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. 

 

Tags: professional learning accountability school improvement testing
Posted at 11:14AM Jul 01, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[0]

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.

Tags: mobile wifi filtering
Posted at 08:31PM May 07, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

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.

Tags: professional learning digital literacy
Posted at 08:47AM Jan 16, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

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:

• 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.

Tags: school development sictaswork sictas
Posted at 03:02PM Dec 15, 2008 by John Travers  | 

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)

 

Tags: sictaswork professional learning school improvement teaching
Posted at 12:14PM Dec 15, 2008 by John Travers  | 

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.

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.


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.

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.

• Maintain a tight instructional focus sustained over time.
• 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 ,

Tags: sictaswork sictas professional learning school improvement
Posted at 02:04PM Dec 09, 2008 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

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 ]



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.

Tags: sictas sictascollab sictaswork school development
Posted at 12:25PM Dec 04, 2008 by John Travers  | 

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

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:

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


They discuss the attributes of digital technology to support personalised education under the headings:
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.

Tags: sictas collaboration sictaswork social networking
Posted at 04:48PM Dec 01, 2008 by John Travers  | 

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.

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

Tags: professional learning sictas staff development sictaswork
Posted at 12:42PM Nov 25, 2008 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]

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. 

 

Tags: professional learning sictaswork sictas aust digital national goals school revolution development
Posted at 10:13AM Nov 17, 2008 by John Travers  |