Leadership

This is the stuff poems are made of. I will try to remain a bit more practical than a poem.

Leadership is a charged term. Everybody wants to read something into it. Two types of leadership are interesting in the context of education: they can be called Everyday Leadership and Great Leadership.

Everyday leadership is what's necessary in order to motivate pupils to go into class, to listen to the teacher and others, to participate in the lesson, to make an effort. Day in and day out. It requires - or at least can use - the ability to know each student's state of mind, and what stimuli would benefit the student in terms of keeping them on track or bringing them back to the right track. It would be good if every teacher were a good everyday leader. The good news is that there are quite a few teachers who are. The even better news is that this seems to be a somewhat learnable skill, so teachers can improve their everyday leadership, for the benefit of the pupils, and for their own benefit.

Everyday leadership in a school principal can motivate the teachers to do perform their grinding work, to deal with unmotivated pupils, unruly parents, insulting pay check, inflexible "system", uninterested politicians, etc. Again, happily, this ability can occasionally be detected in the wild.

Great leadership is necessary to inspire people to achieve great things. More than they would have thought is available to them. A great leader who is a teacher, can inspire the students to aim towards academic achievement, and not just to get by. A great leader who is a principal, can inspire teachers to become great teachers - to have a profoundly positive formative influence on their students. A great leader who is visible by the whole education system can inspire all the pedagogues and administrator to become great. This may also work the other way around: A great student can inspire teachers and others and bring some sparkle into their eyes.

The discussion of Great Leadership this is largely theoretical, though. There is a severe dearth of great leadership, in the education system as well as everywhere else. And it doesn't seem to be a learnable trait. In the absence of leadership, an establishment often uses substitutes: Scaring people into submission, bribing them into cooperation, turning a blind eye or two. A sad way to live. And it doesn't work too well.

What does work?

It is essential for the leader to lead by example. If the supposed leader doesn't lives up to the goals they profess, people may follow for a while, but not for long. Living according to one's convictions should have been very easy and natural, but the flesh is weak, and a surprising majority of us do not live according to our own ideals. Somehow this one aspect of the leader's behavior is especially important, since it shows others how to be leaders themselves. Having more leaders in an organization, who are active and pulling in the same direction, makes it more likely that the organization will move in that direction. To a large extent, people learn by mimicking what they perceive. Oh Leader! Give us something to mimic!

It is also essential that the leader is able to communicate effectively, so those around him or her keep working together in some sense, and not in random directions. In almost all cases, this communication should go both ways: The teacher should be able to receive: To listen and hear the students, and understand - better than the students - what they need, whet they think they need, what they want, etc. Then the teacher needs to be able to transmit: To let the students know themselves better, to let them know what their options are, and to encourage them to work towards the desired goals, whatever they may be. Communication skills are learnable to some extent, and thoroughly neglected by most schooling systems.

Yet another essential is perseverance. Without perseverance, with only occasional and semi-random actions, there may be at most occasional and semi-random success, with much sliding backwards in between. This also beings back the issue of leadership by example: If the principal gives up on getting old teachers to do a new trick (like email), why would the teachers persevere in getting the students to do a new trick, such as taking personal interest in their own studies?

The sense of being too busy and the dissipation and fading of motivation to do something beyond the minimum have much to do with leadership. People’s genuine interest often dissipates over time, and they need to be “remotivated”. Someone needs to blow air into our sails. This is one of the leader’s roles. This is what makes self-motivated / self-propelled people so valuable.

Great Leadership is related to inspiration. The great leader inspires us to be more, and as a side effect, to do more. It would be great if the education system always has someone - at least one - in the role of providing inspiration. Centrally provided inspiration and centrally provided regulation are two poles of a framework: Inspiration doesn't say anything about what needs to be done, but gives us the strength to be great. Regulation doesn't ensure we do anything valuable, but keeps us from doing much damage. In between, there is a wide space for every one of us to do good in our own way.

So, how was the poem about leadership ?

