Literature – What’s the Point?

For the past decade or so, summer has begun for me with a visit to Borris in Co. Carlow. The wonderful Festival of Writing and Ideas fills my mind with new thoughts and interesting opinions and books-I-need-to-read lists that crowd out and chase away the CBAs and the lesson plans and the reports. This year I heard Fintan O’Toole being interviewed by fellow journalist Gary Younge on the state in which we find ourselves. O’Toole spoke as eloquently as ever, touching on the heft of the multi-nationals in influencing Irish public policy, a heft that is sometimes felt in terms of direct demands (or requests if you want to be polite), but more insidiously by a mindset of solicitation that prioritises shot-term attractiveness over long-term, values-driven development.

I am not sure to what extent the multi-nationals bother themselves with intervening in our education system, at least at the primary and secondary levels. That they call for more investment is fine. That we need them to say it is shameful. What I am certain of is that they don’t need to intervene at the level of curriculum and assessment, because the Department of Education actively seeks to pre-emptively please our current and potential inward investors. 

When thinking about schooling in Ireland and how it might play a role in making us look like we have our act together, the problem might have seemed that the system looked a bit old-fashioned, and was too egalitarian. In 2016 the then-Minister for Education Richard Bruton announced his “ambition…to make Ireland the best education and training service in Europe” Few at the time or since questioned the use of the word “service”. I imagine that most people didn’t even notice as they do indeed think of education as a personal service to their own family. Increasingly, and of course I generalise, the kind of parents who see education as a service are used to having most services of which they avail pre-emptively structured around their anticipated requirements. Their requirements are simple. They want their child’s self-esteem and wellbeing nurtured. They want them to do lots of maths. They want a system that ensures that their middle-class child of middling ability isn’t bothered too much by the threat of being overtaken by a bright working-class child who works hard, is taught well, and excels in an anonymised assessment regime. 

Although no doubt many parents and other voters took Richard Bruton’s “service” to mean a direct-to-consumer product in which they were the consumer, it is also plausible that the word was used in a separate sense. Perhaps the end-user of the education service is not the child or the child’s family. Maybe the child is the product and the consumers are the child’s potential employers. This sounds heartless but it is one arc of an economic circle whereby children are formed into an available workforce which attracts inward investment and this inward investment will raise our economic wellbeing, part of which bounty will be invested in educating the next generation and so on. This argument might have held some water decades ago and we were told it often enough when we were in school, but it has become a psychological fig-leaf that covers the infinitely more potent attraction of tax incentives.

The narrative of our broken education system has been essential in order to justify remaking the system, but the Department cannot admit that its purpose is to make Ireland more attractive as a location for business. They must talk instead about raising standards, implying that inward investment is but a happy byproduct of excellence.  Yet these standards are rarely spoken of in terms of standards of attainment, Instead they are standards of delivery: an education system that exists to “meet the existing and future needs of children”. Children are “supported” rather than “taught” (you might say that teaching someone is supporting them to learn, but in that case why not just use the verb “teach”?), while Wellbeing is “at the forefront of teachers’ work”.

The emerging new curriculum takes its lead almost entirely from the OECD’s vision for the future of education (what used to be called “21st century learning”). The forthcoming reforms of Senior Cycle are already being rumoured to be based on the OECD Learning Compass 2030, which is itself based on emerging “megatrends” and is full of vague aspirations such as developing young people’s “transformative competencies” and “co-agency with peers, teachers, parents, communities”. Reform of assessment will be an even more radical version of what has been done at Junior Cycle: replacing externally-assessed, syllabus based examinations with continuous assessment and accreditation for non-academic “other areas of learning”. Both continuous assessment and awarding credit for extra-curricular activities will both, of course, function very well as middle-class ramps that will ensure the children of the well-paid can continue to progress to third-level education in a transition that is so inevitable it can appear natural.

There isn’t much space in this vision for the arts, especially not for literature. The arts in general have been incorporated into the acronym STEAM, where they play the role of handmaiden to engineering and technology, shunted away from ideas of culture and the humanities. The downgrading of literature is my own particular worry, but art and music have also been hit, not least because they have been starved of funding that is going instead towards software licensing and trolleyfuls of iPads. Anecdotally, secondary schools have cut back on the time for art and for music in order to comply with the ring-fenced 400 hours of curricular time for “wellbeing”. Most are no longer in a position to offer a full year of “taster” subjects in first year; a practice whereby in-coming students had at least one full school year where they received instruction in both art and music from teachers with specialist degrees and expertise.

The teaching of literature within subject of English – the first to undergo reform at Junior Cycle – has been the greatest curricular casualty of recent changes   A quick word-search of the NCCA’s 2012 Background Paper and Brief for the Review of English shows 25 results for “reading”, 18 for “literature”, 7 for “knowledge” and 66 for “digital”.  This was a taste of what was to come. A 2023 NCCA-commissioned report on the role and selection of prescribed texts, while opening with the declaration that “Literature plays many roles across the spectrum of education”, goes on to clarify:

“However, the word “literature” is value-laden. For many it creates an expectation of literary works of art, imbued with longevity and cultural importance and therefore with high cultural capital. For this reason, the specification and syllabus for English at junior cycle and Leaving Certificate use the broader term “texts” to include literary and non-literary texts that students will encounter, explore and model in their experience in the English classroom. This may include novels, novellas, poetry, prose, drama, written verse, spoken word, graphic novels, travelogues, blogs, film, biopics, biographies, essay, articles, podcasts and more.”   

The authors of this report mean well and – having presumably at some point come across Bourdieu’s concept of habitus – are trying to design a curriculum that is inclusive and socially progressive. They are working within the confines of a system where literature has no importance, and where education has no importance other than as a prop in our staged window of national attractiveness.

You won’t ever find anyone (unless you go to Florida) who says they are against the teaching of literature. Yet the place of literature is increasingly on the margins. English as a subject overall has lost its identity as a core subject and, even more strikingly, literature now occupies less and less space within this reduced space.

The point of literature is its pointlessness, by which I mean its irrelevance to the economic circle model of education. It is a counterweight without which we are taken ever more off-kilter until we find ourselves somewhere we are not quite sure is real but have no idea how any other existence might be possible. And even beyond this value as a counterweight – a value that is shared by all the arts – literature has further value than cannot be expressed in terms extraneous to the thing itself. Literature is not a luxury, but a necessity as Dr Philip McGowan, Professor of American Literature at Queens University, explains here so well in his inaugural lecture “Literature and the Right to Write”. His words are addressed to Rishi Sunak yet the problem he describes – the displacement of literature within the school curriculum – is arguably even worse here than it is in the constituent parts of the UK education system. 

“Without literature, without art, we are diminished….It’s the subjects that comprise the arts and humanities that truly make the reckoning of who we are, who we have been and who we can become. Without art to articulate the darkness as well as be the light of being, we have nothing beyond merely existing in an abyss of thoughtless meaninglessness…..Culture, art, literature are not just a right, they are a necessity.”

"It's not Mathematics Prime Minister that we should be making mandatory to A-level, it's literature in any and every language." A powerful defence of the arts in schools from @pipmcgowan in his inaugural lecture. pic.twitter.com/SiZkXccts3

— Carl Hendrick (@C_Hendrick) June 24, 2023

Thanks to Carl Hendrick for his tweet which led me to this lecture. The full version is here.

Over the first three years of secondary education, English has a minimum time allocation of 240 hours (remember, the minimum for wellbeing is 400), nominally the same as for Maths but in practice almost all schools give more time to Maths. Between the blogs and the travelogues and the tweets and the podcasts, there is not much time left for children to encounter actual literature in the classroom. Even when they do, it is at a breakneck pace. Gill and Macmillan recently boasted that their edition of “Romeo and Juliet” is designed to cover the play in its entirety, along with themes, characterisation and questions of stage-craft, in between four and six weeks. To take the lower end of that time frame, at four forty minute classes a week that’s less than 11 hours of Shakespeare in three years. 

