Now build it out with an evocative vision. Improvise progress by tinkering: with lots of trial and lots of error. The not knowing is the best bit: the mysteries the surprises, and from time to time the windfalls!
Hello there, I'm Steve Collis!
Click on "contact", won't you, and wave right back at me?
I've been meaning to post this for ages! I'll do a rush job, okay?
Okay - the best professional development strategy for teachers is, without doubt, getting connecting in a Personal Learning Network, in any form. Twitter has proven remarkable for teachers in their ability to reach out and connect, in very real and authentic collaborative learning relationships. For years now my motto has been "if I can get a colleague onto Twitter, they'll never be the same" (like me!!)
But now there is something even better. It doesn't replace Twitter, but it works very similarly. It is the teachmeet movement. Launched in the UK in an initiative by Ewan McIntosh, the idea has spread and is now gaining traction in Australia: organise local face to face meetings of teachers to swap ideas and reflect on practice. The notion is so powerful: you don't have to wait for permission or for top-down policy change. Join the grassroots tribe and transform education from the inside out.
It is a bottom-up movement - teachers can just go ahead and organise a teachmeet. Wonderful people in Sydney, Australia have launched the teachmeet movement here. Lots of colleagues have worked hard to make it happen. I take my hat off to them. I wonder if they understand the energy they've unleashed!
Check out the events here: http://tmsydney.wikispaces.com/ and consider if you might like to attend or organise a teach-meet of your own!
So much buzz and energy and passion for change was harnessed in 2011 in Sydney thanks to the teachmeets!
One indicator of this cascading excitement is a HUGE Sydney Teachmeet planned for Friday, March 2. In fact the ambition is to make it a WORLD RECORD for the most teachers yet at a teachmeet event.
Click here to read more about it. COME ALONG! Doesn't matter if you don't know anyone else. Come join the tribe. As the poster says "FREE EDU EVENT run BY TEACHERS FOR TEACHERS". What an empowering notion!!
For years now at NBCS our professional development has been almost entirely in-house and almost entirely consisted of cross-pollination and crowd-sourcing. We have no IT integrators. We have an executive structure but the emphasis is on distributed leadership and spontaneous "DO IT NOW" collaboration and innovation.
Our full-staff PD day last week included this creative collaboration:
And then the next day staff grouped themselves up and selected their own mini passion project, to be completed in a whirlwind within 4 hours.
Our Stage #3 team were inspired by Yayoi Kusama's "Obliteration Room", and managed to whip up their own in no time (Skender ran home to get an old table... someone must sourced white paint from somewhere):
The students will add stickers all over the place (earning each one, mind you, via a gamified structure).
Elsewhere, Ben Hedstrom, Amanda Hill and colleagues are redeveloping the music rooms to an open-plan student-directed structure. They will crush the distinction between year groups: different classes and ages will share the space simultaneously, forming a semi-professional studio, the older mentoring the younger.
Another team made a boredom buster station:
I'm not sure what this was but it looks fantastic:
Some Visual Arts staff recycled their own previous works, I believe by cutting it into strips and mashing it up again. Their vision for the art spaces is busting them open into a Parisian studio, with no clear distinction between the inside and a creative, rive gauche esplanade in the open air.
Tim Barrett and colleagues made some new furniture, and videoed the process!
The day ended with some crowd-sources post-it thoughts:
The crowd-sourcing of teacher development is the most powerful PD you can offer. Teachers have limited need for outside experts - a more pressing need is space to collaborate, then cross-pollinate.
Two weeks ago I worked with two Brisbane schools for a day. Walking in as an outsider to a new context, I took a hunch on the crowd-source/collaborate/cross-pollinate processes and allocated three sessions in the day for them. It worked a treat, and I don't see why it won't work anywhere. I think it's fine to have top-down leadership: we all want to look up to a leader to help steer the ship, BUT what joy and power there is in grassroots, bottom-up collaboration. No one controlling, no one waiting to act.
It's beyond the scope of this post (it's dinner time) but it's fascinating watching the business world shift in the same direction, to the same distributed-leadership model. All about agility, flexibility, contextual-leadership etc.
And on that note I will abruptly finish this post. I have a roast waiting!
Hardly an original observation I am about to make, yet it has slapped me afresh, so here we go!
Understanding the schooling paradigm-shift requires one to be a culture-watcher. It is the seismic changes in society which make the schooling system appear so anachronistic and functionally irrelevant.
One such change: the rise in technologies facilitating collective action and intelligence.
The original technology that facilitated collective action and intelligence was money. Money sped up collective intelligence in a seismic fashion.
Since I'm on clichés today let's mention Wikipedia. It runs itself. Hierarchies are artefacts that bubble-up from grassroots communities. Everyone chips in.
