Moving beyond "Shut up and Learn".

There’s nothing quite like a classroom. It’s one of the most crowded situations on the face of the planet, and one of the busiest teachers can be involved in a thousand interactions a day. This might help us understand why so much (unexamined) talk about classrooms focuses on “control”. And the effect on classroom learning processes is very substantial. When classrooms were invented on this planet 5000 years ago boys from privileged Sumerian families were learning cuneiform writing: the teacher inscribed syllables into the first rows of tablets of clay, the boys then had to inscribe their version, at which the teacher corrected their attempt, turned the tablet over and did some more. That form of relationship is described as the IRE cycle: Initiation Response Evaluation and research of the last fifty years continues to find it as a dominant pattern in current classrooms in countries all over the world (Bellack et al 1966; Camden 2001). Its most compressed example is “Six sixes?” “Thirty-six” “Good girl”.