Teaching the educators

Jal Mehta, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education wrote recently that we “have an almost endless list of things that we would like the next generation of schools to do: teach critical thinking, foster collaboration, incorporate technology, become more student-centered and engaging. The more skilled our teachers, the greater our chances of achieving these goals.” Building teacher capacity is both a school and system responsibility.

The role of the teaching educator in our system is similar to what Michael Fullan refers to as coaches.  They are experts in literacy and numeracy who work with the lead teacher to plan, model, observe, reflect and challenge with the intent of improving the learning outcomes of all students.

In the early days the arrival of a TE in schools was often met with resistance and in some cases, their expertise was under utilised.  Over the past few years we have worked tirelessly to articulate and communicate the what, why and how of the TE in schools.  Their role is not to obstruct schools but to build instructional capacity.  The focus shifts from building individual capacity to community capacity.  Once we build community capacity, our schools will be able to link into an ever bigger system of inquiry, learning and knowledge.

We now understand that the most powerful way of building capacity is in situ, in context around the real problems and challenges that arise on a daily basis.  Previous models of withdrawing teachers from their context and transmitting information did little to improve their practice and only served to further frustrate them.  The best approach is to learn the work by doing the work and having someone that you can share and reflect with.  I think teachers respond well to the immediacy and collegiality of this approach.

In 2011, Michael Fullan and Jim Knight wrote an article titled Coaches as System Leaders.  They state that if “teachers are the most significant factor in student success, and principals are second, then coaches are third.  All three, working in coordinated teams, will be required to bring about deep change.”

Some may call it the power of three – we refer to it as the instructional triad (TE, principal and lead teacher) or the teacher-learning triad (teacher, lead teacher and TE).

Our TEs are an important part of our system strategy to improve the learning outcomes of all students and ensure a professionally rewarding working life for teachers.  The how and why of their work represents a shift in education from “I know to we learn” and success for some learners/schools to success for all learners/schools.

Schools of inquiry

In March the NSW Government announced its blueprint for improving schooling.  The action plan includes raising entry requirements for teaching courses at universities and ensuring the quality of initial teacher education is regularly assessed.  This is a positive move.

Attracting the best and the brightest is something that all education systems desire. Yet attracting is one thing, retaining teachers is something else when we continue to operate as Richard Elmore says as a profession without a practice.

I believe the most important work is preparing teachers to teach in today’s world.  The demands on schools are great, the work of teaching is complex and the needs of students are diverse.  Add to this the ubiquitous nature of technology and the need for a rigorous teacher education model is apparent.

Some time ago on bluyonder, I raised the idea of an apprenticeship for teachers.  Students would be able to connect the theory in practice by continuous exposure to models of good teaching in classrooms. Observation, inquiry, reflection, analysis and collaboration become the norm.  As knowledge and skills develop, student teachers under supervision either by a teacher educator or mentor actually learn to teach.

Coincidentally the British Government is promoting ‘higher apprenticeships’ for professions such as law, accounting, engineering and possibly teacher education. British Education Secretary Michael Gove has recently said he was keen to move away from higher education providers determining how teacher education was delivered:   “The best people to teach teachers are teachers.”

The best people to teach teachers are effective teachers.

Kevin Donnelly also reflects that since “former teachers colleges closed and education become the preserve of university-based faculties of education, teacher training has become overly theoretical and divorced from classroom realities.”

Linda Darling Hammond in her excellent paper asserts that schools of education must design programs that “help prospective teachers to understand deeply a wide array of things about learning, social and cultural contexts, and teaching and be able to enact these understandings in complex classrooms serving increasingly diverse students; in addition, if prospective teachers are to succeed at this task, schools of education must design programs that transform the kinds of settings in which novices learn to teach and later become teachers. This means that the enterprise of teacher education must venture out further and further from the university and engage ever more closely with schools in a mutual transformation agenda, with all of the struggle and messiness that implies.”

I can’t help but notice how many educators refer to experts who are either providing ideas or visiting schools. Why aren’t we looking to our teacher colleagues for guidance, support and ideas?  Elmore says you do the work by doing the work not having experts do it for you.  I wonder whether this is a symptom of below par teacher training courses? Are we training teachers they way we want students to be taught as they do at Singapore’s National Institute of Education?

