Exploring Futures-Focused Leadership for International Schools, with Patrick Alexander

For our introduction to season 3, we’re delighted to be joined by Patrick Alexander from Oxford Brookes University. Over the summer we’ve been working with Patrick to research and create a new collaborative paper, Futures-Focused Leadership for International Schools.

We intend this to be a provocation to leaders, to think differently about the future of education and their role in the creation of this future.

Today we’ll be talking through the key concepts and tools within the paper, and posing some questions for you to ponder as you listen to season three. 

In this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, how can you develop the future literacies needed to lead the school of today into tomorrow?

Dr. Patrick Alexander is Professor of Education and Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, where he is also Research Lead for Education and Chair of the Children and Young People’s Research Network. Patrick’s research focuses on the anthropology of schooling, concepts of the future, and the professional learning of school leaders and teachers. 

Find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-alexander-1082803/

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Find out more about MSB and download our paper, Futures-Focused Leadership for International Schools, at www.makingstuffbetter.com

You can find us on Linked in at

Matt Hall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-hall-msb/

Naomi Ward: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-ward-098a1535/

Transcript

Matt Hall  00:01

Hello and welcome back to Principled from MSB. This season, we're thinking about the future...

Naomi Ward  00:07

In this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, how can you develop future literacies to lead the school of today into tomorrow? 

Naomi Ward  00:19

Welcome everyone. We're back. It's season three of the principal podcast, and I'm here with my good friend and colleague, Matt Hall, and we've been thinking carefully about you, our listeners, and the content of this season. So Matt over to you, we've been busy, haven't we thinking about some themes to explore in season three?

Matt Hall  00:43

It's really, really great to be back Naomi. And yeah, we've been really busy, even though we've not been on the airways came really clear to us in the middle of the last academic year that we wanted MSB to start to step into the research world. We're at a point now where we've got now we're working with lots of international schools on a regular basis. We've got this lovely kind of laboratory, in some ways, so many people to speak to to find out more. And it came really clear that that actually, there's a real need to better understand what might happen next. Lots of questions at the moment about the future of education, but not many answers, and not even necessarily many frameworks to approach it. So after lots and lots of conversations with lots of different international school leaders, we kind of had this emergent theme of future focused leadership. What should we be thinking about now in order to start to plan and imagine a different sort of education in the future, which is no easy task, and so we're really delighted that we were introduced to Patrick Alexander from Oxford Brookes University, who, kind of, after lots of conversations, agreed to dig into the theory and the research on this, but also to have conversation, to be in conversation with international school leaders, with our clients, and CO produced this paper, which is is now available, and as you know, is going to form the theme of of this series. So I'm really excited to get to get stuck in and start to explore each of the domains he identifies.

Naomi Ward  02:13

Yeah, and in this episode, we'll be speaking to Patrick and diving deep. He's been he's been swimming in this world for a few months. So no one better to speak to today who has this sort of fresh in the moment, understanding and and we're not necessarily looking for answers. Actually, we're asking questions, and we're walking with questions for the whole season. So we're loving having you here along the ride and take these questions and take them back into your organizations, and let's see, let's see what we can come up with as a community.

Matt Hall  02:53

Really excited to get started and equally delighted to welcome Patrick Alexander onto our first episode of season three, who joins me and Naomi today. Welcome.

Dr Patrick Alexander  03:06

Thanks. Very much. Great to be here for the conversation.

Matt Hall  03:10

And you've been busy. It's been a busy summer because we for good or for bad, we asked you to do a little bit of a little bit of research for us over the summer season. Yeah, tell us what you've been up to. Patrick,

Dr Patrick Alexander  03:23

Yeah. So, no, it was, you know, it was great to have the conversation that we did before the summer about, you know, thinking about what the the next steps are for how to frame, you know, thinking about leadership and and the conversation we had, I suppose, kicked off with that, that big idea of, you know, what does it what does the future of leadership look like? And then the conversation moved towards, what would a futures focused approach to leadership look like? And I suppose, in have it starting that conversation, we then opened this huge can of worms, didn't we, about what, you know, what the detail of that would be? So yeah, it's been a great summer to dig into that, and it's taken me in all kinds of unexpected directions. And yeah, it's been, it's been a real pleasure, and we ended up with a lot more than we thought we'd end up with. So that's also good, always good to have more stuff, more questions, more provocations.

Naomi Ward  04:13

And I guess that's the theme of the paper, isn't it a provocation? We appreciate your positioning of it. It's not a not a how to it's more a series of provocations that enable people to think through these big ideas within a very specific context.

Dr Patrick Alexander  04:32

Yeah, that's right. I mean, and I think when we were we were talking through it, and you'd suggested speaking to some different, you know, sort of experts in the field, different colleagues from the international school sector. I think, yeah, we quickly got to that point, didn't we, where we thought, okay, what is this? What? What that purpose is this position paper going to serve? And probably the last thing that any school leader needs is another piece of research that tells them what to do. It was really great to start from that position. Saying, well, let's be sort of serious and complex about this, and recognize from from the get go that, you know, obviously we're, this is about a dialog with people who are experts in phronesis, if you like. They're experts in practical wisdom, people who have, you know, decades of experience, working in their settings, working with their, you know, with their teams, with their communities. And so, you know, it would be patronizing at best and unhelpful at worst, to present people with that, with a kind of how to guide for what the future of leadership should look like. And I think in our conversation, we were talking through that, that problem that you see in the kind of education consultancy space where people offer up solutions. And I think, you know, solutions are generally unconvincing as a way into thinking about the future. This idea that, you know, that's that somebody sat down and thought through the problem and come up with a solution that's going to work for everybody. I think in the kind of uncertain world that we, that we live in, that kind of approach just doesn't seem to be as helpful as it could be. And so and so, you're absolutely right now. It was about, you know, starting with a provocation and saying, you know, this is, this is a paper that is full of concepts and ideas that hopefully are helpful, but the way that they're applied is absolutely going to be down to those expert leaders in this, in their settings, you know, working closely with their colleagues to make to unravel a future that's is most relevant and most, you know, sort of most authentic to them, I suppose, yeah,

Matt Hall  06:27

So I really like that. That's the approach, although it's easy, isn't it, to default to solutions and right? And that's why we're so pleased to have partnered with you to do this work, because, you know, that's the work that we do at MSB is creating the conversation and where we can creating better conversations. Because, you know, our work is all around understanding how, how schools shape the future. That said, I know that you have built, you have built what you've written on some theoretical and academic building blocks. I wonder if you just share, before we dive into kind of the specific areas that the paper outlines, just the kind of research and academic basis by which one starts to think about the future. 

