Cultural contexts for schooling

improvement.

Stuart McNaughton

Keynote address to Redesigning Pedagogy: Culture, knowledge and

understanding. National Institute of Education. Singapore, 28-30th May 2007

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The University of Auckland
Context: NZ disparities in
achievement
The tail problem: like other countries
inequitable distribution of achievement
(One) response like other countries is
school reform / improvement
Mixed evidence for effectiveness plus-
Local adaptation occurs-creating a tension
1. Need to determine and guarantee treatment
fidelity / integrity (what was planned was
what was implemented)
2. But adaptation is an inherent property of a
professional communitys response to new
ideas Woolf Fisher Research Centre
The University of Auckland
 300
400
500
600
700
800

200
Finland
Canada
New Zealand
Australia
Ireland
Korea
United Kingdom
Japan
Sweden
Austria
Belgium
Iceland
Norway
France
United States
Denmark
Switzerland
Spain
Czech Republic
Italy
Germany
Hungary
Poland
Greece
Portugal
Luxembourg
Mexico
Reading literacy: international comparison

Liechtenstein
Russian Fed
Latvia
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Brazil
 From Hattie (2002)
540.00
Total reading comprehension score

520.00

Pakeha
500.00

480.00

460.00 Maori

440.00

Pacific
420.00

400.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

School types lowest SES (with highest Maori

/ Pacific mix) to highest SES (with lowest mix)
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Solution: fitting to context
This paper: consider local adaptation (or
its corollary fitting programme to local
circumstance) as a source of greater
effectiveness -in two senses:
fit with local teaching and learning needs
capitalise on cultural resources of teachers
and children
Develop the latter with an analysis of the
role of teachers ideas
But this will require reconsidering fidelity

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The University of Auckland
Local teaching and learning
Parallel to CRPP at a national level and
CRPP interventions at school or school
cluster level
Example: NZ research in reading
comprehension following policy changes
and interventions in beginning instruction
Possible mistakes of generic programme
(non fitted to the local NZ context) eg..
1. Strategy instruction
2. Vocabulary instruction
Avoided by basing programme on local
profiles of achievement and instruction
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Student achievement: Stanine distribution for
longitudinal cohorts against national norms

35
Percentage of students

30
25
Time 1
20
Time 6
15
National norms
10
5
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Stanines

Mean gain of 0.97 stanine

(mean level Dec.05 = 4.2) Woolf Fisher Research Centre
The University of Auckland
Rethinking treatment fidelity,
integrity and specificity
If fitting to local context then lose fidelity(?)
But specificity of instruction (clarity and
elaboration) and school processes (eg
programme coherence) are significant
Solution: distinguish two types of fidelity /
specificity and occurrence over time
1. Content / focus / instructional
2. Process which should (but may not) lead to
instructional specificity (elaboration)

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The University of Auckland
Teachers ideas, adaptation and
cultural context
Teachers adapt and modify interventions
Variability within and across sites
fundamental to the phenomena of school
improvement
Given this we need to understand more
about the role of teachers ideas and
beliefs (in this talk those most directly
relating to cultural practices and identity)
Variability needs to be understood
(apologies to a venerable radical
behavioural principle) Woolf Fisher Research Centre
The University of Auckland
Teachers ideas continued
Two theoretical traditions
Folk pedagogical beliefs (Wundt via
Olson and Bruner, 1996)
Any innovations will have to compete
with, replace, or otherwise modify the
folk theories that already guide both
teachers and pupils (p.11)
Teacher knowledge (Darling-
Hammond & Bransford 2005).
Effectiveness determined by degree of
adaptive expertise
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L. Darling-Hammond and J. Bransford (eds.).
(2005).Preparing teachers for a changing world: What
teachers should learn and be able to do.

