Artichoke

On Creating A Wasn’t Good, Wasn’t Bad School for Every Child.

I didn’t buy Cyril Taylor’s newly released “A Good School for Every Child – How to improve our schools” because I wanted to read another book on how to do school better. 

At the moment I drift towards thinking and reading about museums rather than schools – probably because I am feeling burdened by the narrow perspective of what is written by people telling us what to do (and not to do) in school.

In truth when you work in a school it often feels like a big part of the problem is that there are too many people "telling" and not enough people "doing".

Still I relented and bought Cyril Taylor’s book because of his background.  All that cover blurb stuff - Taylor has “served as an adviser to ten successive UK education secretaries and four prime ministers, both Conservative and Labour, including Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.”

Given some of the budget funding decisions made by our own New Zealand Minister of Education I wanted to understand the thinking of a ministerial adviser, albeit one from the UK.

As a litmus test I chose to start with Taylor’s take on “How information communication technology (ICT) can be used to improve learning.” This is an area that our minister chose to continue funding through things like the ictpd cluster contracts.  I intended to to follow this with the chapter on “Why and how our gifted and talented children should be nurtured” an area where funding for gifted and talented advisers has been pulled in New Zealand.  

In Chapter 9 “How information communication technology (ICT) can be used to improve learning.” Taylor asks –

“Does your school have an interactive whiteboard in every classroom?” This is a revolutionary teacher’s tool which has made obsolete the old school blackboard with chalk, as well as slide projectors.  Whiteboards can have a dramatic effect in raising standards. Not only can they show film clips and slides, and enable the teacher to write electronically instead of using chalk, they are also interactive with pupils being able to access them through their laptops.“

Given my sceptism over IWB's I immediately wished educational books were displayed in racks at supermarket checkouts so that I could have done a better flick/scan of the content before I ordered my copy from Amazon

I don’t know about you but I was underwhelmed by both the description of use and the claim over outcome for IWBs .... but in fairness to Taylor I continued reading to see what might be offered in defence of his claim “Whiteboards can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”.

In defence Taylor argues  ....

“A good example in the effective use of whiteboards is Kemnal Technology College, an all boys school in Bromley Kent, sponsored by Lord Harris.  Its outstanding head teacher, John Atkins, grew frustrated a few years ago with the difficulty in recruiting good maths teachers and the resulting poor performance of his boys in GCSE maths.

His solution was to convert, by knocking down the partition walls, three of his classrooms into one large classroom with up to ninety desks.  He then hired a master maths teacher at a high salary, plus three teaching assistants.  Every one of his boys was then given a laptop.  The large classroom was equipped with two interactive whiteboards.

I sat in on a maths class conducted by the outstanding maths teacher.  The boys were enthralled by his teaching skills, received personal help from the three teaching assistants, and were able to benefit from three whiteboards in front of them, including learning to solve maths problems.

As John Atkin says: ‘interactive whiteboards means that we can “teach the way the students learn”’

Despite its incoming 11 year olds having lower than average ability range, 64 percent of Kemnal Technology College students soon achieved five good grades at GCSE, compared to its expected results using the Jesson Value Added approach, of only 54 per cent.  They achieve 47 per cent including maths and English with a similar value added of 10 percent, and 63 percent of their boys now achieve A-C grades in GCSE Maths.”

Taylor uses the Temnal Technology College results to back his claim that when we introduce interactive whiteboards into a classroom we see dramatic effects in raising standards.

I don’t have enough information to tell whether the shifts from actual versus expected results he details are valid and reliable but the anecdote allows us to raise a number of alternatives.

For example what if instead of asking “Does your school have an interactive whiteboard in every classroom?  And following this question with the claim “Whiteboards can have a dramatic effect in raising standard”s

He had asked “Does your school have class sizes of ninety students?"  And followed this question with the claim “Raising class sizes to ninety students can have a dramatic effect in raising standard”s

What if:

We asked “Does your school have expert teachers?"  And followed this question with the claim  “Expert teachers can have a dramatic effect in raising standard”s

We asked “Does your school have teaching assistants in classrooms?"  And followed this question with the claim  “Having teaching assistants in a classroom can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your school increase the visibility of presentation surfaces in classrooms?"  And followed this question with the claim “Increasing visibility of presentation surfaces in a classroom can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your school have triple sized learning spaces?"  And followed this question with the claim “ Increasing the physical size of classrooms threefold can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your school give every student a laptop?" And followed this question with the claim “Giving every student a laptop can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your school pay teachers high salaries?" And followed this question with the claim “Paying high salaries to teachers can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your school change the learning environments available? And followed this question with the claim “Changing the learning environment can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your school measure teacher effectiveness through value added testing of students? And followed this question with the claim “Measuring teacher effectiveness through value added testing of the students they are teaching can have a dramatic effect in raising standards.”

