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• Reminder: Teaching is a Soulful Experience that Transforms Kids

  July 9, 2012 4:30 PM Comments Off on Reminder: Teaching is a Soulful Experience that Transforms Kids

  I had the pleasure, along with my colleague @Stephen_Hurley, to facilitate several teacher focus groups across Canada to understand the support they need to teach at their best. This was part of joint research project of CEA and the Canadian Teachers’ Federation called Teaching the Way You Aspire the Teach – Now and in the Future. It is a reflection of where the teacher psyche is today in our classrooms, and provides some ideas of what we need to do to improve the situation for both our teachers and their students.

  Provincial/territorial and local teachers’ organizations from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Yukon, Manitoba, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec played a major role in the organization and the recruitment of focus group participants. As much as possible, the organizers attempted to ensure a mix of teachers for each focus group, (e.g. early and later career, elementary and secondary school, geographic, and gender mix). It’s important to note that these teachers were all volunteers lending their voices to this research. 

  Using an Appreciative Inquiry method we teased out their aspirations as teaching professionals. This was a different type of context than what they were used to. I first explained the research to ‘disarm’ them. As a fellow educator, Stephen quickly built their trust and what emerged after 15 minutes of skepticism and complaints about the way things were was a powerful unfiltered personal context that is reflected in the teacher comments inserted into the report.

  What struck me by the time we got to the third focus group held in the Yukon – which included some very frustrated educators – was just how quickly the tension shifted once we focused on their best teachable moments, and teachers revealed such a profound sense of humility for the enormous impact they have on young people’s lives. They just thought it was a natural process that kids would work with them on a daily basis and simply took for granted that it was their caring personalities that have the kids gravitating to them. It brought me back to my own teaching days when kids would come and talk to me at the end of class because they saw characteristics in me that I couldn’t see in myself. These exchanges affected me deeply at the time, but sadly they were just an afterthought.

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  When you take time to reflect on your best teaching moments, you realize that the outcome of your teaching affects your soul. You’re in the process of transforming kids, and very few professionals on the planet have the opportunity to do this.

  During the focus groups, this reflection brought the teachers full circle on why they got into teaching – and it wasn’t because they wanted to adhere to assessment rubrics and follow the board’s curriculum policies. The same goes for principals. They didn’t get into leading a school because they wanted to balance a budget, enact board policies, and handle complaints from parents. Educators want to make a difference in the lives of their students. So why does it seem that in our public education systems, we have lost our way; our path; and our organizational wisdom?

  Our focus groups revealed just how much teachers work in such good faith and are trying their best, but they often feel powerless amid the barrage of provincial curricula and assessment policies, accountability regimes, and they had a general dissatisfaction with existing pre-service and in-service education.

  Smart organizations are structured in such a way that allow for bright thoughtful caring people to do what they do in a very clear coherent way and have a strong voice for improvement. As far as I’m concerned, the structures of public education inhibit creativity for the sake of control and structure.

  This is why I see Teachers’ Aspirations research as a platform to get educators to stop and reflect. Is this really what we want to do with our kids now that we know better? Maybe 20 to 30 years ago, we didn’t know better, but now we do, so let’s get on with it!

  After 35 years in education, I can honestly say that the teacher voices I heard across the country have changed the way I think about teaching and how caring for students predominate their beliefs and actions. As a society, we tend to either forget or ignore this. Many teachers said that this was the best PD session they had ever had, so let’s do it again and again! The process for listening to teachers and validating their work can now be built to scale to broaden this discussion, and even expand it towards administrators.

  So take few moments to share your thoughts on our report, and/or your best teachable moments with us.

  @RonCanuel

• Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach: Now and in the Future

  July 5, 2012 12:00 AM Comments Off on Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach: Now and in the Future

  Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach: Now and in the Future – a joint research report from the Canadian Education Association (CEA) and the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (CTF) – paints a national picture of who teachers are and articulates the support they need to teach at their best. The research involved extensive input from over 200 teachers who participated in CEA focus groups across the country and 4,700 teachers who responded to a CTF online survey.

• Teaching and Type Two Ignorance

  July 3, 2012 10:17 PM Comments Off on Teaching and Type Two Ignorance

  I am a bit worried about the popular assertion that students should be allowed to follow their passions, because if they do that too much they may never know what they don’t know.  Deepening your understanding in areas of personal interest is constructive and rewarding, but it can become a downward spiral of diminished horizons unless someone or something disrupts this self-referencing process from time to time.  For this reason, adults, and educators in particular, have a responsibility to expand students’ thinking as well as respond to their interests.

  Although I strongly believe that students can and should take a more active role in their own education, it would be the proverbial ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ error if we were to decide that students will take the lead.

  As they get older they can take more of the lead, but at all ages students need teachers to challenge them, figuratively speaking, “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”¹  Sometimes this means insisting that they do things they don’t want to do.  Otherwise, how will they ever grow beyond the bounds of the comfortable and familiar?

  Moreover, there is the matter of the curriculum.  Society sets certain expectations for what students will learn and neither they nor their teachers are free to ignore that mandate.  Students can neither opt out of parts of the curriculum that don’t seem to interest them nor focus exclusively on the ones that do.  No matter how passionate they may be about, or how much they may detest, Art or Athletics or Technology or Poetry, the curriculum requires them to participate in a broad liberal arts program until the last couple of years of high school, at which time there is more individual choice.  This is in the best interests of both the individual and society; it serves both the private good and the public good.

  Student-centered learning does not mean letting the student decide what s/he wants to do.  It means starting with the student’s circumstances and characteristics in order to build towards the outcomes that society has decreed through the curriculum.  The teacher’s job is neither merely to impose the curriculum uniformly nor to accede to individual student preferences, but to mediate between the two so that students both deepen and broaden their understanding within the framework of the mandated curriculum.

  The goal is to increase understanding and to diminish ignorance.²  One way to do that is to expand the boundaries of what students know and can do; that is, their competence.  Another is to expand their awareness of the existence of that which they do not (yet) know and cannot (yet) do; that is, their awareness.  Both increased competence and increased awareness represent learning.  Lacking competence in some area is unfortunate but potentially remediable, whereas lacking awareness in some area is tragic because students are then blind to what is possible and dangerously presumptuous about their prowess.  If we don’t shine a light in unfamiliar corners and lead them out of their comfort along surprising pathways then we are not truly educating them, we are merely indulging their interests.  Ultimately, of course, we hope students will develop the curiosity and the courage to forge new pathways into the unknown, perhaps discovering new passions that they had not previously imagined.

  Students should be given much more choice in how they learn and how they demonstrate their learning, and they should also have some more choice in what they learn – they should definitely have opportunity and support to discover and develop personal passions – but teachers and parents also need to exercise their responsibility for expanding the boundaries of students’ inclination and shining a light as far as possible into the infinite ignorance that surrounds their, and humanity’s, current knowledge.

  Sometimes what students don’t know they don’t know is what they most need to know in order to enable them.

  ---

  1 This was the mission of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek TV series, which was intended to capture the pioneering spirit, not only physically but also intellectually.

  2 Type One Ignorance is what I don’t know.  Type Two Ignorance is what I don’t know I don’t know. The former is finite and the latter is infinite.

• A Co-Planning/Co-Teaching Approach to Instructional Practice

  June 22, 2012 4:36 AM Comments Off on A Co-Planning/Co-Teaching Approach to Instructional Practice

  Teaching can be a very isolated and isolating enterprise. Many of the teaching frames, images and design principles on which our modern-day schools are based are, themselves, rooted in the early one- and two-room schoolhouses that dotted the rural landscape of 19th and early 20th century Canada. The teacher-learner ratio has almost always been one-to-many and this organizational principle, coupled with the closely monitored grade level expectations that have become part of the way that curriculum is developed and implemented has, until now, remained unchallenged in any notable way.

  Lately, there has been a great deal of energy in Ontario around an approach to professional learning that seeks to extend images of teacher collaboration beyond gathering together to plan lessons and assess student work with a grade level partner to an understanding of the classroom as a type of public space where teacher learning, collaborative inquiry and professional conversations can take place.

  While currently, the co-planning/co-teaching model is being used to build more powerful practice in the area of mathematics instruction, it is a model that shows a great deal of potential for transforming school cultures, open some doors, and energize conversations between teachers across many domains and curriculum areas.

  In the co-planning/co-teaching approach educators from across the same school, across the street, or across the district gather together to plan a particular lesson. In the planning process, learning expectations are selected and clustered around the big ideas that teachers wish to explore. Teachers discuss the subtleties and nuances of how the lesson might best be taught, select a problem on which students will work and actually do the task themselves in order to better appreciate what they are asking students to do. This allows teachers to anticipate and discuss the types of difficulties, misunderstandings and misconceptions that might arise during the lesson.

  If the collaborative process were to end there, and individual teachers were sent back to their classrooms to implement the lesson, one might well marvel at the power of the experience.

  But that’s not what happens. Instead of the planning team disbanding and going their separate ways until their next meeting, they proceed immediately to one of the team’s classrooms and teach the lesson with a group of students. Actually, two of the team members are responsible for “teaching the lesson” while the remaining participants attach themselves to a group of two or three students and act as unobtrusive observes watching, but not intervening, while the assigned tasks is completed.

  The conversation that takes place among the team after the co-teaching session allows them to reflect on how the students reacted to the experience and the specific work in which they learners were engaged. They are able to use the student work collected from the lesson as a type of assessment for learning, make decisions on how to proceed with specific groups of students and plan for the next stages of the lesson.

  It’s interesting to note that the co-plannng/co-teaching approach is not about visiting someone else’s class to watch them teach. Instead, its a commitment to gather around a particular curriculum idea, an understanding that the shared expertise in the group will help to create a powerful learning experience and the confidence to engage in shared, embedded, professional practice.

  Teachers don’t enter the profession to be isolated and shut off from their colleagues. Yet, many of the visible and invisible structures define schools–even in this 21st century–do just that. Co-planning/co-teaching seeks to alter this relationship by deepening what we mean by collaborative inquiry and student-focused teaching. It’s a model that is just starting to seep into the cracks that separate teachers in our own district, but it is showing a great deal of promise and meeting with tremendous support from teachers, administrators and the support staff that are working in consultative roles throughout the province.

  A fairly extensive set of videos explaining the approach can be found at http://resources.curriculum.org/secretariat/coplanning/ and, although the main focus for the strategy in Ontario is mathematics, readers may be able to imagine how the co-planning/co-teaching dynamic might find a home in other curriculum areas.

  I would love to hear about your experience with this particular approach, or with another model for collaboration that has been powerful for you and your colleagues.

• What Happened to the “Public” in Public Education?

  June 18, 2012 6:35 PM Comments Off on What Happened to the “Public” in Public Education?

  Canadians share a civic culture that includes both individual and communitarian values as well as political institutions, such as democracy, the rule of law, and protection of human rights. We transmit this shared civic culture from one generation to the next through education, and we do this most successfully by means of public education.

  Alas, many Canadians seem to have lost track of the role that public education plays in the nurturing of our civic culture. We have allowed consumerist thinking – the more choice, the better – to infect public policy around education. A moment’s reflection reminds us that the corollary of consumerism is fragmentation, which is very problematic for the transmission of shared civic culture. Education is, in any event, a generative and productive activity, not one of consumption.

  It is time to re-examine our thinking around choice in public education. In this article, we argue the need for that re-examination and propose a decision-making tool – a public impact assessment – that could be useful to policymakers.

  We begin with two preliminary observations.

  First, so as to avoid confusion, we make clear from the outset our view that choice in public education is good – sometimes even necessary – but providing ever more choice does not necessarily make a school system better and may ultimately destroy it. In the context of good education, citizenship, and community building, it is important that choice in public education be conducive to the attainment of both public policy objectives and the needs of the student. In our view, public school systems should not facilitate choice that is simply a market response to consumer demand for different “packaging”, elite accommodation, or any other factor irrelevant to those two primary objectives.

  Second, we acknowledge that the province we know best, Alberta, has taken the mantra – the more choice, the better – to unique extremes. For example, private schools in Alberta receive 70 percent of the per student grant awarded to public schools. Ontario and four other provinces provide no government financial support at all for attendance at private schools. But some of the other problematic choices have become embedded in the public school system itself, both in Alberta and elsewhere, through the offering of publicly-funded alternative programs – choices – keyed to such factors as religion, language, gender, or place of origin.

  What is Public Education?

   In our view, public education has the following characteristics:

  • Public education is a deliberate model of the best that a civil democratic society can be. This is not accidental, or occasional, or a matter of convenience. Public schools look and function like the democratic, civil, pluralist society of which they are an integral part.
  • All children have a right to be included in public education, and the community has a responsibility to be inclusive: every adult in a community has both a right and a responsibility to be involved in the education of all children, not just their own or their grandchildren’s.
  • Parents play a unique and vital role in the raising of their children, but children are not mere chattels of their parents. The broader community has good reason to be involved in the upbringing and education of children.
  • Public education educates children together unless there is a good reason, justified by evidence and consistent with the goals of nurturing a strong civil democratic society, for educating particular groups of students in segregated settings. When children are educated in segregated settings, the limitations of the setting are explicitly acknowledged and compensated for.
  • Public education celebrates diversity. Children should be educated together, not in order to try to make them all the same, but so they may come to value everyone’s unique individuality.
  • Public education supports social mobility because a democratic society will fail if it does not constantly strive for greater fairness, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to benefit from its public education system, regardless of economic status.

