Category Archives: leadership

School Technology Strategy Part 2: Cloud

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In my previous post of this series I looked at the first and most important part of technology provision in schools: access. Without access, none of the potential learning associated with technology will take place. My conclusion was that although not all technology is or can be mobile, when constructing their technology strategy, school leaders should assume personally owned, mobile technology is the answer unless it clearly isn’t. They should assume this because the data demonstrates that mobile technology adoption is rapidly increasing because it offers a consistent, personal experience and availability at the point of need. Ask any mobile ‘phone owner. This leads to high utilisation and more opportunities for learning. These are important attributes in successfully embedding technology within new pedagogies and curricula as well as for extending learning beyond the school into informal and social environments.

The second part of my blog on school technology strategy is the ‘doing’ or ‘action’ part. This means schools’ core mission. This could be something like: “To provide the opportunity for all students to learn and strive for excellence.” [taken from Washington Elementary School’s web site]. The emphasis here is on learning, not technology. Technology is simply a tool and/or the subject of learning. For the purposes of this blog post, I will not explore technology as a subject, but rather I will focus on it as a tool. In this context, technology might:

  1. Qualitatively enrich or enhance learning and/or teaching
  2. Improve efficiency thereby releasing more time for learning and/or teaching

In developing a technology strategy for schools, school leaders must explore a range of options in both these categories in order to decide how they invest their budget. This means addressing two challenges:

  1. Prioritise investment of the technology budget to optimise learning
  2. Achieve best value through procurement efficiency and technical effectiveness

These two very simple steps hide a great deal of complexity but in separating them out, we begin to see where school leaders should lead and where they should follow. That is to say, school leaders are expected to have an opinion about how they wish to prioritise their resources to optimise learning outcomes in their organisations. That’s their job. It’s not (necessarily) their job to work out how technology can or will do this and then to procure and implement appropriate solutions. That’s probably best left to educational technology experts. There is a twofold and thorny problem here which may be characterised as “the blind leading the blind” or “the one eyed man is king in the land of the blind.” One face of the problem is school leaders who were not raised as digital natives and for whom technology is at best opaque and at worst an issue rather than an opportunity. The other face of the problem is that the so called ‘experts’ who tend to be either well meaning amateurs or individuals with vested interests. This is an unholy alliance in which neither party has much of an incentive to challenge the other.

So to whom should school leaders be listening when it comes to translating their organisational learning aspirations into learning outcomes through technology? Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree. Teachers are experts in learning and teaching, not technology strategy. Network Managers and ICT Technicians have a very clear vested interest in maintaining or expanding their roles rather than seeking out the most effective technology solutions. If it’s not them, then perhaps it’s a trusted partner organisation or a technically minded Governor. In my experience of the former, companies will sell what they have and a lack of competition leads to complacency. With regard to the latter, it’s rare to find Governors who understand and are sympathetic to technology in the context of education as their experience is usually derived from the corporate space. I’m not trying to discredit the positive motivation of any of these individuals. I know their hearts are generally in the right place. Nevertheless, in an average secondary school an annual technology budget is in excess of a quarter of a million pounds and good value means more learning. It is not something to treat lightly.

So my contention is that there’s very often a gaping hole where one would hope and expect to see an experienced education technology strategist without a vested interest. Bectatried to fill this space for schools in the UK and certainly they provided much needed advice, guidance and some procurement efficiency whilst they existed. However, they also fell into the trap of technology for technology’s sake. For example, some of their procurement frameworks for school products and services were so detailed that they drove unnecessary product and service complexity in the market. Complex products don’t get used unless they add real value. This is exactly the situation for many MLE and VLE products which languish in schools, receiving minimal usage and simply ticking the ICT box. Steve Jobs understood this well. Technology is only good if it’s used. Of course Local Authorities and other organisations such as NAACE and BESA have tried to plug the hole in various ways and there’s no doubt they do good work. The issue I see is that their impact is inconsistent because many schools are islands and, as such, they are isolated.

