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• Viewpoint: Changing Academic Standards, One Community Centre at a Time

  November 24, 2010 10:35 PM Comments Off on Viewpoint: Changing Academic Standards, One Community Centre at a Time

  Across Canada there exist pockets of “high-risk” communities that share certain characteristics, most of which experts and researchers correlate to poverty. These communities are normally portrayed in the media as hubs for violence, troubled youth, and drug saturation. While it is true that there are some pervasive issues directly related to lack of resources, one may need to take a second glance before siding with the media’s portrayal and/or one’s very own predetermined perceptions of what environments set the precedent for academic success.  If you have ever thought that youth living in lower-income neighbourhoods were destined for lower academic success due to lack of opportunity, resources and/or desire, I urge you to keep reading and discover, as I have, a very different world than the salacious world of gun-slingers and drug traffickers typically portrayed in the media as the prime activity in low-income housing communities.

  The Alexandra Park Community, also known as the Atkinson Co-op, is nestled unassumingly in the downtown core of Toronto. There are 806 residential units serving approximately 2,000 residents, most of whom live on a fixed income. There is a burgeoning contrast between the Atkinson Co-op, which visibly lacks in resources, and the trendy overflow of splendour that surrounds it. During my exploration I was able to uncover this community’s best kept secret. While visiting the Alexandra Park Community Centre, I discovered that it housed and kept safe the most valuable treasures and ostentatious investments of this community: the youth.

  Contrary to the reflection of how undervalued community centres may be to greater society (i.e. decreased presence in communities and lack of financial support for programming), “out of school programs serve as critical partners in assisting schools to fill […] gaps, especially those serving low-income and working-class children of immigrants of colour.”[1] Research done by Irby, Pittman and Tolman emphasises that schools are only “one of a range of learning environments that share responsibility for helping students learn and achieve mastery… Community-based organizations, museums, parks, libraries, families, etc., are also themselves settings for learning and engagement.”[2] Community centres offer a range of learning opportunities and educational support not otherwise accessible in the schools. According to Lee and Hawkins, “community-based after-school programs have the potential to utilize resources and connect with children in different ways than school.”[3] Irby et al highlight that “because they are not necessarily associated with the expectations of school or other major institutions, students may feel more at home in intermediary spaces.”[4] Community centres offering after school programs create a space of belonging, and familial and academic support, which ultimately serves to enrich the student’s educational life through academic achievement and greater potential for success.

  Mr. Olu Quamina, Child and Youth Program Coordinator at the Alexandra Park Community Centre, would attest that the community centre “is the nucleus of the community.” The roster of various programs catering to the residents of this richly diverse community has the ability to transport the youth past any stereotype to a point well beyond notions of social responsibility and program participation. Exchanges happen here. Ideas are born here. In many contexts, lives are saved here. Youth who would not otherwise have had an interest in school have traded in their long-standing ideas pertaining to the unimportance of academia for new ones geared toward goal attainment and academic success.

  Executive Director Donna Harrow, Atkinson Outreach Worker Donnohue Grant, and Quamina work to implement specific program initiatives that propagate and ensure self-sufficiency while partnering with schools for visible continued support. S.E.R.V.E. (also known as Social. Emotional. Recreational. Vocational. Economic.-Opportunities for Youth, named after the five areas Quamina believes will make a difference in the lives of youth) and Concrete Roses are a few of Quamina’s recently designed programs geared toward the enhancement of youth’s lives through creating bridges of awareness between the relevance of skill development, academic success, and all other aspects of life. “We have changed the standard here. It is no longer ‘cool’ for youth to drop out of school,” says Quamina.

  This sentiment is echoed by Patrick, who largely credits Quamina and the Alexandra Park Community Centre staff for supporting him in the successful pursuit of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto (CHFT) scholarship. Although Patrick is aware that those unfamiliar with the Alexandra Park Community perceive his neighbourhood to be “a criminally-based environment”, the environment that he has come to know and love is much different. For Patrick, much of his environment is guarded safely between the walls of the community centre. “The Dexler Johnson program, movie nights, homework club… all of the centre’s activities helped to keep us out of trouble” explains Patrick. He has participated in these programs for several years and has had the opportunity to assume leadership roles. “The centre is where I learn how to become a better person while being an example for others.” When asked where he sees himself in a couple of years, Patrick answered with a smile, “I want to be in a position where I am able to give back to my community and pay tribute to all those who have helped and taught me along the way – furthering my education will help me to do just that”.

  Ellie also largely attributes the tenacity of her academic second wind to Quamina and the support she felt throughout the community centre. “Prior to moving to this area, I was going to drop out [of school].” At that time, Ellie had just lost her mother. She was also recovering from an eye operation. Although she had been born visually impaired, the operation had rendered her completely blind. “The centre was incredibly welcoming and was definitely an instrument of change.” Not only is Ellie one of the beneficiaries of the centre’s initiatives, but she has also assumed a role as an imparter of those same initiatives. Ellie is a role model for the youth at the centre. She helps and supports children who are not visually impaired to learn how to read. “I felt that I had a greater purpose.” Ellie has since switched schools, career paths, and with the support and resources of the community centre, has also been successful in the attainment of the CHFT diversity scholarship. “These programs help to spotlight a group of people that most would glance over,” says Ellie glowing with appreciation. “We are here, we have voices, and we are beating the odds.”  

  Community centres may be seen as an oasis that refreshes and rejuvenates the spirit of academia. The youth who frequent the Alexandra Community Centre strongly vocalised how important the centre was to them. So on their behalf, and on the behalf of youth from communities across Canada who may not have the opportunity for their stories to be heard, a special thanks goes out to those whom Ellie refers to as “the unsung heroes”: community centres responsible for joining the Quamina’s, the Harrow’s, the Grant’s, the CHFT diversity scholarships, and schools of the world, whose collaboration has resulted in changing the academic standards in marginalized and non-marginalized neighbourhoods alike, one youth at a time.

  EN BREF – Les médias représentent généralement les collectivités à faibles revenus comme des plaques tournantes de violence, de jeunes en difficulté et de toxicomanies. Mais les jeunes vivant dans des quartiers défavorisés ne sont pas nécessairement condamnés à une réussite scolaire moins brillante par suite d’un manque de possibilités, de ressources ou de volonté. Des centres communautaires comme l’Alexandria Park Community Centre à Toronto offrent un éventail de possibilités d’apprentissage et de soutien éducatif dont ils ne disposeraient pas ordinairement à l’école, suscitant un lieu d’appartenance et un soutien familial et scolaire qui enrichit la vie éducative des élèves en leur ouvrant la porte à la réussite scolaire et à un potentiel plus élevé de succès. On doit à ces centres, répartis à travers le pays, de changer les normes scolaires dans des quartiers marginalisés ou non, un jeune à la fois.

  ---

  [1] A. Wong, “’They See Us as Resource’: The Role of a Community-Based Youth Center in Supporting the Academic Lives of Low-Income Chinese American Youth,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2008): 184.

  [2] M. Irby, K. Pittman, and J. Tolman, “Blurring the Lines: Expanding Learning Opportunities for Children and Youth,” New Directions for Youth Development 97 (2003): 18-19.

  [3] S. Lee and M. Hawkins, M. (2008) “’Family Is Here’: Learning in Community-Based After School Programs,” Theory Into Practice 47, no. 1 (2008): 53.

  [4] Irby, Pittman, and Tolman, 18-19.

• Marginalized Youth in Contemporary Educational Contexts: A Tranquil Invitation to a Rebellious Celebration

  10:16 PM Comments Off on Marginalized Youth in Contemporary Educational Contexts: A Tranquil Invitation to a Rebellious Celebration

  First get off the streets, second get a job, and third finish your education so you can get a career. So it is like steps at a time. It is like some people have those things already and they are lucky that they have those things already, handed to them, and they don’t have to start at the bottom and work their way up. They don’t understand what that is like. Starting at the bottom is…I am slowly getting there. I’m not there, but I am slowly getting there.

  -“John” speaks about his education.

  I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

  -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

  Contemporary educational practices remain locked in to faulty ways of doing things, and as a result they continue to lock out many young people. The academic success of young people is of critical interest to societies and individuals for both social and economic reasons. General levels of educational attainment have now been clearly linked to economic productivity, and it is widely accepted that meaningful participation in the democratic process requires a level of literacy and understanding that allows one to sort through the complex issues of the 21^st century. For young people today, economic stability and a sense of belonging in society depend in large part on step-wise experiences and achievements in the pathways provided in the formal education systems. Since the invention of the schooled society, with days filled with age-segregated formal schooling, young people have been at the mercy of educational ideas and practices. For these reasons, when any groups are systematically excluded from meaningful participation and achieve below their levels of competence, they become both “marginalized” in their current school environments and economically and socially disadvantaged over their lifetimes.

  We begin with this tranquil invitation to rebellious celebration: tranquil in that we make space to discuss and reflect on these critical concerns; rebellious in that debate and action are crucial.

  Thus, we have urgent reasons to be on the watch for such tendencies and to work to quickly address and avoid them. We are also well advised to map these trends over time and point out those that persist in the face of policy or program attentions. This special issue of Education Canada provides a focused conversation about the ways in which many young people are continuing to be marginalized by contemporary educational processes. One does not need to look far into the literature to see the lasting and abject effects of poverty, culture, or region on youth education. For many young people, these intersecting marginalities come in the form of lowered expectations from those around them, schools which negate their cultural ways of knowing, stalled academic and social accomplishments, a hopeless sense of being on the outside of the educational journeys they had imagined for themselves, and/or even an inability to access a school.

