1. Script for Ockham’s razor
1.
‘School sux’ or so says too many kids and a lot of other people.
Kids, parents, teachers, bureaucrats, academics and business people all complain about schools. I’ll
bet you can guess who made each of these complaints.
Schools are boring and meaningless!
Schools are being dumbed down.
Schools don’t deliver the outcomes we want!
Schools stress my child out! She doesn’t want to go any more.
School is for nerds!
School doesn’t teach kids the basics any more!
Schools are so hard to work in! Kids make your life miserable!
Kids don’t want to learn any more! They just want to muck around.
Schools don’t teach values like they used to!
2.
What do all these complaints tell us about schools? Either:
• Most teachers are just plain terrible at their jobs, or
• Schools just don’t work well for kids in their present form.
3.
Now, I know I’m “just” a teacher and my opinion is therefore less important than some others, but
one thing I do know is that most teachers are NOT terrible at their jobs. What I think, is that
teachers are hamstrung by some demands of our schooling system.
4.
Schooling in its present form has been around a long time and it still sux. In other words, with all
the changes we have made to schooling so far, there is still a large proportion of students who come
out at the end with poor self esteem and inadequate achievement. It’s gone on so long that most
people just accept that it has to be that way. A number of real innovators like A. S. Neill in his book
Summerhill, have tried to show us what the good William of Ockham would probably have seen
immediately – that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way schools are set up. Not
with the bricks and mortar but with the psychology.
5.
In the rest of this talk I would like listeners to keep in mind two things. The years of schooling up to
about age 15 is the focus age group, and when I use the word schooling, I mean everything that
happens to a child at school, what happens in class, what they are meant to learn, the way they are
taught, their relationships with teachers and others, the testing and reporting processes, etc.
6.
One thing is obvious in most of the previous complaints about schooling. They are about feelings,
and it is in this domain of feelings and psychology that I believe we haven’t yet looked carefully
enough for solutions. I believe that we need a radical change to schooling, one of those paradigm
shifts that are bandied around in academic circles.
7.
My thesis is that poor student engagement, their lack of desire to learn, is the primary cause of low
achievement in most students who don’t succeed, and more importantly, that this disengagement is
primarily a result of a negative schooling experience beginning in their early years. And so
schooling needs to change in order to nurture a positive sense of schooling in ALL students and
consequently a desire to continue learning.
8.
Some might be tempted to suggest that trying to make all students feel good about themselves at
school falls into the ‘hug-a-tree’ category, in other words all warm and fuzzy but not important in
real life.
On the contrary, improving students’ perceptions of themselves in schooling is not only critical to
their success at school but is also vitally important in real life.
9.
There is plenty of evidence to support this. Andrew Fuller, a psychologist specialising in
adolescents in education, said at the Association for the Welfare of Child Health conference in 2005
that many adolescent boys ‘feel that they are a part of a system that pushes people around and in
the process label themselves as resentful victims or depressed failures’. And in his research he says,

2. ‘Why do we persist with a standardised, homogenised approach to education when growing
evidence suggests that is not suited to the majority of children?’
In its Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth, the Australian Council for Education Research and
the Department of Education, Science and Training found that: student perceptions of school
climate and self-concept of ability were found to have an effect on individual engagement.
10.
In other words, how students feel about themselves at school affects their engagement in the work,
and how much they engage affects their results. Well ‘DOH!’!
11.
We need to think in terms of redesigning the schooling experience for students and teachers so
that the best outcomes follow. Specifically, schooling needs to be redesigned so that ALL students
feel that school is positive for them and ALL teachers can teach in a way that nurtures students
without losing the important goals of schooling.
12.
Well, what needs to happen to make students feel good at school? There are many factors, but I
believe the two most significant are
1. that students perceive their tasks to be interesting and relevant and
2. that students perceive themselves as having the potential for success.
13.
Most people would agree that everyone, not just adolescents, will engage with a task when they
perceive it as meaningful or valuable AND they have the potential to be successful at it. The
Sisyphus of Greek mythology is the only person I can think of who would keep doing the same
meaningless, unsuccessful task over and over again, and that was a punishment from the old gods
anyway.
14.
To redesign schooling so that ALL students perceive themselves as having the potential for success
is a fairly contentious issue considering statements by ex-education minister Brendan Nelson in
2005. Minister Nelson advocated a return to the ‘good old days’, with more stringent control of
curriculum and teaching, and a stringent pass-fail assessment and reporting system, clearly implying
that more control of teachers and students will solve what he perceives to be falling standards.
15.
I believe he and the old Greek gods have it completely wrong, more control and sanctions will not
improve standards, and in fact will only add to the present disenchantment and disengagement
experienced by too many students.
16.
This is not just a pretty theory by a tree hugging, chardonnay quaffing, bleeding heart teacher (I’ve
gone off chardonnay lately anyway). Because I am a teacher, actually standing in front of students
all day and every day, in an everyday school with everyday kids, I get to test my ideas.
17.
The teachers in the science faculty at Bremer State High School in Ipswich, Queensland have been
putting these ideas to the test for the past 7 years. Bremer is just an ordinary high school in the State
system. It takes ALL students regardless of their previous problems and abilities, and the teachers
work hard to give them the best education they can. Our students cover the full gamut of
possibilities, ranging from high achievers to those with learning difficulties as well as a significant
proportion with social problems.
18.
We designed a new framework for pedagogy and assessment specifically to increase engagement in
Science learning by focussing on individualisation of curriculum and a changed paradigm of
assessment and reporting.
19.
We trialled the framework in an action research approach, collaborating and supporting each other
to make changes and then interpret and act on the findings. The results we have seen are promising
and support my original thesis. We have seen in our classes that: students have become more
engaged and easier to get on with. and… There seems to be less disruption in the class room and
more willingness to work together with the teacher to achieve valuable outcomes for each student.

