Jeff Piontek is an author, keynote speaker and teacher (most importantly). He has worked with many at-risk school districts nationally and is a thought leader in on-line and blended learning.
There is already a strong backlash against politicians and school administrators because of high-stakes standardized tests, and the way results are used to justify school closures. Some parents and educators have encouraged families to “opt out” of tests, such as those related to the Common Core State Standards, as a way to protest these practices and the effects they are having on children, families and communities. However, Yong Zhao, education professor at the University of Oregon, recommends that parents, educators and policymakers go a step further, and use the moment to re-examine the role of testing—and the issue of accountability—more broadly.
Tests are just one form of assessment, he points out, and limited in what they can accurately measure. Important qualities such as creativity, persistence and collaboration, for example, are tricky to measure, because they are individualized and situation- or task-specific (someone may collaborate well in one group setting but not in another). And no test can measure whether children are receiving “a quality learning experience that meets the needs of individual students.”
High-stakes tests concern Zhao the most, because he says they represent more than misspent time and money. He faults them for suppressing creativity and innovation, and creating narrowed educational experiences, because everything that is not measured becomes secondary or is dismissed entirely. Moreover, “constant ranking and sorting” creates stress and makes students less confident.
By contrast, feedback that avoids needless comparisons among students can be very useful, and doesn’t require much time or money. When it’s clear which skills and content need to be mastered (such as the ability to conjugate verbs in order to become proficient in a foreign language), low-stakes tests can help learners direct their attention to filling in the gaps in their knowledge. More helpful still are explicit written assessments that describe an individual’s progress. The key to good assessment, says Zhao, is to ask: “Whose purpose does this serve? Is the learner trying to get better using assessment, … rather than just using it to judge?”
Parents seeking assurance that their children are learning can look at their children’s engagement level, and notice if they’re exploring topics or pursuits that interest them, and improving in their areas of interest.
Steps for Identifying Needs
As for how to evaluate schools, he recommends that parents and community members ponder some key questions. “First of all, ask if the school is really personalizing learning to meet individual needs, with a broad and flexible curriculum,” he says. Children interested in music, for example, should have equal opportunities to develop that skill as to develop literacy.
The next question he would ask: “Is school an engaging place—do students want to go to school? If the more they go to school, the more they hate it, that would be a horrible place,” he says. Analogies with taking bad-tasting medicine fail, he adds, because there’s no disease involved, and “children don’t need to be fixed.”
And finally, “Do the teachers care about the development of the whole child?” he asks. “If a teacher just helped a student who had lost hope because of a personal problem, that should count for something. Teachers should be human mentors. Children can take ownership of their learning, but inevitably they will encounter setbacks. Do teachers help develop their social, emotional and physical well being, and challenge them and push them forward?”
On a broader societal level, educational equity can be gauged by whether schools in low-income jurisdictions receive comparable resources to invest in good teachers, professional development, materials, facilities, field trips and other enrichment activities.
Who Should be Accountable for What?
Teaching can be mandated, but learning can’t, Zhao points out; what adults can do is provide opportunities and offer guidance when needed. That’s what we should be tracking, he says—“accountability should shift back to what we do for kids, rather than what they’ve done for us.”
In other words, each person should be held accountable only for what he or she can control—the educators for providing an environment that stimulates and supports individual learning, and the community and government for providing sufficient funding to enable them to carry this out equitably.
Even if funding levels are modest (in the first article in this series, Zhao explained how quality can be achieved economically), the best way to ensure that the funds are well spent is to have greater local autonomy. “Locally controlled entities are much closer to their constituents,” Zhao says, and more responsive to pressure to cater to their needs. Those most invested in the schools’ learning environments—the children and their parents—then wouldn’t have to work as hard to get their schools to change direction.
Education is not “omnipotent,” says Yong Zhao, education professor at the University of Oregon, but it can change the trajectory of people’s lives. Most recent education policies, such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core, have sought to better realize this potential by aiming for parity in outcomes, as indicated by standardized test scores. Proponents, including many civil rights groups, see such initiatives as a way to shine a light on inequality in education and pressure schools to help disadvantaged students graduate with the same knowledge and skills as their more advantaged peers, with the goal of better preparing them for colleges and careers.
Zhao says he embraces the underlying goal—to even the playing field for all children—but notes that inequities have been apparent for a long time. Furthermore, he believes that serving the best interest of all students requires a very different approach that starts with a paradigm shift in how we view education. Attempts to standardize individual student outcomes are an unhelpful, if not downright harmful, way to promote the development of human beings, he says. Instead, “we need to start with the individual child, instead of what others think [that child] should become.”
After researching different educational approaches over the years (his findings aresummarized in several books) Zhao has concluded that the most fruitful form of education—and the one with the best chance of empowering children to overcome poverty and other disadvantages—offers each child the opportunity to pursue his or her own goals, in a stimulating and supportive environment. Unfortunately, low-income students are least likely to have any of these elements in their schools. It’s this “opportunity gap,” rather than any “achievement gap,” that characterizes unequal education and is fully within the power of schools (and their funders) to remedy, Zhao says.
In the alternate vision, individual differences are not flaws to be fixed; the emphasis instead is on helping all students to identify and develop their areas of interest, and to build on their strengths. Standards, curricula and tests would play a very minor role, as tools to be deployed only when they can help a particular student to progress. Learning would be organized around individuals, instead of classes and grades. And rather than looking to schools and teachers to manage students’ learning, we should “give children autonomy, trust that they want to learn, and let them become owners of their learning enterprise.”
This also means redefining excellence to focus on how well educators support individual pursuits. “Look at what children are interested in or can do, and plan education with that in mind, rather than trying to fix them,” Zhao writes in his book, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.” “Expect everyone to be great, and start educating from that angle, and things can be very different.”
Whose Standards, and to What End?
Academic standards—whether part of Common Core or not—are subjective, Zhao says, and don’t account for the fact that children naturally develop at different rates, or that learning is more haphazard than linear. He also doesn’t buy the argument that they benefit disadvantaged children by setting a high bar. “Being able to pass a prescribed test is not a high expectation,” Zhao says. “To become exceptional in an area that you want to pursue—that is a high expectation, and it is about having dreams. By imposing standards, we are not elevating expectations, but perhaps driving down expectations, especially for poor communities. … We are depriving them of the chance to dream.”
Even worse, standards can “cause psychological damage to those not judged as good,” Zhao says. This can set off a vicious cycle, creating feelings of low self-efficacy and disengagement that undermine further learning, because “few people want to stick to a place where they are constantly told that they are not good.” A system based on punitive consequences for not meeting expectations can also backfire: If it gets children decoding letters or adding numbers sooner rather than later, but diminishes their interest in reading and leads them to hate math, Zhao asks, “is it worth it?”
Last but not least, “standards describe the past, not the future,” and reflect the notion that children must “fit into the world as it is,” he says. “We forget that our children are the creators and owners of the future.”
