Developing Students’ Thinking in Civics Education as an Example of Scaling-Up HOT Across the School System

Abstract

This chapter describes a large-scale change effort in civics education, aimed at integrating HOT into the curriculum. Following a literature review, the chapter consists of two main parts. Part I provides a historical analysis, showing the bumpy road from policy to practice following rapid political shifts and less than optimal implementation of the desired instructional innovations. The second part discusses a 3-year period when there was an enhanced focus on implementing HOT in civics on a national scale. Some of the measures taken consisted of developing instructional leadership through intense PD on all levels; detailed design of assessment and learning materials; large-scale implementation of project-based learning and assessment; measures to preserve the fidelity of the message across levels of implementation; and sophisticated movement between central control and autonomy of educators on all levels. Together, the two parts of the chapter show the intricate factors that combined to form change in the state of teaching HOT in one school subject. Rather than focusing exclusively on successes, the chapter also gives a realistic sense of barriers and challenges. Although the details may diverge, similar challenges characterize any large-scale educational change process. This account gives an idea of what it takes to induce a system-wide change in substantive pedagogy in general, and in instruction of HOT in particular, across a whole school system. An extrapolation from the data explicates what sort of factors would be involved in scaling-up thinking-rich instruction across all school subjects.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the article: Zohar, A. & Cohen, A. (2016). Large-scale implementation of higher-order thinking (HOT) in civic education: the interplay of policy, politics, pedagogical leadership, and detailed pedagogical planning, Thinking Skills and Creativity 21, 85–96.

Introduction

Education for citizenship and democracy is increasingly viewed all over the world as an important and central role of education. Even countries that do not offer a long list of mandatory subjects that all students need to learn often define compulsory goals of civic education, based on the view that education for democracy and citizenship is essential for maintaining a democratic state. It consists of three main components: knowledge and understanding of relevant contents, civic dispositions and attitudes, and intellectual skills (Crick, 1998). The latter is closely related to the main topic of this book. Fostering students’ intellectual abilities is viewed by many as a crucial factor in preparing future citizens for sound participation in a democracy (Goodlad, 1984; Cogan, 1999; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004; Paul, 1992; Paul & Elder, 2000; Scheffler, 1973; Siegel, 1988; Gutman, 1987; Branson & Quigley, 1998). For instance, the British final report of the advisory group on citizenship (“The Crick Report”) stated that “Open and informed debate is vital for a healthy democracy…. Civics education should thus develop skills of reflection, inquiry and debate. It should help young people learn to argue soundly and effectively, think for themselves, solve problems and make decisions effectively” (Crick, 1998). All these elements are of course part of the definitions provided in Chap. 1 for higher-order thinking (HOT).

The literature, however, also points to a probable gap that is being created in many countries between the goals declared in policy documents and the actual situations in many schools. While the intent is to build a more intellectually active and demanding curriculum, the long lists of prescribed content that crowd the curriculum often prevent teachers from engaging students in active thinking. There is in effect an absence of empirical research on the extent to which civic intellectual skills are actually being taught in schools all over the world. There is also no systematic identification of how to overcome the barriers standing in the way of implementation of effective approaches for teaching such intellectual skills (MacKinnon, 2008). The fragmented evidence that does exist indicates that in many countries transmission of facts is more prevalent in civics education than the cultivation of intellectual skills (e.g., Paul & Elder, 2000; Westheimer, 2008; Yang & Chung, 2009; IES, 2007; Davies & Issitt, 2005). For instance, the results from the IEA 1999 Civics Education study conducted across 28 countries showed a gap between the stated curricula in many countries in which long lists of factual knowledge are to be conveyed, but only an hour or two a week of classroom study is allocated to them. This study also showed that the required factual knowledge is often not related to concepts that are meaningful to students (Torney-Purta et al., 1999).

An analysis of the US results from this international study show that the US international standing was stronger in civics HOT skills than in civics content. The performance of US students on the civics HOT skills subscale was higher than that of students in every other country (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2001). Yet, the NAEP 2006 study conducted in the USA showed different outcomes. In this study a larger percentage of students demonstrated basic-level knowledge of civics than knowledge that requires HOT (i.e., answering civics questions requiring analysis, evaluation, or taking and defending a position, IES, 2007). The disparity between the two tests can be explained by the fact that the IEA Civics Skills items are rather limited in their intellectual demands, while the demands posed by NAEP are more complex. Taken together, these findings show that even the US students who did well on the IEA Civics Skills items compared to students from other countries do not do well in civics test items requiring demanding intellectual abilities.

More recently, the 2009 International Civics and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) set out to investigate civics knowledge, attitudes, and engagement among lower secondary school students in 38 countries, as well as their teachers’ and school principals’ beliefs (Schulz et al., 2010). The findings show that most of the teachers and school principals regarded the development of knowledge and skills as the most important aim of civics and citizenship education. This component of knowledge and skills included, among other things, the promotion of students’ critical and independent thinking. The students’ ICCS assessment of civics knowledge showed that on average, across participating counties, only28% of students were at Proficiency Level 3, characterized by the application of knowledge and understanding to evaluate or justify policies, practices, and behaviors based on students’ understanding of civics and citizenship (Schulz et al., 2010).

In sum, although we do not yet have an accurate picture of how much teaching for thinking actually does take place in civics classes, the data indicate that this issue still requires additional attention from practitioners and researchers.

Chapter’s Goal and Leading Question

The goal of this chapter is to address the issue of large-scale implementation of teaching HOT in high school civics by looking at a specific case of implementing HOT on a national scale in civics education in Israel. The chapter centers on civics studies, i.e., on the part of civic education taught as a formal school subject. The goal is to analyze the implementation process, adopting a dual approach: first, the chapter will provide a historical analysis of relevant policy-making and political transformations. Then, the chapter will zoom in on one specific period in which elaborate efforts took place in order to implement a large-scale change process focusing on instruction and assessment through a civics performance assessment task. The leading question of this paper is: What can we learn from the specific case of large-scale implementation of HOT in civics education in Israel about large-scale implementation of teaching thinking in general?