This sounds like it’s become a pitch for employing an educational technology strategist however that’s not the point of this post. I’m attempting to paint a generalised picture of schools’ ICT in the UK as over-complex, significantly behind the curve in terms of technology innovation and woefully inauthentic in terms of the experience it provides of the 21st Century digital world we’re trying to prepare our young people to thrive in. I’m suggesting that there should be less ‘complex and expensive’ technology and more ‘simple, fast and exciting’ technology. Schools cannot afford to do everything.

I have already blogged about leading technology and the cloud technology paradigm in education. Both these posts are broadly built around the concept of the 80/20 rule. That is, 80% of the results of any endeavour take 20% of the time and 20% of the cost. The majority of time and money is spent in trying to achieve the last 20%. In practice, most schools and users are utilising their software and hardware at substantially less than 80% by any measure. This means a high level of investment and a low level of utilisation; the worst possible solution.

The reason that the cloud paradigm is rapidly gaining traction in businesses is that businesses are very sensitive to utilisation and efficiency as these directly impact their profitability. The same argument should apply in schools. By increasing utilisation and aiming to deliver solutions that don’t deliver in excess of 80% of requirements, schools will dramatically increase the value they deliver. I worked with a very large number of schools during the UK’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme and one regrettable feature of the project was the waste of money that arose from attempting to reinvent 100% personalised solutions for every project. Schools tend to believe they are all different from each other. In my experience they are 20% different and 80% the same. Recognising this fact drives a different approach to the provision of technology. I respect and enjoy the vocational passion of educators but I do not think that this passion necessarily helps them to make wise investment decisions.

If one aims to meet 80% of a school’s technology requirements for 80% of the time, the optimal technology paradigm will almost certainly shift from the traditional on-premise, client/server model to an out-sourced, centrally hosted (or cloud) model. To date, the evidence seems to support the principle that cloud technology delivers more for less in schools by reducing the on-premise investment in technology (both hardware and people). The rapid advancement in web technology is such that even a pure web model may deliver 80% of a school’s technology requirements without considering other cloud technologies such as thin client and virtualisation. However a Web 2.0 model is almost certainly going to be a more authentic experience for most young people and it is in this sense that cloud technology delivers more for less.

The benefits of moving to a predominantly cloud technology paradigm are outlined below and summarised in the diagram:

  • Less day to day management
  • Less local infrastructure, resources and energy required
  • Quick and easy to deploy, update and scale
  • Available on many devices and operating systems
  • Available any time, anywhere
  • Consistent experience from any learning location
  • Stronger links between home and school
  • More budget for content, analytics and training

There will of course still be a requirement for investment in on-premise, school technology but only for the delivery of specialist requirements such as CAD or high-end video editing. As with my blog post on mobile, the message for school leaders developing their technology strategy is not: “Everything in the cloud”. It is: “Think cloud first.” The actual answer is almost certainly a hybrid solution but a hybrid that favours a significant proportion of delivery via cloud technology.

Teachers make mistakes

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When you’ve watched this TED video by Brian Goldman, I suspect you’ll find yourself quite emotionally charged in response to his plea for a culture change in medicine. It hits close to home for many of us. He articulates a theme common to many professions, but particularly prominent in professions where ‘esteem’ and ‘authority’ are valued. His theme is the cultural denial of failure in the medical profession and the conspiracy of silence that accompanies it.

But of course they do! And Brian eloquently and passionately describes why it’s essential to change the culture of medicine to one in which mistakes are openly acknowledged and embraced as learning opportunities.

I remember when I first embraced mistakes in learning (and it wasn’t at school). I was in my mid twenties and a keen climber. As a relative beginner, I still tended to cling to the wall rather than dance with it. The nervous tension in my muscles precluded fluid movement! My more experienced climbing partner told me that I would relax when I began to trust him, myself and the equipment more deeply. However, the only way to learn that trust, and to move beyond my self-imposed limitations, was to try new moves, fail and come off the rock face – a lot. Rather than define success as staying on the rock face. He re-defined success for me as coming off the rock face. If I wasn’t falling, I wasn’t learning. If I wasn’t falling (and surviving), I wasn’t learning to trust him, myself and the equipment.