As for the final assessment, the last time the Shakespearean play was a compulsory element on the examination was 2019. In 2023, candidates could choose to answer on a play by Shakespeare or one of the two novels they had studied. The list of prescribed novels may include “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, “Sense and Sensibility” and “Things Fall Apart” but teachers are arguably disincentivised from choosing such rich and challenging texts for two reasons. The first is that it is hard to cover them in any meaningful depth in the meagre time allowed, and a second, related reason is that choosing simpler material allows for more time to “teach to the test” i.e. practice with past and sample exam papers to hone shallow form-filling skills and practice concocting coherent responses to stimulus material such as the example below from 2019.

2019 Higher Level English Junior Cycle https://www.examinations.ie/archive/exampapers/2019/JC002ALP000EV.pdf

 Professor McGowan describes recent curricular change in Northern Ireland as a “covert attack on literature” whereby “short-term decision-making is stripping our society of that which defines us”. The same point can be made even more strongly on this side of the border. In fashioning our curriculum and its assessment around what we hope will attract economic investment, we are like a beautiful but insecure young person who, inspired by Instagram, opts for lip injections to achieve a pout that is “in line with international best practice”. It’s not about enhancing what we already have and appreciating how it functions; instead we are aiming for maximum superficiality, a synthetic simulacrum of excellence where – as in Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Woebegone” – all children will be above average, and will have studied programming rather than poetry. Reading anything will be the preserve of what some populist aspiring leader will reasonably point to as the out-of-touch élite. Centuries of literary heritage will be preserved only in academia and, what is much worse, we may never hear the voices of the Naoise Dolans and Seán Hewitts and Victoria Kenneficks of the future.

Literature and Language: The Double Helix

I must begin by acknowledging a debt here to Joe Kirby, who first applied the analogy of the double helix structure of DNA to the relationship between skills and knowledge in English. Joe (@joe_kirby) points out, entirely reasonably, that teaching knowledge and teaching skills are not in opposition and that they cannot be completely separated and positioned as polar opposites.

This image, of two distinct yet interconnected strands that aid in each other’s formation, comes to mind as I consider the plans to move the examination of English Paper I to the end of fifth year. (The Irish systems sees English Language and English Literature as one subject; they are taught in tandem and while there are separate exams the results of Papers I and II are combined and reported as one result). Paper I and Paper II have hitherto operated as two linked, interdependent strands and student progress in one allows progress in the other. The plans for 2024 and beyond evoke an image of the strands being pulled apart with the nitrogenous bases scattering and falling to the floor like marbles. What is being proposed doesn’t just damage learning in both areas; dismantling the very structure of the subject risks leaving a scattered heap of disconnected modules that fail to coalesce into the kind of intellectual schema that students can take forward into adult life.

For me, the first and most obvious effect of this move is to the almost complete erasure of writing from sixth year English. I saw “almost” because one small area will remain: learning out to write a short essay based on the study of literary text. This is important and for most students the most challenging aspect of Senior Cycle English. In addition to propositional knowledge about the texts and about literature in general, students learn something of the disciplinary knowledge of the literary critic. They also learn skills around presenting an argument, using evidence to build a case and how to write in a detached, fairly impersonal style that should stand to them should they chose to go to university. This kind of writing is arguably of more utilitarian benefit than the kind developed in Paper I. Here the mainstay of the paper is the composition. Students work on genres such as the personal essay, the descriptive and the discursive essay: all examples of writing they will most likely never have to do in a professional capacity or want to do in a personal one. They get to pretend to be speech-writers and journalists, even though the many will only ever deliver a speech at a wedding or funeral, and those who do go on to be journalists usually benefit from actual, professional training in this area. Then there is the short story option, a popular choice even though the fraction of school-leaver who will go on to write fiction in an amateur, let alone professional, capacity is infinitesimal.

If utility were the guiding principle behind the curriculum, we could jettison nearly everything. English might seem at first glance to have real-world application in terms of students’ future quotidien lives, but this has been exaggerated (especially “now there’s Grammarly!”). Everyday life puts constant demands on our literacy, and the costs of illiteracy are greater than ever as we now do so many things for ourselves, online, that once we could have entered a bricks-and-mortar business or institution and asked a flesh-and-blood person to do on our behalf. Yet these demands in themselves do not require a high standard of literacy. They don’t require being able to read the front page of the Irish Times, or the Examiner or a long-form article that examines a current social issue, any more than they do an appreciation of sprung rhythm or knowing a Petrarchan from a Shakespearean sonnet. They don’t require asking yourself what your standpoint is, or what you feel about something and then exploring that standpoint or that feeling through the process of writing about it. In doing so our students follow in the footsteps of Montaigne, for whom the essai was about trying ideas on for size and trying through writing to find out what he thought much more than for writing down pre-assembled thoughts.

Given its poor utility and that it doesn’t prepare students for academic writing, why do I just not accept that moving Paper I to the end of fifth year is no big deal? For one thing, this will push the preparation for Paper I into fifth year and, necessarily into transition year. Doing so will displace a lot of the Paper II work that is normally done in fifth year and this will instead now take place in sixth year. This allows us to dismiss the idea that the move is motivated by a desire to reduce the pressure on students. Literature – the half of the course that involves more memorisation and acquisition of propositional knowledge – is now located overwhelmingly in the temporal second half of senior cycle. Students will be encountering content for the first time while simultaneously meeting and revising substantial amounts of material in all the other subjects they are studying. This will increase their workload and lead to shallower, often ephemeral, learning as the benefits of interleaving and spaced practice cannot be harnessed to the same extent. So this move is detrimental in terms of student workload, student stress and in pedagogical terms.

Moving English Paper I to fifth year rips the subject apart and harms not just students’ development as writers, but also their development as readers. The value of having students practice writing stories, speeches and articles is not merely that they will go on and produce this kind of writing. It is also because it makes them more thoughtful readers of other people’s stories and articles, and more aware listeners to speeches of all kinds. When we can space Paper I over two years we can gradually raise the challenge level of exemplars that are presented to students. A back-and-forth process takes place where students read an example, emulate, reflect and then at later date repeat the process but this time with a slightly more challenging example in terms of reading and a slightly higher bar in terms of their own attempt. This takes time and whatever is achieved over two years cannot possibly be achieved in one. This is partly because many students supplement what they read in class with their own reading; maintaining Paper I at the end of sixth year can keep that reading habit going for those students who appreciate how forty minutes with the Sunday papers, or that novel on the bedside locker, is not just a distraction but can be converted into cold, hard points. Paper I at the end of fifth year takes away this incentive. Of course there will be students who will still continue to read, just as there are always students who do next to no reading and whose sole encounter with the non-academic printed word is in the English classroom. This last group will be most affected of all.

These are the students at risk of leaving school unable to read the front page of a broadsheet newspaper. Unable to spot the rhetorical tricks of a political speech. Unable to easily read a non-fiction book that is aimed at an audience of educated adults, and for whom the vibrant and ever-evolving world of current Irish and international fiction is an irrelevant abstraction. The question of whether or not these kinds of skills are important is one that asks us what kind of Ireland we want to see in the future. It’s a question with many possible answers, but one thing is certain: removing the study and practice of the English language from sixth year sends a message that this stuff doesn’t really matter.

This is not to argue that the current set-up reliably results in young adults who are literate beyond the purely functional sense. It is imperfect, and there are substantial factors from outside school that have a negative impact on attainment. But this move can only damage what we have, will hobble teaching and learning serve only as a tick in the ministerial “do something about the Leaving” box.

If the Department of Education is determined to examine some of Leaving Cert English at the end of fifth year, I would suggest moving the first half of English Paper I only. This is the Question A (comprehension) and QB (normally a short functional or creative writing task). A section of Paper II, perhaps the Poetry, could then replace these on the Paper I exam and put an end to the three-hours-twenty-minute ordeal that is the current Paper II. This would mean three exams altogether, thereby spreading the load and easing the pressure. Not that this will happen, because this move is a lot less about easing the pressure on students than it is on creating the streamlined, Leaving Cert-lite of of the future. QA and QB come to only 25% of the overall marks, as opposed to 50% for Paper I. If a candidate underperforms they would still have a lot to play for; a 50:50 split means that even an outstanding performance in sixth year will not be enough to salvage the grade. The Leaving Cert remains a high stakes exam and maybe we should consider the effects of those who’ll be starting the process a year younger and with twelve less months of life experience than is currently the case.

