Learning and technology

I wrote this three weeks ago:-

As I write this, I am working in Lahore with a group of senior staff from a private Pakistan school system known as "The City School". Our theme is leadership development. Broadly speaking we are designing, not for the first time, professional development for groups of senior teachers which is based on a mixture of contact days, web-based self-study materials, web-based reading and mentored work-based action projects  

Some of my input is based on materials from the HMIe/LTS "The Journey to Excellence" initiative; and it is not the first time I have used these in Pakistan. There are a range of materials on the LTS/HMIe website: readings; self-reflective exercises; and videos of good practice. Altogether they form a formidable resource: and my previous experience is that senior Pakistan teachers have found them useful, even inspirational. So they certainly have had an influence on The City School (an organisation the size of a moderately large Scottish education authority i.e. with about 300 schools and 3000 teachers.

Whether they have had an effect on any of Scotland's 32 education authorities is more dubious: I suspect not. Most local authority staff I have spoken to certainly think not; and most Scottish school staff to whom I have spoken have not heard of them.

Why is this?

Firstly the sheer volume of material is overwhelming, and navigating one’s way around them deciding what to use and what to discard is a major task. I can do that because my time is paid to do it. For, say, an aspiring head to do that and fit that time around the day-time job would be a real challenge, and probably a frustrating and dispiriting one.

Secondly, and more importantly, we know that online material intended for individual self-study is largely ineffective (except possibly for some tightly defined skills enhancement) when that is the sole and only mode in which learning can be accessed. Embed it within other CPD experiences (e.g. provide some face-to-face interaction with other students, some mentoring support and so on) and the picture is rather different. That is precisely what the training designers in the City School decided to do.

To use the jargon, “blended learning” can work rather well. Which is why, from its very beginnings the Open University “blended” their distance learning study packs and radio and TV broadcasts with Saturday schools, summer schools, tutorials and tutor-counseling support. Within UHI, even the courses that are “on-line” have face-to-face induction days, on-line tutor contact and on-line discussion groups (none of which feature in the “Journey to Excellence” approach.)

(Edit point (5/2/2011) See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06digi.html
 for a more recent and more cogent discussion of the point I am trying to make. )

The concept that individual study of e-learning materials can on its own produce a new generation of school leaders for Scottish schools is a delusion. We do not learn inter-personal or team-building or meeting management skills by sitting in front of a computer screen.

I suggested both in written and in oral evidence to the Donaldson inquiry that leadership development materials will have very little effect if they are deployed only on a website for individual self-study. My evidence was in vain. Instead, “Teaching Scotland's Future”, quite accurately but entirely misleadingly, talks about the high quality of the materials.

My Pakistani colleagues sometimes lack confidence in their abilities : which is why Westerners such as I end up working with them in Lahore and Islamabad and Karachi. I must tell them that, at least when it comes to developing school leaders, they are well ahead of the Scottish game.

Iain Smith

Lahore

(Iain Smith was formerly Dean of Education at the University of Strathclyde)