Don't look weird

Here [http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7343.html] is a fascinating article that flies in the face of what a lot of workplaces [including schools] are trying to move towards - high accountability, high transparency, as well as high standardisation and control.
The article outlined some research, which found that - in a lot of situations - regular observations of workers can actually inhibit their productivity and effectiveness. This is quite counter-intuitive - less observation, control and accountability = better quality results and productivity?!?
The theory behind why this might be the case is that the workers being observed and checked upon would refrain from any form of innovation or practice of efficiencies learned through doing the work day in, day out. Instead, they would revert to doing the work 'by the book', even if their own experience and knowledge from doing this work had found that some chapters of the book were dated and had lost relevance... So, instead of performing their role the best way they knew from their experience and daily practice, or actively trialing and practising some new ideas and methods, when they were being observed it was "a show being put on for an audience"...
In other words, they were doing what they were 'supposed' to be doing, rather than doing what they knew to work best, or actively trying to improve their practice by tinkering with a new idea or way.

The researchers put this obedience down to the anxiety and stress involved in having to justify new ideas and ways. The workers in these situations had found that it was more valuable to wait until the tinkering, experimenting, etc. had demonstrated success, before going to "explain them to management", when these new ideas would be more fully-developed and better-placed to be shared and spread...

This article was not specifically about school contexts, but does it apply a little bit..? Do teachers sometimes shelve their willingness to tinker with a new idea or strategy, to avoid making any perceived mistakes or to give themselves the best opportunity of showing what an observer wants to see..?
Thinking broader, do schools and school leaders, when visited by 'higher-ups', avoid exposing distinguished visitors to any colouring outside of the lines..?

Not everything needs to look good all of the time. Not everything needs to be a perfect extraction from the manual... It might actually be a problem if this is always the case - where then would the tinkering, trialing and innovating be happening..?

Apply some constraints to unleash some creativity...

'20 % Time', 'Genius Hour', 'Passion Time' - all inspiring names for initiatives that hold similar principles. Namely, people being allocated significant blocks of time that are designated for the pursuit of personal interest areas in a highly-autonomous environment. Part of the popularity of these initiatives is that the large amounts of freedom bestowed are often in [very] strong contrast to the remaining [80%... ] time in the work day / week! 
Increasingly, workplaces are using initiatives like these as a means to spark creativity and new solutions. Schools, too, are getting in on the act, driven by a growing recognition of the importance of creativity, of developing new ideas, solutions and products, as well as building diverse skill sets for a future that is less-predictable.
There certainly is a lot of 'gung-ho' support for these sorts of initiatives, so I was interested to read a slightly-critical perspective here: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2013/08/20-time-and-schools-not-the-best-of-bedfellows.html
This piece suggests applying some boundaries and focus to these sorts of times, rather than allowing such time to be completely loose, directionless and out of alignment with the needs and goals of the organisation [or the child themselves, in the school context]. It does seem quite easy to imagine inefficiencies, irrelevancies, as well as general time wasting and low productivity starting to seep into these times if the freedom wheel is turned up to 10... 

In the article, Ewan McIntosh identifies how children in 20 % Time-style settings "often don't know what to do, or... they run out of steam." 
I'm sure the same argument could be applied for many adult workplaces - people often don't have the skills or, perhaps more crucially, the experience in working with high-levels of independence and empowerment. They will often need some boundaries to work within and some support with how to get started, in order to confidently go off and exercise their 'genius' or explore their passion... Having these 'loose' constraints in place will also make relevance and alignment with the needs and goals of the company more likely to occur...

Last week, we did try something along the lines of 'Genius Hour' or 'Passion Time' at our final pupil-free Professional Learning day for the year - the afternoon session was dubbed 'Choose Your Own Adventure', with staff able to go off individually or in small groups to investigate and find out about a topic of choice. 
We did apply some constraints to this activity, providing a starting list of seven topics for people to choose from, which were drawn from staff feedback from previous PL days, recent Professional Learning foci, or school priority areas. 
We encouraged staff to nominate any other topics that they were personally interested in - the only proviso being that this was negotiated with school leadership first. This ended up seeing about four new topics added to the starting list and which people explored on the day.
We also gave some starting suggestions for how people may go off and do this work [read articles, view case studies, watch video clip, talk to colleagues, etc... ]

We also wanted to add a layer of 'internal accountability' [read Elmore re. this], by designating time at the end of the session for each staff member to share their learning experience with a small group of colleagues. As well as ensuring that everybody needed to contribute something, this element also enabled some new ideas to spread and pollinate, as well as gave individuals opportunity to demonstrate their own developing expertise to their peers.


