George Walker’s weblog

Let me admit from the start that I am a conference phobic.  I am the person who is seen rebooking his return flight and sloping off to the airport in urgent response to a bogus message from my PA telling me the office is on fire.  At least I was, until I very nearly rebooked onto the TWA flight to Paris that crashed soon after take-off from JFK.  Since then I have stuck it out to the end.

I have attended several million different conferences and one of my annual nightmares is being trapped, always in the same fin de siècle hotel, unable to find the way to the station (isn’t it interesting how one’s dreams are historically consistent).  An enduring memory of the IBO will be the bell that sounds when the lift finally arrives at my hotel floor which – together with the ever-optimistic wait for my luggage coming round (or not coming round) the carousel at the airport – must have accounted for at least a year of my life.

The IBO thrives on conferences and sometimes measures the relative success of its different parts by conference attendance figures.  Regional conferences, sub-regional conferences, heads’ conferences, coordinators’ conferences: you name it and someone will organize a conference for it.  Indeed, we have very efficient regional conference units to do just that.  But finding myself in someone else’s conference last week, as I dozed off in rather comfortable chairs, listening on my headphones to translations that one can only admire but never fully comprehend, I began to wonder what it was all about.

After all, every one of the papers being presented would be posted on the conference website; the programme was so full there was no time for serious discussion.  In the plenary sessions, each distinguished speaker said more or less what one would have expected each distinguished speaker to say.  The lunch was modest and the afternoon tea was cold.   But, of course, there was the networking amongst all those important people who have come with the sole purpose of learning all about your latest bright idea so another KPI to measure a good conference must surely be the number of visiting cards you bring back.

I think we do still go to conferences in the hope of being inspired but in my experience it rarely happens.  I can remember about half a dozen such set-piece moments of truth, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru, whom I heard when I was a student, and more recently Nobel Laureate, Oscar Arias, who opened our Americas conference in 2001 in Costa Rica with a brilliant speech.  But too often what we hear are recycled presentations obscured, rather than illuminated, by distracting PowerPoint.

Then there is death-by-reporting-back from the inevitable working groups (now rather dubiously called ‘breakout groups’ – if only one could).  Well chairman, I’m going to be very brief as all my points have been covered by previous speakers….25 minutes later….and now I think our scribe, Wendy, has just a couple of tiny suggestions to make.

And yes, we do go to conferences for the networking so it would be interesting to know what percentage of time most people spend in the bar compared to the conference sessions and to ask if it might not be more efficient to put everyone together on a cruise liner without the guilt-inducing distraction of a conference.

But how many of us go to a conference prepared to do some work, to make a contribution, to actually produce something?   The distinguished American psychologist, Jerry Bruner, urges us to associate learning with the production of tangible “oeuvres” and there was a time when one at least returned home with a satisfying pile of conference papers, but no longer: they are only available on the conference website.  Now, all we are left with is the conference bag, a leaking biro and, at the top of the range, a t-shirt.

One of the most stimulating events I ever took part in (OK, it was a workshop not a conference, but the principle remains sound) brought together a mixed group of people sharing an interest in comprehensive education in the UK to write a book from scratch over a weekend.  And, inspired and encouraged by The Guardian’s wonderful education correspondent at the time, Maureen O’Connor, we wrote it, from start to finish, and the sense of achievement was huge.

The recent Heads Standing Association conference in Bangkok came somewhere near this when participants were challenged to contribute to a communiqué to be published at the end of the conference.  I hope someone will build on this idea because too often we invite large numbers of able and experienced people to gather together, we sit them in conference halls and then fail to make best use of their time and talent.

George Walker

Oxfam has a rather good second hand bookshop in Cardiff so whenever I am there for meetings at our curriculum and assessment centre in Peterson House I try to find time to call in.  As well as the usual shelves of paperback fiction, there are many more unusual items if you care to search for them and there is also a small, locked glass cabinet in which I recently saw…but it was far too expensive.

Then I went back a month later and it was still there and, after all, it cost less than a few tanks full of petrol and, after all, it was Oxfam and not some seedy second hand book dealer and, after all, it was one of the first books I ever read in a serious study of education.

So I am now the proud owner of a first edition (1861) of Herbert Spencer’s classic collection of essays entitled Education.

