Derek’s Blog

Interesting time to be in England, just as MI5 is attempting to recruit teachers as “spies” in a new recruitment drive! For real! The Telegraph reports that, according to the job description, successful candidates will be responsible for building contacts with people who can “provide information of relevance to national security”.

But why teachers? Well, as The TimesOnline points out, “Teachers are quite used to moving into new environments, quickly establishing the rules of engagement, the number of people who should be allowed to visit the lavatory and what constitutes the correct PE kit.”

This sort of experience is just what the MI5 recruiters are looking for, apparently, with the advertisement reading:

“Your experience of dealing with people means you can build trust and relationships with all sorts of individuals, which makes you the ideal candidate for securing the information we need to protect national security.”

Seriously though, I found the advertisement oddly affirming of a profession that is all too often undervalued, and where teachers are thought of as “those who can’t (do anything else in the ‘real world’). Teaching is a highly skilled profession, and those who practice it often exhibit a wide range of skills, knowledge and competence that is taken for granted both within and without. This advertisement serves as a timely reminder that a teacher’s CV can make them highly marketable, and perhaps more significantly, serves as an illustration of the way in which an emphasis on developing key competencies is so important!

PS - Nick/Vince, if I don’t return from the UK please send all my mail c/- “M”

I’ve come across a couple of new reports in the UK since being here - both looking at the impact and use of technology in the higher education scene. The significant one for me is titled “The Edgeless University” (PDF download) written by Peter Bradwell from DEMOS. The thesis of Bradwell’s paper is why higher education must embrace technology, and the logic and presentation of his arguments is very compelling. But the interesting thing for me is his use of the concept of an ‘edgeless university’ - based on the work of Robert Lang who asserts that “Edgeless cities are… cities in function… but not in form.’

Bradwell argues that Universities too are experiencing ‘sprawl’, and that the function they perform is no longer contained within the campus, nor within the physically defined space of a particular institution, nor, sometimes, even in higher education institutions at all. Bradwell goes on to demonstrate the critical role that tecnology can play in enabling this philosophical change and the potential of it to be realised.

I’d argue that the same ideas presented by Bradwell in this well researched paper may be applied to our school sector as well, in particular, our secondary school sector where there is a well established need to accommodate a growing diversity of need among students, and a growing realisation that a single institution is unable to accommodate these.

The second paper is titled Higher Education in a Web2.0 world, published by JISC (March, 2009). The following quote describes it’s focus:

“Today’s learners exist in a digital age. This implies access to, and use of, a range of Social Web tools and software that provide gateways to a multiplicity of interactive resources for information, entertainment and, not least, communication. We looked at access to digital technologies and their use from the point of view of level and pattern, purpose, approach and consequences.

The paper is a rather lengthy and well researched tome - but for a quick overview the summary of key findings and recommendations on the JISC website provides useful insights. The list of critical issues is especially interesting.

I found the summary of key ways in which Web2.0 tools are being used in UK Higher Ed fascinating. Again, the list here could easily be applied to what I see happening in the school sector (focus on the bracketed terms beside each tool set)

• blogs (reflective journals)
• wikis (collaborative content creation or supplementary lecture information)
• social bookmarking (expanding reading lists with social references and commentary)
• social networking (course discussion, initiated by both students and staff)
• immersive technologies (role playing)

A central issue arising from this list is how the use of these tools implies a change in pedagogical approach (teaching) if they are to be used effectively.

The following quote taken from the conclusion of the report highlights the tension between the future potential and the current reality - which again I believe applies similarly to our school system:

Web 2.0, the Social Web, has had a profound effect on behaviours, particularly those of young people whose medium and metier it is. They inhabit it with ease and it has led them to a strong sense of communities of interest linked in their own web spaces, and to a disposition to share and participate. It has also led them to impatience – a preference for quick answers – and to a casual approach to evaluating information and attributing it and also to copyright and legal constraints.

The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change… The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.”

PS - if you still have time to read something more on this topic, the recent report titled “The future of learning institutions in a digital age” (.pdf) by the McArthur group is also worth a read - in particular, the ten principles for the future of learning in chapter three.

After-thought - an interesting point to note is that each of these publications has been developed as a result of collaboration among groups of researchers and educators, and so reflects a ‘connected’ view, rather than that of a single author.

