Resumen: Didac India es hoy uno de los eventos más reconocidos en la región de Asia y el Pacífico para material educativo, capacitación y soluciones basadas en la tecnología para el sector de la educación preescolar, escolar, de educación superior y de habilidades y capacitación.
Didac India is today one of the most renowned events in the Asia Pacific Region for Educational Material, Training & Technology-based solutions for Preschool, School, Higher Education, and Skill & Training segment of education sector.
In a bid to showcase the best global practices of education sector, Didac India, the educational event is being organised for nine years. To address the growing demand for innovative educational products and solutions in the Indian subcontinent, the event is held annually with international exhibition and conference.
The event has British Education Suppliers Association (BESA), DIDACTA (Germany), Worlddidac Association & India Didactics Association among esteemed partners. It is also supported by many ministries of the Government of India and various public and private educational bodies.
The World Education Summit (WES) is one such event organised on the similar lines. Held annually in various parts of the world, it is organised by Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd, the Asia and Middle East’s premier technology and media research company.
The WES is meant to showcase innovations, initiatives and best practices followed across the globe in the education space. So far, 10 editions of WES have been organised across the world in various countries.
Congregating top-notch decision makers, influencers, experts and practitioners from around the world under one roof, the WES facilitates learning about groundbreaking innovations in the education sector and propagate them in different parts of the world, making meaningful improvements in global education.
The summit serves as a premier international platform dedicated to encouraging innovation and creative action in education landscape. In this, top decision-makers share insights with on-the-ground practitioners and collaborate to rethink education.
The latest edition of the World Education Summit is set to be organised on 9-10 August this year in New Delhi’s The Leela Ambience Convention Hotel.
Meanwhile, the 10th edition of the Didac India Exhibition and Conference is scheduled to be organised from 4-6 October 2018 in New Delhi.
The stage is, however, also set for Didac India 2018. With a focus on adding more varied products and solutions and a determination to expand improve, the annual exhibition is set to create new benchmarks in the Indian Education & Training Industry.
WES is the congregation of some of the leading thinkers in the education world from across Asia and beyond. The latest edition of WES will inspire one and all, making them understand the challenges and solutions of the developing education world through a new prism.
The event is a must visit for all those wanting to network with the most promising and fastest growing economies of the world – India and also an ideal platform to reach out to the education industry of Asia.
The world is in the midst of an education crisis, as half of the planet’s young people are failing to learn the basic skills needed to secure a more prosperous future. One former child soldier and soon-to-be law student promotes a strategy for putting money behind politicians’ platitudes.
My family was murdered before I could tie my shoes. As a young boy in Sierra Leone, years that should have been playful and carefree were spent fighting in someone else’s war. For me, childhood was a nightmare; escape always seemed impossible. But when the war officially ended, in 2002, I began finding ways to recover. One of the most important has been an opportunity I couldn’t have imagined as an angry, illiterate, nine-year-old soldier: school.
I am living proof of the transformative power of education. Thanks to hard work and lots of good fortune, I managed to graduate from high school and then university. Now, in just a few months, I will begin graduate classes at the Fordham University School of Law, an unimaginable destination for most of the former child soldiers in my country.
And yet, throughout my brief educational journey, one question has always nagged me: why did luck play such a crucial role? After all,education is supposed to be a universal human right. If only it were that simple.
Today, more than 260 million children are out of school, and over 500 million boys and girls who do attend are not receiving a quality education, as the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunitydiscovered. By 2030, more than half of the world’s school-age children – some 800 million kids – will lack the basic skills needed to thrive or secure a job in the workplace of the future.
Addressing this requires money. But while education may be the best investment a government can make to ensure a better future for its people, education financing worldwide is far too low. In fact, education accounts for just 10% of total international development aid, down from 13% a decade ago. To put this in perspective, developing countries receive just $10 per child annually in global education support, barely enough to cover the cost of a single textbook. In an age of self-driving cars and smart refrigerators, this dearth of funding is simply unacceptable.
One of the best ways to do this is by supporting theInternational Finance Facility for Education, an initiative spearheaded by the Education Commission that could unlock the greatest global investment in education ever recorded. Young people around the world understand what’s at stake. Earlier this month, Global Youth Ambassadorspresented a petition, signed by more than 1.5 million children in some 80 countries, to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, calling for the UN to support the finance facility.
By leveraging roughly $2 billion in donor guarantees, the finance facility aims to make $8 billion in new funding available to countries that need it most. If adopted widely, the program could make it possible for developing countries to provide quality education to millions more children, including refugees, young girls, and former child soldiers like me.
Politicians often say that young people are the leaders of tomorrow. That’s true; we are. But platitudes not backed by financial support are meaningless. Simply put, the world must unite to fund quality education for everyone. The International Finance Facility for Education – which is already backed by the World Bank, regional development banks, GPE, ECW, and numerous UN agencies – is among the best ways to make that happen.
Twenty years ago, law school was an impossible dream for me. Today, thanks to hard work, global support, and much good fortune, my future is brighter than it has ever been. But my story should not be an exception. To ensure that others can gain a quality education and follow the path that has opened up to me, we must remove luck from the equation.
The minutes and hours of the school day are critical to build knowledge, foster student motivation, and drive student outcomes. To make the most of precious instructional time, teachers must first develop engaging lessons that meet the various needs of students. This requires teachers to collaborate, plan, and reflect outside of instructional time. Effective school schedules maximize the time teachers spend with their students but also recognize teachers’ additional responsibilities beyond instructional time. Unfortunately, not enough schools successfully balance these priorities.
