George Walker’s weblog

Let me admit from the start that I am a conference phobic.  I am the person who is seen rebooking his return flight and sloping off to the airport in urgent response to a bogus message from my PA telling me the office is on fire.  At least I was, until I very nearly rebooked onto the TWA flight to Paris that crashed soon after take-off from JFK.  Since then I have stuck it out to the end.

I have attended several million different conferences and one of my annual nightmares is being trapped, always in the same fin de siècle hotel, unable to find the way to the station (isn’t it interesting how one’s dreams are historically consistent).  An enduring memory of the IBO will be the bell that sounds when the lift finally arrives at my hotel floor which – together with the ever-optimistic wait for my luggage coming round (or not coming round) the carousel at the airport – must have accounted for at least a year of my life.

The IBO thrives on conferences and sometimes measures the relative success of its different parts by conference attendance figures.  Regional conferences, sub-regional conferences, heads’ conferences, coordinators’ conferences: you name it and someone will organize a conference for it.  Indeed, we have very efficient regional conference units to do just that.  But finding myself in someone else’s conference last week, as I dozed off in rather comfortable chairs, listening on my headphones to translations that one can only admire but never fully comprehend, I began to wonder what it was all about.

After all, every one of the papers being presented would be posted on the conference website; the programme was so full there was no time for serious discussion.  In the plenary sessions, each distinguished speaker said more or less what one would have expected each distinguished speaker to say.  The lunch was modest and the afternoon tea was cold.   But, of course, there was the networking amongst all those important people who have come with the sole purpose of learning all about your latest bright idea so another KPI to measure a good conference must surely be the number of visiting cards you bring back.

I think we do still go to conferences in the hope of being inspired but in my experience it rarely happens.  I can remember about half a dozen such set-piece moments of truth, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru, whom I heard when I was a student, and more recently Nobel Laureate, Oscar Arias, who opened our Americas conference in 2001 in Costa Rica with a brilliant speech.  But too often what we hear are recycled presentations obscured, rather than illuminated, by distracting PowerPoint.

Then there is death-by-reporting-back from the inevitable working groups (now rather dubiously called ‘breakout groups’ – if only one could).  Well chairman, I’m going to be very brief as all my points have been covered by previous speakers….25 minutes later….and now I think our scribe, Wendy, has just a couple of tiny suggestions to make.

And yes, we do go to conferences for the networking so it would be interesting to know what percentage of time most people spend in the bar compared to the conference sessions and to ask if it might not be more efficient to put everyone together on a cruise liner without the guilt-inducing distraction of a conference.

But how many of us go to a conference prepared to do some work, to make a contribution, to actually produce something?   The distinguished American psychologist, Jerry Bruner, urges us to associate learning with the production of tangible “oeuvres” and there was a time when one at least returned home with a satisfying pile of conference papers, but no longer: they are only available on the conference website.  Now, all we are left with is the conference bag, a leaking biro and, at the top of the range, a t-shirt.

One of the most stimulating events I ever took part in (OK, it was a workshop not a conference, but the principle remains sound) brought together a mixed group of people sharing an interest in comprehensive education in the UK to write a book from scratch over a weekend.  And, inspired and encouraged by The Guardian’s wonderful education correspondent at the time, Maureen O’Connor, we wrote it, from start to finish, and the sense of achievement was huge.

The recent Heads Standing Association conference in Bangkok came somewhere near this when participants were challenged to contribute to a communiqué to be published at the end of the conference.  I hope someone will build on this idea because too often we invite large numbers of able and experienced people to gather together, we sit them in conference halls and then fail to make best use of their time and talent.

George Walker

Oxfam has a rather good second hand bookshop in Cardiff so whenever I am there for meetings at our curriculum and assessment centre in Peterson House I try to find time to call in.  As well as the usual shelves of paperback fiction, there are many more unusual items if you care to search for them and there is also a small, locked glass cabinet in which I recently saw…but it was far too expensive.

Then I went back a month later and it was still there and, after all, it cost less than a few tanks full of petrol and, after all, it was Oxfam and not some seedy second hand book dealer and, after all, it was one of the first books I ever read in a serious study of education.

So I am now the proud owner of a first edition (1861) of Herbert Spencer’s classic collection of essays entitled Education.

