HOW SCHOOLS NEED TO CHANGE...ON THE WAY TO OBSOLESCENCE

Is India at last going to witness an educational sea-change? There is certainly more discussion than before of educational reform at the primary and secondary school levels. Kapil Sibal, the Minister of Human Resources in the current central government, has been engaging in discussions with the public and with experts about his educational reform proposals in primary and secondary schools. Nandan Nilekani and other business luminaries have spoken about the need for improving the quality of our huge human resources. Reflected in all these unprecedented discussions is widespread dissatisfaction with the current system of education. Given that there was hardly any discussion before (say, ten years ago) outside of educational  circles, it is encouraging to witness this awakening. What could possibly be wrong with it?

One reason for this awakening might be that the reforms being considered will affect middle class children and not just those who normally go to state run or state aided schools. The discussions, reflecting middle class and elite concerns, are mostly about the quality of education, understood in terms of making it more 'child-centred', whatever this term is taken to mean). They largely seem to assume that education is synonymous with schooling, that what we need is more schools, equipped with more resources like ICT and richer libraries, and with a 'better' curriculum, delivered by 'better' trained teachers, capable of administering a wider range of instruments than just quizzes and exams to assess the 'performance' of their students. (Each of the words in italics poses questions as to their meaning.) Not enough of the discussion is about the relevance of the curriculum and the assessment to the world that students will live in as adults. Nor is it about educational infrastructure, especially about innovative models that could improve access to those who till now have either had to abandon their education or who have never even started it. The only discussion relating to infrastructure has been whether more schools should be provided through the public sector or the private, and the relative effectiveness of state and private schools.

Too much of the discussion seems to be about reform rather than transformation. Too many of the changes are being conceived simply as improvements to existing arrangements. But what if these arrangements are themselves structurally flawed or inadequate? Then introducing the new reforms may only benefit children who can go to the kinds of schools - and there are just a few in India, relative to the demand for education - which are already open to these "new" educational practices. There are even fewer schools that already have the new resources, standards and practices in place for their teachers, students and parents. But both these kinds of schools - the ones that are ready to change, and the ones that already embody the new standards and practices - are overwhelmingly in the private sector, and therefore endowed with the resources to carry out the changes necessary to ensure that their students by and large fulfill the aspirations of their parents for upward social mobility through professional careers after an education in one of the technical or managerial disciplines. The vast majority of schools in the private sector will very likely  benefit from these reforms only by raising fees, because their promoters will want to recover the additional investment required to implement the reforms speedily enough to cater for most of the students who currently attend them. Deep pockets will matter for the school's promoters if they are to gain a place in the competition among private schools for market share. Deep pockets will also matter for parents as they compete for increasingly scarce places in these schools. As for the public sector schools, one needs to keep an eye on the state's educational budget, and to see how the money is being spent, to make a judgment about the efficacy of the reforms. If past precedent is anything to go by, the reforms are more likely to be slowed down by bureaucratic friction, and the impact is likely to be uneven, depending on the policies of individual states. In states where changes in primary and secondary education have been few and (as in the case of West Bengal) actually regressive, the reforms will probably remain mostly on paper and provide yet another occasion for doling out favours to political favourites in time honoured fashion.

I don't object to the reforms as such, as much as to the assumption that they will fulfill their purpose through the existing modes of delivery of educational services, viz., schools. Unless schools themselves are also transformed, the impact of the reforms is likely to remain limited, and cause confusion and anxiety among teachers, students as well as parents. So what is transformation, why is it needed, and how is it different from reform?

Firstly, I believe that schools are structurally unsuited in their present form for the tasks of preparing today's students for the world they will live in as adults. I have argued this elsewhere in this blog, and will do so again in different ways, so I don't want to repeat the arguments here. Secondly, in the absence of countervailing regulatory or social pressure, schooling in an unequal society often works as a mechanism for reinforcing rather than mitigating existing inequalities. Transformation addresses both the structural inadequacies of schools and those of their social environment, because these inadequacies come in the way of students benefiting from the education that schools are supposed to have provided . If reform means updating the content of the syllabus, allowing more projects and portfolios as part of the assessments, and encouraging teachers to keep updating themselves with changes in pedagogical as well as subject knowledge, and engage regularly in collaborative partnerships rather than work in isolation, then transformation of schools means the re-structuring of time and space in schools to allow for closer contact with the real world outside their walls, the design of increasingly personalized learning experiences in schools, and the development of what John Abbott has called cognitive apprenticeship through new learners collaborating with more experienced learners and experts. Transformation must also enable a wider social diversity of students to have access to schools and other learning opportunities. Moreover, it should also improve the ways universities and employers influence and absorb students leaving schools. In the absence of these transformations, reforms alone will have generated more unfulfilled expectations and resultant frustration for the future.