  Each of the articles presented in this special issue discusses such marginalities for young people. The authors have lived and worked with young people who are injured and excluded by their social class, poverty, visible minority status, regions, cultural status, mental health challenges, gender, sexual orientations, and so on. While not claiming to speak for, hear, or represent all young people, the purpose of this issue is to share in collaborative conversations about what we know, what has been done, and what must be accomplished. We begin with this tranquil invitation to rebellious celebration: tranquil in that we make space to discuss and reflect on these critical concerns; rebellious in that debate and action are crucial. Even though many excellent programs and projects have been launched by dedicated communities, celebration is premature while so many young people continue to flounder in the boat of contemporary education and society

  We should acknowledge from the outset that western democracies have shared the hope that public education would be the “great equalizer” for their societies. Despite the progress in societal prosperity and public education through the 20^th century, in most countries educational inequities remain large and persistent.[1] It is clear that we first need to examine our expectations and assumptions about public education systems and how they function. What should we expect of contemporary schools and education systems with regard to producing socially just outcomes for youth?

  On one hand, international data shows that schools appear to account for only about 20 percent of the variation in student outcomes.[2] While this knowledge might tempt us to moderate our expectations, we have to remember that this reflects the performance of our systems, institutions, and the people in them as they now function; it does not tell us about their potential impact. On the other hand, we also know from the same international data that schools do make a difference! In fact, the research carried out in the last three decades makes it clear that students in classrooms with the most effective teachers may gain on average 1.5 years (standardized achievement measures) while students with the least effective teachers gain only 0.5 years in the academic year.[3] Furthermore, the last two decades of research have brought us a wealth of knowledge focused on evidence-based teaching practices that are effective with a variety of students facing academic disadvantage for a number of reasons (socio-economic struggles, learning a new language, learning disabilities, etc).[4] At this point in time then, our evaluations of current and future outcomes and expectations must be set against the framework of what we know can be done as opposed to what we have been doing. Our students deserve nothing less!

  One especially persistent inequality in education is socio-economic. Often intersecting with cultural and regional inequalities, the relative wealth of families has made, and continues to make, a good deal of difference to the educational treatment, opportunities, and pathways of young people. As a recent Globe and Mail article succinctly attests, the elephant in the room of current U.S. educational policy is income inequality. And, we know that countries with the highest levels of equality in income have the most effective education systems.[5] Thus, the persistence of class-based inequalities in education is disappointing but perhaps not surprising given that, despite some positive policy changes, many core inequalities remain unchanged.

  Children’s early experiences within the family still provide them with an essential preparation for formal education and lay the foundations for patterns of inequality and marginality. Some children begin school able to read simple words, identify colours, count, and do simple arithmetic. Others have to acquire these skills within the school environment and may be poorly regarded by their teachers from the outset. Throughout their time in schools, those from more advantaged families often have access to educational resources in the home environment and support from family members who have some knowledge of the curriculum and who can help with homework. In addition, middle class families frequently stress the importance of education, highlight potential benefits, and are able to use their knowledge to secure advantages in an educational marketplace. By contrast, working class families may have narrow occupational horizons, less direct knowledge of educational benefits, and be unable to support their children beyond the end of compulsory education. In short, current notions and aims of education tend to match those of a mainstream middle class.  As a generation of critical researchers and pedagogues has shown, there are myriad ways in which school and classroom practices continue to help in stacking the deck against young people from poor families.[6]

  They may not necessarily appreciate what goes on in school every day, but young people are aware of their desire and right for quality education to set them along good paths as they define them.

  At the same time, education has undoubtedly become more important to young people. The labour market has changed and opportunities for poorly qualified young people are severely limited. In the new knowledge economy, a lack of skills can lead to even further marginalization and exclusion.[7] In these circumstances, young people are participating in education for much longer, and the majority has a strong awareness of the link between educational attainment and subsequent life chances. In our recent studies, young people (those who have left high school and those who have not) clearly state their yearning for quality education, which to them means a system of schooling that is responsive, relevant, flexible, youth-attuned, caring, and proactive.[8] They are interested in “tough but fair” practices and teachers who are “good at teaching” and can make learning fun and engaging while teaching difficult content. This is a reasonable set of expectations for which they do not wish to be short-changed. They may not necessarily appreciate what goes on in school every day, but young people are aware of their desire and right for quality education to set them along good paths as they define them.

  The ways in which young people approach education and establish learner identities, therefore, shapes educational experiences. The cultures associated with socio-economic challenges and social classes are important and can impact on educational outcomes. Previous research suggested that a clash between working class cultures and the middle class culture of schools led some young people to resist the authority of the school and reject school-based values that placed a premium on academic success.[9] This process of resistance was regarded as central to the marginalization of working class pupils. But, with education having become much more central to the lives of all young people, such explanations have started to fall out of favour. At the same time, young people living in poor communities may develop waning confidence in their academic abilities and may distance themselves from school. Indeed, conformity to the school may come at a price: in lower working class peer groups it is often not “cool to be clever”, and therefore the educational rewards for breaking with peer values have to be made clear.[10] Such subtleties require serious consideration.

  Increased participation in education, therefore, may come at a further price to young people and lead to the emergence of fresh inequalities. Not all families can afford to support their children through long periods of post-secondary education or training. And even if state support is available, there are still important dividing lines. Evidence from the UK shows that young people from less affluent families are frequently debt adverse and reluctant to take out student loans to finance their studies.[11] Young people from poorer families frequently select courses on the basis of cost – not simply in terms of fees, but overall costs, which may include the need to move away from home, travel costs, the length of course, and the perceived linkages between their course and future employment. This can result in selecting courses in less prestigious institutions, choosing shorter courses, and considering courses with strong vocational orientations.[12] In addition, less affluent students frequently work long hours to survive in education, which can interfere with their studies and prevent cross-class social interaction.

  In modern contexts, an ability to manage the complexity of educational structures, make informed choices, and negotiate educational careers is increasingly important. Education has been subject to a process of marketization in which knowledgeable “consumers” with spending power are advantaged while others may be marginalized. For those with inside knowledge who have direct experience of the ways in which education is delivered and the implications of various choices, the process can be relatively straightforward, but for those from families with little experience of post-compulsory education, it can be difficult to navigate effectively and further marginalization can occur through inadequate support and poor choices.

  Young people are the divining rods and tropical frogs of contemporary society and our system of schooling. If they are increasingly intellectually disengaged from school at the very time society is asking for further and deeper intellectual engagement, where does that leave them?[13] If more young people are precariously perched along the folds of marginalization, what are they feeling and how are they reacting? What does it mean for education? If they lose confidence in the intellectual aspects of schooling when being called to further demonstrate critical thinking and coping abilities, how are the cultures of schools, families, and communities positioned to respond? The paradox of providing the deep intellectual engagement required for the knowledge economy alongside the creeping watering down and rationalization of education requires discussion, especially for those young people who have traditionally been excluded and made marginal in schools.

  In Canada, the importance of attending to youth confidence (in their learning and futures) is gaining some focus. A meaningful way to assess the pulse of young people is currently on the table at the Canadian Education Association and in many community efforts. If class cultures are serving as reference points through which educational opportunities are evaluated and negotiated, then we come to appreciate that active and prolonged engagement in education requires deeper understanding and accommodation of learner identities over their life course. Young people have always had the challenge of developing and negotiating identity processes and today must be comfortable to describe themselves as students. They must, with our help, work out what that means in terms of involvement in their communities, in the here and now, and in the context of future lives and careers. A class-based “authenticity” must include the effective participation of working class students and those from low socio-economic situations who are not asked to cast aside their identities, but seen to be driven by a desire to accommodate their school experiences within a framework that respects their class roots.[14]

  Understanding how young people make sense of their lives within the dynamic processes of transition and change is crucial. There are many advantages derived by educators who are able to act as “biographical engineers”, and help young people to write their life stories and also recognize that some young people have limited “coping resources”.[15] Young people reflect on past experiences as a way of framing future plans and try to make sense of their lives through putting together a coherent story. In the past, young people were, to an extent, able to use the experiences of significant others (especially family members or peers from the same class positions or with similar educational attainments) to help them construct road maps. In the modern world, rapid processes of social change and the fragmentation of experiences make it extremely difficult to plan for the future and manage lives.

  In this context, it can be argued that educators have a new and important role to play in helping build young people’s capacity for reflexive action, and helping them to become aware of the very real structural barriers that must be negotiated. Educators must become a part of an entire community of helpers who are, at bottom, human developers with a core mission to address and act on the inequalities young people carry to school. Equipping all young people to develop a lucid life story with a stronger sense of themselves – a “room of their own” in Virginia Woolf’s sense – and a place in the future is of the essence. But, do we see this as education? Just as Plato’s original symposium incited debate on the meanings and merits of “love”, so too do we invite critical dialogue on the meanings of a “good education” for contemporary young people – most especially for those who continue to be locked out and/or locked in by socio-economic inequality.