Dr Patrick Alexander  07:11

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's a it's a field that I've been interested in for quite a few years now. I came into this looking at how schools socialize young people into thinking about the future in particular ways, and that led me down quite a long road of thinking about how other people have theorized the future as a concept and and in turn, that kind of leads you, especially during during the pandemic. It certainly led me to be to start thinking about that question of, well, what does the not only how do we socialize young people into ideas of the future through school, but also, what might the future of school look like? And I appreciate that. At this point, people start to say, Well, hang on, what are you talking about? Surely, the future is the future, and that's it. You know, that's that's the concept of the future that we all work with. You know, in our daily lives, the idea that the future is simply the thing that follows the present, it's the thing that happens tomorrow or the thing that happens in five minutes. So it might be worth unpacking that to start, to start off with to say, you know, the hopefully, the useful thing about this paper, and about, you know, the concepts that it, that that explores, is that it offers a window into thinking about the future differently, and it uses the concept of futures literacy to do that. So really, the starting point is to try and understand that the future is not a unitary essential thing. So we can think about future time. We'll leave the physics to one side. You know, the future kind of, of course, is a dimension of the reality that we that we live in. It's it's a it's a component of time. But the version of the future that we've all grown to accept is very specific to our cultural context and to our historical context. You know, we expect a particular set of actions in the present to lead to a particular set of outcomes in the future. And typically in schools that is organized around the idea that you know you work diligently, you work hard in school, schools are a place of meritocracy. You know of equal opportunity to to work hard against certain goals, and that if you achieve those goals, you're able to then access different routes into the life course. Right? So you work hard at school, you pass your exams, you get into university, you get that good graduate job, you develop some income, and you live the good life. That is the that is the version of the future that we're often sort of socialized into through schooling, and of course, that that runs into the rest of our adult life as well. You don't need a social scientist to tell you that, of course, that version of the future is is ever less certain. It's a version of of kind of future progress into the life course that, if ever existed, probably existed about 60 or 70 years ago. Know, for a very small number of people. And you know, if anything, in the last 10 years, we've seen a kind of increasing level of what some people call VUCA conditions, so volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous conditions where Donald Trump can come become the president. And you know, you think you're going to be going to school, but you actually end up staying at home for a year, and, you know, teaching from your bedroom or your parents house. You know strange, strange things happen, and the stranger the present becomes, the less relevant that traditional vision of the future is. And so, you know, if you're, if we're thinking about what a futures focused leadership, approach to leadership looks like, it doesn't make sense anymore to kind of to approach leadership in a school or in any context from a position of predictability, you know, to think, Okay, well, we can certainly predict the outcomes that are going to that are kind of, that are going to come from this action, or we can anticipate what we need to react to in the future, because what we've all lived through in the last 10 years is increasing uncertainty. So thinking about the future as a as a concept, rather than a kind of fixed essential component of of the kind of human experience, means that we can start to unpack that. And I suppose the the main means for unpacking that in the context of this paper, again, is this, this, this concept of futures literacy. And futures literacy is a is an idea that was developed by a social scientist called Real Miller, and it's been deployed by UNESCO for over a decade. So it's quite tried and tested as a concept, but again, I appreciate that people might look at that and say, okay, all right, so you're telling us that the future doesn't exist as a kind of inevitable thing, and you're also telling us that we can become futures literate. And so what does that mean? And really in simple terms, it's a way of engaging with anticipation differently. And so in the same way that you can become, you know, literate in terms of in terms of texts, you can also develop futures literacy. And one way to kind of think about that is to think about the difference between a kind of descriptive approach to a thing and an analytic approach to a thing. You know. You can read a novel and you can simply enjoy the story and go, Okay, yep, this was a story about these guys doing this thing. Or you can approach it from a kind of interpretive and analytic, you know, position, and say, okay, so what is this story actually about? Why, you know, why is it the way that it is? Why these characters, you know, engaging with each other? What's the symbolism, what's the message? And so futures literacy is the same approach, but applied to the future. So one starting point to develop futures literacy is to think about anticipatory assumptions. So you know, why? What? What is it that we think is going to happen? That's the first question. You know, what do we think is going to happen in the future of international school leadership? We can ask ourselves that question. And I'm sure listeners will have a list right that they can say, Okay, this is what we think is going to happen. And then the next step is to say, Why do you think that? Why is it that you think the future is going to be the way that it is by doing that you enter into this really valuable, really powerful, but sometimes quite difficult process of critical praxis. And Naomi, I think this is something that you introduced into the paper early on, when we were talking about what it should do, which is the shift from thinking about best practice or what works to best praxis, or what works for thinking about practice. So it's a moment of pausing and looking around and saying, Okay, what is happening in my setting? Why is it happening in the way that it is. And what does that tell me about what's going to happen next, which I know, on one hand, is not rocket science. There will be lots of school leaders who are already doing this, but by making it explicit, by sort of paying, you know, sort of careful attention to the process, you can start to be a bit more deliberative in how that Praxis emerges. And you know what the outcomes of it are, 

Naomi Ward  14:24

yeah, and I hear this central provocation that you know education today is not sustainable, and it feels very timely that this paper is available for school leaders and a word that sort of sang out to me there when you were talking, was to pause and make space for a different kind of conversation. And I wonder, and I know that the futures literacies model kind of gives us an outline for that. And. Right? What might hold us back from thinking in that way? Because schools do run on this repetitive cycle a treadmill, and we're talking about disrupting that with a pause. So what holds us back from that conversation, and what makes it possible? I guess? 