As a consequence of this learning, I’m guilty of tweeting the following aphorism on a regular basis: “Learning is inversely proportional to the intolerance of failure.” It takes a few seconds to untwist the words but that’s deliberate. I could’ve said, “We learn from our mistakes” and no doubt you’d nod sagely and move quickly on. But the phrase “the intolerance of failure” is important. In principle, we understand that we learn from our mistakes yet in so many situations we are intolerant of failure, both in ourselves and in others, and therefore we limit the potential for improvement.

Can you think of another profession in which this culture is rife? John Hattie can. John is a well known education researcher and author of the book Visible Learning. If you’re a teacher I would thoroughly recommend you explore his research. There’s a very challenging, two part video of him speaking on Youtube (here and here). In his book and in this video, he’s very clear that teaching is one of those professions that’s intolerant of failure. Mutual respect for colleagues is code for, “When I go into my classroom and close my door I’m going to teach any way I like so leave me alone.” John’s evidence indicates that most teachers spend less than a minute a month discussing teaching with each other. This is indicative of a culture of silence around performance.

When I attend my 14 year old daughter’s academic review meetings, I’ve never heard a teacher say, “I’m failing your daughter and I need to work out how I can better meet her needs.” On the other hand, I regularly hear, “Your daughter could do better if she…” But who is  failing who here? The focus on under-performing teachers tends to organise itself around the ability of head teachers to sack teachers who don’t meet certain standards. In my opinion, this is a minor symptom of a much wider malaise facing the teaching profession. The bigger issue is that the profession’s definition of ‘under-performing’ is hopelessly skewed towards extreme failure. I’m more concerned with the large number of average teachers who are chronically complacent about their own personal development than I am about the very small number of acutely failing teachers.

There’s no doubt that many teachers are beginning to build PLNs (Personal Learning Networks) and that learning events such as Teachmeets are becoming more popular. Nevertheless, a culture is not something which changes overnight. It takes time, data and strong leadership. There is a deeply ingrained bias to label children as failing as opposed to teachers. This is the wrong way around and John Hattie’s experimental evidence demonstrates it clearly.

I’d like to see a teaching profession that accepts it is making mistakes, and that actively invites data-led, teacher performance evaluation as a way of learning from those mistakes. I don’t want this data to be used as a stick to beat teachers. I want every individual teacher to seek out this data as a means of steering their personal development within a supportive and vibrant culture of learning.

If mistakes aren’t acknowledged then personal learning isn’t happening. If personal learning isn’t happening then organisational learning isn’t happening. If organisational learning isn’t happening then the teaching profession is not only failing students, but it is failing to learn from its mistakes. This is the unacceptable face of failure. Failure to learn from our mistakes.

UPDATE : I tweeted this today (5th Feb 2011): ‘Failure week’ at top girls’ school to build resilience http://bbc.in/yEHKe1 #education #edchat

Education fails technology?

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As I’ve been blogging about the development of a School Technology Strategy, I’ve also been reading a recently published book called The Learning Edge by Bain and Weston. It’s a stimulating read in this context because it positions education as failing technology rather than the traditional reverse. That might not immediately chime with readers but bear with me. A few days ago I also read an interesting blog post by Wes Miller in which he explored the concept of ‘Premature Innovation’ in the context of Microsoft. The combination of these two sources has got me thinking…

Bain & Weston take the reader back to the work of Benjamin Bloom, the famous Educational Psychologist who in 1984 published ‘The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring’. In short, Bloom argued that one-to-one tutoring was the most efficient paradigm for learning but that, at scale, it is not practical or economical. He went on to say that optimising a relatively small number of significant variables may in fact allow group instruction to approach the efficiency of one-to-one tutoring. In this context, of particular interest is whether technology might simulate one-to-one tutoring effects such as reinforcement, the feedback-corrective loop and collaborative learning.

