On ‘Choosing Your Own Adventure’

Yesterday’s appointment by Minister Pyne of John “Fleming Model” Fleming as Deputy Chair of the Board of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership makes Fleming quite the Man of the Moment and points most definitely to direct instruction as the preferred pedagogy du jour.  (And this was even before today’s announcement of an additional $22m for Noel Pearson’s Direct Instruction program on Cape York.)  Not only is Fleming a member of the eight-person Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG), one of only three members with school teaching experience, but his new role leaves him in quite the unique position in terms of being able to influence the shape not only of teacher education in Australia, but, over time, our understanding as a society of what a good teacher is.

Fleming was interviewed yesterday by Justine Ferrari, champion and saviour of education Murdoch-style, and here we get a little insight into what he’s all about.  

There’s too much ‘choose your own adventure’ in Australian education… There’s a lot unsubstantiated by the research that people still are allowed to espouse about the best way to teach kids. There’s too many broad guidelines people can interpret in many different ways.

Leaving aside the “unsubstantiated by research” nature of The Fleming Model – for now, anyway: we may come back to that in another post – the Deputy Chair of AITSL here seems to be suggesting that teachers being able to interpret ‘guidelines’ (such as, for example, teaching standards) in many different ways, presumably applying their professional judgement in doing so, is a bad thing.

But wait, there’s more.

If you look at medicine or law, they’re really quite prescriptive. I’m not saying we have to be that prescriptive but when you do a heart operation, you follow a prescribed set of procedures.

One more time: “I’m not saying we have to be that prescriptive but when you do a heart operation, you follow a prescribed set of procedures”.  So what exactly ARE you saying, John, because it sounds to me like you’re saying that a prescribed set of procedures is exactly what we educators need.  Because education is just like heart surgery*.  And baking a cake.  And putting together an IKEA bookcase.  And all of those other things for which we use a prescribed set of procedures.  

The thing is, a prescribed set of procedures only works if the task at hand is relatively predictable and fairly simple, which this teaching and learning business inevitably is not.   Teaching practices that ARE substantiated by research do not appear as recipes or pre-digested lists of procedures to be applied across the board, but as possible responses to complex situations that rely on teachers having well-honed and confident professional judgement.  There is not one single best way to do anything across a raft of different complex situations, and every teaching situation is one of those. Every. Single. One.

So I guess, the question is what would we rather:  Teachers ‘choosing their own adventure’ by making informed judgements and tailoring those judgements to what’s going on in their classroom at any given time, even with the possibility for human error that that entails?  Or a bunch of cardboard cut-outs following a prescribed set of procedures regardless of context?  

If this is in the name of ‘teacher quality’ (and of course you know it is), the answer seems quite obvious.

*Unlike Mr Fleming, I actually suspect that heart surgery is about a bit more than following a prescribed set of procedures.

New Year, Not-So-New Ideas…

The Pedagogista’s been on a bit of a hiatus over the summer, while I’ve managed to get some other types of writing done.  But what a summer it’s been for us in education land!  The Review of the Australian Curriculum, the shape of which was leaked to the Daily Telegraph the day after the last schools and universities in the country closed for the year (surely this was a coincidence?), was formally announced on the 10th of January.  Denounced by everyone from Ken Boston to 176 teachers and education academics for both its terms of reference and its ‘impartial reviewers’, submissions to the review (which will probably never see the light of day) are due this coming Friday.  There’s been a lot written about the review, so I won’t re-hash those arguments other than to point to my favourite bit of the press conference where the Review was announced.  Kevin Donnelly, Director of the ‘Education Standards Institute’ and long-term columnist for The Australian, whose views on the Australian Curriculum are, one might say, quite well known within the community, said of the consultation: “Many of the people who I will be talking to are friends who I’ve known for many years”.  I bet.