  Education should be broadly understood. We are not thinking of public education primarily in terms of programs of studies, courses, curriculum, or pedagogy. What happens on the playground, in the hallways and cafeterias, and in purposeful one-to-one exchanges between students and between student and teacher may be more important to public schooling success than is the “formal” learning. What students absorb by implication can be as important as what they absorb by explicit teaching.

  As we see it, public education serves four purposes. It develops students 1) for their own sake, but also 2) as creative and contributing members of society, 3) as effective citizens who exercise personal responsibility in the community, and 4) as members of a public with shared responsibilities to one another. This last objective seems to us increasingly difficult to achieve, in part because the student population is being increasingly fragmented – and isolated – by an ever proliferating number of alternate programs and schools. In our view, public education’s role in sustaining the very idea of “a public” may be imperiled by this increasing fragmentation and the segregation that accompanies it.

  In our view, public education’s role in sustaining the very idea of “a public” may be imperiled by this increasing fragmentation and the segregation that accompanies it.

  The predominant current approach to publicly-funded education is basically this: Education is a solely personal or family matter, so the more choice, the better. As a result, parents are increasingly channelling students into special-interest types of education – schools for elite athletes or artists, or schools that promote a particular pedagogical approach or a similar outlook on life, such as a common religion. These special-interest, alternate programs are exclusive in the sense that they are not accessible to all. Thus they challenge fundamental precepts of public education and ignore – and therefore contribute nothing or very little – to the achievement of our societal aspirations for public education as a community builder.

  These trends flow from ill-considered public policy, which can, of course, be changed if the necessary political will can be mustered.

  Inclusivity: The Default Setting

  Canada is the envy of much of the world in that our highly diverse population lives for the most part in peace and mutual respect. Canadians accomplish this by embracing diversity, all the while keeping front-and-centre Canadian civic values, which include democracy, the rule of law, and protection of human rights. All of these have a solid notion of equality at their core. In our view it is important to begin with an inclusive perspective and to segregate children only for reasons that demonstrably improve educational outcomes and enhance public education, community, and democracy.

  We acknowledge that there may be circumstances where our society’s goals for public education are best served by segregating certain groups of children. For example, the resources available in mainstream schools may not be adequate to handle the educational needs of some children with serious learning disabilities, especially during particularly difficult periods of their development such as their teenage years.

  Not all choice-based schools threaten Canadian democracy and civic values, but some do – particularly those that segregate children along lines such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or economic status.

  Not all choice-based schools threaten Canadian democracy and civic values, but some do – particularly those that segregate children along lines such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or economic status. History teaches us that segregation promotes elitism and militates against the development of a fair-minded, inclusive democracy. What, then, justifies dividing children along these lines for their education? For example, we have a long, painful history of girls’ exclusion from education, or their relegation to much inferior education. Why is it now thought that gender segregation in education is a good idea? Even if girls were not disadvantaged as a result of gender segregation, might boys be disadvantaged by an education that does not include the presence of girls?

  Religion seems to us a particularly troublesome basis for the segregation of children. In Fall 2011, the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) was considering a policy responding to the unique needs of gay and gender minority (GLBT) students. There was pushback from a number of supporters of some of the religious schools that operate under the aegis of EPSB. According to them, homosexuality, trans-sexuality, and other sexual and gender minority orientations are religiously unacceptable. The Board unanimously adopted the GLBT policy – which is perfectly consistent with Canadian human rights law – but will face difficulty implementing it in those schools that profess incompatible values.

  In this context, the special benefit given Catholics – through the separate school systems in Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan – flies in the face of what we understand Canada to be in the 21^st century. How can this unique privilege, based on an historical anomaly, continue to be justified in a liberal democracy committed to serving the interests of all citizens equally? This matter calls out for honest, full, and open debate, which – we recommend – should be followed by plebiscites in Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan on whether separate boards should be disbanded.

  Time Out to Reconsider and Assess

  To the best of our knowledge, the concerns we raise here are not being adequately addressed in many parts of the country. In order to create opportunities to have that conversation, we recommend that both school boards and departments of education take a “time-out” from approving further alternate programs and schools. During such a break, Canadians could assess whether we have our priorities right on public education.

  Choosing a school or program is not like choosing a product – toothpaste, for example – from the store shelf. We can afford to be indifferent to the choice of toothpaste other citizens make. But taken cumulatively, parents’ decisions on schools or programs have a huge impact on the continued well-being of a crucial public institution – public education. Much of that impact may be unintended, so all involved need to be more aware of the consequences of their decisions.

  We recommend that ­– in order to minimize fragmentation and segregation – every proposal for a new alternate program or school be subjected to a public assessment of its impact on our civic values. 

  We suggest consideration of a tool that would require both proponents of alternate programs, and schools and officials with the power to approve those alternates, to take those impacts into account. We recommend that ­– in order to minimize fragmentation and segregation – every proposal for a new alternate program or school be subjected to a public assessment of its impact on our civic values. These assessments would address the potential impact on availability of resources to existing schools, and other such administrative issues, but would also take into account the impact on the education of the student, broadly understood, on the well-being of the community, and on the integrity of the public.

  As with environmental impact assessment processes, proponents of new alternate programs and schools would bear the responsibility to prepare a “public impact report” which would be subject to a careful, independent review by both the public-at-large and decision-makers. With the imposition of such a requirement, both proponents and decision-makers would have to turn their minds to the very issues we believe are currently being either ignored or given insufficient weight. They would have to address whether the proposed new program or school is consistent with the vision of creating a strong and dynamic public that shares the civic values necessary to keeping Canada a healthy, pluralist democracy.

  Conclusion

  We know that we should not take our democracy for granted. As Thomas Jefferson, the great American statesman, said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” To retain democracy, the idea of the public must be preserved, and keeping public education alive and well, we believe, is necessary to that goal. 

  EN BREF – De nombreux Canadiens semblent avoir oublié le rôle joué par le système public d’éducation dans l’acquisition d’une culture civique. Notre mentalité de consommateur qui nous porte à croire que « plus on a de choix, mieux c’est » a corrompu les politiques éducatives. Une saine réflexion nous rappelle toutefois que le corollaire du consumérisme est la fragmentation. Les choix doivent favoriser autant l’atteinte des objectifs des politiques éducatives que les besoins des élèves. Nous croyons que le système d’éducation ne devrait pas se plier automatiquement aux demandes d’une société de consommation qui souhaite des « formules toutes faites », ni accommoder indûment une élite ou tout autre besoin ne relevant pas de ces deux objectifs de base. Certes, les écoles axées sur les choix ne menacent pas toute la démocratie et toutes les valeurs civiques canadiennes. Mais certaines le font – particulièrement celles qui regroupent les enfants selon des critères comme la race, l’ethnie, le sexe, la religion ou le statut socioéconomique. L’histoire nous apprend que la ségrégation favorise l’élitisme et nuit au développement d’une démocratie juste et inclusive.

• Comfort Zones and Civic Values

  6:03 PM Comments Off on Comfort Zones and Civic Values

  I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort zones lately – how snug and, well, comfortable it is to stay within the confines of the familiar and acceptable, and how threatening to wander beyond those confines.

  I have recently learned about something called news aggregators – computer programs or iPhone apps that track your online activity and then provide you with the “news” based on your interests. Wonderful! I can read about climate change and Canadian politics without having to sort through the latest Greek financial crisis or civil wars in places I can’t pronounce. And if there’s suddenly evidence to support building all those new prisons, I won’t have to change my mind. I’ll never see it.

  And people who don’t care about climate change won’t have to read about it. They can concentrate on the Greeks, or the prisons.

  Maybe it’s a stretch, but the article by Janet Keeping and David King on the privatization and fragmentation of schooling made me think about these aggregators. Keeping and King argue against the proliferation of choice in our school systems. They claim that educating young people in religious schools, so-called “designer” schools for the arts or sports, or schools segregated by gender – with taxpayer dollars ­– inevitably threatens the Canadian civic values of inclusiveness and fair-mindedness.

  I would argue that part of the appeal of these exclusive schools is the comfort they provide by limiting children’s exposure to those who share their belief systems or their passion for music or athletics by allowing them to stay within the confines of the familiar.

  But public education should not be in the comfort business. Public schools – and that means schools funded by the public purse – should, as Keeping and King put it, “look and function like the democratic, civil, pluralist society of which they are an integral part.” And as we all know, that’s not always a comfortable place.

  The older we get, the harder it is to push against our comfort zones. We owe it to the kids to start them out with as wide a zone as possible, and that means educating them in a public system that refuses to segregate except – as Keeping and King acknowledge – when the educational needs of students demand it.

  I’m not loading a news aggregator onto my laptop. Even if I don’t fully understand the Greek debt crisis, at least I have to glance at the headlines on my way to the latest environmental crisis. Sometimes you learn things just by having them in your field of vision.

• Just What the Doctor Ordered

  5:50 PM Comments Off on Just What the Doctor Ordered

  A review of Keeping the Public in Public Education by Rick Salutin, Linda Leith Publishing, 2012. ISBN 0987831720

  This series of short essays should be required reading for educators and education advocates everywhere. In saying this, I have to confess a certain bias – and one caused not only by my strong belief in public education. Rick Salutin is a personal friend. He’s also a well-respected journalist and social critic whose ideas strike a chord with thoughtful readers of various opinions.

  Teachers will find this little book (it’s just 64 pages) heartening, administrators will feel their problems are recognized, and those of us who believe that public education is one of Canada’s greatest gifts to its citizenry will now have new tools to back up our claims.

  At a time when many of our public institutions are being dismissed as unnecessary, inefficient, or the product of outdated lefty beliefs, Salutin comes out swinging in favour of public education and against the trends toward privatization, corporatization, the free market, and deregulation that he sees threatening it. In this series of articles (originally published in the Toronto Star in 2011), he looks at testing and accountability, school choice, equity, teaching, and what defines the “public” in public education. He argues that society’s current love-in with the free market is based more on faith than on evidence, and he urges us to protect public education from the ever-encroaching “religion” of privatization.

  In the opening chapter Salutin examines the intangible qualities that go into making a great teacher. It’s all about the magic that happens “after the door closes.” What do we remember about the great teachers from our childhood? “Was it some info they passed on, or was it something they ignited in you? Probably the latter…ignition is the ticket…And since it’s a relationship, almost anything can and does work.”

  Education reformers, he says, speak out of both sides of their mouths. “They say ‘there is no one best way.’ Then they list dozens, or more, of specifics…” In making the case for teacher autonomy, he points out that Finnish teachers have a sense of professional control and responsibility, and Finnish students consistently come out on top in international comparisons.

  In the belief system of the free market reformers, school choice looms large. Salutin argues that, while choice might be good for some students, specialty and alternative schools threaten to “drain the life out of the public system.” He worries that middle or upper class families, looking for a form of private schooling within the public system, are “cannibalizing and undermining the mainstream schools.” Alternative, specialty, and even French Immersion schools break down cohesion, take the pressure off the system to improve for all kids, and fragment rather than integrate. Salutin uses the integration of students with special needs to support his arguments against fragmentation. He says we have come to assume that students with special needs should be educated together with all other students, and he questions what may be a double standard for specialty schools.

  In the section on testing, Salutin examines the current fixation on accountability. He warns against the danger that the measurable outcomes we have placed on our public systems – shorter waiting lists, better scores, higher rankings – end up defining what we do.

  • In a way, once the tests exist, it’s hard not to fix on them. They’re so concrete; they tend to take over from other forms of assessment. Education officials are very good at verbalizing lofty “show goals” like teaching civics or creativity; it helps give all the testing a more human face. But they tend to put their fervor into hailing the latest scores.

  Salutin’s conclusions focus on equity and on the “new public” – a public vastly changed since the beginnings of Canadian public education. In examining the needs of that new public, he describes SchoolPlus – the Saskatchewan policy to support community schools – each one developed to serve its own unique community – where “tectonic shifts” are changing the way schools do business. He also looks at Pathways to Education, a program started in Toronto’s Regent Park and slowly moving to communities across the country, because it’s an example of how kids are served by supports outside the system.

  Of the many important messages in this book, none is more important than its call for pride in the accomplishment that is Canada’s public education system.

  • Canadians have tended to define ourselves as a society in terms of public health care… But public education is an accomplishment on a different level. Health care is biological; it’s about survival on a physical level, and it’s similar for people everywhere. Education is more specific and more social. It’s how we define the way we are, not simply that we are.

  Salutin wants to make sure we recognize both the reasons to be proud and the imperative to maintain a system we can be proud of. 

