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Archive for the 'Education Research' Category
Kids and Student Learning in COVID-19 Times: Where's the Hard Data on its Impact?
Posted in Education Research, Lost Learning Time, Pandemic Education, Post-Pandemic Schooling, Summer Learning Loss, tagged Bernard Shapiro, COVID Fatigue, COVID-19 learning slide, Dirk Van Damme, Janice Aurini, Jess Whitley, Learning Shortfalls, Royal; Society of Canada, Scott Davies, Student Data Starvation, Tania Clarke, Tracy Vaillancourt on October 12, 2021| 4 Comments »
Back in June of 2011, Dirk Van Damme, Head of the OECD's Innovation and Measuring Progress Division (IMEP), stunned a Toronto gathering of prominent international educators at OISE with a rather harsh assessment of the state of education research. "It's mostly of low quality," he said, "and we need to be more hygenic when using the word research."
While Van Damme recognized that education research was improving, he claimed that much of the "research" lacked credibility because researchers began from "fixed ideological positions" and limited their work to "small scale" projects with limited broader applicability. He warned then, a decade ago, that we were not "preparing students for 21st century challenges."
The most recent national study, "Children and Schools During COVID-19 and Beyond," produced for the Royal Society of Canada by University of Ottawa's Tracy Vaillancourt and a team of researchers, provides us with a rare opportunity to examine the state of the field. Surely, a team of widely-known university researchers could produce evidence of how the massive disruption and school closures have impacted the learning of 5.7 million Canadian students in the "pandemic generation."
Studying the Royal Society Policy Briefing report does give you a pretty good sense of the current shape and quality of faculty of education-based research. Social and emotional well-being and children's mental health are the clear priorities of the vast majority of researchers, mostly trained in child psychology and educational sociology. It's little wonder, then, that the report emphasizes the social and emotional impacts and focuses, to a large extent, on "notable threats to children's well-being, educational success, and healthy development" in that order.
Vaillancourt and her research team do convey a sense of urgency. "We are on the cusp of a 'generational catastrophe' that requires swift action to mitigate the harm," they claim, and we now need to keep schools open. "Schools must be the first to open and the last to close" is the mantra repeated throughout the report. Why we need them open seems to revolve mostly around their 21st century mandate to ensure educational equity and provide social and emotional security for children. Judging from the report, the COVID-19 crisis may well have reinforced the commitment of researchers to transform schools into "therapeutic institutions" for all children.
What's strange about the report is the absence of official Canadian data on learning impacts and a call for education gatekeepers to collect and disclose mission-critical data on student achievement, absenteeism, behaviour, and graduation standards. Closing the achievement gap and addressing "learning loss" do not figure in the general policy proposals. Buried among the ten recommendations is this revealing statement: "We need a precise account of who was impacted, how and for how long, so we can take appropriate steps toward providing systems and services that better support them moving forward."
Lead author Vaillancourt's cornerstone essay on the COVID-19 impact on children's mental health, including school closures and social isolation, is original, reliable and evidence-based, and so is Jessica Whitley's research summary on the impact on vulnerable children. Few would quibble with this assessment: "Many children and youth have experienced disengagement, chronic attendance problems, declines in academic achievement and decreased credit attainment during the pandemic, with the impact far deeper for those already at-risk." Learning loss, we can infer, is only of real consequence when it applies to struggling students or those from marginalized communities.
One of the nine essay chapters, "Estimates of Student Learning During COVID-19 School Disruptions," does cut to the heart of the matter. University of Toronto researcher Scott Davies and University of Waterloo professor Janice Aurini confront the problem squarely: "School disruptions over 2020 and 2021 have likely had a significant impact on children's learning." We know this from international research documenting significant "learning shortfalls" during March to June 2020 school shutdowns and more recent international studies showing "learning loss" during online instruction in the spring of 2020.
What we do know is worrisome. "Canada lacks high-quality and largescale data that can be used to directly measure any impacts of those disruptions on student achievement," Davies and Aurini confirm. "Compounding this problem, provinces like Ontario cancelled their planned standardized testing in 2020 and 2021, precluding the possibility of comparing achievement shortly before and after the school closures. Available studies of achievement are limited to single school boards or handfuls of schools, or parent and teacher surveys that can only capture their perceptions of student learning." (p. 52) With few exceptions, Canadian researchers have also ignored sound research on "the summer slide" which formed the basis for early estimates of COVID-19 school shutdown setbacks.
Forced to rely upon international studies and research data models, Davies and Aurini claim that the spring of 2020 disruptions alone resulted in "enduring 3-month learning shortfalls and gaps growing between the quartiles up to 1.5 years." "Most Canadian students struggled, as did students elsewhere in the world," they conclude, "gaining little ground and soon disengaging from schooling partially or fully." While students resumed more normal patterns of learning during the interrupted 2020-21school year, the problem was compounded when students "reached a threshold of 'pandemic fatigue' and grew tired of online learning." (pp. 59-60).
The long-term impacts of "learning shortfalls" are now surfacing, again documented first by international research (UNESCO 2021 and UNICEF 2021). The only significant Canadian research, so far, focuses on social and emotional impacts, often to the exclusion of academic achievement. Poor mental health obviously adversely affects student achievement, but – as Davies and Aurini, point out – the reverse is true because "students who feel they are not achieving will have their well-being compromised"
False binaries bedevil Canadian education research and are much in evidence throughout to RSC report. The whole idea that prioritizing academic achievement is at odds with priorities for student's well-being is not really defensible. That faulty assumption was nicely laid to rest in 2020 by University of Cambridge researcher Tania Clarke in a research article exposing "the dangerous discourse of 'trade-offs in education." Academic achievement and student well-being are, more often than not, reciprocal and mutually reinforcing. Simply put, doing better academically improves your outlook and sense of well-being.
The COVID-19 school closures have demonstrated the need for better achievement data for guiding evidence-based policy making in Canadian education. That research gap is exemplified, once again, in the RSC report. Some of the RSC chapters, particularly those produced by University of Ottawa professors Andy Hargreaves and Joel Westheimer, attempt to steer public education away from measuring learning and setting clear expectations. Like much of the current school change literature, those essays privilege student-well being over academic achievement, denigrate the term "learning loss," and seek to limit or eliminate completely system-wide student assessment.
Actual data from parent surveys, school district reports, and quantitative studies suggest a major disconnect between such educational experts and parents and classroom teachers. Surveys conducted by the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA 2020) Canadian Teachers Federation (CTF 2020) demonstrate the depth of parent and teacher concerns over erosions of children's skills and mental health. After the first phase of COVID-19 shutdowns, parents in the Hamilton-Wentworth Board also expressed a strong desire for more teacher-led synchronous learning activities during regular school hours. The vast majority of parents, when given the choice, still opt for in-person schooling, with the possible exception of those who live in multigenerational households. Summer learning loss recovery programs have, according to Davies and Aurini, proven popular with parents who choose them for their children.
The identified "learning shortfalls" will not go away. Here again Davies and Aurini caution us not to brush the problem aside because the COVID-19 school disruptions may well "trigger a series of negative consequences" in the coming years. Taken together with the solid evidence of adverse mental health impacts, the soundest RSC essays simply cry out for high quality and timely data that can guide educational policy while also speaking to the legitimate concerns of parents, teachers and the public.
What's missing in the current approach to combatting the "learning shortfalls" and psycho-social impacts of COVID-19 on children, teachers and families? Consistent, reliable, and evidence-based data. More specifically, we need a national educational body to support the ongoing creation of seasonal learning data in which sizeable numbers of students are tested biannually in fundamental literacy and numeracy skills, first in September and then again in June. Such research is already conducted in many jurisdictions around the world. Our leading experts, Davies and Aurini, could not identify a Canadian jurisdiction anywhere in Canada that routinely uses seasonal learning designs to generate the kind of data that can assess interventions aimed at developing students' well-being and learning. The COVID-19 disruption has made such research more critical than ever. It would provide the kind of data that can assess interventions aimed at developing students' learning and well-being. Seasonal learning designs that test students at the end and beginning of consecutive school years can also identify the kinds of students that need extra support and the times the year in which they need those supports.
The cumulative impact of school disruptions on proficiency in the foundational literacy and numeracy skills is visible for all to see. Focusing on student well-being in isolation is not the answer and an accumulating body of research, mostly generated outside of Canada, is demonstrating why. Davies and Aurini at least provide some "estimates" as to the likely learning shortfalls. Today's short-term losses, they claim, "may amplify as children move up grade levels and fall farther behind their peers." Being better prepared for the possibility of future closures is now a systemic priority and that simply won't happen without better data that can track the challenges and successes of our students.
The August 2021 RSC study reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of faculty of education research, but all research is handicapped by the paucity of student data. "All policy decisions are made by leaping over the data," Dr. Bernard Shapiro once said, twenty years ago. Now we know that the critical data is actually missing in K-12 education and it's time to demand better from the gatekeepers.
Where is the data on the impact of COVID-19 shutdowns and disruptions in Canada on student learning and psycho-social development? What does the Royal Society of Canada report reveal about the preoccupations and implicit biases of education researchers? How many of the RSC research summaries reaffirm school change theories common before the pandemic? Why, in a collection of nine different studies, does only one confront squarely the lack of reliable student performance and well-being data?
Filling the Educational Vacuum: Where was the Council of Ministers of Education during the Pandemic?
