I was speaking to a number of staff at my school the other day, and I commented that I was going to go and see one of our students playing sport on the weekend. This staff member expressed surprise at such an action – and also suggested that I might be crossing the line of staff-student professionalism. I’d never considered it like that, before, but these comments did cause me to think about what I was doing – was I acting unprofessionally? Was I endangering my career, and the safety of the student? This idea had never crossed my mind before – and ever since I was a young teacher, I’ve often gone to see students play sport, perform in theatre shows or similar things. I’d certainly never really considered my motivation for doing so; it just seemed something that I should do.

Ultimately, I don’t think what I’m doing crosses any kind of boundaries of appropriateness. At the end of the day, a school is a community – or more correctly, a community of communities. There are the communities of practice of teachers. There are the social communities of students. There are the religious, ethnic, cultural and sporting communities within these groupings.This is an important point because I believe that communities are sustained – primarily- through relationships. Thus, it is important to develop these relationships to their fullest extent. Any relationship – and interestingly, Freire makes this exact point – must use as its starting point an understanding of where each member of that relationship comes from; that is to say, it is not enough for me to perceive student simply as a student, or as a boy or as gifted. Rather, I must do my utmost to understand their own life experiences and stories – I need to know about them as a unique individual if I am to come to understand them at all.

I like this idea; I think it is clearly linked to a movement away from the banking model of education and towards a better understanding of the human principles that at the heart of learning. Therefore, to address the issue that started this line of thought, what I was doing by going to this was twofold; firstly, I was learning more about this student’s background and motivations, as hell as his interests, and secondly, this student was learning more about me. Hence, our relationship (which was already pretty good) takes another step forward, and I am better able to assist him in his learning. Sounds very professional, if you ask me!

The leadership team at my current school was kind enough to book a table of 10 for a resent presentation by the Australian College of Educators. It was at the Waterview Convention Centre at Homebush, which was very nice, and all the bigwigs, including some of those from CEO were there, as well, which wasn’t.

It was meant to be about the national curriculum and the relationship between the values and the national curriculum but the presenter, Professor Deakin Crick from the UK, didn’t really talk about that.

She began by briefly listing the curriculum values that the national curriculum will be based on – critical thinking, creativity etc etc, and then compared them (again, very briefly) with the values that other countries have adopted, like the OECD, or the UK, or the European Council, suggesting that there was more in common between them than there was differences. All pretty interesting stuff; one thing that Professor Deakin Crick did say that stuck with me was that she couldn’t identify any theoretical basis for these values of the national curriculum; rather it just seemed a random grab bag of what should be important in schools.

Professor Deakin Crick then went on to explain what she thought was important in education; she basically gave us a potted history of her research, which had 2 main factors (at least as I understood it.) The first factor was the dimensions of learning, or learning power dimensions. These are thinks like making meaning, creativity, resilience, critical curiousity and a number of others that are ways that Deakin Crick suggests we can encourage young people to not only be less passive in their learning, but to also become lifelong learning. Essentially, Crick’s research suggested that, for a lot of students, their ‘learning power’ decreased as their schooling progressed, which is pretty concerning.

The second part of Crick’s presentation focused on using narration as a central metaphor for curriculum delivery and interpretation; essentially, telling stories to learn. She gave us a number of examples, from both Australia and the UK, where students created stories with animals based on the learning power dimensions; for example, the platypus was meaning-making, or the wedge-tailed eagle was strategic awareness or something similar. The reason this metaphor worked and allowed students to develop these learning dimensions was because it allowed them to both tell their story and also to address complex issues through a relatively simple medium. I was especially captivated by the Taronga Breakout story from students in the Hunter Valley.

However, at the end of the evening, I was still left with a sense of despair; for all the rhetoric of grass-roots change and bottom-up support in the face of the authoritarian top-down approach, I personally am struggling to see  a way we, as teachers, can change the system. Decisions already seem to be made; essentially, the curriculum is signed, sealed and delivered, although I am sure there will be a few changes after the consultation process to prove that policy-makers listened to teachers.

It’s because I’ve seen it all before, and I don’t have any faith in pollies at the moment. I’m struggling with where to go to from here…

*fading muttering about neoliberal ideology and capitalist hegemonies*

But I’ll be back, with a new plan. As soon as I work it out…

I had the opportunity to speak with Paul Vittles today, about my research project and plans for future work. Paul is the Chairman of the Australia and New Zealand RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), link here.

The reason I was speaking to Paul was that I wanted some funding to set up the app and website for the online eCitizens community, and the RSA runs a ‘Passion, Proposal, Progress’ program that provides worthy causes with funds to make it happen.

As I was talking to Paul, and he was providing me with advice on making my project less vague and more of a reality, I realized that my research and project needed to be a little more tightly defined. This was also mentioned by Nina Burridge (my co-supervisor). At the end of the day, I need something that I can look at, evaluate and say, this is what I’ve done. I also wanted my work to continue on, after the research period.

