curriculum meeting

Coverage, congestion, and curriculum

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curriculum meeting

As the school year begins, there is a lot of focus in staffrooms and classrooms on the design of programmes that learners will be engaged in as they come back to school.

For some, the focus will be on immediate plans for outdoor education trips or swimming sports and other events that will occur within the first few weeks. For others, it will involve a longer view to ensure that teachers will be able to ensure ‘coverage’ of all essential knowledge before the end of year exam. For some, the planning will be an individual endeavour, for others, it will be more collaborative, either in teams or the whole school.

In recent years, many demands have been made on schools in terms of what it is that they include in their curriculum. In a constantly changing world there is no doubt that the amount of content teachers required to teach is an issue causing a great deal of angst. Schools are called on to teach students all manner of things, leaving many questioning whether sufficient time is spent on the ‘essentials’ such as English, maths, and science.

It seems nowadays that every interest group and government department is calling for their cause to be included in what has become an increasingly crowded school curriculum.

It would be easy to think this congestion is a product of The New Zealand Curriculum itself, which, in addition to each of the learning areas, determines that students must develop a range of values and key competencies. How do teachers find the time to cover all of this?

Or, is the real issue the way in which different schools and teachers understand what is required to implement it? The NZC doesn’t provide a rigid recipe to be followed (that’s the domain of a syllabus as we used to follow last century). Rather, it is as its name suggests, a framework within which teachers and schools are charged with designing a localised curriculum. A curriculum that is tailored to the needs of the learners in that school, and which reflects the local context in terms of the resources it draws on and references.

The localised version of the curriculum should also reflect the particular values and beliefs of the school and the school’s community, which in turn should be evident in the pedagogical approaches that are used and the strategies and structures that support student learning.

Concerns about what needs to be covered, leading to further concerns about the resulting congestion, need not be the distraction that they are. What is far more important in that coverage is the way in which a localised curriculum addresses the vision and mission of the school. If a school’s mission is to create lifelong learners, for instance, then what becomes critical isn’t so much what is covered in the curriculum, as what approaches to learning are developed and refined that will ensure the lifelong love for and engagement in learning.

To gain a perspective on this we need to consider first the ‘why’ behind our curriculum, to understand the drivers behind its design, and then use this understanding to resolve some of the tensions that exist. The NZ curriculum isn’t based upon lists of content that a panel of ‘experts’ have deemed important to transfer into the minds of young people. Instead, it gives priority to the development of skills and dispositions that will create successful learners — both now and into their future. Learners who are inquirers, who have the skills to access, process, and communicate ideas and information in creative and meaningful ways. Learners who can discriminate between fact and fiction, who have a strong sense of their own identity, and who can relate well to others.

The content (or subject) areas of the curriculum, then, provide useful contexts for these skills and dispositions to be developed.

The following questions may help provoke some different ways of thinking about the curriculum you offer, and the way you offer it:

  1. How does your curriculum offer a ‘personalised’ experience for students? Does your view of ‘personalised’ simply result in more work for you as you attempt to plan lessons for each student, or is it more about shifting the ownership of learning, with learners accepting responsibility for and driving more of their own learning?
  2. Does your curriculum design take account of the new and emerging views on equity, diversity, and inclusivity and how these can inform the design of a localised curriculum?
  3. Are you thinking of a curriculum that uses knowledge to develop learning capacity? Or, is your view of curriculum still largely focused on the content that must be covered?
  4. Does your school promote and cultivate a culture of continuous learning for teachers and educational leaders? How is this reflected in the curriculum that is then offered to students, and their role in co-constructing that?
  5. Are you actively pursuing new kinds of partnerships and relationships as a part of your curriculum design? Are you fully embracing the ways in which expertise from outside the school can be used to contribute to the learning of your students? What about the learning your students do outside of school in other contexts — how can that be brought meaningfully into the school curriculum?
  6. What is the role of technology in your curriculum design? Is it simply being used to do ‘old things in new ways’ to access and record information, or are you and your students leveraging its potential to accelerate learning?