• Democratic Deliberation – A Basic Skill for the Future

  June 14, 2012 9:12 PM Comments Off on Democratic Deliberation – A Basic Skill for the Future

  In 1651 Thomas Hobbes famously asserted in Leviathan that without a “commonwealth” based on a “social contract” the world is a jungle “where every man is Enemy to every man … wherein men live without other security than what their own strength, and their own invention, shall furnish them.” He argued for a strong central government to counteract man’s fundamental nature—I presume he meant hu-man nature—and contended that without it life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

  Was Hobbes right? Can a society thrive only if its members’ basic instincts are constrained by external forces so that their higher ideals and collective potential can be realized? If so, what scaffolding is required? Which of our basic human rights are inalienable and what constraint on the others is justifiable, if any? In a more positive vein, what about our interdependence? Clearly, as Hobbes’ contemporary John Donne commented in his Devotions,[1] “no man is an island” and connection only increases as numbers crowd Spaceship Earth, but does this mean that we must be “our brother’s keeper”? What is our responsibility to others? Do we see collective “peace, order and good government” as the ideal, as stated in the Canadian Constitution, or is it individual “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as stated in the American Declaration of Independence? Does an excessive focus on our personal liberty lead us towards the Tragedy of the Commons?[2]

  These are examples of fundamental, recurrent questions that underlie our response to critical social issues such as public safety, healthcare, education and environmental protection. Such starkly phrased choices are, of course, more properly expressed as complexly nuanced dilemmas, but at the heart of things there are some foundational decisions to be made about what we believe and value, and those decisions determine who we become. But the issue is not merely personal, it is also political, and the collective answers inevitably and inexorably shape the society we create. If one abstains from the public discussion of this issue then the ability to decide it is ceded to the most fervent and their answers will be the ones that determine the sort of world in which we will live. This would not be wise!

  In order for students to be prepared not only for the future but also to forge that future, they must have opportunity to engage with such foundational questions in age appropriate ways so that they, first, realize that they are questions and that multiple responses are possible, and, second, develop a conscious personal point of view on them.  Then they have to learn how to deliberate respectively with those who hold a different point of view.

  This is a critical aspect of becoming “educated,” not simply absorbing answers that extinguish perplexing questions but developing the ability to engage continuously with them and to deliberate with others in order to understand their perspectives and thus develop the “commonwealth,” or “social contract,” that enables society to flourish in a diverse and finite world.  This is essential for democracy.

  Unfortunately, this democratic inclination and deliberative ability seems to be in decline. Increasingly we see polarization of views and vilification of those who disagree.  More and more people seem to hold the fundamentalist perspective that those who disagree with them about taxation or education or drug abuse or climate change are not only mistaken but evil. 

  It’s not “this is a complex issue upon which we disagree and about which neither of us has total insight so we need to learn from each and work together to resolve it,” but “I’m right and you’re wrong so I need to vanquish you in order for the right to triumph.”  American politics has fallen deeply into this dysfunctional pit of arrogant, implacable advocacy in which compromise is seen as weakness and Canadian politicians seem to be increasingly adopting the approach.  It seems to win elections but it is a selfish, short-sighted strategy that also creates a great danger for our country and for the world at large.

  What we need is just the opposite—a democratic hospitality to difference.  The knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable respectful democratic deliberation are arguably even more basic and essential than the traditional 3R’s.  What good is powerful literacy and numeracy in a self-absorbed bigot?

  Some would say that it is not the job of schools to teach values but surely nobody would argue that it is not the job of schools to teach democratic ideals, skills and behaviours. This is not a matter of indoctrinating students with any particular viewpoint or belief, but it is a matter of developing their skills and dispositions, and it is a matter of inculcating the value of respectful engagement with differing or unfamiliar viewpoints and beliefs. It requires the humility to know that you may be wrong and yet the courage to be appropriately assertive in support of what you believe.  It is a matter of developing a deep keel rather than an anchor.

  As we add “new basics” to the list of 21^st Century Skills, this is one not to be forgotten.  We allow democratic deliberation to continue to decline at our peril.

  ---

  [1] “No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”  Cited from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation_XVII 

  [2] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

• Ignoring the Evidence: Another Decade of Decline for School Libraries

  April 4, 2012 3:22 PM Comments Off on Ignoring the Evidence: Another Decade of Decline for School Libraries

  Why doesn’t the research on school libraries resonate with educational policymakers and funding allocators?

  Four decades of research from Canada, the U.S., and Australia indicates that well-staffed, well-stocked, and well-used school libraries are correlated with increases in student achievement on the order of 4 percent to 20 percent, as measured on student performance on standardized tests, overall school performance, and student performance in reading comprehension and in academic subjects.[1] Other studies have shown improvements in students’ attitudes towards reading and in the collaborative nature of school culture.[2]

  Is the research on school libraries like the research on healthy living? Is it that we are more likely to pay attention to research that suggests we drink a glass of red wine every day than to research that suggests we exercise every day?[3] We say we want our students to learn how to learn, to become critical users of information, to become knowledge creators, but somehow the complexities of the school library – specially trained staff, multiple information sources, and changes in school culture and pedagogy – are too much for most of us in the K-12 education sector in Canada.

  Not every teacher or principal has had the opportunity to experience an excellent school library, but those who have don’t want to do without one. A recent study of school libraries in New Jersey revealed that educators valued school libraries and teacher-librarians because they:

  • place learning of all kinds, not just information literacy, as central to their mission;
  • help teachers to push the boundaries, to take risks and innovate;
  • shape school culture (e.g., enhance collaboration);
  • offer choice of resources in a diversity of textual formats (e.g., support reading education and inquiry projects for diverse students);
  • offer access to technology and digital resources (e.g., support 24/7 learning);
  • bring people together, colleague-to-colleague and student-to-student.[4]

  Well-staffed, Well-stocked, Well-used

  In and of itself, a school library is not sufficient for supporting and bringing about improvements in teaching and learning. Collaboration is crucial for sustaining educational change and improvement in schools, and the modern school library functions as both a catalyst and a support for change. Excellent school libraries feature planned programs, collaboratively designed to provide stimulating intellectual inquiry and engaging cultural experiences for students and teachers, and implementing those programs requires knowledgeable, innovative staff, and ready access to diverse resources.

  Well-staffed school libraries have qualified teacher-librarians – accredited teachers with additional graduate level qualifications in librarianship, digital technologies, and inquiry-based pedagogies. They also have trained support staff and volunteers. Paid library staff provides leadership, administration, instruction, and information support. Principals, classroom teachers, and other specialists within the school have a role to play as well; in fact, the school library cannot fulfil its mission without their involvement.

  Well-stocked school libraries include local holdings in multiple formats and access to digital resources through the Internet. Adequate funding allows resources to be current and relevant to the school’s curriculum and to the school’s specific instructional focus.

  Well-used school libraries are integrated into the intellectual and cultural life of the school and community. Teachers and teacher-librarians work together to design and implement learning activities. Individuals and groups of students pay both scheduled and unscheduled visits to the library frequently. The library is accessible outside school hours, allowing visits by teachers and students, as well as electronic access to resources 24/7.

  Sustaining the Vision 

  Every person in today’s world needs to be an “information literate” lifelong learner, able to use information to reason and to think critically, to make decisions, to solve problems creatively, to use information responsibly and ethically. Here in Canada. we seem to have difficulties in sustaining that vision, in recognizing that information literacy is not just a library issue ­– it is an educational issue. When the results of provincial, national, or international learning assessments are analyzed, the areas of concern that emerge are frequently library-related, particularly in the realm of information literacy practices: formulating questions, identifying appropriate sources of information, locating information, distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information, interpreting information, and using reading strategies appropriate to different kinds of texts.

  When the results of provincial, national, or international learning assessments are analyzed, the areas of concern that emerge are frequently library-related, particularly in the realm of information literacy practices.

  For a few weeks in June 2011, there was extensive media coverage on the declining number of teacher-librarians in Canada, beginning with the announcement that Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board in Ontario was going to eliminate school library staffing and make serious cuts to school library services and resources. The flurry of concern was short-lived.

  While in parts of Canada we are cutting back on school libraries and teacher-librarians, in parts of Europe they are being supported as a force for educational reform, for improving reading education, and for developing students’ abilities in information handling and knowledge creation.

  Both teachers and students need to reconceptualize teaching and learning, to go beyond the “how” of learning to the “why” of learning, to realize that learning is for life, not just for meeting specified learning objectives or getting high scores on external assessments. The school library – or in its newer iterations, the “Learning Commons” or the “iCentre” – plays a key role in this reconceptualization. It is a place for students to deepen understanding, to go beyond the knowledge that can be delivered to them by others, to learn who they are as learners, and to develop the skills of inquiry that will be critical for them all their lives.

  Other countries are undertaking library-based initiatives in response to the need to educate young people for the challenges of the 21st century. They are building on the potential of school libraries to enable students to become informed and engaged citizens.

  Other countries are undertaking library-based initiatives in response to the need to educate young people for the challenges of the 21st century. They are building on the potential of school libraries to enable students to become informed and engaged citizens and effective contributors to our society and our economy, through the acquisition of life skills, of information literacy strategies, and of dispositions for flexibility, creativity, and innovation.[5]

  Portugal

  In 1996, the Government of Portugal established a School Library Network to ensure that every school and every student in the K-12 sector would have access to school library services. The Network provides services to 2,400 school libraries, publishes national school library guidelines, and promotes teamwork through a national coordination body with fulltime school library network advisors. Today, all elementary students and 92 percent of secondary students benefit from a school library operating according to Network guidelines. Recently, the Network began implementing its School Libraries Self-Evaluation Model in order to measure the value and impact of school libraries and to improve the quality of school library services through action planning and continuous improvement cycles.

  Sweden

  Since 2000, the Swedish government has funded research and development projects on improving the learning environment and on developing the pedagogical role of the school library. In 2006-2007, the government funded three new projects designed to strengthen co-operation between teachers and librarians, increase their competence in information literacy, and support principals in their responsibility for the role of the school library in school development. Based on the outcomes of the projects, a law making school libraries mandatory in all schools was passed in 2011. 

  Norway

  In 2009, the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training initiated a national four-year program to develop school libraries in primary and secondary schools. The central concepts of the program are that school libraries are pedagogical tools and should be included in curricula, and that schools should have a common approach to providing programs in reading education and information literacy. At the school level, teachers and teacher-librarians are working together to define learning aims and content, and principals serve as project managers for the program. In 2014, a comprehensive assessment of Norwegian school libraries will be carried out to ascertain whether they are being more actively used after school professionals have increased their competencies in reading education and information literacy. Preliminary progress reports give the impression that schools are including libraries more systematically in their pedagogical work and that the knowledge acquired through the program is being spread to other schools and professional networks.

  Finland

  In Finland, school libraries are not mandatory, but several municipalities have created projects to establish them and to investigate their impact on student learning. The City of Oulu focused on establishing school libraries to change teaching and learning methods in 11 schools. Research findings indicated that the project had a significant impact on collaborative pedagogical practices among the teachers, among the pupils, within and between the schools and the city library, and with the Education Department of the City of Oulu.

  The school library project in the City of Espoo focused on the role of the school library in providing information literacy instruction and enhancing computer and Internet use in teaching in 26 schools. This long-term, well-planned and well-funded project emphasized a collaborative multifaceted approach: centralized funding, a joint library system, guidance from the consulting teacher in acquiring collections, and the two-year training of 21 teacher-librarians. An important result of the project was the development of a local information literacy curriculum.

  Croatia

  In 2008, the government of Croatia mandated that every school must have a school library staffed by a librarian with a university library degree, formalizing the long-time practice in Croatia. However, because professional staffing does not guarantee that a school community has a substantial and sustained commitment to the library or, vice versa, that a school library operates as an educational centre of the school community, a pilot project was developed to promote information literacy practices among school librarians and also to help the wider school community to think about information literacy as a tool for the realization of educational reforms. A series of workshops was developed for teacher-librarians, teachers, and principals to identify obstacles and develop action plans to integrate information literacy practices into the school. The outcomes included greater understanding of how information literacy practices facilitate learning success and of how collaborative work enhances educational communities.

  School Libraries and Learning: Themes

  The earlier-cited research from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. is now being supported by research and development work in European nations. Here are some of the themes emerging from research and practice around the world:

  1. Improved schools are collaborative in their thinking and practices. The school library as a silo, as a stand-alone entity, is as emblematic of impoverished learning places as the closed classroom door.
  2. Improving schools is more possible where other sectors of the education community actively contribute to the effort – especially government ministries and universities.
  3. Teachers, teacher-librarians, and principals – learning and working together – support and facilitate improvements in teaching and learning.
  4. Sustained improvements in schools are facilitated by policy development, but policy development has to be followed by implementation supports.
  5. School library and ICT staff and resources are being merged and integrated to support digital age learning, e.g., iCentres in Australia and Learning Commons in Canada.

  School libraries could support the changes in K-12 schooling that are needed for schools to be centres of 21st century learning. Many provincial curricula espouse this, but few provinces fund school libraries or even mention school libraries as a force for improving teaching and learning or for responding to the demands of a knowledge-based society. One Finnish teacher involved in a school library project explained the situation in these words: “The National Board of Education arouses a need for school library development through new curricula, without any financial support. School library activity is not like playing an Air Guitar.” How long will Canadian education policymakers and funders keep playing Air Guitars?

