Tasmanian Education - a better future

Early next year Tasmania is likely to have a new Minister for Education. The Minister will promise a better future for Tasmanian education. If this is to be achieved, the new Minister will need to avoid the traps into which the current and recent Minsters and senior bureaucrats have fallen. So the key question is...

“By what method?” (Deming)

Core Method:

• Operate consistently on the basis of (explicit, agreed) principles (Covey,... Webb)

Some principles for consideration

     Core goals: Success & well-being for all now and in the future

Use low cost, low risk (safe-fail), potentially high return initiatives (Snowden)
Maximise improvement while minimising change 

Provide principle-based authority and responsibility - shared accountability
Address the current constraint (Goldratt)
Make things easier first

Adopt a common “job description” for all involved; staff, students, families… e.g., 

o       Know what's happening

o       Work with others to improve what is happening

o       Make it easier for the next person to do well  (Webb)

Rationale

Our knowledge, actions, arrangements, relationships and organisation emerge from (everyday) interactions (complexity theory)

"If you understand the principles... you can choose your own method" (Gaping Void)

A principle-based approach is sustainable

Consistent sharing of authority and responsibility

Sound principles are widely applicable (DoE, other schools and services...)

Sound principles change only slowly co-evolving with the context
A well understood set of principles provides coherence

Moves the focus from driving to enabling

Attracts minimal tampering and disruption

Promotes initiative and commitment

Minimises cost

- Enables and promotes local and system-wide initiatives

- Promotes action learning and continuous improvement

- Builds and attracts social capital

- Flexible and adaptive - provides basis for customisation

- Achieves consistency without requiring uniformity

- Responsive to opportunities

- More with less

It works

I know the above works - I have lived it at Riverside Primary School (1988-2000). And current technology makes the above manageable and scalable at a system level.
Big Picture schools and the Coalition of Essential Schools are other  great examples of very successful principle based  school systems

Common recent traps that can be avoided using a principle-based approach

Confusing drivers and enablers (eg, Naplan with delayed results)

Confusing plans, policies and standards with actual performance
Confusing change with improvement

Confusing additional resources with improvement

Confusing structural change with improvement

Relying on command and control management (compliance)

Ignoring the real starting point – the individual student in his/her current context

[Note: There is nothing wrong with programs, plans, policies, standards, resources... Indeed they can be very useful, if implemented in the right context using sound principles. They should not be assumed to be drivers (causal) despite their successful use elsewhere. At best, they may be useful interim enablers in some contexts.]

Comparing systems - mainstream & BigPicture education

For some time I have been a peripheral member of a research project being undertaken by BigPicture Education Australia. So how does BigPicture compare with a lot of mainstream schooling?

In mainstream schools, students are largely organised by the system which determines curricula, timetables, assessments and to a certain extent teachers as managers... and for many capable students this can work well. Minimal responsibility for students, economies of scale, a sense of order...

Mainstream schooling tends to…

• assume a linear “production” system approach: input -> process -> output, and so,
• provide blue-prints* for educating students based on the assumption which implies a concept of education as "processing"
• result in schools being be managed as production systems - the rules are specified at each step, increasing lock down, reducing flexibility, production is measured
• associate quality with uniformity
• has limited capacity to accommodate special causes of variation
• make minimal demands on students in terms of engagement (other cooperation)

Perhaps, most significantly, students are rarely, if ever, involved in the development and/or evaluation of the system. Their contributions are minimal which leads to a low sense of belonging for many students.

[*Note: the well-intentioned blue-prints also tend to be fragmented and most systems have only low levels of overall coherence, especially from the perspective of many students. The result is often something akin to an Escher architectural image]

In BigPicture, students and teachers are largely self-organising within the context of the Distinguishers

BigPicture tends to...

