George Walker’s weblog

Oxfam has a rather good second hand bookshop in Cardiff so whenever I am there for meetings at our curriculum and assessment centre in Peterson House I try to find time to call in.  As well as the usual shelves of paperback fiction, there are many more unusual items if you care to search for them and there is also a small, locked glass cabinet in which I recently saw…but it was far too expensive.

Then I went back a month later and it was still there and, after all, it cost less than a few tanks full of petrol and, after all, it was Oxfam and not some seedy second hand book dealer and, after all, it was one of the first books I ever read in a serious study of education.

So I am now the proud owner of a first edition (1861) of Herbert Spencer’s classic collection of essays entitled Education.

Spencer (1820-1903) was a British philosopher and sociologist.  Largely self-taught (turning down a place at Cambridge University) he was an ardent supporter of Charles Darwin and it was he, not Darwin, who first used the expression “survival of the fittest.”  Not surprisingly, then, he applied evolutionary theory to philosophy, psychology and sociology, and to education.  The four essays are entitled What knowledge is of most worth, Intellectual education, Moral education and Physical education, and the uncompromising tone is set at the outset by the question, “Of what use is it?”

Well, all this appeared nearly 150 years ago, but Spencer’s ideas have given me a helpful peg on which to hang some recent thoughts.  In October, IBAEM organized a regional conference in Barcelona which, for the first time, challenged science teachers of the Middle Years Programme and the Diploma Programme to work together on issues of continuity.   Not easy, and I know from bitter experience how high school teachers of linear subjects like science and mathematics tend to boss their junior colleagues about, telling them what and how they should teach.

The handed-down instructions tend to be of two different kinds.  First the guilt-inducing: “If you don’t teach them this, followed by this, finishing up with that before they reach us, then please don’t expect us to sort out the mess before they sit their examinations”.  Then there is the patronising: “If I were you, I wouldn’t bother to introduce that concept at all; much better to leave it so we can do it properly.”   (I was once a curriculum deputy head of a 9-13 upper school in the UK which received its new students from six different 5-8 middle schools and the preceding quotations were the staple diet of our school liaison meetings.)

What does Spencer have to say about all this?  His first thought (in the second essay) is to draw attention to the parallels between a system of education and the social state in which it exists.  Thus he could see the growing impact of Protestantism, political liberty and free trade in nineteenth century Britain reflected in less harsh discipline, more recreation and a growing awareness of the unfolding mind of the school child.  Today, our science education reflects its changing social status, which has moved from a sense of triumph (when I was at school) to speculation (when I started teaching it) to the current period of atonement.  I wonder whether there is a shared perception of the role of science education amongst teachers of the different age ranges.

Looking now at the actual process of education, Spencer insists on the substitution of principles, built up from individual instances, for rules learned by rote.  Now this is the pure Nuffield philosophy that I grew up with but I suspect Spencer is concerned with the process of induction whereas science makes progress through hypothesis and deduction: a scientific hypothesis is set up in order to be demolished.  I wonder if all teachers convey to their students the provisional nature of scientific principles.

Finally, Spencer writes

In the mastering of every subject some course of increasingly complex ideas has to be gone through…which, in any true sense, is impossible without they are put into the mind in the normal order.

Today we might call it a spiral curriculum or scaffolding or constructionist theory but essentially it acknowledges the simple truth that learning requires clear signposts to indicate where it has come from and where it is going next.  Otherwise, in Spencer’s words, it will be received with apathy or disgust…unless the pupil is intelligent enough eventually to fill up the gaps himself.  Agreeing where and how to erect those signposts is perhaps the most important task of liaison between the Middle Years and the Diploma Programmes.

I’m glad I went back to the Oxfam shop!

George Walker

A few weeks ago I was in Stockholm where I attended a welcoming reception at the city hall, famous for hosting the ceremony each December at which the Nobel prizes are presented.  Since then, a visit to the University of Adelaide reminded me that one of its most distinguished alumni, Lawrence Bragg, achieved a double-first in Nobel prizes: he and his father, William, are the only father-and-son prize winning partnership and, at the age of 25, Lawrence remains the youngest ever Nobel laureate.

The Nobel prize for physics came in 1915, in recognition of their pioneering work in the development of the analytical technique of X-ray diffraction and with it the birth of solid state physics, and Lawrence received the news in France, in the trenches.  He finally collected the prize in 1922 but his father did not turn up at the ceremony in Stockholm; all pleasure and pride had been destroyed by the death of his other son, Bob, at Gallipoli just a few weeks before the prize had been announced.

