Category: Innovation

Studious staff: New research by Scots teachers in outdoor learning, motivation in sport, and the pedagogy of jazz

20/5/2022

We often talk about curiosity as a virtue to cultivate in young people. We want them to explore, to wonder, to question. And rightly so. But as we learnt from our 2017 Clark Fellow, Professor David Smith, ‘curiositas’, understood in the great classical and Christian traditions, isn’t a virtue at all. It’s a vice. It’s our natural desire to know, turned into a self-focused pursuit of knowledge, to sound smart, to win the day. What you really want is ‘studiositas’, the virtue of paying attention, of asking questions with a love for understanding, and debating ideas with a love for people. (And that’s what we all mean by curiosity in the end, isn’t it?)

Schools should be places where kids learn, yes, but also where we all pursue ‘higher learning’ — where, whatever our age or experience, we seek to become better students, to become intellectually virtuous. In last week’s newsletter we shared the research of Dr Caroline Basckin, Preparatory School Learning Enrichment Teacher, in advancing teachers’ understanding of literacy for students with disabilities. This week we highlight three teachers who are moving knowledge forward through their research degrees, and modeling ‘studiositas’ for our boys.

Mr Jeff Mann, Coordinator of Student Experience, is completing his PhD at Western Sydney University exploring the benefits of outdoor learning experiences for mid-adolescent boys. Hear more about his journey in this short video. Mr Mann recently published a systematic review of research into outdoor learning in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. He led a global team of researchers, including well-known educator Pasi Sahlberg, to screen over 17,000 journal articles and fully read 150 targeted papers to identify what the research says in this field. You can read his article, ‘Getting Out of the Classroom and Into Nature: A Systematic Review of Nature-Specific Outdoor Learning on School Children's Learning and Development’, by clicking here.

Mr Brent Wilsmore, Preparatory School Sportsmaster, is undertaking a PhD at Wollongong University investigating how school sport programs affect students’ motivation, performance and well-being. Despite the ubiquity of school sport, this is, surprisingly, a largely unstudied area. This research promises to better understand and shape the experience of thousands of students, well beyond Scots. Mr Wilsmore is soon to commence his study of all boys from Years 3 to 12 at the College, using Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory to explore boys’ sense of autonomy, mastery and relatedness in their sporting activities.

Mr Eric Hutchens, who joined us in Term 1 as a Senior School Music Teacher, recently undertook and passed the oral examination of his Master of Philosophy Thesis at UNSW. This requires researchers to discuss their thesis with their examiners, responding to critiques and demonstrating their mastery of the topic. Mr Hutchens’s research thesis was entitled ‘Unaccompanied Double Bass in Jazz Composition and Performance: A Case Study of Three Works by John Patitucci'. He looked at the influences on influential jazz composer Patitucci, deduced from transcribing and analysing many of his works. Mr Hutchens also drew conclusions about how music teachers can think pedagogically about their work with students.

Congratulations to these and other staff seeking to advance knowledge and model for our students the virtue of studiositas!

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

How are we reinventing boys' learning?

31/3/2022

In last week’s article we shared a few of the reasons why the current education system may not be best suited to preparing boys for life after school, and why schools like Scots need to continue to reinvent the educational experience. This week we ask ourselves: how have we been helping our staff to reinvent education within the College and best prepare our boys for the future?

Philosophy in action
As with all good design, we start with understanding where we are and where we want to go. When we’ve thought about what’s different in educating for boys in our context, we’ve drawn on our distinctive philosophy of education, ‘Brave Hearts, Bold Minds’. Central to this is the motif of a ‘quest’, a challenge, a calling for boys to go on a journey of realising the potential that lies within and replicating the good they encounter without. As they move through the school, their experience is framed by key themes like Mastery, Adventure and Courage and Conviction. One of the keys to a successful curriculum for boys is ‘coherence’ – does this make sense as a story that’s worth pursuing, or is this just a game that I have to play?

