Seek The Truth
Archive for July, 2009
International Confederation of Principals Conference
Jul 31st
I was able to attend this conference thanks to a professional development grant from the Matipo Primary Board of Trustees and from Project Koru. These grants were used to pay for travel, accommodation and registration. All other costs were borne by myself. My sincere thanks for both these grants but particularly to the Board for their continuing confidence in me. The conference was attended by 1500 delegates from 40 countries, with 650 from overseas.
The opening ceremony was attended by the President of Singapore while Prime Minister Lee gave an outstanding keynote address; outlining the recent history of Singapore education and the fact that it should be free of political changes.
Notable throughout the conference was the quality of the music and dance of the school performing groups – hugely superior to anything in New Zealand but reinforcing our school efforts to deliver a strong arts strand and showing us the way. The lesson however, is that its not enough to just do it, we need to do it with quality.
The theme of the Conference was “Charting the New Education Landscape” – meeting the future.
The only thing we know with certainty about the future is that change is inevitable. Our children live in an international world and an increasingly interconnected world. The term educator has taken on a far wider meaning and ‘teachers’ are not the only teachers.
Disney is more influential than Duke (university)
Spielberg outweighs Stamford
MTV outscore MIT (Benjamin Barber)
The future means that teachers must change, students must change and parents must change. Our school strategic of the last 6 years of changing our school from a place of teaching to a place of learning is more simply put in Singapore – “teach less, learn more”.
Once again, this conference re-affirmed to me that our school, while not perfect, is well ahead of most in leading the future and is right up there! – Strong basics, management, leadership, innovation, arts, media, I.T., value added options, engagement, commitment and a pedagogical emphasis on personalized learning and inquiry learning.
The educational lesson of Singapore is extremely interesting. It only spends 3.8% of GDP on education compared to the OEDCD average of 5.4% yet its standards are amongst the highest in the world.
Why? Singapore is a motivated society where education is valued. Classes are streamed. Schools of around 12 are clustered with a superintendent or lead principal to guide, share and encourage. There is a culture of collaborative learning between teachers and schools. There is a system of performance bonuses.
Sir Dexter Hutt is a leading British educationist. He presented a list of leadership skills/criteria;
- Having and sharing a vision
- Establishing a culture of mutual respect
- By ensuring there is a behavioral platform from which teaching/learning is possible
- By giving staff a sense of pride in the school
- By holding staff to account and having difficult conversations if necessary
- By demonstrating concern for staff when they need help
- By being perceived as having children’s interests at heart
- By publically and privately giving praise for good performance
- By having high expectations of staff
- By being optimistic and innovative
- Quite simply, by leading!
None of this is completely new but what was useful was his theory of Sigmoid Curves – essentially everything rises and falls and what used to work, doesn’t keep working. This is related to the paradigm of change. You need to keep re-inventing yourself. If you don’t change, you fail.
- “School on the move”
- “Committed to continuous improvement”
The trick is knowing when to introduce change. The increased pace of change also means each new strategy will have a shorter life
School leaders need to create an understanding of the need for change. A learning example is the difference and priority of knowledge v skills. Traditionally taxi drivers memorized street names and were tested on it. Now they don’t need that knowledge just the skill of operating a Satnav or GPS.
Andy Hargreaves from Boston College is a frequent conference speaker. He feels strongly that future scenarios for education need to be balanced by a strong social responsibility ethos – equity, inclusiveness, human rights, social justice etc. He believes also that we should utilize the best of the past as a foundation for the future and that teachers and schools need to work more collaboratively together in peer interactions, professional learning groups, clusters and other connections to form learning communities.
He also makes a very valid point about assessment. Assessment to inform teaching needs data on all children but assessment for accountability reasons just needs sampling.
Another interesting reflection is that the NZ Curriculum stands up well as a document well founded on international best practice with its contents encouraging innovation, social responsibility through values and thinking skills, inquiry learning etc through the key competencies. It is reasonably non prescriptive and lays good foundations for 21st century learning.
The last day produced the two most influential speakers for me.
Prof. Kishore Mahbubani is from the University of Singapore. His contention is that we are moving from a mono-civilization world order to a multi-civilization world order where the predominant globally dominant western civilization will change to a world order where Chinese, Indian and Islamic cultures will become more important and influential. How will our education systems adapt? What cultural toolboxes will we need?