  EN BREF – Quand des groupes sont systématiquement exclus d’une participation significative et que leurs résultats sont inférieurs à leurs niveaux de compétence, ils deviennent à la fois « marginalisés » dans leurs environnements scolaires actuels, ainsi qu’économiquement et socialement défavorisés tout au long de leur vie. Pour de nombreux jeunes, ces marginalités recoupées prennent la forme d’attentes moindres de la part de leur entourage, d’écoles qui nient leurs manières culturelles de connaître, de réalisations scolaires et sociales moindres, de l’impression désespérée d’être à l’extérieur des trajets éducatifs qu’ils avaient imaginés ou même de l’impossibilité de fréquenter une école désirée. Nos évaluations des résultats actuels et futurs et des attentes pour ces jeunes doivent être fonction de ce nous savons qui peut être fait, au lieu de ce que nous faisons. Les éducateurs doivent jouer un nouveau rôle, contribuer à bâtir la capacité d’action réfléchie des jeunes et les aider à prendre conscience des obstacles structurels très réels à contourner.

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  [1] R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better (London: Penguin, 2010).

  [2] D. Willms, Learning Divides: Ten Policy Questions about the Performance and Equity of Schools and Schooling Systems (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 1995).

  [3] W. L. Landers and S. P. Horn, “The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System: Mixed Model methodology in Educational Assessment,” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 8 (1994): 299-311; “Teachers Matter: Evidence from Value-Added Assessments,” Research Points 2, no. 2 (American Education Research Association, 2004).

  [4] L. B. Stebbins, R. G. St. Pierre, E. C. Proper, R. B. Anderson, and T. R. Cerva, Education as Experimentation: A Planned Variation Model, vol IV-A (Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates, 1977); C. Bereiter, “A Constructive Look at Follow Through Results,” Interchange 11 (1981).

  [5] R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better(London: Penguin, 2010).

  [6] See for example the work of Jean Anyon, Michael Apple and Bruce Curtis.

  [7] A. Furlong, F. Cartmel, A. Biggart, H. Sweeting, and P. West, “Complex Transitions: Linearity and Labour Market Integration in the West of Scotland,” in Young Adults in Transition: Becoming Citizens, eds. C. Pole, J. Pilcher,  and J. Williams (London: Palgrave, 2005).

  [8] K. Tilleczek, ed., Why Do Students Drop Out of High School? Narrative Studies and Social Critiques (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008); K. Tilleczek, S. Laflamme, B. Ferguson, et al, Fresh Starts and False Starts: Young People in Transition from Elementary to Secondary School. Report to the Ontario Ministry of Education. Toronto, 2010.

  [9] P. Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977).

  [10] H. Williamson, The Milltown Boys Revisited (London: Berg, 2004).

  [11] A. Furlong and F. Cartmel, Higher Education and Social Justice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2009).

  [12] Ibid.

  [13] See D. Willms, S. Freisen, and P. Milton, What did you do in school today? Transforming Classrooms through Social, Academic and Intellectual Engagement, First National Report (Toronto: Canadian Education Association, 2010).

  [14] D. Reay, Who Goes Where in Higher Education: An Issue of Class, Ethnicity and Increasing Concern (Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University, 2005).

  [15] S. J. Ball, M. Maguire, and S. Macrae, Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post-16 (London: Routledge-Falmer, 2000).

• Guest Editorial: Young Lives as Edge Work for Educational Practice

  8:59 PM Comments Off on Guest Editorial: Young Lives as Edge Work for Educational Practice

  Since the beginning of compulsory public education, Canadian schools have done well by some young people and much less well by others. New understandings about the nuances in young lives are showing us that we cannot draw a simple conclusion about who is marginalized, how, or what should be done. One student`s coming out as gay or lesbian may be celebrated in one school but lead to shunning in another.  One Aboriginal community’s young people live with a host of positive inspirations while another continues to mourn the loss of its young. The daily hassles experienced by some youth living in poor families or by newcomers to Canada are met with concern by one teacher, but not by another.

  This social complexity of the experiences and life stories of young people and the ways in which schools respond to them is the focus of this special issue. Educators and social scientists have long been concerned with the distribution and intersections of inequalities as they play out for youth: How are inequalities reproduced and/or resisted in schools? How are we to respond to them? Do we truly reflect the issues as youth experience them?

  John Dewey’s clarifying work toward a theory and practice of education has long made us aware of the necessity of examining the intersections between the lives of young people and a school’s organization. The authors of this special issue work at these very intersections. In May of 2009 many of us had the fortune to assemble at one of Bruce Ferguson`s Collaborative Research Symposia at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. I was thrilled to host Marginalized Youth in Contemporary Educational Contexts, the fifth in a series of seven of these events (www.chsrgevents.ca/default.aspx).

  Many contributors to this issue took part in this dialogue, and others form an emerging network. As a group of researchers, young people, educators, and policymakers, they make fresh contributions. They speak about educational responses to young people struggling to negotiate the identity borders of race, social class, poverty, cultural status, mental health challenges, sexualities, linguistic or literacy challenges, familial chaos, and/or being a newcomer to Canada. These authors attempt to elucidate the abundant folds of experience of these young people and their meanings for educational practice and policy. They also take seriously the narratives, biographies, and life stories that illuminate intersections of identity, experience, and the social worlds of youth. It is our wish to share this knowledge and to provoke a widened conversation with Canadian citizens.

• Partnering Research and Practice in High Schools

  8:09 PM Comments Off on Partnering Research and Practice in High Schools

  The last decade has seen concerted efforts to improve elementary school students’ literacy and math skills. Supported by the implementation of evidence-based practices and programs, there has been measured success; provincial testing agencies have consistently shown year-to-year higher literacy and numeracy scores. Yet this success has not translated clearly into improved high school graduation rates. As a result, governments are now looking at ways to improve success rates of high school students. This may prove to be a daunting task.

  Would we accept a 15 percent unemployment rate in the economy or a 15 percent hospital mortality rate?  Yet, 15 percent failure is considered acceptable for high schools.

  Systems measure success by outcomes. In the healthcare system, measures of successful or positive outcomes include lower infant mortality and longer life expectancy. In education, high school graduation rates are the measure of a successful outcome. Educational systems, like Ontario’s, have set a goal of 85 percent. This is impressive, when measured against 50 percent graduation rates half a century ago, but even with an 85 percent graduation rate, 15 percent of the student population will not graduate with their peers. Is this an acceptable outcome for our educational systems and society as a whole?  Would we accept a 15 percent unemployment rate in the economy or a 15 percent hospital mortality rate? Yet, 15 percent failure is considered acceptable for high schools. Accepting a 15 percent non-completion rate suggests that this group of students is institutionally marginalized by both schools and policymakers.

  This has large lifelong implications for this cohort, both in employment and in quality of life. Historically, there would have been a place for these young people in lower paying employment. But, the workplace has radically changed in the last decade. In fact, a high school diploma alone is no longer a passport to a good job. As western economies move rapidly away from manufacturing to knowledge economies, governments are rethinking successful educational outcomes, moving their expectations beyond high school to post-secondary programs.

  At the same time, post-secondary institutions are identifying large cohorts of new students arriving with insufficient levels of the literacy and numeracy skills necessary for further training. A recent New York Times article identified that even in the worst economic downturn since the great depression, low-end manufacturing jobs sit unfilled because applicants lack the basic literacy, numeracy, and computer skills essential for doing basic work.[1] Today, high school education is only a transitional step towards full participation in society. As the research shows, both rates of employment and salaries increase with the number of years completed in post-secondary education. In the United States, the federal agency responsible for education is now looking at 100 percent graduation rates for secondary education.

  The fact that we accept a marginalized 15 percent as an outcome of our education system begs two questions: who makes up this group of non-graduates, and why are they not part of the educational strategy to promote successful outcomes?

  Though this group is quite diverse and represents a cross-section of our society, a disproportionate number are special education students. Special education students make up between 12 and 14 percent of high school populations. At least half of these students are identified with learning disabilities (LD) and/or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These students have the intellectual competency to succeed, but they experience cognitive processing difficulties that undermine their ability to either take in information or out-put it for evaluation. According to American data, only 38 percent of high school students with LD enter post-secondary education, compared to 61 percent of their peers. The ratio is as significant for students with ADHD.[2]

  The goal of the public educational system is to allow every student the opportunity to achieve his or her potential to be an active and productive participant in our society. Within our schools, this is to be done in a fair and equitable manner. On the one hand, educators agree with this vision; they differ only on the extent to which it is possible or realistic. On the other hand, researchers in the field of education believe that it is possible and can’t understand why it isn’t realized.

  For those who design and implement education curricula and programs, it is becoming more and more evident that change will not happen until researchers understand the culture of education and integrate it into their research, and teachers make new knowledge part of their practice ethic.

  Challenges to Researchers

  In the last decade, the importance of research-based programs and practices has been recognized in the elementary panel. This is particularly relevant in helping special education students who fall within the LD/ADHD group. Evidence-based interventions in reading, and to a lesser extent in writing and math, are now available to teachers across Canada. Yet, their implementation within the high school systems is limited. The translation of research into school practice continues to be a challenge. A big part of the problem is the disconnect between what researchers study and what teachers believe is needed to improve their teaching practice.

  If researchers wish to improve outcomes for all students in high school, they need to ask three key questions when devising studies:

  • Does my research help improve student outcomes?
  • Can my research be implemented in a classroom?
  • Can it be scaled up and sustained across a school system?

