The Russian Bear's diaries

How to change

2012-01-27T17:13:00.000-05:00

Our TEIL group always has intriguing discussions, and people who are not there don’t know what they are missing. Today, we were talking about why some of our curricular projects seem to move faster than others. The first initial hypothesis is the human factor – people who lead these projects are more skilled and dedicated than others. That may be a part of it. However, some interesting projects led by people who are just as dedicated and capable seem to unable to move. We also had to admit that the same people who have done something expertly and quickly, may be also dragging their feet in one of snail-paced, or failed projects. As tempting the human factor explanation is, it is really not that useful.

You can see the results of our brainstorm in rather cryptic notes. But the most interesting insight, in my opinion, was that most of our more successful projects have an outside partner or champion. Some very reasonable ideas that we all agree need to be implemented, will remain unrealized, while others take off and become reality. We’re not sure why, but the seem to have someone on the outside asking, nudging, using different timelines, asking naïve questions, misunderstanding, but also challenging our assumptions, practices, and beliefs – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not. For example, TEIL had a very insightful discussion in December, trying to figure out the year-long residency dilemma. We came up with a very creative, but alas, flawed plan. However, a couple of weeks later, our Advisory Board that consists of outsiders immediately challenged our basic assumption (that schools would never pay to have student teachers), and helped to arrive at a workable solution. The lesson from this is – we need to learn to be more open. Moreover, when we identify a need to change, I will have to think hard – what would be a natural champion outside our organization? Not just an advisor, but someone who actually may have a stake in what and how we do. Another lesson is to not give up on a problem too quickly. Even though it may look like unsolvable, another pair of eyes may see an opening.

Another interesting observation – we don’t put any resources in change; all we’ve got and more goes to maintenance. Basically, everyone seems to be running around all the time to keep up with teaching, advising, writing, service, families... Curriculum design is a very time-consuming process, and there does not seem to be much time for it. The more we fall behind on improvement, the more difficult and time-consuming the regular work becomes. I actually have no idea how to solve this second problem, but perhaps you do.

The groundkeeper

2012-01-21T11:16:00.000-05:00

Memories are often layered over a specific trigger. First big snow of the year, for example, brings me back to my mother walking me to school – or was it pre-school? – with snowy wind in my face blowing at such an exact angle that I must turn my head to take a breath. The next thing, when I was about 20, my college job was to be a groundkeeper at a preschool. When it started to snow, it meant a sleepless night for me. I had to wake up at 4, and go shovel the snow. First, I had to clear space for the morning truck to deliver food. Next were the sidewalks for parents to bring their children in. By the end of the winter, snow accumulates in piles on lawns, sometimes 10-12 feet high; every shovel of snow has to be thrown that high, in just the right motion, so it does not slide right back down. The work was hard by also strangely enjoyable; the smell of fresh snow, and sound of the shovel scraping the pavement. Dostoyevsky writes about snow shoveling in a mid-19th century Siberian penal colony in his The House of the Dead.

I also remember doing another shoveling gig at a liquor store, perhaps next winter. It was so cold one night, and the lighting was not good. I ended up removing a layer of asphalt from the pavement thinking it was ice. Asphalt becomes brittle, and easily broken by an ice pick. I thought I’d get in trouble with the management, only to discover next day the pit filled up with ice again, indistinguishable from asphalt.

Why do certain things stick in our memory forever, while an important conversation from just two weeks ago I cannot recall at all? Some of the memories are shored by emotion, some by repetition, but others are simply random. They make the patchy fabric our lives, which we spend a long time organizing, re-writing, and make coherent after the fact. The relentless snow of forgetting whites out everything, except for some islands of recognizable memories.

The new way of working

2012-01-13T11:47:00.002-05:00

The new way of working slowly emerges. Technology needed forit existed for a while, although not in the most useable form. The issue is notthe technology, but changing our own habits and assumptions about how to work.

The old way

At a meeting, everyone is handled an agenda. People read it,amend the agenda, they discuss whatever needs to be discussed. One person takesnotes. The notes of the meeting are then typed up, and sent to other members tomake sure nothing was omitted. This can be a special approval of minutes, or amore informal process. Then someone converts the minutes into an actionableplan, which almost always includes writing some document or a series ofdocuments. Almost anything we do includes a policy statement, an announcement,an application, a survey instrument, etc. Many are also duplicated as web pagesor published otherwise. The plan is communicated to the respective parties. Someonethen writes a draft of a document, and sends it out for review. People sendback their comments or corrections. The author has to incorporate all of thoseinto a new draft, and send it again for review and comment. Alternatively,people who do little parts, report on their activities, if they remember, andsomeone in charge has to compile reports, so she or he can monitor the process.Then eventually the results of the project need to be either published or sentto specific people.

The new way

When a meeting is called; the agenda and the initial ideas onthe issue are sent along, as a link to a Google Doc. People can add thoughts,questions, or objections on the document before the meeting ever begins. This savestime at the meeting, for all are more prepared. “What are we writing today?” ishow every meeting should be started. IN other words, what are the end product?If it is a policy and an application form, we should work on those end productsright away, skipping all the preliminary writing if possible. Very often theinitial Doc is also reused as either a policy statement, or a discussion board,if a wider discussion is merited. As the project progresses, that doc is alsoused to record progress, concerns, dilemmas and whichever useful informationneeds to be gathered. It is often the case that projects take a long time, soparticipants forget what they agreed on, and what was done already. The doc isan archive, which can be quickly found and revisited. The majority of ourprojects are not confidential, and the doc can be openly available. Wheneversomeone asks for an update or a report, or a news item, we send them a link: ifyou need information, you plough through our working notes and find what youneed. I am not doing it for you!