To summarise: this is a bad idea. Conor Murphy and Julian Girdham have also written on this topic and put forward slightly different but complementary arguments. English is a complex subject and English teachers often have divergent ideas about what’s important and how teaching should happen, but I have never seen such agreement amongst my colleagues and my English teacher friends that this separation of Language and Literature is a baffling and absurd development. We can only ask and hope that it will be reconsidered.

Recent Reads Summer ’22

It has been almost two years since I last compiled a list of interesting books that I have enjoyed, so “recent” here spans quite a length of time. I had a browse through the shelves and these were the ten that called to me. I’ve left out “Bringing Forth the Bard” as I can’t add anything to this excellent review here.

“The Art of Falling” by Danielle McLoughlin

“The Art of Falling” is a novel about art and artists that is it itself a quiet and subtle masterpiece. McLoughlin was already known for short stories that are clear examinations of human desires and shortcomings and this, her debut novel, was much anticipated. The story of Nessa McCormack, an extended version of a character from “Dinosaur on Other Planets”, does not disappoint. Nessa has a good job in a gallery, a teenage daughter and an ostensibly functioning marriage. Interwoven with her story is that of the “Chalk Sculpture” by a renowned, now deceased, Irish sculptor. In the fine and timeless tradition of Irish literature, Nessa and the women for whom the sculpture signifies radically different meanings, find that the past turns out to be inescapable.

“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara is an AF, or artificial friend. She is a kind of robot whose purpose is to provide companionship to lonely children, presumably the only children of the ever-shrinking nuclear family. Lacking a family of origin of her own, Klara (who seems to be solar-powered to some extent) develops a relationship with the sun whose rays briefly illuminate the shop-window where she awaits to be chosen and purchased. She is purchased and moves in with the family but is predictably never quite one of them. To an even greater extent than in “Never Let Me Go”, the naive not-quite-human narrator notes and observes all that she sees and reports in a prose which is paradoxically compelling in its flatness. Klara gets nothing wrong although there are layers of human experience that are denied her. What she gets right is a clear-sighted education in love and empathy. This is Ishiguro on top form, delivering a clinical, semi-detached case study of the mess, joy and betrayal of human relationships.

“Whatever it Takes” by Tadhg Coakley

Another fiction title here, and a page-turning crime novel replete with detail that Cork readers will recognise. Coakley introduces his hard-bitten detective – Collins – due to retire but lured in by one last case that’s connected to his own painful past. Like Morse, Collins doesn’t seem to have a first name. I will bet it will be revealed in a future installment as Fachtna or Finbarr rather than Endeavour. The novel is formulaic, but that’s where the fun is. Coakley has a fine ear for dialogue, an eye for the localising detail and delivers a careening tour of the darker side of the real capital as Collins sets off in pursuit of his nemesis, Dominic Molloy.

“Dictatorland” by Paul Kenyon

I read this in an effort to redress my ignorance of almost everything African, from geography to history to anything beyond the most perfunctory knowledge of what is happening now on the continent. It’s as good a starting point as you can get; Kenyon takes us on a tour through a selection of African nations (DRC, Zimbabwe, Libya, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Eritrea), focusing in each one on a past or current despotic kleptocrat. The stories in each are depressingly familiar, one where decolonisation is in name only as Western companies continue to extract natural resources, propping up whichever régime has the fewest scruples in terms of the theft, environmental and violence degradation that go with this status quo.

“Our Bodies, Their Battlefield” by Christina Lamb

This was by far the most disturbing and difficult book I read last year. Each chapter focuses on a particular conflict and recounts, with compassion and calm outrage, the suffering endured by women and girls who find their bodies turned into battlefields and rape becomes a devastating, life-destroying weapon of war.

“The Education of an Idealist” by Samantha Power.

A non-fiction read from last summer, this begins with the revealing and personal memories of Power’s early years in Dublin and moves on emigration to the US as child, her early career as a war correspondent, involvement in Barack Obama’s campaign and government, to her role as US Ambassador to the UN, taking in struggles with anxiety and subfertility along the way. There’s a strong narrative drive alongside the glimpses into the machinations of geopolitics on the highest stage and I get the impression Power enjoyed writing this book, because when you’re a writer you are in control and you decide where things go and who is heard and if not what happens, then how things are related. .

“Dopamine Nation” by Dr Anna Lembke

This is a book about addiction, but it’s not just for addicts. It’s for anyone who has ever struggled to stick with a good intention or cut down on things we find enjoyable but know are deflecting us from an actual purpose. In the final chapter, on Pro-social Shame, Lembke discusses organisations such as Alcoholics Anonymous and how they use group norms to increase buy-in and support members who find the following the rules difficult, even though the structure was what they signed up for in the first place. This may sound familiar to teachers and to school leaders. In a strategy that reminded me of Robert Pondiscio’s “How the Other Half Learns”, Lembke suggests part of the solution is increasing demands and making it clear that “club goods” require meaningful participation.

“Making Meaning in English” by David Didau

Maybe Anna Lembke could help me kick my edu-book habit. It’s getting stronger all the time and the steady stream of quality education books isn’t helping my wallet , but it is helping my teaching. Since I’ve last compiled one of these lists there have been great releases by Tom Bennett, Oliver Caviglioli, Jo Facer, Alex Quigley, Oliver Lowell, Zoe Enser and Sam Strickland to name but a few and leave out lots of really good ones. Given that there have been so many, I am going to nominate just one for my Edu-Book of the Recent Past Award and it goes to the ever-reliable David Didau. English can seem an amorphous subject, too easily co-opted for causes such as national heritage, social justice, personal development and consumer education. I have heard far too often that it’s a “skills-based” rather than a “knowledge-based” subject. Didau here makes the case that English is very much a knowledge-based subject and sets out to explore what that knowledge might be and how it can be taught effectively. There is so much food for thought here around the role of literature especially, as well as practical ideas around choosing texts, that this should be essential reading for anyone even tangentially involved with the subject at secondary level.

“Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe

There’s a lot in here about the pharmaceutical industry, regulation, about lawsuits, about the hiring and firing of lawyers, the marriages of the rich and their patronage of the arts. I would have yawned as well, but this is just about the most enjoyable book I read last summer. Because it’s also a book about greed and hubris and the monumental divide between a sanitising bureaucracy and the suffering of real people. It’s a dynastic saga, following the Sackler family through generations of apparent respectability, even eminence, even as their wealth was built on a foundation of misery and crime. Radden Keefe is both an indefatigable investigative journalist and a writer with a novelist’s gift of leading the reader through a densely detailed and engaging narrative. As well as giving insight into the opioid crisis in America, “Empire of Pain” raises universal questions around reputation and how blame is so easily shrugged off by those who hold the money and the power.

That’s it. I hope it won’t be as long as another two years before the next post in this series appears. Summer is the reading season.

The Leaving Cert: not brutal, but not as fair as it could be either.

Back in the late eighties I remember my second-year English teacher (who now has rather a big job in Irish education) introducing us to the term “hyperbole”. No, Wordsworth did not actually see ten-thousand daffodils but the inclusion of this impressive number gives a sense of there being many, many daffodils. It’s a term I teach my own pupils today and one that sprang to mind when I read this Irish Times article and the many retweets it featured in. All of them seemed to accept that the Leaving Cert is “brutal but fair”. “Brutal” applied to the Leaving Cert is a nice example of hyperbole. It’s obviously inaccurate but a good rhetorical move that adds force to arguments a particular side of the Leaving Cert debate. The more of these tweets appeared I began to realise how many people don’t realise that describing the Leaving Cert as “brutal” is hyperbolic. Let’s not tell them about ISIS or the Khmer Rouge.

