All the blame and none of the credit
"What if, instead of seeing organizations as problems to be solved, we saw them as miracles to be appreciated? How would our methods of inquiry and our theories of organizing be different?" (Busche, 1995)
What if, instead of seeing schools as problems to be solved, we saw them as miracles to be appreciated? How would our methods of inquiry and our theories of schools be different?"
Perhaps I'm impressed by Obama's ability to speak, but when a President tells a nation to praise more teachers (like he did in the state of the union this week) I can't help but listen and subsequently ponder: What if, instead of blaming schools for all the problems of the world, we gave them credit for all that is right with the world?
Busche's writings about "appreciative inquiry" speak to me, like Obama, as the underpinnings of Positive Psychology and my approach to learning. I realize my ice-age brain is designed to get more excited about problems, yet it doesn't help me much in the modern world. I strive to live with more intent, put forth more effort towards the thoughts and attitudes proven to expand my ability to learn...rather than dwell on those which naturally hinder it (and take no effort at all). I accept there is no hard-wired response to savor and hope like there is to fight or flight, so I must constantly fight for positive affect, satisfaction, and meaning. This type of thinking is considered "unscientific" by many traditional scholars and "unreal" by many friends and family. Appreciative inquiry and action research is even labeled "soft science" because it's not following THE scientific method of addressing a problem -- much like optimism is considered "living in a pipe dream" because it's an attempt to control one's thoughts rather than blindly follow the trivial ups and downs of one's hormonal responses. "Keeping it real" and "soft science" are labels without much inquiry because they elicit the predictable hard-wired responses of our brain. Such negative narrowing is helpful in crisis, but harmful for long-term development. Positive broadening is helpful in retention and health, but harmful for eliciting predictable momentary emotion.
I enjoy the interplay of studying organizations and individuals within them. It doesn't surprise me that attitudes, beliefs, stories, rituals, artifacts, and ceremonies that define an organizational culture are hard to change when members are biologically and evolutionarily better at identifying problems than they are at identifying what works. In my wellness class I ask students to identify things they'd like to fix and work on in small groups and inevitably have to set a time limit to bring them back because they have lots to stay, right away. When I follow it with the task of identifying their strengths and how to use them better, silence and confusion are almost instantaneous. The same happens when I ask groups to identify where they manifest stress in their body; they instantly point to their necks, chest, back, and stomach. But when I ask them to identify where they manifest joy in their body, the finger point hesitates and wanders while their eyes search what others are doing.
Organizations that attempt to increase positives experience the same stall and the same doubt, often a result of the way we study them. Perhaps the search for objectivity is impossible, but the search for positives just requires more effort.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Whatever it Takes
Dear Patrick Faverty,
1. Ed Valentine is long overdue for this program, he should be a part of year 1.
2. The book he assigned: "Whatever it Takes..." is by far the most practical, useful book we have read in this program. It should be assigned day one, year one.
3. Everything you've been teaching is explained with real examples in this book, I have the feeling there is a lack of collaboration going on with our teachers :)
Dear anyone else reading,
.
Last week I was rambling about the need for new goals in schools. This week I have been so sick I can barely move, when I felt a little bettter my wife took me to urgent care and after an hour of having fluids pumped into my arm the delightful doctor prescribed me some meds that made me 10x worse. Today I've decided that I'd rather be sick than on those meds and I'm recovering slowly. I've just finished reading the outstanding book: Whatever it Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn and feel more hopeful and inspired about changing schools than I have EVER felt before. This rollercoaster of psycho-social-physical conglomeration has led me to perhaps the most important thought of my professional career: best practices are only a starting point and goals don't mean much without a plan for how to achieve them.
I think the difference between a dreamer and a hopeful person is the plan, hopeful people develop strategies and dreamers write songs.
There are a million articles in the world that say "this is the best way to do that", and each of them is outdated the minute it goes public. Practitioners like me cite them in proposals, goal statements, and even arrange priorities to meet their conditions. People who question what we do demand them and in extreme cases we follow them to the grave with the "because the research said so" mentality. All the while devoting the least amount of effort towards understanding the questions they are trying to answer. The questions are what matter, not the findings of what one group of people found to work. The questions keep the world going and the interventions changing. What works for someone else could totally bomb for me. Even our heralded meta-analyses are merely for the literature review sections, not for the experiment.
This book is perhaps the closest thing to my philosophies (on education) I have ever found. Each chapter is almost exactly what I wish I could say about a school. It makes me so excited to be in a position of leadership that I almost want to get into k-12. I can see my cohort friends cringing at the thought of it, but I would honestly make every teacher and admin in the school read this book as a starting point. I would institute internships, motivations, and "flourishing" variables as measures of success. For sake of repeating the book, I'll just say it's a must read if you are interested in being in education at all!
