Does It Need a Certificate?

Not everything needs to lead to a certificate.

It has always bothered me when teachers ask "Why are you teaching that?", with the implicit suggestion that we don't need to teach anything that isn't in the specification. Quite often additional knowledge and examples can aid understanding, but teachers aren't just there to deliver success in exam courses, we're there to educate the students. Why would a teacher withhold information?

Could there be an even more extreme version of "teaching to the test"? I'd suggest that it's introducing a "test" when there doesn't need to be one.

If there isn't a qualification that covers exactly the content you want to teach, then aiming towards a certificate distorts what you deliver and spoils the course. Obsession with a specification at the expense of the whole picture makes it more difficult to teach - you see the course as a series of points rather than as a whole with common themes and ideas.

If you've been teaching for a while then you'll probably appreciate how "faddy" and cyclical it is. Sometimes we look back and think "did we really do that?" (see "learning styles"), but other things just seem to get forgotten. When I was an NQT, for example, I was surprised to hear a colleague proposing a "new idea" - a "word of the week". We had a word of the week when I was at school in the 80s - and I still remember some of them now, e.g. "stationery" is spelt with an "e" for "envelope" (and an "a" for something that isn't moving).

Sometimes things disappear without us noticing. In my role as lead teacher I've recently interviewed a number of candidates for vacant teaching positions. They were asked to present lesson ideas - I think they all used PowerPoint, but no-one used animation to reveal the key points one at a time. Intrigued by this - and wondering whether I'd missed a key publication - I did some research over the summer. During my PGCE course we were told that, as people can't attend to two channels simultaneously, if students are reading ahead then they're not listening. This also seems to fit with the ideas cognitive load and Rosenshine's principle about revealing information in stages. I couldn't find any reason not to do it now - it just seems to have gone out of fashion.

Another thing we were told - an idea that most certainly did go out of fashion - is that we shouldn't subject school-aged students to vocational courses. In those days it was probably CLAIT, but it could equally apply to more recent qualifications such as ECDL.

The thinking was that children aren't the same as adults, and think in different ways. For example, if you ask an adult to write you a story, they'll probably have lots of questions about length, plot, genre, characters, etc., whereas a child will just say "OK" and get on with it. Conversely, younger students don't like tasks of a more prescriptive nature - exactly the sort of things you got with CLAIT and ECDL, e.g. set the margins, set the line spacing, swap the second and third paragraphs, etc.

Which brings me back to my original point… getting the students an ECDL qualification might seem like a good idea, but you're teaching strange operations with PowerPoint master slides rather than things that are useful. I've seen tasks that required students to learn how to make changes to settings that I've never needed to do in nearly thirty years of using PowerPoint.

I finished school before the National Curriculum was introduced. I can see why it seemed like a good idea, to ensure consistency across schools, but, when I look back, the teachers I remember are those who delivered content that probably wouldn't be in the National Curriculum now, but they delivered it with a degree of enthusiasm that you rarely see these days. I wonder if they were ever asked "Why are you teaching that?"

That might explain why I still see my role as educating students - not preparing them for exams or delivering vocational training. In ten years' time, will our students (or their employers) really care that they didn't get a certificate for the skills that they learnt in their PSHE lessons or at tutor time? Or would they rather that you taught them something useful and interesting, and delivered it with enthusiasm?

This blog was originally written in September 2024.