1Bastow // Horizon // Issue 2

horizon:thought leadership

What’s Inside:

System leadership for school transformationTowards a growth mindset in assessment

ISSUE #02

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What’s happening at Bastow

Towards a growth mindset in assessment

Horizon Forum with Professor Geoff Masters AO, CEO and board member of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

What messages are we sending to students when we report success or failure? How do assessment and reporting processes shape our beliefs about learning?

It is commonly believed that by specifying ‘standards’ to be achieved by all students in each year of school, and by judging, grading and reporting performance against these standards, learning expectations and thus achievement levels will be raised.

The problems with this approach are that it does not provide all students with appropriate learning challenges, it often obscures rather than clarifies the relationship between effort and success, and it frequently encourages fixed mindsets about learning ability.

Professor Geoff Masters AO will discuss an alternative to this approach: to establish where individual students are in their learning, to set personal stretch targets for further learning, to monitor and recognise the progress that individuals make over time.

Rather than expecting all students of the same age to be at the same point in their learning at the same time, this approach expects every student to make excellent learning progress over the course of a school year, regardless of their starting point.

Date: Wednesday 17 February 2016Time: 5.30pm – 7.00pm Networking and nibbles from 5.00pmVenue: Bastow 603-615 Queensberry St, North MelbourneCost: $35 pp incl. GST

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System leadership for school transformation

Horizon Forum with Professor David Hopkins, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Education, University of London and Director of Education for the Bright Tribe Trust.

Why has the concept of system leadership come into favour in the past decade? And what does it mean to ‘unleash the power of the profession’?

David Hopkins developed the concept of ‘System Leadership’ whilst Chief Adviser on School Standards to the UK government in the early 2000s. It was part of an attempt to create what is currently now known as a ‘self-improving school system’.

System Leaders are those principals who are willing to shoulder system wide roles in order to support the improvement of other schools as well as their own. As such, system leadership is a new and emerging practice that embraces a variety of responsibilities that are developing either locally or within discrete State/regional networks or programs that when taken together have the potential to contribute to system transformation.

In making the case for the potential of system leadership as the key driver for systemic reform in Victoria, David Hopkins will in his presentation:

• make an argument for system leadership set within the context of contemporary school reform

• present a model of system leadership including the internal and external aspects of the system leadership role

• provide evidence to support the widespread adoption of the system leadership role.

Date: Thursday 25 February 2016Time: 5.30pm – 7.00pmNetworking and nibbles from 5.00pmVenue: Bastow 603-615 Queensberry St, North MelbourneCost: $35 pp incl. GST

Register to attend:

At Bastow

At Bastow

Via Video Conferencing

Via Video Conferencing

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A message from the Director

Bastow programs and courses are delivered in partnership with highly respected organisations and leading experts and academics. These organisations and ‘thought leaders’ bring a passion for improving the performance of schools and early childhood organisations and challenge our thinking about how to provide excellent outcomes for all children and young people. Bastow is keen to ensure that Victorian education sector leaders have access to information about global developments in leadership practice and are inspired to lead improvements in their school and early childhood communities.

In 2015 Bastow extended its reach in thought leadership through publication of the first Bastow Horizon ePub and by hosting a series of Horizon forums. The provision of insightful, evidence-based perspectives on a range of issues has been designed to raise school leaders’ awareness of long-term trends in education and challenge them to consider how it impacts on their own roles. Both the publication and the forums have stimulated a new level of professional conversation and engagement about educational leadership development.

The exceptionally positive results revealed in recent independent evaluation of the forums and publication indicates that you, our educational leaders, have benefitted from this access to high-quality thought leadership. This thought leadership not only has the capacity to motivate leaders, but also increases the nature and quality of dialogue in and between schools.

I am therefore delighted to present this latest Horizon publication. This edition focuses on articles from Professor David Hopkins and Professor Geoff Masters. Their articles explore a model of System Leadership and consider how assessment can shape student, parent and community beliefs about learning.

Professor Hopkins and Professor Masters will be our thought leaders at Bastow forums in February 2016. We hope you will be able to join us to explore these questions at the Horizon forums at Bastow or via video conferencing.

Neil Barker Director

Bastow Institute of Educational Leadership

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Professor David Hopkins is passionately committed to improving the quality of education for all and has worked at the intersection of policy, research and practice for over forty years. Among a range of educational roles, he has been Chief Adviser to three Secretary of States on School Standards in the UK, Dean of Education at the University of Nottingham, a secondary school teacher and Outward Bound Instructor. He also helped found the National College for School Leadership, consults internationally on school reform and holds visiting professorships at universities around the world.

