Cultivating global competencies

Cultivating Global Competencies

Dr Yong Zhao

University of Oregon

CEE-Melbourne Girls Grammar, 1/6/2016

Yong Zhao is an engaging presenter and began by talking about some of the problems facing young people, particularly youth unemployment. In the USA 30% of graduates live at home with their parents,the highest percentage ever. ‘We mis-educated our kids, we educated them for a society that no longer exists’.

Zhao emphasised the differences between learners, in their intelligence/s and their human motivations (Dr Steven Reiss lists 16 basic human motivations and their objects of desire) Not everyone has the same motivations, not everyone is equally driven. However, schools ‘shoot for the average, students have to fit into existing positions’ (aka standardised testing)

Zhao described the fourth industrial revolution (steam engine, electricity, computers, AI) and the loss of jobs in what were high skill human jobs (passports, banking, assembly lines …)

So, what can we do to ‘counter the machines’? We need to re-think education (Problem for me here: I don’t agree that education has been preparing students for low-skill jobs)

‘Evidence only works within a certain paradigm’ – be careful of over-reliance on evidence (eg NAPLAN) Norm referenced assessment leads to deficit driven actions.

How can we make children thrive? Celebrate the human-ness of us, our diversity. Diversity has not been valuable in the past; in the future it will be. Artists in the work force have tripled, there are things that machines can’t do. We have a huge appetite for psychological, aesthetic and spiritual products, products that create choice for the new middle class. Computers aren’t good at that. The useless has become useful! Run away from what you’re not good at.

So, what for schools? Embrace the ‘deficits’. Start with the students. Became places of opportunity. School readiness should be about the school being ready for the child. I liked: “PISA is a homogenisation measurement”. Foster social and emotional learning, entrepreneurial mindset: accept the fact that there is no job and create value and your own job. Don’t teach problem-solving, teach them to choose what problems are worth solving. Find the opportunity in crisis. He argued for student autonomy: voice, choice, support (social intelligence, not collaboration), working towards authentic products. (World Class Learners) Teachers become ‘curators of learning opportunities’, mentors. Don’t try to teach. Move away from ‘just in case’ teaching, to product-orientated learning.(meaningful products, sustained process, from isolated classroom to global perspectives) (see http://www.edcorps.org) We worry too much about teaching, and not enough about learning.

On a chilly Melbourne evening, it was stimulating stuff.

Books he talked about:

• ‘World Class Learners’
• ‘The Second Machine Age’
• ‘The End of Average’
• ‘Counting what Counts’

He did this whole presentation using just the camera roll of his Ipad.

Images from The Illustrated London News for April, 1853. 

 

 

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Making sense of ACEL

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Back now for a couple of days after three days in Sydney for ACEL, blog posts about some of the individual sessions below, and trying to make sense of what I heard, and sort through a busy three days of sitting and listening mostly.

There were recurring threads this year: compassion, identity and the bigger picture of teaching beyond scores. And ideas that were ‘contested’, PISA particularly, which I found particularly interesting. Hargreaves (who I was disappointed in) and Harris (who I was impressed by) differed greatly on that one (see my tweet below!)

There was also a big gap at times between the quality of the keynotes and the quality of the break-out sessions, some of which were neither inspirational or particularly practical. It was a lot of sitting, I can’t imagine how students cope with this kind of thing all day, two hour sessions, a break, more hours of sitting. I went for a walk at one stage and rediscovered some favourite Sydney haunts, but it was mostly pretty conventional, passive kind of presenting and receiving.

Interesting too, the gap between the big picture future orientated, no time to waste, let’s transform kinds of presenters, to the attendees locked into specific systems and schools; that’s not the agenda at my school kind of thing.  There was some disquiet among people I talked to about opening the conference with a war story, and about killing people as Australian VC winter Mark Donaldson put leadership into a violent context. Context, that was one of the key words for me; big picture vs life in a school, equity vs excellence, Australia vs the world, transformative vs little picture nervousness. Tragically, the last day commenced with a minute’s silence for yet another school shooting in America, thus bookending the conference with images of violence permeating even an education conference.

I vote for a Hargreaves Vs Harris PISA showdown! #acelconf15

— Warrick (@warrick_w) October 1, 2015

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One of my favourites at the NSW Gallery – John Glover’s idyllic view of Tasmania.Processed with VSCOcam with e5 preset

Every minute counts

Andy Hargreaves
@hargreavesBC

‘Every minute counts’, began Hargreaves, opening the final day opening keynote, a presentation I was looking forward to a lot. He began with a personal story of his own life and his mother.

