Asking Why and Why and Why

As children, we ask “Why?” a lot. It is a part of childhood, that special time when the many forces acting upon our cognitive development converge around a singular desire to ask “Why”. It becomes the central focus of our conversational style, an incessant exclamation into the void which tests the patience of any nearby adult. We seem to develop an innate ability to spot those in our environment who we can recruit into our “Why” centric world, those who have not yet mastered the art of terminating our pattern of questions with a well-timed “because”. At the heart of it though, and despite the many road trips it has ruined, our desire to know why is a marker of the innate human propensity towards curiosity. There is so much to know and seemingly so little time to learn it all. The world presents us with a flood of new things, new interactions (with knowledge and people) and new puzzles for us to wonder about.
 
When we enter formal schooling the pace of our questioning declines. Warren Berger is rather keen on questions, his book “A More Beautiful Question” reveals the power of questions to solve problems and encourages us to ask more. He describes the decline in our questioning and cites research by Richard Saul Wurman who shares that "Preschool kids ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day. By middle school, they’ve basically stopped asking questions. Around this time, the article points out, student motivation and engagement plummets. Which raises an interesting question: Have the kids stopped asking questions because they’ve lost interest?” Middle school is around the time when we turn more frequently to another form of the “Why” question, what David Perkins refers to as the “Uppity Question - Why do I have to learn that?”. It might be that the traditional response to this question is what has turned students away from asking questions - “You need to know it for the test”. If the only things that seem to be valued are those in the test and we do not naturally have a desire to understand them (thus the “Why must I learn that?) why would we ask probing questions? Why would we want to dig deeper into a topic we have no interest in?
 
When we are presented with an engaging topic, when we can see the relevance of what we are learning, “Why” becomes a very powerful question. By asking “Why” we begin to dig beneath the surface and guide our learning towards the issues at the heart of the topic. Facts are interesting but studying facts alone will only ever take us so far. Exploring the “Why” of the facts opens new avenues for rich understandings. But students do not naturally ask “Why?”, they often need a teacher or mentor to ask the “Why?” question for them and of them.
 
Recently our students explored a collection of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Their challenge was to uncover and define a part of the problem underlying the selected goal. I joined one group of students who had chosen to tackle the goal of “Zero Hunger”. Their initial response was typical amongst the groups who had selected this goal; “people are hungry, we will give them food”. I listened to them for a while and realised they had only developed a surface understanding of the problem. I asked them what the problem is and then started on the “Whys”. Why are people hungry? Why don’t they have food? Why can’t the food get in? Why do they need food to be delivered? Why do they not grow food? Slowly we dug down into what they knew about the problem, we quickly added to that pool of knowledge but now we were making connections and developing an understanding as we researched. One simple question led them to a solution that targeted the root issues and would be potentially much more sustainable.
 
The technique of asking “Five Whys?” is a powerful tool for learning, both for children and adults. It is also confronting and handled badly and without forewarning can border on aggression. When I first use “Five Whys?” with a class I always talk through the plan with them first. I tell them that my aim is to test their knowledge and guide them towards a richer, deeper understanding of the topic. I tell them they might not like this. They always appreciate the process afterwards and we always include time to reflect on that process. Some of the students start to include “Why” in their responses.
 
For organisations asking “Why?” has a particular power when it is turned to the matter of the way things have always been done here. Asking “Why do we do things that way?” can reveal the habits and patterns of behaviour we have become tied to but that no longer truly serve our purposes. Looking at these long held beliefs and asking “Why do we do that?” can take courage and is only likely to occur within an organisational culture that encourages it. A good measure of the health of an organisation might be to observe how long it takes new staff to shift away from asking “Why” questions that strike at the heart of our traditional patterns of action.
 
You cannot consider the “Why” question without giving mention to the work of Simon Sinek. In his book “Start with Why” he writes "Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. When I say WHY, I don’t mean to make money— that’s a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause or belief? WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?” We are reminded that unless we understand why we do what we do and why it matters we are likely to lose track of what matters most. We must strive to always be guided towards our “Why” and avoid actions that take us away from this. As Simon Sinek points out the truly successful people and organisations are those who use their “Why” as their north star and never lose sight of it.

And, so we come back to the writing of Warren Berger and his guidance towards “A More Beautiful Question”. Asking “Why?” is a great starting point but it only takes us as far as understanding. We need tools that take us from understanding to action. According to Berger "A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.” A pattern of three questions can take us from our “Why” to that actionable question we are seeking. From our “Why”, we ask “How might . . .” and we finish with “What if . . .”. This is a simple pattern of questions that students can learn to ask and is a pattern we have used with students as they develop ideas for their Personal Passion Projects. It is simply exemplified by the story of Air BnB. The pattern of questions the founders of Air BnB asked probably went like this: Why can we not get a bed in a crowded city, even though there are lots of empty beds? How high we connect people who need a bed with people e who have a spare bed? and finally “What if we create an app that lets people with a spare bed make it available to people who need a bed and in doing so become the conduit that sleepy travelers and people with too much room need?”. 
 
The power of “Why” deserves greater respect if we are to reap its benefits. The next time I am accosted by a preschooler full of “Why” questions I might try a more encouraging approach in the hope that this child’s incessant curiosity might just result in the next big breakthrough the world needs. 
 

By Nigel Coutts

Taking risks outside our comfort zone

Possibly the most dangerous place to spend too much time is inside your comfort zone. Only when we take a risk and step away from the safety of the familiar and the ways we have always done things do we expose ourselves to new ideas and become open to the possibility of learning and discovery. The trouble is having the confidence to take that first step, to embrace discomfort and become open to the risks that come with trying something new.
 
For our young students, school can be a place of constant leaping from one zone of discomfort to the next. Their learning journeys, particularly during the formative years are steep and there are many challenges. The social world of school brings one set of challenges. Time away from home and the safety net of their immediate family requires brave hearts and caring teachers who build bridges of support and care. Moving towards more formalised learning requires great curiosity but school brings the new experience of making mistakes in public. New teachers with each year of learning, different classrooms, shifting friendships and an always evolving curriculum brings a constant stream of challenges and opportunities to embrace the discomfort of the new. 
 
Some of our young learners embrace these challenges with resilience and determination. Some become adept at avoiding challenges of a type they may not feel comfortable with. The realms in which we are willing to take risks gradually shrinks and our comfort zone expands. Before long we are developing a set of protective measures that allow us to spend more and more time inside our comfort zone. Slowly the list of things we don’t do expands. For learners, this pathway to a fixed mindset in certain areas of our learning can have a profound effect. Maybe it is in art where we decide it is not a subject for which we have the required skills. Perhaps it is mathematics that we turn away from. Maybe we believe that there are people who can do maths and people who can’t, and we are in the ‘I can’t’ group. 
 
As teachers, our responsibility is to guide our students away from their comfort zones and back into Vygotsky’s ‘Zone of Proximal Development’. We show them that the risk is not as great as they imagine and provide the safety net they need. By understanding the obstacles they face, we can provide just the right support so they can move in the desired direction. Building their confidence, showing them it is OK to fail, that the little steps they are taking are moving them towards their goal even if they don’t see it. By providing the safe environment they need, full of feedback that guides and shows the way we can help our students move towards a growth mindset.
 
For some of our students the challenges they might face at school fall short of the edges of their comfort zone. These are the students who throughout their schooling achieve at an acceptable standard. They pass the tests, achieve success and nothing seems too difficult for them. For these students, school fails to provide a suitable challenge. These are the students whose first experience of cognitive dissonance, overwhelming complexity and the need to step outside their comfort zones arrives after their school years. Alone and without a caring guide at their side, these are the students who seemingly fail to cope with the world of work despite their great promise they once showed. The challenge is to identify these students and provide the opportunities they need to experience challenging learning while at school. It is interesting to note that for some students it is learning that occurs away from the traditional academic class that brings them face-to-face with real challenge. Maybe it is a learning experience in the great outdoors, where the elements, the isolation and the dramatic change of context shows gaps in their ability to cope. Some students who manage the day to day routine of the classroom find that the challenges typical of maker-centered learning are too much. Their understanding of geometry and physics seems to slip from their grasp as they struggle with the details of a mitered joint or the lines of code required to turn on a light bulb.
 
Teachers also have comfort zones. It is often said that the most dangerous phrase in education is “That’s how we have always done that”. We are comfortable with the ways we teach. We are safe in our routines, safe when we are in control, safe when we know what to expect. We have our imagining of how school should look, what good teaching looks like and believe we know how to achieve this. Inside our classrooms we are masters of our domain. But what if we are wrong? How do we know our approach is best, how are we testing our understanding, how are we exposing ourselves to new ideas and maybe better ways of meeting our learners needs?
 
We need to step outside our comfort zones for the sake of our learners. Maybe this starts with opening our classroom doors and inviting others to observe our practice. Perhaps it starts with trying a new routine, a new approach to questioning, a new take on how we close a lesson. maybe we give up some of our control and hand the learning back to the students. What would it sound like if we were the quietest voice in the room, if we asked but one question and let the students run with it? Alan November asks the question “Who owns the learning?”, to encourage teaching that encourages curiosity and develops self-directed learners. What might our classrooms be like if no one in the room new the answer to the questions that are asked in advance? 
 
As we move from a model of education that sees the teacher as the sage on the stage to a guide on the side, all involved are likely to experience an expanded zone of discomfort. Our students will be required to do much more thinking, collaboration, problem finding and solving. Teachers will not always know how their lessons will evolve, where the learning might lead and there is likely to be more noise. Our classrooms should be a buzz with the energy of inquisitive minds. Questions will be asked for which there are yet no answers. David Perkins describes this elegantly "The agenda of education should not just be passing along the contents of already open boxes but fostering curiosity for those still unopened or barely cracked open.” By stepping outside of our comfort zones, by taking our students out of theirs, we begin a learning journey that will prepare them for a world of unknowns where their willingness to embrace the challenges they face is their strongest weapon.  
 

By Nigel Coutts

Why such a rapid pace of change?

Change fatigue is the response individuals exhibit when the pace of change and the consistency of change becomes too much. Its symptoms are diverse including resistance to change, anxiety, withdrawal and anger. It is not surprising that change fatigue is common in schools, after all change seems to have become a permanent companion and the pace of change only seems to accelerate. For those driving change, there is a constant balancing act that we play between implementing change at the pace we feel is required, while avoiding overload. For those confronting change, there is the easy recourse of blaming those who are driving the change for the anxiety and stress that they feel. Questions are asked and fingers are pointed. Allegations of change for the sake of change are made and purposes are questioned. 
 
In this climate change becomes difficult and complex. The urgency to change is not distributed evenly and some cling defiantly to the past. There is a belief that what worked in the decades before will continue to serve our needs. There is a questioning of the need for change at such a rapid pace. Change after all is nothing new, so why must we change so rapidly now?
 