Dr Patrick Alexander  15:20

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for raising that. And I think that's a that's another key sort of provocation in the paper, as you as you suggest, is to recognize that schooling as we do it in the present. You know very much, harks back to the past. If you'd fallen asleep in 1880 and you woke up in 2024 you would wander around the streets, and most things would be unusual to you, but if you saw a school, you would go, Oh yeah, there's a there's a school. And you know, to the point where, certainly in you know, places like like England, that the buildings are literally the same buildings. You know that. So schools really haven't changed in quite fundamental ways in the hundreds and more years that we've had mass education through schooling, and that's a problem, and I think it's also a problem that most leaders recognize, that most teachers recognize. You know, in our in our interviews with international school leaders, there was real consensus that the education systems need to kind of fundamentally change to equip us and to equip young people for the future that's coming around the corner. And I think it's also important to kind of emphasize that that is not a critique of teachers or leaders. Students experience excellent education because of excellent teachers and leaders, but often in spite of the systems that they're working in education works because individuals make it work, but the fundamentals of the system seem very problematic, and you're right to bring it back to to sustainability, because there is quite a strong argument that's been made by lots of scholars in this in this space, someone like Jeremy rappily would be a good example, who have looked at Our current system of education, and made quite a compelling argument to say, you know, it's fundamentally unsustainable. And the reason that it's fundamentally unsustainable, no matter what you do in terms of, you know, ESG or carbon footprints or anything else, is because it is preparing people to work in an economic system that is based on sort of exponential, eternal growth and extraction. And it doesn't matter, really, where you fall on the political spectrum, you know, I think we can agree that, you know, we're in a moment of climate crisis, and that one of the things, unfortunately that is perpetuating this crisis, is education systems that reproduce the conditions by which our economic system can continue. And so taking that pause to say, okay, so what does that mean for me? What does it mean for me in terms of my ethical positioning as an educator? You know? Can we, all of us, as you know, people who are implicated in systems of education, can we sleep at night knowing that we are complicit in these systems that ultimately are creating an economic system that could lead to the extinction of our of our planet? And that's a, you know, that's a big one. That's a hard one to sort of, you know, look at, look in the mirror, at first thing on a Monday morning, but it's, but it's a really important question to pause and ask. 

Matt Hall  18:29

I think there's something in the nature of the subject area and the the challenges that you, that you, that you've just referred to, that that can feel overwhelming. There's a sense, can feel, a sense of hopelessness, the kind of the inheritance of the system. Yes, I acknowledge that it's 100 years old, and I may, as a head, be kind of complicit in perpetuating that, but that's because that's how we do it, and that's what parents expect. And likewise, I acknowledge the scale of the kind of ecological challenge, but I'm running one school in China. Give me a break here. Patrick, yes. And which, which, to be fair, I think you do in the paper, and I think you said it's not solution, but you do mention, kind of, towards the end of this, of the contextualizing of the paper, this idea of regenerative leadership, and this idea of, I really struggle to pronounce it every time. Help me out out here. Add adhocratic leadership, right? Yeah, and yeah, just, just unpick those a little bit more for me, because that, that to me, is in the paper where I go, okay, I get it. This is big and this is complex, and my brain's slightly hurting. Oh, but here's something I can if I'm running a school, here's something I can start to lock onto. 

Dr Patrick Alexander  19:46

Yeah, absolutely. And I think again, it's, you know, it's really important to emphasize that none of us can have this conversation from a position of being outside of complicity. You know that the whole, the whole system is. Is working in, you know, in in a way that is, that is leading us towards this potentially existentially frightening future, right? So, and we're all in it, so that there isn't that there is no kind of righteous position from which someone like me can say, Well, you better change what you're doing. You know, we're all implicated in it. And you're also right, Matt, that that's a, that's a, in some ways, a kind of unproductive place to end the conversation, right? Because if we all say, Well, you know, it's just, it's just too big, there's nothing we can do about it, then we switch off and we go about our business. And similarly, you know, that concept of futures literacy can feel a bit too abstract if you just talk about it in that theoretical way and say, Well, you know, here's a different way of thinking about concepts of the future. And again, you can read that and say, Okay, that's interesting, but, you know, it doesn't sound like it's practically applicable to me. And so you're absolutely right. The kind of the most important thing to that we can do from from both of those positions, a theoretical position or a big philosophical position, is to say, right? So, what is the, what is the pragmatic next step for trying to engage with these things? And when it comes to futures literacy, in the paper, we talk about a very straightforward, sort of three step approach to questioning that helps to make this a real thing. You know, real tangible thing that you can do with teams or with colleagues, with parents, with students, and that three point approach to questioning is what is possible for our school or for a very particular, specific part of practice. So let's say what is possible for as we talk about in the paper, the future of assessment, what possible things might change. And to look at that across a whole continuum, from, you know, what we think is really positive, you know, what would we really like assessment to look like through, to, you know, what we really don't want it to look like? And once you've got that big picture, and that's something you can just, you know, you can talk through with it, you know, as a collective, you can then say, Okay, what is probable? What's the most likely outcome given what we know about the world that we live in? And again, thinking about assessment as the example, we might say, okay, yes, even though it might be possible that we go down this very experimental route to think about how assessment works, the probable thing is that we are going to continue, at least in the medium term, to have the same kind of high stakes approach to assessment that we currently have. And then you look at that and say, Okay, well, what's preferable? What would we actually like to come to be, you know, the outcome from those that range of possible outcomes. And by doing that, you kind of come to a to a kind of ethical position of intention, to say, Okay, we have kind of consensus broadly that this is what we want assessment to look like. You know, we accept that high stakes assessment is going to continue to be important for our school, because it's this, you know, it's the certification capital, if you like. It's the thing that people need to move to the next step. But we actually want to move away from that, and we want to focus on different forms of assessment. And who knows, maybe in the in the medium to long term, that high stakes assessment will reduce in its significance, and different forms of assessment will flourish, and who knows what the impacts of that will be? So it becomes a kind of cycle of questioning to go back to the beginning and say, Okay, so now we know what we think is preferable what's possible. And so you can keep, you can keep having that conversation. And in the paper, we also talked about very, very, you know, sort of pragmatic questions you can ask about the how of that preferable future. So you go, okay, so we know that the preferable future for assessment is this thing, you know, we want to do assessment in this way, What time will it take to do that? Or what time will that happen in? So, you know, traditionally, we think about, you know, exams happening globally between 9am and 10am GMT, you know, which means if you're somewhere else in the world, you've got to get your kids into school at some, you know, a strange hour of the day to do the exam. So, you know, can we think beyond that framing of time, or can we think differently about what time resource is required to make that change? We can think about space. So we can say, okay, where does this happen? Traditionally, we've always thought about physical spaces in school. Obviously, now we know that the kind of space time of school can be imagined in totally different ways. I mean, five years ago, who would have thought that you could think about the future of schooling as being dispersed across different global boundaries? So thinking about the space time of school is a very practical thing you can do to get closer to that preferable future you want to see. And then we also, in the paper, talk about resource bottom line, you know, what's it gonna What's it gonna cost? What capacity do we have to make that preferable future happen? And activity, so literally, what do we need to do to make that that preferable future come to pass? So possible, probable, preferable futures. And then space, time, activity. Resource so that, I think matters the is the kind of practical list of things that people can engage in. And I suppose the the distinction to make is between bureaucratic and adhocratic leadership, or approaches to strategy. And there's nothing wrong with bureaucracy, right? Bureaucracy is necessary to make to make things work, but I suppose you could think about a bureaucratic approach as being responsive to things that have already happened. So it's kind of, it's the it's the traditional approach to management to say, okay, here is the data from last year. Here are the systems that we used to have. In order to manage those future, those systems into the future, we need to adopt a bureaucratic approach. It's about maintaining existing systems, whereas an adhocratic approach, you could suggest, you know, it's that building on that idea of of ad hoc response is about being flexible, being kind of agile, and recognizing the difference between a kind of specific objective and a shared intention towards a specific objective. So, you know, how many of us have strategy documents sitting in a distant file somewhere that you know, that we work on as a team, and then we just leave there because, you know, we thought we needed a strategy, and lo and behold, the future unfolded in an unpredictable way, you know, to which that strategy was not relevant. So thinking about strategy differently, it's empowering, but it's also it's it kind of takes a weight off you. You know, how many, how many times have you the night before you have your annual strategy meeting, are you looking at your old strategy going, God, we really didn't meet that strategy, did we? You know, we didn't meet those objectives, and it's probably not your fault. It's probably because the goalposts moved in the meantime. Or, you know, the intention changed, or the nature of this, of the, you know, school population shifted. So an antiquatic approach is trying to accept that the change is inevitable, and to make strategy something that's a bit more alive, you know, it's something that you that you're kind of constantly doing its process, as opposed to, as opposed to this kind of product, yeah, that you're kind of aiming for. And again, I appreciate that that is something that people will be doing. They'll already be doing. It's simply hopefully this, this paper is a, is a means to kind of, again, sort of slow down and and become attentive to how that happens, such that you can make it continue to happen, or you can make make it continue to happen better.