Hargreaves argued that the need was well beyond the basics, beyond 21C skills; it was about finding identity, engagement with history and the world.

He reminded us of old things, Delors in 1925 (learning to know, do, be, live together). He talked big picture, of being bold, of a national priority for ‘joy’ in the curriculum (Finland), of knowing where you want to go.

He made a case for PISA, arguing that evidence matters, especially in revealing matters of equity.

He admitted that boldness was harder to measure, and therefore perhaps riskier to go for; how will you know you’ve got there? But you need to try: to be bold and specific.

He argued for professional capital, for collective efficacy, ‘what do we believe we can do together’, not the star system of programs like Teach for America.

It was all bit scattered in the end, and if I hadn’t read his work, I would have thought even a bit shallow, but the key messages were very strong.

What’s holding us back?

In this session Yong Zhau talked about failure and disengagement, about diversity and connections. He talked of multiple intelligences, differing motivations and passions, using ‘Rudolph the red nosed reindeer’ as a metaphor.
He talked about nature via nurture, that the conditions mattered, and also the idea of mastery (10,000 hours and all that) He gently mocked the growth mindset, noting that believing he could become a great footballer wouldn’t make it happen.

But not all diversity is valued, schools make a great guess about what is useful and will be valued, and focus on ’employable skills’. We privilege certain intelligences, talents and motivations. We homogenise kids.

Traditional work is gone: ‘The Second Machine Age’. (book)

He argued that education is broke, needs replacing not fixing. PISA got a drubbing again, a measure of sausage makers, ‘the stupidity of trying to fix the past’, we are seduced by the old paradigm, of education the average. But, in the age ‘of abundance’ we should accommodate all talents and globalisation is way beyond the village and education has side effects too, that we should be aware of: ‘this program will improve your NAPLAN scores but kill off your love of reading forever’.

What’s holding us back?

zhaulearning.com

@YoungZhauOU

Putting a pause on PISA

Putting a pause on PISA (Alma Harris)
In this session, Harris talked about high performance in a global context and argued that ‘high performance is relative’.  She talked about PISA and the success stories of places like Finland and China. She argued strong about the importance of CONTEXT and talked about ‘the other side of the story’, of a culture of private tutoring, of students having 4-5 hours sleep, that success comes with a price. ‘Do we really want to be the top of PISA that much?’, the ‘iron child’ culture. She referenced a book ‘The Smartest Kids in the World’ (Amanda Ripley) but argued that PISA was over valued.
Imagine a grading for students on the ‘Global Youth Wellbeing Index’, she argued, where Australia is the leading country.

We have to be cautious about the attributions we make about the data we see. There are missing pieces like diversity, inclusion, equity and context.

She showed us context like the number of schools, ‘you can borrow policies but you can’t borrow context.’

– Quality teaching matters

– Leadership is the big enabler

– Professional learning is essential

– A central focus on students as learners and people

Harris concluded by talking about the importance of leadership.

It was refreshing.

Professor Harris tweets at @AlmaHarris1

Living and teaching in an era of big data

If there was one recurring thread (I typed ‘threat’ subliminally just then and it didn’t auto-correct!) at the first day of the K-12 National Curriculum Conference today, it might have been the idea of data, analytics and ‘using evidence’ to inform teaching and learning.

‘There are two things we all agree with’, said Professor Brian Caldwell, it’s the idea of an Australian curriculum, and the idea of national testing, of some kind.

Systems: universal, national, local, like the idea of data. ‘We’re not just wasting our money here. Look. You’re not doing it right…’ Data to drive improvement, data to drive reform, data to drive teachers out of the profession. ‘PISA has become an article of faith for policy makers …’ someone said. There was lots of talk of data analysis, of acronyms like PISA, NAPLAN, ACER, VCAA, ISQ, GKR, PAT, EBO, PATT … and on it went.

Everyone wants a dashboard, and they want it now. Not as much talk about how we might deal with all that data once we have it, or how that might drive … well, even more data.

There were some refreshing asides, talk about creativity, problem-solving, the value of learning for its own sake and not as an atom in a productivity machine, but data. Everywhere data.

Most of the presentations are on Slideshare HERE

[Vette Dashboard by Wayne Silver, on Flickr – https://flic.kr/p/8rhcNg ]

I don’t want to even talk about PISA

PISA results were released this week. The media has enjoyed it a lot.