That said, certain types of standards (used with caveats) can be helpful in two ways, Zhao says. They can guide learners, by suggesting a sequence to follow, and describing the knowledge and skills needed in a given field. Such information is dynamic, subjective and personal—those interested in becoming mathematicians might benefit from different math standards than their otherwise inclined peers, for instance. Each individual should therefore be free to decide which standard he or she wants to pursue, whether that means using an established math program such as Singapore math, or the Common Core standards, or developing their own set of standards, Zhao says.
The other useful application of standards is broader, but it is for schools rather than learners, Zhao says: Standards can be developed to define the educational opportunities schools should provide to all students.
Does a Mandated Curriculum Help or Hinder Learning?
Standards (and their associated tests) often drive the design of a curriculum. Placing a lot of weight on test scores in a few subjects has led to “curriculum narrowing,” especially in schools that are under pressure to boost their aggregate scores or else lose funding or face closure. These are usually schools serving low-income students, meaning that “disadvantaged children experience a much less rich education than their advantaged counterparts,” Zhao says, and are therefore less likely to feel a connection to what they’re learning or to view it as relevant to their lives.
But there’s an even deeper problem, he adds: Any set curriculum is counterproductive and also discriminatory, along a dimension that affects people of all incomes and races.
It is counterproductive because the notion that following a set curriculum will make students “college and career ready” is misguided, he says. Not only is college acceptance “an artificial goal, as if life ends at college,” but there are many types of colleges and majors, requiring different sets of knowledge and skills. That is even more true of careers, especially in a rapidly changing world in which many professions will soon become obsolete and others have yet to be invented. “It is very difficult, if not impossible, to predict which course of study will give one a better chance of employment,” Zhao says. “If you want to be ready for a career, you’d better be the one to create that career yourself.” The best preparation for that, he adds, is for students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and chart their own educational paths.
The second issue is that schools that are only oriented toward strengthening students in certain academic areas are imposing subjective and narrow definitions of success on all students and effectively discriminating against those whose interests and strengths lie in other areas, such as music, art, sports and crafts, Zhao says.
Even the basics—the knowledge that everyone needs in order to function in our society—don’t justify a mandated curriculum, he contends. A broad, flexible curriculum that supports children’s individual interests and strengths is more likely to engage them and promote learning, so that truly essential knowledge becomes “difficult to escape—when individuals want to pursue anything, they must learn the basics, so the basics are sought after, instead of imposed.”
A Different Mindset
What all this adds up to is a need to “re-imagine education,” Zhao says. His ideal educational environment (detailed here) would combine the essential elements of democratic schools and certain types of project-based learning programs. This can be accomplished even on modest budgets, he notes; what matters more is mindset.
He recommends questioning all basic assumptions. For example: “Is the teacher the only instructor, or can students help? How about using resources beyond the school, like the community or parents?” (A recent article shows how one school is leveraging such resources.) Technology can also expand access to resources within the wider community.
Another thing to bear in mind, Zhao says, is that schools that provide a learning environment that supports individual needs benefit greatly from harnessing their students’ intrinsic motivation, because they don’t have to work hard to try to overcome resistance to learning. All human beings are born with the capacity and desire to learn, he says, but their environment can either suppress or encourage that drive. “If people are driven by their own goals, that are meaningful to them, and feel a sense of accomplishment and self efficacy, then they really want to learn.”
Recently I wandered around the South by Southwest ed-tech conference, listening to excited chatter about how digital technology would revolutionize learning. I think valuable change is coming, but I was struck by the lack of discussion about what I see as a key problem: Almost no one who is involved in creating learning materials or large-scale educational experiences relies on the evidence from learning science.
We are missing a job category: Where are our talented, creative, user-centric “learning engineers” — professionals who understand the research about learning, test it, and apply it to help more students learn more effectively?
Jobs are becoming more and more cognitively complex, while simpler work is disappearing. (Even that old standby, cab driving, may one day be at risk from driverless cars from Google!) Our learning environments need to do a better job of helping more people of all ages master the complex skills now needed in many occupations.
I am not suggesting that all subject-matter experts (meaning faculty members) need to become learning engineers, although some might. However, students and faculty members alike would benefit from increased collaboration between faculty members and learning experts — specialists who would respect each other’s expertise — rather than relying on a single craftsman in the classroom, which is often the case in higher education today.
Education technology has enormous potential to help. While often expensive upfront, it has the chance to make learning more affordable, reliable, available, data-rich, and personalized. The technology within new learning environments — for example, an interactive simulation offered as part of a well-designed MOOC — is available 24/7, and can provide patient, repeated, and varied practice with supportive feedback that does not embarrass learners.
In the future, these environments may follow learners across their life spans, filling gaps from their past while allowing faculty members to provide the coaching, feedback, and motivation that is possible only with human interaction.
Unfortunately, technology has only a chance to help — there is no guarantee. While we hope that only the best instructors are engaged with technology, imagine your worst college professor. In the old days, that person damaged just a few hundred students per year. Thanks to video on demand and other wonders of technology, today that person might damage a few hundred thousand students — a weapon of mass destruction. Not exactly a win for technology and learning.
Technology is not the problem. As Richard E. Clark suggested in his book Learning From Media: Arguments, Analysis, and Evidence, education technology serves only as a delivery vehicle. All technologies can deliver effective or ineffective instruction. The key question is what you ask students to do and how you help them do it, not what tools you use.
After decades of experimental work by cognitive scientists and others, we now know a lot about how people learn. Neurons do not follow Moore’s law, the prediction by Gordon Moore in the 1960s that semiconductors would double in capacity every two years. Since our brains’ cognitive machinery does not change year after year, the good news is that investing in learning science will have long-lasting benefits.
Science, however, is not enough. It’s never enough for real-world problems.
Consider the tens of thousands of chemical engineers working in the United States. Anyone building a modern pharmaceutical factory needs them. You trust them to get the safety and regulatory issues right, and to use modern chemistry.
Indeed, most of the design processes leading to the conveniences of modern life benefit deeply from mediation between science and its application to real-world problems. Physicians, too, can be seen as “engineers” who use their knowledge of human biological science to tackle various medical problems within the constraints of medical care, economics, regulations, and other factors.
So where are the learning engineers? The sad truth is, we don’t have an equivalent corps of professionals who are applying learning science at our colleges, schools, and other institutions of learning. There are plenty of hard-working, well-meaning professionals out there, but most of them are essentially using their intuition and personal experience with learning rather than applying existing science and generating data to help more students and professors succeed.
Not applying learning science leads us into trouble:
We make assumptions about learning that don’t match the facts. For example, we talk about the need to understand various “learning styles,” yet meta-analyses over decades show no practical benefits from bucketing minds into style categories, compared with well-designed single instruction.
Students, faculty members, and administrators seem reluctant to question educational suppliers (of software, textbooks, and other materials) who do not deliver good evidence that their products or services solve learning problems.