When we switched from typed or handwritten paperwork tofiles and e-mails, we gained in the speed of communication, but lost time withthe ever-increasing volume of the communicated information. We lose atremendous amount of time on e-mails, many of which are unnecessary. Just lookat your inbox – it is probably a request to take some information, and covertit into a different form and share it with different people. The second shiftthat is going on right now is to distributed, shared information creation andconsumption. It promises a significant increase in productivity, which reallymeans cutting out all the routine and boring stuff. For example, at DLCmeetings, we look at the minutes of the last meeting on screen, and correctthem right there; I publish them as we speak. The minutesnow have links to other documents, in case someone forgets, or is curious todrill down the information. This relieves me from the obligation to return tomy office, open the file again, enter the corrections, then do something elseto make the minutes public. When I return from most meetings, I do not need tosit again with my notes and translate them into actionable items, send them outto other people, etc. The minute we’re done, we’re done. I treasure those extrathirty minutes every couple of weeks, because I have more interesting things todo.

Here is another example. Last year, we spent a lot of timeon creating a newsletter: I solicit information from people, and am routinelyignored. Then I pester chairs, and they pester faculty, and somehow produceblurbs and pictures. Then we edit, figure out layout, produce a PDF file, printon color printer, etc. Lots of time is spent with uncertain result.

The new way: Google Search emails me links to any news andany website changes that contain “Rhode Island College.” Most are irrelevant,but when it is our alum or a story about us, I read, and paste the link intoour Facebook page. When one of you sends me an e-mail with a picture or a link, Ican now say, Great job, congratulations; can you please share this on Fb? This createsa semi-permanent record of news. So, when I am asked for news, I send a link. Somepeople still wanted us to produce another newsletter. But you know what? I amhappy with the Fb format. It is not as pretty and organized as the newsletter,but it does the job. You want a newsletter? Well, go ahead, do it! If you needthe information, you know where to find it.

Very few things in life are as satisfying as stopping doingthings you did not enjoy doing.

Fail fast, fail cheap

2012-01-06T15:51:00.001-05:00

One of the Freakonomics podcasts was called The Upside of Quitting; you can also listen to it. It is about the balance between the sunk cost (I put so much into this already, it is hard to abandon) and the opportunity cost (the cost of not doing something else). Their point is simple: the stigma of quitting skews our decisions; we hold on to our failures for too long. And there is also strength in persistence, no doubt. The problem is when we hold onto something just because we already poured too much money and effort into it, NOT because it still has a promise. The Vietnam War is one tragic example of the failure to fail fast.

I thinking about it while reviewing a list of projects I have started and abandoned, trying to discern good failures from bad ones. Here is an example of a better one: last semester, I thought we would do a service to many people if we accept paper copies of some assessment forms here, and have our work studies punch the numbers into our electronic databases. Some objected that this is going to mean too much work for us, but I figured faculty and cooperating teachers’ time is in the end much more valuable than the work-studies’ time. We were also trying to save on the cost of training many people and answering their technical support requests. The trouble, however, came from an unexpected direction. Because there is always a few days’ lag, it was very difficult to monitor compliance. The data could be in one of two electronic databases, or in a pile of unprocessed papers, or in transit somewhere. We just could not tell who completed and who did not, especially in the few critical days at the end of the semester. And yes, work studies and GA’s stopped working because of their own finals. So, OK, we failed, and are going back to all electronic submission. But we failed fast, relatively cheaply. On the balance sheet are negatives (a few people think we’re morons, because we change the process every semester; we lost some data; some instructors never completed the forms), and positives (we learned something from the experience, we have moved on to the next, and hopefully better system).

Bad failures happen when the sunk cost keeps increasing, because people invested their effort, their egos, and their identities into something that does not work. It still fails all the same, just too late, and too expensively. I wish we could be a little more tolerant to failure. The world is changing; it is a much more dynamic and fast-paced place than even 20 years ago. No need to be flaky and try a hundred different things, without following up on any of them. However, we should always have a few more initiatives going than we expect to complete. And most importantly, we need to be attentive and forgiving to each other’s and collective learning processes. Otherwise, people will develop an aversion to risk, and just do the same thing over and over again. And that would be a very boring place to work in.

The treasure trough of secrets

2011-12-22T15:25:00.004-05:00

Today was one of the rare days with no meetings, and very low flow of emails. Days like that are best used for cleaning up old entangled messes and for general organizing. It is time to look into the priority list, and pull some things from the bottom of it. It is surprising how important are some of the tasks that in the middle of a crazy semester never come up to the top of the to-do list. Here is an interesting error we make - certain tasks seems insignificant not because they are, but because no one pressures us to do them. But I venture to speculate that for some of the most important things we can do there is no external pressures. No one will pressure you to write that poem, or to read that book you always knew are important.