I have some strong reservations about the validity of the testing, the meaningfulness of national comparisons and the subsequent media league tables, teacher-blaming and contrived anguish in the Murdoch press that inevitably follows: ‘Our kids dumber than ten years ago.’. Yes, I think this really helpful to all concerned.

I could put up a list of links pointing to articles that talk about this stuff, but look it up.

A personal history of education

 

 

Sir Bob Geldolf replaced De Bono at late notice as the keynote and talked about how ‘crap’ teaching must be, and how important it was. Education matters to him, and he’s helped build over ten thousand schools in Africa.

He argued that to be left out of the knowledge economy is to be left behind. Education is liberating. He talked passionately about his personal journey. ‘We are living through a moment that will be discussed in three hundred years’.

He also gave us some much needed perspective on Pisa, and just how well Australia was doing in these international rankings,  a completely different country to the one he began visiting thirty years ago, a country that was willing to try new things.

He was scathing about the economy of greed that led to the GFC, the very opposite of pluralism. ‘What’s the point of economic progress without social progress?’ He said that we thought we were teaching subjects, but we were teaching ethics and values.

“What it means to be human in the modern world” is the real curriculum.

He told us his own story, of his own lack of a positive education experiences. Of growing up without authority figures. He was saved by the whispering music coming out of Radio Luxembourg.  It was riveting.

And, he had his blue rock stars shoes on!

 

 

Postcard from Finland

At futurEducation I did take the opportunity to make some notes from a couple of the keynotes, which were both interesting.

Dr Tom Wikman, from Finland, opened the conference and was disarmingly honest in his admission that he both was a bit sick of Pisa test discussion but also liked it (‘after all, it’s brought me here’). He opened with a gorgeous Finnish landscape shot, a bit like the one above.

Wikman talked about Finnish education, the ‘Finnish Pisa machine’ he called it, and explained why Finnish results might be so high, even in comparison with ‘like’ countries such as their Nordic neighbours.

One reason he pointed to, ironically, was the lack of reform in Finnish education, where education has been consistent and stable compared to other countries that have had multiple reforms over the last twenty years. The message: test less and reform less, and let teachers get on with it.

But that’s if teachers are trusted as high quality, well esteemed, all with Masters Degrees and seen as teacher-researchers. His metaphor was the teacher as ‘conductor’ (as in conducting an orchestra)and described a surprisingly conservative and old-fashioned sounding education system: blackboards, kids in rows, textbooks, with an emphasis on ‘essentialism’ (the subject) rather than ‘progressivism’ (the child), and traditional in emphasis rather than future-orientated.

Okay, it gets good test results in PISAS; can’t argue with that. But, unquestioned in all this, it seemed to me, was the idea that tests like PISA do accurately measure what matters, just not what can be measured. I’m not sure that I’d go far as to endorse the (somewhat US-centric) view that PISA test results are inverse predictors of creativity or ingenuity or entrepreneurship, but I get the point. Everyone, from the PM down to the boys in the Gonkski-mobile seem to believe.

And, after all Wikman’s talk about the status of teachers, the need for stability and the worth of trusting teachers, what’s the take-home message for Australian politicians?: test, test, test, and make teachers accountable.

Finland landscape photo from Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfgangfoto/

Hear this blog post read by a computer!

Science good, maths holding, reading declining

Barry McGaw’s article Science Good, maths holding, reading declining, published in the latest EQ  (Autumn 2008) coming out of the Curriculum Corporation, discussing the latest data from international PISA testing, nicely illustrates some of my concerns with the national curriculum agenda.

McGaw, who has been appointed chair of the new National Curriculum Board, goes data-happy in his two page piece, talking repeatedly about how Australia ‘tied in fourth place …’, ‘tied in third place…’ and ‘Australia slipped in the rankings from fifth in 2003 to ninth in 2006…’. etc. etc.

And then this;

‘We can of course, continue to be pleasesd that our 15 year olds are among the highest performers in the OECD … But we should not rest content.

We are not usually satisfied with less than gold medal performances in sport. We should set similarly high aspirations for our education system…’

Really? That’s funny because the message I hear is that participation and effort and achieving your own potential is more important than winning. And that just getting there is a huge achievement for some. And that perhaps education is best seen in jingoist contexts. And that perhaps these measurements aren’t it all anyway.

No mention of Finland this time around, thankfully, but we can be sure that the National Curriculum executives will be flying in to Helsinki at some point.

Winter Gold Medal photo from FLICKR by danjc003