Posted in Education Research, Educational Leadership, Federal Role in Education, Future of Learning, OECD Education, Post-Pandemic Schooling, Restructuring Education, tagged Canadian Council on Learning, Council of Ministers of Education, Irwin Studin, Jennifer Wallner, Pandemic Learning Loss, Paul Cappon on July 9, 2021| 3 Comments »
Canada's K-12 schools are in recovery mode after what is being called a "lost year in education." Since the COVID-19 shock in March of 2020, school disruptions and pivots in-and- out of online learning have left our ten provincial systems in a state of disequilibrium with adverse impacts on student learning, achievement and well-being.
Pandemic calamites have given rise to public calls for a more robust federal presence in Canadian K-12 education. Tackling the COVID-19 crisis has shone more light on the fact education is strictly a provincial responsibility under our constitution and Canada is now the only leading member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) without a federal department of education.
Would a new national education coordinating agency make much of a difference? That depends upon your assessment of what's needed to tackle the contemporary challenges facing our education systems. Serving the 5.5 million students attending our K-12 schools is the primary responsibility, but the education sector also includes early childhood, post-secondary education, and adult workplace training programs.
Creating a federal department of education with a seat in cabinet would, in all likelihood, merely compound the fundamental problem diagnosed in my latest book, The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada's Schools (2020). Based upon past experience, it would add a top-tier of administrative oversight which, in turn, generates more layers of centralized, top-down, bureaucracy. While attractive as a fresh source of federal transfer payments, it's highly unlikely that the augmented resources would ever 'trickle down' to the classroom.
The existing national coordinating body, the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC), in existence since 1967, is unequal to the challenge. It has evolved, over the years, into a shell of an organization, little more than an exclusive club presided over by the thirteen provincial and territorial ministers of education. While providing a forum for annual discussions and an external place-holder for Canada, it's scope of activity is circumscribed by the imperative of "fully respecting provincial jurisdiction."
CMEC played a constructive role in fostering pan-provincial cooperation and nudging the provinces into large-scale student testing. Sparked by uneven student Mathematics performance on the 1988 International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP -I), CMEC initiated its own Student Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP) in 1989 and it gradually evolved into a full-blown program from 1991 to 1996, then morphed into the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP, 2007-Present)
Under the leadership of Director General Paul Cappon from 1996 to the early 2000s, CMEC raised national standards and guided our engagement in broader international student assessment programs. With tact, diplomacy and determination, Dr. Cappon wooed and then won over the provinces to boarder participation in the global movement for international testing
Preparing Canada's provinces for international assessments such as the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), gave CMEC its rationale and sense of purpose. When Canadian 15-year-olds fared well in the first two rounds of PISA, 2000 and 2003, its organizational viability was secure.
As Director General, Cappon challenged provincial ministers and their ministries to up their game in preparing students for regular international and national assessments. With his 2004 departure, CMC was rudderless because it was chaired by the education ministers, serving on two-year rotations. It devolved into a Secretariat, convening meetings, producing short reports of aggregated data, and research briefs amplifying the strengths of K-12 education. Provincial ministers held sway, ensuring that CMEC served the interests and upheld the reputations of the member provinces.
The most recent CMEC reports in the "Measuring Up" series, focusing on OECD PISA 2018, TIMSS 2019, and PCAP 2020, do aggregate student performance data comparing countries and provinces, but they tend to highlight our strengths, minimize the deficits, and generally 'put a shine on the apple.'
The latest "Assessment Matters" research brief, the 17th in a series, released in March 2021 is typical of most. The cheeky title "Are You Smarter than a Fourth Grader?" is alluring. It's actually a thinly-veiled rationale for putting more emphasis on "reading literacy" (i.e., communicating in multiple forms) than on reading fluency and comprehension, two critical indicators of reading effectiveness.
Proponents of a more robust national governmental presence, such as former federal bureaucrat Irvin Studin, have correctly identified the vacuum at the centre of Canada's educational system. Provincial systems, severely damaged by the pandemic, are proving incapable of responding with agility to radically changed circumstances. Particularly concerning is the rise of the so-called "third bucket" cohort of children either totally disengaged or missing from public schools, regarded as the human casualties of two years of disrupted education.
While Canada's provincially governed school systems are currently in disarray, creating a fourteenth system is not really the answer, unless the hidden agenda is to use the federal agency as a source of social transfers to reduce educational inequities from province-to-province.
More funding, while welcome, may only change how the educational pie is divided up among governments. We also know, from cross-provincial comparisons of per-student expenditures that pouring more money into K-12 systems does not produce better learning or higher student achievement. If that was the case, Manitoba would be a leading education province and Quebec would cease being the undisputed champion in Mathematics.
Judging from the American experience, establishing a national education department is not a panacea. The U.S. Department of Education, elevated in 1979 to a cabinet level agency by President Jimmy Carter and expanded by subsequent administrations, has introduced new accountabilities, such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top assessment programs, and run up education expenditures with little to show for all those initiatives. Aside from Title 1 federal grants and the Promise Neighborhood initiative aiming to bridge the achievement gap, it's hard to fund much evidence of a breakthrough in better student outcomes. Expenditures have certainly ballooned, reaching $70-billion in 2019, representing 13 per cent of total education expenditures.
Canada's federal role in Indigenous education, managed by Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development, under various names does not inspire much confidence in proposals to further extend federal authority into a provincial jurisdiction. The failure of Bill C-33, the First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act, back in 2013-14, served only to demonstrate the potential for jurisdictional turf wars, territorial imperative, and competing visions about the purposes and future of education.
Most of the substantive criticisms of Canadian education tend to centre around the system's greatest deficiency – the lack of a national, independent education research bureau and clearing house for the best evidence-based research to inform future planning, policy-making and curriculum reform. The former Canadian Council on Learning, headed by Cappon from 2004 to 2012, demonstrated the critical need for that type of national agency. What CCL lacked was the authority to collect and validate student and system performance and the clout to ensure that the provinces were rewarded for collaborating on national school improvement projects, taping into evidence-based research, and actually tackling persistent and unaddressed problems, including early reading inequities, mathematics competencies, student absenteeism, and grade inflation.
The Canadian Council on Learning's final report, "What is the Future of Learning in Canada," remains as relevant today as it was upon its release in October of 2011. While Canada possessed undoubted strengths, specifically in early learning and post-secondary education participation, our students have, as Cappon predicted, plateaued or slightly declined on international assessments and there's still little or no coherence in our approach to "improving the learning futures of Canadians of all ages." Early literacy and mathematics competencies, high school student achievement levels, post-secondary education integration, and adult workplace training programs require improvement, just as they did ten years ago.
Replacing the Council of Ministers of Education has more resonance in the wake of the pandemic shock and its destabilizing effect on K-12 education. Adding another layer of bureaucratic oversight, however, would only compound our existing problem exemplified in the aggregation of provincial authorities inclined to protect their own interests. Nothing much will change unless and until we have a new generation of provincial leaders focused on busting through the bureaucracy and preparing our students with the fundamental knowledge and skills to tackle future twists and turns affecting the life chances of today's students.
Where was the Canadian Council of Ministers of Education when we needed a robust, coordinated response to the pandemic? Can CMEC be reformed to make it more transparent, effective and responsive to dramatic changes in K-12 education? Or should we start over with a more purpose-built pan-Canadian research bureau committed to rapid response evidence-based policy?
Pandemic Disruption and Learnification: Will the Education Crisis Help Us to Reclaim Teaching?
Posted in COVID-19 Education, Education Research, Educational Change, Educational Philosophy, Learnification, Post-Pandemic Schooling, Teacher Autonomy, Teaching Practice, Teaching Profession, tagged Flip the System, Gert Biesta, Guide on the Side, Hanna Arendt, Jelmer Evers, Learnification, Michael Zwaagstra, Pandemic schooling, Peer at the Rear, Rene Kneyber, Sage on the Stage, Teaching-centred-classrooms, The Rediscovery of Teaching on October 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Learnification has finally been exposed and classroom teachers everywhere are gradually awakening to its debilitating effects on their professional autonomy and teaching practice. It took a global education system shutdown to reveal that all things educational had been, over the past forty years, redefined in terms of "learning" and reducing "teaching" to the "facilitation of learning." Warnings from Dutch-born education philosopher Dr. Gert Biesta, the recognized leader of the reclaiming teaching movement, went unheeded; it took an education crisis to bring about that awakening.
Dr. Gert Biesta, Dutch-born education philosopher, and author of The Rediscovery of Teaching (2017) who identified the dominance of learnification in contemporary education
The gradual shift from teaching to learning from the 1980s onward transformed far more than the language of education, and significantly altered the role, position, and the identity of the teacher. A whole generation of teachers were schooled to shift from teacher as 'sage on the stage' to 'guide on the side' and, in the eyes of some, to 'peer at the rear.' System change theorists and progressive education reformers socialized and in-serviced classroom practitioners to blend-in as a learner among learners in a 'learning community,' to the point where many were almost indistinguishable from their students.
The global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic essentially turned the K-12 education world upside down. Suspending in-person schooling in March 2020 for three months, followed by a pandemic-haunted summer break, then a radically altered crazy-quilt pattern of schedules, has shaken-up our provincial school systems. Today's generation of teachers has been thrust into technology-enabled distance learning and given a crash course on managing the complexities of hybrid blended learning. Video conferencing and live streaming are emerging as the primary survival tools for educators faced with teaching a combination of in-person and virtual classes.
School systems are still reeling from the COVID-19 impact and it has dealt a serious blow to what I have identified in my new book The State of the System as the modern bureaucratic education state and for the most part disabled its pedagogical companion, learnification. That dramatic development has also thrown school system change theorists and progressive pedagogues for a loop.