For example, for a long time, we all thought the assessment instrument descriptions need to be edited - both for length and for consistency. They were pretty well written originally, and therefore there were always many more pressing issues to be dealt with. So today I thought I'd bite the bullet and try to clean them up. While the result may not be impressive to any of you, I was surprised how much fun it was for me. Looking at forms, rubrics, descriptions, and trying to figure out how to make them shorter, more economical, and yet detailed enough to be useful. There is a quiet and meditative quality to this. The tiny discoveries - oh, we may not need this document at all; let's just use that one for the same purpose! - these discoveries are probably similar to those of cooking or gardening, or re-writing a syllabus. They are too small to be of importance to anyone else, and are not really worth communicating to others. But we all have those. They make life enjoyable; they constitute a small treasure trough of secrets we all carry in our heads.

This reminded me, when I was about 5, my preschool buddies and I used to hide little things - candy wraps, buttons, bids - in the playground somewhere, in the dirt. Most of them were probably immediately forgotten, but some we then remembered and dug out - for no purpose, just to know one can have a little thing that is just his, and may sometimes be shared with one or two friends.

My holiday wish to you is to have a quiet moment to remember something small that is not for sharing with others. Because there is no one to judge, you can treasure it as much as you want.

Neither evil nor stupid

2011-12-16T10:27:00.002-05:00

An explosive headline today: Providence Goes to War over Charter Schools. Another bitter fight over charter schools just ended in Cranston. People get passionate about educational reform. Yet there are more and less productive ways of debating.

In every class I have taught for the last ten years or so, student are advised: "Do not assume your opponent to be evil or stupid." Indeed, if you question your opponent's intentions and integrity, why engage in a debate? Evil has to be fought, not debated. If you think your opponent is just an idiot, a dialogue is just as pointless.

A good starting point is this: my opponent has the best intentions and really believes in what she is advocating; she is as intelligent as I am. But my opponent has a different set of experiences, and access to different information, so his opinion is different because of that. My job is to educate the opponent on how the world looks like from my point of view, but also learn why and how he came to his conclusions. The point of the debate is not only to change her mind, but also to admit the possibility of changing mine.

The charter school debate is the classic example of mismatched assumptions. The whole idea of charter schools has been presented to the educational community in the early 90-s as way to establish some space for experiment and innovation. On these terms, many believed it was a good idea. However, some people started to suspect that charter schools intend to gradually replace traditional district-run public education altogether. For example, in New Orleans, 71% of students attend a charter school. Under this assumption, most educators including me would object. The question remains - what is the intent? The proponents say the intent is still the same, the opponents say the intent has shifted. The intent is very difficult to know, and consequences of public policy do not always coincide with its intent. Like any organization on the face of the Earth, charter schools want to grow, regardless of their leader's actual intent.

My objections are theoretical: Education is not a typical market of consumer goods, and consumer choice just does not work as intended there. Unrestricted choice leads to development of concentrated educational ghettos. And as the most active and engaged parents move their children and resources to charters, traditional schools will look worse and worse. They will keep larger and larger proportion of special needs, homeless, and just very poor students with weaker family and community supports. However, FSEHD partners with several excellent charter schools, and I admire their accomplishments. A good school is a good school, and all educators have much to learn from the best of charter schools. As long as they remain a relatively small player, the negative systemic side effects will not be significant and the benefits outweigh the cost. I do not know what is the proper size of charters should be within the public school systems, but definitely not 70%.

A productive debate about charter schools should assume the integrity of intentions on both sides. It also has to focus on the real issue at hand: is this a small scale experiment or an opening act of the total charterization? I think if serious legal guarantees were developed to ensure the limits of charter schools' growth, there would be less opposition. With such guarantees, a large district like Providence can afford another charter school without crossing the threshold.

Another critical point: teachers and parents from traditional schools should see a tangible benefit of the innovation and experimentation promise. The good charters create many of excellent solutions, but there is no mechanism for spreading and adopting them in traditional schools. Charters and district schools are fairly isolated from each other, which breeds mutual suspicion, and defies the whole purpose of charter experiments. This has to be a dialogue of equals, where the best practices of traditional schools are treated with the same respect as those of charters.

Writing shorts

2011-12-09T13:08:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I have written 50 emails (29 on Wd, 35 on Tue, 43 on Mn), a reference letter, and worked with two differed groups on a conference program, and on a new program policy. I also put together an application form, and made a couple of Updates entries. It cannot be all that good. In fact, rest assured, most of it was not good. Even marginally decent writing takes time. Paradoxically, shorter pieces may not need less work than longer ones. In fact, proportionally speaking, shorter pieces should take much more time than longer ones. Much of misunderstandings can be avoided if we took time with our short communications. An unclear email can open a floodgate of clarifying questions. It can also create confusion, errors, hurt feelings, and many more unintended consequences.

We write more shorts because our readers are not likely to read longer ones. I love an occasional New Yorker article because it is longer than a usual magazine piece. I am assured though that the author put hundreds of hours into developing it, so it is usually very good. But an email longer than half a page is very unlikely to be read thoroughly if at all. A 20-page policy is assured a pompous oblivion. Web sites with hundreds of pages will linger unvisited. We are forced into the world of shorts, and most of us are as graceful there as an elephant in a china store.

No one teaches us how to write shorts. It is a special skill, one that becomes more and more important with time. As the nature of communication changes, “Twitterature” becomes its own art form. It will develop its masters, its own sets of rules and its own beauty and elegance. I always require students to write longer papers, just because I want to know their thinking, and to make sure they can construct a more complex argument. But now I am thinking that we should also teach them the art of brevity. The problem is not in lack of time; it is the lack of skills. The task is putting the same amount of thought into a shorter text. English is already a very economical language, with a long tradition of economical, direct and clear writing. Yet the skill does not come by itself. We can marvel at Twain’s on-liners, or Hemingway’s laconism, and yet unable to produce anything like that.

