This same sentiment from the above quote can be applied to teaching. In fact, the best place for AI is probably in schools, where students are educated to live with it and are taught about their digital footprint.

The effects of generative AI on knowledge work are unprecedented and there is a radical shift in the way white-collar and analytical work is conducted. AI cuts time, improves outputs, and outsources the boring stuff so work is more enjoyable. We are increasingly algorithmically shaped, and our competitive advantage is our ability to offer value beyond an algorithm. AI will take care of the rote and mundane so we can focus on higher-order skills. Generative AI provides us with a ‘brainstorming partner’ and turbocharges our ability to focus on soft/success skills. The robots can do the robotic stuff so we can be more human.

Shifting Priorities

A predictable education system is increasingly vulnerable to automation, with students soon likely to advocate for AI to double-mark public examinations due to its accuracy and speed. While many schools are scrambling to redesign assessments to make them AI-proof, other educators are lifting expectations of what AI now makes possible – innovating instead of renovating. An example of this can be seen at Verso International School in Thailand, where Dr. Thomas Tran has designed a philosophy project inspired by the Humans of New York series. Addressing the driving question “How does the impression you want to leave influence the life you want to live?”, learners gathered perspectives and exhibited drafts of artwork using the AI image generator Midjourney through creative and descriptive writing to create their representations. The project culminates in an exhibition of artworks, photographs, and videos at the Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre.

Learning is most effective when students feel supported and form meaningful relationships. Catherine McClellan from the Australian Council for Educational Research says, “You’re never going to have a relationship with ChatGPT. You’re never going to be friends with it. It’s not going to know how they did at the football game last night. So, I believe that piece is always going to be human to human.” When the teacher-student relationship is based on collaboration and trust, with the teacher acting as a coach and the student as a producer, AI can be a powerful asset. Conversely, when the relationship is transactional and adversarial, AI can become a weapon of conflict. A punitive approach to enforcing academic integrity strains the relationship between teachers and students.

Personalized Learning

The Latin root word for assessment is ‘assidere’, which means “to sit beside”. How might AI enable us to sit beside learners and conduct powerful conversations about their thinking, so that assessment is more a conversation than a number? AI can provide personalized feedback and shift our focus from finished product to process. It could analyze student conversations, detect learning moments, and create visual representations of them, as well as identify patterns in student questions and virtually coach them to ask better questions.

By leveraging AI, artist-scientist Michelle Huang was able to create a time portal to her childhood. After keeping diaries for 10 years, she trained AI on her journal entries, allowing her to converse with her “inner child”. The AI-simulated responses felt as if they were coming from her younger self. She used it as a tool for self-insight. Envision a future in which, instead of childhood journals, the corpus is learning reflections gathered throughout schooling; the data footprint is the basis for a personal AI assistant, allowing students to have conversations about their learning experiences that help them build self-awareness and gain insights into their thinking and behavior patterns. AI could predict a young person’s future examination results and career paths, providing a powerful tool for educators to shape and guide students’ futures.

Mental Models

AI can’t yet replicate our curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking, but it will disrupt most jobs and lead to deeper social, dispositional, and pedagogical shifts. Our role is to prepare young people to live and prosper in a world increasingly run by technologies. Students need adults who will help them to understand the capabilities of modern technologies and how to utilize them safely and effectively in both their personal and professional lives. Policies should be adaptive, flexible, and responsive, prepared for a never-ending deluge of new technologies.

Professor George Siemens, director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia, argues that in this era of supercomplexity and rapid change, ‘Beingness’ should be the central attribute of education. Beingness is attending to the core human condition – not what we know but who we are. The shift is from epistemology (knowing) to ontology (being).

It will be tricky while we learn to be AI compatible and rely on backup memory. Just as previous generations learned to work with different cultures and genders, the next generation will learn to work with AI and robots. Young people, who are better equipped to understand the opportunities AI provides, will lead the charge in developing new, innovative ways to utilize it. In the longer term, our view of what it means to be human is going to have to change and, at present, we don’t yet have mental models for such a shift.

The post The Rise of the Machines appeared first on Getting Smart.

Imagine if you had to move to a different office and focus on a new problem every hour, sitting down for the entire time, with repetitive work to do after hours, and to top it off, the managers who supervise your various commitments don’t communicate with each other. This is the daily experience for high school students, and teachers are just as restricted: 25 new people enter the classroom every hour, meetings usurp preparation, and unfinished planning follows them home. Nobody benefits from the frenetic pace.

Time is the most controlling structure and the scarcest commodity in schools, and the traditional school schedule is the greatest impediment to educational innovation. Any attempt to redesign the schedule runs up against the intricate constraints of parental custodial expectations, teacher comfort in the known, part-time staff, curriculum mandates, bus schedules, sports schedules, objections from unions, and high-stakes tests. Teachers are held hostage by the sacred timetable, warned that one small change will cause a disastrous cascade.

