Why Are Schools Still Teaching In The Industrial Age?

I grew up in a world which was more limited by the means in which I could gain information. The sources of information which I would use to learn were my teachers, my textbooks (or another from the library) or possibly a late night video from the Open University shown on the BBC. Perhaps my Grandfather or Father who were both engineers would have known if my question related to the physical sciences or maybe there was a 'friend of a friend' who could help. After that, I was pretty much out of luck. The model of the school was that from the industrial age; we moved with the sounding of a bell and were quality controlled at the end by exams. The model worked because of the limitations on the student; the teacher was the cleverest person we knew and they knew the most about what I needed to learn for my course.

As a practicing teacher I can observe that this view has not changed for the teachers I work with. It has however, significantly changed for the current generation of pupils I teach. Students now have a significantly broader spectrum of sources from which they can (and do) draw their knowledge from. As a practicing teacher, I realise that I am now teaching not in the 'industrial age' but the 'information age'. I have noticed that the ways that students can learn, and therefore choose to learn, has begun to broaden radically. Paradoxically, even in the classroom itself, the teacher and textbook are not the only source of information. In pockets and on desks are phones and tablets which can access anything anyone could ever dream of learning. The presentation of the material is almost as diverse and engaging as the topics themselves. My subject is no longer the only thing to focus their attention on at that moment in time and my classroom is not the only place they can learn my subject. A radical shift in beliefs for the girls - which is at odds with that of the teachers'! The ones in denial of this change are the adults in the room.

I teach in a small, traditional, all-girls independent boarding school. The students that do well in school reports and exams are those which thrive on the old model of learning. The period running up to exam time is very stressful to my girls because they are 'learning' (note: not revising) all the work they have been given over the year. The work they do outside of lessons as homework (called 'study' in my school) also has little meaning; they view it has a task to do which keeps the teacher off their backs. The teachers are using study to keep their mark books full. To illustrate my point, I witnessed a Year 11 physics class at the end of their course preparing for study leave by tearing out their marked work and putting it in the recycling bin because they were 'useless and taking up space in their folders!' My girls tell me that they do their study because it prevents disciplinary measures being taken out on them, not because they are an aid to learning. The girls in Year 10 tell me that they copy out the notes in lessons in order to learn them later. Not because they want to learn the content there and then. Getting girls to learn in lessons almost becomes a pedagogical trick of the teacher, rather than the objective of the pupils present.

iPad penetration has reached well over half of the school now and smart phones 100%, which has led to a new phenomenon. Girls are saying to me or my colleagues that they will just find the answer on Google® if they find an explanation or topic unfathomable or my answer to a question simply unsatisfactory. They have even used the phrase 'Don't worry, I'll just Google® it' to show a teacher their displeasure of the way he was explaining chemical reactivity. He was most offended; probably because it shows that he is no longer the oracle of knowledge which perhaps his teachers were to him. His knowledge no longer provides him with the automatic respect he believed he deserved simply by having it. Understandable considering how hard we worked to get it! Pupils today live in an age of instant information and instant knowledge gratification. They have, on average, 5 screens at their disposal in their daily lives and have an attention span of a similar length in minutes if not seconds.

Their education is supposed to prepare them for the future. To provide them with the mind-set and associated skills they need to liberate themselves from ignorance. It must empower them to learn whatever they need to throughout their life in order to get the most out of their careers and beyond. A good education should allow them to get something from their careers, not just get through them to retirement. So the teachers tell the pupils that the information they are transmitting in lessons is very important to learn and learn well. The girls however, openly acknowledge that the information is more of just a means to an end and the content itself is purely functional in meeting that end. They therefore become instrumentalist learners and pressure the teachers to become much the same in their method of delivery. The girls that do best are therefore the girls who are able to soak up information like a sponge and regurgitate it when called upon in the exam. I must admit that although this is a skill I enjoy myself, I would argue that in the information age this does little in preparing many of them for the future.

The majority of formal education is set to take place between 4 and 18 years of age. I believe that science is a practical application of a philosophical method and a most valuable one to have. Agency and attitude towards science are important. These two variables can affect performance in examinations and ultimately sway a young person's choice of future education and career options. Since some students in schools do not even have a subject teacher qualified in the subject they are teaching and the way in which they are being taught is narrower than the actual methods by which they would choose to educate themselves given the freedom to, why is the method by which pupils are being taught in science lessons outdated by several eras?

