Rethinking Time to see Education as a Lifelong Journey - Lessons from Blueback

“Blueback" by Tim Winton is a beautifully written story from which much can be learned. It is a simple tale of a young boy growing into adulthood and discovering his place in the world. Winton’s literary style invites the reader to journey with the books lead character, Abel as he experiences the ebb and flow cycles of life. Through joyous moments befriending the giant blue groper Blueback, through the challenge of moving away from his isolated home where he lives with his mother, to confronting ruthless business men whose greed threatens the natural beauty of the environment, to his growth into manhood, a career pursuing his passion for the ocean, to finding love and starting a family of his own the reader travels with Abel. Like waves passing over a reef, Abel’s life is a series of events which arrive with the possibility of tension and harm but pass leaving him subtly changed and stronger than before. Throughout his life, is the constancy of the ocean and the faithful companionship of Blueback.

“Abel and his mother slid down into the deep again and saw the fish hovering then turning, eyeing them cautiously as they came. It twitched a little and edged along in front of them to keep its distance. The big gills fanned. All its armoured scales rippled in lines of green and black blending into the dizziest blue. The groper moved without the slightest effort. It was magnificent; the most beautiful thing Abel had ever seen.” - Blueback by Tim Winton

Blueback is a beautiful metaphor for life and particularly of the life we live in schools. When looked at close up, with an eye on the details, the experience of school is one of passing and recurring cycles. When looked at from a distance, with an eye on the whole, there are elements of constancy, the throughlines which bring meaning to our experience and which have as their consequence the residuals of education.

There are the daily cycles that begin with the breakfast table discussion of the day ahead, travel routines to school, daily lessons, lunch-breaks, more travel and home-learning all punctuated by times with peers negotiating the social milieu of our relationships. There are the weekly cycles of subjects, specialist teachers, sports days, music lessons, assemblies and co-curricular. There are the longer-term cycles of units of learning; the annual introduction to grammar, the unit on fragile environments, the history project on settlement, another maths unit about fractions and why they matter. There are the annual events, the camps, the musicals, the sporting carnivals the excursions and the special community days such as Mother’s Day, Easter with the traditional hat parade and of course the many events with which we conclude each year.

School seems to be about fitting as much as possible in the short periods of time into which we divide our school life. Ask any teacher and they will tell you, they are forever short on time, that the days seem to never have enough hours for all they need to hold. Each week seems to race by and as quickly as one ends, the next begins. It seems we are just gaining traction with the grammar unit when it is time to move on to persuasive writing. Our students are just grasping why our environment is fragile, when we must change direction for the electricity unit. Our amazing plan to finally teach our students why they should care about fractions, has once again been foiled by the annual art excursion which seems to come around sooner each year.

Our day is divided ever so neatly into one hour (or there about) blocks of time. For the student, the day is a procession of discrete lessons; of introductions, middles and ends. Looked at on this small scale, the daily life of a school student has much more in common with an anthology of short stories than with the epic novel that it should be. Read just any single chapter of Blueback and you will discover a nice story but entirely miss the point, never see the part it plays in the whole. For the teacher trapped in the moment with a looming deadline and an ever-expanding to-do list it is a challenge to shift perspective and see beyond the next few pages of the story they are writing with their students.

We measure the passing of time in Weeks and Terms and Years. Time in school seems to be all about beginnings and endings. We must start the history unit in Week Three of Term, it must finish in Week Eight, the assessment is in Week Nine. The fractions unit occupies just four lessons before the term ends, next term we must begin the geometry unit on time. Each year is a fresh beginning, a new start, but is it a new book when what we need is the next chapter?

From Kindergarten to Year Twelve, our students have spent thirteen years, or three quarters of their life at school. Looked at from this more expansive perspective we see that our students have a great deal of time in which to develop the dispositions they will need for success in their post-school lives. There will be many, many lessons along the way which they forget. There will be excursions they remember because the bus broke down rather than for the physics exhibition it had taken them to. These are the chapters of Blueback, the cycles that washed over Abel's life, but they are not the whole story. We might never finish the unit on fragile environments, but our students may learn from this and the history unit and their persuasive writing lessons, that they have the capacity to drive change. After years of struggling with fractions and geometry and grammar, they may learn that persistence is the key to success. Through the musicals, and the science projects and the art show and the hat parades they will discover that they are indeed creative, and confident. From countless projects, debates, tutorials, presentations and even home-learning they will develop the skills required for collaboration and communication. They will leave our doors ready to write great stories of their own; to discover their "secret of the sea".

If we insist on looking at education on a small scale, lesson by lesson, unit by unit, we are doomed to see it as an endless cycle of chasing our tails and of never having as much time as we might wish for. If we step back and consider the throughlines, the big understandings, the essential dispositions which can only be developed by time measured in years, through the culmination of many connected and related experiences, we have a hope of seeing the greater success that education is capable of achieving with and for our students.

By Nigel Coutts

Winton, Tim. (1997) Blueback. Penguin Group Australia.

Letting how we choose to learn inform our teaching

Think of a time when you were completely immersed in a learning challenge. A time when you became aware of the need to master a new skill or concept. A situation that took you outside of your comfort zone, when there were times that you became frustrated, when you thought of quitting, downed tools and walked away, but came back time and time again. Maybe it was a problem you had to solve. Maybe it was a challenge you wanted to overcome. Perhaps it came with a significant payoff but perhaps it was just one of those things you had to accomplish. 

This learning challenge may push you into a state of Flow as described by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, but at the time it is more likely that you are focussing on the growing feeling of frustration, the moments of elation when you sense a breakthrough and the subsequent despair when it doesn’t quite work. What aligns with Csikszentmihalyi’s description of ‘Flow’ is that time flies, the world fades into the back ground and that cup of coffee you had hoped might reenergise your thinking goes cold on the desk beside you. 

"Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz." (Csikszentmihalyi. 1997)

True learning is and should be a challenge. The moments when we are pushing our cognitive limits are the times when our brains grow. A cognitive challenge should have much in common with a physical challenge. If mountaineering is your thing you will choose the steep and winding path over the tourist cable car option every day. As you struggle your way towards the summit, your legs aching with each step you may long for the climb to be over, but you don’t want to be rescued and robbed of the achievement. 

Think of the actions you take along the path of your learning journey. Do you stop and stare into space as you wait for your mind to process a new idea? Do you frantically jot down ideas only to toss them in the bin moments later? Do you turn to the internet, a book, a video, an instruction manual for guidance? Maybe you ask a friend how they would approach the problem or maybe you plod along in splendid isolation knowing that the answer is somewhere inside. Do you stop and go for a walk, or wander through the house hoping to be struck by inspiration?

True learning is messy, non-linear, difficult to plan for, complicated, frustrating and intrinsically rewarding. As we seek to build an understanding of new ideas either through formal learning such as may occur in a classroom, or through informal learning that we self-direct, we take many twists and turns. The path that one person takes from incomprehension to understanding is not guaranteed to be the same as another even when the learning experiences along the way are the same. We build new understandings on top of those we already have, and this will powerfully influence how we learn and how we value what we learn.

Think also of the conditions which block your learning. Few of us choose to engage with challenging new concepts in an openly public environment where we are exposed to the scrutiny of our peers. Collaborative learning can be powerful but if we are the only one in the group struggling with a new idea and we do not feel safe, we are likely to invoke protective measures to insulate our egos. Without an emotionally safe environment in which we feel accepted and where risk-taking and mistake-making are accepted we are likely to stick with ideas that we have already mastered. 

Think of the physical environment that you choose to learn in. Are you able to adjust the temperature, the lighting, open a window? Can you get up and move around? Can you stop, do something else for a time and go back to your learning? Do you have access to refreshments whenever you feel the need? Do you have a choice of where you sit? Do you need to sit at a desk, in a comfy chair, on a lounge, or maybe you prefer to spread your things out on the floor? Can you take a toilet break when you need to? Are you able to block out distracting noises or do you like to have some background sounds? Are you able to switch off from external distractions or do you find task switching a useful way of overcoming the tedium of focussing on one thing?

The point is, learning is something we do in different ways and under different conditions. We are more likely to be fully engaged with learning that matters to us, that has a clear and meaningful purpose and that we have some control over. We learn best when we feel safe and when the conditions are right, we will persist with learning even when it is challenging; doing this is what makes us human and is what has allowed us to survive as a species. How we learn is also unique to us.

The value to us as teachers in taking time to stop and think about how we learn, is that it should encourage us to reflect upon the conditions which we create for our students to learn in? The potentially painful questions that need to be asked are “Could you learn something genuinely challenging in your classroom and would you want to?”, or “If you were confronted by a fiendish problem, would you choose to solve it in your class?”

By Nigel Coutts

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1997). “Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life”, Basic Books

Why we fear data and how our perception can change.

Data occupies a somewhat curious place within education. Mention it to teachers and you tend to get one of two responses. One group will roll their eyes and with great sarcasm how data is "so exciting”. The other group responds with something akin to “actually I quite like data” indicating that experience has shown them that they are members of a small group. The question is why do some people find data to be a useful and fascinating tool while others see it as a good method for inducing sleep?

Much of it is to do with the way in which we experience data. Long lists of numbers, highly confusing charts and extensive presentations that show how one factor can be clearly shown to have a loose correlation with another. One half of the audience is fascinated, wants to see the underlying data and looks forward to a chance to dissect the numbers later in their own time. The other feels like they are being asked to make sense of an optical illusion; one of those where if you squint just right an image of zebra appears. The presenter has obviously spent a great deal of time crunching the numbers and are convinced there is a story to be told, but most people are not seeing it. Too often the capacity to analyse data is not accompanied by the ability to transform it into a compelling narrative.  Instead of a riveting moment between the lead characters of a film we have an extended scene of Jar Jar Binks. 

Data shows that 86% of people are more likely to believe any claim that includes reference to a compelling statistic, a figure that rises to an astounding 92% if the claim indicates an effect size and the sentence “according to research”. Disappointingly only 7.1% of people recognise that the previous sentence, and this one are both entirely fictional. This use of data to add weight to any argument has become so widespread and so frequently proven to be flawed, erroneous, blatantly false or almost immediately contradicted by another equally confusing data set, means that the use of data has for many lost all impact. Indeed, while some are happy to believe anything with a good data set behind it, others immediately question any piece of data and search for the lie as soon as they hear it. 

In education data is all too often used to support a claim that the claimant already believes to be true. Not always, but often, data is used to support a plan already well under way. A new writing programme in a school is more likely to be embraced if data is found to show it is needed. Rather than looking for the story in the data and from there exploring the consequence of the patterns which emerge, data is used to build a case in support of an argument. This reversal of the intended role of data is perhaps why many people so quickly turn off when data is introduced to the debate. It is not that they are disinterested, but that they know what will follow is a compelling demonstration of why the plan they are being asked to contribute to is a foregone conclusion. 

Data in education is closely connected to assessment and to the type of assessment that is easily reported in numbers. There is a growing awareness that much of the high-stakes assessment movement has more to do with command and control than it does with student success. Traditionally assessments such as NAPLAN, PISA, TIMSS, & PIRLS have measured what is easy to measure and the data has then been used to argue for more of a certain style of teaching and learning that might prepare students for more of this style of assessment but offers them little value beyond their school years. This use of data is so compelling that teachers come to question their own professional judgement. Although a teacher may see his/her students learning on a daily basis, engage in dialogue with them about where they are with their learning and where they need to go next, even though they may gather copious artefacts of learning that demonstrate achievement, many teachers feel that they require something in the form of numbers to justify their decisions. 

