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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  | 

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  | 

Why is education ICT lagging business and government?

 This just released report from EU Commission staff is a down-to-earth and impressive report on progress in implementing ICT goals in education in the EU since the Lisbon Declaration in 2000.

In short, they say that the impact of ICT on education and training has not yet been as great as had been expected. There has been success in building and using infrastructure and teachers generally see ICT as beneficial for learning, but the impact has not been anywhere near the impact of ICT on business and government. The report suggests that much more needs to be done to:

a. embed ICT tools in education systems so that these can be used in multiple ways: administration, communication, learning, etc. as is commonly done by government and business

b. enable much better use of ICT for lifelong and informal learning

c. leveraging innovation and change so that education becomes part of an innovation-friendly society.

"...ICT needs to be seen as a key tool for modernisation and improvement of all aspects of education and training."

A main theme of the report is that "ICT has transformed society and the economy" and is a major lever for innovation, and this has not yet occurred in education. They point to the potential of ICT to support "learner-centred guidance, group work and inquiry projects" but this has not happend on a large scale yet.

It is an often repeated story. The potential is there but is not yet being achieved. Why not?

We can easily list a large number of excuses, but I like to look to comparisons with other sectors and if one looks at two immediate examples: imagine an airline that has not got a comprehensive online booking system, or a newspaper that has no online presence. Innovation and commercial pressure have forced these businesses to change and change they have. The newspaper business is undergoing a revolution that no amount of traditional journalist huffing and puffing can resist.

There is no equivalent pressure on the education sector - yet. In fact there is a renewed push in some quarters for a return to more traditional modes of teaching - particularly in defining curriculum outcomes.

Airlines and newspapers have some very simple fundamental outcomes to focus on: passenger numbers, and sales of newspapers and advertising. If education could focus more closely on some measurable outcomes then we could be more responsive to the new ICT rich environment that allows new ways of functioning. What if we specified and committed ourselves as a society to some clear student outcomes like: ability to research, sift evidence and make considered judgements, problem solving skills, ability to work in a team and achieve tasks, ability to tell stories and communicate in powerful ways, and so on. In other words, be specific about high level learning goals and teachers would innevitably turn to ICT to help them achieve these. Not because it is fashionable to use ICT but because ICT is very powerful support for many of these outcomes. I am making an assumption here that high level learning is frequently supported most effectively by wise use of ICT. I am confident that there is plenty of evidence that this is true.

Sounds simple but obviously isn't. I think we have got our priorities wrong in implementing ICT. We have focused too much on the technology and learning what it can do, then seek to bend and twist our teaching to take advantage of these tools. If we focused more on what we want students to be able to do, and then turned to ICT to assist when appropriate, we would have our minds on the main game and turn to ICT when needed. Too many ICT promoters (like me) have been, or appear to be, focused on the technology rather than what the learning is intended to be.

The practical problem with this approach is that it does not address the need for teachers and administrators to be working simultaneously on the chicken and the egg. While focusing on the egg of outcomes, one needs to be simultaneously working on how to build a chicken. By this convoluted metaphor I mean that I am asking teachers to focus on learning outcomes and simultaneously be learning about a wide range of ICT applications so that when the need arises, he/she can turn to the appropriate ICT tool to assist in the learning.

But then I guess journalists and editors and publishers have been forced to do this sort of thinking and acting.

 

Tags: staff development sictas school development professional learning
Posted at 11:18AM Oct 20, 2008 by John Travers  |  Comments[2]

Digital Revolution: where's the gratitude?

I attended the symposia on the Digital Education Revolution last week in Sydney and Brisbane last week and was surprised by the lack of a sense of gratitude to the federal government for this initiative. Some of the speakers mentioned that it will bring some opportunities, but from the participants there seemed to be a greater focus on problems rather than a sense that this is a significant step forward in the use of ICT in schools. I guess we don't have a great tradition of gratitude to governments, grudgingly accepting benefits as a return of our own tax payments. 

But having been plugging away at the use of ICT in schools for a long time, this looks like a break-through to me. Implementation of grand plans for the use of ICT has always been frustrated simply by lack of student access to computers. It is a fat lot of good having a great vision of how to use ICT when I can only get into the computer room twice a week for a 50 min lesson!

Certainly there are lots of problems still to be dealt with: infrastructure and staff skills to name just two. But isn't it about time we recognise that this is a very significant change for the better in the overall environment for the use of computers in secondary schools at least? The ball is landing firmly in the court of educators to take up the challenge to make the revolution actually occur.

 

 

 

 

Tags: school development aust digital revolution
Posted at 02:28PM May 31, 2008 by John Travers  |