I am finishing a teaching career. Thirty years of teaching in college and some time in high school. During all these years, I have seen and undergone many pedagogical reforms, program reforms and conceptual reforms. New reforms were applied without evaluating the old ones. We “advanced” blindly. I also attended seminars and conferences which were very often completely useless. You may be familiar with multiple intelligences, or the difference between auditory and visual. Have you ever listened to a speaker use a neologism every other sentence? Or that other who wants to sell you the “discovery” method for 4th graderse secondary. They had to find the laws of electrical circuits by themselves (time: 1 hour 30 minutes; number of students: 40). As if Gustav Kirchhoff had discovered these laws in an afternoon. Ridiculous.
I saw the reverence for videos, then aceplates, followed by electronic aceplates, flipped classrooms, the madness of interactive whiteboards, online teaching and assessment, the magic of technopedagogy, etc Now we are on to artificial intelligence… Each of these tools is intended to be an indispensable revolution. But these tools often make us forget that teaching is first and foremost a human relationship.
Teaching by objectives has become teaching by skills. That’s good, but do you know how many definitions there are of what a skill is? With us, the educational advisers have decided that each course number should correspond to a single skill (with some exceptions…). But this is not the case in the neighboring college, and in the other, it is still different. Have you ever heard of the crystal of knowledge which generates its own energy? Rainbow of skills? Have you ever drawn clouds in a group on large white cards with colored pencils and Post-its to express the “pedagogical” links? One could fill pages and pages with all the pedagogical and ideological nonsense to which teachers are exposed.
Of course, all is not negative, I had some professors of pedagogy who knew how to distinguish theory and practice. The small useful parts of the technologies also remained.
But the question remains: how do we effectively teach a subject, how do we ensure that our students understand and not only on the surface, but also in depth? Given the constraints, what is the best way to teach? Or rather, what are the best ways to teach depending on the level and the subject?
The time for change
Our education system is in bad shape. Whether we are talking about integration, quality, public system, class composition, teacher retention, pedagogical effectiveness, failure of boys, etc., just about every component of our education system are faulty. Of course, we can blame it on the politicians. But we will have to recognize and admit that what we see today is the result of the actions of the Ministry of Education and the teaching faculties.
Currently, many teachers navigate almost blind. They trust their instincts. Some have good instincts, others less so. Still others follow the latest fashionable idea and find that it doesn’t work.
Teachers, like the ministry, need to get reliable data and sound advice. As a pre-college science teacher, I would like to know if my students are doing well in college. Did I do my job well? What could I do to improve it? Unfortunately, and despite my repeated requests, I left teaching, and I did not have an answer to my questions. So, I did my best hoping to have been useful to my students.
The status quo is no longer an option. It’s time for change, and the creation of the National Institute for Excellence in Education seems to me to be a first step towards this change.
Some will oppose it by arguing that teachers should be left free to do what they want. But doing what you want does not mean doing anything. Teachers can be left to be creative, but they must be given access to a solid conceptual and experimental framework.
Give the runner a chance
Engineers know that there are a multitude of ways to build a bridge, but they also know that all must follow the laws of physics.
We must clean up what I would call pedagogical esotericism. We must also try to free education from the many pressure groups that want to take advantage of the availability of young brains. The school should not be a place of indoctrination, but a place of education which allows the development of a critical sense.
Unfortunately, nothing that exists today has made it possible to positively change the situation of the education system. In fact, we find that the reverse is happening. So continuing to do the same thing is unlikely to produce different results.
This is why I am of the opinion that we must leave the chance to the runner. The creation of the National Institute of Excellence in Education seems to me not only desirable, but above all necessary.
Moreover, one of its first mandates could be to try to understand why parents flee the public system. Thereafter, it would be possible to propose pragmatic solutions and not ideological constructs that do not work in the real world.