Archive for the 'Leadership' Category
OWL’S HOOTS NO. 6
Friday, May 15th, 2009
Owl’s Hoots No. 6, 15 May 2009: Education and schooling, teaching and assessment: what is the unique value of museums in education? And European Space Agency launches not one but two giant telescopes into space. Another astounding recording from Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela! And museums in Chicago: new buildings and miserliness.
Education and learning, early childhood intervention and performance assessment: I was fortunate in April to attend the recent conference of the American Education Research Association in San Diego, California – 18,000 or so delegates, up to 90 concurrent sessions over five days from 7:30am to 6:00pm! Leading researchers dealt extensively with standards of education, assessment of students and teachers, the development of brain function and cognition and many other important issues.
In asserting that the high stakes testing regime, so common in the USA and some other countries in the last decades, has narrowed the mind, Professor David Berliner of the University of Arizona quoted a letter from John Adams (1735-1826; second President of the United States) to Abigail Adams in 1780, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” Â Berliner asserted that students were learning what Adams’ sons and not what his grandsons were to learn.
Intervention in early childhood education is amongst the most important issues but is not receiving the attention it ought to. Orla Doyle of University College Dublin and others including Nobel prizewinner in economics James J Heckman of the University of Chicago (“Investing in early human development: Timing and economic efficiency”, Economics and Human Biology 7 (2009), 1-6) point out that research has shown that “intervening in the zero-to-three period, when children are at their most receptive stage of development, has the potential to permanently alter their development trajectories and protect them against risk factors present in their early environment.
“Children from poorer households also have lower verbal and cognitive ability and more emotional and behavioural problems on average. Parental education, particularly that of the mother plays a major role in the child’s development as educated parents are, in general, better equipped to provide stimulating home environments. ..Early investment in preventive programmes aimed at disadvantaged children is often more cost effective than later remediation.”
Linda Darling-Hammond (who was on President Barack Obama’s transition team) and Elle Rustique-Forrester of Stanford University in reviewing the consequences of student testing for teaching and teacher quality (in chapter 12 of the Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education vol 104/2, p 289-319, June 2005) note that the centerpiece of state educational reforms over the last decade has been the development of educational standards to guide school practices and investments. “The central assumption is that by holding students, teachers, schools, and districts responsible for results on standardized achievement tests, expectations for students will rise, teaching will improve, and learning will increase. [However] while tests might be levers for greater equity, they have long been used to keep students separate and to exclude students from educational curricula, programs, and opportunities.”
The important conclusions are that “… assessment systems in which teachers look at student work with other teachers and discuss standards in explicit ways appear to help schools develop shared definitions of quality. Evaluating work collaboratively rather than grading students in isolation helps teachers make their standards explicit, gain multiple perspectives on learning, and think about how they can teach to produce the kinds of student work they want to see.”
Our understanding of learning and what advances it, has changed radically in the last several decades but the appropriate strategies for education authorities is far from agreed. Similarly, many museums are approaching their education function as if the responsibility is only to schoolchildren in class excursions (or field trips)and giving them lectures and handing out worksheets for completion by each child individually. In doing so they are ignoring their unique ability to provide free choice learning opportunities.
Huge telescopes launched into space: On May 14 the European Space Agency (ESA) launched two powerful new flagship telescope observatories, Herschel (containing the largest mirror ever carried into space) and Planck. An Ariane 5 rocket carrying the two observatories blasted off from the ESA’s launch centre in French Guiana in South America. On the BBC Jonathon Amos reports (in several items with videos) that the observatories will study space and time in more detail than in the past and give scientists a better and clearer window on the universe. The rocket will take the observatories out to a position some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, an ideal station from which to view the universe. The launch comes during the International Year of Astronomy. The event is covered by other media including Deutsches-Welle World on line.
Another magnificant Simon Bolivar Orchestra performance: I have previously written, talking about “quality”, of Venezuela’s youth orchestra movement and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Their recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and Francesca da Rimini has just been released. The Times of London’s review of the live performance of the symphony at the 2008 Salzburg Festival read, “In Tchaikovsky’s allegros you imagine steam rising from the fiddlers’ flying fingers. The gorgeously played horn solo in the slow movement was as melancholic as anything in Dostoevsky..”