While flexibility in time and space will define the workplace in this century, students get little experience deciding how to learn, where to learn, and when to learn, because schools account for every minute. Schooling is predicated on the perception that busyness is good. Treadmill schedules leave little time for deep learning, quietude, or human connections.

• What does our allocation of time say about what we value in the teaching and learning process?
• How can we provide time to enable young people to take more personal responsibility for their own learning, in line with the adolescent predisposition to begin taking charge of their lives?
• If flexibility in time and space will define living and working this century, how can school best prepare young people for this?

Stephen Covey wrote about Big Rocks, the things we value and feel are truly important. Big rocks are our priorities, the things we want to make room for. If school schedules reflect values and priorities, then we currently value speed, uniformity, and quantity over depth, individuality, and quality.

In Finland, students only spend about five hours a day in classrooms and they have little to no homework. The rule of thumb is 15 minutes of recess per hour of work. Deeper learning advocates recommend daily schedules where students study three or four subjects for around 90 minutes at a time, rather than the usual six 50-minute blocks. Steiner’s model of a deep learning period, where students focus on a single subject for at least two hours, is another way of shaking up the traditional school day. However, there is no optimal class length. The best length of a class period will be different depending on the age of the students, the culture, the number of students, and the experience of the teacher. How teachers use the time they are allocated is more important than the length of the lesson. It is not about how long we teach for but how well we teach with the time we have.

Australian teachers are doing more face-to-face teaching than the OECD average, yet Australia’s performance in PISA has been steadily declining. Countries with higher-performing students give teachers more planning time. Teachers in Shanghai have much more planning time than Australian and US teachers. Planning and collaboration time is critical to teacher job satisfaction and we should make it a priority, a big rock that we put in first.

Some students (and teachers) discovered a new sense of autonomy and flexibility during Covid-imposed remote learning, relishing the loss of early start times and being able to choose when to eat or move instead of responding to bells. Shifts in thinking about time ground evolving educational practices like flipped classrooms, blended learning, and block scheduling. In Australia, Simon Beaumont leads a school which uses a self-directed learning model that needs less face to face class time and builds independent learning habits. Andrew Beitsch wonders, “if we could start the concept of the ‘senior study period’ earlier in secondary schooling as a first step and maybe provide some space for educators to collaborate at the same time?”

At St Luke’s Catholic College high school students can opt for a supervised study session at 8:30 am three mornings a week, or they can sleep in and start at 10 am – a decision guided by research into sleep and teenage brains. Sir Joseph Banks High restructured timetables to allow senior students half days. Trinity Grammar School has a fortnightly lesson-free ay for Grade 12. At Element College, families are able to choose when they take their 12 weeks of holidays per year, without any disruption to their child’s learning or anyone else’s learning.

In a century that is being defined by flexibility in time, we no longer need to be held hostage by sacred school timetables. If we value deep learning and human connection, then this should be explicitly built into the school schedule. Cutting back on sitting, listening, and repetition, will result in more engaged, thoughtful, and creative learners.

This post is part of our New Pathways campaign sponsored by ASA, Stand Together and the Walton Family Foundation.

The post Timetable Absurdity appeared first on Getting Smart.

On the trip home, I found myself wondering what students could take responsibility for that teachers tend to do for them; what learning experiences are we depriving them of? The most obvious response is grading/marking, the bane of a teacher’s life, but there is no way that students could do a teacher’s grading, it is a professional responsibility. Or are we being too precious? There is a large research body supporting the benefits of peer feedback and self-assessment. If you ever believe that kids are too young to provide each other with effective feedback, watch Austin’s Butterfly. Two particularly helpful peer feedback approaches are: Ron Berger’s KiSH (Kind, Specific, Helpful) framework for modeling feedback and the concept of radical revision from the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, where students pair up and discuss what they feel good about in a written draft and what they think they will need to work on, followed by reading their drafts out loud to each other and engaging in a conversation about their work. Grade 9 student Hamish comments, “I have learned how to provide better feedback to my peers. When I read their work, I learn how I can improve my own writing and this helps me take more responsibility for my own learning.”

Assessment is usually something that is done to students so an empowering shift is to co-construct assessment rubric criteria with students. This puts assessment criteria into student-friendly language rather than teacher-designed robot-speak. Grade 9 student Spencer notes, “We designed the marking guide as a class. It helped us know what was needed before we did the task, instead of being told what we did wrong when it was too late.”

This made me start wondering about writing student reports, which are so time-consuming for teachers. While many schools have moved to continuous reporting, lots have not made the shift and continue to write lengthy comments to parents several times a year. Surely students cannot write their own reports. Or can they? Here are some simple self-appraisal questions for students:

• How do you rate your effort? Why?
• What have you done well?
• How could you improve?
• What should your report say?

I preface this self-assessment process by telling students that I need their help to get their report right, and I want to astound their parents/guardians by how well I know them and their progress. I keep the completed self-appraisal in front of me while I type each student report, and I reflect the student’s ideas and language back in the report. It halved my workload, showed that I really knew my students, and it felt more beneficial. Students were pretty much always honest, sometimes scarily so, and on the odd occasion that a student wrote something I did not agree with, it led to a very constructive conversation with them. Win-win.

