This week I was quizzed by a group of really switched on educators about the major challenges in Australian education and WHAT we can do about them.
I hadn’t prepared for the chat, nor did I really know what we would be focussing on prior, so I was as interested as they were about what would come out of the conversation.
We touched upon a whole heap of topics, including:
Student achievement
Teacher workload
Effective professional development
Student behaviour
Teacher shortages
What was funny, and a bit of a surprise to me, is that in my answer to every point, I found myself coming back to the curriculum, and clear, explicit, curriculum resources for teachers. For example…
The fast and robust way to increase student achievement is to put high quality curriculum resources in the hands of their teachers (ref).
The fastest way to reduce teacher workload for early career teachers in particular is to give them high quality curriculum resources.
For PD centred around pedagogical content knowledge, we only see effective professional development when that PD is anchored to concrete examples that teachers plan on teaching. Without this, conversations become overly abstract and theoretical.
Student behaviour systematically improves when students are learning more successfully, or in the words of Rob Coe, ‘Success precedes motivation’ (ref). And this is greatly scaffolded by quality curriculum materials.
And when we address all of the above issues, we will see greater teacher retention, and an easing of our current teacher shortages.
So I found myself coming back, time and time again, to the curriculum.
Lee Shulman called the lack of a content focus the ‘missing paradigm’. I think that in many of our conversations about improving teaching, a lack of content focus is the missing paradigm too.
In more simple terms, and to paraphrase, James Carville, ‘It’s the curriculum, Stupid!’
But, the challenge with quality curriculum resources is that they’re hard to create. It’s hard to build the knowledge required to make expert level resources. And for those who have the knowledge, it’s hard to find the time as an individual, busy teacher. Or even a team of teachers in a year level or department group, let alone an individual teacher.
So, what’s the solution? How do we overcome large-scale expertise and/or time shortages to ensure that solid curriculum materials are accessible and usable by every teacher in our country?
To me, one of the most promising opportunities on the horizon is multi-school organisations, groups of schools working together, and under common governance, to share resources in a way that enables each to achieve much more than they could on their own.
In addition to the important curriculum production role of both gov’t and nfp organisations, as well as commercial programs, I think that getting schools collaborating at a much higher level and in a much more coordinated way is a key way to do this. MSOs are well worth a very decent look-in.
I honestly don’t know how to make this happen, or even if it will happen in Aus. But if you’re a school leader and you’re interested in potentially being involved or kept up to date with any projects in this space (especially if you’re Melbourne based where I am), hit reply to this email and tell me a little about yourself and what you think could be the benefits of a more focussed effort on structured multi-school governance and collaboration!
Ollie.
Announcements and Opportunities
Steplab Instructional Coaching Intensive – July 23rd
If you’re free on June 23rd, and you’re keen for a phenomenal one day of training with the worlds leader in Instructional Coaching (Josh Goodrich), the inventor of the term ‘Responsive Teaching’ (Harry Fletcher-Wood), and yours truly, check out the details here.