Routine experts develop a core set of

competencies that they apply with greater and
greater efficiency.
Adaptive experts continuously add to their
knowledge and skills more likely to change core
competencies and expand the breadth and depth
of their expertise. This restructuring of core
beliefs and competencies may reduce their
efficiency in the short run but make them more
flexible in the long run. [changes] often have
emotional consequences that accompany
realizations that cherished beliefs and practices
need to be changed (p. 49)
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Dimensions of adaptive expertise from
Darling Hammond and Bransford (2005)

Frustrated novice Adaptive expert

Innovation

Routine expert

Efficiency

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Measuring effect sizes

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Three areas to illustrate
1. Teacher expectations
2. Hybrid pedagogical beliefs
3. Teacher awareness of cultural and
linguistic resources

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The University of Auckland
1. Rediscovering the role of
teacher expectations
Beliefs about the capabilities of
students
Mixed findings- Weinstein (2002)
and Andreas Schleichers
commentary generally and for NZ
Research examples
1. Picking up the pace (Phillips et. al.
2004)
2. Te Kotahitanga (Bishop et. al. 2007)
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The power of expectancy effects lies in
the cumulative consequences of
entrenched beliefs about ability over the
course of a school career..expectancies
are expressed in educational opportunities
and interpersonal interactions between
teachers and students (and) they are
reinforced by institutional arrangements in
the classroom, school, family and larger
society. Weinstein, 2002, p.7

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The University of Auckland
 Before (this programme) weve always
had these kids down here (earliest text
levels) and weve always kept them down
there.
I realise that they actually know more
about book knowledge that I was aware of
before, like where a book starts and ends,
all that sort of thing. I wasnt really
focussing on that before, but now I can
see that the kids come in with that
knowledge already, you dont need to
teach it. ( Phillips et. al. p.316).
She thinks that we must be brainy that we
can do [this] work. She pushes us. I think
she believes in us (Bishop et. al. p.162).
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2. Hybrid beliefs
Lefsteins (2007) explanation for the
partial implementation of the National
Literacy Strategy in England
Evidence for teachers cobbling
together new ideas onto old practices
Mixed implementation as problematic
(?)
But can see also as a dynamic (risky)
resource
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The University of Auckland
Case studies of development
School improvement in Samoan bilingual
classrooms (Amituanai-Toloa et. al. 2007)
Distinct cultural and linguistic context
Teacher A distinguished iloa (knowledge)
and malamalama (understanding via
reflection) requiring direct instruction higher
gains
Teacher B limited distinctions associated with
short burst IRE sequences and lower gains
Possibility of using cultural concepts in
schooling improvement?
note David Watkins reframing of concepts eg..
repetition understanding;
collective individual
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The University of Auckland
3.Teacher awareness of cultural
and linguistic resources
General folk pedagogical beliefs
constrain lens on resources
Generic understanding of cultural
resources referred to as
Sociocultural consciousness (Darling-
Hammond & Bransford, 2005)
Diversity awareness (McNaughton,
2002)

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The University of Auckland
Not just knowing background
Awareness of repertoires of practice
Example: daunting issue of vocabulary
instruction significant in our attempts to
boost reading comprehension
Effective instruction in npart depends on
changing teacher ideas why?
Research evidence and experience
suggest pessimistic view (eg Hart and
Risley,1996; or experimentally induced
Matthew effects)
But there are alternative optimistic view
(Delpit, 2003) Woolf Fisher Research Centre
The University of Auckland
Delpit, L. (2003). Educators as Seed people
growing a new future. Educational
Researcher, 7, 32 14-21.
a consciously devised, continuous
program that develops vocabulary in the
context of real experiences, provides
rigorous instruction, connects new
information to the cultural frameworks that
children bring to school, and assumes that
the children are brilliant and capable, and
teaches accordingly can (sustain
vocabulary development). p.17

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The University of Auckland
Vocabulary instruction in
schooling improvement
We know that both explicit and implicit
instruction (incidental acquisition) needed
Teaching depends on views of cultural,
linguistic and psychological resources
eg revisit psychological literature to
activate ideas (fast mapping, hypothesis
testing, pattern recognition, word
consciousness)
Develop evidence for deliberate teaching
(eg strategies)
Locate familiar activities - family,
community and school activities as
resources- the word detectives
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The University of Auckland
Cultural and linguistic resources
revisited a coda
1. Not nave about what is needed to
personalise teaching
2. Given the 30 students problem
3. So teachers need: both generic ideas
(diversity awareness) and strategies for
personalizing knowledge derived from
1. each child (through activity based
assessments)
2. other family members at school
3. parents / caregivers
4. professional colleagues
5. shared experiences
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The University of Auckland
So:
1. Cultural context implicated in school
reforms in several ways
2. The ideas of teachers central to more
effective practices
3. It is in the nature of what experts do
when faced with new information
about their expertise, especially
when sourced from external
agencies, to adapt and modify.

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The University of Auckland