Terra Australis
Australia is an extraordinary place to come, especially if
you’re British. The mixture of instant familiarity (driving on the left as all
civilised peoples do, fried breakfasts, Cockney phonics buried inside carefree New
World idiom) and the novel (dim sum next to baked beans, a menagerie of animals
apparently constructed by God for a dare) creates an uncanny valley. Like you
woke up in an alternate timeline where Britain was at once sunny, healthy and
positive.
Nowhere I this demonstrated more clearly than in that totem
of Terra Australis, the humble Tim Tam. I can summarise it in two words: Aussie
Penguin (the biscuit, not the improbable saviours of zoos’ balance sheets). I
already have orders from three separate people in the UK for boxes of them,
like Antipodean contraband). But it’s a Penguin with an x factor I can’t quite
name. A twist of vanilla perhaps, like someone sent a Penguin through a
teleporter with a 99. And it is very delicious, an Umpty Candy for our age.
Aussie ed reminds me of this. I’ve been fortunate enough to
eke my way across several countries with researchED in my knapsack: Sweden,
Norway, USA, Netherlands, Australia, and next year possibly Ireland, South
Korea, New Zealand- we’re even in talks with schools in the UAE and Spain.
Every time I’m fascinated to discover how education plays out in each
territory. It’s like foreign tongues: the vocabulary and grammar are frequently
alien, but the underlying conventions of language remain. Every country appears
to be wrestling with many of the same devils as every other country.
In some ways, this is unsurprising: the process of educating
children has evolved as a societal necessity, and certain conventions emerge
and converge due to circumstances universal to the human condition: the
classroom, the teacher-expert, the taxonomy of curriculum, testing,
certification, graduation, the lingua franca of instruction. As organisms
evolve circulatory, respiratory, excretory systems in a ticker tape of styles,
education throws up the same issue whether the school bells sounds over Doha or
Dunfermline. Autonomy; selection; instruction and enquiry; whole child or
subject…these and many others are the wrestling rings of debate.
Which is why I’ve found attending researchEDs aboard so
incredibly instructive; the same debates with different accents, angles and
nuance. Educational tourism is of course a dangerous game; often we find that
what propels a perceived outcome (such as literacy or tertiary education
enrolment) can be aligned as much with cultural contextual factors (such as
teacher status, simplicity of language forms, social norms about university) as
with policy levers and school systems.
But if we are careful we can learn from one another. The key
caveat is to remember that correlation is not causation; that constant
conjunction of two factors (such as waking up with a sore head and it being
Saturday morning) may not be causal. So when we visit Singapore, or Finland we
avoid drawing simple inferences about school starting age, bean bags, first
name terms with teachers and wraparound tutoring and classes of 75. Some plants
look beautiful in a jungle, but need imported soil and sunlight to thrive.
British classrooms are not terrariums. Mango trees will not last a winter in
Regent’s Park.
And other flora and fauna will. Look at rabbits, one of many
unwelcome presents the British gifted Australia with. Or Highland cows (Latin:
Heelan’ Coos) that chewed the cud in Mongolia for millennia before they were
kidnapped to Scotland and made to produce toffee for people who couldn’t
otherwise afford tooth extraction. I am fascinated by what we can and cannot
learn from our neighbours, what will and will not take root abroad. There is an
obvious advantage offered here: rather than launch costly (and no doubt
unethical) vast social experiments in different education systems to work out
which ones are most effective, we can just peer over the border and see what
our neighbours are up to. In theory.
I learned a lot (my bar is low, and like a pupil on a G
grade I make fastest progress) from Australia and the two researchEDs we put
together in Melbourne, one at Brighton Grammar School and one in partnership
with the ACE conference. Hundreds of teachers, school leaders, academics,
researchers, and everyone else in between self-assembled to learn from one
another and the fantastic array of speakers who had given their time for free
to talk to their colleagues.
There were too many to mention of thank here, but some
highlights that I managed to get to were:
Professor John Sweller, famous forhis work on Cognitive Load
theory and developing Geary’s idea of Biologically Primary and Secondary Knowledge,
which has proven to be increasingly influential in our understanding of why
some forms of teaching may or may not be more or less effective in different contexts.
His quiet, patient unpacking of his topic contrasted enormously with….
John Hattie, who is as close to a rock star in
edu-conferences as you’ll find. I believe he and Dylan Wiliam are opening the Pyramid
stage on Glastonbury next year. His grasp of meta-studies and the energetic,
passionate enthusiasm with which he delivers it, make him one of our best
communicators in education. Inevitably, one so prominent attracts criticism: for the 0.4 hinge effect
size, the nature of meta studies, and so on. But he is undeniably one of our
most important voices in the Great Debate, and rightly feted as a giant in the
canon.
Katie Roberts Hull from Learning First, who talked about Evidence
Based Professional Learning and the implications for effective practice. In many
ways this seemed to echo some of the excellent work done by the Teacher
Development Trust in this field. Her idea that professional learning needs to
be sustained over a long period, and connected to a learning goal, echoed
deeply with me, when I see so much CPD and INSET based on a snapshot model
where teachers spend a day at a Novotel taking away a bag of notes and often
little else.
Tanya Vaughan from Social Ventures Australia, along with
John Bush, was spreading the gospel of the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, and
carefully explaining the significance of the lock, the dollar and the months-progress
ideas. I hope she’s ready for years of people still asking what they mean like
the UK.
Jennifer Buckingham heads up the CIS’s ‘Five for Five
project’, which promotes the five main aspects of reading instruction that
comprise our best evidenced practice. The resistance to this internationally is
extraordinary, and even more extraordinary when you consider the enormous evidence
in its favour. It’s a Sisyphean task at times, but when literacy is at stake, a
vital one, and people like Jennifer are goddamn heroes for batting on their
behalf against the snake oil dingos.
Greg Ashman. Australia’s deadpan knight errant, and for my
money one of the best bloggers writing about education in the game. Prolific,
spiky and usually dead on. He’s one of my must-follows for anyone interested in
the intersection between practice and theory.
Stephen Norton delivered a brilliant keynote on maths
instruction, international comparisons between pedagogy, and the relative
merits of enquiry versus explicit instruction. The results, it had to be said,
were not in enquiry’s favour.
And Stephen Dinham. And Pam Snow, and Ben Evans…and too many
others to mention. A huge thanks to Helen Pike and ACE for making the whole trip
possible, to Brighton Grammar School for giving until it hurt, and to all the
speakers who gave their time so freely. Kindness and generosity frequently
makes the miraculous possible.
