High Performance Learning

How to become a world class school

Deborah Eyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138940116
• eBook ISBN: 9781317379270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Schools that want to be world class are now paying attention to the findings from neuroscience and psychology that tell us we can build better brains. They are changing their mindset, expecting success for far more students and no longer being constrained by ideas of genetic potential.

High Performance Learning provides readers with a ground-breaking and approachable model for achieving high levels of academic performance for all students and schools. It takes what is known about how people reach advanced cognitive performance and translates it into a practical and user-friendly framework, which can be used with all students to systematically build the cognitive thinking skills and learner behaviours that will deliver success in school, in the workplace and in later life. Flexible and adaptable, High Performance Learning can be used in any context, with any curriculum and at any age. It does not require separate lessons but rather becomes the underpinning pedagogy of the school.

Drawing on the author's 40 years of research into how the most able students think and learn, this book provides a framework that has been extensively trialled in schools in eleven countries. . Themes include:

• Creating world class schools
• The High Performance Learning environment
• The High Performance Learning framework
• Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics (ACPs)
• Values, Attitudes and Attributes (VAAs)
• Creating and leading a High Performance Learning school
• The role of parents, universities and employers.

This invaluable resource will help schools make the move from good to world class and will be essential reading for school leaders, teachers and those with an interest in outstanding academic performance.

Chapter 1 Creating world class schools

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674476-2

World class schools are consistently effective in securing excellent academic results for their students but they also produce students who can think for themselves, are socially confident and have experienced a rich diet of educational opportunities. These students exhibit the characteristics of advanced cognitive performance. At their core, these schools comply with all the features of a well managed organisation and easily meet the requirements set out in any external accountability measures. These external measures are recognised as important building blocks and are not to be underestimated. But world class schools do so much more. They produce consistently large numbers of high achieving students who are college-ready and workplace-ready.

In 2010 in a policy document for Policy Exchange (Eyre, 2010) I suggested that:

More pupils than we previously thought have the potential to perform at the highest levels – that is to achieve advanced levels of cognitive performance – that the way to secure this is to create a system that expects significantly more from more pupils, and that the consequence of such an approach will be to raise the performance of the whole system, more surely than through any specific structural or pedagogical reform. Gifted education tells us exactly how to achieve this. There really is ‘Room at the Top’ if we systematically nurture more children to get there.

High Performance Learning is the framework that turns this policy approach into practice. It tells schools ‘How to be Top’. It has been proven to work at the ‘district level’ in Nord Anglia Education's non-selective international schools, where one in five students are now obtaining places in the top thirty universities in the world ¹ and these promising outcomes suggest far wider system applicability. High Performance Learning helps individual schools make the move from good to truly world class. It does so by placing student learning and professionalised teachers at the heart of the process and uses a unique, robust and replicable framework at the school level that routinely delivers high performance for the vast majority of students in the school. It systematically teaches students how to be ‘intelligent’ and how to succeed in school. Furthermore, the students themselves are intellectually and socially confident, workplace-ready and life-ready with a global outlook and a concern for others.

This approach is modern in conception, building on emerging concepts in neuroscience and psychology regarding human potential, on requirements for twenty-first-century employability and societal success and on the known learning patterns of the most advanced or gifted learners. Crucially, High Performance Learning is not a bolt-on programme but rather a lens through which schools can view and develop their own professional practice.

This approach is timely not only for individual schools but also for system reformers. It fits neatly within the post-standardisation paradigm with ambitions that exceed general competence and aim for overall excellence: schools looking to move their performance from ‘good’ to ‘great’. It articulates in detail what that vision should look like at the student level, provides a route map to help individual schools make it a reality and hence has the capacity to move entire education systems as well as schools from good to great. This approach has particular significance for children from low income and disadvantaged backgrounds. These are the students with low aspiration and low intellectual capital. They do not acquire the relevant cognitive and learner skills at home and so stand to benefit disproportionately when they are systematically well taught in school. In essence, High Performance Learning is an evidence-based, practical framework that allows policy makers to devolve ownership for improvement safely to school leaders and teachers, while simultaneously providing a construct that ensures accountability without creating a teach-to-the-test culture in schools. It provides a practical next step in the quest to move on from securing standardisation as a main focus.