I am currently reading “Thank you for being late: An optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of accelerations” and have found in this the answer to these questions. In essence we are confronting two types of change, one that we have always faced and one that is unique to our current times. 
 
People and the human systems that unite us into societies change at a slow pace. The pace of change at which people and society change, has altered but a little overtime. We slowly learn and adopt new ways of responding to our world. We develop social systems in response to change and when that change is forced to accelerate the results are often troublesome and chaotic. World Wars, civil unrest, political turmoil, violence and upheaval seem to accompany such times. Our responses to the change do not keep pace and we find ourselves struggling for new ways of functioning. The birth and spread of western democracy or the adjustments to work and the economy that came with the industrial revolution are examples of us adjusting our social systems to cope with change.
 
The other change is that resulting from the exponential growth of technology, population, globalised markets and changes to the very nature of our planet. The difficulty is that all of these changes are occurring at a pace that we are not able to cope with. Take technology alone and consider the implications of Moore’s Law. Named after the cofounder of Intel, Gordon Moore it predicts that processing power will double every two years with little change in cost. Since 1965 this law has held true and for at least the next few cycles is predicted to continue. It is this constant doubling that we humans are not very good at coping with. Thomas Friedman, author of “Thank you for being late” use the story of the inventor of chess to demonstrate the power of this type of growth. The story goes like this, the king liked the newly invented game of chess so very much that he offered its inventor the opportunity to name his reward. A clever man, the inventor asked for enough rice to feed his family. He stipulated that in the first square of a chess board the king should place but a single grain of rice. In the second square twice as many grains as in the first and in the third twice as many as in the second. This pattern repeated still every square was covered with constant doubling from one square to the next. The result is in the order of eighteen quintillion grains of rice. 
 
The initial change that this sort of growth makes seems small. One grain of rice is not significantly less than two or so it seems. In the early days of computers a doubling of speed seemed like barely enough to meet our need for faster processing. But now as Friedman describes we are entering the second half of the chess board. The changes being felt now are significant and we are struggling to keep up. Schools in particular find it hard to keep up with such a rapid pace of change. With most change projects set to occur over seldom less than an academic year and any new idea needing to be accommodated in the following years budget we quickly find that we are embracing outdated changes. 
 
More so than before the affordances of the new processing power are set to change how we interact with technology. Our computer systems backed by access to massive data sets, huge processing power and social networks are altering the way we interact with the world. This is resulting in new ways of doing business, think Uber and Amazon, new demands on information, think of the power of the mobile phone, and new pressures on society, think lifelong learning so that you are able to maximise the opportunities just emerging.
 
Technology is just one area where the pace of global change is outstripping our ability to keep up. While population growth in some parts of the world has slowed in others it is increasing and it is doing so in areas where access to services and quality of life is least. Our social systems have not kept pace with improvements to health care and where mortality rates decline and fertility rates remain high population growth becomes exponential. Our environment faces similar challenges and despite the rhetoric of politics climate change continues to accelerate. 
 
What does this mean for schools? Firstly, we need to accept that we are living in a time of rapid an unprecedented change. That the pace of change is now such that the children we teach today will enter a world of work that is very much divergent from the one we know. They will require a different set of skills to compete in a world that is dominated by an unstable climate, accelerating technology, a larger much more connected population and a market driven by forces of globalisation and acceleration. Change is going to happen whether we like it or not. Moore’s Law will win. 
 
But this does not mean we should despair. While we may not be able to describe the exact opportunities that will emerge from this change, we do have an understanding of the skills which will allow our students to thrive. The capacity to think and behave intelligently with what we know, creativity and a disposition for problem finding, skillful communication and empathy will serve us well. By providing our children with opportunities to collaborate with their peers, to access global networks, to solve problems that matter and to do so through models which are responsive to changing circumstance such as design thinking we can prepare our students to thrive in a world of accelerations.

Highly recommended reading:

Thomas L Friedman (2016) Thank you for being late: An optimists guide to thriving in the age of accelerations.

By Nigel Coutts

The purposes of our pedagogy

The debate over the most effective method of instruction continues as ever and where one stands on the topic is largely influenced by the purposes one attaches to education. Analysing a series of research articles reveals the nature of the debate between advocates of direct instruction compared to those who support a problem based learning methodology. In these articles one can see that the debate centres on the desirable outcomes of learning; either a focus on the acquisition of skills and knowledge taught by the teacher to the student or learning that is focused on rehearsing and applying broad skills for learning. The language and perspective in each article is interesting to note and while the arguments over the benefits of each perspective are interesting it is worth digging beneath the surface and asking how each author imagines learning and its outcomes.
 
Kirschner et al., (2006) argue that minimally guided instruction, which they equate with methods such as inquiry based learning, project based learning or discovery learning is incompatible with what we have come to understand about human cognitive architecture. Human cognitive architecture provides a research based understanding of the processes of learning and define particular limits for how learning occurs and even what it is. Learning is defined as a change in long-term memory and this requires new material or content to be processed in short-term memory and then consciously moved into long-term memory. Factors such as a limitation on the number of chunks which may be held in short-term memory and the duration for which items may be held without rehearsal result in cognitive load as defined by Sweller (2003). Kirschner et al conclude that minimal guided instruction methods increase cognitive load to the point that learning is inhibited; that the additional demands of searching for information, acting with incomplete information and exploring complex environments is too great. They advocate for direct instruction (DI) models of learning as the method of instruction and learning most effective and best informed by human cognitive architecture. They further argue that constructivist approaches have no research base and are aligned with an erroneous belief that teaching in the methodologies of the discipline in which the learning is based is an effective approach. 
 
Schmidt et al., (2006) state that Problem Based Learning is not a form of minimally guided instruction and that it is, contrary to the assertions of Kirschner et al., compatible with human cognitive architecture. Their claim is that PBL provides a scaffolded learning environment which manages cognitive load and by activation of prior learning and elaboration of knowledge. They described PBL as a structured approach aimed at developing 'knowledge about how to interpret and approach problems.’ (Schmidt et al. 2006 p96) and identify issues with the type of assessments used in comparison studies between DI & PBL where the focus is on the efficient learning of 'directly applicable knowledge and focus on “sequestered problem solving”'. (Schmidt et al. 2006 p96) A further point is made regarding the placement of learning within a social setting and the effect that collaborative learning and shared knowledge construction has on reducing individual cognitive load. While PBL occurs within a social setting the assessment of its effect occurs in isolation from this. The authors point to the need to avoid conflating research centred around with individual cognitive load with group-based learning. 
 
Kuhn takes a distinctly different approach and argues that the question of what is to be taught and the broad purposes of education are more important than that which is addressed by Kirschner et al. Kuhn argues that the factors of motivation and the need to prepare learners for an uncertain future should focus our attention on understanding what might be considered by learners as the most important objectives for their education. Kuhn identifies the skills of inquiry and argument as those which most importantly learners need to master and to take ownership of. Kuhn states that students need to experience and understand what it means to be learners and knowers and that the goal of empowering students to be problem-solvers is a better preparation for life than a focus on knowledge transfer can achieve. 

Students are provided with scaffolds for their thinking and guided in their use, but have opportunities to use these tools to solve problems that they find. 

Kuhn’s title (Is direct instruction an answer to the right question?) encourages us to consider the logic behind the selection of the most efficient teaching methodology. If our purposes are the efficient transfer of knowledge from the learned teacher to the student, then DI might be the right answer. In the days of the industrial revolution when the desirable output of the education system was a citizenry with the requisite skills and knowledge to allow participation in the workforce direct instruction was a suitable approach. If our goal is to produce individuals and collectives of them capable of taking charge of their own learning and skilled in the art of problem solving, then we need to focus more on the question of what we shall teach rather than how we might teach it. Only where the curriculum exists as a clearly defined body of knowledge and where the answer to the questions we might ask our students is equally defined should we focus on how that knowledge is best conveyed. 

Seymour Papert says "There is only one 21st Century Skill - And that is the ability to act intelligently when you're faced with a situation for which you have not been specifically prepared."

The school I teach at is increasingly focusing on teaching students to think. Our current focus is on the development of a culture of thinking and teaching for understanding defined as the capacity of students to use what they know in meaningful ways and for the solving of novel problems. Beyond our students being problem solvers we hope that they might become problem finders with the disposition towards life-long learning that will allow them to adjust to changing circumstances. In this philosophy PBL is more what we teach than how we teach. As Kuhn suggest we utilise methods of DI as appropriate but this is largely to scaffold the skills of inquiry, knowledge sharing and knowledge making. The problems our students engage with have multiple solutions in alignment with the types of complexity which Schmidt et al., identify as the norm in PBL learning. The challenge is that this style of teaching is not the norm. To embrace a student centred approach to learning with the skills and dispositions of PBL as central tenets of our teaching requires a shift away from teaching for the accumulation of knowledge.

By Nigel Coutts
 
Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J. & Clark, R.E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41, 75-86.
 
Kuhn, D. (2007). Is direct instruction an answer to the right question? Educational Psychologist, 42(2), 109- 113.
 
Schmidt,H.,Loyens,S., VanGog,T.,& Paas,F.(2007).Problem-BasedLearningisCompatiblewithHuman Cognitive Architecture: Commentary on Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) Educational Psychologist, 42(2), 91-97
 
 

Avoiding Assessment Mistakes

Assessment is arguably the piece of the learning cycle we get most wrong. Whether looked at from the perspective of the learner, the teacher, the school administrator, the politician or the parent, assessment is misunderstood and poorly utilised as a tool for learning. The importance of changing this situation is only made more salient in light of the countless research studies from the likes of Jon Hattie & Dylan Wiliam that points to the power of effective assessment. So, what are the common mistakes and how might we avoid them?

Effective assessment is a part of the learning process. In their book "Mindful Assessment: The 6 essential fluencies of innovative learning”, Crockett & Churches compare assessment to the processes driving lean startups. The fledgling startup aims to develop a product that is a just viable product and rapidly releases this to market. The product launch begins an immediate process of product evaluation driven by user feedback. Through a rapid process of iteration and refinement the product evolves to meet the needs of the market. This is how assessment of learning should be. The learner feels comfortable sharing their learning in progress, they don’t need to wait for it to be a polished piece of work before they share. Feedback is sought early and the feedback provided is specific and allows for improvement. The learner makes changes and adjustments based on the feedback, the process repeats. With each cycle of feedback the learner moves closer to their goal but the process never stops.

Effective assessment is timely. This is where we make the biggest mistake. Assessment is seen as an end point by the learner and by the teacher. This is made very clear when the assessment is placed at the end of a unit of learning and feedback is then provided after the learning has occurred. The concluding assessment, the final test at the end of the unit send a message to the learner that assessment is the end of the learning process. According to Dylan Wiliam, "It is formative only if the information is used by the learner in making improvements that actually take their own learning forward. That is why to be formative, assessment must include a recipe for future action.” When assessment is only provided at the end of the unit, or the most valued assessment occurs at the end of the unit, it offers no opportunity for adjustment and sends a clear message that learning is not a continuous process.