The Australian Institute for Teaching School Leadership (AITSL) is about to begin assessing the quality of instruction at universities to ensure that all graduating students meet common standards. AITSL chairman Tony Mackay has flagged that new national standards for accrediting teaching courses would see a “shake-out” of programs offered by higher education institutes.

If the work of teachers is to be continually re-evaluated and shaped in response to the needs of learners and a changing world, then so must teacher training courses.  It is absolutely essential that the next generation of teachers are proficient practitioners; good clinicians and diagnosticians.

We must move away from a commonly held view that anyone can teach fairly well.  Teaching is highly specialised and complex work. As Darling Hammond says teacher training programs must help teachers “develop the disposition to continue to seek answers to difficult problems of teaching and learning and the skills to learn from practice (and from their colleagues) as well as to learn for practice. These expectations for teacher knowledge mean that programs need not only to provide teachers access to more knowledge, considered more deeply, but also to help teachers learn how to continually access knowledge and inquire into their work.”

In a previous blog I reflected on leadership from the inside out.  This is another example where this maxim applies. We have never needed better teachers than we do now.

In moving towards a culture of wide-spread excellence, perhaps we need to stop referring to schools of education and start referring to them as schools of inquiry.  Afterall, isn’t this what learning and teaching is about?

Learning leaders

As I’ve mentioned previously, our focus as a system this year is on good teaching and good teacher practice.  We know what the research tells us about good teachers and student learning outcomes.  This of course is based on a very important assumption – the quality of leadership. Michael Fullan calls the principal the “nerve centre of school improvement” and while they may not have a direct impact on student learning outcomes, what they do is critical to large scale and lasting improvement.

Schools without quality leadership are like orchestras without conductors.  Sure teachers can teach but an effective leader knows the research, develops the knowledge and collaborates with others to bring it all together.  Clive Gillinson writing in the Guardian in 2009 reflects on the role of the conductor:

Any player who has worked with great conductors knows that what they bring to their performances is the difference between competence and inspiration. It diminishes and completely misunderstands great music-making not to think there is any difference between the two.

Sometimes when we talk about effective teachers, we assume that we already have effective leadership at the helm.  This is not always the case.  Fullan in his paper Quality Leadership, Quality Learning states that reviews of research literature on school improvement highlights the “key role of the principal, for better or worse, i.e there are no examples of school-wide success without school leadership; all examples of school failure include weak or ineffective leadership.”

How do principals account for a lack of school wide success?  How do we deal with this as a system?  Past attempts to improve leadership have been ad hoc or too focused on individual attributes.

Over the weekend I began reading Leading with Inquiry and Action by Matthew Militello, Sharon Rallis and Ellen Goldring.  The foreward was written by Richard Elmore.  I have always respected Elmore’s grounded approach – a good mix of common sense and encouragement.  In reflecting on the American education system, he says this:

Every generation of American educational leaders, from the end of the 19th century onward, promises that it will be the generation to transform the practice of leadership into the practice of instructional improvement, and so far, every succeeding generation has failed at that fundamental task.  The leadership of instructional practice has been consistently and systematically displaced, generation after generation, by the bureaucratic demands of “running” schools and the by the “real-world” demands of school bureaucracy.

This summation could equally apply to education systems in other parts of the world.  Why?  Elmore says the answer lies in the observation that “education is a profession without a practice” or more accurately, “an occupation aspiring to be a profession that has not yet discovered its practice”.

He goes on:

We do not, as a field, define a set of practices that everyone who enters the sector has to master as a condition of being able to practice, nor do we insist that people who practice in the field continue to learn their practice at ever-increasing levels of competence and expertise over time.

I agree with Elmore’s observations.   Systems have failed because there has been little investment in school leadership.  We have focused our resources and efforts on the periphery without seeking to change the culture and structure of schools.  We haven’t insisted or enabled leaders continue to learn their practice.  Building system leadership capacity leads to greater accountability.

