School leadership and 'moral purpose'.

I have been interested in the concept of 'moral purpose' in education. This has increasingly been a feature of the leadership literature.

Our New Zealand Ministry of Education has this to say:

Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school. Barber and Fullan (2005) explain that: “The central moral purpose consists of constantly improving student achievement and ensuring that achievement gaps, wherever they exist, are narrowed.” For a school to achieve this, there needs to be a shared commitment to explicit values.

Source http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Attitudes-values-and-ethics/Moral-purpose-and-shared-leadership

Professor David Hopkins, in an article titled 'Leadership for powerful learning' (ACEL Journal Term 2 2015, Vol 37 No 2) states:

Leaders are driven by a moral purpose about enhancing student learning. Moral purpose activates the passion to reach for the goal and prompts leaders to empower teachers and others to make schools a critical force for improving communities"

Now there's a powerful statement.

Eric Mazur on "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"

Last week I had the privilege of attending this year's Edutech 2015 conference in Brisbane. Much about the conference was a mere shadow of the previous few years, but the stand-out session was the opening keynote address by Eric Mazur of Harvard University titled "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"in which Mazur posits that current assessment is not fit for purpose.

My colleagues and I co-constructed some notes during the session, but it is doubtless easier to watch an earlier version of the same address given by Mazur in 2013. It is very similar to that which he gave last week.

Where's yer evidence Part 2

Here's a nice counterpoint to my previous post, written by Claire Amos.

Where's the research? Why we need to stop looking in the rear vision mirror at longitudinal research and data.

Thanks Claire.

Educational mythology... where's ya data?

The world of education is awash with myths and has been for decades. In my early years practice was so disconnected from data and evidence that to claim teaching as a profession might have seemed to be stretching the truth to those ‘in the know’ (although oddly I suspect that it was viewed as more of a profession by the general public at that time than it is now).  I recall pondering (only very briefly) how I would have felt being attended by a doctor or dentist who paid similar regard to research evidence (thankfully I never have been). Things have changed, and teachers generally not only incorporate the use of achievement data into their practice, but also the growing body of good robust research evidence that has accumulated worldwide on what helps cause learning.

One of the seminal moments in this regard must be the publication of John Hattie’s book ‘Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement’ (2008). In the book Hattie and his international research team brought together a vast amount of research data, all carefully sifted to ensure that only quality data was incorporated. The book makes heavy going as a piece of reading as the density of quality material is so high. However it has made for a much better informed profession. Sadly despite work of this sort, some serious myths persist.

One of the classic myths is the ‘learning styles’ debate. In his later book ‘Visible learning for teachers (2012) Hattie says “.. it is not intended to delve into learning styles (visual, kinaesthetic etc), for the effectiveness of which there is zero supporting evidence, “. Professor Steve Wheeler of Plymouth University takes up the cudgel in this debate as well in a blog post titled ‘A Convenient Untruth’ (http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/convenient-untruth.html) in which he says:

“In an excellent expose on learning styles, Riener and Willingham (2010) argue this:

"...learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming “common knowledge.” Its widespread acceptance serves as an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon called the confirmation bias. When evaluating our own beliefs, we tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore contrary information, even when we encounter it repeatedly. When we see someone who professes to be a visual learner excel at geography and an auditory learner excel at music, we do not seek out the information which would disprove our interpretation of these events (can the auditory learner learn geography through hearing it? Can the visual learner become better at music by seeing it?)" “

Another more recent controversy arises over the current concept of Modern Learning Environments or MLEs. This is the notion that we physically and intellectually deconstruct the classroom. We place two or three classes of learners into one space with several teachers, and allow student choice of what they learn and when. Apparently there is a massive intuitive appeal to the concept, one pushed by the Ministry of Education across the state school sector, I understand. While I have serious concerns over the concept, even more concerning is the fact that this major change to education is being pushed in what appears to me to be an absence of data. If there is robust replicable data out there, I can’t find it. I have looked. A lot. The debate resorts to a lot of rhetoric, with the suggestion that the value of MLEs is so common sense that you’d be a fool to challenge it. Apparently this is where the modern business world is going, and we’d ignore that trend at our peril.

I was intrigued to see a piece in the business publication ‘The Main Report’ titled ‘HR - Does a cool office really matter?’ (The Main Report, 11 May 2015) in which the opening statement is:

Recruiting experts Hays says the technology sector’s famously alternative work spaces are being replicated by many businesses, but it asks - do they have the desired impact on employee productivity, performance and retention? The answer is - it depends on the organisation's culture.”

As I see it, someone has decided that alternative open plan workspaces and collaboration are the way of the future. However in the school context it seems to me that this fails to recognise two factors:

1. Employees in the workplace are not adolescents who are right in the middle of that process of testing boundaries and learning about themselves and the world around them.
2. Even in these alternative work environments people need space to sit down at a desk in a quiet environment and think, create or problem solve. They need to be able to close the door to the rest of the world and get on with things.