The Leaving Cert is hard and examinations can be stressful, but it is not brutal by any stretch of the imagination. It is simply the terminal examinations based on our well-rounded, knowledge-rich senior cycle curriculum. The papers themselves mostly require candidates to manipulate the material they have learned to answer not just short-order questions but longer ones that assess understanding. Many subjects now have a second component that can be prepared, and often even assessed, in advance.

The CAO system itself has not really changed since it was introduced in the 1980’s. There has been some tinkering in the form or bonus-points for Higher Level Maths (introduced, scrapped, re-introduced), changes to grade boundaries (originally 15% intervals, refined to gradations of 5%, now 10%) and the move from letters to numbers. But the central premise – grades are converted to points which then act as a currency and places in third-level are allocated in an online auction – remains the same. Each candidate has a single points score and cannot bid beyond this limit. The bids have been placed in advance of the examination, in the form of the CAO form. Candidates have to hope that the number of candidates with a higher score than theirs does not exceed the number of places on their desired course.

The points system has much to recommend it and was itself set up as a bulwark against corruption. To this end, it has been extremely effective. It doesn’t matter who you or your parents know, you are just a number and if you do not earn the required points the computer will just say “no”. But there are some aspects of the CAO that have corrupted the education system itself, from the inside. The first is the blunt nature of how the points are calculated. A H2 in Maths is worth 113 points. A H2 in Italian is worth 88 points. This is true even for a course such as TR670 (joint honours in modern languages in TCD). Apart from Maths, all subjects from geography to home economics to accounting to agricultural science to classics to English to physics earn the same number of points per grade. I won’t venture into the LCVP here. Some courses require specific subjects, almost always Maths and/or a science, but in general once you has your points you has your place. Common sense would tell us, and conversations with pupils bears this out, that choosing subjects for the Leaving Cert is often done with half an eye to which ones are “bankers” in terms of the overall points count. Capable students shy away from subjects they perceive as challenging for fear that the learning rewards will not be reflected in points earned. It is not unknown for candidates to take an extra subject, one in which they have no intellectual interest, purely in the expectation that it will bump up their score.

The single score also makes performance unfortunately and unhelpfully public. I believe in rigorous assessment and I believe in competition and especially in competitive entry to third level, but the points system can lead to candidates and others not seeing the wood for the trees. The answer to “how did you do?” or “how did your son/daughter do?” is a simple three digit number and an immediate scale on which candidates can be instantly and often erroneously compared with classmates, siblings and the neighbours’ children. Grades in individual subjects are lost in this discussion.

The single-score system is a major contributor to the aspect of the Leaving Cert that earns it the most oppoprium: the stress. Reforming the CAO so that bonus-points for Maths would only be applied for courses with a maths component (I’d allow for a generous definition here), and awarding bonus points for other subjects (such as languages) where those subjects are particularly relevant would go a long way to reducing this problem as there would no longer be a single answer. Instead the answer “how many points do you get?” would depend on the course in question. This is something that could be done easily and would still allow points to be counted and places allocated automatically and anonymously.

I don’t believe in stressing anyone out unnecessarily, as can be seen from the suggestion above, but I do find the stress-argument to be the weakest of all when it comes to Senior Cycle reform. Rates of mental illness, particulary anxiety-related disorders, are at worrying levels but we should be wary of self-report when it comes to the causes of these disorders. An anxious sixth-year will no doubt cite the Leaving Cert as an immediate cause of anxiety, but this does not mean that it causes or even exacerbates pathological anxiety. I have yet to see any convincing study that links assessment methods with poor mental-health outcomes. Rather, this rise in mental illness in adolescents and young adults seems to be ubiquitous in highly-developed societies and not correlated with Leaving Certificate style curricula or examinations.

It could be that rising levels of mental illness are happening despite the Leaving Cert and not because of it. The Leaving Cert is challenging, although certainly not brutal. Success requires work and dedication and the candidate must leave parents and teachers behind as they step into the exam hall, surrounded by their peers but supervised by a stranger. Waiting to be told to turn the paper over, waiting for the results and the offers to come out, knowing you have been judged anonymously to a standard set by people who have never met you: this is all stressful. It seems anachronistic in what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff describe as “the new culture of safetyism”. Yet, once they have come through it, students have benefited from the experience, including those who are disappointed in their individual outcome. The stress-argument for getting rid of the Leaving Cert exams also fails to take into account that any alternative will inevitably have its own stress-inducing elements.

Convincing alternatives to the Leaving Cert are thin on the ground. Continuous assessment is just what it says on the tin: a system where senior cycle students would never be more than a few weeks either side of a high-stakes assessment event. Allowing for more projects and coursework would magnify the advantages that those from homes with higher-educational capital already enjoy. A system involving personal statements and awarding credit for extra-curricular activities would also benefit those whose parents can supply or buy the necessary opportunities. It would school a generation in the ways of cynicism and instrumentalism where activities now undertaken because pupils enjoy them and/or see their inherent worth, would be reduced to mere boxes to be ticked.

It is a positive thing to see the content of our curriculum and our modes of assessment being seriously discussed in the media. The topic, and our young people, deserve this attention. We must, however, keep this to a real discussion rather than a drive for a cultural revolution where all that can be labelled “traditional” is marked for destruction and re-imagination. There is much that is good about our current senior cycle, as out-of-sync as it no doubt seems with the global trend towards what Zongyi Deng refers to as “the knowledge society that eschews knowledge in favour of generic competencies needed for the twenty-first century”. We have a sound knowledge-based curriculum and a rigorous, anonymised assessment system of which examinations are the main pillar. Let’s not lose either of these.

Summer Reads 2020

Ah, but the summer isn’t over, you say. This was originally called “lockdown reads” but I can’t anymore. “New normal”, “blended learning”, “social distancing”… it’s all enough to make you want to escape to eighteenth-century Bath or early-nineteenth century Moscow. Even the persecutions of early Christians and the enforcement methods of Eastern European criminal gangs become distraction from the great uncertainty and the frazzling idiosyncrasies of the online learning platform. The merits and demerits of New York charter schools and the empirical evidence base of recent pedagogical trends serve now for entertainment more than CPD and it seems, for the moment at least, that the scores are in on “teachers vs tech”.

Here are eleven books I have enjoyed so far this year.

Fiction

“Persuasion” Jane Austen

I had never read this novel before now. It’s a joy of perceptive characterisation and exquisite social satire. It is amazing how Austen builds such a strong narrative on a plot that is so spare and light, infusing events that are objectively inconsequential with drama and passion.

“The Mirror and the Light” Hilary Mantel

I haven’t baked banana bread, nurtured a sourdough starter or participated in either Zoom quizzes or online yoga. But I did join in on this lockdown staple, the final instalment in Mantel’s trilogy based on her imagining of the life of Thomas Cromwell. This felt a bit stretched in places with far too many flashbacks to Cromwell’s tough upbringing yet is still very cleverly accomplished. Cromwell isn’t as sympathetic as he is in the earlier volumes but just as the reader begins to slip from his side, Mantel unleashes the horror of his final days and we are back again almost inside his head as we were throughout much of “Wolf Hall”. I found myself hoping for a different ending, a sure sign of Mantel’s skill as a novelist.

“War and Peace” Leo Tolstoy

I can’t say I would have stuck with this one had the alternative not been ending my breaks early and returning to the next round of incoming work and queries on the [shudder] online learning platform. The greatest hurdle was familiarising myself with the Russian names and the web of familial ties connecting Countess Thiskosvosky and Prince Thatvalenko. I would also recommend reading  some details of Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia so as to not rely on the book for information. I found myself confused at times as to who had won the various battles, but then was relieved to discover that so were the armies that fought them.

“Girl, Woman, Other” Bernadine Evaristo

The multiple-perspective novel is having a moment and this is as fine an example as you will find. The stories of the twelve characters bounce and deflect off each other as the girls and women (and one other) find their way in a society where racism and  attitudes to gender and class often conspire against them.  Evaristo manages to treat all her characters with equal compassion and empathy, especially when the characters don’t show this to each other. “Girl, Woman, Other” shows us the error of judging the judgemental, while being itself full of  sharp observations and insights.