In the liner notes interviewer David Nice asks Dudamel if his [horn] soloist (in the symphony’s second movement) is the same horn player heard “executing the obligato in the scherzo of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony so brilliantly”. Dudamel replies, “No it’s the other principal horn player. Of course we have quite a choice, because there are 16 horns in the orchestra”. Remember that when Dudamel was auditioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra’s president reported the remarkable reaction of the players, “We had combustion”. The performances on this album are truly outstanding! It is more than youthful enthusiasm.
Miserly Museums in Chicago: In the Chicago Tribune for May 14 (“City culture scourges“), Mara Tapp, organiser for “Cool Classics!”, a book-based art-and-culture after-school program, writes, “When the Chicago Public School year ends June 12, elementary students will not be able to visit for free the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, the Museum of Science and Industry — because none offer free days until September. Let’s call them the Truly Miserly Museum Corps.”
The New Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago designed by Renzo Piano is written up in the Art Newspaper and the New York Times May 13 (with pictures).
Next week: More on education and schooling, learning and cognition and another quote from John Adams. Perhaps some comments on advances in museums in Australia after the Museums Australia conference in Newcastle this coming week.
OWL’S HOOTS NO. 4
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
Owl’s Hoots No. 4, 3 May 2009: Human origins, new species of animals from Papua New Guinea highlands, President Obama speaks about returning science to its proper place. And advice from Delta Airlines CEO: a matter of judgment, an essential skill in short supply. Two important birthdays!
Human Origins: In the AAAS weekly magazine Science for 1 May 2009 (Vol. 324. no. 5927, p. 575) an international team of scientists led by Sarah Tishkoff from the University of Pennsylvania reports on a study of genetic material from 113 populations of Africans from across the continent. The study finds Africans to have been descended from 14 ancestral populations, which often correlate with language and cultural groups. All hunter-gatherers and pygmies in Africa today shared ancestors 35,000 years ago. East Africa was the source of the great migration that populated the rest of the world. The team also found that African-American individuals, on average, to have mixed ancestry from all over western Africa, which will make it difficult to trace roots to specific ethnic groups.
In BBC News Online 1 May 2009 Victoria Gill gives a brief summary.
New species of animals found in Papua New Guinea: Numerous reports summarise a Conservation International (CI) led Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) expedition to Papua New Guinea’s highlands wilderness by scientists from Papua New Guinea and the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Montclair State University. The expedition discovered numerous new species amongst the 600 species collected. Included were 50 spiders new to science including a new Jumping Spider. The three new frogs include a tiny brown frog with a sharp chirping call (Oreophryne sp.), a bright green tree frog with enormous eyes (Nyctimystes sp.), and a torrent-dwelling frog that has a loud ringing call (Litoria sp.).
President Obama speaks to the US National Academy of Sciences: Here are a few extracts from President Obama’s speech of April 27; there are several sources for this speech. (Obama honored a special education teacher and former police officer at the White House on April 28 as the 2009 National Teacher of the Year.)
“At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science, that support for research is somehow a luxury at moments defined by necessities. I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before.”
“I believe it is not in our character, the American character, to follow. It’s our character to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. So I’m here today to set this goal: We will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development. We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science.”
“The pursuit of discovery half a century ago fueled our prosperity and our success as a nation in the half century that followed. The commitment I am making today will fuel our success for another 50 years. That’s how we will ensure that our children and their children will look back on this generation’s work as that which defined the progress and delivered the prosperity of the 21st century.
“This work begins with a historic commitment to basic science and applied research, from the labs of renowned universities to the proving grounds of innovative companies.”
“… scientific innovation offers us a chance to achieve prosperity. It has offered us benefits that have improved our health and our lives — improvements we take too easily for granted. But it gives us something more. At root, science forces us to reckon with the truth as best as we can ascertain it.
And some truths fill us with awe. Others force us to question long-held views. Science can’t answer every question, and indeed, it seems at times the more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world, the more humble we must be. Science cannot supplant our ethics or our values, our principles or our faith. But science can inform those things and help put those values — these moral sentiments, that faith — can put those things to work — to feed a child, or to heal the sick, to be good stewards of this Earth.”