If students can do their own grading/marking and write their own reports, what else could they do? I wondered if they could actually teach the class themselves. I had my Grade 12 students each select a topic from the detailed mandated syllabus and accept responsibility for leading a 10-minute seminar when we got to that topic in class. Some of the seminars were outstanding, but a couple were not, and I needed to be ready to jump in and pick up the slack when the rest of the class felt they had been short-changed or when a presenting student was absent. Grade 12 student Tom comments, “The best way to learn something is to teach it to others. This approach works well when the students prepare thoroughly, but when a presentation isn’t very good, we feel that our time has been wasted.”

Another useful habit is to toss the whiteboard marker to a student on the first day of class and have that student scribe key points on the whiteboard. Students can then rotate this responsibility between each other for the rest of the year. Presto, the teacher never again turns their back on a class when writing on a whiteboard and they can devote their attention to facilitating the class. It is a nicer way to teach.

The last class of the year is now a chance for me to bring in multiple copies of all my lesson planning documentation. We spend the final class with students in small groups leaving warm and cool feedback post-it note comments over everything. I have changed so much of my teaching based on these thoughtful feedback sessions with students. They help me co-construct what my class for the next year will look like. They are particularly helpful with framing questions and projects more effectively.

Can students set their own classroom rules? Of course they can. What about behavior management and discipline? Restorative practices solve that one. Almost anything that a teacher can think to complain about, can be solved by empowering young people. Most of the workload concerns that teachers grumble about are learning experiences that we deprive our students of, because we like to think they are not sufficiently capable; it boosts our sense of professional identity. This is supported by plenty of other assertions that teachers should never work harder than students and whoever is doing the work is doing the learning.

Teachers do too much of the learning and thinking for students. It does not have to be this way. When teachers work harder than students, young people become inculcated into coming to school to watch the adults work. If we want them to learn; if we want them to think, this is not something that can be outsourced. And if we want them to take responsibility for the culture and feel of the classroom and school, we need to invite them into the conversation, and even step away and let them take the lead. What do you complain about having to do that your students could do tomorrow?

The post What Can Students Do? appeared first on Getting Smart.

In her book Teacher, Australian author Gabbie Stroud beautifully encapsulates what is happening by stealth to the teaching profession around the world. She continues,

“Good teaching …comes from teachers who know their students, who build relationships, who meet learners at their point of need and who recognize that there’s nothing standard about the journey of learning. We cannot forget the art of teaching – without it, schools become factories, students become products and teachers: nothing more than machinery.”

There have been profound changes in the work and workload of teachers. School education is becoming a much more bureaucratized system, asking more of teachers and getting less in return. The current workload is unsustainable and the pandemic is exacerbating teachers’ feelings of being silenced. A lack of respect, staffing challenges, low pay, high workload, conflicting demands and now the pandemic, have conspired to generate a perfect storm. 30% of Australia’s teachers are over 50. Education applications have plummeted by 20%. 48% of teachers are thinking of leaving the profession. Teacher workloads are “massive” and “unrealistic” (even though 87% of teachers still find teaching rewarding).

Schools now need to be run as if every teacher has one foot out the door. During remote learning, both teachers and students discovered a new sense of autonomy. Few lamented the loss of restrictive practices like early start times or only being able to eat or move when bells ring. Workers now have a sense of mobility they have never had before. In the United States, over 3 million people per month are walking away from their jobs and the same is occurring in Europe. These competitive labor market conditions and the ‘war for talent’ amplify the necessity for educational leaders to adopt innovative strategies to dynamically recruit and retain excellent teachers. We must rethink the entire way we staff and manage schools.

We should not be surprised if teachers are escaping from an education system that is milking them to serve a purpose that is not aligned with the reasons that they entered the profession to start with. Perhaps we are talking less about ‘burn-out’ and more about ‘moral injury’ – when people see that the systems they are in are not designed to properly support the people they are meant to serve.

Reprioritizing the work of teachers so that their focus is on actual teaching is critical to the success of schools and this is a crucial conversation for education leaders. The less meaningful and frustrating elements of teaching must be actively cleaned off the plate by targeting anything that reduces workload.

• Cancel meetings if they can be done by email instead. Many schools have moved information dissemination to asynchronous bulletins and recordings. When digital summaries are shared with teachers, it makes face-to-face conversations more effective (and staff happier). 
• Can the requirements of the marking policy be reduced while still meeting its aims? Kat Howard writes about how whole class feedback is now an established feature in some school feedback policies and is a way of approaching feedback with the time/value cost mantra in mind.
• Lighten teachers’ lesson planning load by making sure teachers have shared, high-quality common instructional resources across subjects and/or year levels. Natasha Mercer uses a shared Google drive of lessons and has brought in Edrolo and Atomi as resources for flipped learning or as a backup tool if students or teachers are on extended sick leave.
• Arrange for non-teaching staff to cover extra-curricular and yard-duty responsibilities.
• Trial innovative timetable models. There are plenty of examples of systems that have less face-to-face teaching time and higher performance. In Finland, students start school days later and finish earlier. They usually have 3-4 x 75-minute classes with 15-20 minute breaks to digest learning, use muscles, stretch legs, get fresh air and let out the “wiggles.”