As you return to your school or class this year, what is the thinking that is guiding the design of the programmes you are planning for your students? Are you concerned mostly about what you need to cover? Does this lead to a timetable that is congested, leaving you concerned about a lack of time to adequately address things? Or, is your curriculum design focused primarily on developing the learning capacity of your young people who need to thrive in an increasingly complex and changing world?

CORE Education provides a 20-week course for teachers that addresses many of the concerns above. The Modern Learning Curriculum course is specifically designed to assist those responsible for leading curriculum design and implementation in schools, and provide them with the understanding and strategies for doing so. Click here for more information.

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COOLs

What’s cool about COOLs?

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COOLs
Among the changes being proposed as part of the Update of the Education Act 1989 is the introduction of a new form of education provision to be known as a COOL (Community of Online Learning) enabling students to learn via online programmes instead of in regular classrooms.

On the whole, the reaction to this announcement has been less than favourable, with a majority of opinion in the press focusing on the potential pitfalls and shortcomings of learning in this way. Another well-known New Zealander added her voice of concern about the proposed cyber-schools referencing the experience in the US where the Walton Family Foundation has admitted their online public schools have been a “colossal disaster”. Details of this are also reported in the 2015 CREDO report

So, what are we to make of this? How could such a political decision have been made when the evidence is so compelling that it doesn’t work? Or does it?

The reality in New Zealand is that online programmes of learning have been available to students for nearly twenty years through the virtual learning network and, more recently, the VLN Primary. These programmes cater for the needs of learners who cannot access the full range of curriculum options they want at their local school, and have a very successful track record in doing so. The case for students requiring attendance at a physical school where they can develop social and emotional skills is not argued — indeed, they get the best of both worlds.

Of course, there are other students for whom the option of attending a physical school isn’t available to them — these include those in remote and isolated locations, those who may be school-phobic, and those with special health needs. Students like this have also had their educational needs met through online programmes for some years now.

So, why decry the efficacy of online learning? It seems that in the response to what has been announced, the debate has failed to focus specifically enough on what is of concern, and, instead, galvanised a lot of sweeping assumptions and generalisations that exist about online learning as an option. It also brings into question the sorts of ‘evidence’ that are being used to defend people’s positions in the debate.

As with any form of debate like this, there is evidence that can be used to defend any position. Take the case of charter schools in the US. There are some reports claiming they are failing and letting children down, while others highlight the successes where they outperform regular schools. The truth is, of course, that both are correct — there are both successful and non-successful charter schools as illustrated in a recent report in the Economist Magazine that identifies a huge variation that exists among charter schools in the US.

In making claims about the efficacy, or not, of any alternative education system, it is important that one is familiar with the broad range of evidence available. It shouldn’t be simply a reference to a single piece of evidence that happens to support the stance being taken, particularly if the evidence itself lacks sufficient rigour in terms of reliability and validity. I saw a senior educator in New Zealand recently reported as saying ‘there’s a truckload of research that says online learning doesn’t work’. As both a practitioner and researcher in this area, I agree that there are a number of reports that point to failures in online learning — but equally, there are lots that demonstrate its successes. Each report must be understood in terms of its context and how generalisable the findings are based on that. Sadly, we’ve become very influenced by the media sound bites that seem to suggest it’s okay to be selective in terms of the particular sections or even sentences we use to quote in support of our position.
In formulating a response to a new policy such as the COOLs, it is important to be clear about the things that are concerning us. It is evident that there is a significant amount of concern around two aspects of the policy:

  1. First, is whether the intention is for some students to do all of their learning online, and whether this will create systemic issues regarding accountability and monitoring of students, and whether this will also be detrimental to their social and emotional development. The debate around who might benefit from access to online learning programmes and under what circumstances certainly needs to be clarified.
  2. Second, and perhaps most debated of all, is, who will provide these online learning programmes? The policy, as reported, appears to leave things very open in terms of who may set themselves up as a COOL, and while there is reference to a rigorous accreditation process, details of what that might look like and what the criteria will be are yet to be determined. This is certainly another area where informed public debate is required.