Wild Ideas - Send Them to Work

Let's start with "Spring Fever" in the context of school: Teachers know that when spring arrives, the pupils tend to become restless, and lose whatever tendency they had to learn. Probably the teachers themselves are affected by the light, sounds and scents of spring, and by their knowledge that the school-year is coming to an end. Sometimes schools use stricter methods of coercion. Sometimes they give up and start preparing for the end-of-year shows and ceremonies. For 3 months. Some educators try to change the way of teaching a bit, to get the kids' attention.

Here's a great idea that sadly is not originally mine: Send the kids to work in the real world. Outside the school. This will provide a good relief from that restlessness. It won't do much damage to the academic learning - which doesn't get far in the spring anyway. And best of all, working in the real world has some educational value that we usually skip throughout the school age:

• Perspective and context for what is being taught at schools, where and how it is being used by people outside the school. How it might eventually be used by the kids themselves

• Familiarity with the idea of working, together with ideas of real life responsibility, necessity, achievement and earning

• Familiarity with being in the the position of giving real contribution to society. How is that going to work for building self esteem on a real, rather than artificial foundation?

• Familiarity with different real vocations, as a basis for future choices

• Tapping into an almost forgotten educational method - apprenticeship, with all the advantages we lost when we moved to industrialized education

We regularly underestimate the ability of children to contribute, and undermine their own sense of such capability. Then we expect them to suddenly, upon graduation, become responsible contributors to society, to build a life. It's quite amazing any of them (us) eventually does take responsibility, and it is not surprising that it takes a long time.

Some practicalities:

Examples for school children's work in the first tier of include gardening, agriculture, postal work, cleaning and maintenance, ushering, restaurant work (ok, not as chef), etc. In the next tier, we can put more specialized work, such as clerical work, helping professionals such as plumbers, electricians, etc. Giving private lessons to children and adults, etc. The goal is to be able to include as many types of jobs as possible in the list of venues available to school children. One type of job - possibly compulsory, but not the only job for any kid, is to do teaching-related work for school: Teach smaller kids, teach peers with difficulties, prepare teaching materials, be a teacher’s assistant, administrative work, and more.

How to select the work for every kid? Give the kids a choice of work to do – not just a single job, but more than one. If the kid can only select one, they will almost always try to select something fun. But if they can select 3, they can be motivated to select 2 fun things, and one difficult choice. This is true for any learning choice, but also specifically for work choice. There will probably be more popular jobs (e.g., helping your local rocket scientist) and less popular jobs (e.g., cleaning the soot after launching a rocket). This difference can be offset by using incentives - more money, less hours, special favors, projects, extra studies - a bit like the method described in Walden Two for addressing the same issue.

One can expect many objections from parents. Below are a few that need to be addressed carefully and at length, but to keep some cohesion of this article, they are addressed here very briefly.

• “Waste of time” - Actually, it's salvaging time

• “Dishonorable work” - No such thing, as long as the job needs to be done

• “It’s too much effort for the kids” - Being overprotective. Effort is ok

• “The kids will fail” - The jobs need to suit the kids' abilities, so they don't fail too often. Sometimes they will fail. Failing is ok

• “The system is trying to make money off the kids” - Oversight is necessary to relieve this concern

• Legalities - Isn't that nice? These issues will need to be addressed

• Safety - This will have to be addressed on a job-by-job basis

All of the above is not totally new. Sometimes schools send kids to perform various tasks as volunteers (forced volunteering). Some - usually older - kids go and do some work to earn pocket money. Some kids need to help in supporting their families. But I am not aware of any education system that created a comprehensive framework to reap all the possible educational benefits from an organized experience of work. This article started with spring fever, but sending school-kids to work in the real world is so useful to them, that it should be thought of not as a last-ditch solution to a problem, but as an opportunity not to be missed.

