Bend the Form, Not the People 

In international schools, the form usually arrives from somewhere else. A planning template from the group office. A marking policy written for a system three time zones away. A  framework the new head brought from her last school and knows works, because it did there.  Each one reasonable, and each one landing on a staffroom that already knows things the form has no room for. What happens next is not resistance in the way the word gets used. People do  what people do with a container that is the wrong shape: they shave the contents down to fit it,  or they quietly stop using it. 

Ireland after the Famine gives me a way of thinking about this. With the National Schools  pressing the point, English became the language of advancement and Irish the language of what  you left behind. Anyone handed a form that does not fit has the same two obvious options, and  the Irish had them too. Purity, which in practice meant silence. Imitation, which meant compliance. 

A run of writers took neither. They kept the language they had been given and bent it until it could carry what they knew. I read six of them as six ways of doing that, and I should say plainly that this is my reading, laid over men who never thought of themselves as a set. They were six answers to one predicament, which is what makes them useful, because a school is not one problem. 

Yeats changed the sound. In “Easter, 1916,” he put grief and exaltation into one phrase, a terrible beauty, and let neither cancel the other. The ceremony of the poem makes English sound older and stranger than the administration that imposed it. He did not win an argument.  He made the language sound like his. 

A school has a sound too, and it is the sound of how people talk: who has to explain themselves,  who is allowed to disagree, what counts as evidence, what happens to a question after it is asked.  Nobody writes that curriculum down and everybody learns it. When I want to change the story a school tells about itself, I leave the vision statement alone and go to the talk, because that is where a place’s beliefs actually live.

Synge went and listened first. He spent summers on the Aran Islands before he wrote a  line, and what he brought back, in Riders to the Sea and then The Playboy of the Western  World, was the speech of people the system regarded as raw material, given a dignity that  started a riot at the Abbey. Before he changed anything he found out what was there. 

Most leaders skip that. Christensen’s agreement matrix asks two questions of a stuck situation:  do people agree on what they want, and do they agree on how the world works? Each answer  calls for a different tool, and picking the tool first produces the familiar error of treating a  workload problem as a compliance problem. Of the habit that will not die, ask the only question  that helps: what is this still solving? 

Shaw mastered the standard, then turned it. Pygmalion is a play about accent as  gatekeeping, written in cleaner English than most of the people it was aimed at could manage.  Be so good at the form that it cannot be used against you, and then use it on its owners. In a  school the standard has to be visible and applied to everyone first. A rubric used on every  teacher stops being a weapon and becomes a floor that protects her as much as it judges her.  You earn the standing to change a form by meeting it. 

Joyce let the category break. In A Portrait of the Artist the young Stephen offers an English  dean the word “tundish” for what the dean calls a funnel. The dean has never heard it, and the  small asymmetry opens an argument about whose language this is that Joyce spent his life  having. His answer, in Ulysses, was to pour so much into English that the imperial register  became one voice among many. 

Sometimes a school’s structures cannot carry a change and the honest thing is to stop  pretending they can. Susan Moore Johnson found that schools improve when teachers are  treated as agents of improvement rather than its objects, and the difference lives exactly here:  agents redesign, objects get redesigned. A cross-grade team allowed to join what the timetable  kept apart. A unit rebuilt by the people who taught it badly last year. Each needs a leader who  will let a category go. 

Beckett took things away. He wrote Waiting for Godot in French first, to escape the  inherited grandeur of English, and produced a play with almost nothing in it that carries more  than most: two men, a tree, a wait, and an opening line that is just “Nothing to be done.” 

Schools almost never do this. Schools change by addition, by reflex, and in an international school the additions come from several directions at once: the group, the accreditor, the curriculum authority, the new head. The oldest tool I know for it is still the best one, Oncken 

and Wass’s question about who has the monkey. A problem that climbs onto the leader’s back has left the place where it could have been solved, and each one the leader carries teaches the building where solutions live. Subtraction looks like the initiative not launched, the meeting canceled, the reporting halved, the monkey handed back with a question. It feels like doing less.  It is usually the change that makes the others possible. 

Behan laughed. In Borstal Boy and The Quare Fellow nobody argues with the warders or the respectable. They are laughed at, and his characters talk as though the question of whether they  were allowed to talk had been settled long ago. 

That is what a change sounds like once it no longer belongs to the leadership team. Nobody asks permission to use it any more, or to adapt it, or to make a joke about it. The test I use is the newest teacher. When she can explain the change to a visiting parent, in her own words and without glancing at me, it has stopped being an initiative and become how the place works. Until then it is still mine, and anything still mine will leave when I do. 

One warning. Once a department has bent the form into something that works, the temptation is to make it the model for everyone, which restarts the whole cycle by turning a living adaptation into the next container. Ask which variation is essential to keep. A plan that meets the term is meant to be revised by contact with reality, not enforced against it. 

The Irish writers never got a new language. They got the old one to carry what it had been built  to exclude, and it carried more, in the end, than its owners had ever asked of it. I keep that in mind when a reform starts to go awkward. The question it raises is rarely whether the people are ready. More often it is whether the container was ever the right shape, and whether I had been defending it as though it were the work.