It is not the intention in this chapter to review or fully critique the system reform agenda over the past 30 years, but rather to position High Performance Learning within it and to articulate the way in which this very contemporary approach can serve to further the aims of system-wide improvement. It also aims to provide recommendations for ways in which policy makers could support the adoption of the High Performance Learning theory in respect of curriculum, testing, accountability/inspection, teacher quality and funding. This is timely for ‘good’ systems currently grappling with exactly how to bridge from good to world class.

A brief, simple overview of system reform in the last 30 years

No-one in the education space at any level over the past 30 years can have been untouched by the debates surrounding education policy. When I began teaching in the late 1970s there was no clear definition of what a good school should look like or be trying to achieve. Schools had historically focused mainly on teaching core skills, but some went far beyond that and in a myriad different ways. Truly world class schools such as the top English public (independent) schools were clear about their own individual educational offer and why it was desirable for them, but there was no general consensus for the state-run schools; they varied widely in terms both of quality and approach. Yet in the last 30 years the quest to articulate in detail what constitutes good schools and good education has not only raged but has moved from the dusty corridors of academia to become a matter of political concern and indeed political pride. The debate has also moved from fragmentation to a remarkable degree of consensus. Education has become more standardised.

At the heart of this consensus is agreement that the purpose of schools and schooling is to help students reach levels of educational achievement that will fit them well for future life and feed the demands of an increasingly complex workplace and society. Students being given access to quality schooling until the age of 16+ is now seen as an entitlement – at least in more developed countries. The system has, rightly, become concerned about those groups who do not have access to good quality education and about those individuals and groups who get left behind and do not thrive in their educational setting. This has in turn led to a focus on increasing the number of good schools and reducing the inconsistency of student performance within them.

In their state of the art review of this school effectiveness and school improvement journey Hopkins and colleagues (2014) chart it from its early focus on organisational development to the more recent and familiar areas (Phases 3–5) which have shaped thinking in the last 30 years.

1. Phase 1 – Understanding the organisational culture of the school.
2. Phase 2 – Action research and research initiatives at the school level.
3. Phase 3 –Managing change and comprehensive approaches to school reform.
4. Phase 4 –Building capacity for student learning at the local level and the continuing emphasis on leadership.
5. Phase 5 – Towards systemic improvement.

They describe Phase 3 as being characterised by self-managing schools transforming their organisations by managing change in the quest for enhanced student achievement (p. 264) and which gave rise to a series of models of improvement that schools or systems could adopt. Phase 4 enhanced this by focusing on collaboration and networking across groups or districts of schools. It balanced top-down and bottom-up change in order to make measured differences in student achievement (p. 264). Phase 5 shifts the focus to learning about learning and learning from one another.

System improvement strategy over this period has undoubtedly done much to create more consistency in the school system, to the benefit of many students. This has been achieved by setting higher standards for schools and high stakes assessments for students, so ensuring that schools raise their expectations and fewer students fail to achieve the required educational minimums. It has – arguably – set the bar higher and tried to ensure that all institutions and students achieve the minimum standard. It has created a level of coherence and consistency in the international education diaspora and has provided a universal language for education, which assists in both collaborative and comparative work.

It has also, through the work of both the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and McKinsey, challenged assumptions and dispelled myths, for example about the link between spending on education and quality of educational outcomes. It has asked some searching questions as to why schools in cultures as different as Hong Kong and Finland are able to produce consistently good results while others are not. All this debate has helped to give coherence to work on school and system reform. So far, so good.

However, from the outset system reform has exhibited some limitations. Over time these have become more significant and eventually tested achievement reached a plateau (Hargreaves and Shirley, 2008). In the editorial of the anniversary edition of the Journal of Educational Change, Hargreaves (2009, p. 258) posed the following question.

Have we seen great breakthroughs and synergies of strategy and impact along with impressive new results? Or have educational reform strategies been just as much a part of the great unraveling of overconfidence and overreach as have the bursting bubbles of speculative investment and uncontrolled indebtedness?

