NewStuff

I’ve been doing another course with Dr Ryan Dunn and Dr Simon Breakspear. I’ve been deeply attracted to their model as it so closely aligns with my own view of how change in adult learning communities can happen. The detail of their thinking, experience and research gently precipitates into an elegant yet brutishly practical way-of-being as a leader.

I’ve adopted a dialogical approach to reflecting on what impact this course should have on my leadership thus far;

100,000 foot view down to 1000 view.

Q: What is the problem we are trying to solve by introducing Orthography?

A: Improve Reading and Writing.

Q: How do we know that Reading and Writing is what needs improving most?

A: Becasue we do better on NAPLAN in Numeracy.

Q: How else could we know? (ie: Are we in the right forest? re: Steven Covey)

A: – We could ask all the people involved in improving our students’ learning, the kids, teachers and families.

• We can look at their historical information.

Q: What historical learning information is available to look at?

A: NAPLAN, Teacher Judgements, English Online Interview.

Q: What about PM Benchmarks or reading comprehension tests?

A: Yes and no. We now have some PAT Reading Comprehension 5th tests. Some PAT RC, some PAT Grammar and Punctuation and PAT Spelling. There is a bit of ICAS data too.

Q: So if we are trying to improve VC Reading and Writing for our children, is this enough information to tell us where they are at and if they will improve in response to what we do or stop doing? Is it enough to tell us if this is a problem that needs solving?

A: My gut feeling is that that this is good enough to start with.

Q: So then what?

A: Well, we need to find ourselves a little plot of ground to test this cropping method on; ie:

Phase 1: Take action for the sake of learning of how to grow this crop here,

Phase 2: Take action for the sake of reaping a harvest.

This means

– work out what conditions we need to curate in order to sow this crop (the ‘crop’ being a metaphor for an improvement process in Litracy for our learners)

– learn how to skilfully create those conditions (Tune into the preconditions for change to occur.)

– learn how that crop might grow in these conditions (How will this kind of environment afford that kind of change?)

– work out if we curated the ground skilfully (How can we tell if we took the correct actions for this crop?)

– did we plant the right crop? (improving literacy for Learners)

Another way to look at this is:

Focus on the context to see the content. Look through the content to see the context. 

So this is four phase process:

1. Curate artefacts including pedagogies, practice principles, protocols and policies. (ie: an assessment schedule)

2. Model attunements – how a perceived property of an artefact can be used to take action. (ie: grade five mean reading comprehension scores are below that of the reference sample for the last three years)

3. Design structures (rules and resources)  that afford action. (ie: the grade five team and literacy coach use standup meetings to design, resource, implement and monitor reading comprehension improvement sprints for grade 5 students during term 3)

4. Build relationships that activate agency. (ie: the grade five students see themselves as better at reading comprehension. The grade 5 teachers see themselves as better at causing reading comprehension to improve)

So in order for my school to improve our students’ perceptions of themselves as readers we need a means by which we can judge their ‘reading’ performance in a meaningful way.

We need the training, structures, resources and rules in place to give us the power to take action on improving reading results.

Once we have that power, we need to take action in an intentional manner.

Then we need to work out if our intentions are being met through our actions.

So we have spent a couple of years looking at our assessment schedule, creating one, adapting it and refining it. We have invested in the tools we need to take assessment action. This includes PAT test access, Benchmark Assessment Program, GradeXpert. We’ve partnered with an expert in the area – Fiona Jackson who has introduced us to The Writing Cycle, Orthography, Writers Workshops, Anchor Charts, Mini Lessons and much more besides. All of this enacted through  an ‘Agile’ framework.

The reason why I position the conversation in this way, is this: I’m looking for a  philosophy of education that accounts for learner agency.

Thus, this is my attempt to draw on Giddens, Gibson, Harre, Bandura, Foucault, Freire / Giroux, Vygotsky , Heiddeger and others to posit a framework for a philosophy of education that accounts for learner agency.

In 1947 Albert Camus wrote this book. It is about a town that experiences the outbreak of a plague. The similarities with our current global situation are remarkable.