Timely assessment needs to occur as close to the performance of understanding as possible. If you are coaching a child to catch a ball you go through the process and after each turn offer feedback. “Keep your eye on the ball”, “relax your arms as the ball hits your hands”, “move your body so it is behind the ball”, “don’t overreach”. You back the verbal feedback with modelling of the desired actions, you make adjustments to the throw of the ball to allow for success, you allow multiple practice opportunities and over time you praise improvement even when the growth is small. If we learned to catch the way we might learn mathematics or writing we would be given one or two examples, be left alone to apply the new skill and then be given an assessment of our ability. More than likely the result would be in the form of a grade or percentage and we would be left with few if any insights as to why the ball continually ended up at our feet. 

We value grades and percentages more than quality feedback. The disappointing reality is that when we are given are grade or a percentage as feedback on an assessment no learning occurs. Indeed, the damage goes deeper and impacts our desire to learn. Where grades are offered Ruth Butler found that interest and performance declined, where only comments were provided the opposite was true. If both comments and grades were provided the results paralleled those achieved with grades alone. A grade sends a clear message to the learner that the learning is done with according to Crockett and Churches, and a grade handed down by a teacher removes learner agency from the equation. Apply the typical pattern of assessment and grading to the process of building a house. The foundation is laid and assessed with a percentage for overall quality of say 75% and a B grade. By this stage the framers are on the job having started while the foundation’s assessment was still being processed, when they finish they achieve a percentage of 80%, slightly better than the foundation but clearly with room for improvement. The roof follows, the bricks are laid and in no time at all the house is found to be falling behind code, a building certificate is never issued and the house is condemned. The trouble is the fundamental issues with the foundation and each subsequent step were never addressed. Now imagine the same process applied to a child’s years of schooling and it is little wonder that we have students with significant learning gaps. Sadly, as Lane Clark points out we are too busy moving on to the “Electricity” unit to stop and address any issues.

Assessment needs to be of the learning that matters. We know that the skills which will matter most for success in the "age of accelerations” (See Friedman - Thank You for Being Late) are critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, an innovators mindset and a good grasp of models for problem finding and solving such as design thinking. But, this is not what we traditionally assess. Instead we test for recall of information, an awareness of basic theorems and the formulaic application of knowledge, all of which is easily replaced by machine learning or artificial intelligence. Testing for the skills valued in the 21st century, assessing socio-emotional intelligence and the capacity to function effectively within dynamic teams is difficult to do at scale, so we instead measure what is easy to measure. The trouble is in doing so we assign an inflated value to the parts of the curriculum which matter least and then lock ourselves in to teaching for these skills even when we know they are obsolete. The truly sad part is that the assessments we cling to and that drive so much of what we do in schools, are no longer valued by universities and employers; the very people we designed them to serve. 

Education needs to be about more than placing students on a curve. If the only purpose that years of formal education serves is the ranking of children, then we are wasting our time. The factors which result in individual success are diverse and there are better more efficient measures which might serve our needs. To better understand the confluence of factors which on average result in success read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The story of success”. The emergence of ‘Big Data’ is only likely to provide us with new approaches to identifying those whose life circumstances and biology prepare them for any specific role, but surely this not a direction we wish to pursue.

Assessment needs to involve the learner more so than any other person. Hattie found that the empowerment and self-regulation that is achieved when students become skilled in methods for self-assessment had the highest effect size. Dylan Wiliam identifies three critical agents for assessment; self, teacher and peer. Self-assessment is critical in activating students as owners of their learning according to Wiliam and as such is a critical component of life-long learning where learning continues beyond the classroom. 

If we wish to cling to traditional methods of assessment and view the first twelve years of schooling as little more than preparation for the final school assessment, we need to acknowledge at least one rather disturbing reality; most of what we teach and assess is rapidly forgotten. "From this perspective, the research on educational attainment is especially disheartening. For more than 75 years, studies have consistently found that only a small fraction of what is learned in the classroom is retained even a year after learning.” (Matthew Lieberman (2012) Education and the Social Brain. Trends in Neuroscience and Education 1 (2012) 3–9) Unless we take the time to develop assessment processes that clearly reveals to all concerned, where our learners are with their learning, where they are going and how to get there, this situation is unlikely to change. 

By Nigel Coutts

Learn more about quality assessment:

Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical techniques for k-12 classrooms by Dylan Wiliam & Siobhan Leahy

Mindful Assessment: The 6 essential fluencies of innovative learning by Lee Watnabe Crockett & Andrew Churches

The Formative Assessment Action Plan: Practical steps to more successful teaching and learning by Nancy Frey & Douglas Fisher

Assessing 21st Century Skills: A guide to evaluating mastery and authentic learning by Laura Greenstein

The Power of Feedback in Review of Educational Research by John Hattie & Helen Timperley

And you might also like:

Thank you for being late: An optimists guide to thriving in the age of accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

Outliers: The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell

Reflections on a service trip to Fiji

Recently I left the cold and dark of a Sydney winter and journeyed north to the warmer climate of Fiji. A jewel dropped in the warm waters of the Pacific, Fiji is a popular holiday destination for those looking for a tropical escape. This trip was very different from the norm. There would be no resorts, no five-star dining and my company was to be a group of 24 Year Nine students. It was to be a journey full of learning and insights into the challenges facing education. 
 
For the students, this trip was a part of a 'school service’ that encourages them to take positive action for a better world. Charitable donations of cash are an easy and painless step for those from a privileged community; giving of your own time, energy and sweat requires a far greater contribution. While in Fiji the students visited villages, a women’s refuge and threatened coastal environments and spent days in the hot sun making a genuine contribution. Our tour provider was Rustic Pathways, a company whose "mission is to empower students through innovative and responsible travel to positively impact lives and communities around the world.” Rustic Pathway provided the students with opportunities to engage with the true culture of Fiji, to experience life in a village through homestays and to give back by participating in projects that were identified by the local communities. 
 
The cultural learning for the students was a highlight of the trip. This was at its peak while in the Highland village of Nasivikoso. Nestled in the remote highlands and accessed by dirt roads and four-wheel drive ‘carriers’ the village exists on the boundary between the world of the 21st century and a traditional way of life. Technology is slowly creeping into Nasivikoso; mobile phone access exists in parts, a limited electricity, a satellite dish at the school and flushing toilets. There is a feeling that even these remote places the reach of the connected world of information technology is not far from having a much greater impact. The true story of life in Nasivikoso lies in the stories of its people. The community is welcoming and open. We were invited into homes and became members of the families with which we lived. it quickly become obvious that the usual boundaries between families does not apply here. Children come and go from the houses and all have an open door to visitors. No one goes without a bed or a feed and it is harder to be alone than to be part of a group. 
 
Perception is everything but when it is biased by our cultural understanding it can serve our understandings poorly. The people of Nasivikoso live a life with very few of the luxuries we take for granted. We complain mightily if we must do without hot water or electricity for a night, here this is the norm. Clean clothes, a comfortable bed, a kitchen with a fridge and a stove are novel ideas in Nasivikoso. It was a shift in mindset for our students to understand how the children of the village could be so happy despite what seemed to be missing from their lives. This was the moment when the learning really kicked in. That moment when you recognise that your world view doesn't fit with the evidence in front of you. Our students started to understand the complexity that exists for westerners looking to enhance the lives of people in developing nations. The easy response is to seek a path towards rapid modernisation, an imposed process of bringing them with us into the 21st century. The flaw in this process is that it is based on a misunderstanding of what the community needs most. Only partnerships and programmes that never diminish the agency of the community can hope to bring meaningful long term change. 

The children of Nasivikoso are its most powerful ambassadors. They are joyful balls of energy, naturally curious and always ready to play. A favourite game is to use a halved plastic 25 litre cooking oil drum as a makeshift toboggan to race down the grass slope in the centre of the village. The strength and physical dexterity of the local children was remarkable and put to good use as they claimed the walls of the nearby waterfall with ease and a total absence of fear. Such experiences of exploration and risk taking are for the most part filtered out of the lives of children in Australia in the name of safety, but what is the cost of the “Nanny State” to the lives our children live. 
 
An instant bond was made between our Year Nine students and local children. A highlight of the visit was watching the children play together with paper planes that had been made together as part of a lesson taught by our students. The delight on everyone’s faces was a reminder that happiness is best found in the simple connections between people engaged in play. The final evening was filled with dancing and song and not just a few tears as farewells were made. 
 
The visit to Nasivikoso left us all questioning our priorities. We are all less likely to complain the next time the WiFi goes down, we will all cherish the little things that genuinely matter to us a little more; the people we care about, our friendships and loved ones. This is where service programmes rather than charity drives make a real difference. The powerful contextualised and situated learning that the tour offered our students has changed their perception of the world. They understand that they live a life of privilege and that there are others who live happy lives full of love and joy with much less. They became members of a community and understood what life is like for children in a remote village where fun is found playing with their mates. Back home they might notice how few are the opportunities to play with the other kids in their neighbourhoods. They are unlikely to spend their afternoons climbing a cliff, catching a baby goat or sliding down a hill in a barrel. They might well find they miss a life where such simple pleasures are missing. 
 
Time will continue to change Nasivikoso. Technology will creep further into the life of the village. There are great benefits to be had and opportunities to do things better and smarter than what is the norm elsewhere. Solar powered lights are already bringing light into the dark huts reducing the reliance on kerosene lamps. Larger scale solar projects could have a significant effect and the expansion of digital networks and mobile internet cannot be far off. The impacts to the changes soon to wash over the people of Nasivikoso will be challenging and great empathy will be required if the best parts of village life are not to be replaced with the downsides of the modern western world. 

The challenge for education systems as they confront the pace of change is immense. The methods used traditionally struggle with the pace of change and scale poorly and yet the challenge will be to develop a system that is at once agile and able to scale and millions if not billions of new learners turn to education as the doorway to a brighter future. In a country like Fiji with a need to increase its capacity to provide for the needs of its citizens, education must be rooted in the realities of the skills needed for building infrastructure and meeting basic needs. Beyond this there is a need here as in countries like Australia for an educated youth capable of finding better solutions to old problems and new opportunities for growth in markets yet to be created. The positive message from the children of Nasivikoso is that they are naturally inquisitive and wanting to learn, all they need are the right tools. 

 
 By Nigel Coutts

On the path to creativity

We all understand that creativity is an important skill for the future and we want our students to leave our classrooms with what David & Tom Kelley of IDEO call creative confidence. A quick read of the introductory chapter of any book on the future of the workplace will reveal an emphasis on the importance of creativity for individual and organisational success. As one of the four or alternatively five Cs (the others are critical thinking/reflection, collaboration, communication and often compassion) creativity is part of a skill set that differentiates human capacities from those readily replaced by automation and artificial intelligence. The difficulty with creativity is it is not easy and perhaps thanks to our experience of schooling not a natural attribute of many adults. What creativity needs is a process and/or a structure that allows us to bring our intellect to the development of creative solutions.