Money facilitated the 'division of labour'. I have an iPhone. No single person or business knows how an iPhone is made. Apple coordinated the design, but I doubt they know how to mine the materials or manufacture the plastics or silicon inside, and it's the army of poor at Foxconn that assembled it, in a factory assembled by other industries and experts. Every product or process in the modern world bubbles up out of a myriad of collective intelligences, forming meta-collectives, and meta-meta-collectives.
I'm getting to Star Wars.
The mass media until the end of the 20th century consisted chiefly of one-to-many technologies. The printing press, radio, television, yadayadayada.
The web has allowed the proliferation of many-to-many technologies. That is, collective intelligences.
Endless funky web experiments have illustrated the phenomena. Check this fascinating investigation into Twitter rumours during the London riots and how the collective intelligence corrected misinformation.
I'm getting to Star Wars, ok?
Oh alright I'll cut to the chase.
The Star Wars Uncut project allowed anyone in the world to claim a 15 second excerpt from the Star Wars IV film and create their own version. The entire film has been sown back together again from these micro-remakes.
The result is bizarrely watchable and hilarious. Every 15 second cut hassomething unique and witty to bring to the party. Like so much of modern global-village life, it's a pot-luck lunch where everyone brings their best to the table. Contributing artists move between slapstick, irony, gravitas, intertextual references, and the absurd, so the resulting text has a density that is common and expected in the media nowadays.
And it just made me think: our young people are growing up in an age where participation in collective intelligences is as natural as breathing. It wasn't so when I was a lad, but it is now.
Consider the 'technologies of schooling': classrooms, authority figures, timetables, reporting, yadayadayada. These are redundant technologies. They are the equivalent of a horse-and-cart, or a punch-card reader.
Schooling as we know it is an anachronistic technology.
It is only a matter of time before our collective intelligence puts in the bin in favour of a new process - a new sociological institution - that relies on emergent cooperation rather than hierarchical order.
I'm sitting in a café with local colleagues Summer Charlesworth and Malyn Mawby. It's several days after the end of school term for 2011.
And I'm not sure how we got onto it, but I started expounding on my 'teaching is traumatic' theory.
Summer recounts her reaction to this in a blog post, which I will quote at length here:
"When I first heard this statement, I had a physiological reaction. Maybe it was because I was tired, or maybe it struck a real chord as I’ve been working with pre-service and new teachers who I have watched struggle with fatigue and frustration, and I remember this as I feel that I finally found my groove this year. Teaching is Traumatic in many ways, it’s true. Our job is pretty high pressure and high stakes. Trauma reminds me of hospitals, and if you think about it school admin is much like the emergency ward. You can make a list of things to get done, but an incident may happen, or something needs you swiftly, and this means everything stops and all focus is on this unexpected event. It means lots of the creative, and the ‘to do’ work is done late into the night, into the weekends. We are dealing with raw human, heightened emotion every day."
How apt is that? That "school admin is much like the emergency ward"? There is a triage process where you decide which 5 out of the 100 things you wish to achieve will actually get done in your available 15 minutes.
The greatest layer of brutalisation, in my opinion, is the 'classroom management' paradigm, where 1 adult teacher is given 1 alotment of territory with 1 group of students, for 1 year at a time.
Tell me that doesn't sound like the premise for a Big Brother reality TV show?
This scene from Summer Heights High sums it all up for me:
Teachers will recognise it as excruciatingly close to the bone. What does anyone expect will happen? It's the school machine that brutalises teachers and students alike.
Many students emerge from the machine with subtle scarring that is still identifiable decades later. I've noticed it emerges at dinner parties when strangers discover I am a languages teacher. Invariably this triggers a reversion and they recount how they "Made their French teacher cry once." They've not re-processed this event properly since reaching adulthood. All they remember is the moment of triumph where they stuck it to THE MAN (or woman).
It's human nature to kick against confinement.
Teaching is traumatic.
In their first and second years of teaching, teachers settle on coping mechanisms and classroom tactics that somehow WORK to allow them to survive. For some this means repeatedly nagging the kids into submission, reacting to nothing and tolerating very high levels of chaos, as if resigned to a perpetual tug of war over every little detail. Others climb and conquer Mount Classroom Management. Hardly a victory, to my mind, because order was never the litmus test for learning. (See www.anarchyinlearning.com for the counter-example... high disorder + high organic learning, but disorder does not equal chaos).
So teachers find a way to cope. They define their own status quo.
But they earned it at a cost. They survived their first years with tears.