As the debates around COOLs continue, it is important that, as professionals, we:

  1. Ensure we are clear about what it is we are debating (or objecting to) and not confuse the issue by casting aspersions on the very things that can work and are working for some students, and
  2. Are thoughtful about the evidence we use to support our case and take time to locate and understand the body of evidence that can be considered reliable and valid in terms of what it represents.

For further reading:

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digitally fluent environment

Three tips for becoming a digitally fluent educator

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A 21st-century educational system requires the effective and authentic use of the digital technologies that permeate society to prepare them for the future — for both students and teachers. For educators, understanding how best to utilise these digital technologies in our work is central to our collective future.

While there has been a significant focus on how we can assist learners to become proficient in these things, the emphasis on assisting educators to embed these new and digital literacies into their personal work processes has not always featured as strongly.

Digital fluency is the term most recently embraced by the New Zealand Ministry of Education to describe the state of being fully ‘at ease’ with digital technologies, demonstrating the technical, social, legal, and moral understandings that enable individuals to be successful and safe in a digital world. This concept is illustrated further in the diagram below:

path to digital fluency

The progression from proficiency to fluency is characterised by the development of knowledge, skills, and understanding familiar to most educators. The first level involves activity to ‘fill the gaps’ in one’s level of personal skill and knowledge (e.g. learning how to use software or manage devices etc.), resulting in what might be referred to as digital proficiency.

At the next level (digital literacy) the user is likely to be applying these skills with understanding, ‘consciously competent’ in terms of the actions and decisions being made.

The goal of digital fluency is characterised by the notion of ‘unconscious competence’, where everyday activity involving digital technologies is ‘assumed’ and undertaken as a matter of course, without conscious effort or decisions.

As educators, we need to be concerned about the opportunities we are creating for our learners to achieve this ‘state of being’, but equally, it needs to be something that we are also striving to achieve within our own professional (and personal) lives.

In the hectic world of schools and classrooms it can often be difficult to find the time to work on these things. The four suggestions below provide a starting point for educators to work towards being digitally fluent in their work:

1. Create and curate your digital identity

The concept of a digital identity is something that many educators will be familiar with as part of a cyber-safety programme for our learners. But, how seriously do we take it for ourselves? As educators, we spend a lot of time being concerned about the way we conduct ourselves in front of our students and parents, including the way we dress, the things we say, and the way we say them. We consider such things as important in presenting ourselves as professionals — but how much of this carries over into our online activity, and the digital identity that others know us by there? While many of us have accounts on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, for example, there is often little or no consistency in the way we present ourselves in these contexts. Even more, there is often a greater inconsistency between the way we present ourselves in these spaces and how we’re known “in the real world”.

A digital identity is something that you ought to be cultivating with as much care as your face-to-face persona. Failing to do so will mean that how you’re portrayed online will be the product of what others are saying about you and how they interact with you (and you with them). When someone searches for you online, that’s what they’ll find; instead of the digital identity that you’ve taken as much care to create and curate as you do in your physical life.

Take some time to consider carefully how you prefer to be known online — what image(s) will you use for your profiles, and what things will you say about yourself. It’s worth making a bullet point list of these things and keeping them safe on your computer so you can refer to them when setting up (or editing) your profile in the various sites you are a member of. Aim for consistency.

Some people make the mistake of thinking they can create both personal and professional spaces, keeping the activity within them separate (e.g. Facebook for family and LinkedIn for work), and while this can be a useful way of distinguishing between what you’ll use the spaces for, remember that in the online world both are equally discoverable, so your identity needs to be considered and well managed — as does the activity you engage in in these spaces. Many have been caught out posting criticisms of colleagues or making socially inappropriate comments on what they consider to be a ‘personal’ space without understanding this.

Take control and develop the digital identity you wish to be known by.

2. Manage your digital workflow

Information overload and the loss of important digital information are two concerns for many educators, but these can become an excuse for avoiding many forms of digital behaviour.

