"Instead of finding all the bad people and punishing them, what we need to do is find the good practice and exalt it and make it the norm."
Alan Blankstein, the award-winning and bestselling author of Failure is Not An Option, was one of the very first thought leaders in education to promote the values of professional learning communities. He knows and understands schools and how to bring about positive change. In his new book, The Answer is in the Room: How Effective Schools Scale Up Student Success, he offers a very compelling thesis: that within every school and district, even the lowest performing ones, there is great teaching and excellent practice to be found which can be scaled. At a time in education where blaming the teachers is seen as the primary solution for bringing about change, Alan takes the opposite approach. He believes we are wasting valuable time and resources focusing on the negative, rather than finding the positives and building upon those ideas and practices.
Q: The message of your new book, The Answer is in the Room, is that somewhere, within every school and every district, there is great teaching and excellent practice already underway – even in the lowest performing schools. Tell us about why you believe that to be the case?
Alan Blankstein: Well, there are three reasons why I believe that’s the case: one is that it’s been our practice; we’ve been out in the field for more than a decade and that’s what we’ve seen. The second is that, if you talk to any principal or superintendent, they will say almost invariably that someone in the school is doing really well. In particular, someone is doing well with the same kids that others are sending to the principal’s office. I have spoken all over the country and in other parts of the world, and that’s consistently the case. The third reason is that I didn’t believe numbers one and two are enough to let that go as a researcher, wearing that hat, and so I talked with 50 of the top people in North America and the UK on this same topic and to inform the book, and virtually every single one of them agreed with that concept, and that’s been their experience as well.