So, this is what I am suggesting:

Firstly, I would continue reading in an effort to do two things: firstly, define what active citizenship is, and how this might be best formulated into an educative program, and secondly, to understand and generalise principles from exemplar citizenship activities, and incorporate them

This would require an initial study and analyis of data. So, I think I will probably use a qualitative approach, interviewing students and teachers from 3 local schools (2 primary, 1 secondary) about their thoughts regarding citizenship education. I would specifically choose the students I would interview, as well as the teachers. The interviews would probably be semi-structured.

Having interviewed these stakeholders, I would then endeavour to develop a program that would encourage active citizenship. My methodology here would probably be a action research project, and my materials might be Freirean, at least to start with, in inspiration. That is, I would ‘get to know’ the students, looking for the contradictions, and use these contradictions to create generative themes. These would be codified, and then we would decodify these together to learn. Or something like that. The actual process will need more detail before I finish.

Finally, I would evaluate this action research project (which would probably take place with Years 5 – 8), over the course of a week, during school holidays, and publish the finished product on the eCitizens website. I’d also develop an app for students to use, as well.

This would constitute my portfolio for my Ed D.

Pretty excited about this, but I will speak about it to Rick this week.

Originally posted here.

I’ve been reading a lot about education for democracy at the moment, from a variety of interesting sources. For example, I’ve read work by David Kerr, from the UK, articles by Henry Giroux from America and by people like Kennedy and O’Loughlin from Australia. (I mention this in case you’re interested in following up some of the readings that have influenced my thoughts.)

The reason for my interest in this area is that I’ve been curious about the effect that the introduction of a national curriculum to Australia. Previously, I’ve worked in the UK, where there’s been a national curriculum in place since 1996, I believe, and, while politicians might, at times, claim that it has been a vast success, my experience working with teachers suggests the opposite. In fact, the improvements in test scores that are supposedly attributable to the introduction of said curriculum and national testing are beginning to decline, which I don’t find surprising, considering the problems inherent in large scale testing.

Regardless of this, the Australian government has introduced, for next year, a heavily content-led curriculum to be taught in all schools in English, Mathematics, Science and History. Other subjects will follow in the next few years.

Enough background. I’m a firm believer that democracy is not a static process; indeed, to be successful, democracy must be a lived-out experience; that is to say, we don’t have democracy, but we practice democracy. I remember reading somewhere that one of the best judges of how democratic a society is is by seeing how much complaining there is that the society isn’t democratic enough!

If you subscribe to this point of view, then it necessarily follows that, if democracy is a lived out process, requiring active participation from citizens to remain democratic, then those citizens must learn the specfic knowledge and skills necessary to participate in said democracy. These skills can be learnt in a variety of different ways, but the most common way was through participation in political parties, community groups and similar organisations in schools.

However, this participation is in decline; certainly in Australia and the US. In addition, students are not getting the opportunity to participate in these kinds of social movements and learn the skills required for democracy while they are at school, because schools have been forced to abandon these kinds of projects because of the necessity to prepare studenst for nationalised testing. Thus, social studies classes, citizenship groups and social justice action groups have been abandoned in favour of rote memorisation and repetitive exercises in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Therefore, my question is this: if we are de-skilling students of the ability to participate in democracy, and democracy relies upon those skills to survive, where are we heading?

I had one of those lessons that you remember for a long time, today. It was with my Year 11 Religion and Catholic Studies class. We’d moved into the second unit of work, where we examine ‘The Christian View of the World’ or something similar, and this was the second lesson in a group – we’d spent the first lesson looking at what other people might think of as a ‘perfect world.’

Anyway, in this lesson, students were working in pairs to create a movie (warning – Apple plug – using iMovie) about their ideas of the perfect world. We’d prepped them pretty well; they had brainstormed, discussed ideas with small groups and the class and then created a storyboard for their movie, and then they had about 70 minutes to put together their finished movie.

The kids were deeply engaged in what they were learning. From the moment I told them to get started, the students were involved in finding the images, adding the music they wanted, playing around with the transitions and all kinds of other things that are associated with developing a movie. It’s a very simple task, but they loved every minute of it.

Just goes to show the power of technology in engaging learners; I’ve no doubt that the skills they were learning (in this case, related to iMovie) will be of use to them both in employment and other avenues of their life.

Bit of a worry that they had so little experience using laptops, though…

I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day who works in the healthcare industry. Part of her job requires her to provide inservice training sessions to healthcare professionals about a variety of products, including handwash and medical equipment. She was telling me about the procedure that she goes through to train nurses, for example, and I couldn’t help but compare it with similar professional development experiences in the educational environment. To be honest, the comparison was pretty unfavourable for teachers. This really got me thinking, and this post is the first part of that thinking in regards to professional learning and teachers.