David is currently Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Education, Director of Education for the Bright Tribe Trust and founder of the Adventure Learning Schools Charity.

David has recently published Exploding the Myths of School Reform; the third book in his trilogy on school improvement. His previous titles include: School Improvement for Real (2001) and Every School a Great School (2007).

The concept of ‘system leadership’ is one that over the past decade has caught the educational imagination. System leaders are those principals who are willing to shoulder system wide roles in order to support the improvement of other schools as well as their own. As such, system leadership is a new and emerging practice that embraces a variety of responsibilities that are developing either locally or within discrete State/regional networks or programs that when taken together have the potential to contribute to system transformation.

The educational policy direction in many developed countries is changing quite dramatically at the present time.1. There is currently a rapid shift away from the government managed educational changes of the 1990s and 2000s to far more decentralised systems based on the principle of ’autonomy’. This reflects the genuine belief on the part of many politicians and policy makers that there is a need to unleash the power of the profession that has been harnessed in the recent past by too much control. It is within such a context that system leadership assumes increasing importance.

System leadership for school transformation

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In making the case for the potential of system leadership as the key driver for systemic reform in the State of Victoria the argument in this paper is divided into two key sections:

• a model of system leadership including the internal and external aspects of the system leadership role

• a framework for system improvement based on the principle of ‘segmentation’ and driven by system leadership.

A model for system leadershipThe first thing to say is that system leadership at its heart is imbued with moral purpose (Fullan 2003). Without that, there would not be the passion to proceed or the encouragement for others to follow. In those systems where the regularities of improvement in teaching and learning are still not well understood, where deprivation is still too good a predictor of educational success and where the goal is for every school to be a great school, the leadership challenge is surely a systemic one. This perspective gives a broader appreciation of what is meant by the moral purpose of system leadership.

In Every School a Great School (Hopkins 2007: 154), I argued that system leaders express their moral purpose through:• measuring their success in terms of improving student

learning and increasing achievement, and strive to both raise the bar and narrow the gap(s)

• being fundamentally committed to the improvement of teaching and learning; they engage deeply with the organisation of teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment in order to ensure that learning is personalised for all their students

• developing their schools as personal and professional learning communities, with relationships built across and beyond each school to provide a range of learning experiences and professional development opportunities

• striving for equity and inclusion through acting on context and culture – this is not just about eradicating poverty, as important as that is, but also about giving communities a sense of worth and empowerment

• realising in a deep way that the classroom, school and system levels all impact on each other. Crucially they understand that in order to change the larger system you have to engage with it in a meaningful way.

Although this degree of clarity is not necessarily obvious in the behaviour and practice of every principal, these aspirations are increasingly becoming part of the conventional wisdom of our best global educational leaders. It is also clear from this discussion that system leadership has both internal as well as external aspects to the role, a point that will be developed later.Building on these key capabilities, and combining them with the range of identified roles, it is possible to offer a model of system leadership practice that has emerged inductively from the research we have done with outstanding educational leaders (see for example: Hopkins 2007, Hopkins and Higham 2007, Higham, Hopkins and Matthews 2009). This is set out in Figure 1 following.

Figure 1 - A model of system leadership practice

The model exhibits a logic that flows from the ‘inside-out’ (Hopkins 2009).

At the centre, leaders driven by a moral purpose related to the enhancement of student learning, seek to empower teachers and others to make schools a critical force for improving communities. This is premised on the argument that sustainable educational development requires educational leaders who are willing to shoulder broader leadership roles; who care about and work for the success of other schools as well as their own.

It is also clear from our research that system leaders share a characteristic set of behaviours and skills. As illustrated in the second inner ring of the diagram these are of two types. First, system leaders engage in ‘personal development’ usually informally through benchmarking themselves against their peers and developing their skill base in response to the context they find themselves working in. Secondly, all the system leaders we have studied have a strategic capability; they are able to translate their vision or moral purpose into operational principles that have tangible outcomes.

Taken together these two central circles of the diagram reflect the core practice of ‘setting directions’ as noted in Table 1: Key internal capabilities

As is denoted in the third ring of the model, the moral purpose, personal qualities and strategic capacity of the system leader find focus in three key foci of school leadership – managing the teaching and learning process, developing people and developing the organisation.

