‘Monotony is the reward of the careful’- A.G. Buckham
Right now we have some pretty big challenges in education. They are exciting ones but they are challenges. We recently received an invitation a session entitled ‘problems of practice’ run by Education Changemakers. Education Changemakers are an organisation that work to unleash teacher led innovation in schools. One of their core beliefs is that the best way for education to meet the challenges that it currently faces is for teachers themselves to come up with their own unique and novel ideas to enact real meaningful change in their schools which in turn will inform policy, changing the system from the bottom up.
Education Changemakers has established by two people who had a passion for making change in education. Aaron Tait and Dave Faulkner had a reputation for leading radical positive change in their schools. Rather than believing they had all the answers their recipe for meaningful change was to involve teachers in the process. They spent considerable time creating an environment where staff, community, parents and students are encouraged to solve problems and get better every day.
The process we followed was to first create a tree around our identified problem of practice. Time was given to determine possible underlying or root causes of this problem and also discuss the consequences or what is occurring because of this change.
From our tree we then generated many possible solutions, form the common sense to the utterly ridiculous the objective was quantity. In just a few minutes we had over 40 possible solutions. We followed a flow chart for or blueprint for change. We thought that this was a worthwhile process to follow so stay tuned! We will invite everyone in staff to follow the same process. I can imagine that we will literally get hundreds of ideas flowing in the staff room!
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