Surprise, surprise: what worked in education for centuries still works today, while woke ‘theories’ fail miserably. This isn’t just another culture war opinion: we have the data to prove it. It’s science, as they like to say.
A Catholic school cluster has shot to success in this year’s NAPLAN results, after abandoning failed teaching fads through the nation’s biggest experiment in the science of learning.
A return to the old-school teaching style of “direct instruction’’ has delivered academic dividends for 23,000 students at 56 Catholic schools in the ACT and Goulburn, based on the NAPLAN) results for 9629 schools to be made public on Wednesday.
While Catholic schools make up just a quarter of schools in the ACT, they make up two-thirds of the schools singled out by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority as ‘making a difference’’. The schools out-performed others with a similar socio-economic background.
This follow years of under-performance. Until the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn dumped the fancy modern teaching methods and mandated a return to direct instruction.
Four years later, the schools have caught up to deliver their best-ever NAPLAN results.
“We’ve seen dramatic improvement,’’ Ross Fox, the director of Catholic Education for the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, said on Tuesday.
“We’re seeing students who fell behind making substantial progress to catch up because of our intervention programs, and we’re seeing time saved for teachers.
“The incidence of disruptive behaviours has reduced, in part because our students are more engaged in their learning.’’
Mr Fox said teachers were saving five hours a week in lesson preparation because the Catalyst program provides high-quality lesson plans and “commonsense curriculum materials” used in all classrooms.
The Catalyst program incorporates what is called ‘cognitive load theory’’. Instead of being overwhelmed with new information, students are given time to absorb and repeat concepts until they’ve mastered them. Think, for instance of reciting your times tables until you could recall them with barely a thought.
Teachers direct and closely monitor students’ learning – a reversal of the failed fad of “student-directed learning’’ that expected students to “lead their own learning journey’’.
Principal of St Thomas Aquinas School in Canberra, Tim Cleary, is an enthusiast for the back-to-basics, science-based program.
“It works, you can see the results – and the kids love it,’’ he said. “Evidence shows that students learn best when they are given explicit instruction accompanied by lots of practice and feedback.
“They’re not sitting in groups anymore – they’re sitting in rows, old-school.
“We’ve gone back to what happened when I was in kindergarten in 1970 – I still remember the colour-coded phonics cards.’’
And in a turn to make a feminist education bureaucrat gnash they/their teeth in fury, boys are re-engaging with learning.
The primary school boys find lessons fun as they chant their times tables and sound out letter combinations in phonics-based reading lessons.
One of the first schools to adopt the program, Ipswich Grammar School in Queensland, has rocketed from 128th among Queensland schools to third.
The data couldn’t be clearer: regardless of socio-economic context, high-performing schools are nearly exclusively those that privilege evidence-based teaching and learning, including explicit instruction and a knowledge-rich curriculum […]
What’s at stake is not just the productivity of our education system, but the wellbeing and life outcomes of our citizens.
But what about the theory?