The whole point of this blog is to reflect on my reading as I go – from the perspective of an educational leader. Camus’ theory of Absurdity is evident from the get go. The translator has captured a strong sense of what the author was trying to convey.

There are a number of characters who are easy to make ‘self to text’ connections with.

You can see it in people’s eyes. This quiet kind of crazy. An odd look, an edgy sideways glance, a glazed over disquiet. COVID is creeping up on us and we can’t see it. We can only see numbers, more numbers and the numbers tell a horror story. Like an island sinking under the pressure of global warming through rising sea levels, our little oasis is being surrounded by an invisible marauding beast.

Odd times can excuse odd behaviours. One of the odd behaviours I have noted of late is a propensity for principals to stand on their own two feet and act in the perceived interests of their community – in spite, or instead or as well as what our ever more centralised department of education is sending down the pipe line.

This got me thinking about leadership styles in the context of an idea I’d recently been reflecting on from Peter Rolwings. He talked about Albert Camus’ theory of Absurdity. A part of this theory looks at the struggle to find meaning in life given that we are all going to die. Camus grew up pre World War Two, studied philosophy and was a writer for the French Resistance. So the stuff of the pursuit of the meaning of living was something he was fully woke to!  (I don’t actually know what it means to be ‘woke’ but it sounds contextually appropriate!)

He came up with three types of players in this game of meaning making.

1. 1. The Conservative
   2. The Revolutionary
   3. The Rebel

Interestingly, the Conservative and the Revolutionary come from the same starting blocks and head in opposing directions. The Rebel on the other hand is in an entirely different game.

Okay then – in short, The Conservative, as an educational leader is a ‘back to basics’ kind of person. The neo traditional / vocational pedagogue. Always looking back to modernism as the answer, or post modernism as the symbol of meaningfulness in education. That simple time where life was binary. Where right and wrong were we truly were blank slates to be filled with the right kind of knowledge.

The Revolutionary likewise posits meaning in the ‘not here or now’ zone. Rather, meaning comes from the achievement of the Utopian future of grade-less, timetable free, one to one device virtual learning space where children run free in a field of their design, iPad in hand to pursue and post the learning of their dreams. This ties in with the reactionary nature of the ‘Liberal Progressive’ pedagogy that is still teacher directed but directed toward our learners rather than our accountability structures.

This leaves the Rebel. The Rebel doesn’t care for the glory days of the French Resistance or the Utopia of global socialism. The rebel finds meaning in the struggle for change in the here and now. The Rebel hangs out with Freire and the Socially Critical pedagogues. They love the process. They see the next target and go for it.

So, as a leader of a community during COVID-19, what has your leadership been? What kinds of questions have you been asking your line manager? Are they about getting permission to do or not do something?

Have they mostly been about resources or the lack thereof?

Has it been mostly about inconsistencies in communication between different levels of government?

Have you been waiting for departmental direction or going it alone?

These are pretty important questions as they help reveal where you sit as a leader – where meaningfulness is likely to be positioned for you.

For me, I agree with what Camus said ‘I think therefore I rebel’. This is of all about agency – not about rebellion. I’ve just finished reading The Resilience Project, followed by Atomic Habits, and now this. The thing that joins them all together is the idea that, as James Clear says ‘ You’ve got to fall in love with the process’ not the product. He talks about being the kind of person who eats well, not about the goal as an end it itself. Same with The Rebel as a school leader. How do we train our staff to live the life of the The Rebel? What must they do to train up their students to also understand the role of The Rebel in maintaining our freedom and democracy?

This may sound all a bit crazy. But what the haec – now is the time for a bit of crazy, it may just make the world a better place.

Something interesting occurred. I knew it was interesting by the puzzled looks on the faces in the room. At first, the interesting thing was that people were actually trying to engage with the problem. Furrowed eyebrows, half-asked questions, probing looks and furtive glances between each other. This all told me that I was way off track – where had my mojo gone?

What was interesting is that we were talking about a taboo subject in schools – pedagogy. The ‘research’ shows that the use of the word has plummeted in the last 20 years. Even more interesting was the fact that we were trying to work out a signature pedagogy for working online with our students. This was hard and my usual ease and clarity around this subject just seemed to drain away like slurry.

