Remnant

In the small patch of forest

Beside the new

HDB they’re building,

There’s a family of

Dogs that seem

Somehow to survive.

I see one standing

Sentinel sniffing the air

And watching warily

The towers of concrete

That slowly encroach

On his home.

Last night they chased me.

Three wild dogs barking

At my heels

As I pedalled down

The footpath, heart

Pounding, trying to look calm.

They didn’t bite

Despite my fears

And my vulnerability.

Instead they left me wondering

Whether the world will be better

When they’re gone.

In search of the holy grail of assessment

A perfect storm of converging ideas brings this post into being.

A recent IBO program on "Affective Skills and Mindful Living" has got me thinking more about the skills students need for success post school. This reminded me of the role of Capabilities in the Australian curriculum which in turn took me to an article by Richard Bates where he writes:

The central assessment issue for educational institutions has now become that of how teachers and learners are to devise ways of testing validity claims – of testing the validity of information and knowledge claims that are new to both. This is by no means a simple issue, but contemporary circumstances force the issue to the centre of the curriculum and pedagogy of educational institutions. The open curriculum and an autonomous pedagogy require tests for truth and utility that are centred around individual and social purpose.  

(Bates: 2012, Is global citizenship possible and can international schools provide it? p.272 quoting an earlier article he wrote in 2008)

The challenge is complex, but the essence of it, as I see it, is to understand how we prepare students for a future where they can write their stories rather than ours.

One major part of what we do in education is transfer the understandings and opportunities of one generation to the next. Paraphrasing Schultz (1.) via Bates, this "neo-liberal" approach to teaching and learning focuses on the content of curricula assuming that the role of education is to equip students with the key knowledge they will use to replicate and acquire positional advantage in future societies. Once that key knowledge has been identified, benchmarked and disseminated to schools and teachers through documents like the IB curriculum the Australian Curriculum or UWCSEA's Learning

Program, teachers know what to teach, students know what to learn and examiners know what to assess. Those who learn it best can get the highest grades to take them to the most prestigious universities and be first in line to be the next generation of leaders. The best schools become those that get the best grades and provide parents and students with access to a future with economic and personal security.

The problem with an education system built on these neo-liberal lines is that it runs the risk of reproducing both the strengths and the failures of the past and of creating students who know what to think but not necessarily how - students whose education has given them knowledge about one way of understanding the world but not the skills to find other ways. This kind of education does little to address the sorts of concerns that  Mikhail Gorbachev raised in 2012 in this letter to the UWC community:

In today’s world, old threats to peace are persisting and new ones are emerging.The current economic crisis, the crisis of international relations and the threat of a new arms race testify to the fact that the twenty years after the end of the Cold War have been largely wasted instead of being used to build a more secure and just world order. The economy of many countries is in deep crisis. One of the causes of this crisis is the model that has defined global development for the past few decades, a model based on seeking super-profits and overconsumption, on social and environmental irresponsibility, making the human being merely a cog in an economic machine.

A neo-liberal curriculum does little to prepare students to transform the world and instead is more likely to solidify the processes that have created the problems in the first place.

...oOo...

My description of the IB, the Australian Curriculum and UWCSEA's Learning Program does none of the three curricula justice, of course. All three curricula have very deliberately built into them structures to teach students how to think and spaces for students to develop the autonomy they need if they are to be the creative leaders of the future.

In the IB these structures are most specifically represented by the "Approaches to Learning" (ATLs), in the Australian Curriculum by the Capabilities and in the UWCSEA Learning Program by the "Skills and Qualities." Following further Schultz's formulation of different schemata for understanding education, it is the existence of these elements of the respective curricula that might most represent the possibility of a "transformationalist" rather than a "neo-liberal" approach to education. These are the the key elements that underpin a more 'autonomous pedagogy'  which has the potential to empower the next generation to creatively engage with the world and write their own stories rather than re-writing ours.

