Curios of the week #59

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Back from England and to a Ballarat where the weather has started to change.

All the leaves are brown — well not all the leaves — and the sky is grey — apart from when the sun is out. The tree-lined streets of Newington are littered with large acorns from oak trees which, when the wind blows, whisper to us gently of Australia’s colonial past.

I have started teaching some economics. I quite enjoy it although I have lots of work to do to be in front of the subject. I am used to scientific models that are simplifications of reality but these economic models are something else. It is hard, sometimes, to get past the bits they leave out.

This week’s Curios include a little streaming, some defunding a massive sook and much more.

Court case of the week

Katharine Birbalsingh and Michaela Community School in London have successfully defended a court case brought by a Muslim pupil after the school banned students from performing prayer rituals in the yard at lunch time. The judge decided this ban did not interfere with the child’s right to religious freedom and supported Michaela’s stance:

“The disadvantage to Muslim pupils at the School caused by the [prayer ritual policy] was outweighed by the aims which it seeks to promote in the interests of the School community as a whole, including Muslim pupils.”

Michaela seeks to forge friendships across religious divides and Birbalsingh took the view that prayer rituals involving one group of students worked against this aim. In addition, there were suggestions of ‘intimidation’ within the group of Muslim students.

Many schools would have a prayer room available for students of any faith to use, but having visited Michaela, I am aware of the shortage of space. Even if they did establish such a room, it would still require Muslim students to remove themselves from other students during lunch and so could conceivably be against the school’s aims of integration.

Michaela works hard to include everyone while also acknowledging this involves compromises. For example, the ‘family lunch’ students eat is vegetarian to navigate different food sensitivities, but the school cannot ensure the plates have not touched eggs, something strict Hindus would prefer.

Birbalsingh wrote an impassioned and perhaps rather political response which you can read via Twitter below:

It won’t endear her to her critics but then, probably nothing would. She makes the interesting argument that successful multiculturalism is not about absence of a common culture but about forging a shared set of values.

It is worth noting that the pupil’s case against Michaela was funded by the British taxpayer through the legal aid system and that the same child apparently has another case lodged for which legal aid will also be available. The lawyers representing the child are from Matrix Chambers which is a high profile firm that Cherie Blair, wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, helped to establish. These relationships suggest to me that there is more to come and that Michaela may have won this battle, but has not yet won the war.

Agony uncle of the week

Tim Shanahan is one of the authors of the seminal American National Reading Panel that reported in 2000 on the most effective methods for teaching reading. He now curates an interesting blog where he answers questions from teachers. I don’t always think I agree with Shanahan, but I do always find him interesting and thoughtful.

In a recent blog, Shanahan responds to a question from a teacher who asserts that small-group instruction is the most effective way to teach. He highlights some of the advantages but then points out the following:

“However, that advantage gets balanced out against the reduction in instruction that is required in most small group situations. In most circumstances, students don’t learn much away from the teacher. It is difficult to come up with seatwork activities that lead to much gain, except possibly for the highest achieving kids (Connor, et al., 2013).

That means that while grouping may increase the proportion of a lesson that students may master, it also means that there is much less opportunity to learn because so much less can be taught in the reduced time.”

This is a similar point to one that I often make about differentiation. If we teach a 60 minute lesson and divide the class into five groups, each group will get around 12 minutes of instruction — and this is without deducting any time for classroom management and coordinating the groups. Whole class teaching may be less well targeted and may land a little less well with the students, but 60 minutes of it is likely to beat 12 minutes of small group instruction.

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Critique of the week

We all want students to think, right?