The Education Architect

There is a particular flavour of fear that comes with networking. It is not the dramatic, cinematic kind. It is the quiet, internal whisper that says, Who do you think you are?

There is a metaphor quietly shaping how we lead schools. Most of the time, we do not even notice it. If we see schools as machines, we try to fix them with tighter policies, sharper monitoring and new initiatives bolted on like replacement parts. When results dip, we assume something is broken. When behaviour slips, we assume something needs tightening. But what if schools are not machines? What if they are ecosystems? That shift in metaphor changes everything.

There is something quietly disruptive about action research in the classroom. Not the glossy, conference-slide version. The real version. The one where you notice that something feels slightly off on a Tuesday afternoon in Period 5, and instead of blaming the class, the timetable, or Mercury being in retrograde, you run a tiny experiment.