Learning In and Out of School

The selected works of John MacBeath

John MacBeath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415692953
• eBook ISBN: 9781136578489
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions - so the world can read them in a single manageable volume.John MacBeath has spent

CHAPTER 1

REFLECTION'S LEADING LIGHT

Originally published in the TES, 15 August, 2008

All heads and teachers know about self-evaluation. It runs through school life, encompassing not only Ofsted's statutory requirements, but also ideas about departmental self-review, pupils as independent learners, positive engagement with parents and, of course, pupil voice.

But how many know the extent to which its growth, and the movement away from confrontational top-down inspection, can be largely credited to one professor of education and his team?

John MacBeath, chair of educational leadership at Cambridge University since 2000, was formerly director of the University of Strathclyde's Quality in Education Centre. It was there in the late 1980s that he and his colleagues developed a framework for school self-evaluation acceptable both to schools and to those responsible for them.

Professor MacBeath's evangelical belief in self-evaluation is of a piece with his broader conviction that children and teachers learn best when they have freedom to shape their learning together in the classroom. It is a philosophy that harks back to his roots: first as a pupil in Glasgow (‘We had so much to say about the quality of our school and never had a chance to say it') and later as a teacher at Paisley Grammar School.

These experiences led him, as a lecturer at the then Jordanhill College in the early 1970s, to set up the Barrowfield Community School, a democratically organised haven and learning centre for 25 disaffected and excluded children in Glasgow.

‘It was very influential for me,’ he says.’I saw how much even the lowest achieving children could contribute, and how passionately interested they were in their education when given the freedom to pursue their own interests.’

Over the years, that conviction became the driver for producing, at Strathclyde, a workable and effective set of tools for school self-evaluation. In the early 1990s, it was taken up by the Scottish inspectorate and became the nationwide system of self-evaluation known as'How Good is Our School?’ – today familiar to all Scottish teachers as HGIOS.

In England, however, government through the early 1990s remained ideologically and explicitly committed to the need to tackle failing schools from the outside. Preferring the'big stick and little carrot’ approach, they went for Ofsted and'naming and shaming’.

But change was afoot. The early Ofsted model was expensive and unwieldy, and evidence from Scotland and around the world showed that self-evaluation really did work as a way to improve teaching and learning. Arguably, though, the drive to convert English national and local government to self-evaluation only really took off when the National Union of Teachers (NUT) committed its political experience and negotiating skills to the cause. Seeking a positive, practical and academically credible alternative to the Ofsted way, NUT education secretary John Bangs commissioned Professor MacBeath to replicate his Scottish work in a 1995 report: Schools Speak for Themselves.

Presented to the main party conferences in 1996, the document was treated with contempt by Conservative junior education minister Eric Forth, who threw away a prepared speech in order to castigate it. But by then local authorities were already adopting Schools Speak for Themselves as the developmental framework for schools that they were looking for. Newcastle's director of education David Bell, later to become chief inspector of schools and now permanent secretary at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, became an active enthusiast, seeing the framework introduced across Newcastle schools.

Then Labour came to power in 1997 and committed Ofsted at least to the beginnings of a form of self-evaluation, starting the journey that has brought school inspection to the present'light touch’ system based on the Self Evaluation Form (SEF). For Professor MacBeath, though, it is all a very long way from'job done’. Today's self-evaluation is, for him, still'top-down’. What he would like, clearly, is for schools to look beyond making periodic checks on their performance, and instead to ask themselves constantly: how good is our learning?

‘If that becomes a way of thinking, then you don't need this ritual approach of questionnaires and interviews,’ he says.

All of that, far-reaching though it is, tells only part of the John MacBeath story, because his expertise in – and desire to learn about – self-evaluation has led to his ideas and writings being sought by dozens of schools and governments across Europe and the rest of the world. Of all those projects, he singles out as particularly satisfying his work on developing self-evaluation in the traditionally authoritarian Hong Kong school system. He points to the development of a government website showing how various schools have put their own approaches to self-evaluation into practice. His favourite bit of video shows a 10-year-old girl describing with clarity and insight – and in English – the importance of'learning how to learn’.