With schools closed and traditional classrooms gone, teachers were left on their own to deliver the curriculum and interact, mostly-one-on one, with students. Facing a gallery of students with cameras on logged into Zoom or Microsoft Teams or a system-sanctioned platform changed the terms of engagement in COVID-19 education times. Conventional progressive pedagogical practices such as cooperative learning activities, facilitating group discussion, and project-based learning were far more challenging, if not impossible to implement. Many and perhaps most teachers defaulted to simply assigning homework and hoped for the best. Over the course of the first three months, student participation rates plummeted and an estimated one out of four students went missing in public education.
The new normal in K-12 education is not conducive to the simple resumption of past teaching practices, and particularly elementary learning centres, process-driven activities, and interactive group learning. A whole generation of educators, steeped in progressive pedagogy, is coming to the realization that post-pandemic education may well be defined by physical distancing, spaced-out student desks, plexiglass partitions, and 'keeping your distance' education. Standing and delivering a lesson, live-streaming presentations, and whole-class teaching are much more practical and pragmatic responses to post-pandemic educational realities.
Even before the pandemic, teachers were clamouring for a much larger role in setting priorities and determining what happens in today's schools. That spirit was captured well in a 2016 collection of essays, Flip the System, edited by two Dutch teachers Jelmer Evers and Rene Kneyber, which made the case for teachers to take the lead in reforming education. Like most of the book's contributors, the co-editors saw education under threat on a global scale by the so-called "forces of neoliberalism," exemplified in "high stakes accountability, privatization, and a destructive language of learning" ( Evers and Kneyber, 1-7).
Instead of "being told what to achieve and how to achieve it," Evers and Kneyber urged fellow teachers to "show leadership in regard to the how and the what" of education. What did it mean in practice? Reasserting teacher agency in an educational world where many advocating "teacher leadership" were, in fact, appropriating the term as "another tool for domestication" rather than "an instrument for deregulation and professionalization." Flipping the system would move teachers to the centre of the enterprise and resemble more of "a process of emancipation than a 'system intervention.'" The voice of teachers would be given a meaningful place, instead of being just part of the 'noise' reverberating through the system (Evers and Kneyber, 7).
Today it's fashionable in K-12 education to attribute all that ails the system to globalization and so-called neo-liberal education reform. Standardized testing and accountability did play an instrumental role in promoting and entrenching efficiency and managerialism, while eroding teacher autonomy in the school and community. It was not, however, the main impetus behind the new technocratic educational language of learnification. That shift was promoted by education change gurus and reformers of all persuasions, and — most notably– by education progressives wedded to student-centred learning.
The educational status quo has clearly experienced a major disruption. Self-styled progressives continue to describe students as "learners," teaching is "facilitating learning," broader education is "lifelong learning," and school is a "learning environment." The dominance of such a language, promulgated by ministries of education and education faculties, has served to subvert what Gert Biesta identified as the real point of education – to learn something, to learn it for a reason, and to learn it from someone. It may turn out that it took a global pandemic to demonstrate the wisdom of bringing teachers back to centre stage and putting teaching back into K-12 education.
What has happened to teaching in our learnification-driven school systems? To what extent did the almost exclusive focus on "learning" lead to the virtual disappearnance of the teacher? How has the COVID-19 pandemic education crisis impacted upon the teaching practices of classroom teachers? Are "teaching-centred-classrooms," by definition, always instruments of control or can they be places of emancipation for children? Is the time ripe for reclaiming teaching in education?
Adventures in Education Guru Land: What Sustains the Hegemony?
Posted in Edu-Gurus, Education Reform, Education Research, Educational Change, Educational Leadership, EduTwitter, School Change, Teacher Education, Teaching Practice, tagged All American Entertainment, Andy Hargreaves, Built-in crap detectors, Corwin Publishing, Daniel T Willingham, Dylan Wiliam, Education Gurus, Educational Change SIG, Geoffrey Canada, Michael Fullan, Neil Postman, Pasi Sahlberg, ResearchED, researchED Home, researchED teacher guides, Sir Ken Robinson, Solution Tree, Steven Watson, Sugata Mitra, Teacher Populism, Tom Bennett on August 3, 2020| 20 Comments »
Standing in a classroom at University of Toronto Schools in the spring of 2004, global education consultant Dr. Michael Fullan, former Dean at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), uttered one of his most memorable lines. "People only call me a guru, " he joked, "because they can't spell charlatan." Appointed, for a second time, as a Senior Education Advisor to the Ontario government (2004-2018), he was in a buoyant mood after being welcomed back from a a period of exile (1997 to 2004) guiding Tony Blair's New Labour education reforms.
Today, sixteen years later, the global education consultant still ranks 20th out of the top 30 "Global Education Gurus" as posted annually by All American Entertainment (AAE), the Durham, NC-based speakers' bureau. Michael Fullan, O.C., now billed as Global Leadership Director, New Pedagogies for Deep Learning, still commands fees of $10,000 to $20,000 for his North American speaking engagements.
Now considered "a worldwide authority" on education reform, he occupies considerable territory in Education Guru Land. Preaching system-wide reform, advising ministers of education, and mingling with thought leaders, he's far removed from the regular teacher's classroom. He's also more likely to be found in the company of other members of the pantheon, TED Talk legend Sir Ken Robinson (#8), school leadership expert Andy Hargreaves (#21), and Finnish education promoter Pasi Sahlberg (#28).
The world's leading education gurus seem to have had a hypnotic effect on policy-makers and superintendents in the entire K-12 education sector. The profound influence of Fullan and his global reform associates is cemented by an intricate network of alliances which, in the case of Ontario, encompasses the Council of Directors of Education (CODE), the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), the Ontario Principals' Council (OPC), and a friendly parent organization. People for Education.
Challenging the hegemony of this entrenched educational change establishment is a formidable undertaking. "Teacher populism" inspired by British teacher Tom Bennett and exemplified in the spontaneous eruption of researchED from 2013 to 2018 made serious inroads, particularly in Britain, Western Europe, and Australia. It faced stronger headwinds in the United States and Canada, where the progressive education consensus is more all-pervasive. The fear and panic generated by empowered teachers (working around education schools) has sparked not only seismic reactions, but the closing of ranks.
One of the most recent responses, produced by Cambridge University School of Education lecturer Steven Watson, attempted, not altogether successfully, to paint "teacher populism" as a movement of the New Right and offered up a piece of Twitter feed ethnography smacking of contemporary "cancel culture." That article completely ignored the fundamental underpinning of researchED — the crowds of educators attending Saturday PD conferences, paying your own registration fees, and engaging with teacher-researchers who speak without remuneration.
Curiously absent from Watson's article was any reference to dozens of top-notch researchED speakers, including British-born student assessment expert Dylan Wiliam (#11 – 2020 – $10,000-$20,000), AFT magazine cognitive psychologist Dan T. Willingham, and How to Learn Mathematics specialist Barbara Oakley, who regularly speak without remuneration at such conferences.
researchED emerged to fill a gaping hole in K-12 teacher development. The researchED conference Model is decidedly different. Conferences are held on Saturdays in schools rather than hotel conference centres. Two dozen or more teacher researchers or practicing teachers are featured presenting in actual classrooms. researchED events showcase speakers reflecting a wide range of perspectives, spark lively pedagogical debates, and are increasingly diverse in their composition. Many of the short 45-minute presentations by volunteer presenters focus on contested curricular or pedagogical issues, including education myths, explicit instruction, cognitive load, early reading, mathematics skills, and teacher assessment workload.
Over 45,000 teachers on four continents attended dozens of researchED events over the seven years before COVID-19 hit us with full force. The London-based teacher research organization publishes its own bi-annual free magazine and is producing, in collaboration with John Catt Educational Publishing, a series of researchED guides to the latest evidence-based research. Since April 2020, the movement has continued with free virtual PD conferences under the banner of researchED Home.
Today's education world is full of high-priced speakers who are featured at state, provincial and regional professional development conferences, mostly at events where the registration fees are many times higher than that of a researchED conference anywhere in the world. Dr. Fullan's speaking fees pale in comparison with more messianic gurus such as Harlem Children's Zone founder Geoffrey Canada ($50,000 – $100,000) and global tech researcher Sugata Mitra (#19 –$30,000 – $50,000), but he still commands fees comparable to American public school champion Diane Ravitch (#1 -2020), OECD Education director Andreas Schleicher, progressive education advocate Alfie Kohn, and Alberta ed tech innovator George Couros.
Almost forty years since the the publication of The Meaning of Educational Change (1983), Fullan's real influence is reflected in the missionary work of his extensive Educational Change entourage, including Pearson International advisor Sir Michael Barber, Welsh education change professor Alma Harris, former York Region superintendent Lyn Sharratt, and OISE School Leadership professor Carol Campbell.
Although Dr. Hargreaves was mentored by Fullan at OISE, he's branched out and, while at Boston's Lynch School of Education, generated (with colleague Dennis Shirley) an interconnected network of his own. The Fullan-Hargreaves educational change constellation sustains two academic journals and is closely aligned with two American educational enterprises, Corwin Educational Publishing and PD resource provider Solution Tree. That alliance has produced a steady stream of books, articles and workshops inspired by the global school change theorists.
The prevailing educational reform consensus has largely gone unchallenged for the past few decades. Reading Steven Watson's thinly-veiled academic assault on "teacher populism" demonstrates how little it takes to rattle the cage of the ideologues actively resisting teacher-driven research, the science of learning, and challenges to current pedagogical orthodoxy. Equipping today's classroom teachers (and learners) with what the late American education reformer Neil Postman once termed "built-in shockproof crap detectors" is as threatening now as it was a few decades ago.