In addressing the core issue of leading schooling too often we start from the outside and work in. Right on the edge, we usually find things like judging school leaders using blunt instruments like student performance, data and rankings. Further in you find things like “taking things off” leaders to allow them to do their job. This may free up time but it does little to address the inherent problem. Such approaches only serve to demean the complexity of the leadership challenge.

A more constructive approach is to start from the inside out. This means a sharp focus on the core requirements for leading a contemporary school. The research and data show us that the key responsibility of leading has to be around the work of teachers, how they teach, how we know they are effective and how we can continue to build their capacity. If the leader doesn’t know how to do this then they have to be taught how. It requires leaders to be effective practitioners with a deep understanding of learners and pedagogy.

Last year our system focus was learning by inquiry.  Inquiry is critical to how we understand our learners and their contexts in what and how we teach.  Yet there is little point in learning by inquiry if we don’t apply it.  Leaders need to be inquiry minded AND action oriented. This is how we become a profession with a practice.

Know your learners

Here’s a question – do you believe all students can learn?  If you said yes and you’re a teacher or leader, are there examples at your school of students who aren’t achieving gains in their learning?  How do you reconcile the two?  Here’s another question – if you were asked to list ten things that knew you about each learner in your class or school could you?  More importantly, would they know you knew these ten things about them?   If you said yes, then you are doing well at knowing your learners.  If you said no, then you would be wise to read Lyn Sharratt and Michael Fullan’s book “Putting the Faces on Data“.

These are the questions that Lyn Sharratt asked us to reflect on when she was here earlier this month.  This is Lyn’s second visit to Parramatta and we are grateful for her assistance in helping us put faces on our own data.  It’s a strategy that takes personalised learning to a much deeper level because it requires us to continually and collectively analyse student learning and plan the next sequence. Sounds simple but as Lyn says it is hard hard work. It requires a relentless focus on a shared goal.

As former superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction in the York Region, Canada, Lyn says that literacy became their goal and their system mantra. They asked themselves what they expected of their literacy graduates and once they determined this, they worked backwards.  Stephen Covey refers to this as beginning with the end in mind.  It required coming up with a definition that everyone could live with from K-12.  “Literacy” was defined as language and mathematically competency. They then asked what were the foundational literacy skills necessary in the 21st century?  These were the ability of graduates to think, understand, analyse and to critically reflect.

Lyn says they worked hard at embedding the definitions and professional learning so that every single teacher was working toward the same goal – literacy.  It paid off; they achieved significant gains in Year 1 reading levels.  They analysed data relentlessly and looked closely at what was working in the ‘high focus schools’.  As Lyn and Michael drilled down, they discovered these schools hadn’t taken their eyes off literacy.  In the midst of flux, they were able to stay focused.  The other schools blamed everything from a change in principal to a leaky roof on why they couldn’t maintain focus.

Lyn’s experience shows that implementation is often our Achilles’ heel. We have a tendency to move on to something new every year than stay the course.  As Lyn puts it, we need to move beyond the modelling stage to the doing otherwise nothing actually happens in schools.  This means looking at the data, knowing the learner and asking what comes next.  We want our learners to be independent but we need teachers and leaders to be interdependent when it comes to implementation.  If something is fully implemented in your school, it means that 90% of teachers, according to Lyn, are doing it as part of their practice.  The short of it is we all need to know the same things about our work. We all need to know our learners.

On the last page of Lyn’s workbook is the quote: You can’t lead where you won’t go.  Lyn has given us permission to say no to the things that won’t make a difference to students and to go where we may not have been before.

It’s a matter of trust

When Billy Joel wrote the lyrics to It’s a Matter of Trust, he probably wasn’t thinking about the Finnish education system.  Yet the more I read the literature on high performing systems, I am convinced that trust is at the core of the cultural change needed to reshape schooling.  It’s not new nor is it rocket science.

Michael Fullan says that you build trust through behaviour.  John Hattie tells us that the ability for teachers to develop trust within the classroom is key to making students feel OK about making mistakes and asking questions.  In Visible Learning, the highest “effect sizes within teacher student relationship came from empathy, warmth and encouragement of higher order thinking.”  A report on a teacher education model for the 21st century by Singapore’s National Institute of Education emphasises the need for teachers to create cultures of care and trust.