Naomi Ward  27:33

Yeah. Thank you for that distinction. It's clear. It's clear now, yeah, part of what we want to do as this paper goes out into the world is provide these spaces for people to to process and have these conversations and curate these conversations. And you know, we know that there are already incredible educators in schools, in working in these domains, thinking in this way. But, you know, I think we've all worked in education, and you know, I know that teachers are, in their nature, imaginative, purposeful problem solvers, and they're really seeking those freedoms that this paper is sort of seeking to emancipate, emancipate us from. So I think that's energizing. And we're also pragmatists, aren't we? And that distillation that you offer into, okay, so now what is an important part of the of the process? So, so I wonder, with that hopefully, that futures literacy becoming more we're seeing it now as a framework, perhaps we can dip our toes into these domains. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. You picked out these four areas where futures literacy might be relevant. How did you come to those? And maybe you can introduce them to us?

Dr Patrick Alexander  28:53

Looking at those domains, I think was a it was a useful way to kind of break down this kind of foresight, this approach to foresight into things that are a bit more tangible to say, Okay, well, yeah, thinking about my school. You know, what things do I need to attend to? So even though these domains kind of overlap and intersect, we thought, for this process of futures thinking, it would be useful to have them in in separate domains that are kind of clearly defined. So the first one is probably not very surprising. It's the ecological domain. So, you know, we've already talked about how we're, you know, we're facing this kind of existential threat for the future. And so if you know, one of the things that we're trying to do through our practice is to ensure the most positive, positive future for young people today, it would be impossible to, you know, to approach futures literacy without thinking about ecology. So that's the kind of starting point is to say, okay, the big thing we have to attend to is, you know, imagining a more sustainable future for the world. So very squarely we can think about sustainability as the as a kind of. Key futures focus. And that does mean thinking about, you know, environmental practice in a school, but it also means thinking about, you know, how sustainability is written into the whole curriculum. So, you know, not as a kind of thing that we occasionally talk about, but to try and recognize how sustainability enriches our engagement with any field, right, with any with any subject, and also that all that takes us back to that big question that we raised before about what schooling is doing for the kind of, you know, political and economic systems of the world. So if we are educating young people to see sustainability at the heart of every other practice. So let's say, you know, consumption. If you want to understand consumer culture, you're interested in marketing and advertising, then it makes sense that your education in those fields also recognizes what is the impact of consumer culture. What you know, what is the what is the future of a consumer culture that could be more sustainable is that, is that a thing can that happen? So, you know, it has to be written into into the curriculum all the way through. Again, anyone who's been engaged in sustainability in schools, or who is engaged with sgds will be familiar with this. It's certainly part of, you know, of the curriculum for the International Baccalaureate. It's certainly part of certain A levels. So it's this is not, this is not a kind of a new space, but I think what we've done in the paper is to try and expand what we mean by ecology to incorporate other linked themes. So we're not just talking about the environment, and we're not talking just about a sustainability curriculum, but we're also talking about schools as ecologies themselves. So asking that question, what does the ecology of your school look like? Does your school have a healthy ecosystem? You know, is it in balance? Is that is that balance sustainable? And so I think crossing that line between sustainability education thinking about environmental practice and then thinking about education itself as an ecological practice helps to bring those different fields together and to and to make connections, for example, between sustainability and well being. You know that if you if you have a healthy ecosystem in your setting, then you should see children and young people who are happy, who feel safe, who have a strong sense of belonging, who have a strong sense of respect and commitment to each other, who have a strong sense of community. And of course, that should include parents as well. So it's an ethical proposition that is focused on sustainability, but it's also focused on the sustainability of a whole school ecosystem. And I think by making those links, there are some really interesting challenges there to kind of recognize the connectedness between thinking about the environment and thinking about well being, and importantly, not just thinking about well being as a kind of individual practice that I that kind of crude approach to mindfulness, right to say, How am I feeling, and how can I feel better? But to say, No, you know, obviously my well being is connected to the well being of all the people around me, and again, that might feel a bit abstract. It might feel a bit kind of wooly to say, you know, what do you mean, my school's ecosystem isn't that just a isn't that just a different way of saying, you know, what does a school look like? And the truth is, yeah, it is because expert, experienced leaders will know what a healthy system feels like before they can say what it is or even what it looks like. And this really came out in the in the interviews that we did for this paper, just by simply asking the question, what is, what is? What is a good school? And most of the leaders we spoke to could tell us, you know, and I'm sure people listening will know that feeling when you walk into a school and you just sense that it's a good school. And people talked about things like mutual respect for everybody in the school, all the way from, you know, Professional Services, Administration, anyone working in the school, down to the you know, from the youngest to the to the oldest children. You know that sense of mutual respect, of a kind of shared ethical intention, all of those things that make a school feel good. One person talked about the balance between the kind of tension that you feel in a school if you go in at a certain time of year, so normally around exam season, or the kind of freedom and excitement that you might feel around the educational offer when that tension goes away. So all of those things are part of that kind of ecological view, I guess, of what a school looks like. And so if you're thinking about that domain, you can then go back and take those tools from futures literacy and say, right, this feels good. What is the possible? Future of this ecosystem. What is the probable outcome for this ecosystem, and what is the preferable future for this ecosystem? How do we retain this kind of sustainable, healthy ecosystem that we're seeing now?