Prof John Hattie's meta- analysis in Visible Learning - allows us to critique some of these claims BUT it makes me want to ask yet another question altogether -

Why did Cyril Taylor prefer to interpret any changes in student learning outcome at Kemnal Technology College as being causally related to the presence of two (or was it three) interactive whiteboards when so many other factors are in play?  Why did he privilege the IWB in all of this? What happens to our common sense thinking when we get too close to “simmering electrical” technologies?         

“I am haunted by you” flowers and impossible cream cakes.

I had an unexpected escape from the day job today – and I used it to push off from the screen and drift into the ordinary.  I used it to bump up against the stuff that had not been digitised – to see, hear, smell, touch and taste in a way not mediated through a screen - to nudge up against the real.

Escape is best shared.  I persuaded another to cut loose from what life expected of her for the day and we explored the local as if we were seeing it for the first time.

Along the way we visited the dementia centre, delivering impossible cream cakes and an exuberance of flowers; flowers whose colours cried out “I am haunted by you”.  We hugged and squeezed each of the dementia centre staff who had helped grandpa; those who reassured him when he puzzled over the fact that when he drank juice the horizon moved, and juice escaped out the side of his mouth and rolled down over his chin ... and those who flirted with him when he fancied sex on the glacier .... and then we moved on.

At the Onehunga Mall we called into a local cafe.  We laughed so much at our grandpa memories that when we drank coffee the horizon moved for us – and the coffee ran out the side of our mouths and rolled down our chins. 

Deferring to Kingswellian “We are capitalism made flesh” thinking  –All that “every moment of waking and sleeping life is shot through with commitment to the goods and services of the global economy..” we took our caffeinated and sticky surfaces to those emporiums of feckless consumerism – the many $2.00 Shops of Onehunga. 

Here we spent up large (but small) on enough froth, sparkle, glitter and glue to transform fifty self effacing wooden pegs into “off their faces” narcissistic transgendered celebrities.  We drifted into carpet overrun warehouses, admired taxidermy wild boar heads and 3m polystyrene Doric columns in second hand shops, bought charcoal sticks and rolled canvas at an art emporium and got lost upstairs in the New Zealand section of the “Hard to Find but Worth the Effort”  bookshop.  

How would you measure the meaning of a day like this? 

In Chapter 5 of Museums in a Troubled World – Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse,  Jane cites the thinking of Douglas Worts in measuring the meaning of museums. 

Refer: Worts, D.  “Measuring Museum Meaning: A Critical Assessment Framework.” Journal of Museum Education, 31 2006, 41 - 48 

You will not be surprised if I admit that this captured my interest - given that any folksonomy of Artichoke would reveal that I am just a little obsessed with measuring “school meaning”. 

Wort’s CAF framework has three lenses – the individual, the community and the museum. 

The "community lens" focuses on the creation of public benefit, and requires that museum staff ask themselves how well their program(s) will do things like: 

Address vital and relevant needs/issues within the community.

Engage a diverse public.

Act as a catalyst for action.

Stimulate intergenerational interactions.

Link existing community groups to one another.

Initiate or enhance long term collaborative relationships.

Create partnerships that empower community groups.

Result in products/processes that have tangible impacts in the community.  

Jane notes on p 124 that – “this approach is a radical contrast to the typical Museum programme lens, which consists of questions such as “How much will it cost?”, “How many people will attend?”; “Will there be a catalogue?” and “Will there be shop merchandise?” 

I cannot help but think that these community lens questions might work well with school. 

