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:
This post is based on a seminar presented to the Globalisation and Education and Sociology Policy (GEPS) group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
“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:
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)
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:
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.
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
Competence
Relatedness
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!
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.
The rationale for studying what teachers in social network sites are doing is compelling:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our research (based on earlier international work) provides evidence we can achieve this goal by:
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.
Read more:
Why teachers are turning to Twitter
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.
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.
On Friday 9th June 2017 I had the opportunity to present some of the ideas that have come out from TeachConnect. The presentation was called Online support for STEM teachers and in the audience we had representatives from government and the councils of deans of science and education.
The main thread of my argument is:
Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Les Dawes, Kathy Nickels, Melissa Nugent and Belinda Eslick for early assistance with this presentation.
This post continues my attempts to understand how educational economics are shaping our understanding of education. This is a philosophical project in the sense that it’s about concepts – understanding the ones that we use and creating new ones where they are needed.
Previously I’ve written about the difference conceptions of education that arise when beginning from ideologies of either equality or liberty.
I’ve recently been reading What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel (a philosophy professor from Harvard – here’s a good review of it and below is clip showing the main arguments).
My takeaway for understanding the role of markets in education is that there are two main arguments against creating a market in any domain:
These two standpoints help to give us some structure for critiquing economic rationale in education. In the first case creating a market creates unfairness; in the second case creating a market in some way changes the values of society in a way that may (morally) be considered detrimental. This second case is often forgotten due to the challenges that it presents.
A market is fundamentally a way of being able to exchange something. Creating a market is making it possible to exchange something (usually with money) that wasn’t previously able to be exchanged.
In the current climate of neoliberalism, politicians often look for ways to bring “market logic” into education. The rationale for this are complex and I won’t get into the textbook economic theory more than I have to. Mostly it is about:
Where does all of this get us to? The aim is to provide some clear thinking to get us out of the bind that we in education seem to frequently find ourselves in – having to deal with increasing attempts to create markets and set prices within education.
Some examples from around the world:
In every case the advocates of the market solution point us to the ways that efficiency will increase and the way that all parties involved will win from increased funding and choice.
The point of this post is to encourage everyone to consider more deeply the two initial criteria:
The former question is frequently addressed in media reports (e.g. this was discussed widely regards the recent HECS/HELP repayment thresholds in Australia). My concern is that the second question is rarely considered, let alone actually treated by politicians as holding weight.
Yet an education system always embodies the moral values of a society. When will we start actually having a conversation around these moral values rather than utilitarian outcomes?
Ever since Friedman’s work on the educational economics of school choice (Friedman, 1962) the debate has gone round in circles about the merits of a comprehensive public system compared to what is known as a voucher system. It is likely that in some country, somewhere in the world, right now a government is attempting to implement “more competition in the schooling sector” through a voucher system. Is this a good thing?
My fundamental argument in this post is that schooling policy can either work to create a low-friction market or to reduce inequality but not both. I’ll return to this post over time to make improvements as I get a handle on the arguments. My conclusion thus far is that I am strongly opposed to voucher systems based on their tendency to increase inequality.
Some arguments in brief. Schools change slowly. There is a great deal of friction in an educational marketplace (i.e. it is hard to change schools). Critically, human geography (and the social inequality that determines it) makes the idea of choosing schools challenging. There is a strong motivation in a deregulated, competitive market for schools to spend increased amounts of money on advertising (when compared to teaching), to the detriment of all. There are many benefits of schools working in collaboration rather than competition that are lost.
I’m sure there are many more, strong arguments. For now, this is a summary from Dolton (2003) in The Economic Journal:
Opponents of the school choice movement (see Smith and Meier (1995) for example) suggest that it will lead to the destruction of public schools and the increased segregation of schools by race, class and ability and induce greater in- equality. Opponents to the market model suggest that empirical evidence relating to the successes of existing choice-based systems are questionable and that the theories and assumptions that provide intellectual support for choice are abstract and have never been systematically tested. ‘The new market “model” is often not spelt out in detail nor are the assumptions concerning individual and institutional behaviour that would be required to provide the anticipated efficiency gains’, Witte (2000, p. 11). One prominent critique of the public choice also suggests that it ‘will erode the public forums in which decisions with societal consequences can democratically be resolved’,
The central questions in the school choice debate remain: what exactly is meant by school choice; who chooses to select private schools and how do they choose; what do families really know about schools; what are the reasons and rationale for choices; in reality how much choice is there for most families; what happens to the children left behind in the public schools in districts which introduce voucher schemes; how much diversity is there after a voucher scheme is introduced; are parents more satisfied by the market alternative; are parents making rational choices and are market forces leading to improvements in standards?
Empirical evidence which answers these questions can be very negative (see Gorard (1997) for example) suggesting that: schools are basically very similar, families consider very few schools in reality, selection by mortgage/house prices operates powerfully, formal sources of information like league tables are of little consequence and choices are often made long in advance by default. Alternative evidence suggests that the consequences of introducing school choice can lead to positive educational improvements in all schools.
The Dolton article provides an excellent review of the key questions around the issue of implementing voucher schemes. A critical one being the idea that voucher systems presuppose all schools being private. When there is a parallel private and public system then it becomes an issue of “exit and voice” (see Hirschman (1970)):
This problem is that there will not be an effective mechanism for change if the most influential parents choose to ‘exit’ from the state schools to the private schools rather than ‘voice’ their views in an attempt to change the state schools.
