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In a couple of months’ time, the biggest school system in Australia will need a new head. The current Secretary of the Department of Education in NSW, Mark Scott, is moving to greener pastures as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney.
The job of Director-General of Education (the NSW title was changed in 2014) really matters. Some of the great innovators in Australian education have held this role, or its equivalent: William Wilkins in the nineteenth century, Peter Board in the early twentieth, Alby Jones in the reform era of the 1970s in South Australia.
There’s no guarantee that NSW will get another Peter Board – and it’s worth recalling that Peter Board himself resigned in protest against a right-wing Minister’s demand to reintroduce fees for high schools. But in the troubled state of education around the world, there’s scope for an imaginative administrator, even just a thoughtful one, to do a lot of good.
Making choices
There are, of course, bad choices that the NSW government might make. First, they could appoint someone who is a generic corporate manager. There are plenty of potential candidates in the business elite, accustomed to handling big budgets and riding herd on large workforces. Since the public sector was remodelled on corporate lines, there is also a supply from the executive suites of public and ‘public-facing’ (Mark Scott’s unintentionally revealing phrase) agencies.
This way, we could get a D-G who understood spreadsheets, could thump a team into shape, defend austerity, find opportunities for outsourcing, spout the language of excellence – and who would not have two educational ideas to rub together.
Alternatively, the government could go for a right-wing ideologue who did have schemes for education. That’s what Donald Trump did, choosing a wealthy party donor who was an enthusiast for charter schools, parental choice, guns, and other educational devices dear to the far right. Betsy DeVos proved a disaster; one of her few achievements was revoking guidelines on inclusiveness for disabled kids. I don’t think this is a likely kind of appointment in Australia, but it is possible.
How could government make a good choice for this job? Here are the criteria I’d have in mind if, through some terrible error in the Minister’s office, I were appointed to the selection committee for the next D-G.
Know the business
The great myth of managerialism is that all ‘leadership’ roles are basically the same. Just read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, get your MBA, and keep up to date with the relevant apps . . . but education isn’t like oil refining, online marketing, or even Chinese dynastic warfare.
Good administrators need a hands-on knowledge of what educational processes are, and how schools and classrooms work. They need to recognize how teachers weave multiple tasks together in their daily work. Administrators need to grasp the deep diversity among students in a public school system, the complex needs of young people, and the very complex responsibility that creates for educators.
Above all, they need to understand that it is the inter-active work of teachers, students, support staff and communities that produces educational effects as children grow. Good administrators do not fall into the deadly error of thinking of students and their families as ‘customers’ of a school system.
Hold the fort
One of the important roles of public administrators – though one that’s hard for them to acknowledge – is protecting the workforce from disruptions, distractions and abuse from outside. The list of hazards is long: nervous ministers, hostile media moguls, backbenchers with a bee in their bonnet about communists or feminists or transsexuals, business or religious pressure groups, corporations trying to sell new tests or online systems or training programmes (or even take over whole groups of schools, which has happened in other countries), and more.
Defensiveness won’t work. It’s important that a public school system should be open to the community, should acknowledge criticism, and should be constantly learning and experimenting. I think a new D-G is most likely to get the balance right on the basis of a powerful commitment to the children, a strong skepticism about educational nostrums, and a certain toughness in defence of her fellow-workers.
Trust the staff
Corporate-style management is built on distrust of the workforce. It’s replete with surveillance mechanisms, audits, performance indicators, reporting requirements, incentives and threats. Managements’ adoption of these practice is one of the most damaging parts of the corporate makeover of Australian universities; you can smell the distrust around campus.
It hasn’t got that bad in the school system – yet. A new D-G will have to navigate between demands for performance and the damaging effects of surveillance and distrust. A willingness to recognize the skills, knowledge and responsibility of the workforce, at all levels, is basic. Trust can be built, but it will take serious work.
Speak the truth
An important part of that work is speaking honestly. We may not be quite in a post-truth era, but we are in a world with spin doctors in every government, ads on every bus, and obscenities like corporate funding for climate denialism. It’s easy to think that image matters more than reality. Management now has its own lexicon of weasel words – transparency, accountability, values, excellence, community engagement.
The new D-G has to reject those games and that language. It’s an educational as well as a political question. The curriculum in schools is intended to provide students with the nearest to truth that we fallible humans can get. We need a correspondence, not a contradiction, between what we teach and ask of students, and what the people who run the system say and do.
Is any of that possible? I hope so – but I don’t know. Please let the NSW Minister have your view!
Raewyn Connell is professor emerita at the University of Sydney. During her career, she held two chairs, sociology at Macquarie University and education at the University of Sydney. She wrote two classics on education – how class and gender hierarchies are made and re-made in the everyday life of schools (Making the Difference, 1982; Teachers’ Work, 1985).
The photos at the top of this post are, from left to right, Betsy DeVos, Peter Board, William Wilkins and Mark Scott.
The image of Peter Board is courtesy of NSW State Archives and Records which is the source or custodian of the Materials NSWSA: NRS-15051-1-4-[222]-3 | Peter Board
Any minute, your university students will get an email with a link. That link leads to one of the most dire tools of university performance, the evaluations of course content and teaching quality.
These evaluations are meant to provide feedback to enhance course design and teaching methods. However, for several decades research has shown that despite the questions being asked, the factors influencing students’ responses have a minimal amount to do with either the course or teaching quality.
They are instead shaped by student demographics, prejudice towards the teaching academic, and biases shaped by the classroom and university setting.
Despite the clear flaws underpinning the data student evaluations collect, universities continue to use this data as a measure of an academic’s teaching performance. Evaluation results influence an academic’s likelihood of being hired on a continuing basis for contract and sessional staff, receiving promotions for existing staff, and being fired or managed out during staff restructures.
This is a flawed method of evaluating people and it raises questions of why the sector continues to use student evaluations. But the negative impact is complicated further by the fact that we know evaluations impact on different groups of academics to different degrees. The groups impacted the most are the groups the academy declares to value, hopes to protect, and claims to have an interest in fostering their careers.
Different studies suggest the disadvantage can vary in size, and is highly dependent on disciplinary area, student demographics and other factors, but across the board, women are judged more harshly than men. At the extreme, this means women are more likely to fail evaluations than men, and researchers have routinely cited examples of more capable and higher performing women receiving lower scores than their less capable male counterparts. These results predictably mean women fare worse in job applications and promotions, and has been cited as a reason why women are represented less in the professoriate, and fill fewer leadership positions.
The same is true of factors such as race, gender, sexual identity, disability, language and other marginalising characteristics. Studies in different locations across more than two decades of solid research continually find that if an academic is not a white, English speaking, male in the approximately 35-50 year old age group and who students perceive to be able-bodied and heterosexual, this will result in some form of lower evaluation result. The negative repercussions of these results are also cumulative; a woman will receive lower results, and a person with a visible disability will receive lower, so a woman with a visible disability is likely to be treated extra harshly in the evaluations of her course and teaching.
What also cannot be ignored is that as a majority of the existing data originates from large-scale quantitative surveys, repeatedly researchers have noted that the rates of people within the sector who are disabled, identify as LGBTIQA+, people of colour, are refugees or immigrants, or a part of other marginalised groups are so underrepresented in the higher education sector that they do not count as a valid sample size.
At the broadest level, multiple studies showed that evaluation results can be impacted by disciplinary area and assessment type. Several studies have shown that academics in the sciences and associated fields receive lower evaluation results than their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences. Similarly, it has been noted that academics whose courses use essays and presentations for assessment fare better than those who rely on exams.
Institutional factors that have nothing to do with the class, or the academic teaching the class, have also been cited as reasons an academic will receive a lower evaluation score. Lower results can be given because of the class scheduling, class location, classroom design, class cleanliness, library facilities, and even the food options available on campus; all factors beyond the control of the academic teaching the class.