Many of our schools seem obsessed with measurement questions such as “How much will it cost?”, “How many students will achieve [insert sought after qualification]?”; “Will there be media league tables?” and “What is our point of marketable difference?” questions. 

The alternative - measuring schools through a community lens -  Chris Bigum's 2004 “knowledge building through identifying local and community needs” - might give purpose to both our museums and our schools. 

After all, how many of the professional learning conversations held, and learning experiences planned in our schools, are measured against how well they ...  

Address vital and relevant needs/issues within the community.

Engage a diverse public.

Act as a catalyst for action.

Stimulate intergenerational interactions.

Link existing community groups to one another.

Initiate or enhance long term collaborative relationships.

Create partnerships that empower community groups.

Result in products/processes that have tangible impacts in the community.

“The money is always there, but the pockets change” Gertrude Stein

To allow oneself to be physically re-arranged by another is much like allowing oneself to be mentally re-arranged by another.  Both require compliance and conformity, and I guess both require deference to the “power” or “expertise” of another. 

Physical rearrangement has its attraction. 

For example when The Magnet and I became "a living topiary" for a Wreathed Hornbill, a Malay-Eagle Owl, a Chestnut-bellied Hawk Eagle, a Sulfur Crested Cockatoo and a couple of Macaws of the Scarlet and the Blue & Yellow varieties, in the Feathered Friends Photo Booth at the KL Bird Park - we sat where required, raised limbs as required and were perched upon as required.  The photo booth attendants had an expertise with arranging birds and making people into perches that was difficult to fault. The marketing of this expertise was clearly signposted in the “use your own camera” or “instant photo” charges at the front of the photo booth. The outcome and the compliance required transparent.   

I am less certain about the attraction in mental re-arrangement by another.  It is more usual to frame compliance and conformity of thought as indoctrination or an “extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, or as a consequence of Keen's “the cult of the amateur”  .

Our New Zealand Ministry of Education funded by far the largest number of educators to The International Conference on Thinking, ICOT09, in Malaysia this July – reports from conference organisers put the figure at one hundred and sixty plus educators from "the wobbly isles".  In truth it was hard to escape the wobbly isle educators dusted over corridors, and conference rooms – all trying to find stuff to make sense of the New Zealand Curriculum Key Competency “Thinking” - and to find educators to network with from other places.   

On offer at ICOT09 was a continuum of mental re-arrangement expertise - academic expertise, edu_consultant expertise, edu_marketing expertise and the amateurs offering classroom educator expertise.  Though the schools’ “thinking journeys” were often an edu_road-trip better described as a support act for the professional elite than an amateur’s attempt to make meaning .

What surprised me and others when we discussed the days programme over Tiger Beer at the end of each day was the sense that “everyone had something to sell”

It is not that I am unused to applying Paul (1972)’s key questions to evaluate the claims made at educational conferences. For example this is one of my favourites ...

Does the acceptance of this information advance the vested interest of the person or group asserting it? 

It is a good question to ask about anything you read – offline or blogged online - by amateur, consultant or academic.

It is the question that usually allows me to discriminate between the conference claims made by educational consultants and marketers  and the claims made by academics. 

However, in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, during ICOT09, the question didn’t work so well.  Many of the celebrity academics were conterminous with educational consultants – both professional elites appeared to be networking to extend their power and status –  lobbying for invites to the next ICOT conference in Belfast, and waving their latest book.  Some even offered autographs.  On some days it seemed more like a trade fair than a conference.

I was startled by the celebrity academics who chose to use chunks of their allotted speaking time for self promotional marketing and I was reminded of the BBC “Yes Minister” series  and its cynical take on academics

“The surprising thing about academics is not that they have their price, but how low that price is.”

 “No one really understands the true nature of fawning servility until he sees an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of money or personal publicity.”

By the end of the week any difference between the ICOT09  conference and the Petaling St Chinatown marketplace was largely a matter of the air-conditioning.

And all of it made me wonder;

Is the marketing of academia something new or just something I had failed to notice before because in other edu_conferences in New Zealand I have been distracted by the marketing of ICTs?

Is the celebrity academic at ICOT09 an indicator of the end of “freedom of access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.” Stephen Downes The Future of Education cited in Unesco Chair Blogs

Is the validity and reliability of academic research compromised when we make revenue seeking celebrities of the academics themselves rather than ensuring free access to their research findings?

