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.