21st Century Schools @ the Centre

Comment by Sheila Stewart on January 23, 2009 at 8:24pm

I like your questions above, Annie! I am listening...reading...watching what comes together.....and planning my answers to the above! We need to define success together!.

Comment by Lori Lukinuk on January 23, 2009 at 9:03pm

Tough word to define. As Sheila knows, we went through our Strategic Planning and came up with System Success, Staff Success, and Student Success as our focus. During the planning sessions I could not get one person to tell me what they meant by "Success". I don't have a definition either. I'm interested in what others feel success in an education system means to them.

Comment by Richard Renneboog on January 25, 2009 at 11:20am

Perhaps we could start by thinking of 'succuss' as meeting the goals of a plan or a curriculum (as distinct from "the" curriculum...). I don't mean this in the sense of delivering the curriculum and assessing the results of that endeavour. Rather, I mean this in the sense of indentifying what are the goals of that curriculum and assessing how well those goals have been met.
Is this a clear concept?

Comment by Sheila Stewart on February 2, 2009 at 9:47pm

I think the concept of goals may help here. Would we go one step further then and identify the goals, say....at the end elementary and at the end of high school? How broad can the goals be? I wonder if our attempts to measure success has left our focus too narrow. Do we focus on students graduating from school capable of life-long learning, or do we just aim to prove that they learned some STUFF while we have them? At what point is "success" truly acheived? Maybe we just can't define success.....I just hope my kids have a satisfactory education! And I am too tired now to brainstorm on this any longer!

Comment by Lori Lukinuk on February 2, 2009 at 10:13pm

Hey Sheila, I honestly don't think success can be defined beyond a single persons definition. If you asked a Director of Education what success means he/she might say level 3/4 in EQAO results. (Ministry influence) If you ask a parent you will get a completely different answer. If you ask the students, you will in all likelihood get another. If you ask a Special Needs student you will hear another from them and perhaps something different from their parents. Perhaps that is it,......success can be defined as the point where a person is happy with what they themselves have achieved....not the point where others think you should be. I know you Sheila....a satisfactory education is not good enough!!

Comment by Sheila Stewart on February 2, 2009 at 10:55pm

Then I guess satisfied is the better word.....are students satisfied with their own achievements and validated in some way? Have we helped them grow in their weaknesses and helped them find/demonstrate their strengths in order to make confident choices after leaving school? I hope they can say the loved learning too! We are back to broader visions and definitions!

Comment by Annie Kidder on February 4, 2009 at 5:52am

What a great discussion you guys are having off alone here in your group. It's hilarious how the website works - because I somehow had lost track of this bit of it.
So do you think there's a way of somehow starting with the individual "feeling" of success - maybe as measured against a set of goals, and then building on that to develop an overall measure of success. What I mean is - if we think of the overall success of schools, or boards or systems as being based on the success of hundreds or thousands of individual students - then how do we get from the individual to the overall. (It's early in the morning and I have insomnia, so I may not be too articulate.)
Gay Stephenson was just at a meeting of the Learning to 18 Working Table and they too were talking about defining success beyond the EQAO scores. They were thinking about dividing "success" in two: academic success and non-academic success (except they had a better word for non-academic which I can't remember right now).
I think at next year's conference I want to have a whole workshop about defining success. We kind of started this year, by talking about marks and what they mean or whether they matter. But there must be some way of getting to the heart of the matter where it comes to "success".
If we don't define it soon, we will be over run by the Fullan definition, and it will drive every inch of our policy. Success is getting the test scores up. Period.
It's coming soon in board governance - boards will be judged on their scores. Learning to 18 is working on a whole way of evaluating boards and schools based on scores.
SO - you brilliant people in this corner - we need to come up with our own definition or definitions of success so that we can spread them across the land.
I keep wondering if it would work better if every student had an IEP that they developed at the beginning of every year (with parents and teachers) and that part of their assessment was against goals set in the IEP (which could include academic as well as other types of goals) and that somehow you could upload the results of all of those IEPs into some sort of data base, by which we could then measure overall success.
Too airy-fairy perhaps?
It's how we find the right combination of the three "Rs" kind of success and the big picture success. Watch that creativity video. It'll help with the definition.

Comment by John Borst on February 4, 2009 at 9:32am

Annie,
I really wish I had more time to spend on this ning but I am rather overwhelmed with other things right now.
I like the fact that you and others are wary of the Fullan approach. I have just finished my response in each of the four Discussion Areas to the Governance Review Commission. The whole thing runs to over 5000 words.
I have Discussion One and Discussion Two up at Tomorrow's Trust, 3 is tomorrow & 4 Friday.
In Discussion Four, I address the issue you raise about systems and how we are for a variety of reasons giving them preference over the people they were meant to serve:
(here first at s@tc) is an excerpt from Discussion four on what "success" isn't:

The very existence of placing “school board accountability” within the context of “literacy and numeracy” scores and “graduation rates” and “other student Outcomes and implementation measures” only serves to demonstrate how far from the reality of the role of trustee governance the Minister and her mandarins at the Mowat Block have sunk.
Student outcomes simply are not related to the quality of Board governance in the way it is implied in the questions attached to this “Discussion.” One cannot draw a straight line between student scores or a numeric graduation rate and the behaviour of trustees around a board table or for that matter even between the qualities of a Board’s Strategic Plan.
I should not have to remind the Minister that children are not like cars on the line at a General Motors plant. If the composition of the steel in a GM body rusts through in three years versus the industry standard of five, the board of directors can take steps to ensure that the composition of the steel is improved.
Children arrive at school each with their own DNA profile. On top of that each child arrives with a unique set of cultural, emotional, economic and psychic experiences, over which none of the school board members or its employees has any control. Society knows that significant cohorts exist which can cause one board or one school to align with high scores and other boards or schools to align with low scores.
I think society also still understands that teaching and education has for most of history been imprecise, decentralized and as much an art as a science. The implementation of mass testing regimes does not yet permit teaching or the governance of education to establish the same industrial practices which have permitted GM and other car manufactures to create the high-tech automobiles we now drive.
The questions underlying this review have buried within them a deeply troubling component about the power of statistics within a society. According to a New York Times article (February 2, 2009) schools are being closed not for declining enrolment but because over a number of statistical measures on student performance they are claimed not to be a success. On that basis, the school is “closed”, and then rebuilt, reconfigured and re-staffed within the same structure as “new” schools. This is a vision of educational reform as “data driven salvation”. It means that we have reached a state where “the systems we create are now more important than the needs of the individuals such systems once were assumed to serve.”
By all means, the Ministry has every right to continue to use Operational Reviews to assess the quality of Board Strategic Plans, the congruence of earmarked dollars with dollars spent, and the allocation of staff resources on its Strategic imperatives which align with Ministry imperatives but to even imply that there is necessarily a direct correlation between such alignment and student test scores is beyond the realm of research. There simply are too many variables in play to isolate such a relationship no matter how great is our preference for statistical validation and a corporate model of education.
In raising such a question the Minister appears to be confusing the realms of science and technology. Whereas science is tentative, exploratory and capable of being corrected technology has to do with the manipulation of what science thinks it has discovered. In this instance, as in the New York “reforms” technology looks at the data it has produced and says how can I manipulate this to effect change. It asks, how can I use this; it is akin to a belief in “magical thinking.” John Garvey has written, “The search for understanding and knowledge has given way to the desire for mastery and gain, and wisdom is the casualty.” (Commonweal, Jan. 30, 2009).If the Minister was to impose upon Boards as an accountability model built upon student performance, she would be demonstrating this confusion.
Of course the Minister can intervene if a Board after improving its strategic plan and aligning its resources with student outcomes still does not see a rise in its scores or graduation rate. In such cases the Minister should give serious consideration to providing additional supports for children in such sub-sectors of society. In fact a good case can be made for a more differentiate funding model based on both the “society ecology” of boards and “schools”. This was the point to which the Toronto School Board had evolved before the Harris Tories clawed away their financial ability to continue. The results of that decision can be seen in the headlines of Toronto papers with too much frequency.
If however, by intervention, the question means “should the minister have the authority to ‘fire’ the elected trustees and replace them with her appointments?” Never! This would be akin to giving the Minister the power of a dictator. It is simply a gross intrusion into the democracy of school board governance.
There is also an unarticulated assumption buried in the granting of such Ministerial authority. That assumption says that the needs of the “system of governance” must take precedence over needs and will of the electorate, the very people the system was created to serve. It is a Faustian bargain, but senior levels of Government know such practices “are successful largely because they allow power to be excised more effectively and at lower cost.” And they know too, that much of society is enamoured with this over simplified view, even if it does sacrifice one of democracies most cherished rights.
In terms of the Minister’s authority over an elected official, the Education Act is now and has proven to be quite sufficient. Should the Minister, however, chose to give more authority to the electorate through a recall or impeachment option then such a democratically tested means would be acceptable.

Comment by Jacqui Strachan on February 4, 2009 at 9:37am

The idea of each student having an IEP or some similar kind of set goals outlined at the beginning of the year is intriguing. This year, at my son't middle school (he's in grade 7), instead of traditional parent/teacher interviews, we participated in "student-led conferences". It was amazing. Devlin's home room teacher was there, but it was up to Dev to lead the discussion - he showed us samples of his work, explained why he chose that particular thing, what he learned from it, what he was proud of, etc. The whole process was focussed on the student, and it really felt like Devlin was much more engaged, both in his learning and in his assessment of his work. If there was a process at the beginning of the year for students to set individual goals, I think it might increase their engagment in their own learning.

Comment by Richard Renneboog on February 4, 2009 at 9:46am

It occurs to me as I read these posts again, especially yours Annie, that we are looking at shaping a fundamental paradigm shift for the educative process itself. We have inadvertently (and perhaps partially by intent) fallen into a trap that has seen the most successful multi-level flavour of the 'one-room schoolhouse' supplanted by the less-than-spectacular multi-classroom segregated system that we currently rely on. In the former, individual students received a great deal of mentoring and support from their fellow students of all age groups, all of whom were guided at the same time in their various life and academic lessons by their teacher. That teacher was often more of a mentor and spiritual guide than just 'the teacher', a figure of authority, and at times, I'm sure, a surrogate parent.
What we have allowed the system to become over the intervening years is more like an education assembly line: you will learn this in ths year, that in the next, and so on until we have attempted to put these specific pieces of information into your head, you will do this within this time frame, and then you will leave, and, oh-by-the-way, if you do not do this according to plan we will either prevent you from advancing further, make you feel insignificant, or just let you move along because it doesn't matter to us whetehr you are successful or not. Bit of a rant perhaps, but you get the idea. Something that was very valuable in the old system has been lost to the current system.
I rather think that what is needed, and what would certainly at least act as a guide in defining 'success', is to look at the apprencticeship and mentoring way of teaching (as in the traditional trades). Such an approach may allow us to get back that value-added aspect of the teacher-student relationship and leda to greater "success" in our classrooms.

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