Rethinking School Leadership

"The role of the school principal in Canada is increasingly multifaceted and complex. Beyond the foundational administrative and managerial roles they are expected to master, principals are also expected to be innovators and agents of change -- all of this in a culture that increasingly challenges traditional conceptions of leadership."

~ J-C Couture

In June I wrote a post on 5 ways teachers can demonstrate leadership in the classroom.

Here are 5 ways school administrators can exhibit and inspire leadership in their schools and school districts.

1. Good leaders stick around. We know that high principal turnover often leads to greater teacher turnover and initiative fatigue. Sometimes these moves are made by the choices of senior administrators from the school district, however, Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan reminds us that "regularized rotation of principals by their districts every 3-5 years has more a negative than positive effect on improvement efforts". Other times these moves are initiated by principals who "use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments". When leaders come and go in search of their own self-promotion, it's hard to see them as allies with the community. This is no more evident than in New Orleans, a city that is 65 percent black, where the corporate education reform movement is almost entirely white led. In the US, average tenure for urban superintendents is just three years, while education secretaries in England and France tend to turnover after only two years. Albertans have had 4 Ministers of Education since 2011, and we know that Canadian principals are, "at risk of burnout in an increasingly ramped up culture of performativity".

This shouldn't be our society or our schools.

2. Good leaders distribute leadership without stepping on others. Most education systems, school districts and schools are built on hierarchal systems where well intentioned fidelity too often becomes code for do as you are told. Andy Hargreaves reminds us that the best leaders "uplift those they serve by uplifting those who serve them". The best leaders know that they don't know everything, so they reject cultures of compliance built on confirmation bias and instead seek dissent to liberate the conversation. The best leaders reject comforting lies and embrace unpleasant truths. The best leaders reject the seductiveness of efficiency via fear and conformity through standardization and fatalism. Good leaders don't merely accumulate and exercise power while reminding their inferiors to follow along. Good leaders share power to grow leadership among all.

The worst leaders are Decepticons.

3. Leaders don't enslave -- they support. Some leaders empower and inspire teachers to work with children in ways that leave life long impressions while others create instruments of control to separate the powerful from the powerless that makes compliance the gold standard. Teaching is a highly relational and complex job that cannot be reduced to a one-size-fits-all standardized approach. If teachers are to have any hope in accomplishing what many people admit to be an undesirable and impossible job, they require servant leadership that puts "the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible."

4. School leaders are teachers. In his book Finnish Lessons 2.0, Pasi Sahlberg reminds us that, "Some countries allow their schools to be led by non-educators, hoping that business-style management will raise efficiency and improve performance." Most Canadians wouldn't understand how an non-teacher could possibly lead a school or school district while our American neighbours have already embraced this as common practice.

@HargreavesBC @joe_bower Also unsustainable for teachers to provide effective feedback for improvement but receive none themselves

— Ruth Sutton (@ruthsutton) June 21, 2015

 If you haven't taught, you can't give teachers the feedback they need to improve. If you haven't taught, you can't lead teachers. Period.

I found this written on my whiteboard
on the last day of school. 

5. The best leaders don't value what they measure -- they measure what they value. In their book Professional Capital: Transforming teaching in every school, Andy Hargreaves and Micheal Fullen layout how, "great schools are made up of three kinds of capital: human capital (the talent of individuals); social capital (the collaborative power of the group); and decisional capital (the wisdom and expertise to make sound judgements about learners that are cultivated over many years".

At the end of this school year, my grade 6 students wrote Provincial Achievement Tests. Their multiple choice scantrons were promptly shipped off to our provincial capital to be counted.

At the end of this school year, I found this message on my whiteboard that counted formally and officially for nothing -- but meant everything to me and to that student. Good leaders would care about this emotionally intelligent piece of data at least as much, if not more, than spreadsheet-friendly test scores. Albert Einstein said it all, " Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts".

Such a nuanced approach requires us to temper, if not abandon, our mania for reducing learning and teaching to numbers. While so many forces work to sterilize and standardize our schools, Hargreaves and Fullen lead the way to humanize education.

From Detesting to De-Testing

This post was featured in Cathy Rubin's The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Teacher Blogs.

How do you balance preparation for high stakes assessments with teaching and learning in your classroom?


In my classroom, I have replaced tests and grades with projects and performances collected in portfolios. It’s been 10 years since I used a multiple choice test to assess my students, so it’s safe to say that I do not agree with having to administer a standardized multiple choice test for the government at the end of an entire year of making learning visible via blogging.

