Hanging together in tough times – a backyard reflection

Since my “retirement” from active consulting/coaching, I’ve been grappling with the relationship between leadership (and what this means) and culture. I find myself surrounding this relationship, with details gradually becoming clearer while the big picture continues to be fuzzier than I’d like.

As I was working on a draft of a post in which I continue to explore the dissonance between what learning should look like and what I see most kids and adults experiencing in schools, three threads keep surfacing: (1) We seem to be much better at developing solutions than we are at deeply analyzing and defining problems; (2) Our systems have grown in complexity beyond our capacity to lead and manage them; and (3) We seem driven by an arrogance that does not allow us to recognize and/or acknowledge this limitation.

In reading a number of recent articles* about the impact of Eva Moskowitz (founder and CEO of the Success Academy Charter Schools Network), I was reminded of a book by Andrew Bacevich entitled The Limits of Power, in which he describes a national tendency to resolve complex social, economic, governance, educational, etc. problems by seeking and investing in what he terms Messianic solutions – i.e., the identification and acceptance of “leaders” promising to do great things and bring the answers to complex problems.

I don’t find this a hard trend to recognize and had no trouble naming a handful of such “Messiah’s” in a variety of fields. What I took away from this reflection was that there is a direct connection between our unwillingness/inability to deeply analyze complex situations/problems and Druckers’ thinking about confusing dong things rights with doing the right thing.

NOTE: For 2 recent articles providing a kind of “bookend” look at the Moskowitz story, take a look at a piece by Elizabeth Green that appeared recently in The Atlantic and a recent blog by Jan Resseger who critiques the Atlantic piece and adds a number of excellent references for further exploration.

I know. I know. That’s a long-winded intro to the first piece of the New Year. But hang on. As I’ve shared before, I (and a number of others) see this as a critical time for our system of education. I want to restate several observations I’ve shared over the course of my blogging “career” and then suggest a homework assignment.

We are at a time when we must decide what kind of “schools”, what kind of education, we want for our kids. We have been through more than 40 years of the fixes designed largely by non-educators.

Results…

We have unacceptably high levels of student disengagement in school-based learning. We have exceptional rates of teacher attrition accompanied by very low rates of enrollment in teacher preparation programs. And we are on the cusp of the latest educational revolution – personalized learning… an idea not developed by the reformers of the past three federal improvement initiatives, but by the largest corporations in the world developing algorithmically driven “programs” designed to “guide” students in the acquisition of knowledge and skills that only partially reflect the needs of our students and our society.

We need to demonstrate a capacity that should be in the fabric of our education system. We need to demonstrate and model what it means to be a learning organization. We need to begin the process of deep analysis and reject both the Messianic sirens and quick fixes.

In the spirit of “flipped” experiences, I’d like to suggest that you take a few minutes and follow this link to another recent post by Jan Resseger. In it, she references the value of applying the idea of New Year’s Resolutions to the concept of public education.

As a guide for this exercise, I’ll draw on some words Jan offers from John Dewey . For the purposes of this exploration, I’m summarizing four tenets shared by Jan taken from Dewey’s “Pedagogic Creed”.

I’m hoping that you will treat his words as belief statements and take the time, first of all to jot down your level of agreement with each and, secondly, for those with which you find resonance, to jot down a few descriptions of what you might do to bring your school/district in line with such beliefs.

Tenet #1 – All learning comes from within the learner and, therefore, school must be child- or student-centered. Dewey offers: “I believe that interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe they represent dawning capacities… I believe that only through the continual and sympathetic observations of childhood’s interests can the adult enter into the child’s life.”

Comment: In previous posts, I’ve explored how we tend to fit student-centeredness inside of a need for efficiency and adult comfort. Recently we’ve added a new version of this “centeredness” discussion. But it seems that our current preoccupation with the term “personalization” creates a child – or student-centered culture in name only. In Dewey’s words, “Education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results but cannot truly be called educative.”

Tenet #2 – “I believe that much present education fails because it neglects the fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives of school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are learned, or where certain habits are formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future… With the advent of democracy modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him control of himself.”

Comment: This is a challenging concept as we have grown increasingly less community- and more individually-centered in our culture.

Tenet #3 – “I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situation in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs… I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of the neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life… The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.”

Comment: This seems to indicate that we must become more intentional about the ways in which we support a child’s metacognitive look at her/his decisions and actions.

Tenet #4 – “I believe that education is the regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness. This process begins unconsciously at birth, and is continually shaping the individual’s powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeding in getting together… The most formal intellectual and technological education in the world cannot safely depart form this process.”

What Next?

Imagine for a bit what school/education/learning might look like if we had elected to follow Dewey’s beliefs. But we didn’t, you say. Right we didn’t. But we are now at a place where we are faced with the possibility that our current system will not survive without significant change. I don’t mean change defined as more charter schools and greater choice. While I’m certain that the Eva Moskowitz’s of the world would love to see this as the solution, it would be a continuation of our tendency to rely on simple solutions to complex problems. These schools are not schools of the future. They are schools created to resemble schools of the past as they are remembered by those who thrived in them. It is an approach which has been described (accurately, I think) as “marching backwards into the future.”

Your turn. Can you find a resolution or two in here? Happy New Year!