A response to Stuart Jones' ideas in his Draft Ed.D. Thesis on Strategy, Culture and School Development Planning: A Case Study of Staff Perspectives in a Secondary School.
Jack Whitehead, Department of Education, University of Bath, 20th May, 2002.
Dear Stuart - The stimulus to read your thesis and respond is largely because of the pleasure I'm experiencing in working with the teacher-researcher group you have helped to form and sustain at Westwood School. I'm hoping that my responses might stimulate others to engage with and appreciate your ideas in their own enquiries as they respond in a helpful way to your own.
I've supervised and examined quite a number of doctoral theses and I've no doubt that the quality of your works stands alongside the successfully complete theses I've supervised and examined. I felt that you demonstrated a sustained and disciplined engagement with the ideas of others throughout your thesis. I learnt a lot from following your discussions around your list of diagrams as I encountered them in the text. I liked the way you brought together Mintzberg's emergent and realised strategies, Davies and Ellison's three-stage model of strategy development and the related themes including the five-stage cycle of school improvement. I was particularly impressed with the quality of your criticism on pages 63-66 where you examine the five stage cycle and point out some dangers in stage 2, 'How do we compare with similar schools?'
I was also impressed with the systematic way you drew on models of school culture, school organisational structure and school conditions. I think the way you gathered data in relation to the models using very well defined methods is a lovely piece of traditional scholarship.
One of the ideas I found myself thinking about was on page 125 where you say:
"… the deputy head considered that the quality of monitoring could be improved by establishing a better relationships between the action planning process and the performance management process. In the latter system, individuals set targets for their own performance that are negotiated with their appraiser. By emphasising the link that could be made between individuals' personal targets for improvement, a dynamic could be created that could lead to a greater feeling of involvement in, and responsibility for, a team's efforts to improve in specific pre-defined ways. This would require a clearer system for linking the two processes than is currently in place."
This connected with something I read in this morning's Independent Newspaper taken from an article by Tony Blair in the Journal Renewal:
"The challenge is to be open to new ideas and to examine whether our policies are working…. My belief that our party is up to this task comes from my experience of our shared values. We share a fundamental belief in creating a fraternal community based on the values of equality, freedom, fairness and diversity. Pursued without dogma, these are also the values of the British people." (Tony Blair, I have learned the limits of government, Independent Newspaper, p. 15, 20th May, 2002).
"New Labour was founded on the desire to align progressive values with the forces of modernity. But it can only shape those forces by building systems of order capable of renewing themselves without central direction" Tom Bentley, Renewal, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2002.
I fully supported the Labour Government when it came to power in 1997 with a pledge to focus on values and to make 'Education, Education, Education' its priority. I groaned with dismay at their attempts to set 'targets' centrally without any understanding of the need to encourage the creative process of developing the self-set targets of individuals locally. It might be that the government is now open to learning how to support the process of improving practice through the development of living, values-based standards of judgement as individuals account for their own influence in their own contexts. I live in hope!
I'm focusing on your point about 'specific pre-defined ways':
"By emphasising the link that could be made between individuals' personal targets for improvement, a dynamic could be created that could lead to a greater feeling of involvement in, and responsibility for, a team's efforts to improve in specific pre-defined ways."
And linking this to Lyotard's ideas in his book on the postmodern condition:
A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.
Lyotard, F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge. Manchester; Manchester University Press.
I'm wondering if the group of colleagues (I think of them as master educators) meeting at Westwood are showing the importance of working to improve the quality of pupils' learning in a process that doesn't emphasise 'specific pre-defined ways', but rather emphasises the significance of supporting each other in a process of expressing originality of mind and critical judgement as learning emerges through practice and reflection. I'm thinking of a process of learning how to live our values of humanity more fully in our educational enquiries. Rather than 'pre-specify' I wondering if a more appropriate strategy is the expression of faith in the value of each individual's embodied knowledge and capacity to enquire and learn in the process of helping pupils, students and colleagues to improve their own learning. Looking forward to thinking about this some more, when we meet.
Love Jack.