If you have leadership responsibility in 2022, it is hard to overstate the depth of the disruption we are facing. We are witnessing the end of the “command and control” structures that have dominated management since the Industrial Revolution. Teachers should be treated like adult professionals who can manage their own lives and time. This system cannot come at a cost to students; but if we don’t figure out how to do it, the cost may be the teaching profession as we know it. Fundamental transformation of the entire one-size-fits-all schooling model is needed to build a more potent and fulfilled profession – one in which educators are empowered as design thinkers. If we want people in classrooms teaching kids, let’s press the pedal on creative possibilities, pull the reins back on the crushing bureaucracy, and trust and support teachers to be the outstanding professionals that they are.

The post Who is Going to Teach the Kids? appeared first on Getting Smart.

The Covid pandemic has turbocharged conversations about the kinds of skills students will need in the future. In Australia, universities are recognizing the unfairness of the current system and turning to alternative measures such as academic transcripts, microcredentials and entrance interviews. Discussing alternatives to traditional examination measurements, Sandra Milligan the Director and Enterprise Professor, Assessment Research Center, University of Melbourne says, “Being able to learn on your own without coaching from a teacher, being able to learn collaboratively with others, being able to communicate in various ways – Covid has brought home the fact that these kinds of skills are really, really important.”

Milligan’s New Metrics for Success project is a collaborative research partnership between The University of Melbourne and 40 ‘first-mover’ schools to create assessment tools, influence the development of policy and accelerate change. In this partnership, leading educators are working with academic experts to reimagine schooling in Australia. With the support of The University of Melbourne, innovative Australian school leaders have established a broad network of institutions that are influencing the wider educational system by sharing evidence of their transformative practices. Their strength is being bolstered by the academic rigor of the university and their validated assessment tools. Leon Furze at Monivae College explains, “Following the University of Melbourne Assessment Research Centre approach for co-designing trusted assessments and credentials, the New Metrics participants are creating assessment frameworks for a range of competencies and capabilities beyond the traditional scope of education.” Moving beyond traditional classroom knowledge and skills, the New Metrics partnership is developing tools to assess eight key areas:

• Connectedness
• Ethics
• Learner Agency
• Communication
• Character
• Citizenship
• Quality Thinking
• Collaboration

The project is about developing an assessment framework that can be adapted to context and content, and it is the opposite of the standardized testing that has been the norm for the past century. New Metrics participants are enjoying disrupting current practices, and the opportunity to influence policymakers and bureaucrats. It isn’t just about new metrics for learning outcomes, but about new metrics that will shape how we think about school. Kim Bence at Wesley College believes that a new and innovative metric for success will shift the paradigm of education while preparing young people for the next generational challenges. She asserts, “Amid global instability and the emerging importance of digital fluency, the next generation of leaders needs the right frameworks and support structures to feel empowered to make a difference. Developing learner agency and amplifying our young people’s ‘lived experiences’ through re-imaging how we teach them, how they learn, and how we assess is more critical now than ever.”

Mirroring growing global educational change movements, the dialogue is accelerating. A recent Australian Learning Lecture paper proposed that:

• Age 15-19 learners are supported to find a line of sight into work or further study that can lead them to a thriving adulthood and build on their unique interests, capabilities and aspirations.
• A Learner Profile is designed to provide a trusted, common way of representing the full range of attainments of young people during their transition years across a broad range of domains.
• Tertiary education providers adopt broader, more transparent entry criteria, design entry pathways and update their admissions processes to better align candidates’ interests, capabilities and aspirations with the educational opportunities on offer, and better reflect evidence about the progress and potential of learners.

In addition, Learning Creates is a new alliance bringing together a range of stakeholders to focus on personalized, passion-based learning as the key to modernizing education and preparing young people for successful futures. There is now an Australian hub for the Mastery Transcript Consortium, an expanding network of schools who are introducing a digital high school transcript for students to have their unique strengths, abilities, interests, and histories nurtured and recognized. Big Picture Learning Australia is transforming education by retiring the traditional ‘appointment learning’ where everyone learns the same things according to a fixed timetable inside the walls of a school.

The Covid pandemic has been a catalyst. The momentum for change is intensifying and it has turned a particular spotlight onto equity issues. Schooling as we know it is set to change irrevocably in multiple ways. The reimagining is underway; the future is personalized. One-size-fits-all no longer fits.

The post New Metrics for Success appeared first on Getting Smart.

How to Find Inspiration

When we think about finding inspiration in education we might think of self-reflection or collaboration with cool colleagues (like when the person down the hall takes one of your lesson ideas and makes it better) or talking less and listening more carefully to people who challenge us or making more of an effort to surround ourselves with people we admire (even on social media). We can also be inspired by our students.

