Education reform: Share classroom best practice nationwide

Throw away failed top-down approaches, share classroom best practice nationwide & strive for continual improvement.

EDUCATION 

Education reform: Bottom-up using international best practice

Supanutt Sasiwuttiwat & Chosita Salakham
8/03/2017

Thailand is continually attempting to reform its educational system.

Educational reform is largely a top-down approach proceeding by overhauling the Ministry of Education or tweaking laws and regulations.

It was hoped that this would eventually improve learning outcomes in schools.

It hasn't.

Maybe it is the frequent changes in Education Minister after each cabinet reshuffle that is at fault.

Each new minister replaces the previous one and starts from scratch with a new set of pet policies. This obviously makes it difficult to support any long-term reform.

Perhaps, the problem is bureaucrats in the Education Ministry, far away from the actual grunt work of education, far away from the individual teachers and students working hard everyday in classrooms to learn. Perhaps these bureaucrats are too far away from what is actually going on in education.

Some things, however, are for certain:

1. If you look around the world there are countries with successful education systems, Finland for example.

2. There is such a thing as evidence-based educational practice that has been proven to produce learning results, and...

3. There is also a frame of mind (mindset, work strategy) of "continual improvement" and persistence that is conducive to eventual success and learning. 

That is what this article is about.

SOME THAI SCHOOLS WITH POOR STUDENTS ON PAR WITH MUCH RICHER COUNTRIES

Many Thai schools did not perform so well in the 2015 global PISA (Programme for International Students Assessments) educational system evaluations.

A few Thai schools, however, did perform well.

What is remarkable is that these are schools with students from rather poor families.

Normally, one would expect disadvantaged poor students to get lower scores

If all 264 schools participating in the PISA testing are divied into five groups based on their students' socio-economic status. The top 10 schools of the poorest student group scored 461 points in science, above the national average score of 421.

The best-performing school in the poor group is even on par with the average school in the member countries of the rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which are more developed than Thailand!

BOTTOM-UP REFORM INSTEAD OF TOP-DOWN

One of these schools' key success factors could be their know-how in enhancing disadvantaged students' learning outcomes as they are not endowed with more financial resources than are others.

The way todo this is apparently to flip the current education reform approach over and turn it upside down. Do the exact opposite of what the bureaucrats do:

Rather than starting top-down from the Education Ministry, reform should start from the bottom-up from the students by: 

1. Improving classrooms and then,

2. Scaling up good practices nationwide to achieve system-wide change.

Successful educational programs from the US and Japan show that such an approach is possible.

KIPP NETWORK OF CHARTER SCHOOLS IN THE US

The Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) in the US is a nationwide franchise-like network of charter schools, or privately managed public schools.

A full 87% of KIPP students are poor and eligible for free or subsidised lunches.

Research found that students from KIPP schools learned faster in math by half a year than their similarly poor peers.

More importantly, the success has persisted as KIPP has expanded its network to 162 schools, enrolling around 8,000 students across 20 states.

CULTIVATE BEST PRACTICES

One key success factor is their translation of good practices into five core principles ready to be learned.

For example, according to the data-driven teaching principle, teachers should frequently adjust their teaching practices by analysing students' learning outcomes from student assessments.

To ensure that its franchisees effectively use the five principles, KIPP designs a rigorous principal selection process, which currently selects around 10% of the applicants.

The new principals have to go through one-year training and coaching before they can run and manage schools.

INTRODUCE  BEST CHARTER SCHOOLS PRACTICES INTO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Another encouraging case from the US is the adoption of successful practices of high-quality charter schools by public schools.

Roland G Fryer, a researcher from Harvard University, attributed five key common practices to high-quality charter schools:

1. High expectations for students,

2. Instructional time extension,

3. Small group tutoring,

4. Data-driven instruction, and

5. Frequent teacher feedback.

These practices have been introduced to the 20 worst-performing public schools in a Houston school district in the US, whose students' math learning was five months slower than their peers. Early results showed the learning gap was almost closed within one to two years.

WORK FOR CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT

Japan offers another interesting case. In Japan, almost all primary schools adopt the "Lesson Study" or kaizen in the education sector.

Kaizen is a teacher-led approach in which a group of teachers work together to continuously improve educational practices and their students' learning and then share the proven solutions with others.

This approach is credited for transforming Japanese math teaching into successful problem-solving discussions. As a result, Japanese students have high math performance in almost every round of international tests.

In this approach:

1. Small groups of teachers collaborate to identify students' learning problems and develop their lesson plans to address them.

2. Teachers study educational research, teacher manuals, and other learning materials, and provide teaching according to the lesson plans.

3. Students' learning then is observed by the other teachers and educational experts.

4. All observations are later discussed to draw lessons learned from classrooms.

5. Afterward, teachers convey the lessons to other schools and spread the practices across the education system.

IDENTIFY EXCELLENT SCHOOLS IN THAILAND

To scale up good school practices in Thailand, we need to identify excellent schools, Thailand's hidden assets.

National student assessments should be revised to be more reliable like the PISA.

Assessment data can be used to identify effective teaching and learning methods. Good practices should then be turned into explicit knowledge to be used by other schools.

CREATE NATIONWIDE KNOWLEDGE-SHARING PLATFORMS

Rapid scaling up requires platforms, ranging from highly-organised ones such as KIPP franchises to less organised knowledge-sharing platforms among schools like what is demonstrated by the Japanese Lesson Study approach.

The platforms would help schools and teachers to internalise the shared knowledge.

The government and social partners should provide supports for building these platforms.

High-performing schools should be supported to help turn underperforming ones around and expand their franchisee-like subsidiaries.

IN SHORT, STRIVE FOR CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT FROM THE BOTTOM-UP

The ultimate goal of our education system is to turn schools into learning organisations.

True education reform can be achieved only when teachers and schools continuously improve their learning and teaching methods.

To successfully reform our education system, maybe we need to "flip" the approach.

Supanutt Sasiwuttiwat is a senior researcher and Chosita Salakham is a researcher at the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI). Policy analyses from the TDRI appear in the Bangkok Post on alternate Wednesdays.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1210725/flipping-education-reform

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