Schooling for Change

Reinventing Education for Early Adolescents

Lorna Earl, Andy Hargreaves, Jim Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135717797
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focusing on change and reform in secondary and elementary schools, this book explores the possibilities for better schooling for early adolescents.

1

Triple Transitions

The Problem

In Western societies, early adolescence is typically a time when young people undergo a profound transition in their social, physical and intellectual development. It is a time of rapid change, immense uncertainty and acute self-reflection. The exhilaration and pain of growing up for many early adolescents resides in their having much less confidence in what they are moving towards than in what they have left behind.

Strangely, Western societies towards the end of the twentieth century also find themselves in the midst of changes and transitions of great turbulence and uncertainty. Economies are becoming more flexible and also more fragile. Technologies are becoming more complex. Organizations are dispensing with bureaucracy in exchange for flexibility and fluidity. Nations are worrying and sometimes warring about their identities as economies expand, borders become irrelevant and people turn in upon themselves. Gone are the old and obvious antagonisms between labor and capital; East and West. But with more pluralism, complexity and diversity, gone too are the old ideological certainties, the seemingly secure moral foundations on which learning was organized, people lived their lives, and duties and obligations were maintained.

Just when modern industrial societies seemed to be reaching maturity, when economies seemed capable of infinite expansion and welfare states of endlessly extending educational and social benefits to all, social, economic and political life have been plunged into unpredictability. It is as if societies themselves are being condemned to experience a kind of adolescence. Like adolescents, we all now live in exciting and terrifying times of transition and turmoil. The prefix post used to describe these times in terms of what Daniel Bell (1973) labelled post-industrial society, and C.Wright Mills (1959) first termed post-modern society, suggests much greater confidence about the passing of what went before, than about what lies in store ahead (A.Hargreaves, 1994).

Our future is very much an open book. It can be one of triumphant innovation; of diverse and self-fulfilling yet environmentally sustainable lifestyles; of people living and working together in communities of difference. Or it can be a future of division and despair where the successful are seduced into a technologically glitzy world of superficial consumerism and lifestyle choices, while the unsuccessful are condemned to unemployment, underemployment orundemanding employment that offers them few real choices. The nature of our future depends, in part, on how we prepare the next generation who will live and make it.

Young adolescents are at a critical point in their development, as is the changing adult world they are entering. In large part, this explains why educators around the world seem to have identified the transition years of schooling as a focal point for educational reform. Reforming these transition years of schooling seems to promise a double indemnity—against serious harm coming to the future of our youth, as well as to the world they will inherit.

Secondary schools have not traditionally been particularly responsive either to the transitional needs of young adolescents or of wider social change. Secondary school systems evolved from small academies of subject specialization for selected elites, into extensions of the factory-like systems of mass education where students were processed in large batches, and segregated into age-graded cohorts or classes. These were taught (‘instructed’) through standardized and specialized curricula (courses of instruction). Instruction most commonly took the form of recitation or lecturing along with note-taking, question-and-answer and seatwork (Goodson, 1988; Cuban, 1984; Hamilton, 1989). These antecedent structures of schooling, defined for the age of large factories, heavy mechanical industry and specialized bureaucracies, have set the basic conditions for much of secondary schooling today. Whilst the surface and style of schooling may have changed, these deep structures of division, department and delivery have been reproduced from generation to generation.

‘Real’ secondary school teaching, the seemingly natural, normal and given way to organize teaching and curriculum, is therefore a highly specific socio-historical invention from a long-distant period (Metz, 1991). As we move into a more postmodern age, efforts at educational reform and restructuring have begun to address these fundamentally given, indeed almost ‘sacred’ norms of secondary schooling, as Sarason (1971) calls them. Departmental specialization has been questioned through proposals for core and integrated curricula (Drake, 1991). Intelligences are coming to be seen as multiple, not singular (Gardner, 1983). Flexible teaching approaches are being advocated that respond to a diversity of student learning styles (McCarthy, 1980). Assessment strategies are being sought that are more ‘authentic’ in evaluating what is actually learned by a range of methods, rather than just through pencil-and-paper exercises (Wiggins, 1992). Efforts are being made in many places to group students more heterogenously (Wheelock, 1992). Secondary schools are just beginning to confront major transitions in teaching, learning, curriculum, organization and assessment (Sizer, 1992).

