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| There are no boxes in the future |
A few years ago at a BBQ I was talking to a recently
graduated teacher who had not been given any real information about the
position he was to take up in a couple of weeks. In an attempt to help him I
put together some ideas that he, and other beginning teachers, might find useful. I have always liked the quote that there is no shallow end when you
begin teaching – from day one you are faced with thirty plus students to
‘educate’. Those first days are important.
While teachers, even the experiences, are always
apprehensive about what the year hold principals might well use the remaining
days thinking how to better create the conditions to get the best from both
teachers and students.
Leadership is important in any organisation – leaders set
the tone, create the climate for better or worse. The last decades has seen
principals being given them more responsibility while at the same time the
current government has imposed greater accountability and compliance
requirements. This paradox has led to schools ‘being over-managed and under
led’. As a result of imposed formulaic ‘best practices’, evidence based
teaching, and the narrowing effect of
National Standards, teacher and students creativity is at risk.
Let’s hope that while principals are relaxing they are
thinking of better ways to lead ‘their’ schools so as to to create conditions
to allow greater teacher creativity.
With this is mind it is important to step back and try and
see the big picture about the purpose of education for the 21st
Century. Our schools, even at the primary level, have their genesis in an
industrial era – timetables, bells, imposed fragmented curriculums, testing and
targets and a success fail orientation – best exemplified by the sorting of
students under National Standards.
It is hard to do such thinking when the school is in
operation but the questioning of the assumptions underpinning traditional
schooling based on mechanistic concepts of hierarchy, efficiency and
bureaucracy is vital.
It’s obvious that we can’t expect future success as long as
we stay wedded to old approaches. As
Einstein said ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of thinking that
created it.’
Imagine a school focused on developing students talents as the purpose of education – to do so would require a new mind-sets by all
involved and a rearranging of curriculum priorities. For all students to be
successful they would need not only to be provided with integrated curriculum
challenges to allow interests to be established but they would also need to
opportunities to gain all the appropriate skills to achieve personal
excellence. Literacy and numeracy would need to be ‘re-framed’ to contribute and not be an end in themselves.
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| Real innovation starts in classrooms |
Such schools would require
courageous leadership to combat old ideas and habits. Such schools would need
new organisations based on self-managing teams and value, and share, the ideas of
creative teachers. To be leader in such a school would be a real challenge.
Such leaders would, once to develop the talents and gifts of all students has been agreed to,
would need to respond continuously to change and to support and trust their
teachers. A leader, in such an environment, needs to make sure the purpose of
the school is clear to allow teachers to act in ways that align with the agreed
purpose and to hold themselves accountable to agreed values to ensure success. Teachers would need to
earn trust through their behaviours and actions but leaders need to create the circumstances in which trust can be earned.
Leadership in such schools
presents a paradox – how to develop a unified learning community while at the
same time allowing teacher creativity. This tension between the need for
individual freedom and a sense of shared community will be on ongoing dilemma
but it is possible to create resilient and adaptive communities as well as
valuing individuality- no one is saying it will be easy. Individuals cannot
survive alone – and we all need to work within agreed boundaries. Success depends
on respectful relationships resulting in the organisation and the individual
co-evolving.
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| About time we took his advice!! |
We have to learn to live with the paradox held together by their
agreed shared purpose; what teachers have agreed to achieve. Diversity and
uniqueness become contributions rather than issues of compliance. No one person
has the answer – certainly not ‘experts’ distant from the school. Leaders have
the responsibility to make sure what the school stands for is clear. Teachers
need information, resources, opportunities to talk and share ,and support ,if
they are to be trusted.
The model of creative leadership
is translated to the role of the teacher in the classroom.
Life is uncertain -unpredictable
Life is about constant
reinvention, adaptation and improvisation.
Life depends on diversity,
imagination, creativity and imagination.
Life is about learning by taking
risks.
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| Schools are too box like1 |
Success depends on all student having their unique talents
and gifts developed.
Schools are where these qualities
ought to be central.
Leadership is about creating such learning communities.
We need leaders who know how to
nourish and rely on the innate creativity, freedom, and caring of people.
Such leadership is not easy – it is
always dangerous challenging the status quo.
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| Rosy the Riveter WW2 |
Whatever the difficulty creative
leadership is the pressing challenge of our time.
The new year could well be the time for principals to begin conversations about the purpose of schools in the 21st C with all involved.
A good start would be to put the currently side-lined New Zealand central - a curriculum that asks for all students to 'seek, use and create their own knowledge'.
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