Recognising and Measuring Teaching Effectiveness

One of the areas of responsibility for my team is building capacity of teachers across the system. 
To support our learning as a team in doing our work I have established a work blog that is used to share and develop thinking and ideas related to the work of the Professional Leadership and Development Unit of the Catholic Education Office Sydney.
I posted the following for members of the team to engage with and thought that it may be worth sharing more widely.
There is currently some serious discussion and thinking being put into the connection between teachers' pay, the quality of teaching and student performance. (See Sydney Morning Herald 17/03/2011)
Much has been made of the 2007 McKinsey Report, How the world's best performing school systems come out on top, as has been made of Hattie's 2008 work, Visible Learning particularly concerning teachers and what they do.
This research has often been reduced to a simplistic mantra: "It is what teachers do that matters for students and their learning."
One of the areas that is on our agenda is building the capacity of teachers: those graduate teachers who are commencing their careers, but also experienced teachers who wish to engage with the higher level professional standards for teaching.
Linked with this are a number of issues:

1. What works in developing the early career teacher? (Types of induction? Use of mentors? Reflective practice?)
2. Capacity of supervisor in recognising teaching standards in practice? (Use of standards? Understanding standards? Own practice? Who should be a supervisor?)
3. Locating accreditation processes into a career long learning framework rather than a compliance exercise.
4. Developing higher level skill in teachers to benefit the profession.

Linda Darling-Hammond poses a challenge of getting a good teacher into every classroom. Defining "good" and recognising "good" in practice is a challenge.
If we are to lead the thinking about building the capacity of teachers we need to address the question of building capacity from what towards what; and in what context and for what purpose.
Simon Breakspear earlier this year posted the following on his blog:

There is some increasingly interesting research coming out of the States which is seeking to investigate the ‘black box’ of successful schools – what do effective teachers do?

Harvard’s Tom Kane backed by Gates Foundation funding is conducting one of the most remarkable projects yet. Launched in the fall of 2009, the Measures of Effective Teaching Project is the largest effort of its kind to collect video, student perceptions, and assessments of student achievement and teacher knowledge. The project’s goal is to learn what effective teaching looks like.

The website for Measures of Effective Teaching is worth having a look at.
Your thoughts and experiences would be welcomed.


Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/51023923@N07/4688182943/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past

Today I stumbled onto an RSA animate of a speech given by Sir Ken Robinson last year on changing paradigms in education. In this speech Robinson believes that in education we're trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past.


This is because it's in the gene pool of education.


Public education is a product of The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment constructed a view of the mind, and as such the learner and also the curriculum. The Industrial Revolution provided an economic reason for public education. Our present model of schooling is modelled on the interest and the image of industrialism.


Robinson argues that models of learning (and therefore schooling) need to go in the opposite direction to standardisation; standardisation reflected in curriculum and testing. This doesn't imply a lowering of standards.


Below is the RSA animation to the talk (11mins 40 sec).

The full version of the original speech is below (55mins 20secs).

There are a number of questions that arise that perhaps require some divergent thinking!

• What are our new models of learning?
• How can education best meet the future?
• What leadership is needed?
• How can this change be brought about?
• What is needed to make this change last?

After all schools are remarkably resilient places in their present structure.

Born Creative ...

Born Creative is a new publication from DEMOS (the London-based think tank).

This publication is a collection of essays focusing on creativity and arts in the early years education.

Australian Educational Policy – Starting to Listen?

The following Blog Post was placed on the Innovation Unit blog. An interesting view on the Australian situation from an English perspective written by David Price. For more see David Price's Blog.

Having now spent 3 weeks working with Australian Principals, teacher trainers, teachers and student, and talking to press and media people, I feel like I'm starting to get a handle on the issues currently at play. The debates around education, for a Brit, are similar to almost all aspects of Aussie life: familiar and yet, unfamiliar, at the same time.

I wrote earlier about the Australian take on the 'accountability framework' – it seemed like publishing student/teacher results on a national website was bound to lead to league performance tables by any other means. A week later – and I'm sure my post had nothing to do with it – state Education Ministers were in Canberra, meeting to discuss 'school performance'. I happened to be in Parliament House at the time they were discussing it, and joked with colleagues that, if they'd let me in, I'd tell them to avoid league tables at all costs. Lo and behold, they seem to have reached that conclusion anyway, according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald. The problem was familiar, the solution, unfamiliar – prevent the aggregation of individual school reporting into a national blunt instrument. Minister Gove, please take note.

And then there's the development of the National Curriculum. With the best of intentions, the Federal government had aspired to create a Finnish 'pared-down' curriculum, which would encourage flexibility. The consultation process, however, has spawned too much elaboration leading to criticisms of the draft curriculum as 'overcrowded and incoherent' . Amazingly enough, the government seems to be listening, and the intention is now to scale back in future drafts.

So, from a UK viewpoint, a familiar set of issues. But an unfamiliar response, in that people seem to be listening to school principals, teachers and – as in the event I attended last week in Melbourne, courtesy of Musical Futures school, Trafalgar Primary – listening to learners themselves. We (including our popular press) could learn a lot from the way schooling is publicly discussed in Australia.