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Wednesday Jul 01, 2009

What did they learn? Not a bad question for schools.

I have been working away for some months on researching a paper on professional learning, and some of my previous posts late last year reflect this. I have now published a fairly extensive report on what I discovered in this search and here it is: What did they learn? The title of the site suggest the main finding - that the focus of everything in a school should be directed to improving student's learning. This may seem to be a trite thing to say, but it has clearly not been the case. As a principal of a school for about 30 years I can say that we focused on lots of things in the '70s to '90s including school culture, democratic decision making, staff development and a hundred other things, and paid little attention to measuring student outcomes. We certainly cared about student learning, but we concentrated on achieving a good environment for learning and agonised about how to motivate, encourage, support and recognise good learning. But we didn't measure it in a systematic way and did not compare our measurements very much. We got into a huge battle for the last 20 years about external testing, and I was very active in this fight, and much of the criticism of testing is valid. This is reinforced by an excellent article by Ken Boston Our Early Start at Making Children Unfit for Work.

The trouble is, that in that fight we lost some perspective, and while condemning some testing we drifted into a culture in which no comparative assessment of student performance was acceptable. We developed a hundred reasons not to compare one teacher's results with another's. Teaching became secret teacher's business into which no one can intrude. The research into school improvement makes a good case for bringing these two extreme view closer together and achieving teacher professionalism and accountability for student performance. 


 

Thursday May 07, 2009

It's curtains for filter-to-death school administrators

Yet another technical development suggests that school administrators who seek to manage all the problems of students accessing the internet by filtering it to death will fail. The alternative, of accepting the internet, managing it with moderation and educating students and parents and teachers in its responsible use is still there.

This article in the NY Times of 7th May describes a new service on offer by some of the big 3G telcos in the US. It is a tiny 3G wi-fi hub that works off the regular phone network and allows a small group of people withing a few meters of the device to connect to the internet via a $40 a month plan. It works anywhere there is a 3G network. The little gadget called MiFi (me-fi, get it?) stays in your pocket or handbag and will work on the train, in the garden or, most interestingly, at school. So it will be very difficult indeed to supervise access to devices like this. Maybe a better approach will be to make their use in school time unnecessary by opening up school networks to reasonable access.

Friday Jan 16, 2009

The Digital Natives Myth

One of the pervasive myths of the digital literacy landscape is that young people are generally 'in' the digital world and older people are generally struggling to engage with it. The catchiest term for this is that young people are Digital Natives (being born into the digital age) and the rest of us are Digital Immigrants (coming to in in later life). While this is literally true, the conclusions about the gap in engagement with ICT are frequently exaggerated if not simply false.

I have been teaching a group of 30 or so university students in a multimedia course for the last four years and the Digital Native notion has each year been demonstrated to be false. These have been students who chose a computer learning course yet about a third have quite modest skills in using computers, another third were competent and about a third were behaving as Digital Natives are supposed to behave - using blogs, social networking and generally being creative users.

This issue has been well researched by a project involving several universities and a collection of their reports is at Educating the Net Generation (Uni Melb.) and their large scale study supports my simple observations. See 'The Net Generation are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies'. They also demonstrate in another story that the gap in skills between university students and staff is not as great as generally reported.

It is interesting to ask why such ideas as the Natives-Immigrants gap are accepted so readily in many forums. I think it is because it is an idea that Henny-Penny Optimists enjoy. The Henny-Penny Optimists are experts in ICT who promote a nicely contradictory point of view that, a) the world as we know it is ending, everything is changing, revolution is at hand, young people's brains are being re-wired by use of technology, and b) the future with ICT is liberating, collaborative and totally wonderful. Like the original Henny-Penny, these people create a lot of alarm and unnecessary panic. When the HPOs promote the Digital Natives idea, they alarm many teachers and administrators, particulalry those who have low ICT skills about the impossible and widening gap between themselves and their students.

The reality, as usual, is much more complex and not as exciting as simplistic generalisations like Digital Natives suggest.