It is our negative experiences with data that prejudice against its better uses. Data should be a tool that allows us to better see what might be. Through the thoughtful use of data, powerful stories can be revealed. When data is allowed to speak, when it is handled respectfully and with a desire to use it to reveal a truth that might otherwise remain hidden, it is a powerful tool. When it is communicated in ways that make its story plain and understandable by all it becomes a tool that invites dialogue and shared understanding. With access to great quantities of data and the computing power required to make this information accessible, data should be viewed as a great asset rather than as something of a black-art of which we should be sceptical. 

By Nigel Coutts

Towards a pedagogy for life-worthy learning

Particular patterns of pedagogy can be seen to influence much of the debate in education, particularly those that shift the focus from what the teacher does to what the students do, individually or collectively. In traditional pedagogical models the emphasis has been on the manner in which the teacher organises curriculum elements, presents these to their learners and assesses what has been retained and can be applied by the student. In a sense pedagogy was the script that evolved for the teacher’s presentation of content to a group of learners as a result of the teacher’s knowledge of the curriculum and the theory of how this content is made most digestible by the learner.

This model of pedagogy had much to do with systems of management. Many of the teaching moves or classroom routines were clearly linked to managing and constraining the behaviour of the students. The organisation of the daily schedule, the physical layout of the classroom, the expectations for behaviour of both students and teachers all point to a system that was designed so that one person may impart the maximum possible knowledge to as large a group as possible. The dominant pedagogical debate beyond questions of how to best manage students was associated with the presentation and ordering of content; how do I present this information to the learner such that it is most likely to be retained?

In the contemporary classroom, there is much greater consideration of what the learner does in partnership with their teacher so that they develop the capacity to learn. Classroom routines and structures are designed to engage the learner in a rich process of dialogical learning.

With this shift comes an emphasis on understanding how students learn and with this knowledge in mind developing learning experiences that will allow the learners to develop their skills and disposition for learning. It is meaningful to speak of learners as problem finders, a role that was once very much the sole preserve of the teacher. Further the curriculum is often negotiated or a consequence of a dialogue between the teacher and the student. Assessment once the preserve of the teaching professional, now involves opportunities for self and peer-assessment and the teacher plays a role in facilitating this process. Where once the teacher’s expertise lay in their ability to teach, now we find a growing emphasis on their ability to model learning.

This pattern comes out of the emergence of a number of elements impacting education. One is the rise of ICT and the shift that this brings to the importance of content knowledge. When access to knowledge was scarce, the teaching of content knowledge was an important role for teachers. The emphasis was on the transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the student and teaching was about how effectively this transfer could take place and how this transfer may be measured. The student’s role in this process was relatively passive and entirely receptive. Now that access to content is ubiquitous the value of pools of knowledge stored in long term memory has declined. Memory alone is not sufficient for success. Today the emphasis is on what students are able to do with this knowledge. (Wagner & Dintmarsh 2015) The challenge confronting teachers is how we might prepare students to locate and use information relevant to the problems they identify, recognise the skills they may require and then work creatively and collaboratively to create a unique solution.

We also have a much better understanding of what learning is like from a neurological perspective. We know for example that emotion plays a significant part in establishing the conditions necessary for learning. 'It is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotion.’ (Immordino-Yang. 2016) We know that all learning is a consequence of thinking and that the consequence of this is an understanding that learning is an active process requiring the participation of the mind of the learner. We better understand what it means to understand and know that to achieve this level of competence with concepts requires opportunities to use what we have learned in novel situations. Our classroom practice can be informed by research that describes, the factors which result in intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci. 2000), the conditions necessary for creativity (Csiksgentmihalyi. 2013), the development of a growth mindset (Dweck. 2006) or a culture of thinking (Ritchhart. 2015)

For pedagogy the consequence of this is that we shift towards a student centred learning model in which the students are empowered to be learners. Seeing students as creators of works, finders of problems, metacognitive learners and global connected collaborators brings a shift in the role of the teacher to one of guide and mentor. (Loughran 2013) Much is made of measuring who does most of the talking in classrooms and the shift is towards a classroom dominated by the student’s voices. (November. 2012). We set up scenarios in our classes that allow students to fail and in doing so explore iterative learning cycles of trial and error through which students learn ‘grit’ and expand their ability to grapple with complex ideas and solve ‘wicked problems’. Assessment for learning in these classrooms is more interested in evaluating the processes of problem-finding/solving, inquiry or creative and critical thinking utilised by the students rather than the recall of content.

The difficulty experienced by those implementing this shift in pedagogy arises from the fact that neither the curriculum or the ‘High Stakes Testing’ of NAPLAN, HSC, SAT or PISA has kept pace with the change. While teachers struggle to adapt their pedagogy to better fit this new model they do so with a narrow, content heavy syllabus, in a climate of testing that focuses on base skills across a limited and disconnected curriculum. That compliance with the curriculum and student performance on standardised tests are measures of school and teacher success, makes the task of delivering a student centred pedagogy more difficult.

Our students are confronted by a conflict in the three message systems that play the most significant role in prioritising education; curriculum (the what might be taught), pedagogy (how teaching and learning is delivered) and assessment (what is valued by its measurement). The result is we have students who are engaged by learning that focuses on their long-life skill development and challenges them with meaningful learning experiences linked to their interests and real world problems and yet they are measured against a curriculum that overemphasis specific content knowledge and tested in ways that do not allow them to use their skills for creativity, collaboration and connectedness. Our students very quickly learn to play the game and through their experience of the realities of schooling develop a clear understanding of what truly matters. So long as the teacher says that they value thinking and creativity but assess students on memorisation and recall, students will know where to place their efforts and what learning truly matters.

If there is a positive message attached to all of this, it is that the development of dispositions essential to success as a life-long learner are also excellent preparation for tests with an emphasis on memorisation and recall. A learner who possess a deep understanding of fundamental concepts within a discipline, who is a creative and critical thinker, who can find and solve problems, is also able to achieve when the test requires less of them. Our challenge is to show our learners that their path to success is not a short-cut to knowledge, but a winding path towards understanding and life-worthy capabilities.

By Nigel Coutts

Dweck, C. (2006) Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.

Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen. (2016) Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (The Norton Series on the Social Neuroscience of Education). W. W. Norton & Company.

Loughran, J. (2013). Pedagogy: Making Sense of the Complex Relationship between Teaching and Learning. Curriculum Inquiry. 43, 1, 118-141.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2013) Flow: The psychology of happiness’ and creativity: The psychology of discovery and invention. New York; Harper Perennial.

November, A. (2012) Who owns the learning?: Preparing students for success in the digital age. Solution Tree Press; Bloomington IN

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.

Wagner, T.& Dintmarsh, T. (2015) Most likely to succeed: Preparing our kids for the innovation era. Simon & Schuster; New York

How might we confront the challenges of time and "the system"?

Speak to teachers the world over about what they want for their students and you find clear patterns emerging. Key dispositions, capabilities and attributes emerge from the conversation. There are the traits of kindness and empathy which allow our students to become caring stewards of the world, its animals, its people, its biomes, its history and its future. There are characteristics which allow them to be productive problem finders and solvers imbued with capacities for creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. They are respectful of diversity, open to new ideas, flexible in times of change and aware of their place in the world. They are happy in their own skin, aware of their limitations but always aware of their potential for growth. They are agentic and desire to take action for a better world with an understanding of their role within the collective citizenship of the planet.

Dig a little deeper and you find that these teachers have a reasonable imagining of what is required for our young people to achieve these goals. An education which values and enculturates these dispositions is essential. Teachers the world over understand the part that they can play (alongside families and the broader community) in providing our young people with the foundational experiences they require to emerge as young adults ready for the challenges which lay ahead. While the methods required to achieve this may vary the goal is clear and we are blessed with a highly professional collective of educators who are driven by a desire to meet this challenge with their energy and passion.

What then stands in the way?

Two forces seem to present the most significant obstacle to educators hoping to achieve these illustrious goals for and with their learners. The first is time, the second is “the system”. Together these two factors act as a bulwark to change; the constraints within which progress is able to occur but only to the point that it strikes against the seemingly immutable obstacles.

Time, as Bilbo Baggins exclaims is what we always need more of. Our greatest plans and hopes seem to be dashed by the limited time that we have in which to make them real. Teachers want more time to understand the needs of their learners, more time to collaborate, more time to explore the details, time to spend on detours from the curriculum, time to reflect, review and redo. We work within the limitations of time all of the time. We make plans spread over multiple years to give ourselves the time required to implement our designs and yet we know that the students before us now will have moved out of our care before our plans are fully realised. Our limited time causes all manner of pressures and tensions. We seek a semblance of work life balance and strive to give time to all that matters to us across all the spheres of our life. We need and want to spend time with family and friends, we hope to find time to take care of our health (physical and mental) and we desire to learn and enrich our lives with arts and culture. We see that our days are often occupied with the minutia of our roles and sense that we are not spending our time on that which has the greatest impact on our quality of life or that of those who rely on us.

We may have no control over the amount of time that we have but we must at least strive to take charge of how that time is used. Only by taking stock of how we utilise our time and value it as the limited and irreplaceable commodity that it is might we hope to allocate it and our energy more wisely. This is no small task but it is one we cannot hope will be done for us.

The other great tension felt by educators looking to better serve the true needs of their learners is "the system”. Individual teachers function within schools, which function within the boundaries and demands of larger organisations which serve the needs of governments driven by a desire for reelection by a citizenry that may well be misinformed of what is required to build a future-focused education system. The legacy of the past, the incessant pressure of the now, the structures which are imposed, the processes which constrain action, the poorly applied proxies of success which measure only what is easily measured act in combination to restrict and limit teacher agency.

For the teacher within this system it can be near impossible to imagine a way to enact change in the face of such an overwhelming entity. The system takes on the proportions of Hobbesian “Leviathan” acting with malicious intent to stifle and suppress our best intentions. We come to see the system as either an unassailable foe or as great authority figure to whom servitude is required. As meek individuals within this system our role in its functions is erased by the inky completeness of our adversary. And yet it is a truth that the system is us and we are it. We choose to see it as that which authorises us to maintain the status quo even where we see it failing our learners or to see it as that which binds our hands. Change has never had its roots within the system but always within the minds of those who seek it out.

As we confront "the system” we make choices about the path we shall take. One is to accept that it exists and that we must be content with acting within its constraints and hope that in a brighter tomorrow that it may change and allow us greater freedom. Another path is to take what action we might, to bring about change where we can and push against the limits of the system where it constrains us. Others will confront the system head on, question its authority and demand change.

In all of this we must not turn away from the promise of our own agency. Time is short but we can choose how we use it, the system is mighty but we are a part of it and can act to maintain it or to change it. In the end, we can choose to let the world happen to us, or we can let our voice be heard.

By Nigel Coutts

The messages we send about learning

I am a dog person. I am one of those people who can’t help but smile at any dog I walk past and I greet the dog before its owner. I have two Jack Russell terriers and they are absolutely my babies. A few years back one of them developed the habit of becoming extremely timid of any other dog that we would pass. She would dig her feet into the ground and it would have been easier to continue walking if the anchor to the Queen Mary was on the far end of the leash instead of a small brown and white ball of fur. The answer to the dilemma came from the world of TV via Cesar Millan, “The Dog Whisperer”. It was not her causing the problem, it was me. 

Cesar explains how the lead becomes a conduit for the emotions of the human on the end of it. Subconsciously I was conveying my uncertainty down the lead and she was reading these signals and responding with fear. I needed to change my mindset and convey calm confidence as we welcomed other dogs on our ramblings. Today she greets other dogs with a wag of the tail and her head held high but I know it is not that she has changed, she is getting positive messages through the lead. 