In order to understand the significance of the processes described in this chapter, I will briefly describe some background information about the educational context within which the large-scale change process has been taking place. At the end of high school, students take matriculation exams in seven mandatory core subjects: language (Hebrew/Arabic), English (as a second language), mathematics, history, bible, literature, and civics. For each subject there is a National Subject’s Superintendent (NSS) who is responsible for policy making and for the practical sides of teaching in this particular subject. The NSS’s responsibilities include curriculum development, teachers’ professional development (PD), and student assessment. NSSs report to the Director of Pedagogy and work with a team of instructors who are part-time teachers. Instructors are considered “the long arm of the NSS” because they are the means by which the policy formulated by the NSS can actually make its way to individual teachers through school visits and frequent meetings with small groups of teachers to discuss instructional issues.

Historical Analysis: Civics Education in Israel Between 1995 and 2010 from the Perspective of Teaching Thinking

Figure 6.1 describes major junctions in civics education between 1995 and 2009. In what follows, I will describe each junction from the point of view of teaching HOT.

Fig. 6.1

Main events in teaching civics 1995–2009

The Kremnitzer Report and Instruction of HOT (1995–1996)

Until 1995 the civics curriculum in Israel was mostly fact-based (Ichilov, 2013). In 1995, an important policy making event took place in the context of civics education. The Minister of Education appointed a public committee (“The Kremnitzer Committee” – nicknamed after the name of the committee’s chair) to suggest a new policy for citizenship education. In those years the Israel Ministry of Education was characterized by liberal views that were expressed by its pedagogical policy on many issues. The murder of Prime Minister Rabin in November 1995 had put civic education at the center of public discourse because of a common feeling that Israeli society needed to enhance education for democracy and tolerance.

The Kremnitzer Committee wrote a detailed report consisting of multiple recommendations in several areas (Israel Ministry of Education, 1996). The report defined the goals of citizenship education as multidimensional, emphasizing the same three dimensions mentioned earlier. This means an emphasis on attitudes, values and skills, rather than only on knowledge, including an emphasis on education for active and responsible citizenship: “acquisition of knowledge, understanding, making judgments, and decision on social and political issues, internalization of the values of the state, the formation of a commitment to a democratic regime and willingness to protect it, the capability and desire to be an active, involved responsible citizen” (Israel Ministry of Education, 1996, section 4, p. 12).

A note about the relationship between facts, values, and critical thinking in civics education is in place here. The purposes of civics education are complex and particularly prone to be influenced by political ideology (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). This general assertion is particularly true for the Israeli school system that is characterized by diverse ideological groups and sectors. In addition to universal debates about the nature of education for democracy (such as whether the emphasis should be on educating a Personally Responsible Citizen, a Participatory Citizen, or a Justice Oriented Citizen; see Westheimer & Kahne, 2004 for more detail), there is a stormy debate in the Israeli society about the extent to which civics education should reflect universal versus national- particular values. This debate becomes especially turbulent because of the ideological streams that exist in the school system, each with its own notion of citizenship and democracy: secular Jewish, orthodox Jewish, ultra-orthodox Jewish, and Arabic. The Israeli civics curriculum is therefore often at the center of hot public debates characterized by severe value conflicts. A review of the content of these debates and the ways they have been affecting the civics curriculum over the years have been reported elsewhere (e.g., Avnon, 2013). A description and analysis of these debates are well beyond the scope of this paper. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that the focus on the critical component of civics education (Avnon, 2013) that is highlighted in this paper through the notion of HOT, is embedded within rich and quite stormy debates concerning what needs to be taught in terms of values and facts in the civics curriculum. These debates and the politics that surround them have strongly affected civics education over the years. Despite these debates, the Kremnitzer report attempted to capture a consensus that was agreed upon by most sectors for the duration of the period reported here.

The report’s practical recommendations concerning the formal high school civics curriculum included several elements: curricular changes in terms of concepts, facts, and ideas; more hours added to the teaching of civics, adding weight to civics in the matriculation exam (increasing its weight from a “one unit subject” to a subject that is worth “two units”); a requirement to engage students in an active citizenship project whose final grade will be calculated as one third of the final grade; and a requirement that instruction will be organized around a list of thinking goals.

Regarding this last point—education for thinking—which is the core of the present discussion, the report argues that civics education must construct students’ ability to:

• Analyse social or political issues in all their complexity…. This involves encouraging rational and moral thinking …

• Analyse issues addressing the tension between various human rights or between a human right and a public interest…

• Adopt a position on an issue in a controlled, reasoned, responsible manner…

• Engage in well-based, reasoned criticism….

• Debate issues in a civilized manner. (Israel Ministry of Education, 1996, p. 20)

Each of these points was further elaborated, reflecting the interrelationships between these abilities and HOT. For example, regarding the last point about debate, the report stresses that it requires ability for dialogic conversation, including the ability to justify one’s position with diverse justifications and to attend to counter arguments posed by others. Although the report does not use the concept of argumentation, it clearly views the essence of argumentation as a central goal.

The Bumpy Road from Policy to Practice in the Area of Implementing HOT in Face of Political Shifts (1996–2005)

Subsequent sections of this chapter center on the two latter recommendations of the Kremnitzer report: to engage students in an active citizenship project and to organize instruction around a list of thinking goals. As discussed earlier, policy documents worldwide state the need to foster students’ intellectual skills as part of preparing them for participation in a democratic society. However, the road from the policy advocating the implementation of HOT to the daily interactions between students and teachers was extremely bumpy in this context. In addition to common difficulties that always exist while attempting to bridge the gap between policy and practice, two specific factors were at play here. One concerns the inherent difficulties pertaining to any transition from a pedagogy centering on knowledge transmission to a pedagogy centering on fostering students’ thinking and deep understanding. The second is that, as explained earlier, policy in civics education may be even more susceptible to political transformations than other subjects (Fischer, 2014).

