I almost never go back to the things I highlight on my Kindle.
So a mini-holiday project was to stop me being quite such a knowledge tourist. I’ve built a little tool to make it easier to export, browse and actually think about my Kindle highlights.At the moment it’s set up to randomly send me a highlight by email every day and am kind of enjoying that.
And it made me think about how we use feedback as teachers, the quantitative and the qualitative, and balancing a focus on the particular with a focus on the whole.
Expert navigators like Mau, sitting alone in the darkness of the hull of a canoe, can sense and distinguish as many as five distinct swells moving through the vessel at any given time. Local wave action is chaotic and disruptive. But the distant swells are consistent, deep and resonant pulses that move across the ocean from one star house to another, 180 degrees away, and thus can be used as yet another means of orienting the vessel in time and space. Should the canoe shift course in the middle of the night, the navigator will know, simply from the change of the pitch and roll of the waves. Even more remarkable is the navigator’s ability to pull islands out of the sea. The truly great navigators such as Mau can identify the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of the canoe, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its own refractive pattern that can be read with the same ease with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint.
All of this is extraordinary, each one of these individual skills and intuitions a sign of a certain brilliance. But as we isolate, deconstruct, even celebrate these specific intellectual and observational gifts, we run the risk of missing the entire point, for the genius of Polynesian navigation lies not in the particular but in the whole, the manner in which all of these points of information come together in the mind of the wayfinder. It is one thing, for example, to measure the speed of the Hokule’a with a simple calculation: the time a bit of foam or flotsam, or perhaps a mere bubble, takes to pass the known length separating the crossbeams of the canoe. Three seconds and the speed will be 8.5 knots; fifteen seconds and the vessel slogs at a mere 1.5 knots. But it is quite another to make such calculations continually, day and night, while also taking the measure of stars breaking the horizon, winds shifting both in speed and direction, swells moving through the canoe, clouds and waves. The science and art of navigation is holistic. The navigator must process an endless flow of data, intuitions and insights derived from observation and the dynamic rhythms and interactions of wind, waves, clouds, stars, sun, moon, the flight of birds, a bed of kelp, the glow of phosphorescence on a shallow reef — in short, the constantly changing world of weather and the sea.
What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are. One’s position at any one time is determined solely on the basis of distance and direction travelled since leaving the last known point. “You don’t look up at the stars and know where you are,” Nainoa told me, “you need to know where you have come from by memorizing from where you sailed.”
The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be…. They are thus, inescapably, political. Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of. This, I would submit, is value-and cheap at the price.
The second was Lee Bryant’s fascinating talk about instiutions as delivery mechanisms for our values.
Humanities are a great delivery model for democratic values
Institutions act as delivery models for our values
Given that, doesn’t it make sense to keep the humanities in schools and for organisations to actively encourage that? If institutions are actively looking to act as stewards for values, then should they be trying to encourage the humanities in education as well as STEM and the like?
Thought this was an interesting piece at Slate based on Paul David’s paper. There are some obvious parallels with personal or mobile computing and education and the difficulties we have with using it well.
“Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there were generating stations in New York and London by 1881. Yet a thoughtful observer in 1900 would have found little evidence that the “electricity revolution” was making business more efficient.
Steam-powered manufacturing had linked an entire production line to a single huge steam engine. As a result, factories were stacked on many floors around the central engine, with drive belts all running at the same speed. The flow of work around the factory was governed by the need to put certain machines close to the steam engine, rather than the logic of moving the product from one machine to the next. When electric dynamos were first introduced, the steam engine would be ripped out and the dynamo would replace it. Productivity barely improved.
Eventually, businesses figured out that factories could be completely redesigned on a single floor. Production lines were arranged to enable the smooth flow of materials around the factory. Most importantly, each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will. The improvements weren’t just architectural but social: Once the technology allowed workers to make more decisions, they needed more training and different contracts to encourage them to take responsibility.
Last year’s OECD report was one of many to suggest that it might, just might, be a little more complicated than putting more computers in classrooms. I do wonder whether, at some level, the school as an organisation will have to undergo a similar redesign to make the most of our new dynamos.
The following seems to be going down well with my class. They are both enjoying it and seem to be learning more about current affairs at the same time.