Hopefully, we will be able to continue to give supportive, personalised opportunities to our staff to develop their own skills and capacity as learners, whilst continuing to strengthen our collective capacity in identified school priority areas.

ICP 2013

A word cloud of my notes from the conference... 

I've just left Cairns where I went along to the ICP (International Confederation of Principals) Conference, held over three days for leaders in various education settings... 

There was some great (and consistent) messages that came out of the various presentations, much of which was very encouraging - it is reassuring to know that there is a growing strength in numbers in support of progressive ideas regarding educational leadership, at both the school and system level.

Peter Cosgrove provided one keynote, focusing upon courageous leadership and, in particular, the 'moral courage' required of school leaders (as distinct from the physical courage more often required on the battlefield!), who often have to navigate stressful situations or difficult decisions... He stressed the importance of leaders setting a good example. It is not always possible to single-handedly carry a team forward using a 'follow me' approach - often we need to model the desired behaviour / approach and support people to follow this example or image...

Tim Costello spoke of the vital role teachers play in the 'forming' of young people. He distinguished between the 'ladder of career' - the default path most people tend to follow - and the 'ladder of calling', where people pursue their "calling", or - as others have defined this concept - their flow or their passion...

I really liked Andy Hargreaves' notion of "The Goldilocks Principle". There are so many dichotomous views about educational issues - The Goldilocks Principle avoids the binary positions which are either too little or too much, instead aiming for that which is just right.

For example, too little assessment makes it hard to ascertain what is and isn't working, as well as to be precise about where students are and what the next steps in their learning journey should be...

Too much assessment can result in overemphasising the importance of assessments and results, distorting the teaching and learning process so that it is more about training and preparing for short term results, at the expense of considering the bigger picture and the best interests of long term learning. 

Just right use of assessment would ensure that teachers gather and use information about student learning to inform their practice in an ongoing fashion, but that there is not so heavy an emphasis upon these assessments that quality teaching and learning is compromised. ie. assessment results are used to inform, not to reward and punish... 

Hargreaves also spoke about the importance collaboration is / needs to be playing in scaling the good practice that is already in existence within our systems, citing the Singaporean system's approach of 'giving away our best ideas, so that we have to keep inventing new ones'... 

He also offered advice on how to innovate within a relatively conservative system - an issue that was bubbling beneath the surface throughout the conference. His advice was to start small, demonstrate success, learn from the process / trial, then share and spread the new ideas and learning... 

Mark Treadwell, speaking from a neuroscience perspective, noted the growing acceptance that we should be granting increasing agency to students over their own learning, but that there has been far less said about the seemingly-obvious condition of this change in approach - that "we need to teach them how to learn". He also caused us to ponder about the long-term significance of reading and writing - for so long the cornerstone skills learnt at school, but possibly having their usefulness eroded thanks to the emergence of video and other modern communication technologies... 

Andreas Schleicher showed us how the demand for skills has changed in the last 50+ years - another theme that was referred to a few times throughout the conference. He also - somewhat unsurprisingly, given his role with PISA - held up Finland as a model for the rest of us on several occasions... 

He spoke about equity - "what distinguishes education systems is how they leverage the performance of underprivileged children" - as well as the importance, regardless of location and context, of valuing and respecting teachers and the profession of teaching: "(It is important to) keep teaching intellectually attractive"... "The better a country's education system performs, the more likely that country is working constructively with its unions and treating its teachers as trusted professional partners"... "Knowledge workers simply do not like to work in hierarchical organisations"... 