I heard Sir Lawrence Bragg lecture at the Royal Institution in London in the late 1950s when I was in the sixth form at school.  By now he was a grand old man of science and he had left behind an unhappy period at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where he had been sucked into the unseemly squabbling between Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin over the controversial discovery of the double helix of DNA (the first three, but not Franklin who died, would win their Nobel prizes in 1962).

Bragg’s lecture was brilliant and I can still remember much of its structure, many of its experiments and its sheer panache.  The subject was radioactivity, which was too dangerous to explore in any practical way in a school laboratory, but here we could see it all happening on the floor of the Royal Institution in a series of experiments we had read about but never expected to see.  It remains one of the most memorable presentations I have ever witnessed and, looking back, I recognize its profound impact because it was one of the factors that contributed to my decision to study chemistry rather than music at university.

In fact it was not a difficult decision.  In the 1950s science seemed to have all the answers: astronomy was explaining the past; the present offered a huge choice of well-paid scientific jobs and the future would be taken care of by nuclear energy.  Fifty years later it all looks rather different and we are seeing a worrying flight from science in schools and universities.  The sciences (Group 4) are no longer the most popular subjects in the IB Diploma Programme, having been overtaken by the humanities (Group 3) in 2001.  Although the quality of high-performing science students is being maintained, the ‘tail’ is growing longer and longer with nearly a third of all students obtaining a failing grade in their chosen science subject.

A reason for the malaise might be the disappearance of the magic and mystery that attracted me to the subject and was so powerfully present in Bragg’s description of radioactivity.  I still keep on my desk a beautifully shaped glass retort or alembic.  It reminds me how my chemistry teacher at school promised that one day we would use one in our experiments.  We never did but the idea was enough to make me want to study a subject that was evidently still largely concerned with turning base metals into gold.    It is many years since I taught a science lesson but I suspect much of the mystery has gone, replaced by a fatal dose of social responsibility.  Every science teacher should be presented with Oliver Sacks’ wonderful biography Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (published by Picador) to be reminded of the sometimes irresponsible excitement of doing science and of the essential part it plays in the world’s narrative of growing human potential.

George Walker

Postscript
An interesting article related to the above has recently been published by The Guardian. Readers can find this at:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1642253,00.html

George.

I have been in Adelaide, South Australia (as my earliest readers will remember) and having a day free to recover from jet-lag I headed out to the zoo to see the koalas.  Actually ‘headed out’ is the wrong expression because the city is so wonderfully compact, protected on all sides by jealously-guarded parkland, that you can get almost anywhere on foot.

I have a thing about koalas, perhaps having been brought up on a series of books about Wonk, a rather lovable and mischievous example (does anyone know what happened to Wonk?) and I shall never forget my first visit to Australia some years ago when my hosts, Ross and Jan Milliken, took me to Healesville Sanctuary outside Melbourne to satisfy a lifetime’s curiosity.  And there they were, just as I had imagined, frustratingly perched in the tops of the blue gums, but a cleverly constructed aerial walkway enabled me to look them straight in their sleepy eyes.  Now I have to top up my koala experience on each visit to Australia so the memory persists until the next time.

Come to think of it, working in the field of international education has provided many memorable wildlife experiences.  I remember canoeing with Brad Richardson among the alligators and ospreys of Florida and then driving across the state (to a school graduation) where we saw pelicans flying over the Gulf of Mexico.  Having only previously seen them in zoos, I thought they were earthbound: hence the need for those oversized beaks.

In India I have got up early with David and Veronica Wilkinson to look for – and find – wild peacocks in the grounds of Mahindra United World College.  I have stayed up late in Singapore with Jeff and Kathleen Thompson to visit the nocturnal zoo in order to seek out a tiny saucer-eyed tarsier of almost the same iconic status as the koala since I remember seeing a picture of one as a boy on a stamp I collected from, I think, Sarawak.

In Kenya I have driven past herds of zebra, antelope and giraffe with John Mbuthi and Zhanna O’Clery on the way to Olasiti Senior Secondary School in the Rift Valley but why is this any different to passing herds of cows in rural Switzerland?  And what about those rare white camels (stolen from a Saudi sheik, said the bus driver) I saw nosing around the stores in a small town on the road from Amman to Baghdad?  Are they still there?  Never mind the camels, is the town still there?