What it is
Once a week when the children (who are 10 or 11 years old) come into class for morning registration, I’ll have something like this up on the whiteboard.
The game is simple. They need to do three things:
spot the mistakes on the site
say what the correction should be and
explain what the story is about.
So, for example, with the above they’d need to
spot that it shouldn’t be Holly and Drew, (or Amelia, or Nora, or Armand);
suggest something close to businesses and
explain that it has to do with the Scottish vote for independence and businesses saying they will move south if Scotland breaks away from the Union.
So far, the children are in loose teams but (and I’m pleased about this) they’re more interested in the stories behind the news than points. So far the feedback has been good, from children and parents. Continue reading Simple Current Affairs Game for Children
I’ve been having an interesting conversation on Twitter with Martin Robinson and Carl Gombrich (a big thank you to both).
Two things had been bouncing around recently: Toffler’s ubiquitous “Learn, unlearn, relearn” and the Trivium, in no small part thanks to Martin’s excellent Trivium 21C. I wondered, slightly loosely, whether they were connected, along the lines of this diagram.
Rather vague wondering
Carl did not see any obvious connection and (sensibly, I think) warned against numerology/seeing patterns in 3 and the like and, broadly, I think I’m coming to the conclusion that he’s right in that the two are not interchangeable (as I’d initially thought). That said, I do think there is a connection. If nothing else, they are sibling concepts in that both are born of the idea that knowledge is fluid and changing.
There are two differences that Carl’s doubt and Martin’s questions highlighted for me. First, the Trivium is not quite so overtly pro-“change for its own sake”. While the unlearning phase seems fairly wholesale under Toffler, the Trivium’s dialectic is more even-handed. Critique doesn’t have to shatter one’s beliefs or force you to reject what you have learned; it can strengthen them too. Second, for my money, the Trivium deals with the social aspect of learning in a more sophisticated, group-oriented way. Toffler’s “learn, unlearn, relearn” works on an individual level (as it did for Carl’s drumming), but the rhetoric phase of the Trivium works at both individual and social (whatever you think you’ve learned, you can’t have learned it until you’ve persuaded someone else of it).
Anyway, enjoyed the tweets. Especially discussing the holy trinity of Xavi, Messi and Iniesta on a Sunday morning. Seem to remember Maradona talking about Messi playing with Jesus, which sort of begs a question …
Should we be paying more attention the structure of schools? A lot of facets of education are coming under scrutiny at the moment, both in the UK and abroad. The merits of various teaching styles, types of school, assessment formats and curricula among others are all being discussed. This debate is healthy and long may it continue. One facet, though, that very few seem to be questioning is the organisational structure of schools. Many, if not all, UK schools currently follow a hierarchical model. While this structure certainly can work, it is by no means the only possibility. Arguably, it is by no means the best.
The current standard school structure, across state and private, sectors looks broadly like this
Typical (Generalised) School Structure
The focus of such structures is, at heart, the management of teachers and there are a number of advantages to such a structure, perhaps the most obvious ones being:
specialisation,
ease of co-ordination,
control and
security.
Benefits of Specialisation
Specialisation, both academic and in terms of role has some obvious rewards. In the classroom, at the most basic level, you have mathematicians teaching maths and musicians teaching music. Outside of the classroom, you avoid doubling up on tasks and again allow experts to come to the fore, whether it is organising school trips or technical infrastructures.
Easier Co-ordination
Related to this specialisation is ease of co-ordination. By giving everyone specific tasks it is far easier to reduce duplicated efforts, to streamline activities and to become more efficient at producing whatever it is you produce.
Control
Hierarchies also allow for tighter control and clear lines of responsibility. With things as precious as children, it is obviously paramount that we, as teachers, are in some way accountable for welfare, academic and otherwise.
Security
Lastly, hierarchies are, in schools at least, the devil we know. While this is not necessarily an advantage, it’s perhaps easy to underestimate the succour and security working within a familiar system can bring.
While hierarchies are a neat solution to structuring an educational organisation, their focus is on the management of teachers. As soon as we begin to shift that focus to the support of children and parents, this tidiness begins to fray. Hierarchies do not cope very well with complexity, variability or fluidity in their outside environment.
