I have long been concerned by the “do more”, and “be more efficient” narrative which seems to surround our everyday lives.   We are constantly seeking to improve in all we do, which I think is a fair endeavour, but at what cost?   This was recently brought further into focus as I started reading “Thank You for Being Late: An optimists Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations” by T.L. Friedman as I found myself with an hour to spare while waiting to meet someone.   I found myself that bit more content and relaxed as I used the extra hour which had become available to start reading the book and to engage in a bit of people-watching, watching the world rush about its business.  But are these opportunities to stop and reflect reducing in frequency and length?

I look at teaching for example, where I qualified as a teacher back in the late 90’s.   Looking at teaching now, there are so many more things to consider and to do whether this relates to educational research that we are considering, safeguarding, well-being, health and safety, neurodiversity, and much more.  Now all of these things are important but each is another thing to consider, additional cognitive load, or an additional process or task which needs to be completed.  Is there an extra resource in terms of time or cognitive capacity to undertake these things?   The answer is No.   We simply fold them into our everyday workload, which invariably means that although our efforts are getting better, we are also doing more than we ever did before.

Now generative AI can help a little here in that it can help us with some of the heavy lifting and free up some time for us.    This particular post was edited with the help of AI although it wasn’t initially drafted with AI;  I didn’t draft it with AI as this is very much a brain dump of thoughts and as yet AI solutions can’t interface with the human brain, although that may become possible at some point.    But in editing it with AI, I was able to proofread and make changes quicker than I would have been able to do myself therefore reducing the time taken to produce the post.    The challenge here however is this still all exists against a backdrop of “do more”, so the time I may have gained through the help of AI may simply be swallowed up by the next task I need to undertake to continue down the road of continual improvement.   In effect, the net benefit of AI may be quickly nullified by our continued drive for efficiency and maximising output.

Circling back to teaching, this therefore means that generative AI may benefit teachers for a short period, but that eventually, the benefits may simply dissolve in the face of ever-increasing requirements.    But the benefits are so important, that extra time might allow for greater teacher reflection on teaching practice, student learning and student outcomes, it might support greater networking and sharing of ideas plus might support improved well-being for teachers, which I would suggest may result in better teaching, better student outcomes and also better student wellbeing as the students see their teachers modelling good wellbeing practices.   The time AI solutions will provide might support us in spending more time on focussing on what it means to be human and on “human flourishing”.

 Maybe we need to question to “continual improvement” and “efficiency” narratives in that they need to exist in balance and cannot be assumed to be the “right” path.   In relation to continual improvement, I often refer to MVP, minimum viable product and “good enough”.    In relation to efficiency, if I wanted to be more efficient maybe I should stop taking breaks or work through my lunch.    We also need to consider decreasing marginal gains, and maybe that is where we are now, that a lot of the improvements we are bringing about are minor, iterative improvements, but at the cost of cognitive load, time and other resources which may outweigh the resultant benefit.   The extra effort required for each incremental change remains the same, yet the resulting gain is reduced with each change. There is also the challenge of complexity, where more complex processes or systems often bring about greater risk of failure or greater reliance on particular people or tools.And I haven’t even mentioned the speed of change, which the book I am reading refers to in its title, in the “age of accelerations”.   So all of this is happening quicker than ever before which therefore suggests the amount of time we have available to adapt to changes is decreasing.

I don’t have any answers here, so the purpose of this post is not to share a solution, but to pose a question.   I think I know the answer to the question, but not necessarily the answer to the problem it hints towards, but I think the best thing we can do is to start to talk about it and consider it.   So what is the question:

Can we keep adding to the things we need to think about, the processes and the complexity of our lives, or is there a limit?   

In the world of education, it is easy to become obsessed with the pursuit of perfection. Teachers and students alike strive for excellence, academic, pastoral, and otherwise, pushing themselves to achieve the best results possible and constantly seeking to improve processes, knowledge and skills.  I look back on over 20 years of working in schools and see all the things that have been added for teachers, school leaders and support staff to do.   All of the various things that have been added have been added for good reason, to improve education or to address risks or dangers, but they largely have all been additions;  additional systems, additional processes, additional statutory requirements, additional school requirements, inspection requirements, compliance requirements, etc.   We cannot infinitely continue to add.    Also, in this relentless pursuit of perfection, it is all too easy to overlook the value of “good enough” and the negative effects that perfectionism can have.

