What is a successful school?

When my father was thoroughly disgusted with me as a rather aimless and unmotivated teenager, he would often say: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will do’. When I think of this advice, I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s comment on his father ‘When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years’.

I’m way past 21 now but my Dad’s words of wisdom still resonate with me today when I deal with educational questions such as ‘what is a successful school’? It strikes me that we need to have some agreement on the destinations for education to determine the paths that successful schools should follow. While this may appear to be obvious and only common sense, I would suggest that if you asked a sample of teachers, school leaders, parents, politicians, corporate Australia’s CEOs, and state educational officials, you would end up with a diverse set of responses to the question, ‘what are the purposes of schools?’

These responses would range from preparing our kids to make a living and contribute as human capital to our national (state or provincial) competitiveness, to helping our children make a life as responsible caring, contributing citizens. How one answers the purpose question determines what a person would accept as criteria for a successful school. For example, a few years ago I wrote a book called Good schools / real schools: why school reform doesn’t last (Fink, 2000). Professionals in the innovative schools I studied believed that a ‘good’ school prepared students for a changing and often unknowable future and schools needed to adopt flexible organizational structures and encourage open-ended pedagogical strategies. They often looked with disdain, even arrogance, upon the many dubious parents and community leaders who wanted a ‘real’ school. To these skeptics, a ‘real’ school looked and functioned remarkably like the school they remembered from their student days; a school that evoked fond images of rigour, structure and discipline and had contributed to their success. The failure to bridge these ‘two solitudes’ of purpose between arrogant progressivism on one side and nostalgic conservatism on the other worked against school reform, and as a result virtually every innovative school regressed to the mean, and in time looked like every other school, hence the subtitle of my book – ‘Why school reform doesn’t last’. The place to start, therefore, in any discussion of what makes a good school (and for that matter a good leader, a good teacher, and so on) is to decide on the destination, then determine the paths and only then judge their efficacy.

Recently my colleague Andy Hargreaves and I suggested that the ultimate purpose of education must be based on ‘convictions about, and unwavering commitments to enhancing deep and broad learning, not merely tested achievement, for all students’ (2006, p.28). To expand on our meaning of ‘deep and broad’ learning, we borrowed from the UNESCO Commission that proposed ‘four fundamental types of learning which, throughout a person’s life, will be the pillars of knowledge’ (p. 85).

• Learning to know includes the acquisition of a broad general knowledge, intellectual curiosity, the instruments of understanding, independence of judgment, and the impetus and foundation for being able to continue learning throughout life. Additionally, learning to know ‘presupposes learning to learn, calling upon the power of concentration, memory and thought’ (p.86). To do this, Claxton (1999) explains that students and all other learners need to acquire resilience, the ability to ‘stay intelligently engaged with learning challenges’, despite difficulties and setbacks (p. 55), resourcefulness, the capacity to use a range of intellectual tools including imagination and intuition to address learning challenges, and reflection, the facility to ‘monitor one’s own learning and take a strategic overview’ (p. 4).
• Learning to do involves the competence to put what one has learned into practice (even when it is unclear how future work will evolve), to deal with many situations and to act creatively in and on one’s environment. It includes teamwork, initiative, readiness to take risks, being able to process information and communicate with others and also to manage and resolve conflicts.
• Learning to be addresses who we are and how we are with people. It incorporates our aspects of the self – mind and body, emotion and intellect, aesthetic sensitivity and spiritual values. People who have learned to be, can understand themselves and their world, and solve their own problems. Learning to be means giving people the freedom of thought, judgment, feeling and imagination they need in order to develop their talents and take control of their lives as much as possible (p. 38). The Body Shop, in one of its many publications, captures the need for such learning goals when it declared: ‘Let’s help out children to develop the habit of freedom. To encourage them to celebrate who and what they are. Let’s stop teaching children to fear change and protect the status quo. Let’s teach them to enquire and debate. To ask questions until they hear answers. And the way to do it is to change the way of our traditional schooling. Our educational system does its best to ignore and suppress the creative spirit of children. It teaches them to listen unquestioningly to authority. It insists that education is just knowledge contained in subjects and the purpose of education is to get a job. What’s left out is sensitivity to others, non-violent behavior, respect, intuition, imagination, and a sense of awe and wonderment.’ (1). Education is more than preparing students to make a living, although that is important. It is also about preparing them to make a life.
• Learning to live together calls upon students and others to develop understanding of, respect for and engagement with other people’s cultures and spiritual values. It calls for empathy for others’ points of view, understanding of diversity and similarities among people, appreciation of interdependence, and being able to engage in dialogue and debate, in order to improve relationships, cooperate with others and reduce violence and conflict. Learning to live together is an essential element of deep and broad learning in an increasingly multicultural world where millions of families and their children have been mired in decades or even centuries of racial hatred, religious bigotry, or totalitarian control. It is truly amazing how many ways policy makers find to separate students from each other – socio-economically, racially, religiously, by gender and so on. How can we learn to live together if we never get to know ‘the other’?

