Curios of the week #114

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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The week started with a landslide win for the Australian Labor Party in the federal election. Most of the coverage has focused on the precipitous decline of the Liberal party which, in an electoral pact with the Nationals, forms Australia’s centre-right Coalition bloc. However, the Australian Greens also had a bad election in a context where minor parties generally did well.

On Monday, I spent my first day in my new office at the front of our Sturt Street campus. The view overlooks our flag poles, the chapel and Sturt Street. The weather has largely been holding up well for Autumn and so I have been treated to the northern sunshine.

This week’s Curios include a harmful myth, school safety climate, some creativity and much more.

List of the week

Australian education researchers still seem animated by an election that hardly featured any educational issues or policies. Writing in The Conversation, Stewart Riddle presents an unsolicited list of four issues that the incoming Labor government should address. There are no surprises here, neither in what is included and what is notably omitted.

For example, issue number 1 is the teacher shortage. Riddle thinks a lack of autonomy is a major issue for teachers. I don’t know about that. He is perhaps on firmer ground blaming workload which, paradoxically, is often created by teacher ‘autonomy’ for which we should read teachers having to constantly reinvent the wheel. He is concerned about negative portrayals of teachers in the media, but that doesn’t ring true for me. It would be a brave, shock jock kind of a journalist who would portray teachers as lazy or criticise their holidays. Instead, teachers are usually dealt with sympathetically. What tends to irk academics is the implication that teacher training is not good enough leading to issues with teacher knowledge and skills.

What does Riddle miss out? Australia’s obvious and apparent crisis in school behaviour, one well documented in sources such as surveys conducted by OECD and surveys of Australian teachers themselves. When you join the education academic groupthink fraternity, you have to sign a pledge never to mention poor behaviour, or to at least couch it entirely in euphemisms, before they let you into the club house and share their cookies and milk with you.

Issue number 2 is student disengagement and amid valid points about attendance and school refusal, Riddle claims:

“Simple policy “fixes” such as prepackaged lessons, mandated explicit teaching practices, or phonics screening will do little to re-engage marginalised young people.”

I am not convinced by this. I am of the opinion that using the most effective methods to teach children to read or to teach them anything else is likely to increase their chances of academic success and aid engagement with school.

And I have to comment on the appearance of the reanimated corpse of 21st century skills circa 2010:

“Giving young people the opportunity to collaborate on problems that matter to their communities (for example, climate change) can also help make them more engaged and critical thinkers.”

Do we really think students need even more climate change? Do we think this will positively engage them with school rather than further fuel a sense of hopelessness and fear of the future? I guess it depends on how it is done, but the idea that rehearsing the same scary talking points we addressed last term, over and over again, will do anything to foster ‘critical thinking’ is a sardonic joke.

Climate change is real and a problem future generations will face, but to face it well, they need mathematical, technical, scientific, social and civic knowledge and they need to believe they can make a difference.

Mobile phones of the week

Over at his Substack, Andrew Old has written a thoughtful piece about how attitudes to mobile phones in schools in the UK have changes over time and the risks of allowing phone use in the school environment. Andrew is a recommended read.

Rebuttal of the week

Following a couple of articles I wrote where I justified the process (here and here), mathematician Marty Ross wrote a blog post about his misgivings with the way we jointly plan lessons at my school. I then wrote a response. He has now written a rebuttal of my response where he outlines some of his frustrations:

“It is true that I emphasise the ‘what’ over the ‘how’, but not remotely as much as Greg suggests. I’ve written plenty about the ‘how’. But what frustrates me is when I see Greg and Grattan and co, and subsequently the education reporters, who invariably go to Greg and Grattan and co for reportage colour, way underemphasising the ‘what’. This seems to me obvious, and obviously perverting of the entire debate.”

I don’t think Marty has answered the main points I raised in my initial response to him, but he claims to have already done so in a number of previous posts that he lists. I will let you decide.

Safety climate of the week

How does feeling safe at school correlate with other outcomes such as good mental health?