If it is the job of an innovator to have good ideas, the simplest way to get lots of good ideas is to seek different perspectives. There is no such thing as a new idea, just new combinations, so deliberately seek out unexpected combinations and collaborators who have a different perspective. We know that diverse teams are smarter. Diversity increases performance. So, if we want schools to innovate, one of the simplest ways may involve hiring more female leaders and more culturally diverse leaders. Often, the demographics of school leaders do not match the gender and cultural diversity of the student community. The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that women are missing on the boards of Sydney’s top private schools. Gender diversity has become a significant leadership issue at these schools. Diverse school leadership teams improve school performance, increase innovation, and provide more creative approaches to problem-solving.

As this Harvard Business Review article explains: 

“In a nutshell, enriching your employee pool with representatives of different genders, races, and nationalities is key for boosting your company’s joint intellectual potential. Creating a more diverse workplace will help to keep your team members’ biases in check and make them question their assumptions. At the same time, we need to make sure the organization has inclusive practices so that everyone feels they can be heard. All of this can make your teams smarter and, ultimately, make your organization more successful, whatever your goals.”

Leading Innovation

Research into leading innovation in schools has found that the principal is a key influence and often demonstrates a ‘restlessness for improvement’, there is a shared risk-taking school culture and pride in doing things differently – ‘bias towards innovation and action’, and leadership is broadly distributed. Australian educator Hedley Beare wrote the following:

“Enterprises which thrive in the information-rich economy tend to image their personnel in new ways. The enterprise and its members are flexible, they can make quick and strategic decisions, they encourage innovation and entrepreneurship; they value creativity rather than conformity, they give members the power to take local decisions and to exercise initiative, and they regard the people in the organization as partners rather than property.

Creativity, continuous improvement, and the ability to turn ideas into action are critical for schools. Creativity is just doing new things with old things. Breakthrough ideas usually occur when concepts from one field meet new, unfamiliar territory. Creative people live and thrive at the intersection of ideas. When we combine creativity with implementation, we get innovation.

There is a difference between managing routine work (where you can’t allow failure) versus innovative/creative work (where it has to be safe to fail for rapid learning). Bob Sutton shows that managers often overestimate their value and bosses often lack self-awareness. However, a hallmark of good bosses is that they are highly aware of this.

“They realise their followers watch, analyze, and react to just about everything they say and do. And they devote real energy to reading expressions, noting behaviors, and making constant adjustments to help their people think independently and express themselves without reservation. The best bosses are people who realize that they are prone to suffering blind spots about themselves, their colleagues, and problems in the organization — and who work doggedly to overcome them.”

Being a boss is like being a high-status primate: the animals under you in the pecking order observe everything you do and they know much more about you than you know about them. Studies of baboons show that a member looks at the alpha male every 20 or 30 seconds.

The best managers manage by getting out of the way. Innovative leaders devote less attention, don’t require people to ask for permission, and don’t enforce rules consistently. 3M’s William Coyne is famous for stating, “After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it’s doing.” The best leaders protect their people from harm, intrusions, and distractions. This decades-old legend about a brave shielding act still inspires people at Pixar.

The best diagnostic question to assess leadership in innovative schools is “What happens when people fail?” There is no innovation or learning without failure. Great leaders forgive and remember because failure sucks but it instructs.

Takeaway Questions

• How do you seek different perspectives and actively work to build diverse teams?
• What happens when people fail in your school?

For more, see:

• How To Unblock Curiosity And Build Creativity
• Getting Smart Podcast | 21 Insights: Adventures in Learning to Lead

Cameron Paterson is a Getting Smart Staff Writer and is the Director of Learning and Teaching at Shore School in Australia. Follow him on Twitter: @cpaterso

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The post What I Learned From the Stanford Certificate in Innovation & Entrepreneurship appeared first on Getting Smart.

It is challenging to teach in a climate of perpetual reform, with constant political rhetoric critical of teachers. Evidence, data, and scientific measurement are amplifying the surveillance of schools and under this sort of scrutiny, teaching must increasingly be airtight to extract any risk from the return on investment. However, teachers are not technocrats and the illusion of a secure relationship between practice and outcome doesn’t project a positive sense of teaching as a career that has status, identity, and agency.

Teacher voice is largely absent in policy formulation, on advisory boards, and on media panels. The media, in particular, often presents polarising perspectives of the teaching profession and so-called “experts” are regularly trundled out to speak for or about teachers. Teacher voices are rarely sought or valued. The rich experience and expertise of teachers mean that their opinions should be sought, listened to, and highly valued. However, the humanness of those in schools is often lost in the relentless call for data, evidence, and quantitative measures of learning and effectiveness.

While these are issues that much of the world is struggling with, there are some bright spots emerging around the globe.

