Author: nick.kelly

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Research

My teaching philosophy

I was recently asked to write my teaching philosophy in under 500 words. This is what I came up with and I wanted to share it as a part of the general conversation here around education and design:

My teaching philosophy is grounded in three understandings, that: (1) learning is sociocultural and relational in nature; (2) active, experiential, and authentic learning produces intrinsic motivation; and (3) a skilled educator can only produce the conditions for learning, not the learning itself.

  1. Humans develop their cognitive abilities within a social and cultural context and through interactions with other beings (Vygotsky, 1978). While we can learn directly from experience (constructing cognitive connections in the Paigetian sense), it is through our relationships with other beings within a cultural context that we learn how to learn and what we care about learning. Knowledge is thus constructed by learners who are socioculturally individuated. By the time I teach a student they are already complex, empathic beings who will construct new knowledge from within this socioculturally constructed understanding of the world—and when they learn from me or their peers it will be filtered throughthe qualities of the relationships between us/them.
  2. Humans feel intrinsically motivated to learn when their basic psychological needs are met (Deci & Ryan (2000). This involves feeling competent for learning (we are motivated if we have the necessary abilities or prerequisite knowledge), relationality (we are motivated if we feel that learning will connect us to other humans); and autonomy (we are motivated when we feel we can learn in a way that is in harmony with our beliefs about the world). This leads me to use active, collaborative, authentic learning tasks in my teaching that respect students’ existing knowledge, that give them opportunities to collaborate, and that are experiential. Intrinsic motivation improves student engagement, enjoyment, and learning outcomes.
  3. As an educator, I conceive of myself as being able to influence learning in two ways (Goodyear & Dimitriadis, 2013): (a) through my design for learning; and (b) through my behaviour at learntime when interacting with learners in a learning environment. In my design for learning I am able to design the setting for learning (set design), the social relationships that are fostered (social design), the knowledge objects used and epistemic approaches supported (epistemic design), and for student autonomy (design for co-configuration).

Further, I side with Paulo Freire in his suggestion that pedagogy is never neutral: it is either politically conscious (i.e., aware of power relations within society) or else it implicitly supports the status quo (Freire, 1970/2013).

In summary:

The students that I teach come to my units as complex humans with their own knowledge, culture, ways of socialising, and ways of learning. I want to create the conditions that support each student in their learning. Active, authentic, experiential, and collaborative learning will support student engagement, motivate them, respect their knowledge, and help them to achieve learning outcomes. Doing that requires diligent design for learning, and care in the way that I relate to students in my class. This form of pedagogy supports my belief in a just and democratic society, as does the content that I choose to engage with in teaching the necessary skills, mindsets, and methods.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The” what” and” why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological inquiry, 11(4), 227-268.

Freire, P. (2013). Pedagogy of the oppressed (pp. 131-139). Routledge.

Goodyear, P., & Dimitriadis, Y. (2013). In medias res: reframing design for learning. Research in learning technology, 21.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Categories
Creativity Design Research

An artwork that changes the meaning of text

Artwork by Everything You Ever Said in the Roxy Gallery at the Kyogle Writers' Festival

I have recently published an artwork that changes the meaning of any text that you put into it. Please read the associated conversation article for further information.

The artwork was featured in the Kyogle Writers’ Festival, in the Roxy Gallery.

Categories
Research

How do you design and facilitate an online community of teachers?

Teaching is a relational profession. Online networks and online communities make good sense: helping teachers to help one another. Yet history shows that good intentions in creating such communities often lead to poor outcomes.

There are just so many variables involved:

  • Having a focus for the community
  • Involving existing communities
  • Taking the right approach to facilitation
  • Understanding the need for long-term thinking and for sustainable approaches
  • Choosing the right technology for the community
  • Fitting in with teachers’ expectations

And that’s just naming a few of them!

In an academic paper, me and some colleagues use TeachConnect as an example to talk about some design principles that are useful for anyone trying to develop their own online community of teachers. It speaks to the big questions that anybody trying to get a new community off the group is likely to face.