Spencer (1820-1903) was a British philosopher and sociologist.  Largely self-taught (turning down a place at Cambridge University) he was an ardent supporter of Charles Darwin and it was he, not Darwin, who first used the expression “survival of the fittest.”  Not surprisingly, then, he applied evolutionary theory to philosophy, psychology and sociology, and to education.  The four essays are entitled What knowledge is of most worth, Intellectual education, Moral education and Physical education, and the uncompromising tone is set at the outset by the question, “Of what use is it?”

Well, all this appeared nearly 150 years ago, but Spencer’s ideas have given me a helpful peg on which to hang some recent thoughts.  In October, IBAEM organized a regional conference in Barcelona which, for the first time, challenged science teachers of the Middle Years Programme and the Diploma Programme to work together on issues of continuity.   Not easy, and I know from bitter experience how high school teachers of linear subjects like science and mathematics tend to boss their junior colleagues about, telling them what and how they should teach.

The handed-down instructions tend to be of two different kinds.  First the guilt-inducing: “If you don’t teach them this, followed by this, finishing up with that before they reach us, then please don’t expect us to sort out the mess before they sit their examinations”.  Then there is the patronising: “If I were you, I wouldn’t bother to introduce that concept at all; much better to leave it so we can do it properly.”   (I was once a curriculum deputy head of a 9-13 upper school in the UK which received its new students from six different 5-8 middle schools and the preceding quotations were the staple diet of our school liaison meetings.)

What does Spencer have to say about all this?  His first thought (in the second essay) is to draw attention to the parallels between a system of education and the social state in which it exists.  Thus he could see the growing impact of Protestantism, political liberty and free trade in nineteenth century Britain reflected in less harsh discipline, more recreation and a growing awareness of the unfolding mind of the school child.  Today, our science education reflects its changing social status, which has moved from a sense of triumph (when I was at school) to speculation (when I started teaching it) to the current period of atonement.  I wonder whether there is a shared perception of the role of science education amongst teachers of the different age ranges.

Looking now at the actual process of education, Spencer insists on the substitution of principles, built up from individual instances, for rules learned by rote.  Now this is the pure Nuffield philosophy that I grew up with but I suspect Spencer is concerned with the process of induction whereas science makes progress through hypothesis and deduction: a scientific hypothesis is set up in order to be demolished.  I wonder if all teachers convey to their students the provisional nature of scientific principles.

Finally, Spencer writes

In the mastering of every subject some course of increasingly complex ideas has to be gone through…which, in any true sense, is impossible without they are put into the mind in the normal order.

Today we might call it a spiral curriculum or scaffolding or constructionist theory but essentially it acknowledges the simple truth that learning requires clear signposts to indicate where it has come from and where it is going next.  Otherwise, in Spencer’s words, it will be received with apathy or disgust…unless the pupil is intelligent enough eventually to fill up the gaps himself.  Agreeing where and how to erect those signposts is perhaps the most important task of liaison between the Middle Years and the Diploma Programmes.

I’m glad I went back to the Oxfam shop!

George Walker

Oxfam has a rather good second hand bookshop in Cardiff so whenever I am there for meetings at our curriculum and assessment centre in Peterson House I try to find time to call in.  As well as the usual shelves of paperback fiction, there are many more unusual items if you care to search for them and there is also a small, locked glass cabinet in which I recently saw…but it was far too expensive.

Then I went back a month later and it was still there and, after all, it cost less than a few tanks full of petrol and, after all, it was Oxfam and not some seedy second hand book dealer and, after all, it was one of the first books I ever read in a serious study of education.

So I am now the proud owner of a first edition (1861) of Herbert Spencer’s classic collection of essays entitled Education.

Spencer (1820-1903) was a British philosopher and sociologist.  Largely self-taught (turning down a place at Cambridge University) he was an ardent supporter of Charles Darwin and it was he, not Darwin, who first used the expression “survival of the fittest.”  Not surprisingly, then, he applied evolutionary theory to philosophy, psychology and sociology, and to education.  The four essays are entitled What knowledge is of most worth, Intellectual education, Moral education and Physical education, and the uncompromising tone is set at the outset by the question, “Of what use is it?”

Well, all this appeared nearly 150 years ago, but Spencer’s ideas have given me a helpful peg on which to hang some recent thoughts.  In October, IBAEM organized a regional conference in Barcelona which, for the first time, challenged science teachers of the Middle Years Programme and the Diploma Programme to work together on issues of continuity.   Not easy, and I know from bitter experience how high school teachers of linear subjects like science and mathematics tend to boss their junior colleagues about, telling them what and how they should teach.