To conclude, I do believe that curriculums need to reflect the challenges children will experience as adults, together with the way teachers teach, and the way students are judged to be competent for the world they are being prepared for. I also recognize that it is unrealistic to expect that schools will simply be abandoned and replaced entirely with other mechanisms for promoting learning. So I see no harm in the state spending more money on delivering the changes under discussion through the existing mechanisms of schools, with appropriate mechanisms for public auditing at sufficiently localized levels for the beneficiaries (i.e., students and parents) to ensure that the changes are being implemented as planned. This will benefit at least those who are going to school, even if the benefits remain partial and incomplete. The benefits are likely to be more lasting if schools themselves are transformed at the same time, in the manner outlined above. At the same time, I believe there is room for innovating new models for delivery of educational and learning opportunities to those who either do not or cannot go to school. Such models could enable people who are sufficiently motivated to initiate and continue their learning, including those who are currently excluded from schools by virtue of their economic or social status. There is little reason to believe that the children in slums and villages who currently don't go to school will not benefit from alternatives that could enable them to continue their learning through other means, if the current barriers that prevent their reaching these alternative can be overcome. That is why I wish to propose that as much attention needs to be paid to the infrastructure by which education can be delivered as to its quality. Furthermore, this infrastructure should be designed especially to create alternatives to schools, and to provide access to those who wish to continue with their education outside school, whenever and wherever they are able to do so.

Of course, this proposal raises a number of questions: what are these new infrastructural models, who will develop them, and how will they be implemented? I shall try to address these questions in future postings on these blogs.

KEN ROBINSON EXPANDS ON SOME OF HIS MAIN THEMES

Ken Robinson diagnoses the problem accurately, but what do we do about it? Actually, I wish that governments would lighten their control over education, and get out of the way of innovators who wish to move away from the school centred model, and move towards alternatives, including re-structured schools.

I have reached a stage in my life when I have begun to see schools, as they are currently structured, as institutions that have ceased to be relevant to the needs of youngsters growing up in the 21st century. They will either have to exist - because governments and policy makers can't see beyond them - as cultural anachronisms from the industrial age, or under pressure from cultural, institutional and political change, evolve into very different structures, if not cease to exist altogether.

The same goes for the teaching profession. Just as teachers need to become more attuned to the habits of mind and dispositions of expert workers and practitioners directly affecting (and being affected by) the real world, the professions too need to embody a much larger component of teaching or coaching.

The latter is already happening as businesses and other organizations figure out how to acquire, retain and develop their intellectual capital. In other words, schools could become more like workplaces, and workplaces more like schools. The barriers between schools and the rest of society could be lowered or eliminated altogether, so that activities associated with learning and the responsibilities for it are dispersed more widely in society. The role distinctions between workers and teachers, and the conceptual distinctions between work and learning, could dissolve, and the practice of apprenticeship could be reinstated and universalized. Opportunities for personal and communal learning could become more equitably accessible and more differentiated to focus on the needs of the individual and the community. These changes could bring about a truly learning society. This isn’t an original vision (see The Unfinished Revolution by John Abbott and Terry Ryan), but we seem closer to its realization because of the possibilities opened up by web-based technologies. But technological possibilities will not by themselves solve a political problem.

How could the future of learning envisaged here include everyone? How can such new designs for the learnscape be prevented from becoming another mechanism of social exclusion, as schooling already has?

THE DILEMMAS OF THE "PROFESSIONAL" TEACHER

Why are most schools so badly structured for achieving their publicly stated goals? Taking mostly bright, inquisitive, active young children away from the real world for which we are supposed to be preparing them, keeping them locked in rooms in the company of an adult who will drone at them for forty minutes before releasing them to another adult who will do the same...ten times during the day...days punctuated by bells... days that run into a dozen years interrupted only by vacations which are increasingly filled with breathlessly anxious prepping for "success''.

Does this sound like the real world to you?

Not unless the world that we are preparing them for is a prison or a factory governed by a panoptical regime which tracks every waking and sleeping moment of its inmates, and occasionally spews out reports about the condition of the prisoner or the output of the worker.

So it's not a surprise that professionalism in teaching is mostly about compensating for these structural contradictions! According to some books about teaching, we are supposed to be able to engage learners and keep them on task every lesson, document every learning moment, form judgments about their learning as well as ours...while accepting overcrowded or overheated (or underheated) classrooms, administrative procedures for generating mostly useless information, ever-changing government policies, new requirements for testing....all the while mindful of the individuality of each student, and keeping the classroom environment conducive to learning. But this is not how teachers actually teach, although it's perfectly true that good teaching and learning in most schools happen - if and when they do - despite, not because of, the systems and structures that are in place.

