edublogs

Ken Robinson's The Element: reincarnating creativity

Ken Robinson's "The Element" gets launched in the UK this week. It's a superb tome, and one that every educator, employee or entrepreneur should read, if only to check that they themselves are in the right place personally and professionally. Do your natural talents and passions meet at the same time and place, or are you plugging away at the wrong thing completely? Ken's book contains no simplistic lists of things one must do to survive the 21st century - it's Johnny Bunko for the over-educated.

Update: The RSA have now featured a film of his Element Lecture from February 2009.

Many of the messages will be familiar to those who have viewed his famous TED talk which proclaims, rightly in this blogger's opinion, that schools kill creativity. Why? Here's some of the stimulus from Ken's book along with some of my own observations, thoughts and inaccurate takes on the world of education.

Schools are built for, and in the image of, the industrial revolution
Schools are not only built for an industrial revolution past but also in its image - my first ever teaching placement in the most deprived area of Scotland was marked by every period of learning being 53 minutes long, something more like a chicken processing plant's shifts than a stimulating learning environment, with students batched by age and subject to standardised tests for quality before shipping to the real world. Conformity has thus always had a higher value than diversity. Disciplines on offer are subject to a hierarchy (maths and native language, followed by the sciences with music and the arts chasing the coattails).

Creativity and standardised testing can't share the same bed
We know this set of unchanging givens is killing creativity not just in high schools, though generally to a much lesser degree in primary schools, but also in Higher Education establishments. As the number of school leavers not in employment, education or training (NEET) creates a political headache for governments around the world, they are failing to tackle the continued problem in universities and colleges where the numbers also falling into the NEET category are surpassing the figures for high schools.

From recent personal experience of the 'creative output' of some UK Higher Education institutions I can vouch for a killing of creativity, independent thought and entrepreneurship, as hoardes of undergraduates and MScs fight to conform to what university markers want to see and take advantage of the spread of 'cramming courses' at the expense of pursuing personal passions at their best effort. When working on personal projects that are put forward for commissioning (i.e. asking for several £00,000s from the likes of 4iP) or for national and international media and technology prizes, the constraints of the learning environment ("a one-month unit using only x or y software") are used to justify downright poor propositions. Where's the passion that makes them stay up until 11pm and be up at 5.30am to work on their Big Idea? (These are the times 11 year olds at the New York KIPP schools regularly keep to tackle their learning, something about which they, at least, are passionate).

I said earlier that elementary schools have largely escaped this struggle for conformity, but even this elevated position is being gnawed away by standardised tests and curricula. Nothing in the past three years has made me more depressed about the state of education in England than hearing a young Wolverhampton child, part of a PDA-in-the-classroom project, saying that his prime goal from learning was to "get a five" - I still have no idea what "a five" is, but I have a feeling that it's not something that inspires me.

The death of entrepreneurship
This desire to "get a five" or to gain the best possible SAT test result is based on a wrong assumption, both in the creation of such tests and their perceived value in the wider world, particularly in the growing creative sector (worth £50b a year in the UK). Malcolm Gladwell's (right) Outliers, which I read immediately after Robinson's Element, offers a great counterpart in where creative success comes from in the first place. It explores the element of chance, background and opportunity in one's success, but also the need for a serious superhuman degree of practice at something before you reach the beginning of your prime, somewhere, that is, in the region of 10 years or 10,000 hours of passionate practice.

In the schooling environment we still see in most countries' high schools and higher education establishments, it's rare that the personal passion of a young person is given the chance to steer activity, resource and time in order that they might get close to achieving that 10,000 hours quicker. But it's not all the fault of institutions' structures and strictures.

More often than not, the successful student pictures themselves working in the 'safety' of faceless institutions rather than taking their passions and ideas to market themselves. History shows more entrepreneurs who were not successful students making it in the relative unsupported privacy of their entrepreneurship. Most students fail to realise, as Robinson puts it so well, that a degree these days is not so much a passport to a good job and salary, but a visa, something that needs renewed on an ever more frequent basis. But institutions and Governments are not particularly vocal in promoting this fact, thus encouraging the self-perpetuating myth that going to univesrity is better than going to college which is better than following a passion that, while you're willing to spend every waking hour working on it, might not lead to anything.

