New GERM outbreak in Scotland

This was written by Niall MacKinnon who is a Scottish school principal Niall MacKinnon highlights the need for rigorous GERM infection control measures in education reform programs. You can read Niall MacKinnon's extended version on this article here.

By Niall MacKinnon

In his speech to the Scottish Learning Festival this September, cabinet secretary Michael Russell claimed that GERM is not for Scotland. The Global Education Reform Movement is a concept of Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg, presented in his recent book Finnish Lessons. The features of GERM are standardizing teaching and learning, a focus on literacy and numeracy, teaching a prescribed curriculum, management models from the corporate world and test-based accountability and control.

Scotland’s recent tightly controlled educational landscape of attainment targets, performance indicators and inspection judgements was an example of GERM. But Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) opened up a different pathway in the central “four capacities” concept, emphasizing and integrating wider focuses of linkage and personal development in revisioning pedagogy. CfE showed close affinity with the Finnish Way, outlined by Sahlberg as the antidote to GERM.  Finland encouraged risk-taking, learning from the past, owning innovations, shared responsibility and trust through professional dialogue. A central feature of decluttering for CfE was to focus on innovative approaches, emphasizing practice innovation and local professionalism, termed ‘building the curriculum’.

But just as this was coming together, linking proactive innovation, evaluation, and school systems to CfE, it fell apart. This was because of layers of prescription to different performance criteria in new multiple audit schedules, inspection templates and standards and quality reporting, to non-CfE criteria. The main emphasis was not exploring pedagogy, but micro-specification to serve the needs of external control and standardized calibration of schools. Then came hundreds of  “Es and Os” (experiences and outcomes) as a curriculum specification ‘painting by numbers’ kit. CfE was further lashed down to seven “required characteristics of successful implementation” framed in a product model of curriculum, delivery model of schooling and behaviorist model of audit. Self-evaluation split two ways, one as evaluation taking the concepts, principles and purposes, applying them evidentially yet discursively – GERM-free. The other, calibrating audit prescription to fixed, outdated notions and applying these in absolutist terms – GERM. This set up a huge conflict within CfE in Scotland, one which Sahlberg took from me in the chapter defining GERM in Finnish Lessons:

“Niall MacKinnon, who teaches at Plockton Primary School, makes a compelling appeal for “locally owned questions and purposes in realising practice within the broader national policy and practice frameworks.” He gets right to the point of how GERM affects teachers and schools: “There is the real practical danger that without an understanding of rationale and theoretical bases for school development, practitioners may be judged by auditors on differing underlying assumptions to their own developmental pathways, and the universalistic grading schemas come to be applied as a mask or front giving pseudoscientific veneer to imposed critical judgments which are nothing more than expressions of different views and models of education. Through the mechanism of inspection, a difference of conceptual viewpoint, which could prompt debate and dialogue in consideration of practice, is eliminated in judgmental and differential power relations. One view supplants another. Command and control replaces mutuality, dialogue and conceptual exploration matched to practice development. Those who suffer are those innovating and bringing in new ideas.” ” (p 104)

The paragraph came from my 2011 paper ‘The Urgent Needs for New Approaches in School Evaluation to enable Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’ in the international journal Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. My argument there was that specifications, grading and judgementalism destroy conceptual innovation and local practice professionalism, thereby negating CfE. Torridon Primary School and its headteacher Anne Macrae was my inspiration for that paragraph, now the case exemplar of GERM worldwide in Finnish Lessons.

Sahlberg shows how Finnish education placed central focus on professional dialogue, enabling pedagogy to link modern innovations to a long history of educational ideas. The central conceptual genius of CfE was the “four capacities” concept. It is not a slogan but a clarion call to get to know our pupils, and construct learning pathways by reaching out and revealing the dispositions latent in their potentials. These extend in so many ways out beyond conventional notions of learning, set in terms of delivery, targets and specifications.

We need to unpack learning, garner systemic understanding and enable formative development progression, for pupils, educators and institutions working together, not a “clear plan from A to B” as the Scottish schools’ inspectorate currently mandates. Scotland is now in the midst of GERM warfare between specifications compliance and pedagogic innovation, fought out over the morale and professionalism of Scotland’s teachers. As Dr Sahlberg said of GERM on his blog (30 June) “As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less”.

Sadly GERM is for Scotland, and the case study of GERM is Scotland. But it could so readily not be, once this is ‘seen’ and something done about it, or rather undone, simply by removing the specificatory shroud and control freakery of judgmental absolutism to outdated notions. Let us ‘build the curriculum’ as intended and envisaged.

The central lesson from Finnish Lessons is not what Finland did, but rather what Finland did NOT do to its education system. “Transformational” change in the nature of curriculum and its realization in school education, which Scotland “says” it is undertaking, is not going to come about without similarly transformational change in the means of getting there.