Teachers are repeatedly told that the best way to prepare students for standardized tests is to teach the curriculum, but this is at best misleading. We know that multiple choice tests require a certain amount of test taking skills, and that students who have a better understanding for the nuances of multiple choice tests can score well without having learned what the tests claim to be measuring.

So how do I live with myself when I have an obligation to administer standardized tests that I don’t support?

In his article Fighting the Tests: A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools, Alfie Kohn writes:

Whenever something in the schools is amiss, it makes sense for us to work on two tracks at once. We must do our best in the short term to protect students from the worst effects of a given policy, but we must also work to change or eliminate that policy. If we overlook the former – the need to minimize the harm of what is currently taking place, to devise effective coping strategies — then we do a disservice to children in the here and now. But (and this is by far the more common error) if we overlook the latter – the need to alter the current reality — then we are condemning our children’s children to having to make the best of the same unacceptable situation because it will still exist.

In the short term, I teach the curriculum the best I can, and I waste as little time as possible preparing students to fill in bubbles. However, as test day approaches we do a practice test in small groups to reduce anxiety and increase familiarity. The best teachers act less like conduits for the tests and more like a buffer that protects students from the harmful effects of testing, so I also assure students and parents that I do not use the standardized test as a part of their report card.

In the long term, I tweet, blog, write articles and talk with anyone and everyone about how and why standardized tests are broken and how and why the alternatives to the tests are far more authentic. I go out of my way to make the alternatives to standardized tests so obviously better that parents and students see the tests as an unfortunate distraction from real learning.

To advocate for authentic alternatives to standardized tests I actively work with my Alberta Teachers’ Association to create local public events with speakers such as Sir Ken Robinson, Alfie Kohn, Pasi Sahlberg, Yong Zhao and Andy Hargreaves. I’ve joined a political party in Alberta and influenced their education policies. I wrote Telling Time with a Broken Clock: the trouble with standardized testing and co-edited De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Standardization and Accountability.

Together parents, students and teachers join together to opt-out of testing.

Teachers Are Not a Problem. They Are an Opportunity.

This was written by Andy Hargreaves who is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education, in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Andy tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Andy Hargreaves

Woody Allen quipped that when we face a crossroads in life that leads to utter hopelessness or total extinction, we should choose wisely between them. Yogi Berra said that if we come to a fork in the road, we should take it. When Eric Clapton went down to the crossroads, he just fell down on his knees.

In 2014, the future of teaching is at a gigantic global crossroads, but the choices need not be as oddball as the ones that the ABC's of Allen, Berra and Clapton offer us! This week, the Unite for Quality Education movement, organized by the global teachers' union organization, Education International, met in Montreal to advance its campaign of providing universal and free access to quality teachers to all students. This is a bold goal - not just access to education, good or bad, in huge classes or less, with properly qualified teachers or not; but access to quality education and quality teachers for everyone.

Are current trends in their favor or against them? Let's look at some of the most developed economies, including our own - because if we cannot provide quality teachers for everyone here, there is little hope for anyone else.

Some of the signs are not encouraging.

In March, in my home state, a report commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education set out an educational vision for the state in 2030. Although Massachusetts ranks Number 1 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and is one of the top-performing systems on a range of international assessments, the report's leading author, Sir Michael Barber, former adviser on education to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and now Chief Education Adviser to global educational sales giant Pearson unconvincingly portrayed this leading state as suffering from "complacency".

In response, the report recommends two strategic directions for teacher reform that are the opposite of what the highest performing countries are doing - opening up more routes of teacher preparation outside universities, and offering incentives to new teachers to take more pay earlier in their career at the expense of pension stability and security further down the line. What will be the result? A flexible, more easily qualified and more inexperienced profession who will take the money now before they move on to something else.

Now let's turn to the Canadian province of Alberta - consistently one of the highest English and French language performers on OECD's international PISA tests of student achievement. Part of this success is a strong teachers' association that includes principals and superintendents and that has historically worked closely with the province's 40-year Conservative government. This cooperation includes a recently concluded 14-year program to support teacher-designed innovations in 95% of the province's schools with 2% of the education budget. The Alberta Teachers' Association spends around 50% of its budget on professional development, research and policy advocacy, compared to the low single digits in US teacher unions.

This May, an Alberta Task Force for Teaching Excellence, assembled by the relatively new Education Minister, and without involvement from the Alberta Teachers' Association, laid out 25 recommendations for improving teacher quality. The most controversial of these is to impose a bureaucratic system for assessing teacher competence that will be linked to periodic re-certification.

