Happy Friday, Reader

So this week I have been doing a bit of reading into this Alpha School movement. I’m pretty new to it, so I’m still forming a view myself. But what’s interesting is there’s been a massive reaction to some of the people who are working there, and it’s made me think a lot about how quickly we often decide what someone else’s choices mean.

So if you’re catching up with this, Alpha is this school network currently in the US, built around quite a radically different school day. A lot of their main academic learning is concentrated into about two hours using some learning apps, with the rest of the day devoted to more activity work and life skills.

They have adults called guides there to support their students, and Alpha makes quite ambitious claims about how much children can learn through their approach (although it has to be said there are some serious questions about some of the evidence behind it).

The latest debates concern the public introduction of their learning science team, which has quite a few familiar names in education. For example, Peps Mccrea, you might have heard of him with his brilliant writing on effective teaching and his work in teacher development.

You may have heard of Becky Allen if you’re from the UK. She’s an educational researcher and co-founder of Teacher Tapp. Carl Hendrick is also there. He co-authored How Learning Happens, and he does a lot of work about bringing research about learning to a bigger audience.

Now, if those names are new to you, the context is that a lot of their work has helped many teachers think really carefully about the evidence and practice, and people have built a lot of trust in their judgement over the years through their blogs and their work.

So I can understand why them being involved in such a radically different project has raised eyebrows. Like, how can a school that hands so much of its instruction to software, for example, fit with the kind of teaching these people have advocated for for a long time? And what does their involvement mean about Alpha’s claims?

I think these are reasonable questions, and I think the public debate has also included a lot of challenges to the idea of what a learning scientist label is, and a bit of concern about whether these big names are lending credibility to a model that still needs a lot more scrutiny.

But my view is that some of these judgements have just arrived far too quickly.

Take even the timeline. It’s probably a lot more complex than "a of wave of people joining". Some people have been doing consulting for them for quite a while before this public introduction. And what about the remit as well? Alpha describes the team’s remit as improving their apps, which is a good thing, right?

What that leaves me wanting to know is what each person is doing and what influence they have. I think there could be such good in having these brilliant minds improving this system in those schools. And whether that happens and whether it justifies those claims, they’re questions I think we need to keep coming back to.

What this did bring to mind for me was this study that I’ve looked at a few times by Jerald Jellison and Judson Mills. In two experiments they did, there were students who committed to recording their opinions for a public audience, and before they’d even made the recordings, their private views on those issues became more extreme.

Now this is an older study, published back in the late ’60s, and it doesn’t tell us that changing our minds is totally impossible. But I do think it gives a strong warning about what can happen when we commit publicly, which is what a lot of people have done.

A lot of people have committed publicly to saying "this is wrong", "this means X, Y, or Z", and I worry about that.

I think about that a lot in the context of school leadership. If you express a strong view about a proposed change in a staff meeting, for example, and then learning something afterwards complicates your position, you have to then reconsider your whole position in front of people who have heard your confident verdict.

And there’s a huge social cost attached to something that should, as educators especially, feel like an ordinary part of learning.

Now I don’t know enough about Alpha to offer a proper judgement here, but I do think we have to be careful about choosing a side or a camp so early that any new information that we learn over the coming weeks and months we then have to defend ourselves against.

I think there’s room to have concerns. I think there’s room to ask really difficult questions. I think there’s definitely room to remain curious about what answers are provided. But I also think as leaders and educators we have to be cognisant of how we’re helping. We have to feel able to revise our views without embarrassment too.

So I wonder, where might you need to leave yourself a little bit more room to change your mind?

Have a great weekend.

Shane