My first real day on deck in the UK today - visited Tabor Science College in Essex in the morning and had a great talk with headmaster Steven Clarke about how the EPS might be useful to him in his efforts to work with the staff and community to continue to raise the level of achievement and student success at his school. He then took us for a tour of the school where I was impressed both by the quality of the design and architecture, and also by the evidence of the level of student leadership in the school.

The emphasis on measuring and providing evidence of school performance is a big focus here in UK schools, driven to a large degree by the requirements of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) - although I’d have to say that in a number of the schools I’ve had the privilege of visiting, such as Tabor today, I’ve seen plenty of evidence of this emphasis being driven by school leadership not simply to meet the Ofsted requirements, but out of a genuine desire for continuous improvement and striving for excellence in what they do.

Big news today (apart from the death of Michael Jackson) is the news of the government’s decision to drop primary school literacy and numeracy strategies. The main driver for this decision, from what I can make out, is the need to save money - with the government claiming they’ll save over £100 million a year in consultancy fees when the contract with Capita (the company responsible for administering the standards) is abolished in 2011.

That’s not the only perspective however. The Times online led with the headline Dropping primary school literacy and numeracy strategies ‘long overdue’, citing claims by the teacher’s union that the strategies haven’t been raising standards but have instead have deprived teachers of the proper decisions they should be making about how they should teach and what they should teach.

The Guardian ran a story claiming primary school strategies were a waste of money citing a report from the Policy Exchange thinktank that claims in fact, standards rose faster before the government introduced its national strategies for numeracy and literacy. According to that report in the five years before the national standards were introduced, literacy standards rose by 22% and numeracy by 27%, which slowed to 10% and 6% respectively in the eight years after the strategies came into effect.

Some useful stuff here for my colleagues back in NZ to consider as we look at introducing national standards in an attempt to address the issue of stagnancy in the development of literacy. In responding to questions about the National government’s plan to introduce national standards legislation in parliament Minister of Education Anne Tolley referred to the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study survey which found that the average reading literacy score for New Zealand, in statistical terms, did not change from 2001-05. Quite a different situation from the UK it seems.

A BBC report quotes Schools Secretary Ed Balls as saying, “I think the right thing for us to do now is to move away from what has historically been a rather central view of school improvement through national strategies to something which is essentially being commissioned not from the centre but by schools themselves.”

Apparently the plan is to redirect some of the saved money to schools to spend on creating networks with other schools and having their own advisers to help improve teaching standards and pupils’ performance. This must be great news for schools like Tabor, where there is plenty of evidence that they could make good use of such money - and the model of working in clusters/networks of schools is also very encouraging!

Mmm - I’m looking forward to the next couple of weeks over here as an opportunity to learn, reflect and develop new understandings on some of these issues.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to call in to visit Albany Senior High School to see how they were getting on since they started as a brand new school at the beginning of this year. What I saw encouraged me greatly - a good opportunity to see the school operating, “warts and all”, but at its core a strong commitment ot the vision and values that the staff have worked so hard to establish, and are continuing to refine and develop.

Over the past couple of months I have had the privilege of visiting several new schools, including the Leigh Academy in the South East of London, and Discovery Bay School in Hong Kong. All of these places share the same sense of “newness” in terms of their innovative designs, modern furnishings, high-tech infrastructures - and in each I listened to the conversations of principals and staff as they explained how the programmes operating within the schools had been developed in line with the particular vision and values of the school.

The point of this reflection is that when it all boils down to it, the thing that will make any school successful are the shared beliefs of staff and the school community, and shared understandings of the educative purpose of the school. The buildings and environments certainly contribute significantly to the experience students will have while at school, but without a “heart” they are but empty vessels.

I thought of all this when I read the following statement this morning:

“We naively thought, I guess, that by providing a beautiful building and great resources, these things would automatically yield change. They didn’t,”

The comment was made by Jan Biros, associate vice president for instructional technology support and campus outreach at Drexel University and a former member of the SOF Curriculum Planning Committee in an eSchool report titled “School of the Future: Lessons in failure“.The report describes how the school planners worked to design the underlying principles and goals for the school using a Microsoft framework but ‘”Working within this framework often felt more like an academic exercise than a productive process,” said Biros.

