All great educators from Mortimer Adler to Jerome Bruner, from John Dewey to Sir Michael Barber, from Grant Wiggins and John Goodlad to Sir Ken Robinson, from Marva Collins to Maria Montessori, and from Richard Elmore to Graham Nuthall and John Hattie are all in agreement around a few key fundamentals, namely, that schools should be places where families can place their trust and hopes, where they can expect dependability and fairness, and where the day-to-day systems and operations are reliable, consistent, and above all safe places where children can actualise their full potential.
We know these principles lie at the core of the work we do as educators, but we also know that schools too often fail to be highly reliable or consistent, and we know that the reality of schooling (rare exceptions exempted) is at complete variance with the hopes and aspirations of so many. Schools are as different as they are numerous, every magic formula is found wanting in some regard, and as soon as the aspirational becomes manifest it falters. Educators look to the best models to replicate what they know works, but they cannot seem to capture or deliver it. Why not?
Before answering this question, or turning to the Premiera Schools model, I would like to stress what Robert Marzano himself cites in his short introduction to high-reliability schools: just as Richard Elmore and Elizabeth City borrowed from the medical profession to design their instructional rounds, so Marzano cites air traffic controllers and surgeons as examples of high-reliability professions, by which he means professions where mistakes are anticipated, assessed, and consistently avoided. These professions cannot afford to make mistakes. Marzano goes on to assert that schools also have instances of high reliability and consistency, and he names transportation and salaries, both of which happen consistently and without error in most schools. It can be done, he says.
As Elmore and Marzano stipulate, schools can and should learn from other professions, especially from customer relations in the service and hospitality industries, where consistency is an imperative, where the experience of satisfaction in an Apple product, say, or a Radisson hotel stay are designed to be consistent no matter where on earth one experiences them. Schools too can achieve this, and we at Premiera believe with John Hattie that we should simply do more of what we know works with high impact and discontinue those practices that fail to get us the desired outcomes.
We should simply do more of what we know works with high impact and discontinue those practices that fail to get us the desired outcomes.
But we do more of what works by design not by accident, meaning, like Wiggins and McTighe, we plan around only those items that assure success, and they are professional communities of care, collective teacher efficacy, students’ self-reported grades, ongoing and informative feedback, higher-order thinking routines and questioning, authentic learning experiences, holistic and integrated curricula, values-based instruction, robust structures that support child protection and safety, equity and inclusion for all, ownership and accountability, fairness, respect, courtesy, and dependable teamwork. These are the features that lie at the heart of Premiera Schools, and our team has built its entire high reliability and consistent frameworks upon them.