Meanwhile, last week saw the long-awaited announcement of the establishment of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG), whose terms of reference include the following: “using an evidence-based approach, the Group will identify common components regarded as world’s best practice in teacher education”.  (Evidence-based!  World’s Best Practice! Bingo!)  There was some discussion amongst educators on Twitter as to the exact number of reviews of teacher education conducted over the past 40 years or so and while an exact figure was elusive, evidence did come to light that there were 101 conducted between 1979 and 2006.  That’s an average of 3.7 a year for each of those 27 years.  Which sounds perfectly SENSIBLE and as though what we need RIGHT NOW is another one.  Quick!  While the Government has stuck to its primary criteria for selection of individuals to chair such reviews and bodies, i.e. that the individual in question must be a columnist for Murdoch’s national flagship, this time they seem to have mistakenly given the role to someone not known as a reactionary conservative.  Greg Craven was last heard talking sense about teacher education at the National Press Club last year, and with any luck some sense, at least , will prevail.  More worrying is the appointment to the Advisory Group of  John Fleming, who appears to have been marketing his ‘explicit instruction’ model (which sounds suspiciously like the Minister’s preferred pedagogical approach) into schools for some years now.  Watch this space.

Both of these reviews emanate from a fear of ‘new age’ influences on our schools and our children.  When Pyne first flagged the establishment of the TEMAG, back in March 2013 when he was Shadow Minister for Education, he said the following in an interview on Radio National.

“we would immediately instigate a very short term ministerial advisory group to advise me on the best model for teaching in the world, how to bring out more practical teaching methods based on more didactic teaching methods, more traditional methods rather than the child-centred learning that has dominated the system for the last twenty, thirty or forty years…”

Likewise, the Curriculum Review was announced amid calls from the Minister for the restoration of an “orthodox” curriculum, and one of the ‘independent’ reviewers is on the record over and over and  over again calling for an end to “progressive fads” in education.

Elsewhere I asked how long something has to be around and in use before it’s no longer a “fad”, and I was reminded of this when I came across this little gem while re-reading Dewey’s Democracy and Education (published 1916) over the summer:

Careful inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection outside of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn, and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results.

Enough said.  For now anyway.  Roll on the Reviews.

Firing Back

Michael Apple has been in town.  Not my town, strictly speaking, but a town close enough for me to travel to to hear him speak.  He was speaking off the back of his new book, Can Education Change Society?, in which he issues a call to progressive educators to be strategic, organised, loud and articulate in pushing back against the forces of neoliberalism in education.  Aside from his sustained attack on ‘collective amnesia’, which I’ve had a bit of a rant about myself of late, albeit in a different way, what I liked most about both the book and the talk was the emphasis on the importance of the collective, the building of alliances that probably represent our only hope of breaking through.  On page 11 of the book he says:

My grandfather had a favourite saying in this regard.  “When the left lines up in a firing squad, it lines up in a circle.”  (Think about it.)  For me and so many others, this is a history we can no longer afford to recapitulate, especially at a time when neoliberal and neoconservative groups have been more than a little successful at having their agendas define the terrain for using schools for social and cultural transformation.

There’s two things about this.  The first is that I think we see too much of the circular firing squad.  It’s in the petty animosities seen between different quarters of the education fraternity (like some (NB only some, definitely not ALL) teachers and academics who seem to lack a healthy respect for each others’ work), in the jealous guarding rather than open sharing of ideas, in the angry exchanges of my-PBL’s-better-than-your-UbD and so on.  It sucks up a lot of energy that could better be directed at the actual enemy rather than at each other, and in doing so, it does said enemy a big favour.

The second is that implicit in this call is a call for us, as an education community (or at least those of us who aspire to more than drill ’em ‘n’ grill ’em, and there are many…), to become more politically savvy and more activist in our orientation.  That’s not to be a conspiracy theorist – neolibs and neocons are probably not meeting in smoky bars to plot the death of progressive education and the rise and rise and rise of the OECD – but it’s time to own that we’re seeing a convergence of agendas that are detrimental to good education, and that seem to be being universally embraced in Australia as elsewhere.  It’s not hard to be sucked in by audit cultures – their tools are often cast as a better alternative, one that’s cleaner, schmicker, smarter and totally superior – but we need to take to the manifestations of audit with a critical eye and not give over as if there is no alternative.  We need to connect ourselves to each other and to our beliefs about what education should and can be with both our actions and the way we embrace (or not) the technologies of audit.  We need to be calm and strong in firing back, which, coincidentally, is both the title and the message of one of Bourdieu’s final pieces of work.  He wrote:

…the possibility of stopping this infernal machine in its tracks lies with all those who, having some power over cultural, artistic, and literary matters [we might also add ‘educational’], can, each in their own place and their own fashion, and to however small an extent, throw their grain of sand into the well-oiled machinery of resigned complicities (p.65).

