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Posts Tagged ‘student-centred learning’

  1. The Teaching Tightrope

    26 February 2020 by shartley

    MoteOo / Pixabay

    I have been regularly passing under a huge electronic billboard advertising a private school with the words, “Well taught”. I wonder what they are trying to convey with those two words and with the italics emphasising the ‘taught’. Are they saying their classes are teacher centric? To me it certainly conveys an image of delivering content. Supporting this picture, Dictionary.com says taught is the past tense of teach:

    If marketing is supposed to be about conveying a point of difference, the unique selling point, is this to differentiate the school from the progressive trends in education promoting student-centred learning, project based learning, experiential learning and the like? I know the school by reputation and understand they are not completely at the progressive end but I didn’t think they were a traditional desks in row, teacher up-front, students learning in silence type of school either.

    But here I am, thinking in dichotomy terms when I fight so much against false dichotomies. In my own educational philosophy and practice I see a role for both traditional and progressive styles of teaching and learning and constantly promote balance in all aspects of learning. I believe schools should be “saturated in pedagogies” (Thomson, 2001, p.19).

    This week my readings about the Australian Curriculum, what it is and what it could and should be, also falls into two similar camps. On one side is the discipline, subject based education perceived as being about the delivery of content for knowledge and understanding, truly in line with the dictionary.com definition of teach. On the other side, is the capabilities approach or social justice view of education. Lingard and McGregor (2014) word it as being about “what students should learn or become”.

    The Australian Curriculum at one stage was seen as an exciting opportunity to shift to a capabilities approach to education and I enjoyed reading what Alan Reid (2005, 2013) had to say on the matter when I was completing my M.Ed. In the end the Australian Curriculum stuck to the discipline/subject based approach (learning areas) with a sprinkling of general capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities for good measure. What I’ve seen in practice is that since the curriculum is so content heavy, school curriculum starts at that point. The content is spread over the available time period and it is usually a tight squeeze. The extra school activities are factored in, like swimming carnivals, camps and excursions. Assessment dates are planned and up the line someone with oversight checks that assessments across subjects aren’t too clumped together, unless they are part of a planned assessment/exam week. A program with lessons is put together by one or more of the teachers on the subject. When I first started teaching these were mainly textbook driven and indeed some textbook publishers produce their own. At the end of the unit, or more often at the end of the year when the Head of Department requested them, teachers submit annotated programs signing off how much of the planned curriculum was implemented and what substituted for what wasn’t. Due to how much the teaching year is rushed these were rather perfunctory exercises most of the time. Accompanying the annotated programs would be examples of students’ work, assessment tasks and other fiddly requirements. When a new syllabus came in, the old programs were transferred across as much as possible to form the foundation of the new curriculum. Programs were examined to see where there were any existing plans that could be deemed as meeting General Capabilities and Cross Curricular Priorities and marked as such. Any not covered, were jammed into the program in some way, so they could be ticked off the compliance list of things to do. Any real thought or consideration as to actually making it about students’ learning instead of merely meeting compliance measures were usually cast aside because there simply wasn’t time. In the main, NSW curriculum is so content heavy the learning needs to be rather superficial to cover it all and the deep thinking and problem solving I’d like to see is sacrificed in this endeavour to cover everything in time for the exams. 

    So, in practice a serious and laudable attempt to refine what schools should be teaching about today in the compulsory years has become heavily complicated and bureaucratic––overloading what teachers and students are ostensibly required to achieve in a way that can only be met by not taking seriously all of the requirements or else seriously making this activity too a form-fulfilling accountability of teaching to the test. (Yates, 2013, pp.47-48)

    The more I changed schools, the more exam focused the schools were at the senior end of high school, where I taught the most. Many of the teachers taught how to achieve the best possible mark in the HSC, to maximise ATAR, rather than teaching the subject for its own sake. This had a lot to do with me leaving full-time teaching. These external, high-stakes tests have lost the purpose of education all together and made it all about the gateway to the REST OF YOUR LIFE. A paper written to propose a change to the ATAR system, outlines my issues with the ATAR more eloquently than I:

    A single number is a thin representation of the outcome of 13 years of schooling. A single number does not capture the attainments and qualities of any student, and is not a reliable predictor of future academic success for students with scores below 70, or success in life. (O’Connell, Milligan & Bentley, 2019, p.8)

    According to O’Connell, Milligan & Bentley (2019), ATAR was established for consistency in distinguishing the academically capable students. It is also a low cost method for universities to select students, but now it has become THE goal for senior students, often resulting in abandoning other worthwhile goals, such as the pursuit of other real interests, extra-curricular activities, casual jobs. There is also a rise in associated mental health issues. 30% rely on ATAR for entry to university, the other 70% suffer from a focus on this. Due to assessment tasks being exam focused, pedagogy is about developing memory and recall with broader aspects of learning overlooked. (Entire paragraph paraphrased from p.7).

    So if not exam-driven regurgitation demonstrating narrow knowledge and understanding, then what? I have started summarising what I want from our schooling system in one word, agency. The OECD (2019) describes agency as being “about acting rather than being acted upon; shaping rather than being shaped; and making responsible decisions and choices rather than accepting those determined by others” (p.34). I see agency as being about empowering students so they feel they have some control and direction in their lives; that they can make informed decisions about what they do in life, whether they work for an employer or be self-employed; that they have something worthwhile to contribute to community and can choose how they want to contribute (or not); that they can try to change the world, adapting and adopting behaviours and actions to contribute to social change in some way; that they feel brave enough to take opportunities as they arise or even create their own opportunities through guts and determination, not being scared to fail every now and again. Knowledge and understanding gives people a certain amount of confidence but it’s feeling capable that is important for agency. This is where what one does with knowledge and understanding that’s important. 

    Student agency relates to the development of an identity and a sense of belonging. When students develop agency they rely on motivation, hope, self-efficacy and a growth mindset (the understanding that abilities and intelligence can be developed) to navigate towards well-being. This enables them to act with a sense of purpose, which guides them to flourish and thrive in society. (OECD, 2019, p.35)

    The General Capabilities are very important but as Skourdoumbis (2015) pointed out, they are quite generic and as I’ve said above, in practice they are hardly given real thought by many teachers and schools. I believe there needs to be less teaching to the test, in fact very little importance given to tests at all, and make education truly about knowledge, understanding, skills, values and attitudes. These are the words used by NESA in NSW syllabuses but the importance of each diminishes rapidly as you read them left to right. The skewed emphasis can’t wholly be blamed on the school level, it’s also the rhetoric in the educational and government bodies, as well as in the media. The importance given to knowledge is most evident in all these institutions’ attitudes towards NAPLAN, ATAR and in NSW, the HSC.

    Instead, as Skourdoumbis (2015) argues, there should be a capability approach to education that provides “rounded attention” (p.35) to students, thereby developing agency. In quick summary Skourdoumbis (2015) states:

    1. We need to educate for development of reason and thereby provide students with more freedom in their personal decision-making
    2. We need to educate for critical reflection of the world so that students can see how they may contribute to change
    3. We need to educate more broadly for empowerment.

    Some schools are pushing back against the “testing-led curriculum” (Yates, 2013, p.43) and instead providing education that “serves multiple, life-enhancing purposes through a rich array of pedagogic practices” (Thomson, Lingard & Wrigley, 2012, p.2). This is why I am researching enterprise education. Enterprise education gives a focus for the general capabilities, and as much as I question the neoliberal underpinnings of enterprise education, I have the utmost respect for the way it aims to build agency in students, equipping them to go out into the world and conquer it; confident in their standing as an individual, friend and family member; willing and able to be a contributor to community; and knowing they are someone with value to contribute to a workplace or as an entrepreneur.

