Leading Systemic Change in Education - A Conversation with Kevin Bartlett

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If you did simplify and systematize everything to do with learning, teaching, assessing, leading, and the goal was a systemic school and a systemic school system, where would you start? The leadership is the absolute key to the success of these approaches. If the leaders get it, it flies.

Welcome back to the podcast. It was a fantastic pleasure to be able to speak to Kevin Bartlett today. Kevin has held school leadership positions in the UK, Tanzania, Namibia, Austria, and Belgium, where he was the director of the International School of Brussels from 2001 to 2015. Kevin currently leads the learning design team at Escuela Internacional San Pedrana in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where he is based. Kevin is the founding director of the Common Ground Collaborative, which he established with Gordon Eldridge in 2014 as a nonprofit global community of sensemakers, innovators, educators, and partners sharing a common goal: to co-create a compelling alternative to traditional curriculum design. Kevin has co-designed accreditation systems for ECIS, the Council of International Schools, and New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Kevin is a regular author of articles on a range of topics, a keynote speaker and workshop leader, and and works with schools on a wide range of school development and transformation topics. He works as a writer and trainer for the Principal's Training Centre, and as a curriculum designer, he was the initiator and early leader of the IB PYP Programme. You can connect with Kevin on Twitter or LinkedIn and find the links in the show notes.

Hey Kevin.

Hey Tim.

How are you?

Yeah, fine.

Great. So just would love to begin by hearing a bit more about the Common Ground Collaborative, because obviously you've been around for a while since the Total Schools Conference in 2014, as I understand, but I think perhaps not everybody is aware of the amazing work that CGC has been doing over that time. So yeah, I would love to just hear a bit more from you about the origins and who you are and kind of what you are in the sense. So you're not a curriculum organization or an authorizing body. So just what are you?

Yes, it's a good question, Tim. It's actually quite hard to define something that hasn't existed before using language that has existed before. So I'll just unpack it. I'll use a bit of Simon Sinek thinking and start with why. I guess the why goes back to my early days designing the International Schools Curriculum Project, which became the IB PYP, and it was one long continuum of wrestling with actually trying to transform the reality of international education Education, I think, and recognizing initially that there was no real common curriculum for younger learners within the array of offerings in international education. That turned into the PYP. And then continuing that kind of thinking in order to close gaps, I think, Tim, gaps in the system, but also gaps within the system that we call a school. So gaps between disciplines, gaps between what the board thinks and what the director's doing, gaps between parental expectation and the school, gaps between departments. So I looked at the work we were doing in the learning business and I just saw gaps. I saw more gaps than connections. And I saw a lot of tremendous inefficiency because of that and tremendous ineffectiveness. Gaps in communication so that people are reinventing the wheel all over the world. So the big why was to take schools really from complexity to clarity, from silos to systems, with a sense of this just doesn't make sense. Some people actually call us the Common Sense Collaborative. So it's been a, for me, a very long decades-long inquiry with the ultimate goal of saving stress, saving work, saving wasted energy by creating common solutions to what are always common dilemmas. And in so doing, simplify, synthesize, systematize, and just put it out there in the service of schools and parents and kids to say, you know, there's probably a better way to do this. And so it could never be just a curriculum. Because that's what happens in schools. Yeah, decisions about professional learning, not recognizing that what we should be learning about is how to do this kind of learning because it's in the curriculum. So then what we did was we, we said, if you did simplify and systematize everything to do with learning, teaching, assessing, leading, and the goal was a systemic school and a systemic school system, where would you start? And we started as inquirers. So we started with 4 questions. We said, well, you know, it's pretty hard to know if you're doing good learning if you don't know what learning is. So why don't we start by defining learning? And that's the kind of process question. It's not just nice fancy words about we create lifelong learners and stick it on the wall. How do people actually learn so we know how to teach them? So if that's a how question, we then said, well, you've still got the content issue. Yeah. Learn in a vacuum. So The next question for us was, what's worth learning and why? So what is learning? Then what's worth learning? Then we all know the key feature in the quality of learning is the quality of teaching. So how do we teach for that? How do we build learning cultures in every classroom? And no point doing any of that if the kids can't show us what they've learned. So CVC is in effect a global conversation. We actually say when you join us, you don't adopt a program, you join a conversation. And it's about how do we construct a connected learning ecosystem through which learning is well-defined, well-designed, well-delivered, well-demonstrated. So things within it, Tim Logan, especially in the what's worth learning and why, what you would normally call curriculum, learning goals, learning modules organized into very compelling learning matrix organized under what we call the human commonalities, which kind of clusters of disciplines. But it also includes mission work as you define, not only but the purpose of the school. It's pedagogical work as you work out how to teach that way. It's assessment work as you work out how to demonstrate that. Yeah. It's connecting to stakeholders. What is the parent's view on that? How do the kids exercise voice and choice? So I guess the only name I can give it is what we gave it. It's a learning ecosystem.