What is it that needs to change? Clue: It isn't curriculum or assessment
Nearly every country I've worked in for the past three years, from India to China, New Zealand to the states and provinces of Canada and the USA, from my native Scotland to our neighbours in England and Wales, is fiddling with two things: curriculum and assessment. Technology is often seen as the means of making teaching and learning better. I don't want to tackle here whether it does, but one thing is sure, as Arthur C Clarke (via Sugata Mitra) put it: "If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, then they should." This doesn't mean that all teachers should be replaced by computers, of course. It doesn't even mean that poor teachers should be, really. What it does highlight is that the myth an education system has no poor teachers or even a large hump of mediocre teachers needs to be met head on.

We also need to recognise that, largely, those teachers who use technology the most effectively and lead the way with its use are also, by and large, excellent teachers with or without the technology.

This helps us see what many of us appreciate already: the one biggest element of improving education, making learning more creatively inclined and entrepreneurial, is the teacher. It's not curriculum, class sizes (though smaller class sizes make the teacher's life easier) or even assessment. This is something I've been reporting back from research for two years (and which I've been blown out on more times than I can count). It's not about letting students lead the way with technology and "show us teachers" how it's done. Students are generally quite narrow in their knowledge of how to harness technology or creative venture.

No, it's how teachers and parents teach that is important. It is, to use a piece of edu-jargon, pedagogy, both at school and at home.

Yet no national strategy - and I would love to be corrected - headlines pedagogy as the key factor. Think about it: A Curriculum for Excellence (Scotland); No Child Left Behind (assessment: USA); New Zealand's curriculum is about values, competences, subject areas... Also, there's no large educational business à la Pearson that places its centre of gravity around pedagogy forcing the issue with superb pedagogy-based programmes of change, and with good reason - the business of standardised testing, where pedagogy must play second fiddle to cramming and passing the test, is worth in the USA between $1.2 and $5 billion per year per state. How much is teaching the teachers worth? Currently, a lot less.

Fundamental change through Brains Trusts
When I was having a post-panel-session chat with Clay Shirky (I was on the panel and he was the first question-asker of the day) he talked about my current place of employment not in terms of what it was, but in terms of who was in it: "What a brain trust you guys have there", he said. What did he mean? He meant that the organisation employed what it felt were the best people for the job of moving its business forward, and left them to get the hell on with it. The result of feeling that you're part of this brains trust is that you strive more than you ever have to be the best in the world. How many times has someone called the teachers in your school a "brains trust"? Or, for that matter, the management team? Or the parents? Or the students? How many times a day are you aware that you're goal is to be the best in the world?

When we were developing eduBuzz for students and teachers in East Lothian, we centred it around the people, not the platform or the politique of the education authority's management (who, in some schools and particularly in the early days, riled against what we were doing). In a LIFT talk last year, I made the point of saying that its success as a project was probably down to the fact that it offered an immediate change from the importance placed on the school - school boards, school achievement, school councils - and moved it instead onto a level where individuals - people - were the focus. People, not institutions and paper-borne structures, are the sole way to help individuals find their element, nurture it and take advantage of that for the greater good. It's just that most people who have ound their element have had to go and create their own institutions or projects to find a like-minded tribe - education institutions where one is packed away by age and ability, ability determined through standardised tests, are not the place to find fellow tribesmen and women who want to be the best in the world.

It's the nurturing of the brains trust in one's place of work or place of learning that counts the most if we are to improve learning. Schools are pretty poor at identifying talents that are not testable, yet alone nurturing it (this happens thanks to the actions of individual teachers rather than a systemic ability and framework to nurture talent, in the same way as, say, a broadcaster like Channel 4 does; there, the raison d'être is to nurture alternative voices and new talent, with a budget and infrastructure built more or less solely around this. My own department, for example, manages some £50m of public and private money to nurture new talent in online, mobile and gaming media alone.).

Making sure that our current and future students in schools and higher education establishments are capable of entrepreneurship in many areas of their lives, of coming up with solutions that marry new technology (bringing with it new possibilities we could not have before thought through) with strong understanding of design to tackle issues that really matter is the number one task to ensure that they can fully participate as citizens. Simply providing access to part of that equation is not enough: broadband for all without understanding for all, community without happenstance on a global scale, a child's creativity without understanding of the potential technology brings.