As noble a calling as teaching is, the profession has been tarnished by a lack of trust, suspicion of teachers’ work and a top down approach to school improvement.  Richard Elmore wrote in 2007 that a “non-professional teaching force is a compliant and easily managed workforce.”  This view of teaching according to Elmore grew out of the late 19th and 20th century.

What differentiates high performing systems from others is trust.  Trust permeates from the highest to the lowest levels: governments trust schools to deliver quality education, parents trust teachers to meet the learning needs of their children and teachers trust students to set and achieve their own learning goals.

I know Finland is the system du jour and some may be tiring of hearing about the Finnish way but I read a superb reflection in February’s Phi Delta Kappan magazine by its editor in chief, Joan Richardson.  When I re-read the passages I highlighted in the article I am still astounded by the culture of trust that has been built not in one school but in every single school.  How is this done?  By driving responsibility down to the classroom and school level.  This is similar to the principle of subsidiarity and it’s a term we don’t often hear in discussions about school improvement or teacher quality.  Teachers have control over what they teach and how they teach and how they assess students.

The rationale behind Finland’s competitive teacher education program is quite simple: there are no mentoring or teacher evaluation programs and that’s the way they want it. Teachers are trusted to do their best not in their first year of teaching but throughout their careers.  This is a quote from an education official from the Finnish National Board of Education:

We trust our teachers. They will find the best solutions, or they will create their own.  They are doing very well without inspections and testing. If students are not happy, they go home and tell their mothers, and the mothers call the principal. That’s a fine inspection system.”

It exemplifies the level of trust between schools and parents and reinforces the critical role parents play in education.  It is not just the responsibility of teachers or parents or governments – it is a collective responsibility in which the accountability lies with the professionals – teachers and leaders.  Imagine knowing that if you sent your child to any school in Finland they would receive the same level of care and personalised learning regardless of academic ability, learning style or background.

For me, the gold standard is the fact that teachers are free to work from home when they are not teaching.  As Richardson observes, the working conditions of Finnish teachers are closely associated with being professionals instead of the highly regulated working environment of American teachers.  Can you imagine this happening in our schools!

Where does trust begin? With our students; believing that each one is capable of learning and will become life-long learners.  It is on this belief that teaching begins.

If we are to build the same culture of trust then we need to face the facts and look at the evidence.  This is a call to be courageous; to recognise that what was once off limits or sacred is now open to critical reflection and change. All this represents the fact that interdependence has to be the new norm. Isolation and mistrust are death to innovation and change.

To paraphrase an old song, “trust changes everything…..”

School Autonomy: Use Responsibly

The old Chinese proverb, ‘be careful what you wish for’, comes to mind when thinking about the new autonomy agenda for schools.

With autonomy comes great responsibility. This can be said of many sectors but is particularly true for the work of schools. For the school leaders in our Catholic system, local school autonomy has traditionally been a feature of leading their school communities.

Strengthening local school autonomy is now a key agenda for governments – both state and federal – through the Local Schools, Local Decisions  initiative and the Empowering Local Schools (ELS) National Partnership.

The work of the Australian Institute for Teachers and School Leaders (AITSL), who released the first National Standard for Principals in 2011, is supporting the ELS national partnership through its flagship professional learning program, Local Leadership.

These initiatives aim to enable participating schools to make decisions within their local contexts in order to better meet the needs of their students and the school community, and lead the learning and teaching within their communities to improve the quality of teaching and students’ learning outcomes.

While the focus on strengthening local leadership is an important one, we must never mistake autonomy for independence. Schools, like all contemporary organisations, don’t exist in isolation. Isolation in the third millennium is death

Our school leaders have been fortunate over the last few years to work with Professor Michael Fullan to further develop our shared understanding of how to improve students’ learning across the system. Late last year, Michael – who has just received a prestigious and well-deserved Order of Canada for his work – spoke to our leaders about the concept of ‘systemness’. ‘Systemness’ has a few aspects to it, but is essentially the ‘buy in’ you get when individuals identify with the bigger picture.

