Changes in Practice

As Judy Halbert states “Inquiry is a stance. It’s a way of professional being, it’s not a thing. We don’t ‘do’ inquiry. We’re just always asking ourselves and seeking for the evidence that we are making enough of a difference.” (Whole Education, Youtube).

Changes in practice in any industry is critical for success, this is especially true for teachers as the digital revolution growth exponentially.

It is teachers who make the difference and it is often assumed that it is educational management's job is to help teachers to change their practice. But this approach creates the ‘everyone but me’ reliance where everyone thinks someone else needs to change.

This mindset needs to become ‘everyone including me, the collective efforts of everyone are essential to making a real difference to outcomes for students.
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This brings me back to one of the very first Mindlab sessions on Spiral of Inquiry, a framework for evaluation and collaboration.

Inquiry is a collaborative process involving more than just one or two people. To learn deeply you have to learn from one another. The inquiry spiral is a team sport, not an individual endeavour.

Such a method should be used by every school and institute not only for educational policy compliance (ERO for schools, EER for tertiary institutes) but to truly develop a culture of value for the student and professionalism within staff, whether this be at primary, secondary or tertiary level. In assessing the value of our teaching critically we can make required adjustments without feeling singled-out, rather it shows strength of self-engagement and a focus on quality over ego or narrow sighted self-belief.

By continually challenging ourselves, our leadership and our schools to add more value, compliance tasks such as ERO/EER become trivial ticking the box type activities as staff are truly committed to continual improvement, with the value of such clearly seen within every student engagement.

We should remember that although school performance is based on metrics of Qualification Completion, Course Completion, Retention and Progression, it is always the qualitative data seen through the ERO/EER model which really tells the story of performance.

Leadership can try to “drive the numbers” as can teachers, by manipulating statistics or holding disengaged students from withdrawing. However it is much harder to“create” a culture of change, in practice and leadership and even harder to manipulate the results of such a process.

Change of practice is indeed good and something we should all try to embrace within ourselves and our teams.

Timperley, H., Kaser, L., and Halbert, J. (2014, April). A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry. Centre for Strategic Education, Seminar Series Paper No. 234.

Dumont, H. et al (2010). The Nature of Learning: Using research to inspire practice. OECD Publishing.

Interdisciplinary Learning

Education, along with the rest of the world is currently in a state of exponential development. With new technologies driving this growth, educators must adapt to ensure they are on the cutting edge of technological understanding to give maximum benefit to current students.

It is easy to think about Interdisciplinary learning as something that is developed with the sole intent to benefit our students, however as shown in the Mindlabs own programmes it is current teachers who can benefit the most through their own Interdisciplinary Learning.

Today’s students are proficient at multi-tasking, whether this be in using digital technologies or interactivity online. Their entire existence has been digitally driven, with devices in hands, in bags, at home, in the classroom, as a leisure activity and a learning resource.

In comparison many teachers own existence have been vastly different, often filled with memories of playing outside after school, where watching TV was reserved for Sunday night movies and their experience of technology has been in many cases resistive and difficult.

With NZ Governments Communities of Online Learning (COOLs) receiving backlash from the NZ Education Council for not stating teaching must be ‘registered’, I often come back to postulating whether todays ‘registered’ teachers are in fact the best for today’s students.

We believe that teacher registration will improve the learning of students, but does this hold in today's digital environment, where even new teachers often lack the required digital  Interdisciplinary skills, resulting in ‘reactive’ programmes such as the Mindlabs Digital and Collaborative Learning.

Is this a case of the Gap-Generation (J. Bus, 2012), where technology has developed at such a rate that those graduating teacher training colleges, lack the fundamental digitally integrated, cross disciplinary skills needed for new students.

This raises the question of whether the MindLab itself will be disrupted.

When will the required interdisciplinary learning for teaching, such as digital, social, programming, robotics etc be integrated into the actual teacher training programmes and become a requirement of registration, rather than continuing to be the reactionary “patch-job” currently taken.

Interdisciplinary Learning has much to offer and it’s immediate adoption within teacher training will ensure our teachers are at least on-par with students they are responsible to teach in today’s digital playing field.

J. Bus et al. (2012), The Evolution of the Digital Divide, Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2012, IOS Press, doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-057-4-57

Social Online Learning - Is the NZ Government finally moving in the right direction?

The Government’s announcement on Communities of Online Learning (COOLs) (NZ Government, 1989, 2017) activates a more robust legal framework to support what is already happening and opens the door to new players.

With the announcement however, has come a strong backlash from the NZ Education Council citing the need for all primary and secondary education to be delivered by “registered” teachers.

Of course this goes directly against the ethos of community learning especially in the online context such as that within the government's COOLs framework.

I believe there are some risks and benefits which must also be taken into account.

