Self directed learning

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”
John Dewey

Earlier this week I was camping at White’s Bay, a magical spot on the coast less than 30 minutes from Blenheim. Although the peak of the holiday period was over, there were still a number of families camping there with the beach providing a safe place for the kids to swim, play, explore and interact under the watchful eyes of their parents.

After a morning swim I took the time to stroll along the beach and take in what some of these kids were doing. In the image above you can see what the beach looks like – before the kids arrived. If you’re observant enough you’ll also notice the tell-tale signs in the sand of water from a small creek winding its way across the sand into the ocean.

It was around that spot that I stood and watched a fascinating learning experience unfold before me. Two groups of children, mostly boys, aged (I’m estimating) between 7-12, were busy digging in the sand, some with shovels and others with pieces of driftwood or their hands. Observing for a while I saw what was happening. At two different spots after the creek emerged from the reeds behind the beach groups of children were hard at work trying to alter the course of the water. One group appeared intent on creating a small dam and creating a pond behind it, and another creating a deeper channel to expedite the flow of water directly to the sea.

I paused and chatted with each group, hearing their stories of how they got started on the idea, what they’d tried already, what had worked and what hadn’t and what they were planning to do next. All the time the groups continued to work on their projects, aware that the water they were trying to ‘tame’ wasn’t going to wait while they held a conversation with a passing member of the public.

After some time there I continued my walk to the other end of the beach, then returned the way I’d come. On my way back I paused again to observe the progress being made. By now the labyrinth of channels had become quite sophisticated. Aided by the addition of small rocks and large pieces of driftwood the dam was doing its thing, while the deeper channel was being worked on to address the issue of the collapsing walls where the faster flowing water now caused erosion of the sides.

What was even more interesting was that these two groups were now working together to address an entirely new challenge – how to create a channel that would re-route the water from the pond behind the dam into the large channel that the others had created some 10 metres away and so create a continuous flow. I hadn’t seen what had precipitated that collaboration, but by the time I had arrived the teams were working seamlessly on this new task, with ideas being contributed by young and old, and everyone getting on with the task they felt was theirs.

I sat at the beach for some time after, watching the experience evolve as if guided by some ‘invisible’ agreement among all of these young people – with no sign of adult intervention at all (apart from this elderly gentleman stopping to ask a lot of questions 🙂 … which got me thinking again about the experience of learning that we provide for our students at school. Right before my eyes I was seeing the manifestation of the characteristics of learners and learning that so many schools aspire to in their graduate profiles, but so often are neglected or ignored when the pressure goes on to address fundamental issues of literacy and numeracy, or to focus on specific details of ‘content knowledge’ to provide a focus for narrowly defined assessments. Not that theres merit in considering these things – but not at the expense of taking the joy out of learning in such authentic and motivational ways.

Here are just some of the things I observed and reflected on while watching these children:

They were working to a plan – and they owned that plan. The plan wasn’t particularly detailed, nor was it aligned with a specific area of the curriculum. Their plan emerged from their inbuilt curiosity and the desire to discover what might happen if…? As such their plan was constantly being modified and re-focused. Further, they were all capable of articulating what the plan was when a casual observer such as myself took the opportunity to ask them!
There was a culture of experimentation. While the plan was agreed on in a basic sense, the detail of how they’d execute it was left to a process of experimentation, where risk taking, learning from failure and trailing multiple approaches were simply a part of how the activity rolled. Nothing was a ‘failure’ – everything was something that helped inform the next step that was taken.
The participants knew what success would look like. Each of these children had a clear idea of what they were striving to achieve, and therefore what success would look like. In their conversation with me they were able to articulate why some approaches had worked and others hadn’t, how they’d modified their approach at times and some of the ‘big ideas’ about the movement of water they’d learned along the way. They didn’t need an external person or assessment task to tell them if they’d been successful or not.
They weren’t about to give up! In fact, one of these groups had been working on their ideas the previous day and had come back with a refreshed view of how to tackle things as they thought about it overnight. Without the constraints of time they were able to take the time required to work on their challenge – demonstrating high levels of perseverance and tenacity in the process.
The activity was highly collaborative. No-one was excluded in this task. If you turned up and were prepared to assist you quickly found a way you could contribute. Those who’d been working on it a little longer emerged as leaders in small ways, helping guide what others should do through direct instruction or through suggestion as the need determined. Many of the ideas that were put forward were quickly discussed and decided on – often with the addition of new ideas that emerged through this process of negotiation. Overall, there was a role for everyone and anyone who wanted to participate.
There was a lot of reflection going on. Throughout the entire process the thing that intrigued me the most was the level of conversation going on among the kids. It was a sort of articulated reflection in a very real sense. When someone saw an opportunity to do something differently, there would be comments made about what had worked in the past and why this might or might not work in the future. As new ideas were being trialed there was an explicit articulation of the thought processes – often with questions being asked among members of the group, seeking affirmation or confirmation of whether something was a good idea. The reflection wasn’t being left as something to do once the task was over – it was an authentic and highly integrated part of the task itself.

Now I’m not so naive as to think that every aspect of what we do in schools could be designed and constructed in this way. There is, arguably, always going to be a need for developing some of the foundational skills that these children were calling upon quite naturally in this environment. Plus there’s loads of scope for an excellent teacher, through crafted questioning, to promote event deeper levels of learning to be realised from such a task.

