 
Week 3 - Outcomes and Standards
|  | The Horse is Dead in Australia, Too! |
| |
Listing of Papers | |
MR BRUCE L. JONES
Queensland, Australia
EDUCATION SYSTEMS throughout the world use much rhetoric to justify the political decisions that they make. Every year they take up a larger and larger slice of their nations' budgets and the clamour of the public is value for money, and higher literacy and numeracy standards. Or is it? How much of the great educational beat-up of the past three decades has been as a result of parent dissatisfaction and how much has been as a result of media put-downs and political grandstanding?
Diverting Public Attention from the Real Issues
How much social engineering has the literacy debate afforded the governments of the day, by diverting public attention away from 'big picture' changes in society towards something everyone understands so well, the ability to read and write.
Let's not consider the implications of the Columbines and the educational messages implicit therein, as schools marginalise segments of their students. Let's not consider the impact that the disengagement of our learners from learning has for all of society. Let's not consider the ramifications of the growing gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots', already so evident in Australia and so rife in the United States and many Third World countries.
Let's instead focus only on the shortcomings of an education system that was well past its 'use by date' some thirty and more years ago, but which, given enough pushing and pulling, enough testing and rigour, can be made to take our learners kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.
Realising the Terrible Truth
Leslie Hart, writing in Phi Delta Kappa, November 1989, 'The Horse is Dead', describes the scene on the street when the Old Clothes Man's decrepit old nag dropped dead in the shafts of the wagon.
The Old Clothes Man, who looked like the commodity he tried to collect, was profoundly distressed as he looked at his locomotive power of so many years crumpled on the pavement. I suspect that he had never given thought to this possibility. He bent down to straighten out one of the animal's front legs, and a burly cop said, not unkindly, 'Mister, your horse is dead. All of it'.
The time appears to have come when our nearly 150-year-old concept of 'school' has dropped between the shafts. The marvel is that, despite its screamingly evident failures, it has been able to drag its carcass along year after year. It would be hard to find any educator of stature who would deny the import of the waves of reports, surveys, and findings that have issued from foundations and blue-ribbon commissions in the last six years. The demand for 'restructuring' comes from all quarters.
Resisting Change for the Sake of Resisting
The trend around the world towards economic rationalist policies has had an impact on every facet of society and its structures, for the ideology has steam rolled all in its path. The only institutions to stand fast in their resolution to resist change have been the schools, but often for the wrong reasons, as they have resisted change for the sake of resisting. That is now being challenged, as education systems move down the pathway of a 'teach and test and compare' regime, cleverly disguised and made more palatable to parents and employers as Improved Learning Outcomes for Students and School Based Management.
The Technological Information Revolution has now globalised the way society does business. There continues at the same time in schools a reluctance to changing the way in which they provide their services, even though the research and knowledge they now have about how children best learn has never been more available, and more verifiable.
A Mechanical Formula
Still, there exists in the minds of almost everyone a belief that all children must go to school at a prescribed time, for a prescribed period, and learn in a prescribed way, for that is the model which almost everyone has experienced, and with which everyone has had such success.
Some don't remember the 'good old days' as clearly as others. School is still seen as the place to go whilst parents go to work and, in this role, it has become even more important. It's generally pretty safe for the kids too, a lot safer than in their own homes. Carol Tell's paper, 'Generation What?' in Educational Leadership, December 1999, says:
Unfortunately, we focus on the sensational aspects of teens' lives, such as abnormal occurrences of violence. Males tells us, 'School killings receive enormous attention not because they are routine but because they are rare.' In fact, Males argues, of the 52 million students (enrolled in the United States), about 24 are murdered in school each year.
He compares this figure with the National Commission on Child Abuse and Neglect: every year, as many as 3,000 kids are murdered by parents (Males, M., (1998, 'Five Myths and Why Adults Believe They are True', New York Times, at: www.nytimes.com/specials/teens/male.html
Obsessed With Management and Measurement
Schools have become obsessed with behaviour management issues and measuring academic performance, to the detriment of the learning of their students. The total spectrum of learners' abilities and needs are hardly considered when new regimes to mainly satisfy discipline policies, accountability and to circumvent litigation have been implemented.
The wonderful talents of all learners are mainly overlooked by schools as they become mesmerised by the computer print-outs of the assessment data, and try to figure out new ways to tell their communities and political masters that they are doing a better job than ever before, and thus will attract a greater market share of the students.
As the curriculum becomes narrower and more prescriptive, so that teachers can have more success in teaching the subjects that can be tested, so the disenchantment with learning and schools increases.
Brooks and Brooks, writing in Educational Leadership, November 1999, 'The Courage to Be Constructivist' express the problem in this way.
Learning is a complex process through which learners constantly change their internally constructed understandings of how their worlds function. New information either transforms their beliefs - or doesn't. The efficacy of the learning environment is a function of many complex factors, including curriculum, instructional methodology, student motivation, and student developmental readiness. Trying to capture this complexity on paper-and-pencil assessments severely limits knowledge and expression.
