2 - Talk in class at Central High

Summary

After the 1960s and 70s, when child-centred theories of learning were ascendant in British education,

there was an overt and persistent attempt to impose or re-impose the teacher's voice as the centre of a transmission model of knowledge transfer: ‘… by 1979 many [members of the Conservative Party] had gained the impression that schools were chaotic and teachers were lax, or – worse still – militant egalitarians who used the classroom for subversive political activities. The right wing feared that schooling had ceased to be a means for promoting order and obedience, and had taken on the role of encouraging the young to be critical of authority and disrespectful … [In general the Tories expressed] a wish to return to traditional curricula and teaching methods’ (Lawton 1994:47, 147). In the mid-1990s there was also fierce debate … on the desirability of whole-class teaching. This tide of sentiment was joined by the Labour Party before the 1997 election: ‘The Labour Party intends to launch a back-to-basics drive in the classroom if it wins the next election. More emphasis on basic skills, classroom discipline and whole-class teaching will become part of a drastic overhaul of teacher training’ (Times Educational Supplement 31.5.96).

(Harris 2002)

A great deal of more recent political and public discourse, then, is very much in favour of whole-class teacher-talk. And yet, continues Harris,

class teachers have long known that in the new communicative order it is extremely difficult to hold pupil attention with their voice as central, unchallenged, authoritative …