While we often refer to the need to think outside the box, as Ewan Macintosh of ‘NoTosh’ points out, we need the box when it provides the just necessary structure to scaffold our thinking. The more creative we need to be the more we need some structure to keep us on track. For educators, there are other reasons to provide a process to scaffold creativity. Asking our students to ‘be more creative’ without some scaffold is a strategy doomed to fail. If our goal is to keep our students within a zone of proximal development as defined by Lev Vygotsky, then we need to provide a scaffold that will take their capacity for creative problem-solving to a level beyond where they currently are and where they can only achieve success with appropriate scaffolding. Further when we seek to assess creativity and offer feedback on what has been achieved and feed-forward on where the learner can go next we need a process against which we can track progress. To only assess the end product will leave the students with little guidance as to how they may enhance their next effort. Without a process, students are left to be continually guessing at how they should approach the next challenge.

Finding this process was the focus of a workshop offered by University of Newcastle, Sydney as part of Vivid Ideas. Led by John Scott participants were introduced to five approaches to creativity which can be readily used with teams to enhance the results of their creative endeavours. Each offers a process that can be applied to a variety of problems and a common language that can be used within teams as they learn together. 

The first invites team members to state and restate the problem. A seemingly simple step but one that encourages a full understanding of the problem and encourages seeing it from alternative perspectives. Restating the problem is an excellent check of understanding and will often reveal a better approach towards a solution. Strategies such as rephrasing the problem using positive instead of negative terms, identifying persuasive or opinionated words or drawing a picture or diagram of the problem were suggested. 

A model of design thinking modified from the IDEO d.School model

Design Thinking was offered as a solution to complex problems where a highly iterative process is useful. Design thinking is becoming increasingly popular in schools and is even being included in state and national curriculums. It is a process which has been explored elsewhere on this site and there are many models which might be adapted to suit an organisation or a particular problem. Perhaps the key understanding is that it is a process which is based on experimentation and rapid prototyping. For it to be successfully embraced by organisations there must be a culture that is tolerant of failure as without this playful ideation and iteration will not occur. 

Read More about Design Thinking

This model of design thinking has been successful with Year Two students

Agile and Lean processes were explored as possible processes. Agile brings a process focused on user stories and a rapid process for responding. Agile is very much problem solving by doing and with each cycle producing a ‘done’ component of the larger solution it allows for rapid progress. Having identified a user story, self-organising teams enter a ‘sprint’ to identify and implement the first part of the solution or response. Individuals opt into what is called a ‘scrum’ which is the core unit of a ‘sprint’ based on their desire to play a part in that part of the solution. Lean is about identifying and removing waste and continuous improvement. By understanding what is there and always looking for ways to improve what is done, teams can develop enhanced products and operations. A key ingredient in ‘Lean’ is respect for the the perspective and problems confronting every stakeholder. Part of the strategy is understanding how processes and systems impact individuals and groups and then taking appropriate actions. 

The final approach is the use of Edward de Bono’s thinker hats. The 'Six Thinking Hats’ are a common element in classrooms and it was interesting to see this methodology being shared with a mixed audience. It would be interesting to see the hats being worn in the executive suite of a large corporation. Each hat asks the wearer to engage with a different mode of thinking. White hat thinkers are analytical and interested in facts, figures and information. Red hat thinking is about emotion and feeling, the Black hat is critical and full of judgement. Yellow hat thinking is positive and seeks to explain why an idea will work and the benefits it brings. Green hats bring alternatives and Blue hats look at the big picture and bring a reflective, metacognitive approach to the overall process; an understanding of how the creative process is unfolding and what type of thinking it might require more of. The Six Hat process works best when each hat is given a voice and understanding the value that each hat brings to an individual’s or team’s thinking encourages this. It should not be a process of labelling the thinking style most commonly adopted by a team member but a way to bring new thinking modes into their repertoire. 

With an understanding of a set of processes for creativity the team and individual should be better able to approach complex challenges. As mastery of the methods is developed new opportunities can be created by blending elements of one approach with another. Knowing when to break the rules comes with experience and maturity and allows the right approach to be matched to the context. In seeking to maximise the creativity of individuals and teams perhaps the most critical element is a willingness to embrace failure. There is no method guaranteed to produce desirable results the first time but a culture that punishes failure will always limit its creative potential. 

Reflections from EduTech 2017

EduTech in Sydney has been a remarkable experience. A grand celebration of education and an energising gathering of educators ready to share stories and make connections. Despite the rainy weather some 8000 educators came together in the inspiring new International Convention Centre at Darling Harbour and left two days later with heads full of new ideas and wonderings of what might be the future of education. With many ideas still bubbling away here is a brief list of the key take-aways.

Transformation and Change - Not a new trend but as Greg Whitby, of Catholic Education’s Parramatta Diocese says we are confronting the "Radical Urgency of the Now”. The changes which once seemed a long way off are closer than we suspected and our current cohort of five year olds will exit school into a world we may not have prepared them for. The challenge is clear; we must focus now on developing the skills they will require to flourish in a world defined by rapid change, ever increasing technological integration and workplace vastly different to what we have today. Jan Owen of the Foundation for Young Australians concluded the conference with the following statistic: 7 in 10 jobs to be disrupted in the next 5 to 10 years. We are beyond the time when we the goal of improving education will be sufficient, we are in a time that requires transformation.

Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Human Understanding - If there is a single consistent message emerging from industry, futurists and forward looking educators it is that we know what capacities will be required for success in the near future and they are not new skills. Amidst the catastrophising and predictions of a future bereft of employment opportunities emerges a vision for the future where the most desired skills are ones we have known for the longest of times. The trick will be placing these at the centre of our curriculums and providing students with opportunities across all aspects of their learning to engage and extend these capacities. As we move from a pedagogy dominated by the transfer of knowledge to one focused on building learner dispositions the role of the learner and the teacher are both disrupted. Collaborative learning, a focus on the capacity to act intelligently with the available knowledge and rich experiences of problem finding and solving will become the norm. 

We all need to take charge of our learning - Learning is the focus of all that occurs in education and will be a central theme throughout our lives. More importantly, learning is something we need to take ownership of. Once something that happened to us while in school and then at university, learning now is something we are very much in control of. The implications for teachers are profound and some will struggle to adjust their identity to fit the new model. Learner agency, learner empowerment and fortunately teacher agency, are phrases moving into the regular vocabulary of schools and the consequences of this are there to be explored. 

Technology is Maturing - With each iteration we draw closer to a time where technology just works, is a part of the environment that we can take for granted. The signs of this maturity are seen in the products on show in the Expo hall. Travel back a few years and you would leave an expo like this having seen many new products and even a few new product categories. In 2017 the products on show for the most part a refinement of what was already there; a little faster, a little lighter, thinner and more polished but there was very little truly ground breaking hardware on show. 

Virtual Reality and Artificial Reality are Coming - If there is an emerging category of technology it is perhaps VR and AR, although neither was heavily presented here. Google had its CardBoard headsets available through a vending machine, which perhaps signals that even this technology has transitioned into the mainstream. 

Artificial Intelligence - The predicted impact that Artificial Intelligence will have played a significant impact in many of the presentations. Driverless cars, automated workflows replacing cognitive labour and the shifts that all of this will bring to the workplace were described as significant drivers of change. However, there was little of this technology on display. The visible aspect of this, other than the digital assistants baked into phones, laptops and increasingly stand-alone devices such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, is for the most part not a consuming facing product yet. 

Robots may be the future of coding - Robots are increasingly the pathway to teaching coding. From SPHERO to larger humanoid robots and drones the education market is full of options and each one is sold as the answer to teaching kids to code. The translation of code into physical movement makes many principles behind coding accessible to students but there is the danger that this reliance could allow a deeper understanding of computational thinking to be missed thanks to a focus on instructional flows. 

Commercial Products vs Hacking and Making - There are two approaches to technology on display in the expo booths and the reveal vastly divergent mindsets. At one end are the commercial robots and 'internet of things' (IOT) devices with their out of the box operability. Plug and play technology for the masses. At the other end of the scale are the vendors selling kits of electronics which with the addition of "systems on a chip” such as Arduino boards and Raspberry Pi systems allow all manner of projects to be hacked together. While those with the money are likely to be tempted by the convenience of the commercial products, educators will have to ask series questions about what learning their technology spend will produce for their students. If we want a generation of problem finders and solvers who are adept at tinkering with ideas and hacking new solutions into existence, we will need to provide suitable opportunities for this. 

And lastly the acceptance of Growth Mindset theory seems to be complete even if the practical implications are yet to be fully integrated into our pedagogy. Carol Dweck’s presentation was a solid highlight for many attendees who left with a fuller understanding of the complexity of our efforts to shift students towards a growth mindset. With growth mindsets as our goal we now need to look closely at the forces that contribute to an individual’s and even an organisation’s mindset and recognise that the desired change will require much more than kind words.  

By Nigel Coutts

Learning by playing, tinkering and making

Last Thursday I snuck out of school and spent the day playing. I hope by boss finds out, he thinks I was just doing professional development. 

I was not alone either. Thanks to Bondi Beach Public School a large group of teachers gathered in the library and under the guidance of Dr. Gary Stager of "Invent To Learn" spent the day immersed in play. We played a computer game, played with blocks, had fun playing with some art and craft materials and finished the day making toy birds. The silent introspection so traditional of professional development days was replaced by noise and laughter as we shared ideas and explored the possibilities presented to us.

The play we were engaged in was the sort of richly purposeful play that requires mental engagement. We were finding and solving problems, learning new tools and developing skills we thought only brilliant technologists possessed. We made mistakes. We made more mistakes and many of our ideas failed and not only the first time. We persisted. We asked questions of each other and by doing so found possible answers. Our instructor knew when to leave us alone, knew when to let us struggle with our problem a little longer and knew when to offer just enough salvation to keep us moving in the right direction. 

We had the right tools to make learning possible. Nothing fancy for the most part. Some software that had us exploring coding and understanding how inputs would produce the desired output. We thought we were just drawing. Turtle Art provides the learner with a deceptively complex learning environment. A friendly turtle, a simple interface of blocks that are dragged onto a blank screen and locked together into a chain of commands. Learning the basics is easy, going further is alluring and before long you are asking meaningful questions about the code you are producing as you wonder how you can create a desired pattern on screen or how you can simplify the code. Turtle Art was our introduction and it played the foundation for what was to come later in the day.