Education

“Teachers vs Tech: The case for an ed-tech revolution” Daisy Christodoulou

This is just excellent. Whether you’re an edtech enthusiast or a sceptic like myself, your mind will be changed by reading “Teachers vs Tech”. Christodoulou takes a clear-eyed look at the use of technology for learning inside and outside the classroom. She debunks many of the inflated claims that edtech facilitates new ways of learning, explaining that learning still happens the way it always has and reminding us that education is just another market for the companies that seek to sell us their wares. Microsoft, Apple and Google are not humanitarian organisations. The book supports a general ban on mobile phones in school, citing a 2015 study showing that schools in England which had implemented such bans achieved higher exam results than comparable schools that allowed mobile phones. Christodoulou is no Luddite however, and pays equal attention to the ways edtech can be useful, from flashcard apps that enable personalised revision schedules, to assessment that counteracts teachers’ blind spots and to the effective production and sharing of digital resources. This last one will no doubt will be even more important in the coming school year. School closures have been a watershed moment and edtech is here to stay: this is a good place to start for teachers and school leaders seeking to maximise its benefits.

“How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice” Paul A. Kirschner & Carl Hendrick, illustrated by Oliver Caviglioli

This is a reference book rather than one to sit down and read in consecutive sessions. Kirschner and Hendrick cleverly bridge the gap that exists between the many interesting books on teaching that offer insight but skim over the nitty-gritty research on which their advice is based, and on the other side the kind of academic books and journal articles that teachers suspect is out there but don’t have the time or expertise to find and digest for themselves independently. The book takes twenty-eight seminal research studies and for each one reproduces the abstract, gives a summary of the main points, suggests implications for classroom practice and offers some further reading in the area. Clear, practical and informative, this is a useful resource for teachers at any stage in their career.

“Curriculum: Athena vs the Machine” Martin Robinson

However much people love to complain about the Irish examination system – the Leaving Cert and the now defunct Junior Cert that has been replaced with the abysmal Junior Cycle – they may be unaware how lucky and increasingly exceptional Ireland has been in escaping the Machine that grips many education systems, most notably that of our nearest neighbour. Imagine a world where results from class tests are not just entered in your own records, they are elevated to the status of data and thus entered on spreadsheets and subjected to analysis in order to track pupil progress and monitor teacher performance. That’s one aspect of the Machine we’ve – so far – evaded, but another aspect is gaining ever more ground. That is the turning away from education for knowledge and wisdom towards education as training in generic and soulless “skills”. To give one example, the word “literature” appears eighteen times in the NCCA background paper that formed the brief for Junior Cycle English Specification. “Digital [literacy]” appears sixty-six times in the same paper. This is a powerful read in which Robinson warns us to beware of the Machine and instead design a curriculum of which Athena, goddess of philosophy, wisdom and courage, might approve.

“How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice” Robert Pondiscio

Of all the books on this list, this was the one I most enjoyed the most (followed closely by “Girl, Woman, Other”) and it is the book I am recommending that everyone with even the slightest interest in education should read. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of an academic year that Pondiscio spent observing inside the Bronx1 branch of the controversial US charter chain Success Academy. While admiring of much that he sees, Pondiscio is often critical and this is no puff-piece. Throughout the book he offers powerful observations and arguments about educational disadvantage and social justice, all the while acknowledging and teasing out thorny issues and ethical dilemmas.

Non-fiction

“McMafia” Misha Glenny

“McMafia”‘s title refers to the macdonaldisation of organised crime and tracks its subject across continents showing how what was once isolated enterpreneurship is now a global network borrowing much of its organisation structures from standard business practice and facilitated by financial deregulation. Paradoxically, the more crime emulates legitimate business the more suffering its increased efficiency is capable of inflicting  on those who source the product, consume the product and in some cases even are the product. The book’s impressive span – from Bulgaria to China via Israel, India, Nigeria, South Africa, Canada and Colombia (to name but a few) – never overwhelms the cohesive narrative and the Glenny understands the need for characters to make such a story work. Published in 2008, the book is quite old now (the only older ones on this list are “Perusasion” and “War and Peace”) but the edition I have has an afterword from 2017.

“Dominion” Tom Holland

Firstly, thank you to Daisy Christdoulou for the recommendation. This is a great summer read…rich enough that I could feel my brain having to work a bit but still a break from academic reading. It’s a history of Christianity and its influence, with the subtitle “The making of the Western mind”. Holland argues that the West is so much a continuation of Christianity that we are blind to the Christian nature of beliefs and values we take to be secular : from monogamy to the unacceptability of slavery. There’s a strong narrative drive throughout the book and I cannot praise the writing style enough; it’s fresh and always entertaining however dark the subject matter becomes at times.

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” Shoshana Zuboff

Even more of an essential read now that more and more of our lives have shifted inexorably online. Surveillance capitalism refers to what Zoboff calls “the Big Other”, the interconnected tech companies whose hip, public face with the primary colours and the progressive font belies a ruthless exploitation of the clues our online behaviour gives to our inner lives and probable future behaviour. Forget the cliché that if it’s free, you are the product. In a chilling analogy Zuboff argues that it is your data surplus that’s the product, much as an elephant’s tusks are its only lucrative feature, and your actual life –  the essence of who you are – is only the carcass left behind to rot under the sun.

 

Reading continues, and like a lot of the small things, I have never appreciated it more. I hope you are all well and safe and if you have any book recommendations, please let me know.

INOTE 2019

The Irish National Organisation of Teachers of English (INOTE) held our annual conference in Portlaoise on 12th October. This is always a good day to be an English teacher and this year’s conference was a vintage one. Fresh from the triumph that was the previous weekend’s ResearchED Dublin, Julian Girdham delivered an inspiring keynote address on the building blocks of English as a subject discipline. Also in the main conference room, Frances Rocks demystified the Leaving Cert marking scheme and Patrick Huff spoke on the importance of cultural capital and gave an impressive list of book and podcast recommendations. The indefatigable Norma Murray stepped down as chairperson and will be very much missed at the personal as well as the organisational level. The morning also saw the launch of the INOTE magazine.

Selena Wilkes and Claire Madden ran workshops – on creative writing and the CBA1 respectively – in the afternoon. I would have loved to attend both, but was taken up with my own talk on vocabulary. I will put the link to the presentation below. It owes a great debt to Alex Quigley’s “Closing the Vocabulary Gap” which definitely won the “most recommended book of the conference” award. There are also some examples of exercises based on Beck, McKeown and Kucan’s “Bringing Words to Life”.

The basic points of the presentation are:

• Vocabulary is important.
• It’s best to teach vocabulary from context so appropriate lexical challenge is a key factor in text choice.
• Select the words you think are most useful and teach these explicitly.
• It’s probably better to teach easily confused words separately rather than try to teach “the difference between….”.
• Make up your own simple definitions rather than have students look up new words in a dictionary.
• Having a dedicated vocabulary section in assessments helps students to recognise its importance.
• Even though explicit vocabulary instruction is essential, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Independent reading holds much larger potential for vocabulary expansion. Teaching every child to read needs to be a priority for every school.

iNOTE2019

ResearchED Dublin 2019

5th October saw the much-anticipated arrival of ResearchED to Irish shores. Thanks to a packed programme and the wonderful setting of St. Columba’s College the day more than lived up to expectations as teachers were challenged to, as my colleague Margaret Kent puts it, interrogate not just official policy but our own practice in the classroom. As with all ResearchED conferences, hard choices needed to be made when it came to picking which talks to attend. From Dianne Murphy on literacy to Conor Murphy on film to Sandrine Pac-Kenny on MFL to Leona Forde on her school’s approach to CPD, each talk was a research-informed treat, with complementary bookends provided by the legends that are Daisy Christodoulou and Carl Hendrick. Tom Bennett and Julian Girdham can be very proud of what is hopefully the first of many Irish ResearchEDs.  I was honoured – and quite terrified – to present on the day and am beyond grateful for all the kind words and much-needed support I received, including from senior management of my own school and from the #edchatie regulars whom it was great to finally meet in person.

