Education Guide

It is worth thinking about the detail in Anne Salmond’s opinion piece in
this morning’s NZ Herald Anne Salmond Open
Entry for Maori a near miss Monday July 6 2009.

In addressing Pita Sharples’
suggestion of open entry for Maori students to universities, Salmond uses
research findings from the Starpath Project to make three disturbing claims about education
in New Zealand.

Claim #1.
 The management of educational data in New Zealand has more to do with the
distribution of resources rather than with tracking the long-term success or
failure of students.

As a result – “schools
are often unaware when bright students begin to fail; or when groups of
students (say, Maori boys) begin to follow pathways that lead to failure and
early exit.”

Claim #2. 
New Zealand educational investment in initiatives aimed at enhancing student
achievement are “largely working blind”.  We not only do not know if the
investment is making a positive difference we also do not know if the
investment is targeting the real problem.  

A result – “leading to
many uncoordinated, short-term initiatives (80 in one school that Starpath
studied) and a failure to identify those approaches that really work, so that
they can be adopted across the education system.”

Salmond also calls for a more
careful monitoring on government funded initiatives that claim to enhance
learning outcomes for Maori, Pacific and low-income students.

Those
initiatives that don't have a positive impact on student outcomes should be
dropped, while those that are highly successful should be adopted across the
education system.

I find it somewhat
disturbing that Salmond feels the need to recommend “dropping initiatives
that don’t have a positive impact on student outcomes" – it suggests
that this is not currently the case. 

If the Starpath Project has
evidence of initiatives that do and initiatives that don’t – I hope they
offered this evidence to Anne Tolley before the recent budget  – and that Anne Tolley respected their findings – so that we can be confident that we are no
longer funding initiatives that don’t have a positive impact on student
outcomes.

Claim #3 – Our
qualification system NCEA is so complex that families cannot make wise
decisions about which courses to study, which educational pathways to pursue.

As a result, “while most
Maori, Pacific and low-income students aspire to gain university entrance (78
per cent in one study), it is too easy for them to find themselves on NCEA
pathways that foreclose this option.”

I will admit to being
attracted to chaos theory, fuzzy logic and ambiguity in what I read but it
unnerves me just a little to realise that the Starpath Project research
suggests the New Zealand Government is funding educational initiatives where
uncertainty of focus and indeterminate outcomes rule.  In truth it is
easier to understand Pita Sharples call for open entry for Maori to
universities if you accept that  the current framing/ educational design
and funding of the MoE initiatives designed to raise Maori and Pacific
achievement is closer to whimsy than anything professionally responsible.

Claim#3
captures my interest this evening.  Our latest budget set aside “$8 million to ensure NCEA
assessment tools are of a high-standard and well understood by teachers.”
Presumably on the basis that teachers understanding of NCEA assessment leaves
something to be desired.  Salmond’s remarks suggest that parents and
students similarly lack the understanding needed to make good decisions about
NCEA assessment.

It all makes me wonder
how we could re-design the NCEA course options available at secondary schools
so that students and their parents would find it easier to make wise choices

There is more to it
than this of course – Any New Zealand student studying for NCEA can relate
instances where they or their friends have been excluded from courses or
dissuaded from certain option lines on the grounds that the institutions deems
the chance of student success unlikely. 

In New Zealand secondary schools the
right to try (and fail) is seldom available.  Like Etruscans divining the
future from the entrails of sacrified animals, secondary teachers continue to
confidently (and perhaps patronisingly) practice haruspicy on the NCEA course
selections of their students.

So parents and
students not only need to understand NCEA well enough to make wise choices they
also need to understand it well enough to fight the institution for their right
to access courses based upon these choices.

Nina Simon in the Musem2.0 Blog has been
looking at ways museums can design recommendation systems for their visitors in
Designing recommendation systems that go beyond “You’ll like
this”  . 

Much of her thinking about
customised museum tours can be usefully transferred to educational contexts –
where museum exhibits become educational options and courses.  For
example Simon’s thinking helps me think in new ways about the design of
solutions to help students and their families make sense of the courses and
learning pathways available to them.

When it comes to museums,
recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized
tour. How can a museum offer each visitor suggestions for exhibits and
experiences that will uniquely serve their interests? There are many lovely
example of museums providing quirky tours based on particular interests. For
example, The Tate Modern offers a set of pamphlets featuring different tours of
the museum based on emotional mood. You can pick up the "I've just
split up" tour and wallow in depression, or the "I'm an
animal freak" tour and explore your wilder side. And the site I Like Museums lets you find whole
institutions of interest based on your preference for trails like "making
things," "nice cup of tea," or simply "pigs."