I applaud Microsoft for being so open about sharing the results of their SOF initiative - there’s a lot to be learned from the experience, all of which underpins my personal belief that the starting point for any educational change must be time spent on establishing the philosophical frameworks upon which everything else is developed. To achieve this requires an enormous amount of ‘human’ level interaction, reflection and collaboration, based on a view of a school as an ecology, not a process-driven system.

I’m now even more convinced about our work on the EPS as a way of supporting schools in their school change/school development process!

What skills will children need for work? How might parenting and family change? What impact will new technologies have on learning?

I’ve just spent the day running workshops with teachers fromt the the Otaki-Kapiti cluster, focusing on the ways in which ICTs can  be used to develop the key competencies (see slide show under the presentations link on my blog). Inevitably we engaged in some discussions about the future of schooling, and how we can ‘vision’ what that future might be like.

VisionMapper from Futurelab is a great tool for assisting in these discussions. Vision Mapper provides a wide range of activities and resources to explore these issues, centred around 6 expert future scenarios. These scenarios are based on 18 month’s work in 2008-9 by a team of 98 experts and are backed by a wealth of background research, providing a powerful planning resource for educators.

There’s some excellent stuff here - including a collection of 15 activities that could be used to stimulate discussions at staff meetings, teacher only days, leadership retreats etc. Another great resource from FutureLab.

Whatever your position on national standards it is difficult to disagree with the tenor of the quote at the top of this post - it’s the implementation of processes to meet this aspiration that will cause debate.

I unfortunately missed being able to attend the meeting in CHCH earlier this week when the MoE consultation roadshow came to town to inform local teachers and principals about their plans for introduction national standards. From what I’ve heard in conversations, through the Twitter community and in phone calls and skype sessions I rather wish I’d been able to attend.

Consult: to deliberate together, to ask the advice or opinion of
(source: Merriam-Webster dictionary)

interesting when I Googled the word Consult, and when I went to the dictionary definition, advertised links appeared on both pages for the TeamUp page inviting parents to have their say on national standards. Kudos to whoever it is in the MoE that has strategically positioned these ads in these places - I hope they’re successful in drawing out helpful responses.

Consultation is an oft-used idea whose meaning has unfortunately shifted in many circles to become synonymous with “tell”, “brief”, “explain”. So it was of little surprise I read tonight in the Education Week an article titled Subject-Matter Groups Want Voice in Standards that draws attention to the response of various teacher representative groups from across the US to the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

I see many similarities to what we’re currently going through here in NZ - I’m arguing here not for or against national standards, but for a more determined and inclusive approach to the process of consultation to ensure that what we end up doing is informed by the wisdom, experience and thinking of as many people as possible. You can see some of that debate emerging already in the Education Leaders forum.

A comment in the report by Kent Williamson, the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, stood out to me. Williamson states his general support for the introduction of national standards, but is emphatic about the need for consultation with the profession. He says;

“… one lesson from that era was that “top-down reform doesn’t work” in drafting standards. Without the involvement of professional organizations, he said, teachers might come to regard the Common Core process with the same level of mistrust with which many view the federal No Child Left Behind Act.”

I agree.

Teaching is a complex and demanding profession. Teachers require high quality support and training throughout their careers to ensure they have the strategies and skills to meet the needs of learners. Professional learning and development (PLD) is central to maintaining and improving teacher quality.

Page 1, Overview, ERO report.

I’ve just downloaded and begun to read my way through the two ERO reports on Managing Professional Learning and Development (available online from ERO site) after hearing Graham Stoop speaking on National Radio yesterday morning and reading the article in this morning’s Press.

The reports have been described as a “wake-up call for schools” by Graham Stoop, Chief Review Officer for schools, with each report containing details of how well schools plan for PLD; how well they build a culture in which teachers learn and develop; and how well schools monitor the effectiveness of teachers’ learning and development.

