5 Steps Towards a More Sustainable School
The United Nations ratified the Sustainable Development Goals in 2016, signifying the biggest worldwide approach to tackling sustainability since the millennium.
The current COVID-19 has brought chronic uncertainty. However, this imposed solitude has, also brought an opportunity for deep introspection about the state of the world and our place in it. What are the lessons of now that we can learn, so that the future can be a better, more sustainable place? Global problems require global solutions. If the problems are interconnected, then so should be the systems. Into this context, emerge the leaders of education. What should their priorities be?
Understand your ecosystem
Ecosystems are comprised of evolving, interdependent parts. The educational ecosystem is made up of several elements:
The Chronosystem (the influence of time): the evolution of reform patterns across time.
The Macrosystem (overarching beliefs): the economic and political agenda, ideas about a knowledge society.
The Exosystem (the indirect, external environment): government policies, external agencies for accreditation and validation, restraints on spending, parental expectations
The Mesosystem (the interaction of microsystem and environment): the professional learning and organisational culture of the school.
The Microsystem (the immediate environment): the actions and interactions of school leaders, teachers, staff, parents, governors and students.
The most important parts will always be human. COVID-19 emphasised the equality of labour and our interdependence on each other; the doctor, nurse, paramedic, shelf-stacker, bin-man, farmer, teacher, student. Our organisation structures should diffuse power and increasingly reflect the egalitarian nature of interdependency.
We need to build in mechanisms for ensuring continuity in the organisation. Empower others, work collaboratively. Ensure that responsibilities, as far as possible, are shared and that the organisation is not over dependent on individuals. Make your maps of connectivity and sustainability thinking visible. Enable educators to understand themselves in their own system context and give them the tools to transform their teaching practice by making connections that reflect systems theory.
Put human relationships at your organisation
Schools are above all, human organisations. As educators we need to teach and model the skills and practices of sound mental and emotional wellbeing and health. Therefore, as practitioners we also need to learn about wellbeing ourselves, not as a cursory gesture to something peripheral, but as a commitment to a central and essential dimension of what it means to be human. We also need to intentionally and skilfully create communities that maximally promote and nurture good mental and emotional health. We need to reclaim, regain and remember agency about what normal, functional emotional responses to events in life are and be able to distinguish them from pathological responses.
Trust is an essential component of working together towards a common purpose. And moral purpose is what working in education is surely, all about. But cultivating authenticity is not easy in a world where conflict is omnipresent, because fear, anxiety and mistrust are never far away. Acknowledging different kinds of conflict and learning about the subject is essential in avoiding, resolving and transforming it. Dispute is necessary in responsible decision making.
The world emerging from COVID-19, is likely to become more fractious, anxiety more evident, conflict more prevalent, within families, organisations and states as well as inter-states as globalisation shrinks. The emotional intelligence and knowledge of how to transcend and transform conflict will need to be taught. We cannot rely on it to be ‘caught’.
Develop a prophetic vision
The Sustainable Development Goals exist for a reason. The result of focussed collaboration over time by experts from vital and interconnected sectors around the globe; a pinnacle of human hope. Their achievement is down to us.
Schools are learning organisations which need to think in generational terms. COVID-19 only re-emphasises the interconnectedness of the world, so maintaining a sense of global consciousness is essential to send young people into a world where they do not just survive but thrive – and help others to do the same.
We need the courage to make human relationships the priority, where the experience of education for all members of the community teaches them, above all, to serve ideas beyond the self. To develop the capacity to understand and respond to the frightening immediacy of climate change. To contribute to a world where population growth among myriad global trends present impediments and where technology, if handled responsibly, creates hitherto unseen potential that can contribute to solving the problems that we and our leaders, have made for ourselves.
Read the game
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Whilst we can make practical plans for pragmatic responses to crises, we also need to develop the capacity to think nimbly, communicate coherently, act decisively and to anticipate change; to ‘read the game’.
Reading the game is the ability to predict the shape of the future based on the shape of the present. It enables us to keep our eye on the horizon, to consciously embrace the positive energy of what it means to be slightly paranoid and so consider and plan for both best and worst case scenarios.
There seems to be a trend in strategic planning in organisations to move in scope from 5 to 3 years, and why not, considering how much work goes into a strategic plan and how COVID-19 has decimated so many of them. However, there are some essential dimensions of a strategic plan, which simply can never be overlooked. First and last, financial wellbeing. The impact of COVID-19, on the purse of education in the private sector, promises to be crushing. As supply chains dry up and parents are unable to meet their fee commitments, schools still have to meet their own commitments to staff salaries, infrastructure upkeep, and the move to online teaching and learning.
For prudent risk management, it is essential that schools create health, fiscal, and educational plans for the 2020-21 academic year now to offset the many and varied likely negative effects of COVID-19. Fee structures will need to change, to create contingencies. Longer term planning will include endowments and other investment strategies which feed off the current global financial systems, spread risk and create insurance against their collapse. We will need to deploy sustainability thinking. As we learn the lessons of this isolation, there are significant implications for how we manage infrastructure, pay our employees and secure the long-term viability of what we are doing. Schools might reflect that they can change the ratio of teachers to students, they might realise that infrastructure can be re-thought as a community hub for multi-purpose use. A redefined balance is the shape of the future.
Create a meaningful experience of education
Leaders need to model the way. Whatever the priorities of a society, then these should be reflected in the experience of education we co-create for each other.
The relationship between teachers and students is changing, enhanced by COVID-19; they are now learning together. Teachers are becoming guides and facilitators. That is the shape of things to come.
It is time for the school year and the school day to be re-imagined. How about an academic year of 40 weeks, split into 5 projects of 8 weeks, all of which are theme based and inquiry driven, led by a community of learners who might incorporate local, regional and global members, representative of the diversity and inequality of the world? Education ecosystems are now and forever, digital; we need to respond directly to this reality. Teaching and learning will become a combination of online and face-to-face engagement. It will focus on creative thinking and research skills, where, to borrow from Guajome Park Academy, innovation becomes a habit to exploring national and international neighbourhoods, where customs, culture, and history are an interactive theatre of life, and technologies invent the future, examine the past, and make sense out of today.
Our broad themes can be grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals. They can create a common understanding and generate appreciation for the interconnectivity of systems thinking and practice.