Student education

2010 is shaping up to be year when schools have to face up to choosing between developing creative teaching beliefs or implementing imposed reactionary politically inspired ideology. The other alternative is to unthinkingly to go along to get along. If this tuns out to be the case it will be sad day for creative education and the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum.


As soon as primary teachers get themselves back to school in a couple of weeks they will have to face up to the issue of National Standards.

If the National Standards are accepted without even a trial then teachers will be aligning themselves with a system that will distort the education of their students. It will mean developing schools as being un-educational; a source of mis-education contributing to the growing school school failure rate.

The new government has nailed its banner to a standardised approach replacing the move towards personalisation and 21st Century thinking of the previous administration.

It is a clear choice between measurable efficiency of narrow range of targets and an education focusing on developing the attributes, talents and gifts of all students required to equip them to thrive in what will be a challenging future.

The Governments standards approach will alienate students who already find school difficult.All too often schools blame their students backgrounds as an excuse for school failure happily ignoring the role school have played in creating failure.

With an emphasis on standards the schools role in failure will become obvious. While standards focus on primary schools student alienation becomes obvious in years 7 to 10. This was the conclusion of Russell Bishop's Kotahitanga project ( University of Waikato) who, while writing about the experience of Maori students, found that school did not acknowledge student's culture and largely ignored their voice and identity. This alienation for many students begins the day school starts.

It is such students that American writer Kirsten Olsen identifies in her powerful book 'Wounded by School'. She writes that 'shouldn't the joy of learning, creativity and recognising the differences of students be more important than trying to push all students into a middle of the road mold and teaching for standardized testing?' She believes our current school system harms everyone and that there is a need to challenge the industrial age assumptions behind the institution of school that damages so many of our children.

Schooling, she writes, is itself the single most important component to destroying the joy of learning.

School that comply to the government's standardisation approach will be contributing to such wounding and neglect of student's intrinsic learning.

Simple as that.

We need to look at school failure with fresh eyes. For those who would like to gain a greater depth of understanding of the issue of school ought to visit at risk advocate Bill Pages at risk students site

Page believes that the process of failure begins when they are born into impoverished home experiences that cause initial entrance into compulsory schooling to be difficult. These multiple causes ( 'deficit theory') are well known but what is not acknowledged is that educators deny their own culpability in the failure process.

All students have an inbuilt desire to learn and all require encouragement, acceptance, achievement and satisfaction but all too often by our use of peer comparisons (ability grouping) fragile self images of such students are eroded. All students need to have their questions, queries and ideas valued but all too often such desires are replaced by the teacher's planned curriculum. All students need to have their individuality and idiosyncrasy valued but all too often , through teachers influence, students products ( art, writing , research) all illustrate blandness.

After years of such invisibility and frustration a sense of school failure results. When students experience years of not achieving school standards ( many of little interest to them) all the associated behaviour associated with failure results.

Children , writes Page, who begin school behind may never catch up. We need to develop a more creative and personalised approach. Recognizing the futility of it all they readily become kids who quit trying, learning, co-operating , following procedures, or behaving. With their 'loser' image students discover disobedience is preferable to showing stupidity.

School do everything but accept responsibility for the mismatch of students with their imposed curriculum. Educational powers that be created the problem of dysfunctional schooling and only they can solve it system wide.

The sad thing the answer to all this school induced failure is with us. Creative teachers have always known the way to ensure all students retain their joy of learning and it to such teachers we need to look to rather than imposing narrow standards.

Creative teacher know the importance of establishing a non judgemental respectful relationships with all their learners. They know the vital importance of valuing the thoughts, questions, talents and queries of all their students. They understand the importance of students culture and the importance of exploring the immediate environment as as a learning resource. They see their rooms as learning communities and their role as supporting and challenging their students to do their personal best. They appreciate for students to see the need for effort and practice. They encourage their students to do fewer things well and to, in the process, acquire the lifelong attributes and disposition the future will require. In all this they need to ensure that literacy and numeracy are developed in the context of real learning.

