Teachers’ views of writing and their pupils’ performance C. T. Patrick Diamond Department of Education, University of Queensland This is a shorter version of a talk given at the NATE Conference in Sheffield, 1981

How often do we hear the allegation that English teaching is in a crisis state. As Young‘ sees i t , significant thought and research need to be directed towards determining the adequacy of our present ways of teaching English and of any proposed alternatives. Each kind of teaching is underpinned by a professional perspective or a shared system of beliefs which acts as a prism, translating belief into practice. This is what Kuhn‘ describes more formally as a paradigm. Only professional experience and research can show what the present paradigms look like in the classroom and then indicate which of them is the most effective.

When ninety-three teachers of English in large south-east Queensland secondary schools freely sorted eighty statements made about the teaching of writing into similar groups, they were found to share some twenty central ideas about composition (see Diamond’)). Closer inspection of these groupings revealed that the items which constituted some of the most popular clusters had correspondingly very low probabilities of being included in any other groupings. Two opposing networks or even paradigms seemed to emerge, which might be labelled the skills in isolation model and the skills in context or ‘growth’ model. The first way of teaching was dedicated to the ‘basics’ and was delineated by the teachers using the following constructs: the mechanical skills, marking or grading, difficulties in writing, deductive teaching, the best writing, and teacher domination. I t involved absolute standards and saw ‘good’ English as ‘good’ for children. The second way was more progressive and recalled the suggestions made by the American NCTE to parents seeking to help their children become better writers. This paradigm was defined by warm teacher-student relationships, intrinsic motivation, a developmental writing sequence, the importance of pupil talk, teaching for growth, natural development, the teacher of writing who actually writes, inductive teaching, pupils being positive and creative by nature and by criticisms of conventional skills-based teaching (Diamond4). Bussis, Chittenden and Amare15 found that sixty American elementary teachers held seventeen somewhat similar ‘priorities’, eleven of which had a cognitive or skills-based emphasis and six a more personal, tender-minded orientation.

Fifteen Queensland teachers were then selected as rationally repre- sentative of the original sample. On the basis of the ways they inter-related their constructs about teaching writing, three of the teachers were construed

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as employing the skills in isolation paradigm and another three the skills in context perspective. When subsequently interviewed, these fifteen teachers confirmed that there are teachers who ‘teach the skills and nothing else’, while there are ‘just a few who teach for growth. ‘How you relate to kids’ was seen as central to the second paradigm. However, nine of the teachers used some combination or mixture of both paradigms as indicated in the following extract from one of the discussions:

Teacher A Most teachers are a bit of both. I think I’d probably come in there.

Teacher B Me too. Teacher A You realise perhaps there’s another way so you integrate

your approach. Teacher B You try to balance the two.

A mixed point of view may be eclectic and balanced or it may be just incon- sistent and confused. Kuhnfi insists that a balance cannot be struck between opposites and that there must be an inevitable tension between them.

If the growth-related construct system is taken as the tradition-shattering alternative to the tradition-bound, skills-based ideas about the teaching of writing, a paradigm shift or revolution may be occurring in English teaching as the time-honoured theory is rejected in favour of another, antagonistic both to it and to the beliefs and practice of many of the more traditional teachers of writing. One of them captures something of the strain of even suggesting change:

Trust-I wouldn’t call it that. You just can’t afford to get too close to the kids even if you wanted to. They’ll break you end from end.

The usual development of growth in thought is presumed to be the succes- sive transition from one paradigm to another, but not through an easy, gradual process of accumulation. Illumination only follows the ‘scales falling from the eyes’. Such a ‘gestalt switch’ is not achieved by a gentle articulation or extension of the old paradigm to form the basis of a new eclectic or balanced state. Rather it is a total reconstruction of the same field but from new fundamentals. The process of re-orientation involves handling the same observations as before but placing them in a fresh system of relations with one another, giving them a different framework by using the unfamiliar paradigm. An unprecedented way of seeing is involved as two of the teachers indicate:

Teacher A The skills teachers say all you have to do is just teach them to read and write. They collect their pay, they work from ‘9 to 3’ and that’s it.