Lessons from US Airlines: One would not generally look to US airlines, many of which are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, for lessons. Unless it is Southwest Airlines. However, in “He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects“, Adam Bryant (New York Times April 25, 2009)Â reports an interview with Richard Anderson, chief executive of Delta Air Lines. Some extracts:
The most important leadership lesson learned: “I’ve learned to be patient and not lose my temper. And the reason that’s important is everything you do is an example, and people look at everything you do and take a signal from everything you do.”
Other things learned: “You’ve got to be thankful to the people who get the work done, and you’ve got to be thankful to your customers. So, I find myself, more and more, writing hand-written notes to people. I must write a half a dozen a day.”
Hiring: “Typically, when you’re hiring a vice president of a company, they already have the résumé and they already have the experience base. And so what you’re trying to find out about are the intangibles of leadership, communication style and the ability to, today, really adapt to change.
“I like to ask people what they’ve read, what are the last three or four books they’ve read, and what did they enjoy about those. And to really understand them as individuals because, you know, the résumés you get are wonderful résumés. Wonderful education, great work history. So you have to probe a little bit deeper into the human intangibles, because we’ve all seen many instances where people had perfect résumés, but weren’t effective in an organization.
“So it’s not just education and experience. It’s education, experience and the human factor. The situational awareness that a person has and their ability to fit into an organization and then be successful in the organization. It’s a whole series of intangibles that are almost gut instincts about people.”
Recruitment, like everything else that is important, is a matter of judgment!
Judgment: It’s in extremely short supply! I keep a list of poor judgments concerning people who have turned out to be successful, like J.S Bach. The latest two on my list are author David Gutterson (“Snow Falling on Cedars” and “East of the Mountains”) and Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe. Gutterson’s book “Snow Falling on Cedars”, about Japanese Americans in a small island in the US in World War 2, was turned down by many publishers: it has sold millions of copies and been translated into many languages.
Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 6 was described by a critic as sounding like an elephant dragging [something across a tiled roof]. But, along with his Sun Music, the piece led to a contract with Faber Music, a rare honour! (Sculthorpe is interviewed by a number of people including Phillip Adams on “Late Night Live” and Andrew Ford on “The Music Show” as he approaches his 80th birthday!)
Pete Seeger turns 90 today (3 May). Seeger was sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress ““ he refused to sing for the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in August 1955 and he remained on a network television blacklist until the late 1960s, but the verdict was reversed in 1962. At the conclusion of the concert for the inauguration of President Obama, Seeger performed, “This Land is Our Land”.
Next week: More nonsense about the “International Museum” and global climate change: what value are the governments of nation states?
OWL’S HOOTS
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Hoots No. 1 – 26 March 2009: Museums have become “our home from home”, Barack Obama’s work schedule has large gaps in which he sets aside time to step back and think or make calls or read and the late Bill Stanner’s essays published by Black Inc. Australia will support the UN Indigenous Rights Convention which the former government voted against in 2007.
Museums are not much like museums anymore: In “Why museums have become our home from home” (The Times March 14, 2009) Hugo Rifkind writes that “People are visiting our galleries and museums at a startling rate. Is it the cafés, the absence of swearing… maybe even the art?”. Rifkind suggests some reasons: that museums “are the best public space we have” and that museums are safe places. Of course they are free but more people may be visiting “because people are getting cleverer”. But first of all he says it is because “quite suddenly, museums aren’t much like museums”!
Leadership lessons: Writing in the New York Review of Books (“The Thirty Days of Barack Obama”, March 26, 2009) Elizabeth Drew observes the following:
“As carefully as Barack Obama prepared for it, the presidency has held some surprises for him””some foreseeable, some not, and some of his own making. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of the early Clinton era, Obama concluded that, unlike Clinton, he didn’t want to hold the numerous meetings that can chew up so much of the president’s time. Instead, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama’s style is to drop by an aide’s office””a restless man, he roams the White House corridors””or stop an aide in a hallway and ask, “How are you coming on that thing we were talking about?” Gibbs says, “The worst thing is not have an answer.” Asked what happens then, Gibbs replied, “He gets that disappointed parent look, and then you better go find an answer.”