Yeah.

And then it's a global systemic conversation about creating that ecosystem in a customized way in every school.

Brilliant.

I guess that's as close as I can get to a simple enough explanation.

That's, that's pretty concise for a decade's worth of work. Amazing. So, I mean, if you walk into a school that has adopted the CGC ecosystem, would there be a sense that you would know that that was happening, or, you know, is the CGC mapped on top of or working alongside the IB or other frameworks? Just on a practical level, how do you see that?

Yeah, it's a good question, Tim. In one sense, because it's simply systems thinking applied to learning, you could say it's program agnostic. Yeah, but to answer the question in a different way, I'm a big fan of the work of Margaret Wheatley, and she would say when you walk into any organization, you feel the culture immediately. You don't even know how you're doing it. Absolutely. So there is a culture that's shared across a lot of CGC member schools. We actually tend— I try to stay away, Tim, from the words CGC schools because the thing about branding and proprietariness and other organizations students use. Yeah, make me uncomfortable. It's the school we're partnered with and we're helping them. But if you take another example, which is a school that starts up using CGC principles, you would see very, very clear physical manifestations of the culture. In fact, one of the things we do is we're very conscious about what it takes to build culture. Again, Drucker's saying culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we thought, so let's be concrete about that. What are the elements of a culture? Well, one is a shared language. And we define learning and we have this sort of iconic piece of our work, the 3 C's: conceptual, competency, character.

Yeah.

So if I can mention a school name, if you walk into Beacon Private School in Bahrain, huge letters on the lobby and the walls of this new school, conceptual learning, we understand that. Competency learning, we are able to. Character learning, we are becoming more. In English, in Arabic. So this very culturally iconic artifact, if you like, of the language of the CGC alive and well in this school. And then you would hear that language and you would see multiple examples of student work, learner work on the walls about math or science. We used to think that— now we understand that— and it could be about water cycle, or it could be about one of the modules which I really love, it's called So what's real news? Yeah. So there is a language that characterizes CGC thinking about the 3 Cs. We then talk about the map of human commonalities, the matrix of modules and the modules themselves that define the content. But many of our schools are existing schools. They're not starting from scratch.

Yeah, of course.

Even if you had PYP, MYP, DP, a full IB World school, and there are thousands of them, and then many of them are wonderful. It still helps if you define learning and use a common language with the kids or teachers. So yeah, there is, there are certain things that are very recognizable, but they're applicable in all kinds of contexts. And this is another piece of thinking from Margaret Wheatley. She says, when you work in goals like this and projects like this, you co-create in context.

Yeah.

And she said, when it goes really well, you co-create the context.

Nice. Yeah, that's nice.

You actually change the context because of the interactions. And that just happens to varying degrees. If it's a startup, it starts right from the beginning. If it's an existing school, you'll always see a combination of some elements from here and there and different systems. And there are, there are other systems with which we cohabit extremely well. Probably the most obvious is Understanding by Design.

Yeah.

I'm happy to say I have a very enjoyable friendship with Jay McTighe. So he and I looking at ways to combine some of our works.

Brilliant. What I particularly appreciate about it is, in a way, that your reluctance, let's say, to pigeonhole or box off yourself as a, as more of a product that you can drop into a school, because I think sometimes there's a tendency to imagine that that will fix the culture and fix the problems, but actually by not quite defining yourselves as any one particular thing. That's quite an interesting challenge to people to imagine that it's— there's a much more interconnected and systemic piece of work that needs to be done by the leadership and by everybody in, in the organization. That's, that's quite an interesting challenge, I think.

