Professional standards trump 'loose coupling'

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.

"This [loose coupling] view, in brief, posits that the "technical core" of education, detailed decisions about what should be taught at any given time, how it should be taught, what students should be expected to learn at any given time, how they should be grouped within classrooms for purposes of instruction, what they should be required to do to demonstrate their knowledge, and, perhaps most importantly, how their learning should be evaluated, resides in individual classrooms, not in the organizations that surround them."

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.

"...direct involvement in instruction is among the least frequent activities performed by administrators of any kind at any level..."

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.

"...standards-based reform hits at a critical weakness of the existing institutional structure, namely its inability to account for why certain students master academic content and can demonstrate academic performance while others do not. When the core technology of schools is buried in the individual decisions of classroom teachers and buffered from external scrutiny, outcomes are the consequence of mysterious processes that no one understands at the collective, institutional level. Therefore, school people and the public at large are free to assign causality to whatever their favorite theory suggests: weak family structures, poverty, discrimination, lack of aptitude, peer pressure, diet, television, etc.

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.

Design Principles in this article for large-scale improvement in school systems are:

• 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 .

Building your plane as you fliy into the classroom

Gary Pultland used this wonderful video in his talk in Sydney today, illustrating the on the job learning and maybe the makeshift nature of using new technology. At least that's what I think about when watching it. EDS took a smart risk in using it to show how their staff are responsive, adabtable etc. Nasty people will say it illustrates last minute patchups done by programmers. Whatever: it looks like any really lively classroom to me. The passengers generally look please withe getting to their destination.



Gary's talk covered a huge range of opportunities and challenges, then right at the end, one person said, "What about the potential for 3D worlds in learning, like Second Life." Which made me thing, typical, just when you start to get a handle on the business, someone introduces a wild card of unknown potential into your lap (to mix a few metaphors), but get used to it. Keep building your plane!

Travel grassroots video: better than slides?

I have been experimenting with grassroots video making and the following is an attempt to provide an alternative to interminable slide shows. I used a simple digital still camera and took lots of short vids. Is it better than or complementary to snaps? I have just been on a holiday to Japan.



The biggest breakthrough in making this is that I have recently acquired the latest mac with includes iMovie 2008 which makes video editing significantly easier. About as easy as word processing and just as fluid.

This creative effort raises some curly questions though, that are inherent to movie-making. Should I use a soundtrack, is the music too syrupy, and lots of other film making issues that most of us have little experience with.

Some Principles for Child Internet Safety

Having been a school principal for much of my working life I have had plenty of time to observe how people cope with change, and to discover a few guiding principles. Here is a handful of these that seem to apply to the current lively issue in schools about child safety and the internet.

1. learning involves risks but it is better than ignorance
2. there are few really new issues under the education sun
3. parents are sensible and realists
4. bad administrators seek control by fear
5. good administrators look to the long term

Learning involves risks but it it better than ignorance
There is no doubt that the internet poses some real risks to children - but so do roads, sport and school corridors. You can get run over on a road, sport often involves injury and hostile behaviour, and school corridors are sometimes where bullying occurs. The solution is not to hide from the risks but to learn how to cope with them. Of course we also take action to prevent risks, like wearing protective equipment in some sports, but we cannot completely eliminate risk from many activities. Sex education where this phenomenon has been demonstrated. Recent research in the US has shown that students in some systems with very limited sex education are more likely to experience teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseased that teenagers with more information.

There are few really new issues under the educational sun
This may seem like a strange thing to say when we are confronted with a very rapid rate of change in society and schooling. But is is very instructive to look for links to past situations that are relevant to today's problems. For example, anonymous letters and telephone calls are not very different from malicious emails. Comics were once touted as a serious time waster and corruption of proper leisure activities long before computer games were accused of the same. Bullying has occurred in schools in the playground and behind the bike shed long before the internet, and the bullying was not solved just by putting the bike shed out of bounds. New tools like the internet mainly raise old problems in new forms. So well established principles usually point to solutions.

Parents are sensible and realistic
Parents are dealing with learning and managing real life all the time and if given adequate information are responsive and reasonable. Too often their voice is represented by an alarmed minority. If schools make parent information and involvement a priority they will appreciate and take notice of school leadership. This particularly applies to issues like managing internet use because parents are very well aware, often more so than teachers, that controlling and banning teens from certain activities is frequently counter productive.