Teachers in the United States spend far more time engaged in active instruction than teachers in other high-performing countries.1 Based on self-reported data, teachers in the United States spend 27 hours teaching out of 45 hours of work per week.2 Compare this with teachers in Singapore, who teach for only 17 hours per week, or teachers in Finland, who teach for a total of 21 hours per week.3 Schools in these countries prioritize time for planning and collaboration, recognizing that developing and executing lessons take time and preparation.4 According to a recent analysis of more than 140 school districts, the average length of a U.S. teacher’s workday is 7.5 hours.5 In another analysis of more than 120 school districts, the most common length of time allotted for planning was 45 minutes per day.6 In this short time, teachers must grade student work, plan for future lessons, engage with families, and complete necessary paperwork. As a result, teachers have little time to plan or collaborate with peers.7
The squeeze for time to plan lessons and complete other administrative tasks shapes a school’s professional environment and, ultimately, affects the quality of instruction. In a recent survey from the American Federation of Teachers, one of teachers’ two most cited “everyday stressors” was time pressure.8 As teachers are largely separate from other educators during instruction, lack of time for collaboration can be very isolating. More than half of lower secondary school teachers in the United States report that they do not teach jointly or observe other teachers.9 Such practices can improve teaching quality by granting teachers opportunities to receive feedback on their lesson execution and infuse new best practices into their repertoire.
In addition, providing teachers with more time to plan and attend to other responsibilities throughout the school day creates systematic opportunities to support new teachers and stretch more seasoned teachers—increasing the likelihood of teacher retention. During this structured planning time, new teachers should receive the coaching and personalized training they need to maximize their effectiveness and meet their professional goals. Meanwhile, experienced teachers can pursue leadership roles or coach new teachers.
Fortunately, schools can look to several promising models to change their typical schedules. The Center for American Progress compiled five of these innovative school schedules. Some of these schedules have already been implemented in schools across the country to improve instruction and ensure that teachers have ample time to teach, prepare, and develop their craft. CAP has also included teachers’ ideas for alternatives to the traditional school day model.
While each example schedule varies, there were similarities in how school leaders and teachers at each school reimagined the use of time. These innovative schedules all included:
Additional time for planning and collaboration
Flexible instructional blocks to differentiate content to student need
Opportunities for small group instruction or student-directed learning
Innovative school schedules: Example schedules from schools across the country
Guilmette Elementary School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, added more than 260 hours of instructional time to the school year and built in common planning time by extending the school day and strategically aligning grade team schedules. The schedule also allows for targeted intervention and enrichment opportunities for all students. (see Table 1) Students follow a similar schedule on Mondays through Thursdays. On Fridays, students participate in high-quality enrichment programming from noon to 2:30 p.m., which is led by community partners. These enrichment activities include art, music, yoga, and cooking. Teachers participate in professional development and planning at that time.10
Operations and cost
The extra instructional hours are a significant cost. The district’s teacher contract provides teachers with a stipend of $2,500 per year for added hours that is distributed evenly across their paychecks. Moreover, the quality of the enrichment programs offered on Friday is dependent on the community partners that teach the programs. Guilmette has worked to find high-quality, affordable partners.11
Outcomes
In the four years since Guilmette has implemented the new schedule, its English language arts and math proficiency scores have steadily improved; since 2013, Guilmette outperformed other elementary schools in the district. More information is available on the school’s report card.12
Objectives
Add 260 or more instructional hours each school year
Provide collaborative planning time for teachers
Create added opportunities for enrichment and targeted intervention that focuses on acceleration
Achievement First Greenfield middle school schedule, New Haven, Connecticut
What’s different about this schedule?
Greenfield schools, which are a part of the Achievement First network, designed a schedule that leverages four modalities of learning: self-directed learning; small group learning; large group instruction, and immersive expeditions.13 Students engage in daily self-directed learning to build responsibility and differentiate the pace of their learning. During this time, students use independent work or technology to review new concepts and move through mastery of content at their own pace. Students also participate in small group learning in sections of 14 to 16 students to dig into specific topics and receive individual feedback. Larger group instruction is reserved for seminars, debates, and experiments.
Every eight weeks, students engage in immersive expeditions for one to two weeks that explore a specific issue and apply skills to the real world. Expeditions such as creating a play, television show, or movie allow them to use writing, improvisation, and teamwork skills to bring stories to life. For example, in the expedition “Make your story come to life,” students write and produce scenes or short plays to be performed by other actors. They engage with a professional theater company for storytelling workshops and go on behind-the-scenes tours.14
Interactive digital learning is a key element of the Greenfield model. A cloud-based Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, takes the place of traditional textbooks. Students use a laptop to access their online self-directed content, track progress toward their goals, and take assessments to demonstrate mastery of concepts. This system minimizes teachers’ work and increases transparency of student progress. Teachers or students do not need to input results to track progress; the platform does it automatically. Teachers, students, and families can log in to access student progress anywhere with an internet connection. It also helps the school communicate with parents and families.15
Every teacher is responsible for leading one instructional area—either humanities, math, science, writing, or social studies. This specialization allows teachers to focus on achieving ambitious results in their content area. A yearly pacing calendar identifies where students must perform at every point in the year in order to be on track with these ambitious outcomes. Teachers use pacing reports each day to determine where students are performing relative to the bar and to adjust their instruction in ways that will maximize the number of students who are on and ahead of pace.16
In addition, Greenfield differentiates teachers’ roles and schedules to allow for specialization, planning, and life balance.17 This includes collaborative planning time for all teachers, differentiated coaching, and professional development, as well as growth opportunities based on teachers’ skills and experience. Greenfield also offers a staggered teaching schedule for more experienced teachers.