We played with "Little Bits” a tool for prototyping advanced electrical circuits. A large supply of blocks was available for us to experiment with, each bringing a new option to the circuits we constructed. Speakers, lights, switches, motors, servos, coloured LEDs, and sliders were available in the basic kit. Each block connects to another with magnets and each block only fits one way ensuring the right connection is made. More advanced blocks allow coding and computational control to be introduced and advanced prototypes can be quickly assembled in a solder free way. 

Playing with copper tape and conductive thread allowed for and exploration of wearable technology. Clothes with lights and buzzers were tested and proudly displayed. Some members of the group explored the possibilities of Arduino boards while some played with Lego. By the afternoon we were gaining confidence and sharing ideas for how we would take our new learning back to our students. We understood what Gary meant when he told us that "Knowledge is a consequence of experience” and "There is no substitute for the experience”. 

In the afternoon, we tried at our hands at making cardboard robots with motors, lights and servos controlled by a small PC on a chip called a “Hummingbird”. This was our culminating performance of understanding and required us to use all of the skills we had developed throughout the day. The results were, to be honest, rather ordinary. 

Not our work, an example of what is possible from HummingBird.Com

What we gained from the day was an understanding of the power of learning by doing and through play. There were no lectures. No text books, grades or tests. There were lots of opportunities to collaborate, to problem find and problem solve. We needed to be creative and the environment encouraged us to be so. We assessed the results of our thinking as we went, sought peer feedback and our tutor observed our efforts closely and knew where we were with our learning. We persisted with the challenges not because we had to but because we wanted to. We were engaged with our learning. 

Play is a vital tool for learning. It should be vital part of every child’s learning; the norm rather than the exception and we leave it behind as we become adults to our own peril. 

By Nigel Coutts with thanks to Bondi Beach Primary School @BondiBeachPS

The art of modern writing

Learning to write is one of the fundamental skills we gain from our time at school. Writing is one of the cornerstones of learning and we devote significant time and energy towards its mastery. Skilled writing is a mark of an educated individual and a skill required for academic success. But in the modern world what makes a skilled writer? What has changed about writing and what literary skills should we focus our attention on. 

Clearly writing has changed since the time of Shakespeare. For one our vocabulary has greatly increased and the fine art of penmanship is today much more ‘art’ than highly prized talent. We write more today than in perhaps any previous period of history and yet somehow it seems that what we write has less value. Our disposable society has spawned a seemingly endless chain of disposable messages, emails and tweets that are spewed into the ether never to be seen again. Letters lovingly written by hand on paper and transported through rain and snow by tireless mail services have been replaced by the instantaneous transmission of ideas which are dealt with in seconds and discarded. 

On social media, we share the most mundane events of our lives publishing our every passing thought for the world to see. A cacophony of voices writing the story of us all in 140 characters or less and read in full by no one but the artificial intelligence used to decipher what the next great fad might be. We have media articles written for us by computers, rely on our devices to correct our spelling and sign our correspondences with “Sent from iPhone” so that our poor grammar is forgiven.

Some of us do try to cling to the traditions of quality writing and the beauty of the ‘Queens English’. We mock those foolish enough to split their infinitives and debate the merits of the Oxford comma. Words are our friends and punctuation our sword. We delight in our propensities for expansively, expressive vocabulary and ignore the reality that most people read nothing beyond our first paragraph. Sadly, beyond the most academic of tomes our skilled writing is ill appreciated if not plainly mocked.

Why write a page when a paragraph serves as well? An email shall not be read if it is longer than one-hundred words and no policy document should exceed one page. Dot points are not only acceptable in most communication, they are widely appreciated by the time poor reader who needs to cut to the chase. Quality writing will include a 'top ten' and should allow the reader to spilt their attention between reading, driving and chatting on the phone. 

Clearly writing is not what it once was but not a lot has changed in schools. The traditional three-part essay is still taught, as is letter writing. Handwriting is a skill valued for its use on standardised assessments even though we recognise it will be used beyond school for little besides personal notes, lists and the occasional form which has not yet migrated to a digital format. Students for the most part do not learn how to compose emails and tweets are not touched on at all. Newspaper articles are written modelled after the fine work of Woodward and Bernstein but we do not teach how to compose the perfect "and you want believe what happens next” headline. 

This does not mean that the skill of the writer is diminished only that it has changed. A well composed email can influence the direction of a government. Carefully constructed Tweets reach a global audience. Amidst the bland and the ordinary those who have mastered modern writing will still be noticed. It is our understanding of what makes for effective writing in the modern age that needs a rethink.

Great writers have always written with their purpose and audience in mind. What am I writing for? and what do I hope to achieve? are the questions which should guide our constructions. Today how we answer this dictates the form our written communications should take and there is much to consider. Maybe I am writing for a global audience. If I am, then how will machine translation alter my message? Skilled writers will consider this as they compose their thoughts and select words and phrasings which survive the process with their message intact. What device will this be read on? Am I aiming at a mobile audience where screen size and data rates favour brevity? While scorned by traditionalists and an older generation of readers, the use of emoji might hit the mark perfectly with the right audience. Is my purpose to quickly communicate a few key points or is this part of a more nuanced conversation full of subtlety? What font should I choose? What colours might I use? Should the headings be bolded or underlined? Many are the decisions that the modern writer must make. 

If educators cling to traditional forms of writing when will our children learn to master the diverse styles they will require for survival in the real world? Do we hope that an understanding of classical writing can be transferred suitably to less stringent contemporary forms or should we seek to empower our students as skilled communicators able to master writing in all its forms?

By Nigel Coutts

Creativity is a beautiful, messy, chaotic thing

Collaborative creativity is a beautiful thing to see in action. Picture a room full of students engaged by a creative challenge. Groups of children loudly and forcibly stating their opinions. Each offering a different perspective on what might be achieved. A tumultuous free flowing exchange of ideas carried along by the voices of the excited participants. Drawings are exchanged, arguments come and go, gradually consensus is reached and forward progress is made but only for a moment before chaos returns. This is the scene that visitors to Year Six would have found early on Friday morning.

This scene of chaos had its origins in an inspiring presentation by artist, author, musician and educator Boori Pryor. Through his natural style of storytelling, coloured by music and dance Boori brings alive his culture and provides the perfect stimulus for the creative challenge that lies ahead. His story comes to life and he has every student dancing as the telling moves from the orator into the hearts, minds and bodies of his audience. The magic of his style is that he becomes one with the audience and the story becomes their story. With such an inspired beginning to the day it is not surprising that the creative passions of the students are set free.

With their imaginations set free the students confront the challenge of telling a part of the story through collaborative art with vim and vigour. Canvases are provided, paints distributed and with pencils, paper and enthusiastic debate the process of transforming ideas into workable plans begins. Participation is active, visceral, physical and loud. Listening skills are abandoned and chaos rules. Take a step back from the noise and you can see ideas begin to emerge. Each group of ten or twelve students begins to explore what it is they need to achieve and an understanding of the possibilities of the task emerges. The noise starts to come in stops and starts. Leaders begin to emerge and bring order to the mess. Ideas worth further exploration bubble forth while others slip out of the way. From the chaos merges a sense of order. 

Come back an hour later and you find the groups all functioning under a new paradigm. Decisions have been made and the process of transforming rough plans into a finished artwork is well under way. Cooperation is the new norm. Overlapping spaces and patterns of movement allow the artists to create together, alongside and with each other like dancers. The shouting and arguing is replaced with jovial conversations, encouraging observations of another performance and occasional renditions of ABBA classics. This is not the image of school students learning invoked by rows of desks, neat uniforms and teacher sermonising from the front of the room. This is real learning owned by the students and with their teachers as collaborators and facilitators of learning who know when to step out of the way and let things happen. 

The results are amazing. The once blank canvases are wholly transformed into magical renderings of the shared story. Each artwork captures the spirit of each artist who touched it. More than that the students have had an experience of learning that transcends the time allowed to it. They are each subtly changed but the experience and have ricer understandings of their place in the stories that ultimately unite us all. They have risen to new challenges and shown that they are capable of great things when they come together and participate in creative endeavours. 

At the end of the day all involved are exhausted and yet at the same time buoyed up by the positive feelings that flow from what has been achieved. Creativity is hard work. it is messy and times frustrating. It requires an embrace of chaos and is ill served by the structures of traditional schooling. It requires inspiration and is fueled by collaborations. Creativity is often said to be the key to the future. The essentially human attribute that will ensure our utility in a world dominated by automation. It is said to be an essential ingredient in education but it will not be truly learned unless we provide students with opportunities to dive fully into its waters. 

By Nigel Coutts with thanks to Boori Monty Pryor and the Year Six Team @Redlands_School

Learn more about Boori Monty Pryor  -  or access his new film  - for school visits contact Young Australis Workshops

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Growth Mindsets in the Great Outdoors

School camps are a wonderful opportunity to observe how our students handle the challenge of a different learning setting. Away from the norms and familiar settings of the classroom, we see students in a different light. For the students, camps are an exciting and for some frightening challenge. For teachers, they are an outstanding assessment tool that should inform our practices long after camp is over. 

For the students camp will bring many diverse challenges. For some the biggest challenge will be managing their feelings of homesickness. For some camp will be their first experience away from the comforts of home and company of parents and siblings. The time away from home and possibly even the distances involved travel wise creates a sense of separation that can be difficult. Teachers know that this is always worse during the quiet times between activities and as the sun sets will be on the lookout for those struggling with anxiety. 

For many students, the challenge of camp will be associated with a particular activity. Maybe it is something well known to induce fear like abseiling or a night in a tent surrounded by a thousand and one frightening creatures all determined to turn you into dinner. Some students know their challenge points well in advance of camp, others discover theirs when first confronted by it. Many a student has discovered their fear of heights only at that moment as they lean back over the edge of a cliff with nothing but a slender rope holding them in place. Only at that moment does their previously resilient demeanour turn to jelly and they find themselves overwhelmed. 

Camp will also reveal to us the students who thrive in this alternate learning environment. It might be the student who struggles at school who discovers at camp the conditions they need to achieve to their fullest potential. Freed from the demands to sits still, pay attention and solve problems with their mind detached from their body they find the physicality of camp suits their learning style. There will also be those who show a quiet confidence in the new setting. They accept the challenges that are placed in front of them, calmly rise to the occasion and succeed thanks to their grit and determination. 

For teachers camp is a rich assessment opportunity. If we wish to fully understand our students we need to see how they deal with the unfamiliar. This is particularly important if we are to understand the mindset of our students. What camp reveals is those in our student body who might display the hallmarks of a growth mindset in the familiar and comfortable setting of the classroom but are unable to transfer this to a new setting. Alternatively, it reveals those who show a fixed mindset in the classroom but are able to attack the challenges of camp with the grit and determination we wish they exhibited in a mathematics lesson. It is a common misunderstanding of the theory of growth mindsets that allows us to imagine that we do not all struggle with aspects of a fixed mindset. 