     

    References

    Lingard, B., & McGregor, G. (2014). Two contrasting Australian curriculum responses to globalisation: What students should learn or become. Curriculum Journal, 25(1), 90-110. DOI:10.1080/09585176.2013.872048

    O’Connell, M., Milligan, S.K., &Bentley, T. (2019). Beyond ATAR: a proposal for change. Koshland Innovation Fund, Melbourne, Victoria. https://apo.org.au/node/261456

    OECD. (2019). OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030: OECD Learning Compass 2030 A Series of Concept Notes, OECD Publishing. http://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/learning-compass-2030/OECD_Learning_Compass_2030_Concept_Note_Series.pdf

    Reid, A. (2005). Rethinking national curriculum collaboration: Towards an Australian curriculum. https://digitised-collections.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/115751 

    Reid, A. (2013). Renewing the public and the role of research in education. The Australian Educational Researcher, 40(3), 281-297. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13384-013-0116-x

    Skourdoumbis, A. (2015). Distorted representations of the ‘capability approach’ in Australian school education. Curriculum Journal, 26(1), 24-38. DOI:10.1080/09585176.2014.955512

    Thomson, P. (2001). How Principals Lose ‘Face’: A disciplinary tale of educational administration and modern managerialism. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 22(1), 5-22. DOI:10.1080/01596300120039722

    Thomson, P., Lingard, B., & Wrigley, T. (2012). Ideas for changing educational systems, educational policy and schools. Critical Studies in Education, 53(1), 1-7. DOI:10.1080/17508487.2011.636451

    Wrigley, T., Lingard, B., & Thomson, P. (2012). Pedagogies of transformation: Keeping hope alive in troubled times. Critical Studies in Education, 53(1), 95-108. DOI:10.1080/17508487.2011.637570

    Yates, L. (2013). Revisiting curriculum, the numbers game and the inequality problem. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(1), 39-51. DOI:10.1080/00220272.2012.754949 

     

    Category Enterprise Education, PhD | Tags: ,,,,,,,, | No Comments

  2. A conference, a cruise and new connections

    6 February 2018 by shartley

    Even though I have yet to hear a reaction from my supervisor about the latest topic I’ve proposed for my MRES, over the last couple of days I have been steadily researching pedagogical practices in enterprise education. One article amused me because it fitted so well with my experiences of teaching Business Studies. Basically, the article (Jones & Penaluna, 2013) slams the use of business plans for developing entrepreneurship in students. I’ve read 100s of articles in the last few weeks but since this one tickled my fancy, I tweeted the Australian author, Colin Jones. A bit of an exchange about my research ambitions occurred and we are now aiming to meet over a drink in Brisbane in a few months time. Then his co-author from the UK, Andy Penaluna, also started tweeting me and sending links to great resources for my topic. Colin had probably gone to bed. Andy and I tweeted until I postponed the conversation at 2am. This morning I received more tweets from both of them. How cool is that?!

    I think I have been following Russel Tarr on Twitter since my first few months of joining, many years ago. He is from England but teaching History at an International School in Toulouse, France. He is a passionate and innovative teacher. A few years ago he started a conference in Toulouse called Practical Pedagogies but no matter how hard I tried to fit it in to my life and budget I couldn’t go. People have raved about it. Well now I have been accepted to present at this year’s conference which is being held in Cologne, Germany, 1-2 November. I’m hoping to tie-in a visit to Emma who will probably be on university exchange at the time, perhaps in France, perhaps in Taiwan. Now I just have to manipulate credit card points to pay for the flights.

    I am honoured and privileged to have these opportunities but it’s freaking me out a little. There is a lot happening in October and November this year. My MRES mini-thesis is due in the middle of a professional development course called Navigating Pedagogy I’m conducting on a cruise to Noumea and New Caledonia (7-14 October). Tough job, but somebody has to do it. 

    Actually, I shouldn’t be so flippant about it. I have already done a lot of hard work to develop the course and be endorsed as a professional development provider by NESA (Board of Studies NSW). As for the MRES dissertation, I’ll just have to submit it early and be prepared for the cruise and the conference super ahead of time. Really, it just means I need to be as organised as I have been the last few months. Easy!