What sustains the hegemony of today's educational reform establishment? How much of that controlling influence is perpetuated by education gurus committed to upholding the prevailing consensus and defending a significant number of uncontested theories? Will the recent COVID-19 education shutdown change the terms of engagement? Should "teacher populism" be dismissed as subversive activity or approached as a fresh opportunity to confront some of the gaps between philosophical theory and actual classroom practice?
Near Future Classrooms: What if 'Keeping Your Distance' Becomes the New Normal?*
Posted in Child Health, Classroom Management, E-Learning, Education Research, Flu Season Outbreaks, Pandemic Planning, School and Classroom Design, Student Behaviour Management, Student Well Being, Teacher-Student Relationships, tagged Blended learning, Close Proximity Research, E-Learning, Post COVID-19 Classrooms, Sanitizing Schools, School Health Checks, School Pandemic Planning, Social Distancing, Social Interaction Research, Socially Distant Desks, Taiwanese Schools on April 2, 2020| 4 Comments »
Shaking hands is, for now, socially unacceptable and 'keeping your distance' is the new normal in all public settings. Following the strict advice of our Chief Medial Officers of Health, the vast majority of citizens, groups and organizations are complying with 'physical distancing' to contain the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus. If the new public health conventions become ingrained and persist beyond the immediate crisis, the fundamental change in social norms outside the household sphere will profoundly alter life in public settings, particularly in K-12 schools and classrooms.
Seeing images of public schools in Taipei, Taiwan, in full operation during the COVID-19 heath crisis, is jarring, if not downright shocking. Based upon hard lessons gleaned from the 2003 SARS pandemic, Taiwanese authorities, including school heads, were quick to recognize the crisis and activated stringent emergency health management plans to keep schools running instead of simply closing them down.
School life during COVID-19 was transformed into a virtual health protection zone. Students at Daija Elementary School in Taipei were asked to disinfect their hands and shoes before entering the school building, while a security guard took their temperature, and, once in class, the children were seated in separated rows wearing masks. What set that school apart, and drew international attention, was the sight of elementary children eating their own lunches while sitting behind bright yellow dividers on their desks.
With the frightening pandemic upon us, education planners and policy-makers need to look beyond the immediate crisis and start making plans for the resumption of in-person schooling, likely months from now. A whole generation of students, parents and families, having survived the ravages of the virus, may be not only more receptive to online learning, but expecting, a different kind of K-12 day school education.
School practices intended to promote social distancing may well be an unintended legacy of the current crisis. If and when influenza pandemic control measures become higher priorities, social distancing conventions that increase space between people and reduce the frequency of contacts may well overturn progressive teaching methodologies and spell the end, in real time, of clustered seating, learning centres, and interactive small group learning.
Today's student-centred, interactive classroom based upon 'hands-on' learning was, it is becoming clear, greatly advanced by the widespread adoption of vaccines and school-based vaccination and related health programs. The emergency health risk posed by COVID-19 is more reminiscent of the scourge of childhood diseases, unchecked by vaccines, up until the 1960s. While class sizes were larger then, the traditional classroom exemplified social distancing because children were seated in individual desks, spaced apart, lined-up before moving from place to place, and taught personal hygiene in elementary classes.
Classroom design and seating since the 1970s has tended to focus on creating settings that supported 'active learning' and reputedly 'progressive' teaching methods, such as learning circles, cooperative learning, and project-based groupings. Scanning the North American physical classroom environment research, it's striking how may action-research projects were undertaken to demonstrate that teaching children sitting in rows was detrimental to student engagement, widely considered an end in and of itself.
Neglected research on physical proximity and anxieties about crowding will get a much closer look in the post-COVID-19 era of education. Coming out of household quarantine and re-entering school, students, parents and teachers will be far more conscious of infectious diseases and the physical conditions contributing to its transmission. Ministries of education, school districts and principals will likely give a much higher priority to providing face-to-face teaching and learning in classrooms meeting stricter health protection standards.
Academic studies of "peers in proximity" and the few analyzing the "mixing patterns of students in school environments" do provide us with signposts for deeper dives. One 2015 Dutch study of interpersonal processes in the classroom, conducted by Yvonne Van den Berg, demonstrates how "a careful management of physical distance between classmates" can improve classroom climate, but it focuses almost exclusively on rectifying identified imbalances in social status in classes where students choose their own seats.
The role of children in the community spread of respiratory diseases such as H1N1 and COVID-19 identified by medical health authorities has attracted relatively little attention from education researchers based in graduate schools of education. One Canadian health policy study, produced in 2013 by University of Toronto researcher Laena Maunula may have compounded the problem. It claimed that public health messages were "dangerous" because they reinforce "bio power" and "governmentality" (i.e., a coercive state reducing citizens to 'trained subjectivities.')
For more promising disease prevention studies, we have to look to Europe and the pioneering work of two research teams, led by Marcel Salathé of the Salathe Lab at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Juliette Stehlé of Marseille, working with the University of Lyon-based National Influenza Centre. Utilizing wireless sensor network technology, they have studied the social networks in both primary and secondary schools which facilitate infectious disease transmission. Logging the data for CPIs (close proximity interactions), the researchers honed-in on the problem presented by schools as high potential sites for pandemic spread. Follow-up studies by American health researchers applied this research and concluded that extensive alternative school-based interventions regulating free student movement, as an alternative to school closure, can significantly reduce contacts and potential exposure to infectious diseases.
A more recent 2018 Rand Corporation study, building upon the close proximity studies findings, examined American school influenza pandemic policies and practices. It found that, while strictly limiting student interactions in hallways and classrooms reduced transmission rates, only four of 50 U.S. states ( Georgia, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia) had firm policies authorizing the full range of social distancing regulations. Ontario's 2013 Health Plan for an Influenza Epidemic, much like those south of the border, relied upon school closures and made no provision for resumption of school after a pandemic outbreak.
Near future schools reopening after the hiatus will not look or feel the same, given the prospects for a second wave. Taiwanese schools during the current pandemic might represent an extreme akin to a dystopian village, but post-COVID-19 K-12 public schools will in all likelihood incorporate some of those rigid protocols, at least until student, parent and teacher anxieties subside in the coming years.
*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in The National Post, March 26, 2020.
What will classrooms look like following the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic? Will the heightened awareness of the threat of epidemic diseases impact upon attendance monitoring, classroom design and layout, and teaching methodologies? Will the post-COVID-19 classrooms look more like those in Taiwan during the pandemic? How much e-learning will survive when face-to-face, in-person teaching resumes in the coming months?
Education for the Future Rankings: Why is Finland on Top and Who's Advising the World Economic Forum?
Posted in 21st Century Learning, Digital Revolution, Ed-Tech Innovations, Education Research, Educational Change, Global Competencies, International Standards, OECD Education, PISA Test Rankings, tagged Aino Saarinen, Denis McCauley, Economist Intelligence Unit, Educating for the Future, Finnish Education, Jaime Casap, Louis Volante, Pasi Sahlberg, Phenomenon-Based Learning, Pontus School, World Economic Forum on August 18, 2019| 1 Comment »
Students and parents in the Pontus school in Lappeenranta, one of the first Finnish schools to implement the "phenomenon-based" digital curriculum, are now disputing the broad claim made by the World Economic Forum in its 2018 Worldwide Educating for the Future Index. Concerned about the new direction, parents of the children have lodged a number of complaints over the "failure" of the new school and cited student concerns that they didn't "learn anything" under the new curriculum and pedagogy. For some, the only recourse was to move their children to schools continuing to offer a more explicit teaching of content knowledge and skills.
The Finnish parent resistance is more than a small blip on the global education landscape. It strikes at the heart of the Finnish Ministry of Education's 2016 plan to introduce "phenomenon' problem-solving — replacing more traditional subject-based curriculum in mathematics, science, and history with an interdisciplinary model focusing on developing holistic skills for the future workplace. Perhaps more significantly, it blows a hole in the carefully-crafted image of Finland as the world leader in "building tomorrow's global citizens."
The basis for Finland's claim to be a global future education leader now rests almost entirely upon that 2018 global ranking produced by the World Economic Forum, based upon advice gleaned from an 'expert panel' engaged by The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited. While Finland has slipped from 2000 to 2015 on the more widely-recognized Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, that educational jurisdiction remains a favourite of global learning corporations and high technology business interests. A close-up look at who provides the "educational intelligence" to the World Economic Forum demonstrates the fusion of interests that sustains the global reputation of Finland and other Western nations heavily invested in digital technology and learning.
The 2018 World Economic Forum future education index was a rather polished attempt to overturn the prevailing research consensus. The PISA Worldwide Ranking – based upon average student scores in math, reading and science — place Asian countries, Estonia and Canada all ahead of Finland in student achievement. The top five performers are Singapore (551.7), Hong Kong (532.7), Japan (528.7), Macau (527.3), and Estonia (524.3). A panel of seventeen experts, selected by The Economist Intelligence Unit, sets out to dispute the concrete student results of an OECD study of 70 countries ranking 15-year-olds on their scholastic performance.