To these four pillars, we added a fifth: learning to live sustainably.

• Learning to live sustainably is about learning to respect and protect the earth which gives us life, to work with diverse others to secure the long term benefits of economic and ecological life in all communities; to adopt behaviours and practices that restrain and minimize our ecological footprint on the world around us without depriving us of opportunities for development and fulfilment; and to coexist and cooperate with nature and natural design, whenever possible, rather than always seeking to conquer and control them (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006, p.38).

Let me add one final thought about the purpose question. In our hurried educational environment, in which performance cultures force students and teachers to cover content in preparation for ‘high stakes’ tests as though education was a series of sprints rather than a lifelong marathon, we ignore at our peril the fact that ‘deep and broad’ learning often requires slow knowing. ‘It is about time!’ Psychologist Guy Claxton, in his book Hare brain, tortoise mind (1997) says slow knowing is essential for our learning and our lives. It gives depth to our experience and provokes the greatest breakthroughs in human understanding. Claxton makes the case for slow knowing like this:

‘The unconscious realms of the human mind will successfully accomplish a number of important tasks if they are given the time. They will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see; make sense out of situations that are too complex to analyze; and get to the bottom of certain difficult issues much more successfully than the questing intellect.’ (p. 4).

Slow forms of knowing

• are tolerant of the faint, fleeting, marginal and ambiguous
• like to dwell on details that do not fit or immediately make sense
• are relaxed, leisurely and playful
• are willing to explore without knowing what they are looking for
• see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which understanding may spring
• are receptive rather than proactive
• are happy to relinquish the sense of control over the directions the mind spontaneously takes
• treat seriously ideas that come ‘out of the blue’.

If these five pillars are the destination, what paths do we need to follow to get there? How do we create an environment and climate in which learning is at the very centre of every decision, policy, practice or custom, and educational leaders are ‘passionately, creatively, obsessively and steadfastly committed to enhancing ‘deep’ and broad learning for all students – learning for understanding, learning for life, learning for a knowledge society’ (Fink, 2005, p.xvii)? My long-time colleague, Louise Stoll, in her inaugural address at the University of Bath, in the United Kingdom, provided a useful direction when she asked a fundamental question – How good is your local school, really? (Stoll, 2001). Louise went on to articulate the following questions as a kind of road map, to address the ‘goodness’ of a school.

Is your school preparing its students for their future or our past? There is an old Hebrew saying ‘Do not limit your children to your learning, for they were born in a different time’. A starting point is to ask: ‘What do we want our children to be?’ Once we have agreed that we want our children to be, for example ‘literate’, ‘numerate’, ‘creative’, ‘inquisitive’, ‘tolerant’, ‘patriotic’, ‘kind’, and ‘just’, then we can ask the second question.

Does the school do right things? If we want students to be literate, for example, what does each teacher do to promote this goal? How do we build a language program across the curriculum? What does the science teacher or the math teacher do to promote language development? Do we have a coherent school wide policy on language teaching? Moreover, have we examined proven approaches to language development? Are we aware of the most effective ways to promote language learning?

