Letter from Viv - September 2011

Yule Brook College wins NAB Schools First award

Let’s start with some terrific news. Congratulations to Yule Brook College in WA for winning an important award from NAB Schools First.

NAB Schools First is supported by NAB in partnership with the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) and Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

Here’s what the NAB judges said of Yule Brook College.

‘This is a very high quality program which has deeply impacted on the school’s functioning and ability to meet the substantial social and educational needs of the students. Implementing this program has involved a whole school community commitment to change.’

The impact award is a substantial grant from NAB Schools First to assist the school.

If you want to know more, follow this link:
http://www.schoolsfirst.edu.au/sf-2011-winners/yule-brook-college.phps


Talking About My Teacher

It's probably not news to you, but education seems more contested now than ever before.

Everyone wants to use education to solve everything.

Some people believe education will help us get out of our deep global problems – inequity, violence, famine, war and so on. That’s good. Education probably can help us in that way.

And other people believe education gives young people great opportunities and allows them to fulfil their promise. And education can certainly do that too.

Others want education to grow workforces that are smart and efficient and add value. Education can do that too.

Other people want other outcomes from education.

That’s where the contest comes in. The more we seem to need education, the more pressure we apply and the more people come up with different answers. Everyone has an opinion.

It is a vital debate. Big Picture is in the thick of it.

The role of teacher now and into the future is one of the key issues. What do we do with all that content? Who is best to teach? What is the job? What should teachers expect of students? What do students expect of teachers?

Here is an excerpt from Elliot Washor’s TGIF newsletter about the debate in the US.                                                                                                                               
I teach this s*#@, I didn't say I know how to do it.”

>From Good Will Hunting

While I was in my hotel room on Tuesday, I caught PBS journalist John Merrow talking about his new book about teachers. He framed what he believes is the most important issue in education as those who believe we need better people teaching vs. those who believe the teachers we have are the right people, but there is something wrong with the job itself. He said the two camps are composed of the charter people, the ‘waiting for Superman’ crowd, who want to put different people in as teachers on one side with the other camp being people who want to make teaching a better job.

As usual, we don’t fall into either camp. The good news is that there is a good reason we don’t. First, we have changed the role of a teacher to an advisor.  Because of this change we get better performance across the board from our teachers, but there is way more. Second, we have done what no one wants to touch: we’ve wrapped the content around the interests of students and aligned it to appropriate literacies and numeracies where, in the words of Gattengo and Sarason, learning is productive and teaching is subordinate to learning.

In the present system, you can have the “best” teachers who are motivated but have lousy content that is outmoded, out of context, not timed right and you are going nowhere. Moving to productive learning where students want to learn involves the real change away from teaching algorithms and catechisms to creativity and much more uncertainty… The biological drive that children have to learn is strong and neither changing the role of teachers nor getting better people as teachers will make much of a difference until you start thinking about learning and students rather than technically better content providers and the roles they play.

For my money, until we tackle the content in serious ways, and not just solely by a closed loop system of common core standards, and allow students to develop their own style in dealing with and using those standards, we are going to be in the same place we were in the past.’
 
What do you think? Do you hear the same arguments? How does our Australian Big Picture practice fit into the debate?

Should we discuss these things in the Leadership Conference?

The good news, I think, is that now is a great time for education. It is a changing time. Our roles and responsibilities are changing. All the thinking and reflecting might make our brains hurt, but we have a great opportunity to make the future brighter.


A Great Learning Alliance

Here is an interesting fact about students who often go to our schools until their 18th birthday.

'On the day they graduate from high school they have spent on average, less than ten percent of their lives - and none of their formative first years in school'  writes Robert Evans in his book, ‘Seven Secrets of the Savvy School Leader’ (Jossey-Bass 2010).

He goes on to write that “people often react with disbelief to this statistic, but on their eighteenth birthday students have been alive for 157,800 hours and spent fewer than 13,000 or 8% of these in school."

So, how much responsibility do teachers and schools bear for a student’s learning?

A lot of people think that a teacher and a school are totally responsible for all learning.

But the numbers suggest a different story. Parents are with their child far more in the early years.  And there are many other people involved in bringing up a child.

And there are opportunities for learning in all those relationships.

That's why Big Picture is a partnership between student, parent, teacher and mentor. It's a learning design that takes those real relationships into account.

We can all work together to help students learn deeply: it can be a great learning alliance.

What do you think? Should we talk about it at the conference?