Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Dr Jennifer Buckingham puts her finger on an important educational dilemma yet again. She writes in The Spectator:

https://www.spectator.com.au/2018/04/cu ... back-away/
Cut the losses on Gonski 2.0 review and quietly back away

Jennifer Buckingham
One of the most grating elements is the trope that our schools are based on an outdated ‘industrial model’ of schooling, and that they must be transformed to prepare students for the future of work. US cognitive scientist and education researcher Daniel Willingham has given the best response to this well-worn argument: “Apparently schools are bad because 100 years ago evil corporations duped them into prepping workers for factories. And the solution is to emphasise cooperative, creative work, because that’s what present-day, non-evil corporations say is needed for jobs of the future. Got it.”
Although this article is specific to the scenario in Australia, in reality it is indicative of the call for critical thinking and 21st Century Skills that is endemic wider afield than Australia - and reflects the ongoing need to fight the corner for a 'knowledge-rich curriculum' and 'foundational skills' which is taking place via the internet.
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

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Further, Kevin Donnelly writes in The Australian:

Gonski legacy to dumb down the curriculum

KEVIN DONNELLY

Central to Gonski 2.0’s recommendations on how to raise standards is the argument the curriculum should focus on the future by emphasising general capabilities instead of the essential knowledge, understanding and skills associated with established subjects like history, science, literature and mathematics.

The report also recommends an online diagnostic test called Teaching Tools that measures a student’s development over time.

Despite the government’s promise that investing additional billions will raise standards, the Gonski 2.0 report, if adopted, will condemn students to failure as it represents a continuation of Australia’s dumbed-down and substandard curriculum. By emphasising general capabilities instead of what Jerome Bruner describes as teaching “the structure of the discipline” the report condemns students to a superficial, patchy curriculum.

As noted in the 2014 report of the review of the Australian curriculum I co-chaired, generic capabilities cannot be taught in isolation. As E.D. Hirsch notes, they are subject-specific and must be grounded in essential content.

Creativity with language requires a thorough knowledge of grammar, syntax, punctuation and language use exemplified by the finest literature — unlike music or mathematics, that require a very different initiation.

A futurist approach is also flawed as education by necessity is grounded in the past. As argued by Michael Oakeshott, the skills, knowledge, understanding associated with what it means to be educated forms a conversation that has gone on for centuries.

Subjects such as mathematics, science, politics, literature and philosophy can be traced to the ancient Romans and Greeks and to the Enlightenment. If students are to address future challenges they must know about the past.

There are basically two ways to assess a student’s progress and the Gonski 2.0 report adopts a developmental approach where the focus is on individuals and how they performs over a period.

Students are not ranked against each other or told they have passed or failed. Instead, teachers use statements such as “consolidating” or “not yet achieved”. What is ignored is that if performance is below that expected for their year level, they are very much at risk. Promoting self-esteem is delusional if it means students float through school without an objective measure of progress.

The opposite approach is summative assessment; students tested as a class and given a grade that tells them, their teachers and parents, whether they passed.

That the Gonski 2.0 report promotes a flawed model of assessment over content-rich exams where students are ranked should not surprise. Since the mid-80s, the education unions and like-minded academics have argued summative assessment unfairly promotes competition and meritocracy.

Gonski 2.0 epitomises all that is wrong with the system — yet another example of government ineptitude in education.

Kevin Donnelly is a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University.
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

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Rebecca Urban writes in The Australian:

Critical thinking trumps knowledge in Gonski 2.0

REBECCA URBAN

Schools would be required to prioritise the teaching of critical thinking, creativity and social skills under recommendations to come out of the Gonski review into boosting student achievement, despite mounting scepticism internationally about the feverish promotion of those skills in the classroom.

A report, to be published today, proposes a “radical overhaul” of the national curriculum to ensure that “general capabilities” are placed at the core of what students are taught. It notes that declining student outcomes are national and widespread across all sectors.

“Its extent indicates that Australian education has failed a generation of Australian school­children by not enabling them to reach their full learning potential,” the report says. “The importance of this point can hardly be overstated. In 2015, Australia’s 15-year-olds as a group scored significantly lower that 15-year-olds in 2003 on an equivalent test.”

The report also recommends personalised learning and teaching based on each student’s needs, as well as a move away from a year-based curriculum to one targeted to a student’s personal achievement regardless of age.

Each student would be supported to achieve at least a year’s worth of progress each year.

When it comes to assessment, the report found conventional ­reports that traditionally give an A to E grade based on year-level achievement standards could be improved upon. Instead, students should be assessed by the rate of progress and attainment of knowledge and skills based on challenging personal targets, it says.

The focus on critical thinking, creativity and social skills will alarm many education experts, who have been lobbying for a return to a more robust, knowledge-based curriculum. Educational psychologists have spent the past decade questioning the drive to embed general capabilities — which include literacy and numeracy but also contentious so-called 21st-century skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving — arguing they develop only once a student acquires a deep knowledge of their subject matter.