Matt Hall  35:13

Yeah, I really like that shift from, you know, ecological to, you know, what are we teaching in citizenship or, you know, this is just a we need to teach kids about the environment too. How do we think of our own setting as, in an ecological way, as a system of exchange and movement? It takes me to a lot of the stuff we talked about in season one of the podcasts, where we're exploring belonging, and often belonging came up through this lens of systemic health rather than individual health, and you can't, you know, you can't feel like you belong if there's not a sense of system and and connection with others. Yeah, I think it's really familiar with with Healthy Schools, but it may, this may just be a new lens by which to view it for a lot of school leaders, 

Dr Patrick Alexander  35:56

yeah, I think, you know, it's important to to emphasize that a healthy ecosystem is not necessarily one that is in pure harmony. And so, you know, that's another, I think, key component that we identify in the in the paper for a healthy ecosystem is this idea of of intellectual well being, and that necessarily requires a certain kind of uncomfortable unease, you know, to say, Well, no, the question is never resolved. We have to kind of keep working at this. We have to keep discussing it. We have to be we have to feel safe and comfortable to disagree with each other. And you know, in the spirit of that, for this paper, we had critique and disagreement from from leaders who we shared with, and we kind of took that critique on board and built it into the paper. So trying to practice what we preach here. I think there has to be some level of kind of critical engagement in order to recognize how an ecosystem can actually thrive. You know, another way to imagine this is the difference between kind of sort of mapping a territory or understanding its weather, you know, the difference between a kind of cartographic approach, which is to say, Okay, here's the territory, here's what my school looks like. I've mapped it. And of course, the process of mapping is past oriented by necessity. Right as soon as the map is finished, it actually doesn't apply to the present, because the you know, the landscape is changing. And so if you think about a kind of meteorological metaphor, you know that you're constantly in your ecosystem, checking the weather, seeing what's changing. You have a much more nuanced sense of that ecosystem. You have a much more sort of nuanced understanding of how, of how the landscape is changing. And you know, another concept that we raise in the paper is this idea of practice architectures, or the things that hold practice in place. And that's another thing that you can see in the ecosystem, you know. You can say, you know, I want the future of my school to look like this, but I just don't seem to be able to get there. And so by asking those questions, you can say, okay, these bits of the of practice are holding, you know, holding what I'm doing in place in the same way that, you know that a riverbed shapes the flow of a river. This is a metaphor from, from, you know, a scholar called Stephen chemist. But the river doesn't always stay the same, and if you assume it does, you're probably missing something about that ecosystem. And again, I'm not saying this because, you know, we're above that, or we can see it differently. You know, we're all doing this all the time, but again, pausing paying attention to that ecosystem and recognizing that it's in this kind of constant sort of process of flow and shift, helps you to just get closer to it, to understand it better.

Naomi Ward  38:38

So helpful to hold these metaphors and, you know, sitting in your ecosystem and noticing the weather is part of naming what is right, honestly. And you said in the paper that, you know this is brave, pioneering leaders, and certainly in this domain of political economy you refer to, you know, authoring futures, where we think about cultural complexity, social justice, you know, having that critical consciousness. So these are challenging areas for leaders to think about. Our leader. Leaders will be engaged, but take us into that world in the international schools systems and how futures might be authored for the good. 

