The Year of Self-Regulation 2016: What – and Who – Requires the “Treatment”?

A model Grade 6 classroom in Sherwood Park, Alberta, now comes fully equipped with every imaginable solution to coping with fidgety kids, including spin bikes, exercise balls, rotating stools and stand-up desks. The latest classroom pacifiers, ‘Wiggle stools,’ are being hailed as a godsend by a harried Grade 2 classroom teacher in a Sackville, NB.

Schools across Canada went to great lengths to re-engage fidgety students in what will likely always be known as the Year of Self-Regulation. Coping with today’s restless generation of kids now requires every conceivable pacifier, including spin bikes, exercise balls, wiggle stools and stand-up desks.

That is why in any Canadian survey of the top five K-12 education issues in 2016, coping with today’s antsy students would top the list.

Mindfulness and Self-Regulation

High anxiety educators have also embraced the latest panacea known as ‘mindfulness’ and are going whole hog into ‘self-regulation’ of their students.  It’s the brainchild of American advocate Jon Kabat-Zinn who transformed ‘Buddhist mindfulness’ into teaching practice and his Canadian apostle York University’s Stuart Shanker. That approach has emerged in 2016 as the latest wave in what has been characterized as a pseudoscience reform movement.

“It helps with their focus, helps with their creativity, helps promote problem-solving, gives them some way to self-regulate as they have a place to burn-off energy or to gain energy as they need it,” Alberta teacher Kurt Davison told Global TV News Edmonton. Eleven-year-old Connor Harrower heartily agreed: “In other classes, I’m sitting at desks and I’m bored.”

Teacher Misconduct and Discipline

A CBC-TV Marketplace investigation into ‘Teacher Discipline’ in Canada’s provincial school systems aired in April 2016 and immediately drew attention to glaring weaknesses in  professional evaluation, regulation, and discipline. It revealed that only two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, provide public access to teacher discipline records, and most of the others continue to conceal information from parents and the public, including cases of serious misconduct, incompetence and sexual abuse

Fewer than 400 teaching certificates were revoked in Canada (outside Quebec) over a ten year period from 2005 to 2015, which represented one in every 5,780 teacher certificates each year. In the U.S., the revocation rate was about 30 per cent higher. According to the most recent data from the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, the American figure in 2015 was one certificate out of every 4,360.

The Marketplace investigation raised a fundamental question: If your child’s teacher was punished for a serious offence such as sexual, physical or verbal misconduct, would you be able to find out about it? Depending on where you live, the answer was ‘probably not.’

Chronic Student Math Woes

Ontario students, like those in most Canadian provinces, continued to struggle mightily in mathematics. Grade 4 Ontario students lagged behind their counterparts in Kazakhstan, Lithuania and 25 other jurisdictions in mathematics, landing them in the middle of the pack in the 2015 TIMSS assessment, a U.S.-based global study of math and science.

Those startling TIMSS results came on the heels of a dismal showing from Grade 3 and 6 students on the latest provincial test by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), with scores dropping to the lowest levels in more than 15 years. Only 63 per cent of Grade 3s met the acceptable standard, dropping to half in Grade 6.

Math standards advocates such as Teresa Murray of @FixONTmath claimed that pumping $60-million more into a math strategy might not make much of a difference without a return to teaching the fundamentals in the early grades.

B.C. ‘Class Composition’ Court Ruling

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) won a critical Supreme Court of Canada decision in November 2016 that ended a union legal battle that began in 2002. That ruling immediately restored clauses removed from the B.C. teachers’ contract by the Gordon Campbell Liberal Government dealing with class size, the number of special needs students in a class, and the number of specialist teachers required in schools.

The BCTF court victory was forecasted to have far-reaching ramifications for contact negotiations across Canada. Teachers in Nova Scotia embroiled in a contract dispute of their own took heart from the decision prohibiting the ‘stripping’ of ‘working conditions’ and denying teachers the right to bargain on those issues.

PISA 2015 Test Results Fallout

Crowing about the showing of Canadian students in the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report was widespread and the current Chair of the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC), P.E.I. Education Minister Doug Currie, was first-off-the mark on December 6, 2016 to hail the student results in the three subjects tested: science, reading and math.

