Tag: problems

82/365 We Can Do More than Admire the Problem

Building things is difficult. Building things with others – even more so. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in a conference presentation. Assembled in a poorly lit room with mean, uncomfortable chairs, professionals assemble, ostensibly to learn, grow, and take new ideas back to their home bases.

Ask those assembled to begin by turning to those around them and sharing their names, titles, and locations of origin, and you’re on the right track. You’ll get no argument when you ask for a few volunteers to share out what’s wrong, broken, or difficult about the systems in which they work.

In education, we like very much to do what my friend Kristin Hokanson once described as “admiring the problem.” If allowed to roam free, it’s likely an entire conference session could be dedicated to admiring the problem. If conference sessions don’t fit your context, imagine a faculty lounge at lunch break, faculty meeting, learning community meeting, etc. Any place professionals are meeting, it’s likely they can fill every cranny of a space with admiration of the problem.

Ask them to take a moment to consider a possible solution to that problem, though, and the mood will change. Perhaps more to the point, the mood will stay the same and the solution will be sentenced to death by “yeah, buts.”

No matter the research, evidence, data, and testimonials behind a solution, the “yeah, buts” will tumble out of mouths in an avalanche of negativity.

We are no longer simply admiring the problem, we’ve fallen in love with it.

In the schools we need, we must take a stance of “yes, and…”

“Yes, and…” is the fundamental principle of improvisational theater. Where no lines, no script, no direction are driving a scene actors must trust that their scene partners will accept what they say and do and immediately build off of it.

Imagine the power of such a mindset when someone presents an assembled audience with a teaching practice that has opened up learning for her students. Instead of, “Yeah, but that would never work for our kids because…” the answer becomes, “Yes, and here are the ways we’d need to tweak what you’re talking about for it to fit our scenario.”

Do not misunderstand, “Yes, and…” does not avoid conflict. Instead, it embraces conflict and builds from the difficulties rather than seeing the problem as the conclusion.

Another way to think about this is in the shape of the “barn raising” approach described by Don McCormick and Michael Kahn. Pointing out the stonewalling that can often take place in a college seminar discussion where all voices are attempting to be heard by means of either ignoring or tearing down those ideas that come before them, McCormick and Kahn suggest another approach.

They make four suggestions:

  1. The classroom battle is not a good way to teach thinking.
  2. Even if it were, it makes idea-conversation so unpleasant that students do their best to avoid it, in college and afterwards.
  3. It is a significant contribution to the building of a society of contention and enmity.
  4. And, as an alternative, there is another way to talk about ideas which obviates those difficulties.

McCormick and Kahn utilize the metaphor of a barn raising in which all parties are working to build something new and useful to the group. While each may have a different skill or task to complete, they are working toward a common cause of creation rather than destruction or limitation of the others. To be successful, all must be succcessful.

Both “Yes, and…” and barn raising take reality as their foundations. Both acknowledge the present situation or problem as the starting point for any work to be done. They find their usefulness in refusing to stand around and take into account all the factors that make finding a solution so difficult. “This is the reality,” these approaches say, “and now we will work together to build a new and better reality.”

23/365 Diffusing the Diffusion of Responsibility

I sent an email last week. In one of our classrooms, the one in which most of my classes are held, there was a table with two wobbly legs. It was annoying.

It had been so annoying last semester, in fact, that the table had been pushed to the side of the room so as not to be accidentally used. Nevermind that this also meant removing two possible seats from the classroom, the legs were wobbly, and that was annoying.

Table = Banished.

I talked about the table in my email.

I also talked about an electrical outlet. Given the age of the building, it’s not surprising that there aren’t but two outlets in the room. One is at the front of the room, one is at the back. The former outlet doesn’t work. It hasn’t since I’ve been on campus, and I’d venture to guess it’s been out of commission for quite a while before that. The thing is, we, of the laptop and tablet era, need that outlet.

So, I wrote an email to Sara, the woman in charge of managing the facilities of the School of Education, letting her know about the table and the outlet. For the outlet, I said I couldn’t fix it, but that I’d come grab a socket wrench and fix the table if she had one.

A few days later, I got an email from Sara thanking me for the email, and confirming that letting her know was the right thing to do. Sara is on it.

What’s gotten me thinking in the intervening days is the fact that hundreds of people have likely noted both of those problems in the time since they first arrived on the scene. For the table, it meant pushing it aside, giving up classroom space, and making seating tighter. For the outlet, it meant not having the power needed.

They were simple problems with a clear means of fixing them, and no one had sent the email. They had done what I’d done for over a semester – lived with the problem. When either would come up in conversation, I’d also take a few moments to admire the problem.

It turns out, according to Bud (and wikipedia), there’s a name for this, “Diffusion of Responsibility.” Our inaction is contagious. We could all see the problems in front of us. In some cases, we literally had to adjust course to avoid them. Still, we’d done nothing about them.

