adelaidemedblog

I was listening to the radio and a report happened to be on about teaching that wasn’t teaching, but was scripted, as though a play, or theatre.  The host and guest were discussing what seemed to be an experiment, or perhaps a phenomenon, centred on the idea of “scripted teaching”, as I have come to think of it, where a lesson at school may be entirely read off a sheet, word for word - even allowing for instances of student participation, with scripted praise responses.  That’s what I got from it, anyway.

It came to the conclusion that scripted teaching was more effective than “normal” teaching on a large scale.  That is, 1000 scripted teachers teaching 20,000 school kids will get better scores class-performance figures than 1000 non-scripted ones, overall.

The host then wondered about the assured existence of really good teachers, those ones at school who inspire you to greater things etcetera.  The use of scripted teaching would, surely, ensure the extinction of these ones, depriving so many children the opportunity to be inspired, let alone the teacher of their own livelihood (what use a gift without the ability to use it).  The guest then told us, if there were 1000 teachers, only 10 may be truly inspired.  Would we rather let the 300 teachers who think they are inspired run so many children off the right course, than instate scripted teaching with similar/the same results across all 1000?

It must be a British thing.