Session Information
23 SES 11 C, Learning about Leadership Challenges and Strategies in Nationwide Education Reform: Twenty Years after Kazakhstan’s Independence
Symposium
Contribution
Introduction
The section gives an overview of the aims of the seminar. The papers in the symposium exploring different arenas of and strategies for educational reform. They constitute a reflection on a move to reform the educational system in Kazakhstan. The participants have all been involved in some capacity. Collectiively the papers aim to critically explore the question: what has been learned about leadership of reform in the last five years in Kazakhstan? It will examine different levels e.g. the national strategic, the school level, the higher education level and the classroom level. It will examine different sectoral interventions and strategies and reflect on their effectiveness.
The context
The strategies adopted all aimed to improve learning outcomes. They also had a common focus on developing greater institutional capacity for improvement in the next twenty five years. They are part of a national initiative often referred to as the ‘the Roadmap.’ This is a useful metaphor as a roadmap does not determine your destination. It allows you see one or more ways of reaching goals and helps you choose the route that makes the most sense for the time you have to make the journey and the modes of travel you can employ.
While the strategies look to and draw from international practices they also build on the best of Kazakhstan’s past and present policies and practices. There is a solid foundation underpinning its schools and colleges; historically high levels of literacy, near universal participation in schooling, a depth of expertise in physics and mathematics, gender equality in school completion and participation in post school learning.
This reflects a shared experience that it is seldom effective to simply copy and apply policies and practices from other settings. Policies do not always travel well across language and national boundaries. Uncritical importation of resources and practices does not always lead to effective implementation (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004 and Steiner-Khamsi and Stoipe, 2006.) Effective policies are usually grounded in the context of the country and build on existing values and norms.
The papers
The papers that make up this symposium develop these themes from different vantage points. The first looks the way the government determined a set of national priorities for education reforms and key interventions in different levels and sectors of education. It provides a backdrop for five papers focused on specific reform initiatives. One paper will examine strategies to strengthen higher education governance for more autonomous universities, two will analyse attempts to recast initial teacher education to support a new secondary school curriculum and a third will review the impact of action research techniques to guide school site improvement. A fourth paper offers an initial assessment of the effectiveness of a large scale program of professional development of existing teachers to promote student centered pedagogy. The fifth paper examines attempts to strengthen school leadership. The sixth paper examines the trilingual strategy and the final paper examines leadership.
The symposium will conclude with some reflections on lessons learned about the importance of leadership at all levels of the national education system.
References
Schreiner, M., (2012). Road Map Metaphor. Individual Counseling 21 September. Steiner-Khamsi,G. ed.(2004). The Global practices of Educational Borrowing and Lending. New York: Teachers College Press. Steiner-Khamsi, G. & Stoipe, I., (2006). Educational Import in Mongolia: Local Encounters with Global Forces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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