  Teacher perceptions of student needs and research priorities are often at cross purposes in high schools.

  Almost all education researchers feel that ultimately their work will contribute to improving student performance, either directly or indirectly. Yet, from a teacher’s perspective, research needs vary based on a variety of factors. For example, the needs of teachers may vary based on how long they have been teaching or who is in their classroom. Novice teachers often look for information on classroom management, while more experienced teachers search out instructional strategies. Teachers in the early grades focus more on teaching and improving core skills in literacy and math. By the time students arrive in high school, teachers assume core skills are in place and they are more interested in methods of engaging and motivating students.[3]

  Teacher perceptions of student needs and research priorities are often at cross purposes in high schools. For example, research has shown that high school students with ADHD often have difficulty with reading comprehension because of fluency difficulties (speed of reading) rather than decoding problems. Yet teachers often see what, in fact, is a reading comprehension problem as a motivation problem in their students. Teaching good reading comprehension strategies can go a long way to reducing frustration while increasing motivation for high school students with ADHD. They can range from general strategies to subject specific strategies. In fact, teaching subject specific reading strategies can benefit all students.

  A second question researchers should ask is whether their interventions can be successfully implemented in a classroom. Here the waters get a little murky, especially within the high school context. Interventions that address core reading and writing deficits are often designed for younger students, to be delivered in an intense and sustained manner over a block of time, and requiring a constant evaluation to guarantee consolidation of learning. They also require intensive teacher training. This presents two immediate problems for the high school context. First, teachers teach to a subject-based curriculum. High school teachers assume that students arrive in their classes with appropriate reading and writing skills. Second, even when teachers do attempt to teach core skills, they often look for off-the-shelf programs that require minimal training – and, unfortunately, lack any research to support their claims of success. Teachers soon become disheartened with the results and blame all research.

  Finally, do interventions have scalability and sustainability? Often, research interventions work well in laboratory situations or when significantly resourced in specific schools. But, if the intervention is too onerous to move across whole school systems, it doesn’t make sense. It lacks any external validity. This is especially evident in high schools, where the diverse nature of the teaching staff within each school requires that an intervention make sense to all subject area teachers, be they teachers of English, Science, or Geography.

  Challenges to Teachers

  High School teachers receive limited training in adjusting their instructional practice according to student needs. As a result, high school teachers focus on delivering the curriculum more than on mentoring each student to ensure successful learning. This is not to blame teachers. They face two big obstacles when it comes to changing practice to reach every student. One is the underlying system of beliefs and values associated with being a high school teacher, and the other is the institutional nature of the high school itself.

  Many observers have pointed out that high school teachers work in isolation. They are separated both within their own schools and from outside communities. As a result, they are unable to observe or share practices that work. Instead, they develop personalized and idiosyncratic teaching styles. Both in the popular media and within school communities, excellent teachers are seen as creative and autonomous. Unfortunately, what we really get is a huge variation in teacher quality and effectiveness, without any knowledge base of what constitutes good teaching. This promotes a culture that is resistant to change, especially from outside the teaching community.[4]

  Even within schools, sharing instructional strategies beyond individual departments is rare. When full staff development does take place, it is usually a one-day workshop with an externally imposed topic. Ownership and opportunity for implementation are not brought into the process; as a result, there is little motivation to use different practices.

  Without a solid understanding of what constitutes good instructional practice, special education teachers often find it daunting to promote new instructional practices or accommodations for students with LD and ADHD. Concepts like the use of advance planners, shortening blocks of information (reducing cognitive load), and using immediate feedback for lessons taught may not make full sense without a sound understanding of how learning occurs.

  The other problem is an institutional one. It is fair to say that high school, as an institution, is struggling with an identity crisis. Historically, high schools have acted as gate-keepers, streaming students into tracks leading to either university, community colleges, or the workplace. Within this context, high school teachers have seen themselves as teachers of subjects, rather than teachers of students. Subject-based teachers often point out that they are trained to teach their subject area, not special education. As well, they identify that students with learning problems can always be streamed into curricula that match their ability levels. In fact, research has consistently pointed out that schools with low expectations can expect poor outcomes from their students.[5] Students with LD and ADHD are able to access concepts and knowledge across subject areas; their struggle is with absorbing, retaining, and representing that knowledge.

  Instructional practices, learning strategies, and accommodations that work for adolescents have been thoroughly researched; in fact, many of those instructional practices and learning strategies would benefit all high school students. As for accommodations, many teachers resist them because they see them as bestowing an unfair advantage to the recipient. Again, research has pointed out that accommodations improve the performance of disabled students to a significantly greater extent than that of non-disabled students.[6] High schools should realize that many of the accommodations they continue to resist are regularly implemented in post-secondary settings.

  The solution …will have to come from bridging what researchers have learned and what teachers know about their school context.

  Conclusions

  The challenge to create a fully inclusive high school that sets a 100 percent graduation rate as its goal is daunting, but it is not an impossible task. Many of the pieces are already in play. Many education jurisdictions have created multiple pathways toward a high school diploma. These pathways do not represent the old “streaming” model that was based on the levels of learning, but focus rather on different ways to acquire credits leading to a high school diploma. Credit courses that reward experiential learning, dual-enrolment programs that allow students to experience college courses while working on their high school diploma, and alternative courses that appeal to student interests all are a step in the right direction. But, they are not enough because they still do not address how students with learning difficulties learn and how teachers can support this cohort to successfully learn.

  The solution to expanding teacher knowledge around “learning and instructional practice” will have to come from bridging what researchers have learned and what teachers know about their school context. That will come when equal partnerships between schools and research centres become a reality. In these partnerships, research centres will become part of the school over years, helping teaching cultures to become research sensitive and researchers to recognize how schools work. Only as teachers and researchers share their knowledge and experiences on a daily basis over an extended time will teaching practices move beyond personalized style to standardized, evidence-based practices. It is only when this happens that all teachers will know how to teach all students.

  EN BREF – Les systèmes d’éducation ont fixé un objectif de 85 pour cent – impressionnant, en regard du taux d’obtention de diplôme de 50 pour cent d’il y a un demi-siècle, mais qui laisse toutefois 15 pour cent des jeunes sans diplôme. Un nombre disproportionné d’élèves qui ne finissent pas leurs études secondaires ont des besoins d’éducation spécialisée et au moins la moitié d’entre eux ont des troubles d’apprentissage (TA) et/ou des troubles d’hyperactivité avec déficit de l’attention (THADA). Ces élèves détiennent la compétence intellectuelle nécessaire pour réussir, mais ils connaissent des difficultés de traitement cognitif qui nuisent à leur capacité soit d’assimiler de l’information ou de la restituer pour évaluation. On en sait beaucoup sur les façons d’aider ces élèves à réussir. Un taux d’obtention de diplôme de 100 pour cent est réaliste. Mais les choses ne changeront pas avant que les chercheurs comprennent la culture d’éducation et l’intègrent à leurs recherches et que les enseignants incorporent les nouvelles connaissances à leurs pratiques éthiques.

  ---

  [1] M. Rich, “Factory Jobs Returning, But Employers Find Skills Shortage,” New York Times, 1 July 2010.

  [2] N. Gregg, Adolescents and Adults with Learning Disabilities and ADHD: Assessment and Accommodation (New York: Guilford Press, 2009).

  [3] Ontario College of Teachers, Transition to Teaching Report, 2004. www.oct.ca/publications/pdf/transitions04_e.pdf

  [4] D. Burney, “Craft Knowledge: The Road to Transforming Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan 87, no. 7 (March 2004): 526-31.

  [5] R. Rumberger and G. Palardy, “Does Segregation Still Matter? The Impact of Student Composition on Academic Achievement in High School,” Teachers College Record 107, no. 9 (September 2005): 1999-2045.

  [6] Gregg.

• How Useful is Homework?

  November 16, 2010 12:00 AM Comments Off on How Useful is Homework?

  Parents, children, and teachers have always argued about homework! Common questions include: Should teachers give homework to students? If so, how much and what type of homework should be assigned? How much time should students spend on homework? What roles should parents play in their child’s homework?

  Quite a bit of research has been done over the decades on homework, but researchers still hold divergent views on the subject.

  The best current evidence is that homework seems to have a small positive influence on student achievement, though it may be that students with better grades just tend to do more homework. For high school students, the benefits of homework increased as the time spent on homework increased, up to about two hours of homework a day, but any time spent beyond that showed decreased benefits. The evidence for a positive impact of homework on student achievement in the primary grades is weak, although some evidence suggests that homework may help students develop good study habits and foster positive attitudes toward school and learning.

  The amount of homework assigned is less important than the quality and value of the work being done. Assigning homework only has value if the work contributes to students’ learning and engagement. Studies show a wide variation in the kind and quality of homework assigned and in its perceived importance or value by students and parents.

  Parents can also play an important role by supporting their children’s learning at home, encouraging learning outside of school, and monitoring their children’s progress regularly. It is important to be positive and encouraging when working with your children on homework; if homework leads to bad feelings between parents and children it can have negative effects on both school and home relationships.

  ---

  CEA and the Ontario Institute in Studies in Education (OISE) have teamed up to provide you with relevant and timely information based on current empirical educational research. The primary goal of this project is to get relevant and needed research into the hands of parents and other interested people. Five blurbs will be posted to our website throughout the 2009-2010 academic year. They will be written in plain language on topics of interest to parents, such as homework and class size.