Pic: How Intelligent Are You? |   Malcolm Gladwell   |   C4 Offices

Ken Robinson's The Element   |   Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

UK Government Research: Web 2.0 does improve learning

New research from Scotland and the UK Government shows that Web 2.0 and gaming can and do make a difference to educational attainment and student experience.

Since the birth of most "web 2.0" technology in the past six years I've been there gathering and even doing some of the research into whether it offers up any improvements on pedagogy and/or student experience in the classroom. It's not stopped healthy questioning of the validity of data, normally in midflow during a keynote, but there has always been a layer of distrust in stats and research that has not been peer reviewed, to the extent that there has been a great excuse for the lack of change by haughty educators and States that don't want to make the effort.

So I'm delighted that colleague Derek Robertson and University of Dundee researcher David Miller have, through their large-scale study, found that playing 20 minutes of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training every day is much more likely to improve attainment and speed of calculation in mathematics (up to 50% faster than the control group). Their results are to be peer-reviewed, hence the frustrating but necessary wait for the graphs, stats and data.

Furthermore, Becta's research into Web 2.0's impact in the classsroom, for which I presented the opening keynote at the expert seminar earlier this year, has just been completely published, and shows

• Web 2.0 helps to encourage student engagement and increase participation – particularly among quieter pupils, who can use it to work collaboratively online, without the anxiety of having to raise questions in front of peers in class – or by enabling expression through less traditional media such as video.
• Teachers have reported that the use of social networking technology can encourage online discussion amongst students outside school.
• Web 2.0 can be available anytime, anywhere, which encourages some individuals to extend their learning through further investigation into topics that interest them.
• Pupils feel a sense of ownership and engagement when they publish their work online and this can encourage attention to detail and an overall improved quality of work. Some teachers reported using publication of work to encourage peer assessment.

You can read the full research report online, which includes some input from myself and colleague Matt Locke at Channel 4. The recommendations state that all teachers need to be given more significant time to do more complex work with Web 2.0 in their classrooms, directing students learning in these tools. It also, thankfully, helps us see realistically what students do with technology.

Above all comes the caveat that we must not over romanticise what young people are capable of doing with technology without the structure of learning and teachers acting as guides on the side.

Fascinating stuff on which to start building more daring policies. Essential reading for all those who lament the lack of interest in new technologies from "those up top".
Pic from David Muir, his blog is here.

Blue Sky Thinking in Canada

We're heading towards the end of a marathon week in Canada, firstly in Alberta and now in Saskatchewan, working with educators, administrators and leaders of learning to think about some new ways we could inspire tomorrow's generations.

All the links from the past week which I've mentioned, examined or peeled back in my workshops can be found under the big Canada grouping in my online bookmarks. Within that, one can just click the small + sign next to any additional category that takes your fancy to narrow down the options. Happy researching and, above all, tell us here how you get on.

Image of Saskatchewan

An alternative to GTD: Lego brick self-assessment

Having reached the underwhelming nirvana of having nothing on my GTD list for the first time in three years, I'm considering a change of tack after reading about this on Info Aesthetics:

an alternative way to represent time schedule tracking by stacking different lengths of Lego blocks as a way to convey different sequential time periods. stacking hourly rows on top of each other builds up the whole day, while color represents the different projects at hand. a whole week of time tracking is created by setting up a series of rainbow-colored days. [original link]

It could be quite a nice way for kids to keep a non-verbal record of what they've done that day. It could be better than text, even, since they have to have some degree of understanding of how all the blocks of activity actually fit together in the abstract, having had the opportunity to build what they did in the concrete (or, rather, in the plastic). I wonder if it'll make it onto the newly revamped Assessment for Learning Toolkit...

Lehmann's Philly: the same, but different.

What is learning? For the past few nights I've been enjoying my time with Marcie and her boss, Chris Lehmann, Principle of the Science Leadership Academy, taking a look inside their school's way of thinking.

Learning and teaching is about what the students can do, not what the teacher is able to do. It's about what questions we can ask together, about being inquiry-driven, through questions which are authentic, to which we don't know the answers.

