In the course of a teaching day I encounter many queries and questions from my students; I ask a fair few myself. There have been some cracking questions in our recent “Why Week”, my favourite being, “Are we all characters in a play?” Not bad from my Year 8 first thing in the morning. It’s great to think that there could be such creativity, independence and initiative to build on.
But do the next two years of school sharpen that creativity? I recently found myself struck dumb when a well-meaning member of the Year 10 English literature class told me: “I’m not happy with my marks for my last essay - how can I improve?”
On the surface, it’s the kind of question that students are encouraged to ask - after all, they have futures to make and careers to build. But it’s heart-breaking to think that behind that question are a number of anti-academic assumptions and illusions - especially for an arts/humanities subject.
What have we done to make the thinking of 15- and 16-year-olds so instrumental and extrinsically motivated?
The fashionable view is that it is only fair to let students know how they will be judged so that they can gear their responses to the criteria and the assessment objectives. So now students have frequent access to the neatly levelled, multi-page mark schemes that are the product of long negotiation between Ofqual and exam boards, full of the jargon of terminal assessment.
Students see that there are grade boundaries to get over if they are to make “progress”. This instrumental vision is reinforced by the widespread use of targets. It’s a practice which implies that there is always one specific “thing” to be done to move a piece of work from one level to another. Fulfil the target and success is instantaneous.
Students need to make mistakes
The truth, of course, is that there is no stairway to the heaven of high grades, especially in my subject, English literature. Instead, the apparatus of assessment obtrudes and overshadows the learning that it is meant to measure.
The blandly informative exam board-endorsed study guides, which accompany every new specification, are often more carefully studied and learned than the original subject material. Used in tandem with mark schemes, they peddle a sterile, second-hand, even barren experience.
Have we perhaps killed young people’s natural curiosity with the kindness of scaffolding and metacognition to the point where they need some discussion of learning laced with assurances of success before they actually get on with a task? All too often teachers are asked to provide model answers to guide students along the way.
In the wrong hands, the model answers so beloved of study guides substitute learned responses for genuine acquisition of the skills and language needed to denote stylistic effects and the nuances of emotion and sensation. Imitation rather than independent creation is the order of the day.
The reality of the process of learning is that it’s important to get it wrong at times. Teachers cannot and should not rescue students from every disappointment, because in doing so they withhold the opportunity to experiment and create new ways of working.
This puts students into a zone of uncertainty. Students are not robots, even super AI robots! Living with ambiguity, where there is such a wide range of possibilities, is unsettling for those who like right answers.
The process of academic learning is a bit like life. So often you simply have to try it and see. Encounter every new situation through the lens of past experience and with the fresh realisation that some things fit with past beliefs but these will require modification and rethinking. In teaching and learning alike there isn’t a shiny travelator that carries teachers and their classes along the route to success. It’s a bit of a trek really - usually uphill and full of false starts, moments of realisation and - just occasionally - a vision of the crock of learning gold at the end of the rainbow.
Yvonne Williams is a head of English and drama in the south of England and a member of the NATE post-16 committee
