Turning the Ship

“School sucks.”  Has there ever been a time in modern education where that sentiment wasn’t “a thing?”  (Incidentally, by “modern” I’m roughly biting off some 300 years of history from the industrial revolution to the present, where the structures of schooling as we know it have largely remain unchanged throughout.)  I can’t honestly say for sure.  I haven’t clawed my way through enough history to be certain.  But when I query the most wizened and ancient of people I know, they all assure me that school has sucked for a very long time.  I won’t bother to defend this position with evidentiary support.  If you want to come at me with a “my students don’t think school sucks” counterpunch, I will either…

(a) tell you to keep an eye on those Kindergarten and Grade 1 kids you are referring to and survey them again some time around middle school to see if their attitudes haven’t shifted,

(b) applaud you for discovering the holy elixir of pedagogical effectiveness and insist that if you haven't already, you must start a blog, a lecture series, and perhaps a teacher college, or

(c)  suspect you to be even more delusional and narcissistic than I am (which is considerable).

I would wager that at its 13 million views (and counting) on YouTube, nearly every western educator has viewed Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk on Changing Education Paradigms.  If you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen it (because you aren’t an educator or you’ve been teaching in the remote regions of the Patagonia for the last six years), I suggest giving it a look at your convenience.  Sir Ken states that every nation in the developed world is reforming its education systems. But he says so as though education reform is a relatively novel and recent movement.  Even a cursory review of educational history over the last hundred years reveals that education reform, often with a push toward progressive, “non-traditional” teaching methods, has been a prevalent theme throughout the last century.  John Dewey, a significant contributor to educational and psychological thinking in the early 20^th century, advocated strongly for a greater emphasis on hands-on, experiential education practices in the United States a hundred years ago.  Problem and project-based learning models of today still owe many of their principles and practices to work Dewey did around the turn of the 20^th century.  Talk to any teacher who’s been at the game for a significant length of time, and many will give you an eye roll and a dismissive “mm-hmm” when you ask about the “new” directions education is taking toward inquiry-based learning models and project-oriented pedagogy.  They’ve heard it all before.  And their teachers had heard it all before them, too.

So then, if progressive education models are not new, then why do we seem to be encountering the same rhetoric decade after decade regarding the decline of our educational institutions and the need for change?  Is it because progressive methodologies have just failed to take root over the last hundred years?  Are we just not implementing them properly?  Are they simply ineffective?  Are there factors at play that consistently undermine any potential gains from progressive changes?  Answering those questions adequately is probably far more difficult than can be imagined (a premise that deserves its own blog post at some point).  I suspect that the answers to each one of those questions is “yes” to some degree, all depending on a host of factors that are not only difficult to measure, but difficult to identify which are even worth measuring in the first place.  That, however, is not what this particular post is about.

I have a theory (one that has absolutely no scientific evidence to support it, so take everything from this point onward with a very liberal grain of salt) that systemic educational reform has a couple of very big roadblocks that have been standing in its way for quite a few years.  I’m not so self-indulgent as to think I’ll be making any groundbreaking revelations here.  I just think there haven’t been a lot of readily available solutions for getting around these issues.

The first big barrier is that the people and organizations we typically look to for implementing reform simply have too many moving parts in play and too many stakeholders to answer to.  Provincial (and state) governments are steering massive battleships that just take too long to turn.  And given that elected officials at the head of these ships must ultimately answer to the diverse desires of an electorate, the risks of making large changes are fairly high if the outcomes are not already very certain.

Every teacher during the course of a career will find themselves trying out new strategies or approaches in their classrooms.  Whether thoughtfully or instinctively, we then make adjustments and refinements to those strategies in light of how well they produced the intended effects.  Even the most well planned changes can produce unintended consequences or unanticipated results, but we roll with the punches and learn from any mistakes we make.  Strategies that work are further improved upon with repeated practice, while ineffective approaches are discarded.  Often the only people in a position to critique our changes are students who lack almost every resource necessary to be effective critics.

The experience is entirely different at the jurisdictional level.  The larger the educational body, the greater the number of critical eyes on the process and the more able the critics are to identify its deficiencies.  You don’t just “give it a try” when operating at the scale of provincial education ministries or even school divisions.  Individual teachers don’t typically have media scrutiny, opposition critics, or an electoral cycle to contend with when deciding what changes to implement in a classroom. 

The point:  we can’t reliably expect significant reforms to come from governmental institutions, especially if a particular reform is lacking in objective data to support its efficacy.

This is one of the most significant reasons why I contend that meaningful reform must originate on the ground floor – with individual teachers and schools.  One reason why I like to call this a revolution is because I think that valuable and meaningful change starts with the people, not the politicians.  I think that systemic reform is more likely to take place when the changes are already being adopted non-systemically.  If we can show that something works here, we can make the argument that it will work there.

In spite of the fact that I’m arguing we can’t rely on governments to right the ship, my own provincial ministry has made strides in recent years to do just that.  What encourages me most is the initiatives that I think are producing the most positive results are the ones that are ultimately doing just what I’m advocating for here – empowering teachers and schools to tackle the challenges of reform at a local level.  The High School Redesign project is one example.  Alberta Education hasn’t mandated very much with regards to what redesign should look like in schools taking on the project.  Some are focusing on a particular area (assessment or timetabling), while others are literally tearing it all apart and rethinking how an entire building functions.  Each participant is a little crucible of experimentation, some of which will hopefully generate road maps for other institutions to follow once results start to emerge.  Either way, Alberta Education has given teachers and administrators the opportunity to “give it a try.” 

The Queen has invited – is in fact encouraging – the peasants to revolt.  Who are we to turn down the invitation?

Earlier I suggested that there were a couple of barriers to systemic reform, but have only discussed this one.  I’ll make roadblock number two the subject of my next post.

TL;DR: Teachers have the potential to be the best agents for meaningful educational reform.  We should start some.

Until then, vive la resistance!