Flipping the System

The Flip the System movement (very different to Flipped Classrooms) was born in the Netherlands in 2016 when Jelmer Evers and Rene Kneyber produced the original Flip the System book and Jelmer then followed this with a TEDx talk. The message was about trusting the teaching profession and promoting teacher agency and collaboration. The editors wrote:

“In the neoliberal perspective, the teacher is viewed as a trained monkey, and it is simply a question of finding the right stick to beat him with, or the right brand of peanuts, to make him do the desired dance in front of the audience. The teacher is no longer viewed as a professional, but as a laborer who simply has to follow evidence-based methods in order to secure externally determined goals.”

Flip the System UK was then released in 2017, focusing on elevating teacher professionalism and empowering teachers. Now Flip the System Australia is available. At its core Flip the System is a global movement about teacher agency – empowering teachers to shape their profession, democratizing education, supplementing top-down accountability with teacher-led reform, and elevating the voices of those working in schools. In Flip the System Australia, Deb argues, “Flipping the system is about amplifying, elevating, and valuing the voices of those actually working in schools. We believe that the power to transform education is within the profession, not outside it.”

As a global movement, flipping the system propels efforts for teachers to reclaim a place at the policymaking table and resists the mistrust of teachers. It is about building networks and flattening hierarchies so that teachers can collaborate and build consensus via coalition and networked knowledge sharing. This requires a commitment to overcome the political and ideological motivations that impede progress.

Varkey Teacher Ambassadors

The Varkey Foundation supports the Global Teacher Prize to recognize and celebrate the impact that teachers have around the world. This is a US $1 million dollar award, presented annually to a teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession. Since the creation of the Global Teacher Prize in 2014, the top 50 finalists of the Global Teacher Prize have become known as Varkey Teacher Ambassadors and they work to encourage the expertise and capacity of teachers worldwide, providing a voice to influence policy and practice. As well as having a voice at a policy level, the teachers work together on global projects, reaching an increasing number of teachers and children across the globe. There are now over 200 ambassadors from more than 60 countries. Six Varkey Teacher Ambassadors recently released a very interesting book, Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, about empathy, trust, collaboration, global citizenship, diversity, using technology as a catalyst and teachers as networked activists.

Education International

Established in 1993, Education International is the largest and most powerful international trade union organization in history. It promotes the professional status of teachers through trade union rights, and the rights of teachers to participate in the formulation and implementation of educational policies. It also aims to build closer relationships among teachers globally by promoting the status of the teaching profession, countering de-professionalization trends, leading global conversations on the future of the teaching profession, and coordinating a global teacher and educator network in order to empower teachers.

Setting the agenda

An informed and engaged population starts with teachers. Protecting liberal democracy requires curriculum disobedience in the same manner that university professors protect their academic freedom, and upholding professional ethics, just as the medical profession adhere to the Hippocratic Oath. For too long educators have allowed others to set the agenda. The tacit knowledge of teachers is often devalued and teachers are voiceless in discussions about education policy. Education has yet to put in place a system that guarantees teacher’s a voice and makes it an accepted, integral part of the day-to-day operations of schools.

Ultimately, education is a political act. All teachers are activists and the call for teacher voice and agency is a call to resistance. The message is one of hope and empowerment.

For more, see:

• Supporting Teachers in the Digital Age
• 5 Good Ways for EdLeaders to Make Teachers Feel as Important as They Are

NB. The author is an editor of Flip the System Australia, a Varkey Teacher Ambassador, and a member of Education International.  

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Learning is a social enterprise and people learn best in groups. Collaborative structures help to decrease teacher isolation, codify and share successful teaching practices, increase staff morale, and open the door to experimentation and increased collective efficacy. Collaborative environments are also likely to attract talented staff who thrive on interactions with like-minded talented individuals. High levels of collaboration are likely to exist when the leadership marks it as a priority, when common time and physical space are set aside for collaboration, and when teaching and learning are seen as a team responsibility, rather than an individual responsibility.

Collaborative structures imply the provision of both time and space for teachers to interact. Time is perhaps the most precious resource, and time to meet and talk is an essential resource for schools. Collaboration is time-consuming and staff need to be provided with adequate time to interact. The movement from ‘me’ or ‘I’ to ‘us’ or ‘we’ requires frequent teacher interactions which can be achieved through common planning time, team-teaching, and coaching and mentoring.

Physical structures also need to support collaborative learning. Classrooms, staff workspaces, and furniture all either reinforce or detract from collaboration. Schools should be designed more like advertising agencies than prisons. The provision of comfortable sofas and water fountains can do a great deal to support collaboration.

The most important outcome of teacher collaboration may be that teachers learn how to improve their teaching practice. When teachers collaborate, they share experiences and knowledge that can promote learning for instructional improvement. A team focus on learning helps teachers to discover causal connections between teaching and student learning and encourages collective questioning of ineffective teaching routines. High levels of teacher collaboration are also likely to improve teaching and learning, student behavior, and student achievement on high-stakes tests.

Teachers who work collaboratively think and behave on the basis of an understanding of teaching as a shared responsibility. The scrutiny of peers is welcomed. Collaborative structures enable teachers to learn from the experience and expertise of their peers. However, just because teachers work together does not mean that the outcomes will be positive, as there needs to be an appropriate knowledge base from at least one teacher for it to be worthwhile.