My friend (I said that I would not mention her name, nor the company she works for, so suffice to say that she works in a large, diverse healthcare company that is multinational and very well known) made a few very enlightening points about professional learning. I’ve summarised them here:

1. Firstly, professional learning takes place at the request of the learners; that is to say, the nurses (in this case) identify what they require assistance with, and who best to provide that service. They also decide upon the place and time of that learning.

2. The learning that takes place has clear outlines and goals. For example, the nurses might attend a inservice to learn how to use a new piece of equipment or about a new technique.

3. Thirdly, the learning has immediate and meaningful applications to their practice. To continue the example from the point above, this new piece of technology would be immediately implemented in surgery or on the wards.

4. Finally, this idea  of professional learning is ongoing; that is to say, nurses and doctors continue learning about their practice even when they are in the jobs.

I know that none of this is particularly new or revolutionary; it follows on from well-established best practice principles. However, compare it, if you are in education, with the model used in most schools and you will see why I suggested the comparison is unfavourable.

Professional Development has 3 main forms in the teaching profession. Firstly, there are the regular staff meetings – usually for an hour once a week or so. Secondly, there are whole school professional development days. Finally, there are also external courses. It is my theory that, except in rare cases, none of these forms suit the needs of teachers – and hence are ineffective in raising the achievement of students.

Let’s take the first example; regular staff meetings. I’m speaking mostly from personal and anecdotal evidence here, but I think it’s valid; I’m talking about 4 different schools that I’ve worked in. Generally, staff meetings that take place on a whole school level become an information-sharing activity. Members of the school executive usually talk about things like the rubbish on the yard, or plans for upcoming events, or reiterate some of the important details regarding policy and procedures.

I understand that all of these things are valuable; however, they are generally already covered in other places – or they should be! Is it really the best use of a teacher’s time to passively listen to information being presented to them? As professionals, aren’t we capable of showing a bit of responsibility and accessing this information for ourselves? Isn’t there a better way of presenting this information?

The second example is not free of controversy, either; a lot of professional development days are generally given over to planning for the upcoming year or, again, to whole school meetings that generally seem to have limited importance for actual teacher practice. Certainly, there is no personalisation. For example, a school concerned about its discipline might have a whole school development day on student behaviour management – regardless of the fact that at least some of the teachers require no such assistance with their behaviour management.

This type has problems in common with the third example of professional development: that of  external courses. Generally run over 1 or 2 days, but sometimes longer, the real issue with these courses is that there is limited potential for application of any learning back at school, and there is almost never any kind of follow up.

I’ve been critical in the examples I’ve outlined above; this is partly due to the frustration I feel about such wasted time, but mostly because I feel there are better ways to engage in professional learning for teachers, especially if we were to adopt principles similar to those used in healthcare. Not surprisingly, for those of you who read my blog regularly, I think that a lot of answers can be found through more appropriate use of technology to support teachers.

Here are some ideas:

1. A resource bank (perhaps on iTunes U?) of all the different kinds of PD a teacher might need.
2. This resource bank could be linked to specific, directed forums where teachers could receive advice and feedback. The key here would be ongoing, personalised professional development – not a one size fits all strategy.
3. The development of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) which make use of technology to put teachers who need assistance in touch with expert practitioners who can provide said assistance.
4. School systems (DET, Independent Schools, CEO) could employ ‘expert teachers’ (who would need to be current teachers, as well) who would work with individual or small groups of teachers over a period of a term or two.
5. Finally – professional reviews and evaluations of teaching staff – every year, in a format accepted by the Teacher’s Federation and the Unions, with the aim of mapping out individualised professional development, which is reviewed every year.

Just a few ideas, but imagine the power of a system where you, as a teacher, could identify areas of weakness, discuss your concerns with other teachers in a similar position, get advice from a practicing expert, and then employ these strategies in improving your skills, before receiving more feedback!

Sounds like a better use of time than hearing about changes in bell times for Ash Wednesday mass.

I’ve had an interest in games for a long time, and I’ve always been a champion of their uses for educational purposes. I still remember having a stand up argument with a teacher at high school, where I argued that Sim City was actually a worthwhile vehicle for learning about finance and economics. I don’t think I won that day, but that might have been a question of method more than anything else.

This article caught my eye, though. Although hardly ground-breaking, it tracks the way more and more game developers are examining the educational possibilities inherent in their products. And when we say educational, we are not just talking about in schools – there are examples of medical professionals, security officers and others out there using games to learn. I particularly like the Descent rip off which lets you fly around in the human body. Hmmm….

It fits in quite nicely with Apple’s ideas about Challenge-Based Learning, which basically suggests our education systems need to change to be more like… Mythbusters! There’s a link here.