  Additional Resources

  • The Homework Spot:  This website offers advice for K-12 education organized by subject and grade level.  There is also links for both parents and teachers.  The link for parents has a number of resources and publications.  [The Homework Spot]
  • Literacy and Numeracy Tip Sheets for Parents:  Peel district school board in Ontario has created 35 tips sheets for parents to help students with literacy and numeracy skills.  [Available for Download]
  • Free Monthly E-Mail Package of Parent-Child Activities:  A free monthly list of learning activities for pre-school children and elementary, middle school and secondary students [Subscribe]
  • 106 Ways Parents Can Help Students Achieve by Kristen J. Amundson:   This booklet (from the American Association of School Administrators) offers a number of tips organized by the following categories – learning begins at home; using the newspaper for better learning; make family time = learning time; starting school ready to learn; building self-esteem; improving academic achievement; working with the school; promoting your family’s values; peer pressure; preparing for the world of work; good health = good learning; sources of help; learning is everyone’s concern [Available for $12 from Amazon]
  • List of Websites to Help Parents Help their Children:  This website contains links for parents on many topics like reading, math, general school work, summer learning and more [Internet4Classrooms]

  Research References Informing this Topic

  Bennett, S. and N. Kalish (2006). The case against homework:  How homework is hurting our children and what we can do about it. New York, Crown.

  Cameron, L. and L. Bartel (2008). Homework Realities:  A Canadian Study of Parental Opinions and Attitudes, University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Bartel, Cameron & Associates Inc.

  Cooper, H. (1989). “Synthesis of research on homework.” Educational Leadership 47(3): 85-91.

  • For junior high school students, the benefits of homework increased as the time spent on homework increased, up to 1 to 2 hours of homework a night, and then decreased.
  • On the other hand, homework has smaller effects at lower grade levels; however, Cooper still recommended homework to ‘help students develop good study habits, foster positive attitudes toward school, and communicate to students the idea that learning takes work at home as well as at school’.

  Cooper, H. (2007). The battle over homework. Thousand Oaks, CA, Corwin Press.

  • Homework should have different purposes at different grade levels.  In earlier grades (primary), homework should help encourage positive attitudes, habits and character traits. In upper elementary grades (junior), homework should play a more direct role to improve student achievement. In 6th grade and beyond (intermediate/senior), homework should play a role in improving standardized test scores and grades.
  • Research findings supported the ’10-minute rule’ where all daily homework assignments combined should take about 10 minutes multiplied by the student’s grade level, but the rule might be increased to 15 minutes if reading is included as a type of homework.

  Cooper, H., J. C. Robinson, et al. (2006). “Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?  A Synthesis of Research, 1987-2003.” Review of Educational Research 76(1): 1-62.

  • Review of research from 1987 to 2003 in the United States suggests there is evidence to support positive influence of homework on achievement.
  • Research reported that 7 to 12 hours of homework per week produced the largest benefits, in academic achievement, for grade 12 students.
  • Cooper, Robinson and Patall cautioned about too much homework, as its effectiveness diminishes or can become counterproductive.

  Kohn, A. (2006). Homework Myth:  Why our kids get too much of a bad thing, Cambridge, MA,  Da Capo Life Long.

  Marzano, R. J. and D. J. Pickering (2007). “Special Topic/The Case For and Against Homework.” Educational Leadership 64(6): 74-79.

• Waiting for Superman: A Canadian Perspective

  September 30, 2010 12:00 AM Comments Off on Waiting for Superman: A Canadian Perspective

  Canada has consistently performed well in international achievement assessments and is a top performer internationally in Reading, Math and Science. Canada has a unique decentralized education system where funding and policy decisions are made by provincial and territorial governments. Variations in achievement levels and in funding reflect differences in population, geography and economy. Canada’s public education system is open to all children and several provinces provide partial financial support to support independent schools making them more affordable to some families. In response to the desire for choice by families many local school districts allow parents to choose which public school their children will attend. Alberta is the only province that has incorporated charter schools into their public education system. Many school districts, especially in large urban areas offer alternative schools or programs, specialist schools or programs for arts, sports, languages, science and technology. While parents can choose these schools for their children pre-qualifications or lotteries may be used if programs are over-subscribed.
  While Canadian students are doing well, the public believes the quality of education, needs to improve. Canada’s schools produce more equitable results than almost all other countries but there is much work to do to make sure all children share the benefits of a good education. It’s time to build on Canadian success to make sure that all children and youth thrive in this rapidly changing world.

• 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.

• Using Research in Secondary Schools: Education Leaders Respond

  September 22, 2010 8:02 PM Comments Off on Using Research in Secondary Schools: Education Leaders Respond

  Improving the use of research in schools is important to ensure that school practices are as effective as possible in helping students succeed. Many factors contribute to the current situation in education, in which research use is a hit and miss affair. In some cases, the empirical evidence needed to inform practice simply does not exist or is not in a format that practitioners can find or apply. In other cases, however, credible bodies of evidence do exist but are not incorporated into the daily lives of educators and schools.
  (more…)

• The Meaning of “Success” for First Nations Schools

  7:35 PM Comments Off on The Meaning of “Success” for First Nations Schools

  When the First Nations Student Success Program (FNSSP) was first introduced in September 2009, my initial thought was: “No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has finally arrived in Canada.” It seemed prophetic that the 2010 spring issue of Education Canada contained both a piece by Joel Westheimer warning against the pitfalls of constant assessment and Michael Chandler’s article on the social and cultural factors that affect Indigenous learners.[1] FNSSP is a literal marriage of both Westheimer’s concerns and Chandler’s frustrations. The program, initiated by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, exclusively targets the education systems controlled by First Nations. The purpose of the program is to increase student improvement and build a system of teacher and school accountability.

  There exist substantial parts of the FNSSP and NCLB that can be open to comparison. The founding tenet of the No Child Left Behind legislation put forth by President Bush in 2001 is to ensure the success of all students.[2] This American legislation was passed based on an understanding that, by implementing educational reforms based on continuous assessment and accountability, the state would have the data and power needed to make swift adjustments to school administration and teaching staff based on the objective of raising student success outcomes. Nine years after NCLB was introduced in the U.S., it has raised some serious concerns about the merit of assessment-based teaching, continuous standardized testing, and the disappearance of the social sciences. With respect to a struggling school, the NCLB Act allows for three levels of intervention: first the replacement of the teachers, then the replacement of administration, and finally, if the results of the assessment do not indicate significant improvement, school closure.

  The FNSSP program is similar to the NCLB in that it focuses on key areas of performance indicators – literacy, numeracy, attendance, and retention. In the first three years of implementation of the program, schools are required to develop success plans based on these indicators and to establish their own community-relevant indicators as well (which tend to focus on language preservation and culture). In its first year, the program – which is optional for on-reserve schools that already are underfunded compared to provincial schools and could benefit from the additional funding – requires that schools evaluate and adopt assessment schedules, which result in data that can be transferred to the Federal government. What is clear is that to receive the additional dollars for school improvement, the communities must agree to participate in all parts of the FNSSP.

  Who controls First Nations education is a valid question to ask. First Nations communities continue to struggle for their right to exercise control over their own education systems, which are funded through the Federal government. With the FNSSP, the Federal government is taking an overtly paternalistic approach to improving student success rates by insisting on provincial equivalent testing. The standards-based approach is a linear Western mode of conceiving formal education, and it is antithetical to the holistic model of education based on a First Nations’ world view. As outlined in the Canadian Council on Learning report on the First Nations Model of Learning, teaching and learning have traditionally been home- and community-based, without a formal evaluation system; instead, this model relies on the existence of evidence that a comprehensive understanding of knowledge has been transferred.[3]

  Currently, as First Nations communities begin to respond to the requirements of the FNSSP, an open discussion on the questions raised by the NCLB experience in the U.S. would be beneficial. The most important questions are as follows: For what purpose is this data on literacy, numeracy, attendance, and retention being used by the government? Is it possible that what has been presented initially as a constructive tool to improve student outcomes has the potential to become a justification tool to undercut First Nations funding for not improving academic success? Unless First Nations communities clearly define and own the data they produce, there is significant risk that – as has been the case with NCLB – the data can be used to undermine, as opposed to constructively strengthen, their efforts.

  ---

  [1] Michael Chandler, “Social Determinants in Educational Outcomes in Indigenous Learners,” Education Canada 50, no. 2 (Spring, 2010): 46-51; Joel Westheimer, “No Child Left Thinking,” Education Canada 50, no. 2 (Spring, 2010): 5-9.

  [2] Daniel Koretz, “Moving Past No Child Left Behind,” Science 326, no. 5954 (November 2009): 803-804.

  [3] “First Nations Holistic Model of Learning,” Canadian Council on Learning, 4 April 2010, available at www.cclcca.ca/CCL/Reports/RedefiningSuccessInAboriginalLearning/RedefiningSuccessModels

• 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.

