Interessante artikelen van de ICSEI 2012:
School effectiveness
Teacher effectiveness and Professional development
School and System Improvement
Afgelopen januari 2014 was de ICSEI in Indonesie. Een delegatie van de KWP (Olga, Sabine, Frans en Lenie) hebben daar een workshop verzorgd. De lezingen van de keynote speakers en een posterpresentatie van de CEDgroep kunt u HIER downloaden
Hieronder het verslag van Lenie van den Bulk:
Impressie n.a.v. bezoek ICSEI 2014
Algehele indruk van ICSEI 2014: het thema Redefining Education, Learning and Teaching in the 21 Century vond ik niet voldoende aan bod komen. Je zou verwachten met zo’n thema dat meer echte veranderingen getoond zouden worden en met meer nadruk op de urgentie van noodzakelijke veranderingen. Hieronder een verslag van indrukken en uitspraken die ik de moeite waard vond.
Paper: Differential effects of teacher factors for low and high ses students. Pfeifer (Dortmund), Vanlaar (Leuven)
Effective teacher factors benefit all students, but are most effective for high risk students. Policy should encourage good teachers tot teach in schools with high risk students (low ses).
Relationship teacher/student most important to make a difference.
Paper: Teacher’s emotions at primary schools in Hong Kong and China: Implications for school leadership. Junjun Chen, Shun Wing (Hong Kong)
Teaching is an emotional practice (Hargreaves 2000)
Clear interaction between teacher’s emotions and students learning
As a leader you should stimulate and facilitate positive emotions among your teachers, if the teacher feels good it has a strong effect on the students. Teachers, students and parents need to feel positive and secure at school. Think of what you as a leader can apply to make a difference between negative and positive emotions.
Paper: The implementation of a new policy on teacher appraisal: mediating factors and perceived effects. Maria Assunςão Flores (Portugal)
The study focuses on the role of the teacher appraisal in a standards-based education and it’s connection tot teacher development and school improvement and effectiveness.
The system is considered to be summative and bureaucratic, even teachers with a masters degree must take a test to prove their knowledge on the subject they teach. Primary schools students get national exams from the 4th grade. Teachers fear their autonomy.
– How to stimulate a student centered perspective?
More autonomy in how to fulfill a assignment, more presentation of results instead of tests, assignments outside the classroom.
Paper: Academic resilience of immigrant children. Tanja Westfall, Barbara Schrats, (Swiss)
Is academic resilience trainable? Mindset training (Carol Dweck)
What is resilience?
– the ability to adapt well;
– to manage stress and feelings of anxiety and uncertainty;
Specific challenges and stressful situations – resources within a person, resources around a person. The resilience wheel (Henderson 2013)
What kind of resilience is teachable and how can we teach it?
Paper: Using visual research methods in school improvement studies. Doug Hamilton (Canada)
This is an undocumented area of research. Our world is a world of words and numbers (Mead, 1975). Using visual material helps to create referent points and to engage participants.
“Visual research methods are particularly suitable for use in school improvement studies when
researchers:
1. desire a richer understanding of participants’ viewpoints and experiences;
2. desire a more complete understanding of school or organizational culture;
3. are seeking to promote more active engagement amongst participants in the research process;
4. want to give voice to alternative or marginalized perspectives;
5. are striving to stimulate group reflection and collaborative learning;
6. desire a more participatory or emancipator research agenda;
7. are seeking alternative means of gathering data or sharing information when participants have limited textual capacities.
Researchers are discovering that visual research approaches and methods are enabling more creative and diverse possibilities when examining current and complex social phenomena (Prosser and Loxley, 2008).”
Showcase Australia
Collaborative professional learning of 120 schools
Step by step by concrete actions, within the vision that is underlying: Be true to a vision, not to a series of actions. The unit of change is the teacher, make teachers think and talk about what they did in the classroom and why they did it.
Content-pedagogy-students: bodies of knowledge
Keywords: Action learning, acquiring minds, professional learning meetings and events, peer coaching, cooperative teachers. Recommendations:
– not one size fits all, but the right fit for the school;
– build on what’s already there;
– there are no simple solutions, but there are simple steps towards a complex situation;
– professional learning is a process of inquiry what is it what I do and how can I do it better?
Steps in the process
Preparing:
– what happened in the past;
– where are we;
– pick one thing to do better (student focused)
Envision:
– look at what you already do;
– what do you do well and lock this in;
– what do we want to do better;
– feel good about what you do and make the next step;
Refining:
– finding a link from outside and connect this to what you found on the inside.
Embedding:
– do it for the whole school in a sustainable way.
Checking:
– are we still on the right track?
– Using data and evidence measure the learning every step of the way. Putting peoples knowledge around the table. Changing the culture into analytical, deep learning.
Results: Understanding more about how children learn, self improving systems, naturaly evolving networks, confidence in themselves.
Two of the keynotes:
See also reading papers, these are a few highlights.
Jim Spillane (Ireland)
Relation between practice and social structure
“Innovative Disruptive Digital Technologies: Effect on Young People and Schools
Innovative forms of highly uncertain disruptive online technologies are gradually transforming educational and employment opportunities for young people equipped with smartphones, internet access, social media applications and online support in this newly connected, spontaneous milieu. Mobile devices in particular have opened up previously inaccessible learning and job opportunities, even to those in remote rural communities in the poorest regions (Czerniewicz et al., 2009). For those with the confidence and connectivity to learn how to use new ICT resources, it is now theoretically possible to learn and earn 100% online from any location, to teach oneself remotely through free opportunities for study in online courses run by elite institutions across the globe and to generate income from self-publishing or start up innovations. These unprecedented opportunities are best achieved when reinforced by school ICT access, good pedagogic guidance and family support, but are even possible without this. As Mitra has demonstrated, there are circumstances in which, through ‘minimally invasive education’ (Mitra and Rana, 2001), digital resources can enable keen young people effectively to teach themselves valuable skills, regardless of socio-economic circumstances.”
