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• What’s Stopping Us?

  October 21, 2010 12:58 PM Comments Off on What’s Stopping Us?

  It’s Thursday afternoon in a school in Brampton, Ontario. The dismissal bell has rung, and staff members are anxiously waiting in the school library for the arrival of the principal who has called what has been billed as an extremely important meeting—a command performance!
  
  “I’ve got news for you,” the principal declared as he entered the room and sat down. Our ears naturally perked up. 
  
  “We’ve got to change. The world around us is changing and we have to change with it. We need a paradigm shift in the way we think about the work we do!”
  
  And then he paused.
  
  That’s all I remember about that meeting—except the date: February…1990!
  
  In the weeks that followed, we engaged in lively discussions about new practices, student-centered learning, real-world problem solving and authentic tasks and assessments. Not everyone agreed with the new programs that were being introduced, but the school, the district and the province seemed to be pushing forward.
  
  Yet today, some 20 years later, new generations of teachers continue to beat a path to a largely unchanged and unmoved schoolhouse. Curious, isn’t it? Maybe not!
  
  In my last entry, I presented a list of criteria that could help us develop powerful and engaging learning tasks. Someone on my current staff saw the blog post and approached me this week with a rather poignant remark: “This is a great list, but we’ve been talking about this stuff for so long. Why aren’t we there yet?”
  
  There is something stubbornly resistant about this place we call school. But what, exactly, is at the heart of this resistance. I used to think that the solution to the dilemma lay in getting people motivated and excited about new ideas.
  
  But now I spend a good deal of my time thinking that there are more fundamental factors at play here. My new question:
  
  If we have a sense of what the criteria for quality learning environments are, what are the things that we bump up against when we’re trying to develop these experiences at the classroom and school level?
  
  In my own experience, I see several things that contribute to our current state of inertia when it comes to transformation. In this entry, I have chosen to focus on three of the “dissuaders” that I have encountered over the past three or four years.
  
  First, the accountability movement that also began in our schools about 20 years ago (huh!) has actually narrowed our vision of what schools could be for our learners by forcing educators to focus primarily on things that can be easily measured. A charged-up, uber-excited group of teachers in September can quickly turn into a panicked and rather staid set of individuals as the deadline for the first set of report cards approaches. In the past several years, I have found it increasingly difficult to report on student progress using the rather narrow band of success defined by our current reporting system.
  
  And let’s face it: many teachers are governed by yearly reporting cycles. If there is a mismatch between how we teach and how we are forced to report on what we teach, guess which one is going to win out? When push comes to pull, the tiny assessment boxes on the report card rule every time!
  
  Point One: We need assessment, evaluation as well as reporting tools and cycles that are more reflective of the transformative practice that we want to encourage in our schools. We need to expand our notion of accountability to include much more than what can be tested.
  
  Second, the architectural design of our school facilities goes a long way to controlling what actually happens within them on a consistent basis. Most school design is still based on the idea that learning takes place in small, isolated rooms with a single door. Despite a brief period in the late 60’s and early 70’s when walls started coming down in favour of more open learning spaces, this compartmentalized approach to design has been one of the most recognizable features of schools.
  
  Not only are teachers limited to just a few possibilities when it comes to arrangement of learners and furniture, the potential of opening up classrooms to other resources: physical or human is also limited by size and space. Oddly enough, I’m finding that, instead of getting larger and more spacious, many new schools that I visit have even smaller classroom spaces, smaller library, and smaller common areas for collaborative meeting of staff, students and parents outside the confines of the classroom.
  
  Point Two: The way that we imagine learning space will have a great influence on whether our visions of transformation will occur. We need transformation-minded teachers, learners and others to be part of design teams and committees, not just in the early stages, but throughout the entire planning and building process! (Do they make extra small hard-hats?)
  
  Finally, we are still forced to think of schooling in terms of separate distinct curriculum areas. Many jurisdictions produce separate curriculum documents, written by separate curriculum teams and rolled out of district offices by separate groups of curriculum consultants. The chances of developing powerful and engaging integrated tasks at the classroom level is diminished by the way that this strict discipline-bound approach forces educators to envision their curriculum design.
  
  Oh there are some advantages afforded by our current model of doing school. It  allows for easier scheduling of staff and learners, a more efficient balancing of time throughout the day, as well as the development of neat and tidy sets of data for—you guessed it—report cards.
  
  The world that is meant to be the subject of our school-based investigations is, itself, a pretty complex place. And the life that we live within that world is becoming increasingly connected and integrated. We can no longer expect learners to be prepared to be a confident contributor to that world unless the learning experiences in which they are immersed throughout their schooling are somehow reflective of that complexity. And in order to do this, we need a curriculum that reflects the deeper relationships between and among the learning expectations that we develop and the documents that we write!
  
  Point Three: A stronger focus on connective curriculum and interdisciplinary thinking must accompany any attempts to really transform the work of our classrooms. The most creative and imaginative teachers, despite their best intentions, will still declare the challenges they face in bringing to life a curriculum that is composed in silos.
  
  So, there are my three entry points into the conversation about some of the challenges that we face in bringing our ideas for quality learning environments to life. But you have likely encountered your own points of resistance.
  
  What do you see as the primary point of resistance in your own school experience? What are some of the ways that you have met and even overcome these challenges? Where is the most work needed if we are going to foster the development of quality learning environments for all students?

  
  

  Take a chance—post a response!

• Editor’s Note

  October 20, 2010 6:25 PM Comments Off on Editor’s Note

  In her Endnote column of the upcoming Theme issue of Education Canada, Penny Milton notes that preparation for retirement as CEO of the Canadian Education Association is a prime time for reflection. Her approaching retirement is giving me cause to reflect as well – on more than two decades of shared interests, intersecting commitments, and friendship.

  I’ve had the good fortune to work with Penny in several capacities since the early 1990s, most recently as editor of this magazine for the past ten years. In every situation, I have been in awe of her ability to size up and analyze the ideas or issues before her. But a sharp mind is only as valuable as the tasks it sets for itself. Penny’s passion for young people has been the hallmark of her career. She has been unflagging in her dedication to public education – not as a system, but as a vehicle for reaching, teaching, and understanding Canada’s young people, and as our best hope for a more equitable, compassionate society.

  Penny’s creative, flexible, non-dogmatic approach has brought together educators and thinkers from across the political and ideological spectrum – both in Canada and abroad. Her boundless confidence in young people themselves has empowered them to share their own truths about schools and learning in many contexts, including in the pages of this magazine.

  All this is true, and others will repeat it in other words. But as Penny prepares to leave her role as CEO of CEA and as Executive Editor of Education Canada, I am most conscious of the personal support she has provided to me, as editor. I will miss her forthright advice, her vast network of contacts, her keen eye for the relevant, her willingness to brainstorm at the drop of a hat. I will even miss that feeling – at the end of a conversation – that I really couldn’t process ideas a fast as she could generate them!

  I’m sure I speak for all of us involved in the production of this magazine when I say thank you and bonne chance, Penny. Stay in touch with us.

• Wanted: Quality Learning Environments

  October 10, 2010 12:34 AM Comments Off on Wanted: Quality Learning Environments

  Let me begin by acknowledging the elephant that has been lurking in the room for sometime now:

  Schools are not the best place for kids!

  A rather odd statement I know, but look at it this way: If we were to take everything we know about cognitive, emotional and social development, about how people learn and under what conditions and we used that to develop a place where children could be nurtured into a life of happiness and meaningful participation, do you think it would look anything like the schools of today?

  Most people recognize that there is a wide gap between the schools that we need for the 21st century and the schools that we currently have. Although the problem of how best to bridge the gap is a complex one, and even a little scary at times, we have to start somewhere and we have to start soon.

  In the next couple of entries, I would like to do some thinking out loud about a possible starting point that has been recognized by many as the one that holds great promise.

  ---

  If the movie Waiting for Superman presented me with any ideas worth pursuing, it was the one that claims that schools are really about the adults. I’ll massage that point a little and say that, from my experience, our schools are really designed for teaching and not for learning.

  Don’t believe me? Take a closer look at the current education reform discourse that is being used in our schools. So much emphasis is being placed on effective teaching practice: strategies and approaches that teachers can use on their students that will, if performed correctly, result in higher achievement. (My own home bookshelf boasts 32 books on “strategies that work”—all of them written within the last 5 years.) The most popular courses at faculties of education are the ones that deal with effective classroom (read student)  management techniques. Lesson plan templates are strongly geared to the things that teachers are going to do to students in order to get them to learn. Professional development programs in many jurisdictions are limited to those approaches and methods approved by ministries of education and school districts.

  And last year, a ministry-appointed trainer came in and presented teachers at our school with a scripted literacy program to use with our students during the first 20 days of school! It was at that point that I realized that the elephant in the room was actually sitting squarely on the school improvement agenda, and we weren’t going to be moving anywhere very quickly!

  It was then that I began to realize that we need a narrative turn in the story that we tell ourselves about school and I believe that the most important thread in this new story is this:  these buildings to which we force our children to come day after day, year after year are really about them and not us. Our public schools need to become primarily places of learning, not teaching. In schools, the word student and all of the metaphorical implications with which it has become infused, needs to be replaced by something that will force us to pay attention to the needs, challenges and possibilities of the young people that walk into our midst each day. For now, let’s consider the word learner.

  In redefining what we mean by effective, successful schools our starting point should be a serious examination of the heart of the school experience: the type of “work” in which learners are engaged on a daily basis.

  Imagine if all educators–not just teachers–committed significantly more time to designing the tasks and experiences in which learners were going to be engaged than we did to writing the lesson plans, preparing for tests, marking work, and trying to rush through curriculum expectations. Imagine if deep and transferable learning were the new standard for achievement and success. Imagine if learner engagement was an essential criterion for evaluating teacher effectiveness, more essential than test scores.

  So, how do we begin to make our imaginings come to life?

  Well, I think we can begin by trying to think back on those times when our classrooms really hummed—a time when learners were turned on so much that the recess bell seemed like a rude interruption. For those of you who are not educators in the formal sense, you may recall times in your own schooling where you just couldn’t wait to get to school in the morning, or you didn’t want to leave in the afternoon.

  I’ve thought about those times in my own educational career and I’ve come up with a list of ten criteria that might get the conversation going. Here goes!

  You know you’re really on to something when:

  1. the activity connects with the world of the learner; it is engaging because they can relate to it.
  2. the activity comes from the learner’s own input; it is engaging because they helped to design it
  3. the activity is based on the freedom to choose; it is engaging because they selected it
  4. the activity is meaningful; it is engaging because they feel that they are contributing something to their school, their community or the world
  5.  the activity is challenging; it is engaging because there is a real problem to be solved
  6. the activity draws the outside world in; it is engaging because it is rooted in the non-school world
  7. the activity is awe-inspiring; it is engaging because it encourages learners to look at their world in a different way
  8. the activity is interesting; it is engaging because it forces the learner to say “huh!”
  9. the activity is interdisciplinary; it is engaging because it involves ideas from a variety of traditionally separate curriculum areas
  10. the activity is expansive; it is engaging because it offers the opportunity for further investigation and learning

   I realize that, in this brief space, I’ve just begun to explore the question of what makes for a powerful, high-quality learning environment. But it’s a start!

  I would love to get your input on the list—things that could be added, taken away, expressed in a different way. I would also like to hear about those experiences that you’ve had where learning has been particularly powerful. What made it memorable?

  I believe that, despite the complexity of our current situation, we can begin to design and create schools that are full of life, of excitement and wonder. I’m hoping that something about this issue might capture your imagination and allow us to continue the conversation.