No, and I think that's very perceptive, Tim. I have a kind of gut-level aversion to programs in one sense, for the reasons you said. School has become distressingly complicated. Andy and Aiken said schools and hospitals, the two most complex human organizations, and that's somewhat inevitable, but I think we've made it worse. There's an accretion of layers of complexity in curriculum programs, accreditation programs, and what we've been doing is we're being the kid in the emperor's new clothes and saying, hang on, we actually need some of this stuff. But I understand, because I led schools for many years, I understand the urge of the very, very busy, the school leaders, expected to have lots of answers, expecting to fix things, reach out to silver bullets, to the latest thing, the latest program, the latest sales pitch. And we've tended to say it's ironically why we claim to make things simpler. Actually being a great school is never simple. Yeah. But you can interpret simple as meaning easy or clear.

Yeah.

And we've made the pathways clear. 3 to 5 years of solid, sustained hard work to create a systemic school. And it's nice to think that if you buy into this program, it will somehow get fixed quicker. Yeah, but I don't think you can avoid the fact that reculturing is a long, intense process. But I have to say, the schools that have taken it on and stayed with us, you really see transformations. And I could list lots But I prefer to say things like, we do good work, not because we're programmed, but because we're principled. CGC is a very principle-driven approach to transforming schools. So not program, but it is a set of principles that you build and contextualize and work from.

Absolutely. And within that, obviously there's a huge role there for the leadership in the school. And that's obviously, you've got decades worth of experience of school leadership yourself. And then working with school leaders to shift the culture and bring in this more systemic approach. What would you say were the— I mean, could you distill it down into certain characteristics of the leadership that is somehow required for this type of culture shift and reculturing?

Well, one thing I would say is whatever else any research may show, just from my personal experience, the leadership is the absolute key to the success of these approaches. Yeah, there's no way of getting around it. If the leaders get it, it flies. If they don't get it so deeply, it works, but it works more slowly and it's more of a struggle. And if the leadership changes, and if the people recruiting the replacement leader are not committed to the direction, it can grind to a halt very quickly. Yeah, and I think the afflictions of international schools is the stop-start nature of course, because of the changes. So just to combine an earlier answer, I tend to think there are certain principles of leadership that are important, and those can be understood and implemented by a whole range of people with different personal characteristics and tendencies and backgrounds. And in fact, when I'm working with boards and leaders together, we work to co-create a shared set of principles. And I think if any leader followed those principles, they'd be successful. So for example, I always give principles names so that you can— you've got a handle on them. The relationship principle or the community principle, again Wheatley, leaders need to reach across the traditional boundaries and talk to people in all parts of the system. So if leaders don't recognize that you need to build relationships around this direction, it's not going to go very well. Yeah, the principle of learning or learning impact, if they're not aware maybe this is just my own belief, the purpose of leadership is to have a positive impact on the quality of life and the quality of learning in that organization. And then you do certain things to do that. The sustainability principle, we need to create systems that survive the turnover of individual personnel, what I was just talking about.

Yeah.

Um, I like the inquiry principle. Leadership as a process of inquiry. So learning from the Adaptive Schools movement, So I'd say there are certain principles of leadership and we teach to those. We've just written a new leading to learn, learning to lead program for middle-level leaders, because I think another part of the leadership is building the leadership capacity deep down into the organization.

Yeah.

Somebody said that you judge a leader by the number of leaders they leave behind. So we're just about to launch a new online leadership set of sessions Well, for all leaders, but it's really for the middle-level leaders. It's hard. It's hard for a small leadership team to lead a big faculty in any direction, to the dining room, let alone towards a new system. But a good team leader can lead 5 people in that direction. And I think we've severely underutilized, underrecognized, underrewarded middle-level leadership. So, so yes, leadership all the way down to Following the same principles.

Yeah.

And then a couple of other practical things about that, to move away from every teacher writing their professional goals every year, what we came to call letters to Santa Claus. The teacher says, 'Now it's go— we have to write our goals for the year.' They sit down, write a bunch of goals, they send them off to the North Pole. Nobody replies, nothing happens. But next year's Christmas again. I'm a huge believer in goal setting and feedback and planning. But what we've advised schools is one collective faculty goal of very high impact on every kid in the school.