Within the local school context, ‘systemness’ means each teacher isn’t just responsible for the learning of their own students, but for each and every student in their school. At the system level, ‘systemness’ means all schools work to improve the learning of each and every student across the system and so on.

Fullan says the importance of ‘systemness’ or system coherence is the shared mindset. Initiatives such as the ELS national partnership and frameworks like the AITSL standards are only as good as the people using them. We have to work to build the capacity of all colleague leaders and teachers across the system, not just focus on our own backyard.

Nine of our primary schools are taking part in the ELS national partnership funded by the federal government which runs for 18 months from mid-2012 to end of 2013, and will be followed by a year of evaluation in 2014.

In line with our own system strategic focus, the schools have formed a professional learning community (PLC) to challenge and support each other in decisions they make around improving school leadership, teacher and student performance with a particular focus on improving numeracy.

The PLC has discussed teacher goal setting practices and the importance of feedback and accountability to improving school leadership and teacher performance; and have established learning conversations around these lines of inquiry.

Each school is reflecting on their own school effectiveness through a variety of data (e.g. Quality Catholic Schooling data, NAPLAN, attendance rates, locally collected school data, etc); identifying areas of improvement; and asking the tough questions these present. This is then presented within the PLC to share reflections and test conclusions. It’s an iterative process. School leaders collaborate, share experiences and work together to find ways to best respond to changing circumstances for their own schools.

This is a practical example of what I call ‘enterprise schooling’ – our teachers and school leaders in this context are moving from isolation to connectedness from independence to interdependence. Our school communities have identified what is “core” for each and how this core can be strengthened by ongoing collaboration. In this core there are such things as personal responsibility  professional learning for all staff, commitment to an evidence base for improving student learning and teacher feedback to colleagues. How this is done in each context differs and gives a rich experience set for all.

This doesn’t negate local autonomy or responsibility, rather it strengthens it by providing opportunities to build capacity and benefit from the work of other school communities, while contributing to their learning as well. In a connected world, we have never needed interdependence more than we do now.

It’s imperative that… ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’.

Time to Tinker

The idea of school as a workshop for ‘tinkering’ isn’t new. John Dewey and others like Reggio Emilia, were early exponents of experiential learning and a great believer that schools should be an extension of home-life and society. Dewey writes in the School and Society (1912):

There is little of one sort of order where things are in process of construction; there is a certain disorder in any busy workshop; there is not silence, persons are not engaged in maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not folded; they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results from activity. But out of occupation (not akin to work), out of doing things that are to produce results, and out of doing these in a social and cooperative way, there is born a discipline of its own kind and type. But the school has been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary conditions and motives of life, that the place where children are sent for discipline is the one place in the world where it is most difficult to get experience – the mother of all discipline worth the name.

Some years ago, Gever Tulley created the Tinkering School. It began as a six day program to “explore the notion that kids can build anything, and through building, learn anything”.  Tulley saw that new insights often emerged when problems become puzzles to be solved. It’s a powerful reminder of how capable children are – especially ones with power tools!

The best-selling Australian children’s author, John Marsden, has also created a school, which is philosophically similar to Dewey’s approach to education. Candlebark challenges traditional approaches to learning and teaching by emphasising the importance of experiential learning within meaningful social contexts; where the learner is not an observer but an active and valued participant within the learning community. From its website:

Candlebark believes that children flourish by experiencing life at close quarters. We regard first-hand experiences as generally superior to second hand experiences. We try to say “Yes” as much as possible – yes to new ideas, yes to experiments, yes to innovations. If the school has a motto, it is “take care, take risks”. We encourage an active engagement with the world. According to our assessment of students’ maturity and abilities, we may teach them to use axes, log splitters and chainsaws. During maintenance activities students may be up ladders, on roofs, changing light globes, using hammers, saws, mattocks, vacuum cleaners and electrical tools.

What seems to separate these schools from the traditional mainstream approach to schooling is time. Students at Candlebark and Tinkering School have time to tinker, explore, problem-solve, build and reflect.  These students are ‘learning by doing’ or in the case of the Tinkering School, ‘learning by building’. When students tinker with materials and ideas, ideas develop in a process that begins by being open to ideas and can end in a ‘happy accident’ as the doodle illustration below shows.