Of these three curriculum structures, it is the Capabilities that have been around for the longest. Their earliest versions go back nearly 25 years to the 1989 "Hobart Declaration" and became more fully articulated in the 2008 "Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians." The two key goals of the Melbourne Declaration are:

Goal 1: Australian schooling promotes equity and excellence 

Goal 2: All young Australians become:

– Successful learners
– Confident and creative individuals
– Active and informed citizens 

And the second goal is broken down into 24 specific descriptors. Here are three examples:

Successful Learners:

• are creative, innovative and resourceful, and are able to solve problems in ways that draw upon a range of learning areas and disciplines

Confident and creative individuals:

• develop personal values and  attributes such as honesty, resilience, empathy and respect for others 

Active and informed citizens:

• act with moral and ethical integrity

These are wonderful goals and in their modern form as "Capabilities" are surely central to shaping a population ready to address the problems that Mikhail Gorbachev reminds us are so pressing.

The challenge, however, is in giving the Capabilities the space they deserve in the curriculum. For nearly 25 years leaders in business, education and politics in Australia have been saying that we need to be teaching the skills students need to be the autonomous leaders of the future. Speaking from my own experience at the chalk-face through that period of time, nothing much has changed. And I am not sure that the Capabilities, as they are being articulated through the Australian Curriculum will have much impact either.

The problem, as I see it, is in the monolithic shadow of Year 12 exams. Skills can't be assessed in isolation and if something can't be assessed, it has a hard time surviving in a school. The academic subjects with their Neo-liberal capacity to support the processes of sifting and sorting through the Year 12 exams, dominate the pages of the Australian Curriculum; it is through the lens of the subjects that the Capabilities are being articulated. The Capability of "Ethical Understanding", for example, finds it's articulation in English as:

Students develop ethical understanding as they study the issues and dilemmas present in a range of texts and explore how ethical principles affect the behaviour and judgment of characters and those involved in issues and events. Students apply the skills of reasoning, empathy and imagination, consider and make judgments about actions and motives, and speculate on how life experiences affect and influence people’s decision making and whether various positions held are reasonable.

This kind of articulation adds very little to what English teachers have always done: we look carefully at ethical ideas in texts, discuss them, and students write about them in exams. The key problem is "write about them in exams". As long as the summative objective for assessment of skills is an exam, students and teachers remain trapped within a system which, by definition, requires normative judgements and limits the capacity of students to imaginatively engage with their own stories. In the example of English, this is quite literally the case; English exams are structured around students writing about the stories of others, it is beyond the imaginative scope of an exam system to assess students who are writing their own stories.


So what is the answer? It is not, in my opinion, to do away with Year 12 exams or to try to break down the walls that hold up the Subject edifices. We need the stories of the past in our future and we need students to know how to work with them. What we also need is students skilled and confident enough to write stories of their own when these stories are needed. The credibility and reliability of Year 12 exams are a very important pillar of stability in our cultures - both in regard to their reproduction of knowledge and in the stability they provide as a mechanism for sorting and selecting. Articulation of skills like "ethical behaviour" as a Capability - or ATL or "Skill and Quality" - through subject knowledge can do no harm, but as long as we are thinking only of high-stakes exams, I can't see the skills being given the opportunity to do a whole lot of good.

The answer, to my way of thinking, is in the other places and spaces in our curricula where we can assess differently.

This puts a very clear responsibility on the k-10 curriculum. And once again, my description of the Australian Curriculum (and tarred with the same brush the IB and the UWCSEA Learning Program) does it no justice. There are no exams required in the Australian Curriculum prior to Year 11/12. The long shadow of Year 12 certainly has an influence over how teachers and students think in the lower years, but there is no policy requirement to assess with exams.

The question this begs is how should students be assessed K - 10? What does an assessment system that 'tests for truth and utility' in forms 'centred around individual and social purpose' look like? If my analysis is correct, then clearly not like an exam where 'truth and utility' are centred around the power structures of a familiar elite and the normalising tendencies of existing knowledge.

This is too big a question to explore in any detail in this post but it's one I need to return to; my purpose in this post was not to provide a comprehensive answer but to ask what I hope is a compelling question. That said, here are a few preliminary thoughts towards some kinds of assessment which might better support student autonomy and skill development in line with the Capabilities/ATLs/Skills and Qualities:

• The process of setting goals and teacher and student evaluation against those goals puts students more at the centre of their learning. 

