Greg’s Blog – principal (le?) learning

We have been told by our Minister that one of the prime drivers for the national Standards is that parents do not have an assurance that their children are achieving where they should be. Presumably because those shonky teachers hide the real story from them in order to cover their professional butts.
Now the flip-flopping begins. The latest Fact Sheet from the MoE contains this:

The NAGS do not specifically require schools to report in these plain language reports to parents whether students are above, at, below, or well below the standards.

So lets get this straight – we don’t have to report to the families and caregivers of our children about how well they are doing in relation to the Standards put out specifically for the purposes of ensuring we do?
The Standards are now only a Planning and Reporting issue?
So what is the point?

I still come back to my question no one has answered yet – where are the educationally informed voices (who are not paid to say so) saying loud and proud that these Standards are a good idea?  That they are not going to be destructive and detrimental to childrens learning?  That we shouldn’t be resisting this politically driven and motivated agenda with all our might?
Today Hattie, Flockton, Crooks and Thrupp, some of the most experienced and influential academics in the country in the field of educational assessment have come out publicly and said this is all a really bad idea.

How much longer is this shambles going to continue?

I am a big fan of Seth Godin and have read his book Tribes recently and it has a lot to offer educational leaders. This morning I am up pretty early for a Sunday as we are interviewing for two positions at school (and I had to drop our son off at 6:40am to meet a friend who is taking him to a tournament in Invercargill as he has made the Otago softball team in his grade).

Seth has a great TED Talk on tribes and his blog is one of my ‘must reads’. Today there is this:

It’s almost impossible to communicate something clearly and succinctly to everyone, all the time.

So misunderstandings occur.

We misunderstand a comment or a gesture or a policy or a contract.

And then what happens?

Well, if we’re engaged with someone we like or trust, we give them the benefit of the doubt. We either assume that what they actually meant was the thing we expected from someone like them, or we ask about it.

If we’re engaged with a stranger or someone we don’t trust, we assume the worst.

It is ALL about relationships in our job and I must admit one of the things I find most frustrating is when someone assumes incompetence on my part. Building and maintaining relationships is one of the most crucial parts of the principals role – staff, children, families, communities …

Hattie points out it hasn’t worked anywhere else …. so what can we do to make the difference and be unique internationally?

The video finishes with a plee for teachers to be change agents for the system ….

David Warlick is the master of the soundbite and the quoteable quote. This one from the Interface Mag will no doubt get some thinking and others talking.

“If someone’s not willing to teach in a contemporary information landscape, one that’s meaningful to the students, then they need to find something else to do.”

Technology will not solve all teaching’s ills. It will not make a crap teacher good. It will not make children learn. It will not make a poor classroom better. As Trevor Bond said some years ago:-

poor teaching + ICT’s = expensive poor teaching.

Podgoranni is saying things in a similar vein here.

Most classrooms are good.  Some are great.  A few are pretty average and only a hand full are just bad.  I’ve only met a  small number of teachers I wouldn’t be happy to teach my own kids – and that is the acid test for me.  Even with the poor ones they were without exception doing their best.  Not to say this was good enough, but they were trying …. just out of their depth.  I don’t believe many people at all in the world get out of bed each day wondering whose live they can mess up today.

Getting better requires change.  Schools don’t change easily, especially the bigger they get.  Some people seem to be allergic to change too. Managing change is the job of the principal.  Its the one we applied for.  We have to do it well for our selves, the teachers and most importantly the kids.  We also have to decide on which changes are the most important, which will make the biggest difference to learning and teaching, and which to insulate the school from.

Never a dull day in the swively chair!

Some really interesting stuff in here. Focused on older children in some parts but good summary of some of the things that flow out of gaming culture and are applicable to classrooms.
He describes schools as “test prep academies” and points out that creativity is much more important and less risky than focusing on test scores alone.
At 8:50 – ” …. the other thing we have done is de-professionalise teachers.We’ve allowed a bunch of … politicians to … supervise them and do curriculum for them in ways that take away their professional responsibilities to build their own curriculum and to think strategically about how learning works in the classroom. We’ve got to re-professionalise teaching!”
This he sees as a major problem with current education. I would agree. Education professionals are just that, the professionals.
source:

Well, they’re here.  National Standards have been released.  We have been told all of the things we ‘must’ and ’shall’ do; given templates to follow; had the spin.