The principle came up today when a professor used an example of a student who scores lower than his classmates on a reading examine. It’s likely this kid wasn’t failing for the first time on the test. He’d probably been practicing not knowing how to read for a good long time before picking up his #2 pencil.

What the professor pointed out, and what I’d rather not admit to being likely true, was the fact that the student’s teacher could probably have predicted his score sans test. The teacher, my professor suggested, had likely recognized the problem of our sample student not knowing how to read, but had most likely moved along throughout the school year because he didn’t know how to fix the problem. Lacking the necessary solution, he’d let the problem stand.

In the moment today, I wanted to disagree with the professor, to accuse him of making sweeping generalizations about teachers and argue that it was incredibly likely that every teacher had done all that was in their power to help our hypothetical student.

Then, I remembered we were sitting in a room with a broken table and defunct outlet that we’d noticed while ignoring for more than a semester, and I kept my mouth such.

No need to raise your seat back: What happens when teachers lose sight of the destination

The man sits asleep, mouth agape in his window seat as the flight attendant stops by and gingerly taps him on the shoulder.
“Sir,” says the flight attendant, “We’ll be landing soon, and I need you to put your seat up.”
“I can’t,” says the passenger, “Whenever I try, it just falls back down. I think it’s broken.”
“You need to press the button,” says the flight attendant.
“I did. It just keeps falling.” He demonstrates.
“Well, can you put up the seat beside you,” says the flight attendant as he walks away.
The passenger is suggesting someone might want to report the broken seat, but the flight attendant has already moved on.
The entire scene is reminiscent of many teachers’ approach to students and what they have decided are the correct behaviors.
Anyone who has ever traveled by air knows the vehemence with which flight attendants insist passengers put their seat backs and tray tables in the full upright position.
So too might anyone who observes an American classroom note the force with which many teachers insist students follow exacting classroom procedures and practices. Students must submit their homework at a given time, tests must be completed within a certain interval, essays must be formatted according to set parameters. In many cases, if any of these standards is not met, the work will not be accepted. The students will not be cleared for landing.
Teachers are tripping over procedures with little regard to their intended destinations.
Certainly, it is important for a student to learn the lesson of submitting work in a timely manner. At the same time the tardiness of work should not mean a student’s effort up to that point be disregarded.
Why, then, do many teachers impose such draconian measures in their classrooms? They do it for the same reasons many flight attendants insist on upright seats, not because it is imperative for the landing of the plane, but because it is one of the few things still within their control.
If teaching is entirely dependent on others listening and observing instruction and then internalizing it, there is little wonder teachers might savor any element of control they can find when faced with limp success rate of much traditional teaching.
One option, the option of which we are loud proponents, is to keep the intended destination in mind when responding to the idiosyncracies of student behaviors and accepting successes while working to improve upon failures. This is not easy.
Our flight attendant, too, struggled with keeping the destination in mind. If seat back position is important to the operation of the plane, he would have done well to listen to the passenger and report the defunct chair. Ignoring it now means he and subsequent flight attendants will wage constant battle with that seat when a few moments of focused attention could save mountains of frustration.
Teachers too could learn from this piece of the story. Punishing the student who has formatted his essay incorrectly without taking the time to help the student develop a plan for avoiding the error in the future only insures headaches down the road.
Failing to appreciate the work that’s been done while simultaneously punishing the annoyance without working toward a solution leads to something educators are particularly adept at – admiring the problem.

What do you mean when you ask if it scales?

No idea has much chance of surviving in the intellectual marketplace these days if it cannot prove its muster in the face of one question:

But can it scale?

It frustrates me to no end. While I appreciate the market and capitalistic underpinnings that lead to the question, I appreciate a good idea much more.

Problems require nuance and sophistication in their solutions. Elements of those solutions may be replicable or scalable, but the solutions themselves must connect to the people and contexts of a particular instance of problem. Student mobility in one city may look like mobility in another city, but it may be the result of a wholly separate set of causes. The solutions will have some elements in common, but they will not be the same.

I’m interested in whether or not I can see and borrow pieces of the solutions I need in the answers you’ve found. If 95% of what you’re doing would solve my problem, implimenting your solution wholesale prevents me from serving my community as fully as I could. What’s more, it let’s me solve a problem without thinking and without questioning deeply what should and can be done.

Scaling a solution runs the danger of reducing thought.

Earlier this semester I found better language for answering the question of whether an idea scales. From professors Mark Moore and Archon Fung, I came to define scale as follows:

Scale is…

…the number of people affected.
…the geographic spread across jurisdictions.
…the critical mass reached in population segment.
…the size of impact on individuals affected.
…the scope and durability of individual impact.
…the sustainability of effort over time.
…the total individuals and assets engaged.

If all we’re trying to accomplish is scaling in the form of the first definition, we’re paying attention to the number of people, but not being mindful of the actual people.