The time is now.  Let’s get organised.

On Valuing Eccentricities in Teaching

The story about the ‘shock departure’ of the eponymous ‘Mrs Carey’ from the music department she built over 20 years made me really sad over the weekend.  To me, what was evident in Bob Connell’s documentary ‘Mrs Carey’s Concert’ was that Mrs Carey was one of teaching’s great eccentrics.  The kind of teacher who doesn’t always (ever?) conform to orthodoxies about who a good teacher is or what they do, but whose passion and commitment, capacity to challenge and inspire students, oozes out and drives them to do extraordinary things.

I don’t know what happened in this particular instance, but the suggestion that she had in some way been ‘forced out’ of the school made me wonder about the way we relate to our great eccentrics and what happens to them in an age where teaching practice is supposed to conform to a set of norms that have the capacity to be a bit empty.  That’s not to say that teaching standards are necessarily opposed to eccentricities, but we need to be careful that within schools and systems we don’t apply them in such a way that failing to conform to the dominant image of ‘the good teacher’ becomes anathema.

Thinking about my own teaching experience, I remember the History teacher who could bring Ancient Rome alive for sullen students but couldn’t find the comma on the computer keyboard at reporting time; the Principal whose dog could permanently be found sleeping under her desk when it wasn’t in the playground trying to persuade the students out of their lunch; the Maths teacher writing Mills and Boon novels in her spare time and trying the storylines out on her senior students; the Music teacher wont to stop rehearsals to discipline a misbehaving student by yelling “Oi! You in the blue shirt…” (ummm, they were all wearing blue, it was a uniform thing…).  These people didn’t necessarily conform to our image of the good or compliant teacher, but they shared a particular quirky way of building relationships with students and I learned a lot from each of them about how to be a member of this profession and what matters most in our work.

Their students, I hear, learned a lot from them about a lot of things, including that conformity shouldn’t always be aspirational: that there is a place in the world for those who refuse to blend in.  And surely that’s a lesson worth preserving?

It seems to me that we need to tread carefully, particularly as we embark on the implementation of the AITSL Performance and Development Framework, which will eventually see all Australian teachers’ practice evaluated on an annual basis.  Preserving spaces for our eccentrics and valuing different approaches and orientations in teachers will protect us from becoming a ‘carbon copy’ profession where the vanilla has taken hold at the expense of the chocolate, the hazelnut and the even rarer white chocolate with salted caramel (hat tip to Gelato Messina).

It won’t happen that way by accident, and if ever there was a job for an activist teaching profession, to borrow from Judyth Sachs, it seems to me that this is it.  The choice is to define our own measures or to allow ourselves to be defined by the measures of others.  I know which option I prefer.

The Use and Abuse of Effect Size (Don’t try this at home, kids)*

Spurred on by a flurry of #visiblelearning tweets earlier this week, I started to reflect on a number of strange conversations that I’ve had with teachers and other educators of late about the ‘effect size’ of various classroom practices and how we might go about measuring them.

The most recent round of effect size hysteria in education can be traced to the publication of John Hattie’s Visible Learning, a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses of studies relating to student achievement, in 2009.  If you’re an educator from Australia or New Zealand who hasn’t heard of it, I’d be very keen to meet you, outlier that you are…

While I’ve been known to mutter under my breath at times that John Hattie has a lot to answer for, the truth is that Visible Learning is an impressive work, and Hattie is not responsible for its misuse in scores of contexts over the past 4 years.  Here’s a little video of the man himself talking about ‘impact’ – scarcely anything to disagree with there.  A more scholarly and fulsome discussion of the book can be found in this article in the New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies by Snook et al.

The problem lies in the embrace of ‘Visible Learning’ by the ‘What Works’ brigade – politicians (of many persuasions), policymakers, and indeed some educators – despite Hattie’s claim very early on in the book that “what works notions rarely have high levels of explanatory power” (p.4) and his explicit statement that his aim in the book “is certainly not to build another ‘what works’ recipe” (p.6).  In the little-read opening chapters of Visible Learning (OK, I’m surmising here but that’s the best conclusion I can draw given the broad misuse of this work), the bit before we get to the pretty graphs and alluring numbers, Hattie gives us a few clues as to why we probably shouldn’t pick up effect size and use it as a blunt instrument to guide teaching practice – don’t try this at home, kids.