  Stephen Hurley
  stephen.hurley@sympatico.ca

• Preparing The Classroom Garden

  October 7, 2010 7:52 PM Comments Off on Preparing The Classroom Garden

  In my last post I referred you to Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk of 2006.  This year he followed up with a call for revolution in education: “We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”

  Now much as I respect Sir Ken, I cannot agree.  That statement is just too passive and does not acknowledge the power and responsibility that teachers have for actively shaping student experience and proactively nurturing learning.  However, I do agree that ‘human flourishing’ – and learning – is much more organic than mechanistic.  So, as we begin a new school year, what can we do to prepare the educational garden for a bumper crop of learners?

  The Critical Thinking Consortium (http://www.tc2.ca/wp/) asserts that powerful learning depends on supportive relationships, enabling resources, stimulating opportunities and helpful guidance. Let’s start with relationships.

  Supportive relationships – between students and students, students and teachers, students and parents, and teachers and parents – are an important foundation for learning. Creating supportive relationships in the classroom is the first task of teaching.

  So what about that old maxim – Don’t smile until Christmas. To be blunt, it’s nonsense, a remnant of an outdated and unprofessional orientation to “teaching as telling” that required “classroom management” to ensure attentiveness to delivered wisdom rather than the creation of a classroom culture that promotes engagement for constructed understanding.

  Learning is a partnership based on a relationship and few relationships take hold if nobody smiles. So, go ahead, smile. Let’s not confuse sternness with strength. Your students need to know that their teacher is serious about their learning and committed to it, and to them. Simply laying down a bunch of rules does not give them this message.

  Classrooms don’t work best when controlled by the teacher, they work best when well structured by the teacher – which largely obviates the need for control. Classroom structure is the scaffolding that a teacher provides to enable learning. The teacher has to take the lead in creating classroom structures that facilitate smooth operations so that engagement in learning is not impeded, but this is best done in collaboration with students through an appreciative process of identifying what works and spreading it, rather than focussing on what does not work and trying to suppress it.

  I am embarrassed to say that 37 years ago when I faced my first Junior Secondary class I had this backwards and so I gave my best “you’re in the army now” speech on day one to an entirely unimpressed young audience that had heard it all before. I now know that was both unwise and unproductive. Just as you catch more flies with honey, learning proceeds best in response to invitations, not exhortations or demands.

• Equity in Our Schools

  September 29, 2010 6:36 PM Comments Off on Equity in Our Schools

  We shall never cease from exploration
  And the end of all our exploring
  Will be to arrive at the place we started
  And know it for the very first time
  —  from Little Gidding by  T. S. Eliot

  By the time Davis Guggenheim’s latest documentary, Waiting for Superman, opens this month in cities across the United States and Canada it will have already done much of the work that it set out to do. The film has managed to get people talking in passionate and energetic ways around some of the key questions related to school reform. By pulling at our hearts, Guggenheim causes us to care about the issues being presented. By pulling at some of the threads that make up the complex fabric known as public education, he invites us to think deeply about how and where real change can occur.

  It would be convenient and quite easy for Canadian viewers to dismiss the challenges and issues presented in Superman as an American problem. After all, Canada ranks close to the top in the very assessments used in the film to underline the ineffectiveness of public schools in the U.S.!

  But, when you begin to strip away the contextual layers of the film, and get to the major questions being presented, you are soon faced with issues that are important to any modern school system. It is this set of issues that we would like this discussion series to be about.

  Canada’s institutions are rooted in values of equity, fairness and accessibility. Whether we’re talking health care, education, or political participation, we pride ourselves on the vision that all Canadians have a right to receive the full benefits of citizenship, regardless of class, creed, or cultural background.

  It seems both reasonable and important, therefore, that any honest discussion about Canada’s schools needs to begin with that vision of equity and how close we are to making it a reality:

  Do all Canadian students have equitable access to quality education?

  This is where relying too heavily on the massaged and aggregated data presented in local, national and international test scores can lead us astray. Oh sure, test results can provide some sense of general direction—a weathervane, if you will—but they certainly don’t tell the complete story and, in fact, may mask some of the underlying inequities with which certain groups and individuals are faced on a daily basis.

  The lens of equity causes us to shift our gaze from the central averages of a phenomenon to its outer edges—and that is precisely where we find those who are marginalized and left out! Here’s some of what we are forced to recognize when we begin to use our equity question as a lens to look at Canadian schools:

  • 25 % of students not graduating after five successive years of high school in Canada’s largest school board are from Aboriginal, Black, Hispanic, Portuguese and Middle Eastern background. The board also admits that these same groups are more likely to exhibit attendance problems and are more likely to be suspended from school.

  • Canada’s Aboriginal youth now represent one of the fastest growing demographics in Canada, yet they are still faced with a drop-out rate that is three times higher than that of non-Aboriginal groups. Closing the gap between the educational attainment of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students has actually slowed in the past few years.

  • While Canadian policies around students with exceptionalities have improved over the past 20 years, actual school practices and attitudes have not been altered to the extent where true inclusion—honouring and embracing the needs of all students—is a natural part of many school cultures.

  • Canadian schools do better than many others in the world when it comes to mitigating the effect of socio-economic status on school success, but there is still a significant gap between the educational experiences, levels of engagement and the achievement of rich and poor in this country.

  There are, of course, other areas of inequity that could (and likely should) be mentioned, but I would like to suggest that these four should be regarded as bellwethers when we talk about educational equity in Canada. It’s fine to speak about excellence when it comes to our public schools, but unless equity becomes a foundational criterion when judging what excellence looks like, we have missed an essential mark. Students who are marginalized and excluded from receiving quality education as young people also run the risk of being excluded from the benefits of full participation in the life and work of society adults.

  It occurs to me that the tie that binds all of these areas together is transformation. These are not issues that can be dealt with by imposing short-term solutions. nor can they be addressed by simply tinkering with our current way of doing things. True equity can only be achieved by a commitment to a radical change in the way that we design schools—philosophically, conceptually and even architecturally!

  So, here’s your invitation to participate in the conversation. What is your take on the equity question as it relates to Canadian education? How are these issues of inequity currently being addressed in Canada? What more can be done to ensure that the vision of equity becomes are reality? What changes in perspective are necessary in order to bring issues of equity into the mainstream conversation about transformation?

  We need a wide variety of perspectives here to enhance and deepen our understanding around these questions and we look forward to a rich and vibrant discussion!

• Do Smaller Classes Improve Learning?

  September 28, 2010 12:00 AM Comments Off on Do Smaller Classes Improve Learning?

  Smaller classes are popular with parents and teachers; however, because reducing class size is a very expensive undertaking, running into hundreds of millions of dollars each year in a large province, it is important to compare this strategy with other alternatives for improving student outcomes.

  Many studies have been done on the impact of class size on teaching practices and on student outcomes. Although this research inevitably contains some conflicting findings, there is a significant agreement on some major points:

  • Smaller classes in primary grades have been linked with somewhat better student outcomes, but the evidence is much weaker above the primary level.
  • Smaller classes may have the greatest positive impact on students with the greatest educational needs.
  • Academic gains for students from smaller classes depend on changes in teaching practices, but smaller classes alone do not necessarily lead to changed teaching. Teachers need ongoing support to implement new approaches for smaller classes.
  • Fewer children mean more space for classroom activities and may reduce behavioural management issues.
  • Changing class size across a whole system is challenging. Teachers need to change what they do, more teachers are needed, more split grade classes may result (though there is no evidence that split grades are harmful to students) and more classrooms are needed.

  Evidence to date suggests that smaller classes across an entire system are probably not the most cost-effective way to improve student outcomes when compared with, for example, investing the same money in improving teaching skills. However, the fact that both teachers and parents support smaller classes provides another kind of value.

  For parents, it is important to know the size of classes in your school but, even more, to understand the teaching and learning practices being used.

  ---

  The primary goal of this project is to get relevant education research into the hands of the public.  These articles are produced in partnership between the Canadian Education Association and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s (OISE) Research Supporting Practice in Education (RSPE) program at the University of Toronto.

  Additional Resources

  • Reducing Class Size: What do we know? Written by Dr. Nina Bascia, this report provides insights into how to maximize the positive impact of class size reduction directed at elementary schools.
  • Ontario’s Class Size Reduction initiative: Report on Early Implementation CEA commissioned a research team from the Ontario Institute on Studies in Education (OISE), headed by Dr. Nina Bascia (OISE), to undertake a study that included data analysis, site visits, interviews with educators in eight school districts, and an on-line survey completed by over 3,000 parents. Although this 140-page evaluation report focused on Ontario, it has relevance and value across the country.
  • Class Size Reduction: What the Literature Says About What Works is a literature review that includes analyses of over eighty reports and articles from a variety of Canadian and international sources, along with five in-depth descriptions of large-scale class size reduction initiatives.
  • Ontario Ministry of Education:  The Class-Size Tracker allows the public to see the primary (JK to Grade 3) class size of every school in the province of Ontario.  [Class_Size Tracker]
  • Reducing Class Size:  Promises and Perils:  This article discusses what’s good about smaller classes and why caution is needed in class size reduction.  [Available for Download]
  • Class Size Reduction:  What the Literature Suggests About What Works:  This report, published by the Canadian Education Association, looks at a variety of studies and research done on class size reduction.  [Available for Download]
  • At Issue:  What Matters About Class Size?:  At Issue, published by the Canadian Education Association, is “a series that explores current areas of debate within the educational community”.  This article looks at why reducing class size is important to the improvement of teaching and learning.  [Available for Download]
  • The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO):  The ETFO has written a research report on how class size makes a difference.  [Website]  [Available for Download]
  • BC Teachers’ Federation:  The Teacher Newsmagazine, published by BC Teachers’ Federation, looks at the supporting research in class size reduction.  [Available for Download]
  • C.D. Howe Institute:  This report argues that smaller class sizes aren’t always better.  [Available for Download]
  • Teaching Practice Resources:  This website provides a list of essential search engines for teacher and student resources.  [Website]
  • Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching:  The Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching focuses on research and curriculum development in Mathematics teaching and learning.  The website provides a variety of resources for mathematics teachers.  [Website]
  • Web Resources for Mathematics Teachers:  This link provides a list of resources, produced by Ottawa Catholic School Board, for mathematics teachers.  [Available for Download]

  Research References Informing this Issue

  Anh, J. and D.J. Brewer (2009). “What Do We Know About Reducing Class and School Size?”  in Sykes, G., B. Schneider, and D.N. Plank, Handbook of Education Policy Research.  American Educational Research Association, Routledge:  426-437.

  Bascia, N. and E. Fredua-Kwarteng (2008).  Class Size Reduction:  What The Literature Suggests About What Works.  Canadian Education Association.

  Bascia, N. and E. Fredua-Kwarteng (2008).  “Reducing Class Size:  Promises and Perils.”  Education Canada 48(4):  30-33.

  • When classes are reduced, students tend to learn more (at least by a modest amount), as measured by standardized test results, and their engagement in learning is enhanced, as demonstrated by classroom behavior, attitude, and effort; some studies suggest that students expend more academic effort and initiate more of their own learning activities in smaller classes.
  • The enthusiasm for class size reduction is an example of the kind of ‘magical thinking’ that is unfortunately common among educators, policy makers, and researchers alike.

  Bascia, N. (2009). Reducing Class Size:  What Do We Know?  Canadian Education Association.