Monday Dec 15, 2008

The simple formula for successful school systems

The OECD commissioned a report from McKinsey & Company on successful school systems and the report was published in 2007: How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top . The report concludes that there are three unremarkable things that high performing systems do consistently:

  1. They get the right people to become teachers (the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers).
  2. They develop these people into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction).
  3. They put in place systems and targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to ready the highests performance is to raise the standard of every student).
The top systems include England, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Boston, Japan. The report is very readable and basically hopeful because the answer is not just money or extraordinary leadership, but consistency and determination focused on some basiclly straightforward targets. Take teacher quality for example. The report says that all but one of the top systems filter teacher training applicants before University, and then again on entry to the profession. They achieve this in part by restricting the number of teacher training places, which raises the standard of those accepted. They set beginning salaries a little higher, and flatten later salary rises. Most low performing systems have relatively open admission to teacher training, consequent lowering of standards, then there are many graduates for each teaching position, leading to a generally low morale and status for teacher preparation. There is more to it than these measures, but a few smart policy  measures have a large impact and, the report claims, prove that the calibre of graduate teachers can be significantly improved at little net increase in cost.

The top performing systems invest great effort in developing their human capital, creating a culture of permanent review and improvement, focused on student performance, for which teachers and schools are accountable. The major point here is that developing human capital is the goal and accountability measures are one of the means to achieve this. Not the other way around. The McKinsey report makes a key point regarding improvement under the heading:

"NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT
Top-performing systems are relentless in their focus on improving the quality of instruction in their classrooms. Yet this focus on instruction, though a necessary condition, is in itself insufficient to bring about improvement. In order to improve instructing, school systems need to find ways to change fundamentally what happens in the classrooms. At the level of individual teachers, this implies getting three things to happen:
  • Individual teachers need to become aware of specific weaknesses in their own practice. In most cases, this not only involves building an awareness of what they do but the mindset underlying it.
  • Individual teachers need to gain understanding of specific best practices. In general, this can only be achieved through the demonstration of such practices in an authentic setting.
  • Individual teachers need to be motivated to make the necessary improvements. In general, this requires a deeper change in motivation that cannot be achieved through changing material incentives. Such changes come about when teachers have high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and above all, a collective belief in their common ability to make a difference to the education of the children they serve."
It is difficult to imagine how these can be achieved without a 'learning community' approach to professional learning. This is an environment where teachers can safely consider 'weakensses is their own practice', test things in 'authentic settings' and find 'a shared sense of purpose'.

A dominant message from this report is that top systems are overwhelmingly consistent. Everything fits together aiming at the three ingredients: teacher quality, instructional focus, everyone learns.

Mike Lawson: It's about what teachers do

Mike Lawson made the following interesting and quite lengthy comment on "Professional standards Trump 'loose coupling' so I have posted it here to make it more visible.

John: We hear our politicians now argue that one of the most important factors affecting student achievementis teacher quality.  In this case I think they are right.  There is now strong evidence that the most important influence on student acheivement is teacher quality.  This is why in school effectiveness research the between-classroom differences are more powerful than the between-school differences.  In the OECD publication 'Teachers matter' (OECD, 2005, p. 26 etc) it is put like this:

"The broad consensus is that teacher quality is the single most importantschool variable influencing student achievement...Students of the most effective teachers have learning gains four time greater than students of the least effective, which accumulate over time".

Locally Ken Rowe of ACER argues: "When all other sources of variation are taken into account, including gender, social backgrounds of students and differences between schools, the largest differences in student achievement are between classes. That is, by far the most important source of variation in student achievement is teacher quality." ( Ken Rowe ).   How could we improve teacher quality?

We have to work on the quality of what the teachers knows that influences how the teacher acts - all sorts of actions. (The importance of action is suggested by considering whether you could teach if you were totally paralysed. Soon as I begin to teach I act - make a sign with my hand, say something, write something, etc. As soon as i start wotk on my poetry lesson plan I am acting.  When I start to speak to introduce my lesson on poetry I am acting, etc. If you could help me improve my poetry knowldege, and help me improve my lesson presentation actions you would be likely make a positive impact on the quality of my teaching. You could check this out by observing myplanning and teaching and then by checking out the quality of the
knowledge and learning actions of my students. Of course I might need some more time to do these things, so my principal or VC would be improving the quality of their leadership if they set up conditions that supported this, and the curriculum designers would be improving the quality of their curriculum design if they set up conditions that allowed me and my students time to construct the powerful knowledge that would enable us to solve the important problems identified in the curriculum. This doesn't sound like rocket science, but there is some science to support it.  What's more I see some small signs of encouragement that some principals and curriculum designers are acting in the way I suggest (Not sure about the VCs!).