We send our students many messages about learning, growth, ability, potential. . . Sometimes we are sending these messages deliberately, such as when we talk about growth mindset and the rewards of effort, persistence and risk taking. At other times the messages we send are accidental, incidental and unplanned; these are often the strongest messages we send. 

Students are very adept at learning what ‘school’ is about. They see past the pretty posters, the motivational speeches and the rhetoric about learner attributes. They read the hidden message with great skill. The routines of the day send strong messages about what truly matters; lining up, walking silently to class, listening while the teacher tells you what to do. Assessments are another tool that tells a message about learning. We may say that risk taking and creativity matter but that message is sunk by the assessment that shouts at the students ‘there is a right answer and you need to know it’. 

Mathematics provides a good example of the contradictory messages we send to students. On one level, we invite them to be creative, to think deeply about their solutions, to collaborate with their peers and ask questions when they are unsure. We say that we embrace mistakes as the path to learning and tell our students to have a growth mindset. We tell them that mathematics is beautiful and that mathematicians are finders of patterns.

But then we give them timed drills of mathematics facts. Speed and accuracy become the measures of mathematical fluency. We give tests with one right answer and repeated examples of near identical questions. We create blatantly artificial ‘real world scenarios’ in word problems designed to conceal the mathematical thinking required in much the same way that riddles hide their meaning. We teach prescribed methods and reduce mathematics to a sequence of steps to be blindly followed. We begin the exploration of mathematics with a broad array of concrete materials which allow us to see and touch numbers but as the concepts become more complex these are removed and we are left alone with only formulas to guide us. We understand little but know much. Recall of information becomes the visible substitute for understanding and the assessments we take require little else. We may pass the tests but we know that mathematics is not for us; we are not maths people.

Two approaches to teaching number facts but two vastly different stories about mathematical thinking.

No teacher sets out to send such messages. We do not want our students to perceive maths as a subject that is beyond their abilities or is only to be attempted by a certain type of student. We know that mathematical thinking is of great value and in a world that is increasingly shaped by data is a much needed disposition. Sometimes we are unaware of the messages we are sending, after all a five-minute quiz on Kahootz is just a little fun. We fail to notice that this quick quiz aligns perfectly with the mental image that our students have constructed in response to countless similar quizzes; that mathematics is a subject where success is measured in terms of speed and accuracy. At other times, we believe we are saving our students by providing them a quick and easy way to solve a complex problem. Why bother with the complexities of dividing fractions when you need only "invert and multiply”. Sadly, we should not then be surprised when our students don’t ever really understand fractions and are unable to contemplate an approach to any problem that is not dressed in its usual coat and hat. 

We need to become whisperers of our own messaging systems. Only by being aware of every message that we send our students can we hope to change their narrative of what it means to be a learner. When we acknowledge that their story of learning is the one we are telling them, we can take steps to shift the narrative. 

By Nigel Coutts

The power of powerful ideas shared simply

Some statements stand out in your memory for the power with which they resonate through you mind. I recall the first time I encountered the question posed by Alan November “Who owns the learning?” on the cover of his book of the same name. In four words, Alan poses a question that strikes at the heart of education and encourages us to re-think our approach. If we believe that the learner should own the learning, what are the implications of this for our teaching? Like a stone dropped on the surface of a calm pond, the ripples from a powerful idea spread, expand and gain strength.

Warren Berger’s thinking has a similar effect. His work is around the power of questions as a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Ask the right question, in the right way and the effect can be profound. Warren tells the story of innovators who have taken the time to fully understand the situation and found that the answer came from re-imagining the questions that were being asked. The stone that Berger drops in the pond is the title of his book “A more beautiful question”. We ask questions all of the time but for most of that time our energy is spent on finding an answer to the question we have asked. Berger asks us to give more time to finding our beautiful question. When we shift our thinking from a mindset that values answers to one which appreciates the power of a question we open ourselves to new possibilities.

Some statements bring their authors great fame. They immediately grab the attention of their audience with their bold, unapologetic challenge to the status quo. In 2006 Sir Ken Robinson dropped a virtual bombshell on the world of education in what has come to be the most watched TED Talk of all time with over 53 million views on the TED site alone. “Do schools kill creativity?”. Framed any other way Robinson’s query may have disappeared into the ether. Delivered with the perfect mix of humour, charisma and passion, Robinson’s question continues to impact our vision for what education should offer.

The title of a 2014 article by Andy Kiersz is similarly bold in its approach to the teaching of mathematics. “Everything About the Way we teach Maths is Wrong”. There is nothing subtle or gentle about the headline and in the body of the article the author tells his reader about the writing of Paul Lockhart and his book “A Mathematician’s Lament”. Read the full text and explore Lockhart’s writing and you will question why we do not teach a more beautiful model of mathematics. Lockhart writes, "if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done - I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

In 2015 I had the privilege of hearing Lane Clark speak in Bilbao at "ICOT 2015” on the power of real learning. Among many gems is Lane’s essential challenge to how we approach learning; “Now you know it, So What?”. The challenge here is to teach more than knowing and provide our students opportunities to make practical use of the information with which we fill their heads. Lane is not the first to pose this style of challenge. In 2013 Sugata Mitra shifted our thinking about the value of knowledge by asking "Could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a time when knowing is obsolete?”. For educators the world over, the idea that knowledge could be obsolete was either liberating as it opened the door to learning that focused on dispositions, or was hugely confronting and potentially dangerous. While Mitra’s thinking comes from his observation of the emergence of the internet and his research into the learning potential of an internet connected computer, revealed through his “Hole in the Wall” project, the idea is not new. Those who are advocates of the thinking of John Dewey will know that the teaching and valuing of disconnected or discrete knowledge has long been questioned. “Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.”

I share these ideas because I find in considering viewpoints such as these an opportunity to reflect on the manner in which things are done. By confronting ideas that challenge the “way we have always done things” we allow us to either better value what is good in what we do or begin the search for a better story. In their bold and challenging presentation, these ideas force us to think and that can only ever be a good thing. If a bold claim leads to rich and healthy debate, then it has served a powerful purpose; after all the status quo is best imagined as the point where our questioning begins.

I finish with what has become one of the most significant ideas I have toyed with in recent times. It is an idea captured in a single word coined by David Perkins "Lifeworthy; that is, likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live.” In a single word Perkins challenges his readers to focus their efforts on learning that will matter in the lives that their learners are likely to lead. In a world where there is so much to learn, amidst curriculums which are massively overcrowded, the idea of teaching that which is Lifeworthy has great power and invites fresh dialogue around what we imagine education should provide those who own the learning.

What idea has shifted your thinking?

By Nigel Coutts

Who owns the learning? Preparing students for success in the digital age by Alan November 


The title alone is worth pondering, ‘Who does own the learning?’ If the best learning occurs while the unit is being programmed, if the students have little say in the direction their learning takes then how are we preparing them for their learning futures. Alan has a solid understanding of the implications of technology for learning and combines this with student centred pedagogical approaches to describe a model of education that empowers young learners to take charge of their learning. For teachers the challenge is to get out of the way of the spectacular learning that their children are capable of.

Future Wise: Educating our Children for a Changing World by David Perkins 


How do you answer the 'uppity question’ from a student who wants to know why they need to learn what you are teaching? Do you reply that they need it to do well in the test or are you confident that it is learning they will need to do well in life? In this book Perkins examines what we teaching in schools and makes recommendations for a shift in focus. A key idea introduced early and unpacked throughout the book is the idea of ‘LifeWorthy’; learning that is 'likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live’. Future Wise is jargon free and a great book to share with colleagues, it will help you rethink what you spend time on in class and clarify how you see the role and purpose of education.

Visit “A More Beautiful Question”

Read “Everything about the way we Teach Maths is Wrong”

Listen to Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity”

Listen to Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk - “Build a School in the Cloud”

Find out more about Lane Clark and her approach to inquiry and real learning.

Enhancing the power of our reflective practice

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”

― John Dewey

These words by John Dewey point to a truth about learning that is often forgotten. Experience alone is not sufficient for true learning to occur; reflection is an essential part of the process and our failure to include time for this is why our learning often does not stick.

Reflective practice is a mix of active and passive processes. The most obvious part of the process is the deliberate and conscious act of reflecting on what has occurred. As our brain replays the events of the day or moment we review our actions, thoughts and feelings and make efforts to understand what transpired. Perhaps a new piece of information has been surfaced or maybe our feelings of comfort were challenged by new circumstance. Particularly when we encounter moments of cognitive dissidence our brains demand the time to reflect and make sense of the events that have resulted in this challenging mental state. Likewise, when we confront a tension, need or conflict between how things are and our sense of things might be we are likely to require this time to consciously reflect and seek a new state of balance.

When engaged in this conscious internal reflective practice our mental processes are dominated by self-talk. It as though conversation is occurring inside our mind and it is this conversation which we are most likely to consider as our reflective self. In the background of our minds and in relative quiet occurs a reflective practice which we are often not consciously aware of. Perhaps only when a solution to the tension we were experiencing occurs to us or when we find that a situation which previously was misunderstood achieves clarity, do we experience the benefits of this hidden reflective practice. Although this is a process largely beyond our control we can deliberately allocate time to this by building time into our day for our mind to be quiet and still. In our always on, always connected lives, this time is often lacking and when combined with poor sleep patterns, its absence from our daily schedule can result in poor processing of new information and concepts. Without this time for peaceful, disconnected reflection our brain is unlikely to form cohesive schemes from our new learning experiences and our learning will be shallow.

These internal reflective practices, rely upon our cognitive processes to achieve resolution and as such are limited by the knowledge structures and conceptual frameworks which we have access to. Our capacity to make sense of the world is constrained by our imaginings of what is possible and conceivable. To move beyond the walled gardens of our minds we need to expand the circle of influence within which our mind functions; we need to externalise our reflective practice and bring new perspectives into our realm of possibility.

Taking our reflective practices out of the private domain of our minds and into a public space requires the meeting of certain conditions. We must be comfortable with the vulnerability that comes with sharing what would otherwise be a private practice. High levels of trust are demanded if we are to be genuine in sharing the puzzles of our mind. Unless we feel safe in the environment we choose for this, we are always likely to seek ways to protect ourselves by restraining what we share and how we present our inner tensions. The trust relationship involved is of greatest importance and those we trust need to understand the privileged position they are in and honour the trust extended to them. Where there is not the reciprocal arrangement of a reflective partnership, the potential for damage resultant from broken trust is an ever present risk.

The significance of these trust issues must be considered by any workplace that hopes to implement a mentoring or coaching relationship. Unless there exists a culture of trust and great respect for the dignity of the individuals involved, such programmes are almost guaranteed to fail at best or cause irreparable damage at worst. Where a coaching or mentoring relationship is imposed and where there is a power imbalance between the people involved the sanctity of the trust relationship involved must be absolute. 

While going public with our reflective practice carries degrees of risk, there are real benefits to be had. We make the process of reflecting more deliberate and leverage the power of our conscious mind. We articulate our understandings, describe our tensions and name and notice the salient points of the events causing us concern. We begin anew the act of processing information as the reflections we share return to our mind through our own sensory channels. Our listener provides us with a mirror as their responses, both verbal and non-verbal allow us to see our reflected thoughts in a new way. Where we invite another person to share their thoughts on the conundrum we are sharing we gain an alternate perspective and the opportunity to hear our puzzles shared in someone else’s words. Beyond this we have a new experience and new insights on the original puzzlement to incorporate into our private reflections. After all, we do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.

By Nigel Coutts

Schools are made of People

Schools are made of people. Schools are all about people. Schools are made from the connections between people. Schools exist to serve people and make the lives of all people better. 

These are the fundamental truths which underly every aspect of education and schooling. They are inescapable, undeniable and they should be self-evident. 

