Administrator's Corner
Who is teaching the ‘technosphere
cleaners’ and ‘cloud pilots’?
By Graham Norris
M
y last article explored a
few ideas about changing
the education status quo. I
suggested that most school
improvement approaches, based on
self-evaluation (looking inwards) and
learning from good practice (looking
outwards), are not bringing about
transformative change in student
outcomes. Is this because we don’t
have a clear focus on the outcomes
that will matter in the future (looking
forwards)?
We live in a rapidly changing world
in which education is always playing
‘catch up’. We want education itself to
drive change. How often are we led to
believe the solutions of the future lie in
the follies of the past? It’s easy to self-
evaluate against the norms of today,
but without thinking about the future,
we have no way of knowing if what
we’re teaching has any relevance at all.
And therein lies the problem.
It’s probably because most of us are
so involved in the daily pressures of
school life that we rarely have time to
think about how relevant today’s lesson
will be in our students’ lives in 10 years.
For example, are we confident that
someone else is preparing students for
jobs that don’t yet exist but, arguably,
might one day – ‘fact and authenticity
judges’, ‘virtual reality police’, ‘data
miners’,
‘technosphere
cleaners’,
‘cloud pilots’; or do we see that as our
role? We’re all juggling our work across
so many competing priorities and
horizons. Let’s explore three of these.
The ‘first horizon (H1)’ (‘how good
are we now?’) is very dominant in
our lives. It’s our engagement in the
current education system – business
as usual day-in, day-out. Within this
horizon exists the case for change
and sometimes a story of decline, and
while it may be delivering relatively
successfully for the present, in some
cases it will be losing its fitness for
purpose over time. Thus, the education
system becomes out-of-date and less
relevant. Student outcomes often
remain much the same even though,
arguably, schools seem to improve.
People begin to lose faith in what
they are doing and wonder if there’s a
better way. This is often the trigger for
a conversation about the future.
8 | May - Jun 2017 |
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The ‘second horizon (H2)’ (‘how do
we get to where we want to be?’) is
the transformational system. Here,
innovation has started in the light of
the apparent shortcoming