Much of my work over the past few years has been in support of school leadership teams and boards of trustees as they review and develop their strategic plans. Typically, this involves a process of seeking feedback from students, teachers and parents/whānau as we work together to review the school’s vision and values and the beliefs that underpin these to ensure there is alignment of thinking in terms of the decisions we make. While this process has always provided an opportunity to identify and work with the diversity of views that people bring to the table, in recent years I’ve found this to be an increasingly challenging thing to do well – significantly because of how entrenched some of these beliefs about learning and the purpose of education are that emerge from these discussions. This seems particularly true at the moment as we face an increasing level of mandated change in our education system, much of which challenges the underlying beliefs and assumptions of many educators and their communities. In this post I thought I’d share some thoughts about this tension and what we can do to address it.
What do we believe learning is ultimately for?
This question is fundamental to all of the debates we have in education a the moment, and links strongly to my previous series of posts on Why Schools Lose Their Capacity to Learn.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s educational history is really a succession of overlapping answers to three questions:
- What is worth knowing?
- What kind of person should schooling produce?
- What kind of society and economy should schooling serve?
We’ve moved, over the decades, from asking what learners should know, to asking what they should be able to do, to asking who they might become. But no era has ever fully replaced the one before it. I believe that contemporary education has to hold all three questions at once – and that’s precisely why the system feels so contested right now.
Schools are already living with competing ideologies
Walk into almost any staffroom, curriculum meeting or ERO review and you’ll find several ideologies operating simultaneously, often unacknowledged and sometimes in open tension:
- a liberal expectation that students become responsible, informed citizens;
- a scholar-academic expectation that they master disciplinary knowledge;
- a progressive commitment to inquiry, experience and the interests of the learner;
- a social-efficiency demand for measurable progress and qualifications;
- a constructivist view of learners as active meaning-makers;
- a relational and culturally responsive commitment to identity, belonging and community;
- a neoliberal or managerial pressure to demonstrate performance through data.
None of these is new, and none of them is going away. What’s changed is the balance of power between them – and right now, two are pulling hardest against each other.
The fault line: knowing versus becoming
Strip away the jargon and the current tension in our system comes down to a single, deceptively simple contrast – one I’ve attempted to sketch out in the illustration below that contrasts Learning as Knowing against Learning as Becoming.
This image shows two ideologies, side by side: the Knowing classroom optimised for control, performance and compliance; the Becoming classroom optimised for trust, purpose and possibility. Most schools live somewhere between the two – the question is which one is currently winning.
Learning as Knowing treats knowledge as the primary product of education. Success is what you can recall and reproduce. Intelligence is conceived largely in academic and cognitive terms. Curriculum is something to be covered. The learner is, to a significant degree, a recipient. Its risk is inert knowledge – content transmitted but never metabolised – and it leaves an uncomfortable question hanging: who authorises the knowledge of the school?
Learning as Becoming treats knowledge as a means to human development and possibility. Success is what you can do, create, contribute and become. Intelligence is understood holistically. Curriculum is something to be experienced, explored and applied. The learner is an active agent in their own development. Its risk is the mirror image of the first – vague capability or identity-talk untethered from any real knowledge – and it carries its own hard question: whose values, history and knowledge inform this vision, and whose future is it building toward?
Put visually, the contrast sharpens further: one side organised around control, performance and compliance – timetables, test scores, report cards, a teacher at the front converting facts into grades; the other organised around trust, purpose and possibility – collaborative, holistic, oriented toward wellbeing and belonging as much as achievement.
It’s a genuinely useful distinction. It’s also, I want to be careful to say, a caricature if left there.
Learning as knowing and becoming
The temptation, once you’ve drawn a contrast this clean, is to pick a side. We must resist that. “Learning as knowing” and “learning as becoming” are best treated as ideal types – useful for diagnosis, dangerous as a menu. The enduring truth is that becoming always requires something to become through: knowledge, practices, relationships, languages, histories, participation. Strip knowledge out in pursuit of capability and dispositions, and you’re left with confidence built on nothing. Strip becoming out in pursuit of coverage and measurement, and you’re left with content that never becomes anyone’s own.
