Colonial Education and the Mean Dean at York U

The Dean dismissed the November survey, saying he was not "persuaded that other students' political views on the subject are either a relevant or an appropriate consideration."

Me thinks this Dean needs to get his ass back to class for a bit.  Maybe spend some time out in the real world, too.

The point of education is to prepare individuals for success in society.  That means knowledge, skills and sociability, through accommodations where necessary.

The opposite of education is imposition - telling people what to think, how to act, so on and so forth.

This Dean thinks he's being an advocate for the former, but he's actually embodying the former.

What career opportunities is the young man in question preparing himself for?  He says he's taking online classes so as to avoid contact with women.  He's also saying this is due to religious beliefs, though which religion isn't clear; religious scholars were asked about the position and remained puzzled.

The real question here is why this gent feels so against being in public space with women.  There may be very legitimate reasons that are being masked by religion, consciously or unconsciously.  

The fact remains, regardless of what training this fella gets, the moment he steps out his door he'll be in a world filled with women.  Some of them may even wear skirts and short-sleeves; shockingly, some might even be gregarious and opinionated.

There's a whole movement in education towards self-regulation, empowering individuals to have better self-control, understand and manage stressors better and to by and large being more consciously able to  function within a social setting.  It's the tonic to stigma, discrimination and communication fails.

This Dean doesn't seem to know or care about this.  A young man has expressed religious concerns about socializing with women, dammit, and deserves to be accommodated.  The opinions of the girls in these classes are "not relevant or an appropriate consideration."  They may have won the vote, but they're not going to impose their politics at York U!

Accommodation isn't about creating silos between individuals - it's about empowering people to succeed in a social context.  Hearing aids are accommodations.  Translation services are accommodations.  ECEs are accommodations.  Segregation is not an accommodation, nor is telling people their opinions don't count.

Mean Dean is a boss, not a leader.  It's people like him that are stalling society and putting up walls that disengage youth, the people we need to be actively encouraging to be engaged.

Instead of perpetuating a top-down colonial mentality based on ignorance and gut-feelings instead of evidence-based best practices, maybe it's time this Dean commit a bit of sociology and look into this whole social-emotional self-regulation business.

Who knows, he might learn something.

Value Adding Teachers and the Future of Labour

 

 

The 26-year-old kindergarten teacher is heading into the first year in her own classroom, and was given a $100 Wal-Mart gift card to offset costs. She has so far spent $250 of her own money as well.

 

I love teachers - literally,  My family is rife with them.  They are passionate, compassionate and above all, they're perfectionists.  These teachers are incredibly judgemental - not of others, though, but of themselves.  If one of "their kids" doesn't do well, they take it personally, even if there are a multitude of other mitigating factors.  Success lies in their hands and if it isn't achieved, they blame themselves.  On the other hand, when kids do well - when five years in the future, those kids and their parents come up to them and say "thank you", that's the reward they cherish the most.

 

Everything else - the money, the time off, the expectations and mandatory seminars and micromanagement or support of administration - is viewed through that lens. 

 

This is why I think both Unions and those that oppose them have it wrong - they're trying to force teachers into the labour fights of a previous generation instead of supporting teachers in the way that would really advance their labours now.

 

Teachers don't want to make money - they need to have sustainability and some breathing space and all that kind of thing - but what they really want is to add value.  They will invest more of themselves than is perhaps healthy to do, but they do it because they care.

 

More and more knowledge-sharing and project-managing employees are reacting to work the same way.  It's a changing labour (and labour compensation) paradigm smart policy-makers will start cluing into.

 

The future of labour is emerging right now - all we need to do is connect the dots to see what it looks like.

Rise of the Domesticated Ape

Compassion, like physical and academic skills, appears to be something that is not fixed, but rather can be enhanced with training and practice. "The fact that alterations in brain function were observed after just a total of seven hours of training is remarkable," explains UW-Madison psychology and psychiatry professor Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and senior author of the article.