If this can't be done with the existing teachers' association, the report warns, then principals may be separated from it so they will have the line authority to undertake the evaluations themselves. Of course, there are bits of incompetence in any system, but remember: Alberta is already one of the highest performing systems in the world. As international change expert Michael Fullan has put it in Canada's leading national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, to impose this change across the whole system would be like scorching the lawn to get rid of a few weeds.

So, ironically in some high performing systems that have succeeded in part due to their highly qualified, high status and stable teaching professions, there is a movement, against all the international evidence, to weaken the teaching profession in the name of economic "flexibility" and external accountability.

By contrast, a number of educational systems that have been declining or struggling seem to have grasped the significance of Joni Mitchell's old lyric "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"? So they are pushing the teaching profession the other way.

Take one of the biggest basket cases of urban educational reform: New York City. After years of unnecessary upset and upheaval in the Bloomberg years that had no overall positive impact on student achievement, the city has come to an agreement to end a 9-year dispute with its unions. Under Mayor Bill De Blasio and the city's Chancellor and lifelong educator, Carmina Farina, the agreement has taken pay off the table until 2018 by making a reasonable and very modest settlement that now enables teachers and schools to focus on improvement. It has created a Union-Department panel to review and approve innovative and flexible ways to figure out how to improve student learning in 10% of the city's schools. It is establishing pilot programs to increase parent-teacher interaction (as well as time for teachers to engage in these interactions), and also scheduled in-school time for teachers to engage in peer-to-peer professional development. This recognizes the fact that US teachers currently spend less in-school time away from their own classes than almost all other nations, especially the highest performing ones.

The agreement will also streamline teacher evaluations by almost two-thirds - from 22 components down to 8 - and it will balance this with an expedited process to remove teachers who demonstrate unprofessional behavior. New York City is giving up on the one-size slams-all strategy of standardization and the war of all against all of charter school competition to embrace a more professionally inclusive approach.

Then there is Sweden. Once the poster child for social democratic excellence and equity, in the past decade, since its aggressive introduction of market-driven educational reforms, Sweden has experienced the greatest deterioration in PISA scores out of all OECD countries who were performing above average in 2003. Sweden also shows the greatest deterioration in educational equity between these dates. Sweden's educational reforms, especially its profit-based "free" schools (many of them owned by hedge fund companies) are modeled on the Anglo-American reforms of England and the United States. So it is not surprising to see that Sweden's educational performance is falling further and further behind the other high performing Scandinavian countries and moving more towards the low performers of England and the US, whose strategies it has adopted.

With an election looming in September, major political parties are responding to public unrest with Sweden's educational decline in a number of ways. Elevating the status and quality of teachers is one of them. Proposals include raising teachers' salaries, reducing the administrative burdens on teachers, and raising the bar for teacher qualifications so teachers do not come from the lowest ends of the graduation range as they do now.

One more country that is educationally endangered is Wales. Despite its exemplary record in educational equity in a fully comprehensive public school system, Wales is in the bottom third of all the countries who participate in PISA, it is the lowest ranking of all the four UK countries, and it is the only one of these to differ by a statistically significant degree. Last Fall, the Welsh Government invited the OECD to undertake a visit to review its improvement strategy and I was one of two experts who served on the five-person team that did this work.

Our report was published in May and included a number of recommendations on building the professional capital of the teaching profession. This included provisions to attract higher quality individual human capital into the profession, not by setting up a market of providers of teacher preparation outside the university system as the country's English neighbors had done, but by strengthening the existing system of university-based teacher education.

Our report also recommended extending a very promising government-funded program to encourage recently qualified teachers to acquire Masters' degrees. We also stressed that social capital (how well teachers work together) is as important as the human capital of what teacher are able to do alone - and to this extent we advised that a nationwide commitment to building strong professional communities among teachers should be strengthened by giving these communities a clearer focus and by supporting them with government funding so they could occur in school time.

Last - as the BBC and other media highlighted - we said it was important for the government not to get sidetracked by raising its scores on PISA, but to establish a compelling and uplifting vision of what it wanted Welsh learners to be. This, we said, would not only provide a direction for teaching and learning, but would also raise the status of Welsh teachers as the people who would have to realize this vision for their nation.

So whether we are Massachusetts or New York; in Canada, Scandinavia or the UK, when we stand at the crossroads of teacher quality, which path should we take - to build teachers up or break them down? The answer isn't in the earlier ABC's of forking paths.