  EN BREF – Quatre décennies de recherches indiquent une corrélation entre la réussite des élèves et les bibliothèques d’école bien pourvues, bien dotées en personnel et bien utilisées. Les bibliothèques d’école bien dotées en personnel ont des bibliothécaires scolaires qualifiés en bibliothéconomie, en technologies numériques et en pédagogie axée sur l’enquête. Les bibliothèques d’école bien pourvues offrent des collections sur place et l’accès à des ressources numériques par Internet. Les bibliothèques d’école bien utilisées sont intégrées à la vie intellectuelle et culturelle scolaire et communautaire. Lorsque les évaluations provinciales, nationales et internationales des apprentissages sont analysées, les préoccupations soulevées concernent souvent les bibliothèques, particulièrement sur le plan des pratiques de littératie informationnelle : formuler des questions, identifier les sources appropriées d’information, trouver l’information, distinguer entre les informations pertinentes ou non. Bien que certaines régions du Canada affectent des compressions aux bibliothèques scolaires, certaines parties de l’Europe les soutiennent comme une force de réforme éducationnelle.

  ---

  [1] For syntheses of this research, consult: Ken Haycock, The Crisis in Canada’s School Libraries: The Case for Reform and Re-Investment (Toronto: Canadian Association of Publishers, 2003); Keith Curry Lance and David V. Loertscher, Powering Achievement: School Library Media Programs Make a Difference: The Evidence (San Jose, CA: Hi Willow Research and Publishing, 2003); M. Lonsdale, Impact of School Libraries on Achievement: A Review of the Research: Report for the Australian School Library Association (Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research, 2003).

  [2] See, for example: D. A. Klinger, E. A. Lee, G. Stephenson, and K. Luu, Exemplary School Libraries in Ontario (Toronto: Ontario Library Association, 2009); Jody K. Howard, “The Relationship between School Culture and an Effective School Library Program” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emporia State University, 2008).

  [3] The author acknowledges, with thanks, colleagues Ken Haycock and Ray Doiron for their insightful and provocative questions.

  [4] Brian Kenney, “What Does Excellence Look Like? A New Study That Shows the Role of School Libraries in Learning, School Library Journal 58, no. 2 (2011). Accessed October 11, 2011, from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/slj/printissue/currentissue/891938-427/what_does_excellence_look_like.html.csp?mid=4

  [5] For more information on school library developments in Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Croatia, and other countries, see Luisa Marquardt and Dianne Oberg, Global Perspectives on School Libraries: Projects and Practices (The Hague: DeGruyter Saur, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110232219  

• Looking for Magic

  3:06 PM Comments Off on Looking for Magic

  Over the last months, I have read a variety of books and articles indicating that the “traffic patterns” of our family life are evolving. Scientists have mapped the location of family members in homes and have discovered that modern families use space in different ways than families one or two generations ago. In the past, families spent time together (working, eating, studying, watching television, hanging-out). Houses were smaller, there was one television in the home, and children had fewer structured activities.  Ethnologists suggest that family space was used collaboratively and verbal interactions (greetings and conversations) accompanied this collaborative use of space.

  Today, ethnologists tell us, family traffic patterns in the home have evolved. Today’s family members orbit one another, without pausing to interact. They are seldom in the same room, and when they do come together, they pass one another with little verbal, visual, or physical interaction. Children have televisions in their bedrooms, parents are attached permanently to work through cell phones, and young children are absorbed with video and computer games. Family members slip by one another, entertaining themselves, educating themselves, meeting others, and working in virtual worlds.

  I accompanied a group of educators on a learning tour where we visited a variety of innovative educational programs. Before our expedition, a colleague emailed the group to let people know that he had set up a blog to collect our thoughts and ideas as we examined these programs. As we travelled from site to site, a portion of the group focused on their Blackberry and iPhone devices as they uploaded their impressions and ideas to this website. It became apparent that the opportunity for real-time conversation and dialogue had been co-opted by a virtual world and a virtual reality. Like the traffic patterns in our homes, our conversations orbited one another. It appeared that our ideas and collective inspirations slipped past one another to meet somewhere in another world.

  It has become obvious that who we are as families, educators, and citizens is evolving in the 21st century. It becomes equally obvious that who students are, and the skills they will need to thrive, are also evolving. The drive to define and refine what these skills are is important work. A variety of educators define them as the competencies students must have to move forward into the future, including technology use, problem-solving skills, a capacity for teamwork, and the development of well-rounded life skills. Others focus on the orientations students need to operate effectively as citizens. These orientations include the earlier list, but also include wider capacities such as imagination, adaptability, and entrepreneurialism. Still other educators define 21st century skills as social, media, and web literacies, focusing on the technological connective capacities of process, data analysis, and social media use.

  Many years ago I had a conversation with an elder of the Bluebird clan on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. He was the last descendant of the Bluebird clan and the last “keeper” of his people’s memory. He shared with me his struggle over the death of this knowledge. When I asked why he didn’t make records, manuscripts, or documents of his knowledge, he told me about his conception of story and personhood, suggesting that stories are created at moments of intersection. Without collaborative communication (interjection, imagination) the “magic” of story was lost.

  Educators within Aboriginal, new immigrant, and other traditionally marginalized groups offer alternative conceptions of what 21st century skills look like. In Reclaiming Youth at Risk, Brentro, Brokenleg and Van Bockern outline an Aboriginal model of child development, student resiliency, and 21st century skills.[1] They describe the importance of belonging, mastery, independence, and generosity as a framework for preparing students for life. The Canadian Council on Learning’s exploration of Aboriginal success similarly outlines a framework that emphasizes connective capacities, including community context, experience, story, culture, and communal activity.[2]

  It can be argued that the skills we define as important for our students describe our conception of personhood. An emphasis on technological, individual, or connective capacities each describes different futures for our children. Increasingly – in family, in life, in schools – we slip past one another. We orbit one another, plugged into virtual and singular worlds. When schools talk about 21st century skills, they highlight individual capacities with a cursory nod to teamwork and collaboration. I wonder if pursuing the connective capacities highlighted by alternative voices will bring us to richer places as schools and society – and help us recapture the magic of lives in which collaborative communication defines peoples and knowledge.

  ---

  [1] L. Brendtro, M. Brokenleg and S. Van Bockern, Reclaiming Youth at Risk (Bloomington, IN: The Solution Tree, 2002).

  [2] Redefining How Success is Measured in First Nations, Inuit and Métis Learning (Canadian Council on Learning, 2007).

• Living with Uncertainty

  January 5, 2012 10:11 PM Comments Off on Living with Uncertainty

  In this month’s lead article, Danielle McLaughlin zeroes in on a handful of children’s stories to illustrate the importance of teaching young minds to grapple with the messiness of critical thinking. Her passionate belief that children – and those who teach them ­– need to be exposed to all sides of an issue, even if that means withholding judgment, reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, from William Sloane Coffin: “The worst thing we can do with a dilemma is to resolve it prematurely because we haven’t the courage to live with uncertainty.”

  Uncertainty is an unintended, but inevitable, by-product of critical thinking. Sometimes critically exploring all sides of a question yields a clear answer. More often, it results in a need to weigh, analyze, and evaluate – exactly the skills we claim to value in what we often see referred to as “uncertain times”. And yet, how many of us are really comfortable with the uncertainty that results when our best critical thinking can’t deliver a clear answer?

  The courage Coffin refers to seems to be in short supply these days, and yet it may be one of the most important qualities we can cultivate in our young people. There are so many things we just don’t know – something it’s hard to keep in mind when Google is at our fingertips – things like how to balance majority and minority rights in a complex, heterogeneous culture, or how to behave as responsible consumers when the economic and environmental priorities clash, or – as McLaughlin points out in her discussion of Huckleberry Finn – how to expose children to the richness of the past without condoning its negative features. Our kids need to confront these dilemmas without feeling pressure to come up with the “right” answers.

  That’s not easy in a fill-in-the-bubble testing culture, where getting it right is what matters most. It’s particularly difficult when adult role models make claims of certainty when none exists and provide pat answers to unanswerable questions. And as much as we may give lip-service to the notion of critical thinking, the kids know that, most of the time, the right answer will get them farther in school than the right questions. Or the hard questions. If we really want to prepare our children to live in uncertain times, we need to help them develop the courage to live with uncertainty while they continue to search for answers to their – and our – dilemmas.

• The King of Denmark and the Naked Mole Rat: Teaching Critical Thinking for Social Justice

  5:47 PM Comments Off on The King of Denmark and the Naked Mole Rat: Teaching Critical Thinking for Social Justice

  The King of Denmark and a Class Divided

  There is a well-loved, but apocryphal story about the King of Denmark. It goes like this: When the Nazis invaded Denmark during the Second World War, they ordered the Danish Jews to don arm bands displaying the yellow star of David. Jews would no longer be permitted to appear in public without these symbols in plain view. The morning following the Nazi invasion, so the story goes, the King of Denmark rode out on his horse through the parks and streets wearing an armband with the yellow star. While this story is not factual, it has created an archetype, a symbol of bravery in the face of injustice. And, in truth, only a small number of Danish Jews ended up in the hands of the Nazis because their non-Jewish friends and neighbours found ingenious ways to protect them, to hide them, and to spirit them out of harm’s way.

  Many people have seen the film of Jane Elliott’s attempt to teach her Grade 3 class about racial discrimination. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, teaching in a small Iowa town populated largely by White people from homogeneous backgrounds, Jane Elliott decided to introduce her students to an experience that she believed would simulate racial discrimination and thereby teach them to become more tolerant people.

  Her blue-eye, brown-eye class division exercise has become legendary. Over the course of a few days, Ms. Elliott alternately privileged and then disadvantaged her students based upon the colour of their eyes. The film, entitled “A Class Divided”, focuses on children who are humiliated by the experience and also on those who exult in their newfound positions of privilege and liberty. While it is painful to watch children suffering the negative effects of exclusion, we must not forget to look at the smiling children who are experiencing the other side of Ms. Elliott’s coin.

  We need to ask why there seems to be a belief that the children in the experiment will only learn from one half of the experience. The unstated hypothesis of the experiment seems to be that they will suddenly be brought to realize the “right answer” to the question we all ask a child who has hurt another: “How would it make you feel if she did that to you?”

  Has that ever actually worked? We know that a large number of bullies have, themselves, been bullied, so why do we persist in the belief that there is only one thing to learn from an experience like the one Jane Elliott created? If we cannot teach children to see a multiplicity of views, we are – none of us – learning from the experience.

  Where is the King of Denmark in this story? Where are the students who refuse to comply with the demand to exclude their former friends or refuse to stand by while others are denied an extra helping of lunch? Why don’t we see Jane Elliott’s “diversity training” in the same light as we see Stanley Milgram’s experiments? When experimental subjects were given orders, which 65 percent of them obeyed, to apply shocks they believed could be lethal, there was an outcry. Yes, we learned that even ordinary and decent people would follow orders to the extreme. We learned what we have always known about how to train soldiers to kill the enemy and how to make the “other” seem inhuman. But did anyone expect that the experimental subjects who applied the shocks would learn to be more compassionate or tolerant? It does not stand to reason. We cannot close our eyes to the observations and the views that may contradict the “nice” or popular way of examining uncomfortable issues.

  The Naked Mole Rat, Freedom of Expression, and Equality Rights

  One of my favourite picture books is by Mo Willems, of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus fame. This charming exploration of freedom of expression is entitled Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed (New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2009). The book’s main character is a naked mole rat named Wilbur, who likes to wear clothes. When the rest of the naked mole rats see him dressed, Wilbur is met by a chorus of “Eew Yuck,” from the others, who inform him, “NAKED MOLE RATS DON’T WEAR CLOTHES.” His response: “Why not?”

  This two-word sentence elicits an outcry from the majority of his community, but also a response from the great leader, Grand-pah, who upon consideration, decides to don clothing, himself. The questions he asks while pondering Wilbur’s “Why not?” amount to a legal and rights-based analysis, suitable for five-year-olds. Does wearing clothes hurt anyone? No. Does everyone like to wear clothes? Also, no. We do not need a head count here to determine fairness. We need to approach the question in another way.

  Democracy does not, in fact, depend solely upon the rule of the majority; it depends upon the understanding that the majority should be subject to questions and that minority values and views will be tolerated where they do not cause significant harm. And “Eew Yuck” is not harm.

  Democracy does not, in fact, depend solely upon the rule of the majority; it depends upon the understanding that the majority should be subject to questions and that minority values and views will be tolerated where they do not cause significant harm.

  Giving the franchise to women, First Nations peoples, prisoners, and others who did not previously have the right to vote; integrating neighbourhoods, industries, schools; joining people of different races or of the same sex in marriage; covering or uncovering our heads and faces in public have all, at one time or another, met with scorn, offense, and strong negative feelings. Nonetheless, principles of equality and freedom have slowly gained the upper hand. This did not happen by silencing either side of the conflicts involved in these issues.

  Here is the hard part – we also need to hear from those who say “Eew Yuck”. As people who care about justice and who also know that we do not and cannot have all the answers, we need to be open to the questions. Did the King of Denmark love the Jewish people? Did the Danes? Not particularly. They just understood that rather than acting upon arbitrary instructions or upon emotions, they needed to act upon first principles.

  But how do we teach principles in an era when our diverse societies are constantly engaging in conflicts of values and points of view? I believe that we teach justice by actively and purposely engaging those whose views differ from our own. We must do this consciously and creatively. We must invite disagreement, but also acknowledge that all points of view are not equally valid or justifiable. But if we find everyone to be in agreement, if we quickly find a consensus, we should acknowledge that someone must be missing. Whose voice is not being heard? We need to actively seek out views that contradict our own, or we may never truly understand our own views. (If you have ever seen a naked mole rat, you may be more convinced than ever, that clothes are a good idea!)

