Equip Schools

#1: Choose Your Position

The way par­ents under­stand their role will dra­mat­i­cally affect the ways you respond to your student’s behav­iour, per­for­mance and atti­tude. We are all to famil­iar with the stunt-double par­ent who finds them­selves awake at 3 am com­plet­ing that assign­ment on the plan­ets while their child sleeps peace­fully; or the robotic gen­eral who barks orders from afar only to learn that Gen Y is actu­ally just code for “inca­pable of obedience”.

Now, I am not a par­ent (I hope), and there­fore I do not pre­tend to be an expert on what are sound par­ent­ing prin­ci­ples or not. How­ever, in my time, I had sat around many, many kitchen tables with sob­bing stu­dents and par­ents – both at a loss about what approach to take, and deal­ing with the con­se­quences of think­ing about things the wrong way. So let me humbly sug­gest that when it comes to your stu­dent (as opposed to your child), you adopt the posi­tion of “coach”.

Why might that be a help­ful metaphor for mod­ern par­ents? Partly because these days hav­ing a Per­sonal Trainer is a lot like a hav­ing a Hawai­ian shirt in the 70s – you just don’t leave home with­out one. With life coaches and busi­ness coaches and per­sonal train­ers our soci­ety is thor­oughly famil­iar with the posi­tion these peo­ple have in their respec­tive con­texts. A help­ful dic­tum is “on the side­line, but not in the game”. It artic­u­lates the fun­da­men­tal ele­ments of this position.

You see, the coach lives every high and every low, they often make the hard deci­sions for their under­stud­ies, the help for­mu­late the plans and aid in every way they can – except that they are always just mil­lime­tres off the play­ing green, stand­ing there on the sideline.

Let me encour­age all you brave par­ents who have at once the most reward­ing, won­der­ful yet pro­foundly dif­fi­cult job in the world. Might you con­sider the ways that you can respond to your student’s aca­d­e­mic life as a coach – help­ing them to strate­gise and plan; mak­ing tough deci­sions for them (such as elim­i­nat­ing their dis­trac­tions); fight­ing to stay informed of the state of play – for a good coach knows their play­ers and the chal­lenges they face well; and finally, that you stay on the side­line, grant­ing your stu­dent their oppor­tu­nity to shine.

The age-old dic­tum: good is the enemy of great has no greater foothold than in our schools – or so it seems. Once I have been for­given for my gross gen­er­al­i­sa­tions, per­haps take a moment to lis­ten to my rant.

The work that I do and the organ­i­sa­tion I run, exists because schools are not doing the job they are designed to do. Now, in one sense I am not com­plain­ing – I love my work. But on the other hand, we sup­port schools to have an inten­tional, research-driven and edu­ca­tion­ally sound method­ol­ogy and cur­ricu­lum to grow stu­dents in the skills they need to sur­vive and suc­ceed in life – skills like time man­age­ment, or organ­i­sa­tion, or motivation.

For many years, the dom­i­nant model has been to hire an exter­nal pre­sen­ter to come and deliver a day of ‘study skills’ sem­i­nars, once a year (at best). How­ever, it frus­trates me immensely when this model is adopted – and I am partly to blame – we are often the exter­nal pre­sen­ter. The prob­lem is, the very rea­son we took over 2 years of inten­sive research and entirely remod­elled our busi­ness was because this model of grow­ing stu­dents in these skill-based areas is almost useless.

The research on this point has been clear for a long time – skill devel­op­ment does not take place via a once off infor­ma­tional down­load. That would be like read­ing a book about Lance Arm­strong and then being expected to know how to ride a bike – the tech­nique is impo­tent to deliver the outcome.

Instead, skill-development (which is absolutely what these areas entail) is an ongo­ing process of ‘new strate­gies’ being under­stood, adopted, ill-applied, but then refined over time. It requires ongo­ing sup­port, ongo­ing account­abil­ity and ongo­ing access to the tools required to trial and develop these skills.

When we speak with schools and are informed, “Oh, so you run study-skills work­shops… oh we do those too. It seems our school already does what you do”, I get hot under the col­lar and feel like point­ing out that their ad hoc, unin­ten­tional, “tick-the-box”, infor­ma­tion del­uge they refer to as a stu­dent devel­op­ment pro­gram is unlikely to deliver any of the pro­posed results – in fact, it often means that schools out­source that entire con­ver­sa­tion to these one-off sessions.

Indeed, schools often take a lot of per­suad­ing that if they truly desire for their stu­dents to mas­ter key areas like Learn­ing, Plan­ning, Organ­i­sa­tion, Goal Set­ting and Self-Regulation, they need to adopt a more inten­tional, thought­ful and inten­sive approach. Because at the end of the day, we do not want to cre­ate young peo­ple capa­ble of regur­gi­tat­ing the pop­u­la­tion of our con­ti­nent (a symp­tom of our over indulged empha­sis on cur­ricu­lum out­comes), we want them to be con­fi­dent, inde­pen­dent, and resilient learn­ers equipped with the skills to thrive in life.

So no, for the record, the mere exis­tence of a mediocre “study skills pro­gram” is not a suf­fi­cient rea­son for schools to neglect con­sid­er­ing how they are actu­ally sup­port­ing and invest­ing in their stu­dents in these crit­i­cal areas that will dra­mat­i­cally impact their life oppor­tu­ni­ties and like­li­hood of success.

We’ve just returned from sunny Dar­win where we were spon­sors of one of Australia’s best edu­ca­tional con­fer­ences, put on by the Aus­tralian Coun­cil for Edu­ca­tional Lead­ers. It was a fan­tas­tic chance to con­nect with switched on edu­ca­tors from all over Aus­tralia and beyond.

Our very own Simon Break­s­pear was also pre­sent­ing just prior to once again return­ing to the UK to pur­sue his PhD at Cam­bridge on a Gates Schol­ar­ship — switched on, indeed!

We look for­ward to return­ing to ACEL’s 2010 con­fer­ence — in Syd­ney — next year.

Our web­site is back after a brief hia­tus while we pre­pared to switch on indi­vid­ual accounts in our Equip Online sys­tem. The good news is, online setup for indi­vid­ual accounts is just around the cor­ner! Mean­while, feel free to con­tact us to request a demo account and we’ll work some­thing out.