It's about being passionate and whatever we're learning has to matter. Chris' students were cutting sheet metal, part of a project to create a new type of biodiesel which would be more efficient than existing methods. The class applied for two patents this year, and two communities in Guatemala are developing the product to provide fuel for real.

It's got to be meta-cognitive, everyone's got to think about what they did, how they did it, what they could do better the next time. It's got to be technology-infused, technology which is ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. We've got to choose technologies not on the basis of what's new, but what is good for a given task. It's also about being on the same page as the community with whom you wish to interact.

What do certain tools do the best?
Lehmann's approximate and reasonably false taxonomy:

Research: RSS, delicious, Google, Wikipedoa
Collaborate: wiki, google docs, moodle
Create: blogging, drupal
Present: podcasting, uStream, Flickr, iTunesU
Network: Twitter, Skype, Facebook, email.

But tools don't teach
We need strong pedagogical frameworks to see the whole learning experience, onto which we can slot the right tool for the right job. It's categorically the wrong approach to come up with an idea for a "blog project", "a podcasting project", "a social networking project", in the same way as it's wrong to approach pedagogy from a starting point of "what pedagogical proof is there that social networking improves attainment". You start with the pedagogy and use an appropriate tool to fit the pedagogical bill.

In Chris' school, every member of staff and every bone of curriculum is hung on Understanding By Design, with all the teachers using and all the students understanding the same metalanguage of the oeuvre. By doing this, students are able to reverse engineer the work they have done within the pedagogical framework the teachers have used, in the same way as assessment for learning strategies aim to promote. They are able to learn about learning.

Planning
So, planning is undertaken along these five structures:

Desired results: where do you want to go
Learning objectives
Understandings: the big ideas - why are we teaching or learning this?
Essential Questions: The throughline - what do we keep coming back to throughout the inquiry?
Skills and Content: What is the stuff that we have to know to get to those big ideas?

Assessment
If, after a period of learning, you assess by giving out a test, you are not doing project-based learning. Tests and quizzes are but a dipstick, a quick snapshot of where everyone is at. The projects themselves, the projects that are the creation of the students themselves, are the main assessment tool. They are constant, they are ongoing.

What Chris is describing seems to me, albeit in other meta-language, to be what Scotland's Assessment for Learning and Assessment as Learning programmes are beginning to achieve throughout our small corner of the world. The ambition of his school's learning approach reflects the Curriculum for Excellence. I really shouldn't be so surprised that Chris is one of those here at NECC with whom I'm the most comfortable chewing the educational fat.

Quirkology: there is no career path, but there is luck

Last week Bernie Goldbach took me out to dinner with about a dozen of his third year graduating students, all of them working with social media in some way or other (there was also a lovely first year there, who dared to come along to chat with a strange Scotsman and had to go to the trouble of getting a babysitter - much kudos).

The thing that got me: they thought that their careers would be plan-outable, that there was some pre-determinable path on which to travel in order to get their dream job. I tried to pop the bubble gently.

They're not alone. Last year NESTA commissioned Demos to produce the Ready For The Future? report, and it reveals how fair young people reckon the world is. 90% believe that if you work hard at something you'll get what you deserve, and only 30% think that getting on in your life involves any luck.

This is borne out further still. The majority of young people feel that qualifications are the most important factor, by far, in getting a job. In fact, they feel that being hard working is twice as important as being a good communicator and four times more important than being creative. Schools have never done as well, with constantly 'cleverer' kids getting their grades A-C. Parents are over the moon, with certificated 'proof' that their child has really been working as hard as they said they were. But have government policies over the years and around the world on attainment, attainment, attainment "emphasised what's measurable rather than what's important"? Bill, who's currently assessing said attainment, seems to think so.

Yikes - our economy depends on creative, innovative youngsters to thrive, yet they feel they're doing their bit by doing what they think school expects of them - getting good exam results at the cost, if need be, of creativity and communication skills.

No wonder employers complain bitterly about never having the personnel they need.