Immediately after its publication in 1996, the Israel Ministry of Education adopted the Kremnitzer report. It was decided to increase the number of hours for studying civics, to increase the weight of the matriculation exam, to write a new curriculum and a new textbook, to develop a pilot of the active citizenship inquiry project, and to increase the frequency of HOT questions in the matriculation exam. However, as explained in what follows, these decisions were only partially implemented.

The implementation of some of these decisions took a long time. For example, although drafts of the new curriculum had been published earlier, the updated civics curriculum was finally completed and published only in 2002 (Israel Ministry of Education, 2002). Following the report’s recommendations, the new curriculum indeed elaborated issues pertaining to teaching thinking strategies. For example, according to the curriculum document, “students should be able to:

• …Apply the principles and concepts they had learned for examining and evaluating the political and social reality.

• …Understand and analyze graphs, tables etc., present findings and draw conclusions from data.

• …Process information, categorize, compare, analyze and find connections.

• …Distinguish between facts and hypotheses and between facts and positions.

• …Formulate justified positions based on information.

• …Formulate supported and justified criticism. (Israel Ministry of Education, 2002, pages 10–11).

The new curriculum and the new textbook were written under the assumption that the increase in number of hours and in the weight of the matriculation exam are guaranteed. The new textbook (based on drafts of the new curriculum) was published in 2000. In order to adapt it to the ideas of the new curriculum, it consisted of a large foundation of facts, but also of a variety of thinking questions, mainly questions requiring students to analyze primary sources in a critical way, application questions (applying civics concept to current events), and questions that require students to make comparisons. The curriculum and textbook (designed for the scope of a “two unit subject” taught over 2 years) were designed in a spiral way. This means that in order to improve students’ deep understanding, complex concepts were re-visited several times in the course of learning. During this period the matriculation exam was indeed changed to include more HOT questions requiring comparisons, as well as analysis of current events and texts taken from daily newspapers.

Political changes are abundant in Israel and took place several times between 1996 and 2006. One of them however was especially crucial for the implementation process described here. In 2001 a new Minister of Education made new policies and announced new priorities that shifted away from civics education and from education for HOT. Consequently, between 2001 and 2006, pedagogy across the curriculum (not specifically civics) explicitly embraced a “back to basics” approach. The regime in which the new curriculum was about to be implemented was therefore quite different from the one in which the report was initially written. This obviously affected the implementation of the report’s recommendations. Although they were never officially rejected, their implementation was at best partial.

The new textbook had been in use since 2000, and new contents, concepts, and ideas were indeed taught in schools. The matriculation exam was indeed changed to include more questions requiring HOT. However, the shifting policies of the Ministry locked the large budget required for doubling the number of hours for civics studies, and it remained a “one unit” subject taught over 1 year only. Also, pedagogical support for the implementation of the new curriculum and for preparing teachers for the changes in the matriculation exam was limited.

Pedagogical Difficulties

These circumstances created major pedagogical difficulties in the schools. One crucial issue was a very “crowded” curriculum. Because the recommended addition of hours was never realized, there was a need to adapt the new curriculum to a smaller number of hours than it was intended. Consequently, the number of chapters of the new curriculum that schools were required to teach was reduced by approximately 50%. However, there was still insufficient time for teaching for deep understanding of many of the concepts in the new intended curriculum which were abstract, complex, and hard to understand. As mentioned earlier, the original curriculum was (wisely) constructed in a spiral way: many concepts were supposed to be revisited several times. However, in effect, because only half of the intended hours were allocated, the reduction of the number of chapters broke down the sophisticated spiral structure of the intended curriculum. Consequently, it was difficult for students to digest the complex concepts required for the exam. In addition, the budget for PD was cut down and most of the (limited) resources that were allocated to PD were used for developing teachers’ content knowledge. The resources addressing the curriculum’s HOT thinking goals were scarce, and even those usually did not address ways for teaching HOT in an explicit and systematic way. The pressure on teachers to cover a crowded curriculum while preparing students for the matriculation exam made them feel that they could not afford the time to engage students in deep thinking. Together with teachers’ lack of proficiency in teaching thinking, this state of affairs meant that only a few of the thinking goals actually reached the classroom. Yet, it should be noted that during this period, an active citizenship “performance assessment inquiry task” (PAIT) was developed and piloted in 16 schools.

Despite this situation, as mentioned earlier, thinking objectives did make their way into the matriculation exam. The fact that the exam required HOT that was not properly taught, together with the large amount of required content and complex concepts that students did not have enough time to digest, made the exam extremely difficult. As a result, for several years, the civics matriculation exam had the lowest mean score and highest rate of failure among all mandatory matriculation exams. Students began to think of civics as a “difficult” and frightening subject. This unintended consequence is clearly not a recommended formula for increasing students’ motivation to engage with civics nor for civics to become a popular topic.

In sum, a large gap existed between the intended and enacted curriculum, and little instruction of thinking actually took place in classrooms. Civics was perceived as an extremely “difficult” subject which in turn produced low students’ motivation. This state of affairs demonstrates the nature of the gaps between the educational policy that addressed HOT in an explicit way and the actual educational practice that reached the classrooms.

New Policies and Focused Implementation of HOT in Civics (2006–2009)

Then, in 2006, new elections once again brought about a new government and a new Minister of Education. Consequently, two new relevant policy decisions were made: the first pertained to strengthening civics studies and the second to teaching thinking across the curriculum. The new Labor Party Minister of Education decided to strengthen the school discipline of civics. Consequently, the recommendation made 10 years earlier, to increase the number of hours for high school civics, was finally adopted and financed, and a large budget for civics teachers’ PD was secured (see below).

