Ten lines on the horizon: future trends in school communications

There may be lines on the horizon, but everything is still quite vague.

Looking back, on the other hand, I can see clearly how far we’ve come.  Ten years ago, many of us read The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual and it quickly brought about a revolution in our thinking; changing forever the way we understand the communications task.  It was a groundbreaking, radical thesis:  

Stop using jargon, tell it as it is; listen; have conversations and, once and for all, stop seeing customers as the enemy.

Today, though, this seems nothing more than plain common sense.  The thesis has become the new business as usual.

So where next?  What is the ‘next now’ for those of us who work as communications professionals in the field of education?

Here are 10 initial thoughts to get the conversation going.

1. Losing control vs losing the plot: As social media inevitably and relentlessly pushes us to become better listeners, have better conversations and become more flexible in relation to our ‘customers’, I believe that we will have to give up, once and for all, the myth that we can control what people are saying about us, our companies or our educational institutions.  They always did talk about us, in fact.  The only difference now, with the advent of social media, is that we can listen in more easily and, in some cases, measure what people are saying out there. 

At the same time, the more conversations we have, the more air-time we give to our ‘customers’, the more we will feel the pressure to confirm.  Some of our values, mission statements and guiding principles will be challenged and we will be forced to find new ways of ‘envisioning’ the conversations out there.  If we don’t, we will find ourselves blown around by the winds of common opinion.     

In short, our task will be to act as guides; providing a language and a perspective that will ensure that don’t lose the pedagogical plot completely.

2. Telling the story to understand the story: It’s a simple point really.  We don’t ever understand human experience until we tie it into a story.  Until that point, our lives are nothing more than a random, dislocated set of sensory experiences devoid of meaning or relevance.  And the same is true of organizations.  They don’t have a vision until they have a story.  So when it comes to narrating the future of our educational organizations, we simply can’t afford to leave the storyteller outside the Board Room.  It will be her job to find the simplicity in the complexity, bring coherence, offer perspective and a common language.

Obvious, perhaps, but take a look at the Senior Management organizational charts of many schools and colleges.  The Communications Director is simply nowhere to be seen.

3. Finding the new in old media.  It’s all about new media right now, isn’t it?  Shiny new tools that promise an online, anytime, boundary-less future.  And to think, only a few years ago, most of us were content with a brochure and a website that worked!

Propelled towards this future, we will do well to reflect on whether traditional print media can still play a role.  Is print production dead?  To be sure, today it is simply irresponsible to think that we will continue to use paper where there is a credible, preferred alternative.  But perhaps we should not move too quickly away from print production and its allies.  A positive future will be one in which we use paper wisely, creatively and with clear focused objectives.

4. Driven by data vs driven mad by it.  We will need to be more target driven and focus our assessment and evaluative efforts on more than coverage and content.  Measuring inputs, outputs and impact upon the organization will be required at all levels.  And as most of us will not have the luxury of a ‘data officer’, we are all going to have to learn to improve our analytical skills in this area; learn to ask better, more insightful questions of the work we do; learn how to tell stories through the language of number.

5. The old internal vs external chestnut.  We will find that internal communications will be far more important to us than marketing.  This is a bold statement.  But think about it.  Many of us are working in organizations where our market take up is dominated by word of mouth.  So it stands to reason that if we keep our current customers happy, we will have an army of marketeers out there telling the story of our schools and colleges.

Now, of course, I am defining ‘internal’ communications to mean everyone who is currently part of the school-college community.  It is interesting to look across the fence, though, at the Corporations, where a similar trend is being noticed.  (Unless that is similarly because communications traditionally has it in for their marketing colleagues!)

6. Communications as experience architecture.  According to Tom Kelley, the ‘experience architect’ is one of the ten ‘faces’ of innovation.  We know the guys at Starbucks don’t simply want to serve you a coffee; they want you to pay for and receive an experience that just happens to include coffee.

In the future, our customers are going to be far more demanding in this area.  They will be easily bored, distracted and prefer those who communicate more than information on a page.  We are going to have to put on our thinking caps and work out how to communicate the experience of learning, without necessary having access to the big-budget resources of the corporations.