3. 20.
There were several distinctive design features of our framework.
1. Firstly students did jobs that were meaningful TO THEM and they had some say in the
topics and task in collaboration with their teacher.
2. Teachers and students worked together to plan the course that would give EACH student
the best outcomes from school.
3. Teachers had ownership of their classes. They had the same classes for a whole year
allowing them to establish a quality relationship with each student.
4. Teachers were trained to look for success in what students did in class as they researched
and completed their task. They didn’t give meaningless, disconnected exams or tests.
5. Student reports gave parents ACCURATE and HONEST information about each student’s
performance in a way that is WITHOUT any implication of failure.
6. Students were rated against a FIXED scale that began in preschool and continued to year 10
as described in the current Queensland science syllabus. This meant that the definition of
success changed from ‘passing the same grade as everyone else’ to ‘trying to progress
through the levels’.
21.
To explain what I mean by defining success as progression through levels, I would like you to
close your eyes and first imagine this scenario in a school using A, B, C, D, E, which is the
assessment system that most of us worked under, and still happens in most schools and which the
Federal Government advocates.
22.
Close your eyes now. You’re in grade 4. You found it difficult to learn to read for some reason in
the beginning and this affects all of your work. So you get a lot of Ds. Teacher is nice and kind and
tries to make you feel good and says if you work hard you can get a C. So you do work hard. But
so does everyone else and next year you will probably get a D again because it’s actually harder to
get a C in year 5 than year 4, naturally enough. You eventually get locked into a D and you label
yourself as a ‘D’ student and give up trying. OK open your eyes. How do you feel about school?
Not at all OK I suspect.
23.
Obviously this scenario doesn’t happen for ALL students, but high schools are full of grade 8
students whose first comment is ‘I can’t do science or I can’t do maths, or whatever.’ And who
are often turned off ALL of school as a consequence.
24.
To understand an alternative approach that defines success as progression, consider this idea:
Instead of having A, B, C, D, E for each grade that gets harder and harder through the years, we use
a FIXED scale that starts in grade 1 at say level 1 and finishes in grade 10 at say, level 6.
25.
Now close your eyes again and imagine yourself as that same year 4 student. You still have the
same problems with reading. So you do work that matches level 2 while some students are working
at level 3. Next year, although these students are now beginning to work at level 4, you (and
probably some others) are beginning to be successful at level 3.
Open your eyes now. So how do you feel this time? My guess is that that though you aren’t doing
as well as some students, you’re feeling OK because trying hard is obviously working and you can
see you are improving.
26.
This change in feeling from disappointment in getting a D all the time leading to disengagement, to
feeling OK about moving from level 2 to 3 to 4 etc and thus remaining engaged, has been borne out
in discussions and questionnaires with students who have recently been through the current system.
For example, one young person said he ‘failed science and maths all through primary school and
gave up trying in year 8’. He then said ‘I wouldn’t care that I didn’t do as well as another student
as long as I could feel that I was getting better’. And then when I explained my ideas, he said,

4. ‘Yeah, that would work for me.’
27.
Some people argue against this alternative form of assessment and reporting because they don’t
understand how it can be done. Some argue against it on ideological grounds, the most common
example being the statement that kids have to fail to make them try harder. In all my 25 years of
teaching, I have not noticed that consistent failure makes students more resilient and willing to keep
trying. In fact the opposite is true. Most students who fail repeatedly give up, and become one of a
variety of dropouts – uninvolved, rebellious, withdrawn or aggressive.
28.
On the other hand, I have seen that students who feel successful and are engaged through the kinds
of ideas and methods I suggest, develop more resilience and willingness to continue to engage with
the learning process.
29.
We can have our cake and eat it too. There are ways to redesign schooling that will give us happy
and productive kids without dumbing down the system; that will deliver the outcomes we want
and teach kids values and the basics, where school becomes a place where teachers and kids want to
go, and a place that kids don’t have to pretend ‘is for nerds’ in order to hide their own sense of
failure.
30.
As I said at the beginning, we need a complete paradigm shift. Not just more of the same, but
different and better for the sake of our children and society. Let’s get above politics and all work
together to redesign the education system in Australia, to give ALL our children a positive and
productive time at school.
If we can get students to change their thinking from ‘school sux’ to ‘school rocks’, then I believe
that we will see evidence of happier students and higher standards. Then, maybe parents,
employers, teachers and even politicians will think that ‘school rocks’ too.