Brilliant.

Because that way you've got a chance of tracking it, you can see the impact, you can have faculty meetings about it, you can share successes and struggles. So it's kind of leadership deep down with lots of leaders following similar principles and certain practical decisions. So not being just the individual principle and what they're good at or not, but yeah. How does leadership function in this school collectively? We've defined the learning, now let's define learning impact and let's just work for that and let's stop doing a bunch of other stuff.

Busy work, as Greg Curtis calls it. Yeah, moving beyond busy. I mean, there's so many things you've just said I would love to dig into, but one of them, you just referring now to the adaptive schools system. One of the things that always gets me is that these ideas have been around for now for decades and decades, right? I mean, that stuff, the adaptive school stuff, is just wonderful and it's old, right? It's been around for a really long time, but it seems like we keep not being quite successful in actually implementing the, the vision of what school could be, you know, what this school as a learning organization really could be. Where do you think the thing— where do they fall down?

Yeah, I think it's a really fascinating question, Tim, and a really important one. I've had the same conversation with Jay McTighe over the last few weekends. Here are a bunch of ideas from Coalition of Essential Schools, from John Dewey, from Reggio Emilia, from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, from Ron Ritchie, from Adaptive Schools, and the best ones rise to the surface and they're extremely robust and they all complement each other. I like to think of the CDC's definition of learning. I wouldn't claim it's as powerful as UBD's Facets of Understanding, but it's of similar nature. It takes one of the dilemmas and wrestles it to the ground and comes up with a simple, persuasive, sustainable, robust answer. So we've got all the tools we need to create really great schools and we don't. So, and we've puzzled over that a lot. We come up with a lot of reasons. I think one is not everybody's good at seeing the connections between these things. So you have a school with good curriculum but then an awful teacher evaluation system that's almost in contradiction of everything the curriculum says, and no one's saying, well, hang on, shouldn't professional learning mirror student learning and not be evaluation but a learning process? So there's a failure sometimes to see how things are connected. There's turnover, especially in international schools. There's— nobody can make it happen in international schools because there's no government to mandate anything. And then often when you do have a government that mandates things that do make things stick, they mandate the wrong things for political reasons. Somebody once said to me, a lot of people will stay in a bad relationship unless they go to another person. And I just thought, that's right. There are many, many smart people writing books about what education needs to be like, but most of them write the book and they give the keynotes, but they don't create the school that they write about in their book.

Absolutely.

So we said, and I loved Michael Fullan's term, the new theoretician, people who work backwards from practice. And he talked about on the dance floor doing it, on the balcony looking at it, pulling out the patterns, keeping the ones that work, getting rid of the ones that don't. So we said, we're not just going to write about what a good curriculum should be. We have to be the ones actually produce that curriculum. We had our own ideas into practice. We have to say it looks like this. Our definition of competency involves provide a model and deconstruct it. Well, if there's no model of what a good school looks like, people who want to create one have nothing to deconstruct. Yeah, so we don't know what it actually looks like. It's really quite hard to make it happen, and lots of people have worked on bits of what it looks like— a teacher evaluation system, board training— but That's why CGC is kind of comprehensive because we, we thought we have to have a model of what it all looks like when it's connected. But a lot of it is, is just the, no, we're not going to let ourselves off the hook. We're not going to be theoreticians. We're going to be practitioners. We're going to say, and it looks like this and we can help you do it.

Brilliant. Yeah, absolutely.

What we're trying to do, Tim, is create models of good. This is what it can look like. And then we share them and then we learn from each other and we sustain global conversations. And you see a lot of, oh, we could do that. Yeah. Okay. Why don't we then?

Yeah.

Somebody needed to be the ones who said, okay, we're going to try and put it in practice. But I think the other thing is just optimism. You just have to keep believing that you're making a difference.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then over time, you know, Jim Collins, push at the flywheel. Over time you see gathering momentum. That flywheel is starting to spin a bit quicker.