The Economist Intelligence Unit index runs completely counter to the PISA rankings and attempts to counter the well-founded claim that student mastery of content-knowledge and fundamental skills is the best predictor of future student success in university, college and the workplace. Upon close examination, the World Economic Forum index seeks to supplant the established competencies and to substitute a mostly subjective assessment of "the effectiveness of education systems in preparing students for the demands of work and life in a rapidly changing landscape"( p. 1). It focuses on the 15 to 24 year-old-age band in some 50 countries around the world. Setting aside how students are actually performing, we are provided with a ranking based almost exclusively on compliance with so-called "21st century learning" competencies – leadership, creativity, entrepreneurship, communication, global awareness, and civic education skills.
The poster child nation for the World Economic Forum rankings is Finland, now ranked 8th on its PISA scores, because it has now embraced, full-on, the "21st century learning" ideology and invests heavily in technology-driven digital education. The balance of the Top 5 World Economic Forum nations, Switzerland, New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada, rank 15th, 16th, 26th, and 5th on the basis of their students' PISA scores. Most problematic of all, the future education ranking downgrades the current global education leaders, Singapore (7th), Japan (12th), and Hong Kong (15th). Mastery of academic competencies is, based upon the assessment criteria, not relevant when you are ranking countries on the basis of their support for technology-driven, digital education.
Who produced the World Economic Forum rankings? The actual report was written by Economist Intelligence Unit contract writer Denis McCauley, a veteran London-based global technology consultant, known for co-authoring, a Ricoh-sponsored white paper, Agent of Change, alerting business leaders to the urgent necessity of embracing Artificial Intelligence and technological change. Scanning the seventeen-member expert panel, it's dominated by the usual suspects, global technology researchers and digital education proponents. One of the more notable advisors was Chief Education Evangelist for Google, Jaime Casap, the American technology promoter who spearheaded Google's Apps for Education growth strategy aimed at teachers and powered by online communities known as Google Educator Groups, and "leadership symposiums" sponsored by the global tech giant.
Most of The Economist Intelligence Unit advisors see Finland as the 'lighthouse nation' for the coming technological change in K-12 education. Heavily influenced by former Finnish education ambassador, Pasi Sahlberg, they are enamoured with the Finnish model of phenomenon-based learning and its promise to implant "21st century skills" through structural changes in curriculum organization and delivery in schools. It's not surprising that it was actually Sahlberg who first tweeted about the Pontus school uprising, likely to alert Finnish education officials to the potential for broader resistance.
Launched in 2016 with a flurry of favourable ed-tech friendly research, the Finnish curriculum reform tapped into the rather obscure academic field of phenomenology. The new curriculum adopted a phenomenon-based approach embracing curriculum integration with a theoretical grounding in constructivism. All of this was purportedly designed to develop student skills for the changing 21st century workplace. The ultimate goal was also spelled out by Canadian education professor Louis Volante and his associates in a World Economic Forum-sponsored April 2019 commentary extolling "broader measures" of assessing success in education. Peeling away the sugary coating, "phenomenon learning" was just another formulation of student-centred, project-based, 21st century skills education.
The daily reality for students like grade 6 student Aino Pilronen of Pontus School was quite different. "The beginning of the day was chaotic," she reported, as students milled around developing study plans or hung-out in the so-called "market square." "It was hard for me that the teacher did not teach at first, but instead we should have been able to learn things by ourselves." Her brutally honest assessment: " I didn't learn anything."
The Economist Intelligence Unit not only ignored such concerns voiced by students and parents, but brushed aside evidence that it would not work for the full range of students. A Helsinki University researcher, Aino Saarinen, attributed the decline in Finland's PISA education standing to the increasing use of digital learning materials. Investing 50 million Euros since 2016 in training teachers to use digital devices and laptops, she claimed was not paying-off because "the more that digital tools were used in lessons, the worse learning outcomes were" in math, science, and reading. The most adversely affected were struggling and learning-challenged students, the very ones supposedly better served under the new curriculum.
What can we learn from taking a more critical, independent look at the actual state of Finnish education? If Finnish education is in decline and 21st century learning reform encountering parental dissent, how can it be the top ranked "future education" system? Who is providing the educational intelligence to the World Economic Forum? Is it wise to accept a global ranking that discounts or dismisses quantitative evidence on trends in comparative student academic achievement?
The Knowledge Gap: Who is Challenging the Sugary Elementary School Curriculum Consensus in Canada?
Posted in Achievement Gap, Early Reading Instruction, Education Reform, Education Research, Knowledge-Rich Curriculum, Science of Learning, Teacher Education, tagged A Sage on the Stage, Knowledge-Rich Curriculum, Michael Zwaagstra, Natalie Wexler, Prior Knowledge, ResearchED, researchED Canada, Science of Reading, The Learning Gap on August 12, 2019| 21 Comments »
Every school year seems to herald the arrival of a new crop of education books seeking to "fix the education system." Some champion the latest educational panacea, others target the supposed causes of decline, and a select few identify a possible pathway for improving teaching and learning or making schools better. Despite significant investments in remedial programs and 'learning supports,' a yawning "achievement gap" persists between students from marginalized or low-income families and their more affluent counterparts and, with few exceptions, it has not closed much over the past fifty years.
Two new education reform books, Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap, and Michael Zwaagstra's A Sage on the Stage, raise hope that the sources of the problem can be identified and actually addressed in the years ahead. Each of the two books, one American, the other Canadian, offer markedly similar diagnoses and urge policy-makers and educators alike to shore-up the rather emaciated content knowledge-based curriculum.
Prominent American journalist Wexler demonstrates that elementary school teaching and learning, once considered a bright spot, is so undernourished that most teachers now teach as though it doesn't matter what students are reading or learning, as long as they are acquiring skills of one kind or another. Manitoba high school teacher Zwaagstra, in one commentary after another, shows how teaching content knowledge has been downgraded at all levels and overtaken by constructivist experiments embedded in the latest "foolish fads infecting public education."
Forays into American elementary schools, during Wexler's field research, produce some alarming lessons. First graders in a Washington, DC, inner city school are observed, virtually lost, drawing clowns or struggling to fill-in worksheets in a class supposedly based upon a rather dense article about Brazil. Teachers jump wily-nily from topic to topic asking students to read about clouds one day, then zebras the next, completely out of context. Few elementary teachers seem aware of the science of learning or the vital importance of prior knowledge in reading comprehension. Equally disturbing is the general finding that so many elementary teachers simply assume that children can acquire content knowledge later, after they have a modicum of skills. Such 'progressive education' assumptions prevail in most elementary schools, public, private and independent, almost without variation.
Zwaagstra's book, composed of his best Canadian newspaper commentaries over the past decade, takes dead aim at the prevailing ideology fostered in faculties of education and perpetuated by provincial and school district armies of curriculum consultants and pedagogical coaches. Beginning teachers are trained to resist the temptation to be "a sage on the stage" and instead strive to be "a guide on the side." Zwaagstra completely rejects that approach on the grounds that it undermines teacher content knowledge and devalues the expertise of professionals in the classroom. He is, in this respect, speaking the same language as most secondary school teachers who have never really given up the notion that prior knowledge matters and that knowing your subject is critical to higher achievement in colleges and universities.
Zwaagstra speaks up for regular classroom teachers who focus on what works in the classroom and have learned, over the years, to be skeptical of the latest fads. Most regular teachers reading his stinging critiques of 'discovery math," whole-language-founded "balanced literacy," and incomprehensible "no zero" student evaluation policies will likely be nodding in approval. Not content simply to pick holes in existing theories and practices, he makes a common sense case for strategies that do work, especially in high schools —explicit instruction, knowledge-rich curriculum, and plenty of practice to achieve mastery.
Both Wexler and Zwaagstra go to considerable lengths to spare teachers from the blame for what has gone wrong in the school system. Prevailing pedagogical theories and education professors are identified as the purveyors of teaching approaches and practices floating on uncontested progressive education beliefs. When it comes to teaching reading comprehension, Wexler carefully explains why teachers continue to teach reading comprehension as a set of discrete skills instead of being founded on prior knowledge and expanded vocabulary. It is, in her analysis, "simply the water they've been swimming in, so universal and taken for granted they don't question or even mention it." In Zwaagstra's case, he's very sympathetic to hard-working teachers in the trenches who cope by carrying-on with what works and developing 'work-arounds' when confronted by staunch ideologues or impossible mandates.
What's really significant about these two education reformers is that both are strong advocates for, and supporters of, the international researchED movement out to challenge and dispel popular myths that have little or no basis in evidence-based research or cognitive science. Zwaagstra is a very popular presenter at researchED Canada conferences and Wexler is one of the headliners at the upcoming American researchED conference, November 16, 2019, in Philadelphia, PA.
The two authors are very much part of the great awakening made possible by the flourishing of social media conversations, especially on EduTwitter, where independently-minded educators from around the world now go to debate education reform, share the latest research in cognitive science, and discuss ways of grappling with common problems in everyday teaching.
Slowly, but surely, the global edu-gurus are losing their single channel, uncontested platforms and facing more and more teachers equipped to call into question prevailing teaching approaches and fashionable education fads. Moving forward is now less about finding and embracing education evangelists or grabbing hold of, and riding, the latest fad, and far more about interrogating accepted truths and trusting your teacher colleagues to work out what works in the classroom.
What's significant about the two books — Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap and Michael Zwaagstra's A Sage on the Stage? Now that the call for content-knowledge curriculum is back in vogue in the United States, will Canadian policy-makers and educators begin looking more critically at their policies and practices? With more educators embracing a knowledge-rich curriculum, what would it take to successfully challenge the the sugary progressive education consensus in elementary schools?
Ghost of John Dewey: Is the Education School Romance Ending?