Last week I heard Barry McGaw talk about the National Curriculum. Encouragingly he seems
determined to take note of the evidence on the sense of spending more time covering less content in the curriculum.  I also heard a principal talk about the timetabling of space for teachers to work on their projects designed to improve the delivery of the curriculum using ICT. These moves seem to me to be in right direction.

Yes, and I wonder if this focusing of the curriculum on a smaller body of content may complement the focus that leading school reformers are placing on the art of  instruction. (JT)

 

Tuesday Dec 09, 2008

Professional standards trump 'loose coupling'

John Travers
I recently read an article written in 2000 by Richard Elmore that has severely dented a concept that was important to school education in the English speaking world during most of my career as a principal.  He wrote Building a New Structure For School Leadership to explain why large-scale 'standards-based reform' is critical to the survival of public education. The shocking aspect of this paper for me was his criticism of the concept of 'loose coupling' which I widely touted in the '80s and 90s. Elmore blames the notion of loose-coupling for much of our current troubles. Loose coupling was not a term on everybody's lips, but the concept was widespread.

juggler"This [loose coupling] view, in brief, posits that the "technical core" of education, detailed decisions about what should be taught at any given time, how it should be taught, what students should be expected to learn at any given time, how they should be grouped within classrooms for purposes of instruction, what they should be required to do to demonstrate their knowledge, and, perhaps most importantly, how their learning should be evaluated, resides in individual classrooms, not in the organizations that surround them."

He then accurately describes the dominant culture of schools in the west for the last few decades where principals were promoted on their ability to do everything except focus on student outcomes.

"...direct involvement in instruction is among the least frequent activities performed by administrators of any kind at any level..."

We did everything we could to develop a culture and environment where students learnt successfully, but as Elmore explains, much of our work was to provide a buffer behind which teachers could engage privately in the mysterious business of teaching and learning.

Elmore then point to the groundswell of community demand for improved school standards and this has become obvious even in Australia since 2000. But he advocates a strong emphasis on accountability for teaching not as a weapon to punish poor performing schools, but as an accompaniment to a rigorous staff learning program.

"...standards-based reform hits at a critical weakness of the existing institutional structure, namely its inability to account for why certain students master academic content and can demonstrate academic performance while others do not. When the core technology of schools is buried in the individual decisions of classroom teachers and buffered from external scrutiny, outcomes are the consequence of mysterious processes that no one understands at the collective, institutional level. Therefore, school people and the public at large are free to assign causality to whatever their favorite theory suggests: weak family structures, poverty, discrimination, lack of aptitude, peer pressure, diet, television, etc.

So Elmore makes what I think is the best case for school reform that I have seen over many years. It is: build the human capital in the school on a large scale basis, remove the privacy veil from teaching and use rigorous assessment of learning to guide this process and demonstrate the  teachers' and the schools' achievements.

Design Principles in this article for large-scale improvement in school systems are:
  • Maintain a tight instructional focus sustained over time.Target
  • Routinize Accountability for Practice and Performance in Face-to-Face Relationships.
  • Reduce Isolation and Open Practice Up to Direct Observation, Analysis, and Criticism.
  • Exercise Differential Treatment Based on Performing and Capacity, Not on Volunteerism.
  • Devolve Increased discretion Based on Practice and Performance.

Elmore R, Building a New Structure For School Leadership, 2000 Albert Shanker Institute ,

Thursday Dec 04, 2008

Learning Communites: professional learning 3

John Travers
There has been much discussion in staff development circles about learning communities as a key basis for sustained school and staff learning, and the concept has been mentioned regularly in SICTAS discussions. Learning Communities can sound like a woolly exercise from the 1970s but that is not the way it is being practices in good schools today.

Andy Hargreaves is an educator with a long standing high reputation in school improvement and he talks often about professional maturity which is a prerequisite for effective learning communities. There may appear to be a contradiction between this 'gentle' approach to school improvement and the 'hard' test based approach to accountability that some countries and systems have implemented. However there is a comprehensive approach that is gaining currency that is based on real professionalism which combines the best of principles of professional learning through learning communities accompanied by rigorous accountability.