Inevitably, schools reduce the curriculum to only that which is covered on tests, and this constriction limits student learning. So, too, does the undeviating, 'one-size-fits-all' approach to teaching and assessment in many States where accountability has been crowned king.
Convenient Political Capital
Requiring all students to take the same courses and pass the same tests may hold political capital for legislators and state-level educational policy-makers, but it contravenes what years of painstaking research tells us about student learning. In discussing the inordinate amount of time and energy devoted to preparing students to take and pass high-stakes tests, Angaran writes: all this activity prepares them for hours of passivity. This extended amount of seat time flies in the face of what we know about how children learn. Unfortunately it does not seem to matter. It is, after all, the Information Age. The quest for more information drives us forward' ('Reflections in an age of assessment' in Education Leadership, 56, 71-72).
The children move further into their own private realm of interpreting their world almost completely devoid of positive societal influence, for the preoccupation of their teachers is with subjects, tests and results to satisfy the system. The media teach the children all they need to know without going through the literacy hoops once so necessary for learning. No remedial lessons are required for television viewing. The Internet is the literacy of the youth of today, whilst many teachers are still struggling to reach basic computer competency.
In the early seventies many innovations began to take place in schools across Australia and these were partly the result of a huge injection of funds by the new Labor government, and the belief that Australia had something special in its children. They were seen to be the country's future wealth and an investment in education was seen as a long term investment in the country's future, not able to be measured by a raft of tests or an opinion survey. Education Centres were established for the uplifting of teachers, for it was realised that it is the quality and conviction of the teacher that is most significant in the educative process, almost as important as that of the parent.
Well of Innovation Dried Up
The story turned sour as the time went by and the opportunity to make a new covenant for schools was lost, for reasons too complex to cover here. Suffice to say that the new freedoms some teachers were experiencing and the exciting things schools were doing slowly ground to a halt, without a sustained vision or a promise for a preferred future. The structures of schools remained pretty much intact and the well of innovations dried up as the focus returned as always to literacy and the shortcomings of schools in teaching it properly.
Since that time, tide after tide of restructuring has continued and it is almost farcical when each new government announces another 'restructure' to make schools more effective, more accountable and more orientated towards the future.
The more they have been restructured the more they have remained the same, for there is a deep fear in the system that schools might float away if left to their own devices, and might even serve their constituents better.
The Complete Disengagement of the Learner
Through all of this, the one voice never consulted has always been that of the learner. The disengagement of the learner from the joy of learning is now so complete that many fear for the complete disintegration of western society as we know it. Schools are fast becoming places to avoid and destroy, places without any relevance to the lives of our youngsters of today. They certainly don't provide square holes for square pegs, where diversity is celebrated. The scene is now set around the world for centralist education authorities to prescribe the content of the curriculum, the testing regime and the publication of the results so that parents may make the 'best' choice as to where to send their child for the best possible education.
In a recent survey conducted by the Association of Independent Schools in Queensland, parents nominated discipline, strong curriculum, post-school opportunities and social values as the primary reasons for picking independent schools (Courier-Mail, 18/1/00, p.2, 'Parents go private for children's school enrolments').
Education as a Class Filter
If anyone can't see this strategy for what it really is they should open their eyes, as the gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is widening with alarming rapidity. The literacy that schools are teaching and testing today has little relevance to their needs for tomorrow, and the children of the 'have-nots' shall surely be stranded in great numbers, left to carry on the menial tasks in a society where the rich and powerful increase their stranglehold on the seats of decision making, thus perpetuating their position.
Education has always been seen as the ticket to freedom and to new opportunities for everyone who chose to grasp it. In reality it has always been very much a class construct wherein groups have been marginalised, even without their knowing, and have realised too late that they have been passed over.
The pride of all public or state systems, especially primary, was to provide the optimum opportunity for everyone, regardless of race, religion, social standing or disadvantage. It used social justice principles to ensure that all within its fold were treated justly. At the same time, it made one huge blunder and that was to continue to cling to a teaching model and pedagogy that advocated 'one size for all', almost a denial of the diversity it held within its embrace, for how does a system measure diversity?
It chose to ignore the research and findings of the past forty years and blamed its lack of coping on a multitude of external factors, not the least being the deteriorating quality of its clients. It never took the invitation to move to a position of superiority and readiness when the opportunity was so open. Its bureaucratic stranglehold and politically bound structures, so heavily union orientated, prevented it from being responsive to the rapidly changing world around. It is now fighting a rear guard action to try to satisfy a marketplace demand that has already passed it by.
The Treadmill of Continual Improvement
The danger education now faces comes from two main spheres of attack. The political climate has chosen to focus narrowly on teaching for testing and the results and comparisons will keep it preoccupied for the next decade while it proves it is doing better than it did, in what year?