The promise of technology in education to date has almost always exceeded delivery and the blame has usually been attributed to technology. But is it really all the fault of technology? Well, Bain & Weston make a very interesting point in the context of Bloom’s research: although Bloom gave us a very useful framework for educational reform, there has been little systematic change in classroom practice for decades. The didactic model is still the beating heart of most schools. The practical implementation of research-based enhancements to pedagogy and curricula in schools has been painfully slow. In a very real sense, technology is the gifted student, sitting at the front with a straight back and bright eyes, full of enthusiasm, and being studiously ignored by educators. Education is failing technology.

Is this the whole story? Well, I certainly think it’s impossible to divorce a school technology strategy from an educational strategy with associated pedagogical and curricular implications. They go hand in hand. For example, a 1:1 ratio of devices to students is not going to make much of dent in learning in a school if the underlying pedagogy is predominantly teacher-led (for example). Technology will only ever leverage the benefits of a sound educational strategy and its practical manifestation. The biggest challenge for school leaders is therefore to construct a rigorous educational strategy and drive the change required to manifest it using research and data to drive continuous improvement. I see limited evidence of this in most schools.

If I’ve convincingly shifted the blame away from technology, perhaps it’s time to balance the scales a little. When reading Bain & Weston’s book, I was struck by the fact that a lot of the research focused on technology that I think fundamentally fails education, regardless of the education strategy. I think bright eyed, bushy tailed technologists sometimes suffer from premature innovation. This is where a seemingly great idea isn’t adopted or fails to fulfil its promise. A startling example from Wes Miller’s blog is the tablet. Tablets have been around for quite a while with very limited adoption before Apple stepped into the market. They launched the iPad and now tablet numbers are burgeoning and 1:1 iPad models for schools seem to fill every other blog post I read. Why?

before_and_afterAs Steve Jobs was well aware, technology does not get used unless it does what it is designed to do really well and certainly better than a manual option. In a classroom, technology needs to work at the pace of the learner and/or the teacher. Even a 5 second delay can interrupt the pace and rhythm of a lesson. It also needs to be intuitive. It is just not fair to expect every teacher to be a technology expert and there isn’t time for endless training. Taking the iPad as an example, it’s hugely popular because a two year old can use it, it’s personal and mobile, wireless technology and the Internet are have matured sufficiently to fill it up with engaging content, and it is reliable. It’s turbo-charged book. The time is right.

Another example of a significant product failure in education due to premature innovation is the Virtual Learning Environment (or Managed Learning Environment or Learning Platform or Learning Management System). In the UK a Government agency called Bectawas responsible for creating a functional specification for this product category. They then used this specification to put in place a framework off which schools might procure. The problem was that Becta tried to create an all singing, all dancing specification and it was just far too detailed. The resulting software created by the market to meet the requirement was therefore horribly over-engineered. The outcome? A very significant number of VLE products languishing in schools, not being used because they’re too difficult. A very big waste of money.

Again, in the VLE space we’re beginning to see disaggregation of the functional components into bite-size and usable chunks rather than a monolith with all the agility of a supertanker. Platforms are beginning to emerge which re-aggregate these simple elements into a manageable whole, retaining and enhancing usability in the process. The result? I’m beginning to see some interesting products in the VLE space.

Let’s not ever lose sight of the fact that technology is a tool and that my School Technology Strategy blog posts are implicitly (and now hopefully explicitly) intended to sit within the context of an educational strategy that attacks the 2 Sigma challenge with energy and evidence. Without educational change, the impact of technology on learning will be a placebo effect [placebo in the sense that there’s nothing fundamentally changing but leaders feel better for ticking the technology box]. It is also the case that, even with a sound educational strategy, technology will only make a difference if it adheres to some very basic principles of usability and usefulness, a test that most technology in schools still fails.

Competition, collaboration and leadership

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Ewan McIntosh is blogging on collaboration at the moment and his words – and the discussions they’re catalysing – are well worth a read. I don’t intend to cover all the ground he is treading but I would like to pick up on one topic around which we exchanged comments: competition, collaboration and leadership. I want to raise it here because I think it brings to light a healthy debate about the role of competition and leadership in education. As an aside, it is also a great example of how to develop one’s thinking using a blog.

