| |
A Fine Balance Between Order and Chaos
LEADING LEARNERS, LEADING
SCHOOLS.
By Robin Brooke-Smith. RoutledgeFalmer £18.99 A Review by Michael Duffy, in the Times Educational Supplement, July 2003
After a long and successful
career in Internatioanl Development and in schools in UK, Robin Brooke-Smith was principal of Edwardes College
Pakistan - very prestigious, very conservative - then Principal of the
University of Toronto Schools, a high-achieving "laboratory" school committed
to innovation, research and argument. It would be difficult to imagine, he
says, two more different schools, yet the problems of management and leadership
they posed were essentially the same: how to unlock the creativity that is the
well-spring of good learning without generating the tensions that block it.The trick, he says in Leading
Learners, Leading Schools is to find the balance between order and
disorder, stability and change. Nothing new about that, you think, but the term
he chooses to describe this (he calls it, deliberately, "the edge of
chaos") betrays its complexity and challenge.
School Effectiveness
Orthodoxies
The current orthodoxies of school
effectiveness and improvement ("we know what works") are often
counter-productive, precisely because they fail to address that. They assume
change is linear; that learning is mechanical, and that schools are
predictable, ordered, straight-line systems.Wrong, he says. Chaos theory, organisation
theory and psychodynamics are far better guides to the "slippery and messy
realities" that confront most leaders, and the heart of his book is a
carefully researched argument to this effect. He develops key lessons from it:
that strategic planning, for instance, is often counter-productive, that vision
and mission can't be mandated, that anxiety ("we must simultaneously
control and create it") is the heart of our learning.
Stimulating Stuff It's stimulating stuff: it would have been
interesting to hear more about the author's handling of the "deliberately
destructive and negative forces that sometimes take hold of an
institution", but encouraging none the less as a counterblast to the
control-and-command mentality that characterises most education policy and
practice today. The trouble with the mantras of school effectiveness and school
improvement, Brooke-Smith says, is that they try to pick the fruit before it's
ripe. It's a perceptive and apposite image.
One of the principles he identifies deals
with the locus for improvement that exists between schools individually and
collectively and their environment: an interesting comment in the light of the
Department for Education and Skills's sudden and belated endorsement of
co-operation and community involvement.
This Page was last update:
Friday, December 24, 2004 at 6:19:37 PM
This page was originally posted: 24/12/2004; 18:07:58.
Copyright 2008 Creative Consulting Group
|
|
Home
Contact us
About CCG
Resources