My pondering here is simply this. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as we start a new school year, we could do so with a renewed sense of commitment to ensuring all of our learners are able to experience the kinds of delight and joy in learning that these kids on the beach were? Before we become ensnared by the imposed requirements to address the basics more rigorously and of ensuring we address specific areas of content knowledge, let’s ensure we leave room in our design of learning for our learners to experience joy in what they do, and delight in the achievements they make – however big or small.

Oh that more of what happens in our classrooms and schools could resemble what I observed on the beach this week.

If the ideas in this blog post resonate with you and you are looking for ways to incorporate more of this type of learning into your classroom you may find it useful to read Agency By Design: An Educator’s Playbook that I’ve written with Marsha Jones, with the help of George Edwards and Annette Thompson from the USA. It is full of ideas and practical examples to guide your how you might create more agentic learning and learners in your school or classroom, together with ways of measuring progress.

You can download the entire book or individual chapters from the Aurora Institute Website here: https://aurora-institute.org/resource/agency-by-design-an-educators-playbook/

Tags educational transformation, learner agency, learner engagement

Looking for more ambition in 2024!

Photo by Leif Christoph Gottwald on Unsplash
Rocket image: https://www.needpix.com/photo/174049/

“There’s no definite roadmap for a successful moonshot; the path is littered with obstacles and failure. It takes passion, grit, luck and sometimes a decade or more of hard work to see a moonshot materialise, much less succeed.”
Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur, futurist, technologist, New York Times Bestselling Author

I was at secondary school when the Apollo 11 mission made a successful moon landing. I was one of those completely caught up in the wonder of that event – I still have the scrapbook I kept of every newspaper clipping I could lay my hands on at the time! 1300 of us gathered in the school assembly hall and sat in silence for almost three hours, listening to the broadcast on a single speaker that had been set up on the stage. (Yes, no live-stream TV in those days – in fact, no colour TV even, we watched the fuzzy, black and white images a day or two later!)

That was 1969! Just a few years earlier, in 1962, US President, John F. Kennedy, planted the seeds of a dream when he declared “We choose to go to the moon this decade.” At the time this must have seemed near impossible to many, yet it inspired a nation to believe – and to act. The president didn’t say precisely how it was going to happen – he simply set a timeframe for something ambitious, something incredible to happen. It was his ‘moonshot’ moment.

Decades later this concept has become known as ‘moonshot thinking’, when you choose a huge problem, such as climate change, and propose to create a radical solution to the problem using a disruptive technology.

I reckon we could do with some ‘moonshot thinking’ in education at present. There’s no shortage of huge challenges facing us, but there is a distinct lack of any ambition in the solutions being proposed. Mostly we see the same old ideas being re-cycled like the re-runs of Home Alone movies at Christmas. It all seems so tired, unambitious and focused narrowly on short-term wins that pander to the populist vote. It’s been like that for many years now, and there appear to be no changes on the horizon despite a change in government. The table below illustrates just a few examples of the challenges schools face currently and the responses we are seeing…

Consider our current approach…

Problem	Solution	Concerns
Students not attending school, truancy.	Employ people to track students down and bring them back to school. Punish parents for not sending them to school.	Why are they choosing not to attend in the first place? How might we make schools and learning more engaging and meaningful for all learners?
Digital Distraction.	Ban mobile devices at school.	How do we prepare young people (and teachers!) to function effectively in an increasingly digital world – including understanding the safety and moral issues of being a digital citizen?
Declining literacy and numeracy achievement.	Spend more time on structured approaches to reading, writing and maths, focusing primarily on the mechanics.	How do we inspire writers, authors and mathematicians for the future? How to sustain an interest in literature, story-telling and mathematics in the world around us?
Bullying.	More supervision, more punitive measures for those responsible.	How to address the social influences and generational patterns of behaviour that are behind this sort of behaviour?
Recruitment and retention of high quality teachers.	Introduce teaching standards, recognition of excellent teachers and punitive measures for those not performing.	How to make teaching a profession that attracts the very best candidates. How best to design initial teacher education programmes and professional learning programmes that sustains a dynamic profession?
Low level of participation in STEM subjects to meet demand for employment in the tech sector.	Privilege resourcing of STEM programmes and STEM teachers.	What about the arts subjects where creativity (a key element in innovation) is cultivated?
Increasing numbers of learners with special learning needs (incl. ADHD, autism etc.)	Limited funding for special needs teachers and support people. Teachers expected to become skilled in dealing with these demands.	What are the conditions that are most suitable for these learners, and what support is most helpful? How can we personalise/individualise programmes within the traditional one-class, one-teacher structures?
Ongoing disruption and change (e.g. natural disasters, weather events, pandemics etc.)	Short term mitigations, targeted resourcing to bridge the gap until things ‘return to normal’.	What if ongoing disruption of this nature is the ‘new normal?’. How might we structure schooling to take account of the ongoing challenge to sustain an approach that is historically dependent on attendance at a single site?

As the table above attempts to illustrate, it’s not that the solutions being suggested or implemented are inherently wrong – indeed, many have sound research supporting their use in defined contexts. The issue is that while they may provide an effective solution for particular learners in particular contexts, they are unlikely to address some of the wider (and more complex) concerns that are a part of the problem they are attempting to address. It’s not a binary argument – it’s about understanding the broader, richer and more complicated tapestry of interactions among and between these areas that create the current form and function of schools and schooling.