They cry at their desks. They go home and sleep 14 hours Friday evening and don't want to go out all weekend. They get grumpy at their loved ones and then feel like rats. I say they, and I mean me too, although for me, personally, it was a feeling like I had 'lost myself' somewhere in the day. It was all numbness.
Summer's blog post continues as an unfolding story of shifting from survival mode to thrive mode.
Her post deserves a close read to track the dynamics of the shift. Look at her vocabulary. It invokes the language of journey, of community, of connection, of meaning.
I, too, found a path through, assisted greatly by online connections, wonderful, loving colleagues at my school, and a paradigm shift that has only intensified each year I have worked from 'school as a machine' to 'school as a village'.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic and your own journey.
Also, watch this space. I'm working very hard this very moment to put together an online mentoring program for 2012 designed to stare these issues directly in the eye.
I am thinking it will:
- be spaced out over 6 months to allow slow, genuine growth.
- be accessible at multiple, flexible times via videoconferencing, and available worldwide.
- be modularised so people can dip in and out as suits the rhythm of their lives.
- mash up direct advice, and critical thinking, and small-group communities to share a journey together.
- confront all the faultlines we have to navigate, from school politics, to educational philosophy, to inner growth, to workflow and information management.
- aim to nurture a savvy, resilient, leadership-orientated mindset that will stand colleagues in good stead for years to come, across multiple scenarios.
I'll announce the details very soon. It will be a 'SCIL' thing, not something I am doing privately. I wonder if the idea appeals? I'd appreciate your thoughts as always.
What would a visitor take away from your school after visiting for a few hours? Or a day?
Or a week?
Béa and Oliver Beste
Béa Beste visited my school, (Northern Beaches Christian School) in March 2011 for two days, and then returned with her husband Oliver for the best part of a week before Christmas.
We bonded immediately as kindred spirits. Béa had, previously, launched a series of bilingual schools in Germany and was travelling the world seeking inspiration for her next idea: 'playducation'. Béa understands the implications of the attention economy; that engagement is everything, imagination all powerful, inspiration un-stoppable. I decohered somewhat in my last post about 'life is desire', but the point is simple: learning comes from internal impulses.
Béa took a LOT of video footage over her week-long séjour at NBCS in November.
A Third Party Perspective
She has since mixed down hours of footage down to a 7 minute video which is likely to become my definitive resource for communicating what we're on about. First of all, I'm grateful to Béa for her hard work! (Thanks Béa!)
It's fascinating for me to see what a visitor notices. What was most salient? What stood out, out of everything?
A bold vision: turning school into an 'airport of learning', and radically rethinking timetabling and physical spaces.
Vision first, administration second, and distributed-leadership rather than top-down.
Get ideas from other learning spaces, that aren't schools.
Dissolve walls, even between 'inside' and 'outside'.
Possibilities open up with 200 students + 8 teachers in 1 large space, especially 'culture of sharing'.
Students in the driving seat, including co-desigining learning landscape.
Teacher PD must be inline with the same principles. PD isn't lead from the front but is grass-roots. e.g. teachers on field trips to visit businesses around Sydney and investigate modern spaces.
Safe-failing, risk-taking culture.
Connecting teachers and students to the world via the internet.
Teaching the curriculum, but going FURTHER, and not letting it constrain the pedagogy.
Gathering a Tribe, Building a Movement
I am delighted by the video and by what Béa saw after a week embedded in our school.
You know what? Our connection with Béa and Oliver is so strong because we recognise we belong to the same tribe.
The tribe is rethinking learning. I suspect that you, o ye humble blog reader, are part of our tribe too, by virtue of spending your SPARE TIME reading about learning. Why would anyone spend their SPARE TIME on this!? You could be at the beach! No one has asked you to do it. No one is accrediting you. No one is paying you extra. No one has given you permission, a mandate or a deadline.
It takes courage to be in this tribe. Most of us had 13 years schooling learning how to DO SCHOOL. Then in our teacher training were taught how to DO SCHOOL. When we watch soap opera school scenes we're reminded how to DO SCHOOL.
Courage to be in this tribe, because we reject the well-worn DNA, resist its momentum, refuse its answers, recant its first principles - but if we leave the well-worn path, where will we go instead?
The tribe is open for membership, no interview required, no papework. It's conceptual: your name isn't written anywhere. It helps if you tweet or blog, but there's no rules, and there's not even a territory mapped out (we're the surveyors). You may be a lone ranger at your school. That's ok, you can be like a secret spy seeking to overthrow the ancien régime from the inside, lighting a little fire in your own backyard.
If you're in the tribe, wave at me, won't you? Leave a comment and say g'day!
P.S. Keep your eye on SCIL in 2012 - we're keener than ever to help build steam in the transformation movement.