The real devil was evident in the details and more clearly portrayed in the OECD’s own “Country Profile” for Canada. Yes, 15-year-olds in three Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec) achieved some excellent results, but overall Mathematics scores were down, especially in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and students in over half of our provinces trailed-off into mediocrity in terms of performance. Our real success was not in performance, but rather in reducing the achievement gap adversely affecting disadvantaged students.

Final Words of Wisdom

Looking ahead to 2017, we can find some solace in the April 2016 comments of Dr. Stan Kutcher, one of the world’s leading experts on teen mental health. “We are not facing a mental health crisis in schools,” he pointed out, but we do have to learn to distinguish between “the daily slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and those “more serious conditions requiring treatment.”

Why and how did Canadian elementary schools become so enthralled with “mindfulness” and “self-regulation”?  What critical education issues were either obscured or ignored in pursuit of pseudo-scientific cures for today’s classroom challenges? What will be the legacy of turning the younger grades into therapeutic classroom environments? What does all of this portend for Canadian K-12 education in 2017 and beyond? 

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Project-Based Learning: Where’s the Evidence that PBL Measures Up?

High school English language arts teacher Merion Taynton took “a leap of faith” in November 2016 and jumped in “with both feet” into Project-Based Learning (PBL).

While teaching Goethe’s Faust in her Grade 10 class in a Chinese independent school, she adopted PBL in an attempt to “grapple with the ideas” within the text rather than “the text itself.” What would you sell your soul for? How much are your dreams worth? Those were the questions Ms. Taynton posed, as she set aside her regular teaching notes on 19th Century European Literature. Students would complete their own projects and decide, on their own, how to present their findings. “I’m going to do a video,” one said. “I’m going to produce a rap song” chimed in another, and the whole approach was ‘anything goes’ as long as the students could produce a justification.

Ms. Taynton’s project-based learning experience was not just a random example of the methodology, but rather an exemplar featured on the classroom trends website Edutopia under the heading “Getting Started with Literature and Project-Based Learning.”  Better than anything else, this learning activity demonstrates not only the risks, but the obvious pitfalls of jumping on educational fads in teaching and learning.

After spreading like pedagogical magic dust over the past five years, Project-Based Learning recently hit a rough patch. Fresh educational research generated in two separate studies at Durham University’s Education Endowment Foundation (EFF) in the United Kingdom and as a component of the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) has raised serious questions about the effectiveness of PBL and other minimal teacher-guided pedagogical strategies.

The EFF study of Project-Based Learning (November 2016) examined “Learning through REAL projects” involving some 4,000 Year 7 pupils  in 24 schools from 2013-14 to April 2016, utilizing a randomized control trial. The research team found “no clear impact on either literacy..or student engagement with school and learning.” More telling was the finding that the effect on the literacy of children eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) – a measure of disadvantage – was “negative and significant.” Simply put, switching to PBL from traditional literacy instruction was harmful to the most needy of all students.

The 2015 PISA results, released December 6, 2016,  delivered another blow to minimal teacher-guided methods, such as PBL and its twin sister, inquiry-based learning.  When it came to achievement in science among 15-year-olds, the finding was that such minimal guided instruction methods lagged far behind explict instruction in determining student success. In short, the increase in the amount of inquiry learning that students report being exposed to is associated with a decrease in science scores.

Much of the accumulating evidence tends to support the critical findings of Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard E. Clark in their authoritative 2006 article in Educational Psychologist.  “Minimally-guided instruction,” they concluded, based upon fifty years of studies, “is less effective and less efficient than instructional methods that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process.” The superiority of teacher-guided instruction, they claimed, can be explained utilizing evidence from studies of ” human cognitive architecture, expert-novice differences, and cognitive load.”

Project-Based Learning, like inquiry-based approaches, may have some transitory impact on student engagement in the classroom. Beyond that, however, it’s hard to find  much actual evidence to support its effectiveness in mastering content knowledge, applying thinking skills, or achieving higher scores, particularly in mathematics and science.