I believe we need to see more ambition our efforts to identify (and courage to follow through on) solutions that matter. Of course, there’s plenty of ambition around at a personal level, with individuals seeking to ‘climb the ladder’ of personal success, or schools seeking to outdo their rivals down the road – but this sort of ambition is counter-productive in terms of achieving the solutions required to some of our ‘wicked problems’ in education.

I’m talking about the sort of ambition that is linked with taking risks (something that is frowned upon in our current bureaucratic structures), to ‘stretch’ beyond the current limits and push the boundaries of educational possibility. This sort of ambition sets aside personal interest for the corporate good. It involves releasing dreams and capturing the interest and trust of others to pursue those dreams. It’s about letting go of conventional thinking and ways of working, and experimenting with new forms of teaching, schooling and learning to find what works and what will help us achieve our ‘moonshot’ ambitions.

In the table below I’ve shared just a handful of ideas that could form the basis of the sort of ambitious ‘moonshot’ thinking that we’re talking about here. There will, of course, be others you can think of (hopefully!), so regard these as they are intended – something to stimulate your thinking. It might be helpful to consider taking one or more of these and using them as a starter for a conversation with colleagues, or at a start of year staff meeting – anything to help stimulate conversation and lift the level of thinking beyond ‘the ordinary’ as we seek to find ways of resolving the increasingly challenging problems we face in education.

Could these be your moonshot…?

Moonshot 1:
Agency and Joy!

Imagine if…

…we were to create schools where learners come curious and leave inspired? Where learners were eager to attend because they found what happens there, day by day, exciting, engaging and relevant to their needs and interests. Where learners ( and teachers) experience JOY each day, where their physical, mental, social and academic health and wellbeing were all being addressed as a matter of course. Where there is a definite ‘shift in ownership’ of learning, and learners (and teachers) experience agency in all aspects of their learning.

Moonshot2:
Learning Laboratories

Imagine if…

…we were to design our schools as learning laboratories, and our learning programmes around a culture of experimentation, where teachers and learners are open to risk and learn from failure? What if our approach to learning across the curriculum left space for teachers and students to experiment with new ideas and pursue the questions that are important to them. What if, instead of following prescribed methodologies we encouraged innovative approaches to solving problems, including how to address individual learning challenges or needs (e.g. as those in the medical profession do when making a diagnosis).

Moonshot 3:
Boundary-less Schools

Imagine if…

…we conceived of schools as ‘boundary-less’ entities, as nodes in a network or learning ecosystem. Where physical attendance to participate in social, sporting, cultural and collaborative activities, is valued alongside access specialist teachers in other contexts, including community settings and virtually. And what if that learning was all recorded and tracked in a single ‘record of learning’ that recognises the value of what is learned in all of these contexts? What if we recognised the roles of those providing support for learners differently – as specialist teachers, as pastoral support, as virtual teachers etc. as opposed to assigning all tasks to a ‘generic’ teacher. How might we include the link with home and partnership with parents as an essential aspect of this ‘boundary-less-ness’?

Moonshot 4:
AI Enhanced Personalisation

Imagine if…

…we could harness the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create truly personalised programmes of learning for both individuals and for groups based on an analysis of their needs and preferences? What if the AI platform could then provide personalised support and feedback as the learner/group worked on the learning task, scaffolding and shaping the learning activity based on the learner response and evidence provided. What if the platform could also maintain a record of learning for each learner with dynamic links to the evidence provided by the learner to illustrate achievement against the criteria set.

Moonshot 5:
New Structures

Imagine if…

…we were to completely suspend all of the structures around which our current school system is designed – learning spaces, timetables, curriculum, staffing allocations, assessments/exams etc. How would we design things differently? How would the school day work? What would the curriculum look like? What if we were to create the opportunity for learners to be immersed in learning for as long as it takes for them to become accomplished in what they are doing? How might we keep track of what is being learned, how it is being learned and when it has been learned?
What would be the role(s) of educators in all of this? How would they be supported?

Moonshot 6:
New Measures of Success

Imagine if…

…we adopted completely different ways of measuring success? Where exams and summative assessments were replaced by more dynamic and ‘real-time’ provision of evidence to match against the progression indicators linked to criteria established at the beginning of the learning activity? What if learners were actively involved in the decisions around the criteria and the indicators? Instead of designing learning to match the assessment criteria, what if learners were able to immerse themselves in meaningful learning activity, and then select the criteria that they have evidence for – from across different ‘subjects’ and different levels?

[Rocket image: https://www.needpix.com/photo/174049/]

None of the scenarios above are particularly original. In fact, examples of each of these innovative approaches already exist in various jurisdictions and contexts around the world. As William Gibson once said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed yet‘. Also, while the scenarios have been separated out here to emphasise a specific idea, there are many overlaps between them and in most cases, a ‘moonshot’ idea will likely include elements from two or more of the scenarios above (and others not mentioned here).

Create your own moonshot:

Being ambitious in our thinking like this doesn’t come naturally. For many of you reading the list of ‘imagine if’ statements above you may find yourself thinking immediately of all the reasons why this couldn’t happen. That’s quite normal. It’s how we’ve been programmed – a consequence of the education we’ve received and the structures and systems we conform to. But you can break the habit – all it takes is some courage to allow yourself a little space to dream and ponder.

The important thing is that, like JFK, you don’t have to have it all sorted from the beginning. You simply have to imagine, put the idea(s) out there, and be relentless in seeking to find ways of making it happen.

Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur, futurist, technologist, and writer of the TechBlog has a simple five step approach for MoonShot Planning:

5-Year Goal: Briefly describe your 5-year Moonshot goal in a clear, objective fashion using specific dates and numbers.
1-Year Goal: What concrete, measurable milestones can you achieve in 12 months that will put you on track? Remember, your progress is exponential. You just need to hit 6.25% of the target.
30-Day Goal: What can you do in the next 30 days to test and ‘de-risk’ your 1-year and 5-year objectives?
PROOF: What evidence can you provide to your team that this Moonshot is possible?
ACTION: What single action can you take right now to make immediate progress? (Do it in the next hour).

Why not use this framework to create your own moonshot and consider the ambitious approach you want to take in 2024? You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, it’s best if you do it in collaboration with others. Build the dream collectively. Get the buy-in of those who need to be involved and for whom it matters.

Imagine if, across the country, school leaders and teachers found time in these last few weeks before the next school year begins to work through the five steps outlined above, so that as you return to school for 2024 it isn’t simply to repeat what you did in 2023 with a few minor tweaks and improvements, but is something more revolutionary, more purposeful and more life-changing!

Instead of planning to get ‘back to normal’, let’s make 2024 a year of being extra-ordinary, of being ambitious in what we seek to achieve for our learners and our schools!

Check out some of these links for further ideas…

Tags education leadership, educational change, educational transformation, learner agency, learner engagement, school leadership

Know Your Students

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata he tangata he tangata!
What is the most important thing in the world? It is people it is people it is people!

The image at the head of this blog post seems appropriate given the situation in Auckland at present where our schools remain closed as torrential rain has struck the city. The stories of communities rallying around to support one another during this difficult time is a timely reminder of the wisdom of the whakatauki below the image. My thoughts are with all school leaders and teachers in the region at this time, particularly as they were preparing to welcome their students back as this weather event occurred.

As the new school year begins educators in schools across New Zealand have been involved in all sorts of orientation days with their teams, providing an opportunity to focus thoughts on what is important in terms of the teaching and learning that will take place in the coming year.

Here again the wisdom of the whakatuaki applies. Our work as educators is primarily about the people – the students we teach, the colleagues we teach with, and the parents/whānau and community members we partner with in this process.

So as your students return to school for the year, what do you see? Consider the image at the header – a collection of young people, differentiated by the clothing and boots they are wearing? What difference would it make to be able to see the upper half of these children – to see their faces, and to be able to discern something about how they are feeling by the expressions on them? You’d instantly be able to see each as an individual, coming into your classroom with individual needs and experiences, from a range of different home circumstances and backgrounds, and each with unique hopes, dreams and ambitions.

It’s easy to become distracted by curriculum reviews, changes in assessment practices, requirements for teacher accreditation or new approaches for teaching literacy and numeracy – all of which are important in our work – but if we take our eyes off the fact that we are primarily about growing, nurturing and supporting the people we work with all of that will be time wasted.

With that in mind I’ve been reflecting on some of the Teacher Only Days I’ve been facilitating over the past week. I thoroughly enjoy these days as they provide me with an opportunity to engage deeply with passionate educators who are focused strongly on developing their practice to provide the best learning opportunities for their students.

This year was no exception! In one school the staff have been on a journey of exploring what it means to be “Treaty Honouring” as a staff and school community, and how they need to demonstrate culturally responsive ways of teaching and learning. At the end of the session, one of the staff reflected how, on the basis of our day’s activity, he felt the need to take another, deeper, look at the backgrounds of each student in the school to ensure that he and all staff were aware of the cultural identity of each student, particularly those who identify as Māori.

In another school we spent some time exploring more about what it means to be promoting the concept of ‘student-centred learning’ and of learner agency, and how, in order to achieve this, teachers need to have a more detailed knowledge of each of their students. This knowledge then becomes important as teachers seek to understand the impact their teaching is having on each learner in their classroom.

Understanding each of our learners as individuals became a key issue during the COVID response where many educators were challenged with finding out more about the experience of their students outside the classroom (home and family circumstances, access to technology, support available etc.) and how this affects their engagement and performance inside the classroom.

All of this is, of course, strongly linked with the concept of wellbeing, with a plethora of wellbeing resources and initiatives emerging across the country in recent years as teachers and leaders prioritise this in their schools. It’s simply not possible to implement a successful wellbeing strategy if there isn’t a focus on meeting the needs of the individual (teachers and students) as opposed to applying a ‘broad brush’ approach in the hope that some of the ideas will stick.

In fact, the same applies to all learning – not just what we do in wellbeing programmes. An in-depth knowledge of each of our students must inform the way we design and implement all programmes of learning. In a blog post titled Do you know me well enough to teach me?” Australian educator Kath Murdoch puts it this way:

“The challenge within this question is profound and goes to the heart of what we do. While I acknowledge that schools are not always structured in ways that allow for quality relationship building, it’s too important NOT to give this priority. Good teachers know that their job is all about relationships. If we want our kids to ask questions – to show a passion for our subjects, to engage in the concepts we bring to them, we need to do more than simply tell them to ‘pay attention’. Getting to know who our students really are as people is surely a responsibility that comes with the privilege we have of teaching them.”
Kath Murdoch

How well do you know your students?

So thinking of a practical way of approaching this, here’s an outline of an activity I used with one of the schools I worked with, that you might like to try yourself or with some of your staff. The aim is really to create an awareness of the extent to which you already know your learners – and perhaps expose areas where you need to find out more.