You've been recently tweeting about the playbook. So what's your vision there in terms of how people might use that? Because I mean, clearly there's a tension in what you're saying between seeing models and examples of what it might look like, but steering away from just giving them a recipe for how to do it, you know, essentially programmatizing it to then drop it into their school wholesale. So how are you seeing the playbook working for you.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a great believer in McLuhan's 'the medium is the message,' you know, and I think the language we use is hugely important. For example, certain cultural language coming out of certain national systems which refer to teaching as instruction, professional growth as supervision, leaders as administrators, you know, the language we use determines the way we think. Yeah. So we were looking for a medium, a linguistic visual medium to convey the notions of simplicity. But I was also trying to get across the idea of learning as the most important game in town for the kids and the only one we don't teach them how to play. I'm a huge admirer of David Perkins. He's a wonderful thinker, and I've been privileged to meet him. He's also a very nice guy, brilliant and unassuming, which is a nice combination. Yeah, he did a baseball analogy for learning. And we kind of played off that. And then I love sports and I love the notion of teacher as coach. So in Brussels we have this massive American football program and my son played for 4 years. I learned a lot about American football.

Yeah.

Learning as the learning game, but we're going to teach it to the kids so they know how to play the game. Parents, not just as cheerleaders, not just as bewildered bystanders, but as active participants. Here's how the game of learning works and let's share it with the kids. So it was an attempt to find a language medium that would be appealing to people because who wants to read books about curriculum? To appeal to the metaphor of learning as a game, teacher as coach, kid as knowledgeable, informed player in charge of their own game. So it was working on a lot of levels, working with our graphic designer who's brilliant. If you're working in the graphic novel genre, you are obliged to simplify.

Yeah.

And I had to rethink our own learning ecosystem and replace things. In order to tell the story in graphic novel style. One of my friends in Brussels, David Willows, who's brilliant in advancement, would always say, everyone wants to know the story of a school and their place in that story. So telling learning as a story in the form of a graphic novel and telling it as a learning game with a playbook was an attempt to bring that simplicity, story, system, here's how it all fits together, really just as an explanatory document that might attract people to bother to read it. Whereas I knew if I, you know, I write a lot of articles and things, but you know, how do you know who's reading any of that stuff? And I just wanted something that people would go, wow, that's different. And it's short enough and visually appealing enough for people to actually read it. So it was all those things, Tim. In keynotes, I talk about every kid, the MVP, every child should feel like the most valuable player at any given moment in a school. And they don't. They don't work out the game. I learned that from my experience teaching some of our own students in Brussels and realizing some of our high school kids couldn't take notes. Yeah, yeah, you know, nobody had taught them. So let's get people to at least read this stuff and let's tell CGC as a story.

Fantastic. And is that something that's available to just CGC members or is that a publicly available document?

We've kind of changed our strategy in the last year or two, working with my brilliant partner, um, Brooke in Brussels. We're kind of shifting from a content-providing organization to a conversation leader and support provider. And we're radically shifting our kind of membership structure. So this Thursday, we hold a, we hold a session every Thursday with a new idea. We're launching individual membership. We've opened CGC Connect, that community site. We have about 550 people in the first month, I think. Wow.

Brilliant.

What we're trying to do, Tim, is we're saying, look, our driving purpose is not monetary, it's not just about school membership. Write down to it is as many kids as possible benefit from this learning. So what is the way to reach as many people as possible is not to worry so much about protecting our content, it's how do we get the ideas out there. So we are very much into sharing what we've got. Even the individual membership, we're very mindful of sticking to our culture of being not commercial. We're going to ask people to pay for individual membership, but we've given them a sliding scale. We never want anyone to be excluded from our thinking because of money. Brilliant. The playbook is going to be available to anybody who wants it, membership available to anybody who wants it, and on a sliding scale of what people can pay. This will put off some listeners, but yes, it's a kind of learning socialism. It's like social medicine. It's kind of everybody chips in so that everybody can have access to— so yeah, the Learning Playbook will be freely available. We just, we want to reach as many kids as possible.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

But it's, it sounds corny and it maybe, maybe it sounds naive, but we are seriously driven by the moral purpose of more learning, less stress for kids, parents, making sense of stuff, helping. And it, it does generate its own sustainability. The wonderful book, The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. That's what he talks— we're in the long game.

Yeah.

Driven by just cause, as he calls it, inclusive for other people, but it creates a sustainable model in its own right. It's just what drives it.