  If we find everyone to be in agreement, if we quickly find a consensus, we should acknowledge that someone must be missing. Whose voice is not being heard? We need to actively seek out views that contradict our own, or we may never truly understand our own views.

  Huckleberry Finn, Freedom of Expression and Equality Rights

  A few years ago, I decided to read aloud to my granddaughters one of my favourite books. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic of American literature and has been taught in schools and universities for generations. It is genuinely funny, and is also an early anti-racist work of art. What could go wrong? I was unable to get past the first few pages before my granddaughters told me they did not want to hear any more. They were not bored; they simply could not stand hearing the word that is used pervasively in the story – and that was used frequently and commonly at the time the novel was written. The “N” word comes from the mouths of nearly all the characters and appears more than 200 times in the text.

  A number of solutions to this problem have arisen. One such solution is to read a Bowdlerized version of the book recently published (not for the first time), that replaces the word “nigger” with the word “slave.” It also eliminates the word “Injun”, which is also used numbers of times in the text. Do these alterations change meaning and context? Without question.

  Others think a solution is to simply stop teaching or reading the book altogether. After all, there are many other wonderful examples of late 19^th century American literature deserving of our attention. If we use this new version of Huckleberry Finn, or if we stop reading and teaching it, what does this say about our commitment to teaching and engaging with our difficult history, with art, and with critical thinking?

  What do we say to the parent who reports that her child is in a class reading Huckleberry Finn and is now, for the first time, being called “nigger” in the school yard?

  But, what do we say to the parent who reports that her child is in a class reading Huckleberry Finn and is now, for the first time, being called “nigger” in the school yard? Whether we choose to engage with the past (or with the present), whether we choose to avoid conflict by ignoring potential controversy, we inevitably make a choice that leaves someone out. In order to make an informed choice, we need to listen to as many views as we can find. And yet, a choice must still be made.

  Citizenship, Democracy, and Tins of Tomatoes

  Teaching citizenship to young children in many schools has come down to a well-known exercise – the charity fundraising or food bank drive. Many schools teach children to “give back” or to appreciate how lucky they are in comparison to others who do not have the material possessions or security that they are presumed to enjoy. Certain schools enjoin each class in a competition to bring in the most money or the largest number of tins. At the end of the collection period, the class that brings in the most wins a prize, perhaps a pizza lunch or coupons from a fast food restaurant.

  The tacit understanding is that the children in these classes will learn to be good citizens who assist people in need – particularly those who are less fortunate and who live in far-off countries. This seems like a rational and uncontroversial lesson because very few people object to “good works”. And the fundraising drives often involve videos of grateful people in Africa who have had a school built for them or who now have access to clean water because of a new well drilled for them by the funds raised by Canadian children.

  But, rarely are our children shown videos of First Nations people in Manitoba or Ontario who do not have clean and safe water, or decent school facilities. Nor are they shown the excellent living conditions enjoyed by the leaders of the countries in which people have no safe drinking water or schools. As Wilbur asks, “Why not?”

  There are questions we should invite from students who are learning about democracy and citizenship – questions we may not realize we are actually avoiding. When we want our students to be grateful for their good fortune, do we know if some of the children in our classes are asking their families to give them the tins of tomatoes they received that week from the very food bank the school wants them to support? When we gather funds for far-off people, do we ask why their living situations are different from our own – or ask whether there are people in Canada whose lives are similar to the needy or grateful people in the videos?

  Asking hard questions is just that – hard. But if we are truly committed to teaching for social justice, we need to encourage our children to find as many points of view as they can, and to ask questions we may never be able to answer, knowing that education for citizenship lies in the process of thinking critically about the many sides of a question and working toward addressing the inequities this process reveals.

  EN BREF – Poser des questions difficiles est effectivement – difficile. Mais pour enseigner vraiment la justice sociale, nous devons encourager nos enfants à obtenir le plus de points de vue possible et à poser des questions auxquelles nous pourrions ne jamais arriver à répondre, en sachant que l’éducation à la citoyenneté réside dans la réflexion critique au sujet des nombreux aspects d’une question et dans la réduction des iniquités qui sont ainsi dégagées. Si nous constatons que tous s’entendent, si nous arrivons rapidement à un consensus, nous devrions reconnaître que quelqu’un est sûrement absent. Quelle voix n’entendons-nous pas? Nous devons activement chercher des points de vue qui contredisent les nôtres, sinon nous ne pourrions jamais vraiment comprendre nos propres points de vue.

• Politically Correct Preschools and their Discontents: One Teacher’s Story

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  Editor’s Note: Does this story from south of the border resonate with Canadian educators? Have schools crossed the line from sensitive to censorship? Where is that line? Post your thoughts below….

  Politically Correct or “PC” thinking is a potent force, operating at all levels of education in the U.S. Not even my preschoolers are immune from censorship – of traditional tunes and gender-specific toys. But, as a music specialist, I want these young students to enjoy age-old songs and their favourite toys.

  Superheroes

  “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound” – but for all that, the Man of Steel couldn’t break into the preschool classroom where I assist twice a week.

  During “free play”, two little boys had asked me to draw Superman on their construction paper. It was early in the year, and obliging their request seemed a harmless way to help them feel comfortable in school. They looked proud holding up their drawings of Superman.

  When they told me they wanted to take the drawings home, I suggested that they add their own decorations. Indeed, I turned the tables around, and asked them to draw a picture of Superman for me so that I would have something to take home. But before long, one brave Superman flew into the hands of Miss Nicole, the head teacher of this class. “We don’t allow drawing of action figures from the media,” she explained, primly tearing in half and disposing of the rendered intruder.

  I’m still not clear about the rationale for this prohibition. Did permitting me to draw Superman imply that children at our extraordinary school actually watched and enjoyed television sometimes?

  My friend Tracy, an assistant teacher in another classroom, wasn’t handled so gently. “When I first got here, you know, I was trying to win the kids over so I drew SpongeBob and the whole gang.” For this offense, Tracy had been harshly berated by our supervisor. “What’s wrong with you?” the supervisor demanded. “Are you rebellious? Are you sick?” The confrontation left Tracy in tears.

  The next thing I knew, reins were tightened and I was prohibited from drawing with the children altogether. The final, indicting picture – a cake and candles I’d sketched for a birthday child – was held over my head like a dripping murder weapon as Miss Nicole hissed at me, “I thought we discussed this. There is to be absolutely no evidence of adult artwork here!”

  I then learned the grounds for this prohibition: it was “bad for children’s self esteem” to “see my drawing as a standard that they couldn’t meet, and it would discourage them from drawing themselves.” But at the end of the day I was allowed to take out my guitar and play songs for the children, even though the kids couldn’t play a guitar as well as I. Why couldn’t I wield the magic marker? What did that mean?

  No Winners Allowed

  This philosophy of protecting fragile young egos extended to “table toys” and board games such as Snails. The children were excited when Miss Nicole cracked opened a new box. The pieces that moved towards a finish line were different coloured snails. To play, we rolled the dice with the different snail colours. If the dice landed on green, then the green snail could move forward, and so forth.

  Immediately the children got busy choosing their colour and crowing that they were going to win. Miss Nicole frowned on their jubilation. “This game has no single winner,” she declared. “When the first snail crosses the finish line then everyone’s a winner. We all win!” In the moment of silence that followed, the children looked blankly at each other. Quickly they resumed their cheerful boasting, “I’m gonna win. I’m blue! Blue is the best. Blue is gonna win.”

  “This game has no single winner,” she declared. “When the first snail crosses the finish line then everyone’s a winner. We all win!” In the moment of silence that followed, the children looked blankly at each other.

  All Miss Nicole had managed to do was confuse them. When she left our area, I allowed the children to continue the snail game as it was intended to be played. None of us could see the point of playing a game that had no winner. Besides, winning and losing are natural parts of life. Imagine removing the glory of watching The World Series or the Olympic games! We do children a great disservice by not preparing them to tolerate difficult experiences, or to celebrate triumphs.

  Guns and Roses

  Without meaning to, I became a reluctant leader in the nursery school underground. Before I knew it I found myself asked to smuggle weapons.

  “Bang, bang!” Little boys would point fingers at each other in our schoolyard.

  “Watcha doin’?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  “Shhhhh,” they’d beg me. “Don’t tell Miss Nicole. We’re playing with guns.”

  I’m no handgun advocate, but it’s simple-minded to think that guns mean to these children what real guns do to an adult. Besides, a pointed finger in a playground is not a real gun any more than a water balloon is an atomic bomb. To hold a “gun” is to wield power. Children simply won’t buy it if you try to tell them otherwise; they’re too smart. Policemen with guns protect our safety and even the most cloistered child in our culture sees heroes toting guns in movies and cartoons.

  The little boys – and yes, they are mostly boys – are only releasing energy and aggression deferred in a long morning of good behaviour. They are simply letting off steam. To remove their “guns” is to remove the exciting edge to their game. It’s like asking them to eat tasteless food, and brings us inanely back to the artificial world of Miss Nicole’s snail game, where everybody’s a winner, and nobody is.

  Trying to suppress a child’s desire to hold a gun doesn’t seem to work. Friends who forbid their children to play with “guns” have seen them desperately vie for water pistols in the less enlightened homes of their playmates. I have actually witnessed a child nibble a gun out of a piece of toast. A child’s desire to hold a gun in an exciting game will, like a determined rat, gnaw through the bars you set against it.

  I have actually witnessed a child nibble a gun out of a piece of toast. A child’s desire to hold a gun in an exciting game will, like a determined rat, gnaw through the bars you set against it.

  In 2009, the preschool staff attended a conference on The Importance of Play in Early Childhood. Speakers maintained that allowing children time to play, with only minimal adult supervision, was vital for their social and physical development and their ability to solve problems. These speakers stressed that children learned as much in unstructured play times as during formal classroom lessons. Putting such insights into practice for me meant encouraging children to choose their own games, even allowing a “shoot out” or two.

  Of course, during one recess it wasn’t just the firearms that had to be confiscated. In this instance the boys were using jump ropes to tie up the girls in a corner of the yard for a rather frisky game of “playing jail”. While I agreed with Miss Nicole that tying girls up with ropes was too hazardous for school, even the shyest girls weren’t interested in her clueless suggestion that everybody join hands and play “Sally Go Round the Sun” as an alternative.

  No Angels Need Apply

  By the time December’s cold temperatures were keeping us indoors all day, I was in trouble yet again. I was found to be in possession of a far deadlier contraband then even toy guns and jump ropes.

  “We don’t sing Santa Claus is Coming to Town at our school. It’s too holidayish for us,” I was reprimanded when I lit into this old seasonal favourite. Now Santa Claus, like Superman, wasn’t allowed down this chimney. Also blacklisted were Chanukah songs, anything sung in Hebrew or Latin as well as English lyrics resplendent with Christmas trees, holly, silver bells, mistletoe or even the most abstract and diluted reference to a spiritual existence.

  Although we had no African-American children enrolled, songs commemorating the more recently established holiday of Kwaanza fared slightly better. It seemed that only songs for holidays that none of the kids celebrated at home were found acceptable. At what some herald as “the most wonderful time of the year” – a time in New York City so rich in varied traditions, history, and sentiment – my songs with the children were restricted to Jingle Bells and This Little Light of Mine.

  Working on the Railroad

  Holding my job at this school meant that I had to concede to the head teachers’ requests. I tried. But when Miss Nicole tried to block the railroads I went on strike.

  In January, I was assigned the after-school program on Tuesdays. This meant that for two hours I was responsible for entertaining anywhere from two to seven children who already had logged in many hours of school. Little girls were often temperamental and cranky. They’d hide in the play loft, refusing to come out for snack, or cry if they couldn’t hold a beloved toy from home because that created too much distraction in the room. And often the boys, strained from hours of good behaviour, would erupt into biting and strangling matches that I had to quell.

  I’d noticed that these little boys of two and three, who’d spent nearly as many hours in school as adults do on nine-to-five jobs, loved to play with toy trains and Brio tracks. They’d string a row of cars together, lie on their sides and dreamily push the trains back and forth. After enjoying this private, quiet retreat, they were ready to play together peacefully again. With this in mind, I would set the trains on the floor when I arrived so my toughest customers could help themselves. Until Miss Nicole came upon me setting down the tracks, and told me that she didn’t want our little boys playing with trains.

  Girls were allowed to play with their dollhouse or with the basket of dress-up clothes they were drawn to. But now Miss Nicole was telling me that the little boys would be denied their beloved trains, presumably because they would fight over the cars. But it was more than that. Miss Nicole was beginning to embrace a worrisome pedagogical trend: the active suppression of gender difference in a preschool setting. To this “egalitarian” end, I was to address the class as “children” rather than “boys and girls.” It wasn’t enough to abolish winners and losers. Boys and girls, lads and lassies, were now also taboo designations. Miss Nicole clearly resented boys behaving aggressively and gravitating towards traditionally boyish toy trains. Their behavior violated her construct of hegemony, perhaps made her recognize its fraudulence.

