Do We Need More Innovation in Education?

In this paper, Levin cautions against a transformation or innovation mindset as the basis for improving schooling outcomes.  The more promising route, he- argues, lies in improving existing school systems.

Levin has a 40 year history in school improvement, starting out as a student activist against boredom in schools in the exciting and optimistic 70s.  He sees signs today of that same sense of unbounded optimism  - a yearning and a shaping of a transformative vision.

He stresses that he is not anti change and acknowledges the 19th century elements that can still be found in schools today.  But he stressed that the overarching focus should be on exploiting to the fullest extent all that we have learnt from school effectiveness research.

This is an important message in education today.  After all almost every teacher could provide extensive accounts of the new innovations, new program in which they have been caught up - many of which were deemed to be successful  - but lost in time.  Leaving remnants of insights in their wake.  The more high needs the school the more the impact of constant transformation and innovation.

The truth is that this mentality has not led to system wide improvement.   This is because most systems do not have capacity to assess the comparative efficacy of different interventions.  All too often what gets the gong is the one that the most senior decision maker has been more exposed to. There is no subjecting of these important decisions to external review.

There is a dearth of robust evaluation and even when it occurs it is often too complex for it's key learnings to be adopted.

He notes that this risk is even more acute in devolved systems - where there might well be good local wisdom about gaps, opportunities but the capacity to assess different solutions is highly constrained.

For this reason, Levin argues, we need to make much more effective use of what we already know to be effective. 

Levin claims that we have a lot of reliable knowledge that is not being widely applied - particularly about school and classroom practice, but if we were using everything we already know about effective schooling in virtually all schools, we would achieve large gains in student outcomes.

He provides John Hattie's research on the student effect size of different aspects of teacher and classroom practice as a key example.  We have not leveraged this research with anything like the focus it deserves.

Having an agreed and common core of knowledge is the hallmark of every profession. This does not mean that the application of this knowledge in different contexts and circumstances can or should be uniformly applied. The marrying of professional core concepts with the judgement about how they operate in particular circumstances is what make teaching a truly professional practice.

We can be confident that changes in organizational structures, incentive systems, governance and financing, while important, will not in themselves produce improvement.  We can have some confidence that a sustained and positive focus on building the skills and motivation of all parties, especially but not only teachers, can result in real improvements across large numbers of schools.

But we need to continue to research school improvement across all types of schools and we need school improvement and effectiveness research to focus more on actual teaching and learning practices - not just on school characteristics and data.

Finally we need to do much more to promote ways of effective knowledge mobilization - that is how research connects to actual policy and practice (the subject of the Ben Levin Article profiled in the November  Issue of Notepad)