Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 2; March 2001

Talking in the Corridor
Changing the School, not just the individual

Ana Robles, HLT Secondary Consultant, Lugo, Spain

One of the nice things about attending teachers' conferences and conventions is that they create a space and place to talk to friends and colleagues and exchange ideas. Very often those exchanges take the form of 5-minute encounters in the corridor, while running from one seminar to the next.

Sometimes, when reflecting on such and such a convention, I find that what I remember most vividly are those short meetings and exchanges. Probably because, however interactive a seminar may be, you always participate in terms of the trainer's frame, whereas in the corridor you set the frame and express whatever you choose.

Some months ago a small group of friends started an Internet conversation just about that, how nice talking in the corridor is, and how important it is for teachers to be heard and to hear other teachers. Just talking. No gurus, no seminars, no frames. One thing led to another and in those months, as our group grew and incorporated new friends, the conversation moved from one topic to another.

Many ideas were put forward, also complaints, anecdotes, worries and successes. Although good humour was an important element of our e-mails the feeling of being members of a stressed profession permeated all our exchanges.

All through our months-long conversation (it is still going on) we have had two guiding ideas which once and again have pulled us back when the meandering became too wide, too wild.

The first one: we don't like the situation in which we teachers find ourselves.

Dissatisfaction is widespread. Parents are unhappy about our schools, students are unhappy, the government is unhappy and teachers are especially unhappy. In all the western countries teachers are one of the professions with higher stress levels and with higher rates of mental illnesses such as depression.

The second idea: no solution can be found without us, the teachers.

Too often reforms and changes in education have been organised from the outside and imposed on us. The 'outside' may be the educational authorities or the school owner, in all the instances the teacher's opinion has been ignored.

Those two basic ideas were wrapped in an intense feeling of "I want to be heard"; "we want to take action."

As we explored those ideas and feelings, tentatively at first, building trust in each other, many other ideas came up, like entangled cherries, one pulling out the other. Here are some of them (not in their order of appearance):

The problems of the educational system come from an obsolete way of thinking.

Our educational system fosters a narrow set of abilities. It encourages abstract, logical, linear thinking and forgets all the other ways of thinking. It promotes the development of the linguistic and mathematical intelligences but pays scarce attention to the musical, bodily-kinaesthetic and spatial intelligences and just ignores emotional intelligence.

This means that even those students who are academically proficient find themselves ill-equipped when they leave school to tackle the problems of a world changing at an increasing speed and in which technical knowledge is not enough. Thinking skills, learning to learn, creativity and intuition are more and more in demand and our school system, bent as it is on conceptual learning, doesn't do too good a job of developing them.

The curriculum is designed by teachers, intellectuals and member of the academy, which consider that their way of thinking, their way of knowing is the only way. Assessment is designed with their abilities in mind and it ignores their weak points. Because they were successful in such a school system they have no reason to doubt its efficacy.

What would happen if Olympic gold medallists set the curriculum? Would those unable to perform to their standards be considered 'lazy' or 'learning disabled'?

40 years ago only a small percentage of the total population needed to attend secondary school. If you didn't want to study you could become an apprentice and learn by doing. Nowadays in many countries school and academic learning are the only venues open. In Spain, for instance, it is forbidden by law not to attend school if you are under 16.

The implicit belief predominant in our society is that there is only one way of learning, that everybody learns at the same pace (and if they don't they are considered 'disabled') and that learning is about learning concepts.

When I was a child I had to carry to school a bag with books in it. Everyday I toted two or three books back and fro. Nowadays my students carry not bags but enormous rucksacks with no less than six books plus folders and other impedimenta.

Knowledge grows exponentially and there is no way school can keep up the pace. Very often my students have to work longer hours than their parents. And still there are all sorts of protests.

Academics are complaining because Latin has dropped out of the curricula and firms complain because our students' English is not good enough.

Maybe we can try accelerating and increasing our students workload until they collapse under the weight of their bags of books.

Or we could start discussing our present paradigm and way of thinking. Asking ourselves questions like what is learning? How do we learn? What do we need to learn to succeed? What are schools for?

Maybe... maybe we are completely or partially wrong in our assessment of the situation, but what we know for sure is that, if we are right, it implies that all the 'back to the basics' reforms being adopted in so many countries, Spain included, are doomed. They could, perhaps, improve the situation short term, but they are untenable and will only make matters worse medium term.

One of the things that keeps coming up in our conversations, more and more clearly, is that, whatever the solution, what we need is not evolution but re-creation (in the sense of creating again) of the whole system, and that re-creation won't be achieved by overthrowing external forces, but by changing from within our society's way of thinking about education.