Colleges rarely run controlled trials, commonly used in medicine, to compare one approach to learning with another. Sometimes there are ethical concerns with such an approach: If you think a particular teaching method is good, it would be wrong to withhold it, and if it’s not good, it would be wrong to use it widely. Yet many other fields recognize that a promising discovery does not necessarily lead to large-scale benefits — you need to test assumptions. Oddly, in higher education it is unremarkable to change a course with no evidence (by adding a new reading list or teaching practice, for example), while experimenting with a group of courses to test an idea seems controversial. Kaplan University, where I work, runs dozens of controlled trials to make sure we know if an approach or intervention makes a difference before we adopt it.
We don’t do a good job measuring what students learn. For example, a chemistry professor creating a test problem about Boyle’s law (the mathematical connection between pressure, volume, and temperature for gases) may, without realizing it, formulate an item that tests reading ability more than comprehension of the concept.
So what are we to do? To get started, several recent books provide very approachable syntheses of learning science: E-Learning and the Science of Instruction, by Ruth C. Clark and Richard E. Mayer; Why Don’t Students Like School?, by Daniel T. Willingham; and Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else, by Geoff Colvin. I’ll add to the list a volume that I wrote with Frederick M. Hess, Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age: Using Learning Science to Reboot Schooling.
Just being exposed to information is never enough. To learn, instructional-design and teaching professionals need the same things their students do: We have to provide explicit practice and coaching on applying the science about learning for everyone involved in instruction. At Kaplan Inc., we have developed a training program for our more than 100 instructional designers, to help them apply learning science to solve practical learning problems. They might, for example, decide against using a fancy 3-D video game to teach a particular concept once they see research that found that a simpler tool makes the point more effectively.
It is not simple to go from reading the science to putting it to work, day in and day out.
We also need decision makers in higher education — especially those who buy learning materials and educational-technology offerings — to ask harder questions. For example: What learning science underpins this offering? Is there learning science behind a particular professional-development activity as well? Do you have valid and reliable data showing that a new product works better than what we’re using? Will you conduct a pilot program to demonstrate that it works better? How are you using data to improve the learner and staff experience?
New technologies offer a real opportunity to revolutionize learning. The capacity for efficient, accessible, reliable delivery of learning and the generation of more data about learning than we’ve ever had before are huge assets. However, the challenge is to use these technologies correctly.
Whether in the classroom, at home, or at work, we owe it to learners, employers, and families to do a better job at “learning engineering” than we’ve done so far.
By Bror Saxberg APRIL 20, 2015 Pete Ryan for The Chronicle
Bror Saxberg is chief learning officer at Kaplan Inc.
It all started in 1987, when I got a grant from the State of California. The state sent me eight Macintosh computers, never asking if I knew how to use them, and when they arrived I had no idea how to even turn them on. I realized then that I was going to fail if I didn’t get some help quickly. I looked around for colleagues who could help, but none of them had any idea. Our school had no IT department. So I took a leap of faith and confessed to my students that I had no idea how to use the new computers and that I needed help. This turned out to be a stroke of good luck, even though I did not see it that way at the time. It was the beginning of my new teaching methodology.
The students were absolutely thrilled to help me (can you imagine being asked to help a teacher?!), and that was the beginning of my collaborative teaching model. Only, at that point, it did not have a name, and in fact I had to hide it from other teachers who might have frowned on what I was doing. The students and I ended up spending hours after school and on weekends figuring out the computers and how to network them. I had never even heard the word “network” in a computer context. I was one of the first teachers in California to use computers in the classroom, and possibly the first in the nation to use computers in a journalism classroom.
I was soon sold on the idea of collaboration, respect, and trust in the classroom. And it turns out that building a culture of collaboration, respect, and trust is key to a successful blended classroom. The first action a teacher needs to take in the fall when school starts is to set up the culture. On the surface, this may sound like a waste of time, but in fact its importance cannot be overemphasized. Part of such a culture is understanding that the teacher is not the only expert in the room; in fact, students can know more than the teacher about some aspects of what they will be doing together.
Computers, tablets, and other electronic devices alone are not going to change the classroom. It is the change in culture that will make the difference.
To help everyone remember what it takes to set up a culture that works, I have come up with an acronym, TRICK. Each letter stands for an important part of the culture.
T = trust R = respect I = independence C = collaboration K = kindness
Trust The first thing to establish in the classroom is a culture of trust. That does not mean the students are given complete freedom to run wild and do what they want; it means the students trust each other to help in the learning process and the teacher trusts the students. The boundaries need to be established early in the semester. There are a variety of exercises to build trust that a teacher can use, ranging from the blind man’s game to walking into walls.
Since the teacher is the one in control, it is he or she who must take the initiative. Teachers need to put themselves into situations that require students to be trustworthy. Opportunities arise every day. For example, having students work in teams and be responsible to the team teaches trust. Creating a group blog or website gives students a natural way to develop trust in the team, and, if the teacher trusts the team, it builds a community of trust in the classroom.
However, the key to building trust is to actually trust the students. While that may seem counterintuitive to many teachers, it is really the only way to effectively build trust. For example, in my advanced journalism class, the students each have an individual story assignment, so no two students are doing the same thing. Some of the stories are particularly sensitive about issues in the school, the district, or the city. It takes a leap of faith on my part to trust students to get the information right and to write it up in an objective way. We publish the results online— typically garnering thousands of views—and in hard copy for three thousand local residents. Students have told me that trusting them to write the stories is significant in building their self-esteem.
The students also put out a newspaper or magazine. The newspaper class has an enrollment of seventy students, who work in teams on the paper. Six editors-in-chief are in charge of the class, giving the students critical leadership experience and a sense of control over the publication. The magazine classes have an enrollment of thirty-five and an editorial board of three editors. Each student in each class has a title that correlates to his or her responsibilities. Examples are news editor, editorial-page editor, feature-page editor, or reporter.
Besides having the students produce actual publications, a second suggestion is to allow the students to teach the class on a regular basis. For example, the teacher can designate one day a week when the kids take over the class for an hour or so. Having kids teach each other in small groups on a regular basis also creates a sense of trust in the class.
I also encourage the students to help with the technological side of the program. I use Google Docs to create documents and Adobe software to publish. New products come out daily, and many of those might be useful for me, but I have little time to investigate them. Thus, I ask my students to watch out for new software that might be useful for the program, tell me about it, and, if it seems appropriate, learn how to use it. They then share it with the rest of the class.
A third suggestion to enhance trust is to give students your home phone number, cell number, and e-mail and tell them to contact you when they have problems, but not later than a specified time in the evening. Just giving out that information provides for a culture of trust and caring. All students also have the same contact information for all other students including home phones, cell phones and addresses as well as my contact information.
A fourth suggestion is for the teacher to laugh at his or her own mistakes on a regular basis. We all make mistakes, and teaching students that mistakes are part of life is an important lesson in helping them accept themselves. I do that every day in class, and the mistakes are not difficult to find: Every day there is something that does not go as planned. Teachers who are willing to show that they are not perfect, don’t know everything, and can laugh at themselves can more easily develop trust.
