Teachers should see changes as offering them a fresh start in careers

THE President of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, Gerard Craughwell, says he doesn’t think we should “experiment” with our children’s future but I don’t know how we can make progress if we don’t.

Does Craughwell want the Junior Certificate to stay as it is? He doesn’t, apparently. Both ASTI and the TUI say they want it reformed, but they still want it to be externally assessed and certified. They don’t want their teachers doing the marking.

Representatives of 27,000 teachers staged a lunchtime protest on Tuesday against Minister Quinn’s plan to replace the externally assessed Junior Certificate with the teacher-assessed Junior Cycle Student Award. Both unions are balloting their members on strike action.

But we can’t reform the Junior Cycle properly unless we move towards continuous assessment, because we must shift from evaluating the results of learning to evaluating how we learn.

The wide consultation which the National Council for Curriculum Assessment conducted in 2011 made clear this priority in numerous submissions. The Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation (IBEC) put it very well: “Radical reform of the Junior Cycle teaching methods and curriculum content could have a profound impact on educational outcomes, including the development of critical thinking and moving away from the dominance of rote learning.”

This cuts to the quick of the issue. Right now my eldest son is doing the Junior Certificate “mocks” and I am having to hear his rote-learning on a nightly basis. Picture the idiocy of a young man of 15 pacing the floor of a suburban kitchen speaking Aeneas’s love for Dido to his pyjama-clad mammy: “What would he do now, how could he dare address with speech the Queen, who was burning?”

Brings me back to my own school days when my Latin teacher put English translations of the poetry on the blackboard and told us to write them down and learn them off. “So we’re not actually learning anything at all?” I asked, and there was an uneasy silence in the classroom. I loved Latin. I loved poetry. I’m not saying I could have translated Ovid sight-unseen, but there had to be a better way to go about my education than making me learn the English translation, which I rattled off once I heard the starting gun of the opening phrase.

I have always remembered that incident in the Latin class as the moment I lost faith in the education system. But I didn’t think for a moment that over three decades later I’d be listening to my son going through the same ritual. Only it’s worse now. In those days the teachers were a bit disorganised and the students were more so. Now teachers analyse the past papers, they produce likely answers, they compete much more to get their students high results because the schools want to look well in the feeder tables when it comes to the big exam, two or three years later.

I had to watch my son go through the indignity of learning off by heart an evaluation of a poem in Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock. My son, who went through his primary education through Irish and who was a voracious reader from the age of seven, sat at the kitchen table learning by rote someone else’s critical response to a poem. Not in the last century or the one before. This week.

It’s clear that this regime has to be put out of its misery. Continuous assessment is worth trying and is already working to some degree in subjects such as Art and Domestic Science. But on Tuesday the teachers voiced again and again the concern that assessing their own students would change their relationship and would not be “fair”.

What do they think is so fair about one externally-marked exam on one fateful day in June? In the UK the Cambridge University-based Assessment Reform Group list reasons for moving away from exams and towards continuous assessment: test performance can become more highly valued than what is actually learned; testing can lower the self-esteem of lower-achieving pupils; test anxiety affects girls more than boys; teaching methods can be restricted to what is necessary for passing the test, to the neglect of practical work.

Practical subjects such as computers, road safety, budgeting and cooking were called for again and again in the NCCA consultation. When asked what was the most useful thing they had ever learned, students listed life skills such as knowing “how to listen.” The new JCSA’s “short courses” will allow for school-generated options and I already see students in Schull kayaking for credits while Kildare students muck out horses.

I think teachers’ worries about the lack of financial resourcing for this project could be overcome with a bit of creativity. The Assessment Reform Group found replacing tests with assessment did mean more work for teachers but gained schools two weeks of teaching every year. I certainly do understand, however, the teachers’ concern about the measly day of in-service training that English teachers have received to bring in JCSA English in September.

But overall I think teachers should see the proposed changes as offering them a fresh start in their careers. Where is the satisfaction in spoon-feeding students with answers for a jar? Couldn’t a robot do that? By contrast, instruction which stresses process not product puts the spotlight back on the great profession of teaching, than which none is more important.

WORRIES such as those expressed by teacher and East Cork Fine Gael Councillor, Pat O’Driscoll, that there would be pressure on teachers in small communities to mark their kids up can be addressed by introducing robust criteria for assessment and developing an understanding of learning as a journey, not a destination.

From the number of times we have heard that the minister is “not listening” it is clear that his department has not communicated well with teachers.

But such profound change was always going to be difficult, particularly as teachers themselves are by definition strong performers under the old system. Reinventing themselves mid-career will be hard. Some will fail. Some will thrive.

But as a parent watching in horror as my first child prepares for Junior Certificate, and with two more to sacrifice on its altar, I warmly welcome the minister’s plan to revolutionise the Junior Cycle.

The current model can’t possibly prepare kids for the rapidly changing world they are entering. The exam model doesn’t develop skills listed by the Assessment Reform Group as “higher order thinking skills, ability to adapt to changing circumstances, understanding how to learn and the ability to work and learn collaboratively in groups as well as independently.”

So why the hell were the teachers standing outside the school gates this week protesting against it?