Dr Patrick Alexander  39:25

If we think about the first domain being ecology and being the big, big picture, the next domain that we identify is political economy. And again, that might be a term that people are familiar with but don't, haven't fully engaged with, and it can be feel slightly abstract, but really, if you're looking at political economy, you're really looking at the bigger political systems and the bigger economic systems that shape the world that we live in. And by extraction, that means you're also looking at society, and you're looking at culture. So on the biggest on the biggest scale, you're looking. At the kind of globe, the way that things work globally, and then you're looking at your own setting and thinking about how those things play out in context. So the domain of political economy is, you know, fundamentally an ethical one. So it's about sort of saying, okay, What world do we live in? Back to our question about economic systems and how we are implicated in their reproduction or were implicated in socializing people to expect and even to admire or desire them. So it's that that sort of ethical aspect of futures thinking, but it also feeds into other domains that might be more familiar for schools like dei J thinking about social justice, inclusion, diversity, and all of these again, kind of lead, lead us towards this slow urgency. You know, it's to it's to say every single day we know we're not getting that day back, you know, we're sitting here having this conversation for, you know, an hour and a bit. And every, every moment is precious in that sense, you know, that we, we all have the opportunity to act ethically in the moment that we're living in, such that we're authoring a different kind of future tomorrow. And that sounds really idealistic, but it but you know, it can be acted out very pragmatically, through through practice. And you know, to your point, obviously, this is a really big question for international schools, and it's a really hard question sometimes to approach honestly and like you say, with bravery. From our interviews, we've really seen people engaging with this and saying yes, if we want to be able to say with authenticity that we're we're developing global citizens for the future, we have to be brave in our conversations about how we've got where we are, and for a lot of international schools, that means engaging with difficult questions about what in the paper we call history in context to say, Okay, well, why is it that our international school exists in the first place? You know, why are we here? What is the history of of, you know, quote, unquote, expatriate communities coming together in other parts of the world, or what is the history of local communities wanting to come to our International School? And that's that's a hard question to engage with, because in lots of contexts that will involve talking about, you know, elite privilege, it might talk be about talking about white privilege. It might mean talking about post colonial contexts. It might involve talking about decolonization, and depending on your setting, that will be more or less sensitive as an area to discuss. But it's an important area. It's an essential area to engage with if you really want to be able to explore in an authentic way the political economy of the future, to say, Okay, let's be honest in a careful, methodical, sensitive way about who we are and where we are in the world, and then let's think about what we can do about that and that. You know, we discussed how sometimes these questions can just feel way too big to address in a setting, but hopefully this approach makes them quite manageable, because we're saying, you know, what is our history? How are we implicated as a community in these really big questions? That doesn't mean that you're starting from a point of blame or from a point of defensiveness. You're starting from a kind of honest point of saying, let's, let's have a, let's have an open conversation about these big challenges around, you know, the political economy of the world, and let's think about what we can do here to make a difference. And you know, one of the person, one of the people that we interviewed, talked about radical generosity as a way of going into that challenge, of saying, Okay, we recognize that we're in a position of privilege, for example, and we want to find genuine ways to engage with that privilege such that we are making a positive impact on the future of international schooling. And so one, you know, one very specific way you might think about doing that is to think about school improvement, not as a thing that happens to individual schools, but that happens to a whole sector, or that happens to a whole region. And so, you know, you might say the only way we can genuinely suggest that our school is improving is if we can see schools that have less privilege or more disadvantage also improving, and that is part of our gift, or that's part of our of our obligation as an international school.

Matt Hall  44:22

And I was talking to a head just the other day, and I think you know, your that point of acknowledging what is as a gateway to just allowing it to be there is so valuable, but then then flipping it to Well, we know where we are now and how we got here. And this is such an obvious thing to say that had pointed out to me. You know, in a vacu world where where it feels often times, that societies and cultures are increasingly polarized. He was saying, you know, how, how unique are international schools as centers for learning that pull together multiple cultures, multiple students from intentionally bring people together from multiple backgrounds, yes, through the. Often through the lens of privilege. There's that common denominator, because almost all of the schools we work with are fee paying. But even with that caveat, these are deliberately intentional international communities, and there's not many institutions that you'll find globally that are intentionally International, as opposed to intentionally profit making, or intentionally religious, or intentionally A, B or C, absolutely such a unique opportunity there in in this current social, economic, political context, 

Dr Patrick Alexander  45:30

that's a fantastic starting point. I think the challenge is to ask the hard question, how diverse Are we really or what is the cultural identity? You know? What is the cultural complexity of of my school? How well do you know the cultural identity of the children that you work with? You know, how often do we ask them beyond the usual kind of surface level representations of culture? You know, dress, festivals, food, the usual. How often do we ask them how they feel about their cultural identity? In some contexts, this might be something that happens all the time, and in others, it might be taken for granted, you know, you simply defer to their national identity. And so, oh, those are the kids from x national background. But you know, especially in international schools where you have a large local population attending, this is, it's really, it's a really complex question, you know, what does it mean to be Malaysian and to go to an international school in Malaysia that is a different inflection of Malaysian cultural identity than than you might see in a in a Malaysian state school, for example, and in the in the paper, We refer to the work of Danau Tanu, who's an anthropologist who's done work in international schools on exactly this question of, how do we understand cultural complexity in an in an international school setting, beyond the normal approaches, beyond the idea of a third culture kid, which is a helpful concept, but it's probably not. It doesn't offer you a complete picture of the cultural complexity of your school, and in knowing that complexity, you will inevitably come up with issues, challenges, concerns, right? Who feels excluded from the community? In the case of Danau Tanu, her research shows that even though you've got a kind of predominantly non white population in the school that she looked at, it's the white kids in the school who are considered the international kids. And so that reveals something in this particular case about what is considered to be international. It's this idea of a kind of white global elite that people are aspiring to in this case, but asking the question, you know, who are these children and how do they see themselves feels quite obvious, but, but it's a, you know, it's a big, hard challenge to actually get, you know, closer to the answer. 

Naomi Ward  47:55

And one of the things we really appreciate about the paper is that after each of these sections, you pose these questions as you know, starting points to go deeper. And I wonder you used a word there, Patrick, you say, you know, once you know the cultural complexity of your school, and maybe there's a challenge here for like, you will never know the cultural complexity of your school, and it's all these like shifts in mindsets that you're inviting us into. 

Dr Patrick Alexander  48:25

You're absolutely right there. And that's, that's a great challenge because, and this is all the part of the process right is to kind of, sort of bounce, bounce, you know, bounce the conversation. Back to these points of challenge. You're absolutely right. Mapping the cultural complexity of a school would not be the right approach. You know, back to our our metaphors, because the moment you've mapped it, you can use that map and say, Yes, we have, you know, 20% of people from x backgrounds, but, but, of course, that's always changing, and it's always dynamic. And, you know, it's important to recognize that this applies to teachers as well. It's, it's kind of accepting that the question is never completely answered. That is, you know, part of the provocation.

Matt Hall  49:05

Let's now just forward. Patrick, yeah, where do we go next? What's the third domain?