Instead, we could do no worse than revisit the educational achievements of LBJ - Lyndon B Johnson: 36th President of the United States. After the life-shaping influence of being a public school teacher at the start of his career, Johnson built and left an immense educational legacy in the early childhood education reforms of Operation Headstart and in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that assigned Federal resources to offset local inequities.

Standing at his own crossroads of educational and social change, Johnson was clear about the path that America should take. "Education is not a problem", he declared. "Education is an opportunity". It's time we said the same about teaching and teachers.

Teachers are not a problem. They are an opportunity.

Data-Driven Improvement and Accountability

This was written by Andy Hargreaves and Henry Braun. This is the executive summary for a new policy brief released yesterday by National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorodo at Boulder that examines the linkage between data-driven improvement and accountability in education. You can find the entire brief here. You can read about the brief on Valerie Strauss's blog The Answer Sheet here. Andy Hargreaves tweets here.

by Andy Hargreaves and Henry Braun

The drive to enhance learning outcomes has assumed increasing salience over the last three decades. These outcomes include both high levels of tested achievement for all students and eliminating gaps in achievement among different sub-populations (raising the bar and closing the gap). This policy brief examines policies and practices concerning the use of data to inform school improvement strategies and to provide information for accountability. We term this twin-pronged movement, data-driven improvement and accountability (DDIA).

Although educational accountability is meant to contribute to improvement, there are often tensions and sometimes direct conflicts between the twin purposes of improvement and accountability. These are most likely to be resolved when there is collaborative involvement in data collection and analysis, collective responsibility for improvement, and a consensus that the indicators and metrics involved in DDIA are accurate, meaningful, fair, broad and balanced. When these conditions are absent, improvement efforts and outcomes-based accountability can work at cross-purposes, resulting in distraction from core purposes, gaming of the system and even outright corruption and cheating. This is particularly the case when test-based accountability mandates punitive consequences for failing to meet numerical targets that have been determined arbitrarily and imposed hierarchically.

Data that are timely and useful in terms of providing feedback that enables teachers, schools and systems to act and intervene to raise performance or remedy problems are essential to enhancing teaching effectiveness and to addressing systemic improvement at all levels. At the same time, the demands of public accountability require transparency with respect to operations and outcomes, and this calls for data that are relevant, accurate and accessible to public interpretation. Data that are not relevant skew the focus of accountability. Data that are inaccurate undermine the credibility of accountability. And data that are incomprehensible betray the intent of public accountability. Good data and good practices of data use not only are essential to ensuring improvement in the face of accountability, but also are integral to the pursuit of constructive accountability.

Data-driven improvement and accountability can lead either to greater quality, equity and integrity, or to deterioration of services and distraction from core purposes. The question addressed by this brief is what factors and forces can lead DDIA to generate more positive and fewer negative outcomes in relation to both improvement and accountability.

The challenge of productively combining improvement and accountability is not confined to public education. It arises in many other sectors too. This brief reviews evidence and provides illustrative examples of data use in business and sports in order to compare practices in these sectors with data use in public education. The brief discusses research and findings related to DDIA in education within and beyond the United States, and makes particular reference to our own recent study of a system-wide educational reform strategy in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Drawing on these reviews of existing research and illustrative examples across sectors, the
brief then examines five key factors that influence the success or failure of DDIA systems
in public education:

1.The nature and scope of the data employed by the improvement and accountability systems, as well as the relationships and interactions among them;  

2. The types of indicators (summary statistics) used to track progress or to make comparisons among schools and districts;  

3. The interactions between the improvement and accountability systems;

4. The kinds of consequences attached to high and low performance and how those consequences are distributed;

5. The culture and context of data use -- the ways in which data are collected,
interpreted and acted upon by communities of educators, as well as by those who
direct or regulate their work. 

In general, we find that over more than two decades, through accumulating statewide initiatives in DDIA and then in the successive Federal initiatives of the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top, DDIA in the U.S. has come to exert increasingly adverse effects on public education, because high-stakes and high-threat accountability, rather than improvement alone, or improvement and accountability together, have become the prime drivers of educational change. This, in turn, has exerted adverse and perverse effects on attempts to secure improvement in educational quality and equity. The result is that, in the U.S., Data-Driven Improvement and Accountability has often turned out to be Data Driven Accountability at the cost of authentic and sustainable improvement. 