New perspectives of our learners' emerge as fresh demands on their determination, habits of mind, empathy, social understanding and capacities for collaboration are invoked by the experience of camp. 

What becomes very clear is that the context of learning plays an important part in the outcomes achieved. If we wish to have every child in our class experience success on a regular basis, how will we bring the challenges and triumphs of the camp experience into their everyday experience of learning? How will we challenge those who find the specific learning environment of the classroom a perfect match to their needs? How do we help those whose first or only experience of success with learning happens while at camp? It was once OK to believe that the learner must adapt to the setting and the context of academic learning. Turning to the business world we see an understanding of the value that comes from adjusting the context to the needs of the individual. Gone or going are the tightly controlled and highly structured work environments that were the norm. The challenge for schools is to find ways to adjust the context of learning to suit the needs of every individual while ensuring every individual is prepared for whatever might lay ahead. 

By Nigel Coutts

Transforming Homework to Home Learning

Each night in homes across the globe young people and adults prepare to do battle over the completion of homework. Parents often have strong beliefs about homework and its benefits for student success and believe their involvement in its completion is a key measure of successful parenting a view supported by Jeynes’ (2007) analysis of parental involvement in home learning. Students by contrast see homework as a burden that takes them away from family time and time with their friends. John Hattie speaking in an interview with BBC radio in August 2014 said ‘Homework in primary school has an effect of around zero. In high school, it’s larger. Which is why we need to get it right… Treat the zero as saying, “It’s probably not making much of a difference but let’s improve it”.

A recent strategy to alter the negative image that homework has built is to re-brand it as “home learning”. But is this enough and if we are going to “get it right” what do we need to change besides the name?

Research on home learning conducted by Jianzhong Xu (2012) concluded that teachers needed to focus on ‘designing more interesting, well-selected, and adequately difficult and challenging home learning assignments’ if they wish to improve the effectiveness of their instruction. Xu adds that the time spent on home learning compared to the effort applied can indicate aspects of student motivation Students who choose to engage with distractions such as games or social networking according to Xu choose to do so because they are not motivated to complete their home learning. Xu concludes it is important to listen to students and find ways to make home learning more interesting. This contrasts starkly with the traditional approach that blames and punishes students for not completing home learning on time. 

According to Xu ‘This, in turn, will further promote students' self-efficacy, self-regulatory skills, and responsibility for managing their own home learning.’(Xu. 2012 p192) Research by Harris Cooper (2003) indicates that home learning does promote academic achievement in high-school students, has a reduced effect in junior-high and no effect in elementary school. Cooper states that ‘Home learning should be one of several approaches we use, along with soccer and scouts, to show our children that learning takes place everywhere. (Cooper. 2001 p38) Cooper acknowledges that home learning can have non-academic benefits for students in the primary grades where it can help students recognise that they can learn at home, it fosters independence and responsible character traits. But for these goals to be achieved students will need to appreciate and value the purpose of the learning that they engage with. 

In a 2012 meta-analysis Cooper, Steenbergen-Hu and Dent (2012) report that ‘individualised home learning assignments, particularly those assigned according to students’ learning styles, outperform un-individualised ones in terms of improving student achievement, attitudes, or conduct.’ Educator and blogger Mark Barnes refers to Cooper’s research in a post where he asks ‘When will the home learning madness end’. Barnes questions the value of homework that is enforced in a punitive way and denies students the opportunity to develop responsibility and independence. A valuable goal for home learning is that can facilitate self-regulated learning and set patterns of behaviour which are a foundation for adults who are self-navigating professional learners. This goal might be best supported by parents who engage with personally purposeful learning alongside their children rather than committing energy to homework enforcement. 

Choice is a factor linked to student engagement and a method used for individualizing home learning. Patall, Cooper and Robinson (2008 p 294) found ‘The conclusion that can be drawn from this meta-analysis supports the assertion that when individuals are allowed to affirm their sense of autonomy through choice they experience enhanced motivation, persistence, performance, and production’. Patall et al. advise; that choice should not be allowed to become a laborious process, that multiple options should be offered up to a point and that allowing multiple choices can be of benefit.

Self Determination Theory (SDT) identifies three factors which influence motivation, namely autonomy or internal perceived locus of control, competence in ones abilities with the task and relatedness or feelings of security with the setting and people involved. ‘In particular, options should be constructed that are relevant to students' interests and goals (autonomy support), are not too numerous or complex yet not too easy (competence support), and are congruent with the values of the students' families and culture of origin (relatedness support).’ (Katz. & Assor. p439. 2007)

Ryan and Decci (2000) researched SDT and established its theoretical underpinnings in their paper investigating the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development and well-being. They explain the role that the principle factors of SDT play in developing intrinsic motivation or in self-regulated extrinsic motivation. Ryan & Decci (2000) refer to numerous studies that show increased levels of self-regulation can be fostered by providing autonomy (choice), secure connections to carers and supporting perceptions of competence.

When applied to home learning this would indicate a need for home learning; to support autonomous engagement, include elements of choice, be sufficiently challenging while not beyond what is achievable with reduced scaffolding (think Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development) and fits within a learning environment that supports a growth-mindset where risk and mistakes are a part of learning. 

By Nigel Coutts

Cooper, H., Steenbergen-Hu, S., & Dent, A. (2012). Homework. APA Educational Psychology Handbook, Vol 3: Application To Learning And Teaching., 475-495. 

Cooper, H. (2001) Homework for all in moderation.Educational Leadership, Vol.58(7), p.34-38  

Katz, I., & Assor, A. (2006). When choice motivates and when it does not. Educational Psychology Review, 19(4), 429-442.

Patall, E., Cooper, H., & Robinson, J. (2008). The effects of choice on intrinsic motivation and related outcomes: A meta-analysis of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 270-300.

Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. 

Xu, J. (2012) Homework and academic achievement. In Hattie, J., & Anderman, E. (2012). International guide to student achievement. (pp 191 – 193) New York, NY: Routledge. 

Five Great Reads

One of the great joys and best strategies for expanding your understanding is to engage with a great book. Fortunately the options available today are immense and electronic options and audio books make access easy and possible wherever you may be. Here is a short list of what I have been reading lately with some brief reflections. 

Assessing 21st Century Skills: A guide to evaluating mastery and authentic learning by Laura Greenstein

Having embraced teaching for 21st Century skills and with an understanding of the importance for preparing our children to thrive in a world of rapid change we are then confronted with how to assess these skills. Traditional assessment methodologies of post-tests and multiple choice exams will not meet the need and will do more harm than good. Students very quickly learn to align their efforts with what will be on the test and if the test requires little other than recall of information we should not be surprised if students resist modern teaching methods. This book will help you better understand the relationship between learning intentions and assessment strategies and reveal strategies which will ensure the focus remains on the essential elements of learning in the 21st Century.

Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical techniques for K-12 Classrooms by Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy

Interested in using assessment to enhance student learning? Looking to understand how assessment can be a powerful tool for learning rather than a strategy for ranking students? This book is a must read. From the guru of Formative Assessment or assessment for learning, Dylan Wiliam, this book gives clear strategies for transforming practice and placing learning and the learner at the centre of what we do. This book shows how assessment is a vital step for student growth and one that must be woven into the fabric of every lesson if it is to bring effective results. "Good formative assessment is not about keeping records of students’ achievements; it is about the minute by minute and day by day adjustment of your teaching” (Wiliam and Leahy)

Radical Candour: How to be a great boss without losing your humility by Kim Scott

By sharing her vast leadership experience and through highly engaging stories from the worlds of Google and Apple Kim Scott shows how bosses who care personally and challenge directly are able to build effective teams and create the conditions where people achieve their best. From building relationships, providing effective feedback, utilising highly effective communication strategies and understanding the effect you are having as a boss within your organisation this book guides you gently yet forcibly to being the great boss you wish you had. Infused with humour and humility this is a book you will devour and want to share. 

The Coaching Habit: Say less, ask more and change the way you lead forever by Michael Bungay Stainer

Looking for the right approach to that difficult conversation? Wanting to open up dialogue with your staff and understand what is causing them to behave the way they are? Are you finding that you are constantly playing the role of fireman in your organisation? The Coaching Habit provides a set of simple scripts that will transform the conversations you have and free you from constantly having to have the answer to every problem dropped in your lap. If you have a team to manage, if you are needing to unlock their potential and provide effective feedback this book should be hidden in your top drawer ready to be called upon at need. 

Sketchnotes for Educators by Sylvia Duckworth

Spend but a little time on Twitter and you are bound to find educators using the beautiful sketchnotes created by Sylvia Duckworth to illustrate their point. Beyond the insights offered by each image is the simple joy that the image bring. Sylvia’s talent is in representing complex ideas in a manner that makes them easy to understand without oversimplification. This is a book you will want to share and thanks to the links to downloadable versions of every image the possibilities for doing so are endless. Do not be surprised if you find yourself printing copies of Sylvia’s artworks to pin on staffroom walls. 

A bonus:

Top Ten Must Reads on . . . by HBR

If you subscribe to Audible you should check out the selection of 'Ten Must Reads' from Harvard Business Review. Each book presents a compilation of articles around the specified topic and each comes from the talent pool of Harvard's Business Review. Covering topics such as Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Strategy and Change Management to name but a few and with authors that include John Kotter, Peter Drucker and Daniel Goleman these books will keep you reading or listening for hours. 

Understanding the true nature of science

As thousands take to the streets as part of a global 'March for Science’ it is worth considering the significant role that education has to play. What are the messages we need to send our students about science and what role have schools played in creating the current climate? Now seems like the time to pause and reflect on the place of science in our community and our schools. 
 
In seeking to understand the need for a ‘March for Science’ you must look at the political debates which have occurred around recent global challenges. Debate is undeniably a healthy aspect of our quest to make meaning from our observations of the world. It is core to our desire to understand and can be seen in the building blocks of science itself. However, what we have seen recently in political debates is a deliberate and consistent debasing of the science behind the issues which are being debated. The inconvenience of the science, that it contradicts the political desires of some segments of the community, that it casts into doubt the long-term feasibility of structures and assets which have brought power to some has led to claims that science can be equated with opinion or belief. It has become OK to state with no recourse to evidence or research that ‘I do not believe the evidence of science’.
 
To understand why such claims are deeply erroneous one must look at why science does not sit at the table with belief or opinion as equals in a hierarchy of knowledge. Science is fundamentally a process for testing the validity of claims made as a consequence of observations. The work of science is to make sense of the world in which we live through a rigorous process that by its very nature is designed to overcome errors, bias, misunderstandings and in doing so to construct reliable knowledge. Science is much more than the pool of knowledge that it has created, it is the epistemological approach to knowledge with experimentation, data analysis and testing and retesting at its heart. This short video by Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson powerfully explains that the work of science 'is an entire exercise in finding what is true’. 

