This is a post about what we might normally call ‘school improvement’. It is a term which means so many things to so many people. It is a term that has troubled me for some time. I might trace this dissonance back to when I changed the way I think about school leadership, after all the two are intertwined. The rhetoric around school improvement is problematic in similar ways: it is ill-defined; it is often talked about in general terms; it suffers from getting hung up on the surface features of the phenomenon, rather than the underlying structures; it is politically charged.
I have avoided using the term in the title of this post and instead opted for the more encompassing term education improvement. Improving the education system is not just about improving schools. There is nothing wrong with wanting better schools, but I think we get too hung up on particular ‘objects’, in particular schools and individual teachers. Neither schools nor teachers improve in isolation. Their fates are intertwined, and bound to the quality of teams and the effectiveness of the wider system. A useful way of thinking about improving educational outcomes would incorporate various objects and target multiple levels in the system. It would provide a theory for how these components interrelate – how they are reinforcing and more than the sum of their parts.
This is where knowledge-building comes in. Knowledge-building is a good construct for thinking about improvement. To ’get better’ it is clearly necessary to know more and to make better use of this knowledge (we’ll call this expertise). It is almost impossible to think of a scenario where educational outcomes improve and are sustained without greater expertise being a significant cause.
However, school improvement methodologies that focus on one object in isolation (e.g. the standard of teaching by an individual teacher) portray improvement as a quality of the object in question. The onus is on the individual’s expertise. This can, if we are not careful, mean improvement efforts are targeted at individuals and see knowledge-building as an individualistic pursuit.
There is a similar risk when we define ’the school’ as the object of improvement. The strategy adopted by the school becomes the focus, which is attributed to the quality of school leadership. The expertise of school leaders becomes the target for improvement. The logic is that ’better leadership’ will lead to ’better strategy’ which will result in improvement. If more expert leadership is accompanied by knowledge-building at other levels in the system (from classroom practice through to national policy), then improvement is more likely to result. But there is a risk that improvement efforts will be hollow, generic and ’done to’ teachers if we rely only on building knowledge of leaders in isolation.
My contention, therefore, is that it might be useful to consider how well geared we are to collaborative knowledge-building. If the system is to become more intelligent in thought and deed we need a theory of improvement which values collective expertise and suggests what structures and processes are desirable.
Knowledge-building is a socio-cultural pursuit
No human achievement in history has been secured as a result of an individual’s knowledge. Every mind builds on what has been thought and enacted by others. Furthermore, the creation of new knowledge is most often a collaborative activity. The myth of the lone genius is alluringly romantic, but not born out in reality.
It is tempting to place our bets on better teachers. After all, there is plenty of evidence to suggest great teaching is the most important factor in improving educational outcomes for children. It is an intuitive leap to suggest that the key to improved education is therefore to improve teachers, and therefore to improve ‘the teacher’. But that last leap makes an assumption that the individual teacher should be the focus of these efforts. Improving the expertise of an individual teacher will, in fact, yield limited returns. Instead, I suggest, we would be better creating the conditions for collaborative knowledge-building. It is only when we collectively ‘know more’ that educational outcomes improve.
I suggest that taking either a single school, or a single teacher, or a school leader, as the object of improvement efforts is an error. If we are to improve education through schooling, we must think more holistically. Knowledge-building happens between actors in the system, not within them.
To illustrate my point, we’ll try a thought experiment.
Imagine a teacher who teaches their whole career in isolation. They have no contact with other teachers, with teacher-training organisations, or have access to any literature or research about how to teach. How do they develop their expertise?
In this dystopian example, the teacher would have no choice but to learn from trial and error. It would be a slow and painful way to improve. They would try a particular approach and seek feedback on the effect it had, then alter their practice and observe the effects. In this ‘closed system’, knowledge-building is hopelessly inefficient.
Imagine that one day the teacher discovers a hidden door. Behind the door is another teacher’s classroom. This teacher is also caught in hellish isolation. At once, the teachers have each other to learn from. ‘What have you tried?’, one asks the other. And so they exchange knowledge, and as they begin to trust each other they visit each other’s classrooms to become part of the feedback mechanisms, so creating new understanding together.
Humans learn how to shape their environment. But they do not do so in isolation. We wouldn’t have got this far as a species if we did not share what we have learnt or collaborate to generate new knowledge. If improvement is about knowledge-building, then our attention should be on the relations between people, not on what is inside the mind of an individual.
Answering educational questions together
When viewed from the perspective of knowledge-building, we may characterise educational improvement as ‘solving problems together’. For those who do not like the term ‘problem’, we might instead say that our task is to ‘answer educational questions together’. Solving problems and answering questions are both about creating useful knowledge. That knowledge must be shared if it is to improve education at scale – it is no use residing in one person’s head.
We can leave knowledge-building to chance or we can cultivate it. If we are to intentionally improve educational outcomes we should be deliberate. How do we create the conditions in which we promote the collaborative creation of useful knowledge?
We might perhaps start by focussing on the following:
- Asking the right questions
- Knowledge-building opportunities
- Effective feedback loops
- Criticality bias
- Codification
- Spread and scale-up mechanisms
To begin, it is important that we ask the right questions. If my question is ‘How should I build learning power?’ then no amount of collaborative endeavour will generate knowledge that takes us forward. Whereas a question like ‘How do I know if the pupils in my class have understood what I have taught them?’ is worth answering, and my provide some generalisable knowledge. The education system is overflowing with distracting and unhelpful questions (as we write about here) and there is a responsibility on us all to avoid being side-tracked into dead-ends.