"There are many possible applications of this type of training," Davidson says. "Compassion and kindness training in schools can help children learn to be attuned to their own emotions as well as those of others, which may decrease bullying. Compassion training also may benefit people who have social challenges such as social anxiety or antisocial behavior."

 

The first reaction of many reading this article will be "The horror!  The horror!"  Communists!  Social Engineers, committing sociology in our schools and on our streets!  Man is born independent and free and must remain that way, unfettered by the chains of civilization!

 

Which, you know, is true and all, except where it comes to complex consumer goods (requiring centrally-coordinated labour and accommodation to make), education (basic social skills like reading, writing, math and work skills ranging from widget-making to project management) healthcare (which is reengineering human evolution, for Pete's sake) and the like are concerned.

 

Here's the thing, Randian purists; our "natural", pre-civilization state as a species was lived on the plain, being chased by predators and picking each other's lice as a pass time.  Individual strength (and luck) allowed for survival in the face of predators and the acquisition of goods that would otherwise go to weaker members of the species (today we call "take what you want by force" crime, but whatever).  Natural disasters, bad storms, plagues, etc. were all things that were beyond control.

 

The double-horror to which Conrad refers in Heart of Darkness is the primal, bestial, emotional creature that lies in the heart of men (and women).  This is the reactionary self, the selfish persona, the hyper-focused perspective we are told is desirable for success in a competitive world.  Charity begins at home, etc.

 

But that's not the history of history, is it?  Civilization began with an altruistic urge; the same neurochemical-motivated urge can be witnessed in a host of other species, ranging from apes to elephants to those rascally birds and bees.  Environment plays a big factor; for the same reason human societies in rugged, hard-to-access mountainous terrain are more likely to be and stay tribal than on flat, lush flood plains, animals under certain environmental threats are more likely to be selfish.

 

As homo sapiens have increasingly flexed our altruistic, forward-thinking and planning abilities, we have strained that part of our brain that is more developed in humans than any other species.  Think about that for a second; the brain of a modern human is more capable of altruism than our ancestors would have been, or our nearest relatives like bonobos and chimps are (though they're starting to catch up).  Natural selection has increasingly favoured altruism and pro-social behaviour as favourable adaptations.

 

It's worked, too - for all our many continued faults we have cured illnesses, extended life, helped the blind see and can even return the clinically dead back to the living.  Where there were barren wombs before the genesis of life can now take hold.  All of these innovations have been possible as a result of collaboration, critical thinking and evidence-based policy development.  Cooperation, social co-habitation, public transit, shared communications systems, mass media, all of it is only possible because we have it in ourselves to give to each other and gain something personal through the process.

 

To become more than the sum of our parts, collectively, we've had to tame the selfish beast within.

 

But we still have crime, greed, reactive behaviour, leaders without vision and strategists without plans.  Some of this is genetic - inherited from parents or attributable, at least in part, to faulty cognitive wiring.  What we find, though, is that certain environmental conditions (poverty, abuse, access to social programs and positive role models, social inclusion, etc.) create conditions that favour selfish, aggressive behaviour.  This is why slums are breeding grounds for crime; it's also why from a strictly free-market business model, criminals are actually the fittest operators.  If you put differing people in those same conditions, they will face the same likelihood of succumbing to the same pressures. 

 

Of course, nobody who doesn't have to proactively moves into a slum because the property's cheap, right?  There are real risks to being the only rich guy on the block; unless you want to protect yourself with firewalls and drones, giving a bit back is the surest way to build your own sustainable safety.

 

Our "natural" state is selfish; everything from "Johnny, share your toys with your brother" to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", even including the language we speak and the fashions we prefer are all a matter of social programming.  That's why so many reactive people are suspicious of education; it's like a contagion, softening the aggressive edges that are designed to help us survive in the wild. 

 

Whatever our programming might lead us to feel, though, we're selfish actors living in a social setting; in urban environments, everything from driving to work to having clean streets and accessing public transit requires social skills that must be leaned.

Humans are the domesticated ape - it's us that's made it so.  Even wilderness survival has to be trained.