Official university responses to why they continue to carry out student evaluations when evaluations are so flawed and prejudiced towards the sector’s most vulnerable groups are rare. Existing studies suggest universities need data about course content, teaching quality, and student satisfaction, and student evaluations are the most cost and time effective method of gaining this information. In the past, perhaps the lack of data around evaluations was enough to convince institutions that a method of data collection that was seemingly not perfect was still acceptable due to the data that could be obtained rather quickly and easily.
Considering what we know in 2021, time and cost effectiveness are not good enough reasons to continue a flawed practice that so blatantly discriminates against the sector’s women and those from marginalised groups.
Dr Troy Heffernan is Lecturer in Leadership at La Trobe University. His research examines higher education administration and policy with a particular focus on investigating the inequities that persist in the sector.
One in five of all our students fail to achieve minimum levels of reading or maths. That’s shocking. What’s even more shocking is that if you look at the pool of disadvantaged students, that figure skyrockets to one in three, compared to one in ten among advantaged students.
But some disadvantaged students beat the odds and succeed – and that’s we call academic resilience.
These figures are straight from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The good news is we can fix this but there is a long way to go. One key difference between the resilient and non-resilient is the growth mindset, a belief that one’s ability can increase over time, that intelligence is not fixed but changeable. Encouraging students to believe that will be a key driver in any changes and any improvement.
In addition to scoring lower on tests such as PISA, research has shown that students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds have poorer educational outcomes than their more affluent peers on a range of measures, including school completion.
Yet, despite this association between socioeconomic disadvantage and poorer educational outcomes, a small number of students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds do excel at school. Just over 13 per cent of socioeconomically disadvantaged Australian students, and 11 per cent of students across the OECD on average, show what PISA terms ‘academically resilience’ by scoring in the highest quartile of reading literacy performance.
This apparent success despite the odds is the focus of a new ACER report that examines what, if any, characteristics these academically resilient students share, why this might be, and what we can learn from this small group that might assist in improving outcomes for all students.
Enjoyment of reading helps
Learning to read is a challenging task that requires persistence and motivation. It has been suggested that enjoyment of reading and motivation to master tasks may be two manifestations of academic resilience. Similarly, Dweck suggests goal-oriented students tend to be academically resilient and exhibit higher levels of confidence than others, and they are likely to seek challenges and be persistent.
In Australia, and across the OECD on average, academically resilient students tended to enjoy reading more, were willing to work hard to master tasks, and indicated more of an inclination to set and pursue goals than did non-academically resilient students.
Figure 1. Differences between resilient and non-resilient students in attitudes and dispositions
While these findings may be as one would expect, there is interesting variation across other participating countries in students’ enjoyment of reading. In Japan and the participating Chinese jurisdictions, both academically resilient and non-academically resilient students scored at or above the OECD average on the enjoyment of reading index. In Denmark, Norway and Sweden neither group appeared to really enjoy reading, although non-resilient students enjoyed it less than resilient students.
Figure 2. Average scores on Enjoyment of reading index, resilient and non-resilient students, Australia and comparison countries
Gender differences at play
Given that females outperform males in PISA reading literacy in every country, gender is likely to be a major factor in whether a student is academically resilient. Interestingly, while a larger proportion of Australian female students than male students were academically resilient, there was no statistically significant difference between their reading literacy scores. This suggests the resilient males are even more resilient than their female peers.
Table 1. Mean scores PISA 2018 Reading Literacy, by gender
Australian femalesMean (Standard Error)
Australian malesMean (Standard Error)
Whole cohort
519 (2.0)
487 (2.2)
Non-resilient students
373 (4.1)
352 (3.5)
Resilient students
613 (6.0)
617 (7.3)
Whole school influences
Prior research has found that the average socioeconomic profile of a students’ school is strongly associated with their performance on PISA.
While a substantial proportion of academically resilient Australian students attend schools in the lowest socioeconomic group, far more resilient students than non-resilient students attended schools in the highest two quarters of aggregated socioeconomic background, suggesting that attending schools with more advantaged peers may play a role in a student’s chance of being academically resilient.
Table 2. Distribution of resilient and non-resilient students by school socioeconomic background
School aggregated Socioeconomic background
Resilient students (%)
Non-resilient students (%)
Lowest quarter
39
57
Second quarter
30
28
Third quarter
20
12
Highest quarter
11
4
There are a number of reasons attending schools with more advantaged peers may play a role in a student’s chance of being academically resilient. It may be the influence of peers on students’ motivation for learning, or because the more advantaged schools themselves have better access to resources than less disadvantaged schools, that students attending more advantaged schools receive stronger support from parents or teachers, or perhaps that they were selected to attend these schools on scholarship.
Data from PISA supports this theory, as Australia’s academically resilient students were more likely than non-academically resilient students to hold a growth mindset. Eighty per cent of academically resilient students disagreed with the statement ‘your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much’, compared to just 41 per cent of non-resilient students and 70 per cent of Australian students on average.
Growth mindset, along with enjoyment of reading, motivation and goal setting, stand out against gender and school profile as areas related to academic resilience that can be readily targeted by education systems to help address socioeconomic disadvantage. By directly addressing these issues in the classroom, we may be able to improve outcomes for the 87 per cent of Australian students who have not overcome their disadvantage.
Dr Sue Thomson is Deputy CEO (Research) at the Australian Council for Educational Research, and the National Manager of the PISA project.
Meet Melissa Fanshawe and Katie Burke, two senior lecturers from the School of Education at the University of Southern Queensland. These two first met in a Zoom workshop in which they were both presenting on online pedagogy.
Hearing about each other’s ideas, they instantly wanted to work together. Here’s what happened next.
Melissa: We teach maths and the arts for pre-service teachers, who enrol mainly in online courses. These are very hands-on practical subjects so we are always looking for ways to try and help our students ensure they learn the course outcomes while learning online. This is the story of how we changed our courses using constructive alignment to get our students to participate in practical learning activities.
“In constructive alignment, we start with the outcomes we intend students to learn, and align teaching and assessment to those outcomes” (Biggs, 2011, para 2).
Katie: We signed up to do a peer review of each other’s course to see how our students engaged, and saw a number of opportunities to improve. We then decided to use the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Cycle (Kinash, 2019) to engage in a data-informed approach to improving our courses. This would also help us assess the innovations we wanted to implement.
We were really concerned to find that it was possible for our students to complete our courses without undertaking practical learning activities in the weekly learning which would help contextualise theory and practice and prepare them for the classroom.
Our course engagement data over two semesters in 2019 found that only 72 per cent of students in our courses participated in course content. More than 72 per cent of our students passed the course. How was this possible?
Melissa: We believed our students needed to do practical activities not only to understand the application of theory, but more importantly, so they could feel confident to teach our discipline areas when they graduate.
We found our students chose to engage with the activities that were related to the assessment. This was concerning for us, as we both believe the purpose of assessment is “to inform future teaching and learning, rather than only for assigning a summative grade” (Ayalon & Wilkie, 2020, p.1).
Katie: So knowing that some of our students only complete what is being assessed, we saw an opportunity to bring practical learning into assessment. Then our objectives would be constructively aligned.
Melissa: We decided we could prioritise specific outcomes by creating practical learning activities and aligning them with assessment. This meant that activity completion was a part of core learning, and students would probably do it, because they were being assessed!
Katie: We both rewrote our courses starting with the content and skills needed in our disciplines when teaching in the classroom. We created practical activities that the students had to do each week, and this became part of their assessment. This allowed them to practice with the hands-on learning that you don’t often get online.
Melissa: My maths students were guided to submit practical activities that related to number and algebra, measurement and geometry, statistics and probability.
Katie: In my Arts course, students completed and submitted evidence of their completion of a range of practical activities in dance, drama, media arts, music and visual art.
