According to our school’s mythology, some terrible changes were enacted in the 1990s by a new, progressive headteacher looking to make his mark. One of these changes was to modernise the names of the old school houses, changing them from the traditional house names that had been around since… forever. It was a controversial move, not least among the parents who, when sending their children to the school that they attended as a child, and perhaps their own parents had attended, wanted their son or daughter placed in the same house they had been in.
One of the early, and most popular, things I did upon starting at the school was to restore the old house names. I did it to signal that I valued the traditions and history of the school. In the eyes of the community, a wrong was righted.
At around the same time, I reversed another decision which proved less popular. The English department had previously been awarded additional non-contact periods to teachers in other subjects. The justification was the heavy marking load of English teachers. The reason, I think, was that the Deputy Head who constructed the timetable was an English teacher. Either way, it didn’t seen equitable to me, and we were broke, so the privilege was removed. Over ten years later, this decision still comes up in conversation over workload. Injustice lives long in the memory.
It is memory which is the subject of this post, in particular institutional memory. Institutional memory (IM) became a popular subject of study in the 1990s, under the umbrella of the discipline of knowledge management. In recent years, it has come to influence thinking in the English school system, for reasons I will speculate on in a moment. IM is the idea that an organisation holds collective memories that affect how the past translates into the organisation’s present and future. Theoretically, there are only two repositories of institutional memories: in organisational archives or in the memories of people within or associated with the organisation. However, documentation is really only a repository for information, not knowledge, therefore it can be argued that IM is not much more than the sum total of what people know. It seems though that collective knowledge has emergent properties over and above the sum of individual memories, as we shall see.
Why has IM and knowledge management more generally become a big thing in discourse about schools in England now? It probably reflects the dominance of the knowledge-rich movement in curricular thinking and the popularity of some aspects of cognitive science, in particular the concept of a multi-store model of memory. If teachers spend time developing and applying a particular mental model to analyse their practice, it is unsurprising that they begin to view organisational behaviour and leadership through the same lens. Our collective attention is drawn to the importance of encoding memories, long term storage, and retrieval of knowledge for later use. It is a small step to think about the collective knowledge of organisations in the same way – how this knowledge builds, how it is stored, and whether it is accessible to those who wish to access it. This is not a criticism of those who have ventured down this path. I have done so myself (see here and here). Papers have been published on it by influential organisations. Educationalists have taken these ideas and applied them to fields such as school culture and professional learning. The application of these ideas is intriguing and offers some useful insights.
Institutional memory, like individual human memory, is only a good thing in so far as it helps us to function better. In her posts on the subject, Kat Howard writes about the problem of knowledge loss when colleagues leave the school or when knowledge fails to be valued and retained. This is a form of corporate amnesia whereby the organisation has the inability to benefit from hindsight. Kat highlights the current retention difficulties in schools as a factor that exacerbates this risk and calls for efforts to retain valuable knowledge, even if we cannot retain the individuals who contributed to its creation: to encode institutional memories. There are other risks too. Organisations can be poor knowledge creators, culturally biased against learning from past experience. The inexperience of staff can also inhibit knowledge building as the sophisticated mental models required to make sense of events are not available; the wrong lessons are learned. This triple threat – low retention, cultural denial, and weak sense making – leaves schools vulnerable to doom-loops of ineffective decision making.
In the abstract, there is a logic to the idea of institutional memory. But in practice, what form do these memories take? How are they encoded?
First, there is the mythology. Again before my time at the school in which I work, there was a near tragic event in which a group of Sixth Form students on their last day climbed up onto a flat roof with their musical instruments to play an impromptu gig to their fellow students. It didn’t end well, but fortunately all survived to tell the tale. What entered the collective memory was not only the events but the perception that the school’s response to these events was insufficiently punitive. An ‘example’ of weak leadership was encoded in the institution’s memory, one which would come back to haunt subsequent school leaders who weren’t even at the school when it happened. Stories, episodic memories, create reference points against which future actions are judged.