  • The research confirms that class size reduction does provide the environment in which teachers can teach differently.  In smaller classes, they interact with individual students more frequently and use a greater variety of instructional strategies.  They can create more opportunities for higher order co-construction of meaning by students.  They also may spend out-of-classroom work time on more creative planning (and less on routine marking), and they may interact more frequently with other teachers and adults in support of classroom teaching.
  • But the research also suggests that the full gains of class size reduction cannot be achieved if it is implemented without paying attention to other factors that support innovative practice.

  Bohrnstedt, G.W. and B.M. Stecher (2002). What We Have Learned About Class Size Reduction in California.  CSR Research Consortium Capstone Report.  California:  California Department of Education.

  Finn, J. and C.M. Achilles (1999).  “Tennessee’s Class Size Study:  Findings, Implications, Misconceptions.”  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 21(2):  97-109.

  Guillemette, Y. (2005).  School Class Size:  Smaller Isn’t Better.  C.D. Howe Institute.

  Milton, P. (2006).  “What Matters About Class Size?”  Education Canada 46(3):  1-2.

  Stecher, B.M., G.W. Bohrnstedt, et al. (2001).  “Class-Size Reduction in California:  A Story of Hope, Promise, and Unintended Consequences.”  The Phi Delta Kappan 82(9):  670-674.

  Zahorik, J.A., A. Molnar, and P. Smith (2003).  Sage Advice:  Research on Teaching in Reduce-Size Classes.  Temple, Arizona:  Education Policy Studies Laboratory.

• The Hard Work of Learning and the Challenges of “Good” Teaching

  September 22, 2010 7:32 PM Comments Off on The Hard Work of Learning and the Challenges of “Good” Teaching

  Everyone knows what ‘good’ teaching is. Or do they?

  We confront this issue regularly at the university level, where most courses end with detailed student evaluations of the instructor. As might be expected, based on student ratings, university professors are distributed along the scale from abysmal to awesome. But there’s a problem. When student ratings of “good teaching” are compared to instructors’ effectiveness in supporting learning (measured through common examinations, for example), we rarely see a strong correlation. The instructors who have walls covered with teaching awards fare no better than their scorned colleagues. How can this be?

  The answer seems to be that students are more occupied with immediate experiences, such as atmosphere and personality (whereby good teaching is assessed in terms of feelings of comfort, security, feedback, being valued, etc.), and instructors are more focused on the longer-term benefits of actually learning something (whereby good teaching is assessed in terms of achievement, retention, life success, etc.). As educators ourselves, we confess to leaning more toward the latter conception. Unfortunately, even when this distinction is made clear, the results and claims of the research on good teaching have been ambiguous at best.

  Perhaps the most commonly cited studies into the matter fall into the category of “value-added” research. Investigators using this approach look for statistical relationships among such variables as student achievement, teachers, class size, and school funding – a strategy that is not without its problems. For example, a frequent criticism is that this research casts effective teaching strictly in terms of student achievement on standardized performance evaluations. We suspect that readers are well aware of the issues around this construct.

  Nevertheless, there are some compelling aspects to this research, thanks in large part to the wealth of data that has been collected through the No Child Left Behind initiative in the United States. In particular, some researchers have shown that, regardless of school demographics and related factors, some teachers seem to inspire their students to outstanding results – year after year. And, of course, the students of other teachers (often in the same school and teaching the same grade) have consistently poor results. As Green summed up this body of inquiry, “When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to.”[1] Why this is the case has been illuminated by Hattie in his synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. He listed 138 key influences on students’ learning, categorized into the domains of student, teacher/teaching, school, curricula, and home. Variables relating to what teachers do in their classrooms account for 19 of the top 30.[2]

  Perhaps the most intriguing result generated so far was reported by Hanushek and Rivkin. Gauging effective teaching according to student progress, the “top” 5 percent of teachers in their data set managed to encourage their students through an average of about 1.5 grade levels in a single year. At the other end of the spectrum, the “bottom” 5 percent of teachers consistently moved their students through only half a grade level, on average.[3] Even though we have a problem with the fact this research is based on standardized test results, the statistics give us pause. The differences are just too great, especially when they can be disentangled from social background, class size, and other distracters.

  Values-added research – and most educational research for that matter – seems to assume that everyone agrees on what a teacher is supposed to do. That’s simply not a tenable assumption.

  Unfortunately, these sorts of statistics may only be confirming what everybody already knew: there are some really great teachers out there. As for practical advice on how to distinguish among effective and ineffective teaching practices, the situation is not nearly as clear. For example, in a value-added study of high school teachers, Aronson and colleagues were unable to identify specific teacher characteristics or practices that could account for differences in student achievement – summing up with the statement that “the vast majority of the total variation in teacher quality is unexplained by observable teacher characteristics.”[4] To make matters worse, the list of qualities that do not predict effective teaching might be a little unsettling to many readers, including such factors as a graduate-school degree, deep background in a discipline, high SAT or IQ scores, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, and enthusiasm. These seem to be precisely the qualities that students name and that schools of education identify when pressed to distinguish what’s important.

  How to proceed with the question of effective teaching, then?

  We want to suggest here that what makes this question a difficult one is not the word effective but the word teaching. Values-added research – and most educational research for that matter – seems to assume that everyone agrees on what a teacher is supposed to do. That’s simply not a tenable assumption.

  Changes in “Management”

  Elsewhere we’ve offered one account of how the notion of teaching has evolved over recent centuries as prevailing sensibilities shifted and societal needs unfolded.[5] We won’t try to summarize here the evolution of the social role or the word’s meaning, but will mention that a conflicted history and contested usages are evidenced in the hundreds of metaphors and synonyms for teaching that are commonly heard today. A case in point is the obvious contrast between the recent teaching-as-facilitation metaphor that is familiar from constructivist-based writings and the more entrenched teaching-as-instruction interpretation that arose in the early stages of the Scientific Revolution. The two notions couldn’t be further apart in terms of the beliefs about learning that propelled them into common usage, or in terms of their entailments for classroom practice. But it’s not uncommon to encounter them in the same policy statement or teachers’ guide – sometimes in the same sentence.

  Because teaching is too big a concept for us to deal with here, let us instead look at the evolution of the notion of management within teaching over the last century. We recently came across a history of teacher education in Calgary and were a little surprised to read about a heavy emphasis on management in Alberta normal schools at the turn of the 20^th century. More specifically, the concern was with “management defects”, which included “faulty questioning, unrestrained calling out, too much teaching, too little seatwork, lack of method in teaching …, and inappropriate classification of pupils.” [6] Moving through this list, it almost seems as though management was used as a descriptor of everything the professional educator was expected to do within a classroom environment. Perhaps this is to be expected, given the backdrop of school organization around the model of a factory, and curricula structured after tasks on an assembly line.

  But a significant shift in meaning occurred in the 1950s, when the broad notion of management was rather suddenly narrowed and conflated with the notion of control, which in turn was seen as the hallmark of good teaching. As behaviourism ascended to the dominant discourse in educational policy and research, discussions of management shifted from a breadth of concerns associated with the efficient functioning of a classroom to focused references to controlling students – their behaviours, their measureable learning outcomes, and so on. Even the group-based notion of “classroom management” was recast in terms of controlling individual actions. Needless to say, there was a concomitant change in understandings of teaching. As revealed in the practicum evaluation forms of the era, good teaching was recast in terms of effective control of what each student was doing.

  This behaviourism-inspired conflation of management and control still lingers, illustrated in the fact that the phrases “classroom management” and “classroom control” are used interchangeably in many contexts. A more recent evolution has been to attempt to separate them once again, discard references to control, and soften conceptions of management. Within learner-centered discussions of classroom life, management tends to be recast not as the principal work of the educator, but as a necessary backdrop to teaching. That is, most commentators still agree it’s important to be able to manage a classroom, but that’s not the same as running a little factory or controlling the actions of each individual in a group. Rather, the current concept of management seems to be more about such specifics as efficient procedures and established routines. As might be expected, with this change comes a further revision in popular understandings of effective teaching. As reflected in the value-added studies, effective teaching is not framed in terms of the actual moment of engagement or the specific actions of the teacher, but in terms of the where students progress relative to where they began. Not surprisingly, as noted, researchers have been unable to reverse engineer this conception of the consequences of good teaching into the qualities and practices of good teaching.

  Challenging Changes

  It’s strangely easy to reconcile the different phases in the recent evolution of notion of management – that is, from the early 20^th century usage as an overarching descriptor of the educator’s responsibilities, to its mid 20^th century usage as a synonym for control, to the late 20^thcentury usage in reference to a teacher’s background competencies. In fact, it’s so easy to see a harmony in these conflicting constructs that we are compelled to suggest that – while understandings of “management” and “effective teaching” have changed – the popular conception of the core notion of teaching has remained relatively stable.

  Indeed, a constant across the evolutions noted above is that teaching has been conceived in terms of effecting change. That is, teachers have consistently and persistently been seen as responsible for ensuring that the persons who exit their classrooms are different from the persons who entered, and this responsibility for changing learners is most often interpreted in terms of causing things to happen.

  No matter how you slice it, the evidence shows the teacher really, really matters.

  We suspect that this entrenched and pervasive belief is at the heart of difficulties associated with specifying what it is that good teachers do that “not-so-good” teachers don’t do, and a reason that researchers can’t seem to find qualities or practices that are common to good teachers. It’s because, simply put, teachers don’t cause learners to change.

  To contextualize this point, the past half century of research into learning – conducted across domains that include genomics, neurology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and ecology – has underscored that learners are complex, self-determining beings. How a student responds to whatever a teacher does is determined by that student’s complex history – genetic, experiential, social, cultural, and so on. True, the student’s learning is dependent on the teacher’s teaching. No matter how you slice it, the evidence shows the teacher really, really matters. But the student’s learning is not determined by the teacher’s teaching. And that’s a game changer that should prod us to rethink and redefine what teaching is all about.

  To this end, our title is intended to be a little ironic. If we were forced to collect the consequences of emergent research into learning for the pragmatics of teaching, it would be that good teaching isn’t at all about changing students; it’s about challenging them.

  This suggestion isn’t mere wordplay, and the trans-disciplinary conceptual shifts that sit underneath it are anything but subtle. It does more than present a further challenge to the thoroughly critiqued transmission-oriented, delivery-mode conceptions of teaching. It also renders problematic contemporary notions of teaching as facilitating and guiding. It is an assertion that teaching is not so much about easing people toward knowing something they don’t know, but about challenging them to notice in ways they might not have noticed. There are no specifiable ends to education here, only ever-expanding horizons of possibility.

  We have no hard evidence for it, but our strong suspicion is that, if researchers were to reframe their analyses of what’s going on in the classrooms of those 5 percent of teachers whose students are excelling – regardless of where those students start and irrespective of social demographics – they would find that, in fact, what those teachers are up to isn’t all over the map. With regard to practices, they are doubtlessly challenging their students, refusing to make things easy and constantly expecting more than of learners than learners might imagine themselves capable. And with regard to qualities, they are undoubtedly curious – about where ideas come from, how students might have arrived at particular constructs, possibilities that arise when different people and different traditions are juxtaposed, and so on.

  What does this look like? A simple example:

  One of us (Brent) recently dropped into two mathematics lessons, taught by different teachers whose classrooms were adjacent to one another. The school’s policy was for all classes at the same grade level to stay more-or-less in sync, and so the topics of both lessons was adding single digit numbers for sums up to 18.

  Before going any further, we should mention that both classes were exceedingly well managed. Each teacher was warm, approachable, attentive, and clearly adored by the students. The principal reported proudly that parents are thrilled to have their children assigned to either classroom. For some reason, however, one didn’t seem to sponsor the same sort of enthusiasm for mathematics, nor the same levels of mathematical insight, as the other.