Deep down, Professor MacBeath is undoubtedly a radical.’I believe that we are failing schools, failing teachers and failing children by too much prescription, too much pressure, stunting the capacity for growth and creativity,’ he says.

Others have said that, too, over the years. But Professor MacBeath, rather than preach the revolution, has focused on producing a way to improve schools that both respects his philosophy and actually works within the system as we have it.

‘I've seen self-evaluation's transformational power in 30 countries where I have worked with teachers and young people,’ he says.’I've seen them responding to the trust invested in them, almost always surpassing expectation, relishing the freedom to craft their own approaches to what they see as worth evaluating and worth improving.’

It is a common characteristic of the thinkers in this TES series that, working always with the evidence, they have turned theory that was sometimes unconventional, sometimes politically risky, into solid and acceptable practice. Professor MacBeath is firmly in that mould.

John Bangs sums it up:’He has provided a very rigorous but teacher-sympathetic balance to the top-down, data-driven school improvement approach. But at the same time, he has retained massive respect from the Government. John really has, in a very quiet and strong way, made a massive difference and knocked off many of the rough edges of government policy.’

Further reading

School Inspection and Self-Evaluation: Working with the New Relationship by John MacBeath (Routledge, 2006)

Self-evaluation in the Global Classroom by John MacBeath and Hidenori Sugimine (Routledge, 2003)

Self-Evaluation in European Schools: A Story of Change by John MacBeath, Michael Schratz, Lars Jakobsen and Denis Meuret (Routledge, 2000, now published in 16 European languages)

CHAPTER 2

DEVELOPING SKILLS FOR LIFE
AFTER SCHOOL

Originally published in Forum of Education, Vol. 51, No. 1,
April 1996

Homework has traditionally been defined in very narrow terms and surrounded by ambivalence about its purpose and effects. Research and development work carried out in Scotland in the early 1990s suggested that bridging the hiatus between learning in the classroom and at home could make learning more meaningful not only to children but to their parents. When the profile of homework was raised a number of national initiatives followed, the most promising of which has been'supported study’, a vehicle for addressing the needs of the most disenfranchised group. One of the unexpected benefits of supported study has been to offer a'laboratory’ for teachers to learn about how children learn and how they might be taught more effectively in and out of school.

When we embarked on research into homework in the late 1980s we came to it with some of the assumptions that we are now quick to challenge when expressed by teachers. We were ambivalent about the value and purposes of homework, and dubious about its significance in terms of school effectiveness. Indeed'school effects research’ was itself ambivalent on the subject with some researchers finding homework an important factor (Bosker, 1995) and others less convinced (Borger, 1984). However, when we began to probe a little more deeply into the subject we began to raise questions which we had previously given little thought to.

The most forceful challenge to our thinking came when the focus of our research moved from the school and classroom into home and community. Carrying out interviews, usually during the evening, in someone's living room, over the course of two or three hours provided more than just a set of parental views on the subject. The interviews were set in the context of ongoing family life, its patterns and rhythms, often with comings and goings of children and their occasional interjections into the conversation. It gave us an insight into the nature of relationships, the ethos within which children did their homework and how work home from school was embedded in a wider approach to life and learning.

Those experiences with children and families made it less easy for us to separate out'homework’ as a discrete phenomenon and explains why we entitled our research report'Learning out of School’ (1992).

Homework can, of course, be quite simply defined as the pieces of work which teachers prescribe for children to do in their own time, but it became increasingly obvious to us that the meaning and context of that work is the crucially significant factor. When we looked more closely at those contextual influences we could see the connections between micro and macro, between homework and the'non-school effects’ which have preoccupied researchers since Coleman (1966) and Jencks (1972).

The contextual home effect can be seen most clearly at the age of 5 or 6 when children bring their first homework home, their tin with its five or six selected words, the three pages of the first reader or three sums. The time given to that by adults or older siblings, the quality of the interaction, the expectations which encompass it are the factors which begin to stretch the difference between those who are going to succeed and those who are not. These are by no means the only factors which ultimately separate success and failure but there are few who would now dispute the growing body of evidence on the power of the parent as educator (Epstein and Dauber, 1991).