Finally, although there are a growing number of outstanding leaders that exemplify these qualities

Managing Teaching &

LearningDeveloping

Organisations

Act as aCommunity

Leader

Lead an Educational

ImprovementPartnership Improve a

School in Challenging

Context

Partnera Low Achieving

School

Work as a Change Agent

Developing People

MoralPurpose

Personal Development

Strategic Acumen

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and determinations, they are not necessarily ‘system leaders.’ A system leader not only needs these aspirations and capabilities but also, in addition, as seen in the outer ring of the model, works to change other contexts by engaging with the wider system in a meaningful way. We have included in the outer ring the range of roles identified from the research and described in the taxonomy below that focuses on improving other schools, sharing curriculum innovations, empowering communities, and/or leading partnerships committed to enabling all schools to move forward.

The model represents a powerful combination of practices that give us a glimpse of leadership in a new educational landscape (Leithwood, et al., 2007). It is also clear from the model that there are both internal and external aspects to the system leadership roles.

A good way of focusing on the internal aspects of system leadership is to draw on Leithwood and Reihl’s (2005) conceptualisation of the central tenants of successful school leadership. They summarise this as four central domains of setting direction, managing teaching and learning, developing people and developing the organisation. Table 1 below sets out these practices (Hopkins and Higham 2007). This analysis reinforces the argument that enhancing learning and teaching is the key priority for school leadership. The critical leadership challenge here is to ensure that quality teaching and learning is underpinned by more specific and precise frameworks for learning and teaching (Hopkins and Craig 2015a, b & c).

Table 1: Key internal capabilities

Core practices Key system leadership components

Setting direction Total commitment to enable every learner to reach their potential with a strategic vision that extends into the future and brings immediacy to the delivery of improvements for students.

Ability to translate vision into whole school programs that extend the impact of pedagogic and curricular developments into other classrooms, departments and schools.

Managing teaching and learning

Ensure every child is inspired and challenged through appropriate curriculum and a repertoire of teaching styles and skills that underpin personalised learning.

Develop a high degree of clarity about and consistency of teaching quality to both create the regularities of practice that sustain improvement and to enable sharing of best practice and innovation.

Developing people Enable students to become more active learners, develop thinking and learning skills and take greater responsibility for their own learning. Involve parents and the community to promote the valuing of positive attitudes to learning and minimise the impact of challenging circumstances on expectations and achievement.

Develop schools as professional learning communities, with relationships built and fostered across and beyond schools to provide a range of learning experiences and professional development opportunities for staff.

Developing the organisation Create an evidence-based school, with decisions effectively informed by student data, with self-evaluation and external support used to seek out approaches to school improvement that are most appropriate to specific contextual needs.

Managing resources, workforce reform and the environment to support learning and wellbeing; and extend an organisation’s vision of learning to involve networks of schools collaborating to build curriculum diversity, professional support, extended and welfare services.

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Key ‘internal’ capabilities of system leadersAlthough the impact of leadership on student achievement and school effectiveness has been acknowledged for some time, it is only recently that we have begun to understand more fully the fine-grained nature of that relationship. A reasonably elegant summary of this evidence is as follows:

• The leadership develops a narrative for improvement.

• The leadership is highly focused on improving the quality of teaching and learning (and student welfare).

• The leadership explicitly organises the school for improvement.

• The leadership creates:

- clarity (of the systems established)

- consistency (of the systems spread across school)

- continuity (of the systems over time).

• The leadership creates internal accountability and reciprocity.

• The leadership works to change context as a key component of their improvement strategy.

There are two relatively new features to this profile. The first is the emphasis on narrative and its impact on both strategy and culture. It is student learning that is the central focus of the narrative within a unifying story around the image of a journey. This is strategic in so far as it integrates a wide variety of initiatives, and cultural in so far as it speaks both to the moral purpose of

schooling. The second is the emphasis on ‘systems’ and the transferability and sustainability of best practice, the external aspects of system leadership that we now turn to.

Having set out a model for system leadership and made the case for leadership having an unrelenting focus on the quality of learning and achievement, it is now instructive to look at the external aspects of the role in terms of taxonomy of the roles system leaders play.

In our original review, we identified a variety of system leader roles emerging in England and elsewhere (Higham, Hopkins and Matthews 2009). As it happens this taxonomy has received support from subsequent research. The role of the National Leader of Education has developed considerably in response to our policy suggestions (Matthews 2007); as has the concept of the system leader in a more global context (Hargreaves 2012). Our initial framework suggested the following roles:

• Developing and leading a successful educational improvement partnership between several schools, often focused on a set of specific themes that have significant and clear outcomes that reach beyond the capacity of any one single institution.