We’ve then worked extensively and inductively with our staff to flesh out what sort of graduate outcomes we want to see at each stage of this journey. What exactly should we look to see by way of ‘Adventure’ for a Year 9 boy? What, then, should we decide to emphasise in our curriculum and pedagogy to give coherence around those big themes? Doing this helps us avoid presenting schooling to boys as primarily about subjects and disciplines and grades, but more about pursuing noble ideas and virtues. This has been made visible to staff in our unique Brave Hearts Bold Minds Staff Guide, an interactive website showing what we are aiming to achieve with boys across each of our graduate qualities and each phase of a boy’s journey from Cubs all the way through to Year 12, as well as research-informed advice on how to best make this happen in the classroom (and in the rehearsal room and on the playing field, for that matter). And this year we launched the Scots Design Cycle, helping staff apply a design thinking mindset to the way they translate those outcomes into rigorous and engaging learning experiences.

The engine room for this great work by so many staff is The Scots College Research Office, established in 2012 by the Principal, Dr Ian PM Lambert. We aim to support our leaders and teachers to reinvent education through our Brave Hearts, Bold Minds philosophy, and do so not just for Scots, but for ‘the common weal’ — the good of all. Here are three examples of this in action.

Teaching for Character Program
Since 2019 all our staff have been engaged in what we call the Teaching for Character Program as our main professional learning activity across the College. This trains and equips teachers in their teams to redesign an aspect of their teaching to more deliberately cultivate character as defined in our graduate profile. Designed to be an action research cycle, it has seen some exciting developments in both what boys learn and how teachers frame their learning around character formation. For example, in 2021 the Drama and Media team in the Senior School redesigned their unit on ‘Understanding Comedy’ to help boys think about how humour (one of our ‘Leadership Through Teams’ civic character qualities) can be used to build up and bring together, rather than to cut down and divide. In 2020 the Learning Enrichment team in the Preparatory School worked with boys to develop their own language around a ‘growth mindset’ (reflecting our performance character quality of ‘The Quest for Excellence through Personal Growth’). Watch Preparatory School Teacher Holly Davison and students describe their journey. Hear Sam Anderson, Head of Christian Studies, reflect on the ‘buzz’ that his team experienced as they wrestled with the purpose and form of their teaching to better achieve our purpose as Scots educators.

Innovation and Design Co-Curricular Program
In 2020 we designed and piloted a year-long co-curricular course for Year 10 boys focused on design and innovation. Boys worked with internal staff and visiting academics to learn the design thinking process and tackle a series of real problems, such as waste reduction, or assessment redesign for student engagement. The program was carefully designed and evaluated to see how well it achieved its outcomes. One of the best learnings was that when we create curricula from scratch, outside the normal timetable box, students and teachers can see the normal curriculum with fresh eyes and bring new ways of thinking to it.

Applied Entrepreneurship Program
Perhaps our most interesting experiment in curriculum redesign has been the creation of a whole new parallel program for our Year 11 and 12 students. Established in 2017, the Applied Entrepreneurship Program seeks to shape the student experience around the changing nature of work. With perhaps 17 different jobs and 5 careers, they need ‘a new work mindset’ (Foundation for Young Australians, 2017).

Rather than think in subjects, it focuses on five key charges derived from the literature on what future graduates need – leadership, strategy, analysis, influence and problem-solving. While students do receive a normal higher school certificate, they also obtain a range of industry-oriented micro-credentials and experiences that they’d never get in a normal curriculum. They learn not in classes and subjects but in three modes – the Workshop blended classroom, the Scots Lab where they prototype new ventures, and a self-paced My Mastery online learning program. And through a personalised approach, they’re graduating with a much better sense of their identity, aspirations and abilities, as well as work and university pathways into future industries. Just last week Year 12 student Kahu Millen secured an internship in the office of Member for Wentworth Mr Dave Sharma MP, furthering Kahu’s fascination with politics.

ScotsX
Inspired by the work of our staff and the provocations of the many experts we’ve worked with over the years including Professor Yong Zhang, we are in the process of designing ScotsX. This significant new venture will provide a small group of Middle Years boys with a truly reinvented schooling experience — a new ‘operating system’ for a new era — designed to significantly accelerate their academic and character development and show that rigour and creativity go together. Stay tuned for more information about this exciting opportunity launching in 2023.

