Tom Bennett: “Educating children well is an art”

Press Release from Caxton College

Caxton College’s II Educational Innovation Forum emphasised the need for teachers to constantly recycle, to avoid “fake” education.

Professor Tom Bennett visited Valencia in April 2018 to provide some convincing evidence to shake up those teachers who resist change. “Teachers cannot educate blindly. They have to consider their educational models, contrast them with others and research until they know whether what they are practising in class works,” said Bennett in the conference given at the Educational Innovation Forum organised by Caxton College for the second consecutive year.

On this occasion, the talk was given in conjunction with ResearchEd, a non-profit making British organisation led by Bennett, whose main objective is to motivate teachers around the world to organise themselves through research projects, to confirm that their classroom teaching “really helps the students to learn”.

Bennett, who also serves as an adviser to the British government on education, says that for an education system to work well, a revolution has to take place at the grassroots. In other words, it must be teachers themselves who come to a scientific consensus on the best educational methodologies for classroom teaching. In the words of Bennett, who is a teacher himself, this process can be achieved “by creating educational communities, organising conferences to share knowledge and research, attending training sessions, using social networks as a channel to exchange opinions, but above all, having an investigative mind and being self-critical”.

“I have visited many countries and I have found that everyone has the same educational problems. Teachers continue to hold false educational beliefs, or myths, because they get carried along by tradition and assume that it still works for students,” says Bennett. With this call to attention for the educational community, Bennett encourages teachers to question their educational model and to be aware that students can learn more” if they receive clear instructions, if there is a permanent dialogue between teacher and student and if the curriculum is constantly reworked and reviewed”.

With activities of this kind, Caxton College aims to share new ideas with society at large, and to provide stimulating debates, “that serve as a guide and inspiration to the educational community in order to consolidate a pedagogical system that meets the needs of a new generation of students”, affirmed Marta Gil, Vice Principal of this British school located in Puçol (Valencia), at the close of the Educational Innovation Forum.