Salmond's call for more careful monitoring of student learning
outcomes …. 

Above all, the compulsory
education system needs re-engineering. Information systems in
schools should be tracking the educational journeys of students, identifying
the strengths and potentials of individual students (so that they and their
parents get optimal advice), and patterns of success and failure across the
student body (so that initiatives are accurately targeted).

… sounds like it could be answered in part by the design principles in the recommendation system
Simon suggests for museums – one based upon collaborative filtering   (“like the one used to
recommend new songs to you on Pandora or new movies on Netflix?”) –

Perhaps we can design
a platform for the monitoring of individual educational journeys in New Zealand
– one that could aggregate content about the strengths and potentials of
individual students and build it into a Pandora/Netflix like recommendation
system – a system alerting students and their families of the educational
targets to be met and the course options available.

Then the patterns of success data available might allow
students and their families to thoughtfully design learning pathways – pathways
that not only meet their aspirations but also extend them to create
alternative educational reach.

Source: Artichoke

Reading Tactical Media by Rita Raley has provided both an
escape from the tactical activism expected on the domestic front on a sodden 
Sunday afternoon in Auckland and an escape from my current way of imagining the
“future” of school.

I enjoy thinking about the future of museums, libraries and
school.  They are all institutions that
face precarity – uncertainty and challenge – in their current architecture. 

Raley’s critique let me think in a new way about Robert Jane’s questions in  Museums
in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse (London: Routledge, May, 2009) cited in
Pallazo Strozzi Blog 

 Jane asks

If museums did not exist, would
we reinvent them and what would they look like?

Further, if the museum were to
be reinvented, what would be the public’s role in the reinvented institution?

 When I replace [museum]
with [school] I get a much better start point for thinking about the future of
school.

If schools did not exist, would
we reinvent them and what would they look like?

Further, if the school were to
be reinvented, what would be the public’s role in the reinvented institution?

Raley made me realise that whenever I think about the future
of school through questions like Janes  -
there is a unacknowledged sense of a permanence of place or places (real or
virtual) –

If schools did not exist and I did re-invent them – then in my
imaginings I create a spatial identity albeit in some cases a fractured spatial
identity – what I mean is there is a sense of permanence in how I imagine school.  

You can see this assumption of permanence – this focus on a
space/place is not mine alone – in the provocative thinking in “Witnessing the future”  – and in  “Just the other day I saw the future
…”    or
school2.0 

It is interesting that our use of media in education is no
different – we seem hell bent on using Web2.0 all that “participatory media” to create
Raley’s “ever hardening totems of identity” – both personal and institutional – We use participatory media like attention whores – creating multiple textured “look at me spaces”.

When I read Raley on tactical media the focus is different –
her analysis is on the “experiential” – the value of tactical media is to be found in its ephemerality.

Media tacticians challenge even the digital preservation
of "the experience" – asking

“How can Tactical Media be preserved and
made accessible without altering the value produced by its ephemerality?”  Politics of the Ephemeral: Rethinking the
Archive  

This made me laugh for this weekend's media details an instance in New Zealand schools where we see the reverse happening –

Possibly
because of our current focus on totemic place in education – our schools are intent
on preserving and making accessible their places and space online.

It seems this extends to making claims over the ephemeral use of
media for conversation.  

The Sunday Herald newspaper headline reads Dio girls suspended for
Facebook comments   –

The irony is that by claiming the right to preserve a
selection of their student ephemeral online conversation (by printing out selected
conversations (from some but not all Dio students using FaceBook) and by handing these
to school authorities); and then by making the ephemeral conversationalists accountable – and by
withdrawing access to learning for those students whose conversations were chosen
to be preserved by printing, the school has effectively preserved, archived and
made the content of those ephemeral conversations accessible to much, much,
much, wider audiences than the students themselves could ever imagine or have intended.   

It makes me wonder if the follow up headline will read “School
stood down for actions that led to the preservation, publication and digital archiving
of the ephemeral Facebook conversations of young people .”  

I am interested in what happens to our thinking about the
future of school if we refuse anything that creates Bourriaud’s “ever hardening
totems of identity” (p13). 