• November Eleventh

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  When I was a child my father would pack my sister and me into the car and drive to Vancouver’s Cenotaph where we would observe Remembrance Day. When I close my eyes and think of those days, I see grey rain, black umbrellas, and red felt poppies. One year my sister wore a kilt. Both of us usually wore wool stockings, even under pants, to help stave off the cold. Because we were so young, neither of us appreciated why we stood in the streets silent with other darkly clad people. In turns, my dad would hoist us onto his shoulders so we could see the solemn parade of veterans. We would hold our hands over our hearts and sing about our true patriot love, not understanding the words as they left our mouths. I remember being careful and proud of the red poppy my dad would pin to the fabric of my jacket, just over my heart. This ritual was important to my father and, whatever my sister and I failed to understand, we knew that standing there in the rain with his daughters meant something to him.

  As November 11^th neared during my first year at Rockridge Secondary, I prepared for the type of ritual I had attended as a student. I thought we would go through the motions, have the obligatory moment of silence, watch a veteran place a wreath against the podium and listen as one of the band students played The Last Post. I suppose that in the glitz and distraction of consumer culture, I subconsciously believed that war was too distant, too historic, too unfathomable for Canada’s privileged youth. But, perhaps because of 9-11 and other recent acts of war, or maybe because parents continue to introduce their children to the reality of November 11^th, or maybe because humanity simply doesn’t forget, Canada’s youth today remember and honour the cost of their freedom in a way that truly means something.

  The entire student body was summoned into the gym. Chairs had been set up in rows and each student took a seat. A stage had been erected at the front of the room. Beside it a small group of band students warmed up. I took my seat near my students and welcomed the chance to relax for a few minutes.

  As soon as all one thousand of us were seated in the gym, the lights went dark and a spotlight shone on a lone student standing centre stage. He was wearing a beige jacket and soldier’s cap. When he spoke, he told us of how he had enlisted that morning. He told of the pain in leaving his loved ones and of the obligation he felt to protect them. After his monologue we heard from a series of characters, his friends and family, until finally his girlfriend took the stage. Tears pricked my eyes as she shared her worries and sorrow. Then, the stage went dark and audio of a battle shot into the darkness. When the lights finally came up to cast a cold glow over the stage, the girlfriend was crying in the front corner as she read a letter informing her of the boy’s honourable death. Behind her and projected onto a large screen played images of her life with the boy she’d had dreams of marrying. I was glad of the dark.

  Next we listened as a Japanese student dressed in a shimmering kimono of reds and purples recited a poem about Hiroshima. As she read, the poem’s English translation scrolled across the screen over images of the mushroom cloud and people’s pain. I was in awe of how this student-led assembly managed to make history so current. I have not experienced war first-hand. Neither have my parents. But that day I found myself close enough to imagine its smells, sounds, and devastation.

  The only other time I have felt the presence of war was at my Great-Papa’s 100^th birthday party, when I was 12 years old. The evening had been full of cake and relatives and congratulations and balloons, and he was tired from all the excitement. So my aunt, my sister, and I had wheeled him up to his room in the retirement home. As she went to turn down his sheets, my Great-Papa, who only moments before had been dozing with his head on his chest, suddenly grabbed my wrist with ferocity. The silver bracelet I wore bit into my flesh as he gripped tighter and tighter.

  “You’re too slow! Damn it! Get in the hole! Get in the hole! They’re going to kill you! They’ll kill you! Run!” His watery voice was now booming and clear, his shaking muscles now firm and steady. My aunt met my terrified eyes as I tried to twist my wrist from his vice grip.

  “Get down! Get down! You’re too slow! You’re too slow! You’re too slow!” The panic in my Great-Papa’s voice made my throat tight because, in that moment, he took me to an actual battlefield, muddied with rain and blood, noxious with gas and fear.

  “Grand-dad,” my aunt said, “Grand-dad it’s okay. Everything is okay. You’re in your room and we’re here with you, your grandchildren. It’s okay.”

  Now he straddled both worlds and looked at her, pleading, “But he’s going to die! They’ll get him ‘cause he’s too slow. He’s too slow…” his voice drifted into tears and my aunt, having freed my wrist, motioned for me to wait in the hall.

  Back in the darkened gym, students stood at attention as the bugle sounded. Fresh in our minds played images of small children running from black rain, a young boy just enlisted, and row upon row of committed white crosses. I held my wrist and said a silent thank you to my Great-Papa, who now rests in peace, and to these students who, without even meeting him, honoured him so well.

• The Power of Language

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  In this issue of Education Canada, an article by Paul Budra on why we should be teaching grammar gives me the opportunity to muse about one of my own passions – the importance of language competence.

  As an editor, I am immersed in the complexities and the nuances of language daily. It’s an immersion I love. I happily swim about among verb tenses, dependent and independent clauses, and tricky word choices. But throw many of our young people into that sea of linguistic complexity, and they flounder – or drown.

  I would never argue that teaching the structure of the language automatically confers good communication skills, or that young people should be discouraged from the free, unfettered communication of “free writing”. But I do think we deprive them of a great gift when we choose not to offer them the power that a deeper understanding of their language provides.

  Like Budra, I think many students would be intrigued by the intricacy of grammar and syntax, just as many are intrigued by the intricacy of mathematical formulae and biological diversity. Not all, of course. But we’re not even giving them a chance. For a few years I taught a writing course to first- and second-year university students; we couldn’t discuss writing issues sensibly because they didn’t have the basic vocabulary. What’s an active verb? For that matter, what’s a verb? Naming parts of speech may seem trivial, but if you were helping a friend put up a shelf, would you ask for “the thing with the flat metal end you can use to pound the pointy object into the wood”? We need to be able to talk about the tools at our disposal ­– whether they’re hammers or prepositions.

  There is so much more at stake here than passing a provincial literacy test or doing well on a history assignment. Language competence ­– real comfort with the language and its almost infinite flexibility – opens the door to varieties of expression that, in turn, open the door to varieties of ideas. It truly is a revolving door; expressing ideas in words helps us clarify and modify our thoughts, and that ability, I would argue, is central to the effective functioning of a democratic society.

  So ­– does our democracy depend on teaching subject-verb agreement and comma usage in public schools? Probably not. But it does depend on ensuring that our young people can juggle increasingly complex ideas and both understand and express nuances of meaning. If teaching the technical skills of writing helps even some of them do that, we can’t afford to overlook it.

• The Superintendency in Retrospect

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  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.

  ---

  [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).

• How Do People Learn About Research?

  6:39 PM Comments Off on How Do People Learn About Research?

  Imagine a teacher with a couple of autistic students in her class for the first time. She struggles to reach and work with these students but feels quite unsuccessful. At the suggestion of her special education colleagues, she enrolls in a professional development event that discusses concrete classroom strategies grounded in solid research. These practices work well and make a dramatic difference, not only for the autistic students but also in the way the class as a whole operates.

  In fact, this is not an imaginary story; it happened to one of us (co-author Cooper) a few years ago, and it illustrates the potential and challenges in connecting research with daily practice in schools.

  We know that educators are interested in research findings and value the potential contribution research can make to their work. We also know that there is reliable research-based knowledge about good practice in an increasing number of areas of education. Yet, as outlined in a previous “At Issue”, the connections between research and practice in education are not as strong as they might be.  Educators are busy people; teaching is demanding and tiring work. It is not reasonable to expect them to search out original research – which is, in any case, often not readily accessible and written for specialists rather than for practitioners – let alone to wade through dozens or even hundreds of studies on similar topics to determine what the cumulative state of knowledge might be.

  So how do educators learn about interesting and relevant research findings? It turns out that in teaching, as in most other professions, that learning happens largely through third party processes, or what we call “mediation”. Three kinds of mediation are especially important.

  Professional development, mentioned in the scenario at the start of this article, is one main way that research reaches teachers. Educators rightly expect that those who provide professional development should be familiar with and making use of the best available research. Many well-known speakers on education are actually engaged to a large extent in trying to bring research – their own and others – to bear on education practice and policy.

  Professional organizations and publications are another source of research knowledge. When school districts, teacher organizations, or subject associations promote well-grounded research through their meetings, newsletters, publications, and resource materials, they make an important contribution to helping teachers know more about how research can inform their work.

  Another set of organizations is outside the school system itself and is deliberately engaged in research dissemination. Some of those organizations, such as the Canadian Education Association (CEA), have a genuine desire to promote informed debate and practice. Individual faculty members and their universities may also be active in trying to share research knowledge. Other organizations, such as lobby groups or political parties, have particular interests they want to advance and use research to promote their ideas.  Even with a starting bias, those political efforts are often important to the public debate and so do have an effect on what teachers know and believe.

  All this means that at any given moment there are many ideas about education competing for public and professional attention. Some of these will be well-grounded in research whereas others will be primarily the result of ci starting positions, using research only where it supports that position, or may even be sales pitches for a particular program or service that someone wants schools to buy. The result can be confusion; who should we believe when very different positions all claim to be based on research? The task is even more challenging because when there is divergence in ideas, educators – like everyone else – tend to give greater weight to their experience than to research – even though we have much historical evidence that experience can also be quite misleading.

  Weighing the evidence is a difficult challenge in all fields. Schools do not have the time or capacity to sort through the various claims and come to an independent conclusion on their validity. That is why it is important to have independent organizations, such as CEA, that are focused on helping all parties use evidence wisely and effectively. Fortunately, various organizations around the world are involved in similar efforts to share research findings in an impartial way with educators. For example the EPPI-Centre in England (https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/) produces very careful syntheses of research on various topics. Other organizations with similar approaches include CUREE in England (www.curee-paccts.com) and the international Campbell Collaboration (www.campbellcollaboration.org). Some universities operate research centres that do similar work. So increasing resources are available to help educators sort through the claims and counter claims of research, and there are grounds for optimism that the links between research and practice will get stronger.