  So I didn’t cave. I negotiated on behalf of the boys, reminding her that after a long day they’d fight over anything. Better they fight over the train cars than that they strangle each other!

  Even she couldn’t disagree. The boys were allowed their calming moment with toy trains and Brio tracks, and I promise that it will not make them male supremacists. I’ve heard objections to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and St. Patrick’s Day, and I’ve seen veritable war waged over Christmas. I’ve seen competitive games sabotaged and toy guns banned. Now toy trains. What next? Will certain letters be forbidden from the alphabet? Maybe provocative letters, like F or L or N or XXX could be forbidden from our ABCs.

  Soon they’ll be trying to fit the Table of Elements into their agenda. They’ll be telling us that the earth doesn’t turn, and that it’s flat. Or I can hear it now: “I’m just not comfortable with the Gregorian Calendar… it was introduced by the Pope, and the dates are based on Christian holidays, like Easter. Why do we have to have March, April and May? Let’s just have Cold Time and Warm Time.”

  Who would have thought I’d come to agree with conservative Christians, who rallied to retain gender-specific pronouns in the New International Version of The Bible? I simply agree with them that some people are female, and some are male. This is also true of flowers, trees, and animals. There is no harm or inequality implied in acknowledging gender differences. It seems to me that we should be teaching tolerance and honesty rather than denial of the obvious.

  But society expects us educators to inculcate its values, even when these values are not congruent: for example, we value individual freedom and we value conformity; we value competition and altruism; we value immigration and high fences. PC thinkers believe in a static society in which all such conflicts have been settled. They are the proud possessors of new answers to old questions. They feel comfortable, if not righteous, in blotting out differences that were freely acknowledged in the past. Pretend – indeed insist – that we are all the same: boys and girls, men and women. Reduce religious differences to a dull sameness. Banish festive holidays.

  I don’t want to teach in the narrow playrooms spawned by such certainty, in PC purgatories where nobody wins or loses, nobody can be more talented than anyone else, and nobody belongs to a religion that’s older than 1990. No teacher’s drawings, no trains, no superheroes, no moms, no dads, no girls or boys.

  I say, where is Superman when you really need him?

  EN BREF – La rectitude politique est une puissante force agissant à tous les paliers éducatifs aux États-Unis. Même le jeu préscolaire est assujetti à la censure des chansonnettes traditionnelles et à la condamnation des jouets assignés aux sexes. Des superhéros aux fusillades imaginaires, des fêtes officielles aux jeux de société, le personnel enseignant risque d’offenser des collègues et des parents. La société s’attend que les éducateurs inculquent ses valeurs, même si elles s’opposent : nous valorisons à la fois la liberté individuelle et la conformité, la compétition et l’altruisme, l’immigration et les barrières.

• Leah Wells: Have schools crossed the line from sensitive to censorship?

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  Skype interview excerpts with Leah Wells, a New York-based educator, musician, and Education Canada author.

• Paying for Equity: The Role of Taxation in Driving Canada’s Educational Success

  November 18, 2011 7:35 PM Comments Off on Paying for Equity: The Role of Taxation in Driving Canada’s Educational Success

  In 1994, several social policy organizations collaborated to challenge the claim by the federal government that Canada’s fiscal debt was the result of overspending on social programs and that public investments had to be severely curtailed. Because most of the mainstream media accepted and propagated this view, the public had limited access to research showing that it was not overspending, but rather the under-collection of taxes, that was the source of the problem.  Using research conducted by the federal government’s own finance department, the social policy groups released the report, Paying for Canada: Perspectives on Public Finance and National Programs.[1] It showed that deliberate government policy to reduce taxation levels for some of the most economically advantaged groups in Canada had resulted in a significant decrease in public revenues, thereby fuelling a debt “crisis”.

  With five Canadian provinces going to the polls in 2011 and another recession looming, it is important to understand the critical role of stable taxation levels in supporting this country’s success in education. As several writers have pointed out in this issue, Canada’s educational outcomes are much better than those of the U.S. – and the impact of socio-economic status on those outcomes much lower – for a combination of reasons: lower levels of inequality and child and family poverty, higher wages, better support for immigrants, better housing and health care, equitable financing policies, better qualified and motivated teachers, and less variation in quality of schools.[2]

  It is no coincidence that Canadians also pay higher taxes than Americans. One of the biggest differences between Canada and the U.S. is the relative willingness of Canadians to pay taxes at a level needed to support investments in our education, social, and health care systems. Public opinion polls repeatedly show that Canadians do not balk at paying taxes for what they value. Currently, this is being demonstrated in Toronto and other municipalities across the country, where citizens are rejecting proposals by their city councils to cut libraries, parks, and other public services.

  Concerns are often raised that Canada may follow in the footsteps of the U.S. and introduce educational policies such as merit pay for teachers and high stakes testing that are both punitive and ineffective.  Although these policy ideas are sometimes discussed in Canada, there does not appear to be an appetite among provincial governments to emulate American educational policies. A bigger threat to educational quality and equity might be their inclination to follow the U.S. in its low tax agenda.

  Canadians pay for decent public education, health care, and safe and inclusive cities through progressive taxation based on the principle that those with higher incomes should pay a higher proportion in taxes ­– a principle President Obama has been struggling to implement in the U.S. Despite political claims to the contrary, there is evidence that Canadians are willing to pay increased taxes for education. Research commissioned by the Canadian Education Association in 2007 revealed that a majority of Canadian residents outside Quebec[3] – both with and without children – would pay more to support schools.[4]

  Reducing tax levels not only reduces overall funding, it exacerbates inequities. Despite its positive international standing, Canada is drifting toward higher inequality – as groups as diverse as the Conference Board of Canada and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have pointed out. A good example is school fundraising to subsidize budgets; disparities in school-generated funds are “deepening inequalities and leading to gaps in learning opportunities” because of the vastly different financial capacities of neighbourhoods to raise money from the people who live there.[5]

  Quality education and a high level of equity require sustained public investment – an investment Canadians have demonstrated they are willing to make. Public education is the foundation that prepares our children for the future they will inherit and helps ensure they have the competencies needed not only to compete in a global economy, but to live together in a globalized world. Lower taxes compromise both the excellence and equity agendas and shortchange our children and the nation’s future. The polls suggest that citizens may be ahead of some of their governments in their understanding of the need to “pay for Canada” and pay for educational excellence and equity.

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  [1] Child Poverty Action Group, Citizens for Public Justice, and Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto (SPCMT), Paying for Canada: Perspectives on Public Finance and National Programs (Toronto: SPCMT, 1994).

  [2] See the article by Ben Levin in this issue of Education Canada.

  [3] In Quebec, it was slightly lower at 46 percent.

  [4] Jodene Dunleavy, Public Education in Canada: Facts, Trends and Attitudes (Toronto: Canadian Education Association, 2007).

  [5] Lesley Johnston, Public System, Private Money: Fees, Fundraising and Equity in the Toronto District School Board (Toronto: Social Planning Toronto, 2011).

• Putting the Horse Before the Cart: The Culture of Schooling

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  Policymakers conventionally work to effect positive outcomes on the technical aspects of education – i.e., the human capital aspects: what students learn and obtain in skills. I have interacted with hundreds of high school students in the U.S. for the last few years, and my thoughts pertain mainly to the social and cultural functions of schooling. I can’t say definitely that these functions actually “cause” anything because I am first and foremost an ethnographic interviewer – searching for the meanings that students impose on the schooling experience. But these meanings matter; in fact, they might matter more than we know.

  The Price of Inequality

  By all indicators, U.S. society still has a long way to go to rectify the economic and educational disparities that are so highly correlated with skin color, ethnicity, and social status. While inequality has multiple origins, I believe that we must develop educational policies that demonstrate a mindfulness of the massive educational “debt”, to borrow from Gloria Ladson-Billings,[1] that people of colour have inherited from systems of colonization, genocide, and slavery. It is a debt that compounds over the decades as inequality continues to rise, enabling the rich to get richer, the poor to get poorer, and both to be correlated with skin colour and ethnicity.

  This legacy of debt is reflected in both material and educational terms. Only 50 percent of historically disadvantaged U.S. minority groups graduate from high school.[2] The dropout rate for Latinos is more than double the national average. One in five African-American students will fail a grade in elementary or secondary school, compared to one in ten for average students. Only a third or less of African-American, Latino, and Native American students are enrolled in college preparatory classes, compared to half or more of Asian and White students. The average White 13-year-old reads at a higher level and fares better in math than the average Black or Latino 17-year-old.[3]

  Aside from the obvious personal tragedies behind these figures, demographic forecasts predict that Blacks and Latinos will comprise a majority of the U.S. population by the middle of the 21st century. If our schools do not adequately prepare them for higher educational attainment, they may not have the skills necessary to lead this country.

  Unfortunately, the good intentions of reformers to address these concerns have taken us in a dangerous direction, one in which we measure the success of the overwhelming majority of U.S. teachers and students by how well students do on one-shot, fill-in-the bubble tests.

  This test-and-punish trend played out in high drama in Los Angeles, where teachers fought back after being named ineffective in the Los Angeles Times because their latest students’ test results were lower than the previous year’s.

  On the flip side, however, the San Francisco Chronicle featured a story on June Jordan School for Equity, whose students do not place high on achievement tests but succeed in other important ways academically. Although June Jordan students’ test scores place the school in the category of “worse performing”, more than three-quarters of graduating seniors attend college – well above the state average of 50 percent. Of course, high school graduates need to possess strong literacy and numeracy skills, but they also need strong critical and creative thinking skills. The case of a school like June Jordan raises the question: can we produce highly successful children even if they score poorly on standardized tests?

  They don’t really care about us when it comes to school. They just need us to perform well on these tests so that the school can look good, and they [the educators] can keep their jobs.

  I have spent hundreds of hours over the last five years in high schools across the country where I have witnessed how high-stakes testing is eroding the relationships between teachers and school officials, teachers and parents, and even teachers and students. In the words of one 15-year-old African-American student in a relatively high-performing Southern high school, “They don’t really care about us when it comes to school. They just need us to perform well on these tests so that the school can look good, and they [the educators] can keep their jobs.” Indeed, all we seem to care about in the U.S. these days are test-score results and international standings with other countries on particular educational outcomes. Darlene and several of her school mates even told me that they sometimes throw in the towel on these tests, especially when they feel disconnected from the material and when they view the test’s worth as something only to make educators “look good.” We have to go behind the scenes to investigate factors that keep youth committed to and invested in their education.

  Comments like Darlene’s, and the current debates about how we improve the educational landscape of American public schooling, should compel us to think seriously about the direction educational policy is taking us. In many districts, testing strategies take precedence over teaching the content and learning skills that students will need for college and life. Even worse, students who don’t test well often become “collateral damage” in “good” schools, where the objective of maintaining high rankings is such a priority that the schools transfer low performers by “dumping” or sending kids to other, lower performing schools.

  Ironically, the impetus for our current testing fixation is the academic achievement gap between students of different race and class backgrounds. This fixation does not serve them well. We expect poor kids to perform as well as middle-class and affluent kids – but without the same family and neighbourhood supports that we know improve test scores, and without the in-school supports such as current text books, high quality teachers, safe schools, one-on-one tutors, and expensive test-prep programs.

  Emphasizing testing over teaching has put the cart before the horse.

  School Culture

  Policymakers are looking for quick fixes to the racial achievement gap, but for the real fix we need to delve beneath the test scores and deal with the social and cultural functions of schooling. How does a student come to respect his “different” neighbours in the face of fear and apprehension about their culture? And how does a social context of “separateness” affect academic performance?

  In 2007 my research assistants and I conducted a study in two southern and two northeastern high schools, all of which achieved high levels of proficiency and excellence on the mandated report cards required by No Child Left Behind. For half a year we visited these “good” schools almost daily. Though all the schools were considered multiracial, two were majority-White (and wealthier) and two majority-Black and/or Latino. We found that the academic experiences of majority Black and Latino students differed greatly from the experience of their minority counterparts in the majority-White schools. In both majority-White schools, we encountered only one or two African-American and Latino students enrolled in the upper-echelon honours and advanced classes. Strikingly, when I asked teachers at the southern majority-White school to identify high-achieving African-American students among the more than three hundred enrolled, they could mention only two girls.

  Our survey study of 469 students found that the self-esteem of the Black students in this school was the lowest of all of the Black students across the four schools. Along with their Black peers at the northeastern majority-White school, these students were also least likely to report that they sought friends across different social and cultural lines. Meanwhile, their peers of similar socio-economic backgrounds at the majority-Black schools showed significantly higher levels of what I term “cultural flexibility” and higher levels of self-esteem.[4]

  Ethnographically, we observed that, despite attending “desegregated” schools, Black students in the affluent White schools were segregated in terms of both academics and extracurricular activities. That is, their presence in college preparatory courses (known to expand students’ knowledge bases in significantly different ways than regular comprehensive high school courses) and their involvement in cultural activities such as band, orchestra, theatre, and Model United Nations, was much lower than that of their Black peers in majority-Black schools. In brief, we found that Black (and Latino) students in the majority-White schools had little to no engagement in specific educational classes or activities that could potentially broaden their cultural horizons. Their schools’ social organization, coupled with a particular cultural climate, conveyed both implicit and explicit messages about different racial and ethnic groups’ academic and extracurricular turfs.[5]

  “Equity entails… a habit of attention by which citizens are attuned to the balances and imbalances in what citizens are giving up for each other,” writes Danielle Allen.[6] She outlines a conceptual diagram of overlapping networks in which people negotiate losses, gains, and reciprocity without feeling that they are losing their political agency when institutions step in to equilibrate resources and opportunity.