Am I a fan of Modern Learning Environments? Possibly not as they are currently portrayed. However I AM a fan of what you might call Modern Learning Pedagogy. There are new ways to learn, and there is a growing body of research evidence that these new approaches work. We observe in our classes many of those things that the research evidence seems to support. However we monitor what the research says, and modify our practice in the light of research and experience. For example in the midst of the laptop programme we are considering the issue of reading. It is perhaps no surprise to many that reading electronically is different to reading on paper. It seems that there is often less comprehension, less depth to reading done online, or on electronic devices. The nice thing is that this thing called neuroplasticity of the brain seems to mean that we can retrain the brain to read carefully, closely, with an eye to detail. For four years now we have had a focus on critical literacy at College. This embraces a spectrum of issues from the basic skills of reading and writing to the more complex skills of critical thinking and analysis. As she scanned research literature and articles on the subject (part of a regular routine for most of us) a colleague found a fascinating article  in ‘The New Yorker’ titled ’Being a better online reader’.   It can be accessed here: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/being-a-better-online-reader

A: Yeah, me too.

At College we maintain what we call a blended learning environment. That is, one in which we use the right tool for the job, and there will be times when laptops are not the right tool for the job. So while a lot of reading takes place online, we also have boys reading from and working on paper. We have boys interacting  in person as well as online. We have boys putting their laptops away and taking up a hammer or a paintbrush, throwing a ball or sprinting down the length of Upper.

As a consequence of this sort of data, and our own daily data gathering  in classes, teachers modify their practice. Reading is important, and reading a traditional paper book is  valuable exercise. Staff acknowledge this and encourage reading at every opportunity. I have mentioned in previous columns that we need to continue to encourage reading. This will at times mean reading online, but it should also mean reading on paper. Perhaps it’s only true for those of us of a certain age but there is something about the feel, the smell, the look of  a paper book that makes it appealing. It would seem that that is what the research confirms. I find it a little ironic that in an educational era in which we emphasise critical thinking so much, so many people continue to buy into educational myths revealing perhaps a lack of critical thinking.

Incidentally, if valid robust data comes to light to show the MLEs do indeed cause more significant learning than the existing alternatives, I will of course recant. Put another way I will of course ’think critically’ about the evidence and my position.

And as a footnote, last year I was transporting some junior boys to sport and their conversation went something like this:

A: You got a kindle?

B: Yeah

A: Got many books on it?

B: No, I prefer paper books.

Education for innovation

I have been doing  a lot of thinking about what the future shape of education might be. This began because we have some opportunities arising at work for curriculum change, fed by an appetite for some change. Recent events have offered additional insights that are tantalising to say the least.

Recently a number of us visited some of the folk at the EPIC centre in Christchurch. The insights gained form the visit and ensuing conversations were exciting to say the least, and perhaps the most exciting aspect of those conversations is the changing nature of society, and the need to promote innovation and wealth creation.

This started some ears back with Jane Gilbert's work 'Catching the knowledge wave' in which she effectively redefined knowledge for know stuff to doing stuff. For Jane knowledge had ceased to be a noun and become a verb. The EPIC guys want people who can work independently, people who are literate and numerate, but people who can think outside the square. These people are risk takers, not necessarily with wealth, but certainly with ideas.

I posed the question in a recent parent newsletter:

"I want to know how we produce even more innovative and creative people who become leaders in their fields. And when I mention fields of endeavour I have to confess to being agnostic. We might well be talking about the gaming industry or industrial chemistry, but equally we might be talking about the music industry or the law, the visual arts or languages and diplomacy."

As  a consequence I have been pondering how schools need to restructure to do this. The purpose of this post isn't to answer that question but to consider the circumstances in which that question must be answered. My own early thinking went something like this:

We want teenagers to be innovators, we want them to be risk takers (in terms of their thinking, they are already risk takers in many other ways). We want them to move beyond knowing to thinking. Of course this doesn't mean that we abandon knowing stuff. You can't think in a vacuum, you have to know stuff in order to be able to think about it. The question then is how do we encourage teens to get to know stuff in a way that is engaging, in a way that harnesses their natural risk taking behaviour in a safe way?

At this point in time I created this obstacle in my mind: education is currently judged by society by a series of outcomes best defined in terms of the assessment/qualifications system, in our case NCEA. We have to teach to the assessment in order to get the results that communities judge as a measure of a quality school and a quality education, so we are hide bound to stay with the current industrial model of education organised into time periods, subject specialists and classrooms.

