Claire Amos

Over the last year or so I have thoroughly enjoyed being part of the establishment of what looks to be a particularly fabulous West Auckland COL - Te Whiria te Tangata. It is great to see school communities of schools coming together to collaborate to improve student outcomes. It is great to see school communities of schools collaborating, full stop. However I do have a concern. I am not concerned that communities of learning won't see schools coming together to improve learner outcomes, what I am concerned about is that they may not, because of their very structure and achievement challenges, actually change much else. When scanning the endorsed achievement challenges and in the conversations I have had with many colleagues from a range of communities, I keep thinking, is there much within COL plans and achievement challenges that move beyond the paradigm of business as usual? Or are we simply going to see communities of schools holding hands, singing kumbaya and patting t...

Today I am writing a *brief post to simply try and get myself rebooted and back writing on a weekly basis about the sort of stuff that keeps me awake at night, keeps me thinking about education pretty much 24/7. I admit it I am obsessed and happily so. The topic outlined in the title is one such topic, often causing me to toss and turn at 4am. It is a topic I have avoided tackling here because it is so complex and brain hurty. But before I get to the how, let's start with the why. The reason why we need disrupt education is because we need to change education. The reason we need to change education has been covered many times in many places (see here and here ) - basically the world is changing, industry is changing, schools are not. Okay they are. But at a pace so glacial I am not convinced we will see the widespread and deep seated change we need unless something happens to disrupt on a system wide level. So what (short of something catastrophic like war or natural disas...