Ally and I have finished up our current round of data collection on the Teachers’ Work project, and are just trying to decide what might be next for us. We thought maybe we’d bring some of our questions and our thinking to this group to see if anyone else wanted to think alongside us.

When this project began, we were interested in how teachers made sense of their work, especially how teachers who were interested in 21C ideas made sense of it. We wanted to know how real teachers were thinking about what 21C education might be, how they were teaching in their schools, how they made sense of having ideas in the first place. We’ve done some of that, decided other bits were too big, and been confused and enlightened along the way. Now we’re trying to figure out what might be next for us.

We’re interested in the way that individual teachers make sense of their context and their aspirations for the future, and we’re interested in how that sensemaking actually shapes the context and what is possible for the future. We’re interested in how leaders shape their school contexts—and are shaped by them. We’re interested in where the power lies in the system—where the shifting thinking could be most useful, most likely to make a big change in the way kids experience teaching and learning.

The question for us now is: what’s the question for us now? We know that we have not found answers to this big question about leverage points, and we know that very many other things are already known about teachers and how they think and work and schools and why they are so hard to change. But given all that we know, what would be useful for us to explore together? What’s the key missing question?

Now, Ally and I enjoy theory enormously. But this is a practical undertaking we’re discussing here. We want a practical way to understand how schools can change, not a theoretical model of how change might possibly happen. Usually if you’re a researcher and you want to understand something practical, you need to go out and look at something. We’re not aware of schools that have really made it in this regard, schools that everyone knows have transformed teaching and learning so that younger people and older people (inside and outside the local school) experience a different kind of education. You readers might know about those schools, and might be able to say, School X has totally transformed. We’d like to hear from you about School X.

What we’re more familiar with, and we’re guessing you’re more familiar with, are schools that are trying to change. We could name dozens of schools with fantastic older and young people, who are trying to reshape the way teaching and learning and schooling happens. We know of communities where this is contentious, communities where this is invisible, communities where this is deeply supported. But all the ones we know would say that they’re on a journey, that 10% or 40% or 60% of the students/teachers/community members are on board. But we don’t know anyone who has arrived, and we don’t know anyone who isn’t fighting madly along the way.

So, if there are no models to say “this is where we’re going,” we can’t research those.  Indeed, what Ally and I think might be true is that we’re on a journey for which there is no “arrival,” no 100% on board.  We’re moving into an unknown future, trying to take a whole bunch of people who care a lot about schools along with us, and we don’t really know where we’re going. This makes for a tricky research question.

We wonder if you might help. We have an unresearchable question like: “How do you support yourself and others to move into an unknown future?” Now we wonder what questions you have about this whole topic that we might be able to engage with in order to figure out how we’re thinking about things and what we might do next. This is a question that needs a lot of heads thinking together for us to ask just the right question. Will you lend us your head, your questions?

Jennifer Future focussed issues, Shifting research, Shifting schooling, Teachers' work 21st century education, change, community, education, future focus, leaders, questions, research, teachers, thinking

NZ Curriculum In Action was a professional development day created for two purposes:

• To bring together the isolated pockets of educators already working in the direction of the new curriculum, and connect them with educators looking to develop their teaching in that direction but wanting to be inspired by what was possible.

• To build a professional learning community that fostered interest in the theory and practice of 21st century teaching ideas.

Originally envisioned in a traditional workshop model, the organisers soon realised that it would be incongruous to run a PD day looking at 21st century ideas in a very traditional, 20th century way. So we adapted the concept of the World Café to give us an opportunity to run the day in a very different way.  Gone was the single presenter lecturing to the audience. Instead the room was set with five table clusters, and each presenter session saw five different presenters, one per table, leading a more intimate group discussion of what they were about, enabling more questions and discussions to occur than during a traditional style presented session. Flat screens were available to make anything on laptop easy for the group to see. These sessions were interspersed with discussion sessions around provided open-ended questions. The questions were designed to enable thought-provoking discussion and debate about some of the philosophical ideas underpinning the direction that the new curriculum allows education to go.

In order to minimise as many barriers as possible to people attending, the day was provided at no cost. The venue was generously made available by the Foundation Studies Dept of Manukau Institute of Technology, tea and coffee was generously provided by Team Solutions, and all participants were asked to contribute a plate of food for an ongoing buffet table that people could help themselves to whenever they wanted. There was a structure and timeframe to the day, to enable workability, but the overall intention was to create an atmosphere of inclusivity, flexibility, and connection, to encourage people to communicate what was important to them about the direction of education, and to learn from each other.