7. Business vs Education.   We are finally going to have to give up this antipathy.  Let’s face it, it’s our own fault.  It was our educational colleagues, back in the middle ages, who built colleges and universities as castles, keeping the pursuit of learning pure and ensuring that all ‘corrupting’ influences remain firmly on the outside.  In the twentieth century, in particular, anything that resembled ‘business’ was considered anathema and only recently have we seen a shift in thinking about the idea that business can sponsor and begin to determine what the learning experience. 

Our future is going to be tough, it we don’t work hard at breaking down this myth and bringing these two communities together.  And no better place to start than by actually sitting around the table and talking to businesses about the ways in which our curricula are preparing kids for future employment.  It really is all about preparing young people for life beyond school.

As communicators we are going to have to tell stories that bring reconciliation to these once warring worlds.

8. Value added.  It seems a simple thing, but I believe that for most of us, it is not.  Most of us are creative enough to enjoy new challenges and to adopt new ideas.  But where does this all stop?  Is new always better?  In the future, I believe we will have to ask far more and far often those difficult questions about the value of many of our traditional, taken for granted activities.                

We are also going to have to be prepared to act upon the answers we bring to these questions.

9. Capture the student voice.  I truly believe that schools and colleges have not yet even begun to tap into the well of student resources they have at their finger tips.  For many of us, however, working with our own students will become commonplace.  We will look to our students to bring us closer to the experience of learning; closer to new ways of telling the story; closer to new technologies and their communications potential.  And we will need to develop the necessary rewards, structures, protocols by which students receive authentic, mentored work experience before they leave us.  Do this and you will discover a win-win situation for everyone involved!

10. Where did all the vocation go?  Perhaps every generation asks this question, but one of the repercussions of a more professionalized industry seems to be the absence of the word vocation – that sense that we don’t mind not having a BMW in the car park, because our rewards are tied up in the fact that we can truly make a difference to the lives of our students.  In the future, I believe that one of two things will happen.  We will either have to rest content with young professionals joining our teams, being more demanding and consistently being tempted across the street by the corporate world; or we are going to have to think of ways to re-introduce the concept of vocation into the work that we do.

10 briefly stated ideas.  And who knows whether they will last the test of time or whether other lines will appear on the horizon.  Time will tell, I guess.

Ideas are always borne of conversations.  So I am extremely happy to acknowledge those members of the workshop at Case Europe Annual Conference on 27 August 2009 (sponsored by Council for Advancement and Support of Education and European Association of Commuication Directors who so readily engaged with this subject and provided some helpful direction and critical thinking to my own.

Postcard from Brussels: Imagining a partnership full of promise

Our story begins with imagination.

Imagination is not, as some might suppose, a suspension of what is real in order to escape into fanciful, unrealistic thinking. Imagination, I would suggest, involves taking all the messiness of ordinary life and making an effort to pull it together into a bigger picture, where things seem to make more sense and where good things happen to a plan. The official name of our plan at the International School of Brussels is ISB2010. It lays out an ambitious agenda around five priorities: student learning, professional learning, the campus, the environment, and technology. Central to every part of the plan is the concept of sustainability. In other words, ISB2010 is all about building a school that can sustain a truly innovative learning environment for today’s and tomorrow’s students.

So how can sustainability be achieved? One part of the answer, we are beginning to discover, is through the building of effective networks and partnerships. Partnerships not only help us achieve our goals but also enable the school to go further than even we had imagined.

Established in 1951, the International School of Brussels is a nonprofit, coeducational day school in the capital of Europe. Today, with 1,450 students aged 30 months to 19 years who represent 70 nationalities, it remains the oldest and largest English-language international school in Belgium. Driven by the core values of inclusion, challenge, and success for all, the mission of the school is to develop independent learners and international citizens who are equipped to be happy, successful, ethical contributors to the local and global community.