Finally, and perhaps most important, is to put students in situations requiring them to think for themselves. They may stumble and have difficulties, but the key is to support them in their efforts while letting them solve the problem themselves. This builds trust in themselves, in the class as a whole, and between teacher and students.
Respect Teachers need to have sincere respect for their students, especially in today’s world, where the members of a class may come from very different backgrounds and experiences. But each one has unique gifts even if he or she also has unique problems. As a teacher I know how difficult it can be to respect students who create problems in the classroom, but it is up to the teacher to show respect. It goes a long way in making the student feel better about themselves.
Respect is part of trust. I trust the kids and respect them, and in turn they trust and respect me. Someone has to start the process, and it cannot be the students, since the teacher is in charge.
Giving students respect does not mean letting go of expectations. In fact, it means the opposite.
Teachers need to respect them as individuals and expect them to achieve at a high level. My expectations are high and I encourage my students to reach those standards by giving them the opportunity to revise their work on a regular basis. I use the mastery system model (which means students work on a skill until they master it) and grade only when students have finally mastered the standard. An innovative internet company called MasteryConnect.com has software that sup- ports this pedagogy. Grades can be very discouraging for kids but if teachers return an assignment with suggestions on how to improve or correct the errors and kids understand it is part of the process of learning, they will still be excited to learn.
Famed psychologists Albert Bandura talks about the power of self-efficacy and how a student’s self image determines how they feel about themselves. He defines self-efficacy as a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in specific situations and says that self efficacy plays a major role in how people (especially students) approaches goals, tasks, and challenges. According to Bandura’s theory, people with high self-efficacy—that is, those who believe they can perform well—are more likely to view difficult tasks as something to be mastered rather than something to be avoided.
David Kelley, CEO of IDEO and head of Stanford University’s d.school, has a similar philosophy which he calls Creative Confidence. He says the key to being creative and achieving is “believing in your ability to create change in the world around you. It is the conviction that you can achieve what you set out to do. We think this self-assurance, this belief in your creative capacity, lies at the heart of innovation. Creative confidence is like a muscle–it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience.”
Carol Dweck, social psychologist from Stanford University, talks about the power of “mindset” and how if people think their intelligence is flexible and can grow, they will achieve, but if they think it is fixed and there is nothing they can do about it, they tend to be afraid to try. People with a growth mindset understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They think that if they persevere, (mastery learning concept) they will succeed.
This is nothing new, but it is harder to do than to say. Students will rise to meet the expectations of their teachers and parents. By giving students the respect and having the expectation, teachers will be empowering kids. In my experience, students will achieve at levels far beyond what is expected if you give them the opportunity. Just believing in them helps them believe in themselves.
Independence
We all like independence; it is the foundation of our nation. For most children it starts when they are two years old and want to do everything themselves—to the chagrin of their parents. In elementary school, students want to be independent too, but as they progress through the system, they become more dependent on the teacher. By the time they are in high school—if they have been taught according to the old model—they are waiting to be told what to do. However, high school is a time when the students’ drive for independence should be at its peak. One way teachers can encourage this drive is to give students an opportunity to come up with their own projects within defined guidelines. For example, students could have a writing assignment, but one in which they pick the topic. It could be a restaurant review, with each student reviewing a restaurant of his or her choice.
Collaboration
Collaboration is an important part of the culture of the blended classroom. Students love to work with their peers, especially if they are working on a project they selected themselves. In fact, the main attraction of school for most students is being with their peers. So if teachers can make the environment a friendly, collaborative work space in which students feel comfortable, more learning will take place.
This type of learning is important for several reasons: 1) most workplaces today require collaboration and students need to practice those skills at school 2) students learn more when they are responsible for another students work 3) collaboration increases student interest in learning especially if it is on a common project such as a newspaper, magazine, video, or website.
Kindness
Kindness is self-evident. If students feel that the teacher is kind, they want to learn. I can remember many instances of being kind to students who had made mistakes. It paid off a hundred times, because the students were so grateful, it made them feel relaxed and accepted. Being kind not only in school, but in life in general, makes the difference. As the American religious leader William J. H. Boetcker (1873–1962) put it: “Your greatness is measured by your kindness; your education and intellect by your modesty; your ignorance is betrayed by your suspicions and prejudices, and your real caliber is measured by the consideration and tolerance you have for others.”
Esther Wojcicki teaches journalism and English at Palo Alto High School in California. She served as Chair of Creative Commons and is currently a vice-chair of Creative Commons and an advisor to The University of the People, a global online non-profit free university. You can follower her on Twitter @EstherWojcicki.
How do we measure learning beyond knowledge of content? Finding that winning combination of criteria can prove to be a complicated and sometimes difficult process. Schools that are pushing boundaries are learning that it takes time, a lot of conversation, and a willingness to let students participate in that evaluation.
“Most schools and most of our learning stops at knowing and we need to move that and broaden it to the doing and the reflecting,” said Bob Lenz, co-founder & chief executive officer of Envision Schools while participating in a Deeper Learning MOOC panel. The charter network’s teachers follow three steps for assessment: know, do, reflect. Skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration require practice, Lenz said. Students have to do them constantly and be observed throughout the process for a true assessment.
“The real power comes in the reflective process, both individually and with peers,” Lenz said. “Any of the deeper learning outcomes, the reflection is really where the power is and it puts the onus back on the student, instead of the teacher standing in judgment.” Most projects at Envision schools culminate in an exhibition of work at which students reflect on how they could have done things differently or improved on their work. All four years of high school at Envision are a cycle of performance frameworks feeding into a portfolio and culminating in a defense of four years of learning at which students show what they have learned by demonstrating their knowledge and skill, as well as the ability to learn how to learn.
RUBRICS
Teaching rubrics are a common tool in any classroom, but they can easily become a disguised checklist of tasks, instead of a living document designed to structure learning towards a desired skill or outcome. Setting clear goals about what students should know and be able to do when they graduate high school is a good way to start.
“We find it effective to start with the types of student outcomes that we’re after and have all the staff make sense of that, and commit to the common ‘why,’ and then have the instructional practices to reach those outcomes,” said Megan Pacheco, senior director of school design and implementation at the New Tech Network.
Having a rubric doesn’t mean students aren’t engaged in the assessment process or that there’s no room for surprise or creativity. “If those performance tasks are really open ended then students go about them in very unique ways,” Pacheco said. Asking students to dig into the rubric themselves, unpack it, compare themselves against it and reflect on that experience is a great way to get them to understand their own learning.
“Helping students not to think about assessment as just for a grade or the endpoint of learning, but really as that continuing path of development towards all the skills we know they need,” Pacheco said. Students could even be involved in creating the rubric.