• provide a flexible, modified supportive, coherent environment
• promote and supports learning by the students, one student at a time
• accept that purposes and activities emerge from the interactions in which the student is involved, that is, the members of the system interactions are largely self organising within the environment provided
• provide a few simple rules: Students learning, "one at a time in a community of learners" that underpin this self-organisation
• associate quality with consistency

In summary, the difference lies in the assumptions made about about the systems involved

• Mainstream assumes a linear "production" system (centrally managed, aiming for uniformity...)
• BigPicture assumes complex adaptive system (emergent, self organising, co-evolving, aiming for consistency rather than uniformity...

More soon...

Measures of school performance disadvantage more able students

A recent action learning research project revealed that school performance measures tend to disadvantage our  more able students!!

How so? Well, most readers will be familiar with the idea that "Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave". This is the rationale for most performance management systems.

The dominant measure of school performance is the percentage of students achieving benchmarks (and other minimum expectations) according to NAPLAN (in Australia) and similar systemic standardised testing systems.

Investing in better provision for high achieving students will not (directly) increase the percentage of students achieving the benchmarks. Providing for one group of students competes with provision for other groups with different needs. Because of the way school performance is measured it makes sense for schools to give priority to enabling more students to achieve these benchmarks, but who is likely to miss out in this process?  Those students whose improved performance will not effect the percentage of students achieving the benchmarks, including our high achieving students!!

Since even young (e.g.,Year 3) high achieving students have already exceeded all existing benchmarks (e.g., Year 9 NAPLAN) it is easy to give a low priority to meeting their needs. And given their intellectual success it is easy to underestimate their other needs. For example the other major outcome from the action learning project is the degree to which provision for high achieving students should address their social and emotional needs in addition to providing intellectual challenges.

Addressing this issue will require more than new or additional policies.  It will require changing the dominant measures of school performance so that the measures are about making enabling provision for all students regardless of ability.

The need for co-evolution of schools

Schools are complex adaptive systems. And the elements (agents) of complex adaptive systems, their interactions, and the system itself all co-evolve. We often experience this as 'everything is connected'.

But this is a big challenge in all attempts to improve education. Failure to understand the implications leads to the failure of most initiatives. Can you think of a recent large scale initiative that was a great success? Did the initiative focus on enabling one aspect of the 'system' (e.g., pedagogy) while constraining other aspects (e.g., structure, or assessment, or...)? Most do and as a result they impede co-evolution.

So many large scale professional learning and school improvement initiatives fail because they attempt to change some agents (staff) but not others (families, students) while keeping the system (especially structures and rules) unchanged. The latter is really preventing co-evolution. And change is emergent - it is not something that is the inevitable linear result of a specific initiative.  Change occurs over time.

For example, Tasmania Tomorrow tried to improve the system by imposing structural and organisational change on the system but did not allow sufficient time for the agents (particularly staff and employers) to co-evolve.

In response to resent attempts to close 10% of Tasmanian schools Professor David Adams outlined the need to attend co-evolution of schools and their communities (more...)

The current low-level use of ICT by most teachers and students is another example despite schools having had computers for more than 30 years and numerous major school improvement and professional learning initiatives. My PhD research showed that the schools that were doing best with ICT were clearly co-evolving with it.  Staff, students and the community were doing new and higher order things in new and better ways.

BigPicture makes a very interesting case study because to provides the philosophical and systemic requirements for nurturing emergence by addressing and enabling the co-evolution of staff, students, families... as well as the curriculum, pedagogy, assessment...

The people involved in BigPicture all have profound stories about the experience & challenges of co-evolving with BigPicture. At the leadership level, most of the challenges involved in implementing BigPicture are really about supporting and enabling co-evolution.

Conversations and supporting students

BASIC PROPOSITIONS


Perhaps conversations are to people what water is to fish: so ubiquitous and all encompassing that we has lost awareness of the conversations in which we are involved. But with increased awareness we will be able to make improved provision for all students.

The following propositions are worth considering:

1. Support for students is best constructed in rich conversations between the student, staff, family, stakeholders and/or  providers
2. These conversations are many and varied and occur over a wide range of places and times
3. The 'data' that informs these conversations comes from many sources
4. The 'data' that informs these conversations is increasingly unique and idiosyncratic for higher needs students
5. Capturing and working with key data (data that has the potential to make a difference for the student) requires well matched tools and practices
6. The conversations, tools and practices need to be consistent and coherent at, and across, all levels: individual student, class, year group, school, .... school system, external support providers and other agencies, ...