Yesterday, the Cabinet (Monica, Susan, Karen, Eileen and I) spent more than an hour writing this one page document. And note, it went through two drafts already. Why so long? - Because writing is thinking. Language stimulates our imagination, and we are better able to imagine scenarios – intended and unintended – of a policy when we’re working on explaining it. One may believe we think first, and then write our thoughts down. This is not true, of course; no thought arises outside communication, and no thought can be expressed without interpreting. Now, is our one page an example of good writing? Probably not in the aesthetic sense of the word. But we at least walked out of the meeting with some common understanding on what we want to be communicated.

Let’s try to pay attention to our short writings. It is a matter of proportion: the author should take at least twice as long to write something as it takes the reader to read. I know – we won’t be able to cope up with student and each other’s emails, you think. But I bet we’d need fewer exchanges, if we thought a little better about the message that starts it all.

Negative bias or What’s good?

2011-12-02T15:38:00.001-05:00

My work often involves thinking and talking about problems that need to be solved. As a result, the problems come up more that their absence. This creates a bias – all the good things I know tend to be less prominent; their picture in my mind less detailed. For example, a faculty member told me that she had some great students this semester, and she observed some great lessons. But of course, the reason she was in my office was to discuss one troublesome student, which we did at length. Now I know a whole lot about the one problematic student – her history, her attitude, her errors, - but almost nothing about the good students, other than they are good. After all, we don’t need to do something about them. And I don’t think it is just my situation. Most of my colleagues also tend to worry about the things that do not work; while the positive things rarely need discussion or great analysis. Excellent papers or lesson plans are just less memorable than the bad ones, because the latter contain possible clues for how to improve.

The media’s negative bias has been known for a long time: it is hard to sell good news. It is especially difficult to sell good news if they are not really news. For example, imagine a headline “America remains a democracy with functioning legal system,” or “Rhode Island’s public schools continue to accept all children.” Does not work, right? The tendency to take good things for granted is an evolutionary trait. If it is warm and there is a fresh water lake nearby, you would be wasting your time and energy constantly reflecting on how easy it is to keep warm and on the lack of thirst. All cultures have celebrations to balance the negative bias by setting aside some time to reflect on positives. All religions also make a point of thanking their gods for the blessings. But the very fact that these mechanisms exist tell us about the initial imbalance.

The problem is that we are all working a little too much, and trying to solve too many problems. The negative bias contributes to too much stress, because less and less space remains for reflecting on all good things. The traditional cultural resources for restoring the sense of balance are not sufficient anymore. This is why we should all practice a form of cognitive restructuring, or reframing. I hereby declare a new rule. Every time one of you comes in to my office, you must tell me what is the best thing that happened to you lately; describe in some detail. I will do the same when I come to you. Instead of greeting each other “How are you?,” Let’s use “What’s good?” If we start with those conversations, perhaps the problems may appear in their proper proportions, and we won’t stress over the small stuff. You can tell I am getting into the holiday spirit. It’s all the music in the mall.

Who is in the audience?

2011-11-19T20:46:00.001-05:00

Doodle of the week

There is an essential tension hidden in our professional language. On one hand, every profession needs its jargon. The special language signifies the profession’s separateness, its special knowledge. Moreover, the professional language is an important claim to authority. Using common language in professional work would be exhausting, because we would need to redefine over and over again whole concepts and theories compressed into the specialized professional words. There is no legal profession without the legalese, and no medical profession without the doctor-speak. On the other hand, we in teacher education are subject to more and more scrutiny, and often public criticism. The public does not know what we do and how we do it. When criticism – fair or unfair – comes our way, the response cannot be presented in the esoteric language no one outside the profession understands. Additionally, what we always treated as our internal documents – programs, catalog entries, program outcomes, learning objectives – all of it became public, instantly available to potentially much wider audience. Our closest partner communities – teachers, principals, superintendants – are demanding their opinions to be considered in teacher preparation. And even though their own professional languages are much closer to our own, they need extra assurances that we are attentive to the rapid changes in their professions, which we serve. And finally, our own students should become partners in their own preparation. To reach out to them, we must be able to explain our purposes and processes in a language they can understand.

We still need to maintain the professional language; without it, we lose identity and dumb down our thinking. And yet I believe we are now faced with an additional challenge, a task to translate our thinking into the everyday language. I must say, we are not good at it. Most of us are not great communicators where it comes to media, and to just simply crossing professional boundaries. Look through our brochures and websites. Nowhere do we explain simply that students go through a number of practical hands-on experiences, that we evaluate and monitor their every step, or that we have an extensive set of screening mechanisms. The simplest things – like what we want future teachers to be able to do – is expressed in professional lingo that has very little meaning for a lay person. See for example, RIPTS or our conceptual framework competencies. They make perfect sense to you if you are within the field, but not to anyone outside. Just try imagine a reporter asking– what are you trying to teach the future teachers? Well, we have a set of twelve competencies, in four groups. For example, “Human Learning and Development: Reflective practitioners have a solid grounding in educational psychology, the branch of psychology that specializes in understanding teaching and learning in educational settings. They know the four pillars of educational psychology: human development, theories of learning and cognition, classroom management, and assessment.” Well, can you explain to our readers what does it mean, exactly? We can’t do that right now, nor did we ever identify it as a priority to do so.