What happens if we imagine “school” as an experience – a
learning experience where learning and the learners themselves are both flexible
and ephemeral like the conversations we might hold when walking across a mall.   

“Future School” becomes an experience where afterwards there
is little material trace – a concept where “living memory” rather than “products
of learning” dominate our discourse.

When school is imagined as “nomadic” experience, then pedagogy
becomes a “deliberately slippery and heterogenous practice”?

Raley describes the categorical unity of tactical media as “disturbance”.  What if we understood “school” as
disturbance?

Citing Geert Lovink and “The Next Five Minutes” (N5M)  festival of media arts and politics – Raley argues that tactical
media is intended to  disrupt dominant
ways of thinking so that critical thinking can occur.

What if we understood “school” as any open to anyone at any
time experience, where critical thinking can occur?

It is this inclusivity and flexibility of tactical media – that
is powerful in reimagining “school” in this way.

Can “school” be imagined as a process – as a “tool for creating
temporary consensus zones based on unexpected alliances”.  

And all this makes me wonder will our future questions about
“school” reject notions of does it work? – or how well have the learners in an
identified  physical or virtual space met
“national standards”? – or Greg’s fear that the place of school might be ladder
ranked in league tables.   

We would ask instead if the experience is virtuous?

 Virtuosity – described
by Virno as “activity which finds its own fulfilment (that is, its own purpose)
in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product or an object that
survives the performance. p29

Does the experience – “future school” – strengthen interpersonal
relationships in society?  

Raley cites Bourriaud who suggests … the role of art is “learning
to inhabit the world in a better way” p27

 So perhaps “future school”
can be an experience rather than a place – and we can understand “school” as we
do art – as something transitory, precarious, and uncertain that helps us learn
how to inhabit the world in a better way.

 

Source: Artichoke

Pruned Blog’s  "The Crack
Garden"  post captured my attention right from the start –

 “The interventions
into the site of The Crack Garden were primarily actions of removal
rather than the addition of new layers and material. By eliminating portions of
the existing concrete and exposing the soil beneath, potential is released, and
new opportunities for the garden arise.”

“The design is conceived as an intervention that functions
as a lens, altering perception of a place rather than completely remaking it.”

This made me think of “crack learning” and how we might
understand learning based on actions of removal rather than by constantly adding
new layers and materials to our schools, classrooms and students.

I wanted to ask ..

What would happen to learning if we removed "the din"?

“We approach our technologies through a battery of
advertising and media narratives; it is hard to think above the din.”  Turkle, Sherry. (Ed.). The inner
history of devices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. p4

What would happen to learning if we removed the expectation that "progress" requires unrelenting change and innovation  

One of the most critical problems our schools face is … “not
resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence
resulting from the uncritical and uncoordinated acceptance of too many
different innovations” Fullan & Steigelbauer 1991 p197

What would happen to learning if we removed "the rush", if we slowed down, learned how
to see and took time to realise that all things connect?

Crack gardens/learning made me think of a return to; slow pedagogy, to
observation (see think wonder), to Geetha Narayanan like learning spaces
squeezed into cracks between city buildings, to looking carefully at exploring and
knowledge building around the local (existing) rather than all that costly rip
snorting through the screen activity we favour to get to the global, to looking
at ways to discover and develop all learning identities of the child rather simply
addressing learning identities for the 9am to 3pm child.     

And I wondered if the coherence provided by the stripped
back nature of "crack learning" would provide new opportunities for understanding individual
potential.    

Whenever I read the latest policy initiative aimed at
reducing disparity in New Zealand schools I have high apple pie in the sky
hopes … I imagine the MoE policy makers in Wellington as Pratchett’s “great minds”

These are great minds he told himself.  These are men who are trying to work out how
the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion but by inserting their
brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart.  p199 in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

and I hope that this time round we will be brokering
something that makes a real difference to New Zealand’s alarmingly disparate
achievement outcomes.   

That is undoubtedly why it was a little discomforting to
read Gladwell's "Outliers" over the weekend. 
Now Malcolm Gladwell has been accused of cherry picking his references in Outliers but I could not help
but be affected by his description of Karl Alexander’s five year longitudinal analysis
tracking the city of Baltimore’s profile of results for 650 first graders on
the Californian Achievement Test math and reading skill exams. (pages 255 to 259)

Reading Gladwell made me fret that all our MoE sanctioned interventions
to reduce our achievement gap are perhaps a Sisyphean struggle – made me think that perhaps we are
doomed to always struggle because in targeting schools we are targeting the
wrong intervention.