Data, sense-making and conversations

We naturally try to make sense of our experiences and the challenges they contain.  In the process, we attempt to construct knowledge that will enable us to make appropriate arrangements and anticipate the likely outcomes of our actions.

Conversations are a form of action learning:

(a) Insightful questions elicit tacit knowledge including hopes, concerns, activity, experiences, observations… from the participants: staff, students, family, stakeholders, support providers…

(b)  Additional insightful questions then draw on the tacit knowledge, stored data and existing professional knowledge in an attempt to

·   make sense of what is happening, and  

·  construct explicit knowledge, actions and arrangements in response

(c) As patterns emerge in the actions and arrangements they become practices

(d) Some of the explicit knowledge, actions and  arrangements may be captured as stored data  for future use and future conversations

Fig. 1 Typical conversations leading to actions

Not all conversations are one-to-one in real-time. We communicate with others in a variety of ways to share our knowledge and make arrangements that enable us to act. The recipients of this “data” then use it to make better sense of their own experiences and to create new knowledge and understandings. These interactive processes are at the heart of the everyday conversations in which we construct the knowledge, arrangements and actions needed to respond to the challenges we face including the needs of the students we support.

Thus conversations are central to the effective use of data to inform action. Having the right conversations with the right people is critical for the effective support of high needs students. These conversations need to be informed by rich data. They also generate new data for current or future use. 

School Improvement - one student at a time

School innovations are often associated with addressing issues such as retention, behaviour, failure to learn well. That is, the leading edges of educational innovation are largely about catering for each and every student.

But why is this an innovation?

Schooling, as we know it, emerged in response to the industrial revolution - perhaps as an aspect of the industrial revolution?

So there is a still widespread use of batch processing: classes, courses, year groups, terms, linear sequenced curriculum and syllabuses, bulk enrolment and examination periods, daily timetables of lessons and other activities....

In fact, here in Tasmania, schools are the only places where more than, say, 200 people start and finish work at the same time. Our schools are the last of our 'factories'!

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with such arrangements for many students.

But what about those students for whom this approach is very difficult, impossible and/or counter-productive?  These are the students who fail to get a full and rich education?

I see Solution Focus as being a very useful tool for creating better schools that provide for all students.

Making it explicit that "school improvement is about improving schools one student at a time" can be helpful. It is likely to reduce the tendency to see struggling students as a problem.

Rather, with this change of mindset schools can adopt a more natural solution-focused approach because they know that providing for each student is simultaneously improving the school as a whole.

More with less

The challenge
How can we make whatever we do in schools

• as simple as we can
• as functional as we can
• as cheap as we can
• as freely inter-connectable as we can

Rationale
We need simple ways of doing things: they need to

• be functional - simple, reliable, predictable
• be cheap - available, easy to do and easy to use in new ways and contexts
• be high performance actions returning substantial value
• be useful as building blocks, that is,

• they connect with other things that we do and 
• they connect people who share interests and responsibility

Quotes

• "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" - Einstein
• "You know you have achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away"  - de Sainy-Exupery

Reference:
George Whitesides: Toward a science of simplicity (TED Talks, Apr 2010)

Understanding Data

Why we need data
Data is used to construct our knowledge, actions and arrangements. In order to gather meaningful data we need matching concepts and some awareness of the context. A height of 170cm may be "tall" or "short" depending on the person's age, gender, race, group....

The application of data may, or may not, be problematic depending on the nature of causal relationships (if any) involved. For many physical phenomena, cause and effect are consistent over place and time. Thus data can be used to make reliable predictions and transfer best practice.

In most social phenomena, the relationships between cause and effect are not consistent over place and time. This fundamental reality is often masked by the fact that some observations can make sense in retrospect (after the event). The thinking error involved is, "because something can now be explained it could have been predicted before it happened".