Part of the change in how we think should affect, in our opinion, the sort of things we want to reform. Up to now educational reforms have been organised from the outside and about the outside, being mainly concerned with external matters, like the number of hours allocated to each subject.

Our impression is that that sort of change is, though necessary, not enough any more. The gap between society's need and what the educational system offers is too wide. So, taking our cue from system thinkers, we say that, any system, any organization is the product of the way of thinking and relating of the people involved.

And, therefore, those are the two elements we need to act upon. As we change our way of thinking we have to change our way of relating to the larger system. We do not work in isolation, we are part of a bigger system and the system determines our behaviour and effectiveness to a great extent. We cannot just act on ourselves; we have to consider the whole system.

In other words, changing our classrooms is not enough. When I change how I think, I change how I teach and my classroom changes, but if I am the only teacher who changes, then, what I achieve in my classroom is offset by what happens in all the other lessons. At the end, whatever I do alone requires tremendous effort and has very limited impact.

Unless a group of teachers changes in a similar direction and co-ordinately the school as such won't change; unless the school changes what the student receives will be basically the same, despite that queer English teacher and her odd lessons.

In "Schools that learn" Peter Senge et al. say that changes have to happen at three different levels simultaneously:

·
• The classroom ·
• The school (or group of teachers, we add) ·
• The community

This multi-level perspective of change makes sense with another of the topics discussed in our small group. The fact that reforms imposed from above, by the people in authority, tend to fail because the real practitioners, those in charge of the implementing the change, do not believe in what they are doing and do it mechanistically, because they are ordered to do so.

And, paradoxically enough, changes coming from the bottom tend to fail, too, because, lacking the help of the authorities they have to fight the existing structure, which smothers them before anything is achieved. Also, lack of communication means that the same things are experimented with and discovered in many different places at the same time, but the know-how doesn't reach outside the inventors' circle. Exhaustion of the innovators usually causes the changes to peter out.

It seems to us that real transformation becomes possible only when it flows upwards and downwards, starting both at the bottom and at the top at the same time, in such a way that both flows sustain each other.

And we think that it is the second level, that of the school or group of teachers the one which can create a flow of change going in both directions at the same time, becoming the generator of change for the two other levels.

A group of dedicated teachers of an adequate size (which?) could ignite the spark of change in their school, their classrooms and could reach outside to the community. This sort of change would be quite unpredictable and self-propelling. Once you set it in motion each classroom, school and community will go their own way and each small change will foster new changes.

In our view, change doesn't happen as a result of the work of a few leaders. It is the result of the work of many people in many different places, all introducing small changes in their way of thinking and relating. What we need is not heroes or guerrilla fighters, but catalysts in many communities, many small groups getting together to decide what they want and to introduce and propagate changes to achieve their aims.

And we teachers are ideally placed within the system to become such catalysts.

In any system influence is determined by the capability to link to other elements in the system. It is paradoxical that while having the greatest linking potential we are for the present moment the least linked element in the system.

Nearly everyday the media offers us statements and comments about the woes of the educational systems. Parents, university teachers and government officials all have a voice. We do not.

To get a voice and make ourselves heard we need to get out of our classrooms and network. Network, network and then network again. Apart from work groups within each school we need to create associations of teachers working in the same field (very often EFL is an exception in that there are many such associations), of teachers belonging to different fields (like SEAL, but SEAL is also an exception and doesn't exist in many countries or merely bears witness) of schools and associations to link us with other participants in the educational system, like parents and students.

It seems to us that the fact that we have not linked up so far is another consequence of a fragmented way of thinking about education.

Linking would be the first step in deciding what we want instead of what we have. Because it is not enough to complain. We need to start designing something better. We need to get together to, as Edward de Bono would say, design the future.

The future my school designs won't be the future your school needs. Each micro-cosmos is unique and to be effective we need to tailor our responses to our own specific circumstances. But we can get together and share our search for solutions.

Maybe our first step should be to get together to practice the process of dialogue David Bohm describes in "On Dialogue". Dialogue as the act of coming together to listen to another view and for a second, contemplate the world from another perspective and have a different insight, so that meaning can flow from one to the other and we can all learn to suspend our judgement and share a common content.

Maybe, then, our first step could be organising a big convention with no seminars, just corridors to meet and talk.

If you are interested in this topic (and if you speak Spanish, as we are a multi-disciplinary group and not all speak English) you are warmly invited to visit our web page:
http://www.galeon.com/puntodepartida
And contact us at our e-mail:
puntodepartida@galeon.com
And join us in our e-group
puntodepartida@egropus.com

This article summarises the conversations started by Silvia Borrell, Tom Maguire, Ana Robles, Nuria de Salvador and Marķa Luz Valencia.