Writing has a closer and deeper relationship with the government school system than we might imagine. Enter school corridors and the walls display moral inscriptions (“time is discipline”, for example), what constitutes good instruction and the promises to be upheld by an ideal teacher or a pledge every student must take.
What passes off as ‘good instruction’. Photo: Gopal Midha.
Classroom walls often portray disciplinary norms and only the ‘pretty’ versions of students’ or teachers’ writing. Then there is the more private kind of school writing seen in forms, registers and memos that bring the school into existence and keep it alive. Forget oral discussions – only when it is passed through writing can we create, regulate or shut down schools. Writing is such an intimate aspect of every school that a headmaster’s office usually has four or five steel almirahs guarding records that often date back to the day the school was inaugurated.
A pledge for students in a government school. Photo: Gopal Midha.
Yet writing remains relatively below the radar when it comes to understanding schools. More importantly, if we need to change schools, what is written by them – and for them – must change.
Despite education’s close relationship with writing, the conventional view is that writing is merely an objective tool of display or a format for record-keeping. Consider instead that writing is a form of action, as some scholars have argued.
For example, if you tweak the lesson plan format to begin with a question on addressing equity in the classroom, the action itself starts a positive chain-reaction, provoking the teacher to teach differently. If you find, like I did, school headmasters spending half their time engaged in administrative writing (often summarily dismissed as ‘paperwork’) it is because they know that writing matters and is no less than action.
Inspections revolve around written documents such as attendance registers, mid-day meal records, service books and the headmaster’s notes on lesson observations. The act of putting one red remark in the inspection register can stop promotions or, worse, get you transferred to unpleasant locations.
Let’s take another form of writing that has come to haunt schools: numbers. Never before have there been such concerted efforts to capture students and learning in standardised indicators nor has there ever been such a relentless demand to send data up the institutional hierarchy. Requests for information pouring through WhatsApp groups structure a principal’s life, be it sending data on student and teacher attendance, monthly test results or the number of vaccinated students.
The well-meaning effort to convert a living, breathing, playful child to a cluster of purely statistical information undermines education at its roots. Unfortunately, what such information rarely captures are qualitative, humane details such as the life-determining status on mental health, life-changing skills on collaboration or life-defining values such as ethical behaviour.
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Finally, even though the school’s heart, its technical core, lies in instruction, what usurps time and attention is the inter-organisational writing that flows up and down the institutional hierarchy. Such writing is often laborious. I remember how the head teacher of a school I was observing went physically pale when he received a memo to explain why the student count in his classroom register was found to be higher than the actual number of students presented.
Although the inspector had mentioned this discrepancy to the head teacher two days ago, a written memo was serious business. Consequently, the head teacher’s bandwidth for the coming week was usurped by finding the right words and phrases to draft an appropriate response. It was not simply that a response had to be drafted and sent in seven days: the language must be chaste and deeply respectful and the document will forever be part of the head-teacher’s job folder.
What can be done to rectify such affairs in education? Apart from more research on how writing shapes schools and schooling systems, current writing practices must change. I offer three suggestions.
First, remove the moral inscriptions on school walls, since they usually serve to devalue the meaning of education and the true power of the written word. In his essay in Deewar ka Istemaal (‘The Use of a Wall’), Krishna Kumar explored the meaninglessness of a moral inscription like “time is precious” when teachers regularly come late. Instead, list examples of projects students are undertaking and their expected outcomes. Ask teachers to write their current and aspirational subject matter expertise and teaching strengths next to classroom doors. Decorate classrooms with messy works-in-progress to show that learning is more than pretty chartwork. Insist that report cards contain a paragraph about the students – stories not captured by their scores.
Second, develop narratives and case studies when trying to understand how a school or a network of schools is doing. Have block and cluster leaders write the ideas they tried, including what worked and what didn’t. Keep a school journal that documents small and big wins and is open to the public. Change the format of lesson plans, meeting minutes and classroom observations to reflect equity, democratic practice and collaboration.
Finally, when asking for numbers, make the institutional memo format indicate why – specifically, how the numbers will be used and what will be reported back to the school. The current practice of asking for data “because the superintendent wants it” is demotivating for those scrambling to collate data because they do not know why or to what use their effort will be put. They are a waste of time because such requests for data are vague and therefore often misunderstood, resulting in contradictory information. Plus, it allows senior officials to get away with derelict behaviour.
To make these kinds of writing more common, we will have to drastically cut down the number of registers and records maintained in the name of ‘transparency’. Each item received by the school is often recorded in two different places – this is meaningless. A principal’s office is not an archive, so send records more than two years old to a warehouse. Not only is this more efficient to access or easier to digitise, it will also free space to install whiteboards for reflective writing and planning. We can’t expect school principals to be leaders if we bury them in paperwork.
Writing is not a mere tool to support transparency or track performance; it is a form of action. Your written response will start turning the wheel of change. What is essential must be made visible to the eye – and therein lies the power of writing.
Gopal Midha has a PhD in educational leadership from the University of Virginia. He is currently setting up a Center for Research on School Leadership in Goa.
