Introduction
Let’s start with a quote:
“More than half the suggestions we are about to make have been implemented and tested in our elementary school teaching program. This does not imply that they are not of equal or greater value at other levels of education; on the contrary, we are convinced that they give a glimpse of the proper way to introduce everyone of whatever age and whatever level of academic performance, to programming, to more general knowledge of computation and indeed (we say courageously steeling ourselves for the onslaught) to mathematics, to physics and to all formal subjects including linguistics and music.
”
I came across this quote in a book I’ve recently been sent called 20 Things to do with a computer Forward 50 (my review should be coming out soon). It’s basically an update of Seymour Papert’s work (cited above) fifty years later.
That quote made me smile because, much as it pains me to say this as an ex-secondary school teacher, most of the really innovative and exciting stuff I’ve seen in education technology and computing has taken place in primary schools. Not only that, but even suggesting to Heads of Computing in secondary schools that that might be the case tended to lead to my being instantly deleted from people’s Christmas card lists.
When I was an ICT advisor in a London borough I came across some great practice in primary schools, but the Heads of Computing in secondary schools were not necessarily aware of it. Some secondary school HoDs assumed that their counterparts in primary schools weren’t doing very much in Computing, which in some cases, though not all, was true. Those HoDs taught the first year kids from scratch, which obviously bored the socks off the children from the schools that had done quite a lot.
To be honest, I don’t blame them. In my previous job as a Head of Computing I arranged for a class of ten year-olds to come to my school to be taught some Computing using our facilities. Their teacher seemed to know virtually nothing about the subject, yet she was the lead teacher for education technology in her school.
Being a diplomatic sort of bloke, I asked her why she’d decided to be the lead teacher, as it’s quite a lot of work in addition to the usual teaching workload.
“I didn’t.”, she said. “The headteacher walked past my classroom one day, and noticed that I had colour print-outs on the wall. She said that as I’m obviously very IT-literate, I could be the edtech leader. The mad thing is, it wasn’t even me who did the printing. It was my husband!”
There was a time when that sort of thing was not uncommon. If you could book a holiday for your family over the internet, you were clearly the school’s answer to Bill Gates. Things have changed now, I’m sure, but some perceptions die hard I think.
Three examples of attitude or assumptions
Permit me to cite just three examples of unfounded assumptions or prejudicial attitudes from my experience as an ICT advisor.
Example 1: 14 year-olds’ work
The head of history in a secondary school proudly showed me the work his 14 year-old pupils had been doing, using spreadsheets and databases in the pursuit of historical research. At the end of the hour’s tour he tuned to me:
“What do you think of that, Terry?”, he beamed.
“I think it’s excellent.”, I replied. “In fact, I thought it was excellent when I saw the same thing going on in a class of 9 year-olds last week.”
As you can imagine, his face dropped. “I’m sorry”, I went on, “but it really is true. When those kids come to this school they’re going to be repeating stuff they did years before.”
Example 2: The trainee teacher day
On one occasion I was asked if I would give a tour of the borough’s schools to give a group of trainee secondary computing teachers a flavour of the best kind of work going in computing lessons. “We’ll start off”, I announced, “by visiting a primary school, so that you get a taste of our expectations here and what great things the teachers here are achieving.”
One of the group complained. “I’m training to be a secondary school teacher. I don’t want to waste my time seeing primary schools.”
I made a deal with him: give me the benefit of the doubt for now. If, by the end of the day, you still feel the same way, I’ll give you the details of my line manager and tell you how to make an official complaint. Is that fair enough?
He agreed.
As the day was drawing to a close, I looked at him. “Well?”
“This has been a real eye-opener”, he answered. “It’s given me a very clear picture of the level of work I would need to be aiming for if I were to get a job here.”
Example 3: The joint Computing leaders’ training day
The heads of computing in the borough’s schools had three training days a year — one per term. The secondary HoDs had their training day, the primary Computing leaders had their training day, and the custom was that never the twain shall meet. Because of the experiences I’ve just outlined, and others, I decided that one of the days should be a joint one. This met with some resistance, of course, mainly from the secondary HoDs.
Nevertheless, the day went ahead as planned, and it involved activities which got primary and secondary teachers discussing the work they were doing and planned to do in their computing lessons. It all seemed to be going well, but the icing on the cake for me was in the whole-group plenary session at the end of the day. One HoD from a secondary school stood up and announced:
“Yesterday I completed my Scheme of Work for my new intake next autumn. After what I’ve seen and heard today, tomorrow when I go into school I’m going to tear it up, and start again.”
The solution
I have always thought that the best way to overcome prejudices and help to make kids’ experiences of computing lessons more interesting is for primary and secondary computing leaders to talk to each other. Even if physical meet-ups like the joint training day I mentioned is not feasible, there’s no reason why schools in an area should not form an online discussion group, or create a Google doc in which they can share ideas, tell others what they are doing (or planning to do) and link to their lesson resources.
One of the things I used to do when I was a Head of Computing was to send an email to the computing leaders in the local primary schools outlining the first term’s scheme of work in Computing, the clear expectation being that they would try to ensure their pupils had reached the requisite standard by the time they started with me. That was partly the reason for bringing primary school classes in for lessons after the senior students’ classes had stopped because of study leave or because they’d taken their examinations. (It was also a kind of sales push by the school I taught in!)
It didn’t always happen, of course, but it did make clear what my standards and expectations were. By the same token, I was always pleased to learn of what colleagues in the primary schools were doing, so that I could make sure I wasn’t going to waste the first six months of the new school year.
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