Quality Assurance: Reflection from a Research Circle

Bo Sundström

Nynäs Secondary School, Sweden

Summary

To assure quality in education is a matter of grasping the whole picture. We need to assist teachers to examine their everyday problems and work, and by the help of outside researchers lift the issues to a scientific interpretation base. Then it is possible for the teachers to outdistance themselves and reflect on their work. This is what we are doing in research–circles in my school. The result will be a common platform of understanding the mandate, acceptance, continuity and participation. From this platform it is possible by means of a flow chart to identify the prerequisites we need from our municipality in order to fulfil national and local goals.
The flow charting contains seven steps:

• Beware of the whisperings of today and interpret the signals so you are steered by your visions not by your problems;
• Discuss the meaning and the purpose of the national curriculum;
• The view of the human being;
• How to perform learning conditions for each student;
• How to organize the work;
• The competence in the organization;
• The need of school buildings that respond to the idea of activity, organization and competence.

Personal Background

After being an administrator of education in different situations and occupations for almost fifteen years, I realized I had to go back to teaching. In 1994 after a year of reconsideration and a mental clearing who I was, I started as a teacher in social science with 13 –16 year old students. I was fortunate to have good relations with my students and we had a lot of fun, but we also saw the boundaries of a school like an egg carton with no possibility of group activities to the extent we needed. A school built on the concept of treating children as objects to be mass–produced on an assembly line – the Tayloristic way.
I started the spring semester by asking the students who had already spent three semesters in that school, how they wanted to perform their work. I presented different ways for their learning and at the end of their discussion they proposed the following:
“You write on the blackboard what you regard is important to us and we write it down, we read in the books and answer the questions.”
I asked them why that way of learning and they said: “We are used to it and it is an easy way for us.” I asked them whose questions they dealt with, and as talented as they were they answered “yours and the textbook writers.” After that we started discussing how to deal with their questions and trying to find their answers.
In April of the same semester I had been asked by my principal to help him implement the new curriculum and as an example of an old–fashioned way of learning I told my colleagues the story from my class. After my presentation one of my fellow teachers came up to me and said, “That is how we have done for a long time”. I realized that sometimes there is a need of that kind of producing a lesson, but not all the time.
I realized also that we must look back and understand why we do what we do. Then it is possible to change. On the other hand I have worked as an advisor in a firm called The School of The Future and have during three years met more than one thousand teachers eager to develop their work, but they need perspective breakers. I have learnt a lot from each school. When teachers are given the opportunity to climb out of their every day experiences, they develop their ability and willingness to change perspectives.
Quality Assurance is for me a matter of both short–term and long–term perspectives. The outcomes of education are based on analysis of the national curriculum, what impact the world around the student has in the meeting between the student and the teacher, and the comprehension of learning research.

The Curriculum

The Swedish national curriculum is based on both modern pedagogical thinking (e.g. Vygotskij, Blumer, Barnes) and a view of the learning society. The interpreters of the curriculum need not only to read and comprehend the text but also face and discuss the society in which it is written; and produce a picture of what society the educational outcomes may lead to.

The Picture of Today’s Society

At the same time as the overall political ideologies are losing their power, we are facing the consequences of our pursuit: to change progress in the working life with money instead of time, a continuous pollution of the earth, the world–wide spread of poverty and so on. Per Dalin (an international consultant working at IMTEC, Norway) faces “a time in history when basic, ideological, economic, structural and social traditions are changing, all at the same time” (Dalin, 1994). In the last 10 years much has happened in Europe. The decline of communism has caused many problems that we did not know of in the early ’80s, the ethnic civil war in Yugoslavia and the start of a migration–wave, hostile atmosphere among racists and immigrants, the break down of the Iron Curtain, Germany’s problems in assimilating Eastern Germany, the European Union, and the expensive European labour force being replaced by equally educated Eastern Europeans and far East Asians with lower income demands.
Dalin sees the paradigm shifts. The world needs to

• live in harmony with Nature;
• move from war– to peace–industry;
• solve the poverty of the world;
• go from a supervised hierarchic male dominance to companionship;
• change from a mono– to a multicultural society;
• use technology for human development;
• redefine the GNP;
• redefine the view on work;
• face new ethnic dilemmas in human development;
• use information technology for learning and progress.

He summarizes ten revolutions going on at the same time.