 

With all this in mind - why not explore the potential of social-emotional learning, positive psychology, occupational mental health design and restorative justice?  Whatever we might feel about "social engineering" the evidence weight far more heavily on the side of proactive, prosocial approaches (including training) than selfish, laissez-faire ones (including tough-on-crime policies in the absence of committing sociology).  We can train our youth to be more resilient, adaptive and effective in a modern economic context.  We can empower our cognitive labour, reducing presenteeism and increasing both output and innovation.  We can manage down our growing mental-health crisis.  We can even start addressing the root causes of crime, starting in the Justice system but moving out to touch the front line and our varied communities.

 

It's literally our future.

 

The Heart of Darkness lies behind us;  the way forward is consciously touched by fire.

 

21st Century Classrooms: Moving Education Forward

... and in relation to my last post, there's this:

 

Blueprint for Moving to 21st Century Student-Centered Schools and Classrooms

“Too many organizations---not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well---still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.” Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us

It’s not just businesses that are still caught in outdated assumptions about performance and motivation. Schools are caught in that same time warp too. Much of how our classrooms and schools are structured and operate are designed to take advantage of extrinsic motivation, and we are finding that in the 21st century, this structure and way of operating no longer works.

But the question is, how can we transform our schools so that they no longer operate under these outdated assumptions about student potential, student performance, and student motivation? If one were to make a list of how our schools still operate and what these faulty and obsolete assumptions about education and schooling are, that list would look somewhat like this.

• Students are motivated by grades.
• Students are incapable of directing their own learning.
• Classrooms (and schools) must operate under strict control with specific rules and consequences governing student behavior.
• Teachers are the primary dispensers of learning in the classroom.
• Education is something “done to students” rather than something in which they engage.

If these basic assumptions about classroom operations and education are faulty, what would would 21st century assumptions about how classrooms and school operations look like? In other words, what would a classroom or school operating under the principles described in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us look like? Perhaps educator Mark Barnes provides with some answers to that question in his new book ROLE Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom.

In ROLE Reversal, Barnes describes what he terms a Results Only Learning Environment or ROLE. As the name implies, in a ROLE the focus is entirely on results, or student work. Also, in this environment, the principles of fostering intrinsic motivation described by Pink are implemented fully. According to Barnes, a ROLE basically upends many of the traditional assumptions about education and learning. Here’s some of ways these traditional assumptions are upended.

In a ROLE, or Results Only Learning Environment:

• Grades and grading systems are replaced with a “narrative feedback system” that focuses specifically on student work and improving that work. In Barnes’ result-only classroom, teachers do not use numerical grades to provide feedback because numerical feedback systems fail to provide feedback students need to improve their performance. Instead, students are given extensive, comprehensive, and ongoing narrative feedback on their work. This feedback is specific and can be used by the student for work improvement. In ROLE Reversal, Barnes shows teachers how to provide this kind of feedback.
• Instead of teacher-directed learning activities, students are given broad, long-term projects to complete, and they make the daily decisions on how to complete those projects. The intrinsic motivation model described by Pink demands that autonomy be employed to engage people in the tasks at hand. Under Barnes’ results-only classroom model, students engage in six-week long projects that provide a great deal of choice, or autonomy, on how and what is learned and when. Autonomy is a built-in component of his results-only classroom practice.
• Classroom rules and consequences are jettisoned and the use of opportunities to engage in meaningful work, collaborating with peers, and trust/respect are used instead to manage classroom behavior. Too often, classrooms become more about focusing on the enforcement of rules rather than the learning students are being asked to do. In Barnes’ results-only classroom, behavior is managed through well-designed, engaging, and collaborative learning projects that leave students little time to engage in problem behaviors. Also, the results-only classroom described by Barnes fosters a high-level of respect and trust that makes having rules and consequences less necessary.
• Teachers are no longer the “dispensers of information/learning.” According to Barnes, in a ROLE, teachers become coaches and facilitators of student learning. In the results-only classroom, teachers step away from the front of the classroom and spend more time facilitating student learning and coaching students on their work. Teacher-centered activities like worksheets, quizzes, and homework are jettisoned. Instead, students engage in long-term, meaningful activities that challenge them.
• Education and learning moves from being something done to students to something in which students actively engage in on a daily basis. The 20th century traditional model of education is very much still with us. The heart of that educational philosophy and model sees education as a process by which we subject students to, in order to add value determined by test scores. Under Barnes’ result-only model, education and learning is something students actively engage in every day. They are active participants in their learning.

