Teaching and Learning

My name's Jono Broom, I'm going into my fourth year of teaching, and this is my story of change. In 2010 I went to teachers college in New Zealand. I did a one year diploma. I learnt all the usual things, how to plan lessons, how to manage a class full of bright eyed learners, how to be a good team member, how to use curriculum and progression documents, basically, how to teach. I graduated at the end of the year, and in 2011 started my new job, at the brand new Te Karaka Area School. Our induction week was intense. I was overwhelmed with things that I'd never seen before, school charters, annual plans, school values. Things that I'd never actually seen before out in the open, but I was finding out existed behind the scenes. I was assigned my first class of 30 6-7 year olds and, to be perfectly honest with you, I struggled. My classroom was a mess, my reading programme was atrocious and my maths programme was almost non-existent. The one thing in that year that I'm ...

During the industrial revolution, factories were revolutionised by the assembly line. Each person in the line would have responsibility for a certain part of the product, and when they all worked together, the finished product would come together as a tank. Or a plane. Or a machine gun. This was seen as a great boon for the war effort. Rather than one person making a product, a whole lot of people working together could get it done much, much faster. Schools were based on this assembly line model. Children were grouped into batches (year groups) and were moved through the process with a whole lot of different people contributing to the overall product. The children would have a different subject every hour and those hours would be separated by bells. Efficiency was valued over everything else. As long as the children were sitting in neat rows and absorbing information from the 'bosses' then all would be well. This model gave children a great introduction to the assembly line, f...