Continuing the discussion from UK Online Safety Act:
For good reason. The authors got their inspiration from some place, after all…
(Hanon, is this how it’s done? Had to struggle a bit for the title. I just dunno)
Similar to Michaela, quite a number of UK schools have moved towards being more strict— imposing sanctions for talking in corridors, forgetting stationary, and not following the uniform code. Heavy behaviour management can feel oppressive, but its proponents will say the alternative is having children disrupt learning for others. Closely surveilling every child at least prevents them from bullying one another.
Michaela let skeptics have tours, and many report back positively, while others come away with concerns.
Another aspect of Michaela which is less discussed is that they use “direct instruction”, basically getting the teachers to recite from a script. All the teaching resources are centralised and there’s a lot of call and response work in the classes. It’s definitely a different approach.
From my own perspective, I would have hated being at a school like this. They measure success in GCSE results, but I wonder about the inner lives of the children— they don’t even let children speak freely at lunchtime.
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Would help if we knew what sort of adult they emerge as from there. I would imagine “salaryman” at least, succesfull laywer on average.
Children who are raised to be subservient to a strict authoritarian hierarchy grow up to be adults who are most comfortable within a strict authoritarian hierarchy, which is not an attititude you want to foster in a modern Western style democracy.
I’ve been teaching in US public schools for almost twenty five years and the idea of reading lessons from a script and settling for a call and response level of achievement runs counter to everything I believe about effective teaching and learning.
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I have recently gotten back into education, having dabbled in it (and acquired a PGCE) in the long-ago past. Speaking as a newly-employed teacher, I would have a huge problem with reading lessons from a script. In fact I think I would be incapable of keeping to the script. Teaching should ideally be about encouraging young people to think for themselves. If the teachers aren’t allowed to think for themselves either, you haven’t got a school, you’ve got a factory production line.
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The thing is, it seems that a number of people are quite ok with that, as long as the results rank highly in certain metrics.
Scary as hell.
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On the flipside, those metrics are very important, because they counteract grade inflation (when instructors are incentivized to give higher and higher grades to the same work). Right now in the US there’s an epidemic of grade inflation to make up for covid-related learning setbacks, which means average grades aren’t noticeably lower than a decade ago…but average standardized test scores are.
So how do we come up with objective, standardized measurements that actually incentivize learning instead of memorization or gaming the system? That I don’t have an answer to. It’s a thorny problem! And it’s not like these tests can’t be manipulated, either. In the US, individual states can’t change the assessments, but can change what score is considered “proficient”. So last fall in my state, the percentage of high school students who are “proficient” in math suddenly jumped from 28% to 38% despite no change in actual scores. They just changed the definition of proficiency.
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I’m not sure what the actual teaching approach at Michaela is like, but the phrase “direct instruction” is dangerously overloaded in education. Generally, “direct instruction” without capital letters refers to the theory that students learn best when teachers present knowledge to them directly (as opposed to “constructivist” theories that suggest students have better recall and understanding of ideas they have discovered for themselves). Educational research in cognitive neuroscience suggests that this theory is largely correct. “Direct Instruction”, capitalised, refers to a much more specific teaching approach developed in the 1960s, originally designed for raising core literacy and numeracy skills with children from highly deprived backgrounds; this is where the scripted lessons and call-and-response part comes from.
Needless to say, the two terms are very readily confused; most articles I’ve read about Michaela do not seem to be clear on the distinction. And it’s muddied further by the fact that many (lowercase) direct instruction lessons will necessarily contain elements which resemble (capital) Direct Instruction lessons, because successful direct instruction requires some means of ensuring that students remain engaged, checking that they have learned what you think they should have learned, etc.
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This is a interesting distinction. From what I’ve seen, it does seem they use (capital) Direct Instruction inspired teaching material and pedagogy. The co-founder Joe Kirby has written about Siegfried Engelmann.
As @J_J_Guest indicates, having teachers act like call center operatives is probably not what most teachers want to be doing— though I suppose schools like Michaela attract staff who are aligned with their approach.
The articles I’ve read mentioning (capital) DI in connection with Michaela have mentioned it being used as an intensive catch-up mechanism for students who are significantly behind in core areas like literacy and numeracy, which where (capital) DI is most commonly employed. I’ve not come across the notion of a whole curriculum being delivered that way.
