Cleverlands Page 23
Advocates of the importance of these 21st-century skills point out that the world has changed since education systems were first designed, and that technology is taking over most manual and routine jobs. Consequently, the kind of skills that are needed for employment are those that can’t be done by computers, such as solving complex problems as a team; problems which don’t have step-by-step method to arriving at a solution, and to which there might be more than one answer.
In recognition of the importance of these skills, there has been a move across Canada since the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s to teach them to children in school. One conversation I had with a school principal reflected many other similar comments in Ontario – ‘Our philosophy as educators is that students are talking, communicating with one another, collaborating with one another, that they’re working in groups, they’re using manipulatives [physical models used in maths], they’re taking a real-world problem and working through it. So if they don’t understand they can find something to help them understand, they can use those resources.’ The philosophy is based on getting students ready for the real world outside of school by giving them the same type of experiences that they may be faced with in the future.
Reflecting this shift in thinking, new curricula have been introduced across several provinces that stress that these skills must be taught in schools. They also stress how these skills should be taught. For example, the 2006 ‘Common Curriculum Framework for Math’ designed by the Western and Northern Canadian Protocol and implemented by Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon Territory and Northwest Territories states that ‘Learning through problem-solving should be the focus of mathematics at all grade levels’ and ‘Problem-solving, reasoning and connections are vital to increasing mathematical fluency, and must be integrated throughout the program’ (my italics). They later specify that, ‘In order for an activity to be problem-solving based, it must ask students to determine a way to get from what is known to what is sought. If students have already been given ways to solve the problem, it is not a problem, but practice.’
This gives the impression that new maths content should not be taught to the students, but rather they should be encouraged to discover the solutions for themselves, based on what they already know. There is also a focus on children then continuing to use personal strategies for solving mathematical problems rather than being taught one correct method, and on a downplaying of learning by rote.
This is not uncontroversial. In fact, I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I told you that debates over whether teachers should be guiding students to discover things for themselves or teaching them what they need to know have been happening for centuries over several continents, and have been referred to as wars. Once back from Canada I met Canadian mathematics professor Robert Craigen at an education conference, and cornered him in the pub afterwards. Over ginger beer, he started telling me about his concerns with discovery-based learning being expounded as the best way to teach maths, and he pointed me to an article written by a colleague of his, Anna Stokke.208
Anna makes a very interesting speculation about Canada’s maths performance in PISA and TIMSS. She points out that maths scores in Canada have dropped between 2003 and 2012. All but two provinces have shown a significant decline, with Alberta dropping the most by a worrying 36 points (bear in mind that 42 is equivalent to one year’s schooling). In TIMSS too, the three provinces that took part all saw a fall in eighth-grade maths scores between 2003 and 2011, with students performing on the fraction questions only slightly better than they would do if they were guessing.
Anna draws attention to the fact that this countrywide decline coincided with the move towards discovery-based curricula, discovery-based textbooks and discovery-based professional development sessions, and through an analysis of the research into the effects of discovery-based learning compared to more traditional approaches, suggests that changing the training and curricula in favour of the latter (though without doing away with the former altogether) would halt the decline in scores.
What does the research in this area suggest? Essentially that problem-based learning,209 where the new information students receive is through self-direction rather than from teachers, is not as effective at getting children to understand new knowledge and new concepts (I will come to its other effects later on).210 John Hattie synthesised the results of eight meta-analyses, including 285 studies on the effectiveness of problem-based learning which involved 38,090 children, and found an average effect size of only 0.15.211 And a recent study by the OECD based on PISA data found that while most teaching strategies have a role to play in the classroom, students in all but one of the top-15-performing countries reported receiving teacher-directed instruction at or more than the OECD average on this measure.212 What is more, there is also a sound psychological explanation as to why this might be, which is explained in Box 3 in the Japan section (p93).213
Despite my initial scepticism, I therefore found Anna’s suggestion that a change in pedagogy might halt Canada’s PISA decline convincing: the introduction of more discovery maths across Canada correlates with the decline in Canada’s math scores; experiments and meta-analyses at a sub-national level find that less guided approaches are not very effective for student learning, and there is an explanation for why this might be.
The case of Quebec clinched it for me. Quebec also introduced a new discovery-based maths curriculum, six years before the provinces in the Western and Northern Canadian Protocol. The impact of this reform on children’s scores on a standardised maths test was analysed by economists from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), who found that it had negative effects on students’ achievement at all points of the skill distribution: i.e. for children who find maths easy and children who find maths hard.214 What is more, the negative effects grew the longer the students studied under the new curriculum, and these negative effects were more significant for children at the lower end of the skills distribution. The latter impact may explain why in 2003 – after Quebec had implemented this type of reform but before other provinces had – Quebec had greater variance in maths PISA scores than any other province.
