Week 14 - Multicultural and International Perspectives, engagement & agency
PISAThis week started by viewing this video about PISA. Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing is used to measure international success of students from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD is a combination of 34 countries who come together to come up with better policies to improve people's lives. In the 1990’s they looked at how prepared 15 year olds were for their futures as most have finished compulsory formal education by then. They came up with a 2 hour test for core subjects like reading math and science. Participating countries ran this test every 3 years, rotating the 3 subjects each year.
PISA tests if students can use what they have learnt in school and apply these to real life situations and problems. PISA takes the results of all students and analyses this data to compare how countries have ranked. Similarities and differences are shown so governments can analyse results and change education policies if needed. PISA looks at how successful all students are and looks for the characterics of the more successful countries and trends and patterns. Such as girls often outperform boys in reading, and in math boys tend to outperform girls. Another finding is that deciding student pathways early on does not necessarily impact the performance of the student. Also all children have the potential to succeed if given the opportunity and are supported despite their home background also having a major impact on student success.
Engagement
Prior to class I also read an article from Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2016). ‘Engagement in Australian Schools’. This discussed the ambiguity of ‘engagement’ which is hard to define. Often policy makers have been focused on ‘disengaged’ behaviour rather than promoting engagement. Some ideas from Fredericks et. al. (2003) suggests it involves three types of engagement:
Cognitive - which is hard to measure, involves students investment in their own learning. Cognitively engaged learners are focused, resilient, flexible, and goal orientated. We can use physical signs to measure this such as facial expressions, reaction times, question asking/answering etc.
Behavioural - involves behaviour that enhances high performance such as collaboration and communication with others, and participation in other areas of their lives. Essentially are the learners ready to learn and this will help with being cognitively involved. Physical signs may be easier to measure such as attendance, reading and writing achievement data, social withdrawal, negative interactions etc.
Emotional - how the learner is feeling in relation to other learners, teachers, family and friends do they feel emotionally bonded with others. Can measure by asking students about their attitudes and beliefs etc.
We can improve engagement by having flexible, individualised teaching, in a supportive learning environment, like project based learning. Also by strong student-teacher relationships and regular monitoring, trying to make learning feel more relevant to the student, providing choice in future pathways and developing an environment where it is OK to make mistakes.
We then moved on to the ‘don’t ask me where I’m from video’. This was about how to define culture. Nationality is quite different to culture. Essentially your culture is about where are you might be a local. This includes rituals, relationships, and restrictions (where you are able to live, work, travel etc).
The World Economic Forum (2016) lists 16 skills for 21st century learning and they have included cultural & civic literacy and social and cultural awareness etc.
I think this is a great way to describe a holistic approach to curriculum development as it takes into account relevant competencies and personal character, not too sure about how the foundation literacies have been split up but good to see cultural and social awareness were explicitly included.
It was also interesting to learn which three NZ curriculum principles were the least well represented in classrooms based on research by ERO in a review done in 20012. Cultural diversity, future focus and treaty of waitangi were least well represented. I guess for most schools we are all trying to improve in these areas and probably could do with more help and professional learning in these areas.
We then dived into having a look at curriculum in other countries, and having spent a bit of time in Singapore back in the day I suggested we could have a quick look into this curriculum. We found some interesting information. Singapore includes civic literacy, global awareness and cross-cultural skills and social awareness as part of their 21st century competencies;
We were also wondering how well students from Singapore were rated in PISA and found that they were ranked top in math, science and reading in 2015 and also ranked highest in collaborative skills. They also seem to have a small number of bottom performers and a high number of top performers so the education system appears to be very successful for all students.
Agency
We then moved on to looking at learner agency which can be defined as the capability to make choices and act on these choices in a way that makes a difference to the learners life.
We watched a video from Tim Gander about learner agency. He was a teacher who inquired about how he could give his students more choice and how best to help develop their own agency. He developed and co-constructed what this would be for individuals. He create agency with the learners, and looked into how they could take action and deal with barriers, credits, timetables time pressures etc. Many of this they could not change but they did implement 20% time for self directed learning which they shared in an online learning community that also fed into assessments. They created a credits barrier hack by rewriting all the internal assessments to make them more authentic for the class. They developed a flow chart about what they were interested and boys could choose their own path and what they did to enable the choices. Many learners were initially lost and had trouble making the decisions and Tim wondered if by having agency essentially they had chosen to opt out. So they went back to redefine agency to include choices needing to make a difference to yourself and others. There was the ongoing tension of freedom to choose meaning they could choose to engage or not, and having a balance of academic rigour and freedom. This video brought up loads of themes around ways to engage students and how to handle assessments. Some food for thought.
We have just introduced some independent learning time at our school and have been looking at ways to support students to set realistic goals and actions. Many teachers have found some simple ways to engage students in meaningful learning and I look forward to seeing how this evolves over time.
References
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2016). Engagement in Australian schools. Retrieved from http://www.acleadersresource.sa.edu.au/features/engagement-in-learning/workshop-1/Handout_4_Engagement_in_Australian_Schools.pdf
Fredericks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C. & Paris, A. H. (2004). School Engagement: Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59-109.
World Economic Forum. (2016). New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology. Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_New_Vision_for_Education.pdf