And although it seems that nowadays, at least in New Zealand’s popular media, Paglia is eminently “ Always loved that” baggable ...

As a bonus, here's the famous 1993 Julie Burchill-Paglia "fax war", in which Paglia comes off as humourless and smug, and Burchill signs off with the immortal:

Dear Professor Paglia,
Fuck off you crazy old dyke.
Always,
Julie Burchill

Always loved that.

My experience at ICOT09 means I cannot help but think that in “Sex Art and American Culture” Paglia buttoned what I observed seventeen years later

“The huge post 60s proliferation of conferences, produced a diversion of professional energy away from study and towards performance, networking, advertisement, cruising, hustling, glad handing, back scratching, chit chat, group think.”  Paglia in Sex, Art and American Culture 1992 p 221

All of which makes me wonder - will the future with its increasing digitisation of content make performance over study even more attractive for academics?

 Virginia Postrel’s NYTimes Review  of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by Chris Anderson has a passage that explains why this may well be the case.    

 Postrel writes

Faced with collapsing business models, today’s journalists-in-denial rail against Anderson’s message. Free content cannot be the future, they say, because content is valuable. Fixed costs must be covered. We have bills to pay. The problem, they argue, is that we’re giving our work away.

As Anderson himself says, “I’ve got a lot of kids and college isn’t getting any cheaper.” His own strategy, one outlined by Dyson way back when, is to charge little or nothing for his writing and use it to generate lucrative speaking gigs. “You can read a copy of this book online (abundant, commodity information) for free,” he writes (not noting that the free offer expires shortly after the printed book’s publication), “but if you want me to fly to your city and prepare a custom talk on Free as it applies to your business, I’ll be happy to, but you’re going to have to pay me for my (scarce) time.”

So it seems when the internet increasingly allows everything to be free, the future will be all about the value we can leverage from time.

And when time is the new money, the pockets will change

Illich, prescient as ever, identified the role of “time” and “scarcity” with respect to consumption a while back [In “Towards a history of needs.” 1977 – p33]

Time scarcity may soon turn into the major obstacle to the consumption of prescribed and often publicly financed, services.

 Postrel puts it this way

“Unlike tangible commodities like T-shirts or plastics, most digital content doesn’t generate much new demand as its price falls toward zero. Even with no admission fee, videos, blog posts and online games soak up users’ time, and time has a hard limit. So as the supply of cheap content expands, it can’t simply fill ever-growing closets (or garbage dumps). Instead, the competition for time and attention becomes ever fiercer, and the market ever more fragmented. Any given producer will find profits elusive, especially since it’s so easy for amateurs to enter the market.”

When Gertrude Stein claimed “The money is always there, but the pockets change” she wasn’t necessarily thinking about freedom of access to public goods.  But it is worth noting that when we make celebrities of academics, we change the location of the pockets and when we change the location of the pockets we stand to lose an important freedom.

We stand to lose what Downes describes as the “freedom of access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.”

What can recommendation systems in museums teach us about underachievement in school?

It is worth thinking about the detail in Anne Salmond’s opinion piece in this morning’s NZ Herald Anne Salmond Open Entry for Maori a near miss Monday July 6 2009.

In addressing Pita Sharples’ suggestion of open entry for Maori students to universities, Salmond uses research findings from the Starpath Project to make three disturbing claims about education in New Zealand.

Claim #1.  The management of educational data in New Zealand has more to do with the distribution of resources rather than with tracking the long-term success or failure of students.

As a result – “schools are often unaware when bright students begin to fail; or when groups of students (say, Maori boys) begin to follow pathways that lead to failure and early exit.”

Claim #2.  New Zealand educational investment in initiatives aimed at enhancing student achievement are “largely working blind”.  We not only do not know if the investment is making a positive difference we also do not know if the investment is targeting the real problem.  

A result – “leading to many uncoordinated, short-term initiatives (80 in one school that Starpath studied) and a failure to identify those approaches that really work, so that they can be adopted across the education system.”

Salmond also calls for a more careful monitoring on government funded initiatives that claim to enhance learning outcomes for Maori, Pacific and low-income students.