1. The knowledge and information revolution based on an electronic and global infrastructure producing new knowledge at a constant faster pace.
2. The revolution of population causing effects on the ecological system of the earth.
3. The international revolution causing a complete new political picture of the world, with ethnic and national crises leading to consequences such as insurrection and migration.
4. The economic revolution towards a global economy with growth of enormous multinational companies and the development of new products and services.
5. The technological revolution with new perspectives and solutions, creating new products, services and markets perhaps solutions to old unsolvable problems.
6. The ecological revolution with an increasing understanding of the limits of life on earth and new frames for the future.
7. The aesthetics revolution going back to creativity and artistic ways of expression in the centre of life of the individual.
8. The social revolution which gives women new roles and making new forms of cohabitation in a multicultural and pluralistic society.
9. The political revolution: basic questions about democracy and the advocacy of human rights.
10. The revolution of the values, the seeking of a common basis of valuation.

Teacher’s Professionalism

Another paradigm based on Taylor is the last 40 years of pedagogic research. Researchers outside of school have come to conclusions that were supposed to be implemented in schools. In some way teachers and principals have been deprofessionalized over these 40 years. People have become used to being led by experts from outside. If anything goes wrong you seek a scapegoat from outside.
Now we can identify a period of professionalization in our decentralized school systems. Together with new results of how individuals learn in collaboration with others, teachers have to organize themselves in teams using each team member’s special competence. The personnel in schools are stepping forward, interpreting the national goals, formulating activity plans and so on. The initiatives will move from the national level, from politicians in municipalities to school–level personnel. There will be no more of Lortie’s “More of the same” but how we can improve not from old assumptions but from new perspectives. We must leave the atomistic heritage, moving from the part to the whole; and make the students apprehend and approach the world from the whole to the part.
Today the question is, what kind of overall ideology is steering us? The market, ecology, economism? Or is it so that we can observe a movement that is growing stronger and faster than the IT–revolution? Peter Russell among others declares that this movement is development of your personality (Smith and Lovat, 1996). Development of your thinking capacity, using the whole brain, not just one half. Perhaps the parallel to the hunters thousands of years ago settling down and starting to think, is up to date today. You can see it in the growing pressure for ethic standards in business. You see it among philosophers like Stenhouse and Habermas. Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave influenced David Smith to foresee that schools of the third wave will not have marks and other control interests but an interpreting understanding of an experimental learning by thinking critically and thinking together.

The Research of Learning

We believe that you can not transmit knowledge from one person to an other. The brain is not a store where you put knowledge. It is more like a workshop where the input of information goes through a raster of your earlier experiences, knowledge, cultural context and values. The research that has come during the latest 15 years must be taken seriously.

The Teacher’s Thinking in Three Levels

A Finnish professor has explained the complexity of the teacher’s thinking. Pertti Kansanen (1992) divides it into three levels.
The first is the work with the students in the classroom. In the old–fashioned way when you as a teacher produced the lessons and the students were objects you could prepare your lesson at home in your head and perform your show in 40 minutes. There was no need of collaboration with your colleagues. You came to your lessons and left the school some minutes after your students.
Today when you work as a co–ordinator of the students’ learning possibilities, you cannot rely only on your preparations at home and the knowledge you have in your head. The questions from the students are not subject–orientated and you must have an arsenal of strategies and teaching styles in your head at the same time as you have to translate too difficult English text material taken from the Internet, and help other students when the programme does not work, or guide students to find solutions to their formulated problems. The didactic process is regarded as a problem solving process where the teacher is dealing with a complex collection of stimuli and information, decisions to be made, problems to be solved. This is the first thinking level.
The second level is the information level. It often appears after a day’s work when the colleagues are gathered and the principal gives information and wants his or her personnel to think new thoughts. Kansanen says that it is a waste of time asking teachers to think new thoughts after a day’s hard work with the students of today.
To make teachers think new thoughts and establish new paradigms, you must (according to Kansanen) climb out of your everyday shoes and leave the school, be somewhere else at least one night, starting the process of restructuring the students‘ learning and above all have consensus of your visions, goals and common values. This is the third level – the reflection level – the creative thinking level. In order to raise the quality in the school there is a continuous need of giving the personnel time outside school to reflect on and improve their practice.

Research Circles

Michael Fullan (Fullan and Hargreaves, 1991) has formulated eight guidelines for how principals should approach the complex task of working interactively with teachers and communities to creative collaborative work cultures:

1. Understand the culture of the school before trying to change it;
2. Value your teachers: promote their professional growth;
3. Extend what you value;
4. Express what you value;
5. Promote collaboration; not co–optation;
6. Make menus, not mandates;
7. Use bureaucratic means to facilitate, not to constrain;
8. Connect with the wider environment.

