, there is an ‘expectation’ (how I detest and despise that word!) that Slide 2 of each PowerPoint we use (and yes, there has to be one of those too – ridiculously) has the learning objective and success criteria on it.

What I see, everywhere, in all the schools I have visited, is the insistence that lessons have a learning intention or learning objective. Not, note, a teaching intention or teaching objective. Then there need to be success criteria or ‘steps to success’ to make sure that the precursors of that learning intention are met, and that children are ‘on track.’ Often there are vocabulary lists the children have to rehearse at the beginning of the lesson and this might be followed by a retrieval exercise where previous learning is revised.

None of this is necessarily wrong (some of it is, obviously!) and all of these enforced practices (and they are usually enforced by MAT leads, heads, etc.) have some clear ‘evidence’ behind them that they work. Gert Biesta calls this the ‘learnification’ of education, the obsession that what is learnt is the only measure we can use to say whether education has taken place.

I led a school that used this approach for some years and we found it one useful way of supporting learning and, more importantly, a way of creating enthusiasms in children that they would have a successful lesson and, with hard work, be able to achieve all the things we wanted them to achieve in that lesson. We developed strong feedback approaches and used them to support teacher development; staff researched them and had them published, bringing the success criteria or ‘steps to success’ to life.

All of this was good and worthwhile,

…provided that these objectives and criteria did not get in the way of the teacher and the way s/he taught;

…provided that teacher imagination and intellectual curiosity was allowed to push aside the learning objective or success criteria;

…and provided that teacher autonomy was privileged over consistency between classes.

In other words, it was worthwhile whilst the teacher (and who he or she was or loved), was honoured more than what she or he had to teach. But what I am seeing is the opposite of this: teachers are becoming servants (slaves?) of the content; the content does not arise from the teacher but from the content deciders, often curriculum planners in a MAT or a federation, or simply the demands of a bought-in, off the shelf curriculum. I have seen this time and again in primary schools. It is a joke among many of the teacher mentors I work with: goodness knows whether the students are learning to regard this as normal. Teacher skill is increasingly reduced to getting content effectively into children’s heads along a particular pathway.

Whilst this need not say anything about the teachers or teaching students in the classes I observe in, it says everything about the obsessive neoliberal mindset that insists on standardization of the curriculum, the taught content, a planning format heavy on detail and low on imagination, and a top-down lesson structure which is defended in terms of a faux equality which effectively removes the agency of the teacher from the intellectual part of the lesson.

This might be many things, but teaching is not one of them. Of course, many would argue that this supports the teacher to do their job properly. They would argue that it ensures that all children get the same ‘provision’ as though that is some kind of holy grail: that children all need ‘the same thing at school.’ I think that these assumptions are questionable.

There is a lot of work going on currently seeking to minimise the disadvantage experienced by coastal schools in England. This is laudable, and I am sure comes from the best motives. But it seems a terrible shame, and quite wrong, that schools in a coastal rural setting should expect to get the same education as children in inner city Manchester, whose world experiences are so different. Whilst I harbour a secret desire that all children should be taught animal husbandry, gardening and the principles of crop rotation and hedge care, those in rural areas should know something about traditional and modern agricultural practices, whereas it is more important that children in inner city settings know different things to those, and more about the history of cities. ALL children, of course, should be taught how to garden, to grow vegetables and to repair things that break or are torn (like clothes).

At the moment, the curriculum is, to be truthful, dull in the extreme, especially for teachers who have to prepare their minds and their smiling faces to teach it enthusiastically yet again to another cohort of children. It takes a teacher of some skill to take the content and make it thrilling for children to learn so that they will never forget it and not be satisfied until they have learnt it all.

Amazingly, and no thanks at all to the curricular content, we produce such teachers. Yes, they have to learn the subtle arts of curricular subversion at times, but mostly they become amazing through a rich subject understanding and growing reserves of love, trust and joy.

These, I think, are more likely to be the guarantors of genuine equity in education than any externally enforced curriculum.