The second policy decision consisted of adopting the “Pedagogical Horizon- Teaching for Thinking” across the curriculum. Implementation of pedagogies geared toward developing students’ HOT took place in 20 subjects (Zohar, 2008; Gallagher et al., 2012). In all these subjects, HOT strategies were incorporated into curriculum and learning materials, PD programs, and assessment. In civics this process enjoyed an especially strong momentum because it joined forces with the decision to strengthen the subject. The implementation of the “Pedagogical Horizon” reform could therefore be executed in civics in a particularly comprehensive way due to the extra funding and large-scale PD processes that followed the Minister’s decision.

Specific Pedagogical Activities That Took Place as Part of a Large-Scale Implementation Process

It is important to note that during the relevant period, I had been working as Director of Pedagogy in the Israeli Ministry of Education. In this role, I was involved in leading the system-wide implementation processes of the Pedagogical Horizon reform in general and in civics education in particular. This state of affairs has both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that my practical experiences allowed me to get hold of information and to gain insights that are rare for academic researchers. The disadvantage is of course the subjectivity of my interpretations of the events I am discussing.

In order to implement the Pedagogical Horizon reform in civics learning and instruction, that is, to enhance the frequency and quality of thinking activities, several specific pedagogical actions took place between 2007 and 2009 (Israel Ministry of Education, Office of Pedagogical Affairs, 2009).

• 1. Reducing the scope of the curriculum: In order for teachers to be able to devote time for extensive thinking activities in the classroom, there was a need to reduce the substantive scope of the curriculum. Although the number of hours was doubled, the extent of the original curriculum was reduced by 20%.

• 2. Developing a leadership team: The team consisted of the civics NSS and six senior instructors. That team had led PD for 22 additional instructors, who had in turn led the professional development of all civics teachers in the country and took leading roles in developing new learning materials and assessments.

• 3. Teachers’ PD: Most high school civics teachers (N = 2200) participated in PD designed to help teachers engage with HOT in their classrooms.

• 4. Constructing a website: An elaborate website was developed. All the resources developed for the PD courses (the course’s curriculum, lesson plans, and Ppts) were loaded onto the website, along with many additional instructional resources. The website was used for supporting instructors, teachers, and students.

• 5. Designing model learning activities: The leading team together with external experts, developed a set of learning activities and lesson plans that modeled how to integrate specific thinking strategies with specific topics in the civics curriculum, according to the infusion approach (Zohar, 2004, 2013). Working as a team, they collaboratively negotiated the form and content of HOT materials for civics studies. The first goal of these materials was to serve as learning materials for the instructors’ and teachers’ courses. Further goals were to help teachers implement these lessons in their classrooms and learn how to develop similar learning activities and lesson plans for additional topics. The activities surrounding the development of these materials had created a sense of ownership of all those involved as well as the development of a shared “language of thinking” (Tishman et al., 1995).

• 6. Changes in the written matriculation exams: The leading team analyzed matriculation exams of previous years to determine the cognitive levels of its questions. Following the findings showing that most questions required lower cognitive levels, gradual changes were made in the formulation of questions, in the cognitive level of the questions, and in the rubrics designed for scoring students’ replies.

• 7. Implementing a performance assessment inquiry task (PAIT): One of the most significant changes, however, was the implementation of the PAIT—an inquiry project addressing a practical civic problem that students carry out in small groups. The PAIT is a newer version of the active citizenship project recommended by the Kremnitzer committee. Although it had been piloted in 16 schools for several years, scaling it up to all high schools across the country was a major enterprise.

A detailed description of the implementation of all these activities is beyond the scope of this paper. Yet, in order to get an idea of the main principles of the implementation process, three activities will be described in what follows in more detail: the development of a leadership team, teachers’ PD, and the implementation of the PAIT.

Developing Instructional Leadership

The NSS’s Workshop

A significant step in implementing HOT in civics was the development of instructional leadership by creating widening platforms for civics leaders’ PD. The first platform consisted of the participation of the civics NSS in a long-term PD workshops designed for NSSs from many subjects. The idea to invest in long-term PD that centers on pedagogy for a group of such senior professionals was new to the system and quite revolutionary. The rational was to create a group of leaders among those who have already been working in key positions in the MOE, who would become knowledgeable about teaching and learning HOT and would also be motivated to devote time and energy to take on leadership roles during the implementation process. The workshop consisted of 150 academic hours, spread over three consecutive years. The number of participants in each year was approximately 25. Seven participants held a PhD degree, and all others held a master’s degree.

Participants took an active part in shaping the course’s curriculum: they brought up topics they wished to learn, shared their own work experiences, and led many of the sessions. This was done in order to accommodate the need of the participants to create a community of learners that have the time and the opportunity to reflect on their own practice and share the insights they had gained from it. Approximately 55% of the course’s hours were led by academic experts, and 45% of the hours were led by the participants who presented cases taken from their work, bringing dilemmas from the field to share with their colleagues. The intense discourse that followed had gradually created a shared language and meaning.

The workshop addressed the following main topics: what are HOT strategies, the general versus the infusion approaches to instruction of HOT, thinking and knowledge construction, teaching for understanding, metacognition, practical ways for applying metacognition in the classroom, teaching for transfer, learning about a variety of programs for teaching HOT, fostering specific thinking strategies (such as argumentation, posing questions, making comparisons), instruction of HOT to students with low academic achievements, educational technology and teaching HOT, inquiry learning, assessment of HOT, high stakes testing and teaching HOT, teaching thinking across the curriculum; principles of designing in-service PD for HOT, and finally, a peer workshop in which NSSs presented models that they designed and implemented in their respective school subjects as a means for receiving feedback and for mutual brainstorming (Israel Ministry of Education, Office of Pedagogical Affairs, 2009).

A Blend of Tightness and Looseness

One of the major characteristics of the process was a unique blend of tightness and looseness. Fullan (2007) addresses this issue as he discusses motivation for change (p. 43):

All change solutions… face the too-tight/too loose dilemma. If a situation is loosely formulated… the natural reaction is to tighten things. Command and control strategies do get results in these circumstances, but only for a short time and only to some a degree. If we then say that we need to give people more leeway—give them resources and trust them to do the right thing—the press for change is lost. In general terms, the solution to motivating people is to establish the right blend of tightness and looseness… to build both into the interactive culture of the organization.

