Governments and experts around the globe are permanently trying to “fix” education I was trying to come up with a joke or some kind of analogy to begin my address this morning; or perhaps a saying or maxim. Over the course of my professional life, which began as a secondary school teacher almost exactly 30 year ago, I have certainly come up with enough sayings of my own based on what I have learned and, mostly, from my many failures. Let me try out a few on you:
1. There is nothing easy in education (or in development), and if it seems easy, it won’t work.
2. It is impossible to do better if you don’t do differently.
3. You can’t readjust your aim if you haven’t yet pulled the trigger (which actually works better in French: On ne peut pas rectifier le tir si l’on n’a pas encore tiré).
And one last one:
4. Sometimes failure is an effective way to succeed.
Nothing too earth-shattering here. Sartre, Kant, Sophocles..., none of them need fear my dislodging them any time soon from the pantheon of great thinkers.
But what I hope to share with you today is that sometimes great thinking is less what we need than diligent, thoughtful action. How many great ideas have languished because no one was willing or able to put them into action? Or how many laudable ideas turned terribly sour because they were implemented either poorly or malevolently. History and the news are full of such examples. I’m sure that each of you can think of many. And conversely, we can all identify many mediocre or mundane ideas that, once put into practice, yielded magnificent results.
This is basically what we are looking at when we consider a national education reform: that is, a hopefully good idea that we need to put into practice. Indeed, it often seems that governments around the globe are permanently trying to “fix” education. Indeed, when is any country not in the process of education reform? But then again, this makes perfect sense since, one would hope, all countries are continually evolving, be it technologically, culturally, economically, environmentally, socially, or along some other vector. And as society changes, so must aspects of its education system, the purpose of which is to produce graduates that conform to ever-changing profiles? Parenthetically, it is worth reminding ourselves that there is always an element of mystery in this challenge since we are talking about profiles that we cannot honestly fathom since they will not exist for another 5, 10, 15 or 20 years for our children in school today.
So, reform is a necessary constant of education. This begs the question, though, of “How well-equipped is an education system to implement change, coming up with suitable ideas and putting them into practice; and especially on an on-going basis?” If the outcomes of education in most countries, whether so-called developing or developed, offer any indication, which they likely do, the answer is “not very well.” While most national education reforms may be impressive in defining WHAT needs to be done in the classroom, they regularly fall short in specifying HOW to put this “what” into practice that actually transforms teaching and learning for the better.
This failure is easily understood, explained by three arguments. First, the central system must define policy, programs and strategy, the “what” of a reform, for all of its schools, necessarily employing a homogeneous perspective and approach. Because of the vastness of the system, the central structures are essential to devising a “one-size-fits-all” approach. This is viable, one can argue, when talking about “WHAT” to do. However, implementation really rests with the “HOW,” and successful implementation really requires a different “HOW” (and sometimes a different “what”) for each school and, indeed, for each teacher. This is what I refer to as the Heterogeneous Imperative.
Why do I insist on this? Because each individual teaching context is different. Take just a few seconds and think about what distinguishes one classroom from another, whether in different schools or even in the same one. So here’s my list, which includes four basic factors:
-First there is the teacher, of course, who is unique because of her or his experience, personality, outside interests, background, competence, motivation, and so on;
-Second are the students, who are characterized together by the uniformity, or the diversity, of their ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status and future prospects; but who are also individual human beings with likes and dislikes, academic, physical and social abilities, home circumstances and the like;
- There is the school, which is distinguishable based on its size, its location, its infrastructure, equipment and amenities, the quality of its leadership, and so one; and
- Lastly, we can’t forget the community, which stands apart because of its geographic, social, cultural and economic characteristics, among others.
The second reason that the great ideas of a reform rarely translate with full fidelity into practice and results in the classroom is that they typically suffer from a watering down, or various forms of mutation, as they get communicated to the eventual practitioner: the teacher. Let’s just think about this for a moment. First, how much time do our “best” education minds put into studying what needs changed, conceiving the new models, testing these on the ground and then revising them, maybe a few times, to get them “just right?” Months? A year? More? And how much time do we allocate to training teachers in the new model? A week? A few days? A day? Less?...
And wait, there’s more! Who’s heard of the “Cascade” approach to training? That’s right, it’s not the instructional designers who train the teachers, but the model passes through a least a few, and sometimes many different persons before it reaches the classroom teacher. And with each step, there is inevitably at least some degree of interpretation, conversion and confusion that happens. How many of you know the
children’s game that we call “Whisper down the lane” in the U.S.? It’s a game where you put a bunch of kids in line and you whisper a message, even a simple one, in the ear of the first child. She then whispers what she heard into the ear of the next child, having been instructed to be as clear as possible but to utter the phrase just once. The message is quickly changed, and by the time it has passed through several children and reaches the end of the line, the original message is completely unrecognizable. Does this scenario sound familiar as regards innovation in education?