The promise of digital technologies has always been that they would make things easier and less time consuming, yet, for many educators, that promise appears to be a long way off. A significant problem here has been that much of the time our use of technology is rather haphazard and unconnected, focusing on the use of a range of discrete and apparently unrelated applications.

The key here is to take control of and manage your digital workflow. In just the same way as a physical office has procedures and routines that create efficiencies in the way information is organised, stored, and managed, the same should apply in the digital world.

A good starting place is to do a stocktake of the digital tools and environments you use and consider…

  • Are your digital tools and environments your primary way of working? (…or, are you duplicating much of what you do in both the digital and analogue world?)
  • Are you fully exploiting the opportunities that digital tools and environments offer through their integration capability that often saves time and duplication of effort? (…or, do you have multiple tools for similar purposes, none of which are able to share data between them?)
  • Are you using ‘the cloud’ to its full potential as the place to go for applications and environments to work in, and for storing, managing, and sharing your digital files? (…or, are you still tied to using the applications on your personal device, and managing and storing your files there also?)

If you answered yes to each of the above, then chances are you are managing your digital workflow effectively, but if not, then you might like to consider changes to how you work.

For a long time we’ve been led to believe that we need to have “our computer”, and we use an installed application to create, manipulate, and save files on our machines. While this has been the way of the past, it becomes problematic when we work from multiple locations, or when our computer crashes and all of our applications and files are lost. It is now far less important what device we use — in fact, most people now use multiple devices to access, create, and manage their files.  We need to think more about working in ‘the cloud’, where our applications and files can be accessed and managed from anywhere, on any device, and by any number of people that we may care to share them with. Whether you live on the Google world or the Microsoft 365 world, you can now use a cloud-based Word suite of applications for writing and planning, for all of your presentations, and for all of your spread sheet or publishing needs.

Transitioning to working in a cloud-based environment offers the following advantages:

  • Your work is automatically backed up and less likely to be lost if your personal device crashes.
  • The cloud-based applications provide a high degree of integration, so that files and data created in one area can be easily transferred into another — and, in many cases, automatically, so that an update you make in one area automatically flows through to another.
  • You can work much more easily, both individually and collaboratively with colleagues and learners, from anywhere, at any time, and on any device.

3. Build your personal learning network (PLN)

As educators, we are all connected to other individuals or groups that assist us to keep current and grow in our professional knowledge. This may include more experienced educators who mentor us in our work, or members of a professional group such as a subject teachers’ association, for instance. In the digital world, our ability to expand and enhance this professional learning network is multiplied many times over.

Our memberships of sites may include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Skype etc., along with our subscriptions to various blogs and curated spaces such as Scoop. They provide ways of connecting to people and resources that provide valuable sources of new ideas and information, along with opportunities to collaborate on a scale not previously imagined.

This is one reason why creating and curating a digital identity is so important. As you participate in these many environments, the people you interact and connect with will know you through what you say about yourself, what you share in these environments, and how you share it. In the online world, you have the opportunity to connect directly with the authors of books and papers that you have read, to participate in forums and groups exploring the ideas that they have written about, and to engage with them in forming or developing new ideas or insights.

Developing a professional learning network (PLN) won’t occur by serendipity, however. It takes a little planning and conscious effort.

Some ideas for getting started include:

  • Set up a Twitter account and ‘follow’ some of the educators you know or have read about. Ask some friends for their recommendations. Start small and build your list of connections over time. Use an application such as Tweetdeck to monitor the ‘tweets’ you follow, and keep track of any direct messages or mentions you may get.
  • Next time you find out about a conference or event that you think might be interesting, find out what its Twitter ‘hashtag’ is, and set up a column in Tweetdeck where you can follow the interactions from people who are attending the event. Use this as an opportunity to identify and ‘follow’ some of these people to expand your PLN.
  • Set up a Scoop.it account and search for and subscribe to the ‘scoops’ of some others that you’d like to follow. Scoop.it offers a useful notification process that will let you know by email when there are new items added to the ‘scoops’ you are following.
  • Subscribe to the blog feeds of educators (and other thought leaders) you find worthwhile. Most blogs will provide an email notification of new posts, so you don’t have to keep revisiting the blog to find when something new is posted.