In carrying out their review, ERO used a consistent set of indicators based largely on the Teacher Professional Learning and Development: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration, and schools grouped into three categories of effectiveness:

For me there are no real surprises here. As someone who has worked extensively in schools over the past 20 years in professional learning and development I have come to understand that what works best (as illustrated in the BES studies) in the engagement of teachers in in-depth, sustained participation in PLD activities that are linked to the strategic goals of the school, and are anchored in the culture, vision and values of the school and its community. Sadly there are still too many instances of short term, one-off PLD events, and too many programmes that are based on formulaic, ‘out-of-the-box’ designs that fail to reflect the needs of either the teachers or the schools involved. Further, lack of time, resources and the general malaise of ‘too much to try and cover’ are all too often used as excuses to doing anything at all.

I am pleased to read that these reports conclude that there is a link between quality professional development and imporovement in student outcomes, and that they promote and support the notion of self-review as a critical element in determining the effectiveness of school and teacher practice in PLD.

The timing of these reports couldn’t be better in my opinion, as schools confront the task of implementing the NZ Curriculum amid a multitude of other challenges, and when the government’s budget for PLD has been cut by more than $30M.

I hope these reports and the responses that will inevitably follow will stimulate a critical review of what is happening in schools by principals and school leaders, and the adoption of a more strategic approach to PLD activity that will be both cost effective and effective in terms of long term, sustainable growth and development.

Download Secondary Report (PDF - 344Kb)

Download Primary Report (PDF - 346Kb)

(PS - has anyone else noticed the faux pas in the foreword of each of the reports?

I’m not usually into product endorsement, but over the past week or so I’ve been exploring using my new LiveScribe pen, and have fallen in love! Since spending a day working with my Australian colleague Julia Atkin and observing her using one of these devices I knew I had to try one, so when Julia offered to bring me back one from Australia a few week’s later I couldn’t refuse!

The Livescribe Pulse Digital Smartpen records your notes two ways: it creates digital copies of everything you write by hand while recording audio at the same time. not only that, but you can easily listen to what was being said at the exact moment you were writing a particular word or phrase by clicking the smart pen on the word on the page and listening to the playback - a fantastic tool for meetings or for recording research notes. No more listening through hours of taped interviews to find the point that matches something in my notes again!

Once synched with my computer I can download the pages and the audio files and store them away for future. Being someone with rather scruffy handwriting I was sceptical when I read that the software had a search function - supposedly enabling you to search your handwritten notes to find keywords or phrases - but I was proved wrong. despite the untidy script, the search came up with all the instances of several names and words I typed in!

I guess the reason I like this device so much is that it “fits” with my existing behaviours. I have for years carried around spiral notebooks and recorded notes at meetings etc. I happen to like the tactile use of a pen on paper, and the freedom to doodle and create diagrams and mind maps with the same creative ‘feel’ that a pen or pencil provides. This enables me to carry on doing what I’ve always done, with the added advantage of being able to record and download what I’m doing - and once it is on my laptop, I can then email material to my colleagues as happened this afternoon after a meeting involving a colleague who joined us on a skype call.

Since I purchased my pen I’ve noticed they are now available in Whitcoulls stores here in New Zealand (but at over $NZ150 more than what mine cost in Australia!) along with all the accessories such as packs of the spiral notebooks with the special micro-dotted paper that enables the spatial recognition to digitally replicate the notes.

Over the weekend I struggled with making my votes for this year’s Horizon Report (NZ/Australia version) - partly because I wanted to vote for more than I was entitled to, and partly because so many of the things we were considering individually are now becoming increasingly connected and inter-related.

One of the things that emerged again as a strong contender for inclusion was cloud computing - which also  made last year’s list of 1-2 years to adoption. Without doubt, cloud computing is making its mark across the wider spectre of business as well - and so I was interested to read this week a post by Dion Hinchcliffe on ZNet titled “8 Ways That Cloud Computing with Change Business“.

I’ve always enjoyed Dion’s ability to summarise key ideas in the IT arena, particularly through his use of diagrams such as the one at the head of this post which for me summarises the pros and cons of cloud computing very well both by representing an even number of both the pros and the cons, but by showing the cons as a lesser force, and the pros becoming more dominant.

In considering the 8 statements that Dion has shared from a business perspective, I thought I’d have a crack at presenting some thoughts on how I see cloud computing changing education - in particular, schools - in the near future. (note - I am aware that in some of the ideas represented here I am blurring the boundaries between cloud computing and virtualisation, but the impacts are still valid.)