• Choosing to lead and improve a school in extremely challenging circumstances and change local contexts by building a culture of success and then sustaining once low achieving schools as high valued added institutions.

• Partnering another school facing difficulties and improving it, either as an Executive Head Principal of a Federation or as the leader of a more informal improvement arrangement.

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• Acting as a community leader to broker and shape partnerships and/or networks of wider relationships across local communities to support children’s welfare and potential, often through multi agency work.

• Working as a change agent or expert leader within the system, identifying best classroom practice and transferring it to support improvement in other schools.

No doubt these roles will expand and mature over time. What is particularly interesting about them is how they have evolved in the recent past as a response to the adaptive challenge of system change. It is also important to note that the taxonomy includes system leaders working in either national or state programs as well as locally organised often ad hoc roles, a point that is picked up below.

A framework for system improvement based on the principle of ‘segmentation’The underlying assumption of this article is that the real prize and potential of system leadership is the realisation of systemic improvement. It is important to appreciate however that the aspiration of system transformation needs to be facilitated by the degree of segmentation existing in the system. Segmentation implies using the natural variation in school performance within the system as a means of improvement through collaboration. This however only holds when certain conditions are in place (Hopkins 2007).

There are two crucial aspects here. First, that there is increased clarity on the nature of intervention and support for schools at each phase of the performance cycle. Second, that schools at each phase are clear as to the most productive ways in which to collaborate in order to capitalise on the diversity within the system. A summary of this ‘segmentation’ approach is set out in Table 2.

Table 2: The segmentation approachType of school Key strategies – responsive

to context and need

Leading schools Become leading practitioners Formal federation with lower-performing schools

Succeeding, self-improving schools

Regular local networking for school leaders

Between-school curriculum development

Succeeding schools with internal variations

Consistency interventions: such as Assessment for Learning Subject specialist support to particular curriculum areas

Underperforming schools

Linked school support for underperforming departments / year groups Underperforming pupil programs for catch-up

Low attaining schools

Formal support in Federation structure Consultancy in core subjects and best practice

Failing schools Intensive support from System Leader or restart with new name and leadership

The ‘segmentation approach’ to school improvementIn the right hand column is a basic taxonomy of schools based on their phase in the performance cycle. The number of categories and the terminology will vary from setting to setting and Victoria will have to develop its own language and framework suited to its own particular purposes. The crucial point being that not all schools are the same and each requires different forms of support. It is this that is the focus of the second column, where a range of strategies for supporting schools at different phases of their development is briefly described.

There are two key points to consider. The first is that one size does not fit all. The second is that these different forms of intervention and support are increasingly being provided by schools themselves, rather than being imposed and delivered by some external agency. This approach to system transformation relies fundamentally on school-to-school support as the basis of the improvement strategy.

Table 2

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This approach to system transformation requires a fair degree of boldness in setting system level expectations and conditions. There are four implications in particular that have to be grappled with:

1. Schools should take greater responsibility for neighbouring schools so that the move towards networking encourages groups of schools to form new collaborative arrangements. This would be on the condition that these schools provided extended services for all students within a geographic area, but equally on the acceptance that there would be incentives for doing so. Encouraging local schools to work together will build capacity for continuous improvement at local level.

2. All failing and underperforming (and potentially low achieving) schools should have a leading school that works with them in either a formal grouping Federation (where the leading school principal assumes overall control and accountability) or in more informal partnership. Evidence from existing Federations suggests that a State system of Federations would be capable of delivering a sustainable step-change in improvement in relatively short periods of time.

3. The incentives for greater system responsibility should include significantly enhanced funding for students most at risk to counter the predictive character of poverty in relation to student achievement. Beyond incentivising local collaboratives, the potential effects for large scale long term reform include:

- a more even distribution of ‘at risk’ students and associated increases in standards, due to more schools seeking to admit a larger proportion of ‘at risk’ students so as to increase their overall income

- a significant reduction in ‘sink schools’ even where ‘at risk’ students are concentrated, as there would be much greater potential to respond to the socio-economic challenges (for example by paying more to attract the best teachers; or by developing excellent parental involvement and outreach services).

4. A rationalisation of State and local agency functions and roles to allow the higher degree of State and regional co-ordination for this increasingly devolved system.

In reflecting on this approach to system improvement, it is worth briefly reflecting on the distinction between system leaders working in State programs and those working in locally organised often ad hoc roles.