If existing trends in social online learning continue without primary and especially secondary schools suitably modifying their practices there is a real risk that their relevance will slowly disappear, as learners use alternative, unstructured methods of learning more aligned to their online use.
Students are already substantially supplementing traditional teacher-led learning with unstructured, online learning, delivered by the online community - whom typically are not registered, qualified teachers.
This comes through community life-experience and one could say is a return to the way learning was delivered prior the the schooling system we know of today.

Online social media/learning communities not only allow an exponential amount of learning resources, of varying quality from scientifically incorrect to the hands-on expert rivaling the best registered lecturer, but also now allow the cream to rise naturally, so to speak, through social community tools such as upvotes, number of shares, likes, and ratings.

The power of social communities has significantly changed the quality of community made learning resources and will continue to shape this space as online social tools became common across platforms.

Having spent the last 15 years in tertiary education as a teacher and a college manager, my experience has shown that “qualified” teachers are not always the best “teachers”. Often they come from a traditional education background and continue to use these same traditional techniques within today’s classrooms, which does little to engage today’s students but actively alienates them. I can however see the Primary and Secondary School sectors working hard to fix this disconnect through a range of digital upskilling/ professional development courses, however the tertiary space is still years behind.

I do however believe frameworks are required, as bullet pointed within your post.
Whether it is a “teacher” in the traditional sense, implementing the learning frameworks or the community will be the question as what we call a “teacher” has already technically changed with the advent of online social learning.

A good example of this on scale is Khan Academy.

The “teacher” so to speak, is the platform's founder Salman Amin "Sal" Khan, who is not a registered or qualified teacher rather an community member who has expertise in a number of fields (Science, Engineering and Computer Science).

Despite his lack of teacher registration or qualification he has delivered over 1 billion lessons worldwide. The platform is used by 40 million students and 2 million teachers every month.

Teachers using a social learning platforms to be taught by a non-teachers (the irony).

However this is exactly the case in most Tertiary Education Institute around the world.
Tertiary level teacher registration is not compulsory rather highly recommended.
Colleges and Universities find subject matter experts who then deliver learning to students, most of whom are not registered or qualified as teachers through Education Councils.
This is essentially the same as COOLs through an online distributed medium.

It maybe the real benefit is to ensure those that do teach, whether registered and teacher qualified or not , do so through from a place of knowledge, with suitable experience in the fields taught and with an understanding of a learning framework such as those bullet-pointed.

However does that require a full teaching qualification and subsequent registration, especially in today’s online social learning context?

It is a question which must be asked.


NZ Government, Education Act 1989 (Update) Amendment Act 2017 https://education.govt.nz/ministry-of-education/legislation/the-education-update-amendment-act/

Laws and Ethics with NZ Tertiary Education

Laws and Ethics exist to protect and uphold the integrity of our social systems. Within education such is prescribed through government policy and agendas.

While aimed at improving social standings of the citizen within its oversight government often fail to see how a “one size fits all” policy system simply fails within modern educational practice.

In New Zealand, Private Tertiary Education exists as a specialist or second-chance educational system for those that either cannot enter into university or choose not too due to the archaic educational frameworks and subject matter embedded in the core traditions of the university system.

New Zealand Educational Policy, enforced by the Tertiary Education Commission and New Zealand Qualifications Authority, is however made by university subject-experts with little understanding of Private Education and the diversity of students with they cater for.

Key Metrics such as the Educational Performance Indicators (EPI’s)  which measure Qualification Completion, Course Completion, Progression and Retention have all been setup to be measured and reported on within a 12 month period of January to December each year.
Of course, this negatively affects any provider not teaching within this calendar-year framework, with data being skewed to fit with existing policy metrics rather than modifying the policy.

This of course, matches exactly the university trimester dates, however what is the private sector which may have multiple intakes, rolling intakes or start-anytime distance learning?

At what point will New Zealand Education Policy be overhauled so that it meets the wide range of offerings now available to students instead of the traditional focus on university-only.

With the emergence of online distance learning traditional qualification approval and monitoring policy is need of drastic change to ensure it is future proofed with pain points already evident within the monitoring of self-directed study hours.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority recently announced a proposed change to “qualification hours” traditionally split between a number of “Direct Hours (face to face)” and “ Self Directed Hours”.

When gaining approval most institutes would supply content for face to face / directed hours, leaving self-directed blank, so student could study any course material they needed as required per individual.

However the recent proposal suggests providers must account for all hours, irrespective of directed or self directed, as such ensuring providers essentially outline what students must study while out of class.

Such policy has huge implications on the freedom of institutes and students to tailor education to individual needs and devolves student self responsibility and self-learning to a strict managed process, another “one size fits all” system of learning irrespective of student need.

Let’s hope such a proposal is voted quickly by the sector, for the good of the students and the quality of the education provided.