Tag: capacity

134/365 What Keeps our Ideal from becoming Real in Education

The ideal is not necessarily ideal if we want to get things done.

Digging through the files I’ve been squirreling away to read “one day” I finished Laura Valentini’s article “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory” yesterday.

While much of it invited re-reading a time or two to really dig into the intense philosophical text, I got enough practical understanding to move the furniture in my brain around a little bit.

I’ll outline the basics as I understand them here, and let others who understand these things better than I chime in with clarifications.

The paradox Valentini describes is akin to letting the great be the enemy of the good. The problem of basing our goals or understandings of the world on the ideal comes in the application to the real world. The ideal is not the real world.

The imagining ignore the reality.

Then, as I understand Valentini, the application of plans to move toward the ideal runs the risk of nullifying the ideal because we didn’t think about the real world in our imagining.

The good, becomes the enemy of the great.

Another way to think about this.

A. I have a plan for an ideal school.
B. I build the structure necessary for the school.
C. The people who populate the school are not ideal.
D. I treat those people as though they are ideal and have ideal abilities.
E. Frustration sets in because people are not who I imagined them to be.
F. The school fails because we did not take into account the non-ideal nature of people, thereby nullifying my image of the ideal school.

While Valentini is talking about ideals of social justice, the argument travels nicely to systems like schools.

If we imagine the ideal school and take into account that people and extant systems are not perfect and ideal, then we can move the pieces of practice necessary to help all actors increase their ability to create the ideal.

In social justice terms, Valentini refers to the application of affirmative action toward the ideal of social justice as a recognition that people do not act without prejudice even after discrimination has been outlawed. The ideal vision holds while the system is adjusted in recognition of the unideal actors.

In the school scenario, the example would be the teachers and other school leaders who imagine all that needs to be done is working harder and longer hours to make up for their shortcomings in making their school the ideal.

This amounts to working much harder to fall short and not build the envisioned school.

Instead, other steps must be taken. Practically, this could include adjusting the school’s schedule, teacher course loads, course materials, training in new practices, etc. Whatever it takes to adjust for the unideal reality can keep the ideal vision from fading away. It might also include things like focusing first on whether or not all students have access to proper medical care, questioning the dietary needs of students and what the school can do to help, connecting students to adult mentors, etc.

The ideal need not die in education because the system isn’t build to bridge the gap between the ideal and reality. It can remain a viable possibility if we realize the needs of the system and move them toward the capacity of the ideal.

131/365 Trust the Start

My new job has me thinking quite a bit about the flow of systems. For the majority of my career, I’ve been at one end of the educational system – in the classroom – working directly with students and other teachers to make learning and formal education better.

Now, I find myself somewhere in the middle of the system. I’m not in charge of anything, per se, at either end of the system. I support teachers and students and I support the leadership of the district. Sometimes (not often) that support looks drastically different.

I’ve found myself realizing and hoping for a specific string of trust to be enacted and embodied by the district.

It starts like this – Trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning.

From there, direct interactions should be set up in such a way to give them support they need to do what they feel they need to do to help kids. This would be at the principal level. From there, outside the schools, intermediate district personnel should move to support principals based on the assumption that they trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning.

If I believe that’s what principals believe, I’m going to be better at my job.

The same assumption is what I hope for those to whom I report. As I move through schools, help teachers and administrators learn and consider new practices, I hope that those in charge of me assume that I trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students growth and learning.

I want others to assume it in the system, and I want those others to assume that I believe it as well.

If we all operate from this believe, if we all trust that teachers are doing all they can to support students’ growth and learning, a foundation is established on which we can build, improve and design pathways to even greater capacity.

Assuming teachers are doing all they can is not assuming that they are doing the absolute best, it is assuming that they are doing their absolute best in the moment, and that it can always be augmented.

If I work with a group of teachers to build capacity around some new tool or practice, approaching our time together from the assumption that they are doing all they can will result in conversations much more replete with respect, listening, and care than conversations based on the assumption they are slacking, skating, or faking their way through the school year.

I want the best for anyone who endeavors to add to the learning, understanding, and choices of students. The best way I can think of to support and work alongside these folks is to trust they are doing the best they can and move from there.

Things I Know 353 of 365: It isn’t all for everyone

A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamt of by its author.

– Stephen C. Johnson

My stepdad was explaining at lunch today why Facebook just wasn’t how he connected to people. I understood.

“What about Twitter?” he asked. “I haven’t looked at that.”

Knowing him as I do, I told him to stay away. “It wouldn’t be useful to you.”

I get the feeling this is was unexpected piece of advice coming from me.

It took less than a semester for people at Harvard to come to expect my nerdiness.

Even at SLA, a school that breathes technology, I was one of the nerdiest.

Here’s the thing to remember, I like technology. I will totally geek out on the newest gizmo, gadget or app. Being a beta tester is a source of pride for me.

When thinking about systems and considering a task to be completed, however, one of the last things I’d advocate is technology for its own sake. Out of context or usefulness, there are few things I can think the use of which I’d advocate for their own sake.

This is because the misuse or thoughtless application of tools, structures, and systems can be an ugly, counter-productive thing.

I’ve seen it in the teacher with access to 1:1 laptops who makes the worksheet using Word and distributes it for her students to type in their answers and then print them out to be submitted.

I’ve heard it in the arguments of those who call for changes in schooling so that students can, as a result of those changes, do better at school.

While I think most every teacher could benefit from jacking in to the network of educators on Twitter, I don’t think every teacher should. Requiring every teacher in a school to sign up for this account or that account is a great way to insure you’ll never have 100% participation in that market.

The best way to make a tool useful is to wait for the use of that tool and build the capacity to recognize when it is called for.

Had I encouraged my stepdad to sign up for twitter, I would have been giving the world another person complaining about twitter’s uselessness.

That’s not my bag.