• Spending more time outside classrooms exploring how to use their skills in and on the world would seem like another potential opportunity.

• I think my Outdoor Ed colleagues would be mumbling under their breath that it is about time the rest of us caught up - they've been doing this for generations.

• Our Middle School Writing units all have built into them this question to the student:

How are you going to publish your writing? 

In other words, who or how will your writing influence, change, inspire, entertain, engage, amuse, enrage, provoke or prod? In engaging with students around this question, we are engaging with their skills for understanding their autonomy and social purpose. Conversations around who you want to write for and why can become conversations about being "principled" and "self-aware" as students grapple to build their skills for shaping the world. I prepare them for exams by teaching students to shape language, I prepare them for life by supporting them to learn how to shape the world.

At the moment this important question about publishing gets only a small space in my planning. What I have persuaded myself in this post is that it must get more.

• Student self assessment of learning through structures like "portfolios" of writing seem very important. A carefully considered "student lead portfolio assessment" process where students take the lead in demonstrating learning to parents has many of the elements that might support student autonomy and skill development - particularly if the Capabilities/ATLs/Skills and Qualities can be a structuring element.

• The IBO, in their wisdom, have a range of structures that develop student autonomy and encourage connection with authentic audiences. The Extended Essay CAS and TOK requirements in the IBDP are one mechanism as are the Exhibition in the PYP and Personal and Community projects in MYP.

I see the K - 10 curriculum as having a responsibility to balance the scales. Through necessity, subject content weighs heavy in the final years and skills get less priority in the curriculum. In the Middle School and the Primary School, we need to redress this balance and put more weight on the ability of students to demonstrate skills through autonomous and self-directed learning where reading the stories of others takes a bit less of the focus and writing stories of their own takes more.

1. Schultz L (2007) Educating for global citizenship. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research 5(3): 248–258.

Christmas dinner

I've been writing alongside my Grade 6 students in their personal narrative unit. The Writing Workshop approach we use (from Columbia University's Teachers College Reading and Writing Project - TCRWP) encourages teachers to model writing for their students.

It's fun sharing writing with kids. I like the way they're so engaged by the fact that I am a writer, too. TCRWP cleverly encourages me to integrate particular skills into my writing just when students are ready to engage with them. In this story, I am writing about an event from my childhood - when I was about 10 - which I hope inspires students to think about similar times in their lives. We have been looking at how stories look to deeper themes to become more powerful. The kids told me they enjoyed this story but they want something a bit happier next time.

Christmas Dinner

My Uncle is holding the goose by its feet. It's upside-down and it's strangely calm as its head weaves around like an inquisitive snake. My uncle walks towards my father who is standing near the woodpile with the axe in his hand. I stand watching from the corner of the garden. My cousin stands beside me, quietly sobbing.

"Stop it," shouts my cousin, Andy. "You can't kill it." 

 My Uncle keeps walking.

"Quiet Andy," he says, "settle down."

He reaches the woodpile where my dad is waiting. Taking hold of the goose's head, he stretches its neck across the chopping block.

I turn away looking towards the other corner of the garden where two more geese have backed themselves against the fence. After the noise and flapping wings and running and hissing that accompanied our efforts to catch the first goose, their quiet watchfulness seems unsettling. 

I think back to when the geese arrived a week ago. Dropped off by a local farmer who wanted to give my father a Christmas present - something to say thank you for looking after his sick wife. Dad wasn't home of course. He'd arrive home late from the hospital and greet my mother in the usual way:

"Sorry I'm late, honey, been off saving lives."

I look again at the two geese in the corner watching my father.

It's Christmas tomorrow, but my cousin is quietly sobbing. 

 

 

 

 

 

The moral purpose of English

The house which my wife and I own is on the land of the Boon Wurrung people on what is now known as the Mornington Peninsula in the south east of Australia. We have owned the house for 15 years; they have owned the land for 40,000.

