| Article Index |
|---|
| What Makes An Effective Drama Teacher? |
| Part 2 |
| Bibliography |
| Appendices |
| All Pages |
This essay was submitted as part fulfillment for the class Issues in Contemporary Education, part of the Post Graduate Certificate in Secondary Education (PGCE) at The Central School of Speech and Drama, London in 2000.
“Do...or do not. There is no try.”
(Yoda, 1980))
Before beginning my Post Graduate Certificate in Secondary Education (PGCE) in Drama certificate, my experiences of Effective Teaching conformed to the simple notion put forward so succinctly by Yoda; the simple presupposition that one did or did not teach effectively. While researching this essay and attempting to come to a better understanding of the concepts pertaining to the "do"s and "do not"s of Effective Teaching I have formulated opinions on four issues which I wish to use this essay to explore.
1 What do we mean by Effective Teaching.
It could be said that Effective Teaching involves using the method which best communicates the desired objective. However taking into account the average British classroom (whatever that might mean!) it is more pertinent to consider Effective Teaching as: “the methods which best communicate the desired objective to the greatest number of pupils in the least amount of time, assuring the greatest degree of assimilation and understanding.”
Many theorists have written on the subject of Effective Teaching and although there appear to be many vicissitudes, one aspect appears consistent: that effectiveness can be broken down into a set of achievable criteria. The appendices of this essay show some of the many formulae for effectiveness that I have found during the course of my research.
To consider that teachers and teaching, effective or otherwise, can be reduced to a mere set of ingredients is illogical and conforms to the restrictive confines of any codified systematisation. The ‘robotising’ of teachers is a paradigmatic scrap that has been left on the plate of Marxist ideology - that the establishment can make all workers equal by educating them to the criteria of those deemed as “good” workers. Ironically this has been maintained through Prime Minister Margret Thatcher’s 1980’s Education Acts:
"Her preferred solutions encompassed the usual incompatible objectives
of greater central controls on distrusted professionals, increased financial
accountability, wider ‘consumer’ choice in a quasi-free educational market.”
(Evans 1997, p.71)
Teachers are not marketable concepts and Effective Teaching should not be seen as an exercise in standardisation. The idea of Effectiveness being a standardisable quality is problematised by the same inconsistencies as Marxism itself is problematized. It does not take into account the fundamental individualities of human nature: all teacher’s are equal, but some teachers are more equal than others.
Kyriacou agrees that there is a danger in establishing formulaic criteria for Effective Teaching as this reification suggests that there is an ultimate truth of what is effective (1995, p.1). Though we cannot deny that psychology and studies of learning have contributed notions of effectiveness that have a scientific degree of repeatability, there is certainly no concrete model of teacher effectiveness that can not be heuristically adapted through a more pragmatic approach to the ideology of Effectiveness.
Foucault considered this obsession with fragmented ratiocination as entirely appropriate for the discipline of the institutional nature of the school:
“The meticulousness… the fussiness…, the supervision of the smallest fragment
of life… will soon provide, in the context of the school a laicized content, a…
rationality for this mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite”
(Foucault, (1977) in Ball (1990) p.80)
Foucault is suggesting here that meticulous observation of parts can lead to clarity of the mystery of the whole. I cannot agree however unless an analysis by division (a subjective notion) is concurrent with a complete analysis (hence an objective notion). The reason for this is clear. Because of its research methods (mainly quasi-quantitative), modelling teacher effectiveness can also lead to some results that are simply unacceptable. For example in the report “Effective Teachers of Literacy,” commissioned by the Training Agency - responsible for changes to the teacher-training curriculum, it was shown that:
“Effective Teachers knew the material they were teaching in a particular way... they
appeared only to know their material by how they represented it for their children.
What these Effective Teachers have got is understanding of how to teach things to children,
even if it wasn't evident in out-of-context tests that they understood it in an abstract form.”
Thornton K. (Net)
This is clearly not a constructive way of looking at teaching, especially not drama or theatre, I would defy any drama teacher to proffer an argument that they did not need to love and understand their subject in order to facilitate children’s learning with their enthusiasm. This is another consistent criteria in much research (see appendix). Pedagogy is important but so is subject knowledge; even so, these alone do not make an Effective Teacher.
Another problem with a formulaic approach to Effective Teaching is that formulae do not allow for differentiation, not for the pupils but, for the teachers. Different teachers favour different styles (often for the wrong reasons i.e.: “because its easier that way”, “because I’ve always done it that way”, “because someone told me it should be done this way..) but from my observations I have noticed that some teachers establish and maintain a style that is effective in its own way. Usually this style has intuitively included some of the formulaic criteria but it is always something more than just that - something bigger. I would suggest, again from what I have witnessed in schools, that these differences come about not only because every teacher is different, but because every teacher has to deal with a substantial non-teaching work load in the way that best suits them.