As regular visitors to my website would have read, I recently highlighted the inability of my son’s school to update parents through the Net, whether through emails or the school website. This is despite having suggested it to the school some months before. This got me thinking as to what I would like to see on a school website. I will be looking at it from the communications point of view, that is, communications with the stake holders of the school in mind.

The first thing I would like to see are regular updates of the school website. By “regular”, I mean that information is posted on the school website as soon as possible and not “regular” as in once in three months or even more. This I think is a basic demand of any communication between schools and their stake holders. If Singapore schools are serious about Community and Parents in Support of Schools (COMPASS), then they should make greater effort to communicate about what is happening with the confines of a school. If possible I would like to see daily updates.

Some of you (who may be teachers or principals) out there, may think that daily updates is just too much and impossible. But it can be done. However, for this to happen certain things must change in the mind set of those in schools. The first is a paradigm shift in the minds of those in power in schools. They must be willing to allow their staff to post notices on their own. It means that the website is not the prerogative of one or two people or worse, an external website designer. School principals in Singapore are reluctant to do this because of a fear mentality. They have this fear that someone in their staff will post something silly and the school will have to do some damage control. This fear of damage control means that everything posted to the public has to be vetted by the “powers-that-be”.

This fear of mistakes and need for damage control also stems from the siege mentality that schools have as compared to other government departments in Singapore who are more open to public scrutiny. There is almost an unstated rule, that teachers and school principals cannot be criticized in public. They also cannot appear to be fallible. I guess it is part of a “teacher mystique” cultivated in Singapore in order to ensure the high standing that teachers have. It may also come from their own unconscious belief that they are always right and have all the answers. Schools must be willing to allow their staff to make mistakes and not treat such public mistakes as “disaster movies”. The Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore have long introduced the concept of “learning organizations” borrowed from Peter Senge and others. Making mistakes is a part of the learning process, even if it is done in public. Part of the learning for the staff of the school is how to recover from a mistake. Imagine for a moment, a school where its teachers preach to the students that it is alright to make mistakes even in public, and yet cannot accept that from the teachers. That would be either hypocrisy or schizophrenia. Is it also a surprise that students still do not want to look foolish by making mistakes when they can sense that it is not the school culture to value mistakes? These institutionalized mind sets must be removed.

Once schools can overcome this institutionalized attitudes and mind sets, regular daily updates by all staff will no longer be an issue. The technical problems of allowing everyone to post on the website can be easily overcome. Staff members can be assigned accounts with passwords to access the school website. Sophisticated, yet free and easily available software can be used to design the school websites. Free Content Management Systems (CMS) software like Joomla! are easily available for use and because they are CMS, they can do all that I have suggested. The school can also be less dependent on commercial website designers and take full responsibility for the wesbite’s maintenance.

Once the basic framework of the website is set, all staff can post information relevant to the students online. Parents who used to complain about the “interception” of traditional official communication like letters between the school and them, will not have to worry about it anymore.

Other technical issues like creating automatic email lists and other “new” communication media like Twitter are easily overcome. They can be done easily once the main obstacle to the creation of a communicative school website is removed or replaced. That obstacle is in the minds of those who run a school. It is no longer a technical issue.

When I was a consultant for a school in Bandung, Indonesia, a parent came up to me for a short chat. His children had been raised in Australia and were adjusting to the school they were in. He told me that his daughter had asked him why she had had to learn the Sundanese language and whether it would be useful later when she joins the workforce. He said that he told his daughter that he did not think it was important to learn Sundanese. He went on to say that there were many things that she had to learn in school that was not important for later employment. He told me, almost apologetically, that he had always tried to be honest with his children. I knew he was right then because here was a man who has been out working in the real world, and he knew that much of what is taught in schools today would have very little relevance to the real world.

In my last posting, “Where are we heading?”, I suggested that perhaps most schools are not doing a good job of preparing students to be part of the real world; to be part of the future work force. Much of the skills that are required in the future workplace like “abstract reasoning, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration, attributes associated with so-called “knowledge work”, are seldom consciously taught and emphasized in many, if not most, of schools today. These skills require students to “do” not just sit, listen, memorize and regurgitate.

Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase, “The medium is the message”, in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,  advocated what Dewey had already advocated before, and that is we learn what we do. When McLuhan said that the medium is the message he meant controversially that the medium in which we function will determine what we learn and not the content. For example if in a Geography classroom the teacher lectures the class about plate tectonics, Marshall would contend that what is learnt by the students in the class is not plate tectonics but obedience and deference to authority. This is because that is all that the students do in the class (the medium). McLuhan would probably argue that it is fallacious to say that schools today teach anything else except obedience and deference to authority.

If McLuhan’s (and Dewey’s) argument is correct, then even more so that the current and most pervasive model of teaching in use schools today is in need of a great overhaul. Where is the abstract reasoning that is asked for of the student today? Where is the problem-solving? Where is the communication and collaboration? Even in Singapore, a country that is often lauded for the success of the education system, such skills are seldom taught or students are seldom put into situations that require the use of such skills in the school setting.

One may ask if these skills are student-friendly or to put it another way, are students able to function in a school that emphasizes the use of such skills? Perhaps some clues can be found in the way that students interact with their peers today. Just look at the social networking, blogging and instant messaging phenomena that is so popular with teenagers today. What are the skills that we see teenagers using when they interact with their friends and peers from all over the world? I believe schools can take learn from this world wide need to communicate and collaborate. If teenagers today learn the skills of the future workforce today it is most likely not from schools but from their peers online.