Teaching Matters/Breda O'Brien: You knew the honeymoon was ending for Mary Hanafin when a parents' representative pointed out that the minister was only seven years away from the classroom, and was therefore too deeply influenced by teachers' views.
Minister Hanafin earned this disapproval by talking about reform of the Leaving Cert, and the need to make haste slowly. Odd, that being still in touch with the reality of the classroom, and how young people learn, should be seen as a disadvantage in a minister for education.
The current model of a terminal examination on which everything hinges is enormously stressful. The Leaving Cert measures a narrow range of intelligence, and favours those with good memories and the ability to write clearly and cogently under stress. It gives absolutely no indication of a person's abilities in other areas, such as interpersonal or organisational skills. It is skewed by effectively being a college entrance test, even though many young people do not go on to third level. It has spawned a vast "grinds" industry, which favours disproportionately those with enough income to afford help. These are all valid criticisms of the Leaving Cert.
However, several thorny questions arise when change is proposed. For example, if we move to continuous assessment, the question of plagiarism arises immediately. The US has had this problem for years, as shown by the multiplicity of web sites offering ready-made essays on every topic imaginable. At Irish third-level institutions, sophisticated computer programmes have been installed in order to catch such cheating, but with limited success. When the second-level syllabus of Civic, Social and Political education (CSPE) was introduced, project work accounted for 60 per cent of the final mark. To prevent plagiarism, the emphasis was placed on reporting how an action that promotes citizenship skills was carried out. For example, rather than downloading statistics from the Internet on the numbers of people with disability, a group might see how easy it is to navigate public transport in a wheelchair. In their report, they would talk about how they planned the project, what difficulties they encountered, and what they learned from the activity. Factual information is only a limited part of the report.
In spite of this, there have been several controversies concerning plagiarism. The longer the examination goes on, the more certain I am that people will begin to re-submit reports on CSPE action projects which earned an older brother, or a neighbour, good marks. Given the nature of the assessment, it will be practically impossible to detect.
A second problem concerns the correction of continuous assessment. Teachers could certainly do it, at enormous cost to the relationship that they have with their students. Already, students are willing to argue bitterly over grades given for mere essays that do not count towards a final mark.
Imagine if their teachers had the task of correcting the assessments that would determine their future university or job prospects. Not to mention the fact that in Ireland, everyone knows everybody. Picture facing, at a supermarket checkout, the parent of a student to whom you had just given a failing grade. If such assessments were farmed out to independent assessors, it would cost much more than it costs at the moment to correct the Leaving Cert. Mind you, given low rates of pay for examiners, there have been problems getting enough people to mark papers. Yet again, resources seem to be the problem. We will invest in infrastructure, but not in our young people, it appears.
There is also a great deal of support for maintaining Transition Year intact, although proposed reforms suggest breaking it down into a number of modules over three years. I believe, for example, that a substantial period of work experience could be incorporated into a three-year reformed Leaving Cert. However, students are adamant that to split up the Transition Year in this way would take all the good out of it. Personally, I feel a modular approach could work.
Mary Hanafin's suggestion that boys in particular might have difficulty with self-directed learning caused a minor furore. How quickly people forget. Try remembering your teenage self. Given a choice, and without the big stick of the Leaving Cert, would you have spent hours studying subjects such as maths and history? There is some evidence from research into brain maturation, that the skills needed for organisation and self-directed learning do not mature until the early 20s. At the moment, we have been so overtaken by the grind mentality that students practically demand notes on how to get from the school gate to the classroom. There would have to be serious investment in the development of learning skills before we could suddenly catapult into a brave new world of self-directed learning.
Let us hope that Mary Hanafin's caution about reform is not centred solely on unwillingness to commit resources, as one TUI representative suggested. It might well be that she sees that while reform is needed, it should not happen overnight. After all, we are talking about using young people as guinea-pigs. While they certainly dislike, and rightly so, the current system, neither will they be happy to be subjects of a radical experiment.
bobrien@irish-times.ie
Breda O'Brien is a second-level teacher in Muckross Park College, Donnybrook, Dublin, and a columnist with The Irish Times.
