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 Digital Natives Myth

One of the pervasive myths of the digital literacy landscape is that young people are generally 'in' the digital world and older people are generally struggling to engage with it. The catchiest term for this is that young people are Digital Natives (being born into the digital age) and the rest of us are Digital Immigrants (coming to in in later life). While this is literally true, the conclusions about the gap in engagement with ICT are frequently exaggerated if not simply false.

I have been teaching a group of 30 or so university students in a multimedia course for the last four years and the Digital Native notion has each year been demonstrated to be false. These have been students who chose a computer learning course yet about a third have quite modest skills in using computers, another third were competent and about a third were behaving as Digital Natives are supposed to behave - using blogs, social networking and generally being creative users.

This issue has been well researched by a project involving several universities and a collection of their reports is at Educating the Net Generation (Uni Melb.) and their large scale study supports my simple observations. See 'The Net Generation are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies'. They also demonstrate in another story that the gap in skills between university students and staff is not as great as generally reported.

It is interesting to ask why such ideas as the Natives-Immigrants gap are accepted so readily in many forums. I think it is because it is an idea that Henny-Penny Optimists enjoy. The Henny-Penny Optimists are experts in ICT who promote a nicely contradictory point of view that, a) the world as we know it is ending, everything is changing, revolution is at hand, young people's brains are being re-wired by use of technology, and b) the future with ICT is liberating, collaborative and totally wonderful. Like the original Henny-Penny, these people create a lot of alarm and unnecessary panic. When the HPOs promote the Digital Natives idea, they alarm many teachers and administrators, particulalry those who have low ICT skills about the impossible and widening gap between themselves and their students.

The reality, as usual, is much more complex and not as exciting as simplistic generalisations like Digital Natives suggest.

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 .

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.