Contrary to the practices of countries with high performance on international assessments, and of high performing organizations in business and sports, DDIA in the U.S. has been skewed towards accountability over improvement. Targets, indicators, and metrics have been narrow rather than broad, inaccurately defined and problematically applied. Test score data have been collected and reported over too short timescales that make them unreliable for purposes of accountability, or reported long after the student populations to which they apply have moved on, so that they have little or no direct value for improvement purposes. DDIA in the U.S. has focused on what is easily measured rather than on what is educationally valued. It holds schools and districts accountability for effective delivery of results, but without holding system leaders accountable for providing the resources and conditions that are necessary to secure those results.

In the U.S., the high-stakes, high-pressure environment of educational accountability, in which arbitrary numerical targets are hierarchically imposed, has led to extensive gaming and continuing disruptions of the system, with unacceptable consequences for the learning and achievement of the most disadvantaged students. These perverse consequences include loss of learning time by repeatedly teaching to the test; narrowing of the curriculum to that which is easily tested; concentrating undue attention on “bubble” students near the threshold target of required achievement at the expense of high-needs students whose current performance falls further below the threshold; constant rotation of principals and teachers in and out of schools where students’ lives already have high instability; and criminally culpable cheating.

Lastly, when accountability is prioritized over improvement, DDIA neither helps educators make better pedagogical judgments nor enhances educators’ knowledge of and relationships with their students. Instead of being informed by the evidence, educators become driven to distraction by narrowly defined data that compel them to analyze grids, dashboards, and spreadsheets in order to bring about short-term improvements in results. 

The brief concludes with twelve recommendations for establishing more effective systems and processes of Data-Driven or Evidence-Informed Improvement and Accountability:

1. Measure what is valued instead of valuing only what can easily be measured, so
that the educational purposes of schools do not drift or become distorted.

2. Create a balanced scorecard of metrics and indicators that captures the full range
of what the school or school system values.

3. Articulate and integrate the components of the DDIA system both internally and externally, so that improvements and accountability work together and not at cross-purposes.
4. Insist on high quality data that are valid and accurate.

5. Test prudently, not profligately, like the highest performing countries and systems,
rather than testing almost every student, on almost everything, every year.  

6. Establish improvement cultures of high expectations and high support, where
educators receive the support they need to improve student achievement, and
where enhancing professional practice is a high priority.  

7. Move from thresholds to growth, so that indicators focus on improvements that
have or have not been achieved in relation to agreed starting points or baselines.
8. Narrow the gap to raise the bar, since raising the floor of achievement through
concentrating on equity, makes it easier to reach and then lift the bar of
achievement over time.  

9. Assign shared decision-making authority, as well as responsibility for
implementation, to strong professional learning communities in which all
members share collective responsibility for all students’ achievement and bring to
bear shared knowledge of their students, as well all the relevant statistical data on
their students’ performance.  

10. Establish systems of reciprocal vertical accountability, so there is transparency in
determining whether a system has provided sufficient resources and supports to
enable educators in districts and schools to deliver what is formally expected of
them.  

11. Be the drivers, not the driven, so that statistical and other kinds of formal evidence
complement and inform educators’ knowledge and wisdom concerning their
students and their own professional practice, rather than undermining or replacing
that judgment and knowledge.  

12. Create a set of guiding and binding national standards for DDIA that encompass
content standards for accuracy, reliability, stability and validity of DDIA
instruments, especially standardized tests in relation to system learning goals;
process standards for the leadership and conduct of professional learning
communities and data teams and for the management of consequences; and context
standards regarding entitlements to adequate training, resources and time to
participate effectively in DDIA.

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.

Andy Hargreaves on transforming education in Alberta

This was written by Andy Hargreaves who is Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at Boston College and co-author of The Fourth Way. This was written as the forward for A Great School For All: Transforming Education in Alberta which is a research update by the Alberta Teachers' Association.

by Andy Hargreaves

For more than a decade, Alberta has been Canada’s highest-performing province and the highest performing English- and French-speaking jurisdiction in the world on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of student achievement. Despite its superior educational performance in Canada and beyond, Alberta has so far been largely overlooked by influential international policy analysts and, therefore, also by the global media; the plaudits have gone largely to Ontario instead. To make this observation is not to imply that Ontario’s hard-earned international prominence is undeserved but, rather, to wonder why Alberta’s impressive educational record is largely unknown, even among Albertans themselves. 

