Valerie Coultas takes issue with the view that teaching is improved by extensive supervision and imposed lesson observations. Instead she argues for a return to and enhancement of collaborative teaching approaches to re-establish the principle that teachers and lecturers are able and willing to reflect on their practice without fear of sanctions.
She argues that collaborative planning; team teaching and reciprocal approaches to evaluation have a far more profound and empowering effect on teachers and are far more likely to spread good practice…
Secondary schooling has to be de-academicised without becoming ‘vocationalised’ (or, worse, combining an academically selective schooling with relegation to ‘technical’ preparation for so-called ‘apprenticeships’) This because there are no longer vocations save the general one of preparing ‘fully developed individuals. fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions they perform, are but so many modes of giving free scope to their natural and acquired powers'(Marx Capital). This would also prepare graduates from school to take up the lifelong entitlement (but not compulsion) to adult, continuing further and higher education and training, including research and recreation as well as a National Youth Service, that would be the tertiary level of a National Education Service not restricted to schooling.
How to achieve such a socially useful education building on a Foundation in primary schooling is the $64,000 question confronting educational reform and more project working plus some of the other suggestions in Mike Cooley’s latest ‘Delinquent Genius’ book would be part of the way forward.
In my opinion, yesterday’s call by the Chair of the House of Commons Education Select Cttee, Robert Halfon, for GCSEs to be scrapped in favour of ‘ a qualification that recognises academic and technical skills alongside personal development’ at 18 is to be welcomed as a curricular step in the direction that Valerie indicates.
So are the planned walk-outs and demonstrations by school and college plus university students on Friday 15/2 which will certainly teach many more people about the realities and dangers of impending climate and ecological catastrophe than any amount of formal learning/ teaching about ‘global warming’.
Valerie Coultas takes issue with the view that teaching is improved by extensive supervision and imposed lesson observations. Instead she argues for a return to and enhancement of collaborative teaching approaches to re-establish the principle that teachers and lecturers are able and willing to reflect on their practice without fear of sanctions.
Education, Economy and Society 
Pity the teaching looks pretty well the same on the accompanying photo!
Secondary schooling has to be de-academicised without becoming ‘vocationalised’ (or, worse, combining an academically selective schooling with relegation to ‘technical’ preparation for so-called ‘apprenticeships’) This because there are no longer vocations save the general one of preparing ‘fully developed individuals. fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions they perform, are but so many modes of giving free scope to their natural and acquired powers'(Marx Capital). This would also prepare graduates from school to take up the lifelong entitlement (but not compulsion) to adult, continuing further and higher education and training, including research and recreation as well as a National Youth Service, that would be the tertiary level of a National Education Service not restricted to schooling.
How to achieve such a socially useful education building on a Foundation in primary schooling is the $64,000 question confronting educational reform and more project working plus some of the other suggestions in Mike Cooley’s latest ‘Delinquent Genius’ book would be part of the way forward.
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In my opinion, yesterday’s call by the Chair of the House of Commons Education Select Cttee, Robert Halfon, for GCSEs to be scrapped in favour of ‘ a qualification that recognises academic and technical skills alongside personal development’ at 18 is to be welcomed as a curricular step in the direction that Valerie indicates.
So are the planned walk-outs and demonstrations by school and college plus university students on Friday 15/2 which will certainly teach many more people about the realities and dangers of impending climate and ecological catastrophe than any amount of formal learning/ teaching about ‘global warming’.