  The reason was obvious to us when Brent stepped from one room into the other. The first was organized around a carefully structured and rehearsed explanation, brief guided discussion, and then focused individual work on well-sequenced practice exercises drawn from a textbook. The other lesson seemed to be little more than a question printed tidily on the whiteboard: “How many different ways can you add two numbers together to get 15?”

  The first of these lessons was about changing students – that is, about manipulating understandings by engineering learning experiences to fine-grained detail. It was a teaching about molding, shaping, instructing, informing, guiding, facilitating – about everyone achieving the same sort of functional competence. And, for the most part, the students performed. The outcomes were anticipated and achieved.

  The other lesson was about challenging students. If we had been compelled to rate what was happening according to the management-based rubrics – regardless of which of the 20^th century interpretations of the word management might be used – this lesson would not have fared as well. Students talked out of turn and over one another, some meandered off task and worked with a sum other than 15, some were using more than two addends to get to 15, some strayed even further afield and included numbers with fractions. One quiet pair in a corner even slipped into integers, hoarding their delight at the realization that the possibilities were endless when you allowed yourself to use “minus numbers”. Although the teacher attempted to anticipate such happenings, she confessed afterward that she really didn’t “do a good job of predicting” where things would go.

  There were many things at work here, but none of them fall into the category of observable and measurable qualities. Our guess is that, had we the time and expertise to unpack what was going on, we would have found that the second teacher had a “growth mindset”,[7] believing intelligence to be more a matter of focused and demanding practice than genetic endowment. She likely had deeper pedagogical content knowledge, suggested by a prompt that invited multiple interpretations of number, addition, equality, and so on. We do know that she perceived herself more as a participant than an overseer, noting that she always learned new things about addition through this sort of prompt and confessing that she too found it “a little challenging.”

  “Telling a kid a secret he [sic] can find out himself is not only bad teaching, it is a crime.”[8] To our ears, this statement by Freudenthal identifies a vital distinction between good and bad teaching. In a culture of education that is focused on changing students, it makes sense to tell, to show how, to lead, to facilitate discovery, to guide toward insight. A teaching that is focused on challenging learners is organized around the much more demanding tasks of setting situations that allow students to negotiate the level of difficulty, of trusting they will choose the tougher route when they are able, of really listening to where they’re coming from and what they know. It is our hope that, as teaching refashions itself in this rapidly evolving world, it finds its excellence in its challenges.

  EN BREF – « Bien » enseigner, tout le monde sait ce que c’est. Vraiment? Quoique la définition d’une bon enseignant ait évolué, les enseignants ont toujours été jugés responsables d’apporter le changement. Selon le modèle à valeur ajoutée en vigueur, un enseignement efficace n’est pas décrit en fonction d’actions spécifiques, mais plutôt en fonction des progrès des élèves par rapport à leur point de départ. Cependant, selon les nouvelles recherches, un bon enseignement ne vise pas à changer les élèves, mais plutôt à les stimuler. Voilà qui transforme la dynamique et qui devrait nous inciter à repenser et à redéfinir la nature de l’enseignement. Un enseignement destiné à stimuler les apprenants est organisé en fonction des tâches beaucoup plus exigeantes d’établir des situations permettant aux élèves de négocier le niveau de difficulté, de s’en remettre à eux pour choisir la voie la plus difficile lorsqu’ils le peuvent, ainsi que de vraiment écouter ce qu’ils ont à dire et ce qu’ils savent.

  ---

  [1] E. Green, “Building a Better Teacher: Can Educators be Educated About How to Educate?” New York Times Magazine, 2 March 2010. Accessed online, 1 June 2010, at www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1.

  [2] J. A. C. Hattie, Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-analyses Relating to Achievement (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2009).

  [3] E. A. Hanushek and S. G. Rivkin, “Generalizations About Using Value-added Measures of Teacher Quality,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010), 267–271.

  [4] D. Aaronson, L. Barrow, and W. Sander, “Teachers and Student Achievement in the Chicago Public High Schools,” Journal of Labor Economics 25, no. 1 (2007): 95–135.

  [5] B. Davis, D. Sumara, and R. Luce-Kapler, Engaging Minds: Changing Teaching in Complex Times (New York: Routledge, 2008).

  [6] R. M. Stamp, Becoming a Teacher in 20^th Century Calgary (Calgary, AB: Detselig, 2004): 17.

  [7] C. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine, 2006).

  [8] H. Freudenthal, “Geometry Between the Devil and the Deep Sea,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 3, no. 3/4 (1971): 413–435.

• Educated Parents, Educated Children: Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy

  7:28 PM Comments Off on Educated Parents, Educated Children: Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy

  Philanthropists and policymakers sometimes opt to fund childhood education to “stop illiteracy at the source” at the expense of funding for adult literacy education. In 2000, The New York Times published an article about a gift of $100 million being given to schools in Mississippi to promote the teaching of reading to children. The article says that the philanthropist giving the money and “many experts are less than bullish on the prospects for attacking adult illiteracy.” The philanthropist is then quoted as saying, “What this program says is that we can’t solve the adult literacy problem but we can work with the children.”[1]

  In Canada in 2006, the new Tory government announced cuts of $17.7 million in what was already a skimpy federal budget for adult literacy education. According to a government official, “[T]hey want to focus instead on better teaching children how to read and write.” Adult literacy education was characterized as “repair work after the fact”; the government needs to “get it right from the get-go…rather than doing it after the fact.”[2]

  This type of thinking is based largely on a mistaken understanding of “the source of illiteracy” and leads to half-hearted strategies for improving both children’s and adult’s literacy. It focuses on each new child as the beginning of a new life cycle, and then thinks in terms of doing whatever can be done to help the child acquire literacy skills. If this does not turn out well, then a small amount of remedial help may be given in adulthood to help the person acquire higher levels of literacy in a “cradle to grave, lifelong education” policy of education.

  However, this focus upon a single life cycle fails to recognize the key role that the education of adults plays in the transfer of literacy from one generation to the next. That is, adult literacy education may promote the development of literacy not only in one life cycle but in multiple life cycles, depending on how many children the adults have. From this point of view, the potential for developing literacy actually begins before birth in the dispositions, skills, knowledge, language, and literacy of children’s parents.

  I will argue here that the value of adult literacy education is a good investment for improving the educability of children. First, however, I need to deal with a couple of mistaken ideas that are widely held and that hinder the development of adequate resources for adult literacy education.

  IQ, Brain Development, and Early Childhood Education

  Cultural beliefs about cognitive development – and when it is possible and/or desirable to develop it – appear to contribute to the marginalization of adult literacy students and the system that serves them. One of those beliefs is that the brain’s intellectual capacity is developed in early childhood, and if children’s early childhood development is not properly stimulated there is likely to be intellectual underdevelopment leading to academic failures, low aptitude, and social problems such as criminal activity, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency. Since it will be difficult – if not impossible – to overcome these disadvantages later in adulthood, why invest much in adult education?

  This sentiment was revealed by articles written in the Chicago Tribune by prominent columnist Joan Beck. First, she argued for early childhood education because “[h]alf of adult intellectual capacity is already present by age 4 and 80 percent by age 8… the opportunity to influence [a child’s] basic intelligence ­– considered to be a stable characteristic by age 17 – is greatest in early life.” Two years later, in another article, she said the earliest years of life can make a permanent difference in the lifelong level of a person’s intelligence: “It’s not just that the child will learn more. It’s that his brain actually will have more neurons and interconnections so it will become more intelligent and more capable of learning and thinking for the rest of life.”[3]

  But Joan Beck was wrong about early stimulation, both for intellectual development and for the development of the brain. Regarding intellectual development, Beck based her statements about half of intellectual capacity or learning on research by Benjamin Bloom in 1964.[4] But Bloom did not show that half of one’s intellect was achieved by age four. Rather, he argued that IQ at age four was correlated .7 with IQ at age 17. This means that almost half (.7 squared, or 49%) of the variance among a group of 17-year-olds’ IQ scores could be predicted from their group of scores at age four. But the ability to predict half of the variability among a group of people’s IQ scores is a long way from the idea that half of an individual’s IQ is developed by age four. Furthermore, it does not necessarily say anything about intelligence. That prediction could be due to internal factors such as the child’s intelligence, but it could just as well be due to external factors, such as parental styles, schools, or socio-economic level.

  In fact, developing half of one’s intellectual capacity is not even conceptually possible because, for one thing, there is no universal understanding of what “intelligence” is. Further, even if we could agree on what “intelligence” is, there is no such thing as “half of one’s intellect” because no one knows what 0 or 100 percent intelligence is. Without knowing the beginning and end of something, we can’t know when we have half of it.

  Regarding the unique importance of early childhood brain stimulation for intellectual development, for over a decade the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis has supported extensive research in neuroscience. In 1999, John Bruer, President of the Foundation, wrote a book in which he explains that the findings of neuroscience do not support the claims made about early stimulation of infants and children under three years of age and their brain development.[5] Earlier, Bruer discussed major misconceptions that educators have of brain science. For instance:

  (a) Claim: Enriched early childhood environments cause synapses to multiply rapidly. Bruer states, “What little direct evidence we have – all based on studies of monkeys – indicates these claims are inaccurate…. The rate of synaptic formation and synaptic density seems to be impervious to quantity of stimulation. …Early experience does not cause synapses to form rapidly. Early enriched environments will not put our children on synaptic fast tracks.”

  (b) Claim: More synapses mean more brainpower. Bruer states, “The neuroscientific evidence does not support this claim, either…. Synaptic densities at birth and in early adulthood are approximately the same, yet by any measure adults are more intelligent, have more highly flexible behavior, and learn more rapidly than infants.”[6]

  While brain science has the potential to help us understand human learning, it does not offer evidence-based information to guide education in the classroom.

  More recently, in a 2007 update of that position, Bruer and his colleague Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek reported the outcomes of a meeting of a distinguished international group of neuroscientists and cognitive scientists convened at the University of Chile in Santiago for a conference on Early Education and Human Brain Development. During the meeting it became clear that, while brain science has the potential to help us understand human learning, it does not offer evidence-based information to guide education in the classroom.[7]

  To make this point about brain science in a strong voice, the participants drafted the Santiago Declaration (presently available at the McDonnell Foundation’s website, www.jsmf.org/declaration). The Declaration lists several principles about education on which there was consensus among the participants, concluding with this statement: “The principles enunciated above are based primarily on findings from social and behavioral research, not brain research. Neuroscientific research, at this stage in its development, does not offer scientific guidelines for policy, practice, or parenting.”

  The Intergenerational Transfer of Literacy

  Importantly for adult education and literacy educators, in his 1999 book Bruer makes the policy argument that, with a better understanding of the limitations of present day neuroscience for understanding education, “[w]e might question the prudence of decreasing expenditures for adult education or special education on the grounds that a person’s intellectual and emotional course is firmly set during the early years.”[8]

  Consistent with Bruer’s point of view, I have for some years been struck by the many data sets that indicate the strong relationship between parents’ education level and their children’s achievement in literacy. In 1983, I argued that a body of research existed to suggest that more highly educated parents transmit literacy intergenerationally via oral language skills and the modeling of literacy skills. Therefore, if we could find ways to provide education for adults, we might get double value from education dollars because investing in the education of adults could improve the educability of their children. I have referred to this as getting “double duty dollars” when investing in adult education. We pay for the adults’ education, and we get improved education for both the adults and their children.[9]

  More recent research studies have confirmed the importance of the intergenerational transfer effects of parents’ education levels on children’s literacy achievement.[10] According to Feinstein and associates, in a 2004 report from the Center for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning in London, “The intergenerational transmission of educational success is a key driver of the persistence of social class differences and a barrier to equality of opportunity…. Parental beliefs, values, aspirations and attitudes (termed here ‘cognitions’) are very important, as is parental well-being. …Parenting skills in terms of warmth, discipline and educational behaviours are all major factors in the formation of school success.…We conclude that the intergenerational transmission of educational success is a key element in equality of opportunity. There are substantial benefits of education that accrue to individuals and society in terms of what education enables parents to pass on to their children.”

