The Next Big Thing in Education

This is it. The one you’ve been waiting for. The answer to everything that’s wrong with education. Until next week, that is, says Sue Cowley...

In the 20 plus years that I have worked in education, there has been a continuous line of ‘Next Big Things’. You can spot the Next Big Thing a mile off because it will have a fancy name, some capital letters, and often an acronym as well. ‘Assertive Discipline!’ ‘Assessment for Learning!’ ‘Multiple Intelligences!’ ‘VAK!’ ‘Brain Gym!’ Each solution comes with the promise that this new idea or method will solve all our educational ills. And yet, for some reason, that never happens. Children carry on being as complicated, complex and wonderfully contrary as they have always been. Different schools and classes and contexts still require different ways of working. And teachers carry on adapting their teaching methods to the children who are actually in front of them, just as they have always done.

But now, we are told, we have found the Next Big Thing and this time, finally, it is the Last Big Thing. We have discovered the answer, the silver bullet solution, and its name is Evidence Based Practice. Teachers must study the evidence from educational research and base the methods they use in the classroom on the outcomes. They might even run some classroom trials themselves. Research-based methods are the cure for all our ills, because they will tell us exactly which educational medicine to use. No longer will we be swayed or persuaded by the latest fads and fashions. Now we can engage in a search for ‘the truth’ about what actually works.

Over the years I have come to realise that, in each Next Big Thing presented to teachers, there is often a kernel of truth or a useful way of thinking about what happens in classrooms. The problem comes when someone claims they have found the ‘one true way’, and teachers take the idea on board wholesale, without questioning how it would work in their own context. Even though the notion of multiple intelligences does not translate easily into the classroom, ideas about learning styles give us a useful way to explore how different children learn. Our search for solutions is laudable one, but it leaves our profession open to constant change, political interference and to the marketing of ideas. It also takes us on a fruitless search, looking for something that simply doesn’t exist.

Research can give us many valuable insights; it can check to see whether our intuitions, ideas and methods have scientific validity. It is an interesting and useful way of measuring one teaching method against another. But at the same time, what we consider to be ‘best’ will still vary, according to our own values, attitudes and opinions. When I was a child, some of my middle school teachers apparently believed that corporal punishment and screaming at small children was the ‘best’ way to get them to learn and behave. In some respects this was true: I was highly motivated to comply and to get on with my work. But at the same time these heavy-handed methods turned me into a school refuser, and left emotional scars. Indeed, my childhood experience of school is part of the reason why I ended up becoming a teacher.

Over the years I have come to the conclusion that we must help teachers trust in their own professional judgement. That as teachers we build up our bank of strategies, ideas and approaches based on our knowledge of how different techniques work for different children, in different contexts. Mr Gove might be wary of trusting ‘the Blob’, but the teachers I work with are not some amorphous mass; they are intelligent, thinking, professional people who simply want to do the best for their children. It is teachers who are in the classroom with the children. It is teachers who have a professional responsibility to keep up to date with the latest thinking and ideas. And it is teachers who must decide what the best approaches are for their children, in their setting, at that moment. If you learn to trust yourself, and your judgement, then you retain that crucial confidence in your abilities as an educator. And, if you stick with what you believe in long enough, eventually the cycle will come back round, and someone will tell you that actually, you were doing ‘the right thing’ all along.

About the author

Sue Cowley is an experienced teacher, author and presenter. Her latest ebook is The Seven Ts of Practical Differentiation. Visit suecowley.co.uk to find out more.