Looking for opportunities: Wide-open opportunities to invent or build (Part 1)

Sometimes things are serendipitous!

Innovation has been on my mind. Not that it is never too far away from my thinking; but recently I have been thinking about innovation in schooling and why it might exist in individual sites and pockets but not systemically.

I work with leaders in a networked learning community. It seems to me that intuitively these leaders of schools and the principals’ consultant know what it is that needs to happen to not only improve schools but to transform them. The strength is in leaders working together to solve the problems that they face together.

Traditionally we tend to isolate school sites, their leaders and their teachers and expect them to find solutions to the professional problems that face them. System level support is more often than not isolated to individuals working in individual schools. Efforts to de-privatise practice seem to not deliver the improvements and transformations we might have hoped for.

This got me to thinking: Perhaps it is the system that gets in the way of improvement and transformation.

Schools are expected to improve and even transform to deliver learning for today; and yet systems don’t look to themselves to radically change. There might be external reviews leading to restructuring, but somehow things don’t change. Maybe schooling systems are more resilient than schools.

Yesterday two things happened that fed into my thinking:

Firstly, I met with one of my former Directors from Sydney CEO, Seamus O’Grady. In the course of the discussion we got onto talking about strategic management and annual team achievement plans that consisted of lists of what individuals might do to contribute towards the year’s strategic plan for the system.

An alternative might be a more collaborative approach focused on projects and initiatives rather than individual contributions.

Secondly, I had dinner with a leadership team I worked with a couple of years ago. In discussions with the principal we talked about the inadequacies of system support being controlled by the system. We discussed the position I have arrived at in my thinking:

That systems should provide structures and scaffolds that allows for the leaders across the system – school leaders and system (office) leaders - to work together as system leadership with a focus on system improvement rather than school improvement.

One of the ideas I have been playing around with is the notion of schools being held accountable to each other through peer to peer accountability such as principals being accountable to each other for the educational opportunities and outcomes of their schools.

Coupled with this is a re-thinking of accountability as being not just achievement based and competitive, but rather a for schools, by schools approach where it is as much in my interest for you to be successful as is for you to be successful.

This is counter-intuitive to market forces thinking.

Imagine schools working together for the good of our kids and society rather than competing for enrolments, achievement levels and funding!

Part 2 tomorrow: Looking for opportunities: “Greenfield” schooling.

Value adding in education: Most Likely to Succeed: newyorker.com

Greg Whitby's recent tweet alerted me to this interesting article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell from December 2008.

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—what one researcher calls “withitness.”

The link to the article is below:

Annals of Education: Most Likely to Succeed: newyorker.com

The power of Twitter

I recieved a tweet yesterday from Frank Crawford (from HMIe) in Scotland. I met Frank a couple of weeks ago when he was in Sydney. Since then we have "met up" on Twitter. His tweet caused me to reflect on the power of Twitter for me professionally.

I've been using Twitter for a while and have found it a valuable professional tool. As someone who values networking for learning, Twitter has allowed the ongoing connection with others.

It has allowed me to:

• maintain connections with colleagues
• forge new professional connections across all sectors in education and beyond education
• keep up with developments in education and beyond
• be part of conferences when I couldn't physically be there
• share my own thoughts about conferences and forums that I have attended
• put questions out there about professional problems and get instant responses
• access key thinkers that influence my thinking
• put my own thinking out there and get responses.

The power of Twitter and the accessibility it provides has been quite significant for me. Twitter has given me access to people, knowledge and learning in a way that was not possible 5 or so years ago.

Come and Play - Video gaming

Whilst following up on some of the TEDTalk links referred to by Frank Crawford (Scottish Chief Inspector of Schools) in a recent presaentation, I came across a TEDTalk delivered by David Perry on video games. This is a contentious area for education, yet it has huge potential for learning.

In his presentation, David Perry uses a video, I'm a video game addict that was created by Michael Highland. The video is quite stimulating and thought provoking. It caused me to think about the blurring between what is virtual and real with the real becoming virtual and the virtual being real.

It challenges what schooling, teaching and learning could (and even perhaps should) look like if gaming were used in learning.

David Perry concludes his TEDTalk by highlighting that Michael Highland's video showed that video games can impact and move individuals. His closing comment was that the new paradigm of video games can open up new frontiers for creative minds that like to think big!

Imagine schools that did that.