Is there any worse way of getting teenagers to concentrate than sitting them in a room with 20 odd other teenagers and one adult for four and a half hours a day?
To be honest, I couldn’t think of a worse starting point for educating our children, and yet this is standard model on which our day to day experience of education is grounded.
I mean I know the typical day at school or college, for most kids at least, will be broken up with more active lessons such as sport and music, but the standard model is 20 odd teenagers in a room with one adult.
This just seems ridiculous - and this is the 5th out of 11 reasons why I’m quitting teaching this August.
20 students is too large a number for the teacher to engage with one on one in any meaningful way, it's too many for everyone to have a meaningful input into a 'whole class discussion', so teachers are left reverting to either individual work where not everyone gets monitored, or pair/ group work where some students inevitably lose focus, and if you are going to go against 'fairyland Ofsted's' advice, and do the dreaded lecture - well 20 is an equally pointless number, you may as well film it and stream it to 20 000.
The days of 20 teenagers sitting in a classroom must surely come to and end soon? Surely it's possible for schools and especially colleges to be a little more creative with teaching arrangements - A combination of online lectures and independent learning combined with more intense, tailored, smaller group sessions and occasional one on one meetings with students where they spend less time sitting in class, but where they get more focused attention and thus more focused working when they are in lessons .... Maybe>?
A related question is where did the educational norm of '20 teenagers sitting in a room' actually come from anyway, and how did it evolve?
Any further informed information as to the origins would be welcome….