Then why is it so difficult to effect real change in education? Grant nailed one obstacle last year when he was teaching "Constructing Your School's Financial Future," an NBOA blended learning course. "Change isn't hard," he told the audience. "It's uncomfortable." I see this discomfort whenever I meet with independent school business leaders, such as last week in Charleston at Business Office NOW, when I asked a room of more than 40 school leaders how many of them were on Twitter. Nobody raised their hands.
Not surprisingly, it was on Twitter that I learned about George Couros's excellent post on his blog, The Principal of Change. He identifies three realities that thwart real change in schools—and that educators and school leaders can actually overcome.
Isolation is the enemy of innovation. Educators need more time to collaborate with each other, Couros says, but crowded schedules and schools' physical structures make this difficult. A solution for some teachers? No surprise: social media. By connecting with and learning from other educators, they have made "a significant difference in their own classrooms and [created] much more engaging and empowering learning spaces. Isolation is now a choice educators make," he asserts. Equally powerful is this quote from a previous Couros post: "What if ... every teacher tweeted one thing a day that they did in their classroom to a school hashtag, and they took five minutes out of their day to read each other's tweets? What impact would that have on learning and school culture?"
A focus on weakness undermines strengths. As a parent, this hit me hard. Consider the practice of assigning yet more math homework to students for whom math is a real challenge. "It is not that we shouldn't struggle, but it is important [to be] very thoughtful of how we spend our energy," Couros writes. He suggests shifting the focus to building upon students' strengths, to help them develop not just competence but also the confidence to tackle future challenges. Moreover, he suggests, schools should apply this focus to hiring, in "finding the best people and empowering them based upon their strengths."
Side note: Building upon strengths is a concept that crystallized for me in First, Break All the Rules, where authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman encouraged managers to build on the 80 percent of what employees do well rather than attempting to fix the 20 percent they do wrong. That thinking remains visionary and transformative.
Experience may be too powerful a teacher. Couros makes an important point with great clarity: "In no other profession in the world do you sit and watch someone else do your job for 16 years before you go and do it yourself." This concept gave me tremendous empathy for teachers and how daunted they must feel in facing pressure to "undo" all they have experienced, learned and practiced. Empathy, in fact, is Couros's key bit of advice on this matter: To create an environment where students would want to be a part of their classroom, school leaders must encourage teachers to learn from others—and to "experience what learning could look like."
Let's stop cycling through the old problems in education. These obstacles are real—but they're also opportunities to effect real change.