As promised, slides from presentation are here. RDKate Barry

Summer Reads 2019

December 2019 was a busy time and I never got around to compiling a “Reads of 2018” post. This list is really more of a “reads of the last eighteen months”, although most of them are from summer 2019.

 

“The Truth About Teaching” by Greg Ashman

A 2018 read sneaking in. You know the colleague who looks sometimes at the CPD library but claims (with justification) that they’re too busy to be reading books about education? This is the book to give them: a one-stop shop of myths, counter-myths, empirical evidence, simplified theory and practical advice.

“Being Various. New Irish Short Stories” edited by Lucy Caldwell

Perfect summer reading with short stories by Danielle McLoughlin, Paul McVeigh and Sally Rooney.

“Atomic Habits” by James Clear.

You knew I would have to get some pop-psychology in here somewhere. We would be far better off helping students develop good habits than vaguely encouraging them to reach for the stars and believe they can achieve it. In terms of the theory of habit formation there is little here that isn’t in books by Charles Duhigg and Kelly McGonigal among others, but where Clear scores is in getting into the detail of how to plan and focus on daily habits and on micro-goals. I saw a teacher on Twitter (can’t remember who it was, sorry!) use what seemed like a template from this book to help students plan their study. They had to specify the time, the place and the exact activity and come up with a suitable, immediate reward for their efforts. I’ll be trying the same thing this year.

“The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow” by Danny Denton.

This novel deserves to be much more well-known than it is. A riotous yet internally coherent ride through a dystopian Dublin, with a strong cast of well-imagined characters and an excellent feel for neologisms. Hindered slightly by the unconventional punctuation. I can see why Denton does this: new rules for his new universe but feel it may turn off readers and prevent this book reaching the wide readership it completely deserves.

“Making Kids Cleverer” by David Didau.

The title here is provocative. What about educating the whole child or recognising multiple intelligences like “intrapersonal” and “bodily-kinaesthetic”? And surely one’s level of clever is innate? Making kids cleverer by teaching them has come to be seen as akin to making them taller by forty minutes on the rack, but Didau reminds us that there’s a lot we can do to help each child develop their intellectual potential and – just as importantly – that that’s our actual job.

“Washington Black” by Esi Edugyan

Edugyan, along with her husband Steven Price who also a historical novelist, was one of the many writers at the 2019 West Cork Literary Festival. I bought this book after the interview and it is my novel of the year so far.

“Simplicity Rules” by Jo Facer

I had the pleasure of meeting Jo at ResearchED ’18 in London. A recently appointed headteacher, she is full of both positivity and practicality. This book is an antidote to the ever-increasing pile of work-loading fads that plague education. The behaviour management section in particular is one of the most pragmatic I had read.

“Mind on Fire” by Arnold Thomas Fanning.

If you’re curious to know what psychosis feels like and don’t – unlike me – have first-hand experience, then this is the book to explain it to you. Fanning pulls off a considerable feat in rendering the incomprehensible and chaotic into clear and rationale prose. He is also critical, at the end of the book, of the modern tendency to interpret all of life’s challenges through the prism of mental health/illness. Sometimes life is just life, and I agree.

“The War that Ended Peace” by Margaret Macmillan.

A 2018 read that is sneaking its way in here. Essential reading for this age when almost all of us have only ever known peace and are far too presumptive of its continuation.

“Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport

A follow-up to “Deep Work”, this makes a persuasive case for drastically reducing our everyday tech usage in favour of deliberate harnassing of its benefits so as to benefit, not degrade, our lives.

“The Hidden Lives of Learners” by Graham Nuthall

It is with shame that I admit I did not read this book until earlier this year. Every teacher should as it’ll make you think about teaching like few other books can. Cameras were placed in a classroom over a number of months and the pupils’ conversations (most notably during groupwork) recorded. The gap between what teachers think kids are taking in, and what they actually experience, is revealed.

“1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear” by James Shapiro.

One for all the English teachers. Even if you don’t have fifth years this is still illuminating and actually deals more with “Macbeth” than it does with “King Lear” itself. If you like audio-books Shapiro reads these books himself on Audible. I read this one but listened to Shapiro’s earlier book: “1599 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare”.

 

 

When I started writing this post I wondered if I’d end up doing a “Reads of 2019” at the end of the year. Even if I did, it would be short. But as ever the Autumn is seeing a wave of great titles, both educational and (for me) recreational. Reading continues.

 

 

Leaving Cert: the scandal of the exam that requires candidates to rely on memory.

“It’s this big volume of information that they have to cram into their heads which is a big source of the stress.” Dr. Denise Burns quoted in The Irish Examiner 

Today is Leaving Cert results day, and around 57,000 candidates – almost all of them school-leavers- will be opening that long-anticipated envelope with either joy or tears or something in between. The media will be out in force covering this event and there will be words from Minister Richard Bruton, whose department is currently working on changes to senior cycle curriculum and assessment.

In a prelude to today’s results, the Leaving Cert was also in the news last Monday when Dr. Denise Burns of DCU was interviewed on air and in the newspapers about a study which she led and which will be available to the general public next month. You can read it here, but it is behind a paywall.  You might ask why the story featured so heavily on Monday rather than next month when interested listeners or readers could access the information more easily, but in Ireland education tends to be a seasonal rather than a year-round news item.

The study has two parts, one that looked at the examination papers themselves and another that interviewed recent candidates, and this blog also has two parts: the study itself and the media coverage.I should say that in relation to the study itself, these are my own thoughts and initial reactions rather than a detailed critique of its methodology.

There is a degree of disparity between the study as published and the results as reported in the media, both by journalists and by the authors themselves in direct interviews. The most striking of these is the referral to “grind-schools” in all the articles and interviews even though the report itself does not mention grind-schools or the word “grind”. Articles and interviews also fail to distinguish between full-time “grind-schools” (which students attend instead of more conventional voluntary or ETB schools) and supplementary grinds in individual subjects. There is also a sense that this study proves that all anyone does in preparation for the Leaving Cert is to learn off paragraph-shaped chunks of notes and even whole essays (“students are learning off essays, textbooks and notes” Irish Examiner)  but it actually states:

“While the anecdotal reports would strongly suggest that preparation for the examination is dominated by a reliance on reproducing text verbatim, the evidence base for this assertion is limited.”

The analysis of the examination papers consisted of looking at “command verbs” in questions and inferring from these what kind of knowledge the question was assessing, and whether the skills involved in answering were “higher order skills”.

“In an in-depth document analysis of the examination papers, 14, 910 occurrences of command verbs were coded for the intellectual skill and knowledge domains required by the assessment task.” (abstract)

Now while to my uninitiated eyes this part of the study is rigorously designed and looked at a large number of exam papers, I am not sure it forms a secure basis for the claims being made in the newspapers. (I know over-simplification and hyperbole are factors common to all media reporting of all academic research as anyone who’s read Ben Goldacre’s excellent work in this area can testify). It rests on definitions and taxonomies of knowledge and skills that are “widely accepted” but not uncontested. An underlying premise is that “studies suggest that the general intellectual skills are essentially the same across disciplines” and the study deals with examination papers across the humanities, the sciences, maths, home economics and the arts treating them all to the same analysis. The only significant omission is languages other than English. This wide-range is laudably ambitious, but breadth is hard to achieve without some sacrifice of depth and so this is far from the definitive verdict on the Leaving Cert that you’d think from reports such as in the Irish Independent, where Katherine Donnelly writes “the findings present a case for radical change in the assessment process”. 