Within each grade, students are organized into goal teams of 10 to 12 students and assigned a goal coach. These teams meet daily in order to set and reflect on academic, life habit, or enrichment goals; deepen relationships with the goal coach and other goal team members; and build habits of success. Within goal teams, students are paired off with another student, called a running partner. These pairs provide mutual support and accountability to one another as they strive for ambitious short- and long-term goals. Goal teams are led by a goal coach who is a staff member in the school. The goal coach works closely with one goal team to build community and to be a primary support for each student and running partner pair.18
Operations and cost
The ongoing operation of this schedule is not more costly than other schedules that Achievement First operates in its network. Core to Achievement First’s mission is to operate with the same public dollars as traditional district schools in the geographies where it operates.19
Outcomes
The Greenfield schools piloted the model in kindergarten and middle school grades, all of which saw proficiency exceed or equal the scores of other Achievement First schools in Connecticut after just one year. Kindergartners exceeded 90 percent proficient rates in reading, and 60 percent of students demonstrated at least 75 percentile growth in math. For middle school grades, average scores on English language arts weekly quizzes ranked first or second in the overall Achievement First Connecticut network. Fifth grade math scores exceeded the network average, but sixth grade scores were below the average.20For more information on socioemotional growth, review the Achievement First’s Greenfield Schools Year 1 Pilot.21
Objectives
Allow for accelerated, differentiated academics through four modalities of learning: self-directed learning time; small group learning; large group learning; and immersive expeditions
Build in time for enrichment
Foster habits of success in all kids, including curiosity, personal growth, empathy, gratitude, drive, and teamwork
Emphasize the importance of student, family, and staff motivation
Differentiate teacher roles based on experience and create more time for planning for all instructional staff
Reduce turnover by finding ways to accommodate senior teachers who need more flexible schedules
Generation Schools secondary schedule, Brooklyn, New York
What’s different about this schedule?
Generation Schools Network’s secondary school model creates up to 30 percent more learning time than traditional public schools in New York City and provides opportunities for differentiated instruction. It also reduces student-to-teacher ratios and overall teacher workloads to facilitate the development of supportive teacher-student relationships.22
Furthermore, teachers have more time for collaboration and professional development. All teachers, as part of their approximately 180-day work year, participate in a one- to two-week Summer Institute dedicated to collaborative planning in preparation for the school year.23 In addition, grade teams have two weeks of professional collaborative time staggered throughout the year when their students are in intensives. This is in addition to the collaborative time that teachers have every day.24
To reduce teacher workload and increase instructional time, the Generation Schools Network differentiates instructional roles—foundation, studio, and intensive teachers. This allows the school to build on a wider range of teachers’ strengths and to design roles and responsibilities that help teachers be effective and reduce turnover. In addition, it reduces teachers’ student load. Teachers have 75 or fewer students daily compared with their peers in New York City traditional public high schools, who often teach 150 students daily.25 The model organizes teachers into grade level teams and a college and career intensives team. The college and career intensives team rotates from grade to grade over the course of the year, spending a month with students exploring college and career pathways. Teachers on that designated grade team are not responsible for students that month and can use that time for collaboration and breaks. By staggering teacher breaks, Generation Schools Network expands the instructional year for students without increasing the number of working days for teachers.26
Every student also has a differentiated schedule that fits their needs. Students participate in extended foundation courses—including interdisciplinary courses on humanities or science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM—which teach required subjects for all students as well as have various studio courses based on their interests. Studio courses include art history, physical education, art, foreign languages, or advanced sciences.27
Operations and cost
Generation Schools’ model reconfigures the same number of staff members who are employed in a conventional school model so that each school can offer much more planning time to teachers and instructional time to students without increasing staff costs, which are a majority of a school’s budget. Depending on how districts budget, this type of schedule may require additional costs for maintenance or transportation.28
Outcomes
Generation Schools Network has improved student achievement and graduation rates. Brooklyn Generation School, or BGS, has improved attendance, course completion, and graduation rates. At 69 percent, the four-year graduation rate at BGS has matched that for the city overall—70 percent—and outperformed schools with a similar demographic of students. These achievements are especially remarkable, as 85 percent of BGS’ students enter high school behind or significantly behind. In addition, 100 percent of the 2016 graduating class was accepted into college—many receiving multiple admissions and significant financial aid to make the opportunity real.29
Objectives
Increase instructional time for all students and opportunities to differentiate instruction
Reduce student-to-teacher ratios and overall teacher workloads to facilitate the development of supportive teacher-student relationships
Integrate collaborative planning time for teacher teams
Model school schedules designed by teachers
Model elementary school schedule
Created by Lexie Woo, fourth and fifth grade teacher in Queens, New York
What’s different about this schedule?
This schedule allows educators the opportunity to improve their instruction through strategic collaboration with colleagues, additional planning time, and ongoing feedback from administrators.
The timing of instructional blocks rotates to diffuse the negative impact of time-sensitive factors, such as tardiness, early dismissals, fatigue, medication use, and attention span. In addition, each subject has a double instructional block once per week, providing time for innovative educational practices, including multidisciplinary learning; project-based learning; and science, technology, engineering, art and design, and math, or STEAM, and STEM. This allows students to engage in a more self-directed and autonomous educational experience, growing as independent thinkers and doers.
With this dynamic schedule, teachers can select preferred preparation times, allowing teachers to shape their day to fit their working style. In other words, teachers can deliver instruction at the height of their energy.30
Objectives
Create more teacher planning time and develop more opportunities for teachers to receive feedback on their instruction
Allow teachers to self-select preparation periods to ensure that the timing works for their teaching and working styles
Offer double instructional blocks for each subject throughout the week
Rotate the timing of instructional blocks
Model high school schedule
Created by Crischelle Navalta, high school teacher in Donna, Texas; Jillian Harkins, high school teacher in New Haven, Connecticut; Mary Kreuz, high school teacher in Toledo, Ohio; Megan Williams, eighth grade teacher in Washington, D.C.; and Amanda Zullo, high school teacher in Saranac Lake, New York
What’s different about this schedule?