It is easy to lose sight of these fundamental truths. To allow the many layers of minutia to come between our actions and the people who are at the heart of the matter. We may not set out to do so but we allow distracting agendas, organisational structures, policies and processes to act as proxies for the people we are meant to be serving. We might be meeting all the requirements of registration, standards and accountability and yet somehow we have lost that direct connection to the people. 

Curriculum is very important. A well written curriculum should make it clear what is worth learning. It should detail the knowledge, skills and dispositions which the people we serve will need and which schools can develop and promote. Curriculum writers should constantly be connecting what they plan for schools to teach with the people that will be most directly affected by that curriculum. Essential questions such as “What is life-worthy learning?” should echo around the rooms in which curriculum planners work. To be clear, the people that education serve should not be politicians or non-human entities in the form of businesses or global conglomerates. Somehow though our curriculum seems to be a product of many forces and all too often the people most directly affected by it seem to be forgotten. Schools contribute to this dilemma when they measure their success or compliance against the number of tick boxes they achieve in the curriculum. 

Assessment too is important. It should let people know how they are progressing with their learning. What they have achieved, what they are yet to achieve and what they need to revisit or seek assistance with. Assessment should always tell someone who cares, something valuable about someone they care about so that they can take actions to help that someone learn. Assessment should not be about league tables. It should not be a tool for comparing nations, states or schools. It should not be about grading people; let’s save that barbaric process for cattle. Sadly, assessment becomes a measure of the wrong people, used to adjust the behaviours of the wrong people or to validate a decision which fails to take into account the needs of the people who are meant to be served by it. 

Pedagogy might be thought of as an area where we get our priorities right. Pedagogy should be a set of decisions made by a teacher which result in a learning experience suited to the needs of the people that they serve. Unfortunately, pedagogy is often a construct of other forces. A response to a particular philosophy applied too rigorously. A set of actions which have always been taken in such a manner that the pedagogy remains the same even as the people and their needs change. Pedagogy should never be dictated by anyone’s and especially not a politician’s emotional attachment to their school days. Pedagogy should be alive, responsive and in service of the people who experience it most directly. 

Policies, procedures, measures of accountability, routines, timetables etc. all subtly and confoundingly come between us and the people we serve. We implement measures to ensure that we are doing our jobs and they become what we serve. Each layer of structure and procedure sees us become one step removed from the people who matter most. 

As we serve multiple ‘masters’ we forget about the fundamental truths at the heart of education; that schools are made of people, for people and by people. At every level, in every decision, with every idea we implement and with every cent we spend, we need to ensure that we are focused on meeting the needs of the people we serve. 

By Nigel Coutts

For Belinda, who ensured it was always about the people.

How might we develop self-regulated learners?

A common question is how do we facilitate the development of independent, self-regulating learners. With an increased focus on the development of dispositional models for learning where the skills and mindset of the learner are crucial, how do we ensure that our learners move from requiring external regulation to a model of internal regulation? 

"For the learner to become autonomous, as Cohen (2008) points out, he must identify, rehearse and apply learning strategies, structure his own learning, and critically reflect upon his own learning processes in order to be able to utilize his acquired skills, inside and outside the classroom.” (Rajabi, 2012 p348) For this goal to be achieved the teacher’s role is to provide the learner with learning strategies and understandings of how to use them for 'problem-posing and problem-solving’. "helping learners learn how to learn, equipping them with the necessary means to self-direct their own learning” (Rajabi, 2012 p346) becomes a crucial goal. Self-regulation requires more than instruction but also that the learner feels in control and understands the advantages of the learning strategies they are encouraged to apply. Self-regulation thus requires tools for learning combined with the individual’s implementation of metacognitive and reflective practices. The challenge is how do we achieve this goal? What teaching moves will facilitate the desired learning?

Self-regulation strategies can be developed within a community of learners if the appropriate conditions are provided according to Beishuizen. The collaborative learning that occurs within a community of learners provides many opportunities for the development of skills required for self-regulation of learning. The modelling provided by an expert learner in the guise of a teacher, who builds partnerships in learning with their students is a key benefit of a community of learners. 

By expanding the frame of reference to include the social context within which learning and development occurs, a more complex image emerges of the interactions and processes which are at play. Vygotsky's (1978) research shows how interactions between the child and their social environment enables learning. He explores the gap between what a child can do now independently and what they can do with assistance. Termed the 'Zone of Proximal Development’(ZPD), this is the gap into which teachers hope to move their students (Vygotsky, 1978). Within a community of learners this gap between what an individual can achieve on their own, and what they can achieve with assistance is bridged by the capacity of the community and the expertise within it. When the community of learners includes members with expertise in learning and in communicating that expertise to junior members of the community, a highly effective learning organisation can emerge. This is what we see in schools which embrace a learning community model. 

The learning community is enriched when particular aspects of learning are embraced and enculturated. Ron Ritchhart shares that the dispositions so essential for success in contemporary times such as creativity, curiosity and open mindedness cannot be taught but must be enculturated; this requires immersion in a culture that values and models these things. A culture of inquiry, a valuing of questions and curiosity and an emphasis on reflection allows the learner to develop the requisite skills for self-regulation. The conclusion is made that a community of learners can provide an environment in which "By working in teams, students developed collaboration strategies and learned to coregulate their common tasks.” (Beishuizen. 2008 p188)

A number of factors are important in the development of a community of learners and these play a part in the development of self-regulation. Certainly, there are aspects of a community of practice in which a group of learners engage in a learning experience that mimics real world practitioners. This mimicking of the methods of professionals in a field ensures relevance and may have an influence on engagement with the methods. This calls for an embrace of an apprentice/expert model of learning in which overtime the learner is invited to become an equal with the expert. A gradual release of responsibility model where the student grows in confidence and eventually independently takes on all aspects of the task at hand.

For this model to apply to the self-regulation of learning the teacher must re-imagine themselves as an expert learner/problem finder/problem solver who models the methods and dispositions necessary and provides opportunities for the student to rehearse these skills with and without guidance. Our students thus need to see that we are both knowledgeable, as a result of our learning experiences and skilled in the processes of acquiring, analysing and applying the fruits of our learning. In short we need to model our capacity to learn. This requires that our students see us engage with ideas which we have not yet mastered, where we need to draw on our capacity to learn.

At one stage the methods of inquiry, learning and research are directly taught by the teacher but as time goes by the boundary between teacher and student erodes and true partnerships in learning are described; the scaffolding is gradually removed. 

In a learning community a point is reached where the teacher and student find themselves needing to apply the strategies of learning and research and thus the modelling that is provided by the teacher takes on an authenticity that would otherwise not exist. Learning with authentic problems and even contributing directly to true research projects or problem solving opportunities places the community of learners into the domain of situated learning where genuine ‘work’ is being done by the community of learners. Programmes in schools where students and teachers collaborate to solve real world problems within the school’s community are positive examples of a such a model as are service programmes where students and teachers collaborate to serve the needs of others. The essential element is that teacher and student are now involved in the learning process as partners and near equals. Learning is no longer regulated for the student and they enter into truly self-regulated learning.

The process of learning to collaborate and to coregulate is supported by the collaborative nature of the community of learners but it is the process of reflection on individual, peer and collective learning that facilitates the development of self-regulated behaviours at the level of individuals and the group. While the teacher modelling of the dispositions of a learner is critical and ongoing, at some point the learner needs to be given opportunities to become the driver of the learning process; an equal partner in leading learning and with opportunities to themselves be a model to less experienced learners. The cycle repeats. 

By Nigel Coutts

Beishuizen, J. (2008). Does a community of learners foster self-regulated learning?, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 17, 3, 183- 193

Rajabi, S. (2012) Towards self-regulated learning in school curriculum.  Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 47, 344–350

Vygotsky, L.S. (1930) Mind and society. Transcribed by Blunden, A. & Schmolze. Harvard University Press; Boston. PA

The challenge and promise of learning organisations

"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. (Ryan & Deci. 2000)

There is a great deal that I like about this description of humanity at its best from Ryan & Deci. It is both a goal to be achieved and an indicator of conditions which are required for us to fulfil our potential. While the focus of this statement is on the actions of the individual we can see how society might act to deny individuals the opportunities to lead such an inspired and agentic life. I like to imagine what a school might be like if every individual who plays a part in its functioning strove to extend themselves, master new skills and apply their talents responsibly.

Maybe schools would be like the ‘learning organisations’ described by Peter Senge.

Underlying Senge’s writing are essential assumptions about people in organisations which parallel the description of people offered by Ryan & Deci. The most important assumption is revealed in the line ‘Learning organisations are possible because not only is it in our nature to learn but we love to learn’. His evidence for this is the learning that occurs for an infant as they learn to walk, talk and demonstrate intrinsic inquisitiveness. This love of learning that Senge identifies must be present for his learning organisations model to work. While a love of learning is an innate quality of young children it might be questioned that this persists as we age. It can be seen that for many and perhaps as a consequence of their experience of school, learning becomes synonymous with work. When learning becomes something we are coerced to do, when what we learn is controlled externally (by other people or by systems and policies) when our learning is regulated for us and motivation comes through extrinsic forces we lose the capacity to be agentic learners.

The second condition required for Senge’s learning organisation to thrive is that learning is a highly valued ideal of the teams which comprise the organisation. Senge states that ‘Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organisations.’ Lastly Senge describes learning organisations as ‘a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality. And how they change it.’ Taken on mass this is high rhetoric but Senge sees this as possible and achievable as ‘Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work - from what Daniel Yankelovich called an ‘instrumental’ view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more ‘sacred’ view where people seek the ‘intrinsic’ benefits of work’. Where the majority of individuals are yet to embrace this sacred view of work, there is likely to be a great tension between those with high levels of intrinsic motivation to realise the vision and mission of the organisation and those who subscribe to an instrumental view.

Unpacking this Senge pins his theory on the belief that people will want to learn as part of a team to create a learning organisation with a shared vision and purpose because their material affluence and fundamental human nature allows them to rise above their lower aspirations for personal fulfilment. I have a hard time imagining that applying to all but a few organisations. After leaving school and while at university I worked in a hotel laundry. I worked as part of a team, we washed, we dried, we folded on odd occasions we had to learn a new fold, a new wash cycle, but in honesty, there was little learning to do. There was no opportunity to create a reality. Maybe the scale is too small and thinking of the Hotel as the organisation we had some knowledge to contribute to the overall health of the organisation, even so I do not imagine any of my colleagues seeing their work as anything other than an ‘instrumental’ means to an end. Maybe such jobs will soon be replaced by machines and Artificial Intelligence will remove the need for menial, repetitive cognitive labour. Maybe we are close to a time where we are all freed from being the ‘instruments' of the economy and work will become a ‘sacred’ force in all of our lives. Maybe we will all soon be living the life of the aerospace engineer with time to study philosophy and meditate while we await our next royalty cheque.

Senge states that 'This, then, is the basic meaning of a 'learning organisation’ - an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future'. But each organisation is made of individuals and while I agree we do possess an intrinsic drive to learn we have that drive to allow us as individuals to survive. Looked at possibly to the level of 'reductio ad absurdum', from organisations, to individuals, to individual genes as described in Dawkin’s model of the ’selfish gene’. It might be that our genes are encoded to learn but they are thusly encoded to learn for their individual survival and not the survival of the organisation that is us, nor the collective that we call humanity.

Yet in schools I at least want Senge to be correct, I want to work in that model of a learning community where everyone from the night janitor to the principal is committed to learning together to enhance the organisations quality. I want our students to be immersed in learning and to see the intrinsic value of becoming self-navigating life-long learners.