But my abiding memory of the effortless superiority of animals over humans takes me back to India, driving back into the urban chaos of Mumbai off the expressway that leads down the Western Ghats from Pune.  The traffic ahead has come to a sudden halt.  Another accident?  More road works?  No: it’s just an elephant being ridden down the dual carriageway back into town.

Next to the koalas in Adelaide Zoo are the wombats, alas a much less glamorous marsupial.  I am reminded that the pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, kept a wombat as a pet.  Nor is this entirely irrelevant because, had he lived 150 years later, DGR would certainly have studied the IB Diploma Programme, as a pupil at Kings College School, Wimbledon, and no doubt would have written an extended, and probably illustrated, essay on the animal.

George Walker

We have been having discussions recently about putting the IB Diploma Programme online, trying to make it less school-bound, less dependent on where you happen to live. One of the barriers preventing access to an IB programme is the way it is currently confined to authorized IB World Schools and despite double-digit expansion these are still very thinly spread around the world – as my daughter (in parent mode) keeps reminding me.

The IBO has been dipping a number of toes into the waters of distance learning in recent years, accumulating experience through its online curriculum centre (OCC), distance teaching between partner schools in Finland and a Diploma Programme subject (standard level economics) offered online in a trial involving four schools in the USA and Latin America.

Recently, a typically powerful IB mixture of staff and external advisers (all giving us their time voluntarily) met to discuss the concept of an IB Open International College. There was broad support for the idea but unanimous concern for maintaining the same distinctive core values online as we strive to encourage through the conventional teaching of our programmes.

These values are clearly expressed in our mission statement and they have been recently expanded and developed into the new IB learner profile which promises to become one of our most important guiding documents (its origins, incidentally were in the Primary Years Programme: an interesting example of bottom-up influence). “They live a life of integrity and honesty, with a strong sense of fairness, justice and respect for the dignity of the individual, groups and communities…. They show empathy, compassion and respect towards the needs and feelings of others…They are accustomed to seeking and evaluating a range of points of view, and are willing to grow from the experience…They understand the importance of physical and mental balance and personal well-being for themselves and others…”

Until quite recently, such aspirations would have seemed an inappropriately fuzzy distraction in the context of a challenging academic curriculum, a soft target for the political right. Today, educating good citizens is widely perceived as every bit as important as providing them with the knowledge and skills to earn a living. Of course, there is nothing new in this; it just seems that we have put it to one side for a generation or two and it has taken the work of people like Howard Gardner and Daniel Goleman to bring the concept of emotional intelligence to the attention of both the academic and the business world. See, for example, Goleman’s article Leadership That Gets Results in the Harvard Business Review of March-April 2000 and Patrick Sherlock’s article Emotional intelligence in the international curriculum in the Journal of Research in International Education of December 2002.

The new challenge to the IBO is to ask how these values might be inculcated ‘at a distance’, ‘remotely’, ‘online’, ‘by e-learning’. And being forced to think about it is no bad thing because in the environment of conventional schooling we tend to assume that much of it happens through an unmediated experience of the institution’s hidden curriculum, which has no obvious online equivalent.

I am no expert in the area of values education but it seems to me that we shall need to create identifiable communities, coming together for a purpose, with which the student can regularly interact. These might include locally based face-to-face peer support groups, face-to-screen video conferencing and visionless chat room exchanges. Clearly, the IBO has a special capacity to inject a strong international dimension into all this and one can imagine the potential richness of worldwide online lessons on the Theory of knowledge.

And there my musings end. Not because I have exhausted the potential of this wonderful opportunity for the IBO, but rather to give you, the readers of this blog, the chance to tell me what you think. I welcome any comments, positive or likewise, on the theme. They can be posted by selecting the Add Comment link found at the bottom of this page. I’m not able to respond individually to what is said, but you have my assurances that all feedback will be taken into account as the vision of the IB Open International College evolves.

Thank you,

George Walker

Wherever disaster strikes – man-made or natural – there is a good chance that the IBO, with schools in 121 different countries, will be touched by it.  Alas, for some of our schools, disaster is simply daily business as usual, and I will never forget the letter I received from the IB coordinator of a West Bank school describing how his students had zig-zagged their way to their IB examinations that year in order to avoid sporadic gunfire.  It reminded me of the experience of my older brother, sixty years earlier, regularly taking refuge in the nearest safe house when the air raid sirens caught him on his way to primary school where we lived just north of London.  Nothing seems to change.