We then collected data within our online courses over two semesters through course engagement data (n=305), an anonymous voluntary survey (n=64), and semi-structured interviews (n=3). We found our students not only found these activities enjoyable and achievable but they also improved knowledge, understanding and confidence in discipline areas.
Melissa: We were happy to find all students who responded to our survey indicated growth in confidence in their respective discipline area, with the majority of respondents indicating that the assessment tasks were important (19 per cent) or very important (75 per cent) in improving their skills and understanding of maths or the arts. One student told us “I now feel confident that I have the theory together with the practical elements of the arts knowledge”.
Katie: What about our interview participant who said they had “a lot more confidence and a deeper understanding of not only mathematical content but also how to teach this to children”?
Melissa:Oh yes, our data also showed us
the importance of Critical reflection to help students realise the application of theory into practice (Biggs, 2014). Following the activities, our students were asked to reflect on their activities, and how they aligned to the curriculum and course theory. 91 per cent of survey respondents found this useful for preparing for the classroom.
Katie: Students told us that they gained an understanding of how learners would feel completing the activity, as well as some of the complexities of planning. One interview participant told us, “I didn’t realise how much depth I’d have to go into planning a lesson and how much content and thought goes into that”. This thinking is really getting them ready for the classroom.
Melissa: They also said it made them think about the resources required and differentiation for diverse learners.
Katie: I think our strongest finding was that:
assessment of practical learning increased engagement.
Melissa: It sure did. Only 54 per cent of our students said they would have completed the activities if they were not assessed. Some students told us they may have completed the activities they enjoyed. Like your arts student who said “I definitely would not have done the drama or the visual art …. I would have done the music one because I enjoy the music”.
Katie: Or the many respondents who told us they were time poor.
Melissa: That’s right, there were many comments about that, such as “I feel that as my studies need to fit around so many other aspects of my life, I wouldn’t take the time to complete optional activities”. Our survey showed only 38 per cent of students in full time employment would have been likely to complete the activities if they had not counted toward their grades.
Katie: Well this supports research (Bettinger & Loeb, 2017; Stone et al., 2019) that many online students try to complete studies alongside many other responsibilities such as families, work and other responsibilities. So they often engage only with course content that will ensure they pass the course assessment.
Melissa: Well if they are only going to prioritise the assessment, doesn’t that show how important it is to make sure that our assessment includes the knowledge and practical skills they need when they graduate?
Katie: I think so, but what did the course engagement data say?
Melissa: The best part was that after changing our courses to focus on practical activities as assessment, in two courses, over two semesters, 94 per cent or 287 of 305 students completed the learning modules directly aligned to assessment. This was an improvement of over 20 per cent!
Katie: Wow! These incredibly high engagement statistics suggest that the practical learning experiences as assessment, created with a constructive alignment to graduate outcomes strongly influenced students’ engagement in our courses.
Katie Burke is a Senior Lecturer (Arts Curriculum & Pedagogy) at the University of Southern Queensland. Melissa Fanshawe is a Senior Lecturer (Mathematics Curriculum & Pedagogy) at the University of Southern Queensland.
COVER IMAGE: this beautiful work is from one of the students who participated in the research.
References
Ayalon, M., & Wilkie, K. (2020). Developing assessment literacy through approximations of practice: Exploring secondary mathematics pre-service teachers developing criteria for a rich quadratics task. Teaching and Teacher Education, 89. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.103011
Stone, C., Freeman, E., Dyment, J. E., Muir, T., & Milthorpe, N. (2019). Equal or equitable? The role of flexibility within online education. Australian & International Journal of Rural Education, 29(2), 26-40. https://journal.spera.asn.au/index.php/AIJRE/artic…
The “offensive and misogynistic behaviour” of elite private school boys that routinely erupts into the public consciousness is not an aberration. It is a byproduct of the heterosexist ‘machinery’ that organises relational life within these schools (Variyan & Wilkinson, under review).
There is strong evidence that young female teachers are being responsibilised for boys sexually harassing them, where they were being questioned about their teaching and dressing in too feminine a manner. Teachers also reported encountering disbelief from their school leaders in the face of complaints of sexual harassment, as well as the poor handling of complaints with minimal consequences for boys’ harassing behaviours. These are all critical incidences and discourses of victim-blaming that lead female teachers to question themselves, to self-censor and self-blame. However, it also stands to reason that market pressures might lead school heads to play down or disappear reports of sexual harassment before these incidents come to parents’ (or wider public) attention. After all, these schools “have reputations, brands and interests to protect in a crowded educational market”.
Why are elite private schools in the spotlight this time?
Chanel Contos, formerly a student at Kambala, began a petition last month for “sexual consent education” to be taught much earlier. Her petition was swamped with testimonies from young women, some of whom say they were 13 when they were sexually assaulted by their male peers. Now Ms Contos will meet with principals to address sexual assault claims that have affected hundreds of former students.
But it is the culture which matters. And when it comes to researching culture in elite private schools access is always a challenge.
My research in three elite private boys’ schools reveals that part of this social machinery is the male-centric rusted-on cultural practices of these schools. For example, the gender segregation, the hyper-competition and the pre-eminence of rugged sport continue to manifest a culture of masculinity that is both toxic and excluding of females. This marginalisation is a critical aspect of how female teachers in these schools are disempowered, because masculine ways of being and masculine authority are privileged first and foremost, and become the social logics that female teachers must navigate.
The reports of sexual assaults amongst elite private school girls that have recently broke out in the media have been touted as a ‘wake-up call’ for the privileged all-boys’ private schools who have been named in these allegations. For critics who have previously argued that the “education sector [has] yet to learn lessons of #MeToo”, perhaps this is really the moment when everyone actually wakes up. I can’t help but be sceptical about this possibility. A better education for boys is laudable, but also suggests that violence against women and girls is a simply a question of the improving boys’ knowledge about these matters. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In this final calculation, dealing with gender violence and oppression in elite private schools might be a question of dealing with powerful interests. I suspect that these interests, and the advocates for these schools, will aim to ride out the media storm and deflect attention so that they can get back to business as usual. Maybe that’s too cynical, but I doubt that the recent allegations made visible in the media is really new news to these schools’ leaders.
However, If the Australian community is prepared to admit that the usual tropes of ‘boys will be boys’ will no longer suffice, then perhaps there might be an appetite for real change. I do not believe that this change will come from better schooling programmes alone, because the hyper-commodification of schooling, parent pressure, and sedimented school practices are significant social architectures that will continue to generate silences around the profane aspects of elite private schoolboy culture. Instead, it may just be the time to consider even more radical thinking. This could begin with asking whether elite private boys’ schools have any place in a gender-just world, but it could also begin with asking what education might look like if it had an ethics of justice at its core.
Dr George Variyan is a lecturer in Master of Educational Leadership in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His background includes teaching, learning and leading in schools in Australia and overseas. George’s engagement in research is based on a critically orientated sociology, which explores human agency in the relationship between education and society. Key interests include educational sociology, gender, social justice, and ethics.
Governments must stop telling teachers to scale up practice by copying strategies developed for another school’s context. The latest change in NSW education policy again confuses teacher learning from their own evidence-based practice with guidance from practice developed elsewhere.
Scaling up won’t work for improved learning outcomes. Here’s why. The context of our schools is significant for developing evidence-based practice. Trotting out: “Here’s what worked in this A ranked school” is as pointless as mandating protocols across subjects or year levels within one school.
And let’s not even get into the contentious lack of clarity on measures of the ‘most successful schools’. UNSW Professor Pasi Sahlberg told us this exactly three years ago. He cautioned teachers to ‘avoid urban legends’ in his 2018 book FinnishED Leadership. After decisive longitudinal research in Australia, the call for no more reform hangs on hope.
But hope just won’t cut it with the latest proposed Successful Schools Model for NSW. The first point the model makes (evidence-based practice) and last point (scaling of practice) are counter-productive, counter-research and counter-teacher-led-inquiry in context.