This schedule strategically minimizes teachers’ workloads to ensure that they have time to build their content expertise. In addition, teachers have additional time apart from active instruction to collaborate with their content team, plan independently, or assume a leadership position.31
Objectives
Reduce instructional load by ensuring that teachers teach no more than two different course subjects, and limit teaching time to only 60 percent of a teacher’s day
Build in approximately 40 percent of the day for conference time, leadership roles beyond the classroom, common planning time with content or grade team, and professional development
Conclusion
Tasked to deliver differentiated, high-quality instruction that prepares students for the social and academic challenges in college and beyond, schools must push their thinking on how they allocate time throughout the school day. Innovative school schedules should meet diverse student needs and ensure that all teachers are primed to deliver engaging, rigorous content. As this issue brief demonstrates, various models already exist to accomplish these goals. As schools across the country reimagine their school day schedules, they will be most successful if they customize the use of time to meet content needs rather than adapting content to fit a fixed schedule.
Meg Benner is a Senior Consultant at the Center for American Progress. Lisette Partelow is the Director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at the Center.
National Council on Teacher Quality, “The NCTQ Teacher Trendline: A snapshot of district-level teacher policies from NCTQ’s Teacher Contract Database” (2015), available at http://www.nctq.org/commentary/article.do?id=186. ↩
Personal communication from Jonathan Spear, co-founder and former chief learning officer, and Wendy Loloff Piersee, chief executive officer, Generation Schools Network, July to August 2016. ↩
Personal communication from Lexie Woo, fourth and fifth grade teacher, Queens, New York, July 2016. ↩
Personal communication from Crischelle Navalta, high school teacher, Donna, Texas; Jillian Harkins, high school teacher, New Haven, Connecticut; Mary Kreuz, high school teacher, Toledo, Ohio; Megan Williams, eighth grade teacher, Washington, D.C.; and Amanda Zullo, high school teacher, Saranac Lake, New York, July 2016. ↩
Source of the article: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2017/02/23/426723/reimagining-the-school-day/
‘Imagine a world where you are enclosed by war, not knowing if you are going to die tomorrow or tonight, or maybe even in an hour. Living in a world of fear. Hearing gunshots and shelling day and night, hoping that you won’t be the one to get hit. Not wanting to step outside your door to go to the shops, in fear that you might not return home.” Ava has poise. Her eyes scan the gathering. She has them hooked.
“There are children like Wasem and Maher, who were three and 11. They were both executed with knives in front of their parents, who felt as if they were being tortured themselves.” This is a conference room in the House of Lords: an audience of academics, politicians, charity leaders and experts.
“The people who are killing and destroying the country and causing the civil war are following harsh dictator [Bashar al-]Assad and are fighting against Isis, an equally brutal militant religious group. The citizens are caught up in the middle of this awful war and are fleeing the country. This has caused one of the largest refugee crises known in history.” There are nearly 200 people in the room. Ava is only 12.
“So it’s pretty bad, right? We surely must be doing something? There are now over 19.5 million Syrian refugees, that’s nearly four times the population of Scotland. These are harmless, innocent citizens fleeing from war and trying to get to safety. So far Britain has only let one thousand refugees into the country. Only one thousand!
“Let them in! Everybody, together. Let them in!” The audience of the great and the good join Ava in a rousing chorus of “Let them in”. She stares, shocked that they have followed her command. Surprised that her words could have such power. Relieved, drained, tearful, she sits back down.
This is the launch event for a piece of research into the importance of speaking in schools. Ava, like many at School 21 – a state-funded, non-selective free school in Stratford, east London – is finding her voice. She had chosen a subject dear to her heart, one she wanted to speak out about, to craft and deliver something of true worth. Like millions of young people, she is growing up in an age of extraordinary new opportunities, an increasing number of perils and a series of troubling moral dilemmas.
In a world of “alternative facts”, how can we give young people the skills to shine a spotlight on the truth?
At a time of growing disaffection with politics, and alienation caused by globalisation, how do we teach young people that ignorance is not bliss, that expertise is of value, that they can make a difference?
With extreme politicians on the march and the potential for an era of “illiberal” democracy to sweep the west, how do we teach young people that tolerance is a quality to be prized, not discarded when times get tough?
When scientists create babies from three “parents”, what should young people be taught so they can respond with the knowledge but also a moral compass? When an exciting but potentially terrifying world of artificial intelligence opens up, how do we equip young people to understand and shape this changed world? When a 100-year lifespan is within the grasp of those at school today, with profound implications for personal finance, lifestyle, careers and lifelong learning, how do we teach young people to be sufficiently agile? What kind of education do we need that can possibly meet these mighty challenges?
There are no easy answers and, like politics, education suffers from an unhealthy polarisation – divided between those who believe that technology renders the teacher obsolete and those who believe that the role of the teacher is to be boot-camp instructor.
A world without teachers?
Some truly believe that the teacher is and should be on the way out. This is an individualistic world, they say, so education needs to be customised. School of One in New York, for example, is designed to give everyone a personalised curriculum each day by using an algorithm to adapt instructional methods and content based on what was learned the day before. The growth of Moocs (massive open online courses) means millions of people around the world can access expertise and learning online. And many teachers are trialling forms of blended and “flipped learning”, where students have absorbed a lot of information and come to a lesson ready to discuss, apply and interrogate their knowledge.