Worryingly, the study seems to see knowledge not just as “lower order” but as actually inimical to the development of higher order skills. Here again we see the see-saw analogy that characterised the Junior Cycle reform: the fashionable idea that the reason many of our students struggle to be creative or to construct cohesive intellectual arguments is that they know too much, and it’s the fault of the pesky teachers who are expecting them to learn too much information. Following this line of thinking, the first thing we have to do if we want to foster higher order thinking is to reduce the amount of content that we expect young people to learn. We must also avoid at all cost the dreaded “rote-learning” and presumably focus more on inquiry methods and osmosis. The phrase “rote-learning” appears in all the media reports I have seen on this story and is taken to refer not just to learning essays by heart but to all attempts to memorise factual knowledge. The report criticises Biology in particular

“The very heavy focus on “factual knowledge” (73%) in Biology would raise questions as to the appropriateness of the subject as a basis for pursuing third level programmes in life sciences which emphasise the use of the scientific method”.

Elsewhere there is a nod to postmodernism that sees young people’s intellectual development as inevitably including “an awareness of relativism….knowledge is not certain, absolute truth but is contextualised and uncertain”. This distrust of factual knowledge and the desire instead to focus on generic skills of analysis and evaluation is described by Daisy Christodoulou as “educational formalism” and she writes in “Seven Myths about Education”

“…many of the myths work on the assumption that form is more important than substance. If I had to come up with an intellectual trend that underpins them, then I would choose postmodernism…Postmodernism is sceptical about the value of truth and knowledge, and many of these myths have their heart a deep scepticism about the value of knowledge.”

This “scepticism about the value of knowledge” runs through the Burns et al study and through the media reports, showing the growing prevalence of the myth that is one of Christodoulou’s top seven: facts prevent understanding.  This myth could not be further from the truth. I think most teachers – even if unfamiliar with the ED Hirsch or Daniel Willingham –  know intuitively that the opposite is true: far from being lower-order, the ability to recall, organise and utilise factual information is crucial to meaningful intellectual endeavour.  Paul Kirschner and John Sweller, in their well-known paper on the inadequacies of discovery learning are unequivocal that the consensus among cognitive scientists is that “long-term memory is now viewed as the central dominant structure of human cognition. Everything we see, hear and think about is critically dependent on our long-term memory”. As Peps McCrea writes in this recent paper for the UK-based Institute of Teaching, “The more we know, the better we can think, and the better we think, the more we can know”.

***

The second section of the Burns et al study involves qualitative analysis of interviews with recent candidates. Two months after the exam the candidates were presented again with the paper and asked to talk through what they could remember of their thought process in the actual exam. This is an interesting and potentially fruitful way of carrying out the research. However, the evidence from these interviews is being wildly inflated and portrayed as definitive proof of teaching methods at senior cycle, and weaponised in an attack on the current examination system.

The sample size of the interviewees was 30 and they were drawn from a total of 10 schools.  The students were a “convenience sample drawn through research contacts within the 10 schools.” Were the students randomly selected from the school rolls, or hand-picked by teachers known to the researchers? The researchers themselves freely admit

“with 19 of the 30 students from urban middle-class schools, there is a bias in the sample, which raises the question of how representative they were of the whole group of students who had just completed the leaving Certificate.” [italics mine]

They don’t give a date for when these interviews took place, but I am guessing it was after 2010 which would mean that the papers discussed in the interviews were not drawn from the same sample as the papers subjected to linguistic analysis.

The kind of analysis done in the study of the exam papers is a good start, but the papers themselves are only part of the process and the marking schemes are arguably more revealing, as are the Chief Examiners reports. Likewise, “stimulated recall” interviews could also be carried out with examiners and advising examiners, to get an idea of their thoughts when applying the schemes. While there is nothing new in the revelation that some candidates learn off essays in the hope of shoe-horning them in on the day, the study does not provide evidence that this is the most common method of preparation nor that it is endorsed and encouraged by teachers. And it offers no evidence that this method of revising leads to high grades: yes it is anecdotally associated with grind-schools, whose pupils often earn high grades, but there are many other variables around these candidates and it is possible that their exam success is in spite of rather than due to these methods. What about the vast majority of candidates – those who attend “normal” schools – and their preparation techniques and the relation of these techniques to the grades they achieve? We are not told how the candidate who learned off the 30 essays fared in the English exam, and this is a question I would need to see answered before I would join in any calls for the Leaving Cert to be abolished.

Candidates interpreted the “evaluate” questions as less rigorous, which is strange if they’re supposed to be higher-order. The implication was that you couldn’t be wrong if the majority of the marks were given for how well you made your case, and anecdotally I have often found that Leaving Cert English students often labour under the illusion that there are “no wrong answers” in English, even though there are such as the example of saying Boxer represents the bourgeoisie.

One area where there might appear to be no wrong answers is English Paper I. This exam paper comes in for considerable praise from the writers of the report. It’s creative. Candidates can demonstrate their higher order thinking skills on topics of their choosing, such as their own life. They can write short stories, somehow using no knowledge of literature whatsoever. It’s enjoyable and candidates are free of the anxiety of recalling quotations or trying to remember if Gertrude is married to Claudius or Polonius.

In the Irish Times article on the report Dr Burns explains that “They [the candidates] enjoyed when they could be creative for example in English Paper 1 when they are given instruction to write an essay. They expressed anxiety when they had to learn off and retain a huge body of text, which is a requirement for biology or geography.” This juxtaposition betrays two false assumptions about exams and assessment in general. The first is that experiential enjoyment is a desirable factor in assessment, and the second is that the anxiety felt by candidates who fear they might not have learned enough is a negative feature. I would say enjoyment is a neutral factor: exams should not be designed for the candidates’ pleasure, but neither should they be unnecessarily and deliberately discomforting. But the issue of anxiety is essential to exams: if you know for certain that you will succeed regardless of your mastery of the material then that’s not an exam, that’s a worksheet.

These are reported comments interviewees made in relation to Leaving Cert English.

“I really enjoyed writing that story with a ghostly presence.”

“I really enjoyed that…writing about moments of uncertainty in my life”

“I really liked writing my own thoughts in that essay. That’s why I like English so much more than other subjects”.

The authors note that these comments are “positive and confident” but these exam questions are not the best examples of the kind of higher order thinking of which that we wish our school-leavers to be capable. Take the candidate who wrote about “moments of uncertainty in his/her life”. Where is the required evidence that this candidate has learned anything useful in his/her time at school? These questions are seen as nice, in contrast to nasty exams that leave candidates “very concerned with being “wrong”” in a way that reminded me of a recent, excellent blog post that compares schooling to dentistry. We might praise a dentist because she does not inflict pain, but this does not necessarily make her an excellent dentist, and we might have been better off undergoing an unpleasant procedure elsewhere.

“It is worth noting that the exercise of a higher order skills (“evaluate”) is expressed as a positive experience by students.” An exam question involving “evaluation” is seen as being less likely to expose gaps in knowledge, misunderstandings and misinterpretations. They are, quite frankly, “bullshitable”. And bullshitting meets many of the characteristics of a higher-order skill, but again, is this the primary purpose of our education system?

A candidate who has rote-learned 30 essays is well-prepared only when the questions are vague, when these essays can be replicated no adjustments (or only minor ones) and when they are then are rewarded with higher marks than essays written using the candidate’s knowledge of the subject domain.  The Leaving Cert Paper II Single Text questions have been headed in this direction for some time, although the Studied Poetry section continues to be quite specific.  Then there is the Comparative Study section which is the epitome of Christodoulou’s point about the valuing of form over substance. Candidates have to compare three texts and marks are awarded for their skills in creating an answer that manages to weave the three into a coherent essay on the basis of a necessarily generic question. While this is no mean feat and few do it well, there is no room in the marking scheme to reward an answer that shows good understanding of  Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” over one that a similar level of understanding of  Stephen Chobsky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”.  Both of these are “texts” and as such merely vehicles for the fetished higher-order skills of evaluation and comparison.

 

***

The main problem I have is not with the study itself, which looks at important aspects of senior cycle and freely admits its own short-comings. I disagree with its conclusions but the authors themselves assert that their results are “rooted in interpretation” and therefore open to alternative readings. I  agree with the authors that t over-reliance on pre-prepared answers is undesirable and that exams need to extend somewhat beyond purely Q&A responses (which most of the exams already do), but the remedy I see for this is not less memorisation but more of it, specifically a lot more of it at Junior Cycle and possibly also in primary.