This might all be a little bit of blue sky thinking though – what do people really think? I know a number of teachers read this blog, and so do a number of students, too. Let’s hear your opinion.

So what do people think?

I’ve finally put together the forums for mrheggart.com.

So come on over and check them out – there’s a bunch of different ones there.

These are the topics I’ve got up there at the moment:

1. Business Studies Q & A

2. General Chat

3. Teacher Talk

4. Computer Games – Reviews, Comments and Discussions.

Any other suggestions, I’ll put them up right away! All welcome.

This is the link: Forums

See you there.

P.S. Please read the rules before posting!

By Justin Ballis
A leaked Victorian Department of Education memo, revealed by two
newspapers this morning, has made a lie of official denials that
publication of data from the My School website will lead to the
narrowing of the curriculum and “suck the oxygen” out of primary school
classrooms.

The Australian reports that the memo directs teachers to “explicitly
teach” to the NAPLAN tests in order to improve overall literacy and
numeracy results in Victoria. This vindicates Federation warnings that
the publication of NAPLAN data would push Australia towards replicating
the failed English experiment with league tables.

The memo also formalises what President Bob Lipscombe feared would be
teachers’ natural reaction to being unfairly ranked by test results.

“Teachers aren’t fools. And if they are going to be judged by such
measures, as inappropriate as it is, you’re going to see [them]
teaching to the test,” he said of league tables. “You’ll see the very
things that they warned against in England, and most recently warned
against by Dr Ken Boston, former Director-General of Education in NSW.

“The very man who was previously in charge of education in this state
warned us not to go down the pathway they’ve followed in England. The
person who told us that in England up to 70 per cent of teachers’ time,
up to 70 per cent of students’ time – in the time leading up to the
test in England – is now spent coaching to the test.

“The very man who warned us that drama, music, art, excursions all
suffered enormously in the English education system as a result of the
distortions that occurred around league tables.”

According to The Australian, which obtained a copy of the memo, the
directive tells principals to appoint a NAPLAN coordinator and offers a
“blueprint for classroom approaches” that includes coaching skills for
passing the tests such as learning the “test question vocabulary” and
“skim and scan”.

The memo was emailed to all school principals in the Loddon-Mallee
region of Victoria two days before the launch of the MySchool website.

“We are now heading down the pathway that’s been followed in England,
where they’ve had league tables for the last two decades,” Lipscombe
said. “Despite those league tables being in place…there has been no
significant improvement in student outcomes. In fact, if you look at
the international measure of student assessment, Australia ranks well
above England in those measures.”

Boston, the former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority in England, has been an unexpected ally of opponents to
league tables. “Despite their formal qualifications, many young people
[in England] are…deficient in the soft skills that form an essential
component of each individual’s human capital, some of them to the
extent that they are in fact unemployable,” Boston wrote in Britain’s
The Sunday Times last year.

“The present problem is not the result of inadequacies in the primary
curricul…The real problem is that teachers and schools aren’t able to
get on with teaching it. That is because the government’s approach to
the key-stage tests has sucked the oxygen from the classrooms of
primary schools.”

Lipscombe added: “It’s a sad day when we decide that that’s the example
we wish to follow, that’s the pathway we wish to go along. We are very
concerned now that we are going to see distortion of what’s taught in
our schools.”

The Victorian memo indicates that at least one state Education
Department is determined to repeat England’s mistake.

TO: FEDERATION REPRESENTATIVES, ALL SCHOOLS

RE: UPDATE ON LEAGUE TABLES

As you are aware, the launch of the Federal Government’s “My School’ website last week immediately led to invalid comparisons, the
publication of simplistic league tables across Australia, the naming of the supposedly ‘best’ and ‘worst’ schools, and unwarranted damage to the reputations of many schools and their students.

Anticipating this development representatives from teacher unions in all states and territories at the Australian Education Union Federal Conference on 19 January 2010 unanimously endorsed the following as part as a longer resolution of league tables:

“Given our ethical and professional responsibility to our students and broader school communities, the Federal Conference of the AEU resolves that

* the profession cannot and will not cooperate in the implementation of NAPLAN unless satisfactory measures are introduced to stop the further creation and publication of league tables; and

* the AEU together with its Branches and Associated Bodies will allocate its full resources to

* mobilize and organize the profession in support of this campaign, and

* provide the necessary information to parents and the broader community about the critical importance of stopping the further
creation and publication of league tables. The AEU will continue to work closely with the parent movement to achieve
this.

A special meeting of the Federal executive will be convened on April 12 2010 to assess the extent to which the government may have heeded the concerns and calls of parents, teachers and principals to introduce appropriate measures to stop league tables.”

If the Federal Government refuses to take action to prevent the publication of league tables, the NSW Teachers Federation is fully
committed to implementing this decision.

Members in schools that have been adversely affected by the publication of league tables should not hesitate to contact their Federation organiser for support and assistance.