When addition leads to loss
By Graeme Salt
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Schools and parents, with the best intentions, often make a similar mistake. Both want the best for their children, and are ready to invest heavily in order to achieve this. Sadly though, both often over-commit in pursuit of advantage to the detriment of those for whom they care most. Let me explain scenarios I have seen at school and in the home.
In schools, parents should be pleased to know that change is generally a good thing. Evidence suggests the majority of initiatives designed and implemented to improve children's learning do actually work. However, only so many initiatives can be implemented at one time, and, critically, some initiatives work so much better than others.
The greatest challenge faced by school leaders is deciding just which initiatives to choose for implementation. Change that represents additional commitments for staff and students is unlikely to be as successful as carefully considered substitution.
Fortunately for school leaders (and consequently parents and children), there is plenty of high-quality evidence to help make these decisions. Seminal meta-analyses of educational research by John Hattie have identified and objectively ranked factors that are shown to improve children's learning. His research has been evolving and improving for over a decade and, in my opinion, schools would need very good reasons for not latching on to the top recommendations. As a school leader charged with prioritizing, having evidence from thousands of research papers is certainly a welcome guide, and a comfort, when making important decisions.
At my school, Dulwich College Seoul, we have adopted Hattie's research to focus our recent efforts narrowly on three factors: building ever-stronger student-teacher relationships; providing more frequent and personalized feedback; designing more lessons to capture our wonderful students' imagination and curiosity for learning. While we cannot implement every educational initiative out there, we can use evidence to select the best options for our students.
Parents face a similar difficult challenge. There are only so many hours in a day for a child, and so many potential priorities to pursue towards traditional definitions of success and advantage. Will there be extra music, swimming, team sports, maths, coding, English, Korean, SAT practice, extra examination courses, etc.? The big difference for parents, unfortunately, is that there is not the wealth of research evidence to help make the decisions about how their precious children's time is best allocated.
Without this evidence, additional commitments often prevail over substitution in a spirit of FOMO ― Fear of Missing Out, and this is to the detriment of a child's life. Some examples are ripe for immediate substitution (or preferably subtraction) to make way for sleep, eating with family, fun, personal interests and reading for pleasure. These include the long hours of passive, low-productivity directed learning involving tutors in non-accredited and unregulated classrooms; exposure to subject material way beyond a child's meaningful level of understanding; long travel times and late evening appointments. Of course, there are very good arguments for additional study and activity beyond school which I fully support, with the most appropriate being chosen by students to meet their interests, ambitions and self-targeted learning. Like school leaders, parents must be thoughtful and courageous in making the tough choices of substitution. If they do, they will reap the rich dividend of getting the best from their children while conserving their loved ones' health, happiness and interest in learning.
Graeme Salt (Headmaster@dulwich-seoul.kr) is the headmaster of Dulwich College Seoul, a part of the Dulwich College International (DCI) network of schools.