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WHAT IS THE BC NETWORK OF PERFORMANCE-BASED SCHOOLS
LEARNING ABOUT AND FROM RURAL SCHOOLS?
Continued...

Geography and Population

British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province, is located on the Pacific coast, and has a land and freshwater area of 95 million hectares. It is Canada's third largest province and comprises ten percent of the country's total land area. The province is nearly twice the size of Spain, four times the size of Great Britain, and larger than any American state except Alaska. There are only thirty nations in the world larger than British Columbia.

 British Columbia's population of four million is growing more diverse. BC has for many centuries been home to a large, culturally diverse and geographically dispersed aboriginal population. In the five years between 1996 and 2001 the rate of growth of persons identifying themselves as aboriginal increased by 22%, jumping from 140,000 to 170,000. By comparison, the province’s non-aboriginal population increased by 5% during the same time period. This means that the rate of growth for persons of aboriginal identity was more than twice the rate of growth of non-aboriginal persons. Over thirty language groups are spoken by the native people of BC. This reflects over half of the native languages spoken in all of Canada. Virtually all of these languages are endangered and hardly any are spoken by children. This is a serious concern for the aboriginal community and is the source of much focused effort in recent years.

 As well, the non-aboriginal population of BC is changing through a steady influx of newcomers from other parts of Canada and around the world. Over the past few decades the origin of immigrants has changed. Historically, the bulk of the immigrant population came from Europe; more recently, however, Asia has become the predominant source.  Chinese is now the third major language group in Canada after English and French.

Educational Attainment – Rural Communities

Based on international assessments (TIMMS, PISA, Adult Literacy Survey) British Columbia has one of the top performing public education learning systems in the world. There is, however, an unacceptable discrepancy in the achievement levels of aboriginal and rural learners compared to their non-aboriginal and urban/suburban counterparts. Although the number of aboriginal students attending schools in urban centers continues to grow, the majority of aboriginal learners attend small rural schools often in very remote communities.

Many of BC’s rural communities are economically vulnerable as they rely heavily on one economic sector or one employer. A drop in commodity prices, a raising of a trade barrier, a mine or mill closure or a series of poor salmon runs can be economically devastating for small rural communities. Other economic sectors are not available to absorb displaced workers. The economic challenges can cause social problems for individuals and for the community.

Challenges are also created for schools as issues of declining enrolment, teacher recruitment and retention, social service expectations and family hardships have a strong impact on school life. As well, rural out migration is greater for individuals with higher educational attainments. This robs rural communities of locally based learning role models and, often, higher performing students as role models in school.

Nonetheless, there are real and substantial strengths in rural communities – strengths in the resilience of the people, their community mindedness and in their willingness to embrace new solutions to their challenges. That a picture of a rural landscape as bleak and without hope is inaccurate was demonstrated through the work of the Task Force on Rural Education, an examination of the results and the realities of rural educators in British Columbia.

In this study it became clear that rural education has many features from which more urban-based schools could learn. These include a strong sense of teamwork between principals and teachers, strong links between the community and the school, and often, fairly high levels of achievement given the contexts of social disruption and employment loss in the communities. Clearly, as in urban settings, some rural schools are more effective than others. Although the overall picture is far from discouraging, the realities of geography, distance, isolation, size and access to technology present some unique challenges to rural schools.

The Network Of Performance-Based Schools

The Network of Performance Based Schools was formed in 1999 with 30 schools from nine of 60 school districts in British Columbia. These schools came together as a voluntary learning community to focus on new forms of classroom assessment to improve student learning. Through ongoing networking growth there are now 240 schools from 40 districts involved in inquiry-based improvement. The schools in the Network represent the diversity of schools in the province. Schools range in size from an elementary school in Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) of 45 predominantly aboriginal students through to a large urban Vancouver area secondary school of 1800 highly multicultural students.

As developers/designers/directors of this networked community we believe that the most powerful forms of sustainable school improvement will come from educators:

• Working together as learning communities both within the school and across schools;
• Generating learning questions that can best be answered with data from classroom assessments;
• Using common teacher-developed, research based assessment practices in key learning areas;
• Engaging in whole school active research; and
• Annually reporting the results of improvement initiatives to school communities, to other schools and to educators across the province.

Educators in this distributed learning community have studied the assessment work of Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, Richard Stiggins, and Lorna Earl. The Network has been informed in its understanding of change through the work of Michael Fullan; on innovation by following the work of Peter Cuttance; on networks through the research of Ann Lieberman, David Hopkins and David Jackson; on leadership through James Spillane’s concept of distributed leadership; on learning communities through the work of Louise Stoll; on the learning needs of vulnerable children through the work of Douglas Willms: on school improvement through the work of Alma Harris and on sustainability of improvement through the work of Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink. Recently there has also been attention paid to the concept of “positive deviance” as an educational change force as described by Monique and Jerry Sternin.