In September 2015, an Ontario Education What Works: Research into Practice  Monograph, authored by David Hutchison of Brock University, provided a rather mixed assessment of PBL. While the author claimed that PBL had much to offer as a “holistic strategy” promoting “student engagement” and instilling “21st century skills,” it faced “challenges that can limit its effectiveness.” Where the strategy tends to fall short was in mastery of subject content and classroom management, where time, scope and quality of the activities surface as ongoing challenges.

Implementation of PBL on a system-wide basis  has rarely been attempted, and, in the case of Quebec’s Education Reform initiative, Schools on Course,  from 1996 to 2006, it proved to be an unmitigated disaster, especially for secondary school teachers and students. The “project method” adopted in the QEP, imposed top-down, ran into fierce resistance from both teachers and parents in English-speaking Quebec, who openly opposed the new curriculum, claiming that it taught “thinking skills without subject content.” In a province with a tradition of provincial exit examinations, PBL cut against the grain and faltered when student scores slipped in 2006 in both Grade 6 provincial mathematics tests and the global Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) assessments.

None of the critical research findings or claims of ineffectiveness have blunted the passion or commitment of PBL advocates across North America.  With the support of the ASCD’s Educational Leadership magazine and web platforms such as Edutopia, a handful of PBL curriculum and program experts, including Jane Krauss of International Society for Technology Education (ISTE), Suzie Boss of Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation, and Dr. Sylvia Chard of the University of Alberta, have been effective in planting it in hundreds of school systems from Oregon and California to New York State and Ontario, in New England and the Maritime Provinces.

The PBL movement in North America is propelled by progressive educational principles and an undeniable passion for engaging students in learning.  Powered by 21st century learning precepts and championed by ICT promoters, it rests upon some mighty shaky philosophical foundations and is supported by precious little research evidence. Lead promoter Suzie Boss is typical of those advocates. “Projects make the world go round,” she wrote in a 2011 Edutopia Blog post, and “Confucius and Aristotle were early proponents of learning by doing.” That may be quite imaginative, but it is also completely fallacious.

Most of the PBL “research” is actually generated by one California organization, the Buck Institute for Education, where the lead promoters and consultants are schooled in its core principles and where PBL facilitators develop teaching units and workshops. It’s actively promoted by ISTE, Edutopia, and a host of 21st century skills advocates.

Even Canadian faculty of education supporters like Hutchison concede that implementing PBL is “time-intensive” and fraught with classroom challenges. Among those “challenges” are formidable obstacles such as a) managing the significant time commitment; b) ensuring that subjects have sufficient subject depth; c) balancing student autonomy with the imperative of some teacher direction; and d) keeping projects on track using ongoing (formative) assessment instruments. When it comes to implementing PBL in ESL/ELL classrooms or with larger groups of Special Needs students those challenges are often insurmountable.

What works best as a core instructional approach – explicit instruction or minimal teacher guided approaches, such as PBL and Inquiry-Based Learning?  Which approach is best equipped to raise student achievement levels, particularly in mathematics and science?  Are the potential benefits in terms of promoting student engagement and instilling collaborative skills enough to justify its extensive use in elementary schools? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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PISA 2015 Results: Why is Canada Riding High on its Stable,Lopsided Student Performance?

“Canadians can be proud of our showing in the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report,” declared Science consultant Bonnie Schmidt and former Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC) director Andrew Parkin in their first-off-the mark December 6, 2016 response to the results. “We are, ” they added, “one of only a handful of countries that places in the top tier of the Oganization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) in each of the three subjects tested:science, reading and math.”

“Canada” and “Canadian students,” we were told, were once again riding high in the once-every-three-years international test sweepstakes. If that that effusively positive response had a familiar ring, it was because it followed the official line advanced by a markedly similar CMEC media release, issued a few hours before the commentary.

Since our students, all students in each of our ten provincial school systems, were “excelling,” then it was time for a little national back-slapping. There’s one problem with that blanket analysis: it serves to maintain the status quo, engender complacency, obscure the critical Mathematics scores, and disguise the lopsided nature of student performance from region to region.

