I recommend reading my Aug 20, 2015 post before reading the following.
This post provides an additional take on the “I-love-how-you-did-this-but-why-did-you-do-that-when-you-should-have-done-this” management approach. A young colleague just got bludgeoned by this approach as part of a professional development activity. No doubt her principal meant well, but her reaction was to say, “I got lambasted.”
This colleague has a perfectionistic streak, and the “I-love-how-you-did-this-but-why-did-you-do-that-when-you-should-have-done-this” approach does not work as well for that set of teachers as it may with other groups. Like students, teachers vary in their sensitivity to criticism and I-loved-this-not-that statements inevitably carry a degree of criticism, sometimes one that can even be interpreted as an attack, especially if the rigid use of this approach leads to a stream of negative comments.
Eduhonesty: My colleague said something to me after she was “lambasted” that struck me.
“It’s not a conversation. It’s a transmittal of information,” she said.
I found that to be a true characterization of the I-loved-this-not-that approach that’s currently in vogue, although I am not sure I recognized that I was not conversing at the time. I kept trying to communicate. As the year went on, I tried less and less, because my take was that no one was listening. I put that down to the people I was trying to reach. One was young and inexperienced* and the other was… well, the engine was running but I often doubted that man was sitting behind the wheel.
| One would think touchy-feely management would be honest, but it’s not honest when everyone’s following a script and almost everyone knows the so-called right answers. My colleague drifted off the script and ended up feeling clobbered for honestly observing that she did not think a professional development activity would be appropriate or useful for her. She’s not concerned that her Principal disagrees. An honest disagreement would be fine. She’s concerned that her Principal did not listen to her. | ||
| When teachers don’t believe their voices will be heard, they become much less likely to offer suggestions and observations. Teachers provide feedback from the trenches. Teachers are the first people in a school to know whether a new program is working or not. They are the first people to recognize whether the East-Coast designed, common-core lesson plans are actually improving student learning. When teachers’ voices shut down, districts and students suffer. | ||
| I could have helped a great deal as we tried the common-core, identical-lesson-plans-for-everybody experiment, had there been anyone to hear me. But my words floated off into some black hole whenever I spoke against the party line. I found that I could make statements like, “But they can’t read the test!” and no one listened and nothing changed. When I pointed out the chosen book was set four years above the level of one classroom, a district administrator simply shut down on me. He’d picked the book over teacher recommendations for an alternative book written in friendlier English and he had a vested interest in that book. I had classes of students who could not read or understand their book. | ||
| Desperate times call for desperate measures. I understood the desperation that led to a number of dubious choices made by administrators during my last year teaching, especially choices related to my former district’s curriculum. My colleague just gave me an insight on this score, though. District leaders were transmitting information, not sharing information. Sharing implies an exchange of facts and ideas that never happened because no one cared to listen, especially to disagreeable facts that conflicted with the chosen plan of action. | ||
| Teachers and students were the worst losers during the year of inflexible, canned, common-core lesson plans but, in general, when educators don’t communicate, everybody loses. Scripted programs for dealing with people work against communication. A little more humanity and a little less technique would benefit all the players in American education.
Let’s talk to each other. |