I would like to acknowledge the passing of two public servants that trained with me over the last decades. Norm McInnis was a well-loved municipal public servant who I worked with during his tenure in Olds, Alberta. He loved the practitioner engagement tools and put so many into play. The staff at Olds still remember him fondly, as do I. Cathy Mercer was a delight, a firecracker, and a champion of learning organization tools. She was from ‘the Rock’ and her spirit of creativity, laughter and goodwill was known throughout the Newfoundland federal public service. She was a delight to train and work with. I miss her. As the Ennis Sisters sing, she was a daughter of Newfoundland.
This fall, I would like to find many of the practitioners that I worked with. As a project, if you know at least one person who worked with me and who might enjoy these essays, please invite them by adding their email below:
It is September.
It’s been over fifty-five years since I have taught in the front of a classroom and over sixty years since I sat in the back of a classroom, and so my credibility on this subject is low. But like a migrating bird, I get restless in September.
I was raised in a plumbing family and I gave plumbing a pretty good shot but I really did not have the aptitude and I dropped out. So, I went from the trades to Teacher’s College. I then went from teaching to a principal’s job, and finally became a superintendent. The Peter Principle, whereby we rise in organizations, to finally find our true level of incompetence, may have been at play here.
The bad news was that my father never cared for teachers and civil servants as clients (they watched over his shoulder and complained of prices) so he was not that thrilled at my becoming both.
The good news was that I did my education and public service work primarily with indigenous communities. I feel my developmental work with over fifty First Nations, setting up early school boards and seeing them begin to manage and run their own schools, was a gift for me as an educator. I acquired some fine personal learning from those two decades with First Nations. I learned that culture is a great source to put more soul into schools. I learned that schools without embedded elders in them, are schools imparting knowledge but maybe missing some wisdom. I learned that our schools are our future and teachers are the engineers on that train. I hope those fifty First Nations schools are good examples of some new models of education, but I sometimes wonder if the big mental models may still be in play, albeit with an indigenous patina.
My innovative learning journey and that plumber DNA, led me to search for and respect the best tools available and that led me down some fine roads in education and the public service.
Here is a little story about a teacher I knew fifty-six years ago who taught me a great tool for teachers to connect to each individual child.
My progressive educators at the Teacher’s College I attended back in the 60’s, challenged us to practice individualized instruction.
Are you kidding me?? We were supposed to make specific time for each kid when there were 28 of these little time bombs ready to go off at any minute? I do remember, however, one creative grade four teacher, Helen Bumphrey, who decided to actually tackle the question and she set aside the platitudes and actually created a practical everyday tool.
Every day on her school calendar, from three to three ten in the afternoon, she created a ten-minute time slot for each kid, one on one, in private, with the teacher. So, every 28 days, each kid got a precious ten minutes alone with her. The kid, importantly, got to set the agenda for those magic ten minutes, not her.
If you do the math, you will see that each kid probably got less than six of these one on one sessions a year. She never changed the timing. Every session was sacred and not to be bumped. Each kid that year would have almost sixty minutes of personal conversation time with her. Did your kid or grandkid get one full hour of private one on one with their teacher last year?
They made a film about her work. When they interviewed the kids, all they talked about was those few amazing times when they had that teacher all to themselves, the magic ten minutes. I have no idea if teachers today, in a classroom setting, have that sort of rigor about giving priority to the kids by embedding everyday scheduled and sacred individual conversational time. I have told this story to many public service managers and a lot of them have adopted this tool with their staff.
On reflection, I think Helen gave us a preview of the dilemma we see in schools today around the digital vs analog critique. Her tool needed a real time commitment to real time conversation. It would not have been very valuable for her to have a ten-minute text conversation. During the pandemic, teachers grabbed the Zoom for large group teaching but I could not find any students whose teacher gave them a regular ten minutes in actual one on one conversation.
I truly believe all teachers finish their training and head off to work with high ideals, passion and innovative thinking, as they close the college classroom door behind them and open the classroom door overcrowded with fresh anxious faces.
I was a 60’s idealist and I knew I wanted to change the system. In college, I soaked up seminal books like Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman, How Children Learn by John Holt, and the great story of the Summerhill School project. I helped start a free school: no rules, no structure! I was pumped, but it did not go so well. I carried the crazy into my first teaching job: I cut the wires to the bell system on my first day on the job. It all became a good 60’s story with my getting the shove out the door and the kids going on strike. But alas, as all teachers know, true systems change was not and maybe is still not just around the corner, no matter how great the passion.
In mid-career I went back to school. In a Master’s program at the U of T, I studied Learning Organization Theory in which Peter Senge of MIT challenged us that the only real tool to manage knowledge in a knowledge economy was continuous learning. This set me on my ass as I still saw learning as a school-based or training-based episodic model, not as a way to live every day of your life.
I realized that in a real learning organization a manager would never ask an employee “what did you do today?” but would rather ask “what did you learn today?” This simple, but profound idea of continuous learning is the key to innovation, strategic advantage and to quality improvement.
So, are schools learning organizations?
I could not find a lot of indicators in my experience that they were or even might be.
I recall thinking that if a school was a learning organization, we would not reward the kid with the always right answer, but rather reward the kid with the hard questions. I began to suspect that schools were not so much learning organizations but more teaching organizations. We seemed to be making students into receptacles of knowledge rather than do it yourself, hard rock miners of knowledge. Perhaps the modern school should strive to produce knowledge seekers rather than knowledge receptacles.