Prof. David Perkins is from the Harvard Graduate School. His topic was ‘Education for the Unknown’ and was arguably the most provocative. His recurring question was “what’s worth learning?” From various surveys and forums he gets a constant response that conventional disciplines don’t really rate – what’s worth learning well comes from beyond the conventional subjects.
What’s worth Learning in the future
My list:
- communication skills.
- to know how to learn.
- to be open minded.
- to be e-literate.
- social responsibility.
- to get on with people of all cultures.
Perkins’ list:
- understandings of wide scope from the disciplines.
- ways of knowing and the knowledge arts.
- ethical understandings.
- personal & societal understandings.
- Horizon themes
* digital horizons
* artistic horizons
* civic horizons
(His list has a number of relationships with the NZC Key Competencies and relates also to Mark Treadwell’s suggestion of re-designing school curriculums around the Key Competencies).
To take Perkins ideas forward requires a lot of work – the broad stroke framework is very general, there would be entrenched interests and conventions to overcome, political controls and a great amount of courage.
Principal’s Forum – Library Content
Jul 2nd
What sort of books or periodicals does your child like to read which would be suitable to buy for the school library?
What’s Worth Learning?
Jul 1st
This is an incredibly powerful and important question as more and more people ponder education in the 21st century and try and imagine what it will look like. The only thing we know with certainty about the future is that change is inevitable.
We know that children entering our schools now as Year Ones, will work in jobs and use tools, that haven’t yet been invented. We know that knowledge is increasing incrementally at an incredible rate. Engineering and technology knowledge is becoming obsolete within 5 years (Kevin Richardson).
Peter Serge from M.I.T. School of Business believes schools as the finite organizations that we know, will not exist within 50 years. We not only live in a world and a future of change, but the pace of change is also increasing.
David Perkins is from the Harvard Graduate School and was formerly Director of Project Zero within that institution. He asks a recurring question at all forums – with his students, at conferences and within schools; “what’s worth learning?” He talks about ‘education for the unknown’ and what pupils might need to learn in the changing future. Others ask a similar question and also wonder what forms education may take or what ‘schools’ might look like in the future.
Just a couple of years ago, we talked in terms of;
• Technology changes
• Creation of life long learners
• A thinking skills curriculum
• The importance of languages
• Globalization
• Networking as an educational and employment tool.
Some generalities about future learning are of interest. Our children live in an international world and an increasingly interconnected world. The term ‘educator’ has taken on a far wider meaning and ‘teachers’ are not the only teachers.
Disney is more influential than Duke
Spielberg outweighs Stamford
MTV outscores MIT (Benjamin Barber)
Future learning will be I.T. dominant and delivered. Teachers will be less obvious and intrusive. More learning will be 1:1 in nature, might be about negotiated topics, will be within a real life and authentic context and within a parameter of teaching one child at a time (in a NZ context, personalized learning).
Already there are some very innovative projects in action in the United States. One is the Met School in Providence and grown to 54 other Met Schools.
Substantive funding came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The philosophy of the Met Schools is based around the question of ‘what’s good for kids?’ It involves smaller schools, personalized learning, real life contexts with the support of parents and mentors. Students are actively involved in their learning and its design. The philosophy of Met Schools is encompassed in their slogan “one child at a time”. (see also Big Picture Learning).
The second innovation is the Microsoft School of the Future in Philadelphia which as you would expect is highly geared towards digitally dominant learning. Their definition of 21st century learning includes reading, writing and maths along with problem solving, effective communications and critical thinking.
A focus of the school is collaboration, integrated technology, continuous learning access anytime/anywhere, real life contexts and student centered learning.
This gives us a bit of a clue about how education in the future is evolving
• Greater use and delivery digitally
• More personalized learning
• Authentic real-life learning contexts
• Life long learning
• Focus on critical thinking skills
Another U.S. innovative development is the Florida Virtual School. This is a distance education provider with all courses delivered electronically. It is compulsory for all students in Florida to enroll in at least one distance course, in the period of their schooling.
Clearly, on-line learning will very much be a feature of future school and will contribute to both personalized learning and life-long learning.