Rather the following are often true if the phenomena are complex or chaotic:

• cause and effect may not be related at all in any meaningful way
• cause of effect may be remote from each other in place and time
• cause and effect may be related but also inconsistent over place and time - repeated experiments give significantly different results, or small differences result in very different results
• despite our best efforts, outcomes are unpredictable, messy

Data and Complex Phenomena

In complex phenomena such as social activity it is common for patterns to emerge in/from the interactions of the agents. That is, the outcomes are better understood as patterns rather than "products".
[Note: It is more appropriate to use  the term 'product' in relation to the outputs of a production process, one which can be properly understood in terms of Input-> Process-> Output (product)]

The use of data in relation to complex phenomena is to enable us to identify patterns, trends and opportunities rather than to manage our endeavours as production activities. Understanding the difference between production and emergence is critical in field such as education.  

Of course education and similar endeavours uses processes but they are typically iterative rather than linear, as is typical of production processes.

Moving forward and gaining momentum

Enormous efforts are going into improving schools, schooling and education but most are disruptive, counter-productive and undermine stakeholder commitments to future initiatives.

Here are some basic (but counter-intuitive and very challenging) ideas about the way forward for schools, schooling and education:

• Education is NOT a "process/production" activity and cannot be treated, nor modelled as such - A VERY BIG PROBLEM!!!  more...
• Reality is complex, messy, uncertain and unpredictable - Forrest Gump was right: "Sh-t happens!!"
• Certain people may be in charge at various levels, but it is not possible for them to be in control
• Hierarchical systems tend to protect senior officers from the inconvenience of knowing about the current reality
• Knowledge, not plans and policies, make people responsible (and knowledge can help make people, response-able)
• People want to do a good job (unless they are totally discouraged)
• We need to reduce the need for counter-measures (re-work) and move directly towards solutions by nurturing the emergence of what is desirable more...
• We need much less change but much more improvement
• Organisations (including schools) are constructed in the everyday conversations of those involved.
• Such situations require a set of agreed and easily retained rules of engagement/interaction (everyone's job description*), e.g.,
  
  
  • Know what is happening
  • Work with others to improve what is happening
  • Do your work in a way that makes it easier for the next person to do well
• When making changes/improvements always start by making things easier. 
• As a result of the above, everyone will do more and to do it better!!

That is, ongoing improvement of schools, schooling and education can be achieved quickly and economically  

• by working together and
• by adopting a strategy of  Easier First .

[*This 'job description' was used at RPS for the last several years of my time there and was clearly proven to work. In a school of 670 students, I taught 0.4 FTE, the APs taught 0.8 and everyone else taught full-time.  That is, 97% of all the available teacher time was spent working directly with students.]

Nudge - don't shove!!

A posting originally on the FASTForward blog commented on the Emergent behavior and unintended consequences in social systems.

While the author described emergent behaviours as 'unintended consequences that make you happy', this definition was actually created tongue in cheek. Of course not all emergent things are desirable. So, what to do?

Possible implications for managing chnage include the following

• Focus on what is (the future being unpredictable)
• Make small (reversible or containable) steps in the preferred direction (the outcomes of large steps being unpredictable and irreversible)
• Move to a complexity theory approach and learn to work with emergence, that is,
• Apply action learning (insightful questions) to the present in order to move forward

As the shampoo ad says, "it won't happen overnight but it will happen".

Update (2 Dec 2012):

Checkout this Ted Talk by Jonas Eliansson - different context - same principles and same message!!

More on emergence in schools

If we are going to help shape the future then we will need some understanding of why things happen (cause and effect). Such understanding will helps us to appreciate our limitations and to make wise choices about the methods we adopt.