There are four disadvantages that are perhaps of particular importance for schools:
not making the most of your staff,
the Fordism of education,
speed and agility and
awareness and selective attention
Not making the most of your staff
The hierarchical model is perhaps most typically aligned with a military command-and-control approach or product-centred organisations such as manufacturers. In many ways it makes a lot of sense, especially given their life and death incentives, to learn from the army about how to command and control individuals within your organisation. Equally, given the obvious efficiencies of, say, a McDonalds or a BMW factory, one would think there is much schools could learn. There are two difficulties with this: first, that the approach makes it much easier to miss out on your staff’s potential; second, it runs the risk of a category mistake.
Liz Wiseman and her team studied 150 leaders in 35 different countries across four continents and found that leaders were either diminishers or multipliers. Diminishers got less than half of people’s intelligence and capability — about 48 percent. Multipliers, on the other hand, got twice as much (1.97 times) greater intelligence and capability out of their people
Which behaviours do hierarchies encourage?
Now, hierarchies can have more than their share of multipliers. However, the command-and-control ethos underpinning a hierarchy makes them more prone to “diminishing” management and consequently preventing the staff from flourishing. Put another way, multipliers rely on a certain loss of control and hierarchies are designed to work against this.
The Fordism of Education
A second drawback with hierarchical structures in schools is what might be called the Fordism of education. The efficiencies that work so well in a McDonalds or a Ford factory do not necessarily translate to education or indeed any more complex task.
Ford’s famous factory at Highland Park was a paragon of hierarchical structures: dedicated equipment; semi-skilled workers (under a management regime based on Taylorist principles); a standardised product; and a move from craft to mass production (the assembly line). There were also technical innovations such as process engineering and standardisation with the inter-changeability of parts. Workers performed a simple task repetitively. There were also in a number of administrative and social control systems based on the Prussian bureaucratic model of the late-19th century: centralised materials requirements and logistical planning; control by rules; standard operating procedures; and the decomposition of tasks to their simplest.
While the system works efficiently for products that are the same again and again (and indeed need to be), this sort of standardisation does not work for education, learning or knowledge. Polanyi made the distinction between explicit (that which can be codified and stored in media, such as a facts ) knowledge and tacit knowledge (that which cannot be codified and so is harder to transmit, such as how to write an essay).
Polanyi’s View of Knowledge
Because of its focus on efficiency and management, Fordism over-simplifies education by focusing on the explicit, measurable knowledge (“to get an A you need to do X, Y and Z”) and by and large ignoring the tacit. Knowledge and learning become artificially tidy, transactional affairs rather than messy, socially negotiated activities. While every school and educational organisation has to deal with both types, because explicit knowledge is the easiest for these institutions to measure it is often these measurements that are used to see how well they are doing. Exams, test data and the like all provide explicit knowledge about the system and give cues as to how well (or poorly) the system is working. Again, while hierarchies do not necessarily encourage this limited “tip of the iceberg” view of learning, their support for learning is heavily biased towards a Fordist, transactional view of knowledge. There are two problems with this. First, by underplaying the tacit aspects of knowledge and learning, hierarchies make it easier to send the wrong message about learning to children. Second, the assessment of explicit knowledge is not sufficient in itself for any improvement plan.
Awareness and Selective Attention
The third disadvantage of specialisation is the lack of awareness it can bring. While specialisation has its benefits, it also has its risks. The clearest example of this is attentional blindness. If you have not seen it before, have a look at the following video and see if you can count how many passes the team in white make. Then see if you are right.
Selective attention is a fundamental problem. On a narrow level, we begin to focus so much on the fact that Miss Brodie is a French teacher that we miss out on the fact that she is a concert level pianist. On a broader level, the maths department might focus so closely on their assessment targets that they do not see the opportunities for collaboration or cross-fertilisation with the art or science that students are learning. On a broader level still, schools focus so intensely on OFTSED inspections that they miss out on the broader picture that in turn would help them reach “outstanding”.
Speed and Agility
Lastly, hierarchies are prone to being stick-in-the-muds. As anyone who has dealt with bureaucracies knows, the larger the hierarchy, the slower, and more frustrating, the response. Schools, similarly, often appear to be lumbering beasts that seem blind to many of the concerns of children and parents. Given the perceived importance these days of being able to keep up with the changes in the world around us, lumbering is not a good adjective to have earned. Broadly speaking, there would appear to be two factors in this image: locus of control and locus of importance.
Most of the time, this lumbering image is simply a matter of the locus of control. The speed of a decision or response is related to the number of rungs there are in the ladder there are between an outsider’s point of contact with the organisation and the where the decision gets made. In a typical school, following a variant of the structure above, there are four or five rungs between child (and parents) and head. There are, of course, ways to speed up this decision chain. Schools often try to involve the parents in what they do (though often this ends up being PR rather than actual engagement). Again, many parents try to short cut this chain by going straight to the top. This may get them a quick decision from the head but has the two obvious effects of slowing down the head and demotivating the initial point of contact “on the ground”.
The woeful language of hierarchies
Sometimes, sadly, the lumbering response is a matter of locus of importance. The language of hierarchies – top dog, pecking order and the like – implies that the further up the chain of command you are, the more important you are. Some management will always believe the hype, in which case the message becomes the lower down one is (whether frontline teacher, child or parent) the less importance one has to the school (and the less impact in decisions). Again this does not always happen. Teachers, almost by definition, will often put their students interest top.
Good management will often sidestep many of these issues by pushing power to the edge. In the corporate world, one example would be Nordstrom (the American retailer famed for its customer service). They avoid this lumbering by actively inverting the hierarchy, putting the customer at the top. As a result, the salespeople are expected to do everything in their power to keep the customer happy, and management’s role is to support the salespeople in that job.
Nordstrom’s inverted hierarchy
Similarly the military are actively exploring ways for them to be effective when the theatre of war is messy and unpredictable. In cases where the situation is too complex or uncertain to give detailed orders, the military use a style of management called “Command intent”. This is a set of goals and a vision for possible methods of achieving those goals. It’s sufficiently high-level that it can be broadcast widely to everyone in the system, and front-line troops can then interpret how those goals apply to their front-line situation. The British army define it as:
“similar to purpose. A clear intent initiates a force’s purposeful activity. It represents what the commander wants to achieve and why; and binds the force together; it is the principal result of decision-making. It is normally expressed using effects, objectives and desired outcomes….The best intents are clear to subordinates with minimal amplifying detail.”
Power is pushed to the frontline.
The point is not that hierarchies do not or cannot work. They clearly can and do. The point is that hierarchies may not be the best structures for the job of education. By definition, they are slow to adapt and respond. Their design means they run the risk of belittling and/or alienating the children and families they are designed to serve, of not getting the best out of staff and of teaching children lessons we may not want them to learn. As Antoine De St Exupery put it, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
A podular alternative
So how else could we structure schools and what would the advantages (and disadvantages) be? There are a number of options – I have yet to work my way through Mintzberg – but as an example, one alternative might be to mimic what Dave Gray has called “podular” organisations.
In his own words,
“One of the most difficult challenges companies face today is how to be more flexible and adaptive in a dynamic, volatile business environment. How do you build a company that can identify and capitalize on opportunities, navigate around risks and other challenges, and respond quickly to changes in the environment? How do you embed that kind of agility into the DNA of your company?
The answer is to distribute control in such a way that decisions can be made as quickly and as close to customers as possible. There is no way for people to respond and adapt quickly if they have to get permission before they can do anything.
If you want an adaptive company, you will need to unleash the creative forces in your organization, so people have the freedom to deliver value to customers and respond to their needs more dynamically. One way to do this is by enabling small, autonomous units that can act and react quickly and easily, without fear of disrupting other business activities – pods.
A pod is a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered to deliver the things that customers value.”
Podular Schools
One could apply a similar structure to schools without too much disruption.
How would this mitigate the four disadvantages of hierarchies?
Not making the most of your staff
Bad management is bad management. There is nothing to say that podular organisations will stop that. However, they do shift the balance. Because power is pushed to the edge and teh frontline decision makers, managers are starting from a point of a “multiplier” which is an advantage.
Fordism of education
In just the same way that hierarchies don’t necessarily mean a rich view of learning, poduar schools do not necessarily stop a view of education that is heavy on explicit knowledge and assessment. That said, the design is such that people working in a podular school, be they teachers or children, need to work hard to avoid a more collaborative, flexible open view of knowledge.