The handed-down instructions tend to be of two different kinds.  First the guilt-inducing: “If you don’t teach them this, followed by this, finishing up with that before they reach us, then please don’t expect us to sort out the mess before they sit their examinations”.  Then there is the patronising: “If I were you, I wouldn’t bother to introduce that concept at all; much better to leave it so we can do it properly.”   (I was once a curriculum deputy head of a 9-13 upper school in the UK which received its new students from six different 5-8 middle schools and the preceding quotations were the staple diet of our school liaison meetings.)

What does Spencer have to say about all this?  His first thought (in the second essay) is to draw attention to the parallels between a system of education and the social state in which it exists.  Thus he could see the growing impact of Protestantism, political liberty and free trade in nineteenth century Britain reflected in less harsh discipline, more recreation and a growing awareness of the unfolding mind of the school child.  Today, our science education reflects its changing social status, which has moved from a sense of triumph (when I was at school) to speculation (when I started teaching it) to the current period of atonement.  I wonder whether there is a shared perception of the role of science education amongst teachers of the different age ranges.

Looking now at the actual process of education, Spencer insists on the substitution of principles, built up from individual instances, for rules learned by rote.  Now this is the pure Nuffield philosophy that I grew up with but I suspect Spencer is concerned with the process of induction whereas science makes progress through hypothesis and deduction: a scientific hypothesis is set up in order to be demolished.  I wonder if all teachers convey to their students the provisional nature of scientific principles.

Finally, Spencer writes

In the mastering of every subject some course of increasingly complex ideas has to be gone through…which, in any true sense, is impossible without they are put into the mind in the normal order.

Today we might call it a spiral curriculum or scaffolding or constructionist theory but essentially it acknowledges the simple truth that learning requires clear signposts to indicate where it has come from and where it is going next.  Otherwise, in Spencer’s words, it will be received with apathy or disgust…unless the pupil is intelligent enough eventually to fill up the gaps himself.  Agreeing where and how to erect those signposts is perhaps the most important task of liaison between the Middle Years and the Diploma Programmes.

I’m glad I went back to the Oxfam shop!

George Walker

A few weeks ago I was in Stockholm where I attended a welcoming reception at the city hall, famous for hosting the ceremony each December at which the Nobel prizes are presented.  Since then, a visit to the University of Adelaide reminded me that one of its most distinguished alumni, Lawrence Bragg, achieved a double-first in Nobel prizes: he and his father, William, are the only father-and-son prize winning partnership and, at the age of 25, Lawrence remains the youngest ever Nobel laureate.

The Nobel prize for physics came in 1915, in recognition of their pioneering work in the development of the analytical technique of X-ray diffraction and with it the birth of solid state physics, and Lawrence received the news in France, in the trenches.  He finally collected the prize in 1922 but his father did not turn up at the ceremony in Stockholm; all pleasure and pride had been destroyed by the death of his other son, Bob, at Gallipoli just a few weeks before the prize had been announced.

I heard Sir Lawrence Bragg lecture at the Royal Institution in London in the late 1950s when I was in the sixth form at school.  By now he was a grand old man of science and he had left behind an unhappy period at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where he had been sucked into the unseemly squabbling between Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin over the controversial discovery of the double helix of DNA (the first three, but not Franklin who died, would win their Nobel prizes in 1962).

Bragg’s lecture was brilliant and I can still remember much of its structure, many of its experiments and its sheer panache.  The subject was radioactivity, which was too dangerous to explore in any practical way in a school laboratory, but here we could see it all happening on the floor of the Royal Institution in a series of experiments we had read about but never expected to see.  It remains one of the most memorable presentations I have ever witnessed and, looking back, I recognize its profound impact because it was one of the factors that contributed to my decision to study chemistry rather than music at university.

In fact it was not a difficult decision.  In the 1950s science seemed to have all the answers: astronomy was explaining the past; the present offered a huge choice of well-paid scientific jobs and the future would be taken care of by nuclear energy.  Fifty years later it all looks rather different and we are seeing a worrying flight from science in schools and universities.  The sciences (Group 4) are no longer the most popular subjects in the IB Diploma Programme, having been overtaken by the humanities (Group 3) in 2001.  Although the quality of high-performing science students is being maintained, the ‘tail’ is growing longer and longer with nearly a third of all students obtaining a failing grade in their chosen science subject.