“[Students] often don’t like using rubrics that I bring to them,” said Cady Staff, an eighth-grade teacher High Tech Middle Chula Vista. “So when I do use rubrics it would be a co-designed rubric.” Her students reject outside assessments that haven’t been personalized to their classroom and agreed upon by one another. The process of tinkering with the rubric can be on-going. For example, some students at the neighboring high school became interested in gun-violence and started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to make a documentary about gun violence in their lives. As they worked through their project, they continually changed what elements should be included in the rubric, as they experimented with what would entice people to give to their cause.
ASSESSING AT THE RIGHT MOMENT
In addition to making it clear to students what learning goals will be covered and required of them through the rubric or performance framework, students need constructive feedback in order to improve. But feedback isn’t always appropriate; there are times when it’s very effective and other times when it can be a waste of precious energy.
“Assessment is really time consuming and exhausting,” Staff said. “So when I do it, and give a lot of meaningful feedback, I want to do it at a time that it will help them to improve.” Students don’t want to know how they could have done better after they’ve already turned in the project. Peer assessment is another way for students to gain valuable input on how they can iterate on an idea or project, helping to push towards another, better version.
Assessment can happen as students work to improve their projects. Teachers don’t have to wait until students turn in a final product to know if they are understanding the content, demonstrating their knowledge, working well together, thinking critically through problems that arise and reflecting on their own work. In fact, that’s the only time many of those qualities can actively be assessed since learning happens over time and can’t be capture in just a snapshot. “Strive to help students assess their own deeper learning,” Staff said. When students can reflect on their own learning process to the point of assessing themselves, teachers know they’re learning deeply.
USING PISA AT SCHOOL LEVEL
One standardized test that has been praised for its ability to measure critical thinking and creativity is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international test that ranks countries in reading, math and science. While those scores give leaders a sense of U.S. students’ international competitiveness in the global market, they don’t give school-based data. A group of educators is trying to capitalize on what is considered to be a fairly effective test, bringing it down to the school level.
“It gives a school a sense of how they are doing on these deeper learning, critical thinking, problem solving skills,” said Peter Kannam, a managing partner with America Achieves tasked with coordinating the OECD Test for Schools. Schools have used the test to identify weaknesses and change course if necessary. One school found that while its students were reading more, they weren’t reading deeply. The school built in more emphasis on reading for enjoyment to engage students.
The drawback with the OECD Test For Schools, as with any assessment that tries to authentically measure soft skills, is that it’s expensive. It costs $11,000 to administer and score the OECD test in each school. “At the end of the day it costs money to grade,” Kannam said. That is typically the drawback with authentic assessment at scale. “We don’t need to necessarily do more assessments, we need to do better assessment,” Kannam said. He pointed out that many assessments currently in use for accountability purposes don’t give educators useful, actionable data at the classroom level.
SCALING AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENTS
Some educators are hoping that new assessments meant to test Common Core State Standards will provide more authentic assessment of some deeper learning skills. The Hewlett Foundation has been supporting work to grow the Deeper Learning Movement and believes that assessment will not only drive teacher practices, but is ultimately the only way to know if schools are succeeding in their efforts.
“We don’t know if we are getting any better unless we can document it,” said Marc Chun, program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. The foundation commissioned a National Center for Research, Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) study to evaluate the Smarter Balanced and PARCC tests for various aspects of deeper learning. The study found that the test actually does measure content and critical thinking better than any other test and it does a reasonable job at measuring written communication.
“Ultimately what we want students to be able to do is solve problems they’ve never seen before,” Chun said. That’s why he thinks even nationally administered tests like those being used to evaluate Common Core standards can be effective. If a classroom is doing incredible project-based work or sending students on interesting and dynamic internships the ultimate test of how much students learned is their ability to transfer that knowledge to a new setting.
While the new tests don’t measure effective oral communication, collaboration, learning how to learn or develop academic mindsets — the other three and a half parts of Hewlett’s definition of deeper learning — there is still a lot of work to be done to effectively scale up well-rounded assessments of deeper learning. But Chun believes the new tests will be a step in the right direction.
Teachers are increasingly being pushed into new roles as their ability to connect online opens up new opportunities. Educators are finding their own professional development, sharing lesson plans and teaching tips with colleagues around the world, and have often become ambassadors to the public on new approaches to teaching and learning. Easy access to information has empowered many educators to think and teach differently, but often those innovations remain isolated inside classrooms. Without a school leader who trusts his or her teachers, it is difficult to convert pockets of innovation into a school culture of empowered teachers.
One way of building that kind of unified school culture is through distributed leadership, the idea that no one person at the top of the hierarchy makes all the decisions that will affect the work lives of the adults in the building. Instead, the school principal or district superintendent empowers teachers and staff to run crucial aspects of a school, such as admissions, professional development and new teacher mentoring.
“Distributed leadership is not ‘I empower you to do exactly what I say,’ ” said Chris Lehmann, principal of Science Leadership Academy in an EduCon session about how to effectively distribute power. Often leaders believe they are distributing power, but they are actually just delegating. For teachers to buy into a system like this, which asks more of their time outside class, they must feel they are professionals trusted by leadership.
“Teachers have to really own what they are in charge of,” said Aaron Gerwer, intern principal at SLA. “They have to be invested in what they’re doing.” To get that investment, teachers have to know that support from leadership won’t be pulled away at the first bump or disagreement. There has to be space for different perspectives.
“It is a shared belief in the big ideas,” Lehmann said. “However, within the manifestation of the big ideas there’s a lot of room.” It’s the leader’s job to listen and include different viewpoints in a school’s vision statement, and once that structure is set it should guide every decision. If school staff are constantly re-examining core beliefs, there is no time to get good at anything. Through flexibility and distributed leadership, staff can work together to improve the teaching practices that help them reach those big goals.
“Just because you are empowered to take responsibility, there’s still that need for support,” said educator Lisa Williams. “That has to come from on top, on bottom and from left and right.” Other educators acknowledged that when power is distributed and then ripped away, it often results in disenchanted teachers disinclined to participate again.
When teachers are part of the decision-making process, it also makes it harder to complain. And while not everyone in a school is going to agree on how to approach every problem, if the process is consistent, individuals can trust that even when they don’t get their way it will be OK. However, it is just as important for a strong leader to recognize when certain difficult decisions must be made solo — like layoffs, for example. In a community like SLA, Lehmann has to take responsibility for that decision to preserve the working relationships of the rest of his staff.
HABITS OF MIND OF A DISTRIBUTED LEADER
Educators at EduCon had a lot of ideas about how leaders can gain the trust of their staff and genuinely hand over some decision-making power. Good leaders are out in the hallways and classrooms, staying connected to the real work in schools. Leaders model vulnerability, making it OK for their staff to admit a unit didn’t work as well as they’d planned or to ask for help supporting a difficult student. And, while many leaders want to be visible and timely, sometimes taking in information and reflecting before making a decision is the best course of action. Strong leaders try not to say “no” to ideas from teachers, but rather push them to refine their ideas until they are actionable.
