Sydney has just hosted a most amazing celebration of religious faith: WYD08. This uninhibited public display of religious conviction has surprised and challenged a nation that is secularised in so many ways.
We have been part of the largest public event ever held in Australia - a religious event. And the main participants have been members of that generation – Generation Y – that so many people had been fearing was lost to organised religion.
For a week in July – the middle of our winter – hundreds of thousands of Catholics came together in a deep expression of faith, sharing what has truly been a transforming experience.
Polish pilgrims enjoying Sydney Harbour
They were warmly welcomed into our schools and homes. In the Parramatta Diocese alone some 8000 pilgrims from Africa, North and South America, Europe, the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Asia, and various parts of Australia were accommodated in 47 Catholic school sites.
We also had volunteers supporting their parishes and school-centred activities with hundreds of staff lending a hand.
The event has been life-changing for so many participants – both local and from overseas – and a marvellous antidote to a sad cynicism about ‘the youth of today’.
The Pope prayed with the pilgrims that WYD08 would contribute to ‘a new Pentecost for the Church and for humanity in the third millennium’.
We can be confident that a great number of pilgrims left the experience with a deeper relationship with the Risen Lord, with their youthful idealism revitalised, with a strong sense of purpose in their lives and with a new responsiveness to the call to Christian discipleship.
The transforming experiences around WYD08 provide opportunities for Catholic educators that must be grasped.
For so long teachers and catechists have struggled to present the riches of the Catholic faith, with its Gospel of hope, to young people whose development has been so intensely influenced by consumerism, individualism and the moral relativism of the age in which we all live.
WYD08 provides a window of opportunity, a new moment of readiness, in which many young people will be more open and attracted to a life-giving religious world view and an authentic experience of Catholic life and culture. We must embrace this opportunity.
At a very practical level, we must ensure that our Religious Education programs are strong in content and taught with renewed enthusiasm and conviction. Important though our teaching is, it is less significant that our witness. We teach, first and foremost, what we are!
It is timely, too, to reconsider the quality of school liturgies and the significance of school prayer. Through religious symbols and rituals we enkindle and nourish the Catholic imagination of our students. And we must never forget the vital importance of the intrinsic connection between school and parish life, a connection which reinforces the communal dimension of our Catholic culture.
The confluence of rich opportunities presented by WYD08 is not something that comes often. The event itself can be seen as a catalyst for personal and communal renewal, and for nothing less than generational change.
Professor Sidney Strauss is the Chief Scientist, Ministry of Education in the State of Israel and is responsible for research into learning and teaching particularly in the area of cognition and appropriate pedagogies.
We were recently discussing the imperative of changing educational models to reflect 21st century society and the needs of today’s learners. Sid made the point that if you can change the ‘mental models’ teachers bring to the classroom, then you open a whole new world of learning opportunities.
I also caught up with Anat Zohar, Director of Pedagogical Affairs in the Ministry of Education who is driving a change process across their system of schools. Every system leader can relate to the challenge of how you embed innovation and how you create a larger network of innovative schools that are relevant in today’s world.
They are looking at a three pronged strategic appraoch that focuses on teacher-learning and development. Click here for Anat’s explanation of how they are re-focussing teaching for understanding.
I have just delivered a paper at the Patrician Brothers Education Seminar in Maynooth, Ireland. It’s amazing how so many of the same satisfactions and challenges are shared by teachers right across the western world.
The Irish Catholic bishops recently published a Pastoral Letter on their vision for Catholic education. Titled Vision 08, the letter makes observations that are applicable to Catholic schools everywhere.
One of the distinguishing features of an authentic Catholic school, say the Irish bishops, is that they reflect ‘a distinctive vision of life and a corresponding philosophy of education’.
It’s a challenge not just for Irish teachers but for Catholic educators everywhere. What does a philosophy which reflects the Catholic understanding of life and its purpose actually look like when put into action? How does our Catholic vision of life, for instance, determine the types of relationships that exist in our classrooms? How does it affect our approaches to learning and teaching? And how does it provide a religious dimension in every subject that is taught?
This last question is the most challenging of all. How does the Catholic understanding of the human person affect our exploration of literature, for instance? How does the Church’s social teaching affect our teaching of the social sciences? How is the vibrant partnership of faith and reason reflected in the teaching of Science? And how does the Catholic imagination, so enriched by allegories and symbols, affect the Creative Arts?
These are just-in-time questions which take us to the core of our work, beyond accountability requirements and pragmatic responses that are linked to the daily pressures of school life. They are questions which challenge Catholic educators everywhere.
I had an interesting conversation with a colleague recently about how we reconceptualise/redesign the learning space. It’s not simply about shifting furniture or painting walls but looking at how we fundamentally strengthen the relationships within those learning spaces. Can designing new learning spaces facilitate this?
Mary Featherston is an Australian interior designer with a long standing interest in learning spaces. She has documented her work with Wooranna Park PS in Victoria on her website. The report is fascinating and I was struck by this sagacious quote from the Reggio Emilia Project in Northern Italy:
can the physical environment be a teacher in itself?
If it is true, then we have deprived students of the 19th and 20th century of the opportunity to engage with their physical environment by building factory-like schools where the traditional gate-keepers of knowledge stand sentinel at the front of the classroom.