As parents, we are aware of how quickly our children can pick up new skills by watching a clip on YouTube: a scientific experiment, playing the guitar, knitting, coding, even learning to read. We also know as adults that there is such a thing as “just in time” knowledge. When we want to develop a hobby like gardening, build an extension to our house, we swot up on it, immerse ourselves in it as and when we need to. These new types of learning should not be dismissed, as some do, either as fads or as doomed to fail. Neither is the case.
But there are limits to this model, and limits I believe to it being applied wholesale to schools. For, as one of the drama teachers at School 21 says: “Ultimately, teaching is about the relationship between the teacher, the student and the text.” (The text meant in its broadest sense.)
We all know that there is nothing quite like being inspired by an expert, having Shakespeare or a language or the wonders of science brought alive by someone who has a deep passion and real expertise. The teacher, like a great sports coach, is skilled at diagnosing what we need and guiding our deliberate practice – the idea of working again and again, not on the whole performance but on those parts we find most difficult until they start to come easily and automatically.
When teachers are driven out
“Why are you looking to leave your current school?”
“Because all that matters seems to be exams. Students just seem to be going through the motions.”
It is an interview at School 21. We are looking for an English teacher. We have a good field of candidates. But the candidate in front of us is the fourth in succession to give an almost identical answer.
“It’s not right that all I teach is exam practice. I love my subject but you know they’ve added another 100 pages of biology to get through in the name of making things harder. It means you have to plod through the content with no time to deepen their understanding. I want to inspire my students, but I’m being ground down.”
This teacher is describing in sad but graphic detail the exam factory. Most are unaware of how bad it really is; many teachers are so used to it they no longer question.
Ofsted judges schools on data above all else, which means exam results: year 6 Sats, GCSEs and A-levels. Of these, the pressure on GCSEs is highest.
When a single exam is high stakes on three levels (the student, the school and the system) it affects the dynamics and motivations of everyone so profoundly that the system as a whole is distorted and perverse incentives will start to flow. GCSE results are the student’s ticket to future success; the determinant of the headteacher’s job; and the system’s evidence to show improvement over time. Yet these exams are not even ones that employers believe are useful for the world students are entering.
Instead, education is skewed to meet the needs of this rigid accountability framework. Perverse incentives play out as follows:
Perverse incentive 1
Teachers feel the pressure to choose the easiest exam boards and easiest exam content so they can maximise results. English departments, for example, choose novels to study because the books are shorter, the ideas less complex. Easier humanities are chosen for those who will find history difficult.
Perverse incentive 2
Instead of the GCSE syllabus beginning in year 10, giving two years of teaching, schools cover themselves by starting in year 9. So students are being relentlessly drilled for exams for three years of their five-year secondary schooling. Many schools give students GCSE grades from year 7.
Perverse incentive 3
Students are often given a diet solely of exam classes. There is often no non-examined curriculum in years 9-11 because there is no room with all the exam classes. This means that unless you choose to do a GCSE in music, art or drama you do not have any lessons in these from the age of 14 onwards.
Perverse incentive 4
The Ebacc (English baccalaureate) subjects do not include any creative subjects so at a time when creativity, communication and problem-solving are prized in the real world, these subjects are being squeezed in schools.
In such a system, teachers need to become not subject experts but experts in exam technique. Pupils need to get brilliant at passing exams. Pupils get good, very good, at knowing a four-mark question from a six-mark question, a describe question from a compare question. Teachers are asked to “intervene” on children before school, at lunch, after school, on Saturdays, in holidays. “Weaker” or “low ability” students have intervention timetables for almost every subject.
The impact of this is a compliance culture. The tramlines are set. Exam success is a military operation. It is hard to blame schools for this. Headteachers have to work with the system they are given. We have a duty to get each of our students through it. But it means that innovation is a risk. In an exam factory there is little room for individuality. Students are not allowed to mature at different rates, develop different interests, have wobbles at the “wrong time” because it all upsets the best-laid plans.
Many of the schools that have the highest performing exam factory are also the most regimented. Regimentation and compliance is the way of getting people through a system they don’t enjoy. So, more schools opt for the silent treatment. Silence in corridors, silent classrooms, stricter rules. Detentions are regular and relentless for those who transgress. The message is not lost on young people: you are thugs who need civilising; we can’t trust you to talk; we don’t want to hear from you; do as you are told.
These authoritarian regimes deliver for a time but often leave young people floundering when they move to university or work, where the straitjacket is removed. Authoritarian regimes also lead to unthinking young people, afraid to question authority, even when that authority is heading off the rails.
The alternative: an engaged education
So we are currently trapped between these two futures: one where teachers may become irrelevant and one where inspiring teachers leave in their droves, driven out by the exam factory.
This simply isn’t good enough. “Education,” as Nelson Mandela put it, “is the most powerful weapon for changing the world.” Yet, it is a weapon currently without ammunition. We have a one-dimensional education system in a multidimensional world. We are living in an age of big challenges, big data, big dilemmas, big crises, big opportunities. Yet school too often is small – small in ambition, small in what it values, small in its scope.
What is at stake is the wider achievement of our young people. A small education, and a narrow set of measures, undervalues the potential, vitality and successes of our children. We need something different. An engaged education is one capable of meeting the challenge of the times and where we properly engage with the head, heart and hand.
An academic education (the head) starts with the basics of literacy and numeracy, then builds out to a deep love of words and facility with the English language. It then develops a depth of knowledge of key concepts and ways of thinking in areas such as science, maths, history and creative arts. This knowledge should be empowering knowledge – knowledge that draws on “the best that has been thought and said” from the past, as the cultural critic Matthew Arnold advocated, but importantly is shaped and applied to the needs of the present and future.
