(2017-10-15) Dixon Art Of Unlearning

Bruce Dixon: The Art of Unlearning

if we are serious about school change (School Reform), then we have to be serious about unlearning. And we know one of the biggest challenges facing any organizational change is resistance to new ideas, new concepts, and a new perspective of how to do what we do better

We can start by looking at the learning architecture of schooling, or what Seymour Sarason’s calls the “regularities’ which implicitly influence how our schools function and have a strong impact on school culture: The “regularities” of that culture—patterns, rules, and procedures that are mostly unseen and assumed—tend to undermine the basic purposes of educating our youth.

Part of the challenge we face is that in the past, when we have talked about the change in schools, too often we have been tinkering at the edges. As Russell Ackoff highlights in this 2010 video, so much of what leads to ‘change fatigue’ is the result of seeking incremental improvements to the status quo, rather than any fundamental sustainable shift: “The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.”

All of this is a tough ask for many educators because so much of school life is about routine, familiar processes and practices which allow you to become very comfortable with your craft

Robert Evans takes it a step further in his excellent book the Human Side of School Change: “ -one of the chief benefits people seek in their organizational affiliations is protection from change. The routines of any school provide basic security, a framework within which people can come to count on one another and trust the world to be the way it is supposed to be.”