Teacher B Yes, they never do any work at home. I envy them that it’s just so easy.

Teachers’ mews of writing and their pupils’ performance 43

Teacher A But they don’t enjoy teaching. It really has to do with a whole new kind of awareness. They have no concept of what we’re about. It’s on a different level.

The teaching of the fifteen representative teachers was charted by con- struing teaching in terms of a number of different levels of reality (paradigm, commitment, school system, pupils, classroom environment, teaching strategies and paradigm in practice) to see how consistently they implemented one or other of the two models. Three were found to exemplify the skills in isolation paradigm with some consistency and three the skills in context. The other nine were classed as mixed. The fifteen teachers were also rank-ordered according to their degree of teaching effectiveness. The latter was measured by changes in their class means in writing performance (achievement and attitude) over an academic year. Writing achievement was indexed by the multiple marking on global impression of pre- and post- tests of two kinds of writing: expressive-poetic and expository. The attitudes of the fifteen classes (372 pupils in all) towards writing were sequentially monitored by using a semantic differential.

The degree of correspondence between favoured model consistency and teaching effectiveness was determined by means of a rank correlation co- efficient. Since the resultant high degree of relationship could have occurred by chance only three times in a hundred instances, the consistency with which the teachers implemented their paradigms was clearly associated with the progress of their classes in writing. When the three groups of teachers were compared, the classes of the skills-based teachers had a good chance of actually declining in writing performance, while those of the growth- oriented teachers had an even stronger chance of maintaining their present level of achievement.

It seems that, when the skills-based paradigm is consistently imple- mented, there is an appreciable trend for there to be a decline in class results. In contrast, there is an even stronger trend for the consistent implementation of the growth-oriented pedagogy to accompany modest improvement in class results.

The tentative conclusion from this small sample is that consistency or con- tinuity between intention and reality, between thought and action, may be one way of telling the experts from the fumblers. Whether or not a teacher’s constructs are implemented with consistency seems to be educationally sig- nificant. Self-consistency may be a crucial requirement to be satisfied. This ‘bootstrap’ theory is accepted by Polya, who states:

Now, in teaching as in several other things, i t does not matter much what your philosophy is or is not. It matters more whether you have a philosophy or not. And i t matters very much whether you try to live up to your philosophy or not. The only principles of teaching which I thoroughly dislike are those to which people pay only lip ~erv ice .~

However, it does matter what philosophy or paradigm, no matter how enthusiastically it may be endorsed, is put into practice . . . at least in the

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teaching of written expression. The growth-oriented way of teaching, when consistently implemented, has been shown in the present study to be comparatively productive in terms of a class’s writing performance. In contrast, the negative but non-significant correlation with skills-based implementation suggests that perhaps a class’s writing performance may be marred if such skills-oriented ideas are consistently implemented.

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R. E. Young, ‘Paradigm and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention’, in Research on Composing (ed. C. R. Cooper and L. Odell), p. 39. NCTE, 1978. T. S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution. University of Chicago Press, 1962. C. T. P. Diamond, ‘The skills or growth: English teachers’ thinking about the teaching of writing’, English in Australia (1979), pp. 57-66. C. T. P. Diamond, ‘On A Different Level: Two Pedagogies of Written Expression’, in Changes, Issues and Prospects in Australian Education (ed. S. D’Urso and R. A. Smith), pp. 176-83. University of Queensland Press, 1980. A. M. Bussis, E. A. Chittenden and M . Amarel, Beyond Surface Curriculum. Westview Press, 1976. T. S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension. University of Chicago Press, 1978. Cited in P. W. Jackson, Life in classroom^, p. 113. Holt, 1968.