From this broad international school improvement research literature, four key concepts have been distilled that inform the design and shape the work of the Network. The challenge for Network schools is to apply the best of international thinking on inquiry, shared leadership, the use of consistent classroom based assessment for and as learning, and accountability through public sharing of the results of their own improvement initiatives.

Developing an Inquiry Focus

Beginning with inquiry is fundamental to the design of the Network. Kyza-Edelson (2003) underlines the importance of inquiry when arguing that our world is full of ill structured, complex, and interesting questions and that the pursuit of learning through questions is motivating.  Network schools are coached to develop questions that are right sized, evidence-based, linked, and important in one or more of four initial areas of interest – improving student citizenship/social responsibility, writing, mathematical problem solving, or reading. This is based on a belief that a clear inquiry focus will help create both immediate and long-term results while building capacity in the school for lasting learning change.

Shared Leadership

There is growing interest in the concepts of teacher leadership, democratic leadership and distributed leadership. The work of James Spillane, Alma Harris, Ann Lieberman, Jan Robertson and others is making a significant contribution to the understanding of researchers and practitioners about the importance of developing new frameworks for thinking about leadership at the school level. No serious change effort can be sustained without the intellectual and emotional support of those doing the core work of teaching and learning – and this core work must be supported by leaders at all levels. The Network from its inception has been based on the principle of shared, team leadership. Schools commit to work as teacher-principal teams and once involved, the leadership shifts from one defined by role to one defined by contribution and expertise.

Assessment For and As Learning

The core measure of learning improvement for the participating schools is a set of teacher developed and tested classroom based scoring criteria (performance standards) in literacy, numeracy, and citizenship. These resources were developed over a number of years with wide teacher involvement and are readily available both in print and on the provincial education website. The BC performance standards are intended to support classroom assessment for and as learning and include rating scales, student samples, and sample tasks for Grades 1-12. There are four “levels” of performance – ‘not yet,’ ‘approaching expectations,’ ‘meeting expectations,’ and ‘exceeding expectations’, that reflect shared teacher judgment about high quality performance at each grade level.

Educators have worked with parents to develop ‘family-friendly’ versions of the standards and many teachers have worked with their students to translate the standards into ‘kid friendly’ language. These locally generated resources are posted on the Network website for easy sharing.

Public accountability 

In the past most school systems have operated almost exclusively through individual units – be they teachers, departments, schools or local agencies. Such isolation may have been appropriate during times of stability but during times of change there is a need to ‘tighten the loose coupling’, to increase collaboration and to establish more fluid and responsive structures. (2002: p. 10)

Annually schools in the Network present their work at a ‘celebration of learning’ where they present visual representations of their inquiry work. In addition, each school writes a two page case study/story, which includes their initial question, improvement strategies and organizational structure changes, findings, observations, reflections, and recommendations.  These case studies, published annually, are broadly distributed to schools across BC and help to create additional networks.

For six years this connected community of schools in the province has been exploring the role that assessment as and for learning and the role that focused team inquiry can play in improving learning success. Initially all the schools involved were within driving distance of an urban teacher resource center. Two years after the Network was formed we began to explore ways to involve schools from more remote communities using both technology and regional support to connect rural schools with their urban counterparts.

Currently the Network has more than 40 small rural schools connected through shared inquiries. One of the interesting dimensions of this new set of connections is that urban and suburban schools are increasingly drawn to the work of the smaller schools for their lessons in creativity, determination, perseverance, innovative learning/teaching strategies and flexible, focused structures.

What Can A Network Focused On Assessment For And As Learning Contribute To The Strengthening Of Rural Schools?

Increasingly our work with rural schools is leading us to ask, “What can a clear learning vision for individual learners do to assist rural educators and their students?” Recent inquiries in schools throughout the Network have shifted from an interest in the broad use of classroom assessment by teams of teachers to a direct, clear focus on helping the individual learner answer these questions:

• Where are you now? (How are you doing in writing to inform or persuade - or citizenship or reading or math)?
• What are you working on?
• What are you good at?
• What is the one thing you are working to get better at?
• How will you go about getting better – what strategy will you try?
• How will getting better at this help you now?
• How will getting better at (writing to inform or…) help you later?

These questions provide schools serving rural communities the ability to focus on improving learning from the starting point of each individual learner using readily accessible, consistent assessments in their work.