As you establish and monitor activity in these environments, use the opportunity to identify the connections you’d find value in adding to your network.

Become a digitally fluent educator

The ideas outlined above may require some time to begin with, to simply become familiar with the new skills or knowledge to operate in the environment, or understand how they work (digital proficiency). More time is required to become familiar enough to apply them with understanding in your own context (digital literacy), so that, over time, fluency will develop and this sort of activity becomes part of ‘the way we do things’ in all schools and classrooms.

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professional development

PD and change management

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professional development

In a previous post on this blog I discussed how professional development (PD) is a key to enabling teachers and schools/kura to cope with the constant of change in our education system. While I stand by what I wrote in terms of the dimensions of an effective PD progamme, I’d suggest that, while PD may build the capacity to cope with change, we need to set our sights a little higher than simply being responsive to external change pressures — to being the architects of change in our schools and system.

If, through our programmes of professional development, we are seeking to achieve more than growth and development in individual teachers, and lift our horizon to thinking of organisational change, we need to consider the relationship between professional development and change management.

The key link here is in the thinking about how to make professional learning engaging, and what motivates teachers to pursue their ‘cycles of inquiry’ etc., to improve their practice. The same (or, at least, similar) thinking needs to be applied to how we then engage these same people in pursuing the change management goals of the school as an organisation.

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CORE's Ten Trends 2016

Ten Trends 2016

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We’re regularly reminded that, in today’s world, the only constant is change. So, how can we best prepare ourselves and our organisations for this change? And, more importantly, how should we be shaping and providing the education experiences for our tamariki to ensure they grow up, confident in facing the changing work that they will inherit from us? Most of the time we find ourselves responding to change.

‘I find the Ten Trends videos and resource material extremely valuable and excellent PD. They provide great inspiration, and challenge my thinking about my own teaching and what I am doing to empower my learners to be successful navigators of a rapidly changing world.’ (Educator feedback on 2014 survey)

Why is it that this change often comes as a surprise? And what can we do to ‘stay ahead of the game’?
Modern educators know the value of staying relevant and connected to the world around us. We might be leading change in schools and centres, developing vision and strategic direction, or helping our communities understand new thinking in education — whenever we need to innovate and problem solve, it is vital that we ground our thinking in research and effective practices by connecting to sources beyond our immediate context.

A ‘future-focused’ approach is to engage in a process of horizon scanning, to identify and understand some of the trends that are emerging, and to reflect on these in ways that help us imagine what some of the future scenarios may be. For nine years, CORE Education has sought to support the New Zealand education sectors and beyond to look at developments on the horizon as a provocation for thinking afresh about what we are currently doing to support our learners.

Each year, CORE Education’s researchers, educators, and digital technology experts pool their expertise and combine their understanding and evidence of the ways that digital technologies are influencing all aspects of education. The result is our list of the ten trends that are expected to make a growing impact upon education in New Zealand in the coming year.

We’ve categorized our trends in five key areas that are used in much of the future-focused research: structural, cultural, technological, economic and process. The purpose in presenting these trends each year is to provide a glimpse of the ‘big picture’ within which we operate in the education system. It is important to recognise that these are trends, not specific predictions. They indicate broad developments across multiple fields that are likely to influence all our work in coming months and years. As such, they are offered to provoke further research, investigation, and discussion to help leaders and educators determine what might affect strategic planning.

We invite you to take these trends and use them as a focus for discussions among your staff, students, and community. We have found that organisations get best use out of this resource in the following ways:

  • Shared reading and stimulus for professional learning sessions and events
  • Reference points for teacher inquiries
  • Provocation for conversation in lead teams as a prelude to visioning and strategic planning
  • Accessible, dip-in reading for staff and communities
  • Reference points for research

CORE's Ten Trends 2016:

Ten Trends 2016 overview

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