“Obama’s publicly announced schedules have large gaps; he makes it a point to set aside time to step back and think””sometimes going for a long, solitary walk around the White House grounds””or make calls, or read. A night owl, he usually takes work home, to be studied after he’s tucked his daughters into bed. Aides say he turns around paperwork fairly quickly, responding to and signing off on their memoranda.”
Stop Press: Barrack Obama is to read from his book “Dreams from my Father” on ABC Radio National’s First Person (weekdays 10:45am) which is part of the Book Show starting 10:00am, from Monday 30th March. (The readings can usually be listened to or podcast.)
Books: Robert Manne, Professor of Politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, persuaded Black Inc to publish the essays by Professor W.E.H. (Bill) Stanner (under the title of “The Dreaming & Other Essays”) by this distinguished Australian anthropologist and has written the introduction. An edited extract from it appeared in The Australian 14 March 2009 (doubtfully available on the web). There are other articles about Stanner and the essays including one by Professor Marcia Langton also in The Australian on March 4 (on the web).
Manne writes, “In 1968 Stanner was invited to deliver the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. In them he talked of the persistence of “the great Australian silence” concerning the Aboriginal dispossession; the belated recognition in Australia of the genius and the strangeness of the indigenous culture the British had so light-heartedly set upon destroying; the emerging possibilities of a racial composition if we could only see that our problem with the Aborigines was less important than their problem with us; the arrogance and certain failure of the policy of assimilation that was inviting the Aborigines to relinquish what it was that made them a distinctive people or, in Stanner’s biting phrase, was asking them to “un-be”; and, finally and tentatively, the question that came more and more to obsess him, the possibility of a historic act of reconciliation through a willingness to contemplate some new deal over the question of the ownership of land.”
Stop Press: Australia will next week officially back the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, reversing the Howard Government’s vote against it in 2007. (the US, New Zealand and Canada also voted against it in the General Assembly.) Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin will make a statement on Australia’s change in position on April 3 at Parliament House in Canberra.
Music: Tapestry is a vocal ensemble founded in 1995 by Laurie Monahan, Cristi Catt, and Daniela Tosic. Based in Boston, the ensemble made its concert debut in its hometown with performances of Steve Reich’s Tehillim. The group has established an international reputation for its bold conceptual programming which combines medieval and traditional repertory with contemporary compositions. Their album “Faces of Faces of a Woman” weaves together a mix of tales, music and poetry to reveal the many faces of a woman, ranging from 12th century nun Hildegard von Bingen to 16th century Irish pirate Grace O’Malley to 20th century Russian poet Anna Akmatova together with music of female troubadours, traditional songs, and lullabies including “Careless Love”. Astonishingly wonderful!
Next week: A quotation about critics from someone who knew heretic and philosopher Giordano Bruno (whose biography by Ingrid Rowland has recently been published), burned at the stake in Rome in February 1600, and two amazing biological stories about caterpillars being welcomed in the nests of ants and the courtship of Bower Birds – if you haven’t heard them already on the Science Show with Robyn Williams. And an inquiry into Britain’s invasion of Iraq: what might the consequences be?
This page, which should appear weekly, is an addition to the blogs page.
Securing the Future
Monday, March 9th, 2009
“I think we live in difficult and dangerous times. We’re faced with problems that are both unprecedented and serious caused by human numbers and associated impacts exceeding the globe’s sustainable limits. The problems are not yet insuperable. But to solve them we require a paradoxical mixture; not only the questioning fact-based spirit of the Enlightenment to acknowledge the problems and seek solutions to them, but also people and institutions showing high levels of cooperative behaviour, the evolutionary origins of which may well be associated with inflexible and authoritarian beliefs and structures which are antithetic to such a questioning spirit.â€
(Lord Robert May speaking at the Lowy Institute, 19 November 2007; excerpt from transcript, ABC Science Show, 1 December 2007)
_____________
Asked what he thought was the biggest challenge museums faced these days, Thomas P. Campbell, 46, appointed September 9 to be Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to succeed Philippe de Montebello at the beginning of 2009, said without hesitation, “A crisis of confidence.†In his view museums are often cowed by an audience that they don’t fully understand.