Doodle by @giuliaforsythe drawn during @grantpotter‘s presentation on Tinkering, Learning and the Adjacent Possible

Noone knows the importance of ‘tinkering time’ more than the creator of the BlackBerry. Mike Lazaridis has not only been described as the father of the smart phone revolution but is founder of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, whose alumnus includes Stephen Hawking.

In his recent address at the Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, Lazaridis admits that his most prized possession is his education. According to Lazaridis, the basis of a great education is one that provides students with opportunities to tinker with ideas, take risks and even fail. He believes that nothing beats “creating, hands-on learning and teaching” and speaks warmly about his own high school education.

In Singapore, giving students more time to create and innovate was prioritised nationally when, in 1997, the ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation‘ initiative was launched. As a result, Singapore’s curriculum and assessment have been changing; for example, Ng Pak Trak from Singapore’s National Institute of Education explains:

Syllabi, examinations and university admission criteria were changed to encourage more thinking outside the box and risk-taking. Students are now more engaged in project work and higher order thinking questions to encourage creativity, independent and inter-dependent thinking. (Ng, 2008 in Darling-Hammond, 2010).

The results of this national step are evidenced in the example of Ngee Ann Secondary School:

Among other things, students are given seed money to start their own small business, and the funds they make go back into the school. They prepare a concept proposal and a business plan. Those that are selected can use the small stalls lining one walkway to sell their wares, which may include everything from creating and selling baked goods to designing and selling computer or video games. The businesses are licensed; if they violate regulations, they can be closed down for a week, as in real life, so students learn how the world operates (Darling-Hammond, 2010).

Lazaridis believes that while we are now surrounded by very powerful devices, these are just ideas and it will be new ideas that will take us even further in the future. Admittedly these ideas may come to fruition in 20 years from now but we have a responsibility today as educators, to encourage the ideas of students, to promote tinkering and to ensure opportunities for blue-sky thinking that could one day hold the key to solving complex health, ecological, economic or social challenges.

The challenge for schools is to move learners from desks to workshops; from classrooms to learning spaces; from wielding pens to ‘power’ tools. And while we can only imagine what the future will bring, I’d like to hope we are close to seeing every school as a place where children and ideas flourish simultaneously and where there is time to tinker.

Steven Johnson developed this interesting presentation on the concept of ‘where good ideas come from’. In thinking about how to develop ideas in collaboration, it’s worth a look.

The exchange of ideas

I had the privilege of opening the Building Learning Communities conference (#BLC12) in Boston last week with Alan November from November Learning - an international leader in education technology. BLC started with a group of 20 friends and has grown into an international exchange of ideas with over 90 workshops presented throughout the three days. Despite its enormous growth, BLC aims to maintain its early roots by bringing together thought leaders and educators to share ideas and create partnerships to help expand the boundaries of learning and teaching.

There was a great energy in the room on our first day with over 1,000 educators and teachers gathered from 20 countries. The opening session was designed to change the game plan and rethink our first engagement with students. Alan launched November Learning’s 1st5Days project, with the aim of creating a global, online professional learning community focused on changing students’ experience in the first five days of school. Using the power of crowdsourcing, Alan hopes to start an international conversation about how teachers and leaders can transform the start of each school year for learners, to focus and engage students in learning from the very first moments.

As I commented in the opening sessions, often the first five days of school, even the start of each school term, can be taken up with organisation, administration and management instead of learning. I shared the example of a New Zealand colleague who used local fire fighters to inspire his students on the first day of school. One of our own principals, Attila Lendvai from St Canice’s Primary in Katoomba, does a similar thing by creating a ‘wow’ moment for students and staff to engage them in a new learning focus from the first day of each term.

I think the first five days project will provide a great source of inspiration for teachers and leaders and has the potential to really challenge and transform the way we traditionally approach the start of the year; certainly an exchange of ideas worth participating in via Twitter #1st5Days or to register visit http://blc.vxcommunity.com

My Catholic Education colleagues, Anna Dickinson, Gary Brown and Paul Meldrum and I led two workshops at BLC2012 on the theme, Learning by Inquiring, which focused on three key elements for schooling: Imagination, Creativity and Innovation.