The original article is posted on the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology website. You can also just download the whole PDF of the paper from my website, as the AJET journal is fantastic in that they use a creative commons license.

A summary of design principles (from the literature) is:

  • Start small with a core group (e.g., 10 – 100 users) and make it a strong community that embodies the values that are desired for the network. This serves two purposes. Firstly, it is a useful barometer, as if the community relies on being big to function then it is unlikely that it will ever grow to the desired size. Secondly, as the community grows in membership, the values held by this core group are the values that are likely to be perpetuated, so it pays to give close attention to details within a smaller group (Shirky, 2010).
  • Understand what motivates the members and make sure that the learning network provides for this motivation (Kraut et al., 2012). Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation ought to be considered as ways to encourage users to engage with the community. Intrinsic motivation can be addressed by ensuring that users have autonomy (freedom to act in a way that they find harmonious), connectedness (a human connection), and competence (no need to learn new skills to participate) (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
  • Any platform has a set of default options in set design, social design, and epistemic design, for example, default alerts, privacy settings, and display options. These defaults ought to be used wisely to promote social connectivity and the types of knowledge that it is desired to be shared (rather than defaulting all settings to being closed) (Kraut et al., 2012; Shirky, 2010).
  • Recognise that there will be many types of engagement within the platform and cater to these different types of engagement—there will be lurkers (Woo, 2015) as well as active participants and champions (Shirky, 2010).
  • Have as low a threshold for active participation as is possible. Require a bare minimum of activity from users for them to have contributed something to the platform. This contributes to their engagement and presence within the platform and makes future contributions more likely (Kraut et al., 2012; Shirky, 2010).
  • Be prepared to make changes as the network grows and to be responsive to what the community is asking for (Shirky, 2010). Changes need to be made quickly in response to the needs of teachers. This is in keeping with the principles of DBR (Barab & Squire, 2004).
  • The epistemic design of the community should focus on supporting authentic context and activity. The knowledge held in the community should pertain to real problems and issues that teachers actually face in schools (Herrington & Herrington, 2004).
  • Avoid ambiguity about roles within the community. Aim for clarity about who within a group holds the domain expertise and whose words should be attended to (Lin et al., 2008).
  • A barrier to co-creation of knowledge can be present through overly diversified foci, with members having different interests or disagreeing on the characterisation of a problem (Lin et al., 2008).
  • Members can fear criticism from other members of the community, preventing them from sharing knowledge (Lin et al., 2008). Anonymity can mitigate this. Hur and Brush (2009) similarly found that anonymity and lack of physical accountability is one of the reasons why teachers were looking online for support, noting: “the analysis of interviews and observational notes suggested that online environments provided places where teachers could safely share issues that they could not share with local school teachers” (p. 293).

And then, building on those, and using TeachConnect as an example we arrive at three crucial design principles that cannot be ignored:

  1. It is critical to understand the social norms within the teaching profession (and allow this to influence UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) design).
  2. Teaching is a highly context dependent profession and the social design needs to reflect this.
  3. The platform needs to have an inherent simplicity; speed and reliability should mirror user experiences with best-of-breed platforms.

There’s much that can be said about each of these, but I recommend reading the whole article to find out! It uses Goodyear and Carvalho’s ACAD framework for talking piece by piece about the considerations for social design, set design, epistemic design, and design for co-configuration. I really recommend this approach as a way of making sense of something that is really quite complex.

Key References

Goodyear, P. & Carvalho, L. (2013) The analysis of complex learning environments. In H. Beetham, & R. Sharpe (Eds.), Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: Designing and delivering e-learning. Abingdon: Routledge.

Kelly, N., & Antonio, A. (2016). Teacher peer support in social network sites. Teaching and Teacher Education, 56, 138-149. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.02.007

Kelly, N., Russell, N., Kickbusch, S., Barros, A., Dawes, L., & Rasmussen, R. (2018). Online communities of teachers to support situational knowledge: A design-based study. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 34(5). https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.3867

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Categories
Research

Why do teachers leave the profession? Factors affecting early career career teacher attrition and retention in Australia.

