WICKED PROBLEMS AND THE WORK OF THE SCHOOL

Stephen Murgatroyd does not suffer fools gladly.

With more than 30 years’ experience at the top in universities in Britain, Canada and Dubai, a couple of dozen books to his credit and nearly twenty years running a communications consultancy, his blunt assessment of schools is that they are “failing organisations” run by a demoralised profession that has become little more than an army of target-obsessed box tickers.

Against a map of the province showing major centres of population, natural resources and statistics on education and employment, he argued that most educational policy remains stuck in the 20th century and fails to address what will be needed two generations hence in the second half of the 21st century.

“Schools can be seen as permanently failing organisations that never achieve the outcomes expected, being pulled in so many different directions by employers, parents, publishers, pressure groups, universities, government, health services, teachers and unions,” he says.

“We need to re-think teacher education and professional development. We need to find ways to substantially enhance student engagement.”

One way is to stop teaching subjects, give back autonomy and responsibility to teachers and to borrow a concept from the world of design – work with wicked problems that encourage teamwork, inclusiveness and critical thinking across disciplines.

Wicked problems are those that “tend to have tentacles” – the further one goes into them the more complex they become.

He illustrates this by reference to real issues put before school students in Canada and Britain.

In Canada a class was asked to work out ways to permanently reduce water consumption in their community by 20%. Using a real life problem that went beyond the school walls and that obliged them to use different disciplines – environmental science, geography, maths, communication skills – gave a challenge and focus to the students.

In Britain at a Royal Society of Arts school in Cheshire students were asked to find ways to reduce loneliness faced by elderly people in their community.

Only by engaging students in real life problems can thorny issues such as the high drop-out rates in education for post 16 year olds in Alberta, be tackled, Dr Murgatroyd believes.

The approach is also useful for developing innovative and entrepreneurial thinking – a key issue in a country where 92% of businesses are SMEs and 60% of these will change hands or close down within the next four years as their current owners grow older.

As an advisor to David Hancock, Alberta’s progressive Minister of Education, Dr Murgatroyd believes he has a unique window of opportunity to influence the province’s educational landscape for the next decade or more.

Under an agreement with teacher unions that stipulated no collective bargaining until 2011 in return for filling a pensions gap, the education minister has the opportunity to make some radical changes.

“We have to take a futurist perspective and make changes now that will benefit the next couple of generations,” Dr Murgatroyd says.

And about those job titles when he set his firm up? People always ask about that, he says with a smile.

Chief Scout is the managing director who goes out drumming up work; Chief Explorer works on developing concepts; the Outfitter is the operations manager and the Cartographer maps out company strategy.

Simple really.