The hopes educators have for fewer administrative burdens and practical support are illusive. The government says it requires teachers to work from an evidence base yet overall policy selectively draws on the wording of research without a concrete offer of structural change.
Governments must action the well-worn call for time and money for teacher professional learning (TPL) where it happens – in schools.
The complexity and time required for TPL are highlighted in the recent findings and recommendations from the independent Gallop inquiry Valuing the teaching profession commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation. A case in point – will teachers have time to respond via survey on the recommendations of the report? The imperative for government is clear. TPL requires significant structural change to provide the allocated time and salary increases for the essential collective work efforts of the teaching profession.
Now, complexity is not the same as difficulty. More difficult means that the understanding and skills become harder by building from the same basic level, that is, the examples become harder. More complex means that the understanding and skills require multiple relations or interactions within context.
So for teachers, complexity occurs among individual learners in one class, between classes when teaching the same subject, or across different learner developmental levels. This complexity occurs throughout the teaching and learning process, which is why pedagogical models continue to be grappled with by both teachers and researchers.
Teachers develop expertise together in dealing with complexity of practice throughout their career. However, teacher collective efficacy (CE) doesn’t come from being a ‘diva’. A diva school or teacher is inwardly focused on their own development and outwardly focused on achievement in competing with others. This undermines empowered teacher learning through a collective practice-based inquiry that meets all individual needs. Enacted personal professional learning (EPPL) requires approaches that develop professional trust in context with colleagues and enable collectively successful practice to flourish. Communities of teachers working in situ on longitudinal TPL programmes draw on teacher’s individuality to harness the collective learning. This work is both difficult and contextually complex – and ongoing. Articulating the thinking of teachers and their students is a continuing challenge in developing a shared language of learning. One of the positives teachers were able to take from the COVID-19 crisis is that it highlighted the difficulty and complexity of teacher work and learning to those uninitiated to the profession.
Challenges and achievements of teacher professional learning
One teacher professional learning (TPL) programme that was conducted across nine different school contexts enabled teachers to develop strategies through evidence-based practice. Cultivating a schoolwide pedagogy: Achievements and challenges of shifting teacher learning on thinking details the findings and recommendations. Various combinations of teaching teams from either a learning stage, curriculum area, or cross-curricular areas considered their own practice for cultivating a schoolwide pedagogy. The longitudinal time frame allowed teachers to trial a variety of strategies drawn from the formal and informal research literature. Teachers used a shared pedagogical model to understand the scope of learning thinking through an inquiry-based approach. Evident in the creation of pedagogical protocols was the need for teachers working together in context. The impact on learning outcomes was evidenced in the shared thinking on and language of learning for students and teachers.
The teaching profession needs allocated learning time and commensurate salary increases
Governments must make the overdue structural change for the teaching profession. Workloads need to allocate time for TPL and salaries of teachers need to be increased to recognise the increasingly difficult and complex work of the profession. This action is supported by the research and best-practice of TPL.
Teaching as the learning profession models the use of research to develop evidence-based strategies through inquiry into practice. In some jurisdictions internationally, TPL is included in the employment hours resulting in reduced face-to-face teaching hours and the use of agreed standards to progress individual development plans. In jurisdictions like NSW Australia, TPL is completed in addition to teaching loads with a government mandated approach to PD requirements. This does not allow for the potential achievements of changed practice through the collective work efforts of teachers.
The end of the 2020 school year for teachers was difficult whilst still coping with the constant changes to COVID-19 protocols. In NSW, instead of a steady start to the 2021 school year, teachers were faced with understanding new teacher professional development (PD) maintenance requirements. Teachers now have limited choices with the drastically reduced accredited courses through the decimating de-registration of providers. The NSW government’s action has resulted in the economic damage experienced by many de-registered providers. TPL once offered by these providers is no longer available to meet the diverse needs of teachers and the required re-engineered approach for a blended online and face-to-face environment. Significantly, the bureaucratic approach to PD belies the complexity and time required for long term sustainable TPL that impacts teaching practice and results in improved learning outcomes for students.
What can the time and money do for teacher learning in context?
Below are three identified areas of teacher influence on their own practice and that of colleagues for improved outcomes.
1. Individual and team thinking built through teacher collective efficacy (CE)
Developing new efforts with collective thinking to influence schoolwide improvement is challenging. The constraints on teacher’s time have developed practices of cooperatively dividing the work effort. Teacher collective efficacy (CE) is often misrepresented as collaborative task generation or cooperative marking or reviewing of student work. CE entails the work of teaching teams to garner collective contributions for:
developing understanding of observations on learning,
critiquing task requirements,
assessing student work samples,
creating reasoned strategies to implement and evaluation in context,
expanding and clarifying individual teacher thinking with colleagues, and
collectively developing practice in context.
2. A pedagogical model to support evidence-based inquiry and performance predictions
TPL that offers a pedagogical model enables teachers to predict performance and map progress of learning thinking. Trialling new strategies in classrooms requires allocated time and structural support to overcome various challenges. This is evident for teachers who struggle to change entrenched routines, as well as teachers currently working out of their curriculum learning area or with a new stage level, or those early career teachers still resolving the theory-practice divide.
3. Teacher and student language and thinking on learning
TPL situated in context gives meaning to teacher’s practice and enables shared findings to address what mattered to teachers. Over a longitudinal implementation time frame, teachers are able to track changes in the collective thinking on the influences of student learning and identify changes in practice school-wide. Developing student reasoning and a language of learning in context requires dedicated time for TPL.
The essential call to action for governments is clear. Reward teachers for their collective efforts in learning and teaching through salary increases and allocated time in workloads.
Carmel Patterson, PhD, is Director of Professional Learning and Pedagogy at Stella Maris College Manly and an Industry Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. She has published in her research areas of teacher professional learning and qualitative methodology. Carmel consults on professional learning courses provided by schools, universities, and private enterprise and has a wide array of professional networks.
The first major independent inquiry into NSW public teacher’s workloads for 17 years revealed soaring workloads and exploding hours.
The Gallop Inquiry (‘Valuing the Teaching Profession’), the first major independent inquiry into NSW public school teachers’ work since 2004, called for a 15 per cent increase in salary and more release time for teachers.
The release of the Inquiry’s findings follows an announcement last year by NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell which flagged a partial rollback of Local Schools, Local Decisions (LSLD) to better ‘strike the balance’ between autonomy, accountability and support. The Minister claimed that the LSLD reforms, introduced in NSW public education nearly 10 years ago, had ‘given schools too much freedom’.
A decade after LSLD was implemented, it had become evident that there were no improved educational outcomes across the State’s education system. It has also been suggested that this devolutionary policy negatively impacted upon the working conditions of school leaders and teachers. Our analysis suggests that LSLD’s problems are not due to autonomy running wild, but burdens produced by bureaucracy and accountability overload. Despite popular claims that greater school autonomy and local decision-making improves public education, there is very little evidence of this.
The LSLD reforms were introduced off the back of criticisms of the State’s perceived ‘centralised’ and ‘one size fits all’ approach to school management. The Department of Education cited the lack of local authority and decision-making that principals had in their schools. The policy also intended to address declining student performance and widening social disadvantage in schools.
Principals were given discretion over managing their resources – 70 per cent of the State’s public education budget and making every second staffing appointment at their school – in consultation with their communities. A cornerstone of the policy was a new needs-based approach to school funding, introduced through the Resource Allocation Model, that would focus on addressing inequity and disadvantage in schools. Little autonomy was given to schools over curriculum and pedagogy, however.
‘Reforming’ a complex and demanding profession
Our collective research over the last 10 years has traced the impact of devolved school reform in New South Wales.
In a large workload study conducted via the NSW Teachers’ Federation, with a response rate of 18,234 teaching staff, 87% of teachers and principals reported an increase in working hours over the 5 years since LSLD was introduced. More than 97% reported an increase in administrative duties.
