The Commercialisation of School

Commercialisation

With my 'modern teacher' hat on, I was partaking of a Twitter chat the other day. During the chat I was struck by the terminology the moderator of the chat used. He was discussing how you promote the 'branding' of your school. To me, branding is a word with a whole world of commercial and capitalist connotations and it felt unnatural to be using the term in an educational sense.

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2009/07/25/the-significance
-of-establishing-a-prominence-brand-identity-for-your-website/

So with this in mind, I began to think; is education becoming more commercialised? Should it? Is this inevitable progress? And should schools really be adopting marketing and business approaches to their 'core business'? Think of the terminology: 'performance related pay', 'target setting', 'data tracking', 'intervention strategy' in fact, I don't know for sure where these terms originated from but they sound like terms that could have come from industry, and there are many other examples. I was sat in a meeting just this week where the students were referred to as ‘customers’. Students or parents as customers is a worrying thought to a progressive educator when that old adage ‘the customer is always right’ comes to mind.

I enjoy sport, football in particular (the version where the ball is kicked more than any other action), and the podcasts I follow deride the word 'brand' in football. To them it represents the money-grabbing marketeer approach to club ownership. They believe this approach often means the club can afford to pretty much ignore the needs of the match going fans.

So on the one hand, we are bowing to the demands of the customer by giving them what they think they want, while at the same time ignoring what they actually need. This is because we are scrambling to maintain our own thin veneer of success as dictated by the narrow gauge of data.

What happened to the 'industrial' school?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory

In his oft aired talk on the state of schooling (RSA version), Sir Ken Robinson uses the industrial features of schools to question how appropriate the current school design is for the task of learning (recognise that staff meeting anyone?). It's interesting to see that we are being guided away from the industrial model of schooling, the old fashioned world where things were actually made; I loved making stuff at school. To a creeping commercialisation of schooling where things are measured, tracked, compared, publicly evaluated and ultimately judged on how well they sell. Where schools are in competition with each other to develop their unique selling point. Where the actual ‘product’ seems to be lost in the wake of the more important job of reporting the numerical values that reflect the right image for protecting the reputation of the schools, areas/local authorities/districts, political policies or even countries (thanks P.I.S.A.). And we all know how well that model worked for the banking world.

What now?

Naturally, I am not necessarily recommending we go back to the old industrial model. In fact I'm not entirely sure what I am recommending. But as far back as 2008 (and probably earlier too) reports of school’s using tactics which ‘game’ the system, not dissimilar to what the banks got up to, were calling for the end of the targets and results obsession. We are not churning out products. We are not manufacturing, assembling or marketing. We are learning. How can the impact of school life ever be effectively measured when the outcomes last over a lifetime and people's judgements on success are as varied as there are people?

What I really need is some way of measuring how empowered my students are to achieve what makes them happy over their lifetime. That they are wise enough to choose their own success criteria, and that the very same success criteria has a basis in consideration for the world around them.

Find a way to measure me that, and I'll sell it for you.

Learn, Unlearn, Relearn

"The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."
- Alvin Toffler, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century

So I set up a Powtoon account not long ago. This is an animated film and presentation making website, and mighty good it is too. In the first tutorial the fella announces you have a full 7 seconds to capture the audience's attention, before they decide if it is worth watching further. I wondered to myself how long people's attention spans are for reading, or more precisely reading blogs, before they decide it's time to move on to something different? I fear I may already have overrun my attention grabbing window. It's only the hardy, or foolhardy from now on.

So for those still with me, welcome!

As a fresh faced NQT I remember vividly the experience of being enlightened, by some gnarly expert visiting our authority, that teachers had been doing teaching all wrong for years. That students needed to have their lessons delivered to them in a new way, which took into account their 'learning style'. This was news to me and my peers as we all sat around studiously filling in questionnaires to identify our learning styles. It made perfect sense at the time. And who were we to disagree with some such educational Goliath? Even if we had suspected there was something not quite right about it.

So we toddled off back to our schools and dutifully create three different learning style activities for every lesson we teach, as if we weren't busy enough already. Which we just about managed to keep up every time we got observed, for the first year at least.

From: https://everettcc.instructure.com/courses/1054908/pages/learning-styles-and-elearning

Now we are told this was misguided (which is handy, because in the form it was first presented to me, it turned out to be pretty unsustainable). Now we are told that it isn't actually how learning works at all. And yet, a huge proportion of people (82% - find out more here) still believe the learning style myth to be true. This has been learnt, assimilated and then entrenched into popular belief. How long before society manages to 'unlearn' this concept? Then how much longer to learn that everybody uses all methods and it depends on what is being learnt, as to which method is employed? And then, how much longer to unlearn that actually, even this is not exactly how it works but....? (Of course this hasn't happened yet, but it probably will).

This is a specific educational example of learning, unlearning and relearning. But I truly believe that in their working lives, much of the true success of our students will depend upon their adaptability. Indeed, this has always been the case through human history. But as the pace of change seems to be accelerating, examples of the increasing usefulness of this ability are already apparent. 

Recently, in my school, we migrated from an Outlook based email solution to a Gmail one. This was carefully planned for and orchestrated. Colleagues' comfort levels with the new email system were measured, a variety of support put in place, and a number of training sessions laid on. Some folks were so far ahead they could have run the sessions themselves, others neatly switched in line with the programme, and still others are yet to come to terms with labels and filters months after the event. I wonder what impact this has had on each group's effectiveness since the switch?

In the recent past so much effort was put into things like 'learning styles' and the much maligned 'brain breaks' etc, I wonder how long before our Gmail training becomes so equally old fashioned and obsolete? When we communicate by using devices that we dictate to (still can’t get these to work reliably for me yet!) and then devices that even read our minds to compose 'thought messages', the hours we spent learning and teaching a new way to type a message will seem quaint indeed.

http://www.learning-mind.com/mind-reading-device-can-convert-thoughts-into-words/

This makes me wonder, how much have I learnt in the last year that I will need to unlearn, how much have I taught, that will need unteaching, and how many things will I need to relearn this year?

Voice recognition? So twentieth century, Sir.