Curios of the week #40

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

---

It has been a monumental week.

After initially being unable to obtain a dog grooming slot until the new year, we were facing the prospect of Alfie remaining a furball throughout the long, hot Australian Christmas. However, relief arrived in the form of a cancellation at Petstock on La Trobe Street. Phew. At the last minute, Alfie managed to avoid the fate of being, quite literally, a hot dog.

In other news, the PISA results were released. These were depressing, with the OECD average declining. Although we must always point out that PISA evidence is only ever a correlation, it is hard not to highlight the pandemic and school closures as a likely cause of this decline. PISA research backs this up:

“Across PISA-participating economies, at least half of students experienced COVID-related school closures for three months or more. Systems that spared more students from longer school closures scored higher while their students enjoyed a greater sense of belonging at school.”

The researchers also note that those students who had virtual access to their teachers during school closures seemed to do better.

This is all highly plausible. We must assume that going to school has a positive effect on maths, science and reading abilities. If not, there would be little point to schools. So, the withdrawal of school should have a negative impact. And yet this seems to be a surprisingly controversial proposition. I’m not sure why.

This week’s Curios include spoofs, repression, a graph, the behaviour curriculum and much more.

Teacher trainers of the week

Professors Glenda McGregor and Martin Mills have performed a significant service to the public by taking to the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) blog to pen a piece where they explain exactly what they actually think. I will be able to refer to this post for years whenever anyone accuses me of making a straw man argument.

When I was a physics undergraduate, I coined the term, ‘coefficient of wrongness’ to describe the proportion of wiring errors I made in a particular electronics project. However, claiming the McGregor and Mills piece has a high coefficient of wrongness does not really do it justice. It is the sheer density of wrongness, as encapsulated by this paragraph:

“Schooling engagement and associated behaviours have several dimensions – cognitive and emotional as well as ‘behavioural’. The first two factors have to be addressed before ‘better behaviour’ will occur. Students have to be intellectually stimulated to engage cognitively; for teachers to do this they must be confident in their subject matter and enthusiastically creative in their delivery. Learning should be an enjoyable journey for students; it should be meaningful and provide them with opportunities to problem-solve and work in teams; these are the skills required for future economic and social structures for which ‘explicit instruction’ will have no place.”

This suggests that a) poor behaviour is the fault of teachers not planning interesting enough lessons b) inquiry learning and group work need to be part of these lessons c) this will better prepare students for the future in some undefined way and d) explicit instruction should be placed in scare quotes and has no role in the future for some reason — the authors love scare quotes.

Also, it is hard to reconcile the authors’ views that poor behaviour is the result of badly planned lessons with their suggestion that teacher training is already evidence-based because it involves units on the root causes of poor behaviour such as ‘low SES’ — must we expect poor children to misbehave? — and childhood trauma. What trainee teachers need are evidence-based suggestions for what to actually do when teaching Year 9 last period on a Thursday and the students are misbehaving.

Not all teacher trainers hold these views. On Twitter, one indignant teacher trainer from the UK suggested I should point out that McGregor and Mills are Australian. However, adding lists of caveats to everything is tedious. What is clear to me from the feedback I receive is that McGregor and Mills are pretty representative of teacher training in Australia and possibly beyond.

Graph of the week

To be fair, there are plenty of graphs this week. You may have already seen two graphs I generated about behaviour and bullying in Australia. However, I think this next graph is more representative of the overall PISA news.