I recently turned German tutor. Not that I was exceptionally good, or a paragon of good behaviour at school, but I guess as a German I qualified, if not by nature, but at least by nurture. I helped a teenager prepare for an important exam, which included reciting a couple of self-written paragraphs to an audience of teachers. I was honoured to be asked, and also that my tutee was apparently well prepared, and showed enthusiasm for learning what I’ve come to realised is a hard language to learn. We never met, but exchanged emails – a form of communication less natural to her generation than mine – and spoke over the phone to work on pronunciation. When helping her prepare, I picked up a couple of comments from her along the lines of ‘oh, I need to show that I can use the correct tenses – I’ll get a B for that’, and ‘I don’t need to do this – this will only get me a C, but I need to do that, as it will give me a B’. That struck me as rather strategic, and while I remember trying to gain as much knowledge from my teachers in school what we were going to be tested at, we never got a glimpse into the marking scheme – and classes that did had to resit their exams. And, instinctively, I would say that was right. While I enjoyed my tutee’s enthusiasm for language learning, I had the feeling that this way of learning for the exam may be limiting her possible attainment – it is after all about mastering the subject, not the exam. And the self-limitation I think is apparent – never did we talk about what would achieve an A, for that matter. Now I don’t care about grades that much anymore, but I do care very much about learning and gaining knowledge as its own reward – and this outcomes based approach potentially limits the real impact made by the learning experience. I’ve often heard that school is governed by learning for tests and exams, and I think I’ve just seen that happening; and I think it may short-change a generation of learners who will be confronted with life-long learning to adapt to ever changing demands of an ever more flexible workplace. While I was impressed by my tutee’s ability to strategize at a young age, as was her language skill – but being taught to having to strategize to secure a B won’t do in the long term. And I think this is where schools should be rethinking their approach – not adding more ‘rigorous’ exams.
I recently read about a study carried out at schools which found that learning results could be immensely improved (by something like 30 or 40%, I think) by immediately rewarding the students showing good results with something they liked to have (e.g. money; grades alone obviously didn’t do the job). The researchers rather bleak conclusion was that students have no idea why it is that they are studying. One can only hope that every school has two or three teachers who are inspiring enough to give them a little perspective…
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