A character education (heart) is one that provides the experiences and situations for young people to develop a set of ethical underpinnings, well-honed character traits of resilience, kindness and tolerance, and a subtle, open mind. It is about serving others and giving back to the community – developing a sense of interdependence and not just independence.
A can-do education (hand) is one that nurtures creativity and problem-solving, that gives young people the chance to respond to client briefs, to understand design thinking, to apply knowledge and conceptual understanding to new situations. To be able to make and do and produce work through craftsmanship that is of genuine value beyond the classroom.
Those who experience an engaged education understand that they have a responsibility to apply their knowledge in a way that makes the world a better place. And it would do so much to bridge the academic, vocational and technical divide.
There are headteachers and teachers across the world who not only believe passionately in this kind of education but are doing something about it. Some in the United States, Canada and Australia are creating schools that develop particular skills sets and ways of thinking – design thinking, coding, Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). There are teachers that are thinking deeply about how to develop the character, resilience and agility of young people. Other schools such as High Tech High, New Tech Network and Big Picture are combining academic rigour with the chance for students to undertake real-world learning.
To achieve this multidimensional education these educators believe that there need to be fundamental changes in the way schools run – a revolution in curriculum planning, timetabling, the role of the teacher and, perhaps most of all, our beliefs about young people.
These are essential changes in approach that we are developing at School 21, which we opened in 2012. We need a noisy education not a silent one. A noisy education is one where we elevate speaking to the same status as reading and writing. Where we allow young people such as Ava to find their voice and help them grow in confidence and articulacy. It is a place of curiosity and questioning, debate and depth of understanding. The dialogic classroom is one in which talk aids thinking and understanding; through Socratic seminars and exploratory talk, children of a young age learn to wrestle with moral issues, explore difficult concepts and hone their arguments. We want staff to be noisy too: debating their craft and speaking up for how they want to change education.
We need education to be based on trust not compliance. We need to trust young people more. School needs to be not a grinding slog that will lead one day to qualifications, but a joyful time of growth and exploration. We need to believe that students can produce work of genuine value to the world while at school. That is why one of our core approaches is the idea of craftsmanship, crafting work through multiple drafts until it is beautiful. It is why we give students real problems to solve from the community – saving local habitats, using maths skills to campaign against the construction of a local concrete factory, telling the stories of the local immigrant populations for the first time. We also need to trust staff more. Give them the space, the time and the collective autonomy that produce extraordinary learning for young people. That is why we provide dedicated time for collaborative planning; regular, precise and supportive feedback for all staff; and an atmosphere of inquiry, research and intellectual rigour in which teachers feel “re-professionalised” and not just cogs in the exam factory wheel.
We need education to be expansive not constrained
Schools are too often inward looking, lost in their own bubbles. We need to make schools engaged in the world, porous to outside organisations, and support them to form productive collaborations to foster innovation. Students benefit from real-world learning, from having experts – scientists, theatre directors, mathematicians, historians – critique their work.
It is why we have reinvented work experience so students spend half a day every week in an organisation doing a real-world project: recent examples include designing an app for the Department for Education to support business managers in schools; redesigning the children’s menu at a chain of hotels; working out better systems for listening to frontline staff in a major bank.
Three changes to the system are essential to have any chance of a new pathway. First, Ofsted requires a complete overhaul. It was once perhaps essential, a way of ensuring minimum standards, a floor beneath which schools could not go. It encouraged and in some cases forced schools that had no strategic plan or poor behaviour systems to get their act together. But at its heart is a destructive and damaging view of human nature. Instead of believing, as they do in most countries, that failure in schools is not the result generally of laziness or incompetence, the whole philosophy of Ofsted has been punitive. Rapid inspections, brutal judgments, a them-and-us culture.
The result is a climate of fear, and inevitably headteachers start to do things they know are not what students and teachers really need – over-monitoring, prescription for all lessons, over-testing – all in the name of doing well under Ofsted criteria. The stakes are so high that doing something turns into doing anything – almost regardless of the impact.
With the arrival of Amanda Spielman as the new head of Ofsted this month, now is the time for a radical change. Ofsted should be scrapped altogether or reformed so dramatically that it becomes a genuinely peer-led and developmental organisation.
There are three functions that Ofsted can usefully perform and all need a different solution. One, to check compliance – are children being safeguarded and protected? Here there is a case for no-notice inspections so that a school cannot cover up any shortcomings. Two, to check on standards of progress and attainment. This can be done using nationally collected statistics without a visit and if there is anything alarming it can investigate further with the school. Three, to develop the school. This should be done over several visits during a year and be conducted by a group of peers – headteachers and teachers. It should be designed not to catch a school out, but to work with it on a plan for improvement and innovation. No grades are necessary just an action plan that has to be shared with all.
Second, we need a different and more sophisticated exam regime – less high stakes, less standardised, fewer subjects, but measuring a broader range of qualities. GCSEs should be scrapped. They are a school leaving exam at 16 when you are not allowed to leave education until 18. They should be replaced by a smaller set of exams, including English, maths and science, which can be taken when students are ready in their education and could be benchmarked internationally. There should be the chance for students to be assessed on a broader range of qualities, including a portfolio of their best work and their spoken language.
Third, we need an agenda for opening up education to genuine innovation. Now is the time, not for incrementalism, but for changes capable of meeting the pressing needs of the age. We need an innovation hurdle that has to be leapt by those wanting to open new schools. There should be money targeted at innovation in those parts of the country that need the biggest boost to education outcomes – including the north-east and north-west, old seaside towns, and parts of the Midlands. Regional schools commissioners should be charged with nurturing innovation and helping schools broker partnerships with organisations that can help transform learning and provide real-world opportunities. There should be proper funding for the systematic teaching of speaking skills in all schools as one of the most important ways of increasing social mobility.
