Giving staff a simulated experience of being a patient is what a big hospital in Cleveland USA is doing, as part of their introduction of "Serving Leadership", a way of inverting the leadership pyramid, serving the interests of others, raising the bar on what people do and achieving a higher purpose.
You soon discover what it feels like to take away your clothes and your possessions. To wait. And wait some more. To be shunted around from one diagnostic test to another. To be told little or nothing. To become a number in the system. To be patronized. To be unable to see what doctors and nurses record about you and your condition, in case they have it all wrong. Not enough respect for your liking. Being bossed around. Eroding your self esteem.
So what if we could the same for schools? So we teachers could have a direct experience of how young people see the impact of what we do. The fear of closed questioning that shuts down your brain. Constant knowledge telling. Blah. Blah. Blah. Making demands about behavior. The constant testing. Marking the attendance register. Sitting quietly until spoken to. Ridicule or sarcasm if you can't answer a question or to make you sit still/quietly. The resentment at being treated disrespectfully.
Seymour Papert of MIT Media Lab once said that there were three professions that had changed so little during the 20th century that anyone transported from 100 years ago could perform the job just as well as anyone born today. Health workers. Prison officers. Teachers.
The customer experience all depends on the kind of relationship we choose to have with our customer. The global management consultancy, McKinsey, says the next big thing in the business world is co-creating the future with the customer. No longer does the supplier have all the knowledge. And customers know what they want to be different or better.
It's the same in the world of education, particularly with easy access to the Internet, where knowledge is ubiquitous. Kids can easily teach themselves about amost anything if they are sufficiently motivated. In the United Kingdom, where an effort is being made to improve the learning experience for a disenchanted generation, schools are listening to what their students have to say about their lessons, so teachers can design classes that are more exciting, engaging and effective. It's called Student Voice. And because administrators have not been listening to the issues encountered by their teachers, there's a similar program for teachers, called Teacher Voice.
The new relationship with our customers also demand a change in the language we use. If we want to become a "serving leader" organization, little will change if we talk to each other in the old ways. It's like a computer programmer, brain surgeon or an airline pilot trying to use the language of 10,000 years ago to do their job. There are thousands of concepts and their meanings missing from an Agricultural era vocabulary which limit what you can communicate, or result in such impossibly long descriptions, you would need two or three paragraphs or pages to describe a concept.
Its seems time then to define the respective roles of the patient/nurse or doctor, and the student/teacher and the nature of the relationship in new ways.
So here's a workshop to change the learner experience, which could be just as easily applied to hospital patients.
1. Describe the student experience in a school classroom. What do teachers do and say, and what are the consequences for their students?
2. Form into several groups of four or five people. One person is to be the teacher, the rest are to be students. Act out what teachers do or say. Repeat the activity with a different person as the teacher.
3. Thinking about each of the actions the "teachers" performed, what they did and said, how did you feel and how did you want to respond?
4. Thinking about your reactions, develop ideas for what teachers can do or say to engage with students that improves the "customer" experience, e.g. is respectful, positive and helpful/conducive to learning.
5. What should be the role of the teacher and the student in the context of 21st century values?
6. What names could you use for "teacher" and "student" that better reflect their new roles?
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