Is it about learning? While much of the focus of reform efforts has been on improved teaching, we have ignored the learner. We now know that students construct their knowledge – that they filter it through their preexisting experiences, emotions and understandings. ‘Deep learning and teaching are also cultural and emotional processes. They entail contextualizing students’ learning in what they have learned before, in what other teachers are also teaching them, and in student’s own cultures and lives. This deep contextualization of learning which gets students engaged in it, is a cultural and not just a cognitive task’ (Hargreaves & Fink, 2000, p.30).

Does the school have an improvement culture? The simplest definition of culture is the ‘way we do things around here’. Culture is what happens when no one is looking. I think of culture as the rules that the principal doesn’t have in his or her book of school procedures. These are the ‘real’ rules of the school – ‘You primary teachers stay in your area; we will deal with the senior students’; ‘We never take work home on the weekend’; ‘The parents are sending the wrong children again this year’. In our book, Changing our school, Louise Stoll and I outlined 10 cultural norms of improving schools that lead to an improvement culture:

Norms of improving schools

• shared goals - 'we know where we're going'
• responsibility for success - 'we can succeed'
• collegiality - 'we're working on this together'
• continuous improvement - 'we can get better'
• lifelong learning - 'learning is for everyone'
• risk-taking - 'we learn by trying something new'
• support - 'there's always someone there to help'
• mutual respect - 'everyone has something to offer'
• openness - 'we can discuss our differences'
• celebration and humour - 'we feel good about ourselves' (Stoll and Fink, 1996)

Does it have internal capacity? Is the school a professional learning community? Is it capable of challenging the old? - Evaluating the new? - Implementing and sustaining important changes? Professional learning communities are just what the name implies:
Communities where diverse people have a shared commitment to common practice, to each other in pursuing that purpose, and to the acknowledgement an inclusion of minority views in collective decision-making. Learning of the students, the adults and the organisation more generally: the learning is deep and not superficial and the community’s first response to problems and challenges is: ‘What do we know about this?’

Professional in how they value grown-up norms of difference, disagreement and debate about the best ways to identify and implement needed improvements and how they promote, value, and bring together formal evidence (Hargreaves & Fink, 2007, p.126).

Does it have good support systems? Schools are nested in larger systems. Without support from higher levels of the educational hierarchy and from individual communities, it is very difficult for schools to ‘succeed against the odds’ – although some do. Policies pursued with the intent of ‘helping’ often fail to consider the uniqueness’ of each context (Fink, 2001). Simply stated, one size does not fit all. Some schools will need more support than others.

Does it help children to progress? Are the students making progress as a result of what we are doing? This raises the questions, progress on what? How do we know? The entire issue of evaluation of student performance is a huge topic but how do we avoid ‘letting the testing tail wag the teaching- learning dog’. Are your evaluation procedures, evaluating what you value?

Does the school have quality leadership? It seems to me that there is only one purpose for school leaders and that is to enhance the learning of students both formal and informal. I constantly challenge leaders to ask one question of their schools’ decisions, practices, customs or policies – do they enhance the learning of their students? This question powerfully focuses attention on what matters in a school. The very best of the thousands of educational leaders with whom I have interacted over the years were, and most still are, passionately, creatively, obsessively and steadfastly committed to enhancing ‘deep’ learning for students – learning for understanding, learning for life, learning for a knowledge society (Fink, 2005). Successful businesses that sustain success over time invest heavily in succession management to ensure a continuous supply of the types of leaders that will take their organisation forward. These businesses look for people with the potential to learn the key aspects of the business and continue to learn and grow, rather than perseverating on existing competencies. In education and much of the public service we tend to advertise the job as it exists now, rather than taking the long-term view. Succession management involves the identification, recruitment, development, selection, placement, ongoing support, and appraisal of existing and potential leaders. Sadly, many educational jurisdictions see this process as an expense rather than an investment. I have developed these ideas in depth elsewhere (Stoll, Fink & Earl, 2003; Fink, 2005; Hargreaves &Fink, 2006)

