Engaging Schooling

Developing Exemplary Education for Students in Poverty

Wayne Sawyer, Geoff Munns, Katina Zammit, Catherine Attard, Eva Vass, Caroline Hatton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138185081
• eBook ISBN: 9781317202745
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Engaging Schooling, the authors use case studies to engagingly demonstrate how schools can use pedagogical change to enable students from low SES backgrounds to benefit academically and socially from their schooling.

The book, which builds on Exemplary Teachers of Students in Poverty from the same research team, deals with key issues around the reshaping of schooling and teaching, focusing on structures for mentoring and research practice among teachers. It significantly advances international literature that highlights the role of pedagogy for engagement in the educational success of students from low SES backgrounds.

Moving beyond the individual classroom to focus on whole-school change, the book provides a clearer picture of processes which schools might undergo to engage students in low SES contexts, including teacher research, mentoring practices, instructional leadership and classroom discourses. The book will be of interest to all students, teachers and professional researchers in the field of teacher education.

INTRODUCTION TO SECTION 1

This is a book about teacher professional development in public schools in high-poverty communities. It arises from a project undertaken in New South Wales (NSW), Australia and follows a previous Routledge publication – Exemplary Teachers of Students in Poverty – in which the practices of teachers regarded by their peers as exemplary in engaging students from poor communities was documented and analyzed. This book focuses on ways in which teachers sought to recontextualize engaging practices through processes of mentoring and action research.

The book is divided into three sections. Section 1, which begins here, consists of three chapters in which, first, the work of teachers in such communities is discussed in the context of global neoliberal education reform. In particular, it considers the tension between student academic outcomes as a function of socio-economic status and the differences made to students’ lives by teacher practice. Chapter 2 then explains the theoretical lens used in the project to define, explain and analyze aspects of student engagement. It does this by focusing on the notion of teachers-as- messengers. Chapter 3 then outlines the nature of the project – Schooling for a Fair Go – in which these ideas were played out.

1
FROM TUESDAY ON…

Wayne Sawyer, Katina Zammit and Catherine Attard

Teacher development as a function of community

Films such as The Blackboard Jungle, Dead Poets’ Society, Mr Holland’s Opus, Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Lean on Me, Dangerous Minds and Up the Down Staircase represent a common Hollywood take on the teaching profession: the romantic story of the heroic, individual, inspirational teacher (or principal) who transforms lives. Similar British films include Goodbye Mr Chips, To Sir With Love and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. While elite private schools are sometimes represented in this tradition, more often the lives being transformed are the lives of poor, disaffected inner urban youth in public schools.¹

This book also focuses on the schooling of the disadvantaged. Our aim, however, is to deliberately move the focus away from the teacher as heroic individual and onto a vision of teachers as communities engaged in a common enterprise and achieving strong engagement with their students through that communal enterprise. In their book Professional Capital, Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) present a vision of changing education though transforming schools and teaching. Their argument begins with a discussion of what motivates professional effectiveness and change in education:

People are motivated by good ideas tied to action; they are energized even more by pursuing action with others; they are spurred on still further by learning from their mistakes; and they are ultimately propelled by actions that make an impact – what we call ‘moral imperative realized’.

Ibid., 7

There is much to be said about this vision of what motivates people, but we want to place particular emphasis on pursuing action with others. Later in their book, Hargreaves and Fullan return to this theme and argue that a key component of educational change and successful schooling is focusing on ‘developing professional quality collectively’ and building ‘networks of teachers and their schools that are robust and outcomes-oriented’ (ibid., 146).

This is a book about collective teacher action and teacher development which is focused on the classroom engagement of students from low socio-economic status (low SES) communities. It is directly concerned with issues of equality of outcomes for students who are from low SES backgrounds and details a project carried out in Australia among teachers of students from such backgrounds. While it describes the classroom practices of these teachers – and argues that these teachers make a difference to their students’ engagement with education because of these practices – the emphasis here will be on processes of teacher professional development and the ways in which successful pedagogies can be embedded across a broader school community.

The book follows a previous publication which examined and presented the practices of teachers who were regarded by the broader education community as exemplary at engaging students from low socio-economic backgrounds with their education. That book – Exemplary Teachers of Students in Poverty (Munns et al., 2013) – focused on teacher practices which directly targeted the issue of enriching education for poor students, by moving well beyond the low-level busywork that is so often the educational diet for such students, usually in order to keep control. That book ended with a chapter entitled ‘A new Monday morning and beyond’, which summarized the key issues of the book and was, in part, a reference to the pioneering sociological work of Paul Willis in Learning to Labour (1977). This chapter’s title – ‘From Tuesday on…’ – signals the connection with that earlier book, but also the fact that this book moves the story along and into a different direction. While we presented in Exemplary Teachers… a research project about the classroom practices of selected teachers, in this book we present a different project, focused on teacher development in schools serving high-poverty communities. Put simply, the focus here is more centrally on moving and adapting practices of highly effective teachers across and between schools – not in any way that naively assumes that such practices can simply be picked up and used in different contexts, but in a way that puts teacher decision-making and teacher-research in, and about, their context to the fore.