  Realizing this kind of equity will be difficult in U.S. society. Achieving deep understanding of what it takes to recalibrate the system fairly for all citizens is not easy in a society where liberal national values espouse individualism and competition while denying the ways in which historic, exclusionary practices and policies have placed members of particular racial groups in their current economic and academic predicaments. To paraphrase a rhetorical question proffered by Allen: “Can we devise an education that, rather than teaching citizens not to cross social boundaries or to talk to strangers or out-group members, that, instead, teaches them how to interact with them self-confidently and equitably?”[7] I think so. But not easily.

  Achieving deep understanding of what it takes to recalibrate the system fairly for all citizens is not easy in a society where liberal national values espouse individualism and competition while denying the ways in which historic, exclusionary practices and policies have placed members of particular racial groups in their current economic and academic predicaments.

  In addition to a cadre of well-trained teachers bolstered by access to ample learning tools and aids, equity requires a heightened consciousness among educators to “do diversity” with depth: by increasing their own knowledge base to help narrow the divides among and between students and teachers who differ by race, ethnicity, culture, and socio-economic status; by working to ensure that all students have equal opportunities to learn within the school; by maintaining a culture of high expectations for all students; by developing critically conscious and historically accurate pedagogy and curricula; and by preventing new forms of segregation within schools with due vigilance. Regrettably, although some of our nations’ schools have achieved desegregation, few have ever attained social integration.

  Ideologically, thinkers may disagree about the purposes of education. I, for one, continue to believe it is about much more than maintaining society’s economic health. As a social institution, it is a conduit for the transformation of society; for the promotion of vital democratic ideals and practices; for the maintenance of social harmony and balance; and for the building of civic community and capacity. Today, core values embedded in U.S. social and educational policies confirm these are, indeed, shared goals of education. Only focused attention on these areas in discourse, policy, and practice will lead us to the fulfillment of equal opportunity, equity, and the integration of a nation’s peoples.

  EN BREF – Les responsables de politiques cherchent des solutions simples pour combler l’écart de réussite entre les races, mais pour trouver une vraie solution, il faut expliquer cet écart et tenir compte des fonctions sociales et culturelles de l’école. Comment un élève arrive-t-il à respecter les différences devant la peur et l’appréhension face à d’autres cultures? Comment un contexte social de « séparation » se répercute-t-il sur le rendement scolaire? Les éducateurs doivent mieux saisir l’équité pour traiter la diversité en profondeur. Ils doivent enrichir leurs connaissances en vue d’atténuer ce qui divise les élèves ainsi que le personnel enseignant qui diffèrent par leur race, leur ethnicité, leur culture et leur situation socioéconomique; veiller à l’égalité des chances d’apprentissage de tous les élèves à l’école; maintenir des attentes élevées pour tous les élèves; élaborer une pédagogie et des curriculums caractérisés par un esprit critique et une historicité exacte; prévenir diligemment les nouvelles formes de ségrégation à l’école.

  ---

  [1] Gloria Ladson-Billings, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” Educational Researcher 35 (2006): 3-12.

  [2] Christopher Swanson, Graduation Rates: Real Kids, Real Numbers (Washington, D.C.: Education Policy Center, The Urban Institute: 2004).

  [3] Angelina Kewal Ramani, Lauren Gilbertson, Mary Ann Fox, and Stephen Provasnik, “Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities (NCES 2007-039),” (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2007).

  [4] Prudence Carter, “Race and Cultural Flexibility among Students in Different Multiracial Schools,” Teachers College Record 112, no. 6 (2010): 1529-1574.

  [5] Karolyn Tyson, William Darity, and Domini Castellino, “It’s Not a Black Thing: Understanding the Burden of Acting White and Other Dilemmas of High Achievement,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005):582-605.

  [6] Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 134.

  [7] Ibid., 165

• Just Supposing…

  October 31, 2011 5:47 PM Comments Off on Just Supposing…

  Just supposing a province or territory decided to conduct a major study of its public education system, a ‘thorough airing of the bedclothes’ so to speak. And just supposing it announced in predictably prosaic language the title of the study: Education for the 21st Century. Then imagine the number of other projects both private and public with the same title. So, to be taken seriously, it would be essential to set out terms of reference that would elicit some excitement among the taxpaying public. Tough assignment considering that most people, though they care about public education, are at a loss when it comes to changing it substantially. As things stand now, school offers security, qualified teachers, more or less competent instruction in the basic subjects, approved assessment practices, predictable reporting to parents, regulations for the care and management of needy and undisciplined children. Isn’t that adequate?

  No, not really. There is still a wide gap between the emerging realities of life as represented by the high flyers of all ages in the web world and what actually goes on inside the schoolhouse. The authors of a recent work, Teaching the Digital Generation (Kelly, McCain, Jukes), 2009, argue persuasively that education must be brought in line with the current situation where kids are “exposed to new kinds of input from digital experiences for sustained periods of time on a daily basis.” Most of that input is beyond the purview or control of parents and teachers. And, I believe, most of it renders the schoolhouse obsolete in the minds of its young clients – who still crave learning as much as ever. A checklist of emerging or real obsolescence would include: the textbook, the print oriented library, compulsory attendance until late adolescence, standardized testing for information recall, assessment of progress based on mastery of print information, age-grade lock-step progression. Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these traditional education practices except that they are in varying degrees obsolete, that’s all. They are out of sync.

  The book mentioned above proposes asynchronous learning instead of everything synchronized with the textbook, the school timetable, the exam-test schedule etc. Some features of the new learning would include stronger emphasis on visual learning both artistic and practical, generous use of community resources, assessment of pupil progress based on teacher-pupil initiated projects, school architecture for individual or small group instruction, teaching as a largely advisory process. Farewell pedanticism as we’ve known it.

  As I suggested in my last blog, the emerging education paradigm for the 21st century would highlight individualism, singularity, and selfhood.  These need not be seen as menacing signs of civic irresponsibility or self-centredness running amok. Rather, they simply recognize and embrace the digital reality, which is all around us all the time. Education within such a paradigm would, on the contrary, foster the kind of citizenship compatible with a democratic society – intensely knowledge-based and emotionally satisfying. As for terms of reference for this new study, I would be happy with those set down in 1967 for the Hall-Dennis Report:

  • Identify the needs of the child as a person and as a member of society.
  • Set forth aims of education for the province.
  • Outline objectives for the curriculum.
  • Propose means of realizing those aims and objectives.

  That is to say, the terms of reference do not matter so much as the people who relate them to the facts that confront them. Look again at the first one above. An authoritarian reactionary sort of person would respond “Teach the little _______ to behave and work hard” while a more liberal-minded person might say “Our students are young citizens; treat them accordingly”. Either point of view would have profound implications for educators not the least of which would be unsettling questions like: What is the practical meaning of citizenship in a democracy? Should school life be a model for democratic citizenship? If so, how is that to be done?

  The Hall-Dennis Committee wrestled with such questions for a couple of years before publishing their coffee table book Living and Learning, a best seller. Next time, I’ll recall some of the Hall-Dennis fall-out relative to the second decade of the 21st century.

• Cdn EdWire – Old Math vs. New Math

  September 30, 2011 5:21 PM Comments Off on Cdn EdWire – Old Math vs. New Math

  New math equals trouble, education expert says – CBC

  Methods for teaching grade school math don’t add up: Study – Postmedia 

  (more…)

• Curriculum Integration: One School District’s Journey

  September 23, 2011 6:31 PM Comments Off on Curriculum Integration: One School District’s Journey

  How can teachers improve student achievement and also teach the skills necessary to prepare students for a complex, global world?

  In 2008, the Bluewater District School Board educators began to ask this question. The catalysts were a data analysis of provincial large-scale assessments given in Grades 3 and 6, and board-mandated common assessments in math and literacy across all grades. Bluewater educators strongly believed their students needed higher-order skills to succeed in a global world, but could they improve student achievement in math and literacy at the same time? They decided that integrated curriculum might allow them to pursue both goals.

  Bluewater, located in Southwestern Ontario, is comprised of two JK-12 schools, 40 elementary schools, and 11 secondary schools. Many schools are in rural areas with small student populations.

  The focus of Ontario’s educational reform is literacy and numeracy, and there is a move to teach literacy in all subject areas. Teachers are also to include character education and environmental awareness in instructional planning. Curriculum guidelines direct teachers to teach cross-disciplinary core concepts – Big Ideas such as change, systems, and interdependence – and higher-order thinking skills such as research, communication, design, problem solving, and critical literacy.

  Sowing the Seeds

  The Bluewater interdisciplinary journey began with a group of 45 intermediate teachers from 15 schools who met with a small team of system-level staff facilitators for three planning days. This same group continued planning throughout the 2008-2009 school year. Other interdisciplinary planning sessions also took place with all JK to Grade 6 teachers, all JK-8 administrators, and the administrators and all teachers from two high schools.  

  The teachers worked in teams to collaboratively design interdisciplinary units. The process involved backward design and synthesized Drake’s work on interdisciplinary planning and Cooper’s work on assessment.[1]

  Figure 1 shows the steps of the process. [INSERT FIGURE 1 NEAR HERE]

  • Curriculum Scan and Cluster: Teachers select (highlight and literally use scissors to cut up) the standards (expectations in Ontario) from the relevant curriculum documents and cluster standards into cross-disciplinary concepts (e.g., the environment, power, sustainability, etc.).
  • Curriculum Dissection: The groups choose one cluster of standards. Each standard is dissected according to the Know (what do students need to know?), Do (what do students need to do?) and Be (what values are being taught?).
  • Enduring Understanding/Big Question/Unit Questions: The big question is answered throughout the unit. The enduring understanding is the essence – what teachers want students to be able to articulate at the end of the unit. Examples include: “Tomorrow is influenced by decisions made today” and “We can make a difference.”   
  •  Culminating Task: A meaningful culminating task is created with accompanying assessment tools aligned with standards from relevant disciplines. In this task, the students demonstrate the Know, Do, and Be.
  • Daily Learning Opportunities and Assessment Tools: Meaningful daily instructional activities accompanied by embedded assessments lead to the enduring understanding and the culminating task. Assessment for learning is stressed. This process insures accountability.

  Implementation in the Classroom

  A Kindergarten class took part in an environmental unit that included standards from language, math, science, and the arts. The students conducted a study of the recyclable and compostable garbage in their school. The unit centered on the Big Ideas of environmental stewardship and conservation and the higher-order skills of inquiry, problem solving, and communication. The students created environmental posters to convince the staff and student body to recycle and compost the garbage at the school.

  In one Grade 6/7 class, students debated the impacts of early settlement on Canada. The students created flip perspective books depicting the different points of view of the First Nations peoples and the early European settlers. The students included their own points of view and made suggestions for the future. The unit integrated language, geography, history, science, and arts standards. The Big Ideas were interrelationships, diversity, and conflict resolution, and the higher-order skills included inquiry, critical thinking, and communication.

  A Grade 4 unit integrated language, math, science, and arts standards. The students investigated alternative forms of energy and created an environmental conservation magazine that was presented at a whole school environmental summit involving students, parents, and the greater community. The unit centered on the Big Ideas of energy and sustainability. The higher-order skills were inquiry, design, problem solving, presentation, and communication.

  Teacher and Administrator Perceptions

  A Brock University team of researchers explored teacher and administrator perceptions of the impact of interdisciplinary approaches on classroom practice. Qualitative interviews were completed with 26 educators across 16 schools. The following themes emerged.

  Student engagement

  Increased student engagement emerged as the strongest theme. One teacher commented: “Kids have fun, lots of laughter, lots of learning.” Another: “Student excitement with this new approach is great. It’s different for them, and it’s almost like a breath of fresh air rather than the old conventional textbooks.” For another: “Engagement is huge.”

  Student excitement with this new approach is great. It’s different for them, and it’s almost like a breath of fresh air rather than the old conventional textbooks.

  Administrators remarked on both student and teacher engagement. From one:

  Teachers get so excited when they make connections that it is infectious, and so there is real positive energy…Kids are excited…Kids love to go to school and they go home and talk about what they discussed in the classroom. I know learning is taking place because there are no kids in the office.

  Relevant meaningful curriculum

  Many teachers noted that student engagement was connected to relevant learning.  “It’s neat how everything fits together. Students are connecting with themselves and their world.” And, “My students were engaged in the unit and were not asking ‘Why are we learning this?’ Rather, they were becoming global thinkers who wanted to know and do more.” One teacher said, “My students frequently challenge me with new ideas that they are interested in, and I’m encouraged to incorporate their interests with the concepts that I want them to learn.”

  Relevance was also tied to the depth of learning. “I believe my interdisciplinary classroom has allowed my students to deepen their level of insight and increase their depth of thinking. They have become engaged and articulate learners who are not afraid to voice their opinions utilizing a variety of mediums.” And: “Reflections and culminating tasks at the end of each unit demonstrated clearly that the students had internalized the knowledge and skills.”