So there are three transitions. In early adolescence, young people are changing. On the cusp of the century, societies are changing. And with accelerating programs of educational reform, secondary schools and junior high schools are also changing. In this book, we want to address this triple transition and analyze the challenges it poses for educators of early adolescents. We want to articulate what it means to educate early adolescents in the rapidly changingsocial, cultural and economic conditions that await and already surround us. We want to speak plainly about the challenge, and be practical, imaginative, yet properly circumspect about potential solutions. The scope of our task is great, so we cannot always be as detailed as we would like. But we hope to draw together some important threads, identify fruitful directions and stimulate focused debate.

The Book

Our purpose in this book is to consolidate the literature related to young adolescents and present it as a broad narrative summary that is easily read and accessible to teachers and administrators who want to understand the issues involved in educating early adolescents. For this reason, we do not itemize findings of individual projects in great detail, but cite studies and instances which bear on the points being made. Given the range of issues included in this work, our review is necessarily selective rather than exhaustive. It is designed to identify key themes within each of the areas of focus. Our review team concentrated its search on the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Material from other countries is also included in the review, to the extent that we could overcome accessibility problems and language difficulties.

The themes that we address in this book are very much based on our earlier report. They are:

• The key characteristics of elementary (or primary) schools and secondary schools and their impact on student learning and development. This is to build a sense of what students in early adolescence are transferring to and from; of what they are in transit between.

• The transition process itself, as it is understood and experienced by students, and as it is managed by teachers and administrators.

• The curriculum for early adolescents—especially issues surrounding the concept of a core curriculum, the criteria underpinning such a curriculum, and the particular forms that a core curriculum can take.

• Innovative strategies of assessment and evaluation which support and are integrated into the learning process itself during the transition years of schooling rather than ones which are merely undertaken as a kind of judgment, when the learning is over.

This book also expands our original report to include a more comprehensive look at issues of ability grouping, support for students, teaching and learning and the implications of all this literature for restructuring schools. As we discuss these issues we will also refer in places to findings we have gathered in subsequent phases of our work. One of these studies focused on the change process through which people anticipated and implemented newly developed reforms for the Transition Years (grades 7–9). These reforms included a legislated mandate to detrack or destream grade 9 from a position where courses were offered at three levels of difficulty to one where all grade 9 students would be taught in mixed-ability groups. This study of Secondary School Work Cultures and Educational Change (Hargreaves, Davis, Fullan, Stager, Wignall and Macmillan, 1992), described how principals and teachers in eight varied secondary schools were responding to these changes.

A third part of our program, Years of Transition: Times for Change (Hargreaves, Leithwood, Gérin-Lajoie, Cousins and Thiessen, 1993), evaluated issues in the Transition Years as they were exemplified in sixty-two Ministry funded pilot projects, in order to explore directions for policy and implementation in Transition Years reforms. When we appraise some of the widely advocated strategies for reforming education for early adolescents, we will draw on some of the findings of this later study, in addition to the related literature, to see what the concrete realities of restructuring in the transition years of schooling look like in practice.

We do not want our review to assert over-confident claims about research evidence. Nor do we want administrators to use it as a way of imposing new policies on the teaching profession. Rather we urge you to use this material along with your own and your colleagues’ existing knowledge and experience in a critical and reflective way. Science can all too easily be harnessed in the service of greater administrative power! Research evidence is rarely sufficiently solid, timeless or incontrovertible to justify this kind of direction. Nor do we want to encourage over-zealous beliefs in and commitments to magic models of restructured schools for early adolescents that some might advance as answers to our problems. Although we have no cause to be complacent about current arrangements for educating early adolescents, almost all purported solutions, however promising, are themselves imperfect. Although most problems have a solution; every solution brings more problems too! Productive change is a process of continuous problem-solving and improvement; not an investment in the false certainties of science, or the hyped-up promises of rapid reform.

Starting Assumptions

Our hope is that our book will help stimulate debate and evaluation, open new horizons of perception and possibility, clarify directions for improvement and reform, and identify needs for further research. For this reason, our tone is not always absolutely detached and dispassionate. We try to avoid the blandness of superficial consensus by identifying what our recommendations specifically do not mean, as well as what they do. Our style is therefore often argumentative; and sometimes a little blunt. This is deliberate. We believe it is time to stop tinkering around with the education of early adolescents, adding individual initiatives, making minor adjustments to outdated structures and practices. It is time to commit to changes that put young people first and our accustomed habits, traditions and conventions of working as educators second. This does not mean becoming oblivious to teachers’ own needs. But it does mean revisiting our priorities and putting students first among then.