The alternative is to have students organise and manage projects focussed on innovation and creativity. But hang on, most teens can't do that particularly well, so maybe we just have a 'select few' able to do this while the remainder conform to the traditional models?

Well actually maybe more teens can do this than we think. And maybe NCEA isn't the constraint we think it is at all, maybe it is the liberating mechanism with its modular approach. Maybe we have taken up the cudgel with NCEA (of which I am a fan by the way) by simply slotting it into the old industrial system. Maybe in fact NCEA is the system for the new era of innovation. I am increasingly of the opinion that we have allowed ourselves to become fixated with the process of assessment rather than the process of education and learning. It is from the latter two that innovation comes, not from the former.

I have much more thinking to do on this, but this is enough writing for one post. I have a friend who writes tediously long posts that I rarely read because they are just too long.

I found this blog post by Claire Amos "Navigating the space between educational paradigms"
challenging and interesting. You may too.

Why I think schools have a future

When I wanted to learn how to make bread, I looked on the internet, checked out Youtube, and talked to other more knowledgeable friends. I applied what I read, saw and heard. It seemed that you can indeed learn almost anything you want from the internet.

At today's GAFE Summit 2015, one speaker made the same assertion during a part of his address in which he raised the question of the relevance of schools in the future. He said (and I paraphrase here, which translates to 'I may have completely misinterpreted his actual meaning'): 'Motivated learners can learn anything from the web'. The implication seemed to me to be that schools may well have no place in our future, at least not in their current form or format.

This is a question I've been pondering for some time. I've come to the conclusion that there are two critical assumptions behind the assertion that they may not have a future, and they are as follows.

1. Schools only teach knowledge and skills.
2. All learners are motivated.

The first begs the question of what schools actually teach, actually an enormously complex question. I recall having an argument with an 'old school' colleague that went something like this: 

Him: 'I teach <his subject>'

Me: 'You teach boys'

Him: 'No I teach <his subject>'

Me: 'No you teach boys'

You get the picture. This discussion went straight to the heart of the matter. In the secondary environment our subjects are in part merely a 'vehicle' through which we teach what we would now describe as the 21st century skills of critical and creative thinking. Of course content matters. I often find myself saying to others that a 21st century education is about thinking, but you can't think in a vacuum. You have to have something to think about. I find myself more than a little irritated by the NCEA 'haters' society which claims that under New Zealand's NCEA assessment framework content no longer matters. 

However in fact we teach even more than that. The New Zealand curriculum includes a component on values, and of course the key competencies. These are all things that we teach, many of them not just in the classroom but on the sports field on the concert or drama stage etc We teach them by virtue of ur interpersonal interactions with our students every day. This is one of many thingsthat make teaching such a demanding profession: we are being ';judged' every minute of every day as students take meaning from our non verbal communication as ell as the words we say.

In this regard schools as physical spaces in which people meet ought not to become redundant in my opinion. 

The second question is also interesting. I would agree that motivated learners are now able to find most things they want on the internet somewhere. However in the secondary system we teach adolescents. By their very nature these are young people who are finding their identities, finding their way in life, and they do so frequently by making mistakes. That's the nature of adolescence. Many of them are not as well motivated as we'd like in terms of their learning.

The usual response to that is that they must be allowed to follow their passions. However the problem is that they don't know what they don't know. How many times in our careers have we seen young people undertake a significant change of direction because of something new that they have learned in a class that they initially didn't want to be a part of, or as a result of an 'inspirational teacher'? I fear for a world in which people never read Frost or Shakespeare, never see the beauty of a geographic landscape or a simple mathematical proof. I am not a brilliant mathematician (I struggled), but I recall being spellbound when I saw the proof that for any two numbers on a number line, you can always find another number in between, regardless of how close the initial two numbers are. To my mind it was beautiful.

These are things that make us who we are, they are often life changing, and they are things that demand some form of human interaction. I guess that doesn't necessarily mean that schools may have their current physical or organisational format, but as social and learning organisations in my opinion they most definitely do have a future. 

Integrated curriculum

A friend spotted this article on curriculum reform in Finland and sent me the link.

The very idea of the total abandonment of traditional teaching subjects and their replacement with topics is certainly provocative. I recall writing a paper for my previous Head in the 90's in which I supported the notion of an integrated curriculum, one in which a lot of content was taught via topic based research and development.

However I don't think I am brave enough to suggest that we go as far as the Finns are suggesting with a nation wide reform.

I'm a little more conservative than that. For me the answer lies somewhere in between. The traditional subject/class teaching of key subjects such as English and mathematics to support the development of deeper learning of a broad range of subjects using an integrated topic approach.

I would currently classify myself as an anti 'Modern Learning Environments' crusader. I would however accept the label I heard from colleague Pauline Henderson yesterday as a pro Modern Learning Pedagogy proponent.

This needs a little more thought.