Spanning the chasm: Promoting the cultural DNA of learning

As those of you in education who have followed my ramblings for a few years will know, I’m passionate about better learning outcomes for students and the relationship achieving this sustainable improvement must have on the way staff operate and share practice.

In my books Future Proof Your School and Re-Examining Success, I tried to share my experience of how to engineer cultural change. This involved elements of educational research, common learning issues in schools, templates for change and evaluations of effectiveness. The books have sold well to senior leaders and the former has been licensed for production at a Chinese University, proving that the search for sustainable improvement in educational performance of both students and therefore of staff techniques and culture is universal.

I can confidently say that two key forces are holding back the search for sustainable excellence in learning In the English speaking world:

The first force is the managerial culture that pervades the learning culture of most school systems. This involves a top down hierarchy managing schools as if they were industrial units. Information Technology has accelerated this process and made administrative systems and the collection of data for use by the higher echelons a major call on staff time. This has led to the marginalisation of the creative and collaborative efforts of teachers and an unwholesome learning diet for students.

It is also the major element cited by good teachers who leave the profession prematurely. Two wonderful creative teachers in the middle of their careers who live on my street independently said they have left the classroom in the last twelve months because of the administrative burden which prevents them from fully engaging with the students and developing their potential. This is a story repeated across the school estate.

Second is the overemphasis on rote memorisation of curriculum content, rather than gearing a student’s learning towards any sort of process or skill development, or even a tangible goal outside of just “knowing the material.” All the effort is concentrated on the ‘what’—rather than the ‘how’—of learning.? Students feel increasingly alienated from control of their learning because the process is characterised by increasingly exasperated teachers skipping through reams of information in order to prepare students for examinations. Teachers feel that they cannot devote the time to supporting and developing the learning prowess or ameliorate the deficits of the individual pupil in the headlong rush to deliver content, no matter how shallow. In short, there is no time to think about how to learn effectively.

The result? Students are spoon-fed information, receive it passively, get precious little context for how it will be useful to them or how it relates to what they have already learned, and then are somehow expected to remember all of it for their end-of-year assessments or certificates.

And it begs the question—even if they do remember it, how well could they possibly understand it?

That, in a nutshell, is the chasm that needs to be overcome in the education landscape if we are to have students arrive at the end of their formal education as independent and autonomous learners able to apply their learning to research and synthesise adapt and problem solve and present workable solutions in a coherent way.

My attempts to span this chasm have focussed on developing a project management qualification for both students and teachers which would give them templates to scaffold their learning more effectively and focus on skills development.

Over the course of the last two years I’ve been privileged to join conversations with world class educational innovators regarding the future of education and the learning systems that underpin them, none more so than Steve Schecter. We have shared many hours of conversation about how we could improve educational outcomes for students and change the culture of learning in schools to become more responsive and developmental. Slowly Steve revealed the work he has been doing over twenty years which incorporated all the elements of a functioning process for sustainable development under the brand name Much Smarter.

Much Smarter is a comprehensive system for improving learning outcomes for all with elements designed to empower learners, teachers and parents in a developmental and coherent process of supported and sustainable learning improvement, and I am delighted to be able to announce that I have been invited by the Much Smarter Strategic Development Team of Steve, Tom, Gavin and Alice to act as an Ambassador and Special Advisor for the imminent launch of their Much Smarter CPD offer to schools.

Further details to follow….

I'd be interested to hear from any senior leaders in schools, MATS and FE Colleges for whom this resonates.

Contact me at: [email protected] or through my Linked in profile

David Hughes MA NPQH FRSA