The rural Network schools are pursuing active research inquiries through an intense focus on combining the ideas of assessment for learning with its strength in providing clear visions of excellent performance and assessment as learning with its strength in developing learner metacognition.  It is possible that this focus has a “beyond the traditional grammar of assessment” bonus for schools in remote and rural locations as it places the locus for control of improved student learning in their hands and makes them less reliant on the distant and “authority” oriented assessment results from a geographically distant Ministry of Education. This acts as a counterfoil to results published in the media, which often paint a negative and contextually empty picture of rural achievements.

We are interested – over time – to see if these additional questions can be answered by the work of these rural network schools:

1. Is there a particular power for learners and educators in small rural communities in using assessment as and for learning as the core practice of their learning improvement work?

1. Does a sense of belonging to a greater professional learning community become enhanced for small rural schools through a networked approach that uses electronic, print and web publishing as well as personal connection?

1. Can rural schools “pick up the pace” of their improvement work by being connected to other schools in the province that are serving similar learners? Are the strategies and structures in other similar schools of greater use in improvement work? Or – does location matter? Does the power reside in good ideas and strong strategies and structures, regardless of where they are “found”?

1. What can these schools learn from the “third way” of school improvement and the concepts from the study of schools in socio-economic disadvantaged areas outlined by Muijs, Harris, Chapman, Stoll and Russ (2004) in their AERA paper Improving Schools in Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Areas – A Review of Research Evidence?

1. What role does recognition play in encouraging schools to seek out a networked community? Do some of the ideas about ambition and recognition for generally “taken for granted” public service work have application to the work of educators in rural communities?

How Diverse, Rural Communities are Learning With and From Each Other

Often schools are externally “studied” and their stories are reported by researchers and journalists. There are fewer opportunities for schools to speak for themselves. In the Network case study reports, school teams write directly for a peer audience of other educators and parents in their own voice. The Network framework places emphasis on consistent classroom-based methods of assessment and the stories reflect this emphasis. In addition, during Network meetings leadership teams regularly reference their learning results on external measures and the Network leaders annually examine provincial performance data to look for patterns and trends. The pattern we have observed most frequently is that, as educators become more skillful at collecting and examining their own classroom results, they become more interested, less defensive and more analytically sophisticated about results from external sources.

Schools Speak For Themselves: Case Study Reports from Rural Schools

For the purpose of this paper we have summarized the case studies from four of the Network schools working with primarily aboriginal learners in rural communities. The complete case study reports are available at www.npbs.ca.

1. Charles Hay Secondary School, Prince Rupert School District

Charles Hays is a secondary school of 630 students from grades 8-12 with a support and teaching staff of 60. Fifty percent of the students served are of aboriginal ancestry – mainly Tsimshian and also Haida and Nisga’a. Prince Rupert, on the west coast of British Columbia, has a population of 15,000 situated in a town 65km south of Alaska and 920km north of Vancouver. This area is one of the oldest continuously occupied regions of the world with an extensive and impressive Tsimshian Nation and First Nation history. The Tsimshian Nation has 4546 members with 31% living on reserve and 69% living off reserve. There is a strong and unique artistic tradition among the Tsimshian.

The school district is proud of its first nations education system. Prince Rupert School District has 2000 students, of whom more than half are of aboriginal ancestry, including Tsimshian, Nisga’a, Haida and Haisla First Nations. There are 12 public schools – nine in the town and one each in Hartley Bay, Kitkatla and Port Edwards.

The Improvement Work The English Department has played a lead role in developing an inquiry and assessment for learning approach. The first year in the Network, they focused on the reading skills of their grade 8 learners. Specifically their question was:

“Will a collaborative team approach and a daily guided reading program for all grade 8 students improve students’ reading abilities?” (Findings and Stories, 2002-2003, 39-40)

The second year the inquiry was expanded to include grade 9 students and their focus was refined to make it even more explicit for the staff and learners: “Will a structured reading initiative enable students to better identify and use specific elements of text? For grade 8s – can they identify implicit and explicit descriptions of character in literature? For grade 9s – can they identify main points and supporting details in non-fiction?” (Case Studies, 2003-2004, 37-38) The department team used learning strategies including guided reading, oral language development and literature circles.

Results During the 2003-2004 school year 17% fewer students in grade 8 and 42% fewer students in grade 9 were in the “not yet” category of reading performance. Perhaps more significantly, however, there was a substantial reduction in the percent of students who refused to even try the learning tasks – 7% more grade 8s and 16% more of grade 9 students who were in the ‘not yet’ category agreed to try the tasks. The teachers commented that these students are beginning to move out of defeat into a more engaged world of effort-based learning.