It seems obvious for learning to always start with a process of inquiry. Too often perhaps, this is not the case and our traditional approach to learning and teacher learning has been focused more on recitation of facts or information gathering rather than inquiry.

Fortunately, as educators we know a whole lot more today about how people learn. Through the work of Bransford et al we now understand that powerful learning requires knowledge of the learner’s context; building connections between concepts; and the opportunity to engage in metacognition or reflecting on what and how we learn. This process enables deep learning and allows the learner to apply what they have learned to a range of contexts – essential in today’s world.

What does this have to do with imagination, creativity and innovation?

If we consider the learning theory in the context of making schooling more relevant and effective for today’s learners we can identify a process for our own work as teachers and leaders – ‘the HOW’ – through the lens of Imagination, Creativity and Innovation.

 

Imagination – is about looking at the current model of schooling; identifying what is relevant and what is no longer relevant to today’s learner/world; and imagining new approaches = RELEVANCE

Creativity – is about exploration and discovery; playing in the sandpit; the testing and trialing of different approaches using a range of tools = ENGAGEMENT

Innovation – is about monitoring and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t; sharing innovative practice; allowing innovation to take hold and taking it to scale = APPLICATION

This can’t be achieved in an adhoc way. We need a clear intent, a well defined theory of action based on sound educational research and practice, and a framework for building capacity within schools supported by leadership. In our own diocese, this has been an iterative process for our schools based on their individual needs and within their local contexts.

‘The HOW’ is about creating the space to consider new possibilities, to tinker with those possibilities and to learn from what fails and to measure and share what works. The beauty of today’s tools means sharing innovation isn’t limited to just across the classroom or the staffroom, but across the globe.

Through collaboration and the exchange of ideas with other teachers and school communities we are able to benefit from the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and share our own wisdom to benefit our students’ learning. The old adage says ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ In the 21st Century it takes a global, connected, learning community.

In the closing session with Alan November, I presented the proposition to educators for the need to ‘start yesterday’. In responding to the challenges of schooling in today’s world there is a need for urgency. It’s not simply a question of tweaking what we already have but looking at new models and new approaches. The only way to achieve this is through a process of learning by inquiring i.e. imagination, creativity, innovation. It is key for sustained change, engagement and improvement in learning and teaching.

Bureaucrats rock!

It’s a commonly-held view that bureaucrats block or resist change. When a new government comes to power, the first target is the bureaucrat. They tend to get the blame for any failings in the system and for stifling innovation and change. While I’m sure we have all experienced this first-hand, fortunately not all bureaucrats are made equal. Gregg Betheil, executive director of school programs and partnerships for the New York City Department of Education (DOE) breaks the mould.

Gary Brown, Anna Dickinson, Paul Meldrum and myself on the steps of the DOE in New York City

On meeting Gregg last week, my colleagues and I were impressed to find the DOE is informed by a powerful theory of action that places students’ learning at the centre of their work. They are committed to improving student learning by building the capacity of teachers; ensuring good leadership; and using a range of data sets and evidence to drive change.

To give you an idea of the DOE context – here are some key numbers:

• 1,800 schools across the five Burroughs that make up NYC – Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island
• 1.1 million students
• 75,000 staff
• $23 billion operating budget
• The ratio of students in the US who attend school in NYC is 1:50
• In the last 10 years, there has been an 80 per cent turnover in principal positions

For several decades, graduation rates in NYC schools had stagnated – only 50 per cent of students were graduating and in the lowest 50 schools, only 1 in 4 students. Today, the graduation rate is up around 67 per cent and the lowest performing school graduates 50 per cent of its cohort. This is a remarkable result which looks set to improve further.

The context Gregg is working in now is referred to as the ‘post Joel Klein era,’ because much of the work started under Klein’s leadership (2002-2011) continues today. Leaving aside some of the more controversial aspects of the Klein agenda, central to the work of improving schooling in the US is a commitment, to not only build a robust school system, but a robust system of great schools.

