To grow, teachers must be able to critically reflect on their own performance.
Education is “driven” by teachers.
It therefore makes sense that education is also capable of critically reflecting on its own performance.
Currently, this is happening through the comforting precision of analytics and numbers. The language of mathematics, data, and statistics provides a universal language that (ideally) resists rhetoric and emphasizes facts. It also provides a basis for research and natural anchors for the types of strategies we use to improve our schools.
To be wholeHowever, this critical reflection – this self-criticism – must be qualitative and quantitative. This means that right now we only have half the picture.
A self-aware education system
Criticism is a harsh-sounding word, but it’s pretty close to the word critical to see that they go together. To think critically is to achieve a kind of “critique,” but note that critique can occur without critical thinking. It seems that this is where education finds itself in trouble.
See also Education needs more than reforms
Self-awareness is a precursor to self-knowledge; self-knowledge is a precursor to context; context is a precursor to understanding.
Applied to education as a whole – as a system – self-awareness seems tricky. This is a uniquely human trait that depends, in part, on the ability to isolate oneself from oneself, and which dissolves once one person becomes two.
Being self-aware requires that you can see around you without missing anything. That we see all the pieces from their beginning to their end, and in a scale that does not obscure their function. Otherwise you are not aware of yourself but aware of the fragments. Aware of the parts.
For a school system, comprehensive outreach would mean every school, cafeteria, classroom, athletic field, assessment, textbook, computer policy, grading policy, bus route, parent concern, committee, federal guidelines, and budget line item. Every lesson, course title, bell schedule, class change process and school mascot.
And the students too: their history, their interests, their reading levels, their affections, their curiosities, their habits, their sense of personal effectiveness and their own lifestyles in indigenous communities. Every book they loved and every book they hated – every bad habit, source of academic apathy and cause of intrinsic motivation and source of intrinsic motivation.
And the teachers. And higher education. And technology – and each of them can itself be scattered into ten thousand pieces.
So many moving parts obscure the whole, and the whole obscures the parts – meaning that self-awareness and self-criticism remain beyond our reach. The best we can muster is an investigation.
It is clear that a self-aware education system is impossible as it is currently designed – which therefore means that a self-correcting education system is also impossible as it is currently designed.
Regulations
Instead, the awareness of education – and of educators within education – tends to manifest itself in a series of insights and corrections, in a series of jerks. The broad view that leads to day-to-day, semester-to-semester, and year-to-year continuity is replaced by artificial sequences of hustle, enthusiasm, and trend. Insights and jerks do not lead to the transformation that our collective funding, technology, expertise and passion might otherwise be capable of.
Scale will be a challenge to create a self-aware education system that can iterate and transform through built-in mechanisms that actually work.
Let’s create something huge that takes care of the intellectual and creative growth of millions and millions of little human beings, and then be surprised when the results are mediocre and the students are anonymous.
For education to become aware of itself, it will have to see itself and see all its own mechanisms. If we insist on a national system monitored at the state and district level, it will depend on the effectiveness and efficiency of the country, state and district. So we have designed a system of teaching and learning – of human improvement – that is unmanageable by that very design. A system which, incredibly, wants to globalize.
Whether it is a challenge of size, scale, pride or design, “global” self-criticism is not possible. As long as this is true, there is nothing other than minor spurts of incidental improvement.
For now, in your classroom, school, or district, imagine what self-criticism and self-correction look like now. This is likely a mix of data teams, lesson planning feedback, and other data.
What do you do to get a complete picture of who you are, your progress, and the types of corrections your job as an educator requires? If we can’t come up with a good answer to this question, we shouldn’t be surprised when other (deliberately vague) people come to do it for us, stop believing in what we do, or design and fund thought-based alternatives. and their own design.
An underperforming teacher ends up being replaced. Underperforming schools and districts – and especially learning models – are permanently defunded and untouchable.
For what?