I recently published a paper, along with co-authors Marcela Cespedes, Marc Clarà and Patrick Danaher, that does some important research to help address this overarching question of why Australian early career teachers leave the profession. It focuses on the complex relationships among preservice education, early career support, and job satisfaction, and how these impact upon intention to leave the profession. You can cheat and jump to the whole paper here [open access] which should be relevant for anyone interested in early career teacher attrition and retention.

The paper is asking four key questions:

  • How (if at all) does the kind of preservice education a teacher receives relate to early career teachers’ intentions to leave the profession?
  • How (if at all) does the early career support received relate to early career teachers’ intentions to leave the profession?
  • How (if at all) does job satisfaction relate to early career teachers’ intention to leave the profession?
  • The sub-questions of: are any kinds of preservice education or early career support associated with increased job satisfaction for early career teachers?

The abstract of the paper sums it up, and then I’ll unpack some of the key findings from the paper:

This paper investigates the complex factors that lead to early career teachers (ECTs) deciding to leave the profession. It extends prior studies to show the associations that different elements of preservice education (PSE), early career support, and on-the-job satisfaction have with the intention to leave the profession. The study uses data from 2,144 Australian ECTs to explore these relationships. Results highlight the importance of teachers’ collegial relationships with their peers, and replicate prior findings showing the significance of mentoring and induction programs. Results show that elements of job satisfaction are strongly associated with intention to leave the profession, leading to a number of implications for achieving the twin goals of higher teacher retention and job satisfaction.

Key definitions and notes on data sources and analysis

I should add that we define early career teachers as those in their first five years. The data come from the Staff in Australia’s Schools Dataset and I am grateful for the Australian Data Archive for making this dataset available to me (see the paper for the exact data item).

In all that follows note that we had an excellent sample size thanks to the SiAS (2,144 early career teachers), but note also that our data come from 2010. All of the findings below follow use of regression to account for the possible influence of demographics, such as rural/provincial/metro, primary/secondary divide, and catholic/independent/state school systems.

What we found

There were a real mix of findings in response to these questions. I’ll just highlight the key ones here:

  • How (if at all) does the kind of preservice education a teacher receives relate to early career teachers’ intentions to leave the profession?

We found that there were two factors in preservice education that were significant in that they were associated with teachers who did not want to leave the profession: feeling prepared for working with other teachers, and feeling prepared for teaching diverse learners.

It follow that perhaps (although I note that the research is only preliminary evidence to support this idea) one way to improve teacher retention is to focus on these two areas in teacher education: working well with other teachers, and teaching diverse learners. It is interesting on this note that Diane Mayer and her team in the Studying Effective Teaching project found that collaboration and collegiality were not well taught in teacher education programs.

  • How (if at all) does the early career support received relate to early career teachers’ intentions to leave the profession?

In keeping with the literature we found that having a helpful mentor (not just any old mentor!) and enabling structured discussions significantly predicted ECTs’ retention. We were also able to look at the statistical relationship between having these kinds of support and the likelihood that a teacher intended to leave the profession. As it says in the paper:

…for those with helpful (rather than unhelpful) designated mentors, the odds of staying in the profession were between 35% and 122% higher. There was a smaller effect, of between 11% to 96% increase in the odds of ECT responding “no” to intention to leave, when designated mentors were helpful when compared with not received mentoring

Once again, this suggests that schools and school systems should focus upon providing these areas of support. This is not a new findings, but it provides strong empirical evidence to support something that was already demonstrated by people like DeAngelis and Ingersoll, and shows that it holds true in the Australian context.

  • How (if at all) does job satisfaction relate to early career teachers’ intention to leave the profession?