The majority of system leaders tend to operate in State or regional programs that have incentivised activity through organisation, funding and professional development –this is the ‘enabling state’ at work. It is an important strategy for encouraging principals to lead technical

and adaptive solutions in a widening professional domain of cross-school and system improvement. It is a phenomena that is increasingly being seen in those school systems that are accelerating up the PISA international benchmarking scales.

More freedom exists on the other side of the divide, in the roles that are locally developed, often ad hoc and contextually responsive. It is understandable why many conceive of these roles to be a more authentic form of system leadership. With no single framework or protocol, a range of models are developed in relation to specific needs (and times). Furthermore, from this perspective, the role of an ‘enabling state’ becomes focused on reducing both barriers to collaboration and wider policy disincentives at all levels. On the other hand it encourages agencies to provide specific support in networking and bespoke professional development to individual system leaders.

There are of course variations to this bottom up/top down distinction. For instance, strategic local leadership partnerships already exist between principals and regions in Victoria. In one such example, the region retained legal responsibility for value for money whilst delegating, through support, decision making to a partnership of principals who bring coherence and accountability to local collaboration. A perspective on how these (and other) possibilities may inform current professional action and State influence will be dependent on a range of criteria. If, however, a shared criterion is to develop effective system leadership in a growing number of schools, then the following suggestions for more short-term action may prove instructive.

Suggestion One: Incentivise rather than legislate. The traditional response has been intervention and management from regional, State and Federal agencies. The argument here is that this leadership now needs to come more from principals themselves or from agencies committed to working with them in authentic ways. It is clear that the more bureaucratic the response the less likely it will be to work. A more lateral approach may be to create the conditions within the system to promote system leadership and collaborative activity through for example, adjusting accountability requirements, and funding for capacity building. With the right incentives in place schools will naturally move towards these new ways of working and mould them to the context in which they operate and to the challenges they face.

Suggestion Two: Place the agency close to the school. There are now in many systems, system leadership roles whose remit is specifically school improvement. The intention that must be maintained is that instead of creating a new bureaucracy their brief is increasingly focused on facilitating relationships between schools to maximise the potential of purposive collaboration. This approach to school transformation is made increasingly possible by the range of sophisticated data potentially

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available on school and student performance. It enables groups of schools to identify (a) issues where they shared both strengths and weaknesses i.e. their capacity for sharing and (b) common issues where they are likely to need some external input.

Suggestion Three: Use school ‘independence’ collaboratively to tackle underperformance. The underlying assumption here is that autonomous public schools working collaboratively is a particularly appropriate organisational format for contexts where rapid transformation of standards and support for students are most needed. The key point is that the freedoms associated with increased autonomy can be used to promote collaboration and inclusion to directly address the needs of students. The crucial condition is that all schools accept responsibility for the education of all the students within their geographic area.

The purpose of this paper has been to demonstrate that system leadership represents a powerful combination of practices that give us a glimpse of the crucial importance of leadership in the new educational landscape. The collective sharing of skills, expertise and experience creates much richer and more sustainable opportunities for rigorous transformation than can ever be provided by isolated institutions. Realising this landscape, however, may also require a bigger shift within the broader education system, in particular by giving school leaders more agency to take the lead – in short to light their own fires. The future is certainly theirs.

This paper was prepared for Horizon, a publication of the Bastow Institute of Educational Leadership, Department of Education and Training (DET), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.1. For a comprehensive review see - Hopkins, D 2013, Exploding the myths of school reform, Open University Press, McGraw Hill Education, Berkshire.

ReferencesFullan, M 2003, The Moral Imperative of School Leadership, Corwin Press, London.

Hargreaves, D H 2012, A self-improving school system in international context, National College for School Leadership, Nottingham.

Hopkins, D 2007, Every School a Great School, McGraw-Hill/Open University Press, Maidenhead.

Hopkins, D 2009, The Emergence of System Leadership, National College for School Leadership, Nottingham.

Hopkins, D 2013, Exploding the myths of school reform, Open University Press, McGraw Hill Education, Berkshire.

Hopkins, D & Higham R 2007, ‘System Leadership: Mapping the Landscape’ School Leadership and Management, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 147-166.

Hopkins, D and Craig, W 2015a, The System and Powerful Learning, McREL International, Melbourne.

Hopkins, D and Craig, W 2015b, Curiosity and Powerful Learning, McREL International, Melbourne.

Hopkins, D and Craig, W 2015c, Leadership for Powerful Learning, Melbourne: McREL International.

Higham, R, Hopkins, D, & Matthews, P 2009, System Leadership In Practice, Open University Press / McGraw Hill, Maidenhead, Berkshire.