Among the report’s 23 recommendations is an online assessment tool for teachers that could eventually see the NAPLAN test deemed redundant. The tool would enable a student’s progress to be tracked and compared with that of other students. Comparisons between different schools would also be available.

The report, Through Growth to Achievement, follows an eight-month review chaired by businessman David Gonski, which was to provide advice to the federal government on how to improve student achievement and school performance.

Malcolm Turnbull yesterday welcomed the report, describing it as a “blueprint”. “We are drawing a line in the sand to say with our record and growing funding secured, we now must focus on the reforms that improve education outcomes for all Australian students,” he said.

The report followed the Turnbull government’s announcement last year that it would inject an ­additional $23.5 billion over 10 years into the sector.

The government, which is understood to have adopted all of the report’s recommendations in principle, will present the report at a meeting of education ministers on Friday. The federal government plans to link funding increases to the states and territories to them agreeing to certain reforms.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham defended the report’s focus on the development of so-called 21st-century skills, saying employers were demanding that workers had particular skills to add value.

He said the panel had also spelt out the “critical importance” of literacy and numeracy skills as a “building block” of the curriculum.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/n ... 264302d8c1
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

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This response exemplifies the debate around the 'critical thinking curriculum':

My former school system went that route (critical thinking curriculum) many years ago. Results = nada. To me, it's self evident that you can't teach critical thinking without teaching something to think about. Without a solid foundation of general knowledge across disciplines what are the kids expected to think about critically? On the very face of it isn't it counter intuitive? Tell this to someone who is not an educator versed in the sometimes silly jargon of the profession and they will think you are speaking nonsense. I should think the first question they would ask is "So what do they think about?"

As an elementary school principal my school adopted the Core Knowledge Curriculum. The excitement on the part of the entire school community was palpable. We gave up the usual (here in Baltimore) weeks of test preparation and hoopla giving us more time to teach content. We limited test preparation to one lesson a day for one week. Our kids and teachers won state wide recognition for the enormous strides they made in standardized test scores.

It's not just being able to think critically; it's about having something concrete to think about.
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

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Many thanks to Dr Kerry Hempenstall who has responded with research findings (as always!):
“Domain-general cognitive knowledge has frequently been used to explain skill when domain-specific knowledge held in long-term memory may provide a better explanation. An emphasis on domain-general knowledge may be misplaced if domain-specific knowledge is the primary factor driving acquired intellectual skills. We trace the long history of attempts to explain human cognition by placing a primary emphasis on domain-general skills with a reduced emphasis on domain-specific knowledge and indicate how otherwise unintelligible data can be easily explained by assumptions concerning the primacy of domain-specific knowledge. That primacy can be explained by aspects of evolutionary educational psychology. Once the importance of domain-specific knowledge is accepted, instructional design theories and processes are transformed.” (p. 265)

Tricot, A., & Sweller, J. (2014). Domain-specific knowledge and why teaching generic skills does not work. Educational Psychology Review, 26(2), 265-283.
Cognitive psychology has long since reached a level of sophistication that enables it to explain why it is highly ineffective to teach higher-order skills as formal structures. This finding is the most plausible explanation for the historical paradox that national systems that stress content more than skills nonetheless inculcate these higher-order skills more effectively than systems that try to teach higher-order skills as such. To teach content is to teach higher-order skills; to teach higher skills explicitly is to pursue a phantom.

Hirsch, E. D. (2003, Spring). Not so grand a strategy. Education Next, 68-72.
“A hundred years ago, schools of education turned from academic subject mastery to developmental psychology as the foundational resource for teacher preparation. In this now-dominant view, requiring students to learn a specific sequence within a particular subject is pedagogically suspect (Ravitch 2001); (Steiner 2005); (Hirsch 2006); (Hirsch 2016).” (p. 2, 3)

Berner, A. (2016). The promise of curriculum: Recent research on Louisiana’s instructional reforms. Institute for Education Policy: Johns Hopkins School of Education. Retrieved from http://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/the-p ... l-reforms/
“The two ideologies or philosophies that dominate in the American educational world, which tend to corrupt scientific inferences, are naturalism and formalism. Naturalism is the notion that learning can and should be natural and that any unnatural or artificial approach to school learning should be rejected or deemphasized. This point of view favors many of the methods that are currently most praised and admired in early schooling - ‘hands-on learning,' ‘developmentally appropriate practice,' and the natural, whole-language method of learning to read. By contrast, methods that are unnatural are usually deplored, including ‘drill,' ‘rote learning,' and that analytical, phonics approach to teaching early reading. We call such naturalism an ideology rather than a theory because it is more a value system (based on the European Romantic movement) than an empirically based idea. If we adopt this ideology, we know in advance that the natural is good and the artificial is bad. We don't need analysis and evidence; we are certain, quite apart from the evidence, that children's education will be more productive if it is more natural. If the data do not show this, it is because we are using the wrong kinds of data, such as scores on standardized tests. That is naturalism.