Returning to Ryan & Deci we notice two conditions which are crucial if we hope for a future populated by self-motivated individuals striving to learn and extend themselves; agency and inspiration. Firstly, individuals need to be agentic, meaning that they can act strategically to achieve their goals. For individuals to be truly agentic they require the capacity for self-directed action towards a goal and the social/cultural/organisational conditions which allow for this and they must have a desire to act with agency. Secondly, individuals need to be inspired; a requirement served by societal and organisational conditions which connect with what is of significance to the individual.

This then is the challenge for schools, to create conditions which inspire individuals to act with agency such that they become the architects of their learning. In framing such a goal the complexity of this challenge becomes apparent as one plays with the words to capture a condition in which the school is able to inspire the individual and accommodate individual agency, such that the individual is inherently inspired. How do we envision the role that the school or organisation plays in shaping the conditions within which the individual is able to shape their context to align with their inspired actions? How we manage the apparent paradox that agency can be taken from the individual but cannot be given? That all of this occurs in a climate where micromanagement of schools, teachers and teaching is the norm, where external forces increasingly shape what is taught and how, only further complicates matters. And still the words of Ryan & Deci hang there longing to be made real.

By Nigel Coutts

The Trouble with Change Management in Schools

With the new Science and Technology Curriculum in New South Wales, teachers have been asked to teach students Systems Thinking. This in itself brings challenges but it also invites teachers to investigate their school as a system and to then consider what perspectives this lens invites. What becomes clear quite quickly is that schools are inherently complex systems. Imagine creating a systems map of just the people involved in a school and you see that there is great complexity emerging. To this web of the schools immediate human connections one then needs to add layers for curriculum, finance, physical resources, community connections, political factors, historical influences, pedagogies, government authorities, climate factors, technology, infrastructure etc. etc. etc. 

It becomes clear that typical systems thinking when applied to whole school efforts related to culture are going to require a theoretical approach capable of explaining this level of complexity. Thinking and reading about complexity theory opens a number of questions for me. The degree of complexity or organisational scale required for applicability of the theory within a system seems to make it relevant to change at a whole school level (Mason, 2008) and particularly to cultural change. 

Complexity theory points towards the importance of exploring the interactions between the intentions and effects of agents within organisations and reveals that the exponential scaling of these connections brings greater degrees of complexity than may be managed or readily understood. The question is at which point does the level of complexity within an organisation produce relevant degrees of unpredictability? or at what point does the level of complexity become too great to predict reliably the outcome of any change effort. Evaluating this is made more complex as the number of agents and constituent elements within an organisation also seem to defy simple measures. It is unlikely that each agent (human or other such as a mandated curriculum or piece of infrastructure) acts with true independence. Collectives of individuals and closely connected elements (a curriculum that requires a particular pedagogy) may be best seen as single actors within a network with effect sizes not always directly related to the number of component parts. The total number of actors and influencers within even complex systems may be significantly less than what a simple calculation estimates and yet the net effect of all of these factors remains difficult to predict.

Taken simplistically there could be a feeling that due to the complexity of large systems change becomes an uncontrollable beast with a mind of its own. 

If change can only occur where every element of the organisation is continually shaped through ‘massive interventions at all levels’ (Mason, 2008 p43) and even with intense effort the inertial momentum of the organisation means change is hard achieved, how can we hope to negotiate times which require ongoing, rapid change? This then seems to be the challenge confronting schools as the societies in which they exist appear to be racing towards ever greater levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, change becomes the norm and yet change management seems to be increasingly ruled by chaotic drivers. . 

Mason does offer some hope:

‘despite complexity theory’s relative inability to predict the direction or nature of change, by implementing at each constituent level changes whose outcome we can predict with reasonable confidence, we are at least influencing change in the appropriate direction’ (Mason, 2008 p46)

This is perhaps why most change management strategists choose to keep to a more technical rationalist perspective at least early in the change process. The plan put forward by most change analysts centres on placing faith in the establishment of conditions which are conducive to change. By approaching both the small details and the bigger picture thinking of vision and purpose with rational thought and a well-informed plan the hope is that the initial momentum moves the organisation at least somewhat in the desired direction. As the process moves forward it becomes feasible to allow ideas to emerge from within At this stage it is hoped that continuous gentle steering of the change in the desired direction will produce the desired effect. This requires organisations to be open to embracing or tolerating a degree of chaos along the way and being open to unpredictable elements and acts. If it all goes well the organisation will be able to navigate towards a desired goal and be ready for the next challenging change. It is also likely that the whole effort can be derailed by a combination of factors which could not have been predicted or planned for. 

Looking to a hybridized model of complexity theory, humanist approaches and technical rationalist perspectives the appeal of design thinking approaches comes to the fore. In its flexibility and structure founded on a desire to understand the human factors within change it seems to offer a workable solution that can scale. I like that it is a process driven by questions and accepting of failure through rapid prototyping and that it is a cycle with no beginning and no end. It includes scope for input from multiple sources and indicates the importance of feedback and reflection on both the results and process. It also has sufficient flexibility to include elements of systems analysis of an organisation where the interactions between agents are included in the response. 

Daniel Wilson of Harvard’s Project Zero speaking in Melbourne noted that designers achieve greater success with complex problems than others. Designers have a capacity due to their thinking dispositions to cope with complexity and to adapt solutions as needed while working towards a vision or shared goal. Daniel indicates that complex situations, such as those which schools increasingly confront as a result of rapid change and previously unencountered challenges, require emergence as a path to solutions. A bubbling forth of ideas which may be transformed into plans and drivers of change from all areas of an organisation is seen as the best approach to change where the answers do not exist and cannot be passed down from above. 

By Nigel Coutts

Mason, M. (2008). What is Complexity Theory and what are its implications for educational change? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(1), pp. 35-49

Why might we want to learn Digital Technologies?

 Understanding the “Why” of any initiative should be a key step prior to implementation. Without a clear understanding of our “Why” how are we to judge the success of what we are implementing. How will we know which steps take us in the right direction if we have no concept of why we are journeying. In our implementation of ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) and now Digital Technologies, a lack of clarity on the matter of “Why" has often been the most significant challenge to success. 

While it is an unavoidable reality that technology has changed our society, is continuing to bring transformation to all aspects of our lives and our workplaces and that this is a pattern unlikely to change, the place that education should play in education continues as a somewhat grey area. To dabble on the fringes of the false-dichotomy, the use of ICT is to either facilitate learning or it is content, skills and tools that students must master. 

Hammond outlines the perceived benefits of ICT integration to schools as being linked to positive impact on standards, vocational relevance and as a catalyst for curriculum change. In each instance Hammond argues that research does not indicate that ICT has met these goals. Perhaps the most interesting observation is found in the statement, 'In particular, the use of ICT has been unquestioned, policy has focused on adoption rather than pedagogy, and beliefs about ICT are characterised by determinism’. The unquestioned adoption of technology fueled by those who are passionate about its use has led to forced integration of technology and an expanding educational technology marketplace with little real thought given to its purposes. 

Educational technology for much of its short history seems to have been stuck between the two dominant models of education with a foot in the content delivery camp and one in the constructivist, student centered one. Technologies such as Interactive Whiteboards and Learning Management Systems (LMS) may bring new affordances, but if their use remains consistent with traditional pedagogical models of the teacher delivering content then their ultimate value is limited. For many the use of ICT has centered around its use in ways that are designed to bring learners and the curriculum's prescribed content together with perhaps some option for online discussion. LMS options and online courses presented in parallel to face to face learning scenarios offer little real differentiation and the value add of the technology can be minimal. 

There are some significant forces changing the landscape of teaching with technology and this is reflected in a bifurcation of the curriculum into two strands. Information & Communication Technologies continue to play their part as a tool for learning and for communication. Alongside this there is an increasing understanding that mainstream curriculums need to provide learners with the capacity to be producers of digital solutions. 

In the traditional areas of technology use, what has traditionally been labelled as ICT, the maturity of present day operating systems and devices has removed most of the barriers to use that existed previously and today we have systems that allow the technology to move to the background. The modern learner expects technology to just work and to be designed in ways that allow the user to quickly master its interface. In the modern world of low cost Apps, if you design a product that requires a manual or that has a steep learning curve you are bound to fail in the market. The evolution of technology from ‘geek toy’ to mainstream consumer device has allowed teachers to focus on the learning enabled by the devices rather than devoting significant time to learning the technology. 

This does not mean that the use of ICT is without challenges. With the ease of use has come the challenge of how we manage the potential of modern devices to distract us from other tasks. Educators face the challenge of teaching students to take control of their technology use, to manage screen time and to avoid the lure of social media and gaming. New dangers have emerged as a result of our connectedness and the social world of our young people has been transformed. Our young people need to learn how to manage their online profile and avoid the very real threat of being exploited by adults. In the pre-digital world, the social blunders we made were mostly contained to a small circle of possible connections. Today we learn the norms of society in a very public setting and our mistakes linger on as our ever-present digital footprint. 

At the other end of the spectrum we see an increased understanding that the solutions we create, to solve the problems we encounter will demand knowledge of the possibilities of digital technologies. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, physical computing using Arduino and other system on a chip models merge with cultures of making and small scale manufacturing processes to bring new affordances that shift learning beyond content transfer. This is not technology as a tool for learning content or skills that were traditionally taught by a teacher but technology as the product of our problem solving.

It is right to question the validity of teaching all students this new Digital Technology. The automobile transformed society but we did not teach all students to be mechanics. Why should all students learn to code or be taught to solve problems through computational thinking? Perhaps the answer lies in the breath of change that comes with Digital Technology. Every aspect of our modern life is set to be disrupted in some way by the continued expansion of technology. In particular, it will become increasingly normal for technology to be blended into our working lives and a future where our workmates include machines is predicted to be the norm. Our infrastructure (electrical supplies, traffic networks, financial systems etc.) is largely built on now outdated technology and the systems which control it are increasingly susceptible to malfeasance and this will require new thinking if the chaos of disrupted systems is to be avoided. It is also very much the case that the next evolution of the products and systems we rely on will involve a shift to digital systems and those who are able to design these systems will be able to reap the rewards. 

Perhaps the logic for understanding at least a little of how digital technology functions is that it will exist increasingly in the background.  Our world view is already largely shaped by the algorithms which function behind the scenes to control what platforms like Facebook and all the large online media platforms put in front of our eyeballs. That the potential to alter the outcomes of an election through the manipulation of algorithms which modify the news cycle and shape public opinion is a reality points to the importance of understanding how digital technologies function.

 By Nigel Coutts

Hammond, M. (2014), Introducing ICT in schools in England: Rationale and consequences. British Journal of Educational Technology, 45: 191–201. doi: 10.1111/bjet.12033

Confronting the fear and challenge of a new curriculum

Change in schools is particularly challenging. Teacher identity is closely linked to our role as teachers and our perception of that role is reflected in our pedagogy. Where the intended change alters the nature of our pedagogy and fundamentally shifts the relationships between teachers and students, and between teachers and knowledge resistance is more likely. Smollan and Sayers indicate the importance of understanding the socially constructed nature of identity and the potentially negative impact that change can have on this for individuals, 'that change ‘dislodges’ identity and leads to anxiety and grieving’ (Smollan & Sayers. 2009 p439) and that this can result in resistance to change. 

When the intended change combines a shift in our pedagogical practices and an embrace of new knowledge outside of our comfort zone resistance is likely to be high. A new approach to the teaching of mathematics or literacy is likely to be accompanied by a degree of discomfort as we question the validity of the method and contemplate how we might adjust to the new strategies. In cases where we are confronted with the challenge of teaching entirely new skills and content through pedagogical methods which we also find confronting we have little upon which to construct a new set of actions. This is the challenge facing teachers as they adapt to the teaching of Digital Technologies and Design & Production in Primary Schools. 