Strangely, one of Alberta’s greatest challenges in the years to come will be to acknowledge its own success. In a world where education is easily hijacked by governments pursuing strategies that will produce short-term solutions for which they will then take credit in the next election, most other nations and their leaders are inclined to impute failure to the educational systems they have inherited and to the people who work in them, so that the incumbent government can claim victory in righting the wrongs of its predecessors. Alberta, however, has achieved increasing and sustained success over several decades with the same government. Alberta’s challenge, therefore, is to acknowledge and celebrate its educational successes, and to find a way to articulate and explain them to its own citizens and then to the world. Alberta will then stand tall as a recognized world leader in education alongside other creators of educational excellence, in Finland, Ontario and Singapore.

Celebrating success brings risks as well as opportunities, however. This is a second educational challenge for Alberta. Celebration can court complacency. In the teaching profession, it can encourage a belief in the value of untrammelled autonomy among individual teachers who might want to claim that they can now be left alone to get on with the job. Among governments, it can induce business-as-usual approaches that fail to prepare them for the challenges of the future and that maintain long-standing policies that might be preventing even greater success. 

Convincing policy-makers and system leaders to take new approaches when they have experienced educational and political success with existing ones can be difficult, but it is before the peak of performance that decline is often already occurring, even though the decline might not be evident in performance results. A paradox of improvement is that you have to quit your existing strategy even when you look as though you are still ahead. 

Knowing that most innovations fail, leaders and voters are often reluctant to ditch tried-and-true methods in favour of a new approach. In Great by Choice (HarperCollins 2011), influential business writers Jim Collins and Morten Hansen argue that the answer to this dilemma is disciplined innovation that is delivered “with high reliability and great consistency.” According to them, “the great task is to blend creative intensity with relentless collective discipline so as to amplify the creativity rather than destroy it.” Discipline requires relentless perseverance and complete indefatigability to ensure that a good idea comes to fruition in practice and that innovation continues alongside improvement, not at the expense of it.

Innovation in the public sphere is important not for its own sake but because it helps citizens and governments deal with new challenges and opportunities. This is especially true in a province like Alberta, with its increasing population, prosperous but vulnerable energy-based economy, and growing awareness of the needs of indigenous communities and the importance of developing a balanced approach to new technologies that will embrace their creative advantages while offsetting the damage and distraction they can inflict on younger generations.

In 2004, innovation guru Charles Leadbeater argued that the answer to all of these issues was not for some central body to mastermind and implement innovations through pipelines of policy delivery, from the centre to the individual. Instead, he argued, at their most sophisticated, governments should establish platforms that enable users to organize their own lives and behaviours more effectively together. In public services, therefore, promoting innovation is not only a question of relaxing or releasing control and responsibility to others. It is about building platforms where people are increasingly able to design learning supports and solutions for themselves.

This analysis raises important questions for educators. For example, what platforms do governments need to create so that teachers can develop their own curriculum and assessments together, instead of delivering curriculum and testing designed by government? What systems can be created and how can resources be reallocated so that peer-to-peer networks of schools can raise achievement themselves instead of having expensive intervention teams impose policy from the top? What is the best way for teachers to pursue their own professional development to meet their own needs without this becoming fragmented and self-indulgent on the one hand and overly controlled by central priorities on the other?

We have some good ideas about how to mesh innovation and improvement, and about why we should. We need to innovate before our improvement efforts flatten out and before improved student achievement stops. We need to innovate to respond to the new challenges that any system faces. We need to innovate because even the best systems have elements in their policies that could impede success. Effective innovation is disciplined; it should complement improvement rather than challenge it. Finally, innovation in public services such as education is not about governments withdrawing from public life, but about shifting responsibility from driving and delivering services to creating ways for people to develop better supports themselves.

Alberta is extremely well placed to address these issues in its education strategies. It already has an astounding and sustained record of educational success that matches the best in the world. For more than a decade, in comparison to most of its Canadian peers, but in line with best practice across the world, it has supported educational innovation through the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement. Like other high performers, Alberta has begun to benchmark its strategies by starting to network with other high performers in Finland and elsewhere. Albertans are not impelled to change strategy from election to election, because the province has been characterized by a high level of political stability that is typical of most successful systems. Again, like other high-performing peers, Alberta enjoys strong support and participation in the public education system from almost all of the province’s parents. And Premier Alison Redford has indicated a bold preparedness to review those parts of the government’s existing strategy that may be detracting from even greater success, such as the provincial achievement tests, which can undermine commitments to deeper and more creative learning in schools.

One of Alberta’s greatest advantages is common to high performers—a strong and committed teaching profession. Unlike its neighbour to the south, Alberta does not cheapen or demean the teaching profession; it understands that the human capital of its students depends on investing in the professional capital of its highly qualified teachers. Alberta does not involve only teachers in delivering change; it also engages principals and superintendents. And it creates and maintains platforms where educators can advocate for further innovations and improvements to benefit students and strengthen the profession that works with those learners on the front line, every day. Albertans understand that the teaching profession is not an obstacle to transforming the province, but an essential and inalienable part of the solution.