As Gladwell frames it, when we have disparate achievement
outcomes from kids with different backgrounds we are tempted to attribute causality
to either

1.  Kids from background
X do not have the same inherent ability to learn as kids from background Y.

2.  Our schools are
failing kids from background X.

This is certainly what has happened in the conversations
about disparity in New Zealand – option 1 – deficit thinking – is rightly rejected
leaving us with option 2 – our schools are failing [insert gender, socio economic
status, ethnicity] students. Our latest solutions to not failing [insert gender, socio economic
status, ethnicity] students is focussing on improving teacher
student relationships, engagement, and feedback.

Gladwell makes me ask … when we focus on reducing
disparity in learning outcomes by changing the stuff happening in schools have we
misidentified the contribution school makes?   

If for the purposes of this post I accept that The
Californian Achievement Test measures something valuable in terms of learning
outcome [and I know this may be unwarranted]  … then using Alexander’s data below I can suggest
that the achievement gap between students from “rich” and “poor” homes is exacerbated
by attending school.

Californian Achievement Test Data from start of school year (June)

Socioeconomic Class	1st Grade	2nd Grade	3rd Grade	4th grade	5th Grade
Low	329	375	397	433	461
Middle	348	388	425	467	497
High	361	418	460	506	534
Achievement gap between low and high	32 points	43 points	63 points	73 points	73 points

 

Gladwell next reveals additional results from the same CAT
testing carried out at the end of the school year (September) – This testing
that excludes the summer holidays – and allows quite different conclusions to
be drawn about the same group of students.

Socioeconomic Class	After 1st Grade	After 2nd Grade	After 3rd Grade	After 4th grade	After 5th Grade	Total – Cumulative classroom learning
Low	55	46	30	33	25	189
Middle	69	33	34	41	27	214
High	60	39	34	28	23	184

     

It seems that by testing at the end of the school year – the
data showing “within school” learning gains between children from low and high
socioeconomic backgrounds are not as “gappy” as we first imagined.

Which causes us to ask is “gappiness” due to what is happening
in classrooms or is “gappiness” due to  what
is happening outside of classrooms?

Is Glawell right?

Should our focus on reducing disparity look at the effect on
learning of time spent outside of school rather than what happens within school?

To ask …Does the break in schooling over the summer holidays differentially
affect learning outcomes for children from lower, middle and high socioeconomic
homes?

Look at Gladwell's data comparing student reading skill test scores
before and after the summer break.

Class	After 1st	After 2nd	After 3rd	After 4th	Total
Low	-3.67	-1.70	2.74	2.89	0.26
Middle	-3.11	4.18	3.68	2.34	7.09
High	15.38	9.22	14.51	13.38	52.49

 

Now Gladwell, using Alexander’s data suggests that ..

 “When it comes to
reading skills poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session.  The reading skills of rich kids by contrast,
go up a whopping 52.49 points.  Virtually
all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the
result of differences in the way privileged kids learn   when
they are not in school.”    p258

Leading me to wonder – Do we simply need to increase the number of days students
attend school to reduce disparity?

Trying to validate Gladwell’s claims led me straight to Hattie’s Visible
Learning meta-analyses where I checked out the number crunching on Summer
Vacations (d=-0.09) p80 and 81.  

Hattie’s metanalyses on summer vacations confirmed that
students “lost some achievement gains over the summer” and that “middleclass
students appeared to gain on grade level equivalent reading tests over summer
compared to lower class students".  And he
also notes that the “negative effect of summer did increase with grade level.”  

However, Hattie doesn’t call this like Gladwell does – he suggests
instead that the magnitude of these effects when compared to other achievement
influences “are minor indeed”

Hattie concludes

“It may be that if teachers were more attuned to the
proficiencies that students bring into their classrooms, then the first month
of the school year could be used to recapture the losses from the school break
reasonably quickly.”

I hope Hattie is right because, whether it is happening within
schools or outside of school over the summer break, we have an awful lot riding
on the inequality we are building into New Zealand society.

 

Source: Artichoke

I felt like an extra in Richard Scarry’s Busy Busy World yesterday morning.

Filling up with gas at the local garage I shared the forecourt with a huge red fire truck packed with firemen. Given the cell phone risk signs posted all around I was disconcerted to see one of the crew leap down from the truck and start texting in the pump bay.