The Far Side of Educational Reform

This was written by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley from Lynch School Education at Boston College and authors of The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change. This was the introduction to a report commissioned by the Canadian Teachers' Federation called The Far Side of Education Reform.

By Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley

Teachers are at the far end of educational reform. Apart from students and parents, they are often the very last to be consulted about and connected to agendas of what changes are needed in education, and of how those changes should be managed. Educational change is something that government departments, venture philanthropists, performance-driven economists and election-minded legislators increasingly arrogate to themselves. Even when these policy-setting and policy-transporting bodies speak on behalf of teachers, teachers often have little or no voice. Teachers are rarely asked to speak on their own account.

When international delegations visit high performing jurisdictions, including those in Canada, it is not teachers they typically get to meet but rather ministers, administrators and advisors – those who command and commandeer a view from the top, along with an official version of what everyone else is supposed to see. This is not only a bias of judgment, but it leads to a bias of evidence and perception. Diane Wood’s research (2007) has shown that professional learning communities, like many reforms, are often viewed more favourably by people at the top than by those at the bottom. Quantitative survey research on leadership and trust, reveals that “site and district administrators view themselves…and each other…as exhibiting trust behaviors consistently higher on every trust factor when compared with teacher respondents. Moreover, the gap between teachers and administrators is the greatest in regard to trust factors” (Daly & Chrispeels, 2008, p. 44; also Daly 2009). To put it more directly, administrators at the top tend to see themselves as more full of trust and to put a more positive spin on their reforms than their teachers do. Teachers are the end-point of educational reform – the last to hear, the last to know, the last to speak. They are mainly the objects of reform, not its participants.

Not surprisingly, therefore, teachers are also often at the far end with educational reform. They are at the end of their tether. Targets and testing, capricious and contradictory changes, political climates that feed on failure and foment professional fear, insecurity and instability, cut-throat competition and rampant privatization – these are the enemies of teaching that erode confidence and betray trust throughout the teaching profession, although they are more prominent south of the border than within Canada itself. However, less obvious adversaries in Canada and elsewhere can still make teachers feel at their wits end today. Hackneyed harangues against whole-class teaching that equate it with factory-style schooling; excessive exaltation of technologically-driven instruction; reduction of deep personalization to slick customization; data warehouses that drive teachers to distraction; and exploitation of international performance comparisons to the domestic disadvantage of public school teachers in almost every developed country – these are the gimmicky Goliaths of educational change today. They are the surreal Far Side of school reform.

If it is indeed the case, as is now commonly claimed, that the teacher is the most important within-school influence on a child’s educational achievement, then it is time to stop insulting teachers, excluding teachers and inflicting change after change upon them. It is time to bring teachers back in: to make them part of the solution and not just part of the problem.

How do we know our children are learning?

The Alberta Teachers' Association is proud to host a dialoge with Dr. Dennis Shirley on how do we know our children are learning.

Professor of Education
Lynch School of Education, Boston College

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Barnett House, Edmonton, Alberta.

• 6:00 pm Registration and reception
• 7:00 pm Public lecture and discussion
• 8:30 pm Book signing and reception

Tickets: $10.00 + GST each or $50.00 + GST for six. TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE.

This event will sell out! Order your tickets soon! I just ordered six.

For more information, call

Edmonton Public Teachers Local at 780-455-2164

Edmonton Catholic Teachers Local at 780-451-1196

Visit www.learningourway.ca

Indoctrination

I am reading Seth Godin's new book Linchpin, and I am loving it. I can see why Time writes, "It's easy to see why people pay to hear what he has to say." Godin's message carries a cunningly subversive tone. He reads like a 'stick it to the man' instruction manual - and I love it!

One of Linchpin's chapters is titled Indoctrination: How we got here. Godin summarizes the chapter:

The scam is that just about everything you were taught in school and by the media was an invented myth, a fable designed to prep you to be a compliant worker in the local factory. School exists for a reason, but that reason might not be what you think it is.

Can you think of the mindless busy work that you had to do in school? Can you remember those fill in the blank worksheets and bubble shading scantrons? Remember sitting in your desk, facing forward while you learned in isolation?

Well, the gig is up.

It's time we schooled school and end this facade.

We need to make some dramatic changes to education. And we can start right now by listening to some of these ideas.

Aaron Eyler suggests we flip our curriculum.

Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves suggest we move beyond the distractions of the Third way and graduate onto The Fourth Way.

Alfie Kohn and Daniel Pink suggest we halt the Punished by Rewards and focus on developing the intrinsic Drive that is in all of us.

I'd write more, but I have to go to school to make a difference with my students.