Leithwood, K & Riehl, C 2005, What we know about successful school leadership in Firestone, W & Riehl, C (eds.) A New Agenda; Directions for research on educational leadership, Teachers College Press, New York.

Leithwood, K, Day, C, Sammons, P, Harris, A & Hopkins, D 2007, Seven Strong Claims about Successful School Leadership, Available from http://www.leadershipinnovationsteam.com/files/seven-strong-claims.pdf

Matthews, P, 2007, Attributes of the first National Leaders of Education in England: What do they bring to the role? A Research Report commissioned the National College for School Leadership.

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Professor Geoff Masters AO is Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) – roles he has held since 1998. He is also head of ACER’s Centre for Assessment Reform and Innovation.

He has a PhD in educational measurement from the University of Chicago and has published widely in the fields of educational assessment and research. He authored Australian Education Review No. 57, Reforming Educational Assessment: Imperatives, principles and challenges (2013).

Professor Masters is an adjunct professor in the Queensland Brain Institute. His contributions to education have been recognised through the award of the Australian College of Educators’ Medal in 2009 and his appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2014.

The approaches we take to assessing learning, the kinds of tasks we assign and the way we report success or failure at school send powerful messages to students not only about their own learning, but also about the nature of learning itself. Assessment and reporting processes shape student, parent and community beliefs about learning – sometimes in unintended ways.

This article describes three general approaches to evaluating and providing feedback on the outcomes of

learning. Each approach is based on a particular way of thinking about what it means to learn successfully, and each has implications for how students view themselves as learners and how they understand the relationship between effort and success. It is argued that commonly used approaches frequently send unhelpful messages.

Providing ‘success’ experiencesThe first approach is based on tasks chosen because they are within students’ capabilities and are likely to be completed successfully. Underpinning this approach is a belief that, if students are given tasks on which they are likely to succeed, then the resulting success experiences will make learning more pleasurable, increase engagement, build self confidence and lead to further learning success. In contrast, the experience of failure is assumed to make learning less pleasurable, lower self-confidence and lead to disengagement and thus poorer learning outcomes.

Because, under this first approach, students are assessed on tasks chosen to ensure a high probability of success, most students perform well and so receive praise for their performance. By praising success, teachers endeavour to promote positive attitudes, build self-esteem and encourage all students in their learning.

Towards a growth mindset in assessment

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There are several unintended consequences of this approach. First, when teachers assign tasks only within students’ current capabilities, they risk not challenging and stretching students and minimising learning by keeping students within their comfort zones. There is considerable research evidence that learning is most likely when students are given challenging tasks just beyond their comfort zone, in what Vygotsky (1978) called the ‘zone of proximal development’, where success is possible, but often only with assistance.

Second, when teachers praise students for success on easy tasks, they risk sending the message that success at school can be achieved with minimal effort. Rewarding success on unchallenging tasks does little to develop students’ understandings of the relationship between effort and success.

Third, by providing success experiences for almost everybody, this approach can encourage the view that success is an entitlement – that every student is a good learner and is entitled to good results and positive feedback. By protecting students from failure, this first approach does little to develop healthy attitudes to risks, challenges, mistakes and failure.

Psychologist Carol Dweck argues that, rather than giving students easy tasks within their comfort zones and providing praise for succeeding on these tasks, teachers should be communicating to students that unchallenging tasks are a waste of time:

Many educators think that lowering their standards will give students success experiences, boost their self-esteem, and raise their achievement… Well, it doesn’t work. Lowering standards just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise (Dweck, 2006, 193)

Judging performances against ‘standards’The second approach has been developed as a response to the first. Underpinning this second approach is a belief that, by specifying ‘standards’ to be achieved by all students in each year of school, and by judging and reporting performances against these standards, learning expectations and thus achievement levels will be raised.

The appeal of this approach is that it sets clear expectations for student performance. Grounded in the well-established industrial processes of specifying quality standards, judging performances against standards and grading products for their quality, this approach has particular appeal to politicians because it can be represented as rigorous (setting explicit standards against which performances are to be judged) but also fair (equitable in the sense that it holds all students to the same expectations).

This approach has the added advantage of being consistent with the way society generally thinks about schooling and what it means to succeed or fail at school:

the role of teachers is to teach the curriculum specified for the year level, the role of students is to learn what teachers teach, and the role of assessment is to establish how much of what they have been taught students have successfully learnt. Students who demonstrate most of the expectations for their year level are rewarded with high grades; students who demonstrate few of those expectations receive low grades and may be judged to have ‘failed’.