This is where I think the strongest position sits – not as a compromise, but as a genuine synthesis: learning as knowing-and-becoming. Learners become through knowing, and what they know is transformed by how they participate, interpret and act. That formulation avoids two reductions at once. It refuses to treat education as the delivery of decontextualised content. But it equally refuses to treat learning as a set of dispositions, competencies or identities that can be developed independently of powerful knowledge.
Why this matters for the assessment conversation right now
This isn’t an abstract argument. It’s the argument sitting underneath a very live conversation I’ve been found myself having with colleagues recently: are we measuring what’s important?
It’s worth being clear here that assessment never moves alone – it’s one point in a curriculum–pedagogy–assessment nexus, and none of the three can really be understood in isolation from the other two. Right now in Aotearoa New Zealand, all three are shifting together: a more tightly specified, knowledge-rich curriculum; a pedagogical push toward explicit teaching, with structured, time-boxed instruction (an hour a day) mandated for foundational literacy and numeracy; and a move toward standards-based assessment to check whether it’s landing. Taken as a package, this is a coherent, deliberate Learning-as-Knowing response to a real and legitimate concern – that too much was left implicit, too much depended on which school or which teacher you happened to get, and too little was actually being checked. That’s a fair critique of a system that had drifted too far toward Becoming without enough scaffolding underneath it.
But a nexus that tightens in the same direction on all three fronts is exactly where the risk of reduction is greatest – and assessment is where it bites hardest, because assessment is what ultimately defines “success” for everyone in the system. If what gets measured is only what’s easiest to test – recall, procedural fluency, coverage – then curriculum specification and explicit pedagogy, however well-intentioned, will quietly narrow to serve that measure. We’ll have specified the knowledge beautifully, taught it explicitly and consistently, and still failed to ask whether learners can do anything with it, become anything through it, or see themselves and their communities reflected in it. Measuring only the Knowing side of the ledger doesn’t just under-value Becoming – over time it erodes the very engagement and sense of purpose that makes deep knowledge stick in the first place.
The task in front of the sector isn’t to pick knowing or becoming, and it certainly isn’t to let an assessment regime built for one silently pull curriculum and pedagogy intentions built for both back toward it. It’s to ask, of every assessment decision: does this let us see knowing and becoming – content mastered and what it enabled a learner to do, create, contribute and become? If the answer is no, we’re not measuring what’s important. We’re just measuring what’s convenient.
Call to action
None of this gets resolved by a blog post – it gets tested in practice, in the daily decisions teachers and leaders make about what to teach, how to teach it, and what counts as evidence that it’s worked. If you’re using this as a starting point for a PD session or a professional inquiry, here are some questions worth putting on the table.
For teachers, on practice:
- When I look at what I actually spend assessment time on, is it weighted toward what’s easy to check, or what’s important?
- Where in my programme does a learner get to show what they can do, create or contribute – not just what they can recall?
- Is there a foundational skill I teach explicitly that learners never get to apply to something that matters to them? What would it take to close that gap?
- If a learner from my class could only be judged on one piece of evidence from this term, would it show knowing, becoming, or both?
For leaders, on system and culture:
- Look across our school’s assessment schedule – does it, as a whole, make becoming visible, or only knowing?
- Where are curriculum, pedagogy and assessment pulling in the same direction in our school, and where are they quietly working against each other?
- What message are we sending – through timetabling, reporting formats, or what we celebrate – about which ideology we actually value, regardless of what our documents say?
- If an ERO reviewer, a parent and a Year 9 student each described “success” at our school, would their answers agree?
For both, together:
- What would we have to stop measuring, or start measuring, to genuinely capture knowing-and-becoming rather than one at the expense of the other?
- Whose knowledge, values and vision of the future are embedded in what we currently teach and test – and whose are missing?
These aren’t questions with tidy answers. But asking them together, as a staff, is a reasonable place to start putting knowing-and-becoming into practice rather than leaving it as an idea on a page.
Further reading
Blog posts
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.1 (The rise and fall of innovation)
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.2 (Leadership)
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.3 (Trust)
- Why do schools lose their capacity to learn pt.4 (Stewardship)
- Rethinking assessment beyond economic servitude
- Rethinking assessment through a split-screen lens
- Holding fast to our ‘why’ in times of mandates
- Patterns of reform failure
Thought Pieces