Merely placing staff into teams will not necessarily lead to improved learning. There is the problem of contrived collegiality, where the collaboration is promoted as a means of achieving executive purposes, rather than the goals of the teachers. Communication and interdependence are methods of overcoming the balkanization of the silo-like subject-based teams in high schools. Developing cross-disciplinary curriculum structures is another possible method of overcoming the problem of balkanization.

Organizations learn collectively in groups and collaborative structures enable people to work together in teams to accomplish collective purposes.

For more, see:

• Why You Should Create a Collaborative Classroom This Year
• Defining (and Driving) Collaboration
• Collaboration: Key to Successful Teams and Projects

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The post Organizational Learning and Collaborative Structures appeared first on Getting Smart.

Now is the time to do what philosopher Hannah Arendt called on citizens to do: stop and think.

Winston Churchill once declared: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Western democracies are now safer, wealthier and freer than human beings have ever been. However, it would be imprudent to assume that liberal democracy is anything but a historical blip. Democracy is fragile, and people increasingly feel that democracies are unresponsive, run by selfish elites, and failing to deliver. At the same time, Yascha Mounk argues that, “When a political structure continues for centuries, it is easy for those who have never known anything else to assume that it is immutable.” Unlike most of our ancestors, many of us have never had to face starvation or a war, but history is full of examples that suggest that stability might be temporary.

What We Can Do About It

History can warn. We have much to learn from the Europeans who conceded to fascism, Nazism, and communism in a not-so-distant portion of the twentieth century. Madeleine Albright claims that, “fascism and fascist policies pose a more virulent threat to international freedom, prosperity, and peace than at any time since WWII.” Yale Historian Timothy Snyder advocates defending against tyranny by: subsidizing investigative journalism, scrubbing your computer of malware on a regular basis, picking some charities and setting up autopay, keeping up friendships abroad, and being alert to the use of words like extremism and terrorism.

It takes practice to become a good citizen. No government can defend itself from deteriorating or being commandeered by big business unless the enfranchised are informed and engaged. Schools need to salvage their task of educating citizens and teachers should spend more time pointing out that alternatives to liberal democracy are universally repugnant. This is why we teach topics like the US Civil Rights Movement, the fall of the Berlin wall, and the struggle against apartheid. None of these historical moments were inevitable. They required individuals, communities and institutions to turn the arc of history toward justice.

Civic agency is the ability to make a difference as a citizen. It requires the capacity to see through misinformation, to recognize diverse perspectives and engage across differences, to imagine a better future and to lead change. The moment you set an example, the status quo is cracked, and others will follow. Remember Rosa Parks.

Around the world, educators are helping adolescents become engaged democratic citizens and supporting teachers to develop classrooms, schools, curricula, practice, and policies that reflect this. Shikaya in South Africa is supporting educators to address the legacies of apartheid, to recognize the fragility of democracy, and create classrooms and schools that are inclusive, safe, reflective, and compassionate. Afev and their volunteers across France are learning about contemporary racism and antisemitism so that they can stand up and speak out against hatred. Facing History and Ourselves is helping students learn about hatred and bigotry so that students can stop them happening in the future and their Guide for Classroom Conversations is a powerful resource for fostering civil discourse. Other resources are readily available to prepare educators for tough conversations.

Moving Forward

Democracy requires active work. Every generation has to reclaim it. Educators have a critical function, at a moment when we live in filter bubbles and echo chambers, to create safe spaces and facilitate points of confrontation to break single identities. PBL projects that build civic agency and give youth experience in participatory action and making a community contribution can make a significant difference. These learning experiences have the added benefit of helping students develop co-creating, world-building and design thinking skills for their future endeavors. If we are serious about democracy, it is about how we teach. It is about living democracy in the classroom. It might be timely for teachers to consider whether they model authoritarian leaders, how they might support curricula disobedience and academic freedom, and what their professional code of ethics is.

“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

— JOHN DEWEY

For more, see:

• In Boward County, Student Voice Impacts the Classroom and Beyond
• Preparing #LifeReady Students: Creating a Globally-Sourced, Locally-Relevant Curriculum
• Entrepreneurship in K-12 Education

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The post Democracy and Education appeared first on Getting Smart.

In the city of Reggio Emilia, half an hour from Bologna in Italy, education is at the heart of social cohesion. The city invests 13% of its budget in early childhood educational services. They understand the connection between early investment in childhood education and long-term growth.

Education is seen as a right for everyone and as the responsibility of the entire community. In this early childhood approach that has evolved over the past 50 years, schooling is based on the pedagogies of listening and relationships. A great deal of children’s work is done in small groups, grounded in meaningful projects. One of their basic rules is that learning must be pleasureable, children must enjoy learning.

The Reggio Emilia approach provides inspiration for more traditional schools around the globe. At a time of increased conformity and standardization in education, Reggio offers a different path of possibilities. With an educational philosophy grounded in neuroscience and social constructivism, and leaning heavily on Freud, Montessori, Vygotsky, Piaget, Dewey, Freire, Bruner, and Gardner, practitioners of Reggio Emilia define learning as “an interactive process of exchange, not seen as accumulation of knowledge, but as the construction of meaning and maps of meaning that allow children to interpret the world.”