Secondly, cultural memes emerge which encapsulate the espoused values of the organisation. There once existed a working party in our school, set up to explore research into effective pedagogy. This group, comprising less than a dozen staff, coined the term ‘Know thy student’ in their attempts to simplify and communicate the essence of the research around responsive teaching. This term echoes throughout the school years later, emerging to justify all varieties of practices which betray the etymology of the phrase and the sense in which its originators intended it to be construed. The term took hold not because it communicated something new but because it captured a value which already existed in the culture.
Third, there are artefacts: the house cup, the faded graffiti, the pink classroom, the memorial. Memories are not stored in the artefacts, but rather are invoked by them. We actually had a pink classroom (it is no more). It represented something – a time when a teacher was free to decide what colour to paint their classroom, a time when that teacher probably came in over half term and painted it themselves! We have faded graffiti which says ‘2013’. To me, it represents a low point when students would feel able to spray paint on a wall and know they would get away with it.
Fourth, there are lessons learned. Unfortunate events leave searing memories, but these only influence future decisions if they are turned into guiding principles. This is more likely if there are institutional processes for establishing lessons learned. Systems can support this. For example, in our online safeguarding system, there is the ability to capture the outcomes of case reviews. The system captures only information, but it prompts knowledge building by those involved in the review. Schools which systemise structured reflection will encode operational principles which mitigate against error.
Lastly, memories can be encoded in routines, structures and cultural norms. When an organisation learns something it invents and establishes new ways of doing things. We can think of this as hard-wiring knowledge into the very functioning of the organisation. We are downloading knowledge from human memory and storing it in the fabric of the school. Often, these ‘memories’ become no more than unquestioned regularities of school life: they are unconscious memories. There is a reason we call collections of teachers teaching the same subject a ‘department’ and not a ‘faculty’, but who knows what it is? At some point, it was decided that students should be in silence when they enter assembly but not when they enter a classroom. We are reliant on the quality of every decision that has gone before. If a school does not function it is because it has no memory of how to function and those that have gone before have failed to encode the lessons of the past.
Institutional memory is formative in that it is the frame of reference by which we make sense of past and emerging events. It is also predictive. When a proposal is made it will be judged in relation to how its introduction is expected to change the course of events, and this can only be inferred in relation to past experience. For this reason, school improvement proposals will land differently in different schools. In many schools, planning directed activities which exceed 1265 hours in the year would cause outrage and revolt. In my wife’s school, the 1265 cap was blown out of the water many years ago and appears to be quite uncontroversial.
Do some schools have the ability to do things that others do not? Absolutely. I recently saw a commentator on Twitter say that the interesting question about Michaela school is not ‘how do they do it?’, but ‘why isn’t everyone else doing it too?’ (source lost in the endless thread – sorry). Institutional memory may be part of the answer, or part of the excuse, depending on how you see it.
There are calls to map institutional knowledge, to audit it in some way. I think this is taking our analogy to the school curriculum too far. It is obvious to us as teachers that we need to assess what pupils know, but the logic does not necessarily transfer to institutional knowledge. You see, we could spend infinite resources attempting to stock-take the quantity and quality of our organisation’s knowledge, to codify it and reference where it can be found, but to what end? What is of more interest to me is the institution’s ability to do something. Isn’t it more useful to observe that someone can ride a bike than to attempt to map the knowledge they possess which may give them the capability to do so? Yes, it is useful to know who can ride the bike so that we can suggest who those who cannot should go to speak to, but we need not know more than this at an institutional level. Creating bike-riding manuals will mean we have well-documented information, but not accessible knowledge. We need maps, not manuals.
We should also note that the most valuable knowledge in schools is also a) tacit, and b) contextual. Transfer may not always, or even usually, be possible. Creating the conditions for local knowledge-building may be our best bet. As the examples I have used in his post illustrate, institutional knowledge is also often emergent and not intentionally created. Just because we think we understand knowledge-building, that doesn’t mean we can control it at an institutional level. Metaphors can create the illusion of insight, but holding too tightly to this particular metaphor may mean we are missing a potentially powerful perspective that yields greater influence.
Our institutional memory of what happens when particular paradigms dominate our thinking in education hopefully makes us cautious but not too cynical. There are insights to be gained here.
Matthew Evans 