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A Heads Up for Ontario
This Canadian Education Association report on the English government’s “Innovation Unit” which, tasked with finding a solution for the fact that “not enough young people achieve well and become successful learners”, has come up with a new “improvement paradigm”. Using the “language of transformation and radical innovation”, the Unit favours a “fundamental shift in the balance in schools towards a deeper social constructivist approach incorporating co-construction with students; thematic, project-based assignments; re-balanced skills versus knowledge approaches; enhanced mixes of in-school and out-of-school contexts and settings; peer tutoring, mentoring, coaching; enhanced use of parents, community, ‘experts’, and a changed learner-teacher mix”. Yes, Virginia, some people really do write such things. But before you dismiss this as total nonsense with no relevance to Ontario, read on. Near the end of the report appear these chilling words: “The Innovation Unit has always been outward-facing….a new venture…..a transformed education across their jurisdictions….Ontario is one of the first cohorts.“
Tower of BABEL Arising in Ontario?
I think people in Ontario should find out ASAP where this experiment is taking place. Apparently parents are involved as well as educators. Of course, OISE is likely to be involved. Maybe not directly, but I’ve found out that Dr. Lorna Earl, Director of Aporia Consulting Ltd and a recently retired Head of the International Centre for Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education is involved.
The project has been around since 2007, apparently, but beats me WHERE. I’ve read 4 of their papers so far, full of rhetoric, but no locations for the field trials. It probably is costing BIG BUCKS!
Anyway, here is a site I looked at: http://www.innovation-unit.co.uk/content/view/452/981/ The reports say they have “stimulated, incubated and accelerated innovation in different ways across all of the Field Trial sites.” Again, where are these sites? And if parents were involved, were their children involved? Aren’t there supposed to be guidelines for experimental programs?
Anyway, I’m glad your antennae are up in Ontario. In BC we’ve just started to hear about this group, the Innovation Unit from UK. A Valerie Hannon is to speak to the professional association of superintendents soon. I did write up a bit of an alert on our local education blog at the Vancouver Sun newspaper.
This is the background. A new superintendent was appointed in the school district of Richmond and she made the comment to the Press that in this time of restraint “A funding challenge opens up new ways of looking at things.“
I commented that I hoped she could shed the institutional blinkers acquired from the past 35 years and look at things in NEW WAYS. And, bring others along too.
“If there are to be professional development workshops on “new ways” I hope it’s not just bringing in those tired and worn out ideas from the turnaround and school improvement hustlers from afar who earn Frequent Flyer Points beyond belief coming to BC. Monica Pamer’s professional association, the BC School Superintendent’s Association, really likes these presentations.
“How to Talk the Talk but Skip the Walk of Education Reform” is the real message of these presentations. This is especially dangerous, in my view, because it is deceitful and pretends to develop leadership capacity. All these workshops do is give the “so called” leaders the language with which to keep clients, citizens, students, parents, teachers, and trustees placated and quiescent.
For example, an upcoming BCSSA Fall Conference (Nov 19-20) is headlining Valerie Hannon, an expert from England, who will “explore the reasons why transformative or radical innovation in education is now an urgent imperative in education.” I was curious. What’s she talking about?
Her group (Innovation Unit) focuses on 21st C skills called Next Practice. They belittle “best practice”. They train Next Practitioners. Their “agenda” (their word) is to change “values” for the 21stC. Give me a break! The 21st Century has just begun! The previous “change agents” (Fullan, etc.) are tame compared to this baby!
Her literature says: “School improvement techniques have made some headway, but the rate of upturn in results is glacial…as a result, the language of IMPROVEMENT AND REFORM has given way to the language of TRANSFORMATION AND RADICAL INNOVATION.” In other words, since improvement is SO, SO, s-l-o-w (glacial) at least LET US STAY IN THE BUSINESS but change the language. Can you believe it?
Frankly, the credibility of BCSSA is really questionable given that they would buy this bill of goods as a genuine contribution to education change and student engagement. UNLESS, of course, that IS the intent – that this upper echelon of decision-makers WANTS to learn more STALLING language and techniques!”
A veritable tower of BABEL might emerge with all this rhetoric. But will any of this hokum, palaver, bombast have any benefit to children’s education? I doubt it. For BC’s sake I hope this ends at this conference.
If you find any benefits from your three year experiment, please let us know.