The third reason emerges directly from the first two. Accepting that the transmission of new models from the center to the teacher in her or his classroom inevitably yields a modified message, and given that each teacher is hardwired to employ the new model idiosyncratically, the need for quality control would seem to be greatest at the classroom level. Therefore, it is critical to have some strategy to help individual teachers as they strive to figure out how best to use the new model to improve instruction and learning. This requires on the one hand that the teacher learn the different new concepts and techniques that comprise the model. On the other hand, it also requires that the teacher adapt aspects of the model to suit the particular circumstances of her or his classroom, accommodating the four factors I enumerated earlier: the teacher, the student, the school and the community. Neither of these requirements is satisfied in a single training session, regardless its duration. This includes even a full graduate degree program. Rather, adaptation, mastery and successful adoption happen over an extended period of time that combines experimentation, or use, in the classroom with reflection on that experience and adjustment within an iterative cycle.
These objectives are affected in turn by two other considerations.
First, who is going to help each teacher with this process of experimentation and reflection that lead to mastery, adaptation and adoption? In Morocco, the Ministry assigns this role to its school inspectors, who, based on my experience, are usually supremely competent to fulfill this function but, for many reasons, often do not do so.
Second, I usually see what I perceive as a poorly skewed interpretation of quality, or of mastery. What commonly passes as “quality” among teachers, and inspectors, is instruction that adheres closely to the official school program and that reflects faithfully the pedagogic techniques that teachers learned in official training sessions. This is using a metric of “Rigidity” to determine quality. A teacher who does just what she or he has been trained to do is usually evaluated highly, irrespective her or his students’ school success. And in fact, in many education systems, a high failure rate among students is seen as confirmation of quality, because the school has succeeded in separating out the brilliant students from the mediocre and poor ones.
But what country can afford now to discard its youth in such large numbers, whether for reasons of economic, social, political or cultural progress and security?
What I propose as a more appropriate basis for determining quality is precisely the level of student success. We must replace Rigidity with a metric of “Rigor.” This is the notion that teachers should be evaluated based on the learning that their students have achieved, not on how faithfully the teachers do as they have been told. And, as suggested by the analysis I offered earlier concerning the context of change in education, it would seem that the only way to achieve greater uniformity in student success is to embrace greater diversity, or heterogeneity, in how teachers teach. I think back to the greatest mystery of my teaching days. This is how, in one period I could teach French 1 to a class of 20 boys and girls and achieve a certain degree of success; while in the next period, with a second class that has essentially the exact same profile, if I taught just as I had with the first class, I would get completely different results. For the teachers among you, has this been your experience, too?
So, what do we end up with? Essentially, when we are talking about a national Education Reform, the instant this reaches 10,000 teachers in 10,000 classrooms it becomes automatically 10,000 reforms. This is effectively true of any pedagogic innovation or new technology, and it’s so important that I will repeat it: The instant a national education reform, a single innovative pedagogic method or new technology reaches 10,000 classrooms, it instantly becomes 10,000 reforms, pedagogies or technologies.
Horrors! We can’t allow such anarchy in our classrooms; or so fear most top-level education authorities. So what can they do? Typically, what they do is define the parameters of what and how to teach so narrowly that teachers are left with almost no room to exercise their creativity and passion or to take initiative. Education systems do this...
by creating curricula that are so heavy that there is no room to pause or to introduce anything else;
- by establishing a school schedule that is, similarly, so tightly programmed that originality and spontaneity are out of the question;
- by creating textbooks that emphasize the transmission of information while basically dismissing the skills by which to relate this information to “real life” and eliminating opportunities for teachers to build further upon this information (this is even true in curricula that boast “life skills” and other aspects of relevance, which they commonly also reduce to rote information);
- by defining highly regimented instructional methods and assessing teachers on how faithfully they put these into practice – a recipe approach to teaching;
- by conducting “high stakes” standardized testing that usually examine only a narrow range of rote learning; and
- by promoting, and even often enforcing, a culture whereby teachers work in virtual isolation, rejecting collaboration that might capture synergies across academic disciplines or that might allow them to join forces in cultivating students’ mastery of cross-cutting competencies, such as communication, teamwork and problem-solving.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Which is really so horrible: 10,000 reforms that are adapted to their 10,000 contexts or just one reform that expects all 10,000 teachers to perform exactly the same? Indeed, it seems pretty obvious that the second option, the “cookie cutter” version of a teacher, is both undesirable and essentially impossible.