Awareness and selective attention
The fluidity of these systems puts an emphasis on people being able to contribute in anyway they can rather than in the way the organisation dictates. There can still be specialists in this sort of set-up, and there can still be departments. The difference, though, is that the department becomes a core service for form teachers, subject teachers and anyone else to use. As a result, there may well be less
Speed and Agility
By design, these organisations are more agile and quicker to respond than pure hierarchies. Even if the locus of control is the head, there are still only two “rungs” in the decision chain. Similarly, the locus of importance is by design the boundary between family and school. Parents and children have one constant person to turn to who will – and can – act as bridge between what the school can do for the child and the situation the child finds him/herself in.
Again, because power is pushed to the edge rather than kept at the top, those on the ground are given rein to use their best judgement to help the child or parent as quickly and as well as they can. This is not to say that teachers suddenly become shoot-from-the-hip lone rangers – they will still need to consult with colleagues and build consensus around whatever solutions they propose. But parents and children should get a far better, far more human service as a result.
Podular structures are just one possibility for structuring schools differently, and potentially more effectively. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts: other options, is this all a lot of nonsense etc.
“I’ve always believed that when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.”
Given how quickly things are changing outside schools, it makes me wonder how best to keep the rates of change inside them up to speed.
[post_intro]There’s a lot of talk about 21st century education. There are the skills that children need, the jobs that don’t exist yet, the access to learning anywhere and all the wonderful things the internet enables us to do. All of this is valuable, I think, but I wonder how much it is side-stepping the real issue?[/post_intro]
When I first started teaching, the wonderful Annie Younger pointed something out to me. She said that “children will learn from you even when you don’t want them to. It is a blessing and a curse.” What she meant was that in a school you are constantly observed. Not just in lessons, but in the corridor, talking to colleagues, spilling soup on your shirt in the dining room and the children learn from that too.
Much of the 21st century thinking about schools that I have read has focused on overt areas( e.g. assessment and badges) and times (e.g. homework and flipped classrooms) when we do want children to learn. Badges, flipped classrooms and the like. This is all good. Perhaps, though, we are ignoring think more about the tacit, unintended, soup-spilling messages our 20th century schools are giving out.
The main one, for me, is the structure. Perhaps more out of tradition than intent, schools are hierarchical, command-and-control beasts. While yes it’s good to look at ways to reinvent the classroom, what if we had a closer look at the way our schools were structured? It’s always easier to think in binary terms – hierarchy (bad) vs wirearchy (good) – and there is a danger that that blurs much of the goodness in the overlap but should we be beginning to adjust the organisational structures to fit a more fluid world? Does a school need a head? How do we embed teams? Should we? How do we engage in a less us and them manner with parents and communities?
Dave Gray‘s talk below is a great starting point for thinking about this.
As a teacher it’s hugely exciting to be able to use all the magic of technology. It’s great to be able to tweet and blog and share photos and get classrooms connecting with others around the world. That is, as Annie Younger might have said, part of what I want the children to learn. What I’m not sure I want them to learn is that all of this happens despite, not because of, a school’s structure. The values that are implicit in what I am trying to teach are not necessarily carried through in the way my colleagues and I work. That is the soup on my shirt.
Thought I’d share a little slideshow I’ve made to introduce my class to SOLO. Been mulling over trying it this summer and thank in large part to the theory here, some serendipitous resources mentioned by Ewan and the sheer enthusiasm of Tait, I’m taking the plunge.
There’s a lot of talk about making learning personal at the moment. We should all be tailoring it to the needs and interests of the child. Much of it is sensible and I agree with much of the sentiment.
I also think there is a risk that comes attached. That risk is an overt focus on self-knowledge and an assumption of some positive understanding, breadth and direction that isn’t there. The child, so the thinking goes, chooses what he/she wants to learn and then builds up from there, with more vigour and more enthusiasm and more lasting success.
Well, possibly. But as Andre Gide said,
“Know thyself” – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
While we shouldn’t stop personalising learning, we should neither decide too early against the idea that there are some things, beyond the child’s knowledge or perceived interests, that they will look back on and thank us for the introduction.