Ewan cites Morten Hansen’s book Collaboration (check out Morten’s new book ‘Great by Choice’ as well) and discusses one of the six ways (that Morten lists in his book) in which collaboration may fail, that is collaborating in a hostile environment. Ewan writes that schools exhibit many of the characteristics of the hostile environment and that this may explain why we see relatively little collaboration between schools and even less between teachers within schools. I pick up on his comments (using different colours to make it easier to follow):

Excerpt from blog by Ewan McIntosh: “Sony was a company that took pride in its decentralised specialist divisions, divisions whose pride led to them competing against each other. When five divisions were asked to collaborate to create a new music behemoth, Sony Connect, the result was disastrous.

The personal computer division based in Tokyo, the portable audio team behind the Walkman, the flash memory player team, Sony Music in the US and Sony Music back in Japan just couldn’t work together, so strong was their competition. The PC and Walkman groups released their own competing portable music players, and the Music and other electronics divisions of the company released three competing music download portals. The US group wanted to use flash memory and the MP3 format. The Japan group wanted to use minidisc and Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format for music downloads. By May 2004, a very disconnected Sony Connect finally launched and was taken apart by the media and users.

In the meantime, Apple innovated its narrow, well thought-through line of MP3 player products with no competition worth the name. Apple’s divisions had, through Steve Jobs and a culture of unity, collaborated on one perfect player. Sony’s interior competition had decimated any chance of creating one dream competitive product.

So, then, what does this mean for education? In a school there are many competitive units: individual teachers have, traditionally, been the kings or queens of their manor, the closed-door profession meaning that what happens in their classroom, good or bad, is their responsibility. The result can be a competitive one – “my kids”, “my class”, “my results”. Where teachers are recompensed on performance in any way, even in the form of feedback from superiors, this heightens the sense of competitiveness, making collaboration between teachers in a school impossible. The ingredients of competition – closed doors, one-teacher-one-class, rewards and praise for good performance – may have to be dismantled first, before collaboration can be encouraged.”

Comment by Phil Dawson: “I’d love to see hard evidence for the assertions put forward by Morten T. Hansen. They feel to me to be correlated with non-collaboration rather than causal. Competitive units cannot collaborate? I disagree and I think analysis of the nature of competition bears out my view.

The key psychological variable is goal alignment. Competition is social goal-oriented behaviour. Competitors become collaborators when both social and practical goals are aligned. For example, a competitive situation can be transformed into a collaborative one if individuals adopt a shared group affiliation (education rather than school) and perceive a shared opportunity for social gain (recognition or reputational enhancement) that is, at least, not in conflict with other group affiliations (the situation in Sony).

Through the BSF programme, I saw schools collaborate very effectively as they recognised their shared interests were served by behaving as a coherent group rather than individual schools. In fact, I think the removal of competitive elements is a mistake because I think, if focused appropriately, competition is also an engine of innovation and creativity. Successful businesses collaborate and compete in equal measure and I would say the same is true of schools. Effective leaders are, I think, a more important factor in establishing a healthy balance between competition and collaboration.”

Comment by Ewan McIntosh: “I think the notion of taking away competition is an interesting one, for which there is a LOT of evidence, particularly in the education of girls, whereas with boys competitive elements are often seen as helping progress.

Where (generally) men have not seen competition help is in the cockpit. This is why, when landing and taking off, it is often the copilot flying the plane while the pilot gets ready to comment. This became a rule of flying thumb after a terrible Air Mexico accident when the copilot was too nervous to fight with the hierarchy of the pilot – the competitive element inspired by a hierarchy led to the plane flying into the sea instead of the runway.

In Hansen’s book there are ample examples from the professional world and business world showing why competition, more often than not, destroys collaboration, but this is because the competition is INTERNAL. He argues that competition, to help collaboration thrive, needs to be directed outside the organisation: so a school staff uniting to get something (at the expense of another school getting it); a district of schools uniting (so that other districts get less); a country of districts collaborating (so that other countries or commercial organisations don’t realise the same gains).

Competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive – but the competition needs to be directed OUTSIDE the organisation, and it is this competition, WITHIN the institution that will break collaborations. It’s also this kind of competition, I’d argue, that we see most often inside schools and inside districts.”

Ewan McIntosh update to blog: “Competition within an institution breaks collaboration. But competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive. If a leader can unite an organisation in collaboration and turn competitiveness to the outside, then the collaboration will work very well – think: football teams, corporations, or a country of school districts uniting to realise the benefits of scale that come from a nationwide online learning community, rather than letting commercial organisations pick up the financial benefits by uniting to pick off 32 Local Authorities at once.)”

Comment by Phil Dawson: “I agree that the issue identified in the cockpit of planes (first I think with North Korean airline pilots who are almost always ex-military) is about hierarchy (status). Although the purpose of having two pilots in the cockpit is to provide a cross-checking and therefore resilient environment, North Korean co-pilots would not challenge their captains because their military training and culture placed very high value on the chain of command (for general review of cockpit dynamics see: Status and Cockpit Dynamics: A Review and Empirical Study 1998, by Milanovich, Driskell, Stout & Salas). As a consequence, captains became the single point of failure and the airline had a poor safety record. However, this was not manifested as competitive pressure in the cockpit; quite the reverse: it manifested as dominant/submissive behaviour.All people (both sexes) are socially hierarchical but the manifestation of this behaviour may be different in boys and girls. Hierarchy and competition are discrete but linked concepts in psychology, both of which, if undirected, may lead to conflict.

My point is that the boundary between outside and inside is not definitive. It is relative and fluid and may be manipulated. Hansen’s examples (picked to make his point I think) are – in my opinion – the consequence of poor management, culture and leadership, not an inherent incompatibility between internal competition and collaboration.”

Comment by Peter Hirst: “Enjoying this series so far Ewan. Thought I’d link you to an article that intrigued me and certainly got a lot of comments in the US. The main basis is that by removing competition in Finnish schools collaboration thrives and they succeed – there’s no private schools, no school league tables, no performance pay and no standardised tests…”

Ewan McIntosh update to blog: “It is no surprise, therefore, that international collaborations of the kind that eTwinning encourages might work better for teachers and schools than collaborating closer to home, but the question that now remains, is collaborating for what? If there’s nothing to be lost through competition, there is also, perhaps, a perception that there is nothing to be gained. Cue: collaboration for collaboration’s sake.”

Comment by Phil Dawson: “I strongly recommend reading Pasi Sahlberg’s book, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? By coincidence I mentioned it on Twitter only last week. Having read it, I think the key point Sahlberg makes is that Finland’s education system is successful because it it is uniquely egalitarian and every young person believes she or he will be treated equally and fairly. It creates a healthy meritocracy. I’d venture to suggest though that this does not mean there’s no competition; just that the playing field is a level one and that the competition does not manifest itself in a culture of failure. Healthy competition is when one’s reaction to others’ success is to be inspired.”

OK, so that’s where we’ve got to so far… I would just sum up by saying I often ‘discuss’ by adopting a standpoint that is (slightly) more extreme than my actual view. I find it helpful to test how far an opinion might be stretched before it breaks. In this case, the key points that I’m continuing to think about are the role of good leadership in creating a balanced culture of collaboration and competition, both inside and outside an organisation.

I’m also interested in how competition can be a positive and creative force, rather than a destructive one. I think that there is wariness in education of the concept of competition that arises from the assumption that it is about winners and losers rather than finding creative solutions to problems. Once again, I believe leaders have an important role in steering the culture of their organisations to be about healthy and inspiring competition.

UPDATE: Check out this video by Rachel Botsman on ‘Collaborative Consumption’. She has a really progressive view on web-enabled collaboration per the likes of airbnb.com and rabbit.com. The collaboration is a product of both the material value and the social capital it builds. Trust is a vital part of collaboration because it means we understand and accept that the group’s goals are aligned. Reputation is a primer for trusting relationships and therefore for collaboration.