Next Inquiries The school team is determined in 2004-05 to maintain their focus on improving reading levels and to build on their initial successes. As the leadership team reflect in their 2004 case study report:

Tempting though it is to incorporate other aspects of the performance standards (writing, social responsibility) into our inquiry, it is important to maintain a single focus for the time being, until grade 10 has been brought into the mix and the use of the performance standards as they are currently employed becomes more sophisticated” (Case Studies, 2004:38)

2. Sk’aadgaa Naay Elementary, Haida Gwaii School District

This “House of Learning” elementary school is located on the Haida reserve in Skidegate, BC, with the Pacific rainforest on the west and Hecate Strait on the East. The architecture is Haida longhouse style and a locally carved totem pole is in the entrance lobby. There are 200 students and 22 adults working as support staff, teachers and principals. The principal is of Haida ancestry as are 40% of the staff and 60% of the students. All the learners participate in the Haida language and culture program, which provides perspectives on language, history, culture and art.

The Queen Charlotte Islands of Haida Gwaii are 1,884 islands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of British Columbia and close to the Alaska panhandle. This diverse landscape has been home to the Haida people for many centuries. The Haida are a very proud people with a long history of culture and art that is appreciated around the world.

The current population is 5500 mainly located in six small communities on the northern island.

The Haida Gwaii school district serves 850 learners in seven schools: three elementary and three secondary, one adult. Fifty six percent of the children in the schools are of Haida ancestry.

The Improvement Work The leadership team at Sk’aadgaa Naay Elementary asked themselves the following questions: “Can we use a local picture set (selected images of local flora, fauna, people and objects chosen by a team of teachers) and community members to improve the oral, written and reading vocabulary of our primary learners?

Can we involve village elders in a vocabulary and behavior role modeling way to improve the behavior of our grade 2s and 3s?”

The teachers use Haida area picture cards in language arts, science and social studies and the elders use the same cards to develop vocabulary in the Haida language. Community members working to develop understanding of the ocean and the needs of wildlife also use the same picture set. Field trips to the picture locations are also a feature of their work.

Results From fall 2003 to spring 2004 vocabulary identification improved by 43% and student writing assessed using the provincial performance standards improved by 9% across the levels from not yet to exceeds. In reflecting on their inquiry work the teacher-principal research team offered the following comments:

We learned not to try to do too much. Do a little and do it well.

We loved the time spent with the elders and they appreciated the gifts and presentations from the students.

We found that many students had personal stories connected with the vocabulary words especially if their families had spent time in boats, in ancient village sites, at the beach or in the forest. We tried to make sure there was time for the telling and retelling of those stories.

We feel we have made a good start and see lots of ways of improving and expanding on the work we have done this year.” (Case Studies, 2004: 205)

Next Inquiries The schools team is eager to expand the involvement of the Haida elders and their focus for 2004-2005 is: “Can we use elders to deepen the work of the Haida vocabulary as well as use the picture cards to improve one area of reading?

Can we use elder visits to deepen understanding of our responsibility for the natural world and our respect for others?”

3. Alert Bay Elementary School, Vancouver Island North School District

Alert Bay Elementary School is a small community school located on Cormorant Island. Alert Bay is about three kilometers off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island and is approximately 180 miles by water from the city of Vancouver. Alert Bay is a fishing community with a population of about 1,100. The school has an enrolment of 64 students K-7, 80% of whom are First Nations. Alert Bay is home of the K’wak’ waka’wakw people of the ‘Namgis First Nation. The school has a long tradition of excellence in literacy and was selected as one of the two schools in BC for the Society for Advancement of Educational Excellence study of successful Western Canadian rural schools serving aboriginal youngsters.

The First Nations culture has flourished on Vancouver Island North for thousands of years. The Kwakwala speaking people exhibit their rich heritage and continue to maintain and develop their culture. Visible aspects of the communities’ cultural fabric include the impressive big houses, totem poles, petroglyphs and cultural events. Vancouver Island North School District has approximately 2900 K to12 students attending 15 schools dotted across five communities.  The smallest one room school has 8 students and the largest school has just over 500 students.

The Improvement Work In 2003-04, the team at Alert Bay, asked themselves the following question:  “Will a whole school focus on using the performance standards for problem solving improve students’ problem solving ability?” The grade 6-7 teacher provided leadership for this initiative. Intermediate students explained the performance standards to the friends and family members who attended their student-led conferences which acted to build broad community understanding and support. Teachers developed and shared problem-solving strategies and worked with the students to develop math word banks that were posted in their classrooms. Additional time was allocated to math instruction in Grade 6/7 and teachers rearranged their schedules to make better use of the support available from the First Nations Support Worker. 