What I see as the bigger issue here is how yet another limited study has been reported in the Irish media as conclusive proof that the Leaving Cert is broken. At least this one only half-relies on self-report, unlike last week’s offering (again from DCU). This narrative of a cruel, ineffective and out-dated senior cycle is already being repeated on a loop with the natural result that when the DES makes their plans for Senior Cycle reform public they will be welcomed as at the very least an improvement on what went before.  We are being softened up and all the main media outlets are colluding in this process rather than interrogating the official line.  Only when the last person who knows that you need factual knowledge to understand and interpret the world around you has retired, will we realise that you can’t critically think about nothing.

 

Junior Cycle English exam “puts students at the centre”.

“Instead of teaching generic critical-thinking skills, we ought to focus on subject-specific critical-thinking skills that seek to broaden a student’s individual subject knowledge and unlock the unique, intricate mysteries of each subject.”

Carl Hendrick

 

Question 9

A film version is being made of the Shakespearean play you have studied.  What would you include on a poster advertising the film, to represent what you think is important in the play and to create a sense of anticipation for its upcoming release?  Explain your decisions with reference to the play.

Junior Cycle English Examination 2017 Higher Level, State Examinations Commission.

 

This week saw the publication of the first Chief Examiner’s Report on the Junior Cycle English exam. This two-hour exam replaces the  five-hour Junior Certificate exam that was sat over two papers and aimed to assess the breadth of candidates’ achievements across the syllabus. (The vast majority of these candidates are third year pupils, roughly fifteen years of age.) The new exam is not based on a syllabus, but is “linked to” the Junior Cycle English Specification: a document which the Examiner’s report tells us “aims to put students at the centre of the educational experience”.  The Specification, despite its name, specifies very little in the way of particular English subject-specific knowledge: it’s not what you learn that matters, it’s “the quality of learning.”

I am not here to weep over the corpse of the old Junior Cert exam, which certainly had its issues.What I will lament is that the old exam – flawed as it undoubtedly was – was broadly predictable in format and assessed all of the key areas of the syllabus. Candidates had to write an essay, do a bit of functional writing and Paper II covered Drama, Poetry and Fiction always in the same order and with equal marks awarded to each section. This predictability minimised the class time necessary for dealing with exam format and timing.  Now, there were problems, as I’ve said: there were a lot of questions to be done and the most able candidates sometimes ran out of time. The ratio of unseen: studied was 50:50, weighted too much towards the former, and another problem was that candidates could use any play in the drama section and so some students were deprived of the experience of studying a Shakespearean play. We will not speak about Media Studies.

All of these issues pale like distant stars against the glare from the new Junior Cycle exam. The Report mentions twice that this is a “no-choice examination”, despite a course that is so open-ended it can hardly be described as such. This makes the exam an effective lottery. Some candidates will be lucky and more of the questions will match what they have learned and the texts they have studied. Others will be less lucky, but that isn’t supposed to matter. The format of the exam will change from year to year so that candidates cannot be advised in advance when it comes to timing. As to what may come up it could be Shakespeare and poetry (like this year), fiction and film, some kind of media studies, functional writing, or any combination of the above. Candidates in 2017 studied two novels from a list that includes “Jane Eyre”, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Animal Farm” and there was no fiction question on the exam. Their learning in this area was not thought important enough to assess, although there were two questions about posters.

“Measuring Up: what educational testing really tells us.” by Daniel Koretz,  Harvard Professor of Education

In his book “Measuring Up” Daniel Koretz outlines two problems with assessment design and validity , both of which are thrown up by the new Junior Cycle exam. The first of these is “construct under-representation”.  This is “a failure to measure what we want to measure…..This harks back to the  notion of a test as sample from a domain. To measure the intended construct well- – vocabulary, proficiency in algebra,, whatever – we have to sample adequately from the domain implied by that construct” [italics mine] . Koretz mentions extended writing as an example, and indeed there is no essay-style question on the Junior Cycle English paper. Even the longest answer demanded is no more than a standard A4 page in length. (At the in-service I attended, queries around this omission were answered by pointing out that the CBA2 (a type of portfolio) is now “the home of extended writing”.  But this CBA2 is assessed only by the teacher and is not completed under exam conditions. It is still fair to say that extended writing is not meaningfully assessed before the Leaving Cert). In terms of sampling from across the areas of English, the exam format deliberately leaves out large, discrete sections of the subject domain. It is quite possible that Junior Cycle candidates in 2018 will not be asked a question about a play, even though the Specification demands that Higher Level candidates study at least one Shakespearean play in its entirety. It is also possible that there will be no question related to poetry. But there might be an infographic to interpret.

The second problem that Koretz raises around design and validity is “construct-irrelevant variance”. This is “variation in the performance [of candidates] that is irrelevant to the construct intended”. The Report states that the intentionally unpredictable format means that “incorrect reading of the instructions and rubrics led to confusion for some candidates” and that “good examination technique and effective time management are critical”. This admits that the confusing nature of the exam impedes certain candidates, particularly at Ordinary Level, from demonstrating the knowledge and skills they have gained in their three years studying English at secondary school. Surely this is what we want to assess, not whether candidates can interpret arbitrary instructions for carrying out a task that most of them will never repeat. My own feeling is that the prioritising of Carrying Out Instructions over Demonstrating Knowledge is part of an overall drive to reduce our education system from one of opening minds to one of training workers. We are in danger of returning to Pearse’s murder machine, where the “sleek..obsequous..and dexterous” candidate writes inside the lines while watching the clock and is rewarded accordingly.

We will in time have to explain how copying numbers from infographics and subjecting posters advertising children’s films to critical analysis was the highest attainment we aimed for young people in our subject. The Report remarks glowingly on the appearance of posters in two sections writing of Q9 “which asked candidates to nominate material for a poster advertising a film version of the play they had studied.”

“Having completed question two earlier in the examination paper, some candidates modelled their responses on what they had learned from their critical analysis of the cinema poster for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, thus demonstrating effective examination technique and transferrable critical thinking skills.”

This is  one of the most worrying parts of the report. It demonstrates how much the educational establishment of the DES, the NCCA and the SEC are in thrall to the progressive ideological narrative – as, in fairness, promoted by the OECD – that schools need to think a lot less about what knowledge children are acquiring and much more about nebulous “transferrable” skills such as critical thinking. The Junior Cycle framework is itself based around “key skills” and we see here the damage this thinking has on assessment. Exams are no longer about assessing what candidates know, they’re aiming to assess how well they think .  Having the cop on to discuss material presented on one part of the paper in an answer on a later section somehow counts for more than being able to answer the question using a knowledge of Shakespeare’s themes and language. It’s not hard to see this leading to the worst excesses of “teaching to the test”, where teachers coach students in these kind of tricks rather than ensuring they have a secure knowledge-base to tackle rigorous and targeted questions of the kind we haven’t seen at this level since the Inter Cert.

Critical thinking is quite rightly a primary aim of education, but it is not a “transferrable skill”. Thinking about anything properly requires knowledge of that thing, as Daniel Willingham writes in this widely-accepted article, and elsewhere in books such as “Why Don’t Students Like School?”. It is knowledge we have to work on as attempting to build children’s thinking capacity as a skill in itself is counterproductive. Carl Hendrick writes here how this leads to shallow teaching and even shallower assessment (the Junior Cycle English exam being an example).  He calls instead for a subject-specific approach, which in English would include texts of established literary merit along with knowledge of their authors and, where appropriate, their historical context.

The Specification and its assessment – including the final exam – are currently under review by the NCCA. It is desirable but highly unlikely that English will be restored as a two-paper exam. Even we had to live with a two-hour exam and the lottery of not knowing which elements will be examined, I think teachers could get over that if the questions asked were fair, and honestly challenged candidates to write extended answers where they have to use and manipulate their knowledge of the texts they have studied as well as display the language skills so many of them work so hard to acquire.