During this year, funded by The National Board of Education, all the teachers at my school from K– Grade 91 are participating in pedagogical talks, “The Research Circle”, led by researchers from the University of Dalarna. The aims are to discuss every–day matters and look upon them from a more scientific perspective in order to build an interpretation base from which we can evaluate our activities and the results.
The Research Circle offers an arena that makes it possible for understanding, acceptance, continuity and participation. According to Wallin (1997) and Berg and Nytell (1998) the activity can be described as a “pedagogical talk” with its origin in the pedagogical practice. The way it has started at Nynässkolan leads us to be hopeful about fulfilling the objectives of the programme.
According to our common plan, one group of teachers are examining the question of social competence, especially in the light of our being a multicultural school. The objective is to find similarities and differences between Iranian, Kurdish, Polish and South American cultures.
Other themes are:

• parental engagement in development talks;
• the students’ influence, choice and planning of and responsibility for their work;
• the childrens’ learning: what, how and why;
• how to document our work;
• changing perspectives from the teacher as the producer of a lesson and the student as a consumer to the teacher more as a navigator leading the student’s learning.

During the spring we have had four pedagogical talks for three hours and time for reading the recommended literature. Each teacher can use eight days during the semesters for reading, inquiry and writing. A good effect of teachers coming together and exchanging thoughts is the growing ability to lift the discussions from everyday matters and an eagerness to learn more from adequate literature. They have started reading scientific literature that I as a principal earlier had recommended but not managed to get them to read.
The aims are to build up and to use a scientific relationship in order to produce locally relevant knowledge, the development of competence and activity.
The results so far after one half of the period are the teachers’ eagerness to discuss and to make empirical studies, the discussions with colleagues. and the researcher as a mentor. He has helped them with methodological issues and to connect the participants’ questions to relevant theories.
From my point of view I find the circles very useful because the participants have already found in discussions with teachers from other schools that they have reached a higher level of reflection. I confidently hope that they will continue to increase their ability to outdistance themselves from their everyday work and evaluate their work from a more scientific interpretation base.
It is obvious to me that the only way of assuring quality is to start with everyday matters or problems and with help from outside by researchers, lift the empirical data to a more reflecting level. The process will contribute to a more open and accepting arena where the pedagogical talks lead the progress forward.
I have tried during almost 25 years to find the tools to make the paradigm shifts in education obvious, the need of changing lenses and positioning the teachers as workers of the future in order to adjust education to make it possible for the students to prepare themselves for a life–long learning.
The eight guidelines of Michael Fullan are very appropriate. As a principal I need to make the teachers understand their own culture and ask themselves what do we do, how do we do it and why do we do it? With the common analysis of the school culture we can build a mutual vision based on the national mandate for the school.
Caldwell and Spinks (1991, p.161) challenge an effective principal to be “a collaborative leader of continuous improvements in the school as an organization.”
Fullan (1991, p.353) makes it clear that “as individuals we cannot wait for or take as sufficient the actions or policy decisions of others… Administrators and other change managers have organizational power, but not educational power… Decision–makers can make organizational and curriculum change, but still not make any progress. The only solution is that the whole school – all individuals – must get in change business… The current school organization is an anachronism. It was designed for an earlier period for conditions that no longer hold.”

The Need For Local Consensus

To assure quality in education I have found that we need to have consensus within the municipality concerning the national mandate on three levels: the board level, the administrative level and the principal– and teacher level.
The formal mandate of school leaders is to carry out the national goals and to be responsible for the results of the activities of their schools. The results depend on various groups’ perception of the work of their school leader. “Swedish teachers regard this work as being primarily concerned with administration, economy and pupil welfare” (Nytell, 1994). Neither do pupils and parents have a good knowledge of what the work of a school leader entails.
After the decentralization movement in the early ’90s the municipal politicians and the administration have taken the arena, leaving school leaders and personnel more or less offside. The 1992 economic breakdown in Sweden came at the same time as the delegation of the responsibility for the fulfilment of the national mandate from the state to the municipalities. The goal– and result–oriented steering model which was meant to function become steering according to the size of the local finances. The result is an annual control–steering model where the main object is in the budget to organize and lead the activities for the fulfilment of the national and the local goals. Local politicians declare that the budget goals are superior to the national goals.
With the result of the Research Circles I foresee a new strategy to make progress on the municipal arena. There is a need of a structural flow chart that will end with a structure for the politicians in which there is a description of what, how and why it is to be done to fulfil the national goals and local mandate.

The Flow Chart

The purpose of the Flow Chart is to empower the individuals in a structured way going from the whole to the part and to build up a common platform of commitment, quality and continuous improvement.