Held on November 26th, the day was promoted through email contacts, the most productive email lists were the Team Solutions Secondary Science list and the Specialist Classroom Teacher list. I hope to find access to other similarly effective contact lists to be able to reach more teachers in future. The original aim was the secondary sector, but across all subject areas, as the concept of inclusivity and connectedness between learning areas is one aspect encouraged by the new curriculum that I find particularly encouraging. However, as the planning for this day went on, it soon became apparent that building the connections and understanding between primary, secondary and tertiary sectors is as important as building the connections and understanding between subject areas in secondary schools, or between syndicates in primary schools or departments in tertiary institutions. I was pleased to have presenters and participants from all three sectors of the education system, and hope to be able to have a more balanced representation of all sectors in future events.

How did this day dream itself into being? I was in the early stages of a community leadership course run by Landmark Education, and had already selected a project to create, when I was introduced to the new curriculum in such a way that I actually saw it for its full potential.  For myself I saw the way to bridge the gap between my personal philosophy about what education should be, and what I instead would find myself putting into practice in my classroom – a disparity that I always felt but had little idea how to do anything about, and so had always ignored and made the best of. More importantly I also saw that the paradigm shift required to move from the traditional concept of education to what the new curriculum makes possible is not going to be easy for a lot of our colleagues, and so this gift to education could so easily fail to achieve its potential. And so I became determined to do something to help encourage forward thinking and action. My original project idea was shelved in favour of what became known as NZC in Action. What I was surprised by was the so very positive response to this professional development day, right from the outset. It then evolved and grew into something bigger and more valuable than my original idea, and the proof of this pudding was the 50+ presenters and participants that travelled from up to two hours away to attend, the large numbers of positive comments people made to me in passing across the day, the energy present in the room, and the wonderful feedback and supportive suggestions made on our survey forms. Even before the day itself, I had people contact me to say that they couldn’t make that date but wanted to be kept informed for the next one.  People clearly saw a need for an opportunity like this.

What was presented? In no particular order… Kate Slattery (M.I.T.) - Higher order thinking and questioning strategies that get students thinking for themselves; Dr Karen Dobric (One Tree Hill College) - school structures and qualification pathways and what needs to be addressed to allow us to better meet the needs of our students; Larraine Barton (Pakuranga College) – the thinking and planning behind how the Science Dept at Pakuranga College developed their new and different programme in Junior Science;  Melanie Wiersma (Clendon Park School) - using digital tools extensively and to very positive effect to develop independent learners in the classroom; Ang Whitlam (St Mary’s College) - using ICT in innovative ways to support learning in Science; Sarah Painter (Team Solutions) – integrated and contextual learning, cross-curricular teaching; Oriel Kelly (M.I.T.) - using the internet as a teaching tool; Sharra Martin (Alfriston College) – what’s been happening at Alfriston College; Sandy McGivern (One Tree Hill College) – the Shifting Thinking Conference for those who missed it; Anna Gibbs/Harold Russ (King’s College) – integrated units and Harvard’s Teaching For Understanding; Diane Hartley and Toni Shaw (Albany Senior High School) – what’s going on at Albany Senior High School; Jenny Pope (Team Solutions) - Empirical vs Rational Thinking, educational philosophy;  Libby Slaughter (Monte Cecilia School) – Enquiry-based learning.

Where to from here? The survey showed an overwhelming enthusiasm for more of the same, the two most popular suggestions were a blog site and a continuation of the NZC in Action days, at the frequency of once a term. A large number of people signalled their interest not just in attending again, but in being a part of bringing the next PD day into being. I will be getting in contact with those generous people in the New Year so that we can put together the next NZC in Action day with many hands making the job effortless.

My particular thanks to the key supporters and organisers, Mike Stone, Harold and Linda Russ, Sarah Painter,  Anna Gibbs and Jenny Pope, and the numerous people I met and talked with from Team Solutions, Shifting Thinking, M.I.T, and schools around Auckland who answered my opening question of “So who do you know that’s doing edgy and innovative things that I can show to the world?” with great enthusiasm and support. And finally to the group of presenters, who were the embodiment of NZC in Action, generously sharing their ups and downs, breakthroughs and hiccups to help support and encourage others as to what can be done. You really made our day!