It is fairly a obvious proposition that teachers who are satisfied with their jobs are less likely to want to leave the profession, and that’s exactly what we found. What makes this interesting is that we looked at which areas of job satisfaction mattered the most, as well as looking at how they impacted the odds that a teacher wanted to leave the profession.

Firstly, we found that those who were overall satisfied with their job were between 4 and 9 times as likely to not be intending to leave the profession (i.e., we infer that they were more likely to stay).

Secondly, we found that the areas of job satisfaction that mattered most (see the paper for the full list of areas of job satisfaction considered) were:

  • the amount of teaching required
  • the amount of clerical/administrative work required
  • what teachers were accomplishing with students
  • the value that society places on teachers’ work
  • the relationships with parents/guardians

This is interesting, because it supports existing research into which areas of the job matter most for retention, and contributes to the solid empirical foundation. It supports the idea that trying to improve teacher retention cannot be achieved by extrinsic rewards like salary alone.

Rather, it speaks to the notion that teachers need support for intrinsic motivation. I hope in future work to analyse these findings through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000) as I believe that this finding is all about teachers needing to have their basic psychological needs supported, namely:

  • Support for teacher competence (having enough time and training to achieve everything that needs to be done)
  • Support for teacher relationality (structures that support relationships between teachers and with parents as a key part of the job)
  • Support for autonomy (having enough time and freedom to do the job in a way that is true to teachers’ beliefs)

References

DeAngelis, K. J., Wall, A. F., & Che, J. (2013). The impact of preservice preparation and early career support on novice teachers’ career intentions and decisions. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(4), 338-355. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487113488945

Ingersoll, R. M., & Strong, M. (2011). The impact of induction and mentoring programs for beginning teachers: A critical review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 201-233. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654311403323

Kelly, N., Cespedes, M., Clarà, M., & Danaher, P. A. (2019). Early career teachers’ intentions to leave the profession: The complex relationships among preservice education, early career support, and job satisfaction. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 44(3). 
http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2018v44n3.6

Kelly, N., Sim, C., & Ireland, M. (2018). Slipping through the cracks: teachers who miss out on early career support. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2018.1441366

Mayer, D., Dixon, M., Kline, J., Kostogriz, A., Moss, J., Rowan, L., . . . White, S. (2017). Studying the effectiveness of teacher education. In D. Mayer, M. Dixon, J. Kline, A. Kostogriz, J. Moss, L. Rowan, B. Walker-Gibbs, & S. White (Eds.), Studying the effectiveness of teacher education: Early career teachers in diverse settings (pp. 13- 26). Singapore: Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3929-4

Categories
Education Presentation

UAB Guest Lecture: Teacher education and globalisation

Slides from my guest lecture with the Masters of Education Policy students at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in 2018.

A lecture about what teacher education is, what teacher education policy looks like, and some lenses for analysing teacher education policy. With a focus upon globalisation and new public management. Five case studies of teacher education policy make up the heart of the talk.

Slides can be found here:

Teacher Education and Globalisation from nickkelly
Categories
Education Research

We need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously: Examples of research supporting teachers’ self determination

This post is based on a seminar presented to the Globalisation and Education and Sociology Policy (GEPS) group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously.

“In my talk today I am arguing that we need to take teachers’ basic psychological needs seriously. The talk has three parts. First, I will talk about why it is so important that we create an environment in which teachers can flourish. Then, I will talk about what I mean by basic psychological needs. Finally, I will give some examples from my work that highlight what this kind of work might look like…”

This post is placeholder for the article that looks likely to be published elsewhere resulting from this seminar.

The slides for the presentation can be found on slideshare:

Educational policy and teachers basic psychological needs: Creating the space for teachers to collaborate from nickkelly
Categories
Design Education Research

How to design online courses for student engagement

I had the great pleasure of working with Neil Martin over a number of years, during his project investigating the way that the principles of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) can be applied for designing engaging online courses.

I’m forever grateful to Neil for getting me to read deeply about positive psychology–the branch of psychology trying to understand the conditions under which humans flourish.