Even more interesting was the moment when confusion, spurred on by curiosity and genuine concern, gave way to the hope of clarity. The penny dropped and the room went quiet.

Here is what we spoke about:

3 Perspectives of Lock Down Learning (Remote learning)

1. Student Perspective

2. Families Perspective

3. Staff Perspective

We reviewed our surveys and feedback where we asked three types of questions. (thanks Simon Breakspear)

As a result of our experience of remote learning in term 2:

a) What do we NOT let back in? ie: What is it that we didn’t even notice we weren’t doing?

b) What new stuff can we deepen? ie: What did we start doing that we want to keep on doing?

c) What did we let go of that we must hold on to? ie: What did we stop doing that we clearly need to start up again and keep on with?

All of these things can be identified in random ways or as discrete phenomena unrelated to anything else. The newsletter was clearly one of these items that people were happy to let go of!

The interesting learning for us, was viewing all of this through a pedagogical framework.

We looked at three signature pedagogies

Vocational / neo Classical

Liberal Progressive

Socially Critical

The task – in the end, was to match the learning from the feedback – to a signature pedagogy and incorporate that into our practice principles.

We popped a few though bubbles that day. And hopefully, just maybe, created a few more too!

With the end of Term 2 in my education jurisdiction, we all of a sudden come crashing to a halt. Well, more grinding at a glacial pace towards the finish line – which is actually an icy precipice. So, as we become violently amputated from an ancient glacier oblivious to its own demise and that of the planet, we leap into the frozen waters of the Arctic Ocean (otherwise known as the winter holidays). A

After the first giddy rush of shock and awe, it starts to dawn on me that sleeping in till 7am and walking the dog in 1 degrees is not so much an assault on my senses as it is just a normal healthy thing to do. The stuff that human people do quite regularly when they are not trying to ride the wave of unprecedented disruption from the bow crashing glacier.

So in the stark reality of COVID-19 filtered day light there are a few ideas to unpack.

1. Artifacts
2. Attunement
3. Affordances
4. Agency

How do we shape the landscape of our learning ecology such that learners perceive the potential to act out their learning?

One such way we have done this recently is through the use of a manifesto! One the students put together with some help from an expert.

The important part of this is that it recognises that student ‘voice and choice’ is not just a tick the box option. It is a really tough methodology for gaining authentic expression from children. It means designing structures with the end user in mind – our students.

It make sense then, that children would be involved in the design of those structures.

Smack bang in the middle of COVID-19 lockdown is the perfect time to be asking what schools are for anyway!

Has schooling been disrupted in your part of the world? Are there kids relentlessly banging a basketball off the bedroom wall? Do they claim such behaviour is okay merely because they are bored or stressed or neither or both?

Why can’t they get back to school!!!!

Well – what are schools for anyway?

Writing from Kentucky in the late 1980’s one sociologist had this to say about the purpose of schools after the American revolution.

‘to select, sort, and standardize students according to their ability to fit into the urban factory system (Schlechty 1990)

The next phase he identified as being

‘In this vision, students are viewed as products to be moulded, tested against common standards, and inspected carefully before being passed on to the next workbench for further processing.’

The change here is quite dramatic. In the first instance, schools are for students. They are for sorting students.

In the second instance, students are for schools. Schools are for forming students.

In the first instance – schools are at the end of the production line, doing the final quality check. There was a perception that the potential for a student was ‘fixed’ and the job of a school was to identify who was fit for what purpose. In other words – Schools produce workers. Elite schools produce rulers.

The second instance is the product of the ‘scientific management’ approach to production. Thus, schools produce data.

Schools produce data, data for politicians, data for industrialists, data for marketers and those who furtively seed narratives for aspirant mothers and aging grandparents to buy into. Schools produce data, data relentlessly extracted from its host. The host, writhing about energetically in the petri-dish of the classroom just trying to grow. Data to sell, data to sort, data by which to subjugate. Data to liberate and navigate, to celebrate. DATA DATA DATA!