Here are the simple steps…
(NB – you might find it helpful to rule up a page with three columns, one for each of the steps below)

Step 1 – without referring to your class list, write down the names of all of the students in your class. (If you’re a secondary teacher, choose just one of the classes you teach)
WHY? A simple challenge to see if you can list all of your students by name, and whether you can accurately spell each of their names.
Step 2 – beside each name, write something you know about that student that distinguishes them from others in the class.
WHY? This will reveal something about the way you remember who each learner is, what makes them unique/different/stand out in your mind.
Step 3 – in column 3, now write something that you know that student is passionate about. What brings them joy or delight?
WHY? Being able to identify something under this heading provides you with an insight into what is going to motivate and engage this student, and thus help inform the way you design learning for them.

This activity can be expanded in a number of ways with different questions used or added – but these three columns provide an extremely valuable way of testing your own knowledge of your learners. If you choose to do it at the beginning of the year (i.e. within the next week) your columns may look a little sparse (unless you’ve taught these students already) – but try doing it anyway, and then try it again in a month’s time to see just how much your knowledge of these students has grown.

The key lies in column three, where you may find motivation to spend a little time in the next few weeks to spend time with each of your learners and engage them in conversation to help you understand just what it is that excites them or brings them joy.

Armed with this information, consider the following:

Identify one thing you could do to get to know your students better – in a way that will help them become better learners, and better humans.
Consider how you will use this information to shape your approach to learning design and teaching this year.

To finish the post I encourage you to view the video below (if you haven’t already – it’s been doing the rounds a lot on social media 🙂 It provides a heartwarming story of one teacher’s approach to demonstrating that he knows and understands each of his students as an individual, and the powerful effect this has on their learning.

Tags learner agency, learner engagement, school leadership

Feet of Clay

Image source: Two Clay-baked feet via Wikimedia Commons CC4.0

“The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history… The crisis is exacerbating pre-existing education disparities by reducing the opportunities for many of the most vulnerable children, youth, and adults…. On the other hand, this crisis has stimulated innovation within the education sector”.
UN Policy Brief August 2020

Many of us are familiar with the phrase ‘feet of clay’ – referring to a fundamental flaw or weakness in a person who may be otherwise revered. The phrase originates from the book of Daniel in the Bible where Daniel interprets a dream of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. In that dream, a magnificent statue is seen with a head of gold, but weaker and less valuable metals beneath, until finally having feet of clay mixed with iron. I can’t help but wonder if this metaphor may have significance for us as we seek to resolve the issues facing our education system.

Much has been written in the past couple of years about the impact of the COVID-19 school lockdowns and the lessons we have learned from those experiences. As noted in the UN Policy Brief quoted above, there is overwhelming evidence of how this disruption has exposed some fundamental weaknesses in our system – most of which already existed, but became exposed once the traditional veneer of place-based learning environments was removed.

As we see a range of actions being taken in response to this, I can’t help but wonder about the extent to which much of the focus is on simply ‘polishing up the gold and silver’ at the top of the system, and avoiding the fact that the ‘feet of clay’ have been severely damaged.

Here’s an example…

Consider, for example, the current level of concern about students who are not attending school – the rise of absenteeism. This was certainly a rising area of concern before COVID, but has been brought into sharp focus since the 2020 lockdowns and subsequent pandemic disruptions with reports now of attendance in some areas dropping below 50% – some of which is related to student health and the impact of Omicron, while some sheets back to many of our learners simply becoming ‘disinterested’ in continuing to attend school due to a variety of factors.

The government response has been to release a new school Attendance and Engagement Strategy that sets expectations and targets to turn around these years of dropping attendance rates. This is a perfectly understandable response given the government’s investment in an education system that is premised on having learners gather together in a physical place to receive instruction and engage in learning.

In this rhetoric we see that ‘attendance’ is taken as a proxy for ‘engagement’ – i.e.” if you are physically present then you are engaged in learning, but if you are absent, you are not.” This emphasis on physical participation in or at school is reinforced in a recent PISA report that states…”

“…engagement is characterised by factors such as school and class attendance, being prepared for class, completing homework, attending lessons, and being involved in extra-curricular sports or hobby clubs.”
OECD (2020) Student Engagement at School

This explanation clearly links all aspects of attending school in person with the concept of engagement – which is certainly valid if we’re talking about engagement with school – but does that automatically correlate to engagement in learning?

The responses seen so far to the issue of absenteeism include a lot of ‘polishing the golden head’ in the form of increasing truancy services, implementation of better attendance tracking and monitoring systems, making school more ‘attractive’ through provision of lunches, wellbeing services and even some ‘edutainment’ approaches. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these initiatives in and of themselves, but do they really address the foundational issues leading to this dilemma? Could we instead (or in addition) more deeply and genuinely engage with questions such as…

is physical attendance at a place called ‘school’ a requirement for learning for every learner?
are schools (as we know them) still the best model of education provision in the 21st century?
how could we better factor in the home circumstances of individuals, different cultural and religious needs/requirements, as well as different learning needs and preferences?
is our current expectation of full-time attendance across a week, a term, a year, the most suitable or appropriate way of accommodating the needs of all learners – or teachers?
how might we differentiate between engagement in school and engagement in learning – what new measures might be required?
what sort of support needs to be provided in cases where learners may engage in learning from places other than ‘school’? And how do we then ‘support the supporters?’

These questions are often posed at conferences I attend or online communities I participate in, but are seldom followed through because they become ‘too hard’ to do anything about – they challenge the foundations of our system (the clay feet) which becomes simply too difficult to do anything about.

