Staff Meeting June 12th 1956
Conditions for effective teaching.
I intended to speak about teaching method, thinking that we needed a reminder of certain points concerned with presentation and thoroughness. But I quickly found, in thinking about these, that I had to go much deeper. I had been thinking of the superficiality of much of the children’s learning and the superficiality – or light-headedness – that they show in their approach to work. We need a different feeling an approach on their part; something needs to be touched in them. Don’t we tend to slip too easily into the ordinary teacher-child relationship the teacher being there to make the child do what he does not want to do. Teaching is often very inefficient because there are many obstructions – obstructions produced by the children’s attitude, their past experience etc. – and if these were out of the way, if the children enjoyed in a deeper sense what they were doing and really wanted to learn, we should be very much more effective.
Michael Burn’s book on Lyward’s work has made me feel that we must go much deeper if we are to improve our work. He deals with boys who have broken down at the sixth-form or university stage and can’t work at all. He has to relax them, remove the pressures and tensions, before they can begin to live properly and work on their own steam. These are seriously disturbed cases but the very abnormal is only an exaggeration of the more moderate difficulties in children that we have to cope with, and therefore what he discovers and the way he acts have a definite relevance to our work.
Teaching always personal There are some things that I have always regarded as implicit in our work that I ought to say definitely. One is that teaching is essentially a personal task, it is never purely functional. What we are affects our teaching profoundly. It is not merely knowledge that we give in class, but ourselves. We communicate our fears, tensions, anxieties, reservations. If we are not at ease about the job our pupils will not be at ease in learning. If we do not give ourselves in a full sense to the classroom situation, neither will the children to their work. If our own incentive for teaching is a poor one we shall encourage a poor incentive in learning.
Taking the whole of our work – all our relations with the children (for we are educating them in every sort of contact) it must be said that the more we deepen our own lives the more depth there will be in the children. In some measure (obviously not wholly) what we complain about in children is a reflection of faults in ourselves and in the group life of the staff.
Incentives for work How much have we allowed external incentives – examinations – to take the place of love of the subject, of sheer joy in teaching, of the fascination of the objects of study? It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the best condition for learning is not concentration, but relaxation, a state of mind in which you do not know that you are working hard, but in fact are. Whenever we say to a child “You must learn to concentrate” it is an indication of failure. Consciously worked up concentration means great inefficiency.
Education as Nourishment Education is best thought of as nourishment – as though the word were derived from edo instead of educo. If we think of it that way we shall not think of children as having to adjust themselves to an academic syllabus and grumble because they can’t, but we shall try to discover what is the true form of nourishment that they need. To discover this we need to be in close contact with them, no putting so much pressure on to them or so much tension into their learning that their very consciousness of failure shuts them off from us.
Vocation and purpose The pressure produced by the threat of an approaching exam often does not promote efficient learning. It is an inadequate objective. It seems clear that a sense of vocation or purpose, the prospect of a definite career, is far more wholesomely effective, as has been shown in the astonishingly rapid progress made by pupils of moderate I.Q. when their purpose became clear to them. Fundamentally then, our aim with the apparently frivolous, inattentive, time-wasting child should be to reach a deeper level than is touched by our class-room criticisms – a level at which a sense of purpose can begin to emerge.
Unity of Staff At Finchden the half-dozen members of staff are all the time challenged by personal needs, demands or crises produced by the disorders in the boys. They have continually to adjust themselves to serious personal situations. The personal aspect of education is obviously pre-eminent, everything else takes a lesser place. At Wennington, more definitely a school, we tend, inevitably perhaps, to think of personal troubles in the children as mere interruptions to the academic task. We therefore tend to regard them with impatience instead of thinking of them as providing the most important opportunities to help children to maturity.
Questions for staff.
1. To what extent is each member of staff here because he or she understands what the school is trying to do and believes in it? It was agreed at the recent coeducational conference that throughout our schools we assumed far too much that there were understanding and unity in our staffs. In every school we are getting further and further away from the pioneer stage in which understanding and unity were developed out of the very struggle to build up. An apparently happy and hardworking staff is not necessarily united.
2. In teaching what proportion of a teacher’s interest is in
a) the work and the academic achievement?
b) the pupils as persons?
3. How far has the examination pressure distorted our concept of the purpose of education?
4. What is the quality of the personal life of staff in our community of adults? To visitors our staff gives a very good impression. We seem cheerful, lively, hard-working, interested. But how far is this superficial? Is there any depth of personal experience here which changes the lives and outlook of men and women, so that they feel enriched by their life here?
5. In all communities there are failures and disappointments. No person or community ever lives up to its best intentions. Have members of staff allowed disappointment with the school to cause them to withdraw partially so that they no longer give themselves in a generous and personal sense to the school (this means something more than just hard work)? Occasionally one hears, at first or second hand, a general remark which seems to imply ”What more can you expect of this place” and which suggests that the person concerned will continue to find the school tolerable if he limits his efforts and hopes to a relatively narrow field. This is a matter that probably merits considerable discussion at a deeper level.
Points raised in discussion
a) Difficulty arises out of the personal equality that has been encouraged here between teachers and children. It must not be allowed to imply that in it the adult ceases to be an adult and recognised as such. We have something to give by reason of our adulthood and the children must not get the impression that our adulthood is not significant. We must not drop our adulthood – in so far as we have it – however close our relationships with children may be. A valuable intimacy is possible in which however our maturity is fully expressed and recognised by the child.
The question arose as to what is meant by adulthood. One suggestion was that an adult can be content to live with unsolved problems. Adulthood is not a static condition but is a condition for further growth. A mature person is able to free himself from subjective impulses and judgments, able to act more in terms of the real situation, less likely to have the real situation coloured by his subjective needs. He can free himself from touchiness, can discriminate between feelings that are justified and those that are not. In difficulties he does not tend to look for security, like a child running to mother; he accepts conflict and difficulty as the normal experience of life.
b) It was generally thought that the school, certainly the teachers, had become increasingly “exam-conscious” and we were perhaps teaching less from joy and interest and more with the exams in mind. While this was deplored, it was agreed that some of the training for exams is a training we should give our pupils irrespective of the exam. This is a training in clear and complete statement, involving careful and discriminating choice of words; also in the careful analysis of what a question means and requires, and the intelligent assembly and sorting out of the required information. We agreed that we should frequently test children – perhaps very frequently – but that the testing should always involve some questions that required statements in complete sentences – not just one-word answers. The one-word answer may be a sound way of testing a child’s knowledge for certain purposes, but is not in itself an educational experience for the child. Our tests should be themselves an educational exercise, a creative type of work.
We should further train children to understand the purpose of testing – to inform the teacher and the pupil how far the work has been successful, whether any of it has to be repeated, whether the teacher has not been clear. There is no point in cheating during a test because it prevents the teacher from knowing when a child needs further help.
c) On the matter of the apparent triviality of children, it was pointed out that an individual child on his own can often be found to respond with sincerity, but there is also a “community personality” that is trivial and insincere. Is there any way of getting rid of this duality in the children’s personality?
d) It was suggested that at a future meeting Louis should bring a number of children’s drawings and that we should examine them with a view to seeing what light they throw on children’s personality and development.