In the case of the NSS workshop, the overall goal of the Pedagogical Horizon was presented in a rather tight and non-compromising way: transforming instruction in order to engage less in rote learning and more in tasks requiring thinking and deep understanding. Another aspect of “tightness” and control was that in order to keep to the stated goal, plans for implementation and requests for funding submitted by the participants were carefully screened. Only plans that aligned well with the overall goal of teaching HOT were funded. Participants received, however, much freedom in three main areas: (a) participation in the workshop was voluntary; (b) they participated in setting the overall goals of later stages of the workshop and in designing specific sessions; and (c), in effect, the specific goals for each school subject were only loosely defined. Consequently, NSSs were free to analyze the initial state of teaching thinking in their subject, to choose among diverse possibilities those thinking goals that they believed to be relevant and suitable to the overall needs of their subject, and to design suitable specific implementation plans (see below). The workshop thus presented a theoretical framework, a general practical orientation and practical skills in a rather tight way. The specific practical orientation and detailed plans, however, were left to the discretion of each participant. This contributed to the participants’ overall motivation and in particular to their sense of ownership, as will be demonstrated in more detail in the following sections focusing on civics.

Fullan (2007) and Hargreaves and Fink (2006) argue that most externally imposed reforms never get implemented properly because their designs are too inflexible to accommodate to the specific and varying needs of specific educational circumstances. Another benefit of NSS’s freedom to plan their own idiosyncratic implementation plan was the participants’ ability to tailor the change process to the multiple, specific contexts characterizing each school subject. According to Hargreaves and Fink, participants’ freedom to adapt the change process to their specific needs potentially contributed to the longevity and sustainability of the educational change under consideration.

The Medium Is the Message: Modeling the Culture of Thinking

Another characteristic of the workshop was that it modeled the culture of thinking. In a “thinking classroom,” the teacher’s role is less authoritative than in a traditional classroom. Her main goal is to facilitate thinking processes rather than to be the source of knowledge, and she is an active participant in her students’ quest for knowledge and understanding. In order for students to feel comfortable to express their views and to experiment with tentative ideas, the class atmosphere must feel “safe.” These characteristics of the culture of thinking were modeled during the workshop. This workshop culture served as the model for many additional workshops, including in civics, that NSSs later led for their senior staff and teachers.

Widening Circles: Capacity Building Across Multiple Organizational Levels to Increased Fidelity

The risk in wide-scale pedagogical change processes is what Spillane (2004) calls “the telephone game,” namely, that until the message travels through the various levels to reach the classroom, it becomes so diffused and distorted that it is no longer useful. The difficulty, then, is how to transport the message of an innovation in learning and instruction through the system with high fidelity. This can be done by leaders who develop other leaders (“the long lever of leadership”, Fullan, 2005, p. 27), i.e., careful attention needs to be paid to developing the leadership of others in the organization. Rather than happening automatically, this process needs careful planning.

Because, as described in other chapters, the Israeli school system is rather centralistic with respect to curricula, policy changes made by NSSs actually reach most schools in some form or other. Yet, in order not to fall into the trap of schools adopting external facets of the change process while abandoning its deep, substantive essence, it was precisely the illusion of a quick and “easy fix” transmitted in a top down authoritarian manner that the Pedagogical Horizon tried to avoid by the careful development of pedagogical leadership. From an organizational point of view, the NSS workshop was not an end in itself but a link in a carefully planned implementation process focused on PD of educators on various levels. This allowed to accurately transmit the messages involved in the PH across the system to increasingly widening circles (Spillane, 2004; Hargreaves and Fink, 2006; Fullan, 2005, 2007). The NSS workshop served as the basis for an “implementation fan” by preparing a group of informed and motivated key leaders (tier 1) of learning and instruction in diverse school subjects. In addition, four other professional development courses (of 56 h) for more junior leaders took place in order to create a pool of approximately 100 potential instructors in diverse school subjects (tier 2). Due to the small number of leaders in tiers 1 and 2, the PD in that level was generic, that is, professionals from diverse disciplines were studying together. However, the ensuing PD courses that were designed for widening circles of educators (tiers 3 and 4) were subject-specific (see below).

In the next implementation phase, each subject’s NSS and the instructors who participated in the 2nd tier workshop (with additional help from external experts) formed a leadership team. This team designed the specific implementation plan for each school subject, including the development of content-specific learning materials and model thinking lessons. Another role of each leadership team was to develop PD for additional instructors and leading teachers who would eventually be able to work with teachers (tier 3). Finally, all those who had participated in the PD of tiers 1, 2, and 3 were responsible for the PD of a large number of teachers (tier 4). Various elements from the NSS workshop (activities, guest lectures, power-point presentations, video clips, and additional learning materials) were passed on to tiers 2–4. In this sense, the “spirit” of the NSSs’ workshop as well as many of its specific activities served as a model that was replicated across the system, thereby contributing to preserving the fidelity of the PH message throughout the system. This description fits all school subjects, one of which is civics. A more detailed description of the widening platforms for PD of civics leaders is described in the following section.

Capacity Building for Civics Pedagogical Leaders on All Levels

Generation of the widening cycles of implementation through PD described in the previous section took place in all the subjects that had participated in the Pedagogical Horizon reform, including civics. The present section elaborates on how this process was actually carried out in civics (see Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2

Widening circles of implementation in civics PD

The civics NSS had participated in the intensive generic NSS’s PD workshop for 3 years (tier 1). In addition, six leading instructors had participated in a generic 1-year-long professional development course that was designed for leading instructors from several school subjects (tier 2). The NSS and the additional six leaders then formed a subject-specific leading team that engaged in developing new learning materials and assessments combining the principles of teaching HOT with the specific contents of the civics curriculum. The civics leading team (with some assistance from external experts) also led a PD workshop for additional 22 civics instructors (tier 3). Units from the PD workshops of tiers 1 and 2, as well as the subject-specific civics learning materials developed by the civics leading team, were applied in the tier 3 PD, thereby “preserving the coherence of the message” across leadership levels.