But what happens when those ‘clay feet’ show signs of crumbling as a result of the ‘shaking’ experienced in times of disruption? Do we wait for the whole structure to fall, or should we be looking to reconstruct those foundations?

Other examples…

I’ve focused on absenteeism as just one example of where the focus needs to be on the ‘feet’ rather than the ‘head’ of our system – but there are countless others, all of which are, arguably, things that have been exposed as weaknesses during the past few years of COVID disruption. These include (for example)…

evidence of structural inequity across so many parts of our education system – strongly correlated with structural inequities across other parts of society (health, law, welfare etc.) which means that tackling it alone within education becomes impossible.
identification of new measures of success that challenge our existing assumptions about assessment and achievement, and require structural re-alignment of things such as curriculum, pedagogy, learner-agency, role of teachers etc.
participation of parents/whānau and community in the process of ‘raising the child’, creating new forms of partnership that enable this to occur and new forms of ‘social contract’ to ensure responsibilities are understood and followed through on.
legislative, funding, resourcing and policy frameworks and structures that fail to offer flexibility to recognise leaners and teachers that operate outside of the bounds of a traditional school setting, and so deprive the system as a whole of the benefit of their expertise and experience.

So what can I do?

If you’ve read this far and feel, like many I imagine, that this is something that can only be addressed ‘at the top‘ (i.e. by the Ministry or Government), and that there’s nothing you can do from your position as a teacher, parent or even as a student, then don’t despair, you’re not alone. Truth is, any system depends on the stability of its foundations and is effective in ensuring they remain in tact and unquestioned as bureaucracies work to establish their services upon them. Add to that the impact of short-term political cycles and its inevitable that the ‘big issues’ seldom get addressed.

But don’t despair altogether – I strongly believe that it is possible for educators to begin to make the changes that matter, even when the ‘bigger picture’ can feel overwhelming. In fact, there are plenty of examples of individual educators, leaders and schools that are already ‘bucking the system’ to ensure the programmes they offer, the services they provide and the relationships they establish are not dependent on the ‘feet of clay’ foundations that exist.

As you set about designing the settings and experiences to engage your learners in learning (not schooling), consider some of the questions below to guide your thinking and challenge yourself to engage in some radical experimentation that will benefit your learners in the long term.

Who is ‘driving the learning’ in my context? Who is involved in making the decisions about what is learned, how it is learned and who the learning is done with?
What is informing the decisions made in my context about how learners are organised, who is responsible for them and how their time is organised and managed?
How authentic are my relationships with parents/whānau and community? Is there a genuine sense of partnership involved? If so, what sustains this?
What does success in learning look like for my learners? Who decides? Is the process understood by everyone involved? Who is responsible for the measures of success, and for maintaining a record of learning for each learner?
If I’m not physically present (in my school/classroom) for a period of time, who takes responsibility for continuing the teaching and learning? How do they know what is involved and what needs to be done? How do I design learning to account for this?

The responses to each of these questions will inevitably lead to an examination of motive, and the need to answer “am I simply conforming to established practice, or am I pushing the boundaries and challenging the traditional foundations of practice in ways that need to be challenged?” In this way each of us can take responsibility for things that will, in their own way, contribute to a strengthening and eventual re-casting of the foundations of our practice and of our system as a whole.

Tags education leadership, educational transformation, learner engagement

Pivot

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
Peter Druker

The announcement of the closure of the Ministry of Education’s head office in Wellington, Mātauranga House, due to earthquake risk came as a big surprise to everyone – in particular, the 1000 employees for whom that is their regular place of work. They were given just a few days to retrieve what they need and prepare to work from home for an unspecified period of time.

Déjà vu the 2020 lockdown! We all remember the sudden changes in our lives at that time which required us all to immediately find new ways of working. A new word was added to our vocabulary as we learned to pivot from one way of doing things to another.

The idea of pivoting isn’t unfamiliar – it’s likely that most of us have had some sort of experience in life that has caused us to do so, a change in career, a redundancy, birth of a first child etc. Each of these experiences forces us to ‘change direction’ in at least some way as we adapt to and embrace the change we’re in.

The sudden closure of Mātauranga House is a salient reminder that disruptive events are increasingly likely to impact our ability to continue as we have. The OECD identified this in a table titled Potential future shocks and surprises, plausibility and impact taken from their Trends Shaping Education 2019 document (pre-COVID!) as illustrated below (cited in their more recent publication on scenarios for the future of education).

More recently McKinsey published an article titled The resilience imperative: Succeeding in uncertain times, in which they demonstrate a number of ways in which disruption is becoming more frequent and more severe, including a dramatic 300% increase in reported natural disasters over the past 40 years.

Such evidence must inform the thinking we are doing about how best we prepared ourselves for this highly disrupted future. Being unprepared is without doubt a significant cause of stress and decline in wellbeing as we continually find ourselves ‘reacting’ to what is happening rather than having a resilience plan in place for the increasingly likelihood of such events occurring. A pro-active response is always best.

Which has me reflecting on the current situation as we navigate our way through the uncharted waters of change in what some refer to as the post-COVID times. Much of the rhetoric reflects an assumption that we’re only have a short time to persevere here and that there’s a time coming when COVID will be ‘over’ and we’ll be able to get back to normal.

The concept of post-COVID could be further away than we think according to a report released last week by New Zealand’s former chief scientist, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman titled Unprecedented and Unfinished.