The problem with this second approach is that it suffers from many of the same disadvantages as the first. It often is no better at helping students understand the relationship between effort and success. It often does not provide students with stretch challenges. And it often encourages fixed mindsets about learning ability.

How is this possible? The answer lies in the variability of students’ achievement levels within each year of school. In any given year of school, the most advanced 10 per cent of students typically are between five and six years ahead of the least advanced 10 per cent of students (Harlen,1997; Masters & Forster, 1997; Wiliam 2007). Children begin school at very different points in their social, cognitive, emotional and psychomotor development. Many of these differences persist throughout the years of school. As a consequence, rather than being at a similar stage in their learning, students in any given year of school are in reality spread over a wide range of achievement levels.

This is not to say that students who are at different stages in their learning are not making good personal progress. They often are. It is simply that less advanced students are tracking five to six years behind the most advanced students. And these relativities tend to be maintained across the years of school. One of the best predictors of student achievement in the later years of school is achievement in the earlier years.

We may wish that this were not the case. It may be our intention that all students of the same age should be at very similar points in their learning and development. However, the reality in our schools is that this is not the situation, and almost certainly never has been. The problems with the second approach arise from the attempt to ignore this fact.

In reality, students commence each school year with very different levels of readiness for the year-level curriculum that teachers are about to teach. Some are still several years behind. Inevitably, these students struggle, master less of the year-level curriculum than other students, and are judged and graded accordingly. Often these students perform below the year-level standard year after year. In fact, there is some evidence that, in mathematics, less advanced students, on average, fall further behind each year (Wiliam, 2007; Masters, 2013).

When students’ performances are graded against year-level expectations, some less advanced students

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can receive the same low grade year after year. The feedback these students receive is that they are consistently performing below standard and below other students. A to E grades provide little or no sense of the learning progress that individuals actually make over time. A student who receives a ‘D’ year after year could be excused for concluding that they are making no progress at all when, in reality, they may be making as much annual improvement as a student who consistently receives an ‘A’. And worse, they may conclude that there is something stable about their capacity to learn – that is, they are a ‘D-student’. Such demotivating messages undermine students’ beliefs in the relationship between effort and success and frequently lead to disengagement. As Grenny et al., (2013) observe, for many less advanced students, ‘dropping out [of school] is a sane response to persistent disappointment and repeated reminders that they’re performing below average’.

However, the problems with this approach are not limited to less advanced students. They apply equally to more advanced students. When learning expectations are couched only in terms of year-level standards, these common expectations can fail to challenge and extend more advanced students. For example, in some secondary schools it is common for all entering students to be taught the same mathematics curriculum and to be assigned the same mathematics tasks during their entire first year. (Some schools justify this on the grounds that it gives them a year to ‘sort students out’.) This practice inevitably disadvantages more advanced students who are ready for

more challenging work.

And, in some classrooms, it is common for students to be given ‘free time’ when they complete set class work. Rather than extending more advanced students with challenging, more difficult material, this practice makes the completion of assigned class work the common goal for all students. (In fact, there is anecdotal evidence of reluctance on the part of some teachers to give additional work to more advanced students because this could be interpreted as a form of ‘punishment’ for finishing set work early.)

Adding to this concern is a finding by Patrick Griffin and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne that teachers are less able to identify intervention strategies to assist more advanced students. These observations may explain why more advanced students, despite receiving higher grades, do not always make as much progress in their learning as less advanced students. In their study of progress in reading and mathematics, Griffin and colleagues concluded:

Students at the bottom levels of the proficiency scale are improving rapidly. Students at the top end of the scale are hardly improving at all. (Griffin et al., 2013, 5)

Observations of this kind also may help to explain why the decline in achievement levels at 15 years of age over the past decade has been greatest among more advanced students (Thomson et al., 2011).

And there is a risk of these students, too, developing unhelpful beliefs about the relationship between effort and

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success. Because they begin each school year five to six years ahead of some other students, more advanced students sometimes achieve high grades with limited effort. These students can develop a belief that, because they are ‘smart’ – that is, ‘A-students’ – they do not have to make an effort in the way that other students do. And, as Carol Dweck observes, there is no research evidence that more advanced students are more inclined than less advanced students to enjoy challenges or to extend themselves.

This second approach – assessing, judging and grading student performances against year-level ‘standards’ – was intended to challenge and motivate students, encourage effort and raise achievement levels. In practice, it often has the opposite effect on student attitudes and behaviours. The costs to learning and achievement in our schools are potentially significant and certainly justify the search for an alternative.