And already we enter a region of problems: "Ownership" is such a problematic term. When the first permanent settlement of Europeans was established in Boon Wurrung and neighbouring Wurundjeri territory in 1835, my white predecessors thought it just and proper to purchase the land they wanted to own. In exchange for scissors, blankets and an assortment of knives and mirrors, John Batman "bought" the land from Wurundjeri elders and laid the foundations for the city of Melbourne. Less than 50 years later, Jimmy Dunbar, the last full-blooded Boon Wurrung person, was dead.

Jimmy Dunbar

What killed the Boon Wurrung people was not primarily a failure of good intentions. This history certainly has its share of scurrilous individuals and acts of evil, but most of the white settlers did not wish their Boon Wurrung neighbours dead. Some of the settlers wrote with enlightenment sentiments about the Boon Wurrung as noble and aristocratic and relations between the two peoples were primarily peaceful. Germs played a major role in the deaths as diseases like smallpox, to which the whites had levels of immunity, ripped through the Boon Wurrung peoples, who did not.

The most devastating failure, however, was a failure of communication.

As James Cook had so presciently written in his journal whilst exploring the east coast of Australia in 1770,  the way the aboriginal people of northern Australia engaged with the world was profoundly different to the way Europeans did.

From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched People upon Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans, being wholy unacquainted not only with the Superfluous, but with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a

James Cook

Tranquility which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition. The earth and Sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for Life. They covet not Magnificient Houses, Household-stuff, etc.; they live in a Warm and fine Climate, and enjoy every wholesome Air, so that they have very little need of Cloathing; and this they seem to be fully sencible of, formany to whom we gave Cloth, etc., left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the Woods, as a thing they had no manner of use for; in short, they seem'd to set no Value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one Article we could offer them. This, in my opinion, Argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life, and that they have no Superfluities.

(James Cook: Journal Thursday 23rd August 1770)

When Europeans arrived in Australia, they couldn't see any fences and so they assumed that the land was not owned. The settlers on the Mornington Peninsula saw the "Black's Camps" but, as the Boon Wurrung didn't live in them permanently, they didn't understand the complex relationship between land and culture that characterises "ownership" for the Boon Wurrung. When the Europeans brought their sheep to eat the grasses that sustained the native animals and the daisy yam which was the staple of the Boon Wurrung, they didn't understand how their actions were appropriating not just Boon Wurrung food, but also the land which defined them. Ownership is about much more than fences, it's a complex set of understandings about how we can interact with the spaces and objects in our lives: the grammar of belonging is intricately woven from interactions and conventions.

The land was being re-written from the songlines of the Boon Wurrung to the languages of the Europeans. White settlers at the time noted that there were fewer and fewer babies  and it appears likely that, with no land to sustain their future identities, Boon Wurrung mothers took their babies into the bush and smothered them.

Ultimately, the loss of so many Boon Wurrung lives and so much culture, is partly a failure of communication. A failure of the Europeans to understand the Boon Wurrung and a failure of the Boon Wurrung to understand the Europeans; a failure of the Europeans to communicate their culture and values to the Boon Wurrung and a failure of the Boon Wurrung to communicate their culture and values to the Europeans.

As a white Australian male, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells me that my life expectancy is about 80 years. Aboriginal Australian males can expect to live for about 14 years less. Clearly we are still struggling to communicate and understand.


..........


These reflections were inspired by some work we have been doing at UWCSEA to make better use of data as we assess the impact of our teaching. It may seem a bit of a stretch to be relating good teaching practice to the history of race relations in Australia; what prompted the connection in my mind was a question from a colleague about "moral purpose"- he invited us to frame our research around a common understanding of the moral purpose of our teaching of English.

For me, the moral purpose of teaching communication is clear and compelling: if we are to live in a world which is peaceful and just, we need highly developed skills for communication. We need to know how to read and write the contexts of our interactions in ways that a complex, empathetic and insightful. The hard work of living well together is built on a foundation of good communication and building this foundation is our moral purpose.

