Contemporary Global Trends in Education
New Zealand is still provides a high quality education, however our country faces critical educational issues that need to be addressed. A report by the Education Review Office (2012) has indicated that New Zealand education system needs to pay more attention to certain areas.
The boundaries of the school community are blurred in the modern connected professional context. Digital technology has changed so swiftly that teachers are increasingly connected across a variety of platforms and in a variety of settings. Teachers are now remarkably connected in a variety of settings.
Modern learners are using digital devices and platforms. Their learning is moving away from passive teacher led towards active student led and extends beyond the traditional classroom and connecting globally. This inter-connectivity will lead to changes in educational paradigms.
So, how would I address these changes in my context within my professional practice. I attempted to answer several questions.
What are contemporary issues in education which I find most relevant to my practice?
To what extent do the issues impact on my practice?
How do I address these issues?
Are there any lessons from other countries that I find particularly inspiring or relevant?
Contemporary Issue 1: Inquiry Model for Student Centered Learning
In the last twenty years there has been a massive shift globally in teaching methods where the focus of learning has moved from the teacher to the student. Inquiry based learning evokes a process of exploration and leads to asking of questions and making discoveries in search of new understandings which allows the key competencies of the NZ Curriculum to be seamlessly incorporated into this approach.
Timperley, Kaser & Halbert (2014), state that:
“engaging in inquiry is a process of developing collective professional agency either within a school or across a cluster of schools. Inquiry is difficult for individual teachers to do in isolation from their colleagues or from leaders. Nor can leaders decide what the focus of their inquiry should be. It is the collaborative inquiry process that matters” (p. 5)The authors propose focusing on the following a “spiral” instead of referring to the inquiry process as a cycle:
This would involve working across disciplines and transferring knowledge between different schools lends itself more to the idea of a community that is in contrast with the independent approach to education in New Zealand. The idea of strengthening connections for learning is a viable option when faced with the ever changing role and challenges our modern classrooms have to find ways to deal with.
Allowing students the flexibility to choose an area of study particular to their interests is thought to immediately engage them and allow them to take ownership of their learning. Timperley, Kaser & Halbert (2014) further state that:
“the spiral of inquiry leads to innovation, as educators create new approaches that are fundamentally different from the way in which things were done before” (p. 21).
However, this approach takes time to implement. British Columbia in Canada has taken twelve years to design, implement and develop its inquiry approach and now has a large network of connected schools, students and educators that have made achievements in this area. Timplerley, Kaser & Halbert, 2014, p. 23 state:
“The overall focus of the networks is to increase quality and equity through collaborative inquiry, teamwork, research knowledge mobilization, and the development and sharing of innovative practices”
I am personally cautious about student inquiry as in my experience it is an ineffective pedagogy and have seen too many shallow student inquiry outcomes that have captured so much curriculum time.
Learners have problems with the processes associated with inquiry. Inquiry models used in my practice start with obtaining students prior knowledge, then directing through co-construction what they want to know and then developing strategies collectively to find these answers. This requires directing the learning to deep conceptual knowledge rather than factual procedural knowledge. Direct instruction is required for factual and procedural knowledge. The relevant cognitive processes are scaffolded and directed towards with a clear goal in mind.
My practice is designed to scaffold deliberate acts of teaching to develop deep student learning prior to the inquiry.
John Hattie (1995) shares this view.
"Too often, students are asked to relate and extend with minimal ideas on which to base this task -leading to impoverished deeper learning. So many schools are naming themselves 'inquiry schools', as if this relating and extending can be accomplished without a firm basis of understanding of the ideas. As has been noted, transfer across subjects is notoriously difficult and merely learning to 'inquire' without embedding that inquiry in a rich basis of ideas is not a defensible strategy. The claim here, instead, is that teachers must know at what phase of learning the student is best invested in learning more surface ideas, and moving from the surface to a deeper relating and extending of these ideas" (p. 95)
Unless students have become experts in a topic before they inquire, student inquiry will result in shallow/surface outcomes. By exposing students to something engaging and then letting them formulate a question to launch an inquiry creates shallow learning outcomes not higher order thinking ones.