Successful change requires a clearly communicated and compelling vision if it is to be accepted (Causon 2004, Kotter 2008, Burnes 2011, Rogers et al 2006, Self et al 2007) - Early on in the change process inspirational leadership will be needed to get teachers interested in the new curriculum and asking questions about what it will mean for them and their teaching practice. It might be necessary to communicate a degree of urgency around the process while creating an environment that builds confidence and competence. Teachers need to understand the importance of the endeavour, believe the goal is obtainable and know that they will have the support they require. 

Research on change management point to certain conditions which might support the introduction of new methods and ideas. Building on an inspiring introduction that provides a clear vision and purpose as may be described by change experts such as Kotter & Cohen, leadership might shift from an inspirational model to what Perkins (2003) describes as an ‘inquiry-centered leadership’ style where the group’s leadership acts as a facilitator for the development of the group’s collective knowledge processing. In such a model challenges are discovered by the group collectively and solutions are allowed to emerge from within rather than from the top down. Such an approach can be quite empowering and support teacher agency. Given the current pace of change within education it can be easy for teachers to see change as something that is constantly being inflicted upon them. By shifting the locus of control away from external forces such as a new curriculum and back to the teacher a new dialogue becomes possible; one where change is a response to opportunities identified by the teacher. 

Research by Gibson-Langford and Laycock (2006) shows ‘that teachers like to learn together through informal knowledge creation and sharing opportunities characterised by critical dialogue, frequent feedback, critical reflection and appreciative behaviours’. This emergent inquiry approach is elaborated on by Burnes who adds that 'It also sees change as a process of learning and not just a method of changing organizational structures and practices’ (Burnes. 1996 p13) - Such an approach to change and particularly to the introduction of a new curriculum is more likely to allow teachers to see how it will fit with their existing beliefs about education and how it might benefit their learners. Providing an environment characterised by dialogue and learning aimed at developing understandings of the curriculum and then using this to guide individuals and small teams towards embracing its affordances in their own way can maintain agency and autonomy. 

For the new curriculum to arrive at a point where it can be widely embraced it must first infiltrate the language and conversation of the school to a sufficient level. This is the initial goal and a sufficient goal for a first year. There will be those who rapidly adopt the change, those who are already genuinely interested and enthusiastic about either the content or new modes of thinking and developing understanding. There will be some who are already using the ideas upon which the curriculum is based. Teachers who have embraced a design thinking approach to problem solving or have adopted the use of certain technologies such as robotics will feel well served by the new curriculum. There will be those who are willing to engage with the curriculum and will be open to guidance towards an understanding of what it is all about. There will be those who are willing to engage in dialogue about the new affordances and have some understanding of what they might be but are uncertain about their ability to bring the new methods into their classrooms. There will also be resistors both active and passive. Some will feel very uncomfortable with the new curriculum and find implementing it a great challenge. When ideas are significantly outside of our comfort zone it is very normal to find ways to protect our self-identity. In these cases, learning becomes difficult if not impossible and it is only when we are repeatedly shown that we are in a safe and supportive environment that we are able to engage the challenge. Schools must recognise that for some teachers, Digital Technologies is such a challenge. 

Our learners will never now a world where Digital Technologies are not the norm. Using solutions developed within this space and with this mindset is already their normal. Unless they are to be slaves to this technology we must also empower them to be creators of digital solutions. To do this we must begin with recognising the challenges that a curriculum built around mastery of Digital Technologies brings to our teachers and seek to understand the supports they require. There is much to be excited about here but we must help every teacher see the opportunities beyond their fears. 

By Nigel Coutts

Burnes, Bernard (2010) Call for Papers: Why Does Change Fail and What Can We Do About It?, Journal of Change Management, 10 (2), pp. 241 — 242

Causon, J. (2004). The internal brand: Successful cultural change and employee empowerment. Journal of Change Management, 4, 4, pp. 297–307.  

Gibson-Langford, L. & Laycock, D. (2007) So they can fly . . . building a community of inquirers Accessed online 8.10.2016 https://pypchat.wikispaces.com/file/view/So+They+Can+Fly+-+Building+a+Community+of+Learners+copy.pdf 

Kotter, J & Cohen, D. (2002). The heart of change: Real-life stories of how people change their organisations. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press, pp. 1–14

Perkins, D. (2003). King Arthur's round table (1st ed.). New York: Wiley.

Rogers, P., Meehan, P. and Tanner, S. (2006) Building a winning culture(Boston, MA: Bain & Company).

Self, D., Armenakis, A. & Schraeder, M. (2007) Organizational Change Content, Process, and Context: A Simultaneous Analysis of Employee Reactions, Journal of Change Management, 7:2, 211-229

Debating false dichotomies: a new front in the education wars

Sometimes, it seems everyone who ever went to school is an expert on education and has a plan to make it better. Actual teaching experience, years of professional learning and formal training are all easily swept aside. The result is an ongoing dialog around what schools should do, what teachers need to do more of or less of and how the academic success of the nation is linked to strategy x or y. In search of an easy sell, our illustrious media machine is more than happy to run with whatever story seems to fit the current mood of their readership. The one criteria is a catchy headline and an easy scapegoat. A quick sound bite from an ‘expert’, a brief extract from the latest report by whichever industry group has most recently discovered education and you’re done. No need to actually visit a classroom, talk to a teacher or confuse your readers with the subtle complexity that surrounds every issue within education.  

In the eyes of the media any issue can be depicted as a battle between two competing points of view. Little seems to have changed in media land since the invention of the good versus evil plot line. In any field that strives to meet the needs of real people and real communities such a simplistic view will always fall well short of capturing the truth. In education, the false dichotomies created by the media and perpetuated by those who are unwilling or unable to take a deeper look, do nothing but harm. 

The Sydney Morning Herald has contained numerous examples of articles which present education as a contested field where sides are taken and lines are drawn. The most recent version carries the headline 'Hard facts v soft skills: a new front in the education wars’. Sorry, but the last time I was in a school there was no war going on. Indeed, even when you fill a room full of teachers from diverse backgrounds, nationalities and contexts, there is now ‘war’.  

The article depicts and dramatises a debate that does occur in education. Should teachers focus on skills and dispositions or should they focus on knowledge? There is a tension here that articles such as this perpetuate through fear mongering and oversimplification. There are those who believe that there is a trend away from teaching students knowledge, a shift away from content based curriculums. There are also those who believe that there is a trend away from teaching skills and dispositions such as creativity, critical thinking and communication. That this debate exists at all and that it has been allowed to continue does nothing to help our students.  

The supposed war between hard facts and soft skills is a dramatic oversimplification of a conversation that needs to occur in schools, with educational leaders, between curriculum writers and with politicians. Approached with an appreciation of the possibility of a response that lies neither at the poles of this supposed debate nor neatly in the middle allows for a conversation that has genuine merit. A conversation that reflects more closely how teachers have dealt with this tension and in doing so serve the needs of their learners. 

Our students require now, as perhaps they have for a long time, skills and dispositions which will allow them to find and solve problems, deal with complexity and ambiguity and communicate their ideas with clarity. Knowledge may not have the value and power that it once did in times before Google, but being devoid of knowledge is a state of being no-one would argue for. Skills or knowledge alone have little real world value. Intelligence is being able to use what you know in new ways and to solve new problems.  

The framing of the headline of this article is likely to result in a string of arguments on the side; distractions which only confuse the matter and give credence to the imagined ‘war'. There are those who see the term ‘soft skills’ as a devaluing of what are otherwise described as essential skills, capabilities or capacities required for success. They are skills which are complex and take great effort to master. The term ‘hard knowledge’ implies some level of fundamental truth in the knowledge or an essential value in the particular knowledges involved. There is almost an implication that there is an agreed to body of knowledge that all people should possess despite the very obvious fact that we can only ever hope to encounter a tiny fraction of all that might be worth knowing to us as individuals let alone all that is known. To borrow from Donald Rumsfeld, we will always have more unknown unknowns than known knowns.  

The supposed debate dissolves when we understand that it is not only preferable to teach knowledge and skills/dispositions together but that it is an entirely achievable goal. When we use content as a vehicle for developing skills and dispositions we provide our students with opportunities to understand that content in ways not possible through rote memorisation. When we engage our students in critical and creative thinking with and about the knowledge we value we allow them to develop their dispositions while expanding their knowledge banks. By giving purpose and context to the knowledge we teach, when we expect our students to be able to use the knowledge they have in meaningful ways and we assess not just what they can remember but what they can do with it with we provide students with the rich and subtly nuanced education they deserve.  

What education needs is a new narrative. One with complex characters and subtle plot lines. A mature narrative written for an audience that understand that the hero can have a dark side and that the truth is always more than just a little bit messy. We need the media to try a little harder, to dig a little deeper and present a view of education more rooted in the truth of what happens in schools and reveals the many ways educators are meeting the needs of their students. As educators, we have a responsibility to let our voice be heard, to speak truth to power and advocate for a profession that is valued for its expertise in the field most important for our future.   

By Nigel Coutts

Bringing Computational Thinking into the Primary Classroom

Primary teachers in New South Wales (NSW) are this year and next integrating a new Science & Technology Curriculum. It brings with it a number of challenges and opportunities and while it has much in common with the existing curriculum, it will require some significant changes.

The new curriculum is a response to the launch of the Australian Curriculum’s Digital Technologies syllabus. While the use of technology in Primary Schools was once restricted to the use of consumer products by students as they research, engage with media in various forms, publish their learning and use basic spreadsheet functions, the times have changed. Students now require much from their technology learning. Being a consumer of technology, being able to use basic productivity software and even knowing how to create multimedia items is no longer sufficient. Today’s student needs to understand how technology can be leveraged to solve problems and create unique products and services. 

The result is a syllabus that embraces Digital Technologies and computational thinking. In NSW the K-6 setting embraces Digital Technologies as a content strand alongside studies of Earth & Space, Living, Material and Physical Worlds. It presents key ideas from computer science, information systems and software engineering along with the skills and ideas of project management. According to the syllabus:

The Digital Technologies strand provides students with opportunities to investigate existing technologies and create digital solutions. They explore the automation of repetitive tasks through developing their own software and by using existing software packages. Through knowledge and understanding of digital technologies, students are encouraged to become critical consumers of information and creative producers of digital solutions. (NESA. 2017)

Along with Digital Technology, students are asked to become computational thinkers. Students are required to engage in problem solving tasks while leveraging a computation thinking model where a task is broken down into parts, relevant data is analysed, patterns are found and step by step solutions are outlined. The syllabus defines this as:

Computational thinking is a process where a problem is analysed and solved so that a human, machine or computer can effectively implement the solution. It involves using strategies to organise data logically, break down problems into parts, interpret patterns and design and implement algorithms to solve problems. (NESA. 2017)

For teachers, this all brings some interesting challenges. The average teacher has little experience with this style of thinking. Indeed, many are still getting their heads around the sort of computer use required for the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) capability. it is worth exploring then what is meant by Computations Thinking and how it might be introduced. 
 
Perhaps the place to start is with an understanding that computational thinking does not require a computer, or computer code. As the definition from the syllabus states it is a “process where the problem is analysed and solved so that human, machine, or computer can effectively implement the solution”. It is fair to say that the average Kindergarten students spend much of their school day engaged in a form of computational thinking as they learn the many steps required to survive the day, a long string of “If. . . Then . . .” statements. If the bell rings, stop playing and line up for class. If the teacher sings "one, two, three, eyes on me” reply “one, two, eyes on you”. The list goes on. Indeed, when looked at as the method for clarifying the steps to be taken to complete a process in simple terms that even a machine can understand it becomes much easier to see how it might fit into our existing methods for problem solving.