However, these are all trends and don’t answer the question; what’s worth learning? If we return to David Perkins, from his questioning of ‘what’s worth learning?’ the constant response is that conventional disciplines don’t really rate in terms of responses (although most people might regard the ability to read, write and enumerate as a given). His list of what’s worth learning in the future is;
• Understandings of wide scope - the ability to apply or use
from the disciplines conventional subjects
Peter Serge from M.I.T. School of Business believes schools as the finite organizations that we know, will not exist within 50 years. We not only live in a world and a future of change, but the pace of change is also increasing.
David Perkins is from the Harvard Graduate School and was formerly Director of Project Zero within that institution. He asks a recurring question at all forums – with his students, at conferences and within schools; “what’s worth learning?” He talks about ‘education for the unknown’ and what pupils might need to learn in the changing future. Others ask a similar question and also wonder what forms education may take or what ‘schools’ might look like in the future.
Just a couple of years ago, we talked in terms of;
• Technology changes
• Creation of life long learners
• A thinking skills curriculum
• The importance of languages
• Globalization
• Networking as an educational and employment tool.
Some generalities about future learning are of interest. Our children live in an international world and an increasingly interconnected world. The term ‘educator’ has taken on a far wider meaning and ‘teachers’ are not the only teachers.
Disney is more influential than Duke
Spielberg outweighs Stamford
MTV outscores MIT (Benjamin Barber)
Future learning will be I.T. dominant and delivered. Teachers will be less obvious and intrusive. More learning will be 1:1 in nature, might be about negotiated topics, will be within a real life and authentic context and within a parameter of teaching one child at a time (in a NZ context, personalized learning).
Already there are some very innovative projects in action in the United States. One is the Met School in Providence and grown to 54 other Met Schools.
Substantive funding came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The philosophy of the Met Schools is based around the question of ‘what’s good for kids?’ It involves smaller schools, personalized learning, real life contexts with the support of parents and mentors. Students are actively involved in their learning and its design. The philosophy of Met Schools is encompassed in their slogan “one child at a time”. (see also Big Picture Learning).
The second innovation is the Microsoft School of the Future in Philadelphia which as you would expect is highly geared towards digitally dominant learning. Their definition of 21st century learning includes reading, writing and maths along with problem solving, effective communications and critical thinking.
A focus of the school is collaboration, integrated technology, continuous learning access anytime/anywhere, real life contexts and student centered learning.
This gives us a bit of a clue about how education in the future is evolving
• Greater use and delivery digitally
• More personalized learning
• Authentic real-life learning contexts
• Life long learning
• Focus on critical thinking skills
Another U.S. innovative development is the Florida Virtual School. This is a distance education provider with all courses delivered electronically. It is compulsory for all students in Florida to enroll in at least one distance course, in the period of their schooling.
Clearly, on-line learning will very much be a feature of future school and will contribute to both personalized learning and life-long learning.
However, these are all trends and don’t answer the question; what’s worth learning? If we return to David Perkins, from his questioning of ‘what’s worth learning?’ the constant response is that conventional disciplines don’t really rate in terms of responses (although most people might regard the ability to read, write and enumerate as a given). His list of what’s worth learning in the future is;
• Understandings of wide scope - the ability to apply or use
from the disciplines conventional subjects
• Ways of knowing and the knowledge - knowing how to learn & thinking
arts skills
• Ethical understandings - personal values and behaviours
• Personal & societal understandings - social responsibilities
• Horizon themes – digital horizons
- artistic horizons
- civic horizons
Wrapped within the contexts of both personalized and authentic learning.
This is going to require a change in the way we teach and learn. The increased digital presence, more personalized learning, more negotiated and authentic learning, changing the teaching focus from achievement objectives to key competencies including thinking skills and the creation of lifelong learners is already quite far down the track for many schools. We need to do more in teaching children how to learn and incorporating personal, societal and ethical understandings into their learning. The revised NZ Curriculum and the Key Competencies of Thinking, Participating & Contributing, Relating to Others, Managing Self & Using Language Symbols and Texts present an obvious vehicle to incorporate these areas into our teaching and learning.
In considering the future and deciding what’s worth learning, schools need to be thinking of the pathway ahead, their strategic journey. A very pertinent quote would be;
“ if you don’t know where you are going,
you are certain to end up somewhere else”
These are challenging and exciting times ahead for education and change should be embraced as an opportunity to do better.