The first, from chapter 1, is that correlations should not be confused with causes.  Hattie frames his work as an “exploratory story” rather than a “litany of ‘what works'” (p.3), and he gives a great example of what this means in practice, in relation to feedback:

…increasing the amount of feedback in order to have a positive effect on student achievement requires a change in the conception of what it means to be a teacher; it is the feedback to the teacher about what students can and cannot do that is more powerful than feedback to the students, and it necessitates a different way of interacting and respecting students…(p.4)

In other words, the substantial effect size attributed to ‘feedback’ doesn’t mean that any feedback to any teacher with any orientation to their students and to learning, will improve student achievement.  Because education is way more complex than that, and just because there’s a correlation between two things doesn’t mean that there’s a causal relationship.

The second, from chapter 2, is around the calculation of effect sizes.  Calculating a valid and meaningful effect size within your own classroom (as a number of teachers I’ve spoken with of late have been encouraged to do by those further up the ‘food chain’) is easier said than done.  Leaving aside the issue of the ethics of creating ‘control’ and ‘treatment’ groups within the one class (ie your class), the elimination of ‘nuisance variables’ or confounders is nigh-on impossible, and then there’s the issue of the sample itself.  Generalising to anywhere from the experience of 25 or 30 individuals who have not been randomly selected and whose performance is unlikely to be normally distributed in the first place, is simply not possible.  And that’s before we get to the issue of how to set up standardised measures of performance that might enable some validity.

Finally, later in Chapter 2 Hattie discusses at some length the limitations of meta-analysis.  His work represents a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses, which sounds big.  Bigger, even, when you consider that each of those meta-analyses encompasses a large number of studies. The diagram on the right is my attempt to represent the ‘shape’ of the study, although to be an accurate visual representation, it would need to have 800 meta-analyses in the picture and a total of 52,637 studies represented across those meta-analyses.  Put simply, it’s huge.  Bigger than Elvis.  For me, it raises questions not only about the hoary old chestnut of comparing apples with oranges (a long held concern with meta-analysis), but because of the ‘step above’ into research synthesis, working with someone else’s organisation of the apples and oranges into crates that may or may not also contain some kittens. And perhaps some cars.  But you wouldn’t know, because as a researcher, you’re operating two levels above the actual data.  And while Hattie addresses this by arguing that neither quality nor random selection nor sample size has a significant effect on the veracity of the results, it seems to me that we disregard measures of research quality and validity at our peril.  Additionally, publication bias means that small effect sizes are often not reported, confounding the development of an overall effect size.  All of which is not to say that we should throw out the baby with the bath water, simply that we should take the findings with a grain of salt rather than as the answer to the riddle of the sphinx (to mix some metaphors).

More importantly for me, however, is the idea that each study has its own story to tell, and its own context that gave rise to those reported effect sizes.  There’s a ‘why’ in there that when we think only in terms of effect size, gets sidelined in favour of the ‘what’.  Simple solutions to complex problems abound.

As I said earlier, Visible Learning is impressive work.  Like all good educational research, its power lies not so much in the answers it provides as in the questions it raises. Using the lens of this synthesis of effects on achievement to problematise practice and draw us into a conversation about the kinds of teachers we want to be and the kinds of practices we should embrace to best maximise our students’ learning is a good use of our time.  Using the discourse of effect size as a catalyst for setting up classrooms as mini-laboratories in search of the holy grail, not so much.

*With thanks to my friend and colleague Custard for some initial feedback on this post.

Educational Amnesia (OR… Can we please stop calling this stuff ‘new’?)

Today’s post is brought to you by a tweet sent out by Harvard GSE earlier today brokering the radical suggestion that we might redefine teacher from “imparter of information” to “designer of learning experiences”.

