What would it take to fix education in Australia? Notes from a Symposium

What would it take to fix education in Australia?
This was the title question of a recent symposium that I attended at the Melbourne Graduation School of Education. Moderated by Tom Bentley with a panel comprised of Professor Geoff Masters (AO, CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Research),
Associate Professor Larissa McLean Davies, Dr Glenn Savage, and Dr Jessica Gerrard (all three from MGSE), the discussion was held in conjunction with the launch of a new book entitled Educating Australia: Challenges for the Decade Ahead. Here's wot-I-got from the discussion.

Glen Savage spoke first, introducing some of the themes from the book. Containing 22 chapters Glen suggested the content was diverse, but broadly in line with four themes. The first is the Evolving the purposes of schooling. This section of the book suggests the reframing and considering afresh of some of the purposes of education. The second section ‘New Pathways to Student Achievement' focusses on the knowledge, skills, and capabilities that young people need, and the ways that these are changing. Section three ‘The role and impact of teachers', explores advancements in teacher training and teacher education, with a focus on work that's been done with respect to the clinical model espoused at MGSE. Section four is on the challenges of system reform. This section goes into battle with some of the long standing challenges in education.

Glenn suggested three implications from the book. He suggested that one of the main findings was that growing inequality and inequity poses great challenges to education in Australia in the decades to come. In some cases, policies designed to break down some barriers have actually exacerbating challenges. For example, achieving fair funding is undermined by decades of entrenched unfair funding policies. The second take away was in regards to the vital role that public policy plays in achieving positive change in schools, however, policy is never sufficient in achieving such positive change. Somewhat contrary to this, in the book it was often highlighted how politics often get in the way of good policy.

Glenn closed his introduction by highlighting the encouraging number of chapters on ideas and approaches that promise to bring positive change in education, from new collaboration platforms to technologies that will allow people to learn online.

Jessica spoke next. She suggested that in order to answer the question ‘What would it take to fix education in Australia?' we need to first ask ‘What's broken?'. She expanded suggesting that any answer to such a question depends on who you ask. She spoke of four key elements that she herself feels are key to consider. 1. Constantly decrying the failure of education can lead dangerously to fast tracked and piecemeal solutions to eduction. 2. We need to create a space to debate the purpose and role of schooling. How do and can schools and school systems reflect and shape Australian society? 3. We need to take as a starting point the rapidly changing conditions and social relations in Australia. We live in uncertain times. From our settler history and the unresolved challenges that remain, to the current challenges relating to asylum seeker policies. In understanding public schools and their roles we must also understand our diverse and changing populace. 4. The future of public schooling relies on understanding that the state is not a stand in for the public. The state and state funding does play a role in public education, but fundamentally ‘public' education is a place where communities come together and take control of their own education. Governments can and do take a moral and political position that seeks to undermine the safety of certain groups in Australian society, so we can't just leave it to them. In summary, we face a challenge challenge of coming to a collective focus for education whilst acknowledging and embracing the diversity of Australian society.

Geoff Masters, looked at school improvement also, but from the viewpoint of Assessment. He suggested that the current approaches, terms, concepts, and distinctions of assessment are reflective of the way that we think about schooling itself, and that this traditional way that we think about schooling is what you'd hear from anyone on the street. This idea starts with the curriculum, what teachers are expected to teach in a year of teaching. The role of teachers in the traditional model is to deliver this curriculum, and the role of students is to learn what these teachers teach. Finally, the role of assessment is to determine how well students have mastered the body of content that was ascribed to their school level. Geoff then argued that this only really makes sense if all students start at the same starting line at the start of the year. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Why are we then judging all students by the same finishing line? In such a system, the outcome is predictable, those who start further back end up further back, and those who start ahead generally tend to stay there. This means that for some students, who get Ds year on year, they could justifiably be forgiven for concluding that they're not making any progress at all, even if this may not be the case. A challenge exists for those who start and end at the front in that they aren't being stretched? Thus, Geoff concludes that the traditional view of schooling isn't supporting this diverse community. So what's the alternative? Geoff suggests that we could think of the curriculum instead as a map of long term progress against which teachers can monitor the progress of students. Assessment is then the process of establishing where students are on this progression at a particular point in time, and using that to help direct the next step for them and the support of their learning.

