Being 'scientific' about schooling

Wouldn't it be great if we could be 'scientific' about schooling?!!

If only we could find the right thing to do, all would be well. We could treat all cases (students, teachers, schools, sessions...) as if they were all the same. This is a natural (but futile) ambition for anyone wanting certainty, predictability and the capacity to guarantee the outcomes of schooling.

It is obvious that every family, community, school, student, teacher.... is different. Also, cause and effect in teaching and learning are not consistent over person, place and time. Amazingly, this everyday experience flies in the face of so much of the current discourse around school improvement. We need to remember the Emperor's New Clothes!!

But does this mean we should give up trying to achieve improvements? Of course not, we all need to do better and better.

But firstly we do need to give up imposing flawed school improvement strategies including

• confusing student achievement with school/teacher performance - students in the same class, with the same teacher and lessons, do not all achieve the same results
• treating all schools, students, teachers... as if they were the same - they are simply not!!
• identifying and transferring 'best practice' by policy - practices cannot be transferred, they have to be continually constructed and reconstructed
• being 'scientific' - using evidence-based ('proven') methods - see above
• firing 'silver bullets' - 'There ain't no one best way (Law of Tanobway)
• any method based on 'hope for instant pudding' (Deming) - there is a simple solution to every problem and it is usually wrong!!

As well as not really working, such approaches can be disruptive and damaging to current arrangements, practices and relationships. They often result in serious unfairness. When an approach 'succeeds' certain people are rewarded for things they didn't achieve - the 'success' of the approach is substantially coincidental, a matter of luck and/or the result ongoing unofficial corrective efforts of those doing the work. When such approaches 'fail', the blame usually shifts to those doing the work (teachers and/or students). Sadly this often justifies the marginalisation or exclusion of those students not well served by the imposed arrangements (curriculum, pedagogies, sequencing...)

At the same time, under certain conditions and for certain purposes, it can be useful to treat many cases (Pareto's 80%?) 'as if' they were 'basically the same'. Well thought out and delivered programs, courses and timelines can be helpful to a significant proportion of students, but this does not justify imposing them on all students, everywhere and all the time. A significant number of cases (20%?) need to be treated differently and increasingly differently.

There are alternatives to being 'scientific' in this sense. The phenomena involved in schooling are not just complicated, they are complex. Therefore we need to consider improvement strategies derived from complexity theory, for example Nurturing emergence and Solutions Focus.

All schools need the requisite variety of responses in order to meet the needs of those they serve. It is worth noting that there are already mature school systems, such as BigPicture, that have moved beyond the dominant discourse of schooling as a linear activity that can be managed 'scientifically'. These schools have a coherent framework that enables them to make a wide range responses in the best current and future interests of their students.