What doesn’t work; spraying and praying
The expression ‘spraying and praying’ comes from warfare and describes a situation where an automatic weapon is used indiscriminately to spray the enemy with gunfire while praying that some of the bullets find their target. It is used as an analogy in input-based education systems, where groups of learners are sometimes ‘sprayed’ with an abundance of knowledge that might be useful sometime, in the hope that they are thus better prepared for the future. In some Partner Countries for example, the VET curriculum used to have close to 20 different subjects, and we saw instances where astrophysics was part of the fixed VET curriculum in more than one country. In addition, the ‘frontal’ style of teaching, in which a teacher stands in front of rows of learners, providing all learners with the same treatment and limited interaction, is a form of spraying and praying. It assumes that all learners will be able to pick up the knowledge and skills from the lessons provided at the same speed, and the whole curriculum can move forward in line with the timetable. Even if assessment showed that a share of the learners had not yet mastered the knowledge and skills, they were supposed to have done so. Spraying and praying is simply not effective.
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