“Formalism is the ideology that what counts in education is not the learning of things but rather learning how to learn . What counts is not gaining mere facts but gaining formal skills. Along with naturalism, it shares an antipathy to mere facts and the piling up of information. The facts, it says, are always changing. Children need to learn how to understand and interpret any new facts that come along. The skills that children need to learn in school are not how to follow mindless procedures but rather to understand what lies behind the procedures so they can apply them to new situations. In reading, instead of learning a lot of factual subject matter, which is potentially infinite, the child needs to learn strategies for dealing with any texts, such as ‘questioning the author,' ‘classifying,' and other ‘critical thinking' skills.” (p. 135)

Hirsch, E.D. (2006). The knowledge deficit. Houghton Mifflin.
“Without background knowledge, there is little basis for meaningful reading comprehension; therefore, building background knowledge is at the center of Hirsch’s education reform plan. He advocates the building of background knowledge through a slow, cumulative process (143) that develops the core knowledge required of anyone for participation in the public sphere. Hirsch wants a carefully sequenced core knowledge curriculum in place in K-8 public schools. He advocates direct instruction of the curriculum and of Standard English …. Reading comprehension scores started dropping in 1962, he argues, because students did not have enough shared knowledge to comprehend what they were reading. In order to improve reading scores, then, schools must teach shared knowledge so that students can achieve academic success. For comprehension, a student must know 90% of the words on a page (139). (In the professional development I have received and in my experience as a teacher of ELL students, this number is incorrect – students must know 95% of the words on the page in order to comprehend a text.) Semantic awareness, then, is the foundation of reading comprehension. The foundation of semantic awareness, in turn, is prior or background knowledge (143). … Hirsch says “Wide knowledge and a large vocabulary – the prerequisites to achievement in high school – are gradual accretions. You cannot gain them by sudden intensive incursions in the later grades. With a slow, tenacious buildup of knowledge and vocabulary in elementary school, high school will almost take care of itself” (167).” (p.10, 11, 12)

Vieux, V. (2016). A critical review of E. D. Hirsch’s The Making of Americans. NEH Philosophers of Education Seminar, Boston University, Summer 2016. Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar_ur ... cholaralrt
“Moreover, there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age six is the single highest correlate with later success”.

Hirsch, E.D. (2013). Primer on success: Character and knowledge make the difference. Education Next, 13(1). Retrieved from http://educationnext.org/primer-on-success/
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Teacher-blogger, Greg Ashman, shares his analysis of the latest Gonski report via his blog 'Filling the pail':

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2018/0 ... education/
Three flaws in the Gonski panel’s plan for Australian education
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

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Dr Jennifer Buckingham writes a further piece about the second Gonski report - this time in the Financial Review:

http://www.afr.com/opinion/columnists/g ... 429-h0zemn
Gonksi fails a second time around

by Jennifer Buckingham

The highly anticipated Gonski 2.0 report offers little useful guidance for schools and school systems, and does not even meet important terms of reference set down for the review.
The Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools was commissioned by the federal government last year to provide advice on how additional Commonwealth funding should be used to improve school performance and student achievement.

The committee led by David Gonski was tasked to "examine evidence and make recommendations on the most effective teaching and learning strategies to be deployed".

The report released yesterday would have been a disappointment to many in the sector – including the federal government, who were presumably expecting clear, evidence-based direction on effective use of school resources at the system and school level.

Unfortunately, the recommendations in the second Gonski report are not based on evidence about effective use of school resources. Most are inane and obvious – for example, children who learn more in a year at school will have higher achievement. Yes, really … it is surprisingly at that useless level.

And the recommendations that do represent a departure from the status quo have several significant problems. The proposals are not supported by research, they lack detail about implementation, and overall they will significantly increase the level of complexity and bureaucratisation of the school system.

One of the main recommendations is a new online assessment instrument that teachers would use to measure student learning growth over time, aligned to learning progressions derived from the Australian curriculum. These results would form the basis of reporting to parents, presumably eventually replacing standardised tests that determine student performance against an expected range of achievement standards.

The theory is that this will allow teachers to differentiate instruction for students across ability levels, and will be more motivating for students. But the report gives no examples of how this has worked in practice – the closest approximation is the e-asTTle system in New Zealand, but this is not mentioned in the report – and its feasibility and impact can therefore only be speculative.

The report is fixated on the importance of enabling a "growth mindset" among students as being the key to their success. And many of the key recommendations report hinge on this premise – students who believe that academic ability is not fixed will achieve at higher levels, and parents and schools can facilitate this mindset. The notion of mindset is mentioned 10 times in the report. (In comparison, the word "intellectual" does not appear at all).

