More fun please

From http://duhas-blog.blogspot.com/

This may sound like an old theme, but I think the time is right to revisit it. Scottish education is in the grip of near terminal seriousness. I feel fearful saying that, because countless meetings with educators at all levels have taught me that there is a lot of mileage in taking the business of running education more seriously than the next person. The greasy pole is shinned up by accountability, compliance and audit. I therefore expect a few readers to be horrified at the implied levity when we have hard work to do. The features of the “serious” landscape include:

• A belief that “children come first” even if teachers are unhappy; after all we run the business for the children.
• A belief that any experimentation will risk damaging children.
• A focus on auditing over innovating. (Yes they generally are mutually exclusive).
• An inability to manage fears over public accountability. (We do nothing that might have even reasonable risks associated).
• An admin burden that largely serves accountability and data collection.
• Guilt at all levels. There is too much to do and no-one ever manages to get through it all. (Beaurocratic savants excepted. They compound the problem by getting promoted to the top levels and expecting everyone else to be the same).
• Orthodoxies. For example, reading an HMIe study as opposed to a business book. One is seen as more essential than the other. No lesson can be good that doesn’t have learning-intentions and a Plenary.
• A clash between individual personalities and standards. We now have precise definitions of how teachers should perform in every way, however some people cannot fit perfectly because of their personalities. This causes stress.
• Technology is happening fast in the outside world, slowly in schools. More stress.

I could list a hundred other symptoms of the place we are in, but I’m sure you get the idea. I would also like to suggest solutions for the main ones, point by point, but this is not the place.  The central problem as I see it, is that we now live in genuinely different times and as Larry Downes, author of “The Laws of Disruption ” has pointed out, the world is changing fundamentally and rapidly, and we are trying to cope by slowing the changes in our system. This is a road to disaster, and the architects of “Curriculum for Excellence” understood this; we need to change education hugely now to fit the new rapid and global world. The problem is we are still tied institutionally to the old ways. To change things we need to be very innovative, and let me be clear, innovation is always characterised by people enjoying what they are doing. There is a balance point between staying accountable, and playing with new ideas in a non-threatening environment. We don’t have that balance right.

Our last decade has been a command and control decade, and that served a purpose for a particular time. It brought attainment improvements up to a point. It has been a few years now since it stopped doing so and the problem remains that the system is run by those who achieved successes with the controlling approach. We foolishly believe that the same approach will give us “wider achievement” gains in the way that we once had attainment gains. (Those gains never really penetrated the lower attainment levels anyway). we need leaders now who will take us into the new learning-based approach, who will build community, enthusiasm and innovation, and who will let us play a little again.

Children are not damaged by happy teachers. Happy teachers reflect and grow as opposed to the unhappy ones who learn how to pass audit while growing more cynical. If we want more innovation we better have more fun.