Following the PD that took place in tiers 1–3, these 29 civics leaders (the NSS, 6 leading instructors, and 22 additional instructors) became qualified to work on issues related to teaching HOT in civics studies. As noted earlier, instructors also teach part time. Their practical teaching experiences had contributed to their ability and motivation to adapt the teaching of thinking to diverse school environments in a flexible way. The leaders’ PD therefore harnessed pre-existing pedagogical expertise and administrative functions to create a pedagogical leadership infrastructure that would facilitate the scaling-up of PD addressing HOT to all civics high school teachers in the country.

Civics Teachers’ PD

As explained in the previous section, the 29 civics leaders formed the pedagogical infrastructure for PD of all high school teachers. In 1 year, a total of 1100 teachers participated in 34 PD courses of 28 academic hours (tier 4) that took place all over the country. In addition, an online course of 56 hours was developed. The instructors also visited schools and supported teachers in their classrooms. In the following years, the same leaders’ infrastructure was used for deepening the learning of the first cohort of 1100 teachers as well as to run courses for a new cohort of a similar number of teachers. Following this process, 4 years after the beginning of the development of the leadership team, almost all civics teachers in the country had participated in one of the civics HOT PD courses.

Teachers were motivated to participate in these courses by several incentives: first, participation in PD grants teachers in Israel points which eventually accumulate toward the qualification for pay raise. Second, the PD was part of a more holistic implementation process involving public discussion about the value of teaching thinking for twenty-first-century school graduates. Many teachers felt it was a valuable move and wanted to take part in this process. Third, part of the implementation process consisted of changes in the matriculation exam, including the introduction of the PAIT that consisted of 20% of the final civics grade (see below). Teachers believed that they needed the PD course in order to prepare their students for the new assessment (which was announced to become mandatory in 3 years).

In sum, numerous activities on both the structural-administrative and substantive pedagogical levels took place as part of implementing the HOT curriculum in civics. In terms of PD, a four-tier structure was developed. Rather than bringing in external experts to lead teachers’ PD, great care was taken to develop capacities of leaders who had already been in the system. In this sense, the implementation process benefited from pre-existing administrative and pedagogical resources and was able to involve a relatively stable group of leaders from within the system, thereby increasing the sustainability of the change process. Together with the fact that elements from the NSS workshops were reproduced in the PD workshops of tiers 2–4, this detailed plan of four tiers of PD contributed to transporting the message of the HOT innovation in learning and instruction through the various levels of the system with high fidelity. Careful attention to developing the leadership of three levels of leaders (i.e., the NSS, the 6 leading instructors, and the 22 additional instructors) was a prominent component in this process (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006; Fullan, 2005, 2007). Rather than happening automatically, this process indeed needed careful and detailed planning both in terms of the structural sides of the widening platforms for PD and in terms of the elaborate pedagogical body of knowledge addressed in all levels of the PD. Yet, the careful and detailed planning left plenty of room to the participators’ independent initiatives and creativity. Starting from the level of the NSS who led the implementation process, leaders at all levels, as well as teachers, were free to shape thinking-rich learning and instruction in civics as they saw fit. In this sense the implementation process was indeed a blend of tightness and freedom. Another expression of the principle of blending tightness and freedom will be analyzed in the following section describing the implementation of the PAIT.

Implementing the PAIT

General Description

One of the most significant changes in civics studies was the implementation during 2008–2012 of the “performance assessment inquiry task” (PAIT)—an inquiry project addressing a practical problem that students carry out in small groups. The PAIT needs to address a civic problem that is anchored in real life (taken from either the student’s local community or from a wider sphere such as district, town, or state) but also needs to be connected to some of the formal concepts anchored in the civics curriculum. Each group of students is required to define a concrete civic problem, to investigate it by using written sources and by collecting empirical data, to suggest several possible solutions, and to perform a process of decision making to select the best solution. Examples of problems students had investigated in the PAIT are illegal employment conditions of part-time working teenagers, disabled people accessibility to public institutions, or equal gender representation in public positions in local administration. The final grade for this task constitutes 20% of the final civics matriculation score. The scoring is carried out by teachers according to a rubric developed by the civics leadership team. Assessment is therefore school-based, but to maintain quality control, a sample of 5% of the schools is also scored each year by representatives from the MOE.

The goals and characteristics of the PAIT were planned with an eye to transforming the nature of traditional civics learning and instruction in a fundamental way. Rather than transmitting information and drilling students to the matriculation test, the teacher had become an entrepreneur who is leading students’ inquiry processes. The PAIT requires a considerable amount of HOT, and students were encouraged to become active and creative learners. Learning and instruction no longer consists of a linear, “one lesson for all,” but of dialogical learning, in which each group of students constructs a unique body of knowledge. The traditional strong control of the MOE with respect to the content of learning and assessment had to give way to a large degree of teachers’ and students’ autonomy. In order to facilitate such a transformation on a national scale, it was necessary to carry out detailed pedagogical planning.

Detailed Planning

Many resources and much attention to detailed planning on both the pedagogical and structural level were devoted to generate suitable PD workshops and school-based support for teachers. Deep and time-consuming discussions addressed the knowledge and skills teachers need in order to be able to guide students through the PAIT. Much time was also devoted to discussing issues concerning meaningful teachers’ learning. Detailed pedagogical planning was required for additional components of the change process such as crystalizing the guidelines for the PAIT learning process and for its assessment.