In fact, I must admit that the idea of 10,000 reforms excites me. Until we place robot teachers in every classroom or until all instruction is on-line and controlled out of a central facility by a small team of experts (not recommendations!), the delivery of education will remain a human endeavor; and when human beings are involved, heterogeneity rules. So I say, “vive la différence!”
However, most systems, and especially centralized systems, are ill-equipped to embrace and promote such diversity, effectively dooming even the most brilliant reforms to, at best, mediocrity. But there are ways that systems can attain consistent quality while favoring heterogeneity in the classroom.
What I have learned here in Morocco as well as in many other countries where I have worked, as diverse as Ethiopia, Guatemala, Benin and Cambodia (to name just a few), is that the solution to the challenges of a reform will be found first and foremost at the level of the teacher in her or his classroom. Quite simply (and I acknowledge that there is in reality nothing simple about it for, as I’ve said, if it seems simple, it won’t work), I submit two options. The first is the common approach of defining a reform and presenting it to the classroom teacher as a set of strategies that she or he must master and adhere to diligently. I have argued, and I expect all our experiences have shown, that this approach is doomed to fail.
The second option is to submit the reform to teachers as a set of objectives, broad principles and range of relatively loose instructional strategies that comprise a challenge for them to solve. This casts teachers in the role of collaborator. It communicates to teachers that the system acknowledges their experience and expertise and recognizes their professionalism. And it allows and encourages them to summon their creativity and to take initiative to perform better. What I have found in many countries, including my own, is that when you tell a teacher exactly what to do, that is all she or he will do, and anything more requires payment or some other sort of concrete quid pro quo. However, if you establish clear standards for teachers to achieve and you give them the freedom and support to reach these, they will more often than not make all kinds of sacrifices to succeed, seeing this as a personal mission and not just as a job. Surely this is not a universal attitude, but I do believe it is common, and even prevalent.
This we can all recognize as basic human nature: you respect me, I’ll respect you. Unfortunately, we planners and decision-makers often tend to forget that education is a human endeavor before it is anything else. Pedagogic sciences and rigorous experimentation and development of programs have their place, for sure; but not as a substitute for creativity and initiative.
So what do we do? I actually have a book in mind to write to respond to this question, but I know that my time here is coming to an end; so let me just offer a basic list to summarize what I have found to work best in my past work and, now, in my current capacity as Director of the USAID/ALEF Project here in Morocco.
One, we create situations for teachers to discover by themselves what works best, for her or him and for her or his students, to deliver successfully the prescribed curriculum;
Two, we provide a range of validated, practical pedagogic methods and tools from which teachers can choose in their lesson planning and delivery and in their organization of broader education activities;
Three, we equip and encourage teachers to adapt these methods and tools to their particular circumstances and personal preferences;
Four, we make sure that there is adequate training and, especially, on-going support to equip and assist the teachers as they continue to choose, adapt and use the various methods to achieve the greatest results and to assess the actual degree of their achievement;
And five, we promote an environment of cooperation and collaboration whereby teachers seek solutions together to improve their individual and collective performance and the performance of their students, which requires the active complicity of their hierarchical superiors – the school director, the inspector and others.
As I suggested at the start of my talk, education must evolve continually because society is in constant evolution. The national system is like a massive battleship, for which changing course is a slow and laborious process. Plus, it is basically impervious to the movement of troubled seas, except in the most extreme circumstances. But the smaller ships and boats that complete the armada can react quickly when the mission changes suddenly, even slightly, and must react swiftly and nimbly as the seas that have little impact on the mother ship buffet them about severely. It is the individual schools and teachers that need to be able to react to the particular conditions at every moment while the Ministry, the mother ship, sets the broad course, shouts the instructions and protects the schools and makes sure that they have what they need to accomplish the common mission satisfactorily.
So, to conclude, perhaps it is the system of education reform that really needs to be reformed, or at least re-formulated. What we need to care about especially is how a reform is put into practice and how well it yields improved student outcomes. Therefore, as I hope I have shown convincingly, all of us who lead or influence the system must work for the teachers so that they can accomplish their mission with creativity, with initiative and with skill. How will we know that we have succeeded?
When students, both girls and boys, are staying in school and passing to the next grade with their classmates;
When students (and teachers!) are not absent or late to school;
When students are succeeding on their national exams and these exams test both knowledge and the ability to use this knowledge effectively;
When the whole school, in class and out, becomes a dynamic crucible of individual and collective growth; and
In sum, when the whole school becomes a place of JOY in learning.
I wish you all a very joyous conference with much learning.
Thank you.
Muskin
| التالي > |
|---|