Lowly Worm insight: The public’s perceived risk of taking or making any calls in a gas station forecourt is less than the actual risk.

Leaving the gas station I went to our local GP to pick up a script for one of the kids living off the corridor, only to be greeted by a laminated notice and a closed door.  To paraphrase – “Before you open door pause and consider whether you are feeling dodgy in a way that could be ‘flu like – if this is possible remain outside and Tom Jones like “knock three times” at a window to alert us inside of your possible H1N1 incubating self outside.”

Lowly Worm insight: The actual risk of catching something serious in GP’s waiting room is high enough to abandon those too enfeebled to knock three times and those too short to reach the window but not so high as to exclude those without the literacy and or the language to make meaning from the text.  [that is the 380,000 New Zealanders without the literacy to understand the instructions on a fire extinguisher and anyone else without the ability to make meaning from English]  

I then visited a friend who had a Richard Scarry “Great Pie Robbery” experience on Wednesday, where all her electrical goods stolen.  The home and contents insurance was up to date, the burglary happened when she was out, the forced windows and doors were quickly repaired and the police visited and detectives Sam and Dudley dusted for fingerprints.  But she feels vulnerable in a place that the week before had been her refuge.

Lowly Worm insight: The actual risk is not important – the perceived risk of Horace Wolf and Croaky Crocodile revisiting the house creates high levels of anxiety and outrage.  

To understand how we use risk management and risk communication, [or how it uses us] I reckon you cannot better reading Max Brook’s World War Z  but reading Peter Sandman  Talking about “Risk Communication Before and During Epidemics” 
provides a framework that has helped me analyse our response to “swine ‘flu”, national testing and all the other stuff that frightens us. 

For example, I didn’t know that “how much harm a risk does” and “how upset people get” has a correlation coefficient of only 0.2. 

Sandman frames these two as “hazard” and “outrage” and goes on to show that

He elaborates on this research to show that “the correlation between hazard and perceived hazard is also very low, but the correlation between outrage and perceived hazard is very high.”

This analysis interests me as I try to understand the high levels of outrage at the Minister Anne Tolley’s suggested introduction of National Standards – outrage that is based on the “perceived risk” of league tables.

Sandman is smart … he knows that correlation is not necessarily causality … but that when it is … then the directionality is contestable. 

And I love the way he explains the negative

If the outrage is the driver … and the hazard perception is the result the message to Anne Tolley is quite clear – introduce communication strategies to reduce the outrage. The message to the NZEI is equally clear – introduce communication strategies that increase the outrage. 

However, it was the second part of Sandman’s analysis that I most enjoyed reading.

Here he talks about how risk management is also used by those with institutional authority to shelter the public from high risk information on the grounds that the ensuing panic will be more damaging than the risk itself.

All those “damage control”, “on a need to know basis” conversations that obscure transparency within institutions

The Argument: If we scare people this fear will escalate into panic.  Panic will exacerbate the situation.

However Sandman counters by arguing that our experience in New Orleans and 9/11show that we overrate panic. He distinguishes “feeling panicky” from “acting panicky” and he introduces a new idea – that of “panic panic”

And this is a problem because in risky situations fear is tolerated, has an “adjustment reaction” which because it is a rehearsal has positive outcomes in terms of appropriate future reaction …

• The underestimation of the frequency with which fearful people rise to resilient, pro-social, and even heroic behavior. We had ample evidence of that in 9/11, and I won't belabor the point.
• The failure to recognize the positive value of fear in encouraging preparedness, vigilance, tolerance of inconvenience and expense, and so forth.

And it seems contrary to what we commonly hold as true – that communication that makes people fearful in risky situations is a good thing.

The bit I liked best was Sandman’s notion that fear is fungible.

Which brings me right back to thinking about  – what are the things that are currently competing for a slice of the fearfulness pie in education?

Source: Artichoke

Michael Doyle often nudges me into new thinking …  Take this thought from his Science Teacher Blog.

Michael Doyle is onto something …. I like thinking about boundaries of all kinds

This morning in Ponsonby Rd I was captured by the number of people I saw balanced on the strip of white paint that is only a few mm thick.  Clutching biodegradable trays loaded with cups of takeout coffee they were watchful in the precariousness of their boundary – waiting for an opportunity to swap their boundary for another albeit more elevated boundary in Auckland City  – the pavement strip. 