Next, we must provide all those engaged in answering educational questions the time and space they need to answer them, whether they be researchers, policy makers, school leaders or teachers. For teachers in the UK, this is a challenge as the heavy teaching loads crowd out collaborative endeavour and knowledge-building. However, we can be thoughtful about how we use the precious time we do have. Minimising the administrative burdens on teachers will make it more likely that they have time to answer educational questions together. Then we must find ways of reducing the isolation of teachers in particular. Teaching is a peculiarly isolated endeavour, not all that far from my dystopian thought experiment. Unlike other professions, adult contact is limited and haphazard in teaching. And yet it is through these relationships that knowledge will be created.
Unfortunately, our main technology for knowledge-building – trial and error – is severely hindered by the weak feedback loops which exist. We do not know until much later (if ever) what the effect of our teaching is on pupils’ knowledge. Instead we rely on proxies for success, like whether pupils seem interested, are paying attention, can regurgitate information, or perform in a task. To improve educational outcomes, we should develop an awareness of this limitation and mitigate it by adopting a ‘best bets’ approach to classroom practice. This requires that teachers have access to the combined knowledge of the field – the best that has been thought and said about education.
But importing ideas and ‘evidenced practice’ into a school or embedding it throughout the system through policy is dangerous. The myths, fads and transient beliefs that abound has historically resulted in some misguided policy and advice for schools. A mature ‘open system’ which hopes to build collective knowledge which translates into more effective practice must develop a critical bent towards the Next Big Thing. Criticality is a habit of mind, but it may also be built into our systems and approaches. A critical system assumes that not all knowledge is valuable. It will have a set of agreed values and ;goals against which it can evaluate new ideas or proposed innovations. Those within the system will operate to decision making norms when it comes to change initiatives and they will scrutinise evidence of efficacy. The culture must be attuned to criticality so that it acts as a bullshit filter against bad ideas.
Lastly – and this is no small task – new knowledge must be codified and shared. Effective collaborative knowledge- building requires a common language and the creation of new language which captures emerging understanding and practice. Then a mechanism is required to spread (replicate an innovation) or scale-up (infrastructure to support wider implementation) the improved practice. As Trisha Greenhalgh and Chrysanthi Papoutsi explain in their 2019 paper on disseminating healthcare innovations, ‘there is no simple or universally replicable way of implementing change at scale in a complex system’. Their description of three ‘logics’ of spread and scale-up are worthy of our time. The dominant ‘implementation science’ approach, in my view, will at best achieve some knowledge transfer, whereas the complexity science approach is more likely to foster the collaborative knowledge-building which allows local adaptation and shared understanding about successful implementation to be created.
Knowledge-building versus legacy approaches
If we think about education improvement as knowledge-building it takes us some way from legacy approaches to ‘school improvement’.
First, rather than select objects for improvement (the school or the teacher being the most common objects), knowledge-building interests itself with the relations between these actors. We might characterise it as a relational theory of improvement.
Second, knowledge-building promotes a shared responsibility for improvement. No single actor – not the headteacher, nor the teacher, nor the government – should be focussed on improving merely their own ‘performance’. Instead, each has a vested interest in improving along with other agents. The teacher should help school leaders develop and implement better policy; the school leader in turn works with the teacher to enhance their practice. Similarly, schools and trusts should work in partnership with other agencies (Ofsted, government, academics) to develop shared knowledge about effective school improvement approaches.
Third, a focus on collaborative knowledge-building takes a dynamic, not static, view of quality. The quality-focus is not on what level of quality has been achieved but on whether the collaborative knowledge-building processes are leading to improvements in educational outcomes. For the school, we would be less likely to say ‘this is a good school’ and more likely to consider what would help it get better.
What evidence do I have that this is not happening already? Well, in many places it is. Teachers work together to answer questions about education all the time – what syllabus should we use? how do I get the subtlety of that concept across? how are you meeting the needs of that student? What stymies them is a school improvement approach that undervalues the importance of answering questions together. Hierarchical relations are often so much less productive.
We can reveal the embedded approaches to school improvement by asking anyone in a school what we mean by school improvement. They may answer with reference to targets, to improved exam results, to implementing new ‘evidence based’ programs, to the school development plan, to securing a better Ofsted grade, to performance management cycles, to ‘being observed’, or to visiting speakers or consultants. There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of these. But push further. Ask: ‘In what way is our collective expertise enhanced by each of these mechanisms?’ I would suggest that if nothing of value has been learnt then we are no further forward.
Unlike many school improvement efforts, knowledge-building is not a zero-sum game. If senior leaders spend more time observing lessons then they may spend less time being a presence around the school to secure good behaviour. The risk in any redirection of effort is that the maintenance of an effective regularity is disrupted. But knowledge-building means that the same things can be done more effectively. Improvement through greater expertise does not require anyone to work harder, to feel more pressure or to abandon secure practices. Success built on expertise is a sustainable success.
I am not proposing knowledge-building as a silver bullet or a ‘grand theory’ which allows us to leave behind legacy approaches to school improvement. I am suggesting that it may be valuable to think about improvement in this way. It feels like a good bet. Building valuable knowledge may not be the only thing we need to improve education, but it is hard to imagine how we achieve a better education system without doing so.
Matthew Evans 
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