Mark Barnes, Role Reversal

For the teacher and school leader looking for a model of learning that truly captures Daniel Pink’s principles of intrinsic motivation---autonomy, mastery, and purpose---Barnes’ book ROLE Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom offers just such a model. Best of all, Barnes results-only classroom offers the kind of classroom in which students achieve at higher levels. I highly recommend Mark Barnes’new book, ROLE Reversal: Achieving Uncommonly Excellent Results in the Student-Centered Classroom published by ASCD. This book would make an excellent book study to foster discussions in schools about how we can move toward the student-centered schools and classrooms we so desperately need in the 21st century.

Jobs and the Economy: What Jason Kenney Can Learn From Teachers

 

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney recently attacked Liberal leadership front-runner Justin Trudeau, questioning his leadership ability because before entering politics all he did was work as a teacher. In the eyes of some apparently, teaching is a lowly profession. And the idea that teachers are leaders is one that is open to ridicule. Had Trudeau been a lawyer or doctor, this would have not been an issue. But an ordinary teacher wanting to lead our country raises concerns.

 

Stephen Harper never had a real job prior to politics - he never put his fabled economics degree to the test prior to entering politics.  Jason Kenney served as a lobbyist - a role he has essentially carried over to the Immigration file, as he pretty much spends all his time lobbying ethnic communities to vote Conservative.

 

Meanwhile, the Harper Team, focused on jobs and economic growth, are increasingly frustrated by their - sorry, the bureaucrats - ability to develop the labour skills they feel our economy needs.  They're not having any luck getting the Private Sector to loosen their purse strings, either, and innovation in Canada is nowhere near where it needs to be.

 

BUT - the Tories have done a pretty good job of stifling opposition, scaring bureaucrats into silence and demonizing those who disagree with their narrow ideology, haven't they?  Power is theirs and they aren't prepared to share it.  Alas, by choking the Census, clamping down on inconvenient evidence and knee-capping conversation, Team Harper is forcing everyone to rely on gut instinct rather than fact.  Instinct in the absence of fact, particularly in tough economic times, will always, always encourage a bunker mentality - the exact opposite of what we need to get out of our worsening economic slump.  It's a limbic thing.

 

I won't hold my breath on the Harpers and Kennedys of the world connecting the dots between their emphasis on control and their mounting frustrations with everyone else not playing along.

 

What I will do is suggest the CPC folk look at some different models to find out how motivation really works and how to foster the independence, critical thinking and comfort with risk they seek.  Of course, first they must unlearn what they have learned.  What's required for them to do that?

 

Hint - they should go back to the classroom and learn from the masters.

 

It's not about controlling the flow of fish, folks - it's about teaching people to fish. 

 

School of Hard Knocks (Annie Murphy Paul)

 

School of Hard Knocks

‘How Children Succeed,’ by Paul Tough

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

Published: August 23, 2012

 

Most readers of The New York Times probably subscribe to what Paul Tough calls “the cognitive hypothesis”: the belief “that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills — the kind of intelligence that gets measured on I.Q. tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns — and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.” In his new book, “How Children Succeed,” Tough sets out to replace this assumption with what might be called the character hypothesis: the notion that noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.

      

HOW CHILDREN SUCCEED

Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

By Paul Tough

231 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.

 

“Psychologists and neuroscientists have learned a lot in the past few decades about where these skills come from and how they are developed,” Tough writes, and what they’ve discovered can be summed up in a sentence: Character is created by encountering and overcoming failure. In this absorbing and important book, Tough explains why American children from both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum are missing out on these essential experiences. The offspring of affluent parents are insulated from adversity, beginning with their baby-proofed nurseries and continuing well into their parentally financed young adulthoods. And while poor children face no end of challenges — from inadequate nutrition and medical care to dysfunctional schools and neighborhoods — there is often little support to help them turn these omnipresent obstacles into character-enhancing triumphs. The book illuminates the extremes of American childhood: for rich kids, a safety net drawn so tight it’s a harness; for poor kids, almost nothing to break their fall.