However, as I embark on a new journey to apply these principles and real examples to my classes and organization a quandary does arise about the goals of higher education. Are we merely providing the opportunity to learn? Are we guaranteeing all will learn? Do we have things in place to meet either of these goals? This whole book made me question the goals of higher education. What are we trying to teach our students? How will we know if they learned? What will we do if they don't? Are these even appropriate questions for a system that serves less than 1% of the world's population? It doesn't make much sense to have everyone striving to be a part of the 1% we'd all agree, but what then? Maybe I love higher ed so much because I think we are trying to teach our students about different areas of study, so they can choose which matches their intrinsic motivations to become leaders in it? Maybe I love higher ed so much because we know when they learn because they apply it to their lives? Maybe I love higher ed so much because I'm a preventionist and interventionist trying to get to them before they're struggling? Or maybe I love it because these students are just high-achievers all put into one place, all the type to take initiative, and because we're not worried if they don't learn because there's plenty of resources for help? Maybe the accountability movement is coming to a place that has never been worried about everyone learning because we only see those who have shown they can play the game?
1. Ed Valentine is long overdue for this program, he should be a part of year 1.
2. The book he assigned: "Whatever it Takes..." is by far the most practical, useful book we have read in this program. It should be assigned day one, year one.
3. Everything you've been teaching is explained with real examples in this book, I have the feeling there is a lack of collaboration going on with our teachers :)
Dear anyone else reading,
.
Last week I was rambling about the need for new goals in schools. This week I have been so sick I can barely move, when I felt a little bettter my wife took me to urgent care and after an hour of having fluids pumped into my arm the delightful doctor prescribed me some meds that made me 10x worse. Today I've decided that I'd rather be sick than on those meds and I'm recovering slowly. I've just finished reading the outstanding book: Whatever it Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn and feel more hopeful and inspired about changing schools than I have EVER felt before. This rollercoaster of psycho-social-physical conglomeration has led me to perhaps the most important thought of my professional career: best practices are only a starting point and goals don't mean much without a plan for how to achieve them.
I think the difference between a dreamer and a hopeful person is the plan, hopeful people develop strategies and dreamers write songs.
There are a million articles in the world that say "this is the best way to do that", and each of them is outdated the minute it goes public. Practitioners like me cite them in proposals, goal statements, and even arrange priorities to meet their conditions. People who question what we do demand them and in extreme cases we follow them to the grave with the "because the research said so" mentality. All the while devoting the least amount of effort towards understanding the questions they are trying to answer. The questions are what matter, not the findings of what one group of people found to work. The questions keep the world going and the interventions changing. What works for someone else could totally bomb for me. Even our heralded meta-analyses are merely for the literature review sections, not for the experiment.
This book is perhaps the closest thing to my philosophies (on education) I have ever found. Each chapter is almost exactly what I wish I could say about a school. It makes me so excited to be in a position of leadership that I almost want to get into k-12. I can see my cohort friends cringing at the thought of it, but I would honestly make every teacher and admin in the school read this book as a starting point. I would institute internships, motivations, and "flourishing" variables as measures of success. For sake of repeating the book, I'll just say it's a must read if you are interested in being in education at all!
However, as I embark on a new journey to apply these principles and real examples to my classes and organization a quandary does arise about the goals of higher education. Are we merely providing the opportunity to learn? Are we guaranteeing all will learn? Do we have things in place to meet either of these goals? This whole book made me question the goals of higher education. What are we trying to teach our students? How will we know if they learned? What will we do if they don't? Are these even appropriate questions for a system that serves less than 1% of the world's population? It doesn't make much sense to have everyone striving to be a part of the 1% we'd all agree, but what then? Maybe I love higher ed so much because I think we are trying to teach our students about different areas of study, so they can choose which matches their intrinsic motivations to become leaders in it? Maybe I love higher ed so much because we know when they learn because they apply it to their lives? Maybe I love higher ed so much because I'm a preventionist and interventionist trying to get to them before they're struggling? Or maybe I love it because these students are just high-achievers all put into one place, all the type to take initiative, and because we're not worried if they don't learn because there's plenty of resources for help? Maybe the accountability movement is coming to a place that has never been worried about everyone learning because we only see those who have shown they can play the game?
Saturday, January 8, 2011
No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care
It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.Epictetus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epictetus
I don't prescribe much to fate, some, but not much. My dad always says, "You make your own luck" and "Work hard, that will lead to luck"...so I'm guessing I was raised with little faith in fate. The point of this week's blog matches this basic premise and belief that the quality of life is more important than the quantity of life, and to increase quality of life one must focus more on what they can control, and less on what they can't.
I do a lot of values clarification exercises in my classes based on this premise, mostly thanks to the training of my mentor Sabina White. She too is a student of Jim Block and the basics of Blooms taxonomy (see earlier blogs). Neither of us consider ourselves to be masters, but we have seen the strong connections between emotions and learning. Deliberately eliciting emotions increases students' personalization with the concepts, forcing them to react to what has presented with a sense that it matters to them. The "forced choice" between one extreme or another elicits the competence or mastery needs of their brain to be motivated, it makes them feel in control of the concept and really consider how and why they would address it in the future. Organizational developers consider this a democratic intervention, bringing about shared voices and sense of inclusion with decisions. In a classroom values clarification enhance learning, in an organization they enhance productivity, commitment, and even innovation.
