Applied everything

School teaching is a pet subject of the Economist, and for good reason. Education is the best route to global prosperity and to widening opportunity, and improving the quality of teaching may be the best route to improving education. Further, nowadays there are a lot of data and experience to draw upon, but still wide variations in approach and results. The field offers vast attainable global potential for improvement.

Sadly, until very recently this has been a rather sterile and ideological debate, and the Economist has let itself down by becoming sucked into one side. In many countries, teaching is one of the last bastions of the era of powerful trade unions. Teachers have historically had low oversight combined with strong tenure. The focus of would-be reformers like the Economist has been to lobby to break down this power base, making it easier to fire teachers and promoting assessment, often via testing of school kids.

This narrow focus has been intensely political for a generation, generally to the detriment of the kids and to progress. Teachers unions sense threat and respond by blocking reform, via becoming paymasters of major political parties. So-called reformers target teachers and their unions as a sole goal. One result is movements like charter schools, which are sold as child-centric beacons of progress, but in reality are usually little more than devices to weaken the contracts of teachers.

This obsession with contracts and power infects many in business, including myself. In Shell retail, there was always debate about the nature of the contract with operators of filling stations, and we changed for too often, at great cost, misleading ourselves that if only we could fix the governance and control, other good things would follow. While these contracts are important, the risk is that the reality is that the other good things are sometimes attainable without such wrenching change, and prove just as elusive afterwards.

More widely in business, look out for leaders who put too much faith in reorganisations, for that is the same disease. It is good practice to reorganise every few years and to prune a business at the same time, but in many cases endless reorganisations serve little purpose beyond obscuring a lack of real strategy.

Going back to teachers, it is true that in many countries the union has misused its legacy power. Current strikes in Mexico show just how broken patronage type systems can become, how jealously the beneficiaries defend them, and how detrimental such battles are to kids.

But at last the Economist has managed to broaden its lens in an extended essay published last month. The article reviewed what worked around the world rather than focusing on ideology, and was all the better for it.

And it does not surprise me that what works around the world is often about helping teachers become better teachers through applied training and coaching. The best place to learn these coachable skills is in the classroom.

The starting point for the analysis is not the lazy segmentation of bad or lazy teachers and good teachers, but the huge potential every teacher has to increase their effectiveness in front of kids. The way to unlock that potential is usually to understand and apply certain techniques, which differ for each teacher based on their strengths and situation. An expert observing a regular lesson can offer the teacher insight into what works and what could create better outcomes, and work with the teacher as they become comfortable with minor changes and start to implement them. The essay including many fascinating examples of the sorts of techniques and models that work, and they appeared very credible to me.

The current reality is that most teachers are trained in multi-year programmes in establishments where practice is hard to offer, spending most of their time with textbooks and lectures. Having qualified, they are put in front of real kids and many will never again be observed or even have a chance to observe colleagues. Instead they must summon their own motivation to improve and experiment, resources which are limited and tend to decline over years of habit-forming.

Doesn’t this make sense? With almost anything involving human interaction, the way to get better is to practice, coached by someone who can observe and give tips. In the essay, the results and payback for this approach were excellent, far stronger than ideological shibboleths such as smaller class sizes, higher budgets, pupil streaming, more assessments or flexible contracts, many of which seemed to offer no benefits at all.

This research offers great hope to societies. Predictably, unions will carp, seeing it as a Trojan horse for assessment, and market zealots will give them good cause. Beyond that, the main challenge will be resources, since it is not logistically simple or cheap to offer the in situ coaching required.

Applied learning is a fantastic concept that applies equally well to almost any skill requiring complex human interaction. Line management is a topic I have passion for, something, just like teaching, that makes a huge difference to outcomes and to wellbeing, yet typically carries little training, specialisation or facilitated improvement opportunities. In Shell, Greg Lewin and I designed Applied Leadership to address exactly this opportunity, with good results. Our idea was to create peer groups of line managers who would meet periodically with a facilitator to talk through what works and what could work better in specific situations. I am convinced that most corporations could benefit from such a programme.

Another favourite of mine for this sort of treatment is choir conducting. Just like in teaching, students tend to be offered a lot of theory and lectures and then left to improve by themselves. In this instance there is the added problem of ego, which means many are reluctant to invite coaching, especially not from fellow practitioners. My favourite question when hiring a choir conductor is “how do you make sure you keep learning and improving?” Most have never even considered the topic.

Medicine is another obvious candidate for the applied treatment. Medical school is also lots of theory and lectures and not enough practice. To be fair, there is then a long probationary period with plenty of applied learning and feedback. But once that is over, coaching stops and habits solidify. Many GP’s can’t even initiate an open conversation – TV’s Doc Martin is not as untypical as you might expect.

This whole area becomes a wonderful challenge for new technology. IT also has the potential to transform learning, yet it is not obvious how to combine that with the applied teaching methods that seem to work best. The two opportunities do not work against each other, but finding the best combination will take more experience and more studies. This double opportunity carries potential in medicine as well.

I have come to believe that applied learning is powerful in many, many fields, and is used to its full potential in few, for all sorts of reasons. I hope this can change in the coming years, to the benefit of all of us. Meanwhile, what complex human interaction do you employ regularly that could benefit from some applied learning, and how might you go about utilising it? Help is usually available if you are just open and ask.