For many of our current schools this would turn the process of teaching upside down. Imposed 'best practice' teaching in literacy and numeracy has all but squeezed real learning out the window.

Teacher have chance to fight for creative teaching rather than selling their souls by accepting standards uncritically.

Creative teaching is worth fighting for - I for one will be happy to do my best.

A collection of ideas for creative education - somethings old and somethings new.

As our government has it eyes firmly fixed on the past standardized ideas it is important to reflect on what could be. And the amazing thing is that the alternative, creative teaching, is not new.

In the early 1900s writers like John Dewey were writing about that children learn from the environment they are exposed to and through worthwhile experiences they have. It was Dewey who said 'childen grow into people as they live today'.

The environment ( or culture) teachers create is vitally important. As Russell Bishop says, writing about the experiences Maori students in the Kotahitanga Project , 'culture counts'. Many students, in low decile schools, enter school ill equipped to cope with formalised impersonal education they experience - no matter how friendly it all looks. At school it is the teachers world that 'counts'.

What teachers need to do, from the earliest years, is to create an environment that captures children's interests; students need to be seen as active agents not recipients of teacher's curriculums. Students' interests, and their immediate environment, should be capitalised on. As Jerome Bruner wrote 'teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation'. Bruner saw children as 'scientists working at the edge of their competence'. The current idea of pre-planning students activities is all too often counterproductive.

How teachers 'see' students is important.

In America Dewey's ideas were widespread but were eventually supplanted by an approach owing its genesis to scientific management -an approach being found successful in 'modern' factories as they introduced mass production. Schools today,particularly secondary schools, owe more to Henry Ford than John Dewey. Standardisation replaced potential diversity and individuality.

After World War Two in the UK and later in New Zealand child centred education regained centre stage at the primary levels. Elwyn Richardson's inspirational book, 'In the Early World ' was published during this time.In the 1970 an 'open education movement' continued the trend but eventually, by the 1980S, they were all replaced by more traditional programmes.

It seemed, with the introduction of the New Zealand Curriculum in 2007 student centred learning things were changing.

Then along came the standards and creativity once again is now at risk.

Standardisation is to replace personalisation.

Creative educators place great emphasis on assisting students to interpret their own and class experiences through their senses and their imagination and, following any experience, to express what they have discovered. The concept of valuing student's 'voice' and identity is vital - standardisation asks the opposite as students are measured against imposed standards.

Such creative teaching is already rare in our primary schools.

In creative schools students learn how to interpret any experience through a range of frameworks ( learning areas) - as in their preschool years all learning is integrated.

Literacy and numeracy are seen as important but as a means to an end. Today Primary classrooms focus almost all their energy on these two areas and the introduction of standards will just cement this bias. Any idea of multiple intelligences is bi and large ignored. Students succeed or fail on their ability in literacy and numeracy only .

How to interpret experiences using a range of frameworks - to see as an artist, a scientist, a poet, a writer , a mathematician, a musician, a dancer, a historian - all must be taught. It is such areas that students will find their passions ; area of exploration that those involved feel deeply.

By doing 'fewer things well', with the assistance of 'teachers as creative coaches', students learn the importance of effort and perseverance, the to and fro of the creative process, and the intrinsic satisfaction of 'doing things well'. Creative teachers believe that through such intrinsic success students attitudes can be transformed - with sensitive teaching all students can gain a 'feeling for' whatever they are doing.

Standards will tell teachers nothing about students' attitudes -and they are to be limited to reading, writing and mathematics. Learning cannot be limited to water tight compartments.

Creative teacher value imagination over conformity and the work on display illustrates this idiosyncrasy. Many classrooms celebrate formulaic conformity -even in such a creative area as art. All too often 'best practice ' teaching has trumped student creativity. Students are limited to working at the edge of the teachers competence. Students need to be helped to judge how successful they have been by referring to past efforts not teacher tests or standards.

This illusion of certainty is no way to equip students for an evolutionary future. Students need to develop faith in their own ideas, to value their intuition, to be spontaneous and to see possibilities, not to looking over their shoulder for teacher approval.