I know there are schools which do use fully-scripted lessons, but that’s usually because the UK has a teacher recruitment and retention crisis, and having experts prepare a script is one way a struggling school can paper over the cracks of not having enough subject experts to actually staff their lessons. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s going on at Michaela, which is famous enough (no publicity is bad publicity, after all) that I doubt they struggle to find candidates for vacancies.
Quite possibly, I’ve been subject to the very confusion you pointed out and conflated various things I’ve read. I think they use a lot of scripted drills, and their lessons plans are given to them, but that doesn’t mean they’re fully scripted as you say.
Education is a hard problem, and it doesn’t help that things that are easy to measure are often of dubious value, many of the things that are worthwhile are hard to measure, students are all over the place in aptitude, interest, motivation, fulfillment of more essential needs, etc. and technology sometimes causes practical knowledge to shift faster than a curriculum can be updated or run its course.
Honestly, even when I was a student, I hated standardized tests. Not because I sucked at them, but if anything, because I found most of them too easy and hated that they were almost always multiple choice. When I was in highschool, I celebrated everytime a class had a teacher-made final exam instead of a state standardized End Of Course exam.
And quite frankly, a teenaged me chafed under school rules that were downright lenient compared to what that youth torture center is guilty of, and in general, I’m very much in the camp that rulesets should be as lenient as reasonable and that there should be a rationale for every restriction put in place, ideally with those rationales stated in terms those affected by the restrictions can understand.
I also wonder if maybe education leans too heavily on quantitative feedback and doesn’t provide enough qualitative feedback and if the insistance that every assignment be boiled down to a single number and putting so much emphasis on that we ignore less tangible aspects of a student’s work wasn’t a mistake that’s been repeated so long its become a harmful tradition.
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From reading a little on the subject it seems to me that direct instruction, with or without initial capitalisation, is not simply teachers “reading from a script”.
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One thing to note about metrics (and I mean this for all organizations, not just in schools) is that while metrics can be useful benchmarks for improvement, they favor aspects of improvement that are ”easily measured”. When too much emphasis is placed on that, a whole lot of organizational goals that are not easily measured can be overlooked.
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Agreed. There are better ways to provide direct instruction than reading off a script. There are also some educational programs or or kits which explicitly encourage script reading.
an alternative to in class direct instruction is a technique which has come to be known as “flipped class room” where the teacher provides direct instruction resources (videos, assigned readings) for students to digest outside of class, in hopes that the follow up classroom learning will be more dynamic.
Yes, because kids love doing homework and checking out those resources outside class. 
Of course, the whole notion of “should there even be homework at all" is a separate discussion.
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I tried that one for a while and didn’t find much success with it, but I’ve heard good results from others. There always ended up being a certain percentage of students who wouldn’t do the readings but would engage with lectures and in-class activities.
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I’ve seen flipped classrooms before and it seems to be effective. You get homework time in class, so the time outside of class is spent doing the less strenuous task of watching the video or whatever, without the expectation of having to figure it out yourself if you’re confused since you can go and ask the teacher directly. It’s usually used with subjects like math.
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On the total opposite end of the spectrum, I’m just finding out about the New College of Florida via John Oliver.
Note: the following YouTube John Oliver link is not, as usual with Oliver, apolitical. If you don’t want politics, best to skip. Gist: it’s in the process of no longer being what it was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMc07F1UUU
In fact, as the video shows, it’s being… what’s the word… “destroyed”?
My middle school history teacher was called Mr Roberts. He was old and wore a tweed jacket. His teaching method was to copy passages out of books onto the blackboard, which we would then copy into our exercise books. There was very little discussion or analysis of what was being taught. Everybody hated his lessons and I don’t remember a single damn thing he taught me.
In high school I studied Social and Economic History under Mr Machin. He was a young, long-haired Glaswegian and came to work in a tracksuit. We learned about the history of the labour movement, beginning with the Inclosure Act of 1773 and continuing through the Industrial Revolution through to the formation of the Labour Party and the General Strike of 1926. We covered the British Empire, slavery and the colonies. He completely changed the way I looked at the world, got me angry about the injustices visited upon the general population by the ruling classes, and turned me into a lifelong socialist and anti-capitalist. For context, my dad, at the time, voted Conservative and was a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher.
A good teacher, one who really makes you think, can have a huge impact.
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