Posted in Education Research, Education Schools, EDucational Theory and Practice, Progressive Education, Teacher Education, Teaching Profession, tagged David Larabee, David Waddington, Dewey Research, Deweyism, Education Schools, John Dewey, Michael Zwaagstra, ResearchED, The Trouble with Ed Schools on May 16, 2019| 16 Comments »
Progressive education and its principal banner-bearer John Dewey remain popular in Canadian and American faculties of education and within the teaching profession, particularly among elementary school teachers. Educational theories based upon Dewey's voluminous writings still hold great appeal among a wide swath of professors within education schools, encompassing educational psychologists and teacher educators. Citing Dewey in your work is common; less common is delving into the intellectual underpinnings and tenets of Deweyism. While the Philosophy of Education is withering as a field, Dewey scholarship remains a bright spot and a gathering place for the so-called "romantics."
A recent analysis of John Dewey and the state of educational philosophy dared to suggest that the father of modern progressivism may be "doomed to fade" in the galaxy. The short 2019 essay, authored by Dewey scholar David I Waddington, Professor of Educational Philosophy at Concordia University, posited that the "romance" showed signs of coming to an end. That decline and ultimate fall, he forecast with a twinge of sadness, was foreshadowed by the decomposition of "modernity" and the "accelerating failure of the progressive movement's social project." The progressive movement's current difficulties, he concluded, did not bode well for the future of Dewey scholarship in education schools and, by extension, research-informed practice in the schools.
Education schools carry the burden of a reputation for occupying a "low academic status" in the university. In the course of explaining that lowly status David Larabee (The Trouble with Ed Schools, 2006), attributed it in large part to the tendency of American schools of education to embrace Dewey's progressivism with something approaching a religious fervour. He claimed that education schools exemplified a "romance with progressivism" forged in the early 20th century as teacher education moved decisively towards a strong professional training orientation. On the teaching side, this tied-in with preparing teachers for the classroom; on the research side, it was exemplified in the focus on developing new testing systems and building the bureaucratic administrative structure of the modern school system. Faculties of education became, in Waddington's words, "handmaidens to the public school system" absorbed in training teachers and administrators, and later, higher-level consultants.
John Dewey's progressivism filled a vacuum by providing a serviceable educational philosophy. Few teacher educators gravitated to educational philosophy and most were satisfied with a general understanding of Dewey's theories. A significant number of education professors, then as now, were deeply committed to "social justice education" and found in Dewey an aspirational philosophy that accorded with their own commitment to the "liberal reform project" of schooling.
Most education professors were pragmatic educators with surprisingly little interest or passion for matters of theory, cognitive science or discipline-based curriculum. Teacher educators had some control over classroom practice, so this became their primary focus, and curriculum was ceded to the policy branches of education departments. Dewey's writings fit the orientation because they focused on how to teach rather than what to teach. Studies conducted from 1993 to 2006 revealed that alarming numbers of education professors were poorly read and, in some cases, unable to cite a single book or author in their field.
Schools of education needed all the credibility they could muster and they found that salvation in Dewey, widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Many with a narrow focus on teacher preparation, psychology, or technical education latched onto Dewey and claimed him for what Waddington aptly describes as the "sad-sack home team."
While the ghost of John Dewey still haunts teacher training schools, his influence is definitely on the wane. The American education philosopher still has a hard core of camp followers, but his ideas embodied "the modern project" of reconstructing society through the reform of public institutions is in disrepute in the academy. "We are living amidst the wreckage of the modern project," according to Waddington, and the "grand modern Deweyan metanarrative of education as the liberator of humanity now rings increasingly false." Supporting modernity and the renewal of the liberal state is, after all, incompatible with "critical social justice scholarship" leaving Deweyites on a lonely academic perch.
Prominent critics of education schools are now piling-on with fresh evidence that those institutions are disconnected in other ways. Manitoba teacher and education policy analyst Michael Zwaagstra claims that most education faculties remain wedded to Deweyism and resistant to change. "Education schools continue to downplay subject-specific knowledge and promote many of the same fads, albeit under new names," he points out. "Today's education students are fed useless platitudes such as the need to be a 'guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage.'"
Zwaagstra's critique has a familiar ring: "Instead of empowering future teachers with the confidence they need to effectively manage their classrooms, education professors promote theories that have little practical use in actual classrooms with real students." Teacher candidates give high marks to classroom teachers in their practicum sessions, but 'one of the most common sentiments expressed by classroom teachers is that their education classes taught them little about how to teach."
Hopeful signs are appearing as some practicing teachers have begun to take matters into their own hands. Zwaagstra and a growing band of researchED supporters draw hope and strength from the British teacher research movement founded in 2013 by Tom Bennett and slowly spreading (teacher-to-teacher) throughout Canada and the United States. In sharp contrast to education school approaches and education guru-led school change, researchED is "entirely teacher-directed and gives teachers an opportunity to directly engage with the research literature." Freed-up from the ideological conformity expected by modern day Deweyites, teacher presenters come from a variety of perspectives and disciplines and teachers are left to make up their own minds regarding what they hear.
Why does John Dewey and his brand of progressivism still pervade so many faculties of education? Will Deweyism survive the decline and fall of modernity and be exhumed from 'the wreckage of the modern project'? Where do today's teacher training programs fall short? Does the emergence of researchED in North America provide a glimmer of hope?
Future-Proof Learning: What if… 21st Century Skills Don't Exist?
Posted in 21st Century Learning, Competency-Based Assessment, Digital Revolution, Ed-Tech Innovations, Education Research, Future-Proof Learning, Global Competencies, OECD Education, Teaching Practice, tagged 21st Century Skills, BC Education Plan, BCTF, David Didau Taxonomy, Future-proof education, Global Competencies, OECD Education, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Paul A Kirschner, Personalized Learning, ResearchED, researchED Canada, researchED Vancouver, Tom Bennett, World Economic Forum on February 2, 2019| 8 Comments »
Equipping the rising generation of students with what are termed "21st century skills" is all the rage. Since the fall of 2010, British Columbia's Ministry of Education, like many other education authorities, has been virtually obsessed with advancing a B.C. Education Plan championing the latest iteration of a global education transformation movement – technology-based personalized learning.
The whole concept of 21st century skills, promoted by the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), rests upon widely-circulated global theories about our fast changing, technology-driven, unpredictable future. Leading proponents of the new dogma contend that it is now essential to ensure that our youth are "equipped with the right type of skills to successfully navigate through an ever-changing, technology-rich work environment' and ready to "continuously maintain their skills, upskill and/or reskill throughout their working lives."
Much of the 21st century learning mantra went unchallenged and escaped critical scrutiny until quite recently. Today many of the education researchers challenging the 21st century learning orthodoxy are charter members of researchED, a British grassroots teacher research organization, founded by teacher Tom Bennett five years ago.
A growing number of outstanding education researchers, including Daniel T. Willingham, Dylan Wiliam, and Paul A. Kirschner, have been drawn to researchED because of its commitment to scrutinize prevailing theories, expose education myths, and encourage more evidence-informed curriculum policy and teaching practice. That is precisely why I took the lead in bringing researchED to Canada in November 2017.
British Columbia teachers have given the futuristic B.C. Education Plan a cool reception and are, by every indication, ripe for teacher-led research and curriculum changes that pass the evidence-based litmus test.
A 2017 BCTF survey of teachers gave the B.C. Education Plan mixed reviews and has already raised serious concerns about the province's latest iteration of a "21st century skills" curriculum. Teachers' concerns over "personalized learning" and "competency-based assessment" focus on the "multiple challenges of implementation" without adequate resource support and technology, but much of the strongest criticism was motivated by "confusion" over its purposes, concern over the lack of supporting research, and fears that it would lead to "a less rigorous academic curriculum."
Such criticisms are well-founded and consistent with new academic research widely discussed in researchED circles and now finding its way into peer-reviewed education research journals. Professor Paul A. Kirschner and his Open University of the Netherlands team are in the forefront in the movement to interrogate the claims and construct an alternative approach to preparing our children for future success.
Research-informed educators are now asking whether the so-called 21st century skills actually exist. If these skills do exist, to what extent are they new or just repackaged from previous generations of attempted reform. Why, they ask, have the number of identified skills ballooned from four in 2009 (Partnership for 21st Century Skills) to 16 in 2016 (World Economic Forum).
What students need – and most teachers actually want – is what Kirschner has termed "future-proof education." Based upon recent cognitive science research, he and others are urging teachers to take action themselves to ensure that evidence-informed practice wins the day.
The best way forward may well be deceptively simple: set aside the "21st century skills" paradigm in favour of "the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to continue to learn in a stable and enduring way in a rapidly changing world."
Kirschner and his research team propose a new "future-proof" basis for preparing students for success and fulfillment:
Cognitive and metacognitive skills are critical. Five of the identified GCM clusters emphasize such skills and suggest emphasizing a progression from concrete cognitive skills to more generic personality competencies.
Authentic learning situations should be a high priority and the driving force for teaching, training, and learning. Such tasks help learners to integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes, stimulate them to develop coordinate skills, and facilitate transfer of what is learned to new problem situations.
Redesigning schools and professionalizing teachers in 21st century learning strategies are not likely to make much of a difference. Shift the focus to cognitive and metacognitive skills, linking learning with authentic, real-life situations and matching teaching methods with educational contexts and goals.