Interestingly, Schlechty defines structures as ‘rules, roles and relationships’. With this new narrative, each of these ‘Rs’ soon acquiesced to the cold impersonal pressure of the Data Narrative. Even the oldest of school purposes, the transmission of culture to the younglings took a back seat as merely one of the functions that data production could consume.

Those who make rules and allocate resources have the extraction of data from children as the primary vision for the existence of these rules and resources. Improving student learning is merely one byproduct among many. It is an especially useful subnarrative to keep handy as it affords the monetization of the data.

Schools are directed to respond to all this data that they have extracted from the human bodies in their care. Professional non-educators consort with non-professional education administrators. On dimly lit, grubby street corners all red-faced, they whisper in heated tones whilst crumpled money changes hands. Unable to restrain themselves, with no thought of dignity, they scheme how best to use this data to produce yet more data.

So then – this whopping big data producing machine has been tipped on its head and emptied. All the schools have no students and the NAPLAN industry has been starved of its raw material. DATA. Year 12 students in this year’s final throws of The Hunger Games have been stripped of the possibility of bludgeoning each other to see who can produce the best data. What gift shall the winners grovel with at the university entrance gates?

Gosh – if we can’t produce data because the students are not in school – then what are schools for?

Three models are offered by Schlechty, School as Tribe, School as Factory and School as Hospital (meets the needs of children)

Well – you shall have to read tomorrows blog for the answer to that!

** Railroaders were disrupted by truck and air freight – didn’t see themselves as freight transporters. Educators with a clear vision for the purpose of schools will not suffer the same fate as the railroaders.

Hind sight is a thing apparently. The problem is that you can’t have it before you’ve got it. An in order to get it, you have to go though not having it. Like so much else in life!

So how will we look back on 2020? I figure the journey had better start now so that there is some useful material to view it through.

First things first. Let’s start at the beginning of the year. But in order to do that, we have to stroll back to the conclusion of last year.

All of which to say that the process of reflection on school performance in my educational jurisdiction is through a four yearly review. For us we beleagueredly staggered across the finish line in mid January. This was through the haze of bushfire smoke faintly tinged with the threat of COVID-19.

This process clarified some core values for our school community. Who are we? What makes us ‘us’? What does success look like in our community?

We exist to give power to our learners to shape their world.

So,

We curate playlists of affordances that cause learning to happen.

In order to be

Relational, Relevant and Rigourous ……

There is a whole heap more that goes with that. The irony is, I’m sitting here in a hospital waiting room writing this. Not any hospital waiting room – but a fever clinic. I don’t have a fever. None the less, I’ve been dutifully sent to the COVID clinic to get tested.

How then do we make sense of our plans when given the context we find ourselves in. Can a vision for what learners look like survive the impact of drought, flood, bushfires, pandemic, lockdowns, isolation and economic disaster?

Well – if the reason for being for any school is going to get tested – it is right now. And frankly, I’m proud to be part of a learning community that, in the face of unprecedented disruption – can maintain the core values, and even begin to flourish.

Draft:

Tomorrow, my whole school will be off to eperience the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra perform.

How did this come to happen.

So, the term ‘Agency’ is finally in vogue. It is just not fancy though. Schools pick it up and run with it not knowing the shape of the thing they are running with. But it is part of our ecosystem to have a narrative on hand about how our kids ‘do agency’.

Bugger! I was really hoping that we’d use the discourse around agency as a pathway to critical pedagogy and giving learners real power to make rules and allocate resources.

So, instead of agency, I’ve become more focused on the idea of ‘affordances’.

So – James Gibson talks about the complimentary nature of agents in ecosystems.

Anthony Giddens talks about sturcturation,

Rom Harre leads to positioning theory

and Albert Bandura gives us social cognitive theory.

Throw in a healthy dash of the American pragmatists, along with Heidegger and we have a very fertile patchwork of theories to lay the ground of a big idea.

The idea is this : The Good school Affords Agency. One way of saying this is that schools lead students to learn how to be trustworthy with their learning.

Let’s put this another way.

Right now I’m in the middle of a school review pre review review thingy. One of the bits of language that come up over and again is this notion of enablers and blockers.

