An Apple for the Teacher

According to the NZ Initiative report, New Zealand's Education Delusion, a "deluded" child-led approach to teaching is to blame for New Zealand's declining educational performance. The report says NZ educators are deluded in thinking teachers should let children direct what they want to learn about.

It calls for a much more detailed curriculum specifying what children should learn at each level, and standardized national assessments to ensure they learn those things. The report relies on a mostly non-existent binary of knowledge vs skills. Very few educators in New Zealand are advocating for a pure competency or skills-based curriculum in a vacuum of knowledge. NZ teachers and the New Zealand Curriculum understand this and allow for the complexity and nuance of building knowledge and developing competencies concurrently. 

The report also challenges the perceived groupthink and echo chambers that exist in New Zealand education around student-centered learning. However, the report itself is only supported by a particular view of education as outlined by researchers such as Willingham and Kirschner. The lack of New Zealand educational perspectives was jarring. You can hear the author discuss the report here.

The report does discuss the need for both knowledge and competencies/skills. This not actually in conflict with what the school leaders who are passionate about the “child-centered orthodoxy” and New Zealand Curriculum also want and deliver. The desire for powerful knowledge is not unique to a common core curriculum and is supported by the NZ curriculum as it stands. A localized curriculum delivered effectively has plenty of powerful knowledge relevant to that learner - The work of Barbara Ala’alaotoa and the Mutukaroa project is a clear example of what a powerful local curriculum looks like for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Consider also the comments of Auckland primary school teacher Mark Bracey, who blogs at Ease Education, he says teachers need to find the "sweet spot" that is "teacher-led, student-sensitive".

"I am a benign dictator, so it's very much teacher-directed. I set up the framework for our learning engagement, and I have high expectations, so what I see is really collegial learning, so I become more of a conductor, but I am totally understanding every individual child and I'm pushing them and prodding them. So it's not either/or."

The report sees knowledge, and more particular content knowledge is something lacking from the present New Zealand Curriculum. The report argues that this lack of focus on content knowledge is directly impacting the equity of learning opportunities and educational outcomes from students from disadvantaged backgrounds missing out on cultural capital - the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers social status and power.

I don’t disagree with the premise that knowledge is important. The challenge comes when developing a curriculum with this at its core. My main concern is what knowledge should be included in the curriculum and who gets to decide. New Zealand is a bicultural country and has an equal partnership with Māori and the crown, so do we integrate Te Ao Māori. The New Zealand Curriculum has to address this, but as science teachers how to incorporate both Western scientific and Māori knowledge into a science curriculum is going to be difficult. I am still left wondering about exactly what this looks like. It is just as important the Auckland Grammar students learn Te Ao Māori as it is for Opotiki College students to learn Shakespeare as both are our nation's cultural heritage.

The main support for the argument that the child-centered teaching philosophy at the core of the NZ education system has failed its learners is the declining results in PISA tests for New Zealand. There are several problems with this claim. First, we need to question what PISA actually measures, and is it even a relevant measure of success. It is worth reading this article which cites Yong Zhao’s concerns: 

“[T]he foundation upon which PISA has built its success, has been seriously challenged. First, there is no evidence to justify, let alone prove, the claim that PISA indeed measures skills that are essential for life in modern economies. Second, the claim is an imposition of a monolithic and West-centric view of societies on the rest of the world. Third, the claim distorts the purpose of education.”

So with this in mind, even if we consider PISA an effective measure of student attainment. what of the argument made by the report, that the use of student-centered learning at the core of the NZ curriculum is causing this decline, as the use of this approach is not supported by educational research, in particular, that of cognitive science. One needs to consider that the report does not provide any evidence that NZ has slipped in international assessments because it has adopted a child-centered philosophy (furthermore, as previously discussed, the premise that NZ has adopted a child-centered teaching philosophy is tenuous). Additionally, despite being about the NZ educational landscape, the report has very little educational research from New Zealand to support its claims.

Teaching is a profession. As such, teachers hold specialist knowledge and expertise. That knowledge is a combination of content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and knowledge related to the why of education. It is important to note that to advocate for a stronger role of knowledge in education is not to argue for standardization. The report does bring up an important point on the importance of knowledge in a national curriculum, so all students have a common cultural capital that makes us New Zealanders. However, the skills/knowledge dichotomy outlined in the report is not helpful. Teachers are professionals, and there are different ways to achieve common outcomes in education. There is a range of effective teaching practices supported by research. However, when these are implemented and enacted should be the choice of the teacher, in knowing their students. The New Zealand Curriculum at present allows opportunities for teachers to localize and contextualize their teaching and this is one great strength of the document. The greatest challenge is what and whose knowledge we see as having value and how to incorporate this into our curriculum.