The research on minimally guided instruction has repeatedly shown that students experience cognitive overload in trying to learn how to research and learn new content at the same time - they spend too much time on communicating what they have found and too little on making connections between what they have found - and they go off on tangents that mean they miss the important ideas in the domain - when it comes to students ability to search online we have the research from Otago.
Part of the problem is undoubtedly the way educators conflate student inquiry with teacher inquiry in the NZ Curriculum document - being appraiser of the effect we have on student outcomes is quite different from letting students loose to discover the important curriculum understandings by themselves using Google.
Contemporary Issue 2: Big Data and Learning Analytics
Learning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their environments, for purposes of understanding and improving learning and the environments in which it occurs. Core education (2015) defines it as:
“The collection, analysis and reporting of large data sets relating to learners and their contexts"
“Big data” is becoming an important resource in many areas of life with the increasing penetration of technology. My classes use applications like kahoot and socrative to create data on learning happening in the classroom.
In terms of my practice, the impact from learning analytics is my ability to offer learning that is increasingly differentiated and engaging for my students. To track their progress, get early insight into areas they need improving as soon as possible, and to make informed decisions about strategies that are most likely to make a difference for that student.
The other crucial impact of learning analytics is the opportunity it gives me to strengthen the partnerships between school, the student and the whanau through transparency of the learning. It provides a great way to align the support offered to students at school and at home which is completely transparent.
An issue with learning analytics is if educators are completing tasks in a range of different online applications, how do they bring all of that disparate data about a learner and place it in one space to get a fuller picture of the learner?
Data needs to be useful and used. It must be relevant, reliable and meaningful, but it’s pointless to gather data if we’re going to use it. The choice of data to be used is critical when making decisions about what needs to be learnt next and how students might best learn it.
There are also ethical implications for my practice around data sovereignty and privacy, the real power of learning analytics is unlocked when you’re able share data across schools. The use of the data must deal fairly with students and consider student rights to privacy.
As an educator, I can use learning analytics to get the best learning for them, and maximize the engagement and motivation they have for learning, creating a really powerful model for personalizing learning for every student.
To summarize, my practice has been impacted in many ways which I have had to address:
- Interpretation: I need to allow time to analyse the data, rather than just moving onto the next lesson. Data only becomes useful when I use it.
- Timely use for planning: The data has limited use for summative assessment, and there is little point in waiting to the end of a unit to check if learning has taken place. But formatively, as we move through a unit, it enables me and the students to see where we have reached, where we are getting stuck and what we need to do next.
- Relevance: Online assessment applications produce far more information than I need. I need to select the information that has real application to improving student learning.
- Sharing: Data is not directly available to teachers or parents. Sharing it would have benefits, but to be meaningful, those involved would need to be educated.
- Misleading information: Analytics is only one form of evidence of behavioral engagement and viewed in isolation it can be misleading. I therefore use data from tests in conjunction with data such as my observations and interactions with students as they work.
References
CORE Education. (2015). Retrieved September 24, 2015, from CORE Education: http://www.core-ed.org/thought-leadership/ten-trends/ten-trends-2014/learning-analytics
De Jong, T. (2006). Technological Advances in Inquiry Learning. Science.
Digital technologies for teaching and learning. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.education.govt.nz/ministry-of-education/specific-initiatives/digital-technologies-for-teaching-and-learning/
Education Review Office (2012).The three most pressing issues for New Zealand’s education system, revealed in latest ERO report - Education Review Office. Retrieved 5 May 2015, from http://www.ero.govt.nz/About-Us/News-Media-Release...
Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge.
OECD (2015). Education at glance 2014. Retrieved 5 May 2015, from http://www.oecd.org/newzealand/New%20Zealand-EAG2014-Country-Note.pdf
Pratt, K. (2009). Children's internet searching: Where do they go wrong? Computers in New Zealand Schools, 21(1). Retrieved from http://education2x.otago.ac.
Timperley, H., Kaser, L., & Halbert, J. (2014). A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry. Centre for Strategic Education.
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