What can we do while we wait for policy to change? We tinker.
I’ve been inspired by Amantha Imber recently who, in an effort to build trust with readers, started indicating how long a piece took to write, and where AI was used, at the outset so that readers could assess their own time investment in reading. I’m going to do the same thing.
Time to write: About 5 hours.
AI use: Claude was used to aggregate research and analyse change frameworks. My writing is my own and something I do regularly to make sense of complexity, draw connections and ask questions. The ideas, and any errors, are mine.
Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash
Do we wait for policy to tell us what needs to change?
My feed is full of policy critique at the moment. Which, can I just say, is a good thing.
I’ve long worked in the senior secondary space, where I’ve led and been a part of many conversations around reimagining how we measure, represent and celebrate learning – not just achievement – in schooling. The fact that there are more voices adding to this, and the chorus is growing louder, is a good thing; it’s the type of agitation we need for things to shift at a macro level.
But, I often think, as I scroll through these intelligent, well-articulated thoughts is this: if I was teaching and leading in a school right now, and I agree with all this, what do I do? Where does this leave me?
Because any of us who are teaching and leading in schools right now are acutely aware that we still work in systems and institutions that are organised around these outward facing metrics. And while we can challenge this privately in hallway or staffroom conversations, the reality is that metrics like NAPLAN outcomes and ATAR rankings still sit at the core of many decisions we make in schooling – and even how we advertise for enrolments in a competitive market. And further still, these metrics have become synonymous with quality schooling for many families, thanks in large part to the media narrative surrounding it.
And while you’ll be glad to know that I too have many lofty ideas for the future of schooling and the policy shifts that need to take place, the truth is that for those of us in schools, Monday morning rolls around, and the email from the disgruntled parent still needs replying to, the behavioural incident needs to be dealt with, a wellbeing issue needs documentation and follow up, there are staff to coach, an improvement agenda that needs to be implemented, exams to be organised, assessments to be marked.
This is the question that’s been bouncing around in my head since I sat in an auditorium about a year ago, part of an audience that was exploring the future of education. In a Q&A section at the end of the day, a young teacher raised her hand and asked the keynote speaker (an accomplished academic) on stage: It looks like all this change and advocacy is happening, but in my school things are still the same. What do I do as a teacher? As a leader?
Photo by Elissa Garcia on Unsplash
I’ve always been an advocate for not waiting for policy to give us permission to do what we need to do for young people in schooling. Given the many legal and compliance constraints we work in, this is a complex design problem, but one that I think can open up a realm of possibilities for what can change today, and continue to change over time.
It’s an easy platitude to say we should just burn it all to the ground and start again. But if history teaches us anything, it’s that deep, human-centred change doesn’t come as a result of ‘top down’ structural overhauls that are issued by outside policy makers – even when the ideas are good.
My argument here is in a similar sentiment, and it’s informed by Larry Cuban and David Tyack’s idea of ‘tinkering’: incremental, adaptive change made at the micro level, that takes steps to address complex challenges in novel ways and redesigns our internal structures to reflect what is truly important in schooling.
So what can we do while we’re waiting for shifts at the macro level?
We tinker intelligently towards lived coherence, with systems, futures and humans in view.
And for me, that tinkering looks like design-led change.
Experimenting with design in school change and improvement.
In 2019, I was sitting around a boardroom table with four other principals who were members of my direct team. At the time, I was in a senior advisory role working across four campuses with campus leadership teams to reimagine how we merged industry and employability perspectives with mainstream curriculum. On this particular day, we were working through a complex challenge: student engagement in learning. We had our data in front of us, along with our strategic goals and vision. We’d pulled together some research and examples of what we’d seen at other schools. We were pretty sure that we knew what needed to change based on what was in front of us, and what we’d observed in classrooms.
At hour two, the energy was flagging and we continued to shoot down each other’s ideas. I’d been sitting on an ambitious one that would involve reimagining assessment across three year levels – across all four campuses. And though it came with some (okay, a lot) risk, I took a breath and posed it to the group anyway. Before I’d even finished speaking, heads started shaking.
No, that couldn’t work with the timetable.
No, the compliance makes that near impossible.
No, there’s no budget for that.
No, we don’t have people for that.
In response, I could only nod. I knew the constraints as well as anyone, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
“Yes,” I said, “I agree.”
I paused.
“But…” I ventured, “If we really wanted to do it. I mean, like…really wanted to do it. How could we?”
I held my breath in the corresponding silence. And finally, the responses started coming.
“I guess if we really wanted to, we could…”
“What if we…”
“You know what we could do is…”
“You know who you should talk to is…”
As the Principals talked, I scribbled down the thinking on post-it notes, and by the time our meeting concluded, the table was covered in bits of coloured paper, each a possibility for a path forward that hadn’t existed an hour ago. As we stook up and gathered our things to leave, we surveyed the table and agreed: This would be difficult, but not impossible.
Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash
It would take surveys with 500 students 20 teachers and 70 or so parents to challenge our initial frame of the problem, and the assumptions we made going into it. It would take 30 staff across four campuses to design the response over months. At the end, we couldn’t have predicted that path we’d taken, or the outcome that was designed at the end. But what existed as a result was something unique to the organisation we were in – and directly in response to the lived experience of the humans who were central to it.
I didn’t realise it back then, but this is when I’d first started experimenting with the shape of design to lead school change and improvement.
Design-led change: from closed loops to open problems.
I’d always loved design thinking. I’d first learnt about it as an early career teacher and loved the novelty of it; I loved that it could open lines of thinking that previously didn’t seem possible. Later in school leadership, I reached for design thinking often in my strategy and innovation work, always preferring to generate unique ideas for change within our team rather than replicate things we’d seen in other contexts.
It was only years later in a system role, that I realised I was evolving the way I approached change. No longer was my focus on one school, or a few campuses. I was now grappling with 147 schools across the P-12 context, working on a challenge that had many different, interconnected elements. Reaching for the same change tools and frameworks that were go-to’s in the past didn’t seem to fit the complexity of this work. I was turning to systems thinking tools, futures literacy, participatory design methods, behavioural science, organisational psychology. At the time, I was just following my instincts. But a couple of years later, when I would start sketching out the initial idea for Coherence Co-Lab, I learnt that this process had a name. This was design beyond design.
In school leadership, our efforts are often concentrated on making things better and the strategic response to a range of pressures and expectations. Change and improvement in schools can sometimes run on a closed loop. We see the problem, we ideate, implement the solution, measure the results. And several change frameworks are designed exactly around this idea of closed problem-solving. Take Kotter’s 8 Steps Model, Lewin’s Change Theory, Diffusion of Innovation Theory or even McKinsey’s 7 Step Problem-Solving Process – all assume that change is about execution of process. If something isn’t going to plan within one of these processes, or the change stalls, then the instinct is to look for where the ‘buy in’ was weak, or where the communication or execution was insufficient.
Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash
Design-led change assumes something else: The challenge or problem doesn’t have a closed loop. In fact, the challenge is wide open and intricately networked. The only thing we know at the start is the value we’re aiming for, the outcome we want to have, and what’s truly important. The process is then designed around it.
And for the record, this isn’t a PSA for putting all change frameworks in the bin. Closed, linear problems, with a straight line between cause and effect, will continue to exist, and change frameworks will continue to be suitable when applied here.
But the thing about complex problems, is especially in schools, is that solutions to them don’t really exist. There is no single bullet, according to Dorst, that will magically satisfy the needs and wants of all stakeholders. What we can do in a complex problem situation is to instead create high-quality interventions that move the entire system to a more desired state. We tinker.
Design-led change in schools is agnostic to domain and speciality. It poses the idea our most complex challenges around wellbeing, attendance, engagement, curriculum, technology, career confidence are adaptive and networked, and they do not have simple solutions. It acknowledges the constraints of compliance, metrics, public perception, and competing priorities as design parameters, but can also reframe these things as the material to design change with.
Last year, I was facilitating a co-design session with a group of teachers and students. I watched as a student pointed to something on the teacher’s screen and asked, “What does compliance driven schooling mean?”. The educator explained the demands and pressures of compliance, and the constraints teachers are under. The student nodded and said, “That sounds important. Let’s just tweak the idea so we make sure we do that”.
And at the end of that session, I watched as the group of educators and leaders saw that their vision for the future was nearly the same as the one designed by the students - except the students had more agile and novel ways to get here. And I remember a student looking around and reflecting, “I didn’t realise our teachers saw the same problems as we do…and it makes me feel like we’re still on the same side”.
Because this is the coolest thing about design-led change: it also assumes that the people in the environment already hold the knowledge and insight needed to make the change. What’s required is the surfacing of that insight – and the process leadership for the tinkering to happen with rigour, discipline and courage so that change doesn’t just sit as innovations on the surface, but deep in the system, until the whole thing moves.
Design-led change is what we do through Coherence Co-Lab. It all started with these questions:
What if we could take a human-centred design approach to change in schools, and in the process, get our systems to be more reflective of we actually value? What if we could do this all with view of the future that’s emerging?
What if we could build our adaptive capability through the work of change and improvement through engaging with rigorous disciplines that leaders and teachers of the future need?
What if the change we want to see at a macro level could happen internally in schools first?
This is what we partner with schools to do - design change and improvement that is systems aware, futures informed, human-centred and coherence led. If you’re working through a complex challenge, experimenting with reimagining, or starting with a blank page, book a time to chat.