Increased demands were also reported as threatening teaching and student learning. Some 89% of teachers reported that teaching and learning was hindered by their high workload, while 91% reported this was affected by new administrative demands introduced by the Department.
Meanwhile precarity in the teaching profession has grown, with the number of temporary teachers now accounting for approximately 20% of the teacher workforce, while the proportion of permanent employment has declined.
This research on teachers’ workload and working hours has helped to inform the findings of the Gallop Inquiry, which also found teachers struggling under the demands of devolved school reform. Significantly, the Inquiry Report concluded that LSLD had failed.
These findings resonate with the Department’s own criticisms of the LSLD policy found in their final evaluation report released late last year.
While school leaders generally agreed that LSLD had a positive impact on the extent to which schools could make local decisions and hire staff that best met their needs, this was overshadowed by more concerning findings.
The Department of Education report estimates about 90% of principals felt that LSLD had not simplified administrative processes. Since LSLD was introduced, there has been no overall improvement in those student outcomes measured in the report, like in NAPLAN or HSC results, with some results worsening. Problematically, no outcome or performance measures for LSLD were defined when the policy was initially developed.
A report from the NSW Auditor-General’s Office also found that there were no clear targets set for needs-based equity funding or standardised ways to report on how the funding was being spent by schools. This has made it difficult to determine the policy’s effect on reducing the impact of disadvantage or determine whether it led to any student benefit.
Evidence also suggests that over the LSLD period inequity in school funding, rather than being reduced, actually increased. This suggests that resourcing and support for many schools is inadequate and likely to impinge on their abilities to help themselves through autonomy reforms.
A policy backflip
Yet another reform is replacing NSW’s LSLD – the School Success Model that aims to provide:
evidence-based guidance on effective practice that improves student outcomes
more support for schools that need it most
less administrative burden
stronger and clearer responsibilities for schools and the system
recognition and the scaling of practice of our most successful schools.
The fate of LSLD has put a spotlight on the need to free up schools’ time to focus on teaching, learning and leading. The School Success Model claims to have a new focus that ‘balances stronger support for schools to make evidence-based decisions with clearer responsibilities for performance targets’. This intends to be achieved through a range of ‘ambitious yet reasonable targets’ to improve areas like school attendance and literacy and numeracy while redressing under-performing schools.
What this means in practice is difficult to know. It appears to promote what Michael Fullan calls ‘the wrong drivers’ in Australian education policy – including a focus on accountability instead of capacity building; and pursuit of fragmented rather than systemic changes. It is also clear that this does not present the bold, system wide reform that many are calling for. The systemic structural problems of our system have recently been analysed in a report by the Gonski Institute for Education, and suggest that major state/federal reform is required. Failing to attend to the larger systemic problems means that the School Success Model may follow the same trajectory of its predecessor LSLD.
On the basis of our research, we would hope that the School Success Model constitutes greater support for, rather than simply demands upon, the NSW teaching profession, and a reduced administrative burden.
The Department has been resoundingly criticised for the stream of endless reform with no useful purpose. If the School Success Model is to work, it must offer greater support for the NSW teaching profession and a reduced administrative burden.
Teachers aren’t seeking more change. They just want – and need – the time needed to engage in quality teaching and learning practice.
From left to right:
Rachel Wilson is Associate Professor at The Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter@RachelWilson100
Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in the Work and Organisational Studies Discipline at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of school teachers’ work and working conditions.
Meghan Stacey is a former high school English and drama teacher and current lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s primary research interests sit at the intersection of sociological theory, policy sociology and the experiences of those subject to systems of education. Meghan’s PhD was conferred in April 2018. Meghan is on Twitter@meghanrstacey
Mihajla Gavinis a lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work. Mihajla is on Twitter@Mihajla_Gavin
A young student reveals he’s had “regular, valuable and powerful talks” about consent and respect but they haven’t had the “intended and crucial impact. One educator explains what should be done.
By Georgia Carr
I have sat in sex education classrooms and been amazed by what I’ve seen.
Teachers who taught consent in great detail – from legal definitions to enthusiastic consent to how to access help if something does go wrong. I have seen students take these principles and apply them to scenarios involving questions of age, alcohol consumption and online bullying. I have seen teachers who were inclusive and respectful of sexuality and gender diversity, and who made space for students with different cultural and religious beliefs. And they managed to do it while a researcher and her camera sat in the room, and while a global pandemic changed their teaching situation every other week.
But calls for more thorough and earlier consent education, following allegations of sexual assault and harassment in Parliament House and Australian private schools, show that not every student sits in this kind of classroom.
Getting to the root of sexual assault and sexual harassment means teaching comprehensive sex education and educating people of all genders on the importance of consent, and our schools are the best place to do it.
Why should we teach consent in schools?
Research tells us that schools are the best place for sex education, with the strongest evidence for things like increased use of condoms and contraception but also social outcomes like better knowledge and acceptance of diverse sexualities and, crucially, better attitudes around consent and gender-based violence. School sex education is also one of the most trusted sources of information on sexual health, even in the age of the internet. Even though almost 80% of young Australians use the internet to find answers, they still rate school programs as one of the most trusted sources of information, competing with ‘mum’ for first place in the five national surveys conducted to 2013.
What does consent education look like?
Consent education is generally assumed to mean (1) consent to sexual intercourse and (2) the legal definition of consent. While both of these should be part of consent education, they also only scratch the surface.
Firstly, consent is something that exists beyond sexual intercourse. It applies in all sexual encounters, from kissing to touching to sexting, and students can learn about how to seek and express consent even if they are not interested in sex yet. But consent also applies outside of sexual contact altogether. It applies when you ask a friend’s permission to borrow their car, or when you offer to make them a cup of tea. The concept of consent can be taught even to young children: “do you want to give grandma a hug or wave goodbye?” In 2018, sex educator Deanne Carson was mocked for suggesting people can model consent with babies when changing a nappy, but bodily autonomy and respect are exactly the kind of values we should be raising children with. If 8% of children experience sexual abuse before their 15th birthday and 28% of students experience unwanted sex by the end of high school, learning about consent in years 9 and 10 is too late.
Secondly, consent education often focuses on legality – at what age and under what circumstances sexual activity is legal or illegal. We are right to educate students on this, but knowing the legal definition of a term does not on its own change behaviours, any more than saying it is illegal to consume alcohol before the age of 18 stops underage drinking. Consent education must also include understanding the fundamental principles that underlie those laws – bodily autonomy, mutual respect, and enthusiasm and willingness rather than the absence of a “no”.
Consent education should include:
Giving & receiving enthusiastic affirmative consent, that consent is more than the absence of “no”
How to check in regularly, not assuming that yes in the past means yes now
Giving and recognising verbal and non-verbal cues
Understanding what compromises consent, for example drugs and alcohol or an imbalance of power
What does the curriculum say about consent?
The Australian Curriculum on health and physical education includes topics on respectful relationships, including negotiating consent, managing relationships online and offline, and dealing with relationships when there is an imbalance of power (see this recent article in The Conversation for more detail). But there can be a significant difference between what is written in the curriculum and what happens in the classroom.
Curricula will necessarily be quite general: they are designed to be flexible enough to meet the needs of different states and territories, local communities, and individual schools and teachers. This is of course an advantage; schools and teachers can tailor the curriculum to suit their needs. But this also means that a number of factors could interfere.
Given the choice, and a chronic lack of time and resources, teachers understandably stick with what fits with their existing beliefs, interests and practices. Understanding the implementation of these curricula means looking at actual sex education lessons.
What actually happens in sex education classrooms?
This is exactly the question I am trying to answer in my PhD. I have been lucky enough to observe and record real sex education lessons in a NSW high school, and I have seen phenomenal sex educators at work.