A reason for the malaise might be the disappearance of the magic and mystery that attracted me to the subject and was so powerfully present in Bragg’s description of radioactivity.  I still keep on my desk a beautifully shaped glass retort or alembic.  It reminds me how my chemistry teacher at school promised that one day we would use one in our experiments.  We never did but the idea was enough to make me want to study a subject that was evidently still largely concerned with turning base metals into gold.    It is many years since I taught a science lesson but I suspect much of the mystery has gone, replaced by a fatal dose of social responsibility.  Every science teacher should be presented with Oliver Sacks’ wonderful biography Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (published by Picador) to be reminded of the sometimes irresponsible excitement of doing science and of the essential part it plays in the world’s narrative of growing human potential.

George Walker

Postscript
An interesting article related to the above has recently been published by The Guardian. Readers can find this at:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1642253,00.html

George.

Recently, Professor Walker joined me at the IBO’s curriculum and assessment centre here at Cardiff for a chat. We talked about a whole range of things, including his reflections on international education over the past 15 years, his work with the newly-opened United World College in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina, and his plans for the future.

To listen to the podcast, please click here.

During our discussions, a number of references were made to Howard Gardner’s new book, Five Minds for the Future. The book will be released in January 2007, I believe, but recently Professor Gardner delivered a lecture on its key ideas at the Royal Society for Arts in London. You can listen to his speech here. Please note that you will need to scroll down to locate the media file and accompanying presentation slides.

The paper Professor Walker gave at the Nordic Schools conference in September 2005, and to which we refer at the beginning of the podcast, has recently been published in Educating the Global Citizen (Walker, 2006). Further information on this title is available here.

Regrettably, this will be the last entry to the blog. We hope, though, that you have enjoyed reading it as much as we have enjoyed creating it. Watch this space for teacher blogs on the OCC after its relaunch in 2007.

Warmest regards,

Lee Davis
Head of online professional learning

Modern management theory insists that if you cannot measure it then you cannot manage it.  That, of course, is nonsense but it has nonetheless sparked a healthy debate within the International Baccalaureate Organization about the use of KPIs, key performance indicators.

I have learned that diagnostic KPIs monitor how the organization is performing today, but we need a completely different set of strategic KPIs to tell us if we are moving towards a better or a different performance in the future.  I also understand that we must not put all our KPIs in the same basket, but instead adopt a balanced scorecard approach that measures key business processes, finance, staff capacity and customer satisfaction.

But I am still attracted to the suggestion floated over dinner during the recent Council of Foundation meeting by Tony Flatley, chair of the International Heads Representative Committee, that KPI really stands for key pleasure indicator.  I do indeed hope that the IB brings pleasure to those associated with it: the pleasure of achievement, of friendship and of a cause worth working for.  When I started teaching all those centuries ago, much of it was a pleasure and some of it was even fun.   Alas, I don’t see much evidence of that today but I still remember the comments of a taxi driver taking me to Cardiff airport, ‘The strange thing about all you InterBac (sic) people is that you always seem so happy.  You ought to see the teachers in my daughter’s primary school.’

It doesn’t require much imagination to extend Tony’s KPIs to key place indicators and to remember with pleasure all those sights I only dreamed about before I joined the IBO: the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls, the geysers in Iceland, the rain forest in Costa Rica, the mermaid in Copenhagen, the koalas in Australia, the medieval centre of Vilnius, the ancient city of Jbeil, the Civil War memorial at Vicksburg, the exact spot where my father stood in Singapore in 1945 as the Japanese surrendered to Lord Mountbatten, the exact spot in Sarajevo where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.  Everywhere I have been during the past six years I have bought a postcard for my older grandson, Robert, (incidentally the quality of postcards is not a bad KPI for a country’s economic development) and I now look forward to leafing through his very thick scrapbook.

But we all know that KPI really stands for key people indicator and each of those places I have mentioned, and dozens more, bring back special memories because of the people I was with at the time: people who have welcomed me into their country, into their culture and into their lives.  These are the people who make up the IBO and only a fraction of them are our employees; the majority are volunteers who are giving their time, their ideas and their commitment to help the IBO to make the world a better place.