The debate has been conducted for the last three or more decades in terms of social class. School effectiveness researchers took up the issue where the sociologists and ethnographers left off, seeking to demonstrate that'good’ schools could indeed compensate for social and economic disadvantage, and intent on disproving the Coleman/Jencks thesis that schools can have no more than a marginal influence in comparison with the birthright of social class. Despite the catchy titles—Schools Can Make a Difference (Brookover, 1979), School Matters (1986)—there is a continuous thread running that work that has socio-economic status remains by far the most powerful correlate of achievement.

Assumptions about social class effects have, however, been held up to question by work such as that of Feuerstein (1990). Successful learners, according to Feuerstein, are successful because of the way in which their learning is mediated by effective adults—adults who have the time and the relationship in which to support the individuality of the learning process. He cites the example of children brought up in conditions of extreme poverty, without formal teaching and virtually written off by the school system. A child's ability to make rapid progress when given the opportunity he puts down to a background of adult mediation between child and environment, helping the child to make sense of the world and so to be in the appropriate'frame of mind’ to make equal sense of school learning. In Vygotsky's terms (1981) this would be described as the meeting point of'spontaneous’ and'scientific’ learning.

Peter Hannon (1993) has argued that parents can be, in some important respects, more effective teachers of reading than school teachers. He concludes from his own research that:

• pre-school teachers seriously underestimated the value of parental support for children's reading;

• the quality of children's experiences reading to their parents were in some respects superior to what happened in school;

• home readings were longer and had fewer interruptions than reading sessions in the classroom;

• parents’ relationship with children allowed them to relate what they were reading to children's experience;

• teachers used praise more but it was often a mechanism of control and a reflection of their more distant relationship with the child.

There is an irony in the announcement by the British Shadow Education Minister in October 1993 of a new Labour policy for homework which would start at the age of 7. Perhaps there is, underlying that view, a confusion between homework and home work, what children do for their teachers as against what parents do for their children.

We found, in our study, children who taught their younger pre-school siblings so that they came to school not only able to read but confident self-assured learners. We did not conduct a longitudinal study to follow young people as they moved up the school but cross-sectional slices of children's and families’ experiences at different ages and stages suggested that the parental relationship and the home learning context continued to exert a powerful but changing form of influence (MacBeath and Turner, 1992).

We asked young people at different stages to keep a detailed log for one week documenting what they did, who with, and how long they spent on it. We also asked them to record their feelings, their completion or incompletion of the task and their level of frustration or satisfaction. At one extreme there were young people who had private tutors in a range of secondary school subjects and at the other extreme young people who, left entirely to their own devices, invested huge amounts of time on ineffective unfocused copying or reading, struggling to make their own s...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Learning In and Out of School
• World Library of Educationalists series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a life in education
• 1 Reflection’s leading light
• 2 Developing skills for life after school
• 3 Schools on the edge: responding to challenging circumstances - John MacBeath, Jane Cullen, David Frost and Sue Swaffield
• 4 New relationships for old: inspection and self-evaluation in England and Hong Kong
• 5 Revived by post mortems; briefing; research focus
• 6 Inspectors worthy of Kafka - Geraldine Hackett
• 7 Should we sugar coat the pill, Miss? - John MacBeath and Archie McGlynn
• 8 The talent enigma
• 9 School leadership crisis - Neil Munro
• 10 ‘Vacancy. Headteacher required, Scotsman 7/24/365. . .’ - John MacBeath and Peter Gronn
• 11 Leadership as a subversive activity
• 12 Shame tactics ‘don’t work’ - Neil Munro
• 13 Stories of compliance and subversion in a prescriptive policy environment
• 14 Magic moments have disappeared, experts believe - David Marley
• 15 Mathematics for all: the way it spozed to be? -Josephine Gardner
• 16 Chief inspector targets professors - TES editorial
• 17 Do schools have a future?
• 18 Hell-bent on reform, but who cared about teacher morale?
• 19 Three thinkpieces
• Index