I want to get back to this idea, though, of having a set path, and that hard work alone will get you through this imaginary path and towards success. Speak to anyone who you might frame as a mentor and the words 'luck' and 'opportune moment' will crop up somewhere. Luck does play a part, serendipity leads to wonderful things and it's only the fact that some take that serendipity and do something with it that makes the difference between those who are 'lucky' and 'unlucky'. I've also started to get the distinct feeling these past few years that the more connected you are to more people, the more these serendipitous moments crop up. It used to be something to meet someone who knew someone you knew. With Facebook, it's not so uncommon to find you're related to them.

I'm also reading a bit of Richard Wiseman's Quirkology, where research showed that those who feel lucky generally are better off than those who feel unlucky. It's something I notice the minute I land to start working in the USA: people are incredibly confident in their ability to pull off something really good, regardless of how much or how little preparation, fundraising or graft they've done. It's often referred to as an "enterprising attitude" or "self belief". I think it's just that the people in the USA who I've been fortunate to work with feel that they've been lucky in life, and it rubs off on the amazing work they have done (of course, there's also plenty of hyperbole of mediocrity in good measure). People in Scotland have long held the belief that we are crap at everything, especially football (we're historically on the same level as the USA, did you know, and currently doing a lot better).

So, the message for those sitting their exams at the moment or about to set out on that non-existent yellow brick road of employment: do all the revision you can, work as hard as you can this summer in the real world and, of course, start feeling lucky.

Or, as the late design legend Paul Arden put it in the title of his superb book on creativity:

It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be
(The world's best-selling book by Paul Arden)

A comma's omission can make all the difference, eh? But it made me buy the book. And it is good.

Pic: Yellow Brick Road

Stephen Heppell: Measuring creativity

How do you measure creativity. How can we work out the struggle of the 'exchange rate' of assessment. What is "the equivalent" of a 1500 word essay?

• an animation?
• running an online discussion for a week?
• scripting and posting a 3 minute podcast?
• authoring an explanation in Flash?
• annotating a week's worth of delicious links?

What are your suggestions of 'equivalence' in an ingenius, creative school system?

David captures things differently over here, and managed to get the Q&A session tapped in.

E-Scapes - taking eportfolios to the next (formative) level

Does your technology make learning better? Does it make assessment better? Does it make learning more enjoyable? These are the key questions asked by Professor Richard Kimbell from Goldsmiths when he's looking at technology, and he found a problem with all three in e-portfolios. They need to change.

Currently, performance portfolios are created as an end result of project work. With teachers who are increasingly aware and communicating what will gain a good grade, we end up with a project and therefore a portfolio which are not real, which are fiction, which have no real sense. It is, says Kimbell, one of the reasons girls do better than boys - girls have more patience and creativity for presenting the results in a well-finished manner.

Cue Project E-Scape: this project was about generating real-time performance portfolios and finding new ways of assessing them. Initially, the idea began on paper.

A change in pedagogy
The tasks are real: repackaging lightbulbs to make the packaging reusable and multifunctional. The results: the box should be hexagonal, with a taper for the narrow end of the bulb. If you get enough of them you would end up with a sphere to surround the lightbulb. You can cut the ends to create lettering or animals which are then projected around the wall. Their projects are entitled "Your name in lights" or "Jack-In-A-Box light". You can see an example of project in this video.

Students, in their projects, are handed a script by the teacher, which choreographs their activity but does not dictate it. It's a scaffold for some improv. These students end up working like engineers, with the teacher in a technician role: "you could do it this way, or that way, or this way. It's your call". Teachers hate it, seeing their role reduced in some way from the sage on the stage to very much the guide on the side.

The need to make assessment digital
The project became digital as a result of an argument, an argument between two students about where their project should go. If only the teacher could capture that discussion it would make such a difference to the final assessment, providing a way to fill a gap in the learning process which is rarely assessed, if at all.

E-Portfolios, though, have three core problems. Firstly, they are generally works of fiction, created in a sterile ICT suite or on a laptop in a students' bedroom, not in the workshop or art room where the action (and learning) was happening. Secondly, It's a secondhand activity, digitally constructed as an afterthought to the learning itself. Finally, what kids tell you they're learning is different from what they write down in a portfolio.