Although a pilot project for 16 schools had already been on its way for 5 years, there was still a huge gap between declaring the goals of the PAIT in policy documents, and clarifying the goals on a practical, detailed level that would enable each teacher to know what and how she actually needs to do in her classroom. The process of pedagogical planning required months of intense and detailed efforts, addressing questions such as: What should be the characteristics of the PAIT? What would be considered a desirable end product? What are the criteria for a low-level, medium-level, and high-level product? What is the advisable scale of the project in terms of the literature review and the required empirical work? What should be the length of the written paper? Which thinking strategies should be taught explicitly so that students would be able to apply them in their project? What should be the optimal number of students in each students’ group? These questions—all of which are examples of engagement in substantive pedagogy (for definition, please see Chap. 3)—demonstrate the kinds of detailed pedagogical planning that took place within the scaling-up of the PAIT from a pilot in 16 schools to a national scale.

Some of the deepest pedagogical discussions focused around the most appropriate means to assess the PAIT. In particular, much attention was devoted to the structure of the rubrics—to its categories and to the relative weight of the various parts of the project. The adaptation of rubrics was especially challenging to all parties involved in this process due to its level of openness and flexibility which were new to the system. This discussion connected to the previous questions regarding the characteristic of the task and the criteria for its quality, as well as to the planning of the PD (because of the need to prepare teachers for using the rubrics). In addition, it should be noted that planning was an ongoing process, because when the leading team had begun to receive feedback from the field, prior decisions were reconsidered, and plans were changed, sometimes considerably. For example, following the feedback from the field, the official mandatory rubrics has been updated three times in 3 years.

The discussions around these issues took place in several forums. The NSS with the six leading instructors led the process, but involved numerous additional participants: additional instructors, teachers, the MOE director of pedagogy, representatives from the MOE divisions of curricula and of matriculation exams, representatives from the teachers’ union, and representatives from the National Center for Evaluation and Assessment. The NSS and the leading team who were involved in all the discussions devoted much of their time to these discussions.

In sum, the implementation of the PAIT on a national scale required precise and meticulous pedagogical planning down to the smallest details regarding various facets of the task.

“Letting Go”

Despite the detailed planning, implementation of the PAIT involved a considerable degree of teachers’ freedom and autonomy because of the need to interpret the principles presented by the MOE and to adapt them to the context of individual schools in a creative way. Although the education system is quite centralistic, and its administrative culture typically involves strict instructions that teachers are used to obey, it became clear to all those involved that in this case commends and obedience will not work. The instructional goal of teaching for open and free thinking required teachers to let go of their teacher-centered, authoritative routines. Teachers’ difficulties and needs required the MOE to free both the ministries’ administrators and the teachers from the rigid guidelines and regulations that all those involved had been used to. It turned out that “letting go” was not easy for both sides.

At the beginning, teachers requested clear and detailed guidelines. They had often expressed a need to have clear definitions for what is it exactly that they are expected to teach, how to do it, and how to assess it. When the leading team had published documents that aimed to guide teachers by giving examples of various ideas for instruction, teachers treated them as mandatory ways of teaching and kept coming back to the leading team with questions about how to carry out the details of these ideas. Teachers did not feel confident to interpret the suggestions on their own, to adapt them to their own needs, or to create alternative ideas. As time went by and they had gained experience with the PAIT, they became more relaxed and generated more and more original interpretations and new ideas. For instance, as noted above, model lessons in the PD workshops were developed initially as exemplary models rather than as a mandatory curriculum. Nevertheless, it turned out that at first most teachers adapted them verbatim. Consequently, in the first 2 years, the topic of the PAIT in many classrooms all over the country was the conditions for teenage labor, because this was the topic of a main exemplary PAIT unit developed for the PD workshops. However, after they had taught the PAIT once or twice, teachers had begun to innovate by developing their own independent tasks in a variety of topics or even to encourage students to come up with topics that interest them. At the beginning, instructors and leading teachers had also expressed a wish for clear and detailed guidelines and control. For instance, they expressed a wish for very detailed and binding instructions for assessment, expressing a fear that in the absence of clear instructions, teachers will not engage in “serious” assessment, thereby compromising the quality of learning. After a while, they too became more relaxed and accepted the need to leave a wider space to teachers’ discretion.

This process was facilitated by a conscious decision of the NSS and the leading team to adopt a supportive rather than the traditional authoritative approach toward teachers in order to help them in the difficult transition they were expected to make. Instructors, school principals, and teachers were invited to participate in “thinking tanks” addressing various issues in the implementation of the PAIT, to express the difficulties they had encountered, as well as the insights they had gained from their field experiences, or to send in their comments in writing. Following dozens of such meetings that took place all over the country, the guidelines were changed considerably. The general direction of all changes was increasing flexibility and allowing teachers growing pedagogical freedom and autonomy.

An examination of the regulations for the PAIT learning process and assessment rubrics provides several examples for this tendency. For instance, following the feedback received from the field, more flexibility was granted to teachers in terms of the number of students in each group or the time and duration of the project. In the rubrics the increased flexibility was expressed by simplifying the criteria and making the rubrics more user-friendly and by issues such as increased teachers’ autonomy to change the relative weight of various criteria, to give students bonuses according to teachers’ judgments, or to allow teachers to increase the differentiation among the final grade of students working in the same group. Three years after the beginning of the PAIT implementation, it became mandatory, and most teachers reported that they had adjusted to leading it.

The Threat of Administrative Obstacles

The implementation principles described in the previous sections may make an impression of an orderly and rational process. In fact, numerous other factors, many of which were chaotic and incidental, had a large influence on the implementation process. These factors were generated by diverse processes (seemingly unrelated) that took place within the school system at the same time. Each of these factors could have been an obstacle that would block the continuation of the implementation process. In the case of implementing the reform in civics education, these barriers were successfully removed due to either hard work or incidental developments. In other scaling-up processes, similar obstacles may prevent successful implementation, despite the considerable amount of resources invested in the change process. In such cases, many of the resources invested in planning and executing a change process are simply wasted.

