26th October 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Something which might surprise many people not heavily involved in education are the methods of teaching which are now commonplace in many schools in the UK. Teachers are asked to use a particular method to help students to understand concepts. Methods which, it has been decided, are the ‘best’ for students to use. Is this a positive approach?
An example of one of these methods is when students are asked to do a sum which increases a digit in the 10s column, for example 17 + 8. The new recommended method is for students to realise that 17 + 3 is 20, and that 8 is 5 more than 3, so the answer is 17 + 3 + 5 = 25. Many good maths students would say that this is the way they think when doing such a sum. Does this mean it’s a positive method? Well, one argument is that good students have spent time thinking about concepts and discovered these methods themselves, rather than having a method imposed upon them without understanding why the method works.
A criticism of tutoring or any extra help away from school can be that alternative teaching methods can confuse students, and there’s no argument about that. If a student has been doing something in a particular way then showing them an alternative can lead to confusion. It definitely isn’t a good idea to show an alternative method to someone the day before an exam. However, once we stop thinking about preferred methods, and students doing things in a different way from the widely taught methods, the criticism of ‘different methods’ seems like a strange one.
The vast majority of academics will agree that none of us fully understand even the simplest ideas until we have wrestled with them at the highest level. Indeed one of the first maths lectures at Cambridge asks students to prove that 2 + 2 = 4; many subjects at Oxbridge start with the idea that we have to forget what we think we know and be open to new approaches.
The idea is that we understand concepts better when we’re forced to approach them in different ways. GCSE and A Level exams have changed recently to ask students questions that they may not have come across before. This is designed precisely to test how well a student understands their subject, so that they can’t just repeat a method ad infinitum without ever realising why it works, or what the connotations are. If we understand something really well then we should be able to answer any question about it, and this is obviously what education is supposed to do: create intelligent, thoughtful people, who can contribute to society.
As a tutor, one of the lovely things we get to do, a luxury which school teachers don’t have, is that we have time to take students away from a recognised method, and test whether they do understand an idea. Often a new method uncovers a misunderstanding which can be quickly corrected. This is why so many students enjoy having a tutor, and enjoy those one-to-one lessons more than lessons at school; there’s a feeling of finally understanding something which, for so long, the student has seen as a bit of a mystery which they muddle through at school.
The criticism of alternative teaching methods seems particularly harsh. If we’ve created a system where students can give answers using only one method then the system is broken. It’s preferable for a student to understand something perfectly but do poorly on a restrictive test when young, than a student who can blindly follow a method to ace a test, but is lost as soon as the subject becomes more complicated.