For other schools disaster comes out of a cloudless blue sky and the tsunami catastrophe was such an example.  But here the normal situation was reversed because no IB World School was directly affected.  Instead, our schools throughout the world offered immediate help – in cash and perhaps more importantly in kind.  As I write more than 150 partnerships have been established between IB World Schools in 26 different countries and schools in the tsunami-affected areas of Indonesia and Sri Lanka.  If these partnerships are sustained and developed they could be the start of a really significant new development for the IBO.

It is usually the regional office that receives the first news of disaster and this was true for hurricane Katrina.  Ralph Cline, head of school services in our New York office was quick to react, offering immediate help.  But the immediate need is never clear, and in any case most of our schools in the worst affected areas were out of communication.  The same was true following the tsunami, and again following the Bali bombings in 2002 which killed several IB teachers who had arrived early on the island in order to attend the IB Asia-Pacific regional conference.  The kind of help that we can offer follows some time after the waters have receded, the worst damage has been repaired and some kind of infrastructure restored.  Nonetheless, I believe schools are sustained through periods of tragedy by the knowledge that others are thinking of them and empathizing with them.  I remember a terrible case of an avalanche engulfing students skiing in Canada, wondering if I could possibly have matched the exemplary behaviour of its head coping in such circumstances.

Understandably, one of the first questions following any serious dislocation to a school’s routine is “what about the effect on our student’s education and especially on their IB Diploma Programme examinations?”  And here, although the strong temptation is to give reassurances that no one need worry and that all will be well, we do have to be careful.  A procedure has been established to handle these cases but it is never easy to compare the impact on a student’s performance of an earthquake that shut the school a year earlier with a car crash that killed the student’s best friend on the day the examinations started.  Sadly, tragically, all these things happen, and many, many more.  Our consistent advice, tough though it always sounds at the time, is to try to get the student to sit the exam, however upset they may be.  In the absence of some evidence from external assessment and a sufficient percentage of total marks, it is very unlikely that we shall be able to award a grade.

On the occasion when a candidate has completed all assessments, but has been affected by unforeseen circumstances, we can apply a compensating factor and one of my abiding memories of the IBO – because I have attended all the final award committee meetings that review these cases – is of the thought, care, compassion and agonising that goes into these decisions.

George Walker

One of my most satisfying tasks as director general is to sign the letter that confirms a school’s authorization to teach one of the IB programmes. I can usually only guess at the hard work – all those phone calls, meetings, workshops, reports and visits – that lies behind the letter and the supporting material that Celia, my PA, puts on my desk, but I do know what excitement its arrival in the school will cause and with what pride the official certificate will be framed and prominently displayed.

A couple of weeks ago I signed something new: the first authorization of the shorter Middle Years Programme (MYP) option, in this case a three-year programme for a school in Zagreb. I did so with a mixture of satisfaction (heaven knows, we have been working long enough to create greater MYP flexibility) and some disappointment because, as Luz Maria Gutierrez (the MYP manager in the IB region of Africa, Europe and the Middle East), explained to me, the school had previously been in partnership with a senior high school in order to offer the full five-year MYP. Now the partnership was breaking up and each school was going its own way.

I wonder what that partnership meant (the schools are some distance apart) and what actually happened on a Monday morning that improved the quality of education in both schools. Indeed, I wonder what any ‘partnership’ between two or more schools really means in practice beyond a general feeling of mutual solidarity. The Zagreb partnership had arisen out of necessity, as a way of putting together the necessary five years of the MYP but the IBO has also deliberately encouraged a number of partnerships. In Finland, for example, an experienced IB World School in Oulu has successfully helped to teach IB Diploma Programme students on-line in a partner school in Rovaniemi, far to the north (the partner school has since been fully authorized itself). In Kenya, five IB World Schools in Nairobi have organized a series of professional development workshops for the teachers in ten partnered state schools (this project has been supported by The Goldman Sachs Foundation). I am also aware of examples within sub-regional associations of IB World Schools informally mentoring partners in the process of authorization.

The schools-to-schools project has launched a series of new partnerships (more than 150 in 26 countries as I write) between IB World Schools and schools in Indonesia and Sri Lanka that were affected by the tsunami disaster and I believe we should follow their progress carefully. What do we expect from a partnership and what obligations does it bring: exchanges? Shared resources? Joint teaching? On-line links? We really don’t know, yet instinctively we are persuaded that two schools must be better than one and that each partner should have something to gain.