Note: This really was much easier to bring into being than you’d think! And so rewarding, being part of building a community of like-minded people. If anyone wants to see something similar happen in their area, please get in touch with me, I’d love to help support other similar professional learning communities getting underway, in other parts of the country!

Sandy McGivern

Sandy Mac Shifting schooling 21st century education, community engagement, educational debate, people like us, professional development, shifting thinking, teachers

Over the last couple of years several of us at NZCER have been working with schools and thinking and talking about family and community engagement in education. Schools put time and effort into “engaging” their communities for a whole range of reasons. In this blog I focus on some strategies that schools are using in an attempt to provide opportunities for whole school communities to engage with “future focused” ideas about education. I’m going to very briefly sketch out some of these strategies and raise some questions. We invite you to add to the strategies here and tell us what is working for you and your school community, and also add your thoughts about some of the questions raised. This is new territory that needs everyone thinking together.

Some schools are using current forms of communication, such as newsletters (whether hard copy or electronic), to “drip feed” ideas about how society is changing and what this might mean for education. Other schools have some information on their school websites. Several schools have run focus or discussion groups for parents where these ideas are discussed. Often these discussions are linked to the NZC document, especially to its vision and the focus on competencies.

Several schools have brought in outside “experts” to talk to parent audiences. In the words of one principal, “If you really want to shift people you need to bring an expert in who doesn’t have those everyday relationships that we do, who deals purely with ideas and who is able to present powerful ideas and research.” An obvious difficulty with this approach though is how do schools access these “experts”, especially small or isolated schools? Do we have enough “experts” to do the work, if we decide this is a desirable option? An alternative some schools have tried is screening You Tube clips or Ted Talks at parent evenings, or providing links to websites. What other resources are available? Is there a need for resources that have “future focused” ideas about education in accessible language? If these resources were available would parents access them? I’m mindful of the words of one parent who said, “I worry about getting three loads of washing dry…I don’t have time to get involved.” (I also think about how minimally involved I was with my own children’s secondary schooling).

We heard about a couple of schools where parents were facilitating discussions about future- focused ideas. At one school parents ran discussion groups in their own homes, in another school the “Friends of the School” group was very proactive in connecting with new parents of the school and although their focus was not engaging with future focused ideas about education – perhaps they could be a useful vehicle in the future.

Some schools are using individual student’s learning as a way of connecting their families with C21st ideas about education. This could be in the form of three way interviews where students talk about what they are learning and why this is important or it could be by parents having electronic access to their children’s learning programmes and records of progress.

Even though schools in this study have been trying out a variety of ways of engaging families with future focused ideas about education, all were concerned that they were still only connecting with a certain section of the school community. If we really believe it is no longer OK to leave education just to the “professionals” we need to think hard about how we most effectively make this change. Is it better to go deeply into these ideas with those who are already interested, or is it better to put energy into trying to engage as many people as possible, at whatever level? Should teachers have the opportunity to engage with these C21st ideas before parents are invited into the discussions, or should everyone be learning and thinking together?

Many of the schools in this study that are working innovatively with their communities are led by principals with clear, well articulated visions for how education needs to change. One challenge voiced by some of these principals was getting the right balance between inputting ideas and energy, and not being too directive. Another, issue they raised was about sustainability. Where is their energy most effective targeted?

Jane Gilbert suggests the following are key features of C21st education: personalisation; building learning capacity; competencies; foregrounding general intellectual skills such as higher order thinking skills, thinking for oneself, tolerating ambiguity; doing things with knowledge; new ideas about achievement and assessment; and equity – getting everyone tertiary ready. How do we engage the community with these ideas? We invite you to tell us about your successes and challenges in engaging your school community with ideas such as these, and join with us as we try and think our way through some of these issues.

Ally Community engagement 21st century education, community engagement

At the ShiftingThinking conference, we’ll be thinking together about the various things which get in the way of our transition to the future of schools and schooling. Our read of the 21C school literature shows us that if we’re really going to invent schools for the new millennium, we’ll face changes in all kinds of different ways. We’ll have to really think through issues like:
•    Purpose: What is the most important purpose of schooling in the 21C? What current purposes are you willing to give up?
•    People: Who are the people in these learning spaces and where do they come from? How are the older people qualified/grouped and how do they interact with each other and the younger people? How are the younger people qualified/grouped and how do they interact with each other and with the older people?
•    Process: What happens over the course of the day? How is the day defined and organised?
•    Place:  Where does this thing called “school” happen?
•    Content: What is the learning content of schools and how do people engage with that content? How do we know when people have mastered that content? Who gets to decide what the content is?