“There is a fear that the collections themselves are not sufficient, that one has to somehow gussy them up with presentations and dumb them down to two-syllable labels that can be read by a 6-year-old,†he said. “And of course you should never underestimate your audience.
“In this age of communication and the Internet our local and international audiences are actually very sophisticated. So the big challenge is how to deliver different levels of information to different audiences.â€
Carol Vogel, “From Tapestries to Top Job, Ready for Met’s Challenges†New York Times September 11, 2008
_____________
There is no inherent reason why we should always trust those in positions of authority.
_____________
There are five main points to make about museums in Australia in mid-2008, and the future, where they should be and how they might get there. Five because, as I learned many years ago, most people manage to keep seven, plus or minus two, things in their head at any one time. And if we want to move together it is a good idea if we can do so without having to look up the book all the time to find the right lines to speak.
1, Get the social processes right
2, Be engaged
3, Believe in our own goals
4, Celebrate achievement
5, Form alliances.
And we need to laugh more!
None of these justify the existence of museums or distinguish them as special. Rather they recognise that museums are social organisations, groups of people. That is reflected especially in the first point. Professionalism will flourish in an environment conducive to that flourishing!
“Museums are coalitions of like-minded people in search of a constituency, one that will value the product more than they pay to gain access to it. Like clever politicians, the successful museum person knows the utility of the common agenda, vocabulary and shared values. But they know also that the logic of the market is imperfect and that trusted allies are essential. The real experience will give a competitive advantage but the collections and associated scholarship will secure the future only when influential constituencies value the past and its lessons.â€
Museums are caught up in the financial meltdown like everyone else. However, let’s not forget that over the last several decades a lot of things have gotten in the way of clearly seeing a viable future. I am not talking about museums having lost their way and don’t know whether they are Disneyland or academies.
In times like these – the present financial crisis – the tendency is to see that the main game is ensuring the health of the budget. Unfortunately, that has often been the focus over the last several decades as neoliberal and market-driven philosophies have held sway. Accountability and transparency have been demanded but seldom exercised by those making the most strident demands for it. A fundamental of this philosophy is its inherent short run focus. But most organisations, particularly museums, have to have a long term vision.
The principal contributions of board and executive, indeed of everyone in the organisation, are those which provide an environment conducive to the ongoing goal to acquire, conserve and research material evidence of people and their environment so as to make a difference to public understanding. Excitement and understanding!
The whole point of all this is not to pursue management as an end in itself but to get things working so that the really important stuff, doing what the show is set up to achieve, can be done and done well!
Continue to essay
Learning to do it right
Friday, September 19th, 2008
“There are in essence, only two main reasons why people are fallible, why we have failure. One reason is ignorance … a general lack of knowledge about the particulars of how the world really works. But a second source of failure is ineptitude … the knowledge is there, but an individual fails to apply it correctly.” So goes one of the favourite stories of Atul Gawande, surgeon, New Yorker magazine writer and Professor at Harvard. This is an aphorism just as applicable to the museum executive and staff member as it is to a doctor in a hospital or the financial executive in a bank!
Gawende has won heaps of awards including the Macarthur Fellowship, popularly known as ‘the genius prize’ for the fresh and unique perspective, clarity and intuition in his written work and his energetic and imaginative approach to finding practical ways to improve surgical practice. And he has written books now published in more than 100 countries.
In an episode in January 2008 of that wonderful ABC Radio National program “Background Briefing†(which by the way has been going about as long as “Four Cornersâ€) Gawende told of his experiences in a talk to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
Gawende shows just how being diligent, being persistent, questioning when things don’t seem to add up and feel right makes such a difference (remember Ralph Siu and Chinese Baseball?). That this behaviour is significantly less common than it should be is because we are all supposed to be efficient, which means taking less time to do things. So many things seem to go wrong, from inadequate buildings to inadequate attention to financial problems in companies to radiocative waste leaking from pipes at Nuclear power stations in Provence, just because of this.
Contrary to that stupid headline I once saw, Gawende’s stories show that we do not need to make decisions faster because change is happening so fast, we need to make decisions more slowly, we need to understand what is going on. Gawende’s stories are wonderful examples of the difference that approach makes!
I have tried to summarise the presentation but you can always go to the full transcript on the ABC website.
Read more