In the present case, I am personally familiar with the barriers because of my role as Director of Pedagogy in the MOE, who had led the large-scale change processes described in this chapter. It is interesting to note that the amount of time that I needed to invest in order to overcome those barriers was far more than the time I invested in the detailed pedagogical work of designing the instructional aspects of the implementation. Because of bureaucracy and the organizational culture of the MOE at the relevant period, the implementation would have stopped completely without my personal involvement in many of the details of the work needed to break the barriers. Three relevant examples consist of my involvement in issues pertaining to legal issues related to appointing new senior personnel; to problems that came up with the teachers’ union; and to bureaucratic problems created by the need for creating new forms to report students’ grades on the PAIT. Clearly, this state of affairs is far from being efficient. Reflecting on these examples, it is clear to me that without solving even one of these barriers, the huge efforts spent on the pedagogical sides of the implementation process would have been useless, bringing the whole process to a halt. Once again, these threats document the tight interrelationships between the instructional and structural aspects of a large-scale reform.

Discussion and Conclusions

The goal of this chapter is to examine the process of large-scale implementation of HOT in civic education. The first part of the chapter provides a historical analysis, showing the fate of a policy decision to foster HOT across time. The second part of the chapter focuses on one period in which extensive activities to implement that decision took place. Together, the two parts may give a broad perspective of what it takes to actually scale up changes involved in instruction of HOT across a whole school system.

The historical analysis shows that the way from the Kremnitzer report policy declaration to what actually had taken place in classrooms across the system had been long and bumpy. The analysis presented here is a private case showing how political, ideological, cultural, and bureaucratic factors interact in determining an educational policy’s short- and long-term sustainability (Ball, 1994; Fullan, 2009; Hargreaves & Fink, 2006; Levin, 2008). In the case of teaching thinking in civics, like in other aspects of this curriculum, political ideologies may play a more prominent role than in other school subjects (Mathias & Sabar, 2014). The policy did cause several practical changes (e.g., a new curriculum, a new textbook, a few changes in PD and in the matriculation exam, a pilot of the PAIT). For more than 10 years however, impacts were slim, sometimes causing unexpected (and undesirable) consequences such as in the case of making civics a difficult and frightening subject. In 2006, two separate policy decisions (intensifying civic studies and the “Pedagogical Horizons- teaching for thinking”) supported each other to facilitate increased implementation of HOT in civics education. The decisions were supported by an increased budget for additional hours for PD and for students’ learning. If any of these two decisions would not have taken place, it is reasonable to predict that the implementation of the Kremnitzer report’s recommendations would have continued to limp, as so often happens to policy decisions regarding instruction of HOT. The intense implementation of the report’s recommendation that had taken place 10 years after it had been published had therefore taken place due to reasons that are quite incidental to the report itself. The strong impact of political and ideological factors does not mean that these factors are deterministic and that hard work on the pedagogical level can or should be ignored. Although in 2006 the political conditions for implementing HOT were favorable, the implementation process did not develop by itself. In addition to the planning of the structural and strategic dimension of the change process that is always needed for the success of any educational enterprise, the implementation of HOT required rigorous and detailed planning and execution on the level of substantive pedagogy level. Scaling-up HOT across the whole school system required specific and elaborate knowledge of HOT, pedagogical knowledge in the context of teaching HOT (Zohar, 2004, 2008) and deep subject matter knowledge (of civics) that needed to be tailored into the implementation design in numerous points. Weaving that sophisticated knowledge into the design of the PD workshops in a detailed way was crucial for generating a focus on coherent teaching of thinking throughout the system.

A fundamental component of the implementation process revolved around the development of instructional leadership through intense PD on all levels. The analysis shows that starting from the NSS, through the leadership team, instructors, leading teachers, and, last but not least, teachers, the PD process provided a focused goal, a theoretical framework, and practical instructional tools that had initiated “top-down” learning processes. Despite these “top-down” processes, the analysis also shows growing freedom and autonomy. A key feature of the implementation was that educators on all levels expressed creativity and generated initiatives in “bottom-up” processes. Increasing the democratic spirit of “teaching for thinking” throughout the organization was crucial. Deep learning combined with a message of autonomy generated intense pedagogical discourse (that was rather new to the culture of the MOE) among educators on all levels. This provided an engine for creating and sharing new teaching ideas. In addition, autonomy was necessary for the ability of civics educators to attend to the context-specific cultural and educational circumstances that were unique to each school and classroom and to adapt the change process to their highly idiosyncratic conditions. Without such adaptation the change process would have collapsed. The blend of “tightness” and increased autonomy were also demonstrated in the analysis of the process of the PAIT implementation.

On the face of it, the tight “top-down” initiative seems to contradict the recommendation for more relaxed “bottom-up” initiatives. But similar to Fullan (2007) and to Hargreaves and Fink (2006), our argument is that in the complex reality of implementing a system-wide pedagogical change, these two seemingly contradictory trends facilitated and supported each other. In effect, the case of implementing HOT in civics studies is a specific example of the general principles put forward by these researchers and argue that these principles are crucial for scaling-up the thinking curriculum: the “top-down” processes are necessary to generate and maintain a coherent message while the “bottom-up” processes are necessary to generate motivation, creativity, adaptation to individual circumstances, and harmony with “the spirit” of teaching thinking. Interestingly, much of the “top-down” component consisted of the development of human capacity rather than simply of rules and regulations. It shows that endowing teachers more professional knowledge contributes to increasing rather than to undermining teachers’ autonomy, even when it is initiated in a “top-down” manner.

Two additional significant hallmarks of the process were an emphasis on developing pedagogical leadership and detailed pedagogical planning.

In sum, this chapter shows the intricate factors that combined to form a change in the state of teaching HOT in one school subject. Rather than focusing exclusively on the successes, the chapter tries to also give a realistic sense of the barriers and challenges, as well as of their development across time. Even though the details may diverge, such challenges are innate to any educational change process. Assessing the depth and sustainability of this change process is still waiting for future research. Yet, this account gives an idea of what it takes to induce a system-wide change in substantive pedagogy in general and more specifically in instruction of HOT, across the whole school system. Although this chapter focuses on civics, one can extrapolate from it to understand what it would take in terms of detailed pedagogical planning and implementation to lead a similar change process in all school subjects.