“Science provides an empirical way of answering interesting and important questions about the biological, physical and technological world. The knowledge it produces has proved to be a reliable basis for action in our personal, social and economic lives. Science is a dynamic, collaborative and creative human endeavour arising from our desire to make sense of our world through exploring the unknown, investigating universal mysteries, making predictions and solving problems.” (Australian Curriculum - Rationale for Science)

Science is not a matter of opinion. It does not rely upon belief. It is an approach to explaining what is there and for testing predictions of what might be yet unknown. It is a process that has allowed us to build the modern world in which we live. A process that freed us from beliefs of the causes of disease; from a false belief that it was caused by ‘bad air’ (miasma) to an understanding of the part played by micro-organisms. In this case as in so many others, science has provided us with new understandings that have allowed us to advance as a society and find better solutions. It is this process of unlocking new knowledge and utilising our fullest understanding of the facts which is today under threat. We are facing challenges on the scale of global warming, pollution of our oceans, species loss, communicable disease and pandemics at a time when we have politicians and media giants who play games with the truth and question without due evidence or process the science which we need to understand the nature of these threats. 
 
In this, schools have a part to play. We need to teach our students what science is. We need to help them to understand that science is more than information of a certain styling. To show them that the methodology of science provides the measures of reliability and of fair testing that even the most sceptical could wish for. We need to remove ourselves from the political debate and put before our students the scientific knowledge upon which decisions should be made. Sadly, in the name of equity we have fallen into the trap of giving equal time to both sides of debates even where the evidence is clearly stacked one way. We have sought to not offend those who wish to argue against the weight of scientific evidence without recourse to research or reliable knowledge. We have sat by while we watch our ice caps melt and our reefs pale from bleaching and felt contented that our curriculum is unbiased. 
 
When we move beyond teaching students selected pearls of scientific knowledge and allow them to participate fully in the processes of science they will see that its methodologies are trust-worthy. Our students need to make claims, to test them and share them with a community of scientists who will debate and challenge their findings. They need to experience the joy that comes from discovery and the understanding that even a disproven hypothesis advances our understanding. We need to bring scientists into our schools who will share stories of their work and their learning with our students. Scientists who are dedicated to finding truth and expanding our understanding. We need to demystify science and show that the knowledge it creates and advances is in no way equitable with opinion. By doing so we may strengthen our future citizens against the biased and false claims of politicians unwilling to confront the inconvenient truths which science brings into the light. 

By Nigel Coutts
 

Shifting from awareness to action

It seems clear we are in a period of rapid change. Technology coupled with broad changes in society is bringing new challenges to how we live and work. The skill which served us well in the days of the industrial revolution are rapidly approaching their use by date. The evidence is mounting and the narrative around education is shifting towards a story centred on long-life skills, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication. Success in the future seems to be connected closely to one’s capacity to innovate, to problem find and to make strategic decisions when confronted by unique situations for which we have not been specifically prepared. 
 
Data on the future of the workforce increasingly indicates that many of the jobs in high demand today will disappear. A CEDA (Committee for Economic Development of Australia) report indicates that "More than five million jobs, almost 40 per cent of Australian jobs that exist today, have a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing in the next 10 to 15 years due to technological advancements”. Globally a report by the Boston Consulting Group indicates that 25% of jobs will be replaced by robots and Stephen Hawking adds that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining”. 
 

The future workforce might look like this - Servers running AI software

Most at threat are the jobs categorised as routine-cognitive tasks. Those which are easily replaced by computers and artificial intelligence. After a long period of decline in manufacturing jobs with human labor replaced by robots this sector has stabilised. Now is the turn of the office worker, the clerk, the desk jockey to be replaced by servers and AI. If your job involves processing information, evaluating forms and manipulating data you should be nervous. The wider effects will come as the number of people required to complete these routine tasks dramatically shrinks and the effects extend into all sectors up and down the career ladders of the corporate world. Only those who are employed on the basis of their ability to handle complexity, to find new problems and transform them into opportunities are likely to thrive in this new economy. 
 
The implications for educators of this shift are enormous and the pressure to make changes immediate. While the predicted transformations might be some ten to fifteen years away this equates neatly with the lead time for schools. The students entering kindergarten today will entire a workforce that is significantly impacted by the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence we are seeing today. Will they be ready for this future or will they have experienced a model of education that is better preparation for the age of the steam engine and the factory?
 
Here lies the challenge, to move from awareness of the future we are heading towards to an embrace of the change it requires. To shift from rhetoric to action. 
 
What do we place at the centre of our schools? Do we focus on the capacities for success in the 21st century or do we cling to the past and teach the skills required for life in the office? Do we value creativity, critical thinking, innovation and collaboration and if so how do we ensure these skills are experienced by every child and valued in every classroom? What values and attitudes do we instil and how do schools and the broader community prepare our children to lead balanced lives where success is measured in moments of joy rather than in dollars earned? 

Some teachers in Australia will be counting down the days to Vivid Sydney. In addition to the spectacular light shows which attract international visitors, Vivid Sydney has become an ideas festival. Through May and June intrepid educators have the opportunity to share strategies for embracing creativity with innovative trans-disciplinary thinkers. Sessions titled ‘How to Champion Innovation in your Team and the Workplace’, 'Creativity in Education Renaissance Souls’ and ‘Leading Teams for Creativity’ will entice teachers out of their classrooms and into the city. Ideas will flood back into schools and students will for a brief time enjoy learning alongside teachers passionate for change and empowered by new understandings. But will the change stick and will the change scale?
 
When the routines of the educational systems return, when curriculum pressures and the demands of external testing are felt, will we resist the urge to fall back into old patterns of action? Will the ideas of Vivid spread into every classroom or will we have bubbles of innovation? Research by Dylan Wiliam points to the significant impact that individual teachers have on the success of their learners. More than any other influence, getting the right teacher determines the growth experienced by students in any school year. The disturbing consequence of this is that for our future survival we are relying on the lucky chance of being placed with teachers who are active in transforming their practice for the times ahead. If your teacher is not connected, does not have a personal learning network, does not attend teach meets and events like Vivid Sydney, is not a 'self-navigating professional learner' (@mariealcock) will they have an awareness of what your future will be like and the capacity to take action to prepare you for it?
 
By Nigel Coutts

What messages are we sending about learning?

Some educators make you think, challenge your assumptions and leave your head spinning with questions. Mark Church of Harvard’s Project Zero is one such educator. I spent an afternoon with Mark recently and left inspired and keen to seek answers to the challenges he posed. This post is a reflection on some of the questions that arose throughout the afternoon. Hopefully you will find that many of these apply to your setting too and that looking to answer them might allow you to refine the messages you send.  
 
The big question posed by Mark is one that lies at the centre of the research of Project Zero; "What messages are we sending our students about what learning is and how it happens?” The trouble with a question like this is that reaches into every aspect of what we do as educators. Our public facing values and aims are where we are likely to focus our attention. We would hope that we are sending messages about the value of learning, that it is an active process and one that should be a life-long goal. Somewhere in there we will state that learning involves change; the adoption of new habits and dispositions. Learning will be explained as a consequence of thinking, a process associated with attention, effort and motivation. We will have rhetoric about growth mindsets and we will encourage our students to value deep understandings rather than learning for recall. In our public and conscious messages about what learning is we are likely to hit all of the right markers. It is what happens behind the scenes though that has the real impact.
 
What do we do when we ask our students questions? What types of questions do we ask and what kind of answers do they require? Are we playing a game of guess what is in the teacher’s head or is there scope for a multitude of possibly correct answers? Do we require our students to think deeply with what they know? Do we call on the first hand raised or offer the time required for a more nuanced response to bubble forth? And this is just scratching the surface of the messages we send with our questioning techniques during class discussion. 
 
Who does the talking in our classrooms? Who does the thinking? Did the best thinking take place while the teacher wrote the programme? Is it the teacher who talks the most or is it the students? The answer to this question will reveal much about who is required to do the thinking in our lessons and subsequently who is doing the learning. It will also reveal the reality of learning as an active or passive process in our classrooms. Do we require more from our students than active listening and how can we be certain that even that is happening? Is our classroom a place of rich debate where ideas are argued, analysed and torn asunder? Do we encourage our students to take risks, to share their ideas, to argue with evidence and show healthy skepticism or is it clear that there is but one source of truth in the room?
 
 
What do our assessment processes say about learning? Do our students leave our rooms excited by the new concepts and skills they have mastered or the percentage increase they achieved on an exam? Are our students evaluated by the teacher or is self-evaluation an essential part of their learning? Can our students articulate what they do well, what they can improve on and how they might do so? Are our students excited to receive feedback and value it as a part of their learning or do they dread the moment when papers are handed back? Are our assessments aligned with our beliefs about the conditions required for learning or an artificial subset of what it truly requires?
 
When do we talk with our students about how they learn? Do we empower them with tools for self-reflection and metacognition? Do we have rich conversations about the many factors which make learning successful? Do we share stories with our students about how we learn and what we do when faced with challenges and road-blocks? Do our students see us as learners or as ready-made experts in every field? 
 
What do want our students to do when they learn? This was Mark’s follow up question. Again it raises many questions but the key point is that we should seek to ask our students this question. Will they mention that we expect them to think, to pose questions, activate prior knowledge, seek collaborations, argue with evidence or will they believe that we want them to get the answer right and remember their homework.
 
How can we take more notice of the culture of our classrooms and what it communicates to learners about the value of thinking? - This question brought it into sharp focus. The messages we send to our students about thinking and with it learning are conveyed most strongly through the culture of our classrooms. Shiny brochures, mission statements and philosophies of education are all very well but the culture of our classrooms tell the truth. 
 
by Nigel Coutts

What do we need to know?

I keep circling back to this question of what do we need to know, or to learn. It comes up so often in conversations around education and is closely connected to what we hope to achieve for our students. It is a question whose answer shapes not only what we teach but how we teach and what we assess. It strikes at the heart of how we perceive the role of education in society and the way we answer it reveals much about our personal philosophy of education. 

In preparing for a presentation I sought out ideas that support the need to teach for agency. I wanted to understand and to demonstrate why teaching our students to identify with their capacity for goal directed action. Peter Johnston offers this advice “If nothing else, children should leave school with a sense that if they act, and act strategically, they can accomplish their goals”. Clearly Peter’s priorities for education are that it might achieve something other than a headful of knowledge. Ryan and Deci are inspiring and aspirational when they describe "The fullest representations of humanity show people to be curious, vital, and self-motivated. At their best, they are agentic and inspired, striving to learn; extend themselves; master new skills; and apply their talents responsibly.” Spending a little time unpacking this reveals significant implications for education. What are the conditions required to encourage our young people to strive to learn, to want to extend themselves and to master new skills? How do we spark their curiosity and what role does self-motivation play within systems of rules, rewards and external assessments?