Three thoughts I have had lately:
Theory: maybe we should read a book
We need to better understand where the education system came from in order to imagine where it might go. A brilliant thought leader on this subject and its early industrial model is Sir Ken Robinson.
Wikipedia says he:
…suggests that to engage and succeed, education has to develop on three fronts. Firstly, that it should foster diversity by offering a broad curriculum and encouraging individualism of the learning process. Secondly, it should promote curiosity through creative teaching, which depends on high quality teacher training and development. Finally, it should focus on awakening creativity through alternative didactic processes that put less emphasis on standardised testing, thereby giving the responsibility for defining the course of education to individual schools and teachers. He believed that much of the present education system in the United States encourages conformity, compliance and standardisation rather than creative approaches to learning. Robinson emphasised that we can only succeed if we recognise that education is an organic system, not a mechanical one: successful school administration is a matter of engendering a helpful climate rather than "command and control".
Find out more here.
Practice: we might want to study some international successes
In Finland, for example, they have no standardized testing, highly trained and accountable teachers, cooperation not competition, basics still a priority, school starts at seven years old, shorter school days, more relaxed and more time outdoors. All sounds pretty touchy feely, but they do lead the world. Maybe we might look closer.
You may want to see more here.
Innovation: thoughts on teacher training
My own thoughts on teacher training reflect what I have learned in my own leadership engagement practice. It may have changed, but when I took teacher training it was 100% about teaching. The teaching skill is still important but there are many roads to learning these days. The teaching component now seems to be a shared approach with the digital world. YouTube and AI are providing a lot of the learning and teaching side with the amazing amount of content. I can learn that arpeggio on the guitar at two in the morning from my YouTube teacher, and so we see the digital teaching providing a high level of learning with good skill training and information. Perhaps teachers do not need to teach the five rivers of the Amazon but rather through skilled facilitation and coaching, turn the students into critical thinkers, hell on wheels debaters and tireless researchers on the question of rivers in our world. I would then argue that teachers need to also learn and become familiar with these emerging skills of developmental coaching and engagement led facilitation. These Monday morning tools would add to the whole classroom engagement experience and individual student growth, and make thirty years of being in a classroom much more fun and rewarding. Teacher training could be 1/3 teaching skills, 1/3 coaching skills and 1/3 facilitation skills.
I am sure the universities will be knocking on my door!
Let’s finish with a couple of stories:
First one…I threw the line, didn’t catch
I love system thinking where we put whole systems in a room and get them solving issues across turf lines. So, when I had a chance to work with some school folks, I realized that they had a lot of meetings but no meetings as a whole. The school board met alone, the staff met alone, the student council met alone, the parent association met alone and the janitors met alone. A wonderful practitioner, Harrison Owen, invented a tool called OpenSpace to put the whole in a room. One of his first gigs put 300 executive types in a room for three days with no agenda. It was a Depends moment for all of them, but the tool pulled them together and they knew exactly what they needed to discuss, they knew who they needed to talk to, and they knew the answers were in that room.
I offered many educators the opportunity to invite me to run a session like this, the big room full of students, staff, parents, school board members and janitors. I would do it pro bono. They were all excited at the prospect.
Not one ever called.
That was the problem with workshops. They were episodes of learning, not a way of life learning.
Second one…A great idea, just might just work
My daughters have some wicked DNA when it comes to this stuff so I am not surprised that one is a health care front-liner, who has some activist ideas and full commitment these days. The other daughter runs an equestrian business with deep roots working with children, especially those with special needs. She lives and works in rural Alberta. The leader in her local school wants to address what his students are passionate about and find a way to encourage them in the school community. He told me this summer that he wants to set up academies in his school. Perhaps a sports academy, an arts academy, a music academy and to my surprise, an equine academy. He sees horses as a touchstone for many students and is willing to jump over the hurdles to make it happen. He wants my daughter to help him establish an equine academy in his school. If this works out, a lot of my faith in iconoclast educators will be restored.
So, let’s all go “back to school’ this year. There must be something we would love to learn this winter.
Let me know what you might be up to.
Oh…one more, off the wall thought about schooling this September. There is finally a move to put the phones in a paper bag and get back to learning with a pen, a notebook, a challenge, an idea, a debate, a conversation and so much more.
All analog stuff.
I have this image of a school building where back to basics is more than the three R’s as they used to say. Learning to write, read and think are huge analog events. We maybe need an analog refuge in a digital world. Up to now the school has jumped on the speeding digital train while the slower more thoughtful analog pony waits to be noticed.
As those phones upgrade to AI, we realize that AI can write a damn good essay. But is it as important to a kid’s development as the kid hand writing her own thoughtful and authentic essay? Those first essays are critical roads to learning, with an authenticity coming from brain to hand through heart. They tell us that the handmade, the human touch and the thoughtful, personal, authenticity will be the true valuable commodities of the future.
Maybe the school metaphor should be more the warm getaway cabin from the cold digital fortress, the analog cabin, if you will. Make it a place where they learn to dance to the rhythm of the fiddle as well as the pull of algorithms. Help them become friends and citizens with more than a click on a screen. I like to imagine the school as a garden in the world of pavement.
Dream on old-timer!!
And finally, this little video is a good reminder.