Less is Sometimes More
“If school leaders are to support young people to achieve their ambitions for the future in the most effective ways in a world in which power and resources are unfairly and unequally distributed. In considering how best to achieve such school effectiveness in e-leadership, it is useful to observe that the paradox that ‘less is sometimes more’ has been much debated in problematising research and professional practice on school improvement, as well as in other contexts (Harris, 2013; Weaver et al., 2012). Adept recognition of a visibility/invisibility leadership paradox in online school provision, akin to ‘less is more’, can enable us to consider critically how best to facilitate effective learning ecologies. Arguably, school communities thrive in achieving excellent curricular, administrative, technical and qualifications through ICT-enabled outcomes when authority is genuinely broad-based in a sustainable distribution of leadership (Harris, 2013). In the creation of well-balanced and healthy learning environments, attempting to force school improvements through an autocratic hierarchy unskilfully is about as unproductive as trying to force-feed learning. To cite an old proverb, “you cannot fatten a pig by weighing it”. School leaders at all levels need to achieve a careful, fluent balancing act between high leadership visibility as regards ‘meaning-making’, mission, vision, commitment and behavioural values, alongside the observable humility of ‘minimally invasive’, effectively responsible positional management (Collins, 2001). This visibility/invisibility paradox, an on-going expertise in complex organisational plate-spinning (Jameson, 2005), does not change in the leadership of ICT-enabled online school provision. For it remains the case that few things are more important to school effectiveness than broad-based inspiring team leadership. This kind of leadership enables high trust creative educational environments in which staff and pupils feel they belong, are trusted, and can succeed within proactively engaged learning communities in well-functioning school systems (ibid.). To enable the future growth of high trust in virtual and face to face learning ecologies, sometimes more micro managerial effort to improve schools through stricter performance accountabilities, regulation, audit and standardised systems achieves less actual learning and achievement (Ravitch, 2011).
In this changing future landscape for schools, in which unpredictable spontaneous digital innovation willcontinue to accelerate, a genuinely collaborative distribution of e-leadership tasks and responsibilities to all positional levels, both formal and informal, will be needed. This is a risk and a challenge for school leaders, particularly those at the top of institutions. But for young people to become all that they can be in achieving sound digital skills, learning and future employment, it is worth all the effort it takes.”
– Teaching is always social induced, it’s a co-production through interaction between teacher and student (Cook & Brown, 1999).
– Find ways to study the relation between context and human interactions.
– Instruction is crucial for school improvement, but it’s not always in personal contact.
– Continues interruption of the educational process by formal curriculum, this is not helpful. Teaching as a professional activity needs the ‘space’ to do so.
Karen Seashore (USA university of Minnesota)
Redefining the role of school and schooling – Public value and education
“Although I make an effort to examine the enduring assumptions about the public value of education that reflect multiple philosophical perspectives, I draw primarily on the work of an 18th century intellectual, Montesquieu, who outlined a comprehensive framework that suggests why schooling is one of the oldest and most important social institutions created by mankind. At the same time, I will attempt to show that his framework is also reflected in core philosophical debates that emerge from both Confucian and Islamic traditions. The goals of education that he discusses include:
Social skills
Analytic capacities (“critical thinking”)
Intercultural competence
A healthy lifestyle
A predisposition toward reflection
Loyalty and public duty”
“Few of these public value outcomes are being seriously deliberated in most countries today. Instead, the media and policy makers focus on their country’s relative standing based on particular subject matter tests. In the case of higher education, there is increasing emphasis on measuring academic quality by the number of publications that scholars have in a small number of journals, which is assumed to measure the national worth of higher education systems. However, the broader set of public values listed above are tied to other social outcomes that are seen as contributing to the ability of men and women to live a “good life.” These include reinforcing an enduring social contract and political cooperation and increased participation in civic affairs (contributions to the common good).
There are, on the other hand, elements of public value that are insufficiently addressed by older philosophical conversations and ICSEI is well-poised to address them. These are reflected in the kind of debates that are occurring in most countries, either as visible alternatives to the econometric/individual benefit model that underlies the New Public Management approach, or as a less visible set of tensions. First, education is one of the main arenas in which conflicts over cultural preservation vs. cultural change are played out. Second, in many countries, there is an emergent perspective on public value that has arisen. This includes modern purposes, such as creating a more equitable society or the role of educational institutions in developing local communities. “
“An ICSEI agenda in each of these streams has been strong, but there is much to be gained by expanding our work to focus on broadening attention to the educational outcomes that is expansive and that addresses indicators of public value that have been largely ignored in recent years.”
– In the future there is more necessity for social skills: acquiring judgment, flexibility, cultivation of character.
– Important to develop the ability to work in society and to enhance it.
– Students sharpen their wits by rubbing them against each other.
Goals of sustainable education are:
– Becoming strong.
– Becoming curious, modest
– Developing loyalty
– Developing human dignity
Contemporary purpose:
1. Education and social equity.
– Equality of opportunity
– Equality of outcomes
2. Responsibilities, education and community development
Presentatie Kenniswerkplaats Rotterdams Talent
Zie ook de powerpoint van de presentatie (volgt nog).
Reacties vanuit het publiek:
– betrek scholen meer bij het programma
– maak gebruik van journalisten om kenbaar te maken wat je doet
– sluit aan bij de behoefte van scholen
– presenteer je kennis in netwerken en tijdens bijeenkomsten waar het veld vertegenwoordigd is.