We’re guessing that from this set of questions, a set of dilemmas will emerge. You could take just about any question from the above list and imagine that people might have very different answers to them—and that those differences might expose competing commitments right down into the fabric of our society. On this rainy school holiday day, for example, one of the core purposes of school seems to me to be: Get the children out of the house and in some supervised activity where they’re not bored all day and driving me crazy! Now, in my life as a teacher and an educational researcher, I would never put “child care” on the list of major purposes of school. But if I am really honest, in my heart-of-hearts I have to say that I know that if the “child care” component of schooling were absent, that would be a big problem for me as a mom.

At the ShiftingThinking Conference, we’re going to be looking at some of these core dilemmas and why they’re so hard to change (see my thinking about one issue here). We’d like readers to contribute what they see as some of the most difficult and intractable (and thus most interesting and important) dilemmas which face us in the Shift to 21stC schools and thinking!

Jennifer Conference: November 2009 21st century education, content, dilemmas, knowledge, november conference, people, place, process, purpose, shifting thinking, shiftingthinking conference

Our school is participating in the Families’ and Communities’ Engagement in education research project. In this blog I describe the “lever” we are using to generate opportunities for community engagement.  Our school’s research has been around investigating further what our student researchers meant when they said “ learning happens if you feel confident”.  Our intention has been to work with three different student groups in the school to firstly define confidence, to identify ways it is already built in school and to investigate how it might be developed further. The students will then report their findings back to their parents and others in the wider learning community. The purpose of this forum is to create a focus for discussion about the learning capabilities parents would like their daughters to develop –in particular around confidence and resilience. We are hoping parents will have ideas about the strategies they use to help develop confidence and how we might work together to build and maintain confidence. We are also hoping that by discussing a specific capability that the parents ( in earlier research)  have also identified as being important we will be able to more readily engage them in discussions around the changing needs of learners of the 21st century.

In our Wellington discussion workshop Jane Gilbert spoke of the importance of collective decision making given that the ‘knowledge experts’ may no longer exist. The intention of our ‘confidence forum’ is a first step in modelling communities learning together.  

During this research project we have also read widely around concepts of confidence, why it is important and how it might be demonstrated both in and outside the classroom. Of course the best information has come from the students themselves. 

 We also decided to use three different research methods to collect the information. With the Year 13 students we presented them with the Year 9 findings from the year before and asked them to develop a series of survey questions that could be given to two tutor groups (approximately 45 students). They trialled their first survey on their own tutor class. This highlighted the need to ask less questions and to eliminate redundant questions. At this point we asked Josie and Rachel (NZCER researchers) to advise us. The second survey was then given out. During the analysis sessions that followed they quickly realised that their survey still needed further refining. The initial data from these surveys was not as reflective/deep as we had expected from Year 13 students but it did indicate clear trends, some of them unexpected. The discussions about the data with the research group was much more useful.

With the Year 10 group (student researchers of 2008) we interviewed them as a group using similar questions that the Year 13 group had designed. The information gathered from this was more as we had expected – deeper and more reflective – probably because there was opportunity to ask further questions. There was certainly some obvious similarities about the responses but also some interesting differences highlighted between the experiences of the two age groups.

The third group of Year 12 students (student researchers of 2007) we simply presented  with the summarised findings of the other two groups and asked for comment. Their responses were more far reaching, less structured and therefore probably more genuine than the other two groups because they were not constrained by giving expected answers to given questions.   

So in summary: Research Process Evaluation

• Writing survey questions is more difficult than it seems! It is often not until you see the results that you begin to understand what questions really needed to be asked. These questions need to be constantly refined.
• Data gathered from surveys is often interesting because it highlights possible trends and may provide some unexpected issues but only really becomes enlightening after opportunities to discuss and reflect on results is given.
• Sometimes the unexpected data highlights a group of students whose experience is different to the majority and this could lead to the need for further research to explore what made their experiences different to others.
• Gathering data through focused discussion and interview provides deeper analysis. 
• The most genuine response came from presenting the group with summary findings and asking for comments, rather than responding to set questions. This seemed to be because the questions weren’t already leading the responses. There were no expected answers.
   