1. Beware of the whispering of today and interpret the signals so you are steered by your visions not by your problems.
   Each individual has her/his perception of reality: either it is schools, learning or the world around us. You see what your experiences, opinions, attitudes, values tell you to see.
   To get a common framework you must widen the key–hole you look through so that your colleagues can see the same as you do. You must also with an open mind discuss what in the world surrounding the student today has a major impact on your way of producing the activities and possibilities for your students’ learning. How do you match these different impacts compared with the life when you started as a teacher years ago? What are the differences for schooling in the first wave, the second wave and today? What kind of social capital does the student bring with him? What values are steering him? How do you handle the information stream around the student and how do you compete as a teacher? What communicative competence is needed today? What competence are asked for in job advertisements? How do you make your planning accord to all this?
2. Discuss the meaning and the purpose of the national curriculum.
   The new curriculum does not give a picture of the goal fulfilment or a mental picture of the result of teacher’s work. It is up to the personnel in schools to create their visions that will lead them. How does the curriculum deal with the signals in society?
   How do your teachers think when they make plans for their work? Is it an individual process taking place in the head of each teacher? What comes first – planning according to the subject goals or the overarching goals? Experiences from the last year, according to the author of the books you have bought? How do you plan together with your colleagues? How do you follow the line from curriculum, syllabus and the new marking system? What kind of application do they form?
   In my school we apply the curriculum from new perspectives:
   • Cultural competence, to use all senses both when you take in information and when you communicate, to expand your creativity, to be able to see the beauty in things etc.;
   • Social competence, to be able to collaborate, have empathy, to listen and so on;
   • Communicative competence, develop your 1000 languages;
   • Knowledge, competence, to absorb information and to develop it to your own knowledge.
   
   From Grades K – 9 the striving for students, parents and teachers whether subject–orientated, or emphasizing more thematic education or basic learning, should be related to these four areas. The point is, teachers have to collaborate, discussing how the subjects studied will contribute to the overarching goals, how you help the students develop themselves by using others’ competence and knowledge in a dialog. The results from the small–class experiment in Tennessee (Achilles and Bain, 1991) show that when you give the possibility to work together you develop self confidence, responsibility and collaborative ability in the first grade that last for ever.
3. What are your view on the human being?
   Is it
   • a mechanistic view – a replaceable worker at the assembly line?
   • a psychologistic view – you must do what you feel to do.
   • a dynamic view. You are always eager to learn and you learn best if you can have influence, it is meaningful and you can use the new knowledge almost momentarily.
   
   Lovat and Smith (1996) have come to the conclusion there are at least seven perception objects of teachers basic view on pedagogy: how they look upon students, teachers, education, learning, schooling, educational materials and knowledge.
   You have to discuss these matters to develop a consensus or at least you have to express your views to your colleagues before you can go any further. In the team you have to know who you are working with. This is not easy, because you must know yourself, who you are, and have self–confidence to express your inner you. This is a key–point.
4. What is your opinion of the best way of student’s learning
   The result of these agreements is the beginning of an idea of action. How do we plan together based on the three former commitments?
   With a realistic picture of the world and how the curriculum fit into it and consensus on your basic view of pedagogy, how do you use ICT, how do you formulate the best ways for the student’s learning, the strategies you can use which must be easily grabbed when the learning process demands it.
   The result of the discussions will be that all teachers are aware of which teaching strategies you can use and how they contribute to reach the national and the local goals.
5. How to organize the work
   Now is the time to discuss the optimal organization that will facilitate the student’s learning process. You have to look upon organization as a means not as a goal. Often we start organizing and then we fill it with content. In the last five years we have in Sweden changed principal organization and now the economic situation together with the need of one leader from K–9 impels a new organization again. As an OECD report says about Sweden, much organizational change but very little change in the classroom.
6. The competence in the organization
   The competent teachers are no longer best in the classroom. Nor are they masters of pedagogy only. They need to have social skills in order both to work together in teams and to lead the students’ social training. The third skill they need is willingness to change, to think new thoughts, adapt new perspectives and the ability to continue on new paths even it is hard and you risk to fail.
   The common issue for the team is to formulate the idea of competence for the chosen organization, how they will accomplish the necessary competence, at what costs and when.
7. The need for school buildings that respond to the idea of activity, organization and competence
   So far we have come to the conclusion that the industrial way of building schools based on teaching 25–30 students in the same room is out of date. Many of our schools are very difficult to change. But the question is, taking into account the ICT–development, what impact will the expanding use of computers have on using the school as a building for learning?