Those boundaries marked by white painted surfaces are not protected by armies, but they are marked by agreement and convention. The boundaries of white paint road markings might seem a little different from the boundaries of nationalism but many of the same rules apply –

John Stewart Mill describes it “nationalism” as when

Those coffee clutching pedestrians standing on the painted strip boundary are united by common sympathies that do not exist between them and the motorist barrelling down Ponsonby Rd trying to get to work.  The motorists occupying a different boundaried surface have common sympathies that are not shared with the Ponsonby Rd already at work – office gopher.  

Common sympathies always make me anxious -  they suggest the existence of common antipathies.
Looking at “why we belong” requires us to identify those others that don’t … and this is probably why the boundaries of nationalism make me anxious – as do the other boundaries people use to form collective identity.

I guess I can never escape that boundary ideas  that Tom Lehrer so cleverly captures in Who’s Next.

Those coffee clutching boundary perchers in Ponsonby Rd would have to re- position themselves if they attempted the same activity on the Auckland Harbour Bridge -  The lane boundaries on the harbour bridge are movable boundaries – great hunks of interconnecting concrete that make me think of global warming and those national boundaries drawn across glaciers that are not as immutable as we pretended when we talked about them in school.

All of which makes me think again about the boundaries we have built between individual schools in New Zealand.

In education the boundaries and borders we create with our points of difference, our principals as robber barons, our school based curricula etc allows us to measure what fits and what doesn’t – allows us  to discriminate based upon assessment – both formative and summative – allows us Anne Tolley like national standards – allows us NZEI feared league tables.

In the L@S09 keynote Andy Hargreaves talked about creating “culture of collective responsibility” in education  – a culture based on

Collective responsibility – requires movable boundaries – responsibility without boundaries – it is a novel notion in a world predicated on right indexed to the might of a nation state, right indexed to the “successful school”,  and right indexed to the powerful individual. 

Collective responsibility is a certainly a novel notion in New Zealand education where we are encouraged to identify and market our boundaries with other schools as points of difference, to establish zones and where the NZC sees us exhorted to develop our own curriculum boundaries – aka our own school based curricula.

In such a boundary based educational landscape we should not be at all surprised to see principals talking like robber barons about owning the schools that employ them; to see principals passing around personal business cards that could be mistaken for those of our most entrepreneurial real estate agents; and to see as a consequence of this boundaried thinking – teachers and principals made anxious and defensive by talk about national standards and measurement targets.  

The boundaries of teaching and learning allow us vainglorious ambition but they also allow measures of boundaried accountability –

… and yet it is the wantonness of learning sans boundaries that we need to imagine and make real.

When I imagine learning without boundaries in schools across New Zealand – I imagine that all that collective responsibility will be not unlike lovemaking, not unlike art

So how do we get movable boundaries and collective responsibility in New Zealand education – how do we achieve passionate virtuosity? How do we raise achievement outcomes for all young New Zealanders?

Source: Artichoke

The Easter holiday represents a pause, a chance to catch breath and enjoy the texture of my world … I have mostly caught up on promises made and promises broken  – and I am at last free to think about some of the approaches to building deep maths understanding and mathematical innovation  observed in the secondary schools I worked in this term – and from there the relationship of creativity to educational policy.

I know it’s only an impression but it seems that ever since the launch of the New Zealand Curriculum, we have been awash with calls to “bring back” creativity in classrooms.

I always smile grimly at this quote from Robinson – our adult literacy results – "380,000 Kiwi adults' whose “literacy skills are so poor they would be unable to determine how to use a fire extinguisher from the instructions written on the bottle.” (Prime Minister Helen Clark 2007) suggest that Robinson is not aiming high enough if he wants to lift creative potential/capital through educational endeavour. 

Still it seems the “call creative” is the new cry of the educational wild.  And it has grown louder and increasingly wilder with our Education Minister Anne Tolley’s call for the introduction of national standards. A call, which despite Tolley’s best efforts, (see Questions for oral answer 9 April 2009 below), is being widely and possibly unfairly represented in New Zealand schools, as a call for the introduction of league tables.

… and it is hard to counter the need for improving the ways in which we understand student achievement given the ERO statement that despite all the measuring going on in New Zealand schools – 56 percent of them were not using worthwhile achievement data to look at their student learning outcomes. 

ERO’s 56 percent statistic reminded me of John Hattie’s key question at the end of Visible Learning.

In the New Zealand schools I work with there has been a lot of talk about national standards leading to league tables which if I take taxi drivers as a measure – seems a prospect that bothers educators much more than it does the rest of the country. 

