It’s March Break. It’s beautiful outside, but I am inside researching. And I am frustrated.
There is plenty out there telling me that we need school reform. Granted, most of it is actually aimed at the US, but as a current secondary principal, I know Ontario secondary schools have to be a target as well.
The question is, what do we do? As a Principal, what do I do? The system still supports old thinking, and we need massive structural change if we are going to make a real difference. The change we try to implement at the secondary school level is opposed by the structure of the “credit” system, the need for “high marks” to get into university, “awards” and scholarships and competition rather than collaboration.
What small changes can we make to engage students and improve learning while working to change the system as a whole?
As I work through this question, I will share my thinking and my challenges here.
In the meantime, here is some of the reading and listening I have done today. I hope it challenges your thinking too.
Resources:
Children Stressed to the Breaking Point Due to Standardized Testing
Recently New York City made public teacher evaluations based on student standardized test scores. This proceeded the state of New York’s decision to change how educators are evaluated, in part by connecting the standardized test scores of students into final ratings. The following letter was shared with me by a friend whose daughter is in the New York City Public School System. She plans on sending this to officials in the NYC Department of Education to inform them of the potential that more standardized testing will have as a result of recent reform efforts.
Ben Levin’s book: How to Change 5000 Schools http://www.hepg.org/hep/book/93
Carol Dweck: Mindset Podcast http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2012/01/the-right-mindset-for-success.html
Rethinking School: http://hbr.org/2012/03/rethinking-school/ar/1
“The test of a successful education is not the amount of knowledge that a pupil takes away from a school, but his appetite to know and his capacity to learn” Sir Richard Livingstone, 1941 (p. 28).
“No curricular overhaul, no instructional innovation, no change in school organization, no toughening of standards, no rethinking of teacher training or compensation will succeed if students do not come to school interested in, and committed to, learning.” Steinberg, 1996 p. 194
“The need, rather, is to free ourselves from the collective conceptual blinkers which the existing apparatus of educational assumptions represents. At the heart of such a project for comparitivists, I suggest, must be the recognition of the central role of culture in facilitating and shaping the process of learning and thus, of the need to study the part played by the perceptions and feelings of the individual learner.
Broadfoot, 2000 Comparative education for the 21st Century: Retrospect and Prospect Comparative Education 36(3), August 2000: 357-371
