A Brave, Bold New World…

At Northwood College for Girls we held our first ‘teach meet’, where a group of teachers and experts in their fields came together to discuss our thoughts on current research. I cannot thank them enough for their contributions as they have all directly inspired this blog.

For our first meeting we examined Lucy Crehan’s ‘Cleverlands’. The book documents the author’s journey around the world, examining the education system in some of the countries that score the highest PISA test results; something that the UK is renowned for underperforming in. I stumbled on this book by accident and what a pleasant accident it has been. I signed up to a teaching and learning CPD where Lucy is the keynote speaker, so thought, ‘better read the book!’ Well, just a couple of chapters in and I was relaying my excitement at the interesting research based ideas that I was discovering; and as an all through school, the exciting prospect that we could embrace some of these ideas. From this a ‘Teach Meet’ was born, to give us the chance to really unpick the information and discuss new possibilities.

To facilitate the ‘teach meet’ I selected a few chapters from the book, which provide a range of ideas and also a range of cultures. We began in Finland. Finland is unique in many ways, but as an all through school, their approach to when they start school and setting/streaming are of particular interest. In Finland, students do not begin formal education until they are between 6.5 – 7.5 years. However, this is not to say they are left in the wilderness until then – although their curriculum of learning through play means that sometime they are. This generated lots of rich discussion as some of our girls start school at the age of three, and Finland’s apparent ‘late start’ produce some pretty impressive results.

According to the book, the late start reduces inattention and hyperactivity, boys who started later had better mental health at 18 and girls were less likely to become pregnant in their teenage years! Furthermore, the Finnish attitude to reading is impressive, with annual library borrowing figures of an average of 18 books per person – more than any other country in the world. However, it is clear that their success is very much linked to a high quality pre-school programme, as evidence suggests that an early start (2-3) can lead to better intellectual and social development and preschool is particularly beneficial for disadvantaged children.

Finland’s second chapter – selection and setting – generated further discussion. In 1963, Finland moved away from a two tiered system that divided students from 10 years old. These were seen as ‘better’ schools or vocational school. Instead, students choose an academic or vocational route at 15-16 years, meaning that all students  have the same education for nine years rather than four. This is supported through evidence that suggests that countries who select later reduce inequality in secondary school, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds do better. In fact, the evidence from Hanushek and Woessmann shows that there was no negative effect of late selection on any group, even the brightest 5%. Now this nugget of information dominated discussion, as one of our GDST schools has decided to follow a similar path by removing streaming. Could this be a move for Northwood too? Well, as one teacher explained, ‘if you are trying to teach someone tennis, you don’t put them with a group of people equally bad at tennis and expect them to improve’. Which again resonated.

There is much evidence to suggest that in mixed ability groups, those who are ‘weaker’ are pulled up by those who are ‘brighter’ and those who are ‘brighter’ deepen their understanding by supporting the ‘weaker’ student – there was some discussion over whether this really stretches our brightest or disadvantages or even bores them. But this made me think, as we are moving to a ‘Mastery’ curriculum in the UK where deep knowledge of one topic is valued over a length of shallow knowledge, and Primary schools are being told they are not allowed to cover anything from Key Stage 3, even if it is an attempt to ‘stretch’ the brightest; then wouldn’t this approach also support our changing perception of education in the UK?

This in turn, led to discussions on differentiation, which transported us to China. In China they have very much adopted a Growth Mindset and the Confucian way of thinking: “Learning does not privilege anyone, and neither does it discriminate against anyone. Everyone is capable of seeking and achieving knowledge, regardless of one’s inborn capability and social circumstances.” What made me connect Finland and China is the fact that the book charts Lucy talking to a Chinese teacher who had visited the UK and thought it odd how students are given different levels of maths, explaining that those with ‘easy’ maths will never keep up. Again, this made us question, does differentiation by task (as well as setting) disadvantage and cap our students learning, rather than support them? If we want the girls to believe that everyone can achieve mastery knowledge, shouldn’t we start from the top and support all in getting there? My teacher training was very much about differentiation by task, and the thought of even calling differentiation by outcome differentiation would be an insult to your training – this really caused pause for thought.

Furthermore, China’s focus on praise and effort was very humbling. As a school, we have girls who are so driven by success and focussed on academic achievement, that if they don’t do as well as they want, it will knock them for six. Yet in China, failure is not an issue, what matters is that you tried and that you learnt from it. Lucy draws upon some excellent research; Stevenson and Stigler conducted an experiment on persistence comparing East Asians and European Americans. Both groups were presented with an impossible Maths question to see how long it would take for them to give up, however, the experiment had to be cancelled as the Japanese students would not give up, which caused some distress to the teachers. This proves that East Asians not only persist longer, but are also more likely to seek challenge, and are even spurred on to work harder in the face of failure – the opposite to European American students.

This got us talking about motivational differences (as well as cultural ones). It is very much the view that ‘effort’ is not something to be celebrated, in fact, in my days at school it was very much the running joke that those who got the ‘effort’ prize had the pity prize for quite simply not being clever enough. But how do we change this mindset? If we adopt the Confucian way, we know that effort and persistent effort will lead to success. However, in the UK there is still a huge belief that academic success is key, and therefore failure is not an option. Again, if we are going to use this book to inspire how we move forward as a school, changing our girls’ perceptions on failure and effort will be key.

Perhaps we need to adopt China’s graduation encouragement cards which read ‘congratulations on your hard work’ and focus on self-improvement, rather than selecting students who simply ‘excel’ at a subject? Part of me even wonders if we can create safe environments for failure, but then questions is, how do we manage that if this has the potential to disengage them rather than motivate them. As one of the teachers pointed out, what we must remember is that none of these educational reforms happened overnight, it took Finland ten years just to get the reform approved, and there are still reports of schools who ‘speak’ of education in the ‘old’ way. China’s growth mindset derives from a long historical and political
context too; for us, as an independent school we need to acknowledge our context; there is a certain ‘status-quo’ that we must stick to. But what I was most struck by is the clear consensus that each one of us wants what is best for our girls and perhaps we do need to be brave and be bold in what next steps we take in order to do them justice. So let the ‘drip-feeding’ of new, research based ideas begin!

Ms J Hughes,
Head of Cognitive Learning