There’s nothing wrong with this idea – in fact it’s a good one.  But teachers who think of themselves as “imparters of information” are (mercifully) thin on the ground these days, and the discourse of teacher as designer or architect of learning experiences has been around for some 30 years.  It ain’t radical.  Many of these ideas can be linked back to the work of people like John Dewey (1859-1952, and at his intellectual peak around the turn of the century – that would be the 19th century) and Jean Piaget (1896-1980, with his most influential work published in the 1920s and 30s – see this lovely piece by his friend and student Seymour Papert for more about this).  Constructivist approaches to teaching and learning started to hit classrooms in the late 1960s and while the shift has been a slow one – educational change has always moved at a glacial pace – these ideas are absolutely, positively, NOT NEW.

And that’s the problem.

Acting as though they’re the greatest new shiny educational ideas (especially when you’re one of the most revered and prestigious educational institutions in the world) lends credence to the notion that modern education is beset by a war between “traditional” pedagogy and new-age-hippy-just-let-me-use-your-kid-as-a-guinea-pig approaches.  Politicians use this one to great effect – see Pyne’s proclamation last week – as do educational naysayers like Kevin Donnelly and his “Education Standards Institute” with their endless harping on about “progressive educational fads”.

(When does a “fad” that’s been around since 1897 cease to be called a “fad”?)

The pretence that these ideas are new doesn’t do any of us any favours.  It supports educators who have done the firm planted squat and refused to move on from their role as the ‘sage on the stage’ (that one’s not new either, FYI) to hide behind the idea that they’re just being a ‘traditional’ teacher, and all is well.  It reinforces an unhelpful dichotomy that says that teaching is either ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’, when anyone who has ever taught (well) knows that good teaching is about using a range of approaches and choosing judiciously which one to use in what circumstance.  It relegates those of us who do see ourselves primarily as “designers of learning experiences” or something similar to some kind of ‘experimenters’ category.  It invokes fear in parents that tried and true methods are being thrown out in favour of using their children as laboratory rats in order to test some whacked out, half-baked educational ideas that may or may not work.

When the conservative pundits go there, I understand why.  What I don’t understand is why educational institutions, and sometimes educators themselves, institutions and people who can and in fact do know better, embrace this kind of educational amnesia.  This is 2013. Enough already.

Thought for the Day: Cochran-Smith on ‘The Outcomes Question in Teacher Education’

As researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in teaching and teacher education, we will not measure up unless we preserve a place for critique in the face of consensus, unless we keep at the center of teacher education rich and complex understandings of teaching and learning that are not easily reducible to algorithms, unless we acknowledge that although teachers have a critical role in educational reform, they alone are neither the saviors nor the culprits in what is wrong with American schools and American society, and unless we remain vigilant in demanding time and space on the outcomes agenda not just for professional discussions about meeting the needs of all students but for deep interrogation of questions related to diversity, equity, access, and racism. At this critical juncture in the reform and development of teacher education, if we do not take control of framing the outcomes question, then the outcomes question will surely frame us and undermine our work as teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and policy makers committed to a democratic vision of society and to the vital role that teachers and teacher educators play in that vision (pp.543-544).

From: Cochran-Smith, M. (2001). The outcomes question in teacher education. Teaching and teacher education, 17(5), 527-546.

Three Weeks is the Answer…

…to the question “How long after the installation of a new Coalition Government will it take for the Centre for Independent Studies to reignite the Literacy Wars?”.

The weekend saw the release of “Why Jaydon Can’t Read: The Triumph of Ideology Over Evidence in Teaching Reading“, authored by CIS Research Fellow Jennifer Buckingham and two of the founders of MultiLit Pty Ltd, Kevin Wheldall and Robyn Beaman-Wheldall.  Amid a flurry of media activity, Buckingham had the obligatory op-ed article inThe Australian this morning, nattily entitled “Bad Teaching Kills Reading Skills“, and also appeared on Life Matters on ABC Radio National today.  Social media has been awash with discussion of phonics and it seems to be a case of “here we go again”.

I’m no literacy expert, so unlike some, I’ll leave the judgements on the best way to teach reading to those who know something about it.  But let me say this: there is as much evidence to suggest that phonics is absolutely the way to go as there is to suggest that phonics is absolutely NOT the way to go.  It’s very easy to invoke “the evidence” and in doing so ignore all evidence to the contrary, but that hardly makes for a well-informed or authoritative view.  And so here’s the thing: perhaps – like so many educational conundrums – there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.  Perhaps the approach that helps to create a breakthrough for Little Johnny isn’t the right approach for Little Jimmy (or Janey, or Tran, or Cecil for that matter) for a whole host of contextual and circumstantial and HUMAN reasons.  Perhaps what we need is to think about it not in terms of right/wrong, good/bad, or left/right, but to ensure that teachers have a range of methods at their disposal and the kind of well-honed professional judgement that supports them to use the right ones at the right times.

