Skip to main content

Underperforming teachers

Here is something from the TES:

"Dealing with the bottom 10 per cent of the worst-performing teachers would improve our schools immeasurably, argues the Sutton Trust. But is it that simple?
Last week, hundreds of thousands of men and women - some young, some old - took a deep breath (some perhaps even let out a quiet sigh) and stepped in front of class to begin another school year. For some, it will be their first time alone with a whiteboard and children; for others, that terrifying classroom debut will be just a distant memory. But whether these teachers have been doing their job for two minutes or 20 years, one in six is performing poorly.
At least that is the claim according to research on teacher quality published today by the Sutton Trust, which campaigns to improve social mobility through education.
The study suggests that some 64,000 teachers working in England’s schools are not performing as well as they should. If the figures are correct, you may be sitting next to one of them in the staffroom as you read this. Three or four low-performers you have encountered during your career may immediately spring to mind. One of them may even be you.
To put the Sutton Trust figure in context, consider the scale of the controversy caused by former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead when he claimed there were 15,000 underperforming teachers.
According to the Sutton Trust report, replacing or improving just the lowest 10 per cent of those working at the chalkface - roughly 40,000 - to bring them up to the UK average, would have a truly seismic impact on England’s schools and their pupils. The trust’s research claims that - all other factors remaining the same - tackling the bottom tenth of teachers would see the UK’s position in international league tables rocket in just 10 years from 21st and 22nd, in reading and maths respectively, to as high as third and fifth."


I am left wondering how one defines an under-performing teacher. The data collected by Ofsted on teaching quality is bound to be unreliable because they only see a selection of teachers teaching a selection of lessons in somewhat artificial circumstances. How else could they be counted accurately? Most, if not all, teachers perform well on some days and less well on others. Working teachers are aware that some teachers have a reputation for being particularly good or moreorless disastrous, though I have rarely come across the latter in the three schools I have taught out during my career.

So, whilst it is safe to assume that there are some incompetent or lazy teachers, just as there are incompetent or lazy layers, accountants, engineers and cabinet ministers, it is hard to put a number on them. I do agree that there should be measures that can be taken to help or remove such teachers. The development of performance management over the years has no doubt helped teachers in difficulty and the nature of modern teacher training may expose early incompetence more clearly than in the past.

My admittedly narrow experience is that teachers seem to have got a little better and seem to work a little harder than when I began teaching in 1980. They are more accountable, probably better trained (at least in practical teaching, if not theory) have better schemes of work, do more team-working, use their time a little more fruitfully and use a wider range of methods and resources.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,