Seeking better ways of sustaining high performance

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday September 11, 2023 06:00

Perhaps, one can draw from one’s personal experience to drive the point home. During my high school days, I had the pleasant experience of being the best student in Setswana for four consecutive years. The desire to stay ahead of equally deserving and hardworking competitors kept me on my toes.

This means there was no room for one to rest on his laurels. In spite of having achieved proficiency in the subject, one had to do more, perhaps much more than those struggling at the subject. The same spirit applies to top notch schools. High-performing cultures are usually characterised by a dynamic spirit, a burning desire to keep the fire burning and unrelenting search for unchartered ways of sustaining a high achieving culture.

Weak education systems can be disappointingly static, electing to do more of the same while appearing less enthusiastic and less intentional about change or at least trying new experiments.

The truth of the matter is that an education system, more especially one operating in a milieu of academic underachievement, cannot afford the luxury of being static. If the best performing systems cannot afford complacency, underachieving systems should have every motivation and reason to be unrelenting in their quest for change. If sitting on top provides the motivation and inspiration to do much more, it should go without saying that unsuccessful school systems should know no respite.

Opportunities for change are usually squandered and lost at the brainstorming session intended to address the ‘cancer’ eating a non-achieving education system. The brainstorming exercise in most underachieving school systems has become an annual ritual - a compliance exercise, meant to flatter to deceive and not necessarily to translate into work that can raise student achievement levels. Experience shows that the brainstorming exercise can be more about naming and listing problems rather than presenting an opportunity to provide solutions. Identifying bottlenecks and not planning to do anything about them is a futile exercise. At the planning stage, it is important for education systems to draw a distinction between issues that are within a school’s sphere of influence and those falling outside the system’s jurisdiction.

Thinking along the lines of knowing what issues an education system can tackle within its means and those it cannot tackle or at least worry less about can give the system a bit of focus. Again, my experience or encounter with one school brainstorming exercise might be quite useful. I was a new teacher in a certain school but certainly not new in the teaching profession. I had joined the new school following years of experience as a middle manager holding the rank of senior teacher. During the first week of my arrival in the school, which experienced a string of poor results, a brainstorming exercise was arranged to establish and identify issues responsible for its underachievement. It is particularly noteworthy that , one of the interesting issues which generated a lot of debate and somewhat stole the limelight from a host of other problems was the bad publicity the school was apparently attracting. A certain newspaper was singled out for its notorious distinction of portraying the school in a negative light. And so the debate centred on how bad publicity could be reversed. Everybody felt it was an urgent matter requiring urgent attention. My reading of the situation was different in that I felt the school was straying into issues outside its sphere of influence.

My reasoning was it was going to be an exercise in futility to try and change the media perceptions about the school when the school did not do something about improving internal matters within its sphere of control. Doing better and raising student learning outcomes was the best option rather than trying to match the media pound for pound Thankfully, sanity prevailed. My intervention brought about a change of heart and tackling the media was removed in the planning agenda.

There are too many issues which feature in the planning of schools which should not really take centre stage. It is not worth the time and resources of a school to give attention to issues which the school cannot change. The common and unfortunate examples which vex many schools are the ‘culture of a village’ or its geographical location and conditions that students live in or lack of parental support. These could be issues requiring attention but a school should focus more on issues that it can deal with without seeking external assistance. Another aspect that should inform the planning phase is that when faced with a host of issues, school systems should make a determination on whether an issue identified has a direct bearing on the instructional core. Rather than lamenting about lack of physical resources (not meaning to underestimate availability of resources) education systems are better equipped or placed to deal with the teacher quality, rigour of instruction, developing instructional leadership , developing the best possible assessment and raising accountability. As often observed, non availability of resources may inhibit teaching and learning but availability of resources does not always guarantee quality learning outcomes. But too much worrying about lack of resources can slow down the ability of a school to address issues within its sphere of influence.

The situation is little more complicated in primary schools due to the prevailing system of dual administration. In this jurisdiction provision of additional classrooms in primary schools falls on the shoulders of local authorities and it would not be helpful for a school to expend energies on a topic for which a solution cannot be found within the school. In the quest for solutions it is much helpful for an education system to be inward looking rather than outward looking.

In the book, Strategy in Action, Rachel E. Curtis and Elizabeth A. City identified issues which should preoccupy a school seeking to address the instructional core as low expectations of teachers and students, inconsistent quality and low rigor instruction, lack of assessment that inform instruction and lack of instructional leadership on the part of school principals. These are not new issues and often they find their way into the menu of many brainstorming sessions. However, it has been difficult to provide any tangible solutions. The biggest problem is that most schools expect a solutions to come from outside. There is a lot of untapped potential within schools and sharing experiences within a cluster can grow instructional leadership while enhancing teacher quality and rigor of instruction.