June 7th Delegation to OCDSB

Following is the text of a statement that OPERI will be making to the Ottawa Carleton District School Board on June 7th, 2016.

The Reform of Public Education to Fit with the Times

We are a delegation from OPERI, the Ottawa Public Education Remake Initiative. Our purpose in being here is to provide input for the Secondary School Program Review.

We see some positives coming out of the review. The emphasis on community schools, equity, and the reduction of transitions are all in line with our thinking. We also appreciate the transparency and consultative nature of the review process which is reflected on the OCDSB website. Our concern is that evidence to date suggests that the review is not addressing the need to move beyond the industrial model of program delivery. The thinking appears to be caught in the same limited perspective that characterized a similar exercise known as “A New Vision for Secondary Schools” that the board conducted back in 2001. It failed to move us towards a system built for modern times and the current review is shaping up to be no more fruitful. We need to stop trying to make the wrong model right, and turn our attention to developing the right model. We believe that the scope of the current review must be broadened to address new realities and to give people faith in the OCDSB.

In his video titled Creative Alberta¹, Peter Gamwell says that the welcomers of the rebirth of public education are looking for the right midwife, and OPERI is urging you to consider that this midwife is staring us in the face. In an exchange that occurred over a decade ago during a public plenary session held by a newly elected board of OCDSB trustees, a re-elected trustee said, “If you want to see the students we fail, take a ride in a police cruiser on a Friday night.” To this, Jim Greaves, the director of the OCDSB at the time responded, “Oh yes, but if you want to see the students we recover, visit one of our alternate schools.” The midwife in essence is a logical conclusion from this exchange – if we know how to save these kids, then we know how to prevent them from becoming at risk in the first place. Taking this logic a step further, we also know how to prevent a massive number of other students from disengaging and tuning out.

Two major contributors to the success of the alternate schools are that the bells have been eliminated and the teachers, acting as facilitators, are better able to apply the Principles of Learning. A list of these principles is attached for your later consideration. The alternate programs are designed to help students obtain enough credits to graduate, so that they can move on with their lives. The programs proposed by OPERI would do much more. They would offer an opportunity for any student, not just those in trouble, to be free of the bells and to have a different relationship with teachers. Students would still work on Ministry courses, but greater emphasis would be placed on cultivating a community of learners who appreciate the challenges and intrinsic joys of learning, and where a celebration of each student’s unique gift to the world is nurtured. In this kind of learning environment students would develop the skills needed for successful independent learning and living in a democratic society. Briefly said, these programs can become the start of an orderly shift to the new paradigm called for by Ken Robinson in his video titled Changing Education Paradigms.² In his book “Drive”, Daniel Pink gives dimension to this paradigm when he says: “Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word ‘management’ onto the linguistic ash heap alongside ‘icebox’ and ‘horseless carriage.’ This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.” Our impression is that the Secondary School Program Review is focused on better management. Nothing suggests that there is movement towards a new paradigm based on self-direction.

Pink’s quote is said with tongue in cheek to some degree because good management, whatever the paradigm, will always be needed, and effective change management is essential to ushering in a new paradigm. Many good reform efforts have been destroyed by poor implementations. The efforts stemming from “Living and Learning,” better known as the “Hall-Dennis Report”, provide one vivid example. We contend that if its recommendations had been properly implemented, the discontent with public education described in the report would not so much seem like a description of the state of public education today. This description is attached for your reference.

Good change management is incorporated into what OPERI is proposing. Due to time restrictions it won’t be considered now, but the attached document titled Effective Change Management gives some idea of how it works.

A four-minute presentation on a topic this complex will raise more questions than it will answer. To date, a good response is available for every question that has been raised that can be answered without having working models that provide greater insight. We therefore request that the OCDSB conduct pilot programs that will further our understanding of what happens when students are relieved of the bells and given more control over their learning. In a program similar to what OPERI is proposing³, two of the teachers involved were standing together one day observing the students when one said to the other, “Have you noticed that the more we step back, the more they step forward?” Daniel Greenberg of the Sudbury Valley School⁴ goes further when he says, “Our greatest gift to them is to let them be.” Both comments tell us that we are greatly underestimating children’s desire and ability to direct their own learning, and that they are probably the ones most qualified to do it.

In closing I wish to leave you with John Dewey’s definition of open-mindedness. It is the “active desire to listen to more sides than one, to give heed to the facts from whatever source they come; to give full attention to alternative possibilities, and to recognize the possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us.” (Quoted from Ailsa Watkinson’s book titled Education, Student Rights and the Charter.)

Footnotes

¹   The Creative Alberta video is found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoV2EN7W0zU.

²   The Changing Education Paradigms video is found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.

³   The program similar to that being proposed by OPERI was called CHIP. Details about it can be found on the OPERI website at: http://operi.ca/?page_id=137.