Bad administrators seek control by fear
Usually this is not a conscious or cynical ploy, but is a response to their own fear. When issues like internet child-predators arise, the ill informed and easily frightened administrator will often respond to the threat by simple controlling measures are based on fear of child harm or litigation, without stepping back and assessing the risks and educational responses that are available. These administrators may apply the same behaviour to other risks like school excursions, but usually not, because these risks are ones they have become accustomed to and have learned how to manage. New areas of risk in unfamiliar areas such as the internet can encourage a resort to fear.

Good administrators look to the long term
Good school administrators look to long term educational outcomes rather then short term solutions to immediate problems. Bullying on the internet, like bullying in the corridors, is in part an immediate technical issue - supervision of email in the former and overcrowding and lack of supervision in the latter instance. But fundamentally it is not a technical issue, but one of school culture in both instances. Managing responsible internet use is in part an immediate issue for schools, but more fundamentally it is preparing students for their near future in which they will not be supervised at all while online. Solutions which simply address the immediate issue will not prepare students for the rest of their lives.

By age 15 or 16 at the very latest, most students are heavy and independent users of the internet. Learning about the internet in schools must begin much earlier than this, be educative rather than controlling, and, like learning how to ride a bike, involve some manageable risks as students learn by doing.

Fun and games with grassroots video

I have been experimenting with so called grassroots video, as in YouTube, heralded as the current big thing. Here is one of my efforts on my YouTube collection on the potential of smart phones in education - via the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Quick, precise and to the point

The experience of making a number of these little instrucitional videos has taught me that in using this medium, simplicity and brevity is vital. It is all done on a digital still camera, with a 15 cm tripod. A very affordable technology and the quality of the output is adequate. It is the story that matters. And the voice in particular.

I found that getting my little speeches ready without hesitation or loss of fluency was really difficult, and tried some writing and filming as I went.

The Goldilocks effect: getting information JUST RIGHT

The Goldilocks epic hinges around the struggle for humanity to get things 'just right' (and living with bears). Many of us are having this struggle with managing information. The internet is delivering better and better access to more precisely targeted information which presents us with the problem of processing all this great stuff. Our eyes are bigger than our ability to process it all.
For a brief moment it looked as though rss would solve all this. But it just delays the problem. Once my rss feeds were set up there is the nagging pressure to sort through the feeds, and then of course go and look at a selection of the material that lands on you plate. Otherwise, why am I browsing it?

This problem presented itself nicely quite recently when I started using echalk, the very lively WA based discussion list in edna. Half a dozen or more interested emails plonked in my inbox, which is irritating because I then had to click on each and scan the contents to see if it was interesting. The irritation disappeared when most turned out to be interesting. The processing options are simple: read, or skim, or delete, or mark for later attention, or follow a link to further detail. If archived, I can search for remembered topics later on.
Then along came a message saying that email is for the elderly - a tired and inadequate format to the really information literate. A group of echalk people have set up an alternative and potentially richer site to share information: a Ning social networking site.

So off I went to this new place, and rapidly became overwhelmed by the detail and clutter and numerous options. Should I add to the blog, should I attach myself to 'friends'. So I set up an rss feed to keep track of the echalk Ning site. The list to the right is what the rss told me: not terribly exciting or informative, so I had to go to Ning to see what was there of interest. So I am left wondering how much is enough. How much information is 'just right'. The people in Ning echalk are the same people as those on the email list, in the main, so the suppliers of information are not changed. It is the time taken to find out whether their contributions are interesting to me that is the question. There are a lot more tools and opportunities on Ning than I have tried out yet, so can't decide yet what is best. But I am not writing off email yet. It is simple, but it works. Do I want information or do I want a relationship?

It all depends.......

* Image: flickr DaveC71 Glodilocks

Computer literacy/illiteracy Year 6, 10 National Test

The national ICT Literacy Years 6 and 10, 2005 assessment was conducted by ACER and completed in July 2007, but was not published until Jan 2008. Media reports describe almost 50% of students being "computer illiterate", a term not actually used in the report. The full report can be downloaded from here.

The assessment attempted to move beyond a simple measure of skills related to operating the software and hardware.

A sample of Year 6 and Year 10 students did hands-on tasks that set up a number of meaningful tasks involving common computer tasks such as searching and choosing information, creation of a presentation and so on. Students were then assessed against these and placed in one of 6 profile levels illustrated by the graph below. [click to enlarge image]



The profile standards expected for Years 6 and 10 are marked on the graph, with a large proportion of students from both year level assessed at Profile level 3. [click to enlarge image]




I have not read the report in detail but it seems that the writers have made their best estimate at expected year level proficiency and divided the students into a small number of profile levels. It is striking that there is such a large overlap between the year 6 and 10 students at level 3.