A Great School for All—Transforming Education in Alberta is another example of the outstanding intellectual and strategic leadership of the province’s teachers. It is a document that recognizes the successes of the province that the members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association proudly serve; challenges the province’s leaders to be the best they can be in the circumstances they face in partnership with teachers; draws on research, inquiry and international benchmarking to identify the most promising practices; and sets out 12 clear directions to move the province and its children ahead.

Developed by the Association’s research staff, this comprehensive document seeks not just an end to standardized testing but more-sophisticated and more-demanding processes of assessment for learning. It takes a balanced rather than a bullish or obstructive approach to the role of new technologies in schools, calls for a more inclusive approach to special educational needs, and identifies the best supports and partnerships to bring that about. It reasserts the importance of professional autonomy for teachers but understands that this autonomy is collective, not individual. And it argues for a profession that should be given and that must take greater leadership—teachers and principals need to take greater collective responsibility for the quality of professional work. 

Alberta is already a world leader in educational achievement, but its high ranking is not yet matched by international recognition. What Alberta needs now is a clear statement identifying the reasons for its success, champions who can explain that success in inspiring ways to people in the province and across the world, and a platform from which it can launch the innovations that will lead to even greater success in the future. There is no better time for the government and the profession together to show the world what an outstanding system has achieved and can achieve, and to establish a platform that will make Alberta a world leader in educational innovation and transformation in the decade to come. Alberta has no need to rent improvement and reform models that have been built by other systems. On the contrary, it has the proven ability, creativity and professional quality to own the future that it creates for itself. This report can and should become a significant contribution to that quest.

Please read: Hargreaves, Kohn and Zhao

This is another post in a series that I wish to call Please Read. My purpose here is to randomly and inconsistently provide a handful of links on a certain topic that should be read.

I am thankful for the work of Andy Hargreaves, Alfie Kohn and Yong Zhao. After reading books by all three and hearing each of them speak, I've come to see them as shining lights in the dark that is education reform.

Alfie Kohn Interview: Will the Common Core Benefit Children?

Yong Zhao Interview: Will the Common Core Create World-Class Learners?

What is ailing American Schools? An Interview with Andy Hargreaves

The 25th International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement

Niall MacKinnon is headteacher of Plockton Primary School, Highland, Scotland and attended ICSEI 2012, Malmö, Sweden.

by Niall MacKinnon

A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it. This was the key message of linked keynotes at the 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden. 

Pasi Sahlberg outlined how Finland set its own course for education, termed The Finnish Way, whose success offers profound lessons for the world. For Andy Hargreaves the Finnish phenomenon is part of a wider shift of approach, The Fourth Way, one necessary for school education to engage with the vast global economic, social and technological changes underway.

Both agree that most countries have been locked into models of education practice, management and evaluation not suiting today’s needs. 

Sahlberg urges new participatory, learner-led approaches, away from standardized testing and the privatisation of education. He views the conventional notion of a lesson as a ‘dead horse’. Though it cannot be revived, education policy makers are driven to try. This forms part of the GERM, or Global Education Reform Movement, a virus of prescription and control infecting and reinfecting national education systems, outlined in his recent book Finnish Lessons.

Certainly new policy shifts in England – no notice ‘morning raid’ OFSTED inspections, one term teacher competency dismissals, grading of teachers and teaching, lambasting ‘coasting’ schools – echo this view, spreading distrust and despondency. But unattainable perfectionism also contains its own danger. From the Scottish angle there was barely trace of talk of ‘excellence’, and certainly not as central imperative. Indeed the term was not mentioned in the congress review report. That gives global perspective from a key international congress on educational change held by a near neighbor. Perhaps the challenges to be grasped and the responses needed are more profound than mere exhortation.

A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading.

The official theme of ICSEI 2012 was the interplay between policy, research and practice in education. Each annual congress presents a ‘State of the Art’ review, and this year’s was entitled ‘Lost in Translation’, noting that policy makers and the educational research community have drifted apart, with those responsible for policy taking insufficient heed of the accumulated findings of international research.

