Abstract:

As Peter Drucker famously wrote, the central feature of the society of the future, as of its predecessors, will be new institutions, theories, ideologies and problems. Most of our schools, if not all, are institutions which operate on a design springing from the theories, problems and ideologies of the past. Its institutional design needs to be transformed in order to be meaningful for the society of the future.
But this just answers one of the four key questions that any transformation project needs to address: Why do we need to transform? There is currently a lot of discussion about the second relevant question: What needs to change? The answer, of course, is that the curriculum needs to be changed, although there is still a debate about the precise nature of the changes, which might take some time to resolve.
Our point is that the current emphasis on the design of the curriculum is relegating to the back stage two more critical question: Who will lead the transformation of existing schools and How to address this transformation, which will entail, among other matters, a renewal of the culture and the organization of schools.

Culture is here understood as a set accepted and acceptable behaviors. In the current societal context, schools need to adopt a culture of open and continuous innovation, open to students and families as much as to the new pedagogical contents and methods pushed by the educational industry. Industry is increasingly open to user-driven innovation. Shouldn’t schools be equally open to student-driven innovations, springing from the dreams of young people and a their sense of what’s really important to them?

The organizational model of many schools is still an inheritance of the old industrial culture, with a rigid view on disciplines and rigid roles for adults (principal, coordinators, specialists, teachers) as well as for students. A school wanting to increase collaborative and cross-disciplinary contents in their classrooms, for example, might find that teachers of different disciplines (say science and humanities) have different schedules, routines and even meeting rooms and little incentive to collaborate.

Culture change and organizational change need to be seen as change processes. As they entail change people’s minds and behaviors, they cannot be planned in the same rigid way as engineering or business process. Rather than being managed, they need to be led. What brings up the issue of the kind of leadership needed to transform schools (a how) and the identity of the leaders (the who).

In our work as advisors and facilitators of change in schools, inspired by the culture and the pedagogy of the Kaospilot (www.kaospilot.dk), we’ve sucessfully helped school teams to clarify their change purpose, to achieve alignement around the why, how and who questions of the transformation process and to evolve to a culture of distributed leadership. We strongly believe that when team align in their responses to these questions, the whats follow most naturally.

Keywords:

Education, transformation, institutions, culture, organizations, schools, leadership, change, future.