Should you be interested in finding out more about these and other projects, please contact us.

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

What sort of learning will boys need for the future?

24/3/2022

At The Scots College, we want to give boys ‘the finest preparation for life’. The big question we need to ask ourselves is ‘just what will life look like for them’? Our concern has been to make sure that boys are prepared not for the world into which their teachers and parents emerged after school, but the world as it is and will be in this century and the next. In this article, we sketch out some of the challenges facing the education system by the changing nature of work. The following short video from the team behind the award-winning book and documentary Most Likely to Succeed, puts into relief some of the significant changes underway that will affect all of us, and especially our boys.

Education has been the domain of a wealthy minority through most of history. However mass education was first instituted in the early 19th century. New South Wales opened its first public school in 1848, and introduced compulsory primary education in 1880. The industrial revolution was in full swing by then, and employment for many people involved repetitive tasks in a large scale organisation. Educating ‘work-ready’ citizens, in that context, included skills and values such as: compliance with authority, accuracy and efficiency, following instructions, dependability, and knowing your place in the larger collective.

Since the nineteenth century, social, technological and workplace dynamics have changed beyond recognition. And as trite as it is to say, things are accelerating at an unprecedented pace. However, the general ‘operating system’ of schooling, built on an industrial era paradigm, has not changed to keep pace. The industrial model of education is no longer fit for purpose. Recent Australian research analysing 4 million job advertisements confirms that contemporary organisations are just as interested in social and emotional ‘soft’ skills for their prospective employees. These enterprise skills are said to be transferable between careers, and include: problem solving, communications, financial literacy, critical thinking, creativity, teamwork, digital literacy and presentation skills. While the General Capabilities in syllabi do prescribe many of these outcomes, they are generally applied in schools as an after-thought, a box-ticking exercise. Learning is not designed to achieve these outcomes, and thus it’s no surprise that these outcomes aren’t met.

This past week has seen the release of the Commonwealth’s ‘National Microcredentials Framework’, the long-awaited guide to defining microcredentials across higher education, vocational education and industry. Developed by a panel of university, industry and vocational education leaders around Australia in partnership with PWC, it maps out a common definition of these new ways of accrediting small chunks of learning — as small as one hour. Skill acquisition is a lifelong process, and requires a much more agile model than the current system affords.

The World Economic Forum’s 2020 report, ‘Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, summarised the need for change thus:

“As globalization and rapid advancements in technology continue to transform civic space and the world of work, education systems have grown increasingly disconnected from the realities and needs of global economies and societies. Education models must adapt to equip children with the skills to create a more inclusive, cohesive and productive world.”

In a 2018 address, Andreas Schleicher, OECD Special Advisor on Education, put it more starkly:

“when we could still assume that what we learn in school will last for a lifetime, teaching content knowledge and routine cognitive skills was rightly at the centre of education. Today, the world no longer rewards us just for what we know –’ Google knows everything’ – but for what we can do with what we know”.

For boys, there is an added impetus to make learning more ‘real-world’. After concerns in the late 20th century of declining boys’ motivation for school in Australia, a government-funded review recommended that state and federal education systems should lead the international education community to develop ‘real world’ curriculum policies which value extra-curricula knowledge and learning experiences that will better engage boys.

There have, of course, been significant steps in recent years to make schooling more engaging and more personalised. Schools now focus on student wellbeing not just academic achievement, offer a dizzying array of extra-curricular activities and enrichment opportunities, and have a much stronger sense of how individual students are performing thanks to richer data and common standards. All of that is good and reflective of a noble desire to improve education for every student. Teachers and school leaders are working harder than ever to meet the learning needs (and many other needs!) of young people. And governments and parents are pouring more money into Australian schooling than ever before.

But unfortunately it’s not making enough of a difference. Policymakers concede that we are not making good progress on measures such as PISA, NAPLAN, and rates of student engagement and multi-dimensional wellbeing. International experts agree that our model of education has been slow to change. Much of the significant innovation in learning is taking place on the edges of or beyond the system, in alternative and micro-schools, online providers and platforms, and — most interestingly — as students ‘hack’ the system and design their own learning pathways.