We have been doing this sort of thinking for a long time and long before machines or computers got involved. By adding numerical data to the simple workflows that our kindergarten student use we add a degree of complexity but the task remains very manageable. The doorman at the average cinema does this when he/she counts people through the door and closes it when the theatre is full. It might look like this in CT language: If cinema is empty - open door. If 200 people enter cinema, close door.
 
Computational thinking takes this sort of step by step workflow and weaponises it as a tool for analysing and solving complex problems. 
 
There are commonly four essential thinking moves associated with computational thinking. Understanding the role that each plays in solving a problem begins to demystify the process. It is not some magical secret process understood only by geeks with a slide rule and an understanding of binary. The four elements are:

• Decomposition: Breaking down data, processes, or problems into smaller, manageable parts
• Pattern Recognition: Observing patterns, trends, and regularities in data
• Abstraction: Identifying the general principles that generate these patterns
• Algorithm Design: Developing the step by step instructions for solving this and similar problems

It might be useful to consider a set of questions to be used when engaging in computational thinking, something like this perhaps:

• What do we know about what is going on here? - What data do we have/need?
• What are the parts of the problems? What conditions emerge that we must respond to?
• What patterns do we notice? What stands out to us?
• What big idea might explain the patterns? Moving from parts to wholes
• What steps might we take as we respond to each situation we encounter?

Computational thinking does not need to be made overly complicated. Once the basics are grasped then it becomes sensible to ask how our step by step process for solving a problem might be automated and that path might lead us to the inclusion of a machine or computer. As students become comfortable with designing clearly articulated and creatively imagined step by step solutions, they can begin to develop increasingly sophisticated and complex workflows using their developing skills for computational thinking. With an understanding of what computational thinking is, students can move to block coding systems as a substitute for their non-digital methods and in time move to developing solutions which might eventually be expressed in code.

By beginning with an understanding of what computational thinking is, what it looks like and how it is used by people to solve problems we ensure students are equipped with the foundational knowledge they need in what is increasingly a digital world. 

By Nigel Coutts
 
 
 

The learner's role in their search for learning

In ‘The Spirit of Professional Learning’, Tina Blythe utilises the metaphor of searching for driftwood on a beach to describe the process of connecting learning opportunities with our particular needs. The beach wanderer passes by many items which do not meet their needs. Only a few of the pieces of detritus will fit the wanderers needs, maybe fitting into a particular project or perhaps offering enough possibility to be collected for one yet to be imagined. For the professional learner, the journey is the same. They engage with many ideas, strategies and solutions, but only a few are implemented or saved for future use.

“Sometimes, I go to the beach and I know exactly what I’m looking for: sea glass of a certain color, shells of a particular shape or size. Sometimes, I see something that catches my eye, and I’ll pick it up and bring it home, even though I’m not sure at that moment what I’m going to do with it. - you never bring home the whole beach.”  
Tina Blythe

I particularly connect with this metaphor of searching for driftwood. It points to the role that the life-long learner plays in the process of learning. Rather than expecting to be immersed in learning that shines a light on the path forward the notion of searching for driftwood that suits the learner’s needs is very empowering. It requires an imagining of learning as a very active process where the learner is aware of their context, their current understanding and what they might need to move forward. It demands a conscious practice of reflection and a disposition towards taking charge of one’s learning. It is a very agentic view where learning is something that you do, not something that happens to you. 

It also connects very nicely with how I use Twitter. There is a small ocean of ideas available on Twitter and one could never hope to read, let alone embrace every good idea that passes by. A small number of the ideas that are encountered will seem to fit perfectly with what you need. Others might challenge your thinking and encourage you to look at something from a fresh perspective. Some posts and threads are best ignored; freedom of speech was never meant to come with a guaranteed audience. I like Twitter most when it hints at a question, when it leaves me wondering why and wanting to know more.

This metaphor of searching for driftwood extends my understanding of the role of the facilitator, particularly in professional learning. If the learner’s role is to search for and collect what they need then the facilitators role is to make that process possible. If as a facilitator I demand that the learner accepts what I offer, then I take away the possibility for them to find what they need. The facilitator's role is one of supporting the learner in their process of making meaning, finding what they need and valuing what they find. An effective facilitator relies on great questions that encourage reflection, not a pool of knowledge. Rethinking the role of the facilitator helps me see the value in a question like ‘What makes YOU say that?’; not as a test of understanding but as a way of helping the learner clarify how they arrived at the statement or belief that they have shared; a prompt for a very personal reflection on thinking and a question for the benefit of the learner.

What I find challenging in this, is how such a learner centered notion of facilitation and professional learning fits with how many people seem to view learning. If our only experience of learning is traditional teacher led learning, then it is very natural to expect all learning to be like this. This experience hard wires our thinking about the process of learning and shapes our expectations for what the learning experience will be like. If I expect the teacher to teach and me to thusly learn, how will I ever become a self-navigating life-long learner.

The challenge is how might we shift the learner’s mindset from a view of learning as a consequence of the actions of another, to a process that we are in charge of.

by Nigel Coutts

Why we need to move our technology use beyond substitution

It was in 1980 that Seymour Papert published his seminal work ‘Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas’ in which he largely introduced the concept that computers could be highly effective tools for children’s learning. If there is a moment that indicates the birth of our contemporary use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the classroom this is probably it even more so than the release of hardware like the Apple 2 or the much loved TRS-80. Papert introduced the idea that computers could be used for more than games or for basic productivity purposes. Papert introduced the idea of computers as tools for creativity and making, and developed tools that would allow children to playfully take charge of the computer.

When Papert was conducting his initial inquiries into how computers might best fit into education the hardware imposed great limitations upon what could be achieved. This limitation encouraged problem solving but it is hard to argue that we are not much better equipped today to meaningfully integrate computing into our learning environments. It is also hard to imagine any sort of future which will not be increasingly influenced by technology.

In 1980 students with access to the latest technology were using the Commodore VIC 20 and would have enjoyed its 20 KB of ROM and up to 32 KB of RAM. At the time programmes were loaded either manually using the keyboard or from cassette tapes. (Can you imagine having to type in the lines of code required for a modern computer game?) Today you can run a VIC 20 emulator built using Java Script inside your computers browser over the internet. Perhaps most telling is when you compare the speed of a VIC 20’s processor which was clocked at just over 1MHz with the chip in a modern-day phone which runs at around 1.4GHz.

Thirty-eight years after Papert predicted such a bright future for computers in learning and with such impressive progress in computing power and related technology one would expect that the use of computing has become mainstream and that children are routinely using computers to do great things that could not be otherwise achieved. In many classrooms, this is indeed the case and through an evolutionary process we now see computational thinking and digital technologies along with the ICT general capability in our curriculum. 

Despite this there continues to be debate about the use of technology within schools. While there is little argument that technology can be used positively, there is a growing push-back fueled by the side effects of our technology use. One area of concern is that the unconstrained use of technology is distracting students from their learning. That our well-intentioned BYOD and laptop programmes are not enhancing learning but are getting in the way of learning. Maybe a part of the issue here is to do with the way our students are using the technology they have and a lack of understanding amongst educators of how the technology we are putting in the hands of their learners might be used to enhance learning. 

A 2017 article in ’Scientific American’ shared the findings of a set of research projects which are frequently cited as evidence of the negative influence that digital devices are claimed to have on learning. One study reported indicates that students with unconstrained or unstructured access to connected devices spend 40% of their time in activities unrelated to their learning. Such a figure is disturbing on its own and the situation is only made worse when it is shown that students in this group of 84 students spent on average 5 minutes using the internet for class related activities. The point that the researchers make is that the use of devices in this context is impeding learning but one would sensibly ask what opportunities are being missed here? How might the technology that the students have, be better utilised to enhance their learning?

If you look at the learning context in which the study takes place you begin to see why in this scenario technology might not be the right tool. Although not described in detail one gets the impression here that the learning involves students as audience members to lecture style presentations supplemented by some online resources such as 'accessing the syllabus, course-related slides or related material or supplemental materials, searching for content related to the lecture’. This is hardly the creative use of computers that Papert imagined and at best is pitched at what Ruben Puentedura would label as ‘substitution’ use of technology; that is technology as a substitute for what could be equally achieved with a non-technological solution.

While the article acknowledges many positive uses for laptops as tools for learning, their use as note taking tools is questioned. Note taking is the only non-consumption use described in the article. Research is cited that reports on a study by researchers at Princeton and UCLA into the depth of learning achieved by students who take notes using a laptop compared to notes taken by traditional pen and paper methods. It is worth exploring this further. 

"The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. . . . We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning." Read the Full Report

In 2006 Ruben Puentedura defined the now well-known SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition) model for technology integration. At the simplest level is ‘substitution’ where technology replaces what would otherwise be achieved without technology. ‘Augmentation’ adds a level of functional improvement but little else changes. In the case of note taking on a laptop ‘Augmentation’ benefits might be achieved by the ability to later search notes or the security of a cloud backup against the possibility of lost notes. Modification brings a significant change and Redefinition unlocks opportunities not possible without the use of the technology. As stated above, in the case of the students note taking, technology is used at the level of substitution. But what if the students were made aware of tools and strategies which would place their technology use in this context at the levels of Modification or Redefinition

What if the notes that the students took during the class were shared online afterwards and were used as a catalyst for online discussion and dissection? What if the students and the teacher used this forum to unpack and expand their understandings? What if the lecture had an official back-channel that focused not on recording notes, but on sharing questions and wonderings posed by the lecture? How might such a resource later be used by students as they make sense of what they have listened to but are yet to master? In our highly connected worlds it becomes quite possible that a note taking system backed by a social network dimension could involve experts in the field and that their contributions could significantly enhance the learning. 

Tools such as ‘Padlet’ make this form of collaborative note taking easy. In place of taking individual notes, students share their thinking as they listen and the posts of one student become the catalyst for responses and discussion. Padlet is a digital Pin Board that allows users to share ideas, post replies, link ideas and infinitely rearrange notes. For users of ‘Google Slides’ the built-in Q&A feature allows another way for learners to engage with the content. Not only do the students gain from the many perspectives shared in this way, the teacher gets to see in near real time how their presentation is being interpreted or misinterpreted. ‘Answer Garden’ allows interactions around specific questions with a visualisation of the most common answer provided. Answer Garden could be used by the teacher as a quick check in on the developing understanding of the class and with the right question would be a tool for focusing the students on the most essential concepts. 

These tools change the dynamic of the learning environment and unless the affordances that they bring are utilised effectively by the teacher they are likely to become a layer of distraction. Where such tools are incorporated into the learning environment , are used to actively inform the presentation of content, engage students with that content, allow for interaction and support reflection, learning should increase and the teacher should be able to more immediately address gaps in understanding. 

What if the notes that the students took were non-linear? Mind mapping tools such as Inspiration allow for the connections between ideas in a note to be made clear but with the use of hyperlinks allow for connections beyond the document. What if students constructed a mind map from their notes after the class and then shared that with their colleagues and teacher for feedback. Tools such as ‘OneNote' and ‘Evernote' make it easy to add rich media to notes and to link from one note to another. Having more information alone is not enough but such tools, when used to explore connections between ideas should foster the deeper understanding that simple typed notes fail to achieve.

What if the notes were not only typed but included handwritten notes, diagrams and sketches created using a stylus and touch enabled device? Sketchnoting is the new darling of the note taking world and the beautifully constructed notes of sketchnoters such as Sylvia Duckworth show how this artful capturing of learning allows for a deep and conceptual understanding. Books such as ‘The Doodle Revolution’ by Sunni Brown and ‘The Sketchnote Handbook’ by Mike Rhode make this an accessible skill. Not that sketchnoting requires technology, but for those who are somewhat artistically challenged, the ease of editing and the ability to use pre-drawn images that comes with its use can do much to enhance the results.