  Reaching all students

  Historically, the interdisciplinary approach has often been reserved for gifted students. While one teacher mentioned that interdisciplinary approaches seemed to best benefit the high achieving students, others found that this approach benefited all students, including the most challenged learners. Many teachers found students were submitting exemplary work that exceeded their expectations. One administrator told of three learners with special needs who were typically disengaged in a regular classroom. During the unit, these students participated in a heated debate about animal rights. As well, they created a PSA announcement that was uploaded to YouTube to share with families. One student remarked, “Wow, I really am smart.”

  Literacy infused across the curriculum

  In an interdisciplinary approach, literacy is taught through other subjects. One teacher said, “In a year, I’ve seen a big change in literacy. The biggest change is going from teaching one block of literacy to seeing literacy throughout our program.” Others reinforced the same idea: “My language program isn’t English anymore. It is not all about reading the novel and doing a report on it,” and “Literacy is amazing. We built a strong language program around our history and geography units, using different writing tasks.” An administrator summed it up this way: “Literacy tasks are more relevant and there is a deeper understanding in an interdisciplinary unit. Literacy is the basis of what everyone does.”

  Numeracy

  The teachers found the integration of numeracy expectations into an interdisciplinary unit more difficult than the integration of literacy. Those who successfully integrated math connected it to the real world. “This year we are doing real world math. The students really, really like it.” A colleague agreed: “We focus on problem solving. Real-life connections are huge.”  

  Those who successfully integrated math connected it to the real world. “This year we are doing real world math. The students really, really like it.”

  Assessment

  Many teachers found that assessment became more efficient. They were able to assess more than one discipline at a time by creating assessment tools that incorporated standards from different subject areas. The ability to differentiate was enhanced. “I can diversify my assessment tools and tasks to suit student needs.” From administrators: “Now, there are so many ways for kids to demonstrate their learning, such as through drama and technology,” and “Integrated curriculum has reinforced my belief about what good assessment practices are…I realize that the principles of backwards design in assessment and evaluation worked with integrated curriculum.”

  Some teachers found it challenging to report integrated results on a discipline-based report card.

  Planning            

  Interdisciplinary planning helped educators stay focused. One teacher noted, “I can honestly say that my thinking about planning has completely changed. No longer am I wondering ‘What will I teach next?’ or ‘How can I fit this in?’ I have a much clearer sense of where my students are and where they need to go next in order to meet the expectations both of the curriculum and myself.” For another: “This style of teaching is a way of keeping me on track. It has helped me to stay focused, yet allows me to include my ‘great’ ideas or kids’ interests along the way.”

  Time lost, time gained

  There was some disagreement about the time required to plan high calibre interdisciplinary lessons. Although time was a concern for many, others perceived that they actually did less planning on a day-to-day basis. One said, “I feel that my day-to-day planning runs smoothly, as we spend long chunks of time on tasks rather than jumping from area to area or subject to subject.”

  Collaborative professional learning

  Teachers appreciated the formal planning sessions, which provided an opportunity to collaborate and revitalized teacher practice. “Teacher talk brings enthusiasm.” And, “Once you have been teaching for a while, when times are bleak, this opportunity rejuvenates teachers.”

  Next steps

  Today, the Bluewater District School Board continues on its interdisciplinary journey. Evidence-based practice and professional learning are ongoing. The board continues to synthesize interdisciplinary philosophy with accountability measures and Ministry initiatives to teach students the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to be active and caring citizens in a global world.

  EN BREF – La réforme de l’éducation en Ontario met l’accent sur la littératie et la numératie; l’enseignement de la littératie dans toutes les matières est préconisé. La planification péda­gogique du personnel enseignant doit aussi intégrer le développement du caractère et la sensibilisation environnementale. Les programmes-cadres prescrivent l’enseignement de concepts interdisciplinaires fondamentaux – les grandes idées comme le changement, les systèmes et l’interdépendance – ainsi que de compétences de raisonnement d’ordre supérieur comme la recherche, la communication, la conception, la résolution de problème et la littératie critique. Dans le Sud-Ouest de l’Ontario, le conseil scolaire Bluewater a adopté une approche interdisciplinaire pour satisfaire à ces exigences. Il en est résulté une plus grande participa­tion des élèves, un curriculum qu’ils trouvent pertinent dans leur vie et la capacité de rejoindre les élèves de tous les niveaux de rendement scolaire. Des séances structurées de planifica­tion ont permis au personnel enseignant de collaborer et de revitaliser leur travail.

  ---

  [1] D. Cooper, Talk About Assessment High School Strategies and Tools (Toronto ON: Nelson Education, 2010); S. M. Drake, Creating Standards-Based Integrated Curriculum (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2007).

• Adding the 4Cs to the 3Rs: Making a Place for Creativity in the Curriculum

  5:09 PM Comments Off on Adding the 4Cs to the 3Rs: Making a Place for Creativity in the Curriculum

  Thought leaders, CEOs, and governments around the world universally agree that an organization/country’s ability to innovate will be one of the key determinants of success in the 21st century economy. IBM’s recent International survey of 1,500 CEOs re-affirmed that claim, citing creativity as the most important attribute needed for success in the global economy.

  The Conference Board of Canada ranked us 14th out of the 17 major industrialized nations on measures of innovation, further commenting that it was “Canada’s greatest economic weakness (a ‘D’ grade).” The World Economic Forum also ranked us 14th, and what is even more alarming, we are getting worse; last year we were ranked 13th. We are literally in a race for last place!

  The Conference Board of Canada ranked us 14th out of the 17 major industrialized nations on measures of innovation, further commenting that it was “Canada’s greatest economic weakness (a ‘D’ grade).”

  Our productivity track record has fared no better; we stand a troubling 15th, with the annual output per Canadian worker roughly 75 percent that of an equivalent American worker.

  These measures lead to some obvious questions:

  • Since our economic health seems to be the envy of the world, what accounts for such a poor showing in our innovation and productivity?
  • How can our economy and culture be so tightly linked to the U.S., which is a world leader in innovation and productivity, when our own showing in these areas is much poorer?

  There have been numerous debates about the root causes for this lacklustre performance, with “too much reliance on our natural resource wealth” being the most common theme, but I believe there is another fundamental issue that has been overlooked for years across Canada – one that has had an even greater impact on the very foundations of Canada’s national innovation/productivity strategy and success.

  The Foundations

  Experts around the world agree that education is the key foundational building block for innovation skill development, and that the seeds of innovation – curiosity, inquisitiveness, experimentation, risk taking, teamwork, and interest in science and math – are best planted in Grades 3-7. The research further suggests that in Grades 8-12, the roots take hold, with creativity development being key to the whole process, and in university and beyond, the investments finally start to bear fruit.[1]

  So, here is the question: Is Canada’s K-12 system doing a good job of developing these key (and strategic) creativity and problem solving foundational skills – the ones that are the building blocks for tomorrow’s world class innovators?

  Over the past half century, fundamental change to Canada’s K-12 education system has definitely been a challenge. It is still very much fashioned after the Industrial Revolution model, with standardized testing the norm; individual results the focus as opposed to teamwork; memorization and regurgitation standard practices; the agrarian calendar with summers off; and little focus on developing higher level skills. 

  Over the past 18 months, I have had the opportunity to meet with more than half of Canada’s Superintendents/Directors/Directors General of Education. When asked to comment on these observations, they agreed: “We’re educating the creativity out of children…they’re afraid to take risks…they think there is only one right answer…they have limited if any team skills…success is measured only by grade point average… we’re doing a poor job in developing the key skills they need for the 21st century economy.” One summed it up best: “We need to add the four Cs…creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication…to the three Rs.”

  Additionally, our universities are adding fuel to the fire, often using grade point average as the only criterion for admission.

  To make the job even more challenging, the recent Kaiser Family Foundation Media Study found that 8-18 year-olds in America are now connected to some form of media (Internet, TV, music, etc.) 12 hours per day. Hence the question: Are today’s classrooms in sync with how these kids now think, or do the kids have to “dumb down” the minute they enter the classroom? 

  Billions of dollars have been invested by the Canada Foundation for Innovation since its formation in 1997 to improve Canada’s performance, yet we continue to fall behind. Could it be because our “National” Innovation Strategy doesn’t click into high gear until the post-graduate level? Have we left it too late? Why isn’t K-12 curriculum part of the national innovation dialogue? One Superintendent commented, “To use a hockey analogy, it would be like giving Sydney Crosby hockey equipment at age 21 and asking him to become a world-class hockey player, overnight! He started at age 3 in Tim Bits. K-12 has to be part of Canada’s national Innovation strategy.”

  Educators are the first to agree that there is a gaping hole in Canada’s national education strategy when it comes to  “4C” development, but what can we do quickly and cost-effectively to address this need? While there is consensus that the national K-12 curriculum needs to be revisited, a number of significant issues make reform difficult, including political risk, aversion to change, stakeholder buy-in, funding cuts, union resistance, lack of national standards, and parent pressures, to name but a few.

  Canada’s teachers continue to do an admirable job of bridging the gap between how 21st century kids think and the curriculum they are being asked to work with, but the gap is widening, and student engagement continues to be a daunting task. When Google puts the world’s knowledge base at our fingertips, do we need to focus as much on content? Should typing replace script writing? Should process/assessment skills be the new norm?

  Much needs to be done – and quickly. Some suggested actions include:

  • The Federal Government has to include K-12 in the national innovation dialogue…and now!
  • Every Ministry of Education should have 21st century skill development as their number one priority, with an ADM appointed to help drive the agenda.
  • Parents need to understand the challenge, and advocate for change, even though it may conflict with how/what they, themselves, were taught.
  • Every school district in the country should have a 21st century learning plan, with a pilot program starting this fall.
  • Business/industry needs to be actively engaged in the process of reform, as they will be the recipients of these changes.
  • Universities must broaden their entrance requirements to include alternate measures of success.

  Destination ImagiNation

  While curriculum reform must remain Canada’s number one education priority, shorter-term solutions must also be found that are cost-effective, scalable, politically acceptable, complementary to the curriculum, and agreeable to all the stakeholder groups.

  While curriculum reform must remain Canada’s number one education priority, shorter-term solutions must also be found.

  I have the privilege of supporting the world’s largest non-profit,  “4C” development program for students, Destination ImagiNation. If its principles – reflected in this article – were incorporated into every school district’s 21st century Development plan, we could go a long way toward nurturing creativity in our young people and closing the innovation/productivity gap that threatens to undermine our enviable economic status.

  Now in its 28th year – and literally millions of kids later – Destination ImagiNation helps young people discover their true creative potential and fills in the skill gaps that might be overlooked in the classroom. Children learn how to become better team players, communicators, presenters, researchers, budgeters. and “out-of-the-box” thinkers, all while becoming world-class problem solvers and innovators.

  Destination ImagiNation operates in all 50 U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces, and more than 30 other countries worldwide, and has a volunteer base measured in the tens of thousands. The program is competition based, with more than 400 tournaments held annually around the world. The program year culminates with a Global Finals competition, attracting more than 16,000 students and parents from around the world the last week of May. The event takes place in Knoxville, Tennessee, on the University of Tennessee campus.

  Typically offered as an after-school, parent-driven program (but with more and more schools now moving the program right into the classroom), teams of up to seven participants work together for an hour or two a week over several months to create solutions to exciting Team Challenges, which can have a scientific, technical, structural, theatrical, improvisational, or current events focus. Teams also learn and practice creative quick thinking skills for the Instant Challenge portion of the program, where they will have just five or six minutes to solve a challenge they have never seen before.

  The Destination ImagiNation program is a process-based program grounded in well-established creative problem solving theory, and helps young people build lifelong skills in a fun, cost-effective, and supportive environment.

  Conclusion

  Combining the “4Cs” with the “3Rs” will be key to strengthening Canada’s long-term international competitiveness. While volunteer-run, optional programs like Destination ImagiNation are filling the gap for some students, our school systems need to respond urgently to this country’s lagging performance by implementing similar programs for all children.

  EN BREF – Le Conference Board du Canada nous classe 14^e sur le plan de l’innovation parmi 17 grands pays industrialisés. Notre fiche de « productivité » n’est guère plus reluisante. Des experts du monde entier conviennent que l’éducation constitue la pierre d’angle du développement des compétences d’innovation et que les graines de l’innovation – curiosité, soif de connaissances, expérimentation, prise de risques, travail d’équipe et intérêt pour les sciences et les mathématiques – sont idéalement semées de la 3^e à la 7e année. Depuis son établissement en 1997, la Fondation canadienne pour l’innovation a investi des mil­liards pour rehausser le résultat du Canada, mais notre stratégie d’innovation « nationale » ne s’enclenche vraiment qu’au niveau des études universitaires supérieures. Destination ImagiNation, un programme géré par des bénévoles, comble le vide pour certains élèves plus jeunes, mais nos systèmes scolaires doivent réagir d’urgence à la faible performance du pays en instaurant des programmes semblables pour tous les enfants.

  ---

  [1] Based on personal communication with Dr. Don Treffinger and Dr. Scott Isaksen, authors of numerous books/articles on creative and critical thinking.

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