Because organisations have conscious entities (people) it is possible to nurture emergence by acting in the organisations environment. For example, at a macro-level, international conventions on arms, trade and human rights are all examples of efforts by the international community (as an environment) to shape the emergence of certain behaviours by, and within, countries Properly understood government and school system policies and plans make similar attempts to prompt and nurture the emergence of certain changes in schools. Plans and policies are generally thought to cause the desired changes and are assumed to do so. However significant changes in schools are emergent and the plans and policies are something less than causal.

The behaviour of entities in complex adaptive systems is largely is response to attractors and boundaries existing within the system. If the plans and policies are linked with meaningful attractors and boundaries then the intended changes may well occur. However, social systems are particularly fraught, because individuals, and/or groups, may or may not respond to, or even acknowledge the intended attractors and boundaries. The 'overloaded curriculum' may be understood as too many attractors and too few boundaries.

For the above reasons, leaders working in the field of complexity suggest modest "try, learn and respond" approaches to organisational, rather like a form of ongoing action learning.

For example, "Pick something small and try it. If it works, extend it. If it doesn't, learn from it. ", David Gurteen, Twitter, Aug. 28 2009. Similarly when working in the complex domain, Snowden recommends undertaking a few small-scale trial initiatives. If the outcomes are desirable then support and extend them. If the outcomes are undesirable then undermine the initiative, and try something different. He also advocates a 'safe-fail' approach rather than a 'fail-safe' approach. In the former, it is OK for the any initiative fail without serious damage to the organisation, hence the use of small scale trials. The latter approach is only suitable for systems where the outcomes can be accurately predicted, e.g., bridge building and other engineering tasks.

Nurturing emergence should not be confused with the more familiar "design, develop and then implement the system it" approach that is form of engineering. Such approaches work well when cause and effect are known and consistent over place and time. Consider the variability in the use of ICT in teaching and learning. This suggests that any cause and effect relationships between ICT and teaching and learning are not consistent over place and time. Rather, the relationships, say, between ICT, teaching and learning emerge locally. A basic principle of complex adaptive systems is that small differences in the starting conditions (and every school is different) can result in very large differences in the outcomes.

As mentioned previously, while developments may be understandable in retrospect they were not predictable at the time of their instigation.

Thus, professional development may really be an exercise in nurturing emergence. Thus, if Rob Paterson at Fast Forward the Blog is correct, then perhaps we might achieve a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved by using this new approach.
[Note: Emergence is also likely to be a more accurate explanation of our previous successes, and failures. One uncomfortable implication is that our heroic leadership in our major successes may not have been as pivotal as we have believed. Everyday leadership may be less about expertise, insight and heroic actions and more about creating conditions that promote and nurture emergence. Of course changing those starting conditions may require insight, strength and courage at times.]

Requirements for emergence - the right starting conditions

1. Some kind of Container - an environment that is optimal for the emergence in question.

• The environment contain meaningful attractors and useful boundaries such as suitable purposes, curriculum and pedagogy
• The ways and means for activity are available, e.g., reliable and effective infrastructure & technical support
• Governance promotes, supports and acknowledges the desired emergent practices
• A community of practice contains, enables and/or develops the working knowledge, matching and sustainable practices, and promotes interaction (see 2. below)

Notes:
(a) Many teachers work largely in isolation from their colleagues for the greater part of the day. Implications?
(b) The available technology is changing continually and rapidly and is thus disrupting the match between the technology and its use, and making demands on the infrastructure and technical support

2. A lot of Optimal Contact Points - emergence is all about patterns

• A community of practice with an ongoing conversation/discourse sharing knowledge, insights and experience (including stories)
• A collaborative culture that increases the number of optimal contact points for members of the group (class, staff, school, community, profession, school system....)
• Regular, and frequent interactions (especially in the form of ongoing conversations).

Note: For many high performing practitioners the majority of their optimal contact points are outside their own school.