  As it turns out, what many have considered to be the long-term cost-beneficial effects of educating children in early childhood education programs may actually have been the results that the programs had on educating the children’s parents.

  It is not only parents’ education level that can have an intergenerational transfer of literacy effect. Their measured levels of basic skills also influence this transfer. Augustin De Coulon and associates reported, “The impact of parents’ basic skills on children’s cognitive outcomes is positive and highly significant…. This relationship holds even when we allow for the myriad of other factors that also influence child development, including parental qualification levels and parental ability. This means that parents’ basic skills have a positive impact on their children’s cognitive skills, regardless of the education level and early ability of the parent…. The intergenerational transfer of basic skills is always significant, and it is particularly large for parents with low levels of qualifications.”[11]

  Early Childhood Education as Adult Education

  Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, in an interview in 2005 at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, argued against universal preschool and in favour of focusing preschool programs on disadvantaged children. Asked whether public funding should go for universal early childhood programs or for at-risk children, he pointed out that the evidence is very strong that family background is a major predictor of children’s future behaviour. Because a disproportionate number of problem kids come from disadvantaged families, Heckman said, “[t]he simple economics of intervention…suggests that society should focus its investment where it’s likely to have very high returns. Right now, that is the disadvantaged population. It is foolish to try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing.”

  As it turns out, what many have considered to be the long-term cost-beneficial effects of educating children in early childhood education programs may actually have been the results that the programs had on educating the children’s parents. Robert G. Lynch, of the Economic Policy Institute, in citing research on the importance of preschool programs, noted in 2004 that many early childhood education programs also provide adult education and parenting classes.[12] This suggests that perhaps a significant percentage of the benefits these preschool programs produce might result from the effects of their parenting and literacy education activities for adults.

  This idea is supported in The Obama Education Plan: An Education Week Guide, compiled by the staff of the Education Week newspaper. In the chapter on early childhood education, the position is taken that many of the benefits measured in longitudinal studies of early childhood programs appear to reflect, at least to a certain degree, the effects on the parenting behaviours of parents whose children participated in these programs. In this chapter, Lawrence Schweinhart – one of the developers of the well-known Perry Preschool program, which is generally cited as evidence for the cost-benefits of early childhood education – says, “All the programs in the long-term studies worked with parents. In fact, in the High/Scope Perry Preschool program, teachers spent half their work time engaged in such activities.”[13] Clearly, this strongly suggests that much, if not most, of the success of early childhood, preschool programs depends on adult education to improve the skills and knowledge of parents.

  Frederick Morrison and colleagues conducted an extensive review of research on childcare and preschool, which led them to question the effectiveness of both childcare and preschool programs that do not focus on improving parenting skills. Concerning childcare, they say, “Overall, parenting appears to be a more important source of influence on children’s development than is childcare. …high-quality childcare will not offset the negative effect of poor parenting, and poor-quality childcare will not prevent success for children with effective parents.”[14]

  Poorly educated children are the source of adult functional illiteracy, and functionally illiterate adults are the source of poorly educated children.

  Given this emerging understanding of the role of parents in such programs, it seems reasonable to consider that many of the long-term changes in children following their participation in early childhood education result from changes in their very highly disadvantaged parents. This would help explain why a generally short-term education program for children could sustain them through primary, middle, secondary school, and into adulthood long after they had completed preschool. It would also help explain why such programs are likely to have a greater effect on disadvantaged families than on more highly advantaged families who, as Heckman said, already do what preschools teach parents to do.

  From Parents to Progeny: Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy

  Given the important intergenerational effects of parents’ education level on the achievement of their children, I believe we need to shift our education policies from a focus on one life cycle to a focus on “multiple life cycles” education. Such a policy would explicitly recognize that adults transfer their educational achievements to the achievement of their children.

  It would also recognize that adult education should be valued as much as is early childhood education, and that nations should provide adult education systems on a par with children’s education systems. Poorly educated children are the source of adult functional illiteracy, and functionally illiterate adults are the source of poorly educated children.

  Perhaps through education based on a Multiple Life Cycles policy, in which children are guaranteed a right to educated parents, the vicious intergenerational cycles of functional illiteracy can be stopped at both sources.

  EN BREF – Compte tenu des importants effets intergénérationnels du niveau d’instruction des parents sur la réussite de leurs enfants, les politiques d’éducation devraient mettre l’accent sur les « cycles multiples de vie » plutôt que sur un seul cycle de vie, reconnaissant explicitement que les adultes transfèrent leurs réalisations en éducation au succès scolaire de leurs enfants. De telles politiques affirmeraient également que l’éducation des adultes devrait être aussi valorisée que l’éducation de la petite enfance et que les nations devraient offrir des systèmes d’éducation autant aux adultes qu’aux enfants. Une mauvaise instruction des jeunes est à la source de l’analphabétisme fonctionnelle des adultes, et les adultes analphabètes sont à la source des enfants mal instruits. Grâce à une instruction fondée sur une politique de cycles multiples de vie garantissant aux enfants le droit à des parents instruits, il pourrait être possible de faire cesser aux deux sources le cercle vicieux intergénérationnel de l’analphabétisme.

  ---

  [1] Kevin Sack, “Gift of $100 Million Planned to Aid Literacy in Mississippi,” The New York Times (January 20, 2000).

  [2] The Headline News web page of the National Adult Literacy Database (NALD), October 4, 2006 www.nald.ca

  [3] Reprinted in the San Diego Union, 13 October 1991 and 21 April 1993.

  [4] B. Bloom, Stability and Change in Human Characteristics (New York: Wiley, 1964).

  [5] John Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years (New York, The Free Press, 1999).

  [6] John Bruer, “Education and the Brain: A Bridge Too Far,” Educational Researcher 26, no. 8 (1997): 4-16.

  [7] Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek and John Bruer, “The Brain/Education Barrier,” Science 317 (7 September 2007): 1293.

  [8] Bruer, 1999, 26.

  [9] Thomas G. Sticht, Literacy and Human Resources Development at Work: Investing in the Education of Adults to Improve the Educability of Children (Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Research Organization, 1983).

  [10] L. Feinstein, K. Duckworth, and R. Sabates, A Model of the Inter-Generational Transmission of Educational Success (London: Center for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning, 2004); A. De Coulon, E. Meschi, and A. Vignoles, Research Note: Parent’s Basic Skills and Their Children’s Test Scores (London: Institute of Education, National Research and Development Center for Adult Literacy and Numeracy, May 2008).

  [11] DeCoulon, Meschi, and Vignoles.

  [12] R. Lynch, Exceptional Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood Development (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2004), www.epinet.org; F. Morrison, H. Bachman, and C. Connor, Improving Literacy in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  [13] The OBAMA Education Plan: An Education Week Guide (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 23.

  [14] Frederick Morrison, Heather Bachman, and Carol Connor, Improving Literacy in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 48-49.

• Recovering our Histories: Studying Educational History through Stories and Memoirs

  6:56 PM Comments Off on Recovering our Histories: Studying Educational History through Stories and Memoirs

  Contemporary educators suffer from a curious case of professional amnesia, in which opportunities to discuss and learn from the history of education are scarce. Presently, history of education occupies a marginalized position in teacher education, and its place as a foundational subject of study in education is dubious.¹ As it stands, our plight is similar to that of the protagonist in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Following an abrupt and severe automobile accident, this protagonist forgets the story of his own place in the world. Having lost his personal history, the story’s main character is in lost in a fog. He no longer knows where he stands, where he was headed, and from whence he came. As educators, fixed in the immediate and pressing concerns of the present contexts of work and life, we must likewise reconstruct our professional memories and stories. Literature, stories, and memoirs have great potential to open up discussion about educational history in relation to educators’ lived experiences.

  Historical stories can be hinges to critical thinking about educational contexts and spaces. These stories can reach beyond the limits of an individual teacher candidate’s personal experiences and background knowledge. They can connect new teachers to past and lost traditions, places, and faces in education. Factual stories about the teaching profession can dispel the fallacy that the swirling, swimming chaos of classroom pedagogy somehow happens in isolation, unique from all other experience. Our professional amnesia need not be neglected.
  

  Correlating History to Lived Experience

  Early in his career, John Dewey was loosely affiliated with a group of educational thinkers and reformers we refer to as Herbartians due to their fondness for the writing of late 19^th century educator Johann Friedrich Herbart.² They subscribed to the principle of correlation, by which the rough divisions between subject areas are purposefully blurred so that learning activities might not artificially divide ideas into disciplinary boxes that bear no resemblance to lived experience.

  In the first half of the 20^th century, correlation became a vital principle in curriculum planning and instructional design. As an overarching theme, the concept of correlation would integrate skills and subjects across the curriculum, including reading, writing, editing, proofreading, media, technology, arts, social studies, and science. If students are immersed in the creation of a classroom newspaper or webpage, for instance, they are correlating the language arts with any number of subject areas that forms the publishable content.

  Dewey’s conception of correlation went deeper than his predecessors’; he saw that all areas of studies, despite their abstracted and differentiated presentation, emerged from real human experience and history.³ The idea that we have to integrate various subjects takes for granted the assumption that they are fundamentally different things that we, from without, bring together.

  Dewey argued that they are, in fact, fundamentally united and are made authentic through children’s lives and experiences. The correlation of knowledge, then, must not happen only among academic subjects, but also among the problems, needs, and concerns of human life and action.

  It follows, then, that educational history should not be presented to student teachers as an impractical or disconnected body of knowledge, for it emerged – and continues to emerge ­– from the lives and experiences of actual teachers and learners. History can be a powerful tool for exploring our stories and our place in the world, but it is, like all bodies of knowledge, rendered meaningless unless it is wedded to human activity and experience.

  Personal Stories as a Stimulus to Self-reflection

  Reading educational stories that represent past and distant educational contexts can correlate the discipline of educational history to lived human experience, opening up discussion about the pedagogical past. Doing educational history – examining and thinking critically about actual pedagogy – can present educators with the experiences of others that might run contrary to their own, encouraging them to reflect upon educational practice and beliefs. If we can imagine that our belief systems resemble a web of ideas linked together by experiences we have had, a notion articulated by philosophers W.V. Quine and J.S. Ullian, we begin to see the entire network as interwoven and interconnected.

  The re-evaluation, or rattling, of some of our underlying assumptions and beliefs influences all elements of our understanding.⁴ This web can be understood as a complex system whose individual component parts cannot be entirely understood without taking into consideration the way in which they relate to other parts and to the whole.

  I am not proposing that we present teacher candidates with a reading list or canon of stories and work through them methodically, but rather, that contemporary teaching and learning can benefit from an understanding of past contexts of schooling. In university Faculties of Education, the reading of stories and memoirs can lead to open-ended discussion in which points of controversy can encourage engagement with personal or professional questions about teaching and learning.