      

Though Tough examines at length the travails of both groups, it’s the plight of disadvantaged children that compels his interest and emotions. In his previous book, the well-received “Whatever It Takes,” Tough followed the efforts of the educator Geoffrey Canada to turn his social service organization, the Harlem Children’s Zone, into a “conveyor belt” that would reliably carry the neighborhood’s children from infancy through primary and secondary school, into college and the middle class. In Canada’s story, Tough found a deep and complicated character fighting to accomplish a valiant goal in the face of terrific odds. In “How Children Succeed,” Tough is working in miniature, sketching a handful of poor children and their mentors, and these depictions sometimes lack the force and distinctiveness of his portrait of Canada. But they are keenly and sensitively observed, and occasionally even whimsical, as in his captivating account of Kewauna Lerma, a Chicago teenager. Growing up in the erratic care of a feckless single mother, “Kewauna seemed able to ignore the day-to-day indignities of life in poverty on the South Side and instead stay focused on her vision of a more successful future.” Kewauna tells Tough, “I always wanted to be one of those business ladies walking downtown with my briefcase, everybody saying, ‘Hi, Miss Lerma!’ ”

      

Here, as throughout the book, Tough nimbly combines his own reporting with the findings of scientists. He describes, for example, the famous “marshmallow experiment” of the psychologist Walter Mischel, whose studies, starting in the late 1960s, found that children who mustered the self-control to resist eating a marshmallow right away in return for two marshmallows later on did better in school and were more successful as adults.

      

“What was most remarkable to me about Kewauna was that she was able to marshal her prodigious noncognitive capacity — call it grit, conscientiousness, resilience or the ability to delay gratification — all for a distant prize that was, for her, almost entirely theoretical,” Tough observes of his young subject, who gets into college and works hard once she’s there. “She didn’t actually know any business ladies with briefcases downtown; she didn’t even know any college graduates except her teachers. It was as if Kewauna were taking part in an extended, high-stakes version of Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, except in this case, the choice on offer was that she could have one marshmallow now or she could work really hard for four years, constantly scrimping and saving, staying up all night, struggling, sacrificing — and then get, not two marshmallows, but some kind of elegant French pastry she’d only vaguely heard of, like a napoleon. And Kewauna, miraculously, opted for the napoleon, even though she’d never tasted one before and didn’t know anyone who had. She just had faith that it was going to be delicious.”

      

Many poor children don’t develop the resilience Kewauna has in such abundance, and the reason, Tough says, can be traced back to their troubled home lives: “The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet.”

      

Children can be buffered from surrounding stresses by attentive, responsive parenting, but the adults in these children’s lives are often too burdened by their own problems to offer such care.

      

Rich kids, Tough adds, may also lack a nurturing connection to their mothers and fathers — not so much in their early years as when they enter adolescence and the push for achievement intensifies. He explores the research of Suniya Luthar, a psychology professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Luthar “found that parenting mattered at both socioeconomic extremes. For both rich and poor teenagers, certain family characteristics predicted children’s maladjustment, including low levels of maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism and minimal after-school adult supervision. Among the affluent children, Luthar found, the main cause of distress was ‘excessive achievement pressures and isolation from parents — both physical and emotional.’ ”

      

Though the title “How Children Succeed” makes the book sound like an instruction manual for parents, it’s really a guide to the ironies and perversities of income inequality in America. Tough, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, portrays a country of very privileged children and very poor ones, both deprived of the emotional and intellectual experi­ences that make for sturdy character. The political and economic consequences of our unbalanced society have been brought to the fore by debates about the causes of the Great Recession and the claims of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Paul Tough brings us news of the psychological effects of income inequality, through stories of the people who feel these effects most acutely: our children.