I am nearing my first decade of teaching experience and as an 'experienced teacher of chemistry' and active teacher-researcher throughout my career I am pleased with many of my own aptitudes to get high GCSE and A-level grades from my classes. Despite this, I have a growing awareness that I could be providing a more effective education for all of my students. If my belief that the learner's perspective of the classroom is in fact changing, as is their own conduct when learning, then an inherent shift in my role as a teacher in the classroom is required. My responsibility as a professional, as with all teaching practitioners, is to examine and improve my own pedagogy to best serve my pupils and society as a whole. There are some questions in science lessons and assessments which some girls reliably fail to answer correctly; suggesting they are struggling with approbation of these ideas taught in the school science curriculum. I question whether I am allowing them to use their own facilities to learn to the best of their ability.

This perception is based on my classroom experience, but is also exemplified by research untaken as part of my Master's degree in Learning and Teaching (awarded distinction; 83 (upper level)) for which I was also awarded the Oxford Education Society's MLT Prize for the highest score in the 2014 cohort.

As part of this research and my work in the second year on independent learning, I following up an opportunity which presented itself to improve my current teaching methodology by an intervention using the principles of action research and diagrams. The literature on misconceptions shows that the foundations for misconceptions begins early in pupil's school careers and there is sound evidence in place to suggest that when an effective intervention lower down the school is successfully carried out, frequency or severity of misconceptions in scientific ideas would be reduced.

This fairly narrow focus of research presented the outcomes of a project which looked at how children look at diagrams and a collaboration with other teachers in school. It developed teaching strategies for constructing science diagrams more effectively in lessons. The project made observable impacts on pupils` ability to accurately and correctly explain a variety of phenomena studied in the year 8 course. After the intervention, girls reported to have a more positive view of science as a subject and have indicated greater satisfaction and confidence when tackling new ideas or answering problems in assessments. My MSc in Learning and Teaching has been exceedingly useful for me as a teaching practitioner and also for the department as a whole. My findings were shared and taken to the school's own teaching and learning committee. I have taken the findings of my research and presented it at the ASE 2012 and ASE 2014 International conferences and the PALAVA 2012 and 2013 action research group conferences.

Enthused by my appetite for conducting more research and the positive impact it has had on my own understanding of teaching, I have furthered my research with an action research group called PALAVA. I am currently developing my work on an eye tracking methodology to gain a greater understanding of the mechanism by which diagrams are interpreted by pupils. My work is currently going to make up part of a joint 2015 IOSTE flipped learning conference paper and I plan to present my work on eye tracking methodology at the PALAVA conference this year.

Appropriately used diagrams may provide a scaffold to facilitate the construction of mental models. This knowledge could be used to improve the way diagrams are employed when developing a model of independent learning. I believe what I have discovered so far has given my pupils a greater ability to explain phenomena using the language of science and learn more effectively. I hope it will leave our students more satisfied with the principles taught as part of their science course. Ultimately I hope they have a wholly pleasing sense of learning something meaningful which truly will be useful for them to get the most from their lives by applying what they have learnt as part of the process.

Although the findings of this project are beneficial for me as a teacher and the pupils who took part in this project, I still feel that my students do not leave their education with the freedom, or agency, to confidently explore all scientific ideas and debates simply from just extending their ability to use and interpret scientific diagrams. I suggest that the findings of my project so far therefore could be suitably broadened for a DPhil project. Unlike school INSET courses, my research activities have allowed me the freedom to challenge conventional teaching paradigms safely without the dogma of my own school's political and inspectional agenda. The ways by which I can investigate my own thinking has been hugely influenced during the Masters and it is this experience which encourages me to look towards broadening my thinking and contributing to the body of human understanding with further research.

I sincerely believe that the current classroom teaching model is being challenged by the information age student who habitually multi-streams information from several sources; not just their teacher. Teachers are in denial of this change and taking time to develop methods to catch up. Using principles from 'flipped learning', formative assessment (AfL), development of multimedia resources (books, diagrams, videos, websites, VLEs and online assessments) for pupils to use outside of the classroom which I am developing ways to work synergically with the ways in which students are already familiar with using and reviewing the role of the teacher through action research cycles to support learning within the classroom in light of these innovations. Such a project may well better address the needs of the current generation and challenge the traditional model of education to evolve with it.