The Results By the spring of 2004, 100% of the Grade 7 students were meeting expectations in mathematics and 91% of the Grade 4 students were either meeting or exceeding expectations. The leadership team offered the following reflections:

It was particularly rewarding walking into my colleagues’ classrooms and talking to them about their ‘adventures’ teaching math, whether it’s a new game everyone is playing, a project that is taking off or when they’ve just seen the twinkle of excitement in the eyes of a student who just made the connection. Being able to share with someone the work that you are doing is important and rewarding.

In my own classroom, the biggest reward came in the third term when during a class, I stopped for a moment. Looking around the room I saw students working together using their quick scales, making and taking suggestions from their peers. Students knew what to ask to get the answers they needed. The personal attack on their work and what they did wrong was not the focus; instead feedback was safe, direct, and clear. Seeing kids empowering kids was in itself the ultimate reward.”

(Case Studies, 2004:16)

4. Hazelton Secondary School, Coast Mountain School District

Hazelton Secondary is located near the banks of the Skeena River in the community of Hazelton, approximately 290 km east of Prince Rupert in the north central part of British Columbia. The school serves approximately 450 students in Grades 8 through 12, 75% of whom are First Nations living in the communities of Hagwilet, Gitanmaax, Kispiox, Gitwangak, Gitanyow, Gitsegukla, New Hazelton, South Hazelton, and the Kispiox Valley. The remote nature of these communities means that many students spend over two hours daily on the bus.  The Coast Mountain School District has 18 schools serving students in six communities spread over 80,000 square km.

The Improvement Work The leadership for the work at Hazelton came from the teamwork initially of the English department head and the principal-vice principal team. They started three years ago by asking: Can we increase students’ sense of confidence as writers through consistent classroom use of the performance standards as a basis of assessment for learning?  Since then, their inquiry team has grown to include eight teachers and they are expanding their inquiry to look at the impact of student self-assessment on written expression with a particular focus on their incoming students. They have rewritten the performance standards into ‘kid-friendly’ language, released teachers for in-service and for shared marking sessions, collected and organized student writing samples to help inform instruction, and provided data for teachers to review. 

The Results Their findings show that their team work is starting to pay off for their students in Grades 8-10 with a increase overall in the numbers of students fully meeting and exceeding expectations.  What is particularly important in the Hazelton story is that the school has shown perseverance and determination in the face of some particularly challenging circumstances – district uncertainty and turmoil, high turnover of teachers, and isolation. Despite all this, they were identified provincially as one of the most improving secondary schools based on provincial exam results and participation rates in grade 12 academic courses.

Next Inquiries Hazelton Secondary has committed as a school to providing extra time for reading writing, and numeracy during the 2004-2005 school year as they ask themselves: “Will providing additional focused instructional time lead to improve results for learners in Grades 8-10?”

Considerations In Viewing These Schools Through The Third Way Of School Improvement

Clarke, Harris, and Reynolds in their paper (AERA 2004) Challenging the Challenged: Developing an Improvement Programme For Schools Facing Extremely Challenging Circumstances, maintain that “most persons in the school improvement community regard the improving of educational outcomes as a mountain still left to climb” (p. 4). They outline a “third way” of school improvement that they describe as having the following characteristics:

1. There is an enhanced focus on learning and outcomes for learners – rather than on the changing of processes.
2. There is an increased interest in the learning/teaching behavior of teachers at the classroom level – rather than only the school.
3. There has been the development of structures to allow strong practice and research to be used in staff development.
4. The concept of capacity building through staff development, medium term strategic directions, change strategies and intelligent use of “outsiders” has gained attention.
5. Methods have become “mixed” in their orientation – using both quantitative and qualitative data has become an accepted way to measure quality and quality variations. Within this new orientation paying attention to the educational experiences of different groups of students has become accepted practice.
6. There is an increased emphasis of consistency of practice throughout the staff.
7. Cultural change has received more attention along with a stronger balance between “vision” and “the adapting of structures to support” the vision aspirations.
8. More attention is being paid to making sure that improvement programs relate to and impact on teachers and principals through responsive development programs and coaching. (p. 3-4)

We offer the following observations about these four rural Network schools using this third way framework.

