three shifts in policy and leadership culture may help move these efforts forward:
New types of assessment are gaining ground. Several states are piloting performance-based assessments to replace standardized testing.
Exemplars in the business community are now promoting flat organizational structures, where employees work in smaller teams and have more voice and power over how they work.
Teachers are more networked than ever before, providing a unique opportunity to share and spread good teaching practice.
While the hybrid roles that teachers play at teacher-powered schoolsmay seem like a lot of work, they give teachers the power to decide what programs, textbooks, software, etc., should or should not be used in order to make space for the community’s vision. And when teachers decide together on the vision and strategy to reach all students, they are often more invested and excited by the change they are creating from within.
Some of the best available examples of how to improve teacher quality and promote teacher leadership lie in models offered by other high-performing places, like Finland and Singapore.
Seven qualities must be in place.
A vision and strategy for teacher leadership, “with stated goals and clear images of tasks to be done, must be in place.” Teachers must feel part of creating this vision in order to buy in.
A supportive administration. “Principals must be willing to share power with teachers and must have the skills to cultivate them as leaders,” most educational leadership programs focus on supervising teachers, not supporting them as leaders.
There need to be appropriate human and fiscal resources.
Work structures that enable authentic collaboration are crucial. While more resources help on this point, there are creative ways to stretch limited dollars.
Supportive social norms and working relationships are key to teacher leadership. “All too often, policymakers develop incentives to motivate teachers and administrators,” . “Instead, policies and programs should be in place to value teachers spreading their expertise to one another, allowing teaching to be exercised as a team sport.”
Organizational politics must allow for blurred lines between roles. Teachers can only take on leadership roles at the expense of principals and district-level administrators. This also requires teacher unions to act more as “professional guilds” and for districts to follow the example of some for-profit businesses that are flattening bureaucracies.
The school and system must be oriented toward risk-taking and inquiry. Just as students need hands-on applied learning rooted in inquiry, so, too, do teachers need powerful driving questions to push their work forward. “School systems must be able to interrogatethemselves about the extent to which they create opportunities for teachers to learn and lead in ways that spread teaching expertise and improve student outcomes.”
My note: the Spiegel article is about obesity and fitness, but I see if very congruent with gamification
But what are the Finns doing right? The answer is multifaceted and likely has something to do with the Finnish mentality, which tends to take an uncomplicated, pragmatic approach to problems.
there’s a long-standing and still fairly widely held belief that the teaching needed for a particular kind of content is unique. Unless you know the content, you can’t know how to teach it.
What and how we teach are linked, but there are other connections besides those between method and material, and those connections aren’t all unique to the discipline. All (well, almost all) teachers want students engaged, and student engagement in physics and philosophy doesn’t look all that different. All teachers are concerned with classroom management issues. If students are dealing more with their phones than the material, the content is irrelevant. All teachers have a responsibility to prevent cheating. All teachers aspire to use fair and equitable grading practices. Course design principles transcend disciplines. The features of a good multiple-choice question are not discipline specific. And then there are those student characteristics that challenge teachers in every field: passivity, lack of motivation, low self-esteem, less than adequate study skills, and excessive grade-orientation start the list.
Marcin ZaródWhile at the same time in their kung-fu schools they have been using models like “station rotation”, “peer-learning”, “immediate feedback”, mastery learning, even some elements of gamification (like badges-like colour belts showing the mastery on some level and unblocking access to higher-level routines available only for the more advanced students), etc for hundreds of years…. And I am not joking. Just ask anybody who does some kung-fu under the watchful eye of a good coach (sifu).
A great example of a “peer learning” session on the enclosed photo (taken at a kung-fu training in Poland, not in China smile emoticon
China has now reshaped its national exam to focus on a broader range of topics and cognitive skills and, in turn, move away from teacher-dominated lecturing. The new test requires that students employ complex analytical skills, mixed with broader knowledge across various subjects.
The new version — called the Every Student Succeeds Act — returns much government oversight of schools to the states and curtails or eliminates the federal role in many areas. Critics of NCLB are celebrating its demise.
Critics say there’s no guarantee that states will succeed where the old law failed in two crucial areas: closing the achievement gap and raising the performance of the absolute worst schools.
“The real test is going to be whether there is the political will to take data and turn it into action versus just reporting what they’ve been reporting for the last 15 years,” Wise says.
For heavens sake, there are countries that are getting education right. Why can’t we just look at what they are doing and tailor those methods to suit our needs? Japan, Australia, Norway, Finland, France, Germany are all countries that have some very impressive education systems that WORK!
it’s important to question whether alleged “personalized,” “project-based,” or “collaborative” learning efforts are actually helping students and teachers to “hold ourselves in a state of questioning.”
In a true inquiry-based model, how learning happens isn’t as important as whether that learning encourages students to try to learn even more.
“Inquiry means living in the soup. Inquiry means living in that uncomfortable space where we don’t know the answer.”
Increased collaboration between students and increasing student scrutiny of educational content were two other signs Lehmann and the group said signaled the right approach, even if they clashed with classroom norms.For example, collaboration can often lead to tricky discussions about what part of a students’ work are his or her own and what part is recycled. (see IMS blog entry on academic dishonesty: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/05/04/cheating-inadvertently/)
game-based learning seems to be a misnomer, as the learning is not based on games, but enhanced by them. Commercial games are repurposed and modified to support curricular goals, as opposed to driving them. Of course, learning can and should also be based on games, as they are valid texts that can be studied in and of themselves, but it is important to see video games as elastic tools whose potential uses exceed their intended purpose.
My note: game-enhanced learning can be safely classified under “gamification”:
Gamification is defined as the process of applying game mechanics and game thinking to the real world to solve problems and engage users (Phetteplace & Felker, 2014, p. 19; Becker, 2013, p. 199; Kapp, 2012).
More on the issue of gaming and gamification (including coding) in Scandinavian countries:
The author erroneously focuses on Snapchat as a service and university administration, monitoring and censorship; it is a basic issue of education. Educating the Millennials and Gen Z about privacy, netiquette and digital humanity.
Education is about letting students explore, fail, learn from their failure and improve. #FinlandPhenomenon
Still trying to understand the academy’s apparent obsession with monitoring and controlling/influencing every possible aspect of student and faculty behavior, on and off campus. Sometimes I can’t decide if it’s kind of a Stalinist control thing, a guy in the back of a windowless van thing, or some kind of extension of a juvenile obsession with everyone’s behavior but your own. That someone complains does not automatically suggest that someone must “do something,” particularly when “doing something” is often prohibited by law to begin with (in the case of administrators and the university).
In terms of cognitive advantages, learning a system of signs, symbols and rules used to communicate — that is, language study — improves thinking by challenging the brain to recognize, negotiate meaning and master different language patterns. Coding does the same thing. Students who speak English and Mandarin are better multitaskers because they’re used to switching between language structures. Coding, likewise, involves understanding and working within structures.
Foreign language instruction today emphasizes practical communication — what students can do with the language. Similarly, coding is practical, empowering and critical to the daily life of everyone living in the 21st century.
Coding is Ubiquitous
Programming is the global language, more common than spoken languages like English, Chinese or Spanish.
Washington state andKentuckyhave both proposed legislation that mirrors this trend, with Washington asking that students be allowed to count two years of computer science courses as two years of foreign language studies.
In an October post, Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss wrote that coding is something like “cursive 2.0” — a practice that will soon become compulsory in schools across the nation.