But everyone is likely to be on their best behaviour when a camera is in the room, and I know that what I have seen is not every student’s or every teacher’s experience. Sex educators operate in an incredibly politicised climate and may risk becoming a target of abuse themselves. Students may not get the information they’re looking for, especially when it comes to consent, pleasure and LGBTQIA relationships.
There is huge variation in how sex education is delivered. But research like this can help us see what is really going on and can generate resources to help teachers feel truly prepared and empowered to tackle the big questions students throw at them. If we want to really see a change, more researchers need to join me in unpacking sex education. We still have so much to learn.
Georgia Carr is researching sex education for her PhD at the University of Sydney.Her research interests include discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and gender and sexuality.
Social media platform Facebook pulled the plug on Australian news last week after a tussle between the government and the digital giant. What does that mean for Australian educators and students? What are the ways we can combat misinformation and disinformation? And how far along are we in the struggle to teach media literacy (answers from a professor and a PhD student)? How important is it for students to create their own content? PLUS read an excerpt from Kid Reporter, a handbook for young investigators (and their teachers) by Saffron Howden and Dhana Quinn; and Peter Greste’s review of the book.
Why we must foster media literacy in Australian classrooms
By Michael Dezuanni, Queensland University of Technology
Media literacy has gained a great deal of attention in recent years due to ongoing controversies about the circulation of fake news on social media platforms. Most recently, disinformation about the COVID 19 pandemic has been at the forefront of public discussion in Australia, as high profile media celebrities and a federal politician have shared misleading information about false COVID causes and cures. Donald Trump’s fabricated claims of election fraud in the United States, and circulation of disinformation about arson attacks during the 2019/2020 bushfire season in Australia are other high-profile examples. Meanwhile, the power that social media platforms wield in society has never been clearer than in the recent Facebook news ban in Australia. In each of these cases, there have been calls for media literacy to be ramped up as a public policy and education response.
Although media literacy is often seen as a novel response to media controversies, there is a long history of media literacy education in Australia. Its roots date back to at least the 1950s when University of Tasmania educator W.H. Perkins worked to introduce film appreciation education into the classroom. In the 1960s, educators in Victoria and South Australia fostered film and media analysis in English and Art classes, and the Australian Teachers of Film Appreciation (later Australian Teachers of Media) was established. During the 1980s, most State Departments of Education introduced media education curricula and policy documents. Currently, Australia is one of the few countries in the world to have a preschool to year ten scope and sequence for media literacy education in the form of Media Arts in the Australian Curriculum. In addition, English teachers are encouraged to include media texts in their curricula, and English in the Australian Curriculum specifically cites news production and analysis within content elaborations from year 5 and up.
Despite the existence of the current curriculum opportunities, and a proud history of media literacy education in Australia, though, it is included in fewer Australian classrooms than one might expect.
Michael Dezzuani
Over the past five years, I have collaborated with Dr Tanya Notley from Western Sydney University to investigate news literacy, particularly with a focus on young people.
Our surveys of Australian children and young people’s news media experiences conducted in 2017 and 2020 show that only one in five young people have experienced news analysis in the classroom, and only about one in three has created a news story at school. Meanwhile, our study of Australian teachers shows that while they overwhelmingly say it is important to teach about bias and misinformation in the classroom, most also say there are many barriers to including media literacy lessons.
Teachers cite lack of knowledge about media literacy, lack of professional development and timetable constraints as key barriers to the implementation of media literacy in the classroom. There is no doubt that studying the media requires teachers to acquire at least some subject specific language and knowledge. In addition, media literacy work often includes media production, involving the creation of still images and video, with a necessity to combine these with specialist software. Teachers often lack the technological knowledge to include media production in the classroom.
On a more positive note, it is possible to make media with readily available technologies like tablet computers, and many teachers already involve their students in media literacy–like activities without realising it. Often, Digital Technologies curriculum tasks can be slightly altered to also meet Media Arts requirements. Professional development materials, and classroom resources are also increasingly available to schools; a recent example is the Alannah and Madeline Foundation’s Media Literacy Lab materials.
An ongoing challenge, then, is to work out how we can support teachers to include media literacy education in their already busy classrooms. The goal of our research is to support these efforts through the development of resources such as our Framework for Media Literacy Education, and through supporting the efforts of the recently formed Australian Media Literacy Alliance. We see these as essential initiatives given that our media environment is likely to become even more complex and ubiquitous in people’s lives in the years to come.
Michael Dezzuani is a professor in the School of Creative Practice, Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology.
I began to see the words and ideas of far-right extremists being repeated back to me as truth
By Stephanie Wescott, Monash University
This week’s retaliatory action by Facebook to remove Australian news sources sparked conversations around the impact social media news-sharing has had on our ability to identify credible news.
In Victorian schools, arming students with the ability to analyse and identify tactics of persuasion in writing is a substantial component of the English curriculum. The VCE English Study Design (VCAA, 2014) stipulates the key knowledges required to meet the outcomes for Area of Study 2, Analysing and presenting argument, including an understanding of:
the ways authors construct arguments to position audiences; and
the features of written, spoken and multimodal texts used by authors to position audiences
However, the texts provided to students in the exam, and for practise in classrooms, are fictionalised pieces that often bear little resemblance to texts students encounter outside the classroom. Unless teachers expose students to a range of media texts throughout their junior school education, and unless schools offer subjects specifically addressing media literacy, assumptions made about digital natives’ inherent abilities to assess the trustworthiness of information they encounter online can leave them with dangerous knowledge gaps.
During my career as an English teacher, I became increasingly concerned about my students’ lack of media literacy, which culminated in specific vulnerabilities around trusting misinformation, believing conspiracy theories, and, in some cases, following radical right-wing personalities on YouTube and being seduced by their rhetoric. I began to see the words and ideas of far-right extremists being repeated back to me as truth, and a disinterest in engaging with clarifications about why their sources weren’t trustworthy. Explanations offered to students around the unreliability of the information they were consuming often found us falling deeper into conspiracy rhetoric, with students repeating anti-mainstream media suspicions and beliefs around the alleged hegemony of left-wing and/or feminist media.
I attempted, across all year levels, to equip them with the skills and knowledge to not only understand how persuasive language positions them as an audience, but also the deeper, more complex layers of bias and political leanings that underpin the media they consume.
As an English teacher, I considered training my students to understand the cultural and political spectrum that sits alongside our media landscape as a crucial life skill.
Stephanie Wescott
In 2021, we are deep within the era of post-truth, and the COVID pandemic has offered rich opportunities for misinformation to flourish online. We must focus specifically on preparing young people to understand the Australian media landscape, not only as an essential component of their literacy education, but as a life skill.
Stephanie Wescott is a PhD candidate at Monash University Faculty of Education, researching policy and practice in the post-truth era.
Adults made the mess and should clean it up
By Naomi Barnes, Queensland University of Technology
The challenge to become critical creators of content should not just extend to those who intend to join the media industry but to all users of social media who are all involved in the production and consumption of media every day. These are the grown-ups.
The adults made the mess: Zuckerberg, Murdoch, Morrison, Trump and the rest. Adults created the content, including the algorithms, consumed the cat pictures and shared the misinformation. As Steven Watson and I recently demonstrated, adults also deliberately engage in populist tactics designed to pit one group against another. Adults need to be responsible for cleaning up the mess that led to last week’s moves by Facebook. That begins with critical media literacy.
Critical consumption of content should also show that a lot of the noise about the evils of social media drowns out examples of the good that happens on the platforms. Many groups, like IndigenousX, already engage in the critical production of media content and we should be looking to them for models of how to interact and produce online content. Social media has also provided outlets for people to keep connected during the pandemic but has long been there for those who are housebound due to trauma or disability. Social media has also been instrumental in putting social issues on the map.