Tric Community engagement 21st century education, community engagement, future focus, key competencies, shifting thinking, teachers

Some researchers at NZCER are currently working with a group of school leaders to try and answer this question: “How can whole school communities (staff, students, families) be provided with opportunities to engage with future focused ideas about education?” This project began with a workshop where school leaders and researchers talked about what things about school might need to change, and which school practices might be effective levers in bringing about this change.  Each school is now thinking about which particular lever they want to focus on over the next year or so.

Two schools have already decided on using three-way interviews as a lever for getting the whole school community to think about future focused ideas in education. One school has not done three-way interviews before. The principal decided to try this lever having listened to others at the workshop talking about the potential they thought these interviews had.  She is hoping that at these interviews teachers will use assessment data to talk to parents about their children’s progress in literacy and numeracy and then the (primary aged) students will show their parents examples of work that they think are evidence of what the teacher is talking about. The hope is that this will help the children become more involved in their own learning and at the same time make the “teacher speak” more accessible to parents in this diverse community.

We would really like to hear from anyone who has used three-way interviews in this way or who may have ideas about what leads to successful three-way conferences. What support do teachers/ children / parents need to make these interviews successful? Remember the focus of this project is on how to engage whole school communities in future focused ideas about education. All input welcome!

Ally Community engagement 21st century education, community, curriculum

Continuing with the ‘opportunities for thinking about doing things differently’ theme (in the posts below) …

Recently I’ve had to read dozens of different papers, reports and websites on “21st century learning” (for something I’m writing). I’ve been struck by the fact that, while they all talk about the new skills students need, new pedagogies, new forms of leadership, and new technologies, underpinning these things (which are emphasised differently depending on the context), is the assumption that what is distinctive about “21st century learning” is the need to get more people to do harder stuff than in the past. (Very briefly, this usually means developing everyone’s ability to think and learn for themselves, and to articulate/debate this thinking/learning with others to generate new knowledge. )

This is a radical idea – because our current school system was never set up to teach these things to all students (and the ones who were meant to learn these things learned them more by accident than design). Currently we discipline students into disciplines, and, on the basis of their apparent aptitude for this, sort them for various post-school ‘pathways’ (most of which now function very differently from when this system was set up).

So, alongside this idea, in the 21st century learning literature, we usually see arguments for transformation of the existing system (not incremental improvement), and the argument that to be effective this transformation needs to be holistic (not piecemeal), implemented across a number of different systems together, in parallel  (see for example, the Cisco report Equipping every learner for the 21st century http://www.cisco.com/web/about/citizenship/socio-economic/docs/GlobalEdWP.pdf).

Could this idea – that 21st century learning is, in essence, getting more people to do harder stuff, be the 21st century version of the equal opportunity “myth” that was an organising principle for 20th century thinking about schooling in New Zealand? (The myth idea comes from a 1986 paper by C. E. Beeby).  If it is, perhaps it could function as an organising principle, a way of helping us decide what to do when faced by the glut of ideas, suggestions, techniques, and recipes for success that populate the 21st century learning literature … (In the papers and reports alluded to above, I came across ‘differentiated learning’, ‘self-regulated learning’, ‘enquiry learning’, ‘distributed learning’, ‘co-operative learning’, and ‘learning communities’ – and those are just the ones I remember! How would a school know when and where to use each one? Which is ‘best’?).

If a school was to decide to organise itself — everything, including the curriculum, all teaching and assessment practices, its buildings and spaces etc etc – to scaffold everyone‘s ability to think and learn independently and to create new knowledge, setting aside all of the other functions they currently have, what would that look like? How could they do it? And how could they do it in a way that allows everyone to be who they want to be (i.e. not be assimilated into the dominant group), and be the best they can at whatever that is.

Hard to imagine isn’t it? And of course, all this is easier said than done. Higher order thinking skills can’t be ‘taught’ in isolation/independently of ‘content’, nor are they necessarily able to be transferred to other contexts. Just adding these terms into our vocabularies won’t change anything – just as the talk of ‘key competencies’ hasn’t as yet changed very much. (For a succinct discussion of the issues that need to be considered, see Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2008).

To really do this, we would need new underlying thinking – and new tools for thinking. This thinking would need to be done by everyone involved in education with – and this is important – people from outside the education sector. We need public debate, a new public consensus about how we want our schools to contribute to building the kind of society we want, and what we want our schools to achieve in the ‘bigger picture’ sense (i.e. something more than just basic literacy and numeracy).