The DOE recognises the school’s central role in ringing in education innovation and change and as such, gives schools the freedom to innovate and change as they do the work. The role of the DOE then lies in articulating the expectations and, as an accountability measure, in defining standards for school performance. The work of Robert McClintock (1996) helps inform the work of the DOE.

McClintock argues that it is the teachers taking advantage of the digital tools in doing the work where innovative practice can emerge and spread.

As new communications technologies take hold in practice, educators sense that new developments become feasible through them. As diverse educators act in diverse ways on the basis of this shared sense of new potential, they begin to change the character of general practice. (McClintock, 1996)

McClintock also makes the point that with technological innovation basic skills that were once an outcome of education – such as to calculate, spell, remember, visualise, compare and select – are now a given at the outset making for an ‘epistemologically interesting cultural development’.

Knowledge consists primarily of cultural resources that people can store and retrieve on demand, as the need for it arises… People can use digital media both to acquire ideas and to express their thoughts in these diverse ways. As a result, educators will find it increasingly difficult to favour the linguistic modality over all others and they will need to broaden the norms of academic excellence. (Robert McClintock, 1996)

Given the digital revolution is rapidly changing the way people live and work, it is essential for schooling to keep pace with these developments. It was good to see that the essential nature of ICT is recognised in NYC schools as a powerful tool and enabler for learning and teaching. A lot of this work is being implemented using a range of mobile devices but, like all of us, the DOE face similar challenges around vendors, copyright, business models and digital ecosystems.

We found plenty of common ground in meeting with Gregg, the key themes being:
• Building great schools relies on the schools themselves
• Innovation is the lifeblood pumping through quality schools that leads to improvement
• The system has a responsibility for disruptive innovations – i.e. innovations that change the paradigm
• Systems need to remove the blockers for change

It is great to see there are educational institutions with the commitment and intent to drive innovation and change in schooling and a bureaucrat who is leading the way.

Good practice is good theory

Too often, educators fall into the theory-practice trap. How many times have you heard a teacher say, ‘All that theory’s fine, but it doesn’t work in my classroom,’ or the theoretician say, ‘It’s a shame teachers don’t use the theory to inform their work.’ So it was refreshing to meet with a school leader who understands that good teaching involves both sides of the coin – you can’t have good practice without good theory.

Michael Fullan, Lyn Sharratt, James Bond with myself.

Yesterday we met with Michael Fullan and Lyn Sharratt from the University of Toronto and James Bond, who is the principal of Park Manor Public School. The work James and his staff are doing to improve the learning outcomes of students is one of the case studies profiled in Fullan and Sharratt’s new book, Putting faces on the data.

I have written about this in an earlier post, but it was great to meet with James and discuss his approach in detail.

James has an interesting background. He originally trained as a teacher but when he couldn’t find a position, spent several years working in industry where he gained an insight into cultural change, particularly the application of both good theory and practical strategies to deliver sustained change.

What was really fascinating in listening to James describe his school’s approach, was the space he created to do the work – the staff learning centre – where, regardless of what teaching area they work in, teachers come together to share the data, analyse it and collaborate.

James didn’t start this work by leading a discussion on educational theory, rather he focused at the very centre of the teaching process, asking his teachers how they could improve their students’ learning.

He clearly values his staff and knew they had the answers. It was his role as the leader to help them find the answers by ‘putting faces on the data’; starting with the practice and ensuring it reflects good theory is what good leaders need to know how to do.

So what does the data look like?

There is a data panel for every student which is personalised and displayed on the data wall according to their levels of achievement in such a way that staff can see and take collective responsibility for each and every child (see below).

A personalised data panel for each student.

The data wall records:

1. Student achievement at varying intervals
2. Hypotheses for student performance
3. Suggestions for change in teacher practice
4. Verification process for effectiveness of change

Michael Fullan describes this as a powerful ‘pull and nudge’ model.

We can’t ignore the evidence of James’ student achievement data. For us it is a great example of how theory and practice come together to the direct benefit of each student at Park Manor Public School. It is also evident that his theory-practice model is changing the whole culture of the school.

Of course this approach is deeply rooted in good theory. Interestingly though, James never once referred to it.