“You have to be a planner and you have to be strategic,” Lehmann said. As with teaching, if a leader is constantly in crisis mode there won’t be the time and space to make the most strategic decisions or the strongest lessons. “Planning doesn’t mean having the answers,” Lehmann said. “It often means having the questions.” It also means anticipating the challenges and sticking with the hard work it takes to lead in this unconventional way.
IF IT’S SO HARD, WHY DO IT?
When done well, distributing leadership creates a community of people on the same page, working hard toward defined goals. And when teachers feel valued and trusted, they are more likely to trust and empower their students. “The way that SLA is led by Chris is the way that teachers teach,” said SLA teacher Tim Best. And when students are empowered to lead, they not only learn to trust their own capabilities — they also produce their best work.
Shifting school culture is not easy or quick. Often it is impossible to keep all the original staff and still make a culture change. “The people make the culture, so people are either going to come on board with you or you’ll have to coach them out,” Lehmann said. It takes careful and strategic scaffolding over a number of years (as many as seven) to shift and sustain a new school culture, he said.
Setting up the systems is the easy part. “The years it takes to get buy-in to make sure the change stays is the hard part,” Lehmann said. And ultimately, as with so many things in education, the success of a leader comes down to the strength of relationships.
“You can seek to control or you can seek to support, but very rarely can you do both,” Lehmann said. One underrated quality he says leaders need is the ability to say, “I’m sorry,” and mean it.
In his new book, Raising Kids Who Read, Daniel Willingham wants to be clear: There’s a big difference between teaching kids to read and teaching them to love reading.
And Willingham, a parent himself, doesn’t champion reading for the obvious reasons — not because research suggests that kids who read for pleasure do better in school and in life.
“The standard things you’ll hear about why kids should read I actually don’t think are very strong arguments,” he says. “Because if the goal is to become a good citizen or the goal is to make a lot of money, I can think of more direct ways to reach those goals than to read during your leisure time.”
Willingham wants his kids to love reading because, he says, “for me it’s a family value. It’s something that I love, something that I find important. I think I gain experiences I wouldn’t gain any other way by virtue of being a reader. And so naturally I want my children to experience that.”
The professor of psychology at the University of Virginia uses his new book to map out strategies for parents and teachers hoping to kindle that same passion for reading.
What are a few things we can do when kids are young to set them on a path to being passionate readers?
Before preschool, probably the most important thing you can do is to play games that help your child hear speech sounds: rhyming games, reading aloud books that have a lot of rhyme in them and other types of wordplay, like alliteration. That’s helpful.
Once they get that basic idea, you can get a little fancier. And these are the games that kids really love — where you play around with speech sounds.
If you had a child named Billy. You could say, ‘Daddy’s name is Cory. What if we took the first sound in Billy’s name, and my name is now Bory.’ That kind of stuff is comic gold for kids. I talk with a lot of kindergarten teachers who say it’s hard to get kids to stop doing stuff like that.
Banana-fana-fo-fana…
Exactly. You know, Dr. Seuss is full of that. Nursery rhymes are full of that. And it’s been known for a while that kids who grow up in homes where they are exposed to nursery rhymes learn to read more readily than other kids.
But how do you foster a love of reading in young children?
The most obvious is to be a model of someone who loves reading. One of the things I hit hard in this book is the idea of creating a sense in the child that this is what we value in our family. I think a lot of parents don’t appreciate what a powerful message that can be for kids — like the things that are on your wall, the rules you set in your household, who parents talk about as the people they respect.
You should model reading, make reading pleasurable, read aloud to your kid in situations that are warm and create positive associations. But also setting a tone where our family is one where we like to learn new things. We like to learn about the world, and a big part of that is reading. Developing a sense in the child that I am in a family of readers before the child can even read.
The second big piece I would recommend is you have to make reading the most appealing thing a child can do. It’s not enough that the child like reading. If they like reading but there’s something else available that they like more, they’re going to choose that. The easy way to start is to put books in places that your child would otherwise be bored. The most obvious one is in the car. Part of that is also making sure you’re not providing other types of ready entertainment at every moment.
My wife put a basket in our bathroom, full of kids magazines. My 6-year-old reads them voraciously, and now his 3-year-old brother copies him.
My 9-year-old is a very passionate reader, and I think her younger sister is too. But I think it’s in no small part that she grew up watching her older sister do this.
Do you think digital devices are a) keeping us from reading and b) keeping us from being able to focus?
There’s no evidence they’re keeping us from being able to focus. If you look at the way psychologists typically measure span of attention, there’s no evidence that it’s really declined in the last 50 years or so. The brain is plastic, but I think attention is so central to so much of what we do that it seems pretty improbable to me that attention span could shrink significantly. If it did, either we would all get really stupid or lots of other cognitive processes would have to adjust in some way.
I think there is something to what parents and teachers think they’re seeing. They feel like kids are more distractible than they were 10 years ago, and they blame digital devices. What all these digital devices have in common is they provide instant entertainment. And the entertainment they provide requires very little effort from me. It’s always available. There’s pretty much endless variety. So the consequence may be that span of attention hasn’t shrunk but rather what’s changed is our attitudes and beliefs. And our attitudes and beliefs are, ‘Bored is not a normal state of affairs. I really should never be bored.’
What’s your point of view when it comes to rewarding kids for reading?
Rewards have the real potential to backfire. You communicate to your child, ‘This is not something I expect you to do on your own.’ You pay people to do things that you think are unpleasant and that they wouldn’t do if you weren’t paying them. So, by paying your child for reading, you’re very clearly communicating to your child, ‘This is not something that I expect to be pleasurable for you.’
There is good empirical evidence that, when you pay people to do something, if you find the right reward they will do more of it. But once the reward stops, they will quite possibly do less of it. The reason being, they have a different attribution for why they were doing it in the first place. So the child who wasn’t paid looks back and says, ‘I’ve been reading this book because I’m the kind of kid who likes books.’ But if, instead, the attribution is, ‘I was reading this book because Dad paid me,’ now, if Dad is no longer paying him, he has no reason to read this book. That said, my recommendation is that a reward not be the first thing you try. But, if it is the only way to get a kid to read, then I would certainly consider it.
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Let’s begin with a review of those essential qualities (needed to develop intrinsic motivation) in the context of reading and writing:
♦ Autonomy. A major Pew Research Center report (Lenhart et al., 2008) found that choice has an equally important role in teens feeling a desire to write (the story in Chapter 1 of my student who was energized by writing about football illustrates this point). Likewise, in reading, extensive research documents that teachers encouraging students to read books of their choice for pleasure is a major contribution towards students developing a positive attitude towards reading and a life-long interest in it (Leisure Reading Task Force, 20014, p. 2).