⁴   The Sudbury Valley School is a non-coercive democratic schools that has spawned numerous other “Valley” or “Sudbury” schools. Information about it can be found on its website (http://sudval.org) and on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School).

 

Attachments

1. Principles of Learning: http://operi.ca/?page_id=547
2. Living and Learning: http://operi.ca/?page_id=825
3. Effective Change Management

Attachment 1: Principles of Learning

Malcolm Knowles, the person perhaps most associated with andragogy, defined these principles. He was troubled by the fact that many people who had dropped out of school and returned to it after kicking around in the big world for a while, dropped out again. He studied these adult learners and used the title The Principles of Adult Learning to express his findings, but it is easy to see that the principles apply to learners of all ages.

The Principles of Learning

People learn best when:

• they are treated with respect as self-directing persons
• the learning situation is related to their past experiences
• they have participated in the planning of the learning activity and set their goals
• they are physically comfortable and can socialize with those in the learning group
• they are with their peers, freely learning in groups
• there are opportunities for a variety of learning activities
• in a problem-centered situation where a question needs resolving or a task needs doing
• they see progress, immediate results and some rewards for the time they put into learning
• they evaluate themselves

 

Attachment 2: Living and Learning

Living and Learning, better known with reference to its principal authors as the Hall-Dennis Report, was commissioned by the Ontario Government and published in 1968. It stands out as perhaps the best report on education ever commissioned by a government. If its recommendations had been properly implemented, public education would probably now be on much firmer ground. The following quote from the report indicates that things are still much the same as they were 50 years ago.

“Today, on every side, however, there is heard a growing demand for a fresh look at education in Ontario. The Committee was told of inflexible programs, outdated curricula, unrealistic regulations, regimented organization, and mistaken aims of education. We heard from alienated students, frustrated teachers, irate parents, and concerned educators. Many public organizations and private individuals have told us of their growing discontent and lack of confidence in a school system which, in their opinion, has become outmoded and is failing those it exists to serve.”

 

Attachment 3: Effective Change Management

This is a quick summary of how to effectively orchestrate a change from long established views to ones that will serve us better. It is provided to highlight the importance of proper change management in implementing reforms, and to share some of the practices that can contribute to successful reforms in public education.

General Principles:

1. Good ideas develop when innovators are free to innovate. Organizations need to give their people ample opportunity to explore new directions and find new solutions to old problems.
2. Change is not imposed. It is invited by giving people genuine options. The ones that most fill people’s needs will be adopted.
3. The change process must provide for small group options. Decision making on the basis of majority rule too often results in status quo prevailing.
4. People must be fully informed of their options.
5. Options must be equally obtainable.
6. The speed of change must be controlled. New paradigms come with their own set of problems to be solved. If change happens too quickly, the problems can start to mount and things can then get out of control. The result can be that good ideas get discredited and then abandoned.

Change to Education

Specific to the OPERI proposal:

1. No Ministry permission is needed. Students adhere to the Ministry curriculum.
2. No new funding is required. The programs only require the reallocation of existing resources.
3. The proposed programs are risk free. Students can opt for the program for a semester, and then opt out if they prefer a traditional education. In addition to obtaining their credits, students gain invaluable experience developing the skills needed for independent, life-long learning.
4. The programs need to be provided as schools-within-schools. Schools-within-schools address equity concerns. The make programs equally visible and accessible to the entire greater school population.
5. The OPERI proposal permits individual teachers and schools to conduct programs that test out the latest thinking on how students learn best.
6. Change in education can be incremental. Schools can be made a little more democratic. Students can be given a little more control over their learning. As people become comfortable with small changes, new ones can be introduced.

The process takes into account the idea shared by Daniel Pink in Drive: “If we pluck people out of controlling environments, when they’ve known nothing else, and plop them in a ROWE (results-only work environment) or an environment of undiluted autonomy, they’ll struggle. Organizations must provide, as Richard Ryan puts it, ‘scaffolding’ to help every employee find his footing to make the transition.”

The requirement with the OPERI proposal that students obtain Ministry credits under the supervision of teacher/facilitators provides scaffolding. As they become comfortable with a certain level of change, innovative students and teachers will find ways to appropriately dismantle some of the scaffolding. One interesting possibility is what Linda Aronson presents in her book Unleashed to Learn. It’s an account of students who had the opportunity to design one of their courses, and it sparks all kinds of ideas about how small schools can provide a choice of learning options that far exceed those offered by large factory schools.

The Continuum of School Models graphic shows highly controlled schools at one end and non-coercive schools like Sudbury Valley at the other end. The placement of Montessori and Waldorf is arbitrary. In Turning Points, Sharon Caldwell, a Montessori expert believes the ideal school experience for children falls somewhere between Montessori and a totally non-coercive learning environment. Some thinking is that the ideal may vary from student to student. The OPERI proposal has the flexibility to permit students to individually remove scaffolding to discover what is best for them. It contributes to the age-old advice “Know thyself” as it relates to past experience and learning styles.