The other is the relentless attack by teachers and parents to ensure that the 'one size for all' is the only worthy model for our children as they prepare for the world and careers, most of which have not even been yet invented. It was this refusal by school communities to consider alternative school structures in the seventies that has led to the malaise of today. The unique thing that has worked so much to the disadvantage of schools is that everyone in society has been to school for some of their lives and so has a first-hand experience of what worked best for them and how well they learnt to read and to spell, and how successful they are as a result of their education. In no other institution or profession in society is that the case. The other factor which will always mitigate against schools being able to change is that it is the lives and the futures of parents' most precious possessions, their children, which may be seen to be jeopardised if a new idea should go wrong.
The need to look again at the education systems and structures we are developing and providing for our learners is the single most important decision any society can make for its long-term future. If there is not the will to honestly examine what really happens in schools, and to do so in the light of what we clearly know about how the brain works and how learners best learn, then we have a pretty hollow reason for continuing to do what we have always done.
The Queensland Trial
The opportunity that Education Queensland is currently offering twenty trial schools through its Frameworks Project is well publicised on the Internet for all to follow and contribute towards. It is one of the first such contemplated educational changes of this magnitude to use technology in this way. The Rich Tasks and the New Basics are aimed towards overcoming some of the barriers schools face when trying to satisfy two masters, but it will be the expertise and the dedication of the teachers and their adoption of a child-centred pedagogy which will determine whether the project does indeed impact on the success of learners and carry them, and our schools, into the future. The half life of an engineering degree is four years. The half life of an education degree is . . . fifty years? Some would have us so believe.
The Multiage Model
The structure that best satisfies the diversity of learners is commonly described as a multiage classroom and it must be realised that it is just that, a structure in which teachers and learners have the flexibility and freedom to learn in the way that we now know that we all learn best. The philosophy is best described as Constructivism, or simply child-centred, as opposed to subject-centred. Marsha Grace, writing in the November edition of Educational Leadership, ('When Students Create Curriculum'), sums up the differences in the two opposing views of education and learning by quoting Frank Smith.
Frank Smith compares the differences between the social-constructivist and the typical state-approved views of how learning occurs. He states that the classical view on which social-constructivist teaching is based says that learning is continual, effortless, independent of reward and punishment, never forgotten, inhibited by testing and dependent on the growth of the learner. Smith points out that the official view of learning, in contrast, says that learning is occasional, hard work, dependent on reward and punishment, easily forgotten, ensured by testing, and dependent on memorisation. Teachers and communities willing to explore the constructivist approach to curriculum development will need to constantly review the differences between classical and official views of learning. Smith,F.(1998) The Book of Learning and Forgetting, New York: Teachers College Press.
In my view, unless we can change the structure of the classroom and the learning relationships therein, as the first step in accommodating the classical view of learning, we shall never make the long-term changes to the curriculum and pedagogy. The model I have found to be the most effective in achieving this is the multiage classroom, as described in this paper.
Supporting and supplementary papers to this discussion paper appear as 'The Rivendell Papers on Learning and Teaching' and current titles which carry this theme include:
- 'Digging Square Holes for Square Pegs'
- 'Exceptional Classrooms for Exceptional Learners'
- 'Let Them Write Before They Read'
- 'Meredith's Old Doll'
- 'The Five Chinese Brothers'
- 'The Out of Classroom Curriculum'
- 'Imagine'
- 'Getting to Know You'
- 'Homework: Is it an anti-educational activity?'
- 'Multiage Links'
- 'Menus and Timetables'
_____________________________________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mr Bruce Jones retired from the principalship in 1997 from the position of principal of a Band 10 state school in Queensland after some thirty-seven years in the classroom and administrative positions, in all classes of school. He did not retire from his commitment to learning and teaching and works extensively with teachers around the Queensland and around the world through several listservs which grapple with the problems of differentiating the curriculum and individualising learning and teaching. He has had a number of papers published and wrote a regular educational column for several newspapers for many years. He is a regular presenter at educational conferences and forums. He is a strong advocate for a better deal for learners of all ages, believing lifelong learning to be the ultimate experience. He sees direct correlations between poor 'teaching and learning' and the demise of western society in this post industrial era and questions why we will not look for a better way.
He is a challenging and provocative speaker and works through his consultancy, Rivendell Schools Support Services, with schools, teachers, parents, pupils and community groups. The topics include teaching and learning frameworks, behaviour management, authentic pedagogy, marketing schools, multiage classrooms, a futures perspective in management, effective learning and teaching and building communities of learners. He is regarded as innovative in his approach to learning and teaching and it is his quest to challenge all educators to seek out the square holes for the square pegs that everyone recognises, but most often ignore. He is a registered educational provider for Education Queensland and is a partner in an Internet Cafe and Technology Training Centre on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, as well as having a keen involvement in property development. His wife, Trish, his greatest support, is an administrative officer in a nearby school and his nine kilogram cat, Cass, is a continual drain on the family finances.
Bruce Jones can be contacted by email at:
bljones@bigpond.com
|
|
| | |
