An interesting piece on the impact of the Coronavirus on modern learning environment schools appeared on Stuff yesterday. For those of you who have not been in school for some time, MLEs are basically a rehash of the 1970s trend of open plan classrooms. They feature bright and colourful furniture and wide-open spaces. The idea is that rather than having a single classroom of say 20-30 students with one teacher, you have much larger spaces, with more students and teachers.
Given that we are to keep our bubbles as small as possible, these schools may have more difficulty than traditional schools in getting back up and running.
So what is the point of these MLEs? MLEs are a product of philosophy. Remember, our worldview, our underlying philosophy drives our behaviour. So our understanding of human nature, of children, of the purpose of education – these are going to impact our approach to teaching.
As I’ve mentioned before, a modern approach to the nature of the child is that children know best, and adults can get in the way of that. Thus we need to give children plenty of chance to interact without too much adult interference. We need to give them more ‘agency’ and allow them to choose what they learn and how they learn. Teachers become facilitators of learning. As the Stuff article puts it, the idea is “to foster self-management and collaboration.” These are admirable goals indeed. What teacher would not want their students to learn to self-manage and work well with others? But do MLEs provide an environment where these goals can be achieved?
The picture is not always as rosy as the promo videos and breathless praise from educational ‘experts’ make out. The changeover (and the resulting millions of dollars of tax payer dollars spent on new fit-outs) is “difficult to justify” according to a ministry funded study – which you’d have to think would be fairly keen to excuse the money it has poured into MLEs.
Teachers burn out with the demands put upon them in these environments. And while some students thrive in MLE’s, enjoying the interaction, others find it very difficult. Children with hearing difficulties find these environments difficult to work in, as do more introverted children and those who need quiet to think and process.
Once again, incorrect anthropology leads us astray. Children are not basically good, requiring little to no direction. They are sinful from conception and need training. It’s no wonder that research reveals concerns around whether the autonomy given to students in large MLEs is effective for learning. Anecdotal evidence from teachers I know reveals that the quality of learning in some MLEs is questionable at best. I’ve heard tales of children wearing headphones while a teacher is explaining a concept, students walking out in the middle of a teacher explanation, other groups of students making such a racket that a teacher working with a small group cannot be heard, students wasting time on Facebook rather than productive learning, and the list does go on, I assure you.
Consider the example of Rototuna Junior High School. Fraser Hill the principal is quoted as saying that their learning spaces each have two teachers, and can have between 90 and 130 students. A ratio of between 1:45 and 1:65? Surely this is a misquote on the part of the reporter? Let’s charitably assume the reporter got this wrong. Let’s assume that the ratios are around 1:30. Even so, under which model do you think a child would be able to feel lost and slip under the radar more easily? What’s more likely to provide an environment for effective learning: a class where a teacher directs student activity and energy to what he deems is most important, or a wide-open environment where student-led learning is taking place? Where is more wasted time likely to occur? If you’re struggling to answer these questions, perhaps you have forgotten what it was like to be a child, or perhaps you were an extraordinary child.
So what really makes a difference? Is creating these bright wide-opened spaces a game-changer for education? New Zealand’s own John Hattie, in his Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement shows that quality teaching has a much greater effect on student learning and achievement than other factors a school controls, including school structures and class size. What we need to focus on then, is making sure we have excellent teachers in front of our classes.
Given the research and the fact that a similar experiment was foisted on the children of a previous generation, one has to ask the obvious question: What on earth are we doing this for? Answer? Image. It looks good, it sounds good, it makes for good promotional videos, and it fits the prevailing understanding of children and human nature. Governments can point to the truckloads of cash they pour into education to show people how much they care about education. As always in politics, image is more important than substance. It is easy to waste other people’s money for grand utopian schemes.