Enablers is great – it really catches an element of what an affordance is. That is – an artifact in the learning ecology that enables an agent to take action.

This being the case – there can be no such thing as a blocker – at best a ‘blocker’ is the absence of an affordance.

The point here is that schools are sites where affordances are curated such that learners develop the skillful use of agency. The strategic crafting of affordances may allow for their exploitation – by students and learners – not by administrators and theorists.

The minute we say that there are enablers and barriers – we position students as being acted upon – not as authentic actors themselves. We are the ones extracting value for our agenda. We are determining the structure according to our own narrative – this constrains the learning narrative of the student whose learning needs we are serving.  The second and third order positioning (Harre 97) excludes children from the process of developing voice and agency.

A better option is to design structures that allow for students to engage in curiosity, become skilled in the uptake of personal agency and empower students to work collaboratively to produce evidence that they have the power to act.

So – buy a second hand mixing desk and challenge students to learn how to use it – then teach you!

Source a robot kit – part of a international competition and seek volunteers for a team.

Turn the water off so kids have to carry water to the toilets for half a day.

Celebrate the most complex and solid ‘bases’ in the playground made from fallen sticks and foliage.

Stick a data logger on the water tanks.

Rescue some old notebook PCs from recycling.

Say ‘Yes’ to nearly every idea the kids bring to you.

Say ‘Yes … and / as well as” to nearly every idea the kids bring to you.

Put up a ‘green screen and challenge the students to learn its uses.

Teach students industry standard methodologies – ie agile design / Scrum / Elgato

Explicitly teach kids how to ask questions – to be an author – not merely write amazing stories / how democracy works / how to write a petition.

The above ideas are all real live examples in my school over the last year. Of course, they are the product of students identifying an artifact in their ecology and layering affordances on it. Their direct experience of the artifact is as a tool in the hand to achieve their agenda.

Modern teachers understand that authentic teaching is grounded in knowing how to position an affordance in the path of an empowered learner in just the right way at just the right time so as to inspire learning in action in ever greater ripples.

That is really just a fancy way of saying that we teach kids how to do stuff so that they can do stuff that sets them up to do even more complex stuff – and so on. We want them to be confident experts at shaping their ever changing worlds.

We can beat Artificial Intelligence at its own game by teaching kids how to identify the parts of their building blocks for learning in action.

Brains are pretty cool. The material brain that is. How can a lump of organic matter sloshing in our skulls come to define some intrinsic part of itself as ‘other’. I’m talking about tumors here. Is there some organic dichotomous gate method where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are recognised through a genetic moral gene? Or maybe the brain does not ‘know’ that a tumor is growing – and that as a culture we have decided what constitutes ‘brain’ and ‘extra-brain’. I’m glad for that distinction considering how many lives have been saved as a result.

So what constitutes school – or learning or success or agency? How does this constitution change over space and time? Listening to one of my most informative and thought provoking podcasts (Modern Learners) this morning it was obvious that a very clear distinction in education has been crystallising in my head and has already gained broad traction.

This is the American notion of the Accountability Movement and the Progressive Movement when it comes to education. A quick search demonstrates that the Accountability Movement was in formation well before NCLB came into play. There is narrative around this movement that has nothing to do with learners or learning. Rather, co-opting the business approach of the era, it to do with generating data and an external (to the education community) schema for discourse on the efficiency of schools and teachers.

This aligns with my own version of the the ages of education:

1. Schools produce workers.
2. Schools produce data.
3. Schools afford agency.

This of course is but one overgeneralised expression. Jacobs and Alcock in their book Bold Moves for Schools characterise it this way:

1. Antiquated
2. Classical
3. Contemporary

Then there are others with a different aspiration for the project of Education.

The podcast referred to The Accountability Movement verses Progressive Schools. (One useful perspective on qualities of a Progressive school can be seen here)

So we have a contested notion of what schools are for  – and a contest around the structures that afford legitimacy to those claims.

In terms of Learner Agency and where it fits on a continuum with Accountability to the far right and Progressive to the left (far?) then I suspect a school that affords learner agency would have to be in the progressive quadrants of the continuum.