My big question is still  ….. where are the trained education professionals who support this initiative?  I’m not talking about those who are paid to be positive (like in the MoE), I mean those in schools who are prepared to stand up proud and say ‘forget it you doubters, this is going to be great’?  Are there any I have missed?  Seriously, where are they?  Are there any?

I only know of ONE principal who has told their BoT this is going to be great.  And that’s because they see it as a great marketing opportunity and a way to sock it to their neighboring schools.  Great collegiality there!

As Andrew says, there is nothing inherently wrong with standards.  We all have them and certainly at our school we have spent considerable time and effort ensuring that we have consistent and reliable assessment information on which to base judgments we make about our children, classroom programmes, interventions, and so-on.  Without good assessment we can not making good judgements.  Without informed professional judgments we can not make quality decisions.  Without good data we are simply flying in the dark.

We are the professionals.  Ultimately we need to stand up for what is right, what we know is the professional thing to do.  We are told that ERO will be the agency that checks the standards are implemented, reports are in plain language and other aspects of the political agenda are complied with.  The MoE website on Friday still would not relinquish the text of the new NAG so I still don’t know what it says.

This seems like it may be a step back in the time tunnel to the Judith Aitkin days where a single view of compliance requirements drove education policy through assessment.  At that time people like Lester Flockton encouraged schools to stand tall and insist that anything beyond the letter of the law is merely opinion and therefore doesn’t need to be accepted.

We are self managing schools under the BoT model.  Where there is a clash of belief between ERO opinion and legal fact, fact wins.  Between self management (following legal requirements) and ERO, the self managing school is right by definition.

The new standards are quite different from the draft versions.

I wonder if they were developed and shared simply with a desire to inform practice and without the compliance if we would be so resistant?  If they were a document intended to create a collaborative system wide picture to sit alongside the revised National Curriculum if we would be so negative?  I doubt it.  We all have established  ’standards’ already.  Sometimes they will be higher than the national ones!  We have always compared expectations with other teachers …  The difference is now we have politicians telling us what  to think.  Educational novices (politicians) dictating to managers (MoE) , who mandate it for the professionals (teachers, principals and other educators).

Professionals on the outside rather than professionals at the centre.   Very low trust.  Back to the Future?

Word on the block is that the National Standards will be available online and launched by the minister on Friday. Watch this space I suppose.
Wonder what the timeline is for us to get copies delivered?

Who is going to send them back and who will open and devour them?

Why do we need hard copies in this day and age anyway? We all have laptops supplied by the MoE, is this not a perfect opportunity to force people to think digitally?
I wonder if we will get an acknowledgment from Ms Tolley about how much work will be involved and what a great job NZ teachers do? Or will it be like ULearn and we simply get lambasted about how we are failing the ‘tail’ again?

Had an interesting discussion with a group of principals, and others who were at ULearn today.  We agreed on the paramount place of the necktop computer in the classroom.  What matters is what the teacher believes, thinks and does, not simply the size of the internet pipe coming in.  Bandwidth absolutely makes a difference to the quality of quality programmes.  For some it is just more crap faster.

Interestingly a recent NBR  article quoted Finland as adopting broadband as a human rights issue.  WOW.

Imagine this …. after the last round of BoT elections a school board was stacked with parents from a particular religious/ethnic/philosophical group.  This group formed the voting majority of the BoT and held the firm belief that the school should no longer spend any time on the arts or PE.  The strong focus of the programme should be on the ‘basics’ of literacy and numeracy, nothing else.  No health education, no studying other cultures.

