Teachers' credibility test as kids log in, tune out

WHEN Peter Wilson started teaching, he could rely on having his students' undivided attention for the 90 minutes of class time.

Peter Wilson

WHEN Peter Wilson started teaching 12 years ago, he could rely on having his students' undivided attention for the 90 minutes of class time.

With the intrusion of technology in the classroom, that is no longer the case. While Dr Wilson is trying to explain a scientific concept to his class, students are on the internet, double-checking what he's saying, or on their mobile phones texting students in the next room or another school.

"One very cluey boy, who is always on his laptop during class, always checks what I'm saying. Now I just ask him, 'Did I get that right?'," he said.

Dr Wilson, who teaches maths, general science and biology at The Hutchins School, an independent boys' school in Hobart, retrained as a teacher after working as a scientist with the CSIRO for 13 years.

He has experienced a range of classrooms in the past 13 schools he has worked at in four states, including government and non-government, affluent and disadvantaged, single-sex and co-educational schools.

The biggest change he has noticed since his own school days is the impact of technology and the effect on student behaviour. As a result, Dr Wilson said, teachers had to spend much of their time justifying what they were trying to teach.

"I was quite shocked when I went back into classrooms," he said. "The biggest shock was the take-it-or-leave-it attitude so many children have to their schooling. They're losing respect for education," he said.

"I'm spending time having to justify what I teach. It's changed the way I teach. I've made it part of the curriculum.

"I don't ever recall a teacher doing that when I was a student. In some schools, teachers spend all their time just trying to gain credibility."

Dr Wilson said the need for teachers to justify themselves had been exacerbated by changes in the curriculum and in teaching styles. "In a postmodern curriculum, you don't just teach the phases of the moon, you must teach what several indigenous cultures thought of the phases of the moon," he said.

"The subtext of the curriculum is that teachers are just presenting a case and there could be an alternative. It does away with your authority."

Dr Wilson said the challenging attitude from students was part of the shift in teaching styles to "student-centred learning" that had repositioned teachers from instructors to guides or facilitators in the classroom. As a result, teachers had ceded authority to the students.

Dr Wilson said student-centred learning was the buzzword in his teacher training, and created a situation where teachers had to fit into the students' world "and be a sub-culture of their culture".

One thing student-centred learning neglects, Dr Wilson argues, is children's nature; that they need direction and are going to take the path of least resistance, which usually does not involve teaching themselves the periodic table. "To learn the self-discipline needed for a mere child to manage their own learning takes a tremendous amount of guidance and patience," he said.