Components of the Vision

The process has also built up the components of your visions. With these visions you have strength, confidence and mutual commitment to be the workers for the future, guiding your students to build a better world. You have a language based on research, evaluation, quality assurance and common values which gives you a professional platform that teachers and principals have never had before.
The key person in this flow chart is the principal who must have the visions ready, but not outspoken and dominant.
“The vision describes the organization’s direction of travel, while the goals can be described as station stops along the way. The political level must also develop orientation instruments that guarantee the possibility of an orientation in the direction of the vision... The chain of visions/goals is transformed into goal–achieving action through professional goal–oriented school leadership” (Stĺlhammar 1992).
You have the vision for yourself and give pushes and encourage the staff mark their ‘station’ and in a collaborative process orientate themselves along the ‘chain’. There is a good chance of consensus and when you reach the stations you will find that your visions as a principal and the visions of your staff almost are the same. The result so far will be a thoroughly argued platform when you have to express the financial needs for your school.
In Sweden we have recently got a new agreement on teachers’ working time and salaries. It is based on traditional classroom work and collaborative work among colleagues. You have to be at school 35 hours a week and in order to do your whole year’s work in 1760 hours in ten months, you have to make your own preparations in 10 hours a week. That means if you remember Kansanen’s three levels, the hard work with students, working in teams interpreting the goals, adjusting your values, planning together according to a common plan of activity, being aware of your economic situation, and in a third level thinking adjust your progress according to your visions, I find it odd that teachers have to work much harder than most of other employees because of an obsolete school year. And they pay for it with 16 days more vacation than the general employee.
In the old–fashioned Taylorite school system it worked when you produced your lessons in your head, evaluating your efforts by marking the students’ ability to transmit facts from one source to another like a store inventory.
Today when the student is the subject and the lesson is produced by the students and yourself together in a problem–based learning, you have to have rapid access to your brain’s internal memory and ‘hard disc’. You must be prepared in another way and use the competence of your colleagues. You must start your mutual reflection and planning by building your visions and goals from a platform consisting of mutually agreed paradigms, mutual basic views of pedagogy. You must consider your planning as to what happens in the earlier grades and those that come after. You have responsibility to lead the students’ learning so they are prepared for a long life in this century. If one of your students become a teacher, he or she will educate individuals who will live into the 22nd century. The values transmitted now will have influence more than one hundred years ahead. If the Earth still exists then.
It is time to face the paradigm shifts and make the necessary transitions to the future. These transitions will not happen unless you start individually reflecting on what, how and why you do as you are doing.

References

Achilles, C et al. (1991), The State of Tennessee’s Student Teacher Achievement Ratio Project, Technical Report 1985–1990. Tennessee State University.
Berg, G and U Nytell (1998) The School as an administrative political meeting–place. Uppsala University.
Caldwell, B J and J M Spinks, B (1991), The Self Managing School. Brighton: The Falmer Press.
Dalin, P (1994), Education for a New Century. Stockholm: Liber Utbildning AB.
Davies, D R (1993), Chats in Eternity. Nova University, Florida.
Fullan, M G and A Hargreaves (1991), What´s worth fighting for in your school. Toronto: Ontario Public School Teacher´s Federation.
Fullan, M G (1991), The New Meaning of Educational Change. London: Cassell Educational.
Fullan, M G (1995), Change Forces Probing the Depths of Educational Reform, London: Burgess Science Press.
Glasser, W (1992), The Quality School – Managing Students Without Coercion. Harper Collins Publishers.
Handy, C (1994), The Empty Raincoat – Making Sense of the Future. London: Hutchinson.
Kansanen, P (1992), The Role of the School in the Future Society. Department of Education, University of Helsinki.
Nytell, U (1994), Govern or to be Governed? A Study of School Leaders Work and Working Conditions. Uppsala, Sweden.
OECD (1995), Redefining the Place to Learn. Paris: OECD.
Russell, E (1989), The Creative Manager, London: Unwin Hyman Ltd.
Smith, D and T Lovat (1996), Curriculum – Action on Reflection. Social Science Press, Australia.
Stĺlhammar, B (1992), Goal–oriented Leadership in Swedish Schools. Örebro: Skolledarhögskolan.
Sundström, B (1995), The School Personnel is Stepping Forward. Gothenburg: Gothia.
Turner, C (1995), The Eureka Principle. Shaftesbury, Dorset, England: Element Books Limited.
Wright, G von (1995), The Science and Reason. Stockholm: Bonnier.