We would all support the school leadership in standing up for what is educationally and pedagogically defensible.  The BoT may have the governance role and authority but they would be wrong in what they are saying.  They are making decisions that we educationalists know would be detrimental to the interests of kids and their learning.  The ethics of the BoT decisions enable the principal and his/her team to take and keep the moral high ground and even go out on a limb and say a resounding NO to what the have been instructed to do. 
The BoT are crossing into what the Education Act says is the domain of the principal – the day-to-day operations of the school.  Intruding on what is the professional domain, not the governance one.  Making decisions the education professionals and NOT the enthusiastic amateurs should be making.

To me the national standards present us with the same scenario:

1.  We KNOW from the experiences of  other countries that national standards and league tables ultimately have a resounding, negative, long-term effect on the achievement in schools – NCLB in the US, England, etc.

2.  This is a politically driven policy not an educationally derived one.

3.  You don’t make a pig grow by measuring it!  Learn about its needs, feeding it properly, giving it what it needs ….. and then the story is a different one.

4.  We KNOW that the NS’s will hijack the good work and intent of the revised NZC.  It is happening already. Just look at what we are talking and thinking about!

5.  What is measured becomes important; even if it isn’t.  The Standards focus on a very narrow range of skills in a narrow range of subjects.  We have spent the last few years focusing on 21st century skills in programmes like ICT PD.  Now we will be asked to report on an simplistic set that form only a small selection of the things we hope children will leave our schools mastering.

6.  We have not been given the information or the where-with-all to do them justice anyway.  We are yet to see the final Standards that we will all have to have in place and report against in 9 school weeks time.  Over half of that time in our school is school camps, Pet Days, Athletics, aquatics, ICT PD days, etc so in reality we have 4 weeks or less to get to grips with the whole shebang.  It’s simply not going to happen.

I am not at all big on compliance that makes no difference to student achievement or our ability to make things the best they can be for children.  This week I have received the nice reminder letter about our 2008 Planning and Reporting.  I’ll send it in now.  We have always planned our development.  Sending it to someone in the MoE doesn’t make it better or change in any way what I write.  It is for our thinking and to share with our BoT how things are going.

At what point do we stand up for what we believe in?  To say NO to what has no place in schools, what will make no positive difference, what will make the job harder?  To challenge what we believe is not educationally defensible and say we want no part of it?

Where is that line in the sand?  I believe we all need to be asking ourselves this question and then be prepared to live by the answer.  The NZPF email today has the strongest statements I have seen for a long time encouraging us to really think about where we stand and what we believe as professionals.

Professionalism is the key issue …. professionals stand up for their professionalISM.  It is important to them.  Managers do what they are told, and make others do the same.

Leaders do what is RIGHT, even in the face of adversity.  Not necessarily what is easy or popular; what is RIGHT.  Principal development programmes have been telling us this for years when looking at dynamics, relationships and choices inside the school.  Should the same not apply to things being imposed from outside?

In the past couple of months I have had the interesting experience of having a number of MoE people, some of them senior managers, tell me they follow this blog.  I have also been asked (instructed) to ‘correct’ things I have put up here.  My response has been digital (in the finger sense) and to suggest the appropriate thing to do is leave a comment if you don’t agree with a blog post I write.

This blog is MY opinion and MY ideas, not CORE’s (if you look a the url it is theirs but simply a hangover from when I was seconded to the National Facilitation Team of ICT PD in 2006), not Outram Schools ….. MINE.

I believe what I say.  If anything I am quite circumspect in voicing opinions because of the url, and that my wife works for GSE, which is part of the MoE.  To be too vociferous would not necessarily be fair on school, Jane or CORE.

There are plenty of others who agree with my sentiments on things like National Standards.  Podgoranni and the crew from Invercargill maintain we should send the whole package back, ‘return to sender’.  Conversely I know of high decile schools who are in competition with their neighboring schools who can’t wait to sock it to them in a league table to ramp up their marketing.

The different opinions are to be encouraged.  We all believe what we believe.  The MoE are watching and use blogs to find out what we think.  Lets use the medium to let them know!  Silence and inaction will be taken as passive agreement with the changes.

UPDATE – well written response from Paul.  Kerry is telling us the emperor is naked.