There are thousands of young people like Ava, wanting to find their voice and make a difference to the world. And thousands of extraordinary, passionate, thoughtful teachers ready to be unleashed to do amazing things. Most want to be freed from outdated notions of being traditional or progressive.
There is common ground among the vast majority of teachers, a shared desire for an engaged education. They are hungry for a more expansive education that connects pupils to the great works of our past but also the richness, variety and opportunities of the modern world. An education that is layered, ethical and deals with complexity as an antidote to the shallow, overly simplistic debates our young people often have to listen to. The best defence against extremism and “illiberal” democracy is an education that teaches reflection, critical thinking and questioning.
Now is the time to release this energy. It is the time to remove the straitjacket, unshackle the potential and let our system become the most creative and exciting in the world.
Standing outside Mango, a high street fashion shop, on Oxford Street are a dozen School 21 students in orange boiler suits. They are in the middle of a human rights project developed in their Spanish lessons. They are protesting about what they see as the injustice of a powerful company that has failed to compensate the people of Bangladesh for a fire in their clothes factory. They have produced a website, petition and learned the Spanish that will allow them to communicate with the shop’s owners and are now drumming up support for their campaign. In the words of their website: “We are a group of people with big ambitions who believe in finding justice for those who need it. There are other campaigns that we are doing all under the hashtag #S21redlines. Many people would say that we are ‘just’ children, but Mozart was ‘just’ a child and to compose something better than his work at seven years old, you’d be hard pushed. On our side we have professional campaigners, government officials and big human rights organisations so we can do a lot. We are big thinkers. We are for success. We are for the 21st century. We are for justice.”
An engaged education – perhaps the only hope we have in this mad world.
New Zealand/May 29, 2018/Source: https://www.nzherald.co.nz
Education is one of our most critical sectors, and it is hardly surprising, therefore, that education policies and practices are often among the most controversial.
Government ministers want to make their mark on the portfolio, research and other international developments offer continually evolving ways of looking at the way in which we teach and learn, societal changes mean schools increasingly take on a larger role in children’s lives – all of which can mean increased funding pressures and regular changes to systems, processes, learning models, curriculums, and measures of achievement.
Those changes, and increasing immigration and mobility, mean parents have often learnt in different places and ways to their children, which can make understanding new systems and supporting children in their learning difficult, too.
The overall result can be one of confusion and alienation, when parents should be able to rest assured their school is equipping their child with what they need in order to go confidently and competently out into the world.
Various reports over the past decades have highlighted increasing inequality in educational achievement. Alongside that, the egalitarian notion of a free state education is fast becoming a myth, as the cost of the basics, plus «voluntary» donations for all the extras, puts immense pressure on families.
Political parties, unions, school boards, teaching staff, parents and children may have very different ideas about various education policies, yet it seems, when it comes to the latest debate – over the school decile funding system – there is a consensus.
The 20-plus-year-old system was designed to allocate funding and staff to schools according to the socioeconomic demographic of the surrounding area, yet it has had the undesirable effect of being used by parents as a perceived measure of educational standard, leading to distorted rolls, zoning implementations, and the use of terms such as «educational apartheid» and «white flight» as middle-class parents snub local low-decile schools.
The previous National-led Government had planned a new funding system based on the risks of each student underachieving (draft factors included ethnicity, mother’s income and age when she gave birth, and whether the male caregiver was not the biological father), and the new Labour-led coalition Government still plans to adopt the system – although it will make some alterations and has just said it will defer the introduction for a couple of years while it sorts out funding. Education Minister Chris Hipkins is also anxious to ensure the new system does not simply end up transferring stigma from schools to individual children (even though the data to be used will be anonymised) and, in line with this thinking, he has also renamed National’s «risk index» an «equity index».
While change is clearly necessary, care and caution are essential for the sake of stability for the country’s educators and learners. It is vital to ensure there are no unintended negative consequences. It is also timely to examine whether a significant funding boost is required to help the sector cope with the diverse demands on it today.
An egalitarian education system remains an admirable and worthwhile aim, yet achieving that will be impossible in isolation. Until the yawning socio-economic disparities are addressed elsewhere, their effects will inevitably continue to be felt in the classroom – no matter how well-meaning any government or how dedicated the country’s teachers.
He was, however, extremely bright. Everyone recognised it straight away. He spent his life in a hurry, leading his mates on merry adventures and forever tinkering with things to make them work: motors, electrical switches, wirelesses, go-karts, motorbikes …
That didn’t cut it at boarding school, where Tim’s parents, like a lot of country people those days, sent him for an education.
A schoolmaster decided he would whip Tim into shape. Literally.
In his first term of secondary school, Tim was given “the cuts” – six thwacks of a strap to the hand – every day. For rushing when he was supposed to walk; for failing to finish assignments; for answering questions he wasn’t asked; for failing to understand what was required of him.
MONROVIA – Around the world, some 263 million children remain out of school, and of those who do attend classes, 330 million are receiving substandard education. As a result, an estimated 617 million school-age children are unable to read at grade level.
The problem is a global one, but it is particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 88% of young students– some 202 million boys and girls – are not achieving a sufficient level of reading proficiency. And it is also here where solutions are being tested.
African governments and international donors have long paid lip service to improving educational outcomes, especially in basic skills like reading, writing, and math. At a financing conference for the Global Partnership for Education in February, developing countries vowed to increase spending on education by $110 billion, and wealthy donors pledged an additional $2.3 billion to improve school systems in poor countries.
But as important as these commitments are, Africa’s education crisis will not be overcome by donations and pledges alone. A new approach is needed to strengthen struggling schools, train teachers, and ensure that every child can obtain the necessary skills to succeed. One pilot programme being tested in my country, Liberia, has shown considerable promise.
