In Australia, schools are just beginning to return after the long summer vacation. Teachers are turning their thoughts to what the new school year might look like, preparing for professional learning days and readying classrooms for a fresh year of learning that we all hope will look more like those we remember pre-COVID. In other parts of the world, schools are entering a new calendar year and where the challenges of remote learning continue to dominate their thinking. On the horizon is the prospect of a post-COVID world thanks to the development and distribution of hopefully effective vaccines.
As we move towards this brighter future with the fear of a global pandemic somewhat alleviated, what might be our next steps? How might we apply the lessons learned so rapidly, and brutally during this past twelve-month period? Might COVID be a catalyst for the reinvention of education that so many have been calling for?
In his book, “The Infinite Game”, Simon Sinek advises readers to look beyond the short term gain. Rather than seek the immediate win by playing a finite game, we are urged to consider how we might best engage with the infinite game where there are no fixed rules, no set players and the game has no end. The concept of finite and infinite games was developed by James Carse in 1986:
THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. (Carse, 1986 p3)
Infinite games have infinite time horizons. And because there is no finish line, no practical end to the game, there is no such thing as “winning” an infinite game. In an infinite game, the primary objective is to keep playing, to perpetuate the game. (Sinek, 2019 p4)
Education is most definitely an infinite game. For everyone involved, particularly in modern times, it meets all of the requirements of our definition of an infinite game. The players routinely change. So too do the rules and the goal posts move just as frequently and are at best fluidly defined by the changing tides of society, politics and culture. There is no endpoint. It might be argued that when we are talking formal education, we are defining a period of time from the moment one enters their first year of schooling as a Kindergarten or Foundation student until they leave with a formal qualification. In modern times such a neatly framed definition of our time in education is laughably ill-conceived. There is little if any doubt that education, and through it learning, is something we shall engage with until long into our sunset years.
Despite this, schools seem to adopt an unhealthy embrace of the finite game. Each school year seems to be viewed as a game with winners and losers. The measures of success are taken as the assessments students complete and the culmination of these is the final school leaving qualification and its associated ranking of students. This exam preparation focus distracts us from the infinite game that we should be giving our attention to. Instead of asking what grade I got for that last assignment, our students should be wondering how it drove them toward their next learning goal. If we were to play an infinite game, our focus would be on how each learning moment better prepares us to achieve the primary objective of playing-on, perpetuating the game of learning.
During our COVID adventures with remote learning, at least after the initial shock and rapid responses to the most immediate challenges, educators grappled with new challenges and found exciting solutions. Many of these allowed us to move a step away from playing the examination focused finite game. We recognised that a prime goal was to develop in our learners, new levels of independence. Unable to control every moment of their learning, we confronted a reality in which partnerships between learners and educators became essential. Remote learning also revealed to us that education could occur across boundaries of time and space. Freed from the constraints of the physicality of the classroom learning took on new shapes, new forms and achieved new possibilities. Our students saw their role in learning differently too. They were able to take ownership of the process in ways they did not have access to in a traditional setting. The almighty timetable and daily schedule became somewhat more flexible. Learning was less a thing that happened to them during set hours of the day and more a thing that they could choose to engage with in an almost à la carte fashion.
In a post COVID world, how might we continue to build learners who own their learning? What approaches to learning and pedagogy might we continue to engage that are supportive of independence and learner agency?
Such skills and dispositions are both timely and timeless. The World Economic Forum routinely publishes a list of the most desirable skills for the workplace of the not too distant future. For 2025 their top five connect beautifully with a vision for education focused on playing an infinite game. Each has value now, tomorrow and long into the future. Each is resistant to changing circumstances. Each equips a player in an infinite game with the capabilities they need as they adapt to changes in the game and to play as drivers of change.
Analytical thinking and innovation
Active learning and learning strategies
Complex problem solving
Critical thinking and analysis
Creativity, originality and initiative
(WEF - Future of Jobs Report 2020)
These are skills that we can develop and learn but never truly master. Nor are they pieces of knowledge or base capabilities which are likely to become irrelevant with time. We shall continue to call upon these dispositions over time, and we can refine and relearn how we approach each as new challenges and opportunities emerge. As society continues to evolve, new strategies, tools, modalities and ideologies are bound to emerge, but our capacity for engagement with these changes will be defined by these skills.
Education, as a finite game, will always tend to undervalue these skills. They are too easily seen as obstacles to the teaching of essential content required for exams. To win the finite game of education, one’s needs are seen as best served by privileging the specific knowledge and skills assessed in the next test. Time spent on teaching active learning strategies, innovation, creativity and initiative is too easily seen as a series of distractions which stand in the way of achieving the more immediate goals. Like a player in a soccer game, we are focused on scoring the winning goal but blind to the reality that there is no winning goal to be had in this game.
Perhaps this is the ultimate challenge for education post COVID, to shift our focus towards how we prepare our students to play the infinite game of education.
By Nigel Coutts
Carse, James. (1986) Finite and Infinite Games (p. 3). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Sinek, Simon. (2019) The Infinite Game (p. 4). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.