3. A few Rules that both shape the pattern (e.g., of ICT use in teaching and learning) and also keep it coherent

• It can be difficult for many teachers to develop and adopt a set of coherent practices in the context of continual change without a consistent and agreed and endorsed framework.
• A few simple rules focusing, endorsing and promoting action and collaboration enable confident, coherent and sustainable interaction even in a changing environment.
• For example, Riverside Primary's 'job description' that applied to everyone (staff, students, visitors) proved useful in improving all aspects of the school
  
  • Know what is happening
  • Work with others to improve what is happening
  • Make it easier for the next person to do well (achieve success and well-being)

Note: The traditional approach to curriculum has been to provide teachers with little detail and much choice, or, a great deal of detail and little choice. Few, if any, curriculum writers have attempted to identify and articulate a few simple rules that are likely to prove effective in enabling staff and students to work together to achieve success in their teaching and learning endeavours

Summary

• Baring some dramatic or catastrophic event, we can usually envision the immediate future with some clarity and confidence
• Envisaging the longer term future is problematic - the probability of significant unforeseen/unforeseeable changes in the external environment increases rapidly as our timelines extend.
• Changes (even small ones) of staff, policies, leadership, resource provision, technologies... may have a profound impact.
• For many schools/school systems, a change of Principal may be as profound as the combined effected of the global financial crisis.
• And who would have predicted that a global financial crisis would result in major physical development costing $14bn in thousands of Australian schools?
• Similarly, "Why I don't believe in 5 yr plans:5 yrs ago, YouTube/Twitter didn't exist, & Facebook was for college kids", johnniemoore, Twitter 18 Oct 2009. And consider the emergence of devices, services and practices associated with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
• Professional development in relation to teaching and learning is more about nurturing emergence through understanding, attending to, and bringing together
  
  • the factors involved in teaching and learning (especially governance and collaboration)
  • well developed matching pedagogies
  • action learning in a range of forms
  • the nature and mediation of activity
  • communities of practice
  • an understandings of cause and effect in its various forms
  • knowing what is happening (particularly as the starting point) in order to improve it
  
  

Nurturing emergence for a better school

Schools cannot be managed as machines. Rather schools are complex entities and are therefore largely emergent. For example, over time, particular values, purposes, ways of interacting and practices transform: some emerge while others diminish. Continuity and change are concurrent. These changes are, at least in part, responses (adaptions) to changes in the school's environment. Of course, at any point in time, certain aspects of schools may be treated as simple or complicated and managed using approaches that approximate engineering.

However the complex nature of any school means that development and improvement is really about promoting and nurturing emergence of desirable aspects and constraining other aspects.

But to have Emergence we need 3 elements:

1.Emergence requires some kind of container - an environment that is optimal for the emergence in question. This can be physical and energetic such as the physical and the social environment needed for a baby to be set on her way to reach her potential. For better or worse a school (together with its community and the school system) can be such an environment.

2. Emergence require a lot of optimal contact points. Emergence is all about patterns. To have patterns you need many points of connection. A Human with too small a social world cannot reach her potential. 3 birds cannot make a flock. A few breezes don’t make a hurricane. A few stars do not make a galaxy. No flow in water and you cannot have a vortex. When man had no complex language, he could not communicate widely enough to make much technical progress. He could not create patterns. A father might show his son how to carve a hand axe but an emergent breakthrough like a throwing stick or a bow and arrow would be beyond them. For without complex language enabling abstractions and enabling a large circle of participants the creation of patterns abstract thinking and design cannot happen. For then, if it could not be seen and copied it could not happen. Most schools can meet this requirement, provided the majority of members (staff, students, families...) of the school see themselves as belonging and participating.

3. Emergence requires a few rules (ideally principles) that both shape the patterns of interaction and also keep it coherent. As we learn more about complexity, we are astounded by how few the rules are and how often they are so simple. With computers it is easy to model bird flocking now. But, to get the pattern, we also need the process of iteration and we need a computer to do the math. But to model, we need to know the rules.

In the meantime, one school (Riverside Primary School) adopted three simple interactive rules for all of its members: staff, students, families, community members and visitors:

• Know what is happening around you
• Work with others to improve what is happening
• Make it easier for the next person to do well

And it worked well... click here for more information

Acknowledgement to Rob Paterson at the Fast Forward the Blog