It is important to us to become better public communicators. We need to translate our program’s purposes and practices into the regular lay language, and keep those translations not only publicly available, but also committed to memory. Our audience has expanded, and we may not have noticed.

On Federalism

2011-11-10T11:36:00.001-05:00

The Doodle of the Week

The RIC/AFT Agreement was developed some time ago, under the assumption that each Department operates more or less independently on all things academic and personnel. This was the time-honored tradition of liberal education, with its respect for academic freedom and faculty governance. However, things have changed. As a professional school, we now have some serious accreditation, public relations, and assessment needs. In many respects, we need to operate as one unit. For example, we absolutely need to have a Unit-wide assessment system. It would really be nice (although not critical) if course evaluations became a part of that system. We need to speak with one voice on the issues of educational reform and policy. The power is in synergy and common resources. It is simply more efficient to have centralized data storage solutions. We would save time and effort by doing less manual work. It is also very important to develop a common response to the challenges and demands of our respective communities of practitioners. For example, we are expected to modernize our curriculum, to establish common admission and graduation policies, etc, etc.

So we’ve got to set up some long-term agreement amongst ourselves. This does not mean we overrule or contradict the Agreement. No, it has to be a strictly voluntary decision of every department to delegate part of its authority to the School (not to the Dean’s office). In essence, it is the federalism debate on a smaller scale.

There are two cases that brought the issue to the surface. We tried two relatively minor things: to develop a common course evaluation instrument, and to revise the Governance Document. Both areas are explicitly within the scope of authority of departments. Inalienable rights, so to speak. Perhaps naively, I thought we can just develop some drafts with participation of all departments, and then ask each department to vote to accept, and voila. Well, it did not quite work so well. Of course, departments cannot participate in their entirety in development of the drafts. Their “delegates” do not have the explicit authority to negotiate on behalf of all. The timelines are not identical. For example, three departments have adopted the course evaluation instrument, one has small editorial suggestions, and one more has developed an alternative proposal. But we cannot really take the proposals back to the departments that already approved them, and ask to vote on amended drafts. Where the documents were approved, faculty were not perfectly happy, they just decided to compromise and try it out. If you ask to reconsider, they will remember that they, too, had suggestions at the time. And if another department can introduce its corrections, why cannot we? This would create an endless cycle of revisions and counter-revisions. In fact, nothing would be accomplished at all, because faculty from one department are unable to talk directly to all other faculty. The reasoning and the rationale gets lost and misinterpreted. Basically, we have a system where each state has a veto power over any law, no matter how fundamental or trivial.

Should we write 85 papers, or can we just read the Federalist Papers? I mean, the American democracy is a mess, but it has been functioning for a very long time, and almost always better than any other mess out there. Maybe the challenge is not as difficult?

The DLC decided to develop the Charter simply because the existing governance document was a bit out of date. Earlier drafts of the Charter had some more radical ideas; they are all gone in the latest draft. If anything, it is perhaps a document that is a little thin on substance. But perhaps the real issue it needs to address is federalism within FSEHD. We do need a constitution. Some issues should still remain in the exclusive jurisdiction of departments. For other issues, we need to figure out a way of making deliberate decisions, but in a timely manner, and not paralyzed by vetoes. We need a process where people can participate and express their professional and personal opinion, and yet a process that has a beginning and an end. Perhaps we need a congress of some sort, or maybe DLC can be trusted to fulfill that role. I don’t know; this is a call for founding fathers and founding mothers. I do know that without the agreement on how to deal with disagreements, we are divided and weak, and our capacity for change is limited.

A modest proposal

2011-11-04T11:30:00.004-04:00

-By Johnathan Swift (as recorded by me)

It is a pity that the outstandingcertification policy just adopted by the RI Board of Regents does not fullydevelop all of its brilliant ideas. I shall take one such idea and apply itconsistently, with rigor and enthusiasm. The idea is to abolish requiringadvanced degrees of advanced teachers, because there is indeed little evidencethat said degrees improve test scores of students. It is commonly known thatabsence of conclusive evidence to support a claim is irrefutable evidenceagainst the claim. For example, if you eat salad, but are still overweight,salad surely makes you fat! If you groom yourself and still cannot get a date,stop grooming and you shall attract members of the desired sex! Thank God forscientific reasoning! How shall we extend this brilliant idea further?

1. The proposal still requires all administrators, supportprofessionals, and specialists to obtain an “advanced degree.” The dreadful phraseappears 18 times in the document! Surely, if it is not good for teachers, itmust not be good for anyone else. There is no scientific proof that a principalor a school psychologist with an advanced degree raises children’s test scores.These degrees are issued by the same disreputable colleges caught peddlinguseless master’s degrees to teachers. If you have the courage to stop thefraud, stop all of it! District-directed, job-embedded professional developmentwill naturally turn an individual into a superb principal, or an excellentsuperintendent! One will soak up the wisdom of being a Reading or an ESLspecialist from having thoughtful conversations with colleagues, and reading powerfulbooks. If this works for teachers, it should work for all!

