Key to learning is …

The Holy Grail of teaching and learning – that’s what someone called it. Dr Researcher (not Dr Teacher) says that the key to real and effective, long-lasting and deeply affective, nurturing loving and caring learning is… feedback. Duh, really? He combed and trawled through 15 thousand bits of research to come up with that.

And here was I thinking that being a good teacher was all about taking field trips, and obviously completing all the appropriate Health & Safety pro-formas, ensuring all the diabetics have their insulin, the epileptics have their pills, the ADDs have their amphetamines and they all have  politically-correct and nutritious low fat, high-fibre, GM-free, carbohydrate-low lunches.

And I thought good teaching meant thorough planning and preparation, maintaining a safe learning environment, being prompt to playground supervision duties, ensuring children all play in a caring, supportive, culturally safe and meaningful way, supporting and loving and caring for the environment, any animals that might stray within a 500-metre perimeter of the school, vigilant all the while for nefarious activities such as smoking, swearing, bullying and thinking about sex.

And who’d have thought that feedback was education’s holy grail. What – and it doesn’t matter if the marking is done in red, blue, gothic-black or citrus-seedless-orange? Well I’ll be rogered.

This surely means that marijuana use (or not) doesn’t matter. Alcohol, solvent, and caffeine abuse don’t matter either. It’s all and only about feedback.

I’ve done some research myself and I’ve concluded that the biggest interference in teaching and learning is Dr Researchers who say it’s so simple when really, if they’d bother walking a mile in our shoes they’d see that teachers aren’t just expected to teach. Were it so simple.
And it has nothing to do with the internet or electronic whiteboards or attendance? What about the attendance register? What about NCEA – they assured us that was the holy grail.

And after school footy, debating, school plays and the athletics sports have nothing to do with it either? Nor cake-stalls, nor week long fourth form camps in hell, nor even clean shoes and tucked in shirts? What about high-fibre low-stupidity diet?

Who’d’ve thought that teaching children and teenagers was so simple and that teaching a class of 30 primary-aged kids, or six different classes of 20-30 secondary-aged devils could be so simple? Piaget didn’t know anything, nor Bloom, nor Skinner, nor even Howard Gardner with his many-coloured intelligences and learning styles. All these complex humanettes need is more feedback.

It’s jolly lucky that in these difficult economic times that the research didn’t show that smaller classes would be better. That would’ve been very expensive to implement.

— Peter Giddens