Politicians should stop worrying about whether tests are being 'dumbed down' and provide pupils with the right tools for life
"If I put a bunch of flowers in the back of a computer, does the computer become a vase? Everyone spend a minute thinking please. Let me stress there is no right answer." This was the start of my assembly for 240 11-year-olds at a west London comprehensive a few weeks ago. Pointing at a boy in the second row I ask: "What do you think?"
"It can't be a vase, the computer wouldn't hold water."
"I don't agree," another says. "You could put water in the back and push in the flowers and then it would be a vase."
"No, the water wouldn't stay," a student answers. "A vase has to be curved, so it can hold water."
"A vase has to be pretty, that's the point of it," says a nervous girl at the back.
"So what is the definition of a vase?" I ask. "Could this be a vase?" I say, holding up a dustbin. The students look thoughtful.
"If I put this bunch of flowers in my mouth," I say, clutching four wilting daffodils, "and put water in my mouth, am I a vase?" I start to put the flower stems in my mouth. There are rumblings of "yuk" from the hall.
"No, whatever you do you're not going to be a vase," one girl says emphatically.
"So where have we got to?" I ask.
A serious-looking boy answers: "The computer is not a vase; it is only acting as a vase for that moment. It is changing its identity, sir."
This question, about flowers and computers, is one of hundreds of "thunks" – "questions that make your brain go ouch" – compiled by educationalist Ian Gilbert to get students to think. Yet surprisingly, children spend very little of their time in school thinking. There is almost an unspoken deal: we'll spoonfeed you the required nuggets of information to pass your exams if you behave and do your homework on time. Our education system is not designed to get children to think. Why?
Because even now, after some streamlining of subjects, teachers have huge amounts of content to plough through. Because teachers often do not have the techniques or confidence to engage in open-ended, probing questioning. Because in some schools there are crowd-control issues that get in the way. There is perhaps one further reason. We don't prize thinking in this country. We are suspicious of the intellectual; it's almost as if we believe too much thinking is not a good thing.
Using a power-point slide, I give my students some of the theory of educationalist Benjamin Bloom. There are six levels of thinking, starting with the most basic, knowledge, and progressing to understanding, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Lessons where students have to evaluate and justify their answers, synthesise many sources of information or create, for example, a new experiment in science using the principles they have learnt in previous lessons, all involve higher-order thinking.
Yet too many lessons do not get beyond information-giving and that's often because exams test knowledge and some understanding but not a lot else. That means much of a child's education is spent on low-level thinking. The result is, sadly, that the imagination and potential of too many children are dulled.
The traditionalists would say that the main problem is ignorance of basic information. The conclusion of these critics is that schools don't teach this stuff any more. They do, of course, with bells on. A thousand years of British history has been compulsory since 1988. The question is why aren't students retaining the information? The answer: probably that there is too much focus on imparting knowledge and not techniques for understanding, explaining and then using that knowledge.
While passionate subject specialists are essential to bring a subject alive (my students were almost salivating when they got their hands on some original correspondence between Churchill and Hitler held at the magnificent national archives at Kew), freely available information on the internet means that the role of the teacher must now be changed (many are already doing this). They need to focus on students acquiring a way of thinking, a series of transferable techniques, that can be used in a range of situations.
This week I, like many teachers, will share the anxiety of my students awaiting exam results, worrying about my GCSE history students in particular.
The truth is that the annual debate about whether exams are too easy or too hard misses the point – which is whether the exams test the right sorts of things. In my view, they don't. GCSE exam results are not a true reflection of the talent of my students or anyone else's. GCSEs are based on the assumption that students leave school at 16, which most don't. Yet politicians of all parties are too scared to get rid of them. It's time to scrap them and have a series of pathways from 14 to 19, with students able to take relevant exams and do extended projects at the times that suit them. The best schools are starting to offer this already.
Much has been achieved in education since Labour came to power in 1997. There is more funding, better teaching and improved literacy, though there is a huge amount still to be done to ensure that every child enters secondary school reading and writing properly. What has not been cracked is a policy for secondary schools.
With the government preoccupied with an education policy focused, it seems, more on "community cohesion" than learning and teaching, and the Tories believing, strangely, that another bout of structural reform is going to raise standards, what is being neglected yet again is what matters most – what goes on in the classroom.
What has been missing is a fundamental debate about the sort of students we want leaving school at 18. What skills do we want them to have? What toolkit should they have to thrive in the world they will enter? If we want Britain to succeed, we need students leaving school with the qualities – teamwork, creativity, perseverance – that will prepare them for their working lives. When employers are asked what skills they want from students, they regularly put good oral communication at the top of the list. Yet too few students leave school having the confidence to perform in front of an audience or present an articulate case without notes.
Many schools are now rebelling against the old way of doing things and devising lessons that explicitly teach students the best ways of improving their learning. I have spent several months working with some excellent teachers at my school to devise a new thinking skills curriculum for the 11-year-olds starting secondary school in September. The aim is to provide them with the tools – critical thinking, analysis, public speaking, reflection, leadership, independence, love of reading – that will encourage good learning habits and prepare them for a life enjoying learning.
Yet unless politicians get behind it, every school that does something similar will worry that Ofsted or the government will expose them for not drilling their students enough in the antiquated exams they sit.
My assembly ends with a final thunk: "What colour is a zebra when you remove the stripes? Find me in the playground later today and give me an answer. But when you leave this hall, remember one thing: school is for thinking."
Peter Hyman is deputy headteacher of a London comprehensive. He was political strategist to Tony Blair from 1994-2003 and is the author of 1 Out of 10.
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Just a brief comment to make a minor correction to the story.
Quote:"And scientists should watch their language, he said. Many mistakenly confuse the words “theory” and “hypothesis”, in scientific terms, a theory is a clearly proven fact."
This is an indirect quotation from me not my actual words (hence no quote marks). A scientific theory is a well evidenced explanation of a natural phenomenon a theory is not a fact and facts are not theories. Scientific theories explain the observations and data that we gather.This minor error just goes to show how difficult it is when reporting science in the media and how precise we must be when using the language of science. James Williams.