2. No evidence exists that a bachelor’s degree causesa teacher more likely to raise student test scores. I implore the Board toexercise simple logic: A bachelor’s degree is just another pointless academiccredential, a collection of seat time sold by the same despicable institutionsof so-called “higher learning.” Isn’t it better to measure the effectiveness ofteachers directly without regard to their credentials whatsoever? Therefore,bachelor’s degrees are unnecessary. We have the mighty educator evaluationsystem you all saw working so well for so long! Why certify, if we canevaluate?

3. And while we at it, why not abolish the veryconcept of the approved teacher preparation program! After all, anyone can justteach oneself to be a great teacher by engaging with great books, thoughtfulconversations, and worthy examples. Even a shoe store should be allowed totrain teachers, as long as they raise the test scores. If we happen to hire ateacher who cannot read, for example, well, his students will not show anygrowth. Within a few years, we will know that we made a mistake, chastise theshoe store, and fire the teacher. Our children are the least expensive and mostconvenient instruments for measuring teacher quality!

4. Don’t dictate what a teacher can do! You arealready prepared to send elementary and high school teachers to middle schools.Let worthy individuals teach music one week, and calculus the next, preschoolone year, and an AP class the next. We all know that principals possess the uncannyintuitive ability of judging every teacher’s talents just by looking at them.Principals famously have the ultimate power to hire whomever they want. Youhave embarked on the glorious path to deregulation that did wonders for thisnation’s economy recently. Deregulate until it hurts!

5. Attention, the biggest fraud of all times willbe exposed now. Did you know that economic research so far failed todemonstrate a convincing link between the high school diploma and workerproductivity? It is not clear if schooling is simply a screening mechanism toselect talent, or it actually raises productivity. Over 1000 scholarly papershave been published on the subject only in the last ten years. Still no proof! Andwe already established, no proof is the proof of the opposite! High schooldiploma is not proven to be good; therefore it is bad and must be abolished. Improvethe quality of all education by not requiring it!

6. And finally, not even a shred of research evidencesupports the claim that having a board regulating education policy has any effecton the test scores. If you abolish advanced degrees, bachelor’s degrees andhigh school diplomas, there will be nothing to regulate anyway! Take yourbrilliant idea seriously. Abolish yourselves tonight, for there is no proof youare useful!

I should liketo take this opportunity to announce that the Jonathan Swift award goes toRhode Island, the first government in the world that will improve teacher qualityby lowering its expectations for teacher learning.

Brilliant,simply brilliant!

Dear Regents…

2011-10-27T21:18:00.001-04:00

This is not an attempt to influence your vote, but an attempt to influence your deliberative process.

You are asked to regulate a professional community with an internal disagreement. One group of well-meaning and well-qualified people believe in A, and others believe in B. Both are committed and passionate. Who do you trust to make a decision? You do not have the luxury of time to examine the conflicting claims on their own merit. For example, RIDE believes that the certification system should no longer require professional development; it will be handled better by the new evaluation system. Others argue that this would be an unprecedented move, in sharp contrast with other states’ policies. Another example: a professional organization (RIMLE) believes teachers working in middle schools should be required to be certified in this area. RIDE staff believes these should be local hiring decisions, rather than centralized certification rules. How should such disputed be adjudicated? There are two ways, both developed within our democratic tradition.

The first is to ask both sides to tell their own stories, and decide which is more convincing. RIMLE, for example, would have told you something like this: We are concerned that any middle level job opening can be claimed by any high school teacher with seniority, and principals may little say. RIDE has another story, also compelling: one district has recently decided to move its sixth grade into the middle school, and suddenly all their 6 grade teachers become unqualified to teach the same kids in a different building. The problem is that you heard the latter story, but not the former. RIMLE members cannot directly engage with the Board, and their input is actually summarized and responded to by RIDE, a party to the dispute. This is a conflict of interest.
The second way is to invite a third party, an expert who knows as much as both of these professional groups, but has no stake in the outcome of the debate. Courts do that all the time when judges and jury lack specialized training to weigh the evidence. Invite someone familiar with educational policy research from a neighboring state's university or a research center to testify. It is faster, and although you may not learn as much detail, at least you have another party checking the facts and conflicting claims.

The same approaches can be taken with the evaluation/certification debate. Both sides are equally compelling; both can commandeer research evidence, arguments, anecdotes, and metaphors. We can (and did) debate those for hours on end, going into more and more professional nuances, imagining more and more intended and unintended consequences. Each side has its biases, and interests in the outcomes of the debate. This is why a non-professional citizen board like yours is so important; the interests of the public should be protected, and no profession should have a monopoly on running its own affairs. But protecting public interest also requires weighing in on disagreements among the professionals.

In the end, you would have to agree with one or the other side. But in a deliberative democracy, the process is more important than the outcome. And can you honestly tell what exactly does RIMLE have against the change? Do you know why do teachers object? Are you sure you understand the Higher Education community’s position before deciding it is wrong? If you can and do, cast your vote. If not, perhaps another look is warranted.