I got a lot out of the Steve Francis session on sustaining change - he distilled a lot of research and theories, including from Jim Collins, Ken Blanchard and Daniel Pink, in order to communicate some practical tips and advice for us to leave with... Some of the biggest takeaways for me from this session included:

• The importance of building and sustaining momentum.
• Don't focus upon any more than three projects / initiatives / priorities at a time (less than three is good!)
• The Situational Leadership Model (Ken Blanchard), focusing upon differentiating your leadership style based upon the individual and the situation:

Despite all of that great learning throughout the three days, without doubt the highlight and greatest privilege for me occurred in the very first session of the conference! Yong Zhao gave the initial keynote, focusing mainly upon the fast-growing importance of developing creativity and how traditional, conservative models of schooling are in conflict with this need. His messages about why it is so important for us to move towards system, school and classroom structures and approaches that promote and encourage creativity, entrepreneurship and other essential skills for now and into the future, set the scene for the remainder of the conference.

As I said at the start, it is heartening to know that there is so much acknowledgement of the sorts of progressive ideas discussed through this conference, but I'm perhaps a little apprehensive about how well and easily these ideas will make it through to education departments, who's direction is inevitably set by what is politically popular... 

Observations

I recently read this interesting article re. Teacher observations, discussing some of the pitfalls of observation processes, in the context of broader evaluation procedures.

Some food for thought for me, as this (watching teachers teach) is something that I value highly as a means for improving everyone's practice, but is perhaps an example of something that can have negative results if used in the wrong way, or for the wrong purposes...
For example, it is important for school leaders to be observing teachers in action on a regular basis, so they have credibility and can have informed discussions with teachers about teaching. We also need to be better at having teachers observe each other, exposing people to different ways and ideas, as well as building platforms for quality professional discussions.

However, like a lot of broad-brush, top-down mandates, observation processes that are rigid and focused upon compliance can end up crowding out professional engagement, instead becoming a chore that is - to quote the article - "viewed as something to check of (sic) the list of "to-do's" for the day".

So, any performance-related processes need to have observations of the practitioner in action as a significant component. We wouldn't judge or discuss the performance of a footballer without seeing them play... 
It is the purpose of teacher observation processes that needs to shift - from one that relies on potential punishments and external rewards (eg. performance pay initiatives.. ), to instead focusing upon helping and supporting teachers to improve their own capacity and to be better contributors to their school - tap into the internal desires to get better at what we do and to contribute to a shared goal with other people.

What Works..?

PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] is an OECD initiative that occurs triennially. PISA focuses upon assessing the capacity of students to problem solve, as well as apply their knowledge and skills in new ways. PISA also differs from many mass-produced tests that are administered by national or state jurisdictions, as they do not seek to assess the learning of any one particular curriculum.
Given these traits, it is a little more difficult to artificially improve PISA achievement via sheer familiarisation with test formats, conditions and content, as can be the case with many mass-produced tests... 

A significant point about the information derived from PISA is that it shines a light on equity, putting it on equal footing, in terms of importance, with actual achievement. This tends to be another point of difference with most standardised tests, which don't usually put as much emphasis or do as good a job of measuring how equitable our schools and education systems are.

Probably the main purpose of PISA is to enable analysis of how different countries structure their education systems and, importantly, to help identify some of the practices, structures and policies that show up as common among the systems that demonstrate high achievement and high equity. In the clip below, Andreas Schleicher goes into detail about this:

So what are the common traits of high-performing, highly-equitable education systems..?

• Government and society value education, schools and teachers.
• A growth, rather than fixed mindset, permeates through the system - policy makers, parents, teachers and students believe that all students are capable of learning, rather than lowering expectations based upon demographics and stereotypes... 
• Schools and teachers in such systems "embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices... and they personalise learning... "
• "Nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of it's teachers" - teachers, themselves, as well as systems, value and prioritise ongoing Professional Learning.
• "Teachers work together".
• Teachers have professional autonomy - they are clear about where they need to go and what they need to aim for, but they are trusted to choose the ways and methods of pursuing these standards and goals, in order to best meet the needs of their unique local contexts. They are not robots on a production line and they do not 'follow' heavily-prescribed programs and curriculum documents.
• Further to the above point, high-performing systems have moved away from past goals of standardisation and compliance, to empowering principals and teachers to be inventive, innovative and creative.
• Honing in on the equity aspect, systems with low disparity between their highest and lowest achievers "invest resources where they can make the most difference, they attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools and the most talented teachers into the most challenging schools."

What [if any... ] are the excuses for not prioritising these traits of high-performing and highly-equitable education systems..?