Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Co-operation vs. Competition (vs. Collaboration)

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Finnish educator and author Pasi Sahlberg writing in yesterday’s Washington Post:

Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

One thing that fatigues me more than almost anything about the United States is our compulsion with competition. We have to be the best in the world at seemingly everything…cars, solar panels, education…and if we’re not, some committee will be created to study the “problem” and figure out how to remedy the situation and get us back on top. In education, we’ve totally gone off the rails in terms of assessing kids and teachers and schools by test scores and AP classes and all sorts of other meaningless stuff that no one thinks about or remembers three years after the fact. 

Look, I’m not against healthy competition. My kids play sports, and I think they can learn a great deal being on teams that are striving for a common goal and, in the end, experiencing wins as well as losses. And I know great ideas and products are many times borne out of the competitive spirit. There’s nothing inherently wrong with striving to be better than another in ways that promote and sustain goodness in the world.

But we need a different lens on a national level these days. At a moment where so much knowledge is at our fingertips, and when we’re facing so many seemingly insurmountable problems, we need to spend more of our time figuring out how to work together instead of work against each other. And this is especially true in education.

I think it’s interesting that Sahlberg eschews the word collaboration here. And I’ve been persuaded by Stephen Downes and Harold Jarche and others that really, we need to talk less about collaborating in networks and focus instead on cooperation. The difference is not subtle. Mike Caulfield summarizes:

The neat thing about cooperation is that if you can structure a solution to a problem as a cooperative one rather than a collaborative one you can solve very big problems in a very short amount of time — because at it’s best, cooperation requires simply that you do what you normally do, but in a way that allows cooperation.

And according to Jarche, at it’s most basic level, cooperation means sharing. For cooperation to happen, we need to be participating transparently with the idea that others can build upon what we share, reshare it, curate it, connect it or whatever else. In that vein, it’s why we need to promote a “network literacy” that supports our ability to find, analyze, synthesize and share information and knowledge in safe, effective and ethical ways. In my discussions and snap polling of education audiences, I can tell you we’re nowhere near a tipping point with that in schools. 

This competition to cooperation thing requires a huge culture shift here in the States. The longer we wait to begin to immerse our students to the principles and literacies of sharing and participation, the longer it will take for that shift to occur.

The Web as Human Development

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Had a great conversation with my friend and former colleague Rob Mancabelli the other day about the challenges that individual teachers face in understanding and, more importantly, practicing learning in these online spaces. Rob started a blog for a bit a few years ago, one that I thought was exceptional, but he dropped it in short order. He’s mulling over a return, thankfully, because he’s continuing the work we started at my old stomping grounds by rolling out a student 1-1 pilot this fall, one that will hopefully move teachers and students to more self-directed, inquiry-based curricula and classrooms. Personally, I keep begging him to share that process in a blog; I think I may be breaking him down. ;0)

Anyway, we were talking about the pilot group of teachers that had been selected for the work, and at one point the talk turned to the reasons why this is such a hard shift for many. It’s not the technology, we both agreed, as much as it is the shifts in transparency and privacy, and the emphasis on writing and creating that go along with putting yourself out there online. “It’s not about blogs,” he said “so much as it’s about human development.” I totally agree, but since our conversation I’ve been thinking about what the implications of that are, exactly. The Web and the social connections and learning it affords is moving us, I think, to a different type of consciousness, a different way of being in the world. While the way we interact with people in our personal spaces will always be crucial to our personal development and well being, we are in many ways being asked to recreate ourselves in virtual spaces, sometimes multiple spaces. And we’re being asked to do that work in public with others. I happened upon this old Doc Searles quote this morning, and it made even more sense than it did two years ago when I first read it:

“We are all authors of each other. What we call authority is the right we give others to author us, to make us who we are… That right is one we no longer give only to our newspapers, our magazines, our TV and radio stations. We give it to anybody who helps us learn and understand What’s Going On in the world.”

The comfort zone required to live in that “author-ity” space is pretty difficult for many of us, educators and non-educators alike, to find. And while our kids may seem to exist more comfortably in these online, social spaces, I still question whether they completely comprehend the potentials of their work there.