    Article: 

    Jones, C., & Penaluna, A. (2013). Moving beyond the business plan in enterprise education. Education Training,55(8/9), 804-814. https://doi.org/10.1108/ET-06-2013-0077 

     

    * This post is also on my general writing blog: https://squibsandsagas.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-conference-cruise-and-new-connections.html

    Category Master of Research | Tags: ,,,,,,,,, | No Comments

  3. Risks, Fears and Concerns: Issues teachers have with pedagogical change

    6 February 2018 by shartley

     

    The last few days I’ve been doing a slow dig into my research. I am looking at the concerns teachers have about shifting to more student-centred pedagogy. I am also trying to find out what can be done to alleviate these concerns, particularly in the form of professional development.

    For non-teachers, very roughly, pedagogy is the art and science of teaching, the methods used in the teaching and learning process. Student-centred learning is when students have more of an active role in their learning. Instead of merely being recipients of information and drilled into skills, they undertake activities that develop skills in critical thinking, problem solving and much more. By having greater choice over the process of learning, students often take on more ownership of it.

    A traditional view, reinforced by popular culture, is that learning at high school consists of students sitting in rows, in a classroom, with a teacher talking at them, leading a discussion or showing some boring film. Sometimes learning needs to be with a teacher directing a class from the front but often it is not the best way to learn. It is probably the best way to maintain order and control in a classroom. Complete order and control is not necessary for learning to occur. Structure and purpose is important most of the time, but not so tight it confines students’ minds from thinking for themselves.

    Many teachers have difficulty letting go of order and control. In their minds, quiet work is productive work, and reflects well on them as teachers. It is so incongruent of a concept, it is hard for them to learn and implement strategies that allows students more freedom because the perceived risk is too high. One of the articles I’ve read about this is called ‘What if students revolt?’. This happens more in the higher grades because students have so much pressure on them to achieve in high-stakes tests, such as the HSC, they just want to be told what they need to write to do well in the exam, having very little focus on learning itself. I’ve had one frustrated student who pleaded, “Just tell me what I need to know”. Memorising and regurgitating information just doesn’t cut it anymore. The fear is also about students not achieving as well in assessments and that also reflecting badly upon the teacher. It is being scared of looking a fool by trying something out of their comfort zone and possibly failing.

    Textbooks give the false illusion that learning is linear and straight forward, a mere comprehension task. Textbooks also help teachers know exactly where they are up to in the teaching process and can check-in with other teachers about their pacing. It shouldn’t be about where students are up to in the textbook but where they are up to in their learning.

    This fear is exacerbated if teachers feel they don’t have the backing of the school leadership or the wider school community (eg school board, parents) and are constantly slammed in the media and by government figures. The literature calls this a lack of relational trust. From my  own experience, this can occur in several ways. For instance, there is the fear that school leaders will change their mind and switch back from the new innovation to the traditional way or leapfrog onto something else again, thereby wasting a lot of time and effort of everyone involved. Sometimes when a teacher tries a new teaching method, as advocated by the leadership, and it results in complaints from students and/or parents, the leadership kowtow to the complainers when the teacher should be backed by them. It is demoralising and makes teachers even less inclined to change what they have always done. The risk to change becomes way too high. Some schools have gone through incredible changes, only to have a new principal come in and change it all back again.

    Most schools are going down the student-centred learning path but veer back to traditional teaching for the HSC when marks trump real learning. It’s the HSC game really. I hate how many times I say to my classes that in reality ‘xyz’ is this but for the HSC it is that. For example, in HSC Business Studies students have to write a business report. They are usually taught to write in exams an Executive Summary as a substitute for an Introduction and to keep it as brief as possible. It is purely to tick the box that they did one, and move on as quickly as possible to provide content that will produce the bulk of the marks. In reality, executive summaries actually are what they sound like they should be, a summary of the report and a rule of thumb is that it should be a page in length. I find this so frustrating! Exams are so removed from real life but are a convenient way of ranking people, distributing them across some statistically desired graph. We supposedly have a standards based system, meaning students are assessed against standards instead of against each other but when it comes down to it, results are manipulated to reflect a particular norm. A friend who has marked Food Technology exams has reported that when the statistics revealed the majority of students failed a question, the markers had to go back and scratch for just a word or two that could just possibly mean, perhaps, the student may have actually understood what they were writing about in some way.