Why do we need schools to get everyone to think and learn independently (when we didn’t seem to think this was necessary before)? What is there about 21st century life that is different/more complex than before, and how does this mean that the ‘old’ skills are necessary but no longer sufficient? How can we put together what we know from the past about what is good, and what ‘works’ in education (which is a lot), with what we think we know about (or would like to create in) the world of the future? What, in the current system, will we have to give up (or lose) to do this?

We plan to discuss these questions (and others like them) at a conference being organised by NZCER (to celebrate its 75th birthday) to be held in Wellington (New Zealand) on the 3rd and 4th November 2009. So, if you are interested in all this, mark the date in your diary, and watch this space for more information.

References

Beeby, C. E. (1986). Introduction. in W. Renwick, Moving targets: Six essays on educatonal policy. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research (pp. xi-xlv).

Bereiter, C. and Scardamalia, M. (2008). Towards research-based innovation. In: Innovating to learn, learning to innovate. Paris: OECD (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation).

See also:

Wagner, T. (2008). The global achievement gap: Why even our best schools don’t teach the new survival skills our children need, and what we can do about it. New York: Basic Books.

Jane Shifting schooling 21st century education, Add new tag, Beeby, diversity, equity

This posting continues an ongoing thread designed to bring to your attention other blogs or websites I think are worth checking out.

changelearning

I recently met one of the directors of the Canadian Council on Learning, and whilst having a good look around their website, I found my way onto a wonderful related site called changelearning.

changelearning has exciting (and uncanny) parallels to shiftingthinking.org, and I couldn’t be more happy to have found it!  It’s based on the work of The 21st Century Learning Initiative, an international network of academics, researchers, policy makers and educators who (like us) are encouraging people to re-think our current systems of education. The development of the site was funded by the Canadian Council on Learning, and created by an organisation called Classroom Connections (find out more about them here)

The site is well laid out, and content-rich – but obviously (like us) still in development. There are videos, research summaries, and it looks like eventually there will be places to post book reviews, blogs, discussion forums, and so forth. If anyone from changelearning.ca is reading this – let’s talk about cross-postings and/or collaboration!

The e-learning research network

This site is a little closer to home, based right here in New Zealand. The e-learning research network is a place for teachers, educators and researchers to share the evidence about the impact of e-learning on teaching and learning (The Network’s byline: “From research to practice: transforming New Zealand education through e-learning”).  Last night I realised I ought to spend a bit more time reading or participating in some of the discussions happening in this network, as I dipped in and out of conversation threads that mused on the real meaning of “lifelong learning”, and read about some of the ideas around elearning that people were exploring in their  research and/or classrooms.

Realising the wealth of possibilities out there for people to connect, collaborate, learn and discuss ideas related to 21st century thinking in learning and education is exciting. But it’s also a little challenging. How can one find the time to read everything one wants to read, write everything one wants to write, and keep up with all the discussions one wants to be part of? I’m not sure of the answer to this one. But in any case, I’d like to keep connected…and I’d like to keep sharing the things I find with you!

Rachel Bolstad Shifting schooling 21st century education, blogosphere, links to other blogs, people like us, technology

I’m back from the NZCER curriculum conference in Wellington on Friday, where we did a lot of thinking and talking about what’s next—in the new curriculum, in teaching and learning, in 21C education. I was thinking, of course, about all of these in relation to this blog space and the questions we have about 21C education. Then layer Ally’s musing about service, Rachel and Josie being back from AERA where they spoke and listened about service learning, and the whole idea of dispositions. Throw in Chris’s idea that all 21C teachers need to be learners themselves (how did I miss this important idea?! that’s why we’re thinking together…) and suddenly I’m bewildered about what, in fact, a disposition is in the first place and how we increase the stores of teachers who somehow have these mystical things.

Chris wanted to know things about those of us writing here, wanted to know something about who we were and what made us tick. Well, I’m a developmentalist–I think about the changes in adult sensemaking over the course of their lives. I think about how to create contexts that welcome adults in their current sensemaking and also enable them to reach beyond their current thinking if they’d like to. I care about how these contexts make new things possible for people –in their thinking and in their practice.

So the thing is, what is the connection between development, context, and disposition? Suddenly I’ve fallen into a red hot panic that this thing that we’re trying to study—“21C teacher dispositions”—isn’t a THING at all. Have we checked to see what our particular vision is of what a disposition is? Is a disposition something that an individual is born with? Is it something that an individual develops? Or is it something that is an interaction, not held by an individual per say but reflected by individuals?

