I thought you meant the Indian Defence League! No - IDL rarely works in Secondary due to the structure of the 33 week timetable. Any IDL projects have been box ticking with a wee bit of Geography her, Science there and literacy, numeracy and Health and Well-being tagged on. Very disappointed in this myopia.

flamencodancer

What is your opinion of IDL?  Do you see it as contrived and time wasting in the main?  I think it is going to impact on subject specialism and will cause a dilution of Secondary  Education.

I assume you mean interdisciplinary learning? What a farce. It's not only going to cause dilution of secondary education, it's already gutted what there was of science education in primary, which has been subsumed into the various "topics" around which we are supposed to structure all our teaching. 

Thanks to CfE, science in primary, already underemphasised as far as I've seen in the past six years (compared to Canada) is now pretty much taught on a hit-or-miss basis, with huge gaps in both skills and understanding left for someone else to fill.

As usual, I'm astonished that parents put up with this---how passive and uninformed are Scottish parents, in the name of God?

If we had time and opportunities to talk to colleagues and find genuine links, interdisciplinary work could be great. The imposed shoehorning of different subject outcomes into an ill fitting partnership does nobody any good.

Who has endured the Rapid Response Engineering Challenge? We did it 2 years ago- it's all about a hurricane in Honduras. The organiser gave me a CD and said, "Everything you need is here- it's from LTS". I should have guessed- when I opened the folder marked "English", it was entirely empty. When I raised this with the organiser, he suggested that I try- with S1- "Honduran poetry". We cobbled together a piece of sh*t, which even that we had trouble doing, as the kids kept saying, "Aw no, no' effin' Honduras again". However, it was deemed a success, as on the last day, activities day, "everyone seemed to be having a good time". Of course, this would have been the case had we handed out porn mags that day too. Guess what? We start again tomorrow. With the same piece of sh*t we used last time.

One of the ill conceived ideas of CFE that all learning has to be "joined up".  Why? Because some civil servant in Edinburgh decided it sounds good.

Secondary schools are all about subject specialists - history teachers shouldn't be teaching fractions, science teachers shouldn't be teaching woodworking skills and English teachers shouldn't be going over the periodic table.

Most of the IDL projects are very contrived and a load of sh*te, purely to tick boxes - lets do a topic on Scotland for instance that everybody can write shitty lessons on

[edited by: Effinbankers at 22:01 (GMT 0) on 23-4-2012]

I peacefully left my dept meeting when we were to discuss it because the ideas were so sh1te, In my absense they managed enough to tick the box.

I am in total agreement with what all your contributors have said.  What a complete waste of a subject specialist's time for such a load of meaningless p---h!  My question is : Is there anybody out there who DOES favour IDL in Secondary Schools and if so...WHY?

IDL would be a useful occasional contribution to our pupils' learning if it was thought through properly, resourced adequately and prepared thoroughly.  In principle, it would be excellent if adolescent minds many of whom are becoming capable of greater insights and problem solving were exposed to ...

 Do I sound convincing?  Naw.  The IDL I have seen so far has been badly thought out, inadequately resourced and the gaps filled in by hard pressed but inventive teachers.

What would it have taken to have got a few subject experts together from a number of schools and given them a couple of weeks to come up with a decent plan to fit into an actual curriculum and with matrerials which were appropriate and worked with actual kids? 

Instead of that, we get 400 secondary schools trying to re-invent the wheel or re-hash old ideas.  The Honduras challenge is a case in point.  Lots of potential there if class room teachers had been engaged in writing it along with the Institute of Engineers people.  As it is, it is a day off normal lessons and fun in many ways but educationally of little lasting value.  "Deep learning"?  I don't think so.

The theory of IDL is that it allows pupils to see the connections between subjects. However, it is my view that it actually narrows understanding, because it detracts from broad understanding in favour of knowing more than you'll ever need about...Honduras, or the Vikings, or the Commonwealth Games. I (just) remember being at school and learning discrete subjects (and we had to learn a lot in those days, believe me); as I got older, though, I started to make my own connections between subjects: between literature and history and geography and music and science and philosophy, as I developed a world picture. Our pupils will emerge in a fortnight knowing more than I ever did about Honduras and hurricanes but, because of CfE's emphasis on skills over content, b*ggerall about anything else. They'll know how to access information when they "need" it (ever tried winning a pub quiz these days**?), but because they'll only be accessing narrow lines of enquiry, they will actually be able to make fewer connections than before. It's an utter betrayal of our young people. ** I actually won a literary quiz last year (with another); the pub was full of students with smartphones so we thought we were a goner: question 1- 12 photographs of Scottish writers, us victorious, students screwed, because they couldn't identify any on their own account.

Don't know whats sadder - that IDL is ill-thought out and underfunded or that the purpose of content-based education is to improve our chance in pub quizzes.

'Twas a jocular analogy. You have not been paying enough attention, pal.

lol, m8.

.....wondered how long it would take to lower the tone

My niece gave us a wonderful example of her content-free education recently. We were preparing an order of service for a funeral, and in designing the booklet and preparing it for the printer, she showed considerable skill (or, as we now have to say, skills). However, when I told her we'd be singing Psalm 127, she typed in "Sam 127". What was significant was her reaction: "How was I to know? I just thought it was someone out the Bible". The Apostle Sam. She's got a 2:1, by the way.

Don't you just love them?

Cthulthu

My niece gave us a wonderful example of her content-free education recently. We were preparing an order of service for a funeral, and in designing the booklet and preparing it for the printer, she showed considerable skill (or, as we now have to say, skills). However, when I told her we'd be singing Psalm 127, she typed in "Sam 127". What was significant was her reaction: "How was I to know? I just thought it was someone out the Bible". The Apostle Sam. She's got a 2:1, by the way.

 

 

I get your point but I know what a psalm is and how to spell it.  I wasn't taught this at school but learned from seeing the word in church.  Is knowledge of the components of a religious book that important in an increasingly secular world?  

Yes it is because we are all being driven down the route of ignoring the spiritual side of existence.  We're not just like the animals, we have higher levels of consciousness and it's very sad to see that deliberately ignored. Even if there is no religious belief on someone's part it's helpful to understand the world you live in, as the case above highlights.

I am not religious myself but I do agree with Delilah0.

To broaden the argument, how can you understand literature, history, geography, sociology, science, philosophy et al, without a knowledge of religion? But IDL won't provide that, because you'll only get what you need for that specific topic- in Honduras, they're Catholic (I presume), although I doubt you'll investigate the extent to which the tenets of the Catholic faith help people endure or understand hurricanes. What you need is wide education, so that you can apply what you know to new situations which arrive. It's called being educated, but is very far from the BGE currently being promoted, which is about "skills" (mostly very low level) over knowledge, even though the acquisition and application of knowledge is the greatest of the skills.