In particular, I find the work of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci to be extremely elegant, putting this research into human flourishing (or, as it’s referred to, eudaimonia) on solid scientific ground. I thoroughly recommend this paper for anyone wanting a scholarly introduction to the idea of why not all kinds of motivation are equal, regardless of behavioural outcomes.

This post aims to give a brief overview of a paper that Neil led–and very kindly invited me to be a part of–describing the work from his PhD thesis  in developing a MOOC in which every part of the design was informed by thinking about intrinsic motivation from the perspective of SDT.

I feel like the resulting paper (Martin, Kelly, & Terry, 2018) really has a lot in it, and may well be of help to anyone who is doing work designing an online course and wants students to be more engaged.

(It is also worth mentioning that I quite  enjoyed the fact that all three authors have last names that are also first names. It makes me feel like I have at least one thing in common with Elton John,  George Michael and Buddy Holly)

Principles for designing engaging online courses

Some principles for designing engaging online courses can be distilled.

The essential principle of self-determination theory, when applied to motivating people to doing a task, is that human intrinsic motivation has three elements:

  1. Competence. People tend to feel intrinsically motivated for a task if they feel like they have the ability needed to successfully complete the task. In other words, people like the feeling of being good at something.
  2. Relatedness. People tend to feel more intrinsically motivated for a task if they feel that completing the task will, in some way (either direct or indirect), help to connect them with other human beings. In short, people like feeling as though they are developing a relationship with other people.
  3. Autonomy. Autonomy is about giving people the freedom to complete a task in a way that is in harmony with their beliefs about the world, to do things in a way that makes sense to them and fits in with their life.

This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of what is a deep theory with decades of research  behind it (see http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/ for a nicely curated website about SDT).

Neil’s work (his PhD is available here and well worth a read for anyone wanting to go much deeper) demonstrated that these principles–of achieving intrinsic motivation of students through support for relatedness, autonomy, and competence–can be applied directly to learning design for online courses.

He found fairly convincing evidence in his work that the students were more engaged with the course, and more likely to complete the course, once it had been redesigned based upon these principles–and as anyone who has tried to make a MOOC knows, getting students to begin the course is one thing, but getting them to complete it is much more challenging!

The figure below is from Martin et al. (2018) and is a summary of what I would call a model for designing engaging online courses. The premise is that if students have their basic psychological needs met, then they will be more engaged with the learning.

designing for engaging online learning

The paper (freely available thanks to the excellent online journal AJET) goes into detail about what all of these things mean and describes this model in detail. It makes a bridge between these three basic psychological needs and what this means in practice when designing for online learning. Some examples:

Autonomy

  • Not having deadlines and reducing pressure
  • Letting participants set their own pace
  • Giving participants meaningful choices wherever possible

Competence

  • Making sure that challenges are optimal (i.e., are within the zone of proximal development)
  • Giving clear rationale for any task
  • Providing constructive feedback on tasks

Relatedness

  • Making sure that the text and interface design of the online course is warm and friendly
  • Making sure that participants have an opportunity to connect with each other
  • This can be done by learning designers by making use of personas (refer to Martin 2017 for more details on this)

I’m writing this post now because I’m finding this to be a big help in some course redesign work that I am doing with La Trobe university, in their MTEACH course.

Hopefully the result will be lots of engaged students!

References

Martin, Neil; Kelly, Nick; Terry, Peter.  (2018).  A framework for self-determination in massive open online courses: Design for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, v. 34, n. 2. Available at: https://ajet.org.au/index.php/AJET/article/view/3722
Date accessed: 02 nov. 2018.

 

 

Categories
Education Research

Studying teachers in social network sites: Thinking about methodology

teachers in social network sites
teachers in social network sites

There is an entire genre of journal articles about how teachers in social network sites are behaving, what they’re doing, and what benefits they’re getting. This refers to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Ning and EdModo.