I recently had a chance to see the Reggio Emilia approach live in action on a study tour through Italy–below are a few of my reflections.

Children are Citizens

One of Reggio’s key aims is to look at what children can do, rather than what they can’t, and to break the image of the child as weak and incomplete. Children from all socioeconomic backgrounds attend Reggio Emilia schools and children with disabilities receive first priority and full mainstreaming under Italian law. Instead of being labeled “children with special needs” they are labeled “children with special rights.” Every child is seen in terms of the resources and potential they bring, rather than what’s missing.

Reggio educators claim that learning is an act of identity and that children are citizens of today, not just tomorrow. Everyone contributes to the community, each person brings their own knowledge, thoughts, and ideas, and change is brought about by valuing other points of view. This Kid Nation post from Project Zero gives us some indication of the possibilities when children are seen as citizens, capable of making meaningful contributions.

The Walls of Schools Speak

In many schools around the world, the only representations of learning made public are marks and rankings. However, quantification is not the only way to share evidence of learning. Qualitative forms of sharing evidence like student work, photographs, and video are powerful ways to provide a more complete picture, and are representative of what Finnish educator Pasi Sahlburg calls small data.

Jessica Lander asks, “What if all schools proudly displayed the academic work of their students? When schools put up student work for all to see, they send a powerful message to students that educators respect their academic effort and their intellectual contributions. After all, we publicly display what we value. And students pay attention.”

Visitors to Reggio Emilia are struck by the quantity and quality of the children’s own work on display. Displays walk viewers through research, rough drafts, and final versions, with descriptions explaining each step. These public displays of high-quality work enhance student engagement and pride, among both students and teachers.

Documentation

Documentation is a way of thinking, a structure for remembering, and a process of evaluation (in Reggio Emilia they don’t give tests). It provides a visible memory in order to serve as a jumping-off point for next steps in learning. The intent of documentation is to explain, not merely to display. Documentation is not a report, or a portfolio, or an archive, it is the process of reciprocal learning and institutional memory for the purposes of sharing and reflection.

The core of documentation is observing. Mara Krechevsky from Project Zero defines it as, “teachers and learners observing, recording, interpreting, and sharing, via a variety of media the processes and products of learning in order to deepen and extend the learning.” Reggio educators refer to documentation as “visible listening.” When teachers stop and notice what students are saying or doing, they hone their capacity to recognize and respond in more informed ways. The capacity to pause and notice is key. Could it be possible that intelligence is more about noticing than knowing?

Teachers as Researchers

The most important prerequisite for employment as a teacher in Reggio Emilia is the disposition to continue learning. Reggio teachers are researchers and learners. In Reggio schools, they avoid calling in experts to address teachers, preferring to get teachers together to interpret what is in front of their eyes. Reggio educators work through trial and error and continually develop new pedagogies. While others have a tendency to standardize products and thinking, changing constantly is part of the skin of Reggio schools.

When teachers document student work, their image of their role changes from teaching children to studying children, and by studying children, learning with children. Systematic documentation allows each teacher to generate new ideas about curriculum and learning. Teachers collaborate and discuss student work with other educators, believing that effective teaching requires a level of interpretation that can come only from discourse with other professionals.

“Confronto”

A strong value is placed on communicating, interacting and building places where people with different ideas can bring their ideas to the table. They use the Italian word “confronto,” which means cognitive conflict, generative discussion, or perhaps more accurately “putting our heads together.” This constant questioning, exploring and feeling unsettled with colleagues is the antidote to professional complacency. Questions give order to the world and answers are considered temporary, in order to develop new questions. As documentation is discussed and shared, culture and collective understanding is created. It is this shared construction of meaning that is the unifying theme of the Reggio Emilia approach.

The educational work in Reggio Emilia is always undergoing re-examination and experimentation. It is always in flux. Continual collaboration with others creates new pedagogies, stressing social constructivism and different points of view. The high level of practice that they obtain in Reggio is largely attributable to the fact that they continually question, refine, and change their practices rather than codify and replicate them.

Questions

In Reggio spirit I would like to conclude with some questions:

• How can we create learning communities that value wondering, exploring and feeling unsettled as much as achieving high test scores?
• Why do most schools focus so much on what students can’t do, rather than what they can?
• Why don’t we publicly display both the rough drafts and the high-quality work of our students?
• What would our schools look like if we saw children as citizens capable of making meaningful contributions to their communities?
• And why, when many education ministries around the world offer open possibilities, do we fall back on tradition and closed interpretations?

For more, see:

• Early Childhood: What We Know, and What’s Possible
• Why Early Childhood Education Matters Now More than Ever
• Early Learning as a Strategy for Achieving Equity

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The post Reggio Emilia: An Inspiring Approach to Early Learning appeared first on Getting Smart.