We should also note that children are already involved in the critical production of content so positioning media literacy as something for the kids to learn ignores a lot they already know. Young people are already breaking apart old structures of education. What else is the school strike for climate except young people declaring that school is too didactic and not critically active? As Greta Thunberg challenges adults to clean up the climate mess they made, so too should adults take the time to be informed and critical creators and focus on cleaning up their online act while they are critiquing Facebook’s.
Naomi Barnes is a lecturer in Literacy, Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology
Review of Kid Reporter
By Peter Greste, University of Queensland
One of the paradoxes of modern life – and one we were forced to confront last week – is that in a world where we suffocate under a firehose of information whenever we open our smart phones, it is becoming harder and harder to find trustworthy news.
Facebook’s decision to ban links to Australian news services, over its row with the Australian Government’s News Media Bargaining Code, created what one critic described as a ‘fact-free zone’. That might be a bit harsh on all the other well-meaning businesses, clubs and organisations who rely on the social media giant to communicate with their followers, but it did force us to confront some increasingly vexing questions: How do we distinguish quality news from the bad stuff? What would our world look like without reliable, trustworthy news services?
And what really is ‘news’ anyway?
Even a megasaurus the size of Facebook, with its banks of nerds and vast technical resources, struggled to define it. They not only blocked the usual suspects like ABC News, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald; they also took down the pages of the Bureau of Meteorology, Western Australia’s fire and emergency services, and a host of seemingly random non-news organisations including my own School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.
That is why the book, Kid Reporter, by Saffron Howden and Dhana Quinn, feels so timely. (Subtitled, “the secret to breaking news” it ought to have instant appeal to any kid with a rebellious streak; coincidentally exactly the kind of trait that often makes a great journalist.)
As they point out in the introduction, the book isn’t just for budding reporters. It works for anyone who cares about what is going on in the world around them, and anyone who consumes the media. In this digized world, that means just about everyone.
The book provides a thorough, thoughtful and easily digestible toolkit for any young reporter, with plenty of takeaways and tips for identifying what a news story looks like, how to gather information, and put it all together into a finished product. None of that ought to be a surprise though, especially from a pair who both have admirable careers as journalists
themselves. But its real value is in the way it asks all its readers – the grown-ups included – to approach the far wider subject of ‘news’, both as producers and consumers.
“One of the best ways to learn about the media is to become a media creator yourself,” Howden and Quinn write. “If you know how to find accurate information for your own news story, you are far more likely to know if another person’s work is based on facts… There’s almost no chance you’ll be fooled by ‘fake news’ again.”
For me, the book really gains traction in Part III, “How to be a news detective”. It takes a deep dive into the kind of approach that experienced journalists would be expected to bring to their craft, and that seems to be missing in far too many newsrooms. The approach is rooted in the philosophy of critical thinking, asking its readers to not only question and confirm basic facts, but also to think about things like the motives of the people presenting information; its context and purpose; the difference between opinion, fact and analysis; and the authenticity of apparently conclusive photographic evidence.
(Coincidentally, creating a media literacy program with critical thinking at its heart, is also the approach that a group of colleagues and I have taken in designing a journalism course for high school students.. More news on that soon.)
As a journalist with more than 30 years of experience, I thought I knew my craft well. But I am humble enough to admit that even I learned a thing or two from the vivid examples that Howden and Quinn give their readers, and the approach they ask them to bring to the business of assessing and presenting information.
You don’t need to be a budding journalist to find Kid Reporter worthwhile though. It is illuminating for anyone who wants to understand what quality journalism should look like. Mark Zuckerberg would do well to grab a copy.
UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communication, School of Communication and Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland
Extract from:
Kid Reporter: The Secret to Breaking News
by Saffron Howden and Dhana Quinn
SLEUTH AT WORK
It’s time to get out the magnifying glass. Before you can call yourself a reporter, you need to understand where information comes from, how it’s created, how it’s understood and what’s done with it. Journalists are critical thinkers. That means turning over every bit of evidence, examining it, and then making an informed decision about its value.
We looked at sources [later in the book] but now we need to dive deeper. How do you tell the difference between a rumour, a lie and a fact? When does a statement become an opinion? Is it okay to have various perspectives, or points of view, on the same event?
People have different ideas about the world. These are formed by family and friends, school, culture, heritage, religion, community, even government. All these influences on your life affect the way you see information and how you pass it on. And that is the same for every person in the world.
Being aware of this helps us appreciate other people and respect their views, even when we disagree. It helps us understand our own perspectives and lets us sort through and share information in a fairer, truthful way.
HOW TO BE A NEWS DETECTIVE
To be media literate involves knowing the difference between reliable and unreliable sources, being able to fact-check claims and spot fake news and advertisements.
Developing these skills is an important part of being an engaged and informed citizen in the 21st century.
Who said what and why?
All forms of knowledge come from somewhere. Information includes any and all details about a situation, person, thing or event. But someone has to create that information, whether it’s written, spoken, in a report, part of a video or in a graphic.
As a news detective you have to find out who created it, try to understand why it was produced and identify the target – who the creator wants to reach with the information.
These are clues to help us understand all messages. And their meaning can change depending on their context.
Kid Reporter: The Secret to Breaking News by Saffron Howden and Dhana Quinn, published by NewSouthPress
Universities all over Australia are welcoming back students – but what will the learning experience look like?
The Australian National University’s vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt told staff last week:: “We need our teachers to be more than just people who stand at the front of the lecture hall or before a video camera. We need them to connect with their students in richer ways. This might include fewer lectures, and those that we do deliver, will be memorable and sophisticated, utilising technology.”
Campus Morning Mail reported his remarks: “It would be easy to make the university into an on-line supermarket of inexpensively delivered courses and divert the savings into research or other funds.”
And The Guardian reported: “Australian universities are prioritising ‘Instagram-worthy’ experiences on campus, while cutting building costs and face-to-face lectures, according to an external report on university digitisation. Darren McKee, the chief operating officer of Murdoch University in Western Australia was quoted in the report saying: ‘The face-to-face mass lecture is all but dead’.”
We asked educators to respond to these comments. Shirley Alexander, deputy vice-chancellor. University of Technology Sydney; Sarah O’Shea, director of the National Centre of Student Equity in Higher Education at Curtin University; Marcus O’Donnell, director, Cloud Learning Futures at Deakin University; Sally Male, chair in engineering education, University of Western Australia; and Amy Wong, research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, formerly of the University of Queensland.
Have lectures ever really been alive?
By Shirley Alexander: Avid readers of higher education news will have noticed a recent run of articles proclaiming the lecture as “dead”, with universities reported to be ceasing expensive building programs, and/or no longer building “lecture theatres”. But have lectures ever really been alive?
To answer this question we need to explore what we actually mean when we use the term ‘lecture?’ One form (and one which I’m sure many have experienced) is the practice of conveying information. This can range from someone engaged in a one way communication of knowledge, perhaps even reading Powerpoint slides to an audience (who presumably already know how to read) to someone who is incredibly inspiring and motivating to listen to. Do students learn from these? It depends on what the learner does, and how he/she/they perceives the context.
Another teaching activity sometimes described as a lecture, is one in which the teacher gives a clear explanation of an important concept, and then asks students to apply that knowledge to solve a problem or complete an exercise that makes use of that concept and creation of personal meaning. Students might submit their own responses and then have the benefit of seeing a variation of responses from their peers, after which they might refine their own understanding. Do students learn from these experiences? It depends on what the learner does, and how he/she/they perceives the context.
My original question “have lectures ever really been alive?” can only really be answered by analysis of whether they have led to good student learning outcomes. The prevailing evidence is that the more active learning approaches to ‘lectures’ as described in the second scenario are much more likely to achieve that. But I also sound a note of caution as hinted at above. No teaching method can guarantee learning independent of what the learner does and how they perceive the context of their learning.
