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The end of the Dead Poets Society
An interview with Ralph Tabberer, Chief Executive, Teacher Training Agency
By Kim Thomas |
Ralph Tabberer, Chief Executive of the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) since 2000, has had a varied career in education. He's been a teacher, educational researcher and government standards adviser, and in 1999 he headed up the National Grid for Learning. Since joining the TTA, he's presided over a hefty 50% increase in the number of teachers joining the profession. It's not surprising, then, that he has some interesting thoughts about the future of teaching and the roles of teachers.
Ralph believes that the job of the teacher will inevitably change as schools begin to play a more central part in the life of the community. "Schools are extending now," he says. "They're not only being asked to look after the education of the children but increasingly their well-being, so there'll be people working in schools from the health sector, from social care, or even from justice and the police."
The impact of this, he says, is that teachers will no longer be working alone - they'll get used to having other people in the classroom, whether it's someone from a local business who has a particular expertise or an academic from the university. It's the end of what he calls "teachers' monopoly control of the classroom," and the "Dead Poets Society model". But that doesn't mean that the teacher will be marginalized: "When I say it's the end of that era, I don't mean it's the end of that inspirational input. I still hope the teachers are inspiring and can make people stand on desks and get out a book of poetry, but I just think there might be one or two other people in the room who know a bit about poetry."
Ralph is optimistic that teachers will be able to accommodate this change because the quality of teachers coming into the profession is improving all the time: "There's been a tremendous turnaround in the last few years in the appetite of people for teaching and the energy with which they're coming into it." Many of the new recruits, he says, are career changers in their 30s, 40s and even 50s, and their qualities as teachers are enhanced by a richer set of work experiences: "The new cohorts of teachers are the best ever. The data on their performance in the first year of schooling shows that in that first year they're almost as good as the experienced teacher."
The teacher of the future is going to be expert in four core specialisms, says Ralph, which he refers to as the "four Ds". The first, diagnosis, is about understanding the individual strengths and weaknesses of each child. The second is design, which means devising the most effective strategy for enabling children to learn. "I'm absolutely certain that the future of education involves thinking about individual needs of children much more," he says. The third, delivery, is about delivering learning to children, communicating enthusiasm as well as subject knowledge. The fourth D is deployment - the skill of knowing how to deploy people and resources: "There's still a tremendous role for the class lesson and for the lecture. We need teachers who are good at knowing which techniques to use: when to personalise, when to generalise."
ICT will have an important part to play in each of those four specialisms, but particularly in the areas of diagnosis and delivery. In the diagnostic area, its role is to take away some of the donkey work: "ICT has got to clear away the mundane parts of assessing and recording things so we can concentrate on getting to the whole-child interpretation of assessment data that we get."
In delivery, Ralph believes technology can add real value: "It's got tremendous power. Whether it's an electronic whiteboard, or an interactive environment that you can explore and manipulate, technology brings lots of possibilities. Technology at its best enlivens and motivates. It's great to have the ability to give a child a tool where they can start to manipulate variables and watch the effect - that's where you get deeper learning." As an example, he cites children in a science lab walking towards a sensor to map velocity, then representing the acceleration on a graph, and, finally, exploring the impact of changing the variables. He firmly believes in technology as an enabler, not so much teaching children as allowing them to learn for themselves - by, for example, using creative software to produce music, art or writing.
Ralph believes that the internet will have an important role to play in transforming learning, and is excited about the power it has to bring together children in different parts of the world: "It allows children to take part in a sharing of views, getting into discussions about things like how they see the Iraq war. It brings the potential for helping understanding between peoples."
Although teachers are increasingly confident in their use of technology, he warns that the internet is also sometimes used badly: "You can spend 45 minutes with the children trying to find something on X, just hopelessly trudging through the search engines finding every distraction in the world."
In the next few years, Ralph argues, we will see closer links between universities and schools: "Tomlinson is setting an agenda whereby it's absolutely clear that the education of most school leavers will be provided by a combination of schools, FE and hopefully HE. There's a need for children to get experience of university earlier in their lives, particularly for those whose families haven't been to university. You're suddenly starting not just to help schools with access to knowledge, and skills that they don't have, you're also giving universities the opportunity to widen participation - which of course is what they're there for."
Ralph's vision of the future is one in which the dividing line between schools and the wider community is blurred. Technology, especially the internet, will play a part in bringing the outside world in to the classroom - but it should never replace real live interaction: "I wouldn't mind seeing an occasional professor in a school as well as a picture of one."
December 2004
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