1. Reduced and/or simplified expenditure on software licensing -  Software licenses are less of an issue with many cloud-based apps provided free or at very low cost. Increasingly we’ll also see more pay-for-use licensing, and licensing arrangements that take into account the specific needs and use of schools and individuals.
2. Decreased reliance on school-based ICT staff - fewer applications hosted locally means less to do for school-based technical staff, with their particular skills and abilities diverted to local network and infrastructure needs, or reduced even further through aggregation demand through the provision of on-demand online help desks and remote access support.
3. Enabling greater ubiquity of access for students and staff - for too long we’ve limited our view of ICT in schools to what happens at the installed desktops in schools (often in labs). Increasingly staff and students are requiring (demanding?) ubiquitous access to their files, applications and social connections - any time, any place, any device. Cloud computing provides a powerful way of achieving this.
4. Reduce/eliminate problems associated with software version control and updates - using cloud-based applications means that schools will no longer have to worry about the ongoing issue of software updates as they happen automatically in the cloud. No more problems associated with some computers in the school operating one version of the software, and others another - or worse, always being a version behind (or ahead?) at home.
5. Ease of leveraging benefits of shared management systems (LMS, SMS etc) - currently the bain of most school administrator’s lives, the management systems that are used to help make the running of schools more efficient are tending to be more trouble than they are worth. Using cloud-based applications, or virtualising these services, saves schools having to make large, individual investments, firstly in the software, then in the support inevitably required to make it work in the local contest, them by the hardware required to install and run it on, and lastly in the ever expanding requirements for space, air conditioning and UPIs required to keep them running. Then there’s the advantage of having large-scale, interoperable systems that seamlessly allow for the transfer of data (with permissions granted) between systems so that student learning can continue uninterrupted. (Now there’s something to aspire to!!)
6. Allows for greater experimentation, choice and agility in terms of applications used - lareg, monlithic applications and the access rights, conditions of use and licensing issues around them are often the most constraining aspect of how ICTs are used (or not) in schools. Consider the rapid adoption of Web2.0 technologies outside of school compared to what happens on the inside. Cloud-based services and applications can provide for more nimble, agile use and access - and allow for lots of smaller products and services to be ‘tried out’ without the requirement of a large-scale commitment.
7. Reduce barriers to participation, contribution, sharing - identity and access management, a major problem in our current education system, can be resolved more readily in a cloud-based world, allowing far greater degrees of shared access across and among systems and applications. So too, the nature of the applications that allow for greater participation and contribution from individuals because individual accounts can be established and managed more easily, and the content that is created and shared in this way can be stored, managed and retrieved across the whole network.
8. Infinitely expand resource sharing opportunities - the provision of high quality resources to support teaching and learning remains a key focus in schools. The problem is keeping it all up to date and relevant. Cloud computing options provide unlimited opportunities for shared repositories to develop, with access rights and management issues addressed on a wider scale than within an individual school. In addition, catering for the development of teacher and student developed resources becomes more achievable in the cloud.

Footnote - I realise this is a pretty optimistic list, and as Dion’s diagram at the top of the post reminds us, there are still issues with cloud computing that are yet to be fully resolved. However, I can’t see it disappearing as an opportunity, and my intent here is to provoke some thought about the possibilities and generate more discussion about how we can make this happen.

A few days ago my friend Dan sent me a link to a story about Dr. Monica Rankin’s “Twitter Experiment” which she explains in the video at the top of this post. It highlighted for me just how easy it can be to begin investigating the potential of some of these web2.0 technologies within the conventional classroom (albeit in this case a university setting.)

Some key ideas that I saw canvassed in the video:

- limitations and opportunities of the 140 character limit

- students using a variety of technologies for contributing

- the ability of people to “join from afar’ (including the lecturer)

- increased engagement of a class of 90 students!

- the ability to review and follow up after class

I couldn’t help but notice that they were using the web interface of Twitter for their contributions, and wonder how much more might be added to the experience if they were to use something like TweetDeck or Seesmic which would provide the opportunity to more directly monitor replies and direct messages for instance.

Dr Rankin has posted some her thoughts on the experiment online that provide a more useful reflection after watching the video.

I applaud her approach to trying something new here, captured in her final comment on the video: “Yes, it’s going to be messy. But messy doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be bad“.