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.