Recent review papers by Macia & Garcia (2017) and Lantz-Andersson et al. (2018) gives some indication of quite how many articles are out there about teachers using these sites. I’m doing work at the moment with Bernadette Mercieca and Paul Mercieca to conduct a wide, integrative review, that looks at the methodology of studies of teachers in SNSs.

Teachers in social network sites

The rationale for studying what teachers in social network sites are doing is compelling:

  • We know for sure that lots of teachers are using them
  • They are getting all kinds of benefits, such as social/emotional support, exchange of resources, a place to get new ideas, and even occasionally a place to have serious conversations reflecting on practice (Kelly & Antonio, 2016)
  • We want to know how to use social network sites better: How should they be used by individuals? How should policy around them be framed? How should they be a part of teacher education and school operations?

These are all great questions, but I feel like there is a growing need for more maturity in the methodology of studies of teachers in social network sites. Consider the “classic case” of many studies (some of my own included!) of teachers in social network sites:

  1. A sample is being studied that is chosen for convenience: an existing group in a social network site, a cohort of preservice teachers, a group of teachers within a single school, etc.
  2. Often teachers from that sample will self-select to be a part of a study
  3. Traces from the social network site are typically analysed in some way (coding and counting, social network analysis)
  4. Often a survey is conducted (again, often self-selected from participants in the social network site) for self-reported data relating to use of the social network site

In case it isn’t obvious, this is not a great recipe for any kind of generalisability from results. The volume of studies that have been conducted could potentially have led to meta-analysis for some kind of convergent validity–except that often there isn’t enough information included in many studies to know such basic information as:

  • The size of a group (for groups are the unit of study)
  • It’s focus (e.g., subject/region/theme/identity)
  • How it was convened and if it is facilitated

A way to categorise groups productively is discussed by Kelly & Antonio (2016). The key issue is that without this kind of information, there will be no movement towards convergent validity of theories.

Towards theory

We have well and truly past the point of needing studies that point to the potential of social network sites for teachers; or that collect exploratory data from a one-off study. There are many such studies and on their own they are not contributing to a collective whole.

The ideal situation would be to work towards an understanding of how different types of group serve teachers in different ways and how approaches to designing/facilitating/convening groups in social network sites can better lead to desired outcomes (see for example Clarà et al., 2015;  Kelly et al., 2015; Kelly et al., 2016; Mercieca et al, 2017).

The analogy is that of a chemical engineer trying to understand how to create a reaction of some sort–let’s say that she’s trying to create an explosion.  She could work for years randomly combining elements to see what happens, in the hope of coming across something that works.

Far more fruitful would be to develop a theoretical understanding (say, the table of the elements) that allows her to predict what will happen when elements are combined.

In short, what we need is the kind of research that allows us to make theoretical propositions (about teachers in social network sites) that are generally applicable–or where the limits of generality are at least understood. The work of Kraut & Resnick (2012) gives us a glimpse of what such work might look like. We need methodological rigor else our whole domain risks failing to reach maturity.

Thanks to Professor Peter Reimann for the chemistry analogy, it comes from a conversation with him.

References

Clarà, M., Kelly, N., Mauri, T., & Danaher, P. (2015). Can massive communities of teachers facilitate collaborative reflection? Fractal design as a possible answer. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 1-13.

Kelly, N., & Antonio, A. (2016). Teacher peer support in social network sites. Teaching and Teacher Education, 56, 138-149. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.02.007

Kelly, N., Clará, M., & Kickbusch, S. (2015). How to develop an online community for pre-service and early career teachers. Paper presented at the ASCILITE 2015, Perth, Western Australia.

Kelly, N., Clarà, M., Kehrwald, B., & Danaher, P. (2016). Online Learning Networks for Pre-service and Early Career Teachers. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan/Palgrave Pivot.

Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (2012). Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. Mit Press.

Lantz-Andersson, A., Lundin, M., & Selwyn, N. (2018). Twenty years of online teacher communities: A systematic review of formally-organized and informally-developed professional learning groups. Teaching and Teacher Education, 75, 302-315.