The diagram below illustrates the elements that Hargreaves sees in a professional learning community. He is a passionate believer in the true professionalism of good teaching, the essentially moral purpose of teaching and its pivotal role in helping society adjust to the demands of the knowledge society. [Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity ]

Professsional Learning Communities

Andy Hargreaves [OECD 'Teachers Matter' 2004 ]

Hargreaves explains how teachers can only respond to the emerging new learning needs of their students by being continuing learners themselves. They can maintain this with good leadership and by learning alongside and with their colleagues. But he and other writers in this field such as Richard Elmore are not talking about the   professionalism that was evident during my early years as a school principal in the '70s and '80s which I think was not yet professionally mature. There wasn't enough concentration on the elements to the right of the diagram - evidence based on a focus on learning and teaching. We were moving in those days away from a rigid and narrow curriculum to a very different one, serving a quite different society and the emphasis was on collaboration. Today we are still on the move to a new curriculum and professional learning and accountability have to be achievable side by side.


Monday Dec 01, 2008

Two reports on changing times: professional learning 2

John Travers
In investigating issues of staff capacity in using ICT for the SICTAS report a prominent issue is the mixed messages that teachers are receiving across the country regarding the purposes for using ICT in schools. Some systems and authorities suggest revolutionary reform of education resulting from the use of ICT. Others seem to merely expect that ICT will increase efficiency in delivering the same curriculum. Two recent reports support the more radical view, and suggest that the time certainly are a-changing.

The first is Living and Learning  with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project just published by the MacArthur Foundation. It is the result of a lengthy set of studies of how youth engage with social media and provides interesting and reassuring information on the value of these activities.

Living and Learning  with New Media

Today's youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

Self-Directed, Peer-Based Learning  In both friendship-driven and interest-driven online activity, youth create and navigate new forms of expression and rules for social behavior. In the process, young people acquire various forms of technical and media literacy by exploring new interests, tinkering, and "messing around" with new forms of media. They may start with a Google search or "lurk" in chat rooms to learn more about their burgeoning interest. Through trial and error, youth add new media skills to their repertoire, such as how to create a video or customize games or their MySpace page. Teens then share their creations and receive feedback from others online. By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning. Others "geek out" and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. What makes these groups unique is that while adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting. Youth respect one another's authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predetermined goals.

New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn, and this raises a new set of issues that educators, parents, and policymakers should consider.

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access "serious" online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions.

Recognizing important distinctions in youth culture and literacy. Friendship-driven and interest-driven online participation have very different kinds of social connotations. For example, whereas friendship-driven activities center on peer culture, adult participation is more welcome in the latter, more "geeky," forms of learning. In addition, the content, ways of relating, and skills that youth value are highly variable depending on what kinds of social groups they associate with. This diversity in forms of literacy means that it is problematic to develop a standardized set of benchmarks to measure levels of new media and technical literacy.

Capitalizing on peer-based learning. Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively
by adults as a means of "peer pressure." Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting
"learning goals," particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

New Role for Education?
Youths' participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of it as a process guiding youths' participation in public life more generally? Finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

The report contradicts a lot of hand-wringing in the media and some education circles that seems to be based on the idea that if lots of young people are doing something they enjoy together then it can't be useful and is probably corrupting them, as did comics, rock and roll and television. They carefully addressed the issue of online safety:
"In our work, contrary to fears that social norms are eroding online, we did not find many your who were engaging in beaviours that were riskier than what they did in offline contexts."

The notion that there may be a significant role for informal education via adults joining self-help activities online is intriguing.

The report does not suffer from future-hype, but calmly and with rare evidence makes that case that schools are ignoring this world to their loss.