We need to look beyond simple solutions to complex educational problems, no matter how convenient, mandate-able and measurable they may be.  Now when we’re done with this one, can we get back to the enduring question of what should be in the History Curriculum, please?

Thought for the day: Connell on Education as ‘Encounter’

To say that education involves nurture is important. Education involves encounter between persons, and that encounter involves care. Learning from a computer is not education; the machine does not care. Learning from a person behaving like a machine is not education; that person’s capacity for care is being suppressed. It is care that is the basis of the creativity in teaching, at all levels from Kindergarten to PhD supervision, as the teacher’s practice evolves in response to the learner’s development and needs.

Encounter between persons implies people capable of encounter; that is, people with significant autonomy. The more that power relations impinge on a situation, the less scope there is for encounter and therefore for education. Military training is not education. Power of course exists in many forms, and one of the tasks of educational research is to explore the many ways power in and around educational relations can be diagnosed and contested.

Encounter implies respect and reciprocity, a degree of mutual engagement by learner and teacher. And despite the distinction between learners and teachers, that mutual engagement requires a strong kind of equality, an equal citizenship in the educational situation. Mutual respect is the condition required for the complex communication through which
complex learning occurs. (pp.104-105)

From: Connell, R. W. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: an essay on the market agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 99-112.

Standards, Standards, Standards

It’s hard to argue against standards.  As Peter Taubman puts it in Teaching by Numbers, “clearly no one wants to admit to having no standards, since currently that amounts to saying one has no sense of taste, no moral compass, no ethical bearing, no goals, no principals or simply no criterion against which to measure things, others, or oneself” (Taubman 2009, p.112).

So today’s revelation in The Australian that the new Australian Education Minster will “put the emphasis on standards” (because, standards, not money, is the main issue facing schools, just so you know…) is hardly surprising.  Not only does this helpfully shift the discussion away from equity and the debilitating correlation between poverty and educational opportunity and success – a move perfected by the previous Labor Government – it shifts it to something we can all get cranky about: SUBSTANDARD TEACHERS.

In an attempt to remedy our appalling standard of teaching, Pyne’s reportedly planning to have Noel Pearson “roll out Direct Instruction” to all rural and remote schools across Australia (although elsewhere it’s been reported as to all disadvantaged and impoverished children, so presumably that would also include urban disadvantaged schools).

So just what is ‘Direct Instruction’?  The first thing to note is that ‘Direct Instruction’ is not the same as direct instruction.  What we’re talking about here is a system developed in the 1960s by Engelmann and Becker that seeks to ‘train’ students (just like monkeys, you see) in cognitive and affective behaviours.  According to the National Institute for Direct Instruction (always good to have a National Institute, especially one that represents “The Gold Standard” in anything), Direct Instruction (DI) is a “a model for teaching that emphasizes well-developed and carefully planned lessons designed around small learning increments and clearly defined and prescribed teaching tasks”. DI utilises scripted lessons and purports that “all details of instruction must be controlled to minimize the chance of students’ misinterpreting the information being taught and to maximize the reinforcing effect of instruction”.  If that sounds a bit Pavlov’s dog-ish, or a bit education-as-transmission, that’s because it is.  Essentially, it’s about teacher-proofing the classroom.  We’re not talking here about a little bit of direct instruction before the students get stuck into a substantial task designed to build understanding.  This is a whole new ball game.  Or, to be more accurate, a very old ball game reinstated.

The most concerning facet of this is that it’s unusual for a Government to try to dictate pedagogical practice to teachers, and this isn’t a healthy path to be embarking upon.  When it comes down to it, Pyne is about as qualified to instruct teachers on good teaching methods as the Minister for Health is to instruct surgeons on how to do operations.  The difference, of course, is that we all went to school.  Not everyone has had brain surgery, so it’s more difficult to have an opinion.