Teach Secondary Issue 14.2

Pay and display A frustrated Gordon Cairns sets out his reasons for why CPD courses need to jettison the ‘make a poster’ finales... Y oumight think that a teacher grumbling about a time-saving feature is about as likely as a student demanding more French verbs to parse – but I’m sure I’mnot alone in feeling somewhat peeved when I discover that the really interesting CPD I’ve just signed up for culminates inmaking a poster – and nothing else. For some things, a shortcut simply doesn’t cut it. When an intensive course of training adds up to little more than the production of a single sheet of paper that displays our findings, we attendees could be forgiven for wondering what all the effort of organising cover, or rushing to a twilight course after work was for, if all we ultimately end up with is a pretty graphic. Selling ourselves short Alas, poster production seems to be steadily creeping into more and more personal development training, as the endpoint of the learning ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications experience. I believe any training course that entails a labour-intensive research project – and potentially much reflection and evidence-gathering from our own teaching practice – merits rather more than a mere poster communicating our discoveries. As reflective practitioners, we’re selling ourselves short. Our completed posters will typically be pinned to the four walls of the training room, so that we and our fellow poster-makers can then circulate around them in a clockwise direction, slowly absorbing all the educational discoveries we’ve collectively made. In reality, those first few graphics we see might be closely perused, but our focus will quickly start to wander. As a group, our thoughts will turn to when the next coffee break is due. Or we become engrossed in chats with our colleagues. And, if we’re being honest, we’ll take more than a few glances back at our own displayed work, hoping to glimpse a gaggle of rubbernecking teachers agog at our outstanding academic research, rather than focusing on the work displayed before us. The ‘workload’ argument The course organisers, meanwhile, believe themselves to be doing us attendees a favour, by reducing our workload. Theoretically, posters are much quicker to make than a PowerPoint presentation or mini essay. They can also be assessed more speedily too, thus reducing the workload of the (well compensated, I’d expect) training provider. Not all teachers will respond to the poster task in the same way. The conscientious and more visually literate will spend forever perfecting a publishable poster, choosing only the most impactful colours, font sizes and graphics. Conversely, some produced by others may as well be daubed with the words ‘ Will this do? ’ I would imagine that pretty much anyone who undertakes a learning experience needs to feel that their learning is valued – which is something a poster simply doesn’t do. A poster is as much about about its presentation as the content. For the more visually clumsy among us, putting our amateurish doodlings on display can be a dispiriting experience, unless accompanied by a more substantial piece of work – such as an essay, or possibly a talk of some kind. Steadydevaluing Even in academia – where the practice of presenting research information via a poster format first originated – posters are becoming steadily devalued. Researchers have been presenting their findings at scientific conferences using this simple format ever since the ready availability of computer-assisted desktop publishing. Their typical aim now is to encourage fellow scientists to stop, ask questions and then read the concrete research that backs up the poster’s assertions. More recently, however, some academics have become uneasy about using the poster format, since event organisers won’t necessarily endorse the findings shown on a poster if its creator has had to pay for the privilege – as I’ve previously discovered to my cost. Some years ago, I submitted a poster to a conference, and found that if it were accepted, I’d have had to pay a fee of £250. So I declined. Maybe my antipathy towards posters began as disguised form of bitterness…? At the end of a year’s course of study, we don’t ask our students to create a pictorial representation of all that they’ve learned. And yet, we’re now being asked to accept a poster as the culmination of our own studies. It really doesn’t make any sense. Posters do have their place – that place being on the walls of teenagers’ bedrooms. 35 teachwire.net/secondary C P D