Context

For those unfamiliar with the debate:

Rhode Island Department of education has developed a proposal to revise the State’s educator certification policy. It is due to be voted on by the Board of Regents on November 3, 2011. Many of the provisions were supported by various professional groups, but some were also strongly objected. See, for example, RIC’s Feinstein School of Education letter, and the Resolution of the Certification Policy Advisory Board. There is also the RIDE-compiled Summary of the public comments and recommendation, which in my view, does not do justice to representing the opposing arguments. The three public hearings were recorded. The controversy is mainly around three items:

Teachers object to the immediate link between the new teacher evaluation system and the certification policy. Union leaders and many teachers actually support exploring the idea, but feel that the evaluation system (which makes student achievement an important part of teacher evaluation) is just too new, it has not been piloted, and we don’t know if it can generate reliable data. RIDE responds that the actual decisions are a few years away, and if the evaluation data is no good, they would be the first to pull the plug on using it for certification decisions. The issue is – should the safety mechanism be statutory or administratively decided.
Institutions of Higher Education object to removal of professional development requirements from the certification policy. They believe de-valuing graduate education removes an important teacher quality assurance mechanism and sends a wrong message about the value of educational credentials in general. RIDE team believes teacher PD should all be embedded into curriculum work, and is best determined locally, by principals and districts. The issues is – should teachers keep going to school, or their professional growth can be self-directed and employer-directed.
The proposal keeps the Middle Level Certification area, but no longer requires teachers working in middle schools to have it. Secondary teachers will be able to teach 7-12 grades, and Elementary teachers – 1-6 grades anywhere, in any school setting. The issue is whether teacher qualifications are only age-specific, or also setting-specific.

What’s next?

2011-10-23T23:02:00.000-04:00

It is hard for me to get excited at educational policytalks. A good scholarly paper makes me happy; a great story about teaching movesme. But talk on educational policy… Let’s just say, these things usually bring outa skeptic in me. In fact, I can’t remember last time it happened to me, - untilThursday night that is, when Robert Balfanz gave atalk at the RI Foundation. I thought -these are all things I always knew to be true, but just could not say it.First, he deal with education in terms of dropout prevention. It is a muchbetter lens than international tests. Dropping out of school is a real andoften tragic event, coinciding with giving up hope to succeed. In contrast, theshrill calls for outcompeting the world through education strike the wrong note,not only because they are untrue, and are just disconnected from real lives.

Balfantz then goes into a simple line of reasoning: futuredropouts can be easily identified by sixth grade, and not by test scores alone(one must consider absenteeism and behavioral problems). Different kids may have very differentreasons for falling behind, and they need a different set of interventions.There should be a better allocation of resources: some schools have much moreneed than others, and therefore should receive more resources. Schools alone,in the narrow sense cannot help them. While kids must all have a good lesson inthe morning, there should be a second shift of adults offering rich afterschool activities, support, specialized interventions, and just the sense ofcommunity and belonging. All of these efforts should not only resourced (forexample, by shifting resources from the justice and prison expenses), but alsotargeted and coordinated. Teachers shuld be closely involved with the “secondshift” people. Balfantz like to use the term “engineered.” Another metaphor heuses education requires coordination effort comparable to putting together aBroadway show.

I noticed that there were no usual divisions in theroom. The approach can bring people fromdifferent camps. Teachers have always rightfully argued that schools andteachers alone cannot undo the effects of concentrated poverty, no matter howhard they try. Many educational researchers have been arguing that schools asinstitutions of pure learning cannot work, and need to be augmented anddiversified to improve. The reformers liked that there is still measurements,accountability, clear numerical targets (the drop-out rate) which have direct economicsignificance. The after school crowd of course, loved this, too, for obviousreasons. This is one unique case where the idea may actually play wellpolitically, for everyone can be (and should be) included. Balfantz’s strength isin the systems approach. He is basically suggesting we may have enoughresources to significantly reduce drop our rate; all we need to do is toorganize and allocate them smartly.

The national education policy since Reagan has been doingvery few things, each is somewhat promising, but also so mind-bogglinglydisconnected. The reform has been dominated by non-professionals, who believein miracles, and fail to see nuances. Every time one of us in the professiontries to critique another silver bullet, they take it as resistance to change. So,they will not listen, and keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Theirpassionate, well-intended, but unsophisticated thinking did little to address education’sproblems. A quarter of century worth of reforms has very little to show for themoney. The thinking goes like this: let’s just do more of the same, and do it awhole lot harder, and for longer, and it should work. If it does not work,overcome the sabotage in the profession. It created a whole new set ofpolitical divisions which did not exist before, by asking teachers to performmiracles, and then blaming them for failure to deliver.

A platform that would reunite fractious groups of educatorsis possible, and it can be developed along the lines of Balfantz’s thinking. Let’skeep all the existing reform efforts. I wish some could be just scaled down alittle, take less time and attention, but let’s keep them all, but find properplaces. Yes, we need a set of nationalstandards, and better testing. Yes, we need coherent teacher evaluation systems,better induction practices, and experimental schools. But we also need to bringa whole lot of additional resources into struggling schools – social workers,community partners, - in such a way that they don’t fall over each other. We needto elevate our diagnostics (along the lines suggested by the RTI) to a moresophisticated, and yet simpler level. Let’s measure not just tests and grades,and learning outcomes, but also engagement levels, how attached kids are toschools and to the adult world. Are they fed? Healthy? Have a stable home? Weneed to think of a whole day, from morning to night, not just about lessonsfrom 9 to 2.

The big task is the system building. It can be done. For example,our friends in PASA have figured out how to bring dozens of after school serviceproviders and putting them into one schedule to serve Providence kids. CentralFalls is experimenting with the Restorative justice Approach which integratessocial work with education. They arealso trying to connect public schools with charter schools. There are manyother examples, recent, local, but also historical, and across the world. It isimportant to realize that the integration work is a special kind of work. Bringingcommunity partners, schools and social services is no small task. Someone hasto develop a model for integrative, logistical services, with the use ofcontemporary information technologies.

