Curios of the week #113

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Last weekend was the Ballarat marathon and this created traffic chaos in a town where a ‘Ballarat park’ usually means a parking space right in front of the place you want to visit. So, I found myself having to walk around the town a little more than usual. This took me past ‘Blockbuster Video’ which is actually a council art gallery but in a building where they have uncovered some old signage from a previous incarnation in the late nineties or early 2000s or whenever it was they loaned out their last DVD.

This week was also the week when my youngest left for our Yuulong campus down on the Great Ocean Road. Yuulong is many things, one of which is a digital detox. During her ten week stay, she will have no access to a mobile phone and we will be able to call her on a landline only three times. The rest will be correspondence by physical mail and so I am dusting down my quill pen and Basildon Bond.

This week’s Curios include a podcast, a combative school leader, a welcome resurrection and much more.

Experts of the week

The academics over at the blog of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) have been writing lots of posts this week. So many, in fact, that I have already written a free post that dealt with three of them. The posts are inspired by today’s Australian federal election, which feels like a strange thing to write after one of the most uninspiring election campaigns I can remember—one that has essentially descended into a series of competing bribes with the media doing little to shine a light on anything resembling policy. So, good for the AARE to respond constructively.

Unfortunately, it is hard to see much relationship between the election and the posts. It would perhaps be unkind to characterise these posts as a plea for relevance, but many of them represent complaints about the sidelining of education researchers by politicians and the public at large. And it is interesting to ponder why that may have happened.

One such post is by Professor Penny Van Bergen of Macquarie University and is interestingly titled, Turning away from celebrity and towards genuine topic experts. The title pretty much summarises the thesis. Policymakers and the general public should be wary of relying on ‘slick edu-celebrities or think tanks’ to tell them what to think:

“There are edu-celebrities of every brand in education. They are for and against creativity, for and against various brands of explicit teaching, for and against phonics, for and against play-based learning. Some of these views are evidence-based, some are not. Evidence-based policymaking means turning away from populist views and towards genuine topic experts”

She never quite says so, but I am guessing the genuine experts Van Bergen has in mind are education academics.

Van Bergen also takes aim at another popular target among academics—the Strong Beginnings report into Initial Teacher Education in Australia that has prompted the federal government to take a more prescriptive approach and insist on core content:

“Ironically, however, little evidence of a problem in ITE quality or a connection to teacher shortages currently exists.”

Isn’t that strange? We have had numerous reports into teacher training and its inadequacies over the decades, many of which identify similar issues, and yet there is ‘little evidence of a problem’.

Part of the reason is that education researchers only consider something to be evidence if it is peer-reviewed. That means it has to have been collected and written about by an education researcher. However, for some strange reason, education researchers don’t seem to research the quality of teacher training.

And the resistance is more than passive. When I conducted an anonymous survey on teachers’ experiences of their training for my blog, one academic apparently reported me to the university I am affiliated with to complain that I had not obtained ethics approval. Which is a little extreme.

The reality is that I meet teachers all the time who complain about their training, just as I meet people in the real world who are troubled by their child’s experience at school and don’t understand why the teacher is not simply teaching their child things. The latter is perhaps why education academics have lost some credibility among politicians and the population at large.

Bargain (?) of the week

For a mere $1979 AUD or the discounted rate of $1879 AUD for members of the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT) you can join Peter Liljedahl in August on either the Gold Coast or Adelaide.

Not only will you hear Liljedahl passing on his wisdom on ‘Leadership for Building Thinking Classrooms’, you will be treated to a luxurious networking mini break:

“Inclusions

• Two days of transformative learning with Prof. Liljedahl at luxury properties, centrally located in the heart of Adelaide and the Gold Coast, providing the perfect backdrop for an engaging experience.

• Access to premium resources and the chance to connect with like-minded educators in meaningful ways; and

• All morning and afternoon teas, lunches, and a 3-course Gala Dinner with drinks on the first evening.”

It is worth reminding readers that Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms has precisely zero robust evidence of effectiveness and is based on the fundamentally misconceived idea that unless students are engaged in discovery learning, they are not ‘thinking’. It is therefore likely to be a less effective approach than explicit teaching and disastrous for the most disadvantaged students.

Podcast of the week

I sat down with Luke Mooney of Catalyst to discuss my work at Clarendon. You can listen here.

I hope you find it interesting.

Mindset of the week

A few years back, it was all about ‘growth mindsets’. Posters were affixed to walls, assemblies were given and all manner of tokenistic initiatives were launched in response to the latest thing.