We should always be reticent to declare certainty about what good pedagogy looks like. Nevertheless, we would argue that there is now some broad agreement in the research community about what constitutes effective and engaging pedagogy, including in low SES contexts. This knowledge derives from ongoing research that includes Authentic Pedagogy (Newmann and Associates, 1996) and Productive Pedagogies (Lingard et al., 2001; Hayes et al., 2006), as well as engagement frameworks,² including our own MeE Framework for low SES schools (Munns et al., 2013). The crucial central question now – and what we focus on in this book – is how these understandings can take hold more widely across and between schools. The project we report on here focused on that movement. We locate our work, then, in the research on pedagogy in low SES schools, but also relate it to work on effective teaching as a function of teacher practice in communities (e.g. Ayres et al., 2004; Sawyer et al., 2007). Collaborative professional learning as a form of teacher practice is, of course, a well-established notion (McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001; Bolam et al., 2005; Louis, 2006; Stoll and Seashore Louis, 2007); however, here we wish to connect this specifically with teacher-research, to situate it within the specific contexts of low SES school communities and to do so in the context of a particular framework for engagement, to be detailed in Chapter 2.

However, we do not want to present a world in which educational success can somehow be removed from the socio-economic circumstances in which students find themselves, and we begin with a discussion of this issue.

Student outcomes and SES

In 2015, the radio programme This American Life ran a two-part series on desegregation in schooling in America. The programme included a discussion of the period from 1971–88, in which a number of school districts had worked towards increasing integration of black, Latino and white students into the same schools, with the result that educational achievement gaps between these population groups closed considerably. Most often, this was achieved by ‘bussing’ black and Latino students into ‘white schools’. After 1988, however, America began to resegregate schooling, partly as a result of the phenomenon of ‘white flight’. The results were that the achievement gap between white students, and black and Latino students again widened (This American Life, 2015).

This story touches on key issues around educational disadvantage. It is about what happens when students have access to better facilities, to more highly qualified and more experienced teachers,³ to more advanced courses. Above all, it highlights the issue of the concentration of poverty in schools: ‘when you put a lot of [poor] kids… together in one classroom, the studies show, it doesn’t go well’ (ibid., 5 min. 26 sec. – 5 min. 30 sec.).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the segregation/desegregation/ achievement gap story is that desegregation was a systemic response to the link between under-achievement and poverty, not a response left to individual teachers and schools.

It is, of course, a commonplace of research into educational outcomes that ‘socio-economic status is… a strong predictor of performance’ (OECD, 2013a: 34). That quotation comes from what, at the time of writing, was the latest PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report, that of the PISA testing for 2012 – and it has been a consistent theme in PISA outcomes since the first tests. Sixty-five countries took part in PISA 2012, which had its central focus on mathematics. In that testing ‘a more socio-economically advantaged student score[d] 39 points higher in mathematics – the equivalent of nearly one year of schooling – than a less-advantaged student’. Overall, SES is ‘associated with large differences in performance in most countries and economies that participate in PISA. Socio-economically advantaged students and schools tend to outscore their disadvantaged peers by larger margins than between any other two groups of students’ (ibid.).

Countries which run against this trend in PISA enact policies that also run against the trend of the increasing marketization of education in the name of consumer choice – consumer choice being a particularly strong theme in (though of course, not exclusive to) English-speaking countries such as England, the USA and Australia. The mix associated with more equitable outcomes includes policies of social inclusion, high levels of school autonomy in formulating curricula and using assessments (OECD, 2013b: 52 passim) and low levels of between-school competition (ibid.: 54 passim). The PISA 2012 Report has this to say on social inclusion, for example:

Social inclusion is the degree to which students with different socio- economic status attend the same ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• SECTION 1 Introduction to section 1
• SECTION 2 Introduction to section 2: case studies
• SECTION 3 Introduction to section 3
• Appendix 1: classroom planning guide
• Appendix 2: observation and reflection guide
• Appendix 3: records of mentoring meetings
• Appendix 4: Grassland PS: extract from coach’s log for one month/one teacher
• Index