Tertiary goes Middle Years

There is a philosophical divide in many schools; do we emphasise “middle years” (more generalist teachers, less segmentation of learning into discrete subjects, more emphasis on engagement, social and emotional competencies, individual approaches, generic thinking skills),  or do we for go for subject discipline (emphasis on specialisation, structured content, exams)  as soon as possible?  

On of the purposes of this blog is to have some debate about this (a lot of maths teachers are on the latter side, and they feel they can’t air their views, since it feels unpopular in the current environment, against VELS etc). And some others would say, we can do both; we can engage them early on with generalist strategies and build healthy foundations – good thinking skills etc –  for later specialisation. But for the sake of argument, lets “pretend” many middle years proponents and KLA specialists don’t agree with each other.

One argument that is often heard against the middle years goes like this : its all very well to aim at engagement, and to explore your own individual learning plans etc, but sooner or later, they have to do leave that stuff and do Real Exams. You know, Real VCE or Real University exams. And here the middle years proponents might say – well, our approaches prepare them better for this than just pushing the content earlier down the school (and reteaching it every year).  And the specialists reply, they come to us with gaping holes, and our subject has a definite body of knowledge and skills that are not being taught properly, if at all.  And so it goes …  

So, lets call this drive to prepare for Real Exams, the push to specialise earlier, the “top down” approach. Top Down says that Education in general, and Maths is particular, is tough at the top end, so lets prepare for that as early as possible, and limit the generalist, middle years approaches as soon as possible.

Notice how this works:  Uni  >> VCE  >>  7-10  >> Primary

the logic of this top down approach is that the sooner specialised maths teaching kicks in the better, preferably before the end of primary school.

(One irony of this is that on many counts uni courses typically boast the most monotonous examples of pedagogy, much less interesting than many primaries.)

OK, we’re all familiar with this landscape. But what would happen if the top changed its mind? If the tertiary sector starts looking for less segmentation of learning into discrete subjects, and started talking about pedagogy and engagement. How would we validate that chain of events, the need to prepare for the Really Big Exam, now?

heres a quote from Melb Uni’s vice chancellor, Glyn Davis, on their new approach to undergraduate courses:

As specialisation becomes more and more the way the world we live in is, there’s a tendency to drive specialisation very early on in degrees. [a] Year 11 student … will be choosing subjects for Year 11 and Year 12 long before they get to university, with an eye to the enter score, and an eye to the course they want to do to university. That‘s not a particularly good way to run your education system. It‘s better that at school, you can explore your potential, and that when you come to university for the first three years, you’re in the broad area that interests you and you want to develop in, but you’re using the time to experience a broader arrange of offerings that you might and to make your mind up pretty clearly about what you want to do. One of the key messages we’re been getting from employers – and we ‘ve been talking in great detail with them – in, say, the accounting firms and the law firms likewise are saying, “The students you ‘re sending us are well-trained, “they ‘re everything we want, “except they’re not necessarily motivated “because they made this choice at 17 and 18. “By the time they ‘ve done five years or four years of university, “and they come to us, they ‘re still asking themselves, “Is this the career choice I want?” A student has spent three years in a broad undergraduate degree getting to know themselves and the possibilities and the subject areas, we think is more likely to choose precisely and carefully and with great motivation about what they want to do in graduate school.

Now thats a bit of tertiary cat among the pigeons. Maybe they listened to too much Andrew Fuller.  This was on LateLine (transcript and video here) (italics added)

I did discuss this with a maths teacher, with strong academic connections, who sees Melb Uni’s new approach as economically motivated – a way to get students to study longer and spend more. I don’t know the truth of this, except to note that this was discussed in the same interview :

(INTERVIEWER) of course, some of your rivals see this move by you as a way of boosting
Melbourne’s private revenue stream. I understand in fact, you ‘ve got agreement from the minister that, in fact, your graduate students can in part be funded by a transfer of HECS-funded placements, is that right?

GLYN DAVIS: Yes. We proposed to the Minister late last year and early this year, and she has publicly endorsed a suggestion that a significant number of places move from undergraduate to graduate. That means they remain HECS-based places, which means the cost for students in undertaking the new model is unchanged. It is no more expensive.  

And their professed view is different:

This is drawn from our point of view from pedagogic incentives. This is about a better education model. That’s what’s driving our changes. One of the problems with just saying, “Let’s have undergraduate degrees and then graduate degrees,” is that there has been significant fragmentation in the curriculum. There isn’t a lot of coherence necessarily in the undergraduate curriculum, and undergraduate degrees don’t necessarily articulate strongly into graduate school.

These fine motives might not be the case, of course, but just noting the arguments. Not sure what it does for the mythology of the Big Exam Coming Up, thats used to pass the message down the chain (VCE, 7-10, P-6)  that they better stop playing with middle years approaches and do more Formal Mathematics, and that of course advanced maths is useful for all, if for no other reason than its looming on the final exam.

 Might provoke some responses.  You don’t need to register to comment below … and you can follow these instructions to respond with a full post if you prefer. What do you think if all this? Fire away ..