Cumulative Gains at BETT

I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at BETT - the global Education Technology show in London, where I was asked to speak on behalf of Google, as one of the educators speaking at Google’s Teaching Theatre. I’ve long been a vocal advocate of Google Apps for Education and have seen its transformational effect in my own teaching practice and in that of my friends and colleagues – at my own institution as well as on-line.

I gave a talk that focused on what might seem like a pretty dull aspect of education technology – being efficient. Being efficient is not exciting. Being efficient isn’t attention grabbing but, I hope I argued, everything that is exciting and attention grabbing becomes possible when you become more efficient.

My model on this is what I’ve called cumulative gains but the idea really comes from that of marginal gains – an idea especially developed by the British Cycling Team. I’ve no interest in cycling and know little more than nothing about it but a colleague who is into cycling told me something very interesting. The British cycling team’s coach took a new approach towards improving the team’s performance. He looked at each individual component that fed into the team’s performance and looked to improve this by a small percent. For example, by using bacterial hand gel and teaching proper hand cleaning techniques the team got sick far less often which meant they could maintain their work and progress much better. The coach arranged for the team to have really excellent pillows each which they then took from place to place to try and ensure that the cyclists had the best night’s sleep possible.

None of these changes on its own is revolutionary but the cumulative effect of all of these changes was profound. I’m told the performance of the team increased by such an extent that they were accused of cheating, with the French team claiming that Team GB must have been using illegal wheels!

My metaphor for all this is that at the start of the school year we have a big bucket full of time and money and energy. All sorts of things require us to dip into that bucket, and quite rightly – teaching, marking, giving feedback, developing as professionals etc. But there are also a huge number of holes in this bucket. Some substantial holes, that suck down-time, energy and money, and some much smaller. In my view, every hole we can plug gives us a little more in the way of resources to spend where we’d really like to spend it – in our teaching and learning.

To that end, I view Google Apps for Education as one of a number of toolkits that can find these holes and plug them. In some instances that simply stop that time, money or energy from leaking away but sometimes they can even give us a bit of a boost. To give people a rough idea of the kind of thing I’m talking about we can do a quick back of an envelope calculation on any number of our seemingly intractable practices. I usually take photocopying as my go-to example as it’s something I loathe and that drains time and money out of schools. If we think we might spend 10 minutes a day photocopying it doesn’t really make a huge difference if I can save that time. If I multiply that across a week it begins to add up a little but it’s far from a huge amount. Across the year, things begin to really mount up – that 10 minutes has become 25 full hours of time. Big, but not really worrying. However, factor in a few other members of staff – a school of 100 teachers, say, and we have 2500 teacher hours a year. At an average teacher’s salary, that’s about £30,000 of school money just in time. Let alone paper, toner, electricity, maintenance, and hardware. A dull point, maybe, but one we start putting monetary values on things it can be quite surprising how much we’re letting trickle through our fingers. Imagine, this is only a single instance of a single practice at a single school. If we were to begin to add up a half dozen, a dozen, or even more of these cases significant sums of money and amounts of teacher time are being wasted.

I love teaching. As a consequence, I dislike almost everything that takes me away from that. If I can pull back 25 hours a year just from not photocopying and instead disseminating materials in seconds with Google Classroom it means I get to do more of what I love, more of what I’m good at, and more of what I’m paid to do. Ultimately, of course, that means our students get more teaching and better teaching from happier, healthier teachers. My rule of thumb on this is Can I get the Same for Less or More for the Same? I want the same impact, the same information gathering, the same learning success from less time, energy, money so that I can then spend this making things even better. Or, I want to get greater impact, more information, or better learning from the same time, energy, and money. To be honest, I’ve yet to come across something I do that can’t be improved in one of those two ways. The end result, I hope, is to make my teaching and my students’ learning ever better.

My rules for spotting cumulative gains:

1. Target repetitive tasks – If you’re doing it more than once you might be able to do it more efficiently. That isn’t to say one-off tasks can’t be improved, but the repetition of a task means the repetition of gain.

2. It’s not just you – sure, it might only take you 20 minutes but who else is doing this? And how often? Think beyond your own practice. If you can multiply the improvement across colleagues you can multiply your gains.

3. Do the maths – ballpark figures are fine but get some numbers on the problem. How much time is saved? How much does that time cost? Nothing motivates people to change like some hard numbers – especially when those numbers have pound signs in front.

4. Share and collaborate – no one can streamline every practice and procedure but a culture that is open to improvement, that sees why making these tasks more efficient benefits staff and students alike and that encourages the sharing of these practices will multiply their gains even further.