Part 1: Educational Engineers
Reading ‘Better’ by Atul Gawande was seminal in influencing thoughts that I have had about school improvement and leadership in secondary education in the UK. Despite Gawande’s writing being in the context of surgical and medical practice in various locations around the World and particularly in the US, there are lessons we can learn. Notably these lessons can revolve around many hot topics in Education currently including Ethical Leadership, solving BIG problems and standards. In this series of blogs I’ll cover the lessons I have learnt from ‘Better’ and subsequently used as a Principal in two secondary schools and the work I complete across our Trust.
Educational Engineers
These days I like to think of my leadership in schools as being an educational engineer. This view was heavily influenced by the chapter ‘Washing Hands’ in ‘Better’. Here in the context of hospitals historically and currently, Gawande talks of the difficulties in stopping the spread of infections in hospitals. Doctors know that hand washing whilst using the correct antibacterial solution and a strict procedure is the best way of reducing infection spread. Yet statistics have shown that doctors and nurses only wash their hands 33% to 50% as often as they are supposed to and rarely follow the hand washing procedures.
“Stopping the epidemics spreading in our hospitals is not a problem of ignorance – of not having the know-how about what to do. It is a problem of compliance – a failure of an individual to apply that know-how correctly. But achieving compliance is hard.” ‘Better’ – Atul Gawande
We see this in schools in all manner of areas; feedback, marking, setting homework, assessment or behaviour to name but a few.
To illustrate the point, let’s take break time duty as a simple example. We all know why break time duty is important. At a basic level duties aid student compliance, monitoring corridors, toilets, canteens, fields and ensuring that students are safe and behaving appropriately. However, in the very best scenarios this duty presents us with an opportunity to interact with students outside the classroom. It is often where the ‘what did you do at the weekend?’ conversations occur or I get ribbed from my Year 11s about the latest inept performance that Nottingham Forest have offered up.
We have probably all been in situations (often during inspections) where ‘everyone’ is out and about on duty and the atmosphere is great; the conversations are good, student behaviour is great, thus leading leadership teams to wonder ‘if only….it was always like this’. We know that having staff on duty helps to keep a calm, pleasant environment in our schools.
However, schools, like hospitals are complex places. Teachers, leaders and associate staff are busy dealing with a multitude of things that have arrived in front of them and as a result, for any number of genuine (or not) reasons, duties can be arrived at late or missed altogether. As with infections in hospitals, these are just excuses to the relatives of the patient that gets an infection the one time a doctor didn’t wash their hands, or the parent of the child that gets bullied or the site manager when toilets gets damaged because we weren’t there.
The solution in a particular Pittsburgh hospital as described by Gawande, was to employ a young industrial engineer, Peter Perreiah, to be in charge of 1, 40 bed unit. Engineers solve problems and the problem to be solved was to stop the spread of infections. Within 2 years, infections of MRSA the hospitals biggest threat had fallen by almost 90%. Gawande reports that staff involved in the project told him:
“Peter (Perreiah) didn’t ask ‘Why don’t you wash your hands?’ but rather ‘Why can’t you?’. By far the most common answer was time. So, as an engineer, he went about fixing the things that burned up the staff’s time.” Better – Atul Gawande
Dozens of changes that simplified processes and procedures were introduced that reduced the opportunities for infection to spread and made it easier for staff and their equipment to stay clean.
As a result, the idea of seeing myself and my leadership team as educational engineers was born. We utilise Lens Leadership to view any school issue or problem to be solved through the lenses of the people involved. This allows us to ensure that the ‘solution’ works for the end user. To return to the simplistic break duty example, asking staff ‘why they can’t get to their duty on time’ rather than reprimanding for lateness or absence helps us to find solutions that reduce the likelihood of staff not being able to make their duty. A similar approach to much more complex school issues also reaps rewards.
The washing hands message does end with a note of caution, that is also relevant to schools. After 2 years, despite the success, the ideas Perreiah introduced had only spread to one other area of the hospital and he moved onto another project. Performance began to slide – nothing had fundamentally changed.
Again in schools we often see short term fixes introduced. These solutions are often genuinely sought out and may have a short term impact. However, too often an issue is approached only from the perspective of school leadership, however, for sustainable impact it has to work for the end user who needs to be engaged in the process. For example, a feedback policy may be good for evidence of marking but to enable compliance is negatively impacting the RE teacher that teaches every class at KS3. The feedback policy is therefore, no good, however pretty the evidence. The consequence will likely be losing a member of staff, lack of consistency and a feedback system that provides little value for students.
We encourage leaders at all levels to be educational engineers by identifying and solving the problems they face by asking the ‘why can’t you?’ questions. School staff, regardless of their status or responsibilities want to do a great job. Our job as school leaders is to make that as easy as possible for them to achieve.
Comentarios