ISB2010 imagines a future for our school that is a significant stretch to attain. In short, we knew where we wanted to go, even if we didn’t know how we are going to get there. However, as we began to engage in a new partnership with the European Commission’s Directorate General for Transport and Energy, some of the pieces of understanding began to fall into place. It was this partnership that allowed us to enter into new worlds of understanding, knowledge, insight, and perspective.

In 2005, the European Union launched a major campaign—“Sustainable Energy Europe”—that was designed to raise awareness and change the landscape of energy both in terms of sustainable energy production and energy efficiency (see www.sustenergy.org). Because ISB had the reputation of being able to model good practice for other schools, we were invited by the commission for become the first school “Campaign Associate.” The school welcomed this formal acknowledgment, since it gave the institution increased visibility. But it also had another, unexpected, and immediate impact: It challenged us to go further than we had gone before.

One of the most tangible expressions of this partnership was an environmental and energy day, set in the context of the European Sustainable Energy Week 2007. The day, called Reducing Our Impact, consisted of a series of plenary sessions and hands-on learning activities designed to help students realize how they can respond to today’s global energy and environment issues while mitigating their own environmental footprint.

In total, the event involved more than 400 high school students and faculty members, as well as a number of external experts on the subjects of environmental impact and sustainable development. European Commission representatives were present, as well as other key external stakeholders from ExxonMobil,World Wildlife Fund, Unilever, Toyota, and the Brussels Institute for the Management of the Environment.

Reflecting on the impact of this day, high school student Rachel Chapman writes: “A day like this certainly makes you sit up and think! By measuring the size of our ecological footprint we realized it was time to begin to act.What is important now is to change what we do in the future and to believe we can truly make a difference.”

This collaborative venture among students, faculty, and external partners is now an annual event at the school. Other schools in the area are keen to participate, and students are involved in the planning. This year we look forward to welcoming a number of UN agencies as well as representatives from Brussels-based NGOs, local environmental agencies, and multinational companies. Beyond ISB, the “Sustainable Energy Europe” campaign is proving extremely successful. Originally foreseen to last four years (2005-2008), organizers have announced that they intend to prolong the campaign for a second four-year term, extending it until 2012. This will mean greater reach to citizens across Europe and undoubtedly an emphasis on the role of schools.

As the first school Campaign Associate in this initiative, much of our focus with the European Commission has been to think through how to involve other schools. We have also pushed the message of the campaign out to new audiences via a number of joint communication initiatives, including joint advertising, publications, and conference presentations.

From our perspective, however, the most important impact of this partnership is absolutely clear: by building a bridge to the European Commission, we discovered an opportunity for recognition and a powerful catalyst for change that is now affecting all aspects of the school and its development. At ISB, we are no longer content to engage in token environmental initiatives that are here today and gone tomorrow. Rather, we are committed to establishing coherence across all aspects of the school, connecting what the students are learning in the classroom with the way we manage the campus—in the buildings we build, the partnerships we establish, and the many student and parent initiatives around the school.

So where are we going next? Today, teams of teachers across the school are working on a major curriculum initiative on global issues. This year’s annual giving program is soliciting funds for a “Forest School Project” designed to ensure—via the building of outdoor wireless networks, an outdoor classroom, observation platforms, and signage—that the forest is preserved and yet is also a place where students can gain a deep understanding and respect for the outstanding natural beauty surrounding them. New energy-smart buildings and mobility solutions are also being planned to promote and ensure that at every level and in every way we really do practice what we preach and begin to reduce a carbon footprint that for too long has remained too large.

And this really is just the beginning. As we move forward with ISB2010 we remain deeply committed to becoming a school in which lasting, creative partnerships between students, parents, our local community, and “vision partners,” who share our core values, take us further than we can go alone.

Imagining the future of international education is certainly not an easy task. It requires courage and a constant willingness to dig deep into the complexity of the educational task and discover new patterns, configurations, and opportunities. Looking back, much of what we have discovered now seems so obvious. But maybe that’s the point: Only in retrospect is it possible to judge the imaginings that began in our mind’s eye. For ISB, we’ve seen what is possible.

This article was first published in CASE CURRENTS magazine, March 2008.

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