Failure, Leadership and Learning

I once took up the offer of being the principal of a private school not fully knowing the implications of that decision until years later. I had joined because I wanted to make a difference, to make an impact in the lives of students and the community that I served.

The situation did not look bright when I joined the school. It was not seen as attractive and enrolment had already started to fall. Still, a challenge was a challenge and I wanted one. The deciding factor to go back there was that it was also my old school. I had good years there and had many good memories and I wanted the glory years back.

It wasn’t easy. It was the toughest ride I had ever been on. To cut the story short, the Board closed the school after being in operation for many years. I was the school’s last principal. Closing a school was unheard of those days. It was a painful experience for me and for those associated with the school especially its teachers, students and the small community.

However, I have learnt something from that experience which I wish to share here, hoping that all of us can learn something from this.

What led to the closure? The simple reason is economics. The school was not able to recruit enough students. Each year the enrolment went down and eventually the numbers became too small to even pay its variable costs.

But why did the numbers fall? The school was no longer attractive enough for prospective students. New schools mushroomed around the time that my school started to experience declining numbers. Competition looked shinier. The school was offering a programme that others too were offering. There appeared to be no differentiation except for the fact that we were a single sex school and our extra-curricular activities looked good. Even that didn’t seem to mean much. The school appeared to have reached its maturity stage and without further developments in terms of facilities the school soon found itself in the declining stage of its product life cycle.

The situation was not helped by the demographics. Residential areas were built away from the school. Students left when new schools were built in areas where they lived.

To arrest the decline, the school introduced the sixth form section and that improved numbers. But any improvement in one section was going to be short-lived if there were no improvements elsewhere. Furthermore, without sufficient injections of funds it was always going to be an uphill battle.

But there was another factor that was really critical. It’s the recruitment and selection of the right people for the job. This was where the school could not compete. With falling funds, getting good and experienced teachers to work in a challenging and competitive environment was practically impossible to achieve.

The school’s reputation was also affected. Every school, it seemed, was measured by what it produced and for us it was the school’s performance in the public examinations. The school, whether it liked it or not, was constantly being compared with better resourced schools which in turn attracted better quality students which in turn produced better results.

Feeling despondent and frustrated, I enrolled in a PhD programme because I wanted to see if there was anything else I could do to help the school turn round. I could not control what was happening outside the school but I still had some say in what was going on within the school and within the classroom. My professor advised me to engage the teachers in professional development which sought to understand the reasons for students’ underachievement in Mathematics and Science.
Professional development can mean different things to different people but for the research that I did, it meant working with teachers’ different ways of experiencing teaching and uncovering students’ different ways of experiencing the object of learning with a view to designing lessons that would open up students’ different ways of seeing the object of learning.

Over a period of two years, the teachers and I discussed how lessons in Science (eg topic on Pressure) and Mathematics (eg topics on Fractions, Area and Perimeter) could be taught and whether the joint planning would have an impact on student learning. They had the opportunity to enter their colleagues’ lesson to collect data about what it was possible to learn from the lesson that they designed. I used a research approach called phenomenography and the variation theory of learning to inform the design of the intervention.

Through interviews with teachers and students, analysis of student work and transcripts of hours of teachers’ meetings, I learned about teacher culture and their attitudes towards learning. Not everyone saw the need to learn from each other and from their students. As a result, their thinking of teaching and learning hardly changed. They saw teaching as transmission of knowledge.

Some teachers experienced teaching in a totally different way after engaging in the professional development. They saw the importance of learning from students’ thinking and responding to their different ways of thinking. For these teachers the professional development was a success for them.
The school’s closure has definitely changed the way I looked at organisations now. Would I do anything differently now? Yes, I would:

• Focus on recruitment and selection as this will ultimately affect outcomes
• Focus on appropriate professional development that will give opportunities for teachers to experience teaching and learning in a more powerful way
• Focus on programmes that provide maximum impact for learners.

I am grateful that despite the difficult experience as a school leader, I understand more sharply what failure means. Experiencing failure has taught me valuable lessons about leadership and about managing organisations – more than I can ever learn from textbooks.

I now understand far better what it takes to lead a school and what it takes to improve teaching and learning for the benefit of all learners.

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If you are interested to read more about my PhD research, the citation is:
Andrew, V. (2011) Enabling Teachers to Teach Better: A Practice-based Teacher Professional Development Strategy to raise achievement in schools in Brunei Darussalam. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

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