Macià, M., & García, I. (2016). Informal online communities and networks as a source of teacher professional development: A review. Teaching and Teacher Education, 55, 291-307.

Mercieca, B., & Kelly, N. (2017). Early career teacher peer support through private groups in social media. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 1-17.

Categories
Education Media Articles Research

How design thinking can help teachers collaborate

I wrote this article with Les Dawes, Natalie Wright, and Jeremy Kerr for The Conversation about how design thinking can help teachers collaborate.

The original article is under a Creative Commons attribution license and is located here: https://theconversation.com/how-design-thinking-can-help-teachers-collaborate-95932

I have included a reprint here:

 

The recent release of the Gonski 2.0 report has done an excellent job of re-opening the conversation around how our schools could better fulfil their purpose.

Much of the commentary has centred on the report’s recommendations for teaching and learning in schools. But the whole chapter focused on “creating, supporting and valuing a profession of expert educators” has not received enough attention.

The suggestion that teaching and learning can be significantly improved by better supporting our teachers is vital and should not be overlooked. In particular, there is growing evidence that teacher collaboration can lead to more satisfied teachers while producing better outcomes for students.

What does Gonski say?

The positive impact of active collaboration is summarised in the report on page 58:

Teacher collaboration occurs in many forms, however not all types are equally effective. Active collaboration — such as peer observation and feedback, coaching, mentoring, team teaching and joint research projects — allows teachers to learn from each other and typically has a positive impact on students. In contrast, collaboration that concentrates on simply sharing resources, planning activities or administrative issues has little or no positive effect on student achievement.

While the report flags the need for action on embedding professional collaboration in everyday teaching practice, it doesn’t provide much in the way of suggestions for how to achieve this. This criticism has been repeated by many in education.

While active collaboration between teachers has long been recognised and encouraged (for example, as a part of the AITSL teacher professional standards), the reality for many teachers is there is precious little time in which to collaborate. Even where there is time, there is a need for more structure to the way teachers collaborate so it happens in an authentic, productive way.

What is design thinking?

The ability to empathise, think creatively, collaborate productively, experiment with solutions and communicate ideas are all key parts of design. They are skills anybody can learn.



Read more:
How the mindset of designers can make us better leaders

The term design thinking has become a popular buzzword to refer to this set of skills. It’s particularly popular in education because design thinking is a great way to learn 21st century skills, such as creativity and critical thinking. If teachers develop these skills themselves, then they are in a better position to teach them.

Design thinking is not just about knowing the design process and having the tools to use it, but also about adopting a design thinking mindset. This involves seeing the world in a solution-focused way and having the creative self-confidence to try tackling problems in new ways.

Design thinking in schools

Our team has been working for the last year on a project that involves partnering with groups of teachers in different schools around Queensland to work on design problems. This kind of partnership between designers and non-designers to solve problems is known as co-design.

Teachers engage in collaborative design tasks as part of a research project in Queensland.
Author provided, Author provided (No reuse)

The first problem that we have worked on is the planning of a term of work for the new ACARA Digital Technologies curriculum. Instead of teachers working individually, we work with school leadership to create time and space for them to work as a group. We support them in framing the problem, developing student-centered ideas, and preparing classes. Teachers learn to adopt a design thinking mindset simply by taking part in this process.

For example, some teachers implicitly conceive of curriculum planning as “making sure that the curriculum gets covered”. We challenge them to work as a team to reframe the problem through a journey-mapping exercise. We find they come up with a new frame such as “keeping students as engaged as possible for an entire term”.

We also use exercises such as developing personas and brainstorming to come up with ideas that are more “out there” than they might first think possible. We then provide the technological and content knowledge to help them achieve their goals.

This form of facilitated collaboration with teachers around design tasks has had success. Preliminary results show that teachers feel supported (because they can draw on the help of a team), happy (because collaboration is one of the fundamental drivers of professional satisfaction), and empowered (because they see the results with the students).