1. Learning and outcomes for learners. These rural schools all have a shared focus on learning and teaching and they are tracking the results themselves at the classroom and school levels. The shared learning inquiry connects teaching with learners and their outcomes directly.
2. Classroom level. The work is focused at either the whole school or the departmental level but the focus is on teaching and learning in classrooms.
3. Structures for strong research-based and practice in staff development. Schools scan regionally and provincially for practices to use in their work. They devote their own time and invent new time structures to deepen the work once it is ongoing
4. The use of capacity-building and external interest/knowledge. The access to external knowledge sources and interest/recognition is through electronic, regional and personal networking. These forms place a strong emphasis on self-reliance and yet allow simultaneously for a sense of membership in a broader community. The knowledge that inquiry has been sustained over six years in many schools creates a sense of medium and longer-term strategic direction and commitment to the work.
5. “Mixed” method orientation. Rural schools use both classroom-based quantitative evidence and qualitative “storytelling” data to develop their work and to recount their findings. Attention is being paid to learning questions regarding both aboriginal and non-aboriginal groups as well as both females and males.
6. Consistency of practice throughout the staff.  Rural schools using questions to form their work are finding that inquiry is not power coercive but is intellectually contagious. Many schools and departments have already found their own tipping points where all members of the learning community become curious and committed to consistent actions.
7. Cultural change. These schools are characterized by two cultural norms – genuinely valuing the cultures of their founding populations, and working to create cultural norms that confront racism and banish low expectations for learners from any background.
8. Responsive development programs for teachers and principals. The support for the development of rural school educators comes in three forms: a belief that rural schools hold the power to change their learners’ lives for the better using their available local resources and networked connections; that leadership must come from teacher-principal teams using authoritativeness in their commitment to inquiry (rather than defensiveness or reliance on formal authority), and that annual sustained inquiry work that is published needs to be recognized formally through the provision to the school of a small research/leadership grant on completion of the year’s study.

Clarke, Harris and Reynolds also point out that the third way ideas of improving schools has yet to find answers to the following six issues:

• Context specificity – How are schools to find specific help based on their individual needs and help in common with other schools?
• Level synchronizing – How can classroom teaching and learning be strengthened at the same time as the school leadership is strengthened?
• Results reliability – Now that we know it is important how can we achieve it?
• School improvement and school results integration – How is this to be done now that the knowledge it must be done is available?
• Enhanced school capacity to share and extend good practice – How can this be nurtured/strengthened?
• School ownership was important in the first two waves and probably is now too – How can this be productively conceptualized and operationalised? (p. 5-6)

There may be applications to rural Network schools related to these unresolved and unresearched issues. We offer these observations as a tentative beginning:

Context specificity and common cause Many rural schools are interested in using community members in the learning/teaching programs as the Haida school is doing. Many are also interested in developing visual forms of resources through materials such as the Haida picture cards or locally developed “sense of place” materials based on the picture-word induction model strategy. During the 2004-2005 school year it will be interesting to see which of these strategies “travel” and which remain exclusively local.

Level synchronizing How can classroom teaching and learning be strengthened at the same time as the school leadership is strengthened? From our current perspective the best way to do this is to assume from the beginning that the development of both roles (teacher and principal) needs to take place at the same time and together. This approach has been embraced in rural schools as it builds on the historical strength of teamwork found in rural communities. Focusing on only one group – whether teachers or principals -will ensure non-sustainability.

Achieving results reliability According to the OECD report, Learning for Tomorrow’s World – First Results from PISA2003:

Students do not passively receive and process information. They are active participants in the learning process, constructing meaning in ways shaped by their own prior knowledge and new experiences. Students with a well-developed ability to manage their own learning are able to choose appropriate learning goals, to use their existing knowledge and skills to direct their learning, and to select learning strategies appropriate to the task in hand. While the development of these skills and attitudes has not always been an explicit focus of teaching in schools, it is increasingly being explicitly identified as a major goal of schooling and should, therefore, also be regarded as a significant outcome of the learning process. This is particularly so as, once students leave school, they need to manage most of their learning for themselves. To do this they must be able to establish goals, persevere, monitor their progress, adjust their learning strategies as necessary and overcome difficulties in learning. Therefore, while understanding and developing strategies that will best enhance their learning will be a benefit for students at school, even larger benefits are likely to accrue when they learn with less support in adult life. (p. 141)

The report goes on further to make comments regarding the importance of learners controlling the learning process:

Good learners can manage their own learning and apply an arsenal of learning strategies in an effective manner. Conversely, students who have problems learning on their own often have no access to effective strategies to facilitate and monitor their learning, or fail to select a strategy appropriate to the task in hand. Control strategies through which students can monitor their learning by, for example, checking what they have learned and working out what they still need to learn, form an important component of effective approaches to learning as they help learners to adapt their learning as needed.” (p. 141)

Our observations of the rural and other Network schools placing a major focus on assessment as and for learning is that this focus shines a very clear light on the learning strategies area and drives principals and teachers quickly towards thinking about strengthening the metacognitive abilities of their students. We know of no other focus that does this as strongly.

