Does Your School Have a Memory Problem?

An open question to school leaders — from a former teacher who might be wrong, and wants to be told so.

Not long ago, I sat across from a school principal and tried to explain the problem I've given the last part of my career to. I fumbled it. I had the whole thing clear in my head — years of it — and yet when the moment came, it came out as fragments. I left the meeting certain of two things: that the problem is real, and that I had not yet done it the justice of saying it plainly.

So this article is my second attempt. It's written to that principal, and to every school leader and teacher who might recognize what I'm about to describe. And it comes with an unusual request attached: tell me how wrong I am.

I mean that sincerely. What follows is a set of problems I believe schools are living with. But I'm aware they might be problems that live mostly in my own head — the obsessions of one former teacher who couldn't let something go. Before I ask anyone to consider a solution, I need to know whether the problem is real. Because if it isn't, there's nothing to solve, and I'd rather find that out from you than build a beautiful answer to a question no one is asking.

A word about where I'm coming from

I taught for several years inside the IB world — the Middle Years and Diploma programmes — in schools that took teaching and learning seriously. I don't say that to impress anyone; I say it because it's relevant. These were not struggling schools. They were good ones, full of capable, committed people. And the problems I'm about to describe were present even there — quietly, structurally, in the background of good work being done by good people.

That's what unsettled me enough to leave. Not that education is broken in the obvious places, but that even in the strong places, there's a gap no one had named, and no one seemed to be fixing. And I came to a simple conclusion: if the people who feel a problem most acutely — teachers — don't take charge of fixing it, it may not get fixed at all. So I stopped waiting for someone else to build it.

Here is the problem, as clearly as I can now say it. I call it the school's memory problem. It has a few faces.

1. Schools forget the feedback they give

A teacher gives a piece of feedback to a student today. It's thoughtful. It's specific. And then it lives — for a while — in that teacher's head, or in the margin of a paper, and then it's gone.

Now widen the lens. If the same kind of feedback is being given, year after year, on the same learning criteria — and nothing structural ever changes in response — then one of two things is true. Either that feedback is not being heard by students. Or there is something in how a topic is taught that keeps producing the same misunderstanding, and no one has noticed the pattern because no one is holding the feedback long enough to see it repeat.

I won't reach for a specific example — I think you can supply your own. The point is this: feedback is one of the richest signals a school produces about its own teaching, and most schools throw it away the moment it's spoken. Not out of carelessness. Simply because there is nowhere for it to accumulate.

2. Without that memory, a school has no predictive intelligence

Here is the consequence of forgetting today's feedback: the school also forgot last year's, and the year before that.

And so a school has no reliable way to anticipate its own students. It cannot say, with evidence, "students tend to struggle with this specific idea at this specific point — let's teach into it before it becomes a problem." It can only react, after the fact, again and again.

I know the objection, because it's a fair one. Experienced teachers do know what mistakes to expect. Years in a classroom build exactly that intuition. I am not for one second denying that this knowledge exists. What I'm saying is that it exists only in individual minds — unevenly, un-transferably, and temporarily. There is no institutional memory of what students struggled with, what errors recurred, what misconceptions surfaced term after term. When a teacher who holds that intuition leaves, it leaves with them. The school does not get to keep what it learned. It cannot compound its own experience, because it has no place to store it. Predictive intelligence, in a school, is currently a personal trait — never an institutional asset.

3. Feedback arrives too slowly to be useful

Many schools run periodic diagnostic testing — assessments every three or four months — and treat the results as formative data: based on this, we'll adjust course.

But I want to gently question the timescale. If the purpose of formative assessment is to catch a problem and act on it, why is there a two-to-three-month gap between the moments we look? A misunderstanding that forms in September and isn't surfaced until December has had a full term to set.

I believe this kind of insight should live in the hands of the individual teacher, at the resolution of a single lesson — something a teacher could run two or three times in a class period, not two or three times a year. That's when formative assessment actually becomes formative. Right now, even teachers who want to work this way often can't get around the room fast enough to give each student feedback they can act on before the moment passes. The assessment happens; the timely feedback doesn't. And so assessment for learning quietly collapses back into assessment of learning — a record of what happened, rather than a lever to change it.

There's a quieter cost here too. We set success criteria for our students. But a teacher's formative check is really a success criterion for the teacher — for the lesson itself. Without fast feedback, a teacher loses their own most honest signal about whether the teaching landed.

4. Assessment happens on a schedule, not on demand — and the data lies because of it

This one may be the most counterintuitive, so let me lay it out carefully.

Imagine a student scores poorly on a specific learning outcome today. That evening, they go home, work at it, and genuinely fix the gap. They come back tomorrow having learned the thing.

But there is no way for them to demonstrate it. The next assessment is two weeks away. So in the school's data — the data that feeds its picture of how a cohort is doing — this student and a student who did nothing look identical for the next fortnight.

Every student's data point contributes to the school's read on its own academic health. But if a student can't refresh their data point the moment they've actually improved, the school is making decisions on a stale picture. There's a dead space in the data — a lull where reality has moved on but the record hasn't caught up. And bad information leads to bad decisions.

What's missing is not more scheduled tests. It's the ability to reassess on demand — a systematic way to give a second chance the moment a student is ready for it, rather than on a calendar the student didn't set. Frequency, and who controls frequency, turns out to matter enormously.

5. New teachers inherit nothing

When a new teacher joins, they need two things to carry the baton well. Everyone talks about the first: training. Almost no one talks about the second: memory.

A new teacher walks into a classroom with no inherited sense of what previous cohorts struggled with, what feedback kept recurring, what this school has already learned about teaching this material. They start from zero — not because the school has nothing to teach them, but because the school has no way to hand over what it knows. Every teacher transition is a small institutional amnesia event.

So — am I wrong?

That's the memory problem as I see it: schools that cannot remember the feedback they give, cannot predict from their own history, cannot respond fast enough to be useful, cannot let students prove growth on demand, and cannot pass their hard-won knowledge to the next teacher.

Now here is where I genuinely need you.

I'm aware that I might be describing a problem that leaders don't actually feel — or feel, but rank far below a dozen more pressing fires. I'm aware, too, that I might be a little ahead of the question. There's the old story about the customer who, before the automobile, would only have asked for a faster horse — not because the car was a bad idea, but because it wasn't yet visible. Sometimes a problem is real but the solution is hard to picture, and the burden is on the person who sees it to make it visible. I might be in that position. Or I might simply be wrong. I can't tell from inside my own head.

So I'm asking you, directly:

• Do you recognize any of these five in your own school?
• Are they real pains — or minor compared to what actually keeps you up at night?
• Are they problems for now, or ones schools may only have to reckon with in the years ahead?
• And is there one I've missed, or one I've overstated?

I would rather hear "you're off base" from a working school leader than keep building in the quiet of my own conviction. Tell me in the comments, or message me privately if you'd prefer candor without an audience.

And if any of this does ring true — if you read one of those five and felt a small flicker of recognition — then I'd like to talk properly. I've spent a while building toward answers to exactly these problems, and I'd rather shape them with a school that feels the pain than present them to one that doesn't. For schools that are interested, I'm genuinely open to sitting down and co-designing something around your specific version of this — because no two schools forget in quite the same way.

I taught long enough to know how much good work already happens in schools, often invisibly, often heroically. This isn't a critique of that work. It's a question about the thing holding it all together — the memory underneath it — and whether we might build that part properly, at last.

Tell me how wrong I am. I'm listening.

Written by a former IB MYP & DP teacher, now working on institutional memory for schools. If this resonated — or if it didn't — I'd like to know. Comment below, or reach me directly. → https://baccalytics.com/schools