The argument that Dolton is making here is that for a competitive market to actually work, there needs to be an accountability – where the needs of consumers (parents) are taken into account by the market (schools). This does not happen in practice.
The key gap in the literature is that models of school choice theory “do not explicitly address the issue of how parents exiting from the public school sector to the private sector will affect outcomes in public schools” (F179)
Paywall link: http://www.jstor.org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/stable/3590143
References
Dolton, P. (2003), A review of ‘The Economics of School Choice’, The Economic Journal, Vol. 113, No. 485, Features (Feb., 2003), pp. F167-F179
Friedman, M. (1962), The Role of Government in Education. In Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the community on the economics StackExchange site for help with researching this post, especially the user luchonacho. You can read the full thread here: http://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/16128/is-there-any-work-on-equality-in-a-market-versus-friction/16158#16158
Update and edit:
This theme was recently addressed by Amanda Keddie in an excellent post on the EduResearch Matters blog on Why Australia should not follow Nick Gibb’s advice on how to run our schools.
My comment on her post is reproduced here as it is germane to this discussion:
Thanks Amanda for a well-written post arguing for nuance in this debate around educational reform.
I am writing this comment to take up the thread and argue for a high level of debate around this issue. To my mind there are three levels at which debate tends to occur when it comes to ideas of school privatisation:
1. Ideology: People who talk passionately about educational systems tend to hold one of two ideals. If liberty is your ideal then anything to do with “competition”, “autonomy”, and “choice” is a good thing. If equality is your ideal then anything to do with “social justice”, “opportunity”, and “social mobility” is a good thing. At this level, the debate can go nowhere and cannot attempt to find common ground. (For the record: I favour equality but I recognise that this is simply not as important as liberty for many people in society).
An example of commentary at the level of ideology: “I believe that choice is also a major piece in the puzzle of providing the best education to young Australians” – Senator the Hon. Simon Birmingham
2. Empirical: Sometimes the debate rises to the point that people start throwing around the conclusions of one or other study from the literature. At its worst there is cherrypicking of whichever study best supports ideology. Often there is simply a lack of recognition that education is highly contextual. Something that works in one country with its own culture and educational history may have entirely different outcomes in another country. At its best there is nuanced weighing up of empirical evidence from both sides and attempts to find trends and contradictions.
3. Theoretical: We need debate that attempts to understand why studies produce the outcomes that they do. Debate that leaves ideology at the door and perhaps even moves beyond prior examples to imagining what could be possible. This would involve firstly having a discussion around the objectives for what we want the outcomes for a school system to be. For example: Do we want better international PISA scores (often assumed to be a goal) or do we care more about a reduced disparity between advantaged and disadvantaged (one of many other possible aims)? Is it possible to achieve both without significantly more funding? What do we choose if it must be one or the other?
From a considered understanding of desired outcomes, we can then learn from many the nuanced examples in the literature. The literature around these issues is far more broad than many recognise, spanning many decades and multiple paradigms: applied economics, education, sociology, history, etc. We need to learn from all of it if we want to get arrive at good policy that fits with our own context in Australia.
For example, this is a quote from Dolton (2003, The Economic Journal 113(485)) trying to find the nuance in the debate around “school choice”:
“The central questions in the school choice debate remain: what exactly is meant by school choice; who chooses to select private schools and how do they choose; what do families really know about schools; what are the reasons and rationale for choices; in reality how much choice is there for most families; what happens to the children left behind in the public schools in districts which introduce voucher schemes; how much diversity is there after a voucher scheme is introduced; are parents more satisfied by the market alternative; are parents making rational choices and are market forces leading to improvements in standards?”
I’ve realised that I’m yet to put up here on this site a plug for my own book (co-authored with Marc Clarà, Ben Kehrwald and Patrick A. Danaher).
It’s got the catchy title of Online Learning Networks of Preservice and Early Career Teachers. What does that actually mean?
The book brings together a few years of research into understanding what actually works for teachers within online communities.
You can find the book here: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137503015
The book is structured in a way that aims to make a contribution to theory. Each of the chapters addresses the questions of:
Chapter 7 brings the whole book together and there is a figure that I would like to briefly draw attention to – a framework for evaluating online communities:
The y-axis in this diagram is drawn from the framework outlined by Carvalho & Goodyear (2014) in The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks.
This is an ontology for talking about the different design elements in an online network (e.g., a community of teachers). In brief: set design is design for look and feel (the stage on which action occurs; social design is design for the relationships between participants (how you set things up for actors to relate to one another); and epistemic design is design for the relationships with knowledge objects (how actors are able to relate to things).
On the x-axis are theoretical constructs that we believe are critical to the success of any online network of teachers:
Each square in this matrix is interrogated within Chapter 7. For example: How can set, social and epistemic design all come together to facilitate presence in the community? How can the design of the learning network facilitate teachers supporting one another to develop situational knowledge about the profession.
The book can be found here.
(Update: We’ve just found out that the book won a USQ Publication Excellence Award for 2016 in the authored books category.)
References
Carvalho, Lucila, and Peter Goodyear. The architecture of productive learning networks. Routledge, 2014.
Kelly, Nick, et al. Online Learning Networks for Pre-Service and Early Career Teachers. Springer, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50302-2