• Brain Science, Adolescence, and Secondary Schools: A Critical Disconnect

  6:16 PM Comments Off on Brain Science, Adolescence, and Secondary Schools: A Critical Disconnect

  Our argument starts not with statistics about secondary schools, or even comments about various political initiatives, but rather with a kind of fable.

  Of all the animals in the woodland surely it is the deer that most excites human imagination. A peaceful herbivore, the deer’s survival has depended on its ability to sniff out danger and run off to safety faster than any other creature. Over millions of years it has developed the sleekest and most powerful combination of bone structure, muscle, and tendon, making it a veritable icon of animal fitness.

  It takes all of two years for the young fawn to learn enough about the art of survival from its mother to live on its own. Once responsible for itself, the young deer has learned not to panic when danger approaches, but to stand stock still so as to attract no attention; to sniff the air for the scent of danger; to hold a leg just off the ground to detect the slightest vibration of an approaching predator; and to flex its ears to pick up the faintest of sounds. All those skills have been perfected by its ancestors over vast periods of time and have become part of the instincts that create the character of a deer. A powerful set of survival skills, it seems – but no longer quite enough.

  Setting out on its own as dusk creeps over the woodland, the deer comes on a clearing of unnaturally level and hard ground. Suddenly, around a corner approaching at high speed, comes a noisy contrivance sporting two bright headlights. The young deer does everything that its instincts have taught it to do – in an instant it becomes immobile, sniffing the air furiously, sensing the vibrations and testing its muscles for action, but unsure of where to go. Mesmerized by the lights, the young deer remains rooted to the spot a split second too long, and that young prince of animals, the ultimate descendant of an ages-old line of evolution, is killed instantly as it is hit head-on by a car. The car is probably a write-off, and the driver – if he is lucky enough to survive – curses the animal for its “lack of intelligence” in not getting out of his way.

  Like the deer, humans too are the result of a long saga of evolutionary adaptations that has taken us to the point where we have the intelligence and motor skills to build a car, send a man into outer space, and carry out complicated medical operations using the power of the new nanotechnologies. Because humans have evolved big brains, rather than a deer’s athletic anatomy, it takes our young far longer to grow up. Unlike the fawn, whose brain was nearly fully formed at birth, human babies are born with brains so premature that two thirds of brain growth happens after birth (an evolutionary compromise made necessary by the narrowness of the woman’s birth canal resulting from our species learning to stand upright). Consequently most human brain growth is shaped not simply by genetics, but by the lessons we draw from real-life experience.

  Here is the secret of our phenomenal brain: every baby is born with a variety of inherited pre-dispositions that enable it to so internalize such real-life experiences that it is literally able to grow its own brain (in a way that the fawn does not) and so reflect the increasing complexity of the environment in which it finds itself. Thus humans have the capability to adapt, in very quick time, to almost any environment – always providing that they keep every one of their mental antennae alert to further environmental change.

  Within the past 300 years (a mere split second on our evolutionary time-scale), our ancestors have developed a range of technologies that have enabled our species to spread out across the globe. There are now some 20 times as many of us as there were when the first steam engine was invented in 1728; ten times as many of us as there were in 1824 when the first railway engine enabled a man to go faster than on the back of a horse, and two-and-a-half times as many as there were at the start of World War II, less than seventy years ago. This vastly inflated population (some would say a population waiting for Mother Nature to carry out a savage cull) has only been made possible by turning much of the world’s population into “specialists”, people who so concentrate on the efficient production of the individual components of a machine or a process that they have little understanding of how the various parts connect.

  Two hundred years ago, most young people learned about growing up by participating in family farms, businesses, or community projects for which they had to learn how every subpart contributed to the usefulness of the final product. They had to know how things worked, for theirs was a world in which connectivity was obvious – the strength of a chain was well understood to be dependent on its weakest link, just as the speed of a convoy depended on the speed of the slowest ship. But over the last two centuries, ever fewer young people have had this experience. Ours is a world of information saturation, where the power of computers doubles every eighteen months, and it is estimated that the world produces about five exabytes of new information per year (an exabyte is a billion gigabytes). That’s about 37,000 times the amount of information held in the Library of Congress. This brings enormous opportunities: ten years ago who would have thought of “Googling” an old friend and five years ago who would have known what a “wiki” was? But it has also brought problems. 

  In our search for greater material rewards, we seem to have decided that there is no longer any reason for young people to learn, as did the apprentices of old, by working alongside older people. Instead, and especially in the past 60 years, we have decided that youngsters should spend longer and longer studying in ever greater detail – in theory rather than practice – a single aspect of a sub-component, or a sub-discipline, as defined by somebody else. This, we are told, will enable the wonderful productivity of the present technological world to thrive.

  While it is entirely appropriate that a young fawn should grow up as a mirror of its parents, for a human child to grow up as a clone at a time of rapid cultural and economic environmental change would be nothing short of disastrous.

  In exchange for what was once the satisfaction gained from a job well done, as shipyard workers cheered when the boat they had built together for two or three years finally slipped into the water, people are now paid good money for a job that may have little or no intrinsic satisfaction. It gives them a wad of cash to spend in their free time, but not the satisfaction of a job well done. Too many of us don’t even realize how vulnerable this makes us, because we have readily exchanged wealth today for any sense of personal responsibility for the future.

  To support this materialistic mindset, education has come to mean doing what you are told and not asking awkward questions. But is that what our brain evolved to do?

  Pushing the Evolutionary Envelope

  “Cultural speciation” – cultural change requiring people to modify their behaviours and attitudes – proceeds infinitely faster than does “biological speciation”, the development of biological adaptations to changed sets of circumstances. In other words, what we are now expecting from individuals in our so-called advanced culture has far outrun those adaptations inherited from the past which, when properly utilized, streamline the operation of the brain. While the human race is wonderfully empowered by its ancestors, it is certainly constrained as well. We are very adaptable, but not infinitely so. Being driven to live in ways that are utterly uncongenial to our inherited traits simply drives people mad

  In the past 20 or 30 years scientists have learned much about the grain of the brain. We now know that, because of our initial physical vulnerability, we learn a whole raft of skills in the first seven or eight years of our lives through closely imitating the actions of our parents and teachers. Like the young deer, young children’s learning is clone-like. But while it is entirely appropriate that a young fawn should grow up as a mirror of its parents, for a human child to grow up as a clone at a time of rapid cultural and economic environmental change would be nothing short of disastrous. Within our lifetimes, the next generation must be equipped to go where no one has gone before. To equip them to do this, we must not forget the past. But at the same time, we have to recognize that to 21^st century man, the past is only a partial clue to the future.

  The brain may, in fact, have evolved to help us. Scientists are now discovering massive structural changes in the adolescent brain through extensive functional MRI scans, changes that apparently shake the internal mechanisms of a teenage brain to its roots. If this is true – and all the signs suggest that it is – these must be seen as essential evolutionary adaptations that ensure the survival of the human race by forcing teenagers to break away from their parents and teachers. “Get off my back,” adolescents down the ages have pleaded. “Leave me alone. Give me space.” Adolescence is about growing up and no longer thinking like a child. It’s about ceasing to be a clone. Sitting still (if only for part of the time!) may be an appropriate learning environment for the pre-pubescent child, but it is largely inappropriate for adolescents, whose biological pre-dispositions, we now know, urge them to find out things for themselves.

  And here is the crux of the present advanced world’s dilemma. Little more than 100 years ago, American psychologists started to define this rebelliousness of adolescence as a disease, an aberration that made teenagers a threat to themselves. Psychologists and educational bureaucrats alike concluded that something had to be done to prevent teenagers from threatening the carefully controlled world that teachers had created.

  Educational administrators saw only one answer to this problem: put adolescents into school for longer and longer, and give them so much studying to do that they wouldn’t have the time or energy to question what an adult society was actually doing to them. We’re still doing this today. Policymakers, with little background in the neurological processes, expected that, by the age of 22 or 23, the next generation of young people would have been “broken in” to the currently defined way of doing things. Their thinking resembled that of horse breeders who, until very recently, thought it necessary to break in a young foal after it had run relatively wild for two years. Now horse breeders carefully study the temperament of every foal, and then define unique training programs that build upon what each can do naturally. Human adolescents crave and deserve no less. Deep down, there stirs within them the urge to climb the mountains of the mind and see what possibilities lie before them; they are innately “big picture” thinkers and frequently upset older generations by questioning the compromised lives so many of us lead. That is their nature; it is what their brains have evolved to do. It is the apparently unreasonable dreams of adolescence that, years later, drive the progress of what we are proud to call our civilization. It has always been so.

  And yet, society has so outlawed the natural rebelliousness of adolescence that most people simply accept the specialized roles that have been created for them and have but a limited capability to look beyond their restricted worldview to see the ecological, environmental, and social crises that are hurtling towards them – crises that the unfettered adolescent brain may have evolved to tackle.