Spencer (1820-1903) was a British philosopher and sociologist.  Largely self-taught (turning down a place at Cambridge University) he was an ardent supporter of Charles Darwin and it was he, not Darwin, who first used the expression “survival of the fittest.”  Not surprisingly, then, he applied evolutionary theory to philosophy, psychology and sociology, and to education.  The four essays are entitled What knowledge is of most worth, Intellectual education, Moral education and Physical education, and the uncompromising tone is set at the outset by the question, “Of what use is it?”

Well, all this appeared nearly 150 years ago, but Spencer’s ideas have given me a helpful peg on which to hang some recent thoughts.  In October, IBAEM organized a regional conference in Barcelona which, for the first time, challenged science teachers of the Middle Years Programme and the Diploma Programme to work together on issues of continuity.   Not easy, and I know from bitter experience how high school teachers of linear subjects like science and mathematics tend to boss their junior colleagues about, telling them what and how they should teach.

The handed-down instructions tend to be of two different kinds.  First the guilt-inducing: “If you don’t teach them this, followed by this, finishing up with that before they reach us, then please don’t expect us to sort out the mess before they sit their examinations”.  Then there is the patronising: “If I were you, I wouldn’t bother to introduce that concept at all; much better to leave it so we can do it properly.”   (I was once a curriculum deputy head of a 9-13 upper school in the UK which received its new students from six different 5-8 middle schools and the preceding quotations were the staple diet of our school liaison meetings.)

What does Spencer have to say about all this?  His first thought (in the second essay) is to draw attention to the parallels between a system of education and the social state in which it exists.  Thus he could see the growing impact of Protestantism, political liberty and free trade in nineteenth century Britain reflected in less harsh discipline, more recreation and a growing awareness of the unfolding mind of the school child.  Today, our science education reflects its changing social status, which has moved from a sense of triumph (when I was at school) to speculation (when I started teaching it) to the current period of atonement.  I wonder whether there is a shared perception of the role of science education amongst teachers of the different age ranges.

Looking now at the actual process of education, Spencer insists on the substitution of principles, built up from individual instances, for rules learned by rote.  Now this is the pure Nuffield philosophy that I grew up with but I suspect Spencer is concerned with the process of induction whereas science makes progress through hypothesis and deduction: a scientific hypothesis is set up in order to be demolished.  I wonder if all teachers convey to their students the provisional nature of scientific principles.

Finally, Spencer writes

In the mastering of every subject some course of increasingly complex ideas has to be gone through…which, in any true sense, is impossible without they are put into the mind in the normal order.

Today we might call it a spiral curriculum or scaffolding or constructionist theory but essentially it acknowledges the simple truth that learning requires clear signposts to indicate where it has come from and where it is going next.  Otherwise, in Spencer’s words, it will be received with apathy or disgust…unless the pupil is intelligent enough eventually to fill up the gaps himself.  Agreeing where and how to erect those signposts is perhaps the most important task of liaison between the Middle Years and the Diploma Programmes.

I’m glad I went back to the Oxfam shop!

George Walker

A few weeks ago I was in Stockholm where I attended a welcoming reception at the city hall, famous for hosting the ceremony each December at which the Nobel prizes are presented.  Since then, a visit to the University of Adelaide reminded me that one of its most distinguished alumni, Lawrence Bragg, achieved a double-first in Nobel prizes: he and his father, William, are the only father-and-son prize winning partnership and, at the age of 25, Lawrence remains the youngest ever Nobel laureate.

The Nobel prize for physics came in 1915, in recognition of their pioneering work in the development of the analytical technique of X-ray diffraction and with it the birth of solid state physics, and Lawrence received the news in France, in the trenches.  He finally collected the prize in 1922 but his father did not turn up at the ceremony in Stockholm; all pleasure and pride had been destroyed by the death of his other son, Bob, at Gallipoli just a few weeks before the prize had been announced.

I heard Sir Lawrence Bragg lecture at the Royal Institution in London in the late 1950s when I was in the sixth form at school.  By now he was a grand old man of science and he had left behind an unhappy period at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where he had been sucked into the unseemly squabbling between Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin over the controversial discovery of the double helix of DNA (the first three, but not Franklin who died, would win their Nobel prizes in 1962).

Bragg’s lecture was brilliant and I can still remember much of its structure, many of its experiments and its sheer panache.  The subject was radioactivity, which was too dangerous to explore in any practical way in a school laboratory, but here we could see it all happening on the floor of the Royal Institution in a series of experiments we had read about but never expected to see.  It remains one of the most memorable presentations I have ever witnessed and, looking back, I recognize its profound impact because it was one of the factors that contributed to my decision to study chemistry rather than music at university.