  These discussions can then become a public crossroads for multiple perspectives, where considering “the other”– as well as alternative or suppressed perspectives – can happen at the intersection of differences in background, belief, privilege, and aims.

  In teacher education programs, reading and discussing historical stories can foster exploration of the relationships between teaching, learning, culture, and language.

  To be most effective as pedagogical tools, texts used for discussion and analysis should be provocative and stimulating, provoking alternative and dissonant educational beliefs or experiences. This might mean, for example, juxtaposing the narrative of a female teacher in rural Ontario at the beginning of the 20^th century with that of a missionary Jesuit in 18^th century in New France. Teaching memoirs, as exemplified by Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, draw the teacher into the minds of a community of teachers whose experiences and feelings paint vivid and accessible scenes of the otherwise forgotten – past and distant.

  In teacher education programs, reading and discussing historical stories can foster exploration of the relationships between teaching, learning, culture, and language. As an indicative example, consider the case of Mary McLeod Bethune, whose life experiences elucidate some of the struggles that women of colour had to overcome in order to pursue higher education. The daughter of former slaves in South Carolina, Bethune had 16 siblings and was the first to be born “free” following the U.S. Civil War.

  She worked in the fields until a single one-room schoolhouse was opened miles away from her home. Following her elementary schooling, because there were no high schools for blacks nearby, she returned to the fields until receiving a scholarship to study up to the age of twenty. For most of her life, Bethune was the only African-American student in her school. Throughout her life, she encountered resistance and prejudice, but she succeeded in working as a teacher, directing a school, founding an institution for the education of African American girls, assuming the position of college president, becoming a national leader for the black education movement, and touring the world as an international advocate and spokesperson for equity in education.

  While the questions, triumphs, and defeats experienced in contemporary classrooms are sometimes particular and unique, more often they are not.

  While a single, descriptive paragraph does very little justice to the complexity of Bethune’s story, even from this brief description of her life there emerges a set of rich opportunities for debate and discussion. How did the Canadian context of the same historical period compare to this U.S. situation? Are there, in the present multicultural environments that make up our classrooms and schools, students and educators whose family histories or personal experiences resemble Bethune’s? How might such experiences affect the worldview of my students, their parents, and my co-workers? Do women today, particularly women of colour, deal with the same kinds of discriminatory social behaviours that Bethune overcame? Do I, as an educator, unaware of my underlying assumptions or biases, contribute to discriminatory practice?

  Not only could personal histories, like Bethune’s, represent imbalances in power, they could stimulate personal reflection and, potentially, transformative action. The questions posed above are the products of the kinds of analyses that pounce out of the texts when we engage with, discuss, and debate powerful stories.

  These stories emerge from the historical record and are extremely relevant to present classroom action and practice, as demonstrated by the Bethune story. Stories about educators and educational contexts from history can, while opening up forums for rich discussion and study of the past, correlate the content of history to the lived experiences of educators and teacher candidates. While the questions, triumphs, and defeats experienced in contemporary classrooms are sometimes particular and unique, more often they are not.

  Conclusions

  The study of history via personal stories and narratives is an opportunity to develop the interpretive tools that enable educators to reflect deeply upon the implications of the setting and situation in which education happens. It provides an occasion to grapple with the complex understanding that education is intimately related to the situational learning context. In order to discover where we are, it is essential that we consider where we came from, who came before us, and how our living, learning, and working environments were shaped. These considerations all relate to educational history, and they are all topics that should be explored through stories and critical discussion rather than with textbook summaries, drill, and recall of dates.

  To conclude, as educational historians are ushered increasingly and hastily to the margins of educational study, they might rally behind the thought that history is an eminently human quest to recover human experiences and stories. Far from theoretical, the history of education can be seen as vital to the study and practice of teaching if anchored in the cultures and contexts of stories. The aim is not to foster a backwards-looking reverence or revulsion for things old and passed; rather, a forward-looking, hopeful, and imaginative vision for education requires a robust understanding of the past and of the evolution of ideas.

   

   

  EN BREF – L’histoire est une quête éminemment humaine visant à récupérer les expériences et récits de l’humanité. Loin d’être théorique, l’histoire de l’éducation peut être considérée essentielle à l’étude et à la pratique de l’enseignement lorsqu’elle est ancrée dans les cultures et les contextes des récits. Dans les facultés d’éducation, la lecture de récits et de mémoires peut mener à des discussions ouvertes dont les éléments controversés peuvent amener les participants à considérer des questions personnelles ou professionnelles liées à l’enseignement et à l’apprentissage, faisant éventuellement charnière à la réflexion critique sur les contextes et espaces d’éducation. Ces récits peuvent dépasser les limites de l’expérience personnelle des enseignants en formation, les reliant à des traditions, à des lieux et à des visages perdus du passé. Ils peuvent contribuer à dissiper l’illusion que le chaos de la pédagogie en classe se produit isolément et se distingue de toute autre expérience.

   

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  1 Theodore Christou, “Gone But Not Forgotten: The Decline of History as an Educational Foundation,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 41, no. 5 (2009): 569-583.

  2 K. M. Kliebard, Forging the American Curriculum: Essays in Curriculum History and Theory (London: Routledge, 1992).

  3 John Dewey, Lectures in the Philosophy of Education: 1899 (New York, NY: Random House, 1966).

  4 W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2^nd ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1978).

• The Superintendency in Retrospect

  6:47 PM Comments Off on The Superintendency in Retrospect

  As recent retirees from neighbouring urban school districts in British Columbia, we found Education Canada’s invitation to reflect on the nature of the superintendent’s role both a healthy and daunting assignment; healthy in its stimulus to think hard, together, about what we have learned from our experiences; daunting in its challenge to offer something meaningful to others without becoming either too specific or general, too personal or detached.

  If hindsight is at least somewhat 20/20, we hope our reflections are useful. They are offered, however, with the caveats that our contexts were characterized by their own particular histories, dimensions, and socio-political environments, and that these are our personal perspectives based upon our particular experiences, enriched by conversations – both locally and nationally – with other superintendents over the years.

  In our experience, the superintendency was a particularly solitary position, uniquely positioned between political and pedagogical demands.

  Although we spent our entire careers in public education and many years working in close association with superintendents, the transition into that job surprised us with its complexity and intensity. While pre-service training is available for positions of senior administration and leadership in education, there is no training to prepare for the full realities of the superintendency, and – despite our proximity for many years prior – we found little opportunity to gain real insight into that role before assuming it. This was not due to secrecy, or any lack of collegiality on the part of incumbents, but rather to the uniqueness and relative isolation of the role. At the same time as we worked closely with superintendents over the course of years, we were immersed within our own supportive roles with little opportunity for objective and analytical observation or reflection with potential mentors. Additionally, the superintendency was not a role either of us actively sought, so we were not creating or pursuing such mentoring or preparatory opportunities. Consequently, it was not until we were in the role that we became fully aware of its distinct nature.

  In our experience, the superintendency was a particularly solitary position, uniquely positioned between political and pedagogical demands. Standing astride these two canoes, we felt strongly connected to each, bridging and buffering in both directions, yet frequently unable to fully interpret or connect these often divergent domains and never able to completely settle into either. Our duty to put the best possible face on initiatives that emerged from the compromises of political decision-making and to press for compliance was often in conflict with our duty to protect the organization and its people from overload or distraction. This required adapting – and sometimes even diluting or delaying – directives to fit available resources and competing demands. Everyone in the school system encounters similar dilemmas as they seek to achieve ends defined by others and somehow fulfill their dual duty both to those in authority and to those for whom they are responsible. However, while we found many willing and capable colleagues, as the CEO we had no professional peers in our organizations with the same information, perspective, duties, or experience.

  While the districts in which we served were considered highly successful, it was important to press for ongoing improvements in order to move beyond the confines of traditional structures and conventional thinking and practice. Such improvements involved the systemic inclusion of students formerly segregated in special programs, adapting to large numbers of students with English as a second language, employing new technologies to personalize education, giving students a voice and greater responsibility for their learning, and preparing them to succeed in a rapidly changing post-industrial and globalized world. In addition, of course, our districts faced the usual stream of operational challenges that vied for attention and diverted energy from the quest for growth and adaptation at a pace commensurate with the changes in the socio-political surround.

  As crises arose and various aspects of the ongoing need for system change came into focus, the board, community, and schools continually called for decisive and effective action to fix problems, right wrongs, or seize opportunities. Calming this cacophony and moving it towards harmony required us as superintendents to respond definitively and immediately where necessary while sustaining a strategic focus at all times; to listen empathetically without taking on the angst of others; to remain calmly alert; and to direct urgent attention to the right issues. This mediation of competing interests and issues was the central challenge of the superintendency. It called for an artful blend of authority and influence, being at once the senior bureaucrat in the district organization and the symbolic leader of the educational community that populated it. Again, the challenge of effectively combining management and leadership functions is not exclusive to the superintendency, but we found that it reached a zenith in that position.

  Our communities were generally proud and supportive of their schools, but were subject to an increasing social/political trend to accept and perpetuate myths and misinformed opinions about “dysfunctional” schools. The intensity of such criticism and complaint seemed directly proportional to the critic’s distance from schools, reflecting a spreading malaise of cynicism about all existing authorities. Staff were capable and committed, but increasingly distressed by economic strain, rising expectations, and societal changes combining to escalate complexity, turbulence, and intensity. Our schools were not in crisis, but pundits increasingly suggested otherwise, and it was certainly true that they were under significant stress, which often decreased staff’s inclination and ability to engage in adaptive change, causing many to seek the comfort of the familiar and accepted rather than the excitement (along with the relative uncertainty) of the new and promising.

  These struggles with shifting internal and external influences affect all public and governmental institutions, and there are many different beliefs about how (or if) they might be resolved. In our districts, we chose to accept the fact that contextual dynamism and complexity were inherent attributes of our professional organizations. To us, this implied that effective leadership must focus on transformation rather than incremental changes in policies, procedures, and practices. At the same time, however, it was essential to ensure the continued stability, viability, and excellence of an educational system that serves both the public and private good. In balancing a transformative and long-term change process with day-to-day operation and accountability, we found it essential to work collaboratively across the system to articulate and highlight a guiding set of core values – a shared understanding of central purpose.

  The diverse interests, beliefs, and expectations in the community often converge with the aforementioned societal tensions and become focused on the board and superintendent. Boards deal with this in various ways and with varying success, which can change dramatically every three years through the election of even a couple of new trustees. Since the time frame for genuine and systemic change is longer than three years, much of the responsibility for the sustained focus required to move the school system lies with the superintendent. In theory, the board sets policies and the superintendent enacts them. In fact, to steer a steady course of organizational change and development, this relationship must be reciprocal.

  Even assuming a strong partnership between board and superintendent, characterized by mutual understanding and carefully considered decisions, the loosely coupled nature of the school system makes change initiatives a challenge. Policy directions within a professional bureaucracy[1] cannot be implemented by fiat. The aspirational goal of “enabling all learners” (as stated in the preamble to the School Act in British Columbia) requires deep knowledge, profound commitment, and enormous creativity by professional staff at every level, but most particularly in the unique context of each classroom. Thus, the school system cannot succeed through compliant behaviour alone; it also requires commitment. This cannot be mandated, but must be earned through the respectful communion of people commonly devoted to a compelling moral purpose. We were fortunate that this was the case in our districts, as we believe it to be generally true of Canadian education systems.

