Why schools don't need ICT

This is the title of a provocative, brief and, I think, sound argument here by Ian Yorston about the failure of ICT to improve learning. He says we are smothering the digital revolution with rules.

In his own words:

"If you had to spend a million pounds, you'd really hope to have something to show for it."

"schools have finished up at the wrong end of the ICT revolution."

"...no money has been saved whatsoever...."

"Nor have we seen any obvious gains in productivity."

"The real curiosity is that, even when the newest, fastest, coolest computers have been purchased, heads promptly sit down to draw up policy statements that effectively cripple the machines before they have even been booted up."

"Now that we have finally built the Library of Alexandria — now that, thanks to Google, our students really do have access to all the world's knowledge in a curated and useful context, why would we want to limit their access?"

"We block Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. We denigrate Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. We ban mobile phones and digicams. We even make our students write by hand."

"Schools don't need ICT. It's coming through our doors every day. We just need to adopt and adapt a little bit.

I think he is being a little ironic in his use of the word 'little' in the last sentence.

One-to-one backup salvation

A number of schools that are providing Apple notebooks for individual students are using automatic backups to make radical changes to how they manage one-to-one computing.

The students are provided with a backup hard drive that stays at home. They are required to use the Time Machine software to automatically backup the entire computer on a regular basis - possibly daily. Time Machine saves everything - settings, files, profiles etc. The Time Machine name comes from the fact that the hard drive saves each backup in series until it runs out of space. So a typical student may have 5 or 10 or more backups according to date. So if a computer is having problems, is lost or damaged, it (or a replacement) can be connected to Time Machine and restore to the latest or whichever backup version is desired. (If the problem appears to be caused by some new software, for example, go back to the backup prior to the software being installed). Everything is re-installed, so the only cost to the student is the hour or so that the restoration takes. There are backup systems available for PCs, so this is not just an Apple opportunity. The major issue here for a school is not technical but attitudinal.

The implications are very significant.

Maintenance: technical support demands can be reduced. Rather than tech staff needing to spend long hours trying to detect a claimed fault in a computer, the student can simply be advised to restore the problem computer from the backup. The storage and backup responsibilities of the school are greatly reduced.

Student Responsibility: The system places the student firmly in control of their own computer, just as they are currently responsible for their own paper based aids. This is highly desirable if students are to become responsible student and adult computer users. An important implication of this system is that students must have administration rights to their computer. Some schools find this threatening. Others, who have tried it, do not, because they prefer to deal with misbehaving students individually rather than constrain and limit what all students can to. A major benefit of this open approach is that a significant number of students will explore new software and potential of their computer, and pass this knowledge back to the school for the benefit of all. Parents who understand the procedures and responsibilities are generally very supportive.

The savings in unnecessary school computer administration are very significant.

Names, children, internet identity and common sense

Last year in a workshop on Web 2.0 applications we got into discussion about children's personal information and privacy and safety. Some teachers showed a deep-seated fear of children's identities being discovered on the internet and dreadful but unspecfied consequences occuring as a result. Obviously it is a good idea to be sensibly discrete about personal information, especially if you are young and not having developed the the set of sensible caution-antennae that is called adulthood. But after the workshop I called in at a local roasted chicken establishment, as one does, and waiting in front of me was a girl about 12 wearing a pullover with the names of all the year 6, 7s and 8s in her school on the back. So I can now tell you that Hazel McIntyre is in year 7 at St xxx School. Apparently there is something about internet personal information that is much more dangerous than old-media personal information. I can read in the local free newspaper that Lucy Liu is goalkeeper of the school netball team, just below her photograph. The unthinking fear about exposing any child information on the internet needs to balanced against the way we routinely use similar information in the public arena without any apparent harm. Teachers need to be engaged with Web 2.0 tools on the internet so they can understand from their own involvement how to manage privacy and openness in a sensibe ways.

What did they learn? Not a bad question for schools.

I have been working away for some months on researching a paper on professional learning, and some of my previous posts late last year reflect this. I have now published a fairly extensive report on what I discovered in this search and here it is: What did they learn? The title of the site suggest the main finding - that the focus of everything in a school should be directed to improving student's learning. This may seem to be a trite thing to say, but it has clearly not been the case. As a principal of a school for about 30 years I can say that we focused on lots of things in the '70s to '90s including school culture, democratic decision making, staff development and a hundred other things, and paid little attention to measuring student outcomes. We certainly cared about student learning, but we concentrated on achieving a good environment for learning and agonised about how to motivate, encourage, support and recognise good learning. But we didn't measure it in a systematic way and did not compare our measurements very much. We got into a huge battle for the last 20 years about external testing, and I was very active in this fight, and much of the criticism of testing is valid. This is reinforced by an excellent article by Ken Boston Our Early Start at Making Children Unfit for Work.