The challenge presented by the Gonski 2.0 report is these benefits need to be scalable — teachers across the country all need to have these opportunities to collaborate meaningfully.

Sharing the knowledge

Our research (based on earlier international work) provides evidence we can achieve this goal by:

  1. Instilling a design thinking mindset in teachers. This has been proven to be a great way to create the space for meaningful collaboration, while developing the capacity of teachers for teaching creativity, critical thinking and interpersonal skills.
  2. Using co-design as professional development to meet these needs in a way that could reach every teacher across a state, through a combination of face-to-face and online workshops.
  3. Sustaining these partnerships over time by creating online spaces for teachers that enable them to share and re-use knowledge but that remain connected to real-world institutions and events. For example, we developed a community of design teachers in Queensland that was underpinned by professional development workshops and support of teacher associations.

These three pillars provide a direct way of responding to the recommendation in Gonski 2.0 for better teacher collaboration.

Our proposal is to shift funding away from the approaches that have defined the past decade — like online databases of resources that give little context, “standalone” online communities that are divorced from real-world organisations, or “driveby” professional development workshops. Funding should instead be put towards the provision of co-design teams that provide the link between professional development, online resources and online communities.



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Further, co-design is a meaningful way of sharing learning between schools. Each time we work with a school we are able to share with them resources and advice from our work with previous schools.

For example, one rural school we worked with took a term-long project that had been successful in a city, and adapted the assignment to make it fit the rural context. Most of the lessons needed only minor changes, and the result was the rural students felt the project spoke directly to their own experiences.

Gonski 2.0 presents an excellent opportunity for us to re-evaluate how we nurture, support and provision our teachers. The report states:

For teachers to fulfil their role as expert educators, schools need to be seen as professional learning organisations. They need to develop a culture that values continuous learning where teachers, as well as students, can feel safe to admit gaps in knowledge and understanding.

We believe that this culture of collaboration, growth and experimentation is best achieved when teachers adopt a design thinking mindset. Teachers come to adopt a design thinking mindset through a combination of design experience, professional development and ongoing support. Co-design presents an excellent way to achieve all three.

Categories
Economics Education Media Articles

Economic thinking in education and its degrading/corrupting effect

This piece on economic thinking in education was originally published on the EduResearchMatters blog of the AARE under the title Economic Thinking is Corrupting Education in Australia where it is freely available.

Introduction

There is a growing trend in education of proposing and enacting policy ideas that are based primarily upon economic thinking. I believe there are hidden impacts of applying economic thinking (typified by price signals, market mechanisms and market-oriented ideas) to education. In this post I want to unpack some of that thinking and look at what is happening to education because of it.

 Corruption of the concept of education

The philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that there are two main arguments against policy based on economic thinking. These arguments are made on the basis of fairness and corruption, and both are significant for education researchers and policy makers. While it is typical in policy formation for much attention to be given to the concept of fairness – with steps taken to ensure that policy is as fair as possible – the concept of corruption is rarely given consideration. In the case of education policy, this relates to questions about how policy can change (or corrupt) society’s conception of the role and purpose of education, and about how the moral value of education can be crowded out by economic values.

If you want to read more about this notion of economic thinking in education you should read Hidden Privatisation in Public Education and (released in July this year) Commercialisation in Australian Public Schooling. This latter study provides data confirming that teachers in Australia are indeed concerned about the influence of commercialism in schools, characterised by “top-down, test-based accountability, the introduction of market competition between schools, the use of private sector managerial practices, and an increasingly standardised curriculum that focuses on literacy and numeracy” .

In this climate of economic thinking there is a great need to attend to the moral value of education – its role and its purpose in society.

Read the rest of the article on the AARE EduResearch Matters blog.

A commenter on this article recommended a related link to this eloquent talk by Professor Alan Reid about the value of public education:

The article follows on from previous discussions on educational economics by talking bout economic thinking in education.