Finally, Larissa McLean Davies spoke. Larissa focussed on clinical teaching and took a strength based approach, ‘what is working already?', to her chapter. Drawing quite heavily on the Master of Teaching from the MGSE as a case study, she then broadedned this to the discussion of teacher education more broadly. Larissa interestingly opened by acknowledging and naming the co-orthers of the chapter that she contributed to, and talked about how she did this as an acknowledgement of the importance of a communication and cohesion between the different levels of teacher education, from the pre-service phase right through and into schools themselves. Larissa argued for a fundamentally different conceptualisation of ‘teacher education' beyond the walls of teacher education institutions. We won't solve the challenges that we face without bridging the gap between policy and practice.

In question and answer time the discussion moved into Geoff Masters making the oft heard assertion that the inevitable destination for schooling is to move away from students being divided by year levels. He cited the role of technology in this and how technology would facilitate better tracking of students along his aforementioned curriculum progressions. I'm still not sold on this one, I haven't as yet seen a successful model of this working. Would love for someone to point me to one!

Jessica made an interesting point in question time about how we operate on an assumption that equality and equity are goals for education but once we leave school and head into work and life we assume that there's going to be inequality everywhere. Is such a schism in expectations justified and, if it is the case, what does that mean for what we expect of education? Glenn added: are we placing too much pressure on schools to fix society's problems?

The four speakers then closed…

Glenn: There's a misalignment between the locus of policy making and the locus of accountability in Australia. We've increasingly got federal bodies making decisions that have implications for education right across the country (locus of policy making), whereas the accountability to the impacts of these decisions actually falls not at the federal level but at the state levels. Fundamentally this is a broken feedback loop (my terminology) that undermines improvements and accountability right throughout the system. .

Larissa made an interesting point on the role of literacy. Following up on a question from Maxine McKew on the inclusion of Australian literature in Australian schools, she suggested that the literature studied in schools must represent the diversity of our Australian society. If we don't do this then we're effectively saying to vast swathes of our society ‘You do not have a place here'.

In closing, Geoff spoke about the importance of clarifying what highly effective teaching looks like, and how do we evaluate whether teachers are implementing these processes? What is it that teachers who stay in the classroom and are supposed to be getting better, supposed to be getting better at. Again here I'm not totally sold. I think we know a whole heap about what makes good teaching (see ‘The Science of Learning‘, Rosenshine's ‘Principles of Instruction‘, and ‘Why Students Don't Like School‘ for just three starting points). The challenge is for us teachers to become better informed about the basis of good teaching, and then to apply it.

Larissa closed by suggesting that if she could pull one lever it would be to establish sustainable funding for teacher professional development for the entirety of their career.

In her closing address, Jessica responded to a question from the audience about the way in which the structure of ‘the academy' undermines some of the suggestions that were made throughout the evening around having a diversity of contributors to education and involving communities more broadly. She then mentioned how the definition of what ‘public' is has changed from the times of Gough Whitlam to today, where we now believe that a system can still be public whilst at the same time accepting private funds. Jessica purposely resisted, and spoke about resisting, the pull to answer the question ‘Which one lever would you pull', and did so in order to acknowledge that education is not a sectioned off system, but actually a complex part of a complex society, no one lever will ever do the trick.

Glenn closed with an analogy. ‘As a gardener, monocultures are a bad thing'. He asserted that we should be wary of top down solution proposals, and consider the strength and power that comes from diversity more broadly.

All questions at the end came thick and fast, and the facilitator Tom took about 10 questions in a row prior to giving each of the panel members 3 or so minutes to sum up. The question that iI asked was ‘If we ever do manage to ever agree on what the purpose of education is, what do we need to do as teachers, academics, members of the public, or educational change makers to get there?', none of the panellists addressed this question directly, but I think it was somewhat addressed by Tom, the facilitator, in his closing. Tom spoke about the role and importance of us building community. He spoke about how, at whatever level of education we engage in, it is communities that underpin communication and collaboration. By building such communities we can amplify the good work of any single individual, as well as support each other throughout the whole process*.

Several times whilst I was listening to this very high level discussion on education a quote came to mind that I heard a couple of years ago,  ‘If you change what happens in your classroom, you are changing the education system.' So now I guess it's time to stop blogging and turn my head to lesson plans for tomorrow.

*For a little on an initiative that I've started to try to build the community around education research here in Melbourne, check out my page on the Education Research Reading Room here.