You cannot measure people on a scale of one to ten: their hopes and fears, their illnesses and family responsibilities, their loyalties and motivations, still less their occasional inspirations.  But the generous management of all these different aspects of messy, unpredictable human behaviour ultimately determines the success of a not-for-profit organization like the IBO.

So I sign off my final blog as I come to the end of more than 30 wonderful years trying to manage messy, unpredictable human behaviour. And now I shall have time to look at those postcards.

George Walker

I doubt if any educational term has been more misunderstood than ‘holistic’.  It even gets misspelled and a colleague was once obliged to sit through a presentation in an IB candidate school on the importance of “wholism”.  Although many people believe that the IB programmes are ‘holistic’ in nature most would be hard pressed to explain why, beyond the fact that they seem to contain something of everything.

It has therefore been a particularly interesting experience to help in the supervision of a piece of research at the University of Bath in which the student is examining the concept of holism in the context of the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and, in particular, its science component.  After all, we do say in the Schools Guide to the MYP:

While insisting on a thorough study of the disciplines, the MYP accentuates the interrelatedness of them and so advances a holistic view of learning.

But first, let me go back to a rash comment I made when I was director general of the International School of Geneva (a version was published under the title The Art & Craft of Teaching in the International Schools Journal of November 1997).  I wrote,

And what of the special teaching skills needed by the teachers in an international school?  I suspect there are none…  
Two years later I revised this sweeping conclusion and decided instead that international schools need holistic educators.  I presented a hexagonal model of holism which illustrated its six component modes of learning: intellectual, spiritual, artistic, moral, emotional and physical and I made reference to the research on multiple intelligences of Howard Gardner.

I felt rather pleased at my refinement of the ‘something of everything’ definition, but I now realise that I was still quite wide of the mark.  To quote my research student, the basic principles of holism are:

• There is an interconnectedness of reality and a fundamental unity in the universe
• There is an intimate connection between the individual’s inner or higher self and this unity
•  In order to see this unity we need to cultivate intuition through contemplation and meditation
• …

At this point, I have written (in red, naturally) in the margin of an early draft, ‘This is in danger of going over the top’.  What I really meant was, ‘I don’t understand it any more’ or perhaps more honestly, ‘I do understand it and I’m not very comfortable with it.’  Hexagons, forms of learning and Howard Gardner fall well within my intellectual comfort zone.  Fundamental unity, higher self and meditation do not.

But that is more a reflection on me and my narrow, single-track intellectual upbringing than a serious comment on the concept of holism.  After all, my favourite book on education What is and what might be by Edmond Holmes, published in 1911, (I’m afraid you will have to search hard to find a copy and I am not lending you mine) has some entirely convincing passages on the education of the soul.  And the whole point of education, surely, is precisely to take you outside your comfort zone in order to examine previously unimagined relationships

I think John Miller (confusingly, there are two Millers who have written extensively on holism, the other being Ron) offers a description that I can both relate to and find challenging (The Holistic Curriculum by J.P. Miller.  Revised 2nd edition (2001) Toronto: OISE Press.):

The focus of holistic education is on relationships – the relationship between linear thinking and intuition, the relationship between mind and body, the relationship between various domains of knowledge, the relationship between the individual and community, the relationship with the earth and the relationship between self and Self.  In the holistic curriculum the student examines these relationships so that he/she gains both an awareness of them and the skills necessary to transform the relationship where appropriate.

This is not a million miles away from a statement the IBO makes in its publication A Basis for Practice:

The focus of holistic learning is the discovery of relationships between areas of knowledge, between the individual, communities and the world.  
So how does the MYP measure up as a holistic curriculum?  The final draft of the thesis is in my briefcase.

George Walker

I always enjoy reading good news about the IB and never more so than a recent headline in The Arizona Republic: Vault over the minimums and reach for the stars.  Just a bit over the bar, but we should certainly keep it in mind until the time comes to revise our mission statement.  Through challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment, the IBO encourages its students to vault over the minimums and reach for the stars.  I like it.

On a slightly quieter note, but a particularly resonant note for me personally, was a comment made in a report by the UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in 2003:

The whole structure of the (IB Diploma) course - including the examination on the theory of knowledge - and to a great extent its assessment are traditionally rooted in a concept of the educated person with which Matthew Arnold would probably have felt comfortable.