Rushing head-long into 21st century skills makes little sense to Kirschner and fellow researchers because the most effective and durable initiatives are those that are planned and staged over a longer span of as much as 15 years. He proposes a three-stage approach: 1) laying the building blocks (i.e., concrete cognitive knowledge and skills); 2) develop higher-order thinking and working skills; and 3) tackle Bigger Problems that require metacognitive competencies and skills. Much of the underlying research is neatly summarized in David Didau's 2017 Taxonomy demonstrating the connection between long term memory and working memory in teaching and learning.
All of this is just a small taste of my upcoming researchED Vancouver 2019 presentation on the B.C. Education Plan. It will not only analyze the B.C. version of 21st Century Learning, but attempt to point the province's education system in the right direction.
Where did the "21st century skills" movement actually originate? Where's the evidence-based research to support 21st century skills projects such as the B'C. Education Plan? How much of the Plan is driven by the imperatives of technology-based personalized learning and its purveyors? Can you successfully prepare students for careers and jobs that don't exist? Would we be better advised to abandon "21st century skills" in favour of "future-proof learning"?
Competency-Based Student Assessment: Is Dr. Thomas Guskey Recycling OBE without Student Grades?
Posted in Competency-Based Assessment, Education Research, Educational Leadership, Student Assessment, Student Reports, Teacher Autonomy, tagged Assessment for Learning, Competency-Based Assessment, Daisy Christodoulou, Dylan Wiliam, Eliminating Marks, Lynden Dorval, Mastery Learning, Michael Zwaagstra, No Zeros Policy, OBE Backlash, Outcomes Based Education, PEI Education, Percentage Grades, Summative Assessment, Thomas Guskey, William Spady on December 2, 2018| 10 Comments »
University of Kentucky student assessment guru Thomas R. Guskey is back on the Canadian Professional Development circuit with a new version of what looks very much like Outcomes-Based Education. It is clear that he has the ear of the current leadership in the Education Department of Prince Edward Island. For two days in late November 2018, he dazzled a captive audience of over 200 senior Island school administrators with has stock presentations extolling the virtues of mastery learning and competency-based student assessment.
P.E. I's Coordinator of Leadership and Learning Jane Hastelow was effusive in her praise for Guskey and his assessment theories. Tweets by educators emanating from the Guskey sessions parroted the gist of his message. "Students don't always learn at the same rate or in the same order," Guskey told the audience. So, why do we teach them in grades, award marks, and promote them in batches?
Grading students and assigning marks, according to Guskey, can have detrimental effects on children. "No research," he claims, "supports the idea that low grades prompt students to try harder. More often, low grades lead students to withdraw from learning."
Professional learning, in Guskey's world, should be focused not on cognitive or knowledge-based learning, but on introducing "mastery learning" as a way of advancing "differentiated instruction" classrooms. "High-quality corrective instruction," he told P.E.I. educators, is not the same as 're-teaching.'" It is actually a means of training teachers to adopt new approaches that "accommodate differences in students' learning styles, learning modalities, or types of intelligence.".
Guskey is well-known in North American education as the chief proponent for the elimination of percentage grades. For more than two decades, in countless PD presentations, he has promoted his own preferred brand of student assessment reform. "It's time, " he insists, " to abandon grading scales that distort the accuracy, objectivity and reliability of students' grades."
Up and coming principals and curriculum leads, most without much knowledge of assessment, have proven to be putty in his hands. If so, what's the problem? Simply put, Dr. Guskey's theories, when translated into student evaluation policy and reporting, generate resistance among engaged parents looking for something completely different – clearer, understandable, jargon-free student reports with real marks. Classroom teachers soon come to realize that the new strategies and rubrics are far more complicated and time-consuming, often leaving them buried in additional workload.
Guskey's student assessment theories do appeal to school administrators who espouse progressive educational principles. He specializes in promoting competency-based education grafted onto student-centred pedagogy or teaching methods.
Most regular teachers today are only too familiar with top-down reform designed to promote "assessment for learning" (AfL) and see, first hand, how it has led to the steady erosion of teacher autonomy in the classroom.
While AfL is a sound assessment philosophy, pioneered by the leading U.K. researcher Dylan Wiliam since the mid-1990s, it has proven difficult to implement. Good ideas can become discredited by poor implementation, especially when formative assessment becomes just another vehicle for a new generation of summative assessment used to validate standards.
Education leaders entranced by Guskey's theories rarely delve into where it all leads for classroom teachers. In Canada, it took the "no zeros" controversy sparked in May 2012 by Alberta teacher Lynden Dorval to bring the whole dispute into sharper relief. As a veteran high school Physics teacher, Dorval resisted his Edmonton high school's policy which prevented him from assigning zeros when students, after repeated reminders, failed to produce assignments or appear for make-up tests.
Teachers running smack up against such policies learn that the 'research' supporting "no zeros" policy can be traced back to an October 2004 Thomas Guskey article in the Principal Leadership magazine entitled "Zero Alternatives."
Manitoba social studies teacher Michael Zwaagstra analyzed Guskey's research and found it wanting. His claim that awarding zeros was a questionable practice rested on a single 20-year-old opinion-based presentation by an Oregon English teacher to the 1993 National Middle School conference. Guskey's subsequent books either repeat that reference or simply restate his hypothesis as an incontestable truth.
Guskey's theories are certainly not new. Much of the research dates back to the early 1990s and the work of William Spady, a Mastery Learning theorist known as the prime architect of the ill-fated Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) movement. OBE was best exemplified by the infamous mind-boggling systematized report cards loaded with hundreds of learning outcomes, and it capsized in in the early 2000s. in the wake of a storm of public and professional opposition in Pennsylvania and a number of other states.
The litmus test for education reform initiatives is now set at a rather low bar – "do no harm" to teachers or students. What Thomas Guskey is spouting begs for more serious investigation. One red flag is his continued reference to "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences," two concepts that do not exist and are now considered abandoned theories.
Guskey's student assessment theories fly mostly in the face of the weight of recent research, including that of Dylan Wiliam. Much of the best research is synthesized in Daisy Christodoulou's 2014 book, Making Good Progress. Such initiatives float on unproven theories, lack supporting evidence-based research, chip away at teacher autonomy, and leave classroom practitioners snowed under with heavier 'new age' marking loads.
A word to the wise for P.E.I. Education leadership – look closely before you leap. Take a closer look at the latest research on teacher-driven student assessment and why OBE was rejected twenty years ago by classroom teachers and legions of skeptical parents.
What's really new about Dr. Thomas Guskey's latest project known as Competency-Based Assessment? What is its appeal for classroom teachers concerned about time-consuming, labour-intensive assessment schemes? Will engaged and informed parents ever accept the elimination of student grades? Where's the evidence-based research to support changes based upon such untested theories?


text:
COMPLIT 110: Introduction to Comparative Queer Literary Studies (COMPLIT 310, FEMGEN 110X, FEMGEN 310X)
Introduction to the comparative literary study of important gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender writers and their changing social, political, and cultural contexts from the 1880s to today: Oscar Wilde, Rachilde, Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Jeanette Winterson, Alison Bechdel and others, discussed in the context of 20th-century feminist and queer literary and social theories of gender and sexuality.
COMPLIT 112: Oscar Wilde and the French Decadents (COMPLIT 312, FRENCH 112, FRENCH 312)
Close reading of Oscar Wilde's work together with major texts and authors of 19th-century French Decadence, including Symbolism, l'art pour l'art, and early Modernism. Points of contact between Wilde and avant-garde Paris salons; provocative, creative intersections between (homo)erotic and aesthetic styles, transgression; literary and cultural developments from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, Huysmans, Flaubert, Rachilde, Lorrain, and Proust compared with Wilde¿s Salomé, Picture of Dorian Gray, and critical writings; relevant historical and philosophical contexts. All readings in English; all student levels welcome.
COMPLIT 121: Poems, Poetry, Worlds
What is poetry? How does it speak in many voices to questions of history, society, and personal experience? Why does it matter? The reading and interpretation of poetry in crosscultural comparison as experience, invention, form, sound, knowledge, and part of the world. Readings include: classical Chinese poetry, English Romantic poetry, and modern Arabic, American, Brazilian, Japanese, German, Spanish poetry, with specific attention to landscape, terrain, the environment, and the role of the poet.
Instructors: Barletta, V. (PI)
COMPLIT 121 | 5 units | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED | Class # 16102 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP) | LEC | Students enrolled: 17
09/21/2015 - 12/04/2015 Tue, Thu 10:30 AM - 11:50 AM at 100-101K with Barletta, V. (PI)
COMPLIT 123: The Novel (ENGLISH 184)
Literary inventiveness and social significance of novelistic forms from the Great Depression to the present.