Hold on, not so fast, CMEC — the devil is in the real details and more clearly portrayed in the OECD’s own “Country Profile” for Canada. Yes, 15-year-olds in three Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec) achieved some excellent results, but overall Mathematics scores were down, and students in over half of our provinces trailed-off into mediocrity in terms of performance. Our real success was not in performance, but rather in reducing the achievement gap adversely affecting disadvantaged students.

Over half a million 15-year-olds in more than 72 jurisdictions all over the world completed PISA tests, and Schmidt and Parkin were not alone in making sweeping pronouncements about why Canada and other countries are up and others down in the global rankings.

Talking in aggregate terms about the PISA performance of 20,000 Canadian students in ten different provinces can be, and is, misleading, when the performance results in mathematics continue to lag, Ontario students continue to underperform, and students in two provinces, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, struggle in science, reading, and mathematics.  Explaining all that away is what breeds complacency in the school system.

My own PISA 2015 forecast was way off-base — and taught me a lesson.  After the recent TIMSS 2015 Mathematics results released in November 2016, an  East Asian sweep, led by Singapore and Korea, seemed like a safe bet. How Finland performs also attracts far less attention than it did in its halcyon days back in 2003 and 2006. The significant OECD pivot away from excellence to equity caught me napping and I completely missed the significance of moving (2012 to 2015) from pencil-and-paper to computer-based tests. 

Some solace can be found in the erroneous forcecasts of others. The  recent Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) “Brace Yourself” memo with its critique of standardized testing assessment, seemed to forecast a calamitous drop in Alberta student performance levels. It only happened in Mathematics.

Advocates of the ‘Well-Being’ curriculum and broader assessment measures, championed by Toronto’s People for Education, will likely be temporarily thrown off-stride by the OECD’s new-found commitment to assessing equity in education. It will be harder now to paint PISA as evil and to discredit PISA results based upon such a narrow range of skills in reading, math and science.

The OECD’s “Country Profile” of Canada is worth studying carefully because it aggregates data from 2003 to 2015, clarifies the trends, and shows how Canadian students continue to struggle in mathematics far more than in reading and science.

Canadian students may have finished 12th in Mathematics with a 516 aggregate score, but the trend line continues to be in decline, down from 532 in 2003. Digging deeper, we see that students in only two provinces, Quebec ( 544) and BC (522) actually exceeded the national mean score. Canada’s former leader in Mathematics performance, Alberta, continued its downward spiral from the lofty heights of 549 (2003) to 511 (2015).

Since Ontario students’ provincial mathematics scores are declining, experts will be pouring over the latest PISA results to see how bad it is in relation to the world’s top performing systems. No surprises here: Ontario students scored 509, finishing 4th in Canada, and down from 530 on PISA 2003. Excellence will require a significant change in direction.

The biggest discovery in post-2015 PISA analysis was the positive link between explicit instruction and higher achievement in the 2015 core assessment subject, science. The most important factor linked with high performance remains SES (soci0-economic status), but teacher-guided instruction was weighted close behind and students taught with minimal direction, in inquiry or project-based classes, simply performed less well on the global test.

The results of the 15-year-olds are largely determined over 10 years of schooling, and not necessarily the direct consequence of the latest curriculum fad such as “discovery math.’’

It’s better to look deeper into what this cohort of students were learning when they first entered the school system, in the mid-1990s. In the case of Canadian students, for example, student-centred learning was at its height, and the country was just awakening to the value of testing to determine what students were actually learning in class.

Where the student results are outstanding, such as Singapore and Estonia, it is not solely attributable to the excellence of teaching or the rigour of the math and science curriculum.

We know from the “tutoring explosion” in Canada’s major cities that the prevalence of private tuition classes after school is a contributing factor, and may explain the current advantage still enjoyed in mathematics by Pacific Rim students.

Children of Chinese heritage in Australia actually outperformed students in Shanghai on the 2012 PISA test, and we need to explore whether that may be true for their counterparts in Greater Vancouver. The so-called “Shanghai Effect” may be attributed as much to “tiger mothers” as it is to the quality of classroom instruction.