  Externally driven or imposed change, particularly upon an already stressed professional staff, runs a risk of resentment begetting passive resistance. Worse still may be a response of superficial or ritualistic compliance, where some change may seem to be happening as practitioners wait for this “latest and greatest” innovation or expectation to fade away, which it often it does, leaving front line educators confirmed in their caution, or even cynicism, about future proposals from the superintendent or board. The more appropriate and constructive approach is an appreciative and respectful one that invites practitioners into a mission-driven dialogue about the desired change, involves them in defining it, and supports ongoing implementation and institutionalization of new practices. This, of course, takes longer and is far more complex, but is the only way to effect genuine, lasting change.

  Unfortunately, we found such approaches and processes were not well understood by provincial policymakers, and often difficult for boards to accept because of their strong sense of responsibility to effect rapid systemic improvements or respond to specific community expectations. Naive approaches to policy implementation are reinforced by the fact that, in poorly performing systems, imposed change may be a necessary first step and can result in quick short-term improvements in some cases. Stories of such “turnaround” initiatives from other jurisdictions have been popularized in both the news media and educational literature. However, when imposed upon organizations that are already performing well, the outcomes can be more regressive than progressive and can negatively affect a collegial professional culture.

  Real change in a professional bureaucracy is a slow process of individual learning and organizational re-culturing… Once such change becomes established, it endures.

  To be truly effective, change requires a combination of pressure and support that balances clear expectations with strong, meaningful encouragement. This needs to be provided in a genuinely respectful way that generates a positive sense of urgency through the commitment of teachers to valued purposes, a belief that the change will result in improved life chances for their students, and evidence that they will receive support as they deal with the difficulties that accompany all change processes. Imposed change runs the significant risk of creating what Andy Hargreaves calls a Performance Training Sect that is obedient to organizational ends and means but incapable of learning and adapting.[2] Professional learning communities that actively inquire into learning and strive for continuous improvement in their practices arise only from internally motivated commitment.

  For us, the implication is that, despite the understandable desire of government, boards, and the community to seek “control” and direct, immediate impact, imposed system change is at best temporary and superficial, and at worst harmful. Real change in a professional bureaucracy is a slow process of individual learning and organizational re-culturing. We have seen such change occur, for example, in the ongoing journey towards truly inclusive educational programs, in the institutionalization of pervasive support for learners with English as a second language, and in the development of balanced literacy programs. Once such change becomes established, it endures because it has become part of the shared assumptions, values, and traditional practices of the district as a professional culture.

  We had our greatest impact when we were able to weather the endless parade of issues that challenged us without being overwhelmed by them, doing what was necessary to sustain the district without forgetting that, albeit necessary, management alone was far from sufficient.

  This is not to say that inappropriate practices or behaviours should be allowed to correct themselves on their own timeline. Clearly, there is a duty to exert authority in order to effect immediate change in cases of misconduct or harmful practice, but improvements to what is fundamentally a high-performing education system come only through consistent expectations and sustained support over an extended period of time.

  As superintendents, we found ourselves at the nexus between this understanding of the nature of the school system and the often-contrary expectations of many in the greater community. Our ability to reconcile these two perspectives, explain them to each other, encourage patience and supportive involvement on the part of the community and urgency on the part of the school system, and to strengthen the relationship of mutual regard between them depended on our credibility in both quarters. Such credibility grew out of the evidence of our genuine respect for the interests and priorities upheld by each, our ability to foster a common sense of resolve and purpose between them, and our resourcefulness in providing the requisite means towards fulfilling their common purposes.

  This was complex, often messy work, best understood through a cultural lens and approached with a balance of rational and relational strategies – the latter being essential to the animation of the former. We had our greatest impact when we were able to weather the endless parade of issues that challenged us without being overwhelmed by them, doing what was necessary to sustain the district without forgetting that, albeit necessary, management alone was far from sufficient. Our ability to also effect intended change required that we hold steadfast to the ethical principles and moral purposes that gave meaning to our work and seize every opportunity to articulate, demonstrate, and advance them. When sustained over time, such persistent attention to an issue was able to mobilize and broadly distribute latent leadership by others who were committed to the same ideals and willing to apply their creative energy to those ideals in whatever role they held. When that happened, and only when that happened, did we see real change that we believe will persist.

  In all its complexity, the superintendent’s role is an essential one – to the school district as an organization and social institution, to the greater system of which the school district is a part, and to the profession and field of education. Most directly, the role and person within it are essential to the overall welfare of the school district – its stability and credibility, performance and progress. At the same time, neither the role nor the person acting within it can and should ever be preeminent. Like any human organization and enterprise, the school district and its schools are dynamic organisms, subject to, and generative of, perpetual cycles and phases of experience, activity, and development. No single position or person within it should ever presume to control or own that dynamism. Knowing and respecting it, managing it, guiding and positively influencing it, however, are all central to the superintendent’s actual effectiveness and particular contribution to the ongoing life of the organization.

  Any person aspiring to or assuming the superintendency should do so with the clearest possible ingoing sense of the purpose to be fulfilled by his/her particular attributes in relation to that particular district/organization in that particular time of its experience and development. To this end, ultimately effective superintendents are those who know what they stand for and are good at, identify their district’s a priori needs and opportunities, envision desired change, and focus their influences and resources accordingly. It is also vitally important that they recognize that their time will be temporary, the organization will eventually and inevitably be carrying on without them, and the best they can hope to do is to affect at least some aspects of the district’s culture in a way that will have some positive and enduring impact on others; namely, on the students and those who serve them.

  Whatever impact we may have had on our districts, it pales in comparison to the impact the districts had on us. The experience was challenging, edifying, rewarding, perplexing, depleting, and humbling in ways that we could not have imagined in advance. Looking back, there are many aspects of it for which we are personally grateful and by which we feel we have been honoured; there are others we would not want to experience again. That’s life, as they say, but within our shared reflection is an earnest hope that, in any setting, the role of the superintendent can be given its greatest possible chance for positive, progressive, and enduring contribution, both by the persons within it and by all those whom they serve and depend upon in a commonly intended, reciprocal relationship.

  EN BREF – Truffé de complexité, le rôle de la direction générale est essentiel – pour le conseil scolaire en tant qu’organisation et d’institution sociale, pour le système dont fait partie le conseil scolaire, ainsi que pour la profession et le domaine de l’éducation. De façon plus directe, le rôle et la personne qui le remplit sont essentiels au bien-être général du conseil scolaire – stabilité, crédibilité, rendement et progrès. Par contre, ni le rôle, ni la personne ne doivent être prééminents. Le conseil scolaire et ses écoles sont des organismes dynamiques faisant l’objet de cycles – et générant des cycles – perpétuels d’expériences, d’activités et de développement. Aucun poste, aucune personne ne devrait présumer maîtriser ou posséder ce dynamisme. Toutefois, l’efficacité réelle de la direction générale, ainsi que son apport particulier à la poursuite de la vie de l’organisme, dépend de sa capacité de le connaître, de le respecter, de le gérer, de le guider et d’y exercer une influence positive.

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  [1] The term “professional bureaucracy’ is taken from Henry Mintzberg’s The Structuring of Organizations (1979), which contrasts a Machine Bureaucracy that relies on hierarchical authority, with a Professional Bureaucracy that affords staff greater autonomy (i.e., professionalism).

  [2] Andy Hargreaves, Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity (New York; NY. Teachers’ College Press, 2003).

• Inviting the World into the Classroom: Video Conferencing in Big Valley

  6:43 PM Comments Off on Inviting the World into the Classroom: Video Conferencing in Big Valley

  Video conferencing is impacting education. Gaining real world experiences and sharing first-hand information with experts, lecturers, and peers from around the world is enabling students to solve problems, develop knowledge and understanding of different cultures, and gain an interest in community and global events. Video conferencing will definitely influence 21st century learning and students’ ability to participate creatively and effectively in a growing, competitive society.

  In this small, rural, K-9 school, with a population of about 100 students, video conferencing is enhancing student learning through live, global communication.

  At Big Valley School in Alberta’s Clearview School Division, video conferencing is enhancing student learning through live, global communication. Our small, rural, K-9 school, with a population of about 100 students, has spent the past four years improving course delivery by expanding our knowledge and use of video conferencing in the classroom.

  In 2005, we received video conferencing equipment to develop a team teaching approach among rural schools. At the end of that year, we were left with the experience of having tried the approach, and some very expensive equipment. We had also gained a valuable understanding of how this equipment could enrich curricular content and classroom instruction by allowing us to access information and programming outside of our area. We were determined to find a way to continue utilizing this precious resource.

  The Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) program was established to improve student learning and performance by fostering initiatives that reflect the unique needs and circumstances of each school authority. The focus of AISI’s Cycle 3 Projects was to emphasize innovation and research, analyze project outcomes, enhance professional practice, focus on professional development, and expand knowledge sharing and dissemination. Clearview School Division’s AISI Cycle 3 Project was Real World Literacy, and we felt the use of video conferencing would open new doors to literacy in our school. Over the next three years, our video conference programming was funded through this AISI project.

  During the life of the AISI project, video conferencing expanded and enriched our daily studies. Programs were booked based on specific objectives, and what participants experienced was far beyond our expectations. Video conferencing became a tool to enhance and enrich curriculum; increase access to professionals in specialty areas of study; link our school with the outside world and current events; give the class access to experts in career fields of choice; develop knowledge and understanding of different cultures and global areas; and create community awareness on a provincial, national, and international scale. We participated in over 30 video conferences during our second school year. Today, our classrooms continue to take part in over 40 video conference programs yearly, offering many experiments and hands-on activities, learning new songs (in other languages) and games, speaking to experts about careers, and discovering new adventures from around the world.

  When developing new approaches in a school community, it is important to effectively communicate with parents. In September 2008, we held an open house to welcome students back to school and to showcase our video conference programming. We video conferenced to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Due to the time difference, it became an evening program that provided an excellent opportunity to show parents and community members how their children were learning. It was a very big success as the students and parents were able to communicate directly with the underwater divers as they took us through a tour of a reef.

  Video conference programs are used to enhance curricular content. Often content providers send “kits” containing materials, as well as pre- and post-study activities that supplement their programs. When our science teacher wants to explore space, he conferences with the Houston Space Center. Students experience a space station tour on how the astronauts eat, sleep, exercise, and go to the bathroom. Students interact through questions and learn a great deal from this real-time communication with experts. When the unit of study is biology, the classroom teacher turns to The Center of Science and Industry (COSI) where a doctor from the St. Louis University School of Medicine leads the students in a pig heart dissection. Each student dissects a pig heart while the doctor answers their questions and uses models to show them diseased hearts and hearts with artificial valves.

  Many students believed the video conference to the Holocaust Memorial Center was “life changing” for them.

  Students have also been able to access experts regarding career choices. The National Science Center in Augusta, Georgia, offers a video conferencing program involving a panel of experts (including a chemist, an accountant, a doctor of research, and a mechanical engineer) who discuss how math shapes their careers and everyday life. We have video conferenced with Adora Svitak, a 12-year-old author from Washington, to learn strategies and techniques for creative writing, poetry, editing, and revising. The younger students particularly enjoy these programs as they interact with someone their own age.

  Our entire school division has benefited from our AISI project. Last year the high school theatre arts group was performing The Diary of Anne Frank. The students were not familiar with the Holocaust and did not really understand the play. In order to improve their knowledge and understanding, the class took part in a video conference to the Holocaust Memorial Center and spoke with a Holocaust survivor. For one hour the students were engaged in conversation with a real person who lived through everything these students were trying to portray on stage. They went back to the stage with an intensity and personal involvement that made the play a huge success. Many students believed the video conference to the Holocaust Memorial Center was “life changing” for them.