The Impossible walking around as Possible

"The impossible walking around as possible" is a rough translation of a comment made by the writer S. Izhar. This phenomenon - of the impossible masquerading as possible - can be seen everywhere in human existence. Here are a few examples in the field of education:

• Not using kids’ tendency to teach

• Squandering kids tendency to learn

• Being a teacher being considered a low type of work

• Maintaining an education system that serves various interests other than the children and society

• No offense meant to the education system's personnel. It is natural for any organization to be committed to its own continuity and growth

• No offense meant to trade unions. It is natural for people of a trade to form a trade union to look after their interests. The problems begin when the trade union has more success than what's necessary to prevent victimization of the members. When the union is too successful, it just keeps taking care of the members' interests regardless of the damage it does to other interests. An organization can't just stop doing what it is designed to do

• Following what's natural to organizations can lead to impossible realities for individuals and society

• We are still doing early-stage studies about teaching methods

• After hundreds of thousands of years of of being human, and thousands of years of large scale civilization, we still don’t know how to do it

• Some people would object to this statement and say that we do know how to do it. They will have many different and contradicting views of what it is we know. Humanity does know how to grow wheat, and there isn't much controversy about the methods. The fact that we are not close to an agreement about teaching methods that work, shows that there is no unambiguous knowledge in this field

• Teaching kids in homogeneous age groups

• It can only work when there are dozens of kids of the same age in the same geographical area. This can happen only in a city - a of human dwelling type invented only a few thousand years ago. Theoretically thinking, it is highly unlikely that this matches the natural way for learning, designed into our brains for a very long time before cities were invented. Looking at differently aged siblings, or at kids in small communities, it is clear that teaching and learning takes place naturally when those kids who know more teach those who know less - either by example or by explaining

• Trying to teach kids by putting dozens of them in front of a lecturer

• Similar issue as with the homogeneous age groups - it fits massive groups, not natural to the types of smaller groups in which humans developed

• This may sounds like trying to be funny, but it is not the intention: Frontal teaching of a group makes sense for swarms, such as ants and bees; not for tribes

• Most of us got used to this state of affairs

Push, Pull, Design

As soon as anyone gets involved in education, they are exposed to the origin of the word “education”. It doesn't really matter much what the origin is, but it is a nice conversation (or blog-entry) starter. The origin of the word education is said to be the Latin educere, made of - ex- and ducere. “lead out”. This origin is often used to remind us that education has to do with bringing out what’s already there in the child. Yet the average schooling system works hard on pushing things from the outside into the student’s mind. In a time prescribed by the education system, a teacher prescribed by the system speaks the prescribed words about the prescribed issue, and the students must accept the lesson pushed at them. This can sometimes work, depending on the charisma of the teacher. But charisma is hard to come by, in any profession.

Alternatively, one can think of the origin as pointing to the idea of leading the student out of ignorance. Our school systems often try to yank the student out of ignorance, at a pace and content set by the system. And what does a normal human do when yanked? Same as a donkey - Resist! The system then tries to do what the average donkey-master would do: Beat the beast into compliance with either a stick or calling the parents; Bribe the beast into compliance by either giving it some hay or permission to go and play a ballgame.

A worthy goal in some schools of education is that of letting each kid set the pace and content of learning. The kids can pull information from various sources: Their environment, books, Internet, experiments. They can even ask the teachers for assistance. One of the questions here is whether enough kids will pull information and construct knowledge, skills and habits in domains that will serve them throughout their life. Many kids like to play ballgames. If we let them pull information and practice time, they may become good soccer or basketball players. Most of us will be uncomfortable with the idea that a student graduates a school being very good at basketball, but not quite being able to read. We talk about the freedom to pull anything, but we do have a hidden agenda of things we think would be good for the student to learn. There is a real benefit in having the student learn what is personally relevant to them and what they asked to be taught. There is also a definite benefit in developing certain specific skills. How do we get to enjoy both?

One way sometimes being attempted is to pull from the other end. The teacher pulls the pupil’s interest by asking questions. For example, the kid who likes soccer may be aware that many exceptional players come from South America. A teacher might want to use this to get that kid interested in Brazil and its history. Maybe by asking the kid what he thinks makes Brazil a place where great soccer players grow. In some cases, and with a skillful teacher, this can work well. But one danger with this method, is that the kid may not be readily pulled from playing a game to anthropological query. This may quickly deteriorate back into yanking the pupil around.