School improvement and results integration A fifth unresolved issue raised by Clarke, Harris and Reynolds relates to enhancing school capacity to share and extend good practice.  They ask: “How can this be nurtured/strengthened?” Our experience with the rural Network schools suggests the important of sustaining the interest and providing right sized support. As gains are achieved it is important to invest in ongoing and continuing learning for the adults in teaching, support staff and formal leadership roles. Building receptivity to an inquiry model is engaging rural educators in learning about the positive differences that can be made in a variety of settings.

School ownership It is critically important that the ownership for results belongs to the school team. This can be a challenge for those providing both the pressure and the support to this work. Other levels and roles will want to claim the results if they are positive. The experience in the Network is that building and retaining school ownership is done best by providing ongoing opportunities for school teams to publicly tell their own story for respected peers, colleagues, parents, and their community. Our observation is that it is important to stress honest owning of difficulties as well as successes. It is vital that the trust built through Network membership provides a safe environment for schools to explore all facets of their improvement efforts.

What Does A Network Of Schools Using Inquiry Have To Offer Rural Schools?

From our work with the Network of Performance Based Schools, we believe that a networked inquiry approach has the following dimensions to offer rural schools serving students living in remote and sometimes economically challenging communities:

1. Dignity Rural schools get to participate in a broad based inquiry community and they get to generate interesting and context-specific “solutions”. The involvement of Haida elders as language teachers using local nature picture cards in the Queen Charlotte Islands is a productive example of this idea.
2. Curiosity and Intellectual Independence Rural community members are used to having to figure things out in circumstances that would baffle and defeat many urban dwellers. An approach through inquiry is a natural style fit.
3. Connection Rural schools have a way of connecting with a broader community of like-minded – and different – communities throughout the province. The use of peer guided reading tutoring in a suburban school has natural links to work in rural schools. As well the involvement of the community through shared reading experiences in a similar rural community provides a mental model of a structure that works.
4. Timely Learning Rural schools have the guarantee that at least annually (and more often if they use the website and list serve) they will have the opportunity to learn from other rural communities around the province either through regional case study “celebrations” of learning findings or through reading the case studies of other schools.
5. Recognition Often public attention is disproportionately paid to issues of urban education and schools. The opportunity to have the work of rural schools known and to see the work of rural educators as a source of advancing knowledge for educational peers rather than a “less than” paradigm is unique. This may sustain the will to keep going in the face of significant challenges.
6. Leadership Cultural “Fit” The teamwork built into the network design – of teachers and principals working together on behalf of learners – without worrying about roles and positions – is a natural fit with the way rural educators already work.

What Might We Learn More About From This Expanding Rural Inquiry Community?

We offer the following questions as possible areas for future study:

Formative Assessment

Does a persistent and sustained focus on formative assessment cut through and “lift above” the defeat that rural principal, teachers, communities and students often feel when they are on the receiving end of “league table,” summatively based rankings from institutes/media? Does this improvement approach, by providing a self-monitoring, thoughtful assessment that can be used daily with learners to build success and regularly with teachers to discuss gains, strategies and midcourse corrections, give educators greater motivation and confidence to pursue unique local solutions to learning challenges? Is there evidence that rural schools cannot get large scale, consistent, sustained, positive educational change results unless formative assessment is at the core of the change process? (There seems to be some evidence in the literature and in practice that always relying on external sources of “data” diminishes internal motivation and local integrity and leads towards performativity and/or passivity.)

Inquiry

The language of educators (inquiry) and the language of policy makers (accountability) often seem to be contradictory and mutually exclusive. What role can inquiry and the language of teamwork, community, strategies and evidence play in acting as a counterforce to the current global language of goals, outcomes, measures, data, accountability, monitoring and supervising with their connotations of rationality, control, power, mastery and urgency? Can thoughtful teams of educators, parents and students make the language of formative assessment, inquiry, and individual “story” an important one in both the local and broader contexts?

As most theoreticians (Elmore, Fullan, Hargreaves) about change have noted, it is impossible to create large-scale reform without genuinely engaging the adults working directly with learners – support staff, teachers and principals. One of the unseen powers of an inquiry approach is that the language is “natural” to those in a learning culture. Can the speakers of the two “languages” learn to communicate respectfully with each other in a way that is productive for learners? Speakers of both languages want success for learners but they are often speaking at cross-purposes – educators because their context is personal and policymakers because their context is policy/political.

What role can an inquiry-networked strategy play in sustaining adult and student learning? Can curiosity drive positive school change? A potential strength of inquiry is that it has almost a natural sustainability factor built into it – the pursuit of genuinely engaging questions lasts over time, space and place. New questions emerge and previous questions “travel” with the curious inquirer to new settings. Now that this inquiry community is six years old we have had the opportunity to observe how the questions shift over time within a single school setting. Often the question becomes more focused as the involvement broadens.

