If the common lore is to be believed, the reason that the practitioners of the emerging medical profession of the 15th and 16th century insisted on naming all the body parts with latin names (‘patella’ instead of ‘kneecap’) is because they wanted to ‘appear’ clever, and so justify their expertise, acquire status and thus justify the high fees they would prefer to charge.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that educationalists feel or felt the same way about the science of education. Hence we have really fancy sounding words like ‘matriculate’, ‘graduate’ or how about ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’? I mean let’s be honest, these aren’t everyday words even if we’ve heard some teachers talk about them. As a parent these phrases used to made my eyes glaze over with no real understanding as to what they meant.
I would like to argue that when children actually know what the words ‘pedagogy’, ‘curriculum’ and ‘assessment’ mean, they are actually empowered and become better learners.
Take ‘curriculum’, which I tend to translate mentally as ‘the stuff we teach’. Why should we force them to rote learn their times tables? Consider that you probably are going to saying something about the usefulness of working out things mentally in your head, like roughly calculating the number of items you can buy with a limited shopping budget – BUT – you can only say that now with the experience of shopping and trying to make your money stretch. Until a child gains that experience, they cannot benefit from it and see the relevance of learning their times tables. So this learning task is abstract, and makes no real sense, in fact for most children it probably appears as ‘non-sense’. That is certainly true for me, and it was not until I was doing mental calculations on a daily basis that I saw the relevancy of learning those (wretched) times tables. I believe I would have engaged with the rote learning task far better had I known why I was being taught this stuff (the ‘curriculum’).
Take ‘pedagogy’ (the way one teaches), which translates into simply rote learning one’s times table. There’s no discussion, or exploration, children simply learn to chant ‘3x4 is12, 4x4 is 16, 5x4 is 20 …‘ and so on. With the benefit of experience, I recognise that there are simply some things that must be learned through rote learning; not because it’s the only way, but probably because it’s the most efficient. Understanding why 6x6 is 36, is not inherently interesting, but simply knowing this calculation, gives you a mental tool to do far more interesting things. I think had I been told this at a younger age, I would have far more readily engaged with learning those (wretched) times tables.
So at our school we’ve decided that it’s time to tell our children what we’re trying to teach and why we’re teaching them that way, so they understand what we’re trying to do. From Class 4 and upwards they even get to hear and learn about the concepts behind the words ‘pedagogy’ and ‘curriculum’. We believe if they understand our purpose for what and how we teach, they’ll respond far better to some tasks that let’s face it, are a drag – like learning the times tables.
As much as we would like to take credit for this approach, one usually finds that someone like John Dewey has already done so when he wrote about the ‘purpose’ of education in the 1930s. He argued that once children understand education’s purpose, the task becomes relevant and they become more engaged and it feels less like ‘school’. It’s not the fancy educational words that make our children smart, but by explaining the purpose of what we’re doing, we believe makes them significantly smarter.