      

In one of the most affecting parts of his book, he reflects on his decision, 27 years ago, to drop out of college. “It hasn’t escaped my attention,” Tough notes ruefully, that many of the researchers he writes about “have identified dropping out of high school or college as a symptom of substandard noncognitive ability: low grit, low perseverance, bad planning skills.” And yet this same research helped him realize that he was lucky to be allowed to make his own mistakes. After leaving Columbia in the fall of his freshman year, he bicycled alone from Atlanta to Halifax. Following another aborted attempt at college, he took an internship at Harper’s Magazine and embarked on a successful career as a writer and editor.

      

Fewer and fewer young people are getting the character-building combination of support and autonomy that Tough was fortunate enough to receive. This is a worrying predicament — for who will have the conscientiousness, the persistence and the grit to change it?

Annie Murphy Paul, the author of “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives,” is writing a book about the science of learning.

Designer Families

 

The role of the family in shaping individuals' ability and inclination to make use of the means of cultivation that capitalism offers is hard to overstate. The household is not only a site of consumption and of biological reproduction. It is also the main setting in which children are socialized, civilized, and educated, in which habits are developed that influence their subsequent fates as people and as market actors. To use the language of contemporary economics, the family is a workshop in which human capital is produced.

 

There's a direct correlation being made here between family, home and where youth spend their time (acquiring socialization). 

 

Kids spend a lot less time with their parents today than they did in the past - teachers are among those assuming many of the duties that were once the sole purview of parents.

 

Homes aren't the hubs they once were.  Where are those hubs being found today?

 

How can we better design our social institutions and programs to suit emerging behaviour patterns but lead to socially beneficial results?

 

If you fear social engineering, you're gonna hate this emerging trend but consider - justice is a form of social engineering, too.  Imprisonment costs a lot yet produces no social value.

Democracy: If You Don't Use It, You Lose It

It’s very difficult for me to be out of my class and I certainly don’t want to be, but I also think democracy and our rights are more important than some of the minor inconveniences,” he said.

Bingo. 

Canadians are very lucky – we have a democracy to neglect.  We don’t face threats on our boarders, as some nations do.  We don’t get killed by government authorities.  Most Canadians (but not all) have access to the basic necessities required for life.  Because we have it so good, it can be easy to take these hard-one privileges for granted, but they are not entitlements.

Our democracy isn’t under attack, but it is eroding – and it’s all of our fault.  We’ve stopped working together and holding ourselves accountable.  We’re buying into the spin, making do with the cake we’re given.

But no so these students.  They are setting an example of active engagement we should all pay attention to.

Sometimes it takes the children to lead, doesn’t it?

Transforming schools an entire system at a time (by Michael Fullan)

Improving education is at the top of many governments' agendas. Recent large-scale efforts yield useful lessons for relatively quick whole-system reform.

October 2012 | by Michael Fullan

 

The deliberate attempt to use “change knowledge” to bring about whole-system reform in schools is barely 15 years old. By change knowledge, I mean ideas and strategies that cause the system to move forward in performance, especially when it comes to raising the bar and closing the gap for all students. By whole-system reform, I mean all schools in the state, province, or country, and all levels from local to intermediate and state.

My colleagues and I began to get some clear ideas of the do’s and don’ts of large scale reform when a group of us evaluated the literacy-numeracy reform that was launched by the United Kingdom in 1997—large scale to be sure, as it addressed the performance of the over 20,000 primary schools in England. We drew four lessons from this partially successful reform effort, two negative and two positive.

First, on the negative side, we found that depending too heavily on targets turns out to be a distraction. England had set as targets 80 percent for literacy and 75 percent for numeracy from a starting base of some 60 percent. They did progress to about 75 percent, but then for various reasons leveled off and declined in subsequent years. Overreliance on quantitative targets turns out to be a temporary boost at best. Second, a negative approach to accountability—name, shame, and improve—also turns out to be of questionable use in the mid to long term.