How a person answers these questions and what one accepts as evidence of success depends entirely on how that person views the destinations for education. Since there are multiple paths to success, reliance on simplistic measures of student achievement based on standardised tests makes little sense. Each of the paths I have suggested requires contextualised measures to provide a total picture of schools success (See Stoll & Fink, 1996: Hargreaves &Fink, 2006). To return to the idea that successful schools blossom in effective school systems, let me conclude with a couple of suggestion to those that are charged with operating schools and networks of schools. If you want schools to succeed:

• Think systemically – schools in many places are overwhelmed by changes and projects thrust upon them by well-meaning change agents. They suffer from ‘projectitis’. Since most educational jurisdictions operate as bureaucracies, one division is often unaware of what another division is doing. They need to understand what is happening on the ground - to teachers, students and parents. Schools need pressure to change but also support to respond to change. It is the judicious application of pressure and support that yields the best results. Too much pressure creates a siege mentality in the schools – too much support promotes apathy and contentment.
• Coalitions not coercion – educational stakeholders need to unite around important moral purposes for schooling. This implies enrolling governments, unions, community groups and whatever other groups strive for a shared set of goals on behalf of children. We have successful models in the civil rights environmental and feminist movements. It is now time for the ‘learning movement’. ‘Finger pointing’ and ‘naming shaming and blaming’, as has been the practice in the United Kingdom and Ontario, may bring short-term political gain but in the last analysis contribute little to the learning of students.
• Networks not markets - the strategy of choice in many countries to improve schools is to force schools to compete for students and use the logic and competition of the market place to force changes for schools to survive. This absolves governments and taxpayers of the problem and the guilt. Markets are wonderful places and are excellent at producing wealth. Markets, however, do a terrible job of distributing wealth. The clear evidence is that market principles applied to education create wonderful schools for a few (usually with money) and mediocre or worse for the vast majority. If schools are to compete it should be as united and networked units against the forces of ignorance poverty, and injustice.
• It’s about learning and it’s about time – focus your resources on improving students learning, not their test scores or other artificial means of intellectual accounting. To achieve growth in student learning you need to invest in teachers’ learning and leaders learning. The goal is to have every school a learning community.

References
Claxton G (1999). Wise up: the challenge of lifelong learning. London: Bloomsbury.
Claxton G (1997). Hare brain/ tortoise mind: how intelligence increases when you think less. London: Fourth Estate.
Delors, J, Al Mufti, I, Amagi, A, Carneiro, R, Chung, F, Geremek, B, Gorham, W, Kornhauser, A, Manley, M., Padrón Quero, M., Savané, M-A., Singh, K., Stavenhagen, R., Suhr, M. W. and Nanzhao, Z. (1996) ‘Learning: The Treasure Within’ - Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century. Paris: UNESCO.
Fink, D (2005). Leadership for mortals. Thousand Oaks CA : Corwin.
Fink, D (2001). ‘Two Solitudes: Policy Makers and policy implementers’ In Michael Fielding (ed.) Taking education really seriously: three years of hard labour. London: Routledge/Falmer.
Fink, D (2000). Good schools/real schools: why school reform doesn’t last. New York: Teachers’ College Press.
Hargreaves, A and Fink D (2006). Sustainable leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey- Bass.
Hargreaves, A. and Fink, D. (2000) ‘The three dimensions of education reform’, Educational Leadership, 57 (7), 30-34.
Stoll, L. (2001). “How good is your local school really’, Inaugural Address. Bath: University of Bath, U.K.
Stoll, L, Fink, D. and Earl, L. (2003) It’s About Learning and It’s About Time. London: Routledge/Falmer.
Stoll L. and Fink, D. (1996) Changing Our Schools: Linking School Effectiveness and School Improvement. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Footnote
1. This is from a publication of the Body Shop from over 20 years ago. Efforts to get a direct reference from The Body Shop were unsuccessful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Dean Fink is an educational development consultant at Dean Fink Consulting Associates, in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.