The question remains: How to reconcile what the kid wants (play soccer) with what the parents want (that the kid learns certain skills relevant for civilized life)? It would be nice if we can gently lead the students from ignorance towards worthy knowledge, skills and habits. This doesn't need to invoke the need for great Capital-L "Leadership", which is scarce. It does have to do with encouraging the desired interests in the kids.

Looking at ways to lead the kids so that their genuine interests are better aligned with those of the parents and society, we can start with extreme methods, and work our way back to where we feel more comfortable. The extreme can be represented by tricks such as those used by Derren Brown, who is able to manipulate a victim into wanting something, or into inventing something - exactly as Brown wanted them to. Hairy stuff, and by the way, this is not the worst of it. Using this sort of manipulation in the context of education would make most of us unhappy, and anyway it requires uncommon abilities that are not easily teachable. But it does point in a certain direction:

Designing the environment in which students play and study, can have an effect on what they are inclined to do and feel about learning. This is not a new idea. In many classrooms, one sees "targeted decoration themes" relating to the studied materials, such as the ABC, numbers, etc. These decorations sometimes include motivational messages, morality issues, materials that may enhance self esteem, and whatever the decorator thought conducive to a learning environment. Unfortunately, in most cases this design work is done as an afterthought based on overly simple guidelines, and not as part of a systematic methodology. And of course there is no feedback - there is no systematic checking of the actual effect of one design choice or another. This state of affairs can be improved: Persuasion design is currently mostly concerned with the effect of Internet web design on the tendency of a surfer to continue using the web-site. The same principals can be adapted to classroom, lesson and study-material design. The knowledge and method behind Derren Brown's work mentioned above, can be softened and used to encourage the kids in the desired directions.

There are pitfalls inherent in discussing a "desired" attitude: Desired by whom? By the powers that be? By the politician temporarily in control of the Ministry of Education? The immediate answer is "Desired by the parents." Since the system of education that emerges from this text gives parents the choice of where and how to educate their children, this should be an important part of that choice. Of course there should be some careful control here, like the control over the materials being taught. A question of regulation, which we need to address anyway.

For those who feel terrible about brainwashing, do bear in mind that what the kids want (and let’s reluctantly admit that - what we want) is immensely affected by the standard brainwashing by media - mostly TV, politics, market, … Suggestions are already there in abundance. What we may do here is add some suggestions that will hopefully benefit the kid rather than the commercial or political interest of someone.

One final thought: Imagine being able to get kids to have an attitude of curiosity rather than fear with regards to mathematics.

Premises... Premises...

A discussion about any topic is meaningful only if the participants in the discussion are in agreement regarding some basic premises. Otherwise, we get a normal political discussion - a mess of misunderstanding and anger.

There are a few such assumptions in the base of all the entries in this blog, and it would be good to make them explicit, so if some readers disagree with any of these assumptions, they can just leave this text alone, since it is irrelevant to their beliefs. No hard feelings.

Premises:

1. Learning is important

• Learning is important for the genius rocket scientist, brain surgeon or rocket surgeon, to learn the basics of their profession, and then to keep up with the new knowledge being accumulated by their peers and by experts in fields adjacent to theirs. This is what will make it possible for them to make the most of their genius

• Learning is important for the mentally retarded. If they can learn to talk well, to read or even to perform a job, this can enable a great improvement in the way they are treated by society and their quality of life

2. Kids' happiness is important

• There is a discussion about whether kids’ happiness is paramount, in the context of education. Some say it we should let the kids be kids totally, and let them learn only when and what they want to learn. Some say we shouldn't bow to a child’s every whim.
  The "happiness is important" premise doesn't get into this discussion. It just states that part of our responsibility is for the children’s happiness

3. Learning comes naturally

• Not only to humans - also to just about any other animal, but that’s beside the point

If the reader feels that these assumptions are true, then the rest of the blog should make some sense.