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Shaping Ideas.... Shaping Lives
Pedagogy and Values
David Taylor (HMI)
Click here for a print version of this article.
It was a privilege to attend the 2008 Annual Lecture by Estelle Morris to the National Education Trust, and a delight to hear the way her thoughts had turned to pedagogy as a central focus of reform and improvement endeavours. This rang strangely true and curiously familiar to one who started out as an HMI thirty years ago, visiting schools in Camden and Westminster which were often crucibles of exciting pedagogical practice.
Educational policy has veered from basing its slogans on standards to structures and back again. One underlying constant - though at times so far underlying as to be reminiscent of the princess's pea, perceptible only to those of finer judgement - has been that high quality 'teaching and learning' (that great double act) is, at the very least, an indispensable prerequisite to real improvement and, at the most, the only important success criterion: the acid test.
However, my focus here is not on the general theme but on what may well have been a throwaway remark of the speaker, when she asserted that pedagogy should be based on evidence not on values.
Her response to my questioning of this statement was that the 'values' that she was concerned should not dictate pedagogy were in fact the prejudices and predilections of politicians - and on that it would probably be hard to disagree. But it may be worth pausing briefly to reflect on why the statement is not only a false dichotomy, but it is even a failure to recognise that good pedagogy is fundamentally based on values. So, too, is bad pedagogy, by the way.
Part of the trouble, perhaps, is a wider societal evasiveness about values. In order to demonstrate our tolerance, we have collectively bent over so far to avoid making value judgements, especially ones that might threaten someone else's preferred way of life, that we can easily forget how much of what we say or do rests on value-laden assumptions.
So what are the underlying values which inform good teaching and learning? I suggest that they fall into the following categories - a failure to acknowledge any one of which can lead to teaching which embodies technocratic, functional criteria but is starved of essential elements of humanity and civilisation.
First and foremost, there are moral and even perhaps spiritual values.
Education aims to achieve central moral purposes: it is in essence about helping people to grow into autonomous, morally literate human beings who become valued members of society and citizens. There is, of course, plenty of room for debate about how best it does this, and what are the central features of a morally educated person. But what is surely incontestable is that not only what we teach but how we teach can make a great difference to our students: whether by precept, example or demeanour, teachers exert a moral influence, for better or worse.
The Times Educational Supplement, in its regular features on 'my best teacher', bears eloquent testimony to this. I still have etched on my mind the story of the RE teacher who went round the class saying 'Remember God is Love' while vigorously striking the pupils on the head with a Bible.
So it surely follows that successful pedagogy is both informed by positive human qualities such as sensitivity, concern for individuals, compassion and kindness, and imbued with a desire to cultivate in one's students such educational outcomes as moral responsibility, spiritual awareness, socially cohesive attitudes, respect for cultural diversity, an understanding of right and wrong.
No doubt there are some who will think to themselves: 'how is any of this going to help them to get through Maths GCSE?' But think about it. In a nutshell, the teacher who is passionate, humane, civilised, scholarly and also excited about the subject and subject-matter is also the teacher whose students do best in tests and examinations.
Secondly, any selection of teaching methods or learning approaches makes its own value assumptions and by implication at least transmits these.
It is easy to see this if one studies how the aim of unquestioned or unquestioning religious, ideological or political indoctrination, for example, is best achieved through certain highly structured and authoritarian teaching methods, including a heavy dose of rote learning. Open questions would plainly be counter-productive.
Conversely, learning by enquiry or research is likely to imply a commitment to following truth wherever it may be found, to basing actions on evidence and exploration, to a willingness to doubt, test and evaluate independently. Use of practical methods is based on a recognition not just that often we learn best by doing (an old truth, but often a true one), but that we are about helping students in the process of becoming 'Homo Faber' (Max Frisch's famous title): humans who create, design, build, compose.
Encouragement of wide reading and research presupposes the values of intellectual curiosity, open-ended enquiry, and the subjecting of ideas or hypotheses to a variety of views and interpretations in order to arrive at a well-grounded conclusion.
Thirdly, the whole way in which learning is organised and managed rests on fundamental educational beliefs about the learner and the learning process.
It is for this reason, in effect, that people such as HMI bang on endlessly about 'differentiation'.
It is not just that doing things differently for different people relieves tedium and is more efficient as a means of instruction. Above all, it is the fact that the key moral value - however difficult to uphold consistently - is that each member of the class is an individual with her or his own rights, character, disposition to learning and level of understanding.
It therefore follows that any teaching which short-changes any one individual is a failure to apply the core moral principles of equity and human rights, since it privileges one learner over another, one form of ability over another.
Child-centred learning has often been rightly pilloried for leading to an excess of sentimentality and muddled methodology. Nevertheless, as the key underlying principle about pedagogy, its position is unassailable: if the teaching is not centred on the individual learner, it is centred on the teacher, or the system, or the school's position in league tables.
To return to Estelle Morris. We need more values in our pedagogy, not fewer. We need teachers who understand how their own personal integrity and values make them not only the people they are but the teachers they are. And we need schools to articulate, disseminate and celebrate the values and purposes on which all teaching depends and all learning thrives.
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