So, E-Scapes asked if they could capture, in a portfolio, the learning that was happening in typical, messy, complex classrooms. They answered with handheld learning devices and collaborative co-creation of ideas: ideas are created, swapped around and extended by team-mates. As work is done, step-by-step, the work is uploaded dynamically to the e-portfolio website. Each stage of the learning 'build' can be accessed in a browse mode, or examined in greater detail. It's real-time, so the teacher can see and hear everything, all of the time, act on the spot or react later. You can see more of the process in this video.

How can this be assessed?
One potential methodology is based upon the law of comparative judgement. Think about eye tests, where we are asked which spot is sharper, the one on the left or the one on the right? We've only got two options, so we answer which one is better, without considering or knowing why. Taking this further, the E-Scape team, with their especially hard-to-judge non-identical projects, is to use a comparative pairs methodology (pdf). On a very simplistic level, assessment from seven judges is carried out on pairs of projects at a time, each judge marking 17 pieces of work. The judges decide which one is better, and move onto the next pair for the first round.

In a second round, the 'core' of median performances are taken and worked on further to create a rank order of evenly spaced performances. Using the resulting curve of performance, grade boundaries can be created retrospectively to award a grade, and the margin of error between the highest and lowest opinion of judges can be seen as clear as a whistle. These large margins of error are down to judges disagreeing, so these portfolios need to be pulled out and looked at further. We can also look at the judges and how consensual each one is with the rest of the judging team (the principle of moderation, which Scottish schools already practice). Those who are too harsh or too 'easy' can stimulate discussion as to why a project might be more or less strong. So this formative assessment informs the judges and teachers.

The reliability coefficient of all this? 0.93% It's virtually faultless, and no assessment system anywhere else comes close to getting this realistic in its outcomes. The team are working now on the third phase pairs being selected automagically after each judgement has been made, making sure that the process is as efficient as possible.

If you want to take more away from this model, the innovation in teaching, learning and assessment, I cannot recommend highly enough the interim reports on the TERU website: Phase 1 and Phase 2. You might also want to watch this 30 minute programme on new e-assessment ideas, where the E-Scape project is featured, and follow Professor Kimbell in discussion on the assessment element of the project in this programme.

Pic: Moleskin PDA

3/3: The best school systems in the world: best students come from best teachers

This is the final of three posts in a series paraphrasing the 2007 McKinsey report (pdf), which analysed what made the best education systems in the world, well, the best.

It's the way you tell 'em
It was a Northern Irish comedian who explained comedy like that, but the same might be said of teaching. The only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction, the way teachers teach.

In the top performing school systems learning occurs when students and teachers interact, so the quality of interaction is vital. But it follows naturally that for teachers to learn to be better teachers they need coaching practice, teacher training in the classroom, the development of stronger school leaders and, importantly, more teachers learning from each other.

Canada's Alberta defines instruction with a set of 30 variables: very messy, very complex, in the same way that a year's worth of blogged reflections can be very messy until you review them.

Curriculum development is one way to improve teaching - political, controversial, difficult, but easy from system management: give a space to debate.

Providing teachers with the capacity and knowledge on how to deliver is more important and more difficult to gain an oversight of. Teachers need:

• high expectations
• shared sense of purpose
• collective belief in their ability to make a difference

These three things need to happen at the same time or risk having no impact.

Satisfying every teacher's needs... and a blog will do it

1. Building practical skills during initial training (providing ongoing support beyond the first 24 months, and making better connections between university lecture and classroom. There's no point in learning technology skills, for example, only to fail in updating them - this wastes £800m per year in the UK in unused new technologies).
2. Placing coaches in schools to support teachers - good teachers with good teachers
3. School leaders as 'instructional leaders'. The best teachers become principals (and, I presume, Principals or Head Teachers lead on pedagogy, not accounts).
4. Teachers are enabled to learn from each other, all the time.

With these satisfying conditions, there are also skills or attitudes on the part of the teacher if (s)he is to take advantage of them, which include:

1. Becoming aware of the weaknesses in their own practice
2. Gaining an understanding of best practice, which is precise enough to use in their own practice, immediately, ideally in their own classroom (think doctors and lawyers)...
3. Holding a shared purpose and a collective belief that they can make a difference: both required to make this happen (salary is not enough).
4. Knowing how to carry out frequent lesson observation and being open to being observed regularly, significant time to plan jointly (one afternoon per week), timetabled well so that teachers of same subjects can cooperate and collaborate, with systems in place to disseminate excellent practice throughout the school as quickly as possible.