On the positive side of the equation, two components did turn out to have strong value. One was focus and the other was capacity building. Focus meant selecting core educational-improvement goals and staying with them relentlessly. Capacity building consisted of strategies that systematically developed the skills, resources, and motivation of individuals and groups to put in the effort to get results, as well as to sustain that improvement effort.

During this same period, stimulated in part by the introduction of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), governments around the world developed an interest in the state of school-system performance and how to improve it. Biannually since the year 2000, PISA has been assessing the performance of 15-year-olds in literacy, math, and science starting with the 30-plus OECD countries and then rapidly expanding to the current number of close to 70 countries. The question is now front and center: how do you improve all systems in reasonably short periods of time, such as 6 to 10 years?

In this short article, I do not attempt to answer this question in detail. Rather, my goal is to give some directional advice and illustrate what that advice looks like in practice. There are at least four dilemmas that must be continuously addressed:

1. The accountability dilemma
2. The policy-overload dilemma
3. The capacity-building dilemma
4. The sustainability dilemma

The key to understanding accountability is to realize that no system that relies primarily on external control can be sustained. Therefore policy makers must design, monitor, and improve systems that ensure built-in accountability on the part of the implementers. The idea is to achieve forms of accountability that are based on both internal commitments to the users of the system and on commitments to the public. We have found that effective accountability is first a function of good data used primarily as a strategy for improvement, second a degree of “nonjudgmentalism” that reduces the culture of blame, third widespread transparency about results and about what’s working and not working, and last a drive to intervene in order to build capacity for progress.

Policy overload happens when governments fall into the trap of developing plans that are too complex, too vague, and contain too many priorities. Policy overload results in a lack of focus, fragmented priorities, and a sense of an endless stream of ad hoc initiatives. Successful reform plans are designed as much for the implementers—that is, the teachers and school and district leaders—as they are for the planners themselves. The overall plan must be actionable, reasonably clear, and lead to widespread ownership.

The centerpiece of all successful whole system reform cases is capacity building—the development of individual and group efficacy when it comes to new skills, resources, and motivation. Put another way, all the failures we observed had a weak capacity-building core. In fact, governments tend to underestimate the need for capacity building or try to address it in weak, individualistic ways. The bottom line for those engaged in whole-system reform is that the core strategy must focus on thorough and widespread capacity building, especially the collective capacity of groups.

The fourth issue is sustainability. If a transformation program addresses the first three dilemmas successfully, it is most likely well on its way to greater sustainability. Focus, integrating accountability and capacity building, and developing widespread leadership relative to the agenda all contribute to greater sustainability. Widespread leadership includes leaders developing other leaders to carry out the core agenda.

There is no single model for addressing whole-system reform. Particular models will vary according to the starting point and context. For example, if a system has extremely low capacity and is very large in size, as is the case for many developing countries, it will call for certain approaches that are more direct at the early stages. Below I address the core attributes of the whole-system reform model we developed in Ontario, which has achieved widespread success since 2004. The value of this model has been documented by several external case studies, and the model is based on a good deal of research and evidence from around the world.

The Ontario case

Ontario is Canada’s largest province, home to over 13 million people and a public education system with roughly 2 million students, 120,000 educators, and 5,000 schools. As recently as 2002, this system was stagnant by virtually any measure of performance. In October 2003, a new provincial government (Canada has no federal agency or jurisdiction in education) was elected with a mandate and commitment to transform it.

Improvements began within a year, and some eight years later, the province’s 900 high schools have shown an increase in graduation rates from 68 percent (2003–04) to 82 percent (2010–11), while reading, writing, and math results have gone up 15 percentage points across its 4,000 elementary schools since 2003. Fewer teachers and principals leave the profession in the first few years, and achievement gaps have been substantially narrowed for low-income students, the children of recent immigrants, and special-education students. In short, the entire system has dramatically improved.