I believe the IBO is in a strong position to shed some light on the increasingly popular practice of school partnership and we are actively seeking funding to support a serious study.

George Walker

It can be helpful to see a familiar concept suddenly illuminated in a completely new context and it is often the novelist who provides the illumination.

At my wife’s insistence, I have just read Edith Wharton’s novel, The Children, and I’m glad I did.  It describes the behaviour of a group of seven children, aged from just a few months to 15 years, siblings and step-siblings, who are dragged from one Palace hotel to the next in the glamorous resorts of 1920s Europe – Venice, Cortina, Biarritz, Paris – unsure anymore of where they belong.  They have lost all contact with their places of birth and have only a passing interest in where they happen to be.  Completely lacking any roots, they have become self-reliant, competent in a variety of languages and desperately dependent on each other’s company.  Their only point of stability is a grandmother in New York whom most of them have never met.

In a book that was one of her favourites, but is little known today, Edith Wharton gives us a vivid early account of children whom today we would describe as Third Culture Kids (TCKs): they are detached completely from the culture of their passports, never long enough in their temporary place of residence to acquire a replacement culture, but instead they develop a new, third culture, whose distinctive features have been well researched.  For example, read Mary Langford’s chapter ‘Global Nomads, Third Culture Kids and international schools’ in International Education: Principles and Practice, edited by Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson (Kogan Page,1998)and also the article ‘Belonging, identity and third culture kids’ by Helen Fail, Jeff Thompson and George Walker in Vol 3 No 3 (2004) of the Journal of Research in International Education.

The TCK is well known to anyone who has taught in an international school.  In Wharton’s satirical novel, the parents and step-parents are the hedonistic, super-rich Americans of the Jazz Age, drifting aimlessly from one expensive source of pleasure and distraction to the next.  Today they have been replaced by hard-working international diplomats, civil servants and business people, but the children’s sense of isolation remains essentially the same.

Into these children’s drifting lives is suddenly thrown a middle-aged civil engineer, Martin Boyne.  Reluctantly, he becomes their adviser, their protector and their advocate in negotiations with their dysfunctional parents, whom he knew in his youth.  Boyne provides a bridge, a common feature in many of Wharton’s novels, between the values of the old and stuffy aristocratic New York (into which he is about to marry) and those of the new generation of can-do entrepreneurs represented by the boisterous energy and naïve optimism of the children.

For reasons that are still unknown, Edith Wharton decided to change the original happy ending and instead brings the sometimes hilarious novel to a bleak and lonely conclusion.  Even so, it was a huge popular success when it was published in 1928 but the critics did not like it, perhaps because they did not know how to handle the 46-year-old Boyne’s increasing infatuation for Judy, the 15-year-old leader of the children.  Such a relationship was taboo at the time and it is off-limits today, which may explain why this remarkable book still remains largely hidden in the shadows.  It is published by Virago Press (1985).

George Walker

I have a very important meeting coming up, and very important meetings produce a lot of worry and need a lot of careful preparation.  During two days in late September a group of the IBO’s most senior staff (18 of us from around the world) will try to agree on a draft operating budget (totalling about US$ 60 million) for 2006.

We are in for some tough negotiations but I hope it will turn out to be a positive learning experience for everyone.  I shall try to remember the advice of Fisher and Ury in their excellent book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Penguin 1983):

• Separate the issues from the people and be tough on the issues
• Try to get behind the positions people adopt to understand their interests – why they have adopted that position?
• Involve everyone in generating different options for resolving the problem
• Use objective criteria (‘You say this will lead to an improved service for schools – exactly how?’) to judge different options.

I shall also try to remember that the professional virility of senior staff is often measured by how they perform in the annual budget negotiations.  They are inevitably seen as the champions of their departments, but we can reduce the sense of personal exposure by trying to focus on the priorities of the organization as a whole.  This, after all, is what the process of strategic planning has been all about.

George Walker

I have been in Stockholm at the biennial conference of Nordic IB schools.  I am not really supposed to attend sub-regional meetings but I can never resist the Nordic invitation, perhaps because so many are state schools, so four years ago (two days after 9/11 - I remember it well) I was in Denmark and two years ago in Iceland.

George Walker

The IBO combines vision and pragmatism in equal measure so if you’re running low on one you can switch over to the other without any sense of guilt.

George Walker