The classroom — one teacher, one group of students, usually of the same age, one rectangular space, door closed — is the great survivor of schooling. It is now as it has been for two or three centuries the main arena of the encounter between teacher and taught, and the taken-for-granted stem cell of schooling as it metastised from cottage to global enterprise.
The pre-eminent chronicler of the classroom, United States historian Larry Cuban, has depicted the history of the classroom as a contest between 'teacher-centred' and 'student-centred' pedagogies. In the foundational form of the classroom, rows of desks faced the front where, on a raised platform, standing before a blackboard, a single adult talked, told, and controlled dozens of students who sat up straight and listened, recited, copied and remembered their way through one 30-minute 'lesson' after another.
But this form has long been under assault from 'progressivism' and its disruptive ideas about how to organise space, students, time and activities to produce 'active' and 'creative' learning driven by 'student needs and interests'.
The contest between the old and the new, Cuban argues, has been settled decisively in favour of the established order. As a stroll down any school corridor will reveal, 'student-centred' teaching and learning have steadily gained ground, particularly in the earlier years of schooling, but even there it has been absorbed into a 'hybridised' but clearly teacher-dominated classroom order.
There is little evidence to suggest that things have played out differently in Australia. Here as in the United States a crazy-brave rebellion in the 1970s in support of the 'open classroom' and its team-taught, flexibly-grouped, activity-based learning was effortlessly defeated. A former colleague conducted a national evaluation of the open classroom, and could tell some very funny stories about the ingenuity with which teachers used pot plants, book-cases, office partitions, stacks of cartons, anything to turn open classrooms back into closed ones.
Twenty years later another incursion came from a different direction but suffered the same fate. In the early 1990s the National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning (NPQTL) set out to encourage different ways of organising the work of students and teachers, but soon disappeared without trace. The classroom is a jealous god.
But does it have another century or two left in it? The classroom is facing a combination of pressures which might force it to cede more ground, perhaps even lose its place as the dominant life form, in at least some areas of schooling.
First and most familiar is the pressure of what and how teachers want students to learn. Teachers have been the apostles of progressivism, often against the opposition of parents and editorialists. Now more than ever they want students to 'take responsibility for their own learning', to 'learn how to learn'. Teachers know that as early as Year 3, a single class will include some students who are five learning years ahead of others. They want to organise learning that stretches all of them, the fastest, the slowest, and the in-between.
For many years teachers believed that they could do it if only they weren't trying to cope with so many kids. On my first day of teaching in February 1964 I faced 40 students, a special dispensation because I was first year out. The old hands had 50-odd. Teacher militancy in the 1960s led to tumbling class sizes in the 1970s and 1980s, and for a time it seemed to work. As classrooms became less crowded so did they become less formal and more varied in their organisation of furniture, student groups, time and activity.
But change in both quantity and quality has been arrested by two realities. First, even 20 students constitute a crowd. Chaos always threatens, and only one person stands between order and chaos. That is why the social order of the classroom has not been fundamentally changed. A gathering body of evidence suggests that it will stay that way unless and until the student group shrinks to as few as eight, perhaps ten at a pinch. Halving class sizes was expensive. Halving them again is prohibitive. The central reform strategy of half a century has reached its terminus without delivering the kind of learning and teaching that teachers want. But that hasn't stopped them wanting it.
A third pressure on practice comes from the theory of reform. At the risk of suggesting neatness and sequence where it is often hard to find either, 'reform' in the 1950s and 1960s meant more — more teachers, more classrooms, more schools. Then it meant changing 'the system', through devolution, regionalisation, and restructuring hierarchies of control. As teacher scepticism about these changes deepened into cynicism, the attention of reformers shifted from the system to the school. 'School improvement' and then 'school effectiveness' were all the go.
The last of these grew up as an effort to understand how so much time, money and effort could be spent with so little apparent improvement in student learning. The trail led, at last, to the classroom door. As researchers peered inside the most obvious thing was the difference between teachers. A very effective teacher, they calculated, makes three or four times as much difference as a very effective school. The question now on the agenda is whether the grail will be found in somehow producing more and more highly effective teachers, or in changing a workplace that functions well only in the hands of a maestro.
Until recently the question might have been hypothetical. The demise of the open classroom and then the NPQTL demonstrated that even if the classroom didn't let teachers teach as they felt they should, there was no alternative. The fourth pressure on the classroom is that an alternative may be just around the corner. I refer, of course, to emerging information and communications technologies.
Schools have been fiddling with computers for decades, but computers have so far gone the way of numberless other innovations, absorbed by and pushed to the margins of the dominant order. In other words, they haven't delivered. But, they will — or perhaps I should say, they will be able to.
There already exists a good deal of software that helps students learn at their own pace in a thoroughly engaging and productive way. But the big gains will come from the management of learning rather than, or as well as, its conduct. 'Expert systems' combined with the 'soft' technology of standards- or outcomes-based curriculum will be able to assess or record assessments of where each student is up to in each area of learning, figure out the best next step, summon up ways and means of taking it, and monitor progress toward a clearly-defined and amply-illustrated objective.
Expert systems will open up the private world of the classroom and make possible a different allocation of the labour of learning. Students, both individually and in varying combinations, will be able to take over from teachers some management of the teaching and learning process, as will other adults including parents, support staff, and trainee and intern teachers. Teachers will spend more of their time in expert diagnosis, prescription, planning and supervision.
At this early stage it seems likely that emerging technologies will also free up resources needed to construct a different division of labour. There are already entirely 'virtual' secondary schools in the US as well as schools that 'blend' virtual and real-world schooling, each with cost structures very different from those of the classroom-based school. The productivity problem of schooling may find a solution long-familiar elsewhere.
Perhaps all this can be done within the familiar circumstance of the class, the teacher, and the classroom, but technology-rich learning and learning management may be better served in spaces that look and feel more like a workshop or studio than a chapel or a factory. In any foreseeable or desirable future there will be a place for the class and its teacher, but it will be shared with many other combinations of students and adults, time and space, brains and machines.
Where and when these fundamentally different forms will emerge is hard to predict. The class and the classroom are heavily defended, by the physical shape of schools, by how students and teachers are used to behaving and interacting with each other, and by a cat's cradle of regulations and industrial agreements. It is possible that what exists will cause what could be to arrive last in those schools where the need is greatest.
Dean Ashenden was co-founder of the Good Universities Guides and the Good Schools Guides, and has been an adviser or consultant on education policy to state and federal governments and agencies.