Whether Canada and Canadians continue to exhibit high PISA self-esteem or have simply plateaued does not matter as much as what we glean over the next few years from studying best international practice in teaching, learning, and assessment.

Surveying PISA student results, this much is clear: standing still is not an option in view of the profound changes that are taking place in life, work, and society.

 

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First Nations High School Education: After the Healing, What Comes Next?

A Thunder Bay Ontario coroner’s inquest report into the deaths of seven First Nations students, issued on June 28, 2016, seemed to inject a sense of urgency into the whole debate over the sad state of Indigenous education. It also gave fresh impetus to public calls for concrete, meaningful changes in First Nations high schools, particularly in northern Ontario. Six months later, my latest Northern Policy Institute report, After the Healing, explores why so little has happened and proposes an immediate action plan.

Going well beyond its strict mandate to rule on cases of death, the five-person jury, presided over by coroner Dr. David Eden, delivered a total of 145 far-reaching recommendations and even set out the laudable goal of building a high school in each of northern Ontario’s mostly small, isolated reserve communities. That alone is a monumental undertaking that would take massive investments and years to achieve.

The state of education on most of Canada’s reserves is dire, but outside observers, including C.D. Howe Institute researchers Barry Anderson and John Richards, tend to reach sweeping conclusions that do not apply to all First Nations-run schools, particularly the two largest Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (NNEC) schools in the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, covering much of northern Ontario.

Over the past seven years, 2009-10 to 2015-16, graduation rates at the two NNEC high schools, Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School (DFCHS) and Pelican Falls First Nations High School (PFFNHS) have risen steadily from 53.6 % to 76.0% this past year. Out of 424 students registered in Grade 12 over that period, 261 (61.5 %) achieved a high school certificate, better than most on-reserve high schools.

In the 2015-16 school year, while the Thunder Bay inquest dominated the news, both DFCHS and PFFNS recorded their highest graduation rates ever, at 64.7 % (33 of 51) and 100 % (24 of 24) respectively.

Given a funding gap of 25 to 30 per cent per student and the adverse media attention, the label of “failing” schools does not seem to square with the facts.

Yet much more needs to be done to immediately improve the quality of education and student life for First Nations students attending Thunder Bay’s Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School and other First Nations-run schools in the Ontario North.

My earlier September 2014 NPI policy paper Picking Up the Pieces supported the full transition to First Nations control of education through Community-School Based Management vested in Indigenous education authorities such as the NNEC.

Investing in First Nations high schools remains the best way to capture the true “Learning Spirit,” to embrace a more holistic, community-based philosophy of lifelong learning, to raise student performance levels, and prepare graduates for healthier, more satisfying and productive lives.

Fixing the problems threatening the very existence of the NNEC First Nations high schools, DFCHS and PFFNHS, is the new imperative. Taking action now will not only ensure that First Nations teens attending NNEC high schools will return home alive, but better prepared for successful lives.

The Thunder Bay Coroner’s Jury bit-off much more than can be digested and implemented in a timely and effective fashion. My report focuses more explicitly on addressing the needs of students making the transition to high school in Thunder Bay, Sioux Lookout, and other northern Ontario towns and cities.

My latest report, After the Healing, presents a five-point action plan, urging policy-makers to:

• close the funding gap for NNEC and NAN schools;
• design, fund and build Dennis Franklin Cromarty transition lodgings to be known as the Student Living Centre;
• re-build and expand student support services to smooth the transition to city/town life;
• establish a Race Relations Commissioner and officers in cities and larger towns with sizable populations of First Nations youth and students; and
• expand and fortify ‘Student Success’ curriculum initiatives based upon Indigenous ways of knowing and learning.

‘Focus, focus, focus’ is now what’s needed as we embark on renewing First Nations education. Fewer and more immediate concrete actions are the best guarantor of a brighter future for First Nations students attending band-operated high schools.

Why is there so much talk and so little action on the First Nations high school education front?  Who is coordinating and monitoring the implementation of the Thunder Bay inquest recommendations?  After six months, what has changed at Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, the prime focus of the inquest? Is it because the mere mention of “residential school” (whatever its form and leadership) sends people running off in the opposite direction? 

 

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