What if students used a tool like ‘Liquid Text’ to analyse their notes after the class. Liquid Text allows users to grab parts of a document and re-combine them in new ways while preserving their original place within the document. Students equipped with their detailed typed notes could identify the connections between ideas and use Liquid Text to drag snippets into groups around key concepts.

How might computational thinking bring a new perspective on the notes we take and the information we access as we learn. A tool as simple as WordArt will perform a basic analysis of text identifying words commonly used and making this visible. A tool such as this can reveal patterns and shine a light on what might not otherwise be seen. 

What if students used a tool like ‘Prism' to collaboratively interpret text. According to the Prism website 'Users are invited to provide an interpretation of a text by highlighting words according to different categories, or "facets." Each individual interpretation then contributes to the generation of a visualization which demonstrates the combined interpretation of all the users.’

The point is that if our use of technology remains at the level of substitution we should not be surprised when it does not enhance learning. Add the very real possibility for distraction that technology brings and it should be clear that using technology as a substitute for traditional methods is not going to achieve comparable results. The challenge is to find ways by which technology can enhance learning. We can be certain that technology is not going to go away and that those who maximise the affordances that it brings are likely to gain the most from it. 
 

By Nigel Coutts

What might our children most need from Education?

According to many STEM or STEAM skills are essential to future success and the prosperity of nations. In these times where technology is increasingly a part of the solution and where understandings of science, engineering and mathematics are central to so many industries this makes sense. But counter to this argument is a growing body of educators who point to the significant role that the humanities have in producing young people who are empathetic and aware of the social aspects of the modern world. They argue that a focus on STEM pathways ignores the human elements of change, the interpersonal and societal power relations that shape our society. What path then should schools take in planning to meet the needs of our learners and to what degree should the needs of the economy shape our curriculum?

Much of this debate arrives from observations that we are facing a time of unprecedented change. Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) are to be the norm and the pace of change is set to accelerate, we in what has been termed ‘the age of accelerations’. In an effort to make sense of this world, the OECD has identified three mega-trends which are shaping this change; globalisation, technological progress and demographic change. Each of these trends alters the nature of our societies and so we must also manage the changes that they induce in areas parallel to their immediate sphere of influence. Factors such as automation and globalisation of markets and workforces will place pressures on our workforces and change what skills are most valued. Some professions will disappear altogether while others will be transformed. Any work that is routine, repetitive and machine learnable is likely to be relegated to the pages of history while careers involving non-routine cognitive skills are set to expand. While economists predict that our economies are likely to expand as a consequence of all this change, it is uncertain as to how many people this new economy will require or if we will be able to prepare our young people to thrive in this new work-order. 

The term “Great Acceleration” was coined by scientists to capture the holistic, comprehensive, and interlinked nature of all the changes simultaneously sweeping across the globe and reshaping the human and biophysical landscapes of the Earth system. (From “Thank You for Being Late: An optimists guide to thriving in the age of accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman p10)

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development identifies the need to prepare young people for times of constant change in environments laden with technology.

Prepare young people for the jobs of the future by ensuring that they are equipped with the right type of skills to successfully navigate through an ever-changing, technology-rich work environment, (OECD - Future of Work & Skills - 2017)

To many, this process involves developing STEM skills and dispositions. According to ‘The Innovation Policy Platform’, a group within the World Bank Group, 'Increasing students’ participation in STEM remains a primary component of policy measures to strengthen education for innovation.’ Economists at PwC state that 'Australia needs a STEM capable workforce if we are going to continue to prosper in an increasingly complex and competitive world.’ Indeed there is a close affiliation between papers addressing the importance of STEM and those which point to needs for an innovative workforce. There is also some evidence that STEM careers have tangible benefits for the individual as reported by ‘Education Technology’ citing research by ‘Institution of Engineering and Technology’ who 'found that those who’ve pursued STEM in their education or career earn more, get on the property ladder quicker and save more than those who haven’t pursued STEM subjects.’

Another line of thinking is that the skill set most required in our future will be that of the entrepreneur. While in the short-term STEM skills might be in demand, it is not certain that this trend will continue. We may always need some scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians but there are many routine tasks within these careers which will be subject to automation. Coding, data analytics, structural analysis, quantity surveying/estimates, repetitive laboratory tasks are just some of the STEM careers which are likely to diminish as machines and artificial learning moves in. It is not that there will be no need for humans in these roles, but the number required is bound to decline and this is most likely to impact entry level positions.

What becomes important then is the skill to exploit emerging opportunities in a constantly shifting market. This requires a capacity to see opportunities where others do not and then take decisive action to maximise the return available before the market shifts again or others move in. To this end there is an emerging trend towards teaching the skills of entrepreneurialism in schools and colleges. This goes beyond teaching problem finding skills, creative or innovative thinking to include the specific skills required to transform an idea into a business opportunity. Indeed, in the spirit of entrepreneurship there is a growing marketplace for those who are looking to sell ‘Entrepreneur Education’ programmes to schools. 

The common thread to much of this debate is that schools are seen as places which prepare the next generation worker. In this discourse, Education is absorbed into the machinery of the economic system and has a part to play in assuring the continued growth of our economies, even if that means preparing individuals to be the makers of their own destinies as may be the case for entrepreneurs. This economic imperative driving education is important and to some extent unavoidable. After all we hope that our young people will have secure futures beyond their time at school and at least in part this demands financial security. 

But only in part. There are hopes and wishes for the future world which are not readily measured in economic terms or served directly by participation in the workforce. There are many pressures confronting our society which require understandings that have little to do with STEM disciplines or entrepreneurialism. 

2016 was a landmark year for the VUCA world. In June of 2016 the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and in November the United States elected businessman and reality tv host Donald Trump as president. While these events are perhaps not the origin moments of what has been termed the ‘Post Truth’ era these two points in history illustrate clearly that we have entered a time where truth and opinion are interchangeable terms. The democratic traditions and rule of law upon which our modern western society was built are increasingly under attack. Amidst this political turmoil we face rising threats from global warming, societal change through immigration and an expanding refugee crisis, and with it all, threats to our values and human rights. To some there is a growing pattern of actions and discourse that is reminiscent of our darkest days prior to the breakout of total warfare and the rise of fascism. 

How should education respond to these threats and how might we best prepare our students for this world? STEM and entrepreneurialism have little to offer here. What our students require are the understandings developed most capably by the humanities. An ability to interpret our history and use that understanding to shape our present. An awareness of political discourses and a disposition to speak truth to power. An empathetic understanding of ‘otherness’ and a desire and capacity to read the stories of our individual and collective humanity. The ability to create and sustain a movement driven by a desire to make the world we share today a better place for all and for those who will call it home in futures yet to be imagined. To know who we are, where we have been and how we might shape where we are headed. 

By Nigel Coutts

For more on the "Post Truth Era" read:
Matthew D’Ancona (2017) Post Truth: The new war on truth and how to fight back. Bury Press; London

Engaged, Disengaged and Overengaged - The consequences of engagement on learning

If you consider the day to day life of many of our students today, you see that they have very little time that is free from some form of programmed activity. Indeed, it is increasingly the norm for families to fill their children’s time with the maximum number of learning, sporting and co-curricular activities. Schools naturally are happy to facilitate this and many see the breadth of programmes that they offer as a measure of success. But is there a consequence to all this activity and constant state of engagement?

During school hours, we hope that our students are actively engaged in the process of learning. We understand that learning requires engagement and that all learning is a consequence of thinking. Unlike a cake baking in an oven, where it is sufficient for the cake to sit passively on its tray while the process happens to it, learning demands the active participation of the learner. Observe some students as they undertake internet based research and you see where this process goes wrong. The student flicks aimlessly from one site to another, pauses here and there and then quickly moves on. It is as though they imagine that by being near the information they will somehow come to understand the material. A similar pattern is evident in some classrooms as the teacher delivers content to their students with little awareness of whether the students are joining them on a learning journey or imagining what they might be having for lunch. And before we blame the students for their lack of engagement, how many times have we bodily sat through meetings and professional development sessions while our minds are busy elsewhere?

The significance of engagement in the learning process should be one area around which there is little debate. What is perhaps debatable is how engagement should be achieved. There is a line of thinking that seems to imply all learning should be connected to the learner’s personal passions. That all our lessons should be personalised and individually relevant. We see as a consequence of this line of thinking some educators bringing theatrical elements to their lessons in an attempt to engage the minds of every learner or others who attempt to present only content that is matched to the personal interests of their learners. On the opposing side of the fence are those who claim that there is content that just must be mastered and that it is the responsibility of the learner to engage with it or miss out. 

This debate around engagement is, like so many topics in education, made more complex than it need be by the way that we construct false dichotomies. Engagement is indeed important and there is content that we need to learn which might not always make it on to our personal ‘Top Ten’ list of things to learn. What the talented and passionate teacher will do is reveal to the learner how and where the content or skill is relevant to the individual’s learning journey and how it fits with their interests. What will never build real engagement are claims that the content is relevant because it is on the test or will be needed at some distant point in a future that seems increasingly unlikely to turn out like the teacher imagines.  Often when we are engaging in new learning we fail to immediately see its relevance and in these times, it is the role of the teacher to help us make this connection. When we have teachers who truly understand the material in question and share with us their passion for it we are much more likely to make the effort to uncover its personal relevance. 

Where this very much falls apart is when we confuse engagement with entertainment. We want our learners to be active participants in the learning process, for their minds and bodies to be engaged in the process of learning. This requires activity on the part of the learner and any measure of success must look at the learner’s side of the equation. A lesson is only engaging if it engages the learner in learning, regardless of how entertaining it might be. 

All of this engagement however has a significant down side that we often ignore. Our students should be actively engaged during their time in our classrooms. After all the expectation is that this is a time when they are learning. The danger is when we extend the boundaries of their learning day far beyond the time they spend inside our classrooms. Between time at school, time in activities outside of school, time spent on home learning, time engaged in flipped learning, time spent negotiating complex social lives, time interacting with screens, time reading books and consuming other media there is little time left for the average young person’s mind to be quiet and disengaged from external stimuli. Our drive to keep young people engaged is so great that we have removed the downtime that their minds need to process all of this learning that they are engaged in. 

The neuroscientist, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s research shows the importance of allowing time for the brain to be ‘disengaged’ from the outside world. From imaging of the brain using FMRI, Immordino-Yang has shown that the neural networks utilised while attending to our environment, turn off those which we use while looking inwards for introspection and reflection. The direct consequence of this is that if we are forever actively engaged our minds do not have adequate time to make sense of what we have learned and to move this learning into our long-term memories. Immordino-Yang reflects on her research as follows:

"These findings also suggest the possibility that inadequate opportunity for children to play and adolescents to quietly reflect and to daydream may have negative consequences—both for social-emotional well-being and for their ability to attend well to tasks."

"The overarching premise of the article is that although daydreaming and other lapses in outward attention lead to poor performance on concentration-requiring tasks in the moment, skills for reflecting during lapses in outward attention, and time for safely indulging mind wandering, may be critical for healthy development and learning in the longer term."

Filling our days with engaging activities seems like an admirable goal and to a degree has merit. There are many ways in which young people and adults can spend their time which are neither meaningful nor are offering their minds the quiet time they need. Being aware that our minds require time to wander, daydream and disengage from the external world should encourage us to seek a better balance between active engagement and productive disengagement. 
 
 By Nigel Coutts
 
 
 
 
Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen. Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (The Norton Series on the Social Neuroscience of Education). W. W. Norton & Company.