And at this point I have to admit to total bias.  For me, Matthew Arnold (1822-88) is a hero, indeed several heroes.  First, he wrote one of the best poems in the English language in the nineteenth century, Dover Beach, which ends apocalyptically in words that might have been written yesterday:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Second, he had a daytime job as Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools and from 1851 to 1886 he visited schools across the United Kingdom listening to children regurgitate their rote-learning.  Their teachers would be paid according to his assessment in a system known as ‘payment by results’ (today it is called performance-related pay).  He hated it but his experience informed his brother-in-law, W.E. Forster, who introduced into Parliament the Education Act of 1870 making the first provision for state elementary schools.

Third, he was the loyal son of a famous but controversial father, Dr Thomas Arnold, the great Headmaster of Rugby School, and he wrote a moving (if at times verbose and pompous) poem in defence of his father’s reputation, entitled Rugby Chapel.  I frequently use this poem in seminars about leadership:

And there are some, whom a thirst
Ardent, unquenchable, fires,
Not with the crowd to be spent,
Not without aim to go around
In an eddy of purposeless dust,
Effort unmeaning and vain.

Finally, Matthew Arnold produced one of the most intellectually influential essays ever written entitled Culture and Anarchy (1869) in which he seeks to describe the educated person.  In it he coins the phrase sweetness and light, which for him is the essential character of human perfection.  The essay raises the spectre of élitism (IB research notes, January/Feburary 2005) but a careful reading suggests the very opposite:

…culture works differently.  It does not try to teach down to the level of the inferior classes; it does not seek to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgements and watchwords.  It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely – nourished, and not bound by them.  

Matthew Arnold did not always get it right.  As a young man in 1846 he was travelling in central France and got himself invited to midday breakfast with his heroine, the novelist George Sand, at her home in Nohant in the Berry.  Chopin was there, a musical genius amongst literary mediocrity: would Arnold be able to tell the difference?  Amongst those present, he wrote later, was Chopin with his wonderful eyes.  Oh dear.

George Walker

The early relationship between the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) and the United World Colleges (UWC) is accurately described by that sometimes ill-used term ‘symbiotic’.   In the early days, each needed the other and Lord Mountbatten, an influential supporter of both, wrote to the IBO’s first director general, Alec Peterson, in 1976:

…as you know, anything you can do to enlarge the acceptance of the IB will be very helpful to UWC.

Peterson, in his classic account of those early days (September 1987, Peterson ADC, Schools Across Frontiers: The Story of the International Baccalaureate and the United World Colleges, Open Court Publishing Company) later reflected:

…without the input of students and teachers from the United World Colleges, the IBO would have foundered, as I am sure that without the IB, the United World College fleet could never have set sail.
and the remarkable decision taken in 1971 by the headmaster of Atlantic College, David Sutcliffe, to abandon all national examinations in favour of the IB Diploma (less than a year after the award of the first diplomas to just 29 candidates!) was arguably the turning point in the successful development of the IBO.

At the time, Atlantic College, located in a medieval castle in Wales, stood on its own.  Today there are ten UWCs dotted around the world, all of them, apart from the college in Venezuela, depending upon the IBO and it is no coincidence that some of our most interesting diploma syllabuses have originated from the work done by UWC teachers.

In recent years, though, the relationship has weakened and I doubt if any of the colleges is now in the top ten of the largest IB schools.  At a joint conference in Prague in 2000, I suggested (September 2004, Walker G, To Educate the Nations: Reflections on an International Education: v. 2, Peridot Press):

The IBO and the UWC have developed during the past generation into organizations whose influence has far exceeded their size.  I am suggesting today that our potential influence over the next generation is even greater but it will only be achieved through partnerships and collaborations.  We can neither do it alone this time, nor can we do it together because the world around us has changed.  We need partners and that will test our political skills to the limit but my colleagues and I in the IBO will be doing our best to practise the art of the possible and we shall look forward to the closest possible collaboration with the UWCs.

I therefore have contradictory reactions to the recent news that two more colleges, one in Costa Rica and another in Kenya, are being planned.  On the one hand, this will bring fresh vigour to an organization that has not made much headway since the tenth college opened in India nearly 10 years ago.  But I cannot conceal a feeling that it merely perpetuates the existing system with all its apparent weaknesses – unstable long-term funding, geographical isolation and an educational paradigm that (for me) does not sit entirely comfortably in the 21st century.