If Arne Duncan was an educator, that’s what he would fund.But I don’t want to wait for another wave of ill-conceived reforms to pass. Ithink we should just do it in Rhode Island.

The capacity for change

2011-10-14T17:23:00.002-04:00

We had an interesting discussion today at the TEIL meeting. Why is higher education so slow to change? What we realized is that the best side of us is also the worst side. As an industry, we have some of the most educated, most dynamic workforce. Faculty are trained to be critical, thoughtful, inquiring. This very advantage makes many changes on campuses almost impossible. The minute one small group comes up with an idea, a suggestion, with a plan, other groups will immediately start investigating and critiquing. They will inevitably find flaws in it, and demand further revision. Yet once revised, the proposal becomes the subject of scrutiny by other groups, and other flaws are immediately found. Eventually, the proposal either dies, or is changed to be very similar to the status quo. Higher education is a unique system where almost everyone has a veto power. Many players can say no, but almost no one can produce a definite yes. So the odds are against any potential change. This is a matter of probability determined by cultural and organizational conditions, not a result of any special conservatism.

The other extreme is passivity, where people are disengaged, and they let administration, or a group of faculty to do whatever the want. This is not a good option either. Change can happen quickly, but first, some of it is not good (the ideas were not vetted), and there is little buy-in and support from faculty. Changes like these are easy to do superficially, but they fall victim of slow sabotage of those who consented but did not engage.

We eventually started to talk about trust, and how it is an essential condition for change. To a certain uncertain degree, we need to operate on trust, and suspend our critical judgment. For example, if we trust a committee to develop something, and then find their product unconvincing, we should make an attempt to accept, unless this is something completely unacceptable. We simply cannot develop everything by consensus. Consensus is great for fundamental beliefs and strategic priorities, but fairly counter-productive for developing specific things. Writing by committee only works when people become exhausted, and ultimately disengaged (which is the error of the second kind). All campuses I have seen often fluctuate between the two extremes of jaded passivity (usually about big decisions) and of spirited struggle (usually about the littlest things).

In most cases, our thinking should be like this: OK, you guys were asked to do something; and I was amongst those who asked you. I was also asked for input, but sorry, did not have time to provide much. OK, now you produced something that, frankly, is not that great. I would do a much better job, no doubt. But hey, I was not on that committee; I did not hear all the debate and compromises. I am talented, but busy. Well, OK, perhaps my version would be just as vulnerable as yours. Can I live with what you produced? Is this against my core professional and ethical beliefs? - Not really. Is there ill intent behind this? - Probably not, just benign incompetence. So, I can’t do everything myself, so let’s try it. Next time, I‘ll get on that committee and get things right.

The human factor

2011-10-07T16:45:00.001-04:00

It is a gorgeous Fall Friday, one of those days that can putone’s senses in the state of hyper-alertness. Certain smells, shades, and viewsbring out misfiled, but never quite discarded memories. This is all I want tothink and write about.

However, I am still at work, so these are my five cents on thenew teacher evaluation system that RIDE is implementing this year. None ofthis is news to them; I have had many opportunities to share my thoughts withthe RIDE team members responsible for this impressive project. I am writing asa concerned friend, not as a disengaged critic. It does have a good potential,and I wish it very much to succeed.

The main idea is to use the value-added model to evaluateteacher effectiveness. In other words, if your students show growth, you mustbe an effective teacher; if they do not, you are not effective, whatever yousay and whatever your credentials are. Intuitively, this makes a lot of senseto the policy makers and to the public at large. And RIDE’s statistics expertsdeveloped a very clever model that measures just the growth, not the absolutetest scores, against the average growth rates in the state. There are alsomultiple safety checks in place for teachers not to be dismissed on accident.First, the growth model is only about one third of the evaluation; the rest isobservations and professionalism. Second, you’d need to show several years oflow performance to be actually dismissed. Third, you will be offered help alongthe way.

There are still serious scholarly concernsabout how the model is going to behave in a large-scale trial. Most of them have to do with measurements’stability. If you were excellent one year, but then poor in the next; themeasure is not likely to be accurate. It happens more than people expect – an instrumentmay be tested to be valid, but after scaling up its use, or after theconditions of use change (say, from clinical to field application), it losesits reliability and validity. The non-measured, external influences may becometoo strong, your selection of sample becomes less random (more biased), and itssize turns out to be too small. Will it happen in this case? We don’t know yet.The RIDE team has run some older data through the model, and it seems to be checkingout. But no one can say it will be fine once the data is collected in thecontext of the high-stakes system. The math in the model is not really aproblem. (Well, it may disadvantage teachers who work with gifted students –those tend to score very high on any tests to begin with, so their growth maynot be as impressive. It may reflect poorly on teachers who work with studentswho are so low, their growth is invisible on available instruments.)

Once the evaluation system is established, people will startmanipulating it, consciously or unconsciously. That pull may or may not bestrong enough to undermine the validity of the central measure, but we simplycannot tell in advance. It is very hard to predict how the pressures of the newsystem will affect teachers’ and principals’ behavior. For example, if I workfor a non-NECAP-able subjects and grades, I get to establish my own learningobjectives and measure their achievement with an instrument I construct. There areverygood guidelines on learning objectives, and they could be mastered, nodoubt. But it takes years of trying to develop a good sense of what’sachievