Are Schools Learning Organizations?

Rod Paige hired me when I first became a middle school principal. At that time, Paige was superintendent of the Houston Independent School District. Later, Dr. Paige became U.S. Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. I still remember what Paige told us during district-wide principal’s meetings – “Don’t tell me there is teaching happening if there isn’t any learning demonstrated.”

Schools are too much about teaching and not enough about learning. Which calls into question whether schools themselves are actual learning organizations? Learning organizations behave in ways that make the latest models of learning, like remote learning, something worthy of action research. The last two years, beginning with 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, suggest schools aren’t learning organizations based on their inability to execute remote learning strategy for the betterment of their young learners.

Mark Lieberman, an EducationWeek reporter, recently wrote an article titled “What Schools Really Learned From Remote Learning.” Lieberman writes, “Remote learning is – for now – a thing of the past in much of America’s K-12 system. But it’s not likely to stay that way forever. Natural disasters driven by climate change, future outbreaks of COVID or other diseases, snow storms, and even efforts to save money on fuel costs could present schools with dilemmas over whether and how to maintain instruction. And some students are still learning remotely, if their district provides resources for that model.”

Lieberman shares four long-term strategies needed to engage students when they aren’t physically present in school buildings. These strategies come from two researchers, Alvaro Brito, a doctoral student at Boise State University who serves as 21^st century learning specialist at the Compton school district in California, and Devery Rodgers, assistant professor of educational leadership at California State University – Long Beach. Brito and Rodgers argue school districts need to train their teachers immediately to be able execute on these strategies:

1. Empower teachers with online course design experience to lead remote teaching efforts.
2. Support educators struggling with the basics of remote learning, rather than expecting them to learn on their own.
3. Develop systems that use data to strengthen educators’ understanding of their students’ progress.
4. Overcommunicate and collaborate, rather than working in isolation.

Let’s discuss each of these in greater detail.

When we launched a pilot personalized learning lab school within the Houston Museum District several years ago, one of the first things we learned was the importance of empowering our learning coaches (teachers) with the ability to “resource” learning for their young learners from experts and information sources around the world. It was nice if our learning coach had expertise in literacy or math, but the “have to” we needed to see was the coach’s ability to access expertise and information to help the young learner meet their learning plan goals. This skill, being able to help young learners “learn how to learn” isn’t present in many classrooms or schools today. Instead, schools seem trapped in a system that still depends on the knowledge and skill of one adult in a classroom, when there are thousands if not millions of experts out in the world ready and able to help young learners meet their goals.

Supporting educators to “retool” their skills from classroom-based practice to a model of remote learning will be an ominous task. Already, we are seeing veteran teachers retiring or leaving the profession because of the stress involved in their learning a different way than how they were originally trained. Even if teachers stay and commit themselves to learn a new way of leading learning, schools haven’t been places in the past where professional growth has been embraced as a daily responsibility of the adult learning leaders. Instead, schools seem to “double-down” on practices they are familiar with – like curriculum and pacing guides, scopes and sequences, standardized tests, and tutoring if kids don’t learn what they need to learn the first time.

The only data traditional schools pay attention to, still today, are test scores – and test scores don’t tell us much about learning. Instead, what we learned with our pilot lab school was the importance of multiple data points being used to determine learning or not. Peer conversations, coaching feedback, and individual reflection were all used to build capacity when it came to developing a young learner.

Teaching has been called “the loneliest profession in the world,” and for good reason. Teachers usually stay in their rooms, teaching their kids, for a good 85-90% of their work day. Attempts have been made to build professional learning communities between teachers and other school leaders with mixed results. But it should be said here that most schools today still struggle with communication and collaboration between teachers and the rest of the school staff. It seems that the structure of school, especially on the secondary level, just doesn’t lend itself to professional communication and collaboration.

So are schools learning organizations? I think the evidence tells us that they aren’t. Furthermore, it should be noted that most schools today might not have the ability to turn themselves into learning organizations. Therefore, we need to create a new type of learning organization, one that embraces remote learning, and other models of learning, moving forward.

Til tomorrow. SVB