Virginia Blackburn

Virginia Blackburn is a journalist, columnist and author. She has written two novels and more than 20 celebrity biographies including David Beckham: The Great Betrayal, Kylie: Story of a Survivor, and Robbie's Secrets.

Teachers are born - not made or trained

THOSE who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

A GOOD TEACHER It s not rocket science A GOOD TEACHER: It's not rocket science

That must be one of the most pernicious sayings ever coined and is clear proof of how much we as a nation denigrate teaching, one of the most important professions in the world.

We almost deserve the education system we've ended up with for our arrant stupidity in not putting the status of teachers at the top of the tree.

So you would have thought that the teaching profession would be delighted to hear that those people we used to consider to be a great success, high flying bankers and the like, are now queuing up to join the educators' ranks: not a bit of it.

The National Union of Teachers, never one to knowingly improve the image of its members, has condemned proposals to fast track the training of teachers from one year to six months. What utter nonsense. A really good teacher hardly needs training at all.

What do they actually do in the year it currently takes people to qualify as a fully formed teacher?

As it so happens, I am a qualified teacher, albeit of English as a foreign language rather than an academic subject, and I did my training in three months, part time.

Had I done it full time, the course would have been one month. And that is the maximum amount of time it should take to train a teacher, while those looking after really small children need no more than kindness and common sense.

Teaching is a vocation as much as a profession and the best teachers are the instinctive ones.

That's why you can have the most highly educated people in the world and they still can't pass on their knowledge. A good teacher is born, not made.

What do they actually do in the year it currently takes people to qualify as a fully formed teacher? Well - they learn how to teach.

They do not learn about their subject: teachers are already expected to have a good knowledge of history, geography, mathematics or whatever their speciality is (though not all teaching courses require university degrees).

Trainee teachers, meanwhile, are taught "skills in the classroom". Not that these skills are going to be put to exceptionally good use: one teachertraining course optimistically proclaims that it will teach the teachers the skills to get their pupils a Grade C in English Literature GCSE. A great deal to aspire to indeed.

GORDON BROWN DEFENDS 'TEACHER IN SIX MONTHS' SCHEME

I'll tell you what teachers need to learn: how to remember their students' names (a good wheeze is to get pupils tossing something like a plastic pink pig at one another while shouting the other person's name - it works); how to keep discipline (isolate the pupil, don't shout); how to prepare a lesson (write out a plan in advance, including timing each stage of the process); how to avoid silly mistakes (never say, "Do you understand?" as they will say yes whether they do or not and will feel stupid if they don't); how to get them to rehearse their new skills (put them in pairs and get them to work together); and which are the best textbooks.

That's it. It's not rocket science and a good teacher will pick it up straight away.

That (taxpayer-funded) year, examining children's motivation and all sorts of contemporary theories of child psychology and bureaucratic box-ticking, is a waste of time.

What teachers actually need is knowledge of their subject matter and they pick that up at university, not teachertraining college. Then they need empathy with the child.

 

As matters stand, under the current education system, one in six pupils left school last year without so much as a single GCSE. That's after 11 years in the classroom.

Whatever their teachers were taught in their "classroom skills" sessions clearly wasn't working. Time for a change.

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