Yeah.

And that, that keeps you going when the going gets tough.

That leads quite nicely into one of the other questions I wanted to ask you about, because I know obviously you worked with Peter Mark very closely on the development of ACE Learning. And you know, there are, there are many other really quite interesting ecosystems or learning paradigms. I talk with a lot of people on, on this podcast. I spoke with the LearnLife guys last week, and there's Lumiar from Ricardo Semler, and then there's ACE Learning from Neask. And how do you see the partnership potential within that? Because what I'm hearing from you is a lot about systemic transformation, but then I also see a lot of different ideas being proposed, you know, with similar but significantly different elements to them. You know, do you see that as a positive diversity within the ecosystem that's necessary and important, or, or is there a sense that some of that is fragmentation and kind of loss of energy as people pull in slightly different directions?

Yeah, it's a difficult question. I mean, it's a complex question because I think at a very broad level, and I'll try not to be too declarative, if you take the whole system, I'd say crudely, broadly, there are probably 3 ecosystems within international education. Let's say there are the very obviously for-profit groups. They have their own motivation. There are the nonprofit, what I would call rather bureaucratic groups. I'm not going to name anybody who tend to have a controlling relationship with their members. And then there are the, um, the kind of practitioner theoreticians. The Principal's Training Centre, wonderful. Bambi Betsos, Theory into Practice, CGC, ISS, you know, the ones who, who are trying to put things in the hands of schools for the kind of right reasons. And then within that, there's a lot of really, really good thinkers. Personally, it seems to work in not to sound too vague or silly, almost a Zen kind of way. Uh, we tend to find each other. I'm now working with a really smart and interesting person who runs the HIVE schools around the world with Jay McTyre, with the Consilience Group, with Shabir Luther in Mumbai, and really trying to work together. And I think in the end, within that kind of general movement of focusing on learning, and trying to do the right stuff. The fact that there's a lot of models out there is probably a benefit. It can, almost like politics and splitting the vote, I guess it can dissipate energy, but I think there's nothing to be done about it in any case. People will populate a field and have every right to with their own ideas. Schools have every right to choose who they want to work with and which ideas they like best. Those of us who are inclined towards collaboration will find each other and our work will strengthen each other. Those people who prefer to have their own system and promote it will do well and will do good work. But I guess there's a kind of, well, what are we going to do anyway? So I think it's a reality. And what we do is someone sends an article, someone makes a connection, or I'm in a Zoom with a bunch of people. And I think I like the way this person talks and thinks. We contact each other. We do some work together. We get stronger together. There's a kind of fluidity about it that is interesting.

Yeah, that's—

so I just think the proliferation of good ideas is a good thing, you know.

Good. I mean, quite honestly, that's one of the things that I'm hoping to do with the podcast. There, I'm trying to bring some of those ideas together in some format, you know, sense-making through conversation with brilliant thinkers, because there are so many interesting connections and commonalities between many of those ideas. And, you know, at the end of the day, I would agree that we can't do anything about it, but collaboration is a better default position than siloing, going back to your original point at the very beginning.

Yeah, and I, I just find it as a learning exercise. That's what I love about it, Tim. It's my personal professional learning working with Will. I learn a huge amount working with Will. So there's just great benefit in sessions among people And you somehow, they morph into thinking and they strengthen your own work and another piece falls into place and it just evolves and grows.

That, I mean, that is learning, right? That is inquiry and that is learning. And that's what we want.

Well, that's exactly our definition, Tim. And I'm always thinking that we define inquiry as simply as possible. I think Einstein's as simple as possible and no simpler than that. Connect, construct, contribute. So every time I talk to someone, including this conversation, I make a connection with what I already thought. I begin to construct a slightly new idea and I begin to check it out and share it back with you. And it's ongoing spiral of connecting and then constructing and then checking it out and contributing it. And then from that new platform, another connection, another construction, and conversation is the best tool.

Exactly. Amazing. Wow. That's really a wonderful conversation. Thank you, Kevin. It's a real privilege to be able to speak to you and I really appreciate your time. Thank you for joining me.

Yeah, it's fun, Tim. Thanks. I learned a lot. So thank you for the learning and pulling everything together.

Brilliant. Thanks, Kevin. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.