Because low-income countries rarely have enough money to implement needed education reforms, pooling public and private resources is an attractive alternative. Since 2016, Liberia’s education ministry has merged select public schools with various independent operators in an effort to increase educational quality in a tight budget environment. Early results are impressive.1
For example, at the free public schools currently managed by expert contractors participating in the program, learning outcomes improved by 60% in the first year. At the 25 schools operated by my employer, Bridge Partnership Schools for Liberia, average student test scores doubled in just nine months. Parents and pupils have embraced these reinvigorated schools, with many calling them the best they have ever experienced. As a result, the previous government expanded the program, and the current one is committed to continuing support.
One of the most powerful components of a Bridge Partnership School is the pedagogy. For every lesson in every subject across every grade, educators have access to detailed lesson plans developed by academics. These plans help teachers prepare and deliver instruction to maximise learning outcomes. By assisting in classroom planning, Bridge ensures a degree of standardisation across schools, and helps teachers focus more attention on individual students.
At first glance, Liberia’s school system might seem a poor fit for such an innovative experiment. Today, some 58% of Liberian children are out of school, the literacy rate is among the lowest in the world, and teachers are in short supply. Moreover, the current government budgets just $50 annually for each child attending elementary school. The average in the OECD in 2013 was $9,200.
But programmes like these are attractive for two reasons: they deepen a country’s access to educational expertise, and, more important, they open up new funding streams.
Developed countries have already recognised the value of strong public-private partnerships in education. Notably, the United Kingdom’s 2018 education policy encourages the expansion of such programs because they have been found to “improve access to education for poor and marginalized children.”
Not everyone will agree; partial partnerships with the private sector and NGOs in education generates considerable controversy, and there is little doubt that in Liberia, the Bridge model remains a work in progress. (A new impact analysis is due in the next academic year.)
But while costs were high, they are quickly falling. And continuous teacher training for those who are part of Bridge PSL is helping to increase the quality of instruction. As test results in Liberia demonstrate, children are learning more than ever. With the support of prominent global investors, our schools are achieving outcomes that were previously unthinkable.
From my perspective, the public-private partnership model has revolutionised education in Liberia, and I am confident that it can work in other parts of Africa, too. In countries where learning outcomes continue to lag, governments need collaborative solutions. And, as past failures have demonstrated, education systems in much of the Global South cannot succeed alone.
To achieve “education for all” by 2030, the target set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, educators must embrace bold solutions like Bridge Partnership Schools. With millions of children still being denied the right to an education, the world can no longer afford the status quo.
The writer is the country director of Bridge Partnership Schools for Liberia.
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My family was murdered before I could tie my shoes. As a young boy in Sierra Leone, years that should have been playful and carefree were spent fighting in someone else’s war. For me, childhood was a nightmare; escape always seemed impossible. But when the war officially ended, in 2002, I began finding ways to recover. One of the most important has been an opportunity I couldn’t have imagined as an angry, illiterate, nine-year-old soldier: school.
I am living proof of the transformative power of education. Thanks to hard work and lots of good fortune, I managed to graduate from high school and then university. Now, in just a few months, I will begin graduate classes at the Fordham University School of Law, an unimaginable destination for most of the former child soldiers in my country.
And yet, throughout my brief educational journey, one question has always nagged me: why did luck play such a crucial role? After all,education is supposed to be a universal human right. If only it were that simple.
Today, more than 260 million children are out of school, and over 500 million boys and girls who do attend are not receiving a quality education, as the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunitydiscovered. By 2030, more than half of the world’s school-age children – some 800 million kids – will lack the basic skills needed to thrive or secure a job in the workplace of the future.
Addressing this requires money. But while education may be the best investment a government can make to ensure a better future for its people, education financing worldwide is far too low. In fact, education accounts for just 10% of total international development aid, down from 13% a decade ago. To put this in perspective, developing countries receive just $10 per child annually in global education support, barely enough to cover the cost of a single textbook. In an age of self-driving cars and smart refrigerators, this dearth of funding is simply unacceptable.
Over the past few years, I have advocated on behalf of three global education initiatives – the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity (Education Commission), the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), and the Education Cannot Wait fund (ECW). I have done so eagerly, because these organizations are working collectively toward the same goal: to raise funds to make quality education for every child, everywhere, more than a matter of luck.
One of the best ways to do this is by supporting theInternational Finance Facility for Education, an initiative spearheaded by the Education Commission that could unlock the greatest global investment in education ever recorded. Young people around the world understand what’s at stake. Earlier this month, Global Youth Ambassadors presented a petition, signed by more than 1.5 million children in some 80 countries, to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, calling for the UN to support the finance facility.
By leveraging roughly $2 billion in donor guarantees, the finance facility aims to make $8 billion in new funding available to countries that need it most. If adopted widely, the program could make it possible for developing countries to provide quality education to millions more children, including refugees, young girls, and former child soldiers like me.
Politicians often say that young people are the leaders of tomorrow. That’s true; we are. But platitudes not backed by financial support are meaningless. Simply put, the world must unite to fund quality education for everyone. The International Finance Facility for Education – which is already backed by the World Bank, regional development banks, GPE, ECW, and numerous UN agencies – is among the best ways to make that happen.
Twenty years ago, law school was an impossible dream for me. Today, thanks to hard work, global support, and much good fortune, my future is brighter than it has ever been. But my story should not be an exception. To ensure that others can gain a quality education and follow the path that has opened up to me, we must remove luck from the equation.
*Fuente: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/financing-universal-quality-education-by-mohamed-sidibay-2018-05