But this premise is not supported by evidence. Two recent meta-analyses of 129 studies of growth mindset (not cited in the Gonski 2.0 report) found a "very weak" relationship between growth mindset and student achievement, and some small positive effects of mindset interventions for disadvantaged students. The authors of the study caution that "policies and resources targeting all students might not be prudent".

One can see the superficial appeal of a theory that children who believe they can learn are more likely to. But without a deep understanding of psychology, it implies that effective teaching is a secondary factor – and it is a huge insult to children with learning disabilities to suggest that they can do better if they simply believe they can. In a massive oversight, the report does not acknowledge any of the copious evidence about effective instruction.

Likewise, the recommendation for an increased focus on general capabilities has no support in sound research about curriculum design and how children learn. General capabilities do not exist as abstract skills, divorced from knowledge. Creativity and critical thinking are different in different disciplines and are dependent on good teaching of content. Creativity in maths is different to creativity in writing. Creating a set of learning progressions for general capabilities, as recommended in the report, as an attempt to "prioritise" them in the curriculum ignores this evidence.

One of the specific terms of reference – "improving the preparedness of school leavers to succeed in employment, further training or higher education" – was not properly addressed, with the report deeming an investigation of senior secondary education to be "beyond the scope" of the review.
Instead, the Gonski committee recommended yet another review looking into senior secondary education, giving the impression that this process has become like an expensive Gonski hall of mirrors.

It is hard to see where the whole thing might end, except with a giant headache for the government and a waste of yet more taxpayers' money.

Dr Jennifer Buckingham is a senior research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.


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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

PODCAST:

Miranda Devine interviews Dr Jennifer Buckingham and Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham about their views on the Gonski 2.0 report.

Listen to the interview via The Daily Telegraph here:


https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs ... um=Twitter
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

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Teacher-blogger, John Kenny, writes his thoughts on the Gonski 2.0 report:

https://johnkennyweb.wordpress.com/2018 ... very-ugly/
Gonski 2.0: The good, bad and very ugly

The much anticipated Gonski 2.0 report has finally dropped and criticism has come in thick and fast. The report comes on the back of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools established by the Federal Government in July 2017 to provide advice on how to improve student achievement and school performance. It’s a big report sure to create waves in all education sectors in Australia and, just to be clear, I am not impressed with its recommendations. Here are the need-to-knows and my take on some of the report’s recommendations.
Just a quick 'aside' from my personal experience as, at the time, a mainstream class teacher: Some time ago in England, the New Labour government brought in 'Personalised Learning' (as suggested in the Gonski report) as the ethos that teachers were expected to work with. I was pretty horrified. My response was that if the powers-that-be wanted personalised learning, then they needed to set up one-to-one teaching which is, actually, 'tutoring'. We were not 'tutors', we were class teachers with up to 30 pupils in the infants (Key Stage 1) and perhaps larger numbers of pupils in a class in the juniors (Key Stage 2). How can anyone who has an iota of common sense think it is practical, or reasonable, for a class teacher to devise personalised lesson plans and lesson delivery (and marking, and assessment and so on) for 30 or so children - per subject. Get real!

Years later in England, the emphasis is increasingly on recognition that whole-class teaching can actually be desirable and effective and that groups and one-to-one teaching should be fit-for-purpose and not the general class management arrangement. There is an increased understanding that detailed written feedback via marking per pupil is not necessary - it is time-consuming and not reasonable to expect of teachers. There is an increased understanding that differentiating for pupils' individuality is not necessarily best-served by the provision of multiple different tasks and resources for different groups in the class.

Meanwhile, teachers have left the profession in droves in England and there is now a teacher-crisis in at least some areas. No wonder!

My heart goes out to teachers in Australia because from my perspective as a teacher that has lived through a similar political call as described in the Gonski 2.0 report, it feels like 'deja vu'. It's a pity Nick Gibb, Minister for School Standards in England, has not been invited to contribute to the Gonski report! Thank goodness Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham was encouraged by Nick Gibb to trial a phonics screening check in Australia.

It seems to me that Simon Birmingham is now in a position described by the following expression: He's 'between a rock and a hard place' when it comes to the conclusions of the Gonski 2.0 report and I wonder what he'll do next!
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Re: Aus: Dr Jennifer Buckingham 'Cut the losses on Gonski and quietly back away'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Professor Pamela Snow has drawn attention to this historic report (2005) as recommended reading.

She wrote via Twitter:
Perhaps we’d all get better value from advocating for adoption of the recommendations arising from the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy

https://research.acer.edu.au/tll_misc/5/

13 years on, its 20 recommendations remain as relevant (and as urgent) as they were in 2005.
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