This means that our review is not and cannot be absolutely neutral and impartial. While we endeavor to be rigorous about weighing the evidence, our analysis and summary is still guided by certain values and assumptions. In some literature reviews, these all too often remain undeclared and implicit. We want to place ours ‘up front’—so that as a critical reader, you can engage not only with the evidence we present and see how far it validates our assumptions, but you can also engage in dialogue with the assumptions themselves, perhaps using them to revisit your own educational purposes and commitments. Three basic assumptions have guided our analysis. These are:

Assumption #1

Programs and services in the transition years should primarily be based on the characteristics and needs of early adolescents.

This means that those programs and services should not be determined by the inertia of historical tradition that has come to define our existing understandings of ‘proper’ curriculum subjects (Goodson, 1988; Tomkins, 1986) and of valid, workable methods of teaching (Cuban, 1984; Curtis, 1988; Westbury, 1973). It also means that programs and services for early adolescents should not be shaped primarily by the curriculum and credential requirements of what is to follow in the senior years, as is currently the case (Stillman and Maychell, 1984; Gorwood, 1986; Hargreaves, 1986). Rather, the different stages and sectors of the educational service should work together in a partnership of equals, building education as a continuous process which effectively meets the needs of young people at each stage of their development.

The main purpose of schooling for young adolescents, we assume, therefore, is not to prepare students for senior high school but to help make education a continuous process addressing the personal, social, physical, and intellectual needs of young people at each particular stage in their development.

Assumption #2

The different aspects of schooling (i.e., curriculum, pedagogy, guidance, assessment, and staff development) should be dealt with as an integrated whole, not as isolated subsystems.

It is little use encouraging teachers to be more flexible and learner-centered in their approaches to teaching, if they are left to work within traditional, judgmental, fact-centered systems of assessment and evaluation. There is little value in asking teachers to be more experimental and take risks in their teaching, when they work within closely defined, curriculum guidelines that put a high premiumon coverage of content. There is also little point in encouraging all teachers to take more responsibility for the personal and social development of their students, unless the responsibilities of what is presently understood as ‘guidance’ are distributed more widely throughout the school (Levi and Ziegler, 1991; Hargreaves et al, 1988;Lang, 1985).

In other words, we assume with Sarason (1990) that programs and services for young adolescents are best approached as an integrated system if improvements are to be effective. In education, things go together. Everything affects everything else. Curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, guidance, staff development, and the like are best considered together in terms of the ways they can support the learning and development of early adolescents.

Assumption #3

The development and implementation of any changes should be based upon, and take account of existing theories and understandings of educational change.

Simple and relatively superficial change, in terms of adopting new curriculum guidelines, installing computers, reducing class sizes or implementing detracking or destreaming, is comparatively easy to prescribe (although less easy to fund!). Complex and enduring change, in terms of new teaching strategies or greater attention to students’ personal and social needs, is not (Miles and Huberman, 1984). In these matters, teachers do not change because they are told to, or even as a result of a few ‘quick’ shots of in-service training (Fullan and Hargreaves, 1991). Responsiveness to change, interest in change, and willingness to change, rather, are deeply rooted in teachers’ own personal and professional development (Hunt, 1987) and in the extent to which their colleagues, principals, and schools can provide an environment or culture which supports and promotes change (Fullan and Hargreaves, 1991). In such schools, change is most effective not when it is seen as a problem to be fixed, an anomaly to be ironed out, or a fire to be extinguished. Particular changes are more likely to be implemented in schools where teachers are committed to norms of continuous improvement as part of their overall professional obligations (Little, 1984; Rosenholtz, 1989). We therefore assume that if it is to be effective, change in schooling for early adolescents, like any complex and lasting change, must address the deeper, more generic issues of staff development, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Triple Transitions
• 2 Adolescence and Adolescents
• 3 Cultures of Schooling
• 4 The Transition Process
• 5 Care and Support
• 6 Curriculum Problems
• 7 Outcomes and Integration
• 8 Assessment and Evaluation
• 9 Teaching and Learning
• 10 Getting There
• References
• Index