Dr Patrick Alexander  49:09

Yeah, so the third, the third domain is the big one. So the third domain is the educational domain. And so this is, you know, really, where we're talking about knowledge, assessment, pedagogy and curriculum as the kind of, you know, core aspects of of of what we might be thinking about to adopt a futures focused approach to leadership. Of course, that's not that should be no surprise to anyone, that this is, you know, what we would be talking about when we're thinking about the future of education. But in each case, you can kind of dig down into those, those areas of what the future of education looks like, and try to Yeah, to be provocative, to be imaginative about where you know what happens next, by looking, for example, at assessments and knowledge production. So you know, typically in education, the way that we measure whether or not someone has learned something. By getting them to do a test. And normally, you know, that test is represented as an outcome that is textual. And you know, so if you get somebody to write an essay, historically, that's we would look at the essay and say, yeah, they seem to have learned some things. I can see that in what they've written. And of course, you know, generative AI massively challenges that as a valid way of representing knowledge. And so, you know, that's one way to think about what the future of education might look like, is to say, Okay, if we are no longer sure, or maybe we've never been sure, about what knowledge, you know, how knowledge is represented in the process of knowledge production, then where do we go next with that? You know, if we can no longer, and maybe we could never have depended very much on exams as a robust way of reflecting what education looks like, then do we need them? And that's, you know, this can be a fun process as well. I should say, you know, you can just posit questions and say, what if we had no exams? And some people would say, well, we need exams. Of course, we need exams. And you go, Well, I mean, what if we didn't have them? So asking those kinds of questions, almost in a kind of trickster type way, can be a good, a good way to enter into discussions of provocation about what the future looks like. But I also appreciate that we've always got to go back to the Prag to the pragmatics of it, right? And so you can approach those three questions, the possible, the probable, the preferable, by going back to the domains of a pragmatic solution. You know, what is the time, what is the space, what is the activity, what is the resource? And that grounds those those sort of, more sort of, you know, lights or or playful provocations in something that's that's really practical.

Matt Hall  51:47

It does. And I see this often in the work that we do where, you know, a lot of the work that we do with one to one, with international school leaders, is about challenging deeply held assumptions about self and possibility, you know. And it kind of just came up in me. Then my my gut reaction to those questions are like, Well, someone else, you know, of course, of course, we're not going to abandon exams, like, I have no power over that. And then you're like, Well, wait a minute, if I'm running a school, like, why don't I, you know, it's particularly an international school, where we're not having to work within legal regulatory bodies, necessarily, depending on which part of the world we are. Like tricky to do in some countries to say, I'm not delivering a national education, but totally possible in others, yeah. And often, I mean, no, me will know this in a very, on a very small scale, a coaching conversation will absolutely say, well, well, can't you and, and who's saying that, and, yeah, well, is that a real voice saying you can't do that, or you can't, least start to play with that, or you can't start to have that conversation with your parents and communities? Or is there, is there actually an authority figure somewhere above you telling you can't and so often, when you start to knock on that door, it's like, Oh, no. Do you know what? There isn't that that is my own self limiting belief for a whole range of very good and justifiable reasons that's sitting there. And so the invitation, I think in the paper, is just to, you know, not blow the doors off, but just to start to slowly open that door to what might be possible, preferable, etc.

Dr Patrick Alexander  53:15

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that's, that's, again, has such strong resonance with that idea of of anticipatory assumptions. You know, you say, of course, next year we'll be doing high stakes exams. Of course, in 10 years we'll be doing them. Of course, in 20 years, we'll be doing them and asking the question, well, why? Why? Just simply asking that question is really profound, because it requires you to then go and look at the architecture of your practice and say, what is it that's holding this in place? And sometimes it will be simply your assumption about what needs to be done, and sometimes it will be some other constraint, right? So I think we, you know, we had a really constructive pushback from the people we interviewed around that idea that you can simply get rid of something like high stakes exams. And they said, Okay, that's a nice idea, but of course, we have to accept that one of the things that we do is offer people a route to getting these highly valued types of certification that then lead them into other educational areas like university. But the corollary line of questioning for that is to say, Well, why do they why is it that universities care about a level results? And probably, if you ask a university, they say, Well, you know, we don't really care about a level results. We just know that that's the thing that we have to measure what people have done before. And so then we get into a conversation to say, well, what if we all had a challenging discussion about different ways of navigating that process, or even, you know, why is it the universities offer university education? You know, surely there's no logical reason why a school couldn't stay in touch with its community and support them to move through you know what we. Now call level four, you know, level three, level four education. So, yeah, all of those, all of those kinds of questions, to me, are actually really exciting. You know, they're, they're, they're things that can really kind of bring some light and some and some life into into a school, 

Matt Hall  55:15

yeah, and I guess my observation as well is, you know, who, who has been telling us this since the modern education system was devised and implemented, and the answer to my mind is kids, kids. I've got a I've got a 13 year old who regularly is like, Why? Why do I go to this other building every morning and do this range of disciplines, half of which I have no interest in, to get myself through a system that I don't want to be involved in, just to come home at the end of the day and feel miserable about it. And she's not unique in that regard. And then I have another child who's like, this is great. I get I know what the performance criteria. I know how to succeed. Let's just, I'll just do this on repeat happy days. And I kind of know which one's going to hit the wall in adult life first, as we all do, because we see it time and time with the kids that we teach. You know the compliant? I know the system. I know how to do it. Some point that comes a little bit unstuck when, when the reality of a vacuum world kicks in,

Dr Patrick Alexander  56:19

yeah. And I think, you know, you're absolutely right, that so many of us see this, you know, this isn't a revelation, right? This is something that everybody recognizes, you know, recognizing the issues and the problems with a system that is kind of, you know, ossified. It's kind of, it's it's brittle. So it speaks to a sort of past way of thinking that, even then, didn't actually apply to the future that was coming around the corner. The challenging voice does come from, from students, first and foremost, to ask that question. I mean, you know, you're absolutely right, if you keep asking, why you get to the to the hard parts of the questioning as well. You know, all of these, all of this knowledge is there? The means are there to change it? It's simply a matter of working through the questioning to try and get closer to that change.