I’m thinking here about Richard in our study (all the names we’ll use are pseudonyms, although those in the study reading this might want to contribute in some way, and might recognise themselves). Richard was one of the most 21C teachers I’ve ever met. He had each of the ways of think-ing and be-ing that I wrote about in my last blog, AND he was made up of all the curiosity and love of learning which Chris reminded us to value. He sat in a room with us, and he talked about education and his context, telling us about his pathway to education (multiple subject area expert, picked his content because of the process of teaching that was most interesting to him), his goals for the kids (all process-based—no particular content goals), and his orientation to the world (to learn learn learn—and to push his ideas up against very different ideas to learn from them). But therein is the issue. Richard was in a context—with colleagues who valued him and learned from and with him, students who followed his lead, parents and community members who let him be the kind of wacky guy he was—that enabled the full expression of these ideas. He was part of an on-going group of teachers who had conversations to push ideas around. This group, decades old, had changing membership and purpose, with the constant force the conversation people had together over time.

So does Richard have particular personality traits that enabled this way of being in the world? He was open and curious and passionate. Did he have the perspective of being developmentally sophisticated (more on development on another day)? Or did he have a context that allowed him to be in the world in this way? Or do these three things create each other? And where do we intervene in the system to help more teachers become as alive and passionate as Richard, as filled with not only 21C ways of looking at the world but also 21C ways of INHABITING the world? Do we create contexts—using schools and the new curriculum and technology and other pieces—that allow teachers to BE different? Do we look for teachers who have these sorts of traits in the first place? Do we seek to develop these dispositions (and how do we do that)?

At the Curriculum Conference, when we were talking in tables about all the things that get in our way of enacting these 21C ideas—timetabling, NCEA, needs for teachers to cover classes, money, etc.—I had this serious vision that there were some relatively simple answers just out of view. I think these answers will require us to change everything we think about, but once we’ve made that change, a future vision will slot into place relatively quickly. I can nearly see it out of the corner of my eye. But what about Richard? What about you, Chris? Can you see it? Can others? And is it a thing to be discovered, or is it a thing to be developed, or is it a thing to be co-created? All of these? None of these?

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” (Albert Szent-Gydorgyi)

Jennifer Teachers' work 21st century education, context, curriculum conference, development, dispositions, richard, teachers

This teachers’ work thread in this blog comes in part from a research project we’re doing here at NZCER that attempts to understand what it looks like when teachers are working in 21C ways. As Ally wrote in the very first entry of this thread, our curiosity was to try and figure out even what we mean when we talk about the actual practice of 21C teaching and learning (you can read that here).

In our meetings and our talking and our rereading of data, we still haven’t quite figured out what exactly we mean when we talk about what it takes to have teachers who teach in 21C ways. Is this a curricular set of choices? A pedagogical set of choices? A way of being in the classroom? A set of theories or beliefs a teacher might have? We are happy to engage with any of those ideas.

Our first stab at it, though, is to wonder about whether there is a set of dispositions/ beliefs/ philosophies etc. that individual teachers might hold that would lead us to believe that perhaps they were more aligned with 21C ideas about education. After a couple of different sorts of data collection, the research team pulled together a set of ideas about what these dispositions etc might be. We thought we’d share them here and talk about them together to see how readers connected with them.

We found that some of what we all gravitated towards in those teachers we spent time with that we agreed had "it" was a particular set of ideas about which they were thinking. I think of this as thinking dispositions. It wasn’t always the specifics of what they were thinking that we were particularly drawn to, but the fact that they were questioning the old ways of doing things. And it wasn’t even enough to be questioning these different bits—they had to be questioning those old ways in a connected package.

The other main component of "it" in the teachers we all somehow agreed were 21C teachers was the way they showed up in the world. This was a kind of attitude, a way of being in the world, a set of personal characteristics which they might have had whether they were doctors or teachers or taxi drivers or accountants. (This distinction is not iron-clad but I hope it’ll get more clear as I talk about it here.) I’ll give examples of the elements of both the thinking and the being dispositions.

Thinking dispositions: 21C ways of thinking

1. 21C teachers need to be thinking about education in new ways, and they need to be linking those ways together. They need to be thinking about the purposes of schooling, the role of knowledge and content, the relationship between pedagogy and curriculum. They don’t necessarily have to come up with the same answers or focus on the same connections, but from our perspective they have to have a mindful awareness of the often taken-for-granted pieces of schooling.
     