Terms: Win | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED
Instructors: Gumbrecht, H. (PI)
COMPLIT 123 | 5 units | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED | Class # 42258 | Section 01 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP) | SEM | Students enrolled: 14
01/04/2016 - 03/11/2016 Tue, Thu 12:00 PM - 1:20 PM at 80-115 with Gumbrecht, H. (PI)
COMPLIT 146A: The Arab Spring in Arabic Literature (COMPLIT 347)
An examination of the events of 2011 in the Middle East through literature. We will read short stories, poetry, graphic novels, and blogs in order to try and work out whether the revolution could have been predicted, and how it took place. Prerequisite: two years of Arabic at Stanford, or equivalent.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-ED
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
<?php

use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Kernel;
use Symfony\Component\Config\Loader\LoaderInterface;

class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
    public function registerBundles()
    {
        $bundles = array(
            new Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\FrameworkBundle(),
            new Symfony\Bundle\SecurityBundle\SecurityBundle(),
            new Symfony\Bundle\TwigBundle\TwigBundle(),
            new Symfony\Bundle\MonologBundle\MonologBundle(),
            new Symfony\Bundle\SwiftmailerBundle\SwiftmailerBundle(),
            new Symfony\Bundle\AsseticBundle\AsseticBundle(),
            new Doctrine\Bundle\DoctrineBundle\DoctrineBundle(),
            new Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\SensioFrameworkExtraBundle(),

            new Doctrine\Bundle\FixturesBundle\DoctrineFixturesBundle(),

            new JMS\SerializerBundle\JMSSerializerBundle(),
            new FOS\RestBundle\FOSRestBundle(),
            new Nelmio\ApiDocBundle\NelmioApiDocBundle(),
            new Liip\CacheControlBundle\LiipCacheControlBundle(),
            new Bazinga\Bundle\HateoasBundle\BazingaHateoasBundle(),
            new Hautelook\TemplatedUriBundle\HautelookTemplatedUriBundle(),
            new Bazinga\Bundle\RestExtraBundle\BazingaRestExtraBundle(),

            new Richpolis\BackendBundle\BackendBundle(),
            new Richpolis\FrontendBundle\FrontendBundle(),
            new Richpolis\PublicacionesBundle\PublicacionesBundle(),
            new Richpolis\PaginasBundle\PaginasBundle(),
            new Richpolis\GaleriasBundle\GaleriasBundle(),

            new Knp\Bundle\PaginatorBundle\KnpPaginatorBundle(),
            new Avalanche\Bundle\ImagineBundle\AvalancheImagineBundle(),
            new Stfalcon\Bundle\TinymceBundle\StfalconTinymceBundle(),
            new Knp\Bundle\LastTweetsBundle\KnpLastTweetsBundle(),
            new Inori\TwitterAppBundle\InoriTwitterAppBundle(),

        );

        if (in_array($this->getEnvironment(), array('dev', 'test'))) {
            //$bundles[] = new Acme\DemoBundle\AcmeDemoBundle();
            $bundles[] = new Symfony\Bundle\WebProfilerBundle\WebProfilerBundle();
            $bundles[] = new Sensio\Bundle\DistributionBundle\SensioDistributionBundle();
            $bundles[] = new Sensio\Bundle\GeneratorBundle\SensioGeneratorBundle();
        }

        return $bundles;
    }

    public function registerContainerConfiguration(LoaderInterface $loader)
    {
        $loader->load(__DIR__.'/config/config_'.$this->getEnvironment().'.yml');
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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The value payable system is designed to meet the requirements of persons which wish to pay for articles sent to them at the time of receipt of the articles or of the bills or railway receipts relating to them, and also to meet the requirements of traders and others who wish to recover, through the agency of the Post Office the value of article supplied by them.
Registered Parcels, registered letters, registered book packets and newspapers prepaid with postage of newspaper rates of postage and with registration fee may be transmitted by the inland post as value payable postal articles, provided that the amount specified for remittance to the sender in the case of any such postal article does not exceed Rs.1,000/- and provided that such parcels, letters and packets do not contain coupons, tickets, certificates of introduction designed for the sale of goods on what is known as the "Snowball System".
No such postal article as aforesaid will be accepted at any post office for transmission by post as a value payable postal article unless the sender declares that it is sent in execution of a bona fide order received by him. At any post office notified from time to time in this behalf by the Director General, the sender will in addition be required to declare that the article is one the transmission of which by post as a value payable postal article is permitted. No postal article as aforesaid will be accepted at these offices without such further declaration.
An article may be sent by the value payable post even though it possesses no intrinsic value. Thus legal documents, bonds, policies of insurance, promissory note railway goods and parcel receipts, bills of leading or ordinary bills for collection may be sent as value payable postal articles. In the case of a railway receipt of bill of leading sent as a value payable postal article, it will be sufficient for the purposes of this rule if the article to which railway receipt of bill of leading relates has been sent n execution of a bona fide order. In the case of the other documents specified the documents must be sent in execution of a bona fide order to send the document itself.
Value payable postal articles can be posted at any post office that is a money order office (with a few exceptions) for transmission to any other post office that is a money order office. All post offices are money order offices except those that are distinguished in the list of post offices given in Part-III of this Guide by the letter 'D' opposite their names.
NOTE: The sender's name and address may be indicated by clear impression of a stamp on the value payable articles.
(2) Value payable articles will not be accepted unless the town of payment shown in the value payable money order form is the one where the article has been booked.
(3) A receipt will be given to the person who preset the article.
A procedure similar to that indicated in clause 167 for registered articles is available for the convenience of firms and other institutions posting at least ten uninsured value payable articles daily. No extra charge will be levied for this facility. Enquiries of Post regard should be addressed to the local Superintendent of Post Offices.
(1) No article will be accepted at any post office for transmission by post as value payable postal article if it is so small or so covered with writing or sealing wax on the address side or otherwise made up in such a manner as to render it impracticable to affix to the article the prescribed official labels of the Post Office.
EXPLANATION: This rule does not apply to an article which has an address labeled to it, provided that the label is not so small or covered with writing on the address side as to render it impracticable to affix to that side the prescribed official labels of the Post office.
(2) No article on which the amount specified for recovery from the addressee exceeds Rs.100/- will be accepted at any post office for transmission by post as value payable postal article unless it is insured for at least the sum specified for remittance by the sender.
EXPLANATION: This rule does not apply to value payable letters containing Railway receipts, bills, invoices, documents, etc. of no intrinsic value and to value payable packet containing printed papers, books, etc., sent under book packet rates.
Payment to Sender: When the amount due is recovered from the addressee, the sum for payment, to the sender will be remitted to him by means of money order.
If the addressee of a value payable postal article omits to take delivery of it within 7 days following the date of its first presentation or the date of delivery to him or to his accredited agent of an intimation of its arrival, the article will be returned to the sender on the 8th day:Provided that if in the meantime the addressee has applied in writing to the post office for detention of the article for a further period not exceeding seven days beginning with the said 8th day and pays the prescribed fee the article shall not be returned to the sender until the expiration of the further period covered by the application. Any fee so paid shall in no circumstances be refunded.
(2)When a value payable Postal article is returned to the sender under sub clause (1) the sender will be required to pay any charges that may be due on it and to acknowledge receipt of the article by signing the form presented by the postman. In no circumstances will any fee or fees prepaid by the sender be refunded.
Insurance of VP articles: The value declared for insurance need not correspond with the amount specified by the sender for remittance to himself. Thus in the case of a watch returned after repairs per value-payable post to its owner, the amount to be remitted to the sender of the watch would be only the cost of repairs while the sum insured would represent the value of the watch itself.
(1) Wherever the sender article addressee of a value payable postal article makes a complaint regarding the delivery of or payment for, the value payable postal article, he will be entitled to have an enquiry made by the post office on paying the prescribed fee. The fee will be paid by means of a postage stamps or stamps affixed to the letter of complaint. This fee will be refunded in cases where the complaint was found to be well grounded.
(2) The complaint will be required to furnish full particulars regarding each value payable article to which the complaint refers and to pay the prescribed fee in respect of each article. No complaint will be attended to unless made within six months of the date of posting of the value payable article. The result of the enquiry will be communicated by letter.
(3) When a complaint is made regarding payment for a V.P. article the V.P. money order will not be produced unless and allegation of fraud or receipt practiced on the sender is put forward, and the V.P. money order will only be available for inspection at the post office at which the Department finds it convenient to permit examination.
(4) If a complaint is made by the addressee immediately after the receipt of a value payable postal article, that it was sent dishonestly or fraudulently the Head of the Circle may if he is satisfied that there are prima facie grounds for believing that the value payable postal article was sent with the intention of defrauding the addressee, withhold the payment to the sender of the money recovered from the addressee. If after making such enquiries as may be necessary, he is fully satisfied that the value payable postal article was sent with this intention he may order the return of the article to the sender and refund to the addressee the sum of money recovered from him on delivery of the value-payable postal article.
EXPLANATION: Impression of a stamping machine made b a competent authority shall be tantamount to affixing stamps of corresponding value.
The Central Government shall not incur any liability in respect of the sum specified for remittance to the sender in respect of a value payable postal article unless and until that sum has been received from for remittance to the sender in respect of a value payable within six months from the date of posting of the article.


text:
Martin Ouředníček
Ivana Křížková
WoS a SCOPUS
Immigrant internal migration in a new destination country: Do immigrants suburbanise in Czechia and why?
KŘÍŽKOVÁ, I., OUŘEDNÍČEK, M. (2020): Immigrant internal migration in a new destination country: Do immigrants suburbanise in Czechia and why? Population, Space and Place, 26, č. 7, s. 1-13 [online].
Abstrakt/Abstract
International migrants are often a major force reshaping settlement geography. However, their role in urbanisation processes has predominantly been explored in more established immigration countries, whereas such knowledge remains limited in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper investigates trends in participation of different groups of foreign residents in urbanisation processes in Czechia, which has recently become a new immigration destination. Using a longitudinal dataset of the Czech migration registers (2005–2017), it assesses the extent of participation in urbanisation processes. It also evaluates the strength of sociodemographic and place-based factors contributing to suburbanisation, a process which makes the Czech suburbs the settlement type with highest net migration and to which both the Czech majority and the immigrant population contribute. The paper finds similarities between the internal migration of different immigrant groups and that of the Czech majority, indicating the predominance of suburbanisation of affluence, notably in culturally and economically well-off groups.