    An issue with all this is the conflicting demands placed on teaching and learning. The national curriculum’s general capabilities provides a good overview of what school education should be about:

    • Literacy
    • Numeracy
    • ICT capability
    • Critical and creative thinking
    • Personal and social capability
    • Ethical understanding
    • Intercultural understanding

    However, NAPLAN, the only compulsory external testing system in NSW before the HSC, is only about literacy and numeracy. Since NAPLAN and HSC results are so public, schools can fall into the trap of teaching to the test, resulting in formulaic responses that produce solid results. Teaching for genuine, deep learning, is much harder to test properly so that in our current system, real learning can result in wildly inconsistent outcomes in NAPLAN and the HSC. I always professed I wanted my children to be motivated more by learning than by assessment results. Yet I had to compromise that ideology when Emma wanted to learn Economics for the HSC but performed better in Ancient History, which she had been interested in for years but was now bored. To achieve the mark she needed for her desired university course, the interest in learning was traded in for a higher mark.

    It takes time to implement change. It takes time to learn new ways of doing things. It takes longer to do something for the first time than it will subsequently. The planning time for new pedagogical practices will be longer because the style of learning is new and taxes the brain harder than just doing what was done before. Many teachers are used to Heads of Department writing programs and handing them over to be followed (or not). Now it’s more about collaborative planning and coming up with new ways to work together as a team of teachers. It feels like independence is being stripped away as well as authority in the classroom. However, it actually should be giving teachers greater ownership and pride in what they do because they design the learning process instead of deliver information. By not being up the front of the class so much, teachers should also have more time in class to have one-on-one discussions with individual students about their progress

    Technology has a lot to do with the shift away from traditional learning, enabling students to participate in the learning process in new, innovative and fun ways. Just watch how young people jump to YouTube for tutorials in how to do something, from knitting (I have seen a student do that with my own eyes when they were supposed to be working on something else) to changing a tyre. The Internet is their go-to for communication, information, entertainment and well, everything, really.

    Many teachers find it hard to understand and adopt technology and are fearful of it. They are already forced online to mark their rolls, maintain a grading system, complete their welfare reporting and much more, so that to also have to learn more technology for the teaching process, it can be overwhelming. Technology can also be unreliable in schools, being such an expensive commodity. To me, the gap between the technology haves and have nots is the biggest divide in education of modern times. My son gained 17 marks on his school assessment in his Information Processing Technology HSC exam with a great deal of help from Eddie Woo’s YouTube videos. If we didn’t have a reliable internet at home this would not have been possible. I worry about students who don’t have access to reliable Internet at home – it will hold up their education and their adjustment to participating in life, at work and play. Schools need to help out more in this regard, but that’s a completely different post to write.

    I know and recognise I have been a bit on my soapbox in this post. I partly wrote it here to shake it out of my system so I can approach these issues in a more academic and studious way for my research. All these concerns are real and need to be acknowledged and addressed. I am looking forward to investigating how this can best be done.

    Further Reading

    Boschman, Ferry, McKenney, Susan, & Voogt, Joke. (2014). Understanding Decision Making in Teachers’ Curriculum Design Approaches. Educational Technology Research and Development, 62(4), 393-416

    Dole, S., Bloom, L., and Kowalske, K. (2016). Transforming Pedagogy: Changing Perspectives from Teacher-Centered to Learner-Centered. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 10(1)

    Le Fevre, D. (2014). Barriers to implementing pedagogical change: The role of teachers’ perceptions of risk. Teaching and Teacher Education, 38, 56-64

    Siedel, S. B., & Tanner, K. D. (2013). “What If Students Revolt?”–Considering Student Resistance: Origins, Options, and Opportunities for Investigation. CBE – Life Sciences Education, 12(4)

     

    * This post is also on my general writing blog: https://squibsandsagas.blogspot.com/2018/01/risks-fears-and-concerns.html

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