Spoon feeding V Using their own hands.

Having worked at several top pre-preps in Central London and at state schools/academies all across London for nearly 15 years, I have observed many styles of teaching. I worked as SLT at several of the schools I taught at and I had to observe teachers teaching their students.

There are two distinct teaching styles in my opinion.

The first one is what I call ‘Spoon Feeding’. The second one is what I call ‘Allowing children to use their own hands.’

In the society that we are currently living in, it is vital that we teach our children to be able to ‘use their own hands.’

What I mean by this is having their own independence of thought. Having the opportunity to problem solve without heavy guidance and being able to make mistakes without freezing and thinking that something has gone terribly wrong.

I observed one lesson in a year two classroom in which the teacher was teaching writing (I was English Head at this school). She spent the whole lesson modelling the writing to the children and the children essentially copied her writing. Some of the more advanced writers were able to change some of the words but the majority of the children ended up having identical pieces of writing. The writing was excellent. But here is the problem.

It was HER writing.

She spoon fed the children. What had they actually learnt?

They had learnt how to copy words off a screen.

Their books looked beautiful and neat but it wasn’t their writing.

When I asked a group of children to write a sentence independently for their introduction describing their character, they could not do this.

One of them said to me, ‘Miss, what shall I write?’ Another one said to me, ‘Is this right?’

Oh dear.

Another lesson I observed, the teacher had set up tables with visual stimuli such as objects, jewels and story books and she simply asked the children to hold the objects and describe them using their own words. She then provided the children with envelopes that contained three adjectives and asked them to put the adjectives into their sentences.

Their books didn’t look as good as the other teacher’s books but it was THEIR OWN work.

Do you see the difference?