There has also been the suggestion that creative endeavour and creativity, which is widely and for the most part approvingly received by teachers, will be lost if we adopt national standards.

To sum up these lunchtime conversations: we have Tolley’s – National standards  “a very bad thing – don’t let them in” , Robinson’s – Creativity in classrooms – “ a very good thing – let’s bring it back” 

The weird thing about any discussion about “creativity” in New Zealand is not the “let’s bring it back” sentiment – though that’s kind of weird since it never went away in a lot of the places I work – it is the creative conversation default setting.

When you join a conversation about creativity in education in New Zealand  – instead of finding yourself interrogating what creativity might mean in 2009, or evaluating how we might judge creative practice in New Zealand classrooms – you end up revisiting the writings of Elwyn Richardson in the 1950’s early sixties.

This default to the activities of just one male teacher and his mostly self described creative practices from nearly sixty years ago makes me suspicious.

I’d like to ask -

Why are we privileging Richardson’s descriptions of his classroom experiences?

Why was it that Richardson was published and promoted and other creative educators didn’t and aren’t?    

I ask this because I do not find it plausible that in a culture that is built upon “number eight fencing wire innovation” Richardson was, (or for that matter is), the only educator designing worthy creative adventures in learning in New Zealand classrooms.

I don’t find it credible that nothing creatively worthy was going on in New Zealand classrooms before Richardson, at the same time as Richardson, or since Richardson. 

And I also wonder why – if creative teaching did occur in the past and does occur in the present – we don’t we refer to it today? Why we don’t appear to even know about it?

You might jump in here and declare Richardson an iconic educator on the basis of his writings and the memories of teaching colleagues – but it does not explain why in our discussion and commentaries we fail to reference any creative educators before or since Richardson – For instance I have never climbed a mountain but I know the names of more New Zealand mountain climbers than I do New Zealand teachers famous for their creative teaching practice or creative student outcomes.

It makes me wonder if anyone at NZCER has done a historiography of creativity and creative practice in New Zealand education; has anyone looked at the way creativity has been represented and understood and the way creativity has been written about?

It seems more likely that we have neglected and undervalued the stories and practices of other creative teachers in New Zealand in a way that we haven’t done for mountain climbers both before and after Hillary.

If we did privilege Richardson in the past and if we continue to do so  – is this because of gender, or ethnicity, is it simply because our current day commentators are mostly contemporaries of Elwyn, or is it something else?

I suspect we need to clarify “creativity” and to more carefully distinguish creative acts of teaching from creative achievement outcomes if we are to progress.

To ask –
What are the assumptions we make when we identify a teacher and or their practice as creative?
Does creative teaching result in creative achievements by students who in turn become creative adults?
Should it?
Is a measure of the success of a creative teacher the measure of the creative success of their students?
Should it be?
What is the measure of the success of a creative teacher?
Without a measure of achievement success how can a creative teacher who is teaching creatively tell what they are doing, whether it is going well or not, and what they should do next?
Ditto for the student in a classroom with a teacher who identifies themselves as creative or who describes their teaching strategies as those developing creative outcomes.
Who do we judge to be creative adults in New Zealand today? 
Who taught the New Zealanders we judge as creative today, and how did they teach them?
What did these creative New Zealanders remember learning from their teachers that they believe enhanced their own creative abilities?

If we accept Ken Robinson’s definition of creativity

Then J.J Thompson  must surely have been a highly successful in enhancing creative thinking in the science students he taught 

 And Bill Manhire -  jumps out as a New Zealand educator who is highly successful in enhancing creative writing in the writers he teaches.
.
Perhaps the researchers of a historiography of creativity in New Zealand education could start by asking the contributers to Manhire at 60: A Book for Bill (ed Fergus Barrowman and Damien Wilkins; 2007, VUP) to identify “How did he teach?” – "what were his rules of thumb?"

Those staffroom claims – both simplistic and expansive, that our current educational focus on accountability, assessment and compliance are dangerously hampering the innovative and original classroom teacher need to be more carefully unpacked.

Because I don’t know that they can reliably or validly be used to reject the Minister of Education Anne Tolley’s push for a national standards policy.

Hargreave’s I’m stuck to the floor keynote address at L@S09 - “The Fourth Way” revealed a man and a mind that was funny, provocative and ever so smart – a great pick by the conference programme organisers to launch New Zealand teachers at the start of our school year.  His claims over the freedoms and innovation The First Way afforded teachers seem kind of relevant here

Rather like topology we shouldn’t be looking at the objects involved but rather at the ways in which they work together.