What I liked about the Inside-Out project was that students and teachers were asked to identify the activities which were to take place and the qualities they believed were important to them. The result is flexible, functional and dynamic learning spaces, which evoke ‘democracy and respect’ .
It’s not often ‘democracy’ and ‘respect’ are used by students and staff to describe their learning spaces but this is what happens when your design is built on good principles of learning, understanding how students learn and today’s pedagogy.
Recently, we invited senior students involved in project-based learning (PBL) to address a meeting of our principals. A daunting task for anyone but these three students were able to clearly and honestly reflect on their learning experiences.
It was an important wake-up call to hear from today’s learners who could just as well have been from any school in Australia.
Their message to leaders of learning:
Involve students in the planning
Learning must be challenging and worthwhile (relevant)
Ensure opportunities to share and celebrate their work with others
Don’t think copying and re-copying material is good learning
It’s a pretty powerful message and reason why we need to change our learning paradigm. It was also interesting that they did not see technology as the rule but a tool to engage in deep learning.
Teaching Australia has published Teaching for Uncertain Futures - a scenario building project involving teachers and leaders from across Australia. It describes four future scenarios for schooling and asks the provocative questions:
what will the Australian teaching profession have to do to be successful in the environments in which it will have to operate in 2030?
what are the implications of these challenges for school leadership?
We must accept that our classrooms do not represent today’s world - they are products of the 19th and 20th century. One of the defining characteristics of the 21st century is the rapidness of change particularly with technology. So what implications does this have on the teaching profession?
Whether we like it or not, teachers and school leaders will have to become ‘futurists’ if schools are to survive beyond 2030. We can no longer think about schooling locally but globally. And we must be planning in years not in weeks or terms.
How is this done? It means asking the right questions, monitoring global trends, building sustainable partnerships, understanding technology, managing risks and seizing opportunities.
If these ‘future scenarios’ do not become part of our reflective practice now, schools will certainly be obselete before 2030.
Firstly, it provided an opportunity to hear what other educators/leaders are doing to improve their system’s learning and teaching and teacher-learning. Secondly, it allowed us to participate in a professional dialogue and critical reflection on our own work.
Stephen Covey (author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) refers to the process of continuous improvement as ’sharpening the saw’. For me, the recent visit helped us to ’sharpen our focus’ by adding to our collective wisdom and commitment to improving learning and teaching across all schools. We listened to our colleagues, we were challenged, inspired and learnt something from their experience.
I think as leaders we are often distracted by the process, at the expense of purpose of school improvement. We need to continually remind ourselves that the success of school communities, networks and systems depends on people and how they are ’sharpening their own saw’. Covey speaks about the need to feed the spiritual, physical, emotional and social side of ourselves - the very things we aspire to do for our students.
Perhaps the question school and system leaders need to be asking is how are our processes improving our people?
Learning from each other is critical to our success. After all we now expect our students to do it.
Interesting to read that the average age of teachers in Catholic schools is now 40. This is nearly 10 years below that of their colleagues in government schools.
It’s predicted that in the next 5 to 10 years, 40% of government school teachers will retire. This will mark a significant generational change, one that will be delayed in Catholic schools for yet another decade.
Any acknowledgement of generational change in the teaching profession is a reminder of the importance of attracting, selecting and developing the type of teachers who will best serve schools in the future.
I think if we are to attract the best and brightest to the profession, the seeds are usually sown during the years of schooling by example of staff and, often, by personal suggestion or invitation.
Good educators and school leaders shouldn’t hesitate to invite the most committed students to consider a future as teachers and help shape innovative learning communities for the 21st century.
Our schools are fortunate to have worked closely with global educator - Marco Torres. Marco is passionate about the capabilities of Web 2.0 in the learning space and is able to engage and inspire not only students but our teachers!
Marco’s strategy for learning is simple - it’s about process not final product.
Marco has been capturing his work with our schools on a site called Flick School. It’s a terrific resource for educators who are dipping their toes into the Web 2.0 pool!
The last several years has seen the emergence of a growing consensus on what makes the difference in student learning. This consenus is often arrrived at from different perspectives yet the foundations for improving learning outcomes is clear.
Angus James, Director of the Business Council of Australia has written about the link between economic prosperity and quality education systems published in the Australian Financial Review (30 April 2008).
Angus believes that ‘education is not an isolated process…rather a continuum’.
It’s great to see the business sector supporting our efforts to make schooling relevant and to acknowledge that learning does not stop in Year 10 or 12.
Angus is in favour of principals recruiting their teaching staff as a way of improving the quality of teaching and therefore student learning outcomes. Principals are like coaches, each wants to be able to select the best player for the team but what happens when there isn’t enough talent in the pool to draw from?
The BCA believes the most important educational reform is to improve the quality of teaching by creating initiatives to attract and retain the best staff. This a key part of supporting good learning.
We have to always remember that our educational strategy does not miss the star player - the teacher. We must focus on our teachers if the quality of teacher is the key influence in improving student outcomes. This means a well crafted professional learning strategy involving the teacher at the centre of the strategy, not peripheral to it. It also means ensuring teachers have greater control over their working lives. Tough challenges but very doable.
As I’ve said before, raising the professional bar requires a national strategy. We need to start by:
ensuring our universities reflect learning in today’s world
developing whole of school professional learning programs
