Lucy Crehan - Cleverlands

I read this for pleasure and enjoyment but it's also pretty relevant to work, so I sent around a note as below (with some specifically work-related commentary removed):

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The author, Lucy Crehan, took a couple of years out from teaching in the UK to visit Finland, Japan, Singapore, Shanghai and Canada, aiming to get a better understanding of what contributes to their strong performance in standardised international testing (especially PISA), which aspects might be replicable elsewhere, and the trade-offs associated with focusing on such tests.

It came out last year and is well informed by an understanding of evidence and policy but also weaves in her experiences as a visiting teacher and observer in schools in all of those systems, as well as elements of psychology, sociology, and national histories and cultures. It’s very readable and also has heaps of classroom anecdotes and conversations with parents, teachers, principals, administrators and policy makers.

Anyhow, I finished reading it over the weekend and really enjoyed it. So a few things that I took out: 

Ten interesting ideas, reminders and ways of thinking about things

All contestable and maybe over-simplifications to varying degrees, but good thought starters.

1. Evidence suggests that the aims of improving overall achievement, equity and equality are not in conflict with each other. Broadly, you can measure the equity of a system by how much students’ outcomes depend on parental background, and the equality of a system by the overall dispersion (or spread) of students’ results. While everyone would agree that improving overall achievement and equity are desirable, equality can be trickier: what does it mean for the ‘highest performing’ or ‘most able’ students?
2. Early selection (into schools – often a choice between ‘vocational’ or ‘academic’ schools), streaming and setting (into different ‘tracks’ or ‘sets’ within schools and subjects based on ability) of students seems to produce overall worse outcomes than a system that sets universal expectations and tries to bring all students (to the extent possible) up to those standards. Early and more selection/streaming/setting seems to reduce equity and equality, without improving overall achievement. 
3. There’s a potential tension between high equity/equality in student outcomes and high employment but a choice between the two is not inevitable. Earlier selection, streaming and setting – and creating different expectations for different students – may reduce equity and equality, but can have the benefit of increasing a system’s vocational orientation. Avoiding selection, streaming and setting until upper secondary years may achieve the best of both worlds, provided that primary and early secondary education is strongly directed at improving all students’ outcomes and there is strong vocational educational education in upper secondary and tertiary years. 
4. Intelligence (general cognitive ability) is not fixed – rather, it develops over time. It is partly heritable – explained about half by genetics and half by environment/experiences. And it does not develop in a linear way but rather through intermittent bursts at different times for different children. A school system should recognise this, including by not lowering expectations of children too early but instead structuring effort to bring all children up to a minimum standard over time and to ensure as much as possible that all children have the same education at least through to mid-secondary years. 
5. Activating teachers’ motivation is critical. People act based on intrinsic motivation when the action is inherently interesting or enjoyable. The four elements that contribute to individuals being intrinsically motivated are mastery (our desire to get better and better at what we do), relatedness (our desire to have positive relationships with others), autonomy (our desire to be self-directed) and purpose (our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves) (see Daniel Pink for more). Effective school system settings will play into all four of those. More recent theories of motivation also differentiate between different types of extrinsic motivation which are more or less effective according to how much we internalise them. 
6. Culture and society matters (1). People in Western cultures are more likely to believe that learning is more strongly attributable to a child’s intellectual abilities and that intelligence is fixed, whereas people in Asian cultures are more inclined to believe that hard work is more important relative to innate ability and that intelligence can be developed. This means that Asian societies will tend to assume a greater equality of potential amongst children (regardless of starting point). One reason this is important is that we know from the evidence that teacher expectations make a big difference to student outcomes. Teachers in China, for example, may be more likely to praise a student for hard work than for high achievement – which happens to be, according to Carol Dweck, one of the most effective ways of promoting a ‘growth mindset’ in children. 
7. Culture and society matters (2). The way that children interpret behaviour of teachers makes a difference to how they respond, and is likely to be culturally conditioned. For example, there is some evidence that behaviour such as a teacher keeping a child behind in class to complete homework might be interpreted negatively by the student as controlling behaviour and reduce their motivation in America, but more positively as indicating that the student was being looked after or cared for and increase their motivation in China. The same may be true for parental behaviour – e.g. parents being demanding about completing homework may have different effects on students’ motivation and learning in different cultures. 
8. Memorisation is helpful for more than tests. The more you have committed to long-term memory, the better you will be at problem-solving – because when solving problems, you don’t need to use any of your working memory to solve or retain certain operations or facts since they can be accessed from long-term memory with minimal additional cognitive effort. Also, memorisation and repetition doesn’t always imply only shallow, surface-level understanding. There is a difference between rote learning and repetitive learning, and if done properly, the latter can lead to a deeper understanding. So the popular perceptions about Asian societies being all about rote learning at the expense of creativity and the ability to problem-solve and innovate may be off base – things may be more complex than first appears. (Having said that, some high-performing Asian systems are actively reforming in this area; a few years back, the Chinese government introduced a new curriculum that emphasised the cultivation of independent and critical learners, in a move away from ‘tianyashi’ or ‘force-feeding the duck’ – what an amazing educational metaphor). 
9. If not designed carefully, pedagogical shifts designed to enhance ‘21st century skills’ such as problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity may entail a trade-off with learning core academic content like maths and reading. Across Canada, maths scores in PISA and TIMSS dropped between 2003 and 2012. This coincided with a national move towards more discovery-based (or problem-solving focused) pedagogical approaches, away from more traditional teacher-directed learning approaches. And in Japan, PISA scores dropped after it introduced a ‘relaxed education’ policy in the early 2000s that partly had as its goal focusing more on developing students’ critical and creative thinking abilities (it also, for example, included other elements like eliminating the previous practice of requiring students to attend school on Saturdays). Both Canada and Japan then moved back towards more traditional approaches and learning goals after those experiences. 
10. Other forces and policy settings also affect PISA results, beyond school system settings and socio-cultural forces. For example, in China, people are registered according to their home town and can generally only access public services in that area. In Shanghai, this means that many migrant children are educated in lower-quality migrant schools, outside the high quality public school system, and are forced to return to their parents’ home town at the age of 13 or 14 to attend high school. The effect is that a large proportion of the poorest and least educated cohort of students in Shanghai society leaves just before PISA testing (15 years) – which may well have an impact on Shanghai’s results.

Lucy Crehan’s ‘five principles for high-performing, equitable educational systems’ 

1. Get children ready for formal learning – through both high quality ECE and ‘non-learning’ supports such as multi-disciplinary teams on-site in schools
2. Design curricula concepts for mastery and context for motivation – cover fewer concepts in more depth, and in a way that motivates children to learn 
3. Support children to take on challenges, rather than making concessions (this is the principle that Crehan identifies as her number one most important principle) – have common standards and support all students to achieve them, including providing extra support for children who are struggling, not selecting children into different schools based on ability until late secondary years, and teaching children in mixed-ability classes also until late secondary 
4. Treat teachers as professionals (an aside: in Finland, teachers have a high degree of autonomy in how they teach, and yet there is a very high degree of uniformity in classroom approaches because there is strict quality control in teacher training and resources) 
5. Combine school accountability with school support (rather than sanctions)