Creativity and creative endeavour is advanced by deep learning, and conceptual understanding and if national standards mean knowing what you are doing, whether it is going well and what to do next then it would seem that national standards and creativity may well be two straight lines that cross over in the middle.

One supports the other and X marks the spot.  

Source: Artichoke

If you ask what students learn when we give them a Problem Based Learning (PBL) “scenario” to learn through, teachers answers are entirely predictable.

In PBL they will tell you … students learn through activities that are interdisciplinary, student-centered, collaborative, and authentic in that the PBL scenarios are integrated into real world issues and practices…. and what they learn … well what they learn through PBL learning experiences is stuff that prepares them for living in the 21st Century.

This is usually followed by a string of process talk that buttons the buttons of authenticating the learning> awakening prior knowledge> strengthening prior knowledge> constructing relevant questions> planning the research, discovering relevant information>constructing the knowledge> new insights and understandings is .

And because of these beliefs discussion over the student learning outcomes in PBL tend to revolve around

What information is given to students in the “scenario”?

What do students infer from the information they are given in the “scenario”

And sometimes but not often enough

What do students assume from the information they are given in the “scenario”

These are undoubtedly worthy questions for educators to explore but I think there are better ones…

I’d like to “lucychili wind” the focus out a bit and look at learning through problem solving per se.  To ask what else is being learned through PBL activity?

To ask …

1. What information is given to students who learn through PBL pedagogies?
2. What do students infer from the information they are given?
3. What do students assume from the information they are given?

I think that an inconvenient problem is exposed when we examine the information, inference and assumptions made by students when they are immersed in PBL.

In PBL students learn that:

1.  Problems in a lived experience are identified and described by people with institutional authority.
ie The act of giving students the PBL scenario means for students problem finding and problem scoping is something passive, something done by others with institutional authority.

Students must assume that

2. People with institutional authority can reliably and validly identify problems in the lived experience of others.

And although they sit outside the problem framing, and outside the lived experience, students must infer that 

3. They can “solve” the problems identified and described by someone in authority in a way that satisfies the perspectives of the person who framed the problem …. the person with institutional authority

And that although they sit outside the problem framing, and outside the lived experience,I suspect that all our talk about authenticity means that in PBL we encourage the belief that

4 They can “solve” the problems identified and described by someone in authority in a way that satisfies the perspectives of the people identified in the scenario. 

When we asssess or encourage their peers to assess the outcomes I suspect we tell students that

5.  When problems are initiated by others, the problem solving response must fit within the solutions pre-determined by the problem constructor 

By that I mean that the way in which the PBL case study is constructed will favour particular solutions – that old “Problems are formulated by people who can envisage a solution”.

Furthermore In PBL we suggest to students that

6.  Complex and conflicting lived experiences can be simplified to solutions

And that

7.  These solutions can be identified by outsiders … by students (who are essentially coerced into the role of becoming observers of the observations of an institutional observer of the lived experience.)

It is Sponge Bob and Patrick all over again

“You mean to say they’ve taken what we thought we think and made us think we thought our thoughts we’ve been thinking our thoughts we think we thought… You think?”

And it is not as if any of this is remediable by dealing with the different authority structures in PBL and letting students identify and craft the issues and problems they find in a lived experience

We still have the issue that learning through PBL means that student learning is happening in a context that assumes life is a problem to be solved

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”  Soren Kierkegaard

8.  PBL reinforces the assumption that life is a problem to be solved

For Pita Sharples argument in Speech: Boys in Education Conference – Wednesday 19 April, 2006* in
New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work, Volume 3, Issue 1, 3-11, 2006…

If we construct boys as a group of people who lack equality, resources, opportunity, expectations, confidence, talents, achievement, communication skills, literacy skills, support, attention we are forever restricting the discussion to one around negativity, a discourse of disadvantage.

… could be just as easily made for schools whose students predominantly learn through pedagogies of problem based learning

If we allow [those in authority to construct through PBL scenarios the lived experiences of others as experiences] that lack equality, resources, opportunity,  expectations, confidence, talents, achievement, communication skills, literacy skills, support, attention we are forever restricting the discussion to one around negativity, a discourse of disadvantage.

All of which makes me want to ask

How can students learn in school that life is a reality to be experienced?

Source: Artichoke