As a headteacher – and a class committed one – it was refreshing to find many present were practitioners, or liasing directly with them. A group of teachers from Vancouver Island, Canada gave an interesting presentation Walking along the Difficult Path of Education Change, displaying approaches of inquiry-based learning, away from overly fixed pre-determined learning progression. From the other end of the telescope, the Brunei School Inspectorate were keen to bridge gulfs of understanding, searching out commonalities and differences of meaning, seeking to penetrate them in discourse, through stronger working relationships with schools.

The means to establish and enable effective collaboration through professional learning communities was covered by many presentations. The need to grasp new concepts and let go of old ones was a theme throughout. Hargreaves spoke of the fallacies of educational reform, warning against those of speed, substitution (seeing people as the problem), standardization, competition and a ‘fallacy of extremes’ achieved “by remedying or removing defects at the bottom and replicating excellence at the top”.

The pervading themes of the conference stood very much against the prevailing orthodoxies of educational administration, encapsulated in Sahlberg’s GERM. A need for new approaches, methods, concepts and a new participatory bridge between all those involved in education was perhaps the dominant message of the conference.

Next year’s ICSEI will be held in Santiago, Chile, with the theme Educational Systems for School Effectiveness and Improvement: Exploring the Alternatives. Will policy, discourse, research and practice move closer together this coming year? Which countries will embrace and explore genuine alternative approaches, as Finland’s case study was celebrated at this year’s ICSEI? Or will education policy continue to wield the ‘wrong drivers of change’ identified by Michael Fullan, a keynote speaker for ICSEI 2013? Certainly much hangs on the outcome. There was common agreement that through effective educational change the economy, society and culture necessary to establish a new benign internationalism may work in partnership to meet the global challenges of this century, already very different to the last.

This was not a national agenda, but an international one. The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise.

http://www.icsei.net/icsei2012/

What has Finland *not* done?

In his book Finnish Lesson, Pasi Sahlberg writes:

The dominance of cognitive psychology, along with the emergence of constructivist theories of learning and the advances in neurosciences on the horizon, attracted Finland educational researchers to analyze existing conceptions of knowledge and learning in schools. Several influential and teacher-friendly readers were published and sent to schools. They included "Conception of Knowledge" (1989), Conception of Learning (1989), and "About Possibilities of School Changes" (1990). Questions like "What is knowledge?", "How do pupils learn?", and "How do schools change?" were common themes for teacher in-service training and school improvement until the end of the 1990s. 

From an international perspective, this first phase of educational change in Finland was exceptional. At the same time as Finnish teachers were exploring the theoretical foundations of knowledge and learning and redesigning their school curricula to be congruent with them, their peers in England, Germany, France and the United States struggled with increased school inspection, controversial externally imposed learning standards, and competition that disturbed some teachers to the point that they decided to leave their jobs. In England and the United States, for example, deeper analysis of school knowledge and implications of new research on learning remained mainly issues among academics or reached only the most advanced teachers and leaders. Perhaps it is due to these philosophical aspects of educational change that Finland remained immune to the winds of market-driven education policy changes that arose in many OECD countries in the 1990s.

You don't make change by simply making those who have less power than you do what ever it is you demand. To believe otherwise is to ignore what research has been telling us for a very long time.

A prominent researcher in the field of motivation and psychology Edward Deci explains in his book Why We Do What We Do:

The proper question is not, "how can people motivate others?" but rather, "how can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves?"

On what planet would the cartoon above be considered an environment where people could nurture a desire to motivate themselves to learn?

In the forward for Sahlberg's book, Andy Hargreaves writes:

One of the ways that teachers improve is by learning from other teachers. Schools improve when they learn from other schools. Isolation is the enemy of all improvement. We have spent decades breaking down the isolation of teachers within and between our schools. It is now time to break down the ideology of exceptionalism in the United States and other Anglo-American nations if we are to develop reforms that will truly inspire our teachers to improve learning for all our students -- especially those who struggle the most. In that essential quest, Pasi Sahlberg is undoubtedly one of the very best teachers of all.

I hear a lot of people ask "What has Finland done to improve their education system", but it might be equally as important to ask, "What has Finland not done to their education system". While most Anglo-American cultures have spent their limited time, effort and resources on content-bloated, standardized, prefabricated, top-down mandated curriculums with test-based accountability and market-based competition, Finland has focused on broad & creative learning, personalization, professional responsibility, collaboration and trust.

If you look at that comic above and think to yourself, "there has to be a better way", there is... and it starts with examining the Finnish Way and reading Sahlberg's book Finnish Lessons.

While you do this, keep in mind that we should not be interested in cloning Finland, rather we are simply looking to them so that we can begin to imagine how we can be different.

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.