Equip Schools

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.