In brief, the strategy consisted of assertive goals and high expectations from the government, combined with a commitment to partner with the education sector in order to develop capacity and ownership in the service of student achievement. The key factors were:

1. Relentless and focused leadership at the center (in this case, the Ontario government)
2. A small number of ambitious goals, specifically higher levels of literacy and numeracy and improved high-school graduation rates
3. A positive stance toward the schools, districts, and teachers
4. A core strategy of capacity building to improve the quality of instruction
5. Transparency of results and use of data for improvement purposes
6. A nonpunitive approach to accountability
7. Learning from implementation, by disseminating best practices both vertically and across schools and districts
8. Fostering leadership at all levels to drive and support items 1-7

The conclusion to be drawn is that systems will be successful if they focus on a small number of key strategic elements, deploy them in concert, build capacity on the part of the implementers, persist with the process over time, and monitor and learn as they go in relation to actual results and effective practices.

 

About the author

Michael Fullan is professor emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. He is currently special adviser to the premier and minister of education in Ontario. Fullan has published widely on educational change and leadership. His most recent book is Change Leader: Learning to Do What Matters Most.

Cognitive Labour in the Classroom

While the board hasn’t specifically instructed teachers not to discuss their labour dispute with students, it has asked principals to make sure teachers don’t let their frustrations rub off on students.

 

 

Now, we're starting to get somewhere! 

 

Education is the front-line of civil life - the equivalent of the working world for adults.  Teachers are front-line managers, ensuring their charges have the tools and training necessary to do their job, which pretty much translates into passing tests and getting good grades, enabling them to get further training and decent jobs.

 

As such, schools are both a springboard and a microcosm of society.  The skills students learn (and don't learn) in school and the examples they see around them will form the tone of their adult lives.  It's really enlightening to watch school-yard shenanigans, because they're a much more honest portrayal of behaviour we see in the rest of the world.  "But he hit me first" is, from a youth's point of view, an acceptable response for bad behaviour.  Bullying is a method of reducing competition for resources and attention.  Kids haven't bought into the notion that they're supposed to have spilt work/life personalities, so they naturally bring stresses from home to school and vice versa.  Office politics, cliques, etc. all exist in the adult world, too - we just deny this and confabulate justifications for behaviour we chastise in our youth.

There are cognitive differences between children and adults (see sensory fusion), key among these is the fact that they are more resilient and adaptable; it's actually adults that have a harder time making distinctions, despite the social pressure to do so.  Kids will move past emotional wounds more quickly; they'll get over colds more quickly, too.  Part of the reason for that - we let them.  When a child's parent dies, we don't tell them they get two days off and then are expected to be back at peak performance.  If they've had a big fight with their parents or best friend, we don't tell them to get over it immediately and focus on their work.  Good teachers will serve as counselors, too, helping their students learn to cope with and manage through personal and familial challenges, helping to build social emotional skills along the way.

Teachers bridge the gap between the emotional honesty of the playground and the suppressed individuals of the working world.  The best ones are deeply involved in the emotional lives of their students, because they have to be.  Understanding their students is the only way to reach them, and it's only through that connection that knowledge can effectively be transferred.  When teachers refer to their students as "my kids," it's less like a boss referring to a team than it is a parent referring to their family.  Yet teachers themselves are being told to leave their personal baggage at home and not let the work-related stresses that weigh on their minds impact their teaching.  It's impossible to switch selves, so what teachers are really being asked to do is repress their cognitive stresses. 

We're asking teachers to shovel water; it simply won't work.  It's not a coincidence that teaching ranks among the top ten stressful careers.  Again, schools are a microcosm of the working world at large - the mental health challenges that we're recognizing in schools also impact teachers.  In fact, we have a growing mental health crisis in all sectors that's burning out Canadians, dragging down economic growth, dominating insurance claims and placing an ever-growing burden on our health system.

 

A key part of addressing the mental health crisis is to stop using the "suck in up" and "separate work and life" memes as excuses for ignoring the social stresses that lead to mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.  Doing so isn't about ignoring problematic behaviour, but about empowering everyone to develop the internal resiliency tools they need to manage stress better and to start designing work and work environments that are conducive to strong cognitive labour performance. 

 

This is going to be a hard lesson for all of us to learn - but like all education, it's going to start in the classroom.