My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
Last week I shared some personal reflections about leadership that flowed from my thinking about the exemplary model of education used in Finland, and how it related to issues of leadership in schools.
Like most weeks, I received several e-mails with questions and comments on my blog (thank you to those who take the time to send such messages). One of the very interesting messages came from someone who referred me to some refreshingly different research on leadership being done here in Houston by Dr Brené Brown (a research professor at the University of Houston).
Brown defines a leader as “anyone who holds her or himself as accountable for finding potential in people and processes”, which is a refreshingly different approach which follows from her work in the cutting edge field of shame research. Referring specifically to school administrators and teachers as examples of leaders, she argues that innovation and true leadership cannot exist in a shame-based culture. In other words, when we ridicule ideas that are outside the box, people disengage and innovation becomes impossible. Similarly, she believes that vulnerability underpins the feedback process, and without feedback transformative change is impossible. She has an especially helpful (I thought) graphic on her website that helps to articulate these points; the link is http://www.brenebrown.com/leadership-manifesto.
Going back to what I wrote about Finland last week - Finland is something of a statistical and geographical outlier when it comes to education. Most of western Europe, and north-west Europe in particular, does not perform nearly as strongly as Finland on international measures of educational outcomes. Eastern Europe scores more strongly than western Europe, but when the global picture is examined, the area of the world that performs most strongly is East Asia.
At the top of the international reports of educational achievement, and roughly equivalent with Finland, is Shanghai in China (where Awty has recently established a sister school relationship). The next three countries in the rankings are Hong Kong (where I worked for seven years before coming to Awty), Singapore and South Korea.
As reported somewhere in the media here in the US on an almost daily basis, the United States came 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in mathematics. To be fair, these figures apply to a wide range of schools in the US, and when we discussed education in Finland at the Admin meeting a few weeks ago, a few of those present claimed that if independent schools in the US (such as Awty) could be isolated from the US scores in general, then they were confident that we (i.e. American independent schools) would top the world.
Having worked in education in the Asia-Pacific region for many years, and having had all four of my own children attend schools in that region, I am not confident that the claim that independent schools in the US out-perform all others in the world is valid (but neither are there any statistics available to disprove their claim). My reasoning is based on the fundamental differences in cultural attitudes towards education in Asia compared with societies that could be broadly termed “Western”.
In most parts of Asia, no-one ever has cause to doubt that education is everyone’s number one priority. Teachers are held in high esteem in the tradition of the Confucian scholar. Even though they are not paid very highly, teachers are universally valued as selfless, knowledgable, wise, sacrificial people who work very hard to place students’ needs above all else for the sake of the future of society as a whole (the collective good). The students who are most admired by their peers are not those who are sports stars or class clowns, but rather the students who are either the brightest or the hardest working.
Starting from a miserably backward position just a few decades ago, China has shown spectacular gains in the quality of its education in recent years. Even as recently as the 1990s, poor children (especially girls) might drop out of primary school in some isolated rural areas, whereas today, high school education is universal for boys and girls alike, even in the most isolated and backward parts of the country. When I have visited primary schools in China, both in cities and in rural areas, I have found that the level of mathematics is usually a grade ahead of the maths that is being taught in the UK and about two grades ahead of the maths that is typical in US schools.
Despite the overall high quality of education in China today (as shown in international testing), I have always found it fascinating that teachers and administrators in China are usually very critical of the standard of their own schools. In fact, they seem more critical of their own education system than outside observers ever tend to be.
I believe that this capacity to be self-critical is a key reason that Chinese education has advanced so much in such a short time in recent years.
When I first visited China back in 1982, the same humility was not evident in Chinese schools. Indeed, there was a kind of pervasive arrogance in the way teachers and educators proclaimed the superiority of their ways of doing things “marching forward in unity under the banner of Mao Zedong thought” (or similar).
Three decades later, the comments I hear from Chinese educators are more likely to be along the lines of “we need to learn from foreign schools”, or “we need to encourage more creativity”.
The comment about creativity is a pertinent one. Even today, Chinese classes typically have between 60 to 80 students, and learning is done through an emphasis on memorisation and rote learning. Because of the long hours that Chinese students tend to devote to their studies, this methodology is highly effective in mastering content, but it is not effective in developing skills of questioning or critical thinking – and Chinese educators recognise that this is so.
The important point in all this for me as an international school educator is that Chinese educators are improving the quality of Chinese education at breakneck speed, and a large part of this progress is occurring because the Chinese have a deep humility and a desire to learn from others’ best practice. As the New York Times columnist and author of the book “China Wakes”, Nicholas Kristoff, wrote: “while William Butler Yeats was right that ‘education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire,’ it’s also true that it’s easier to ignite a bonfire if there’s fuel in the bucket.” In my view, the willingness to learn from others’ proven successes is the fuel in the bucket that schools everywhere need to have.
The question that arises next in my mind is this – to what extent can the East Asian model of educational quality inform the educational debate in the United States and other Western nations. Perhaps regrettably, the answer is probably “not much”. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and so on, are deeply Confucian societies, and this emphasises the near-universal attitudes of valuing hard work, the high esteem held for teachers, the goal of learning diligently for the collective good of society – and also the emphasis on highly structured rote learning content rather than fostering creativity and lateral thinking.
Having said that, is it overly optimistic to dream that one day Western societies might revere educational excellence and strive towards improving educational outcomes? If there is any hope of this, surely it lies in the one key characteristic of Chinese education that is independent of Confucianism and worthy of emulation anywhere – the sense of humility that leads to a yearning to learn from others.
It is difficult to imagine that in east Asian schools the “good” could ever be the enemy of the “excellent”.
I think this resonates with one of my favourite quotes by former US President, Richard Nixon, whose 100th birthday occurred on Wednesday of this week. In his Presidential resignation speech on 9th August 1974, Nixon reflected on successes and failures, and his words could have applied as fully to today’s quest for educational excellence as it did to his own political career. His (less than grammatically perfect) words were these: “The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”
In order to ascend to the summit of the highest mountain of educational quality, educators everywhere need humbly to understand, acknowledge and appreciate the weaknesses of their schools today. Only then can we as educators build excellent schools, excellent curricula, and thus excellent students, in the future – and we must always remember that the future of our society is lurking in the classrooms and hallways of our schools today.
I believe that the capacity to be self-critical is a key condition for schools everywhere to advance. And learning from Brené Brown’s research, we also need to appreciate that there is no shame in acknowledging that we can learn from others.
I hope we can learn these important lessons, because to deny our shortcomings today would be to condemn us all to a mediocre and diminished future.
The lead photo this week shows a primary school class I visited in the north-eastern Chinese city of Dandong in 2010. As the photo shows, there were 64 students in the class - NOT something I am advocating for Awty. :-)
Learning from others with a sense of humility
Sunday, 13 January 2013