Alberta benchmarks itself against international tests such as PISA and TIMSS to know when standards need to be raised. Finland "does well because [we] ave high standards". As systems get better, the system relaxes. Where things are not going so well the curriculum is highly unflexible.

Do you have an increasingly flexible system or an increasingly relaxed one? Are teachers therefore being empowered or held back? Are teachers, Principals and Head Teachers then taking advantage of the flexibility to improve, swiftly and in a connected way, as they best systems already do, or are they ready to help build a system which affords greater skill in the workforce?

Photo: Swimming lesson: I like this title graphic: the coach teaching by holding on, only to let go later. It's a good metaphor for restrictive systems trying to make things better, regardless of whether that's what the systems should be doing.

Related posts:
1/3: It's not (all) about the money
2/3: Finding the best teachers

2/3: The best school systems in the world: finding or creating the best teachers?

This is the second of three posts in a series paraphrasing the 2007 McKinsey report (pdf), which analysed what made the best education systems in the world, well, the best.

Duh Point #1: You need Good Teachers
We've all had the experience of being taught by a dire teacher, someone who turned us off learning or, at best, made it difficult to enjoy. Why is that as professionals we have such a hard time saying that there are Bad teachers out there, just as we find it so easy to say that there are some Good ones, too?

Tennessee and Dallas research shows that a good and bad teacher can make a 50%/49% difference in attainment over three years. Students learn three times as fast as those in poor teacher classes. Low-performing primary teachers create damage which is irreversible. Quick progression early on is essential, with p.15 of the report giving lots of examples of the issues of not doing this by 11 years, with the impossibility of getting to university by 14 years old when the damage has been done earlier in the school career). Reducing a class size from 23-15 improves performance by 8% at best.

Again, let's take a look at the most successful systems. Finlanders only start school at 7, for 4/5 hrs per day for the first two years. Similarly, evidence in the UK recently points to the damage that can be done to reading when children are pushed into it too early. So starting students early, having smaller class sizes, pumping in more money... nothing seems to work at creating excellent systems. Maybe the answers lies in those (who should be) empowered to make the biggest lasting changes in education: the teacher.

Duh Point #2: Faakid ashay la yua'tee
One cannot give what one does not have
In the USA and the Middle East teacher recruiting comes from bottom third of college graduates; these countries also lag in the school system league tables. So is a challenge behind the success of any education system raising the profile of the profession, in order to attract a better raw ingredient to 'bake' into a teacher?

In many far Eastern countries there is a far more 'Confucius' respect for teachers, leading to a greater status for the profession and, in return, more people coming into it. Selection of teachers is often competitive and tested (otherwise there's potential for 40 years of bad teaching, with maybe 10,000 children affected).

Where teachers are selected after the teacher training course, there is oversupply and difficulty in finding employment. Therefore the best candidates are turned off from teaching and every student ends up with less attention during the teacher training course.

So how do you attract the best, and keep them away from other professions which, traditionally, have paid more salary? Financially, Korea has got away with paying 161% of the OECD average by doubling class sizes from the average 17 to 30, allowing the percentile increase in salary.

Finally, though, is the question of what you do once you have the best initially trained teachers, and what of the ones who've been in the profession for years already? The answer, logically, is in professional development and reflection on that development. Again, those languishing in the league tables tend to be offered less structured opportunities to reflect: just 1 hour of paid professional development per year is given in New York schools versus 100 hours of supported, paid professional development and reflection in Singapore.

For those systems which won't move, maybe some other instrinsic reward is required, like the potential for being re-employed. Maybe Jeff Utecht's interview questions should be asked of any teacher wanting a new job in 2008.

This is where blogging teachers stand to thrust themselves, and their countries, ahead in the international stakes. By reflecting regularly and as part of an internationally benchmarked professional group, blogging teachers are already heads and shoulders above the average.

Pic: Gillian Craig

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1/3: It's not (all) about the money