Inspiring Educational Change through the 'Collective'

The preparation

On Monday 21 March I am making my final plans for the session and once again asking myself questions such as do I need a powerpoint, who might attend and how will I connect with them online? In addition, I wonder, to what might the difference be between the experience of the live session and how the recording of it might be engaged with for those who access it later? 

These are not uncommon questions, but it is easy to get caught up on them and start to overlook the substance and purpose of the event and how my contribution might trigger opportunities for reflection, learning and change. While these might seem grand ideals, in a world awash with online education conferences and accessible material it is important not to just create and load up more content but to shape a moment for critical thinking, prompts for discussion and hope for ripple effects felt far away from the screen.

So – I have resorted to writing.  In olden days I would have been a woman hammering incessantly at a typewriter, with drifts of paper, covering my desk and office floor.  The luxury of a laptop and a blogging platform is at least the capacity to keep a tidier space around me.

The theme

I go back to the title Inspiring Educational Change through the ‘Collective' to re-imagine my motivation of offering this to the conference organisers.  What was I thinking? How does it link to my work? In what ways did I feel it was relevant?  I also have the luxury of 3 bullet points in the conference information:
•    This session emphasises the ‘collective’
•    Educational policy typically neglects the fact that meaningful, sustainable change is built one conversation at a time
•    Find out how coaching can be used to have new and necessary dialogues between education communities

The challenge

I can now see what my thinking was many moons ago. The final bullet point reminds me that attendees would expect something concrete – the ‘finding out ‘how’’ phrase means they should be able to go away with knowledge that they can use or share.  But this is not a workshop on how to coach. Reading the rest of that bullet point indicates that there is a more philosophical stance. The proposition that coaching offers opportunities for ‘new and necessary dialogues’ implies an urgency and a way of seeking out alternative perspectives in education.  And still with that bullet point there is a substantial final word – ‘communities’. At first glance this could be overlooked, particularly when the focus is coaching, which is typically understood as a one-to-one developmental approach, rather than something on a wider scale. But I need to consider the significance of this word.

The provocation

So, to understand this further I go to the second bullet point.  This contains a provocation. The statement that ‘educational policy typically neglects the fact that meaningful, sustainable change is built one conversation at a time’. It is of course possible that the participants will disagree with me, or at the very least feel that the assertion is insignificant.  Indeed, some might even suggest that ‘policy’ is by definition and necessity monologic. By this I mean that policy acts to create a way of existing in an organisation or sector and a direction of travel that is tightly defined and easily held to account, which represents a singular way of approaching situations. Policy might help us replicate the status quo or might hurtle us into a new way of working.  But we can all recount education policies (at school or governmental level) which have had ill-desired outcomes, which seem to create ever more trivial work, or policies which are rapidly abandoned. But the rest of the bullet point indicates a core principle, a call for meaningful and sustainable change.

Why coaching?

The suggestion that we create meaningful and sustainable education change one conversation at a time – brings us to the realm of coaching.  This session needs to illustrate the connection between the two, the potential of coaching and the research evidence base for coaching in education.  This is familiar ground for me – both in terms of my past and current research and also with respect to the networks and learning opportunities that CollectivED has created.  I can draw on current research on dilemma-based coaching, recently published research on contextual coaching and perhaps the way that peer coaching can create connections between people and help to situate learning from professional development provision. This will give me and the participants something to get our teeth into.

Inspiration and the collective

Finally, I remind myself of the focus on the ‘collective’ both in the title and the first bullet point.  If the session is dedicated to ‘Inspiring Educational Change through the ‘Collective'’ then I need to reflect on what I mean by ‘inspiring’ and what types of educational change might be desirable.  For me inspiration relates to being able to influence, to create shared visions, and to motivate action.  It demands both advocacy and activism. I typically find inspiration in communities and have a desire to bring people together rather than single them out for hero status.  Just as it is said that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ I would propose that it takes the profession and the communities it serves to raise our educational sights. As I prepare my session, I wonder whether the participants session will share that perspective?

The prospects

And what of this ‘educational change’; what is it that the future might hold and is it what we might hope for rather than what might we fear? We need to ask ourselves what would the purpose of educational change be, and what would be the steps to change? We need to consider by whom the changes can be made and for whom? We need to reflect on the scale of change, the internal and external components of change, its pace and its relationships to the past and present. And as we start to ask these questions we return to the essence of education, its purpose, its ethical dimensions, its social contexts and its potential to shape lives and communities and to unlock futures. It is these discussions that are necessary, and in some quarters could be new. The role of coaching in creating these conversational opportunities is still emerging. Perhaps this session is one step in a desirable direction of travel?