♦ Competence. A scene from the HBO series The Leftovers (http:// www.hbo.com/the-leftovers) succinctly explains why this quality is so important for intrinsic motivation. In it, two FBI agents were sitting in an office, and one told the other that his child wanted to quit soccer and wanted to know if he should let him do it. The other agent asked him, “Is he any good at it?” The first agent responded, “Nobody quits what they’re good at,” and much research backs him up (Tsioulcas, 2013; Yuhas, 2012). Providing scaffolding like writing frames and strategies/tools such as graphic organizers (student- or teacher-created) for responding to prompts (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 144) can assist students’ developing confidence as writers. The Progress Principle, which highlights that intrinsic motivation can be driven by people seeing meaningful progress in their work, was mentioned in the first chapter and in previous titles in this series (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 10). Creating structured opportunities for students to see their progress in reading and writing by comparing work (preferably emphasizing tools like “improvement rubrics” that focus more on what they have successfully done and less on their deficits [Ferlazzo, 2011, p. 79]) done at the beginning of the school year with accomplishments later in the year can also support student feelings of competence. In fact, at our school English folders are passed up through the grades and students can see and reflect on their progress over the years!
♦ Relatedness. The Pew Research Center found that teens say the most important factor for them to feel motivated to write is using it as a way to connect with, and receive feedback from, teachers, family members, and friends (Lenhart et al., 2008). Opportunities for students to discuss what they are reading with their teachers and with their peers in low-or-no-stakes environments has been found to promote a greater interest in reading (Leisure Reading Task Force, 2014, p. 4).
♦ The work is seen as interesting, and valuable for future goals. In other words, as mentioned in Chapter 1, students should see it as relevant to their present lives and/or hopes and dreams for the future.
A slight “qualifier” should be attached to the second part of this last element— the one about it being seen as helpful to hopes and dreams for the future. As mentioned in Chapter 1, some researchers suggest that teachers explicitly pointing out how skills being taught in the classroom can be used in the future by students can be damaging to intrinsic motivation, particularly if they do not feel confident in their abilities or have little interest in the subject (Hulleman et al., 2010, p. 881). This issue is particularly relevant to a discussion on reading and writing since a significant percentage of students, particularly boys, often say that English is not a favorite subject (Wiggins, 2014) and multiple surveys have found that decreasing percentages of young people say they enjoy reading (Leisure Reading Task Force, 2014, p. 3). As a result of these negative attitudes, many of us teachers may tend to use a motivational strategy of emphasizing to students how important literacy will be to any of their future goals (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 147).
Is this a bad strategy? The slightly “qualified” answer is yes, no, and possibly maybe . . . Other researchers also suggest that we need to be particularly careful when we focus on relevance towards a student’s goals, though they also see potential benefits. Motivation researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan call slightly different versions of it “regulation through identification” and “integrated regulation.” They believe the motive of wanting to do something less for the joy it brings and more for its instrumental value towards achieving a goal is a less harmful form of extrinsic motivation that—on a continuum—is as close as you can get to intrinsic motivation without being there (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 61). They also point out, however, that its promotion can still bring many benefits, including greater engagement and learning as well as increasing the potential that those tasks can be moved to the final step of intrinsically motivated, as long as the other three elements—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—are present (Ryan & Deci, 2000, pp. 63, 65). Indeed, organizers of the 2012 international PISA test in 2012 found that, over the previous ten years, countries where students reported an increase in intrinsic motivation also reported an increase in students reporting this kind of instrumental motivation (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2012, p. 74).
So, what does this “qualifier” mean practically for our classroom practice? Is it a group of academicians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (What’s the historical origin, n.d.)? Or is it a meaningful nuance we should seriously consider?
Larry Ferlazzo
I would suggest that teachers explicitly connecting what is being taught in school to student goals—by pointing it out themselves or by drawing it out of students (which, as Chapter 1 pointed out, appears to have less damaging potential)—can have a place in class, but also has to be kept in its place. In my experience, we will get fewer “Why are we learning this?” questions in learning environments that promote autonomy, competence, relatedness, or are connected to student interest. But when we do, I don’t see anything wrong in helping students make those connections to their personal and professional goals or periodically having teacher- initiated lessons with that focus, such as several in this book and in previous ones (Ferlazzo, 2013, p. 147). On the other hand, constantly getting “Why are we learning this?” or “How are we going to use this?” questions might be an important indicator that we are not doing as good a job as we could be on implementing those other important conditions necessary for the development of intrinsic motivation.
Larry Ferlazzo is an award-winning teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He writes a popular education blog and a teacher advice column for Education Week Teacher. You can follow him on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.
David Cameron argues we need to train the smartest to teach. But Finnish universities select only 10% of applicants – and not the cleverest
Finnish teacher training institutions aim to get students with a passion for teaching – rather than the most academically able. Photograph: Olivier Morin/AFP
When my niece was finishing school in Finland, more than anything else she wanted to become a primary teacher. Despite her genuine interest in teaching she failed to get into a teacher education programme at the University of Helsinki. She was smart and bright, yet she was not deemed qualified.
This is not unusual. Finnish universities regularly turn away applicants such as my niece to try again or to study something else. In fact, Finnish primary school teacher education programmes that lead to an advanced, research-based degree are so popular among young Finns that only one in 10 applicants is accepted each year. Those lucky students then have to study for five to six years before they are allowed to teach a class of their own.
There are those who think that the tough race to become a teacher in Finland is the key to good teaching and thereby to improving student achievement. Because only 10% of applicants pass the rigorous admission system, the story goes, the secret is to recruit new teachers from the top decile of available candidates. This has led many governments and organisations to find new ways to get the best and the brightest young talents into the teaching profession. Various fast-track teacher preparation initiatives that lure smart young university graduates to teach for a few years have mushroomed. Smarter people make better teachers … or do they?
Who exactly are those who were chosen to become primary teachers in Finland ahead of my niece? Let’s take closer look at the academic profile of the first-year cohort selected at the University of Helsinki. The entrance test has two phases. All students must first take a national written test. The best performers in this are invited on to the second phase, to take the university’s specific aptitude test. At the University of Helsinki, 60% of the accepted 120 students were selected on a combination of their score on the entrance test and their points on the subject exams they took to complete their upper-secondary education; 40% of students were awarded a study place based on their score on the entrance test alone.
Last spring, 1,650 students took the national written test to compete for those 120 places at the University of Helsinki. Applicants received between one and 100 points for the subject exams taken to earn upper-secondary school leaving diplomas. A quarter of the accepted students came from the top 20% in academic ability and another quarter came from the bottom half. This means that half of the first-year students came from the 51- to 80-point range of measured academic ability. You could call them academically average. The idea that Finland recruits the academically “best and brightest” to become teachers is a myth. In fact, the student cohort represents a diverse range of academic success, and deliberately so.
If Finnish teacher educators thought that teacher quality correlates with academic ability, they would have admitted my niece and many of her peers with superior school performance. Indeed, the University of Helsinki could easily pick the best and the brightest of the huge pool of applicants each year, and have all of their new trainee teachers with admirable grades.