Does an inquiry approach create new forms of “micro” change? One interesting offshoot of the inquiry approach in British Columbia has been the formation of small, self named research teams. One example is “the Trilogy”, a set of three small schools in one northwestern rural district that works as a self-managing learning team. These micro networks share inquiries, energy, improvement strategies and results.

Change

Should we be thinking about “going to scale” in a different way – more as a lateral, networked classroom and school out model and less exclusively as a top down, bottom up model?

Thinking

Can a focus on inquiry as the driving force in professional and learner development place teaching for thinking at the center of the learning process for adult and young learners?

Can placing a direct and explicit value on forms of professional and staff development designed to develop thinking help to avoid the perils of the scripted programs with their unpleasant unintended outcomes of reduced teacher morale and poor professional retention?   Work by Spillane and his colleagues draws from the study of distributed thinking and provides a useful emerging model for the development of disciplined and critical leadership thinking.  Further, their work reinforces the necessity for deep learning to take place at the school level. Spillane, Diamond and Jita point out in their paper Leading Instruction: the Distribution of Leadership for Instruction:

The past decade has witnessed extraordinary efforts to improve the quality of instruction in US classrooms, with raised expectations for students’ academic work leading to increased expectations for teachers’ instructional practice, expectations that imply substantial change for existing classroom instruction.

To achieve these ambitious goals, national and state standards have been deployed, and many states have built new assessment systems aligned with these standards. These initiatives represent an extraordinary marshalling of incentives and resources in the cause of more intellectually rigorous pedagogy. Still, because of the magnitude of changes envisioned by reformers, most local educators will have to learn a great deal to grasp the substance of the reforms and their entailments for practice. For a majority of teachers, much of the learning essential for successful implementation of recent instructional reforms will have to be initiated and supported at the school level. It is difficult to imagine how state and district staff, given their limited resources and distance from classrooms, would ever be able to motivate and support this sort of teacher learning on their own. (2002:23)

As Network schools develop their own focused inquiry, they seek professional learning opportunities and support both from within their own school and from schools across the network. It has become apparent that one of the most powerful forms of professional learning for these educators occurs when it is focused on the actual work of their students. 

A second question relates to the role of visual thinking and the possibility of visual thinking finding a place of greater prominence in school improvement work. As Network schools have followed their inquiries they have learned more about the importance of oral language development for all learners but especially for vulnerable learners. By pursuing this insight they have discovered the power of visual forms of learning/instruction and visual forms of evidence display. Photographic and video journal evidence is evolving naturally as a way of communicating results and metacognitive growth.

In conclusion, we are suggesting that a networked inquiry strategy offers an interesting set of possibilities for researchers and practitioners interested in developing a ‘third way’ of rural school improvement. We believe that there is much to learn from and with these schools that, with an emphasis on formative assessment, teamwork across roles, a genuine inquiry orientation, and public sharing of results, are in the process of building vibrant learning connections in their small, remote, and lively rural communities.

References

Black, P, and Wiliam, D. (1998) Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment. Phi Delta Kappan. 10: 139-148.

Black, P. Harrison, C. Lee, B. & Wiliam,D. (2002)  Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom. London: Kings College.

Clarke, Harris and Reynolds AERA, 2004  Challenging the Challenged: Developing an Improvement Programme For Schools Facing Extremely Challenging Circumstances

Costa, A. & Kallick, B. (2000) Habits of Mind. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Cuttance, P. (2001) School Innovation: Pathway to the Knowledge Society. Canberra, Australia: Department of Education, Training, and Youth Affairs.

Earl, L. (2003) Assessment as Learning – Using Classroom Assessment to Maximize Student Learning. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Earl, L., and Katz, S. (2005) Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind: Assessment For Learning, Assessment As learning and Assessment Of Learning, in press.

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Elmore, R. (2003) A Plea for Strong Practice. Educational Leadership. 61 (3). 6-10.

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Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the Knowledge Society. New York: Teachers’ College Press.

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Kaser, L., and Halbert, J. (2004) Networks of Inquiry for School and District Improvement. Paper presented at Rotterdam, International Congress of School Improvement and Effectiveness.

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Spillane, J.P., Diamond, J.B., and Jita, J. (2003) Leading Instruction: the Distribution of Leadership for Instruction. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(1), 1-14.

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Willms, J.D. editor. (2002) Vulnerable Children. Edmonton, Alberta: The University of Alberta Press.

Relevant websites

British Columbia Network of Performance Based Schools: www.npbs.ca

British Columbia Student Classroom Assessment Performance Standards: www.bced.gov.bc.ca/perf_stds/

The term aboriginal is used to include people of First Nations, Métis, or Inuit ancestry.
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