  When our students are asked how video conferencing has changed their learning, the most frequent answer is, “It’s a fun way of learning.” Often students will say they can remember the information better because they are involved in the program. Some say they achieved higher test marks and that it is a valuable extension to their classroom learning. It is very exciting, as an educator, to listen to the students’ hallway conversations as they enthusiastically discuss a video conference program they have just experienced. Often the students spend additional time after a program discussing the events that just took place, or sharing information that they have just learned with other students.

  Our video conference program has evolved. During our first and second year, the equipment was set up in the Grade 9 classroom, causing disruption of class time and inconveniences. Time was spent arranging the classroom to meet video conference needs, and then rearranging it again. With this in mind, we developed the concept of creating a “professional video conference room” in our old computer lab, where we felt the space could be effectively and creatively utilized. A “professional” video conference room would open yet another window of opportunity for our students to expand their knowledge and experience.

  Our professional video conferencing boardroom would be based on the realization that this technology was not only improving student learning in our school, but was being utilized by corporations and businesses to improve their productivity, cut costs on business travel, and communicate more efficiently with their partners. We would advertise our boardroom as a place for companies to make their global connections, and it would be available to oilfield companies, health care services, banks and financial institutions, law firms, trades people, real estate companies, educators, farmers, and even non-profit organizations like churches, museums, and community groups. Students would be involved with planning for the utilization of this room. Professionals would rent our room with the expectation that they would speak with the students about their specific positions in their companies, how corporations function, and share some important factors about success in the work place. The student role in these conferences would be to have the room prepared for meetings and to be available to assist where required.

  A “professional boardroom”, using state of the art video conferencing equipment, would elevate our students to a higher level of learning and contribute to their development as confident, productive citizens. Exposure to new ideas, professionals, and real world experiences would open doors to limitless possibilities. Students would be required to play a significant role in this project, helping them develop into valued community members. We knew this project would be a solid investment for the future of our students, school, and community. Today, this boardroom is about 90 percent complete. We have used it for our video conference room all year, and it has already been used by community businesses.

  As we continue to enhance education through video conferencing, our students are becoming familiar and comfortable with this way of learning. If you ask Big Valley students to research a topic, they will search for video conference programs where they can speak with someone directly about the specific topic. This spring, our junior high students put together a presentation for the AISI Conference held in Edmonton, Alberta. The students, together with teachers and parents, delivered their presentations via video conferencing. This was the first time the AISI Conference offered a video conference presentation, and it was very well received. The accolades that followed provided the acknowledgment that our project was worthwhile.

  The successful development of video conferencing within a school division depends largely on the acceptance of this new tool. It is also dependent upon a financial commitment. This year, through the new AISI Cycle, we were able to staff a part-time Video Conference Consultant. This individual coordinates all our video conference programs including researching programs, matching curricular content with programs, communicating with content providers, booking programs, and all the follow-up work – including preparing the room and materials for each conference. Our video conference consultant leads information sessions and trains school division staff to effectively utilize video conference technology in their schools. She also presents to division administers to keep them informed of the progress and success the Big Valley School project.

  Video conferencing has removed some of the traditional classroom walls in our school, allowing our students to experience the world that is waiting for them.

  As more schools and businesses use video conferences as a routine way of learning, programming and content providers are becoming more available and simpler to access. Alberta has developed a Videoconferencing Regional Leads Network to support the use of video conferencing in our province. It is a non-profit organization operating under the 2Learn.ca Education Society. This volunteer group of teachers, administrators, and video conference technical experts offers support to teachers in their attempts to use video conferencing technology. They have been a big part of our success this year.

  As students experience changes in learning related to developing technology, their daily instruction experiences change. Our school will be participating in some innovative projects with energy conservation next year. It is our intention to use the knowledge and experience we have learned in energy conservation to create a video conference program and have the students present their program to the rest of the world. The students and staff are very excited about this future project.

  Video conferencing has removed some of the traditional classroom walls in our school, allowing our students to experience the world that is waiting for them. As schools become more familiar with this technology and its use in the classroom, learning will dramatically change. Collaboration will take on new dimensions. Classrooms will be able to share ideas, projects, and presentations with other schools around the province, across the country, and globally. Learning will evolve as students share and work with the wealth of information they have gained through video conferencing with experts. Video conferencing will improve the effectiveness and productivity of teachers and school administrators. Professional development is limitless as professionals and specialists on every subject area become accessible. In fact, every program that a classroom participates in becomes a professional development opportunity for the teachers involved. They may learn a new approach to a specific topic, an additional way to teach a concept, new experiments, or projects and lessons on similar curriculum objectives. Sharing information and resources translates into new ideas and new teaching methods.

  Video conferencing is improving education now and holds even more promise for the future.

  EN BREF – À l’école Big Valley School de la Division scolaire Clearview, en Alberta, les vidéoconférences favorisent les apprentissages des élèves grâce à une communication mondiale en direct. Cette petite école primaire rurale d’une centaine d’élèves améliore ses cours depuis quatre ans en élargissant l’emploi des vidéoconférences en classe. Les programmes de vidéoconférences servent à enrichir le contenu du programme d’enseignement, à consulter des experts à propos de choix de carrières et à effectuer des recherches sur des sujets en parlant directement à des spécialistes du monde entier. Lors de la préparation d’une pièce de théâtre sur le journal d’Anne Frank, les élèves ont parlé à un survivant de l’Holocauste du Holocaust Memorial Centre. Lorsqu’on a demandé aux élèves comment les vidéoconférences avaient changé leurs apprentissages, la réponse la plus fréquente insistait sur le plaisir d’apprendre ainsi.

• Ron Canuel Appointed as CEA’s New Chief Executive Officer

  September 17, 2010 9:58 PM Comments Off on Ron Canuel Appointed as CEA’s New Chief Executive Officer

  (more…)

• Ron Canuel Appointed as CEA’s New Chief Executive Officer

  9:08 PM Comments Off on Ron Canuel Appointed as CEA’s New Chief Executive Officer

  Toronto – September 13, 2010 – The Canadian Education Association (CEA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Ron Canuel as its new CEO. An accomplished leader in public education, Mr. Canuel will strengthen CEA’s position as an authority on innovation in teaching and learning in Canada.

  “I have always considered myself to be a catalyst for change and appreciate how change in education can and should happen,” said Mr. Canuel. “The opportunities provided to me while speaking at conferences around the world have further enhanced my appreciation of the challenges, strengths, and future orientations of public education.”

  Mr. Canuel has over 34 years of experience in the public education sector, most recently as Director General of the Eastern Townships School Board in Quebec, where he was the principal architect of one of the first Canadian district-wide wireless laptop computer program for students and teachers. He has received numerous awards in recognition of this ongoing initiative, and has been a frequent presenter and lecturer at national and international conferences on change management, innovation in education, leadership, and technology in the classroom.

  “Ron is known for his commitment to the education of all students and his innovative approach to furthering the development of publicly funded schools, and we are ecstatic to have him join our organization to contribute his expertise towards CEA’s ambitious transformation agenda,” said CEA President Carole Olsen.

  Mr. Canuel will begin his appointment on October 1, 2010. He succeeds Penny Milton, who is retiring after 14 years of exemplary leadership that has elevated the Association to new levels of growth and influence.

  CEA is a cross-Canada network of leaders in the education, research and policy, not for profit and business sectors. CEA conducts research, generates constructive ideas, and shares them through collaboration with educators, students, and other stakeholders. CEA is committed to advancing ideas that lead to greater student and teacher engagement; teaching that inspires all students to learn; and schools that ensure both equity and excellence to meet the developmental needs of all learners in our global and changing society.

  For more information:
  Max Cooke
  CEA Director of Communications (bilingual)
  416-591-6300 ext. 225
  mcooke@cea-ace.ca

• Spring Comes in September

  September 16, 2010 3:53 PM Comments Off on Spring Comes in September

  After a too long summer, September brings the energy and hope of a new school year to teachers, students and parents.  Its going to be different this time.  Its going to be better – not that last year was bad, but we have learned from our mistakes and we know we can improve.

  But intentions count for naught without actions, so what are you going to do differently this year?  Einstein claimed that the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, so what are you going to change?  You need a plan.

  Try harder is not a plan, its a fantasy.  Keep on top of things is not a plan either.  A plan includes specific actions and, importantly, a plan assumes that you will fail before you succeed so it includes supports and backups to catch you when you fall.  Good plans often include other people who are taking the same steps and can form a supportive community so that you don’t have to venture out alone. 

  A plan for new behaviour also requires new thoughts, new ways of seeing things and interpreting things so that we don’t just fall back into old habits.

  As I launch this new blog, I hope that I can become a part of your plan to take hold of this new school year and make it the best ever.  I will be thinking out loud in public and I invite you to join me.  We can agree or disagree, but let’s rethink things together.  Feel free to lurk, but also please feel free to respond.

  This venture is as new for me as the school year is for you and I am both excited and anxious about it.  I hope I don’t make a fool of myself, but nothing ventured nothing gained as they say, so away we go.

  Let’s start with a little inspiration from Sir Ken Robinson on the TED Talks.  Give yourself a treat and listen to him at http://thurly.net/ while I think about what to say next and let me know what you think about his comments if you are so inclined.

• Education Canada’s Summer 2010 Edition is Now Available

  August 5, 2010 7:54 PM Comments Off on Education Canada’s Summer 2010 Edition is Now Available

  Featured Articles

  The Big Ideas Behind Whole System Reform
  

  Michael Fullan
  Professor Emeritus at OISE/UT and Special Advisor on Education to Ontario’s Premier, Dalton McGuinty

  Whole system reform means that every vital part of the system – school, community, district, and government – contributes individually and in concert to forward movement and success, using practice, not research, as the driver of reform. With this in mind, Fullan shares several “big ideas”, based on successful implementation, which informed Ontario’s reform strategy.

  
  Self-Regulation: Calm, Alert, and Learning

  Stuart Shanker
  Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology and Director of the Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative at York University

  In the simplest terms, self-regulation can be defined as the ability to stay calmly focused and alert, which often involves – but cannot be reduced to – self-control. The better a child can stay calmly focused and alert, the better he integrates the diverse information coming in from his different senses, assimilates it, and sequences his thoughts and actions. In this article, Shanker provides a detailed account of what self-regulation is and why is it so important for learning.  

• CEA’s What did you do in school today? initiative featured in collaborative education research video

  6:58 PM Comments Off on CEA’s What did you do in school today? initiative featured in collaborative education research video

  This video is part of a series ‘commissioned’ by the Ontario Education Research Panel (OERP). It explains how CEA collaborates with an active network of school districts committed to understanding student engagement in the classroom.

• Early Childhood Education: An International Perspective

  11:43 AM Comments Off on Early Childhood Education: An International Perspective

  Early Childhood Education: An International Perspective

• Research, Policy and Practice in Education/La recherche, les politiques et les pratiques en éducation

  11:43 AM Comments Off on Research, Policy and Practice in Education/La recherche, les politiques et les pratiques en éducation

  Research, Policy and Practice in Education/La recherche, les politiques et les pratiques en éducation

• Joining-up and Scaling-up: A Vision for Early Childhood Education and Care

  11:43 AM Comments Off on Joining-up and Scaling-up: A Vision for Early Childhood Education and Care

  Joining-up and Scaling-up: A Vision for Early Childhood Education and Care

• From the Editor / Le mot de la rédaction

  11:43 AM Comments Off on From the Editor / Le mot de la rédaction

  From the Editor / Le mot de la rédaction

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