Good teachers do spend a great deal of time trying to design engaging and interesting activities with clear objectives before the student. I say "trying to", because the three crucial resources required for good teachers to thrive - time, material resources, and the affirming and supportive companionship of teachers with ideas and passions - are almost always scarce. Most teachers who take their profession seriously are being "professional" to the extent that they are striving to do their best by their students, while ignoring or trying to circumvent or compensate for the constraints and systemic failures that keep them from doing their best. The pressures created by the systemic failures often take their toll on teachers' personal lives in the form of isolation, frustration, cynicism, fatigue and burnout.

A good school is one where teaching with integrity and passion is not a daily struggle against interruptions, delays, failing technology, administrivia, isolation, lack of time and appropriate resources, and students are not usually violent, rude, intransigent, tired, or just having their own difficult times. Such schools are rare enough. But a great school is where the systems, structures and ethos consistently support teachers in giving their best, even if the students are not ideal and the furniture and technology is a bit run down. These are extremely rare.

I don't wish to suggest that all teachers are selfless saints struggling in exploitative schools run by evil heads. Some of us are bone lazy, and would prefer nothing better than to teach from notes and administer tests that have remained the same for the last ten years. There are days when I myself have walked into my classroom without the faintest idea of what I should do with my students (you have to believe me when I say I don't make a habit of this), and sometimes wished that I had these ten year old notes to fall back on. A school that I know with an unassailable reputation as a "successful" school, and one, moreover, to which all parents in this country aspire to send their children, has a good number of such teachers, secure in their comfortable sinecures for decades. Many teachers are self-satisfied, teach the way they have been taught, remain in blissful unawareness of the changes in educational practice, and rely mostly on teachers' folklore and war stories about what makes a successful student or an inspiring lesson. Many teachers make terrible students, and admit as much among themselves half-jokingly. This is because most teachers work within schools and in educational environments that demand a great deal of them by way of managing large class sizes, piles of marking, high pass rates in their exams, but very little by way of artistry in designing good lessons.

To counter such tendencies among teachers, administrators sometimes spend time drawing up long lists of what makes a Good Teacher, in the hope that once they put these lists into a faculty handbook, every teacher will strive to become a Good Teacher. The list then often becomes a device to catch teachers out in their failings, however minute, if it becomes necessary to retrench them. Such administrators rarely have time to visit the classrooms in their schools, and seldom talk to their teachers about teaching and learning, about the best way resources - especially time - could be used to support their work. They don't communicate by example or by empathy, but by fear.

The best teacher (and the best administrator) is one who supports students (and teachers) through conversations, commitments and action. These conversations are judgmental only to the extent that they support the student (and the teacher) in discovering ways of improving their learning performances. But the main attitude behind these conversations is patient optimism, the main commitment is to steady improvement till mastery (often defined by some publicly available standard of performance) is achieved, and the action is mainly of supporting in various ways the efforts of the learner to attain mastery.

Unfortunately, most teachers are under pressure from parents and administrators to raise the scores of their students (the only criterion of success) in standardized exams and tests. Administratively, tests and exams are the most convenient ways of assessing achievement, and exams requiring single responses are much more efficient at measuring achievement than exams requiring evidence of reflective and evaluative thinking. It all depends on what one means by 'achievement'. Pedagogically, exams and tests are among the worst instruments for assessing achievement if the achievement being assessed is in the depth and flexibility of understanding (comprising conceptual grasp, awareness of one's own thinking, and ability to apply in unscripted situations as evidenced in actual performances or artifacts of understanding). How after all would you assess a swimmer's ability to swim? By having him write a test on swimming or by watching him swim in various settings? Why is it any different if one wished to judge a learner's mathematical ability, or understanding of business, or of biological principles or of historical changes? It's different because it's administratively convenient for the highly complex and individualised process of learning to be flattened into a standardized format yielding numerical results as a product that could then be accepted by schools, parents, universities and of course children as representing scholastic achievement. The teacher's role then is to "improve" scholastic achievement as measured by these numerical indices. And when teachers are rewarded professionally by the degree to which they can get their students to show this success, then their commitment to steady and patient improvement in performative and artifactual evidences of understanding is undermined, and the effective teacher becomes the efficient trainer of techniques for achieving exam success.

Teachers need to constantly bear the burden of living and working within this structural contradiction: the burden of struggling to keep alive the kindly light of developing learning and self-awareness both within their students and in themselves; but doing so amidst and despite the encircling gloom of industrial modes of schooling, with their fixed times for absorbing knowledge and skills, their standardized measurements of student achievement in exam scores and the associated traumas of failure, their inability to accommodate individual learning styles and trajectories within the standard curricular molds, and the boredom and self-destructive behaviour induced by their worship of efficiency. The master teacher is the one who has learnt to resolve this contradiction in his/her own context and environment.