There is a certain amount of ‘invisibility’ around the resourcing of online teaching and delivery
The best way lectures can be delivered in the new environment is by adopting a diversity of modalities of delivery including face-to-face, online with small supportive groups. It is offering students that choice between different delivery modes that is most optimal.
Effective teaching and learning can be delivered online and face-to-face but academics need both time and additional specialist skills to do that. Simply, you can’t just deliver the face-to-face content and put that online. It won’t be effective. Creating online content is time consuming and may require fundamental changes in delivery. Academics may need to shift their existing skill set and also need recognition of the time this involves. To do that, they need additional support.
There is a certain amount of ‘invisibility’ around the resourcing of online teaching and delivery – having taught online for over a decade I know how significant this time commitment can be. Recent research also indicates this, such as Cathy Stone’s work in this regard. Aside from the time commitment, there are also equity implications. Academics and educational developers need to remain mindful of the context of learners. It is recognising that not all learners have high level NBN, high uploads and downloads or access to even basic technology – content needs to be delivered according to the context of the learners within the institution. Yes, we must have interactive strategies but we also need to recognise that not everyone can be online at the same time. It’s more important to offer options and flexibility in order to make learning truly equitable . We cannot assume that all learners are the same or have access to the same equipment. Students from a range of equity backgrounds have indicated the diversity of ways used to access online content for their studies which can range from driving on-campus, sitting in McDonalds’ car parks or using friends or family. Some may only have pay as you go data plans which are notoriously more expensive and may often be shared with other family members. Hence, offering a diversity of modalities of delivery is key, a combination of online, face to face and also, asynchronous mediums such as recordings, podcasts and static downloads
To be effective in online delivery and development – professional development for academic staff and a greater investment in educational technologists and technology is also needed urgently. The educational technology support staff are absolutely key; they understand how to maximise available platforms and how to ensure that all students are getting the same learner experience.
With colleagues, I have interviewed over 1,000 students from a diversity of backgrounds. Overwhelmingly, what makes a positive learning experience for them is often just the accessibility of people to talk to. It can be as simple as knowing who to contact if they have a problem, just knowing there is someone at the other end of the line can make all the difference for both retention and progression.
Sarah O’Shea is a Professor and Director of the National Centre of Student Equity in Higher Education at Curtin University. Sarah has over 25 years experience teaching in universities as well as the VET and Adult Education sector, she has also published widely on issues related to educational access and equity.
By Marcus O’Donnell Higher education is currently emerging from a fraught year of constraints and experiments where COVID19 forced a move away from on campus experiences to online only delivery. This seems to have emboldened some institutions to finally bite the bullet and scrap traditional lectures. So is the lecture dead?
The reality is that the lecture has been dead or dying for a very long time. Students have largely been voting with their feet. One lecturer in my own institution famously went viral a few years ago when he tweeted a picture of his empty lecture hall at the start of trimester with a cranky rant.
The persistence of lectures is largely driven by the fact that they are the most economical way for universities to deliver an in-person experience to large numbers of students. We know however that it is not an effective or engaging form of learning. Active learning where students are set tasks, asked to solve problems, asked to engage with their peers – not only mimics how we learn in real professional situations – it is now widely confirmed as a more effective form of learning.
Over the last few decades Australian universities have all committed themselves to turning out graduates who are digitally literate, critical thinkers, problem solvers, and excellent communicators. These are the learning outcomes that employers constantly demand. We cannot deliver these outcomes in programs which are primarily lecture-based because this is not just about “knowing stuff” it’s about “doing stuff”.
The danger in the post-COVID transition for higher education is that institutions take the worst of our old methodologies (ie hours of one way information transmission) and simply transpose this to online recordings. At Deakin we have adopted what we call a “Cloud First” philosophy. This takes as a given that all students engage with the university through digital tools – one quarter of our students are fully online, but all students who attend our physical campuses also engage with learning materials online. We have become very adept at producing these online learning materials in smart engaging formats, in our best courses we match this with active learning seminars where students learn together in more interactive ways. But transformation to this way of teaching and learning is hard and expensive. It takes leadership and resourcing.
Lectures have become the key-way universities organise staff time allocation and physical campuses have traditionally been organised around large lecture theatres, so until we address these elephantine structural issues lectures will persist, just like the walking dead.
Students still benefit from explanations and demonstrations
By Sally Male Universities have diverse student demographics, teachers, teaching and research strengths, campuses, relationships with employers and communities, and funding models. The meaning or existence of classes such as ‘lectures’, ‘tutorials’, and ‘practicals’ varies by discipline.
How we teach must adapt to changes with requirements, contexts, resources and constraints. Desirable graduate attributes have changed as work and society have changed. For example, the significance of addressing sustainability has increased in recent decades. Technology has provided opportunities. Students now access numerous resources online. Simulations, models, virtual and augmented reality and online interactions are used in teaching and learning. In 2020, constraints changed due to COVID and we adapted.
Requirements for diverse students in diverse disciplines in diverse universities will be diverse. Requirements include equitable opportunity and support to learn in order to lead a successful life contributing to society, and inclusive opportunity to develop identity. Students still benefit from explanations and demonstrations. In classes that might be called lectures, teachers complement explanations and demonstrations with active, interactive learning activities. For example, students consider carefully designed problems and are led in discussion about the common alternative conceptions revealed by these.
By taking advantage of technology, and with thoughtful implementation, blended synchronous classes are likely to be one element of the range of classes and learning activities that meet future requirements. Face-to face classes can be convenient and involve rich experiences and opportunities to establish relationships for a school-leaver living in college. A student with work and dependents might prefer to join online. A student outside the dominant cultural group might prefer to ask questions via chat despite sitting in class. A student with poor vision might attend face-to-face and watch their laptop more easily than a projected image. Rather than abandon lectures, in many circumstances, and especially to achieve equity and inclusion, there is opportunity for blended (face-to-face, and online), synchronous (with students participating concurrently) lectures, involving instruction and carefully designed, active learning.
Why we need live lectures
By Amy (Wai Yee) Wong Live lectures provide an invaluable opportunity for students to engage in synchronous interactions with lecturers and their peers. These social interactions are unique in live lecturing which is core to co-create knowledge and skills that are meaningful to the context of students’ university and lifelong learning.
The use of educational technology such as online polling and collaboration tools not only enables these interactions among a large cohort of students, either in a lecture hall or in a virtual environment, but also provide an inclusive opportunity to involve the less ‘out-spoken’ students to have a voice to connect with the lecturers and their peers. To make the best out of the live lectures, lecturers play a pivotal role as knowledge translators, co-creators and change agents developing partnership learning communities with students (Advance HE, 2016).
The current pandemic has encouraged lecturers to adapt their teaching practices to a digital world. Reflecting on my recent experience of delivering live lectures online for an evidence-based practice (EBP) course in health professions education, I argue that lectures underpinned by purposeful pedagogical design work for higher education. For example, as a co-creator to construct meaningful knowledge with students, I have to know the existing level of their understanding of a topic and take students to a high level of learning. I heavily rely on real-time feedback from students during the lecture through an online polling tool which provides me with instant results of student responses showing in a bar graph or a word cloud. Based on the students’ inputs, I translated the abstract concepts of EBP to concrete examples in the healthcare setting that are relevant to the students’ practical experience. Students suddenly realised how the theoretical knowledge can be applied to the real-life context to make an impact on enhancing practice. This also creates new ideas for further professional conversations and inquiry.
The process of co-constructing knowledge is a distinctive feature achieved through synchronous interactions with students during live lectures. The personal interactions in live online or face-to-face lectures are irreplaceable by other means of delivery in higher education. To make live lectures truly work for student learning, we need to take the advantage of technology to deliver lectures with innovative design supported by sound pedagogical principles to connect, inspire and empower students to create partnership learning communities.
Figure 2. Average scores on Enjoyment of reading index, resilient and non-resilient students, Australia and comparison countries
