Imagine parents impatient with their daughter’s physical development, force-feed her steroids and HGH. Such parents would (hopefully) soon receive a visit from Social Services !! Andy Hargreave’s research gives excellent proof of the need for systems thinking; Peter Senge (author of The Fifth Discipline, 2006) would be pleased! Hargreaves quickly shows how huge collateral damage can occur from such poor policy decisions! It’s a worthwhile read.
Reformers like to tell us that they are in a hurry. They want everything reformed now, or yesterday. They can’t wait. They can’t even wait to find out if their reforms make any sense. Their motto might as well be, “Don’t just stand there, reform something.”
But Andy Hargreaves explains here why the hurry up approach doesn’t work. Hargreaves is one of our most sensible thinkers about education. He is now advising the Ontario minister for education.
Ontario, he writes, has tried to learn from the mistakes of others. It has aimed for slow and steady improvement, not overnight transformation by forced march of teachers, administrators, and students.
It paced the change agenda so that achievement gains would be steady and sustainable rather than spectacular but unstable. It also provided a stronger spirit and much higher levels of support than in England in terms of resources, training, partnership with the…
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