In the report an international group of researchers outline the drivers and possible outcomes of the pandemic over a five-year horizon. The team used over 50 ‘vectors of uncertainty’ to identify three scenarios for the future illustrated here.

Long story short – the current pandemic situation isn’t going away any time soon, and the degree to which its impact is felt depends entirely on the extent to which we see a global collaboration around vaccinations and putting in place preventative measures.

“It’s fair to say that it’d be very foolish of governments within the multilateral system to see this pandemic as a single, exceptional event.”
Sir Peter Gluckman

So what does this mean for education? Sir Peter Gluckman’s quote above could apply equally for our education system and its leaders – at the national, regional and local level. We have to see this as more than simply a single, exception event that we can simply ‘get through’ and come out the other side. We see this sort of response so often – a school and community impacted by flooding, an earthquake, or other natural disaster for example. We respond as if we hadn’t expected it, and each time we’re challenged to find ways of catering for our learners while they can’t attend school – always as a short-term measure until they can return to school and ‘get back to normal’.

There’s nothing at all wrong with considering our young people attending a physical setting called school as the ‘normal’ we might aspire to. The problem is that this ideal is likely to be disrupted all too frequently, and we should be doing more to reconceptualise how we might operate as centres of learning so that each time such a disruption affects us, we are not thrown into a tail-spin, with systems and processes designed only for the on-site, in-person settings we’re used to. We need to pro-actively plan how we might pivot when the need arises.

This is where the focus on hybrid approaches is so important – not as an end in itself, but as a strategy for building resilience in our schools and our education system. Working to design and implement the elements of a hybrid teaching and learning approach is an effective way of ensuring that when the next disruption occurs, we’re better prepared to respond pro-actively, with strategies and mechanisms in place that can actioned as required.

Of course, there are lot of other benefits of putting the time into designing and implementing such hybrid approaches, besides being prepared for future disruption. These include:

Achieving greater coherence across a school and the system
Addressing systemic issues re equity and inclusion through learning design that is focused more intentionally on meeting the needs of all learners
Increasing transparency of systems and processes – for teachers, students and parents/whānau
Increasing professional collaboration to focus on what is important for student learning
Increasing the focus on developing learner agency and self-management
Improving links with parents/whānau and community as partners in the design of learning and support of learners
Reviewing what counts as success in learning, with more transparency in the assessment process
Taking a ‘systems’ view of our use of digital technologies to support and enable quality teaching and learning that is truly boundary-less

If the challenge of responding to disruptive events isn’t motivation enough for us to be exploring the hybrid learning alternatives, then surely the outcomes in the list above are?

Give a S***!

I am in the habit of riding my bike along the local river trail as regularly as I can. It’s a shared trail that is used by other cyclists, walkers, runners and those walking their dogs – everyone appreciating the opportunity this great community asset provides.

Cycling is one of those activities that provides me with thinking time. This morning my thoughts were on the many dogs I pass on this trail each time I ride it, the different types there are, and the different owners I observe.

This morning I was reflecting on the inevitability of these animals taking a moment to relieve themselves at some point during their morning walk, and the responsibility that falls on these owners to deal with that.

My observations today led me to the conclusion that there are actually three types of dog owner. There are those who are diligent when it comes to scooping up the small piles of excrement their beloved pet deposits and there are those who simply look the other way and ignore that it has happened.

Then, this morning, I became aware of a third group. This group give the appearance of doing the right thing – they scoop it up in a plastic bag and tie the ends, but then, at some point along the way they simply place it on the side of the path – presumably hoping someone else might collect it and dispose of it for them I can only imagine.

I refer to ‘group’ here as it’s certainly more than one. In a 10km stretch I cycled this morning I spotted four such bags, so there were at least four people who fall into this category. Two of the bags were actually within 50 metres of a special ‘dog poo’ collection bin placed on the side of the track by the local council to encourage responsible dog owners to do the right thing.

So why use my blog to today to write about this? Well, because it its own small way, the way these dog owners deal with the inconvenience of having to clean up after their pets provides a small window of reflection about the things that bind us as a community, as a society. The social norms and mores we observe and adhere to that we might enjoy the benefits of a healthy, cohesive and sustainable social ecosystem. A place where everyone can thrive and enjoy the benefits that accrue from our collective endeavours.

Healthy, thriving, sustainable communities have always been characterised by a strong emphasis on complying with a set of behaviours that have come to be recognised and agreed upon as being important to the collective as a whole. Sometimes these behaviours have to be spelled out in the form of ‘rules’ or ‘reminders’ so there’s no confusion about what is expected. Whether the result of compliance with rules or driven by some sort of social altruism, this is how healthy democracies work. While there have always been a minority who choose not to observe these behaviours, they are generally far outweighed by those who do.

But what about this ‘third group’? Is this a more recent phenomena, or has there always been this group in our midst? These are the people who, while not wanting to be seen to be not complying, are actually just as disinterested and deflecting of their personal responsibility in all of this as the group who outrightly say ‘no’.

So what are the possible drivers for someone to act like this? Certainly there’s a driver for social acceptance – they don’t want to be identified as a ‘rule breaker’ because of their actions – thus they at least go through the motions of scooping up the excrement. But why not complete the task of then carrying it to the bin? It seems the reasons that lie behind this rule have completely escaped them – it’s something that applies to everyone else, but not them. The driver to actually do the right thing appears to be superseded by the driver to be giving the appearance of doing the right thing.