Those initiatives that don't have a positive impact on student outcomes should be dropped, while those that are highly successful should be adopted across the education system.

I find it somewhat disturbing that Salmond feels the need to recommend “dropping initiatives that don’t have a positive impact on student outcomes" – it suggests that this is not currently the case. 

If the Starpath Project has evidence of initiatives that do and initiatives that don’t – I hope they offered this evidence to Anne Tolley before the recent budget  - and that Anne Tolley respected their findings - so that we can be confident that we are no longer funding initiatives that don’t have a positive impact on student outcomes.

Claim #3 – Our qualification system NCEA is so complex that families cannot make wise decisions about which courses to study, which educational pathways to pursue.

As a result, “while most Maori, Pacific and low-income students aspire to gain university entrance (78 per cent in one study), it is too easy for them to find themselves on NCEA pathways that foreclose this option.”

I will admit to being attracted to chaos theory, fuzzy logic and ambiguity in what I read but it unnerves me just a little to realise that the Starpath Project research suggests the New Zealand Government is funding educational initiatives where uncertainty of focus and indeterminate outcomes rule.  In truth it is easier to understand Pita Sharples call for open entry for Maori to universities if you accept that  the current framing/ educational design and funding of the MoE initiatives designed to raise Maori and Pacific achievement is closer to whimsy than anything professionally responsible.

Claim#3 captures my interest this evening.  Our latest budget set aside “$8 million to ensure NCEA assessment tools are of a high-standard and well understood by teachers.” Presumably on the basis that teachers understanding of NCEA assessment leaves something to be desired.  Salmond’s remarks suggest that parents and students similarly lack the understanding needed to make good decisions about NCEA assessment.

It all makes me wonder how we could re-design the NCEA course options available at secondary schools so that students and their parents would find it easier to make wise choices

There is more to it than this of course - Any New Zealand student studying for NCEA can relate instances where they or their friends have been excluded from courses or dissuaded from certain option lines on the grounds that the institutions deems the chance of student success unlikely. 

In New Zealand secondary schools the right to try (and fail) is seldom available.  Like Etruscans divining the future from the entrails of sacrified animals, secondary teachers continue to confidently (and perhaps patronisingly) practice haruspicy on the NCEA course selections of their students.

So parents and students not only need to understand NCEA well enough to make wise choices they also need to understand it well enough to fight the institution for their right to access courses based upon these choices.

Nina Simon in the Musem2.0 Blog has been looking at ways museums can design recommendation systems for their visitors in Designing recommendation systems that go beyond “You’ll like this”  . 

Much of her thinking about customised museum tours can be usefully transferred to educational contexts – where museum exhibits become educational options and courses.  For example Simon’s thinking helps me think in new ways about the design of solutions to help students and their families make sense of the courses and learning pathways available to them.

When it comes to museums, recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized tour. How can a museum offer each visitor suggestions for exhibits and experiences that will uniquely serve their interests? There are many lovely example of museums providing quirky tours based on particular interests. For example, The Tate Modern offers a set of pamphlets featuring different tours of the museum based on emotional mood. You can pick up the "I've just split up" tour and wallow in depression, or the "I'm an animal freak" tour and explore your wilder side. And the site I Like Museums lets you find whole institutions of interest based on your preference for trails like "making things," "nice cup of tea," or simply "pigs."

Salmond's call for more careful monitoring of student learning outcomes .... 

Above all, the compulsory education system needs re-engineering. Information systems in schools should be tracking the educational journeys of students, identifying the strengths and potentials of individual students (so that they and their parents get optimal advice), and patterns of success and failure across the student body (so that initiatives are accurately targeted).

... sounds like it could be answered in part by the design principles in the recommendation system Simon suggests for museums – one based upon collaborative filtering   (“like the one used to recommend new songs to you on Pandora or new movies on Netflix?”) –

Perhaps we can design a platform for the monitoring of individual educational journeys in New Zealand – one that could aggregate content about the strengths and potentials of individual students and build it into a Pandora/Netflix like recommendation system – a system alerting students and their families of the educational targets to be met and the course options available.

Then the patterns of success data available might allow students and their families to thoughtfully design learning pathways - pathways that not only meet their aspirations but also extend them to create alternative educational reach.