The question all this raises is, ‘Will our children be ready for the world of work and life into which they are moving?’ Looking at the current educational pathway almost all children walk, the answer is not looking good.

If education in the 21st century needs to incorporate knowledge, skills and character development in order to prepare young people to be successful workers and flourishing citizens, what styles of teaching and learning will best achieve these aims? The dominant model of knowledge transmission by the teacher (as the ‘sage on the stage’) is argued to be less useful for future education than the role of facilitator (as the ‘guide on the side’) or even as strategic disruptor (as the ‘meddler in the middle’).

Various methods of student-centred pedagogy have been suggested, including: co-created learning, project based learning, personalisable education, inquiry learning, experiential education, product-oriented learning. Whilst each of these approaches are easily charicatured (think bean bags and chaos!), there is a strong and growing body of rigorous research and design around these pedagogical approaches. Some common factors amongst them:

Students are given some choice in the shape, content or timing of their learning.
Students need to work together collaboratively.
Learning has an open-ended design, requiring students to solve a problem or create an idea or product.

These pedagogies require some upskilling of teachers who are trained in the traditional model, and some ‘unlearning’ of established attitudes and habits on the part of students and parents. Of course, this does not mean that traditional direct instruction is no longer a useful pedagogy. To borrow an analogy from a trades context, teachers need to expand their pedagogical toolbox rather than replacing it with an entirely new one. I recently visited a boys’ school in Western Sydney that has successfully transitioned its whole approach towards a rigorous project-based and applied learning model across Years 7-12, and seen its NAPLAN and HSC results improve such that it is one of the top-performing non-selective schools in the state.

In next week’s newsletter we plan to share the ways in which we have been experimenting and learning with our staff and students about successful approaches to new forms of learning for boys.

Mr Jeff Mann
Coordinator of Student Experience

Dr Hugh Chilton
Director of Research and Professional Learning

AARE Conference Presentation on 'Research-Invested Schools'

3/12/2021

“...teachers and principals are cast as technicians who have the technical skills to implement the ideas of others but not the professional expertise to engage in the exciting task of theorizing and designing curriculum” Reid, A. (2019) Changing Australian Education.

Research-Invested Schools (of which there are over 30 in Australia) are challenging this story in new and compelling ways.

Dr Caitlin Munday and I enjoyed presenting on this yesterday at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Conference with Prof Peter Twining, Prof Allyson Holbrook, and Dr Carl Leonard (University of Newcastle).

We will soon publish short pieces on Research-Invested Schools in Teacher ACER magazine and EduResearch Matters (the blog of Australian Association for Research in Education). And we look forward to some exciting research and collaboration among research-invested schools in the year ahead.

See below our abstract:

It is no longer especially novel to think of schools as sites of research, or to hear calls for teachers to be ‘research-engaged’ or ‘research-informed’ professionals. The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers require all teachers to ‘structure teaching programs using research and collegial advice about how students learn’, and ‘engage with professional teaching networks and broader communities’. It is well recognised that practitioner research is an effective way to enhance professional learning and cultivate a climate of experimentation and review. In addition, Government-backed education research institutes devoted to influencing policy and practice have proliferated in recent years, among them the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK, the What Works Clearinghouse in the US, and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. The Gonski 2.0 Report recommended creating a national evidence and research institute, and with $50 million of federal seed funding, the Australian research education Organisation launched early in 2021, while the Q Project located at Monash University seeks to understand the use of evidence in Australian schools. Alongside these top-down approaches, a bottom-up movement is also in evidence as schools increasingly strive to embed ‘research-informed practice’ as a key part of their professional learning and improvement agendas. In the last 7 years, more than 30 Australian schools have either established a research centre or institute of some description or appointed a ‘research lead’ to explicitly focus on research. This paper seeks to distinguish the characteristics of this group of what we have termed ‘research-invested’ schools, where research engagement and the professional growth research skills development and knowledge creation affords become embedded in school goals and institutional identity. The paper traces the growth of this phenomenon and how research-invested schools have evolved within the increasingly fluid landscape of research development and training in Australia.