But they don’t do this because they know that teaching potential is hidden more evenly across the range of different people. Young athletes, musicians and youth leaders, for example, often have the emerging characteristics of great teachers without having the best academic record. What Finland shows is that rather than get “best and the brightest” into teaching, it is better to design initial teacher education in a way that will get the best from young people who have natural passion to teach for life.
The teaching profession has become a fashionable topic among education reformers around the world. In England, policy-makers from David Cameron down have argued that the way to improve education is to attract smarter people to be teachers. International organisations such as the OECD and McKinsey & Company, Sir Michael Barber for Pearson, and in the US, Joel Klein, former New York education chancellor now working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, have all claimed that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. These are myths and should be kept away from evidence-informed education policies and reforms.
A good step forward would be to admit that the academically best students are not necessarily the best teachers. Successful education systems are more concerned about finding the right people to become career-long teachers. Oh, and what happened to my niece? She applied again and succeeded. She graduated recently and will be a teacher for life, like most of her university classmates.
Pasi Sahlberg is visiting professor at Harvard graduate school of education and author of Finnish Lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?
You’ve certainly heard of Teach For America but you may not know that its founder, Wendy Kopp, now runs a related organization called Teach For All which is a network of TFA-like school reform organizations in a few dozen countries around the world. One place there isn’t such an affiliate is in Finland. Why that is so is explained in the following post by Finnish educator and scholar Pasi Sahlberg, who is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and educational practices. Sahlberg is the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” — originally published in 2011 and just republished in an updated edition – which details how Finland created its world-class school system. The former director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation, Sahlberg is now a visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has written a number of important posts for this blog, including “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools,” and “What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland about ed reform.” Here is a new piece that debunks some myths about teachers and teacher preparation. You can find more about him here on his website.
By Pasi Sahlberg
If you ask anyone why kids do better in school in Finland than other countries, you will probably hear one answer more often anything else: They have great teachers. It is true that Finnish teachers are well prepared, widely respected and commonly trusted professionals. But are education systems successful just because of great teachers? Many would emphatically say “yes.” I would say, however, “not so fast!”
Many of us are delighted that teachers are now recognized as key players in efforts to improve the quality of education systems. The International Summit on Teaching Profession, an annually organized gathering of education ministers and union leaders around the world, is just one of the new forums where teachers are at the center of attention. We now know more and understand better teachers’ lives and their work as a result of increased academic research and global surveys done by international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Education International (EI). However, the extent that teachers can make a difference in student learning in school remains a question with different answers.
In Finland, entry into teacher education is one of the most competitive among any field in higher education. Since all teachers must hold advanced academic degrees and they are therefore relatively well-paid and protected professionals, teaching is an attractive career choice among young Finns. And yes, teachers in Finland also have good working conditions in schools and a moderate teaching load by international standards. According to the recent Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) by the OECD, middle school teachers in Finland teach, on average, 21 hours and work 32 hours a week.
A frequently cited claim is that the best-performing education systems recruit their teachers from the pool of brightest graduates. Whatever that means, it’s a myth not supported by evidence. The logic is that the smarter the person entering the teaching profession, the better teacher she or he will become. Getting the best and the brightest into teaching has therefore become a policy mantra repeated in education policies and reforms around the world.
There are those who argue that fast-track teacher preparation models, like Teach For America and its sister organizations in many countries, are justified by referring to more successful education systems like Finland. They say that just as Finland selects its teacher candidates from the best available young people, these alternative teacher preparation programs recruit only the best to become teachers in demanding schools with a notable proportion of disadvantaged children.
Then there are those who go even further, claiming that there are many similarities between the Finnish and TFA conception of teaching. I would argue that these two could not be further apart from one another. Here are three reasons why.
Teacher education vs. short-course preparation. All teachers in Finland must hold a master’s degree either in education (primary school teachers) or in subjects that they teach (lower- and upper-secondary school teachers). Primary school teachers in Finland go through rigorous academic education that normally lasts five to six years and can only be done in one of the research universities that offer teacher education degrees. This advanced academic program includes modules on pedagogy, psychology, neuroscience, curriculum theories, assessment methods, research methods and clinical practical training in teacher training school attached to the university. Subject teachers complete advanced academic studies in their field and combine that with an additional year of an educational program. This approach differs dramatically from the one employed by TFA, requiring only five or six weeks of summer training for college graduates, with limited clinical training in the practice of teaching.
Life-time career vs. short-term experience. Teaching is a competitive career choice in Finland and therefore very popular among upper-secondary school graduates. According to a recent study on the teaching profession in Finland, four out of five teachers are satisfied with their work and just about 9 percent of teachers have left the teaching profession for some other job. In 2012, a Finnish teacher’s career lasted approximately 40 years, while a typical teacher has about 16 years of teaching experience. During their work in school, most teachers – in fact, over 95 percent – are members of the Trade Union of Education in Finland (OAJ), an association of all educators, which belongs to the Confederation of Unions for Academic Professionals in Finland (AKAVA). This is strikingly different from TFA corps members who only commit to teach for two years and normally have loose connections to professional communities of teachers. In 2012, a study on teachers in America shows, the typical teacher in the United States was someone in his or her fifth year. By contrast, 20 years ago, the typical teacher in the United States was in his or her sixteenth year.
Social capital vs. human capital in the teaching profession. In Finland, teaching is regarded as a team sport built on teacher collaboration. Teachers are members of professional teams that share the same goals and purposes. Most schools in Finland have both physical space and time for teachers to work together within every school day. School improvement and professional development focus on enhancing personal work and organizational performance and they normally have strong emphasis on teamwork, collaboration with teachers and schools, and shared leadership. Enhancing social capital is as important as improving human capital in Finnish schools. This differs from the logic of the fast-track teacher preparation programs that build on human capital and often undermine the role of social capital, such as professional learning communities and teacher networks, as the critical element of high-quality teaching and learning in school.
It is true that only about 10 percent of those who send an application to primary school teacher education programs in Finnish research universities will be accepted each year. But that doesn’t mean that Finland recruits teacher candidates from the top 10 percent of upper-secondary school graduates. The admission system is designed in a way that it gives all students interested in becoming a teacher an equal starting point. The students that are recruited to academic teacher education programs each year at the University of Helsinki, for example, have surprisingly diverse academic profiles. The typical freshman teacher education student is one who had slightly above average grades as an upper-secondary student and slightly above average scores on the matriculation exam.
Finnish teacher educators don’t think that superior academic performance would necessarily correspond with being a great teacher. Selection to teacher education in Finland focuses on finding those individuals who have the right personality, advanced interpersonal skills, and the right moral purpose to become lifelong educators. TFA is for many a stepping-stone to prestigious careers in law, banking, business, and public policy while in Finland teaching is a lifetime commitment.
And because Finns think of teaching as a high-status profession akin to medicine, law, or engineering, there is no room for Teach For Finland, just as there’s no room for Cure for Finland or any other short cut to trusted professions.