  Going with the Grain

  By misunderstanding teenagers’ instinctive need to do things for themselves, society has created a system of schooling that goes against the natural grain of the adolescent brain and ends up trivializing the very young people it claims to be supporting. By failing to keep up with appropriate research in the biological and social sciences, current educational systems continue to treat adolescence as a problem rather than an opportunity bequeathed to them through the genetic transfer of important mental pre-dispositions to learn in particular ways. These predispositions, once activated, transform the clone-like learning of the pre-pubescent child through adolescence into the self-directed learning of the mature adult.

  We have effectively lost the plot: adolescence is an opportunity not a threat. Understand that, and it changes everything.

  By using our schools to subvert the natural processes of growing up in order to fit more comfortably into our present economic state, we have created whole generations of young people and adults who are now mesmerized by the bright lights of a way of living that is hurtling, out of control, towards us. Like the young deer, we too are transfixed by the lights that are about to destroy us. Because we have effectively told young people not to think for themselves, far too many of today’s so-called “educated” people know of no way to find a solution that has not already been prepared for them and described in a text book.

  This kind of thinking gave birth to the modern secondary school, which became a kind of holding ground in which the problems of adolescence could be worked through so that eventually youngsters would be mature enough to deal with adult society. School became the exact opposite of apprenticeship. Schoolchildren were required to sit docilely in classrooms, listening to the received wisdom of the teacher and reproducing that knowledge when tested. Independent and creative thinking was not encouraged, for that threatened the teacher’s control of the rest of the class. Young apprentices, on the other hand, had to be put through their paces so that the older they became, the less dependent they were on the craftsman and the more confident they were in demonstrating their ability to solve problems. Every skill learned, every experience internalized, increased the apprentice’s sense of autonomy.

  Recent research in cognitive science and neurobiology makes it obvious that apprenticeship was a culturally appropriate response to the neurological changes in the adolescent brain. Apprenticeship was a form of intellectual weaning whereby the more skillful and thoughtful the apprentice became, the less he or she would depend on the teacher. The German philosopher Nietzsche put it succinctly: “It is a poor teacher whose pupils remain dependent on him.”

  If Western society is to survive (and it really is as serious as that), it is essential that all those involved with young people escape from that assumption made a century ago by early psychologists, that adolescence is an aberration and an inconvenience. While the human brain has evolved to enable each of us to function effectively in complex situations – we naturally think big and act small – modern education has become side-tracked into creating specialists who are well-qualified in their own disciplines, but unable to see the wider impact of their actions. Because formal schooling has done its best to neutralize the impact of adolescence, recent generations of young people have been deprived of the strength that comes from fearlessly making difficult decisions – and if necessary picking up the pieces when things go wrong. We have effectively lost the plot: adolescence is an opportunity not a threat. Understand that, and it changes everything.

  An education system that truly went with the natural way in which people learn – we call it “going with the grain of the brain” – would prepare children in their younger and prepubescent years for the self-defining struggle that is adolescence. A delightful story illustrates this well. A man, seeing a butterfly struggling on the sidewalk to break out of its now useless cocoon, bent down and with his pocket knife carefully cut away the cocoon and set the butterfly free. To the man’s dismay the butterfly flapped its wings weakly for a while, then collapsed and died. A biologist later told him that this was the worst thing he could have done, for the butterfly needed the struggle in order to develop the muscles needed to fly. By robbing the butterfly of the struggle, he had inadvertently made it too weak to live.

  Children need the struggle of adolescence to sort themselves out and put away those childish behaviours which earlier had served them well. Sometimes alone, often with their peers and supported by the guidance of wise and caring adults, adolescents need a careful mixture of guidance and the space to work things out for themselves. Through the struggle of adolescence they develop the strength for adult life. To waste adolescence is to deny future generations the strength they will need to respond to the serious problems facing our civilization and our planet.

  EN BREF – Au cours de leurs sept ou huit premières années, les enfants acquièrent une multitude de compétences en imitant de près leurs parents et enseignants. Mais il serait désastreux que les enfants grandissent comme des clones pendant une période de rapides changements environnementaux, culturels et économiques. Nous savons maintenant que les enfants ont besoin du tumulte de l’adolescence pour s’affranchir de ces comportements infantiles. D’après les recherches récentes en sciences cognitives et en neurobiologie, l’apprentissage – une forme de sevrage intellectuel réduisant la dépendance de l’apprenti sur l’enseignant au fur et à mesure de ses progrès en matière de compétences et de réflexion – constitue une réponse culturellement plus appropriée aux changements neurologiques du cerveau adolescent que ce qu’offrent nos systèmes scolaires actuels. Gaspiller l’adolescence, c’est nier aux générations futures la vigueur qu’il leur faudra pour résoudre les graves problèmes confrontant notre civilisation et notre planète.

• CEA Contributes Canadian Context to American Education Documentary, Waiting for Superman

  September 17, 2010 10:11 PM Comments Off on CEA Contributes Canadian Context to American Education Documentary, Waiting for Superman

  Waiting for Superman is a call to action for better American schools. An accompanying website has been developed to inform viewers about the performance of American public education system in order to mobilize a movement for change. The film, produced and directed by the same people who brought us An Inconvenient Truth, will be released in Toronto in October 2010.

  CEA has collaborated with Paramount Pictures Canada to provide key statistics for the Canadian section of the film’s website so Canadian viewers and media will have Canada-specific information available where viewers can learn more about the Canadian context.

  Click here to access these statistics.

  Coming soon on the new CEA website: The story behind these statistics.

  You can view the trailer and learn more about Waiting for Superman at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbCZB_sy6Ws

• 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.

• Are we really committed to the idea of critical thinking?

  2:48 PM Comments Off on Are we really committed to the idea of critical thinking?

  “Which one do you want?” I asked my 3 and a half year old son as I placed the two fruit smoothies on the kitchen table. Luke approached the glasses, happy to have the choice, but unaware that I had slightly transformed our early morning breakfast ritual. For the past two weeks I had been filling two identical glasses with equal amounts of liquid. Each day he had carefully examined the contents of each glass and made his choice. Today, however, I had switched things up a little by using two new glasses, each the same height, but of different diameters. Not surprisingly, Luke chose the glass that had a higher fill line, He was satisfied with his choice, thinking that he was getting more smoothie; I was satisfied knowing that I was!

  A scan of a child psychology text from my teacher education program warns me that I can probably count on just one or two more years of this type of “thinking game” with Luke before he’s on to me. While I expect that there are aspects of thinking that develop quite naturally in most people, there are other more sophisticated forms of cognition that need nurturing, attention and application if they are going to become fully functional and useful in our lives.

  I’ve been musing during these waning days of summer about the type of thinking that is most often promoted in our schools. Although our professional development activities, curriculum documents, and even our lesson plans are often peppered with talk of critical thinking, I’m not convinced that our collective hearts are committed to all that this entails. After all, in most of our jurisdictions, teachers are told rather explicitly what to teach, how to teach it, and what students are expected to understand and be able to do once it has been taught. That doesn’t leave much time or space for the exploration of ideas, perspectives and alternative ways of seeing, all of  which form the foundation for  good, honest critical thinking.

  So why do we, on the one hand, inscribe the value of critical thought—the desire and ability to seek what it would make sense to believe in a given situation—into our foundational teaching and learning documents, and then fail to nurture the infrastructure to support it in our schools and classrooms. A few possibilities come to mind, and I’ll very briefly outline them here.

  First, it’s quite possible that a good number of us (myself included) don’t have a really clear sense of what we mean when we talk about critical thinking. Perhaps it is just one of those terms that is so used that it has lost some of its meaning and, therefore, its power.

  Second, while I have met several people who are really trying to transform the learning that goes on in their classroom using the rubric of critical thinking, larger scale implementations are difficult to find and even more difficult, I would imagine, to maintain.

  Third, many of us who find a home in this place we call school weren’t raised in critical thinking classrooms. Oh, we may have been exposed to programs involving time set aside each week or month to work on skills related to critical thinking, but most of us weren’t exposed to its subtleties, nuances and the real-world applications that would allow us to become proficient and confident critical thinkers. And to quote the familiar adage, “you can’t give what you don’t have!”

  Finally (and this is a little more disturbing), perhaps we really don’t want to nurture a critical stance in our students. Perhaps the conversation and action to which true critical thinking can lead is best left to the edges of our communities. Perhaps we’re a little reluctant to put the powerful tools of critical thinking into the hands of the general population.

  So, as a parent, I will likely continue to take advantage of and enjoy the fact that my children are just beginning to think for themselves, but the case for the type of deep, critical thinking that could transform our schools, our communities, and,  indeed our world, extends well beyond my breakfast table manipulation. It is a vision that requires serious, confident and consistent work at all levels of our educational system. We must find a way of nurturing the vision in our policy-makers, supporting it in the professional development work we do with teachers, and making it a viable and vibrant part of the lives of our students!

  My role as a parent is to teach my children how to become active thinkers in the world; is my role as a teacher much different?

  Lots more to chat about here, but I’ll leave you with some questions.

  Where have you seen good work being done in the area of critical thinking? As an educator, what are some of the things that would encourage you to explore critical thinking more in your work with students? What are some of the things that might cause work in this area to be put on the back burner?

• 2010-2011 School Calendar

  August 15, 2010 12:00 AM Comments Off on 2010-2011 School Calendar

  The School Calendar provides all opening and closing dates, statutory holidays, and spring breaks for elementary and secondary schools across Canada. This free resource, compiled annually, is an essential tool for conference, event and vacation planners. The School Calendar is published in mid-August.

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