Box 5: Didactique de mathématiques
Although Quebec’s TIMSS scores have been declining, they remain high internationally, and both Quebec’s maths PISA scores and their TIMSS scores remain higher than any other Canadian province. In her essay, Anna Stokke points out that unlike every other province in Canada, pre-service elementary and middle-school teachers in Quebec have to complete at least two three-credit-hour maths courses at university, with many completing even more. In Ontario, by contrast, pre-service elementary teachers are recommended to complete a maths course, but it isn’t compulsory, leaving them trailing in the wake of Quebec teachers’ superior mathematical understanding.
I had a chat with Annie Savard, a mathematics professor from Quebec who is taking part in some exploratory research into differences in pedagogy across the provinces, and she built on this idea. ‘There are differences… For me it’s training: teacher training. Just to give you an example, Quebec doesn’t have Grade 7 and 8; it’s Secondary 1 and 2. But in many provinces, Grade 7 and 8 are taught by elementary-school teachers. In Quebec they have expert math teachers, so they have two extra years with strong teachers, which might make them more prepared for this PISA math test. I’m not saying that the others aren’t good, or that they aren’t doing a good job. I know teachers want to do their best, and do the best for their students. But when teachers don’t have the knowledge, you know, you can’t.’
While she also believes that Quebec’s superior maths performance might be due to teacher training, she went on to make a distinction not only between the quantities of training prospective teachers were getting, but between the types of training they were getting. As part of her research, a small sample of teachers from different provinces were filmed, and then teachers from other provinces watched the videos and discussed their contents. Annie
noticed a difference in what was being discussed. Teachers from Quebec focused much more on the mathematics: ‘they really talked about the concepts’. She explained that this was because teachers in Quebec get more training in ‘didactique’. Annie described this as hard to define, but summarised, ‘it is really pedagogy and mathematics together’. Whereas teachers in other provinces get taught pedagogy (how to teach in general) and mathematics (as a subject), in Quebec they have many courses in ‘didactique de mathématiques’, where they learn to analyse student mistakes and deconstruct each mathematical concept, considerably more so than in other provinces.
In a recent review of research into what makes great teaching (defined in this case as teaching that leads to improved student outcomes), Robert Coe and colleagues from Durham University in England concluded that one of the two most effective features of great teachers sounds very similar to what is known in Quebec as ‘didactique’: ‘As well as a strong understanding of the material being taught, teachers must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods, and identify students’ common misconceptions’.215 In English, the latter is known as ‘pedagogical content knowledge’.216 Coe and colleagues found strong evidence that this has an impact on student outcomes, adding credence to the idea that the additional teacher training in this area received by Quebec teachers might explain why they get higher maths results than all other provinces.
Pedagogical content knowledge would be a fantastic addition to any teacher’s repertoire, whether they were teaching students directly or guiding them to discover it for themselves.
Have I Missed the Point?
I would have missed the point, had I stopped there. I started by talking about the importance of skills such as independent problem-solving and creative thinking, and then I switched to looking at outcomes of traditional academic tests only. But je ne regrette rien – it is important I looked at academic outcomes for two reasons. Firstly, this book is about ‘top performing’ education systems, so the potential causes of significant drops in international test scores are relevant, even if they may appear to some to be unimportant. Secondly, as we saw in the Japan chapter, you can’t have advanced problem-solving and critical thinking without good subject knowledge, so the excessive use of any method that is not effective at getting students to understand academic content will reduce the range of topics about which they can think critically and in which they can solve problems.
Do these methods have positive effects on anything else, despite their limited effectiveness at developing children’s basic knowledge and understanding? Yes they do, so it would be a waste to drop them completely. Problem-based learning can have a positive effect on deeper knowledge and understanding, ‘when students already have the surface level knowledge’.217 Once students have been taught the basic content, problem-based methods can then be used to help children deepen their understanding through application. The mistake is to try and get them to learn the content in the first place through problems, as this limits their understanding of even the basics, precluding them from ever getting to the stage where they can apply and solve problems in a particular domain.
Knowing and understanding content is necessary for children to be able to solve problems or think creatively in an area, but it is not sufficient. Surely the case of China and Singapore have shown us that. In the more traditional classrooms in these countries at the secondary level, teaching to the test with little room for questioning or alternative interpretations has led to children having significant knowledge, but also in many cases, a mindset that there is only one right answer. This is not good for the world – all of us need to be able to think critically about issues in ways that acknowledge that not everything is black and white. There is a huge range of teaching practice though between this rigid approach – which surely limits children’s creative thinking – and the other extreme of getting the children to discover everything for themselves, without teaching them anything at all.