Deanna Kuhn asks to consider the questions we ask about how we teach in her article ‘Is direct instruction an Answer to the Right question?’. She argues that it is more important for us to look at what we teach than how we teach it. In debating against advocates for direct instruction, Kuhn indicates the importance of understanding the factors which motivate our students to be learners and to be clear on what skills/dispositions they will require: "the only defensible answer to the question of what we want schools to accomplish is that they should teach students to use their minds well, in school and beyond.”  Kuhn indicates the role of motivation in determining what we might attempt to teach our students and the need for them to see the value in what they learn. More than just the acquisition of knowledge long term success in learning comes from the individuals efforts to attach meaning and value to what is learned.  Kuhn proposes "that the most defensible educational goals are those that pertain to mental self-management—taking charge of one’s own learning—and coming to value learning and knowing and one’s self as learner and knower.”

In ‘Creating Cultures of Thinking’ Ron Ritchhart asks the question "What do you want the children we are teaching in our schools today to be like as adults?”. The common responses focus on dispositions and personal values which have little connection with basic skills or acquired knowledge. They are qualities of individuals who are confident in their capacity to learn and to grow, to interact with others positively and to communicate effectively. These are the so called soft-skills of the 21st Century, the ones which are difficult to assess. 

"curious , inquisitive, questioning, creative, problem solvers, risk takers, imaginative, and inquisitive, collaborative, empathetic, good listeners, helpful,
able to deal with complexity, analysers, makers of connections, critical thinkers, global citizens, members of a community, someone aware of his or her impact on the environment, effective communicators, compassionate, joyful"

For a long time our educational systems served the needs of society well. A structured and disciplined system of lessons and practice, based on a well defined curriculum prepared a workforce ready for the routines of the workplace. Employers knew what to expect from graduates and little other than a foundation in the three Rs of 'reading, writing and arithmetic' was all that was expected. The average graduate would be in the workplace for many years before they might be expected to think for themselves a reality assured by suitably defined policies and procedures. This is the world of dystopian representations of workers as little more than cogs in the machinery of industry and the rationale behind Pink Floyd’s assertion “that we don’t need no education”. 

'What do we need to know to pass the test?' might be the question students learn to ask from their time at school. The unavoidable exit slips that educational systems impose on learning. The need to assess the years of learning and to rank students as they move beyond schooling. Do these assessments reveal learners who are agentic and inspired, striving to learn; extend themselves; master new skills or do they capture our performance at one brief moment in time. What are the messages we send to our students about learning with systems that serve purposes seemingly at odds with the purposes for learning?

When we ask what should we teach? or what do we need to learn?, we unconsciously shape our thinking about education. The question itself impedes progress towards a focus on long-life skills and the empowerment of learners. It directs us to lists of content, to skills we can assess, to learning that becomes connected to the purposes of others. We need to ask better questions; ones which are linked to the cultures we create within our schools, to the dispositions and values we immerse our students in and to the conversations around learning that we might hope to inspire. It seems we are clear in what we hope to achieve but tied to our past by the questions we ask. 
 

Johnston, P.  (2004) - Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning. Stenhouse Publishers

Kuhn, D. (2007). Is direct instruction an answer to the right question? Educational Psychologist, 42(2), 109- 113. 

Ritchhart, R. (2015) Creating cultures of thinking: The eight forces we must truly master to transform our schools. SanFrancisco: Josey-Bass  

Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

by Nigel Coutts

Learning in the age of Social Networks

Learning, according to Vygotsky is a social endeavour. It occurs as a result of our interactions with others, within our environment and through an accumulation of contextualised experiences. We learn by watching others, by the immediacy of feedback in social settings and from the modelling of learned behaviours that we experience. When we are young we learn through play, through exploration and experimentation. Learning is natural and there are few barriers to our explorations. As we grow we increasingly rely on others for guidance, as exemplars and for feedback. We move from relying on our parents as the focus of our social world to an increasingly enlarged and networked social landscape. Entering school brings a host of new opportunities and connections. Learning becomes formalised and control shifts away from us as the sole arbiters of what we attend to as we engage with externally set learning priorities. As the formal education we receive continues, so too does the informal social learning that we engage with and that shapes our identities and understandings of our place in the world. Our priorities for learning are in a constant state of flux between the demands of our formalised learning endeavours and our social learning as members of networked communities. 

The social world in which we live has in recent years been transformed, expanded and exploded to a global scale. Where once our community was dictated by the scope of our physical connections, we today have the possibility to be connected on a near limitless scale. The opportunities for those who actively seek an expanded learning community are immense. Ideas generated in isolation may rapidly spread. Knowledge can be seamlessly shared, refined, expanded and distorted by the networks we create through our social circles. Our devices bring access to information on an unprecedented scale and we have the tools to add our voice to the collective wisdom. We are able to learn across borders, across oceans and cultures.

The challenges that this globally connected world brings are immense. We have access to so much information that our capacity to filter, process and respond is overwhelmed. We live in bubbles and rely on others to filter our world view by means we little understand. Our understanding of how to learn in this globally connected world is limited by our experience of learning. Our formal education has led us to believe that learning is something given to us. We are one step removed from the process of planning and regulating our learning for so much of our lives as learners that we become dependent on educators. We have powerful tools at our disposal and yet make poor use of them. Networks which should bring us closer together are used to divide and segregate. Instead of enhancing our collective understanding we are confronted by the challenges of alternate facts and fake news. We have an abundance of information but seemingly little wisdom and little understanding of who we may trust and how we may find truth. We need to be shown how to live and learn within the affordances of our globally connected communities and how to take charge of our learning. 

Our students have never known a time when their social network was constrained by their physical locality. They take for granted mobile communications, social networks and ubiquitous access to the internet. In their social lives, they have never experienced the constraints of a land-line telecommunications system, never been restricted by long distance calls, never known a time without on demand media. They take Facebook and video chat for granted, watch YouTube not television, shop online and publish their thoughts to world rather than refrigerator door. Only at school in their formalised learning are they required to disconnect, switch off and learn in isolation from their extended network. It should then not be surprising that they grow up with a poor understanding of how to utilise their social networks as tools for powerful learning.

In place of asking our students to switch off we need to show them how to use their networked communities as a source of knowledge. To empower them as media critics and creators who use the tools as their disposal to effect change. Learning needs to be placed inside the social world in which our students live. At the same time, we need to provide them with the tools and cognitive resources to thrive in this world. Just as we learn to live in our physical communities through experience, through exploration and play we need to learn to live in our globally connected online worlds. Just as we have models for learning in the physical world we require models for learning in our digitaly connected worlds. We need the safety of the sandbox, the caring guidance of the “more knowledgable other” to show us the way around. We need places to safely make mistakes and missteps and the opportunities to learn from experience. This requires teachers who are social contractors with expertise and experience in navigating a globally connected reality.

Learning is a social endeavour. Schools need to understand that for our students the social landscape has changed. Rather than turning away from this reality we need to understand what it means and what our children need to know and learn to safely maximise the opportunities it brings.

By Nigel Coutts

Teaching in the 21st Century

Last week I joined over five hundred educators from across the Asia-Pacific region to share ideas on education in the 21st century. The consistent message is that we are preparing our students for success in a world very different to that which was the norm only a short time ago. The implications of this change are immense and require a shift in our thinking about what matters most in our classrooms. Such is the pace of change that within any school there will be multiple generations who normalise different perspective on technology and its place in their lives. What becomes clear that the skills we most need within our schools at every level are those which are critical for individuals to be empowered, self-navigating learners. But what does this mean in practical terms?

For students, the shift in focus is from recipients of knowledge to being literate self-navigators of learning who are able to take charge of their own learning and are able to adjust their skill sets to suit problems as they evolve. In the model articulated by Dr Marie Alcock students are professional learners who are media critics and save media makers. Learning is an active process not something that happens to the individual but a process that the individual is in control of. Teachers are in the same boat and must see themselves as ‘Self-navigating professional learners’ who actively engage in professional learning, seek out appropriate learning opportunities and develop professional learning networks to facilitate continual growth and the capacity to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances. The contemporary teacher, according to Alcock, is a social contractor who uses their connections to enable learning for themselves and their students, media critics/creators who bring the mindset of the innovative designer to hacking the systems and structures within which they operate to better serve their objectives. All learners need to become globally connected citizens who are aware of network effects that come with connected technologies. We can publish to a global audience and share ideas at this scale but doing so requires new sensitivities and new literacies. 

An important final competency for modern teachers is outlined by Alcock when she calls for educators to become ‘Active Advocates for Education’. As teachers, we need to find our professional voices and utilise the networks and media at our disposal to advocate for the change in education we need. Without strong advocacy for innovative practices in education driven by an understanding of what our students need we should not be surprised if ‘back-to-basics’ rhetoric dominates the political debate. 

This shift towards student centred learning where the learner is empowered to take charge of their learning requires a shift at every point in the educational system. This brings challenges within typical systems of control and management. Educational systems at a district, state or national level become huge and control measures are likely to impede shifts towards individualisation. Administrators and politicians who are removed from the immediate routines and practices of the classroom have few options for control and those that have access to are unlikely to support individualised student-centred learning. Increasingly, assessment is used as a measure of control and accountability and governments seek measures of the effect that their budgetary, training and curriculum measures are having. 

Noam Chomsky is critical of a culture obsessed with assessing and ranking students and teachers. 

“The assessment itself is completely artificial. It’s not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who will reach their potential, explore their creative interests. Those things you’re not testing.. it’s a rank that’s mostly meaningless. And the very ranking itself is harmful. It’s turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank. Not into doing things that are valuable and important.”

 The danger of this, according to Chomsky is that our obsession with assessment and ranking systems is that they rob teachers of opportunities to be creative and innovative and focus students on the achievement of goals which meaningless. Rather than pursuing educational goals which matter and which connect with personal interests we are forced to teach to the test and it is what the test requires that has perceived value. Carol Dweck agrees and asks:

“What is education for? Is it for pouring facts and formulas into students’ heads, or is it for creating learners? Research shows that an environment that emphasizes evaluation and testing creates a fixed [achievement] mindset. That is, it sends the message that intellectual abilities are fixed and that the purpose of school is to measure them. Students come to see school as the place to look smart and, above all, not look dumb— not a place to create and learn.”

Dr Yong Zhao encourages a focus on the control that educators require to innovate and meet the needs of their learners. He encourages bureaucracies to step out of the way of educators and allow them to get on with the job of educating students for their futures. "Finally, we should invest in education innovations to encourage educators and local schools to seek creative ways to deliver an education for the future…” 

 The net result is that these are challenging times for teachers but times that offer great benefits for those filled with a passion for education. The success of future generations will depend on the foundation they are given in schools. More than knowing we must empower our students with a love of learning and the dispositions they require to take charge of their lives as learners. The skills of learning that are so central to the art of teaching have the greatest importance in the lives our children are likely to live and it is our passion for these skills, the art of learning, which should be visible in every lesson we teach.  

By Nigel Coutts