2. 21C teachers need to be thinking about students and the relationships between students, teachers, families, and communities in new ways. Again, there aren’t right and wrong answers in this category; it’s the fact of the wondering about new kinds of relationships that signals to us the 21C teacher. Other teachers, who were doing innovative and interesting things in their classrooms but were not ever questioning the one-teacher-with-many-students-in-a-single-cell-classroom, did not strike us as 21C.
     
3. 21C teachers need to be thinking about the future. This one might strike readers as even more obvious than the others, but we found it was often missing even for those teachers who had self-selected as being particularly interested in 21C learning. Unless teachers were open to ideas that the 21C might be quite different from the past and that those differences might be unknown and unknowable, they did not seem to us to be really engaged in 21C teaching.

Now each of these thinking dispositions seems fairly obvious to me as I type. Of course teachers should think in new ways about school and schooling, about relationships between those traditionally inside schools (e.g. students and teachers) those traditionally outside (e.g. communities and families), and about what future they’re preparing students to enter. The discovery we made on the research team after talking through the data, though, was that many many teachers—even those explicitly interested in 21C education—in fact do not think about these things and instead swim in the water of them, unquestioningly. This makes perfect sense (the old saying, "If you want to learn about water, do not ask a fish" comes to mind). And it has to change if we’re to see 21C teaching.

Being dispositions: 21C ways of being

We also saw what we thought of as individual characteristics in those teachers with more 21C ways of being. We found that while there were a variety of characteristics that seemed useful for 21C teachers, there were three that seemed to us to be mandatory and one that seemed, if not mandatory, at least important. You’ll see as you read that these are often tightly entwined with the Thinking dispositions above, in that some of the thinking may give rise to these ways of BEing and some of the BEing may give rise to new ways of thinking. Nevertheless, I’ll marshal on and act as though they’re separate for the purposes of useful explanation.

1. Openness and reflectiveness, about practice, about self. Those teachers who we thought of as 21C teachers were deeply engaged in reflection about themselves and their teaching. They were constantly asking themselves why they did this or that, why students responded in particular ways, why schools were set up as they were.
     
2. Comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity. To teach in new ways which prepare students for an unknown future requires a kind of comfort with things that are new and uncertain. Some of the teachers we worked with thrived under this uncertainty; others tolerated it. Whether they thrived or tolerated, all of them had to be able to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity without shutting it down or running from them to make our list.
     
3. The capacity for juggling multiple things at once. Because each of these pieces is so entwined in practice, for us to recognise one of the teachers in our study as 21C, she had to be able to handle more than one thing at a time. In fact, it was important for these teachers to hold on to multiple strands of these ideas simultaneously in order to synthesise across them or put them together in new ways. Someone who thinks first about mathematics and then about literacy and then about science, or who thinks first about students and then about community members and then about the future, is unlikely to put the ideas together to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
     
4. The ability to author these ideas. Here’s the one we weren’t totally convinced about and so we’ll hold tentatively here. It seemed to us that in order to show up in ways we recognised as 21C, you had to actually put these ideas together in some kind of self-generated packet. We didn’t care exactly what the ideas were that people were putting together, nor did we mind if people weren’t putting the ideas together in ways that were aligned with our ideas. What mattered to us was that each teacher was putting together his own package. If a teacher could quote from a book or resource where someone else had done a masterful job of putting these ideas together, and even if he was putting those ideas to use on his own, we did not necessarily believe that this was a solidly 21C teacher. For us to really believe in the solidity of it, a teacher had to put the ideas together in her own way and use them in her own way. Reading things and citing the ideas of others was great, but citing an authority outside yourself as the reason you knew what you knew seemed to us to be a less robust way of holding these ideas.

So that’s the list of them, or at least that’s the list I take away from the discussions we had (my colleagues may pile on and show me their different perspectives). We believed that if we saw these thinking and being dispositions in a teacher, we’d recognise that teacher as 21C. Without those dispositions, the teacher could strike us as a fantastic, helpful, intelligent, wonderful teacher, but not as a 21C teacher from our perspective.

We intend, over the next weeks, to play with some of these ideas about dispositions and to put flesh around this initial skeleton of our thinking. But we want readers to help too. As we write, we’d like you to think about where the holes are in our thinking. Are there dispositions we’re missing? Are there some here you don’t believe in? Perhaps we’re misguided with the idea about dispositions generally and you have a better way to put these ideas together? Come along and play with us!

Jennifer Teachers' work 21st century education, being, dispositions, Teachers' work, thinking