My thought drift here isn’t really about categorising dog owners. That was simply the catalyst for a wider reflection – back into the world of education and schools that I inhabit for much of my working existence. There we have the same concerns when it comes to both learners and their parents and whānau.

The recent government announcement to add a significant amount of money to help schools battle truancy is but the tip of this iceberg. In his press release for this, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said:

“Some of what the regional response fund will be used for is ensuring pathways are there for disengaged youth alongside iwi, schools, councils and community groups and providers. It can be used to support whānau-led responses to break the cycle of disengagement, or brokering services with other agencies to ensure students have the level of support they need to stay in school. It’s important and complicated work,”

The focus on an ecosystem response (multiple agencies/organisations/family/whānau engagement) hinted at here is extremely encouraging – but might it end up being like the dog owners who simply place their bags of excrement along the track after appearing to do the right thing. “Oh well, we gave it our best shot!” they say.

The reality is that any solution to this problem must be an ecosystem response – no single entity (e.g. a school or a truancy service) is going to be able to address the escalating issue there is with non-engagement. Particularly when the measure of non-engagement is non-attendance. What about the increasing levels of non-engagement among students who are actually attending, but simply not engaged with what’s happening?

There are a myriad of reasons for this non-engagement becoming an issue – and a plethora of solutions to be considered. Schools could work to make their programmes more authentic, purposeful and interesting – that could be a start. The curriculum could be more current, relevant, inter-disciplinary – that would help. The Ministry of Education could provide more support, better resources and more expertise – there’s certainly been a decline there. These things fall within the locus of control of those within the education system – but what about those things outside of that? These students each come from a family/whānau context that may or may not be upholding the same expectations, they spend time in their communities where patterns of behaviour and expectations of their peers may have different drivers etc. etc.

We live in a VUCA world – this is the complexity we must grapple with if we are to resolve challenges such as the engagement one. We must work to establish meaningful and mutually beneficial ways of working, living and loving alongside each other.

We can’t allow this ‘third group’ mindset to grow – where the appearance of doing things right matters more than actually doing the right things! We’ve got to stop leaving our bags of s*** on the side of the road for someone else to deal with!

Tags democracy, educational change, educational transformation, learner engagement

Learner engagement

Image source: https://www.goguardian.com/state-of-engagement

When my students know that I care about them as a person, far beyond what score they get on a reading test, they see themselves through my eyes and my eyes see endless possibilities.
Middle School Teacher, US – quoted in GoGuardian Report

Learner engagement is one of the ten areas of teacher practice that are the focus of a recent paper I published titled Codifying Teacher Practice. In that paper I write, “All students need to be engaged in learning—not just the interested students, not just the ones who are obedient. In our familiar in-person settings we are apt to confuse engagement with attendance – the very act of being present. But in remote settings this becomes a bigger challenge.”

A recent report from GoGuardian supports this view, providing strong evidence for developing practices that improve learner engagement.

The report is based on a survey of of more than 2,000 educators from across the US, and identifies instructional practices that enable student engagement, no matter the learning environment.

Not surprisingly, a key finding is that the foundation for effective learning experiences is a strong and meaningful relationship with their students. Once that relationship is formed, engagement becomes much more achievable.

The report identifies six teacher practices that impact on learner agency:

Forming Teacher-Student Relationships:
Forming teacher-student relationships was highlighted as the top instructional practice for driving engagement across teachers of all grade levels and subjects, with a third of all teachers identifying it as the single most-effective practice.
Communicating Clear Expectations
When students understand what they need to do and aren’t afraid of forgetting directions, they are more likely to take risks in their explorations, which can lead to tremendous growth.
Linking New Information to Prior Knowledge
When a student can see new learning as an extension of something they already know, they feel empowered and motivated in their learning.
Making Course Content Relevant to Students
Making course content relevant to students shifts the focus to the student and what energises them to learn, rather than simply relaying information from a textbook.
Practicing Hands-On Learning
By giving students the opportunity to apply their knowledge in a tangible manner, practicing hands-on learning can provide a deeper learning experience.
Facilitating Student Participation
Be it verbal, written, or through another method, teachers emphasise that this instructional practice first and foremost requires intentionality, ensuring that students understand that their participation is both desired and important to the topic at hand.

The report also identifies five key impacts of these practices on learner engagement:

Creativity & Self-Expression
Academic Engagement
Curiosity & Lifelong Learning
Critical Thinking
Social-Emotional Well-Being
Conceptual Understanding

Given how important these learner qualities are as an outcome of our education system, and in terms of preparing young people for their future, giving emphasis to the teacher practices as outlined above becomes very important.

The role of teachers in all of this is critical. In their blog post the importance of trust in nurturing student engagement online, Rebecca Bennett, Cathy Stone & Ameena L. Payne argue that while teaching is inherently relational, models of “good teaching” must include trust to acknowledge that learning is not simply a cognitive process, it also has affective elements. While their work draws from research at a tertiary level, the findings are equally as applicable in the compulsory sector. They say;

The importance of nurturing trusting relationships between students and teachers is even more important online, as the teacher-student relationship often becomes a proxy for the social, pastoral and cultural support that campus-based students access outside of class. Online students do not usually ‘hang out’ on institutional websites; thus, their online subjects and teachers are their primary experience of ‘university’ itself.

Plenty here to think about when it comes to being more intentional about improving learner agency – particularly in a hybrid environment where the ‘normal’ ways of providing support and building relationships aren’t there.

Tags codifying teacher practice, hybrid learning, learner engagement

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