A Stick in the Sand

We speak–often in critical tones–of education as if it was a homogenous whole. But it is really several overlaid structures or models:

• pedagogical
• economic
• delivery (place & time)

These are interdependent and the economic and delivery structures model in particular are so tightly connected most don’t see them as separate things.

Education cannot be treated as a single entity when it comes to reform. CORE, STEM (or even STEAM) or in my jurisdiction, the BC Ed Plan, may be laudable, may be necessary, but they’re hardly sufficient to bing about the reform we seek. Unless we address the other two structures at the same time, we will find ourselves merely swapping one set of pedagogical standards for another. The force those two unchanged structures exert will dampen any effects of pedagogical change.

Cities work because they are never finished. I don’t know if I made that up or if I heard it, or something like it, from someone else. But it’s true. Cities, especially great cities, are always becoming. The regenerate themselves. Cities outlive kings and queens and empires: Rome is still here, the Roman Empire is not. Remarkably, Hiroshima is still here. Cities work because they create conditions, rather than outputs, and because civic governments largely stay out of the way of the people they govern. Oh sure there are taxes and by-laws, but these go to building and maintaining the infrastructure that people need to get on with their own business.

Structurally, the public education model is much more like the Roman Empire than the city of Rome: pretty great, glorious even (it’s a wildly successful social endeavor that dropped illiteracy rates in North America to near zero), but monolithic and programmatic. It tries to be self-perpetuating rather then self-regenerating. Alas, nothing lasts forever.

Last Wednesday I took part in a panel discussion called Empowering Educational Leadership to Innovate, one of a series of webcasts put on by Cisco’s GETideas, a global online community for educational leadership (watch the webcast here) I was glad to see us move quickly off any talk of technology which too often dominates discussions of innovation; we seemed to recognize that technology is catalytic but not central to innovation. What came out of our chat was a list of seven qualities that mark a culture of innovation. Great school leaders will cultivate these:

• Trust – We thought it fair to say schools generally run with a top-down control/dependency management model. They need to shift to a trust/capacity model. The pace and pressure of change is now too great to be centrally managed. A high degree of faculty autonomy and capacity means more power in the system overall.
• Transparency – Transparency yields accountability and accountability creates trust. This applies to all stakeholders–students, families, faculty and administration. Opaque systems, characterized by elaborate (read costly in administrative time and money) policies and controls working in place of trust, are stiff.
• Time for Collaboration – This is where faculty and administration develop capacity for themselves as individuals and collectively as a school. This needs to be a significant amount of time–a few hours a week at least.
• A User-Driven Experience – In some sense we’ve treated students as the objects of teaching: We say “We teach students,” for example, and that leads to a passive engagement from students. And we’ve asked students (and teachers) to adapt to a set of entirely artificial constraints–the school calendar and bell schedule, for example. Innovative schools will flip that around and adapt themselves to their users needs. The consumer-driven BYOD movement is just the beginning of this change.
• Maker Culture – “Our whole theory of education,” Henry Miller famously lamented, “is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water.” Innovative schools will embrace the Maker movement, explicitly or implicitly, which taps our human need to make and do meaningful work.
• Hyperlocal Decision-making – One size does not fit all in education and what works in one school may not work in another. There is a huge difference between an inner city public school on a lunch program and an Ivy League prep school. There is good research showing the best schools are the ones most responsive to their immediate communities, not to some central authority.
• Optimism – Change is messy and unsettling. A sense of adventure and an assurance that all will be well makes all the above doable.

David Byrne, in his wonderful book, How Music Works, suggests that creativity is dependent on context. This, as Byrne explains, is “the opposite of conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion…[We] unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit pre-existing formats.”

For example, says Byrne, it’s “usually assumed that much of Medieval music was harmonically simple because composers hadn’t yet evolved the use of complex harmonies.” But such music would have sounded terrible in stone-walled cathedrals where reverberation time is as much as four seconds. “Shifting musical keys would invite dissonance as notes overlapped and clashed…Slowly evolving melodies that eschew key changes work beautifully and reinforce the otherworldly ambience…Creatively, they did exactly the right thing.”

We can maybe see the effect better in reverse. Last year I attended a Dan Mangan concert at the Orpheum, a concert hall in Vancouver. The Orpheum is built to feature dynamically and harmonically complex work, such as a symphony or perhaps some jazz compositions. Mangan’s steady-state and percussive music reverberated, collided with itself and became a sonic mush. Mangan writes for a club scene or outdoor concert

There is nothing slavish or fatalistic here. Passion and genius are still present. But when we see greatness, Byrne argues, we are seeing creativity perfectly adapted to the context or environment. What we are admiring, unconsciously, is the perfection of the adaptation, the seamless alignment, rather than the created object itself.

Like Byrne, I feel a slowly-dawning realization that this insight about creation is true. I am more and more impressed by the way the structure of schools (the organizational structure, the social rules and the physical environment) shape and limit behaviour.

So now I want to ask, if we have just one kind of school structure (I think I can argue that all public schools and most of independent schools form a monoculture built on a single structure) we will have, at best, only one kind of genius? And next, is our current structure of schools capable of delivering the kind of genius we are asking for in our critiques of contemporary education, i.e. creativity, collaboration and so on? I don’t think so. My hunch is that if we want to see the innovation we asking for we are going to have to create another venue for it.