Matt Hall  57:07

Okay, so I mean the fourth, not final, but you know, as we're working through them in order, this is the one that when I see on a conference brief, I just come up in some kind of hives, you know, the international school sector is flooded at the moment with help us. Help us. Let us help you. Make sense of AI in school, and I've sat through enough conversations to think, I don't think we still really know what we're talking about. But maybe that's just me so but that they worry that I but I get it. I get why it needs to be here, and I like the way you framed it under a broader heading of technology. So, yeah, take us into this domain. Patrick, just put a bit of flesh on on this last one for us. 

Dr Patrick Alexander  57:52

Yeah, absolutely. And again, you know, we've already seen how that overlaps with the educational domain. Because, you know, to your point, we tried to, we tried to approach technology in the paper from a bit more of an expensive position by recognizing that, you know, technology is a is a kind of essential part of the human condition. You know, technology has always been a part of education in so much as anything that you use to externalize your existence in the world can be seen as a form of technology. You know, pens are technology, books are technology, stone tools are technology. So, you know. So there's a long history of us engaging with ways of externalizing our knowledge, of working with, you know, working with the material world. And it just happens that digital technology is the latest version of that very long story. So on one hand, yeah, it's, I suppose, a call to kind of, again, sort of slow down a little bit, and not necessarily buy into the into the kind of inevitable edtech hype that the Gen AI is going to change everything, and is the solution to everything, or is going to destroy everything. And I should be very clear that that is not to say that those concerns aren't warranted, because, I think, by and large, they are. And we have to recognize that, you know, technology enters education almost, you know, almost in all cases, not with the intention of improving education, but with the intention of selling technology. That's something to be, to be very sort of careful and and sort of critical about, I think so. So, yeah, so there is absolutely cause for concern around, you know, what technology is useful or relevant in education, what tech companies think they know about education, which is often not a lot. But we also have to recognize that that change is coming. And, you know, one of the, you know, one of the things, probably, that is most arresting, that creates the most sort of vivid feelings of helplessness about something like generative AI is, is velocity, right? We have this sense that change is coming so fast that if you wake up tomorrow, the nature of AI will will have changed such that there's no way you can ever keep up with the pace of change. Change. But that's an idea, you know, of course, it's reality in so much as you know, the technology is being developed quickly, and it's expanded very quickly, but it's something that you can step back from and say, Okay, well, how you know, how big is this difference between existing practice and the changes that this, that this implies, and just by simply having that question again, you go back through the possible, the probable and the preferable. And one of the provocation questions that we have in the paper is to ask a big question about our engagement with technology, to say, what does a technology enhanced future human society look like, and what would we like it to look like? And just by simply asking that question, you can start to see where the shared intention of a community is around their approach to technology. The big question, I think, that generative AI asks us about of our education system is not what it's going to add, but how it allows us to reflect on what we should have changed a long time ago, what's wrong with our current modes of assessment, or what's wrong with our current approaches to pedagogy, that kind of questioning, I think, is really valuable, because it's not necessarily about the technology. It's about what, how the technology helps us to reflect on on the bigger picture of education. 

Naomi Ward  1:01:18

So as we step back and regard the paper as a whole Patrick, and as you just, you step back, I'm curious about what you've learned from this process?

Dr Patrick Alexander  1:01:25

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, what I've learned, I think, is that, you know, this is, this is the start of a really long conversation. And I think that's the, you know, that's one of the most challenging, but most, maybe most rewarding parts of this kind of futures focused approach to work in education, you know, to leadership, but generally thinking about education is that it, you know, it really demands that you dwell in a space where the questions aren't always answered. You have to kind of accept that, you that you that it won't be resolved, but there is resolution in kind of accepting that process, to say, you know, this, you know, I won't be able to kind of neatly pack this up as a report in a year's time and say, here's what here's what we did, and here's what the outcome was. You kind of constantly have to be, you know, having this conversation, and be willing to have, you know, to ask the hard questions. That to me is, you know, something that I've that really has been kind of consolidated in the process of writing this is that it's yeah, it's just the beginning of the conversation that needs to run, yeah.

Matt Hall  1:02:33

And it's interesting, isn't it? The, you know, we've got quite a few heads, and former heads in our in our team at MSB, and I'm reading the instinctive response was, whoa, there's a lot here. There's a lot here. Closely followed by, I'm not sure I've got time, right, and I'm really pleased with how long the paper is, because it it forces, it forces a slowing down. It forces, you know, my response to that was, you're going to have to find the time right and flippant for me to say that, maybe to our, you know, our followers and our listeners who who do have very highly pressured and busy roles. But there's a real invitation in the paper, by its very nature, just to take some time back, slow down, really consider the questions it's asking, and then in turn, what I like about it, it's not a solution, as we've said, but it does provide a whole range of tools for you to start to have those conversations with your senior team, with your middle leaders, with your teachers, with your parents, with your kids, and here at MSB, we're Really looking forward to helping to facilitate those conversations. So it's, it's, it's great to have you on today, because this is both a starting point to season three, but it's also a starting point to a holiday of conversations that we're looking forward to to hosting and having over the next I don't know how long,

Naomi Ward  1:03:56

yeah, we're going to be walking, walking with those questions. I think, is something I'll take away. And the question being enough, we do rush to a solution, we rush to fixing. And, yeah, there's so many invitations here, so So thank you so much for walking us through through the paper today, Patrick, it's been fascinating.

Dr Patrick Alexander  1:04:18

Thank you. And you know, just, you know, absolutely agree with, you know what you're suggesting about the process of engaging with the paper. I think you know it is challenging in parts, but um, even, even even responding to your question about about having time to do it is a provocation. Right to say, Well, why not? Why not see if you can take the time to engage with it, disagree with it raise questions, but yeah, hopefully, in any case, it's a provocation and a kind of moment for pause and reflection.

Matt Hall  1:04:48

Let's pause and reflect there then. Thanks very much.

Dr Patrick Alexander  1:04:50

Thanks so much.

Matt Hall  1:04:53

You can download a free copy of our paper, futures focus leadership for international schools by signing up on our. Site making stuff better.com. And don't forget to like and follow principled, so you don't miss an episode.

Naomi Ward  1:05:06

You've been listening to Principled from MSB. The podcast was produced by Emily Crosby Media, with music by Lucy Farrell, released on Hudson Records.