The practice described in Finland, for example, involves teachers leading class discussions which encourage children to give their opinions, and challenge one another’s ideas. In Japanese primary schools, we heard about teachers setting up a real-life problem to engage the students, before teaching them what they needed to know to solve the problem (though not how to solve it), and then letting them try it out in groups. In Singapore, I saw teachers demonstrate an experiment, and then encourage the students (as a class) to come to an explanation of what was going on through intelligent questioning. And in the classrooms I visited in Canada, I saw much more of a combination of teaching approaches in practice than are being encouraged in their curricula. In each of these settings, the learning was highly structured by the teacher, who had a goal in mind of what the students should be learning, and gave the students enough information that they were able to handle the levels of uncertainty they were being presented with. Call this traditional or progressive – it makes no difference to me. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, you don’t get to be an independent problem-solver by learning everything independently; but then again, you don’t get to be one either if you never get to try problem-solving for yourself.
Of all the countries I visited for this book, Canada would be my choice for where I’d like to send my own children to school. It is far from perfect – the over-emphasis on discovery learning would worry me as a parent as I know it worries some Canadian parents, and some provincial governments are cutting educational funding, which might take away from the things I was so impressed by. But in the main I found the Canadian education system to be one that had a good balance. There was a balance between the teaching of academic content and broader cognitive, social and moral skills and traits. There was a balance between having the same high expectations for all children, and catering for individuals by offering support to the less able and challenge to the more able. And at the level of the school system, there was a balance between holding schools accountable and providing them with the advice and support to improve.
CONCLUSION
Chapter 17: Five Principles for
High-Performing, Equitable Education Systems
One summer evening after an education conference in London, I was enjoying my second glass of Pinot Grigio in a nearby pub garden, catching up on the latest educational goings-on in the UK with similarly keen beans. I saw a man come into the garden with a pint – a friend of a friend who at the time was an advisor to the Secretary of State for Education – and waved my free hand in a greeting. He came over.
‘I see you’re back from your educational travels, Lucy.’
‘I am indeed.’ I smiled.
‘So, what are the three things that we ought to do in England to improve our education system?’
My smile froze on my face. I’d only recently got back from Canada, and my brain was still processing all the things I’d seen and the conversations I’d had. I hadn’t yet consolidated what I’d learned, let alone applied them to the complex and political muddle that is the English education system (I was also one-and-a-half glasses of wine down, on an empty stomach). Yet here was someone with influence asking what I thought.
‘Well, I suppose we could start by reducing the number of teacher training providers and ensuring their quality like they did in Finland.’ I reasoned.
‘No I don’t think that would work, we’re committed to School Direct and… ’
I’m slightly ashamed but also delighted to say that our conversation was interrupted at this point by a friend calling over that she needed a hand carrying the drinks. I was only too happy to oblige.
This book is not about England; it’s about education in Finland, Canada, Singapore, Japan and Shanghai. I’m tempted to leave it there – after all, no one knows with any certainty ‘what works’ in designing quality education (and if they think they do then they are unduly confident). At the level of systems, it is difficult to run controlled experiments;
occasionally system leaders make decisions that allow for proper evaluation of education reforms, but often all we have to go on are correlations between particular policies and outcomes, and case studies of systems that appear to be successful. Yet despite all this uncertainty, politicians and system leaders have to keep on making educational decisions. And these decisions are influenced by the beliefs and desires of the society that they represent, and mediated by the beliefs and desires of the teachers that work for them; so to a degree we all have to work with this uncertainty, and do what we think is best, given the available evidence. And so – although I’ll not attempt to offer specific policy suggestions for any one country – I won’t leave it there. I want to share with you five principles that I believe underlie high-performing, equitable education systems.
The countries I went to are very different places – they vary in size, culture, diversity and history – and yet during the months since I returned home and started working on this book, I’ve realised that there are some underlying approaches that they have in common.218 This does not mean they all use the same methods to achieve them – these approaches, or principles, are applied in different ways in different countries, based on the context and politics. In the main they are not specific enough to be empirically tested (few things which are that specific will work across culturally diverse systems), but the types of policies that arise from them are, and I have included links in the footnotes to the high-level evidence on these where it exists. Of course – these principles are those that I believe bring about high performance and equitable outcomes in educating children in the application of maths, reading and science at age 15, and there is more to education than this alone. So after I’ve shared the five principles with you, I will address a very important question: is the pursuit of high PISA scores through the application of these principles at odds with other important goods in education? But first, let’s go back to preschool.