He answers this by suggesting that the journey has been by way of originally large-scale centrally driven approaches that became increasingly prescriptive and demanding, and is now moving towards more developmental approaches as capability in the workforce has increased. He sees this as not just desirable but essential because:

The ironic effect of international interest in large-scale reform is that it has exposed how the countries and systems that have actually been most successful educationally and economically are ones that provide greater flexibility and innovation in teaching and learning, that invest greater trust in their highly qualified teachers, that value curriculum breadth and that do not try to orchestrate everything tightly from the top.

(2009, p. 13)

Hargreaves is not alone in taking a moment to pause and reframe. Many of the architects of the large-scale system reforms have similarly engaged in a process of determining what to keep and what to ditch as school reform moves to a new stage. Fullan (2009) is somewhat more optimistic. He points to the gains made, including the fact that Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, Ontario, Alberta and England are all engaged in self-conscious strategy formulation and implementation and looking to see what they can learn from their own and others’ experiences and evidence base. But Fullan also sees the need to move on and build capacity in the teaching profession, while continuing a commitment to test-based educational accountability. The period 2008 to 2009 proved to be something of a watershed in terms of school reform.

This centrally driven approach has been successful as a first step and has ratcheted up overall standards in schools. It has seen some notable step-changes in poor performing systems at the district level (London Challenge) but it has not helped systems to reach the world class standards that characterise the very best, nor has it served to meet the needs of the workplace and society. Massachusetts has been one of the most successful systems in terms of reform. Yet in 2014 it recognised that its considerable achievements would still be insufficient for the future. It needed a new transformation (Brightlines, 2014). In framing its future vision it identified six gaps that remained following the first phase.

1. The employability gap: the gap between what the economy demands and what the school system produces.
2. The knowledge gap: the gap between what a twenty-first-century American needs to know and what graduates of the school system actually know.
3. The achievement gap: the gap between Massachusetts students as a whole and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
4. The opportunity gap: the opportunity to succeed between children of the well off and children of low income families.
5. The gap between the performance of Massachusetts and those in the top performing education systems in the world.
6. The top talent gap: the gap between top performing students in Massachusetts and top performing students in the best performing systems in the world.

These gaps are immense in terms of scope and scale. The reasons why this situation has occurred is interesting and important in terms of what that means for current and future system reform. Critics of large-scale target driven system reform in England have suggested that it has led to an increase in schools being deemed ‘good’ or even ‘outstanding’ on the school improvement criteria, but it has not resulted in more schools becoming ‘world class’. By creating a test-led approach to education, it has created students who are focused on passing the test but have little interest in mastery of the subject and teachers who are similarly focused on passing the inspection test (or other accountability measures) but less interested in creating well rounded, successful students. The methodology has led to an approach whereby government or state knows best and has made teaching a stressful and undesirable profession with excessive workload being one of the top two reasons given for teachers’ leaving (Barmby, 2006). In 2013 the OECD figures showed England as having 20 per cent of secondary teachers under the age of 30, the second youngest workforce after Indonesia. This indicates that retention of teachers is a significant issue.

Success has been particularly limited in minority groups, with social mobility stagnating and children from disadvantaged backgrounds much less likely to develop the advanced cognitive skills required to enter a high-status university than their more advantaged peers (fewer than 3 per cent of children from disadvantaged backgrounds in England and the US reached a ‘high’ standard (Level 5) on the PISA 2009 reading assessment compared with 15 per c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Creating world class schools
• 2 The High Performance Learning environment
• 3 The High Performance Learning framework
• 4 The Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics (ACPs)
• 5 The Values, Attitudes and Attributes (VAAs)
• 6 Creating and leading a High Performance Learning school
• 7 The role of parents, universities and employers
• Appendix 1: Becoming a world class school rubric
• Appendix 2: Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics (ACPs)
• Appendix 3: Progression in Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics
• Appendix 4: Values, Attitudes and Attributes (VAAs)
• Appendix 5: Progression in Values, Attitudes and Attributes (VAAs)
• Index