Scots named among most innovative schools in Australia

10/11/2021

‘The Educator's’ 5-Star Innovative Schools list for 2021 has included in the top 30 (of 150 schools), The Scots College. This acknowledges the work of our inspiring staff at all campuses.

Here's what they said:

The Scots College is one of Australia’s oldest and most respected Presbyterian boys’ schools, located in Sydney, that defends the honourable traditions, adventures and learning of boys. We exist to inspire boys to learn, lead and serve as they strive for excellence together.

The Scots College is committed to grow Scots boys who are ready for a future yet to be imagined. Scots boys are offered programs designed to inspire them to strive to their full potential and equip them for the world of tomorrow. The heart of the Scots’ innovation engine is the Patribus Initiative model – building expert communities of knowledge practice and formation in five key areas: character and care; experiential education; design thinking and creativity; mind, body and spirit; and entrepreneurship and social leadership. Beyond its outstanding academic, sporting and co-curricular results, Scots is changing the way education happens.

Scots staff are invited to be part of a dynamic learning community through our extensive professional learning programs directed by The Scots College Research Office. These include: ‘Teaching for Character’ program, the Master Teacher Mentoring Program, our Leadership Program, a capstone service learning experience (such as co-teaching in a school in Vanuatu), bespoke cohort-based coursework and research degree pathways in partnership with leading universities, and exposure to leading education thinkers from Australia and around the world.

Scots hosts boys' educators from around the world for experiential learning conference

31/7/2018

Over the first two weeks of the July school holidays, the College was involved in running and attending major conferences of the International Boys’ Schools Coalition. The IBSC brings together over 280 schools around the world to share research and practice in the educating of boys. The Principal has, for some years, been a Trustee of the IBSC, and since July 2017 has chaired its Research Committee (which also involves Scots Research staff Dr Hugh Chilton and Dr Caitlin Munday). As of July 2018, the Principal was elected the IBSC’s Vice-President for Australasia, further cementing the desire for the College, in the words of our vision statement, to be ‘recognised globally as a leading, caring school for boys’.

IBSC Annual Conference
The 25th IBSC Annual Conference took place at The Southport School on the Gold Coast 8-11 July. It featured over 600 delegates from some 14 countries. Taking advantage of the proximity of this year’s conference and the opportunity to expose our staff to the world, we sent a delegation of 43 staff, selected from across our campuses and from executive, teaching and support teams. Scots staff gave 6 presentations, including a Featured Speaker session on research and innovation in boys’ schools in conjunction with Eton College and St Christopher’s School. Science Teacher Nick Little won the Action Research Award, the top in his global cohort, for his year-long study of how boys learn in our Graeme Clark Centre activity-based learning environments. He has since been asked to speak on the topic at a major conference in Melbourne. Staff who attended the program were effusive in their reflections on the ideas and inspiration this gave them for their work at the College.

IBSC Pre-Conference Adventures: ‘Ventures and Adventures in the Real World: Educating boys experientially’
As a boost to the Annual Conference and an opportunity to show delegates the College’s programs and the Australian environment, we organised a 3-day experiential learning program at Glengarry, Bannockburn and Bellevue Hill. We had around 60 delegates from leading schools in the US, UK, Canada, South Africa, India, China and Peru. They engaged in a range of activities and sessions built around our experiential approach to teaching and learning, as well as our 5 Patribus Initiatives. Leading thinkers spoke to the guests, such as Jason Pellegrino, Old Boy and MD of Google Australia/New Zealand, on entrepreneurship, and Prof Kees Dorst (UTS) on design thinking and creativity. A highlights video of the conference can be seen here. This program provided a unique opportunity to share and build on the world-class work of our staff, and provide a new model of professional learning for future IBSC conferences. One attendee had this to say about Scots:

“Not only is your school outstanding, but the way you present yourselves to the outside world, especially those of us from outside Australia, is a genuine inspiration.”