A few weeks ago I was in Banja Luka and Sarajevo participating in the joint UWC/IBO project in Bosnia and Herzegovina (The IB in the Balkans).  Our international conference in Sarajevo attracted representatives from IB schools in Croatia, Slovenia and Greece as well as a large group of UWC graduates, some local some international, from colleges around the world.  I doubt if there has ever been such an impressive example of the potential influence of the combined networks of UWC and IBO and it offered a tantalising glimpse of how we can move beyond the syllabuses and examinations of the IB Diploma Programme to offer a new model of post war educational reconstruction.

To those who ask me, how can I best see international education in action? my reply has always been, visit a United World College.  Now, I believe this latest UWC/IBO partnership should encourage both organizations to seek a renewed relationship that reaches beyond the often isolated experience of one particular institution.

George Walker

Let me admit from the start that I am a conference phobic.  I am the person who is seen rebooking his return flight and sloping off to the airport in urgent response to a bogus message from my PA telling me the office is on fire.  At least I was, until I very nearly rebooked onto the TWA flight to Paris that crashed soon after take-off from JFK.  Since then I have stuck it out to the end.

I have attended several million different conferences and one of my annual nightmares is being trapped, always in the same fin de siècle hotel, unable to find the way to the station (isn’t it interesting how one’s dreams are historically consistent).  An enduring memory of the IBO will be the bell that sounds when the lift finally arrives at my hotel floor which – together with the ever-optimistic wait for my luggage coming round (or not coming round) the carousel at the airport – must have accounted for at least a year of my life.

The IBO thrives on conferences and sometimes measures the relative success of its different parts by conference attendance figures.  Regional conferences, sub-regional conferences, heads’ conferences, coordinators’ conferences: you name it and someone will organize a conference for it.  Indeed, we have very efficient regional conference units to do just that.  But finding myself in someone else’s conference last week, as I dozed off in rather comfortable chairs, listening on my headphones to translations that one can only admire but never fully comprehend, I began to wonder what it was all about.

After all, every one of the papers being presented would be posted on the conference website; the programme was so full there was no time for serious discussion.  In the plenary sessions, each distinguished speaker said more or less what one would have expected each distinguished speaker to say.  The lunch was modest and the afternoon tea was cold.   But, of course, there was the networking amongst all those important people who have come with the sole purpose of learning all about your latest bright idea so another KPI to measure a good conference must surely be the number of visiting cards you bring back.

I think we do still go to conferences in the hope of being inspired but in my experience it rarely happens.  I can remember about half a dozen such set-piece moments of truth, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru, whom I heard when I was a student, and more recently Nobel Laureate, Oscar Arias, who opened our Americas conference in 2001 in Costa Rica with a brilliant speech.  But too often what we hear are recycled presentations obscured, rather than illuminated, by distracting PowerPoint.

Then there is death-by-reporting-back from the inevitable working groups (now rather dubiously called ‘breakout groups’ – if only one could).  Well chairman, I’m going to be very brief as all my points have been covered by previous speakers….25 minutes later….and now I think our scribe, Wendy, has just a couple of tiny suggestions to make.

And yes, we do go to conferences for the networking so it would be interesting to know what percentage of time most people spend in the bar compared to the conference sessions and to ask if it might not be more efficient to put everyone together on a cruise liner without the guilt-inducing distraction of a conference.

But how many of us go to a conference prepared to do some work, to make a contribution, to actually produce something?   The distinguished American psychologist, Jerry Bruner, urges us to associate learning with the production of tangible “oeuvres” and there was a time when one at least returned home with a satisfying pile of conference papers, but no longer: they are only available on the conference website.  Now, all we are left with is the conference bag, a leaking biro and, at the top of the range, a t-shirt.

One of the most stimulating events I ever took part in (OK, it was a workshop not a conference, but the principle remains sound) brought together a mixed group of people sharing an interest in comprehensive education in the UK to write a book from scratch over a weekend.  And, inspired and encouraged by The Guardian’s wonderful education correspondent at the time, Maureen O’Connor, we wrote it, from start to finish, and the sense of achievement was huge.

The recent Heads Standing Association conference in Bangkok came somewhere near this when participants were challenged to contribute to a communiqué to be published at the end of the conference.  I hope someone will build on this idea because too often we invite large numbers of able and experienced people to gather together, we sit them in conference halls and then fail to make best use of their time and talent.

George Walker