Very sadly, Professor Richard Elmore from the Harvard Graduate School of Education passed away earlier this year. His research focused on building capacity for instructional improvement and, more recently, on the relationship between the neuroscience of learning and the design of new learning environments. His innovative HarvardX online course, Leaders of Learning, was taken by over 100,000 people.

A decade ago I found myself in Elmore’s class on ‘Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement’. In that class, he encouraged us to think about teaching as a “practice,” a body of knowledge in need of regular collaborative review, in the same way that medical doctors and lawyers see their work. After lamenting that educators fail to achieve collective learning (“watching teams operate in schools is like watching Astroturf grow”), he pioneered instructional rounds, modeled on medical rounds, for educators to identify a problem or practice and gather data from a range of classrooms to draw conclusions.

In class, Elmore argued that most school structures are based on adults’ fear of children running out of control and adults always underestimate the capabilities of children. He taught us that the best indicators of student learning are the tasks that they undertake – task predicts performance. Yet the task that students most frequently undertake in schools is listening to a teacher talk.

 He finished the course arguing that schools are operating on a 19th century bureaucratic model, a compliance-oriented structure, based on:

• Deficit-based versus asset-based models of student learning.
• Teacher to student versus student to teacher models of authority.
• Extrinsic versus intrinsic models of motivation.
• Fixed versus incremental models of intelligence.
• Cognitive versus social-emotional models of knowledge.
• Status versus developmental models of performance.

While Elmore believed that there will always be a place like school for students to interact with teachers, he warned that the school education sector as we know it will soon be obsolete. We are increasingly organizing ourselves around social networks and there is more learning going on in social networks than in formal organisations. Chillingly, he concluded, “There is no future in the organizations you used to work in. Our future is not a future of fixed practices. Our future is a future of dramatic transformations. The more I know about learning, the more problematic I find this institution called school.”

In the last decade, Elmore argued that we needed to rethink the concepts of scale and policy in education. He believed that scaling in education focuses on procedural change and never really gets to the deep change in teachers’ beliefs required for effective school improvement. He saw policy as too focused on standardization without taking into account the wide variety of factors that influence learning. Most recently, Elmore had turned his focus to using the emerging “neuroscience of learning” to transform the design of learning environments. 

In 2012 he declared, “I do not believe in the institutional structure of public schooling any more”, and he described his work as “palliative care for a dying institution.” He was inspired by Sugata Mitra’s student-driven learning in Indian slums and he explored outlier organizations that are unleashing powerful learning, like NuVu, Beijing Academy in China, and Redes de Tutoría in Mexico. “A major lesson we have learned from attainment-driven models of schooling is that it is possible to disable human beings as learners by convincing them that they do not have the capability to manage their own learning.” 

In his last podcast, he argued that there is a growing gap between schooling and learning. Learning is central to our survival as a species, but there is not a powerful connection between learning in schools and learning in our lives. Learning is a biological, evolutionary necessity for survival, as opposed to an institutionalized practice. He described schools as toxic physical environments which run counter to learning. Elmore saw the central function of schooling as custody, the second function of schooling is control, the third is to decide privilege through money, rewards, and merit (he found it bizarre that people committed to equity run the machine whose purpose is to create privilege). Learning is merely what we do when time is left over. He felt that learning is migrating away from schooling as a matter of human survival and he encouraged educators to get involved in non-school learning environments.

Elmore likened current schooling practices to the practice of medicine before germ theory. We are learning an enormous amount about learning from neuroscience but it is having virtually no effect on education. Elmore argued that each individual has a unique developmental path, yet we have created institutions that have purposes that are becoming obsolete. He thinks people are just going to walk away. They have chosen to be in institutions that do not support their aspirations. He concluded the podcast by describing the power of learning through a beginner’s mindset and encouraging educators to always have something in their lives that they are a novice at. He touted the work of Alison Gopnick and Sarah Blakemore and encouraged us to read their work with a beginner’s mind. He also recommended Tom Vanderbilt’s book Beginners as a great read for lifelong learning.

Vale Richard Elmore. You were an intellectual giant and you will be missed.