One of my outstanding instructional assistants sent me this video that addresses this well in terms of motivation and organizations with complex cognitive processes;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
In other words, how we react to almost anything is inextricably linked to why. The relative amount of "deliberateness" or "intentionality" that an organization allows ("autonomy" in the video), in many ways, defines it's ability to connect consumers and producers with it's higher level political and symbolic goals. I love the examples in the video because Apple so clearly sells values while Dell sells productivity. In a way it's ironic that an organization would structure-in autonomy...aren't organizations by definition predictable and thus conformative? Not necessarily.
Predictability is a defining factor of any organization. A hamburger amazingly tastes the same way at McDonalds in NY as it does in CA. But that's a hamburger (albeit a sucky one). Schools produce living, breathing, changing human geniuses. Thus they require different processes to produce hamburgers that are all very different. Successful products are defined by different measures. Unfortunately standardized testing is only on two levels (math and verbal) and performed on one level (filling in a bubble). Even hamburgers are judged on more levels than that. I see the biggest problem with schools as organizations is that their goals are well...are their goals? Are they really just math and verbal competency on a bubble test? I think not.
I think motivation is at the core of education's goals of developing intellectuals. The study of how humans flourish is essential to understanding the aims of education and I think we'd all agree that math and verbal skills are only scratching the surface. Building on character strengths, relationships, creative expression, health, and even happiness are where education should focus a real set of goals. Imagine that, schools with goals. Now imagine using the research about how to reach them to accomplish them! Perhaps then schools, as organizations, would become professional places with deliberate methodologies addressing how students react to knowledge content, rather than just something that happens to them.
Jim Block always said to me (not an exact quote), "We know how to fix schools, that's easy. The problem is getting everyone on the same page." Seems to me that goals are clear in most organizations except the ones that matter most. I think the place to start changing that is to address how we react to what matters most.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epictetus
I don't prescribe much to fate, some, but not much. My dad always says, "You make your own luck" and "Work hard, that will lead to luck"...so I'm guessing I was raised with little faith in fate. The point of this week's blog matches this basic premise and belief that the quality of life is more important than the quantity of life, and to increase quality of life one must focus more on what they can control, and less on what they can't.
I do a lot of values clarification exercises in my classes based on this premise, mostly thanks to the training of my mentor Sabina White. She too is a student of Jim Block and the basics of Blooms taxonomy (see earlier blogs). Neither of us consider ourselves to be masters, but we have seen the strong connections between emotions and learning. Deliberately eliciting emotions increases students' personalization with the concepts, forcing them to react to what has presented with a sense that it matters to them. The "forced choice" between one extreme or another elicits the competence or mastery needs of their brain to be motivated, it makes them feel in control of the concept and really consider how and why they would address it in the future. Organizational developers consider this a democratic intervention, bringing about shared voices and sense of inclusion with decisions. In a classroom values clarification enhance learning, in an organization they enhance productivity, commitment, and even innovation.
One of my outstanding instructional assistants sent me this video that addresses this well in terms of motivation and organizations with complex cognitive processes;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
In other words, how we react to almost anything is inextricably linked to why. The relative amount of "deliberateness" or "intentionality" that an organization allows ("autonomy" in the video), in many ways, defines it's ability to connect consumers and producers with it's higher level political and symbolic goals. I love the examples in the video because Apple so clearly sells values while Dell sells productivity. In a way it's ironic that an organization would structure-in autonomy...aren't organizations by definition predictable and thus conformative? Not necessarily.
Predictability is a defining factor of any organization. A hamburger amazingly tastes the same way at McDonalds in NY as it does in CA. But that's a hamburger (albeit a sucky one). Schools produce living, breathing, changing human geniuses. Thus they require different processes to produce hamburgers that are all very different. Successful products are defined by different measures. Unfortunately standardized testing is only on two levels (math and verbal) and performed on one level (filling in a bubble). Even hamburgers are judged on more levels than that. I see the biggest problem with schools as organizations is that their goals are well...are their goals? Are they really just math and verbal competency on a bubble test? I think not.
I think motivation is at the core of education's goals of developing intellectuals. The study of how humans flourish is essential to understanding the aims of education and I think we'd all agree that math and verbal skills are only scratching the surface. Building on character strengths, relationships, creative expression, health, and even happiness are where education should focus a real set of goals. Imagine that, schools with goals. Now imagine using the research about how to reach them to accomplish them! Perhaps then schools, as organizations, would become professional places with deliberate methodologies addressing how students react to knowledge content, rather than just something that happens to them.
Jim Block always said to me (not an exact quote), "We know how to fix schools, that's easy. The problem is getting everyone on the same page." Seems to me that goals are clear in most organizations except the ones that matter most. I think the place to start changing that is to address how we react to what matters most.
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