The trouble is, that in that fight we lost some perspective, and while condemning some testing we drifted into a culture in which no comparative assessment of student performance was acceptable. We developed a hundred reasons not to compare one teacher's results with another's. Teaching became secret teacher's business into which no one can intrude. The research into school improvement makes a good case for bringing these two extreme view closer together and achieving teacher professionalism and accountability for student performance.

It's about student outcomes, stupid!

The 'stupid' in question is me. The following 3 min video outlines some re-thinking I have done over the last 6 months. While I am changing my ideas about school professional learning and what we need to focus on - student outcomes, I can now see how we can resolve the contradictions that have be-deviled us for years - the tension between teacher freedom and external testing.




See also
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QnNSd6PIsc

The (relatively) simple formula for successful school systems

The OECD commissioned a report from McKinsey & Company on successful school systems and the report was published in 2007: How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top . The report concludes that there are three unremarkable things that high performing systems do consistently:

1. They get the right people to become teachers (the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers).
2. They develop these people into effective instructors (the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction).
3. They put in place systems and targeted support to ensure that every child is able to benefit from excellent instruction (the only way for the system to ready the highests performance is to raise the standard of every student).

The top systems include England, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Boston, Japan. The report is very readable and basically hopeful because the answer is not just money or extraordinary leadership, but consistency and determination focused on some basiclly straightforward targets. Take teacher quality for example. The report says that all but one of the top systems filter teacher training applicants before University, and then again on entry to the profession. They achieve this in part by restricting the number of teacher training places, which raises the standard of those accepted. They set beginning salaries a little higher, and flatten later salary rises. Most low performing systems have relatively open admission to teacher training, consequent lowering of standards, then there are many graduates for each teaching position, leading to a generally low morale and status for teacher preparation. There is more to it than these measures, but a few smart policy measures have a large impact and, the report claims, prove that the calibre of graduate teachers can be significantly improved at little net increase in cost.

The top performing systems invest great effort in developing their human capital, creating a culture of permanent review and improvement, focused on student performance, for which teachers and schools are accountable. The major point here is that developing human capital is the goal and accountability measures are one of the means to achieve this. Not the other way around. The McKinsey report makes a key point regarding improvement under the heading:

"NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT
Top-performing systems are relentless in their focus on improving the quality of instruction in their classrooms. Yet this focus on instruction, though a necessary condition, is in itself insufficient to bring about improvement. In order to improve instructing, school systems need to find ways to change fundamentally what happens in the classrooms. At the level of individual teachers, this implies getting three things to happen:

• Individual teachers need to become aware of specific weaknesses in their own practice. In most cases, this not only involves building an awareness of what they do but the mindset underlying it.
• Individual teachers need to gain understanding of specific best practices. In general, this can only be achieved through the demonstration of such practices in an authentic setting.
• Individual teachers need to be motivated to make the necessary improvements. In general, this requires a deeper change in motivation that cannot be achieved through changing material incentives. Such changes come about when teachers have high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and above all, a collective belief in their common ability to make a difference to the education of the children they serve."

It is difficult to imagine how these can be achieved without a 'learning community' approach to professional learning. This is an environment where teachers can safely consider 'weakensses is their own practice', test things in 'authentic settings' and find 'a shared sense of purpose'.

A dominant message from this report is that top systems are overwhelmingly consistent. Everything fits together aiming at the three ingredients: teacher quality, instructional focus, everyone learns.

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 .

Children, sex and safety on the internet

There was an excellent program on Australia’s Radio National recently titled Sex on the Net about child safety. In the style of this program it is a very sensible and thoughtful perspective and in 45 minutes goes into considerable depth. The link allows you to listen or download the audio and there is a transcript.

In short, the program says: there are serious issues at stake, there is no need to panic and the issues are complex. As usual, there are no simple answers and there is a lovely section in the program where a man who has been working for years in an educational program for children with one message - don’t give out your personal details, who realises that it is probably a useless approach.

It is a topic that school administrators and teachers need to know a lot about, and many of the ‘expert’ on this program said that they don’t really know what is happening.

Infernal technology: the automobile

The Editor,
The Times
29th September 1899

Sir,
I wish to express my dismay at the appearance of the automobile on the roads of England. This increasingly popular form of travel heralds a severe deterioration in the standards of transport of people. A good horse and light buggy provides a quiet, gentle, reflective and throughly pleasant mode of travel. The motor car on the other hand is noisy, smelly, and much too fast for safety. Furthermore, as seems likely, the cost of the motor car is falling below the cost of maintaining horses, and the development of the ominbus with up to twenty passengers, will mean that travel of longer distances will be economic for the lower classes which will lead to the deterioration of roads and crowding thereof. Furthermore, there is the likelihood that crowds of unruly people will congest popular places of leisure.

On a personal level, we must note that Man's relationship with the horse has been treasured by many people for thousands of years and may be lost if this trend continues.

The so called advancement of technology in the form of the automobile may have some benefits, but overall, its introduction is to be resisted because it disturbs our way of life.

Yours faithfully,

Disgusted.