ABSTRACT
This discourse and the prevalent assumptions deserve questioning for two important reasons. First, they may incorporate a limited and limiting set of concerns. For example, many politicians and a minority of anxious parents press their teacher-centred, ‘delivery’- centred view of classrooms in response to their short-term performance concerns. The longer-term developmental concerns of individuals and of society are sidelined, and the risks are many. One is that creative and committed teachers become disaffected. As the Times Educational Supplement headline put it: ‘Young staff flee factory schools’. Second, the prevalent assumptions may actually be counterproductive for achieving the goals which many stakeholders and the vast majority of educators would hold dear – including the goal of high-level performance! The idea that better performance, even on the many narrow tests which beset pupils nowadays, is achieved through improving the mechanical efficiency of teaching, of routinising our approach to teaching, is challenged by much evidence. By contrast, the evidence is that classrooms which operate as learning
communities also get better results. So I’m writing this book from a stance which includes the belief that current trends
towards routinising classrooms are wrong: wrong for pupils, wrong for teachers and wrong for achievement.
