One of the features of British Columbia as an education jurisdiction, is the existence of a voluntary network of educators who have a clear purpose. ‘Spirals of inquiry’ are followed to identify, understand and address issues to improve learning and life outcomes for students. It’s an iterative process of checking, scanning, focusing, developing a hunch, learning and taking action.
What this approach recognises is that when smart people doing complex work such as teaching are united and harnessed to an audacious purpose, and are given the opportunity to get on with the job, they do so in powerful ways. What is absent in this approach is coercion, bureaucratic restrictions, and undue system accountabilities and monitoring measures.
In the majority of Western education systems, the drive for improvement is focused on standardised test scores, comparative performance data including league tables, scrutiny of teacher performance and teaching quality, and in some jurisdictions, performance pay. In many systems, the (industrial) mindset is that when there is evidence a particular strategy can produce academic results, that ‘shiny thing’ is imposed from above.
What GeePaw Hill’s work with RAMPS indicates is that high-quality outcomes are achieved when the right conditions to motivate people (within the school and by extension the schooling system) are put in place. Not surprisingly, this demands of us the recognition that it is the activity in the middle levels of an organisation that is key to system growth. Hill says the enabling factors are high levels of Psychological Safety and the establishment of a rhythm within the organisation to meet, share and learn together.
What I learned from NOII, and more recently from the schools I'm working with in Queensland that are utilising the Designed inGenuity framework, is that our best way forward does not lie with objects and measures imposed by large educational bureaucracies. What is needed are agile structures in schools where high levels of safety are present, where iterative cycles of learning benefit all, and where accountability flows from purpose.
Next: Meso Level Activity
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