The concept of “perfect” is a subjective one, and what one person considers to be perfect may not necessarily be the same for another. The problem with striving for perfection in education is that it can lead to unrealistic expectations, which in turn can lead to feelings of failure, anxiety, and stress.  It can lead to increasing workload where workload is a considerable issue impacting on educators the world over.    We can become so fixated on getting everything right that we lose sight of the bigger picture, and what really matters and is most important.     And what is most important is equally subjective;  is it academic achievement, developing character, soft skills, sportsmanship, preparing students for future life, supporting student wellbeing, or the many other things which schools are involved in.

I believe the culture of constant addition is doomed to fail us, it is simply unsustainable.   We do not have the resources and this is already clear given ongoing discussions regarding workload in schools. As such we need to look towards what is most important and prioritising.  We need to look towards “doing less” which is one of the principles I have shared with my team in looking to identify the tasks and activities we do that add little value or provide little impact, seeking to cease these or spend less time on them.   Now this is a difficult process as anything which has been added has been added for a reason however not all reasons are equal and the impact and value of all tasks and activities are also not equal.   And this is what is hard in comparing tasks and identifying which are worthwhile to continue and which can be ceased or reduced, while acknowledging that ceasing any tasks will result in a negative impact; Remember we started a task for a positive reason, so ceasing or reducing time on it can only reverse this; a negative impact.   But we need to start to reverse the culture of addition before we reach a tipping point, before the workload crisis goes beyond where it already is.

In terms of the difficult task of prioritisation I always come back to values;   A schools values should help guide on identifying that which is important and which adds value, therefore helping in identifying the things it might be possible to cease doing.    And if not ceasing doing things it should help in identifying priorities and allocation of resources so rather than stopping something, we may simply do less of it. These are the difficult discussions which need to happen, identifying how to divide up the limited resources available, and what areas or tasks cannot be done, should not be done, or will see less resources to make way for other things.

In schools and colleges we want to do the best for our students but maybe in seeking to do so we need to recognise that best does not mean perfect as this simply isnt possible;   the resources, the staff, the time, etc will never be sufficient to be perfect.   Therefore do we need to become comfortable with “good enough”?    I feel as a manager of an IT support function that this is the right thing to do although equally as an educator I am uncomfortable with it from a student and a learning point of view, where I would want to deliver the best possible learning experience.    But maybe the discomfort is unavoidable, and better to work with good enough than to try to be perfect across too many areas of education, the pastoral, academic, wellbeing, health, fitness, etc, such that we fall significantly short of even good across all of them.  

The above is a bit of a rambling chain of thoughts but in terms of sharing my thoughts, concerns and ideas, hopefully it is Good Enough!

Thinking about this I can see where the emphasis on the need for standardized tests has come from as this is hard evidence of the impact of the  educational strategies a given country has undertaken.    But we know it is not that simple as I and many others have previously blogged.

Another impact of this need for “hard” evidence is that teachers seek to ensure they have proof of what they have done.   This leads to the need for forms, checklists and other documents to be created and completed which in turn leads to an increasing workload, another issue which is constantly under discussion.    The need for evidence results in the increased administrative workload.

Taking a scientific standpoint “Hard” evidence, in my opinion, relates to something which is provable by repeatable experiment, however I admit that this is very simplistic and that a full blog or even book could be dedicated to the discussion of hard evidence.

My issue here is that of the number of variables which go into the use of learning technologies, or a particular learning strategy, in the classroom.    These include prevailing national culture, national views on education, available resources, school leadership aims and approaches, teacher qualifications, teacher experience, technologies being used, purpose for the use of technology, etc, and this is just the very tip of the iceberg.   How can any evidence therefore be considered as hard?   It may be that it is “harder” than another source of evidence however, especially where we are looking at generalization on a world or even national level, there will never be any certainty of the ability to replicate a given study and its results.    Having read Talebs The Black Swan I realize it is highly likely that it would be possible to disprove any given study with little effort after all it takes a large number of common studies with the same outcomes to prove something however requires only a single study with contradictory outcomes to disprove it.

Now I am not suggesting that we should stop examining whether given approaches have provable impact.    We must try and check that the actions we take are having a positive impact as otherwise we may undertake initiatives which have no impact or even a negative impact on student learning.   We must however accept that there are unlikely to be educational practices which are so generalizable as to have truly hard evidence which supports their impact.