Two seats

It's a bit impertinent

To write this

When I

Didn't know you

That well

But I read

Your books

And taught your son

And you gave me a

Collection of your writing

So I thought I could give

You this in return.

You wrote about

Soundings -

Sailors taking soundings

Trying to fathom

The depths of

Meaning in the place

We both lived.

I loved the masterful

Elegance of

Your art form:

Swinging the lead

And letting it fly

At just the right

Moment so that it

Hit the water

Far enough for'ard

For the lead to touch

Bottom just

As the line

Became vertical.

Timing: a split second

To fathom meaning

And make sense

Of the darkness

Beneath.

...

Your two seats

Were like all the rest

In that instant

Before whatever

Political stupidity

Turned a flight

I knew nothing about

Into one

about which

I knew too much.

It was intermission
When I looked at my
Phone. Ballet
In the park. The
Twist and turn of bodies
Beautiful
Until it is shattered
By the news.

I can't make sense

Of it.

A line

Of words

Trying to sound

Depths which are

Immeasurable.

For Liam and Frankie Davison 17th July 2014

Moral obligations of YA literature

Mice by Gordon Reece
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I didn't like this book and I don't feel I have a right to be overly critical of a book unless I can put in the time to explain why - so here goes.

This is a YA book and, whilst I'm not of the opinion that YA literature should shield readers from the harsh realities of the world, I do believe that it has a moral responsibility to treat difficult issues with complexity and insight. As the narrator of the novel notes:

"So much of what Mum was was made up of what she'd read. Is that what our middle-class culture created? People formed more by the books they'd read than the lives they'd lived?" (p.199)

To the extent that this may be true, I was disappointed by the lack of empathy or insight shown in the novel. The main character is a victim of cruel bullying which drives her to decide to suicide. A series of events saves her from taking her own life. She then goes on to murder two people. Despite having been a victim herself, Shelley, the first-person narrator of the novel, shows little or no empathy for her victims. There's a level of egotism that is in itself quite frightening. In another moment of reflection she says:

"After everything I've lived through, surely I'll be able to write something truly great? After all, how many writers actually know what it's like to kill somebody?" (pp.224-225)

And this is where I think the novel fails. Reece didn't convince me that he truly understood his subject matter. Too often I felt that Shelley's introspective moments were there to move me to the next point in the plot rather than to explore honestly this difficult subject matter.

If the novel had been about a less difficult and important topic or if it had taken a much lighter hand to it's subject matter, I could be more forgiving, but if you choose to write a YA novel about these topics you have a moral responsibility to say something that matters. I don't think this novel does.

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Imagine

It’s the complexity of it all

That gives me a headache.

Reimagining John Lennon’s

Song with my Grade Six

Students, we stumbled into

The binary of black

And white as John

And Yoko walk down a

Dark path to arrive

At a white house and

Yoko opens shutters to

Illuminate an empty

Room in a place they

Call “not here”.

The peaceful simplicity of a

Black and white world

Greyed as we walked

Our own path:

Black White,

Wrong Right,

Evil Goodness,

Dirty Clean,

Ambiguity Clarity,

Weak Strong,

Chaos Logic,

South North,

African European,

Female Male,
Innocence,
Experience,

And arrived at a room

Where my illumination

Opened eyes
And minds onto

A world which is increasingly

Hard to see.

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gladwell's ideas are as compelling as his prose. The essential premiss is that mainstream views of success produce Goliaths who may be unable to view the world creatively and may lack the resilience to adapt and succeed when times change. The Davids of the world might see opportunities others miss and have the the necessary resilience for success which comes from being an underdog.

It's interesting that several of the case studies Gladwell works through are based on religious figures as there is something of the evangelist in the way Gladwell writes, too. This makes for an easy read - like listening to a sermon on one of the Gospel stories - but did make me wonder at times how much the flow of the story was encouraging me to lazily drift over the rigour of the argument. Not that I have particular reservations about Gladwell's argument, just that he is so skilled with his prose that I wondered at times if I might have forgotten to think for myself.

