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Listen in: every educator is complaining about administration.

June 18, 2014

Background

Part of my professional life, I spend teaching. I like that part of my job a lot. I discovered my passion for teaching many years ago. It is one of my few powers of life that is not declining with age. Health, muscle power, memory, ... they all suffer from the progress of time. Luckily, one’s passions never age.

My circle of friends counts a lot of teachers: primary school, secondary school, higher education, ... the whole lot. They all share my passion: getting the most out of our world’s youth.

Though there are a lot of new technologies supporting our job, and there’s the evident broadening movement from knowledge-oriented to competence-oriented and life-long learning, the nature of the job did not change that much. Children and adults-to-be need to be inspired, challenged, supported, criticized, applauded, ... and all of that in a precious balance.

A cry for help!

However, one thing did change dramatically: the last few years, I hear all of my collegues complaining about the amount of administration they are subjected to. Recenty, those complaints have sharpened into a harrowing cry for help.

My nature is of the quite resilient type, so, though I feel the increased administrative pressure, I kind of manage to cope with it by only committing to the bare necessities when it comes to administration. Yet, a deep reflection of ‘our industry’ is paramount.

Observation

My observation is that the marginal return on investment of the recent administration has become negative.

Many elements are involved:

  1. In many cases the software supporting the administration of an educational institution is of detrimental quality. Cause? Written by people who are not ‘on the job’. Speaking in terms of product design: user-centered design is often misconceived as designer-placing-himself-in-the-position-of-the-user-centered design. I summarize this as: written by incompetent people. Very often, the software is also written by people that don’t have the overall view on the educational business.

    That brings me to a second element.

  2. A lack of people with an overall view on the educational business, capable of judging how procedures and administration influences agility, motivation ánd quality.

    That brings me to my third element.

  3. I consider quality control to be a must have, not a nice to have. I regularly see problems with staff and students that are due to lacking quality control resulting in ‘institutionalized and therefore long-time tolerated problems’. Only a decent quality control and an organization acting upon it can avoid that. However, the educational system is ill-equiped with the means to do efficient quality control. By that I mean quality control with a good marginal return on investment. For that, you need good people and good tools. But also people with a vision, who can make a stand against the often absurd requirements that the institution or ‘the outside world’ portrays to be necessary.

    That brings me to my fourth and final element.

  4. Teachers need a stable pedagogic framework. Our thesaurus keeps changing: old concepts are relabeled over and over: teaching goals became skills, then competencies, even core competencies, and recently learning outcomes. Alas, every relabeling requires doing the same administration in a different setting over and over again. Put this in the perspective of detrimental-quality software and you’ll get the picture. I realize that insights of pedagogic experts change (dare I say ‘improve’?). However, the marginal return on investment is often neglected in the debate. Reason for that? Paper and publishing papers and books have become too cheap.

Global warming

I can illustrate these elements with testimonies of my circle of friends, but I will not do so out of respect for all the parties involved. I don’t throw stones for the fun of throwing, but I cannot but signal a disaster that is about to happen: the wiring of a lot of our most enthusiastic teachers is overheating and on its way to a complete melt down. We will all play the price if that happens.

People have proven to be very good at denying the effects of global warming. I hope we will get to realize the global overheating of the educational industry a bit sooner.