This dealing with uncertainty is the essence of creativity and it at odds with the misguided certainty of standards. Learners are boundary breakers.

Creative teachers see, when students are truly engaged, students inventing their learning identities through the tasks they undertake. The tasks we involve our students in must be chosen with care if we want to avoid students disengaging from their own learning and be coming part of the 'achievement tail' of lost learners.

It this vision of creative education that has inspired me over the decades. When creative teachers network with each other such creativity will become contagious. Standards may be having their turn in the sun but they are too fragile to last as they will destroy the creative spirit which is the basis of learning and life.

Each student desires to be recognised as an individual because of their own unique backgrounds and each student needs to learn how to contribute to their community - this is what teaching is all about. Or ought to be. We don't want 30 plus identical products - school are not factories.

Learning is process of discovery for both teachers and their students and it is as much about feeling and relationship as it is about thinking or knowing.

John Dewey had it right all those years ago. It time for Henry Ford and his modern day 'one size fits all' standard followers to move over. Students have amazing potential if placed in nurturing and challenging environments.

It is a respectful environment and quality experiences, not standards, that are needed, if the joy of learning is not to be crushed.

We have a problem in our schools - it is one of disengagement which is at a worrying level at years 7 to 10.

The government with its popular mandate believes the answer is to do with poor teaching of literacy and numeracy in primary schools and intends to introduce the failed concept of standards against the wisdom of highly respected educationalists, the Primary Principal's Federation and the primary teacher union.

I had hoped that common sense would prevail and that at least a trial would be set up but it seems not. Yesterday the Prime Minister made it clear the standards are to be imposed this year and that school Boards that did not comply would be sacked.

And this from a political party that believes in initiative, freedom and individual responsibility. As I see it it is the the worst case of political interference ( social engineering) or a government imposing a centralized agenda on schools. State socialism of the worst kind - free market Stalinism.

Students are failing, there is no doubt about this; we do not need national standards to find out who that are and we know that the worrying problem of student disengagement increases between the ages of 12 and 15 or so. Imposing literacy and numeracy standards in primary schools will not solve this problem - it will make it even worse by distorting the learning experiences of students and distracting the time and energy of teachers.

What is really required is some rethinking of the school system which is just not possible to educate all the students in its present arrangement. The joy of learning, which all students are born with, is lost as students 'progress' through the system.

Standardisation might have worked in an industrial age but the world has changed dramatically and what is now required is the develop the creativity and initiative and individuality of all students. We need a school system that centres on helping each student develop their unique talents - naturally this has to include literacy and numeracy.

What is required is a personalised approach to learning from an earl;y age.Even primary schools the past decades have lost the creativity and have fallen into the trap of standardized or formulaic 'best practice' learning. The problem comes to a head in early secondary school when non academic students begin to lose interest.

Retaining all students interest in and joy of learning is the real challenge.

A recent survey in the UK slams schools.

'Many British adults say they did not realise their true potential until years after they had left school. A survey of 2000 people found on that, on average, they cited 22 as the age they found their niche in life.Nearly half of those surveyed felt they were regarded as average or poor students while they were at school. Of those, 15 percent they never really got the chance to discover their talent in the classroom because their teacher had written them off as failures.'

How will imposing national standards fix this?

Standards will mean that all students will be assessed twice a year and recorded as below, average or above average. As is is not possible for everyone to be above average students will continue to disengage from their own learning. This will be made worse by the ignoring of their special talents in the process. This is what has happened in the two countries that have developed such an approach - the UK and the US - both performing far worse that NZ!

If schools accept the imposition of the conformist standards then I am out of helping such schools but will remain as an advocate for teacher creativity.

For educators there is a choice to be made that will require leadership and courage.

Already those in the Ministry have learnt to dance to the tune of the new masters selling their integrity in the process as have those who deliver contracts for the Ministry.

Are schools next to cave in in this brave new 'big brother knows best' standardized world?