From my perspective as a Middle School Teacher, I'd like more of my students to think about Gladwell's discussion about universities and the advantage of a 2nd tier university over a 1st tier uni. I particularly liked the argument that we can define success broadly and see opportunities for meaning in many different life paths.

I was given this book by one of Grade 8 students who wanted to know what I thought. I hope this review helps, and a copy of the book will be going into my classroom library to challenge some of my other enthusiastic readers.

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More about Middle School - an article for Dunia

This is a recent article I wrote for Dunia, a magazine published by UWCSEA. You can find the digital version here. The version below is the original which was clipped slightly to fit into Dunia.

It follows nicely from my reflections in my last post about the changing nature of teaching and learning in Middle Schools.

Reading and Writing Workshop in the Middle School at East

“Do you like the rhythm of this?” asks Ali, as he turns to his partner.

“Yeah, but the mentor text is shorter, maybe you could cut out a few words.”

The two boys look again at the lead they’ve been using as a model: There’s no dignity in poverty. They compare their writing to the mentor text discussing what they’ve been learning about meter and rhyme and the need for a catchy phrase to help anchor their audience’s attention. After a moment more of discussion, they return to the speeches they are writing as a part of their study of the Grade 6 Development Unit.

This style of learning will be familiar to parents who have had children come through the Primary School as UWCSEA East. The “Workshop” approach uses a combination of very structured “mini-lessons” mixed with sustained periods of time for students to write and conference with their teacher and student partners. At the heart of “Workshop” is the belief that ‘children want to write’ and that instruction around writing should be very focussed and succinct leaving time for students to apply and consolidate skills.

In our Primary School, reading instruction takes a similar form with focussed lessons on particular skills and an emphasis on building student’s reading volume and stamina. The teacher’s key objective is to help the students find the right book for their reading ability and interests and to keep them reading.

Learning in High School English classes can look quite different to this. In High School students will spend sustained periods of time in whole class discussion around one common novel and teaching points will often come organically from this discussion. Writing becomes increasingly focused on the essay form and feedback will focus as much on the student’s ideas as it does on the craft of writing. This transition from learning in Primary Schools to High Schools is sometimes described as the difference between “learning to read and write and reading and writing to learn”.

What should reading and writing instruction look like in the Middle School?

Middle School is, of course, in the middle and we need to do a bit of both. Middle School students have a very particular set of developmental needs and learning instruction needs both to recognise what is unique to early adolescents and also where students are in their journey through the curriculum. Over the past twelve months, Middle School English teachers have been working with our colleagues in Primary and High school to decide how best to build on the success of the Workshop approach in Primary School as we prepare students for High School. UWCSEA’s English Standards and Benchmarks describe what we should teach; our discussions have centered on articulating how best to deliver this curriculum. What has resulted is a plan to extend the Columbia University “Workshop” approach up through Middle School but with modifications to meet the needs of our particular circumstances here at UWCSEA East. We have been trialling many of the teaching strategies from Workshop already and parents will already notice many similarities in the way writing is taught between Primary and Middle Schools.

The big challenge in our planning has been around reading. By Grade 6 or 7 students are classified as “independent” readers meaning that, whilst they need guidance in their reading choices, they don’t need the same kinds of support in learning how to read.

A lot of our discussion has been about how to encourage good independent reading habits when the diversity of demands on students’ time are increasing. The establishment of a dedicated Middle School section in the Senior Library has certainly helped, but we have also decided to establish classroom libraries in all Middle School English classrooms and High School is exploring a similar approach. The emphasis here is on maintaining stamina and engagement in a wider range of novels to supplement the common class texts that students study in Grades 7 through to 12.

As you can see in the photograph accompanying this article, students still share texts in the Middle School. One important insight into the complexities of Development comes from the novels that describe the experience of poverty and these Grade 6 students are sharing their understandings through their Literature Circle discussion. They will use what they are learning in their writing as well, building both from the ideas in the text and also learning from the skills the writer uses to construct his narrative.

Reading and Writing Workshop supports a rich environment for learning; we believe it provides the best foundation for building readers and writers who are skilled, confident and capable - ready to face the many complex communication challenges they have ahead of them.