Learner Engagement: A review of learner-voice initiatives


The second report is Learner Engagement: A review of learner voice initiatives across the UK's eucation sectors (futurelab) . The UK has in recent years placed strong emphasis on personalised education for its own sake as a desirable attribute of modern education. And of course, the pursuit of personalised education can be facilitated very powerfully through ICT. Learner voice is seen as an important part of personalised education and student engagement. The 'Learner Engagement' report not surprisingly includes a section on the use of digital technology. http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/other-research-reports/Other-Research-Report1095

"The internet has revolutionised the ability of individuals to connect with people from different geographies and backgrounds online compared with the greater restrictions of face-to-face interactions. The vast amount of information that is now available to people, either through their laptops or mobile phones, is astonishing, with profiles of individuals and organisations availale for anyone to communicate with and connect with in a non-intrusive manner. People with similar issues and concerns can now acknowledge one another, learn from each other and staff communicating with one another, creating new networks. In addition, people are able to tag websites and key interests through Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and social bookmarking." p34 

They discuss the attributes of digital technology to support personalised education under the headings:
Make connections
Foster collaboration
Encourage communication
Provide a dynamic repository

These two authoritative reports provide evidence that the educational times are a-changing, and that some important shifts in power are occuring, bringing some wonderful opportunities to learners and teachers.

Tuesday Nov 25, 2008

Professional Learning - what works No 1.

I am involved in a national project ( Strategic ICT Advisory Service - SICTAS ) that includes researching the building of staff capabilities in the use of ICT in learning. This entry is the first in a series canvassing the issue of what I initially was calling 'staff development'. It was pointed out in an online discussion that a more appropriate term might be 'professional learning'. "A rose by any other name..." I muttered to myself. But now, a little wiser, I think there is a significant difference between the two and the words 'professional' and 'learning' have real meaning if we are to help build capacity among teachers.

Professionalism seems to be returning to centre stage with a renewed focus on accountability and deep learning. There is a lot of evidence that deep learning is the result of collaboration, rigor, testing and trialling and measuring outcomes via student performance. It is not just externally developed courses. Accountability means monitoring performance at a number of levels - rich observation, student results, comparative testing and more. It is not just one of these.

Richard Elmore , sometimes called 'the father of school reform', has some interesting things to say about what happens when teachers' work is over simplified and they are not treated as professionals.

"An even more costly misconception ... is that schools will do better if they are given clear information about their performance. In this view, delivering clear information to schools and their communities about their performance will have a galvanising effect on the people who work in them, and will cause them to do something they would not otherwise have done to improve teaching and student performance. ....... In fact, people in schools are working pretty reliably at the limit of their existing knowledge and skill. Giving them information about the effects of their practice, other things being equal, does not improve their practice. Giving them information in the presence of new knowledge and skill, under the right conditions, might result in the improvement of their practice, which might, in turn, result in increased student performance." *

This is a failure to treat educators as professionals if the assumption is that simply delivering test results is a basis for improvement. He then goes on in this chapter to describe a mixture of learning opportunities based on the local context, sound educational research plus accountability processes that have a good record of success in bringing about professional learning.

I am very interested in his observation that "people in schools are working pretty reliably at the limit of their existing knowledge and skill." It is very unlikely that laziness is the problem. Teachers want the opportunity and the means to learn.

* Improving School Leadership, Volume 2: Case Studies on System Leadership, Directorate for Education OECD, Edited by Beatriz Pont, Deborah Nusche and David Hopkins

Monday Nov 17, 2008

National Educational Goals and ICT

The  National Declaration of Educational Goals for Young Australians is in draft form for consultation.  Prepared by the Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA), this statement will be the new national policy for education taking the place of previous Hobart and Adelaide Declarations. [ National Declaration ]

The draft says some interesting and powerful things about the impact of ICT on education.

In the Preamble... 

"Rapid and continuing advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the
way we share, use, develop and process information and technology, and there has been a massive
shift in power to consumers in general, and to learners specifically. In this digital age, young people
generally need to be highly literate in ICT and increasingly expect to be able to use such technologies in
their learning. While there is some knowledge about how to effectively embed these technologies in
learning in schools, we need to make a quantum leap in this effectiveness over the next decade."

'...a massive shift in power to... learners...'

and a little later...

"This new declaration recognises fundamental changes in how students learn driven by technology and
drawing on better information about how learners learn. It acknowledges that the skills of critical, cross-
disciplinary thinking are vital in all 21st century occupations and are already occurring beyond the school gate in the way young people are networked into online communities. It acknowledges that these
sophisticated skills are built upon the achievement of basic literacy, numeracy, social and digital media
skills."

 '...fundamental changes in how students learn...'

 This language promises to provides a much needed unequivocal statement about how the game is changing, that business as usual in schooling is not acceptable and ICT is not just an embelishment to the curriculum but part of a new environment. 

 

John Travers


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