ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the issue of improving students’ outcomes through a consideration of the nature and purposes of schooling as well as improved classroom practice. It outlines the framework of productive performance that encapsulates such outcomes, and illustrates these performances with examples of students’ work. Productive performance contains both silences and amplifications about the types of student performances that are valued and pursued in schools. Desired outcomes from schooling are articulated at one level by broad systemic statements in relation to content, opportunities, and the sorts of persons and citizens schooling ought to produce. The reconfigurations of globalisation, as the work of Castells convincingly illustrates, bring with them double logics of wealth and poverty, inclusion and exclusion. Productive performances may be demonstrated when students are asked to engage in substantial problems requiring the application of disciplinary knowledges and problem-solving skills.