In fact it was not a difficult decision.  In the 1950s science seemed to have all the answers: astronomy was explaining the past; the present offered a huge choice of well-paid scientific jobs and the future would be taken care of by nuclear energy.  Fifty years later it all looks rather different and we are seeing a worrying flight from science in schools and universities.  The sciences (Group 4) are no longer the most popular subjects in the IB Diploma Programme, having been overtaken by the humanities (Group 3) in 2001.  Although the quality of high-performing science students is being maintained, the ‘tail’ is growing longer and longer with nearly a third of all students obtaining a failing grade in their chosen science subject.

A reason for the malaise might be the disappearance of the magic and mystery that attracted me to the subject and was so powerfully present in Bragg’s description of radioactivity.  I still keep on my desk a beautifully shaped glass retort or alembic.  It reminds me how my chemistry teacher at school promised that one day we would use one in our experiments.  We never did but the idea was enough to make me want to study a subject that was evidently still largely concerned with turning base metals into gold.    It is many years since I taught a science lesson but I suspect much of the mystery has gone, replaced by a fatal dose of social responsibility.  Every science teacher should be presented with Oliver Sacks’ wonderful biography Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (published by Picador) to be reminded of the sometimes irresponsible excitement of doing science and of the essential part it plays in the world’s narrative of growing human potential.

George Walker

Postscript
An interesting article related to the above has recently been published by The Guardian. Readers can find this at:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1642253,00.html

George.

I have been in Adelaide, South Australia (as my earliest readers will remember) and having a day free to recover from jet-lag I headed out to the zoo to see the koalas.  Actually ‘headed out’ is the wrong expression because the city is so wonderfully compact, protected on all sides by jealously-guarded parkland, that you can get almost anywhere on foot.

I have a thing about koalas, perhaps having been brought up on a series of books about Wonk, a rather lovable and mischievous example (does anyone know what happened to Wonk?) and I shall never forget my first visit to Australia some years ago when my hosts, Ross and Jan Milliken, took me to Healesville Sanctuary outside Melbourne to satisfy a lifetime’s curiosity.  And there they were, just as I had imagined, frustratingly perched in the tops of the blue gums, but a cleverly constructed aerial walkway enabled me to look them straight in their sleepy eyes.  Now I have to top up my koala experience on each visit to Australia so the memory persists until the next time.

Come to think of it, working in the field of international education has provided many memorable wildlife experiences.  I remember canoeing with Brad Richardson among the alligators and ospreys of Florida and then driving across the state (to a school graduation) where we saw pelicans flying over the Gulf of Mexico.  Having only previously seen them in zoos, I thought they were earthbound: hence the need for those oversized beaks.

In India I have got up early with David and Veronica Wilkinson to look for – and find – wild peacocks in the grounds of Mahindra United World College.  I have stayed up late in Singapore with Jeff and Kathleen Thompson to visit the nocturnal zoo in order to seek out a tiny saucer-eyed tarsier of almost the same iconic status as the koala since I remember seeing a picture of one as a boy on a stamp I collected from, I think, Sarawak.

In Kenya I have driven past herds of zebra, antelope and giraffe with John Mbuthi and Zhanna O’Clery on the way to Olasiti Senior Secondary School in the Rift Valley but why is this any different to passing herds of cows in rural Switzerland?  And what about those rare white camels (stolen from a Saudi sheik, said the bus driver) I saw nosing around the stores in a small town on the road from Amman to Baghdad?  Are they still there?  Never mind the camels, is the town still there?

But my abiding memory of the effortless superiority of animals over humans takes me back to India, driving back into the urban chaos of Mumbai off the expressway that leads down the Western Ghats from Pune.  The traffic ahead has come to a sudden halt.  Another accident?  More road works?  No: it’s just an elephant being ridden down the dual carriageway back into town.

Next to the koalas in Adelaide Zoo are the wombats, alas a much less glamorous marsupial.  I am reminded that the pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, kept a wombat as a pet.  Nor is this entirely irrelevant because, had he lived 150 years later, DGR would certainly have studied the IB Diploma Programme, as a pupil at Kings College School, Wimbledon, and no doubt would have written an extended, and probably illustrated, essay on the animal.

George Walker