Assessing ‘growth’ over timeThe third approach is focused on establishing the points that individuals have reached in their learning, setting personal stretch targets for further learning, and monitoring the progress that individuals make over time. Underpinning this approach is a belief that, at any given time, every student is at some point in his or her learning and is capable of further progress if they can be engaged, motivated and provided with relevant learning opportunities. Rather than expecting all students of the same age to be at the same point in their learning at the same time, this approach expects every student to make excellent learning progress over the course of a school year, regardless of their starting point. In other words, this third approach sets high expectations for every student’s ‘growth’.

Carol Dweck refers to this way of thinking as a growth mindset:

When [teachers and students] change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Their commitment is to growth, and growth takes plenty of time, effort and mutual support. (Dweck, 2006, 244)

When students’ performances are assessed from the perspective of a growth mindset, the focus is not so much on ‘judging’ as on understanding where individuals are in their learning at the time of assessment. What knowledge, skills and understandings do they currently demonstrate, regardless of how other students are performing or what the intentions may be for students of this age or year level? To answer this question it may be necessary to investigate and diagnose in some detail the difficulties that individuals are experiencing or the misunderstandings that they have developed.

Assessment information of this kind provides starting points for teaching and learning. It enables learning activities to be selected and designed to maximise the likelihood of successful further learning. It also assists teachers and students to set targets for learning. Rather than being based on common year-level expectations, these learning targets are personalised; they set realistic stretch challenges for individual learners.

When assessments provide information about where students are in their learning at the time of assessment, they also provide a basis for monitoring individual progress over time. Assessments of progress are an alternative to judging success only in terms of year-level standards. Under a growth mindset, success is defined in terms of the

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progress each student makes, or the ‘distance travelled’.

Importantly, the adoption of a growth mindset does not represent a lowering of expectations. On the contrary, it sets high expectations of every learner, including more advanced students who sometimes are not challenged or stretched and hardly improve at all. Under a growth mindset, ‘failure’ is defined not in terms of year-level expectations, but as inadequate learning progress.

The adoption of a growth mindset also invites a change in thinking from a belief that there are ‘good learners’ who meet year-level expectations year after year, and ‘poor learners’ who perform below standard year after year, to a belief that, although students may be at different points in their learning and may be progressing at different rates, all are capable of good learning progress.

And, when learning is evaluated in terms of the progress that individuals make, the relationship between effort and success is clarified. Students’ self-confidence is built, not through success on easy tasks, but when they are able to see the progress they are making, when they appreciate how the quality of their work has improved, and when they succeed on challenging tasks that once were beyond them.

Many existing learning frameworks provide a basis for assessing student growth. School curricula that define clear progressions of learning across the years of school make explicit what long-term growth in a domain looks like, and so provide a basis for establishing individuals’ current levels of attainment and for monitoring growth over time. So do a range of empirically-based ‘proficiency scales’ and ‘developmental continua’ (Masters, 2013).

No small challengeThis article has argued for defining, assessing and reporting school learning in terms of the progress that individuals make. However, this is no small challenge. Success at school usually is assessed not in terms of the progress that individuals make (for example, over the course of a school year), but by judging and grading performances against age/year group expectations. Although letter grades are a relatively recent phenomenon – they appeared for the first time in some North American higher education institutions in the late 19th century and were widely used in schools only in the 20th century – they have come to define what it means to learn successfully at school. Reform depends first on a change in mindset.

Added to this is the challenge of developing credible and easily understood alternatives to current reporting practices. The kinds of reports called for in this article would provide information about: (1) where students are in their learning at the time of assessment (e.g., what they currently know, understand and can do); and (2) how much progress they have made over some specified time (e.g., a school year, a semester). Good reporting alternatives of this kind generally do not exist. In their absence, the practice of reporting success in terms of year-level expectations is often justified on the grounds that parents wish to know how students are performing in

relation to others of the same age. However, this may be less true if parents also had good information about where exactly students are in their learning and what progress they are making over time.

Changing mindsets and developing assessment and reporting tools to support such change are long-term educational agenda. They almost certainly require a transition phase in which processes based on differing mindsets operate in tandem. A starting point is a wider appreciation of the ways in which efforts to provide ‘success’ experiences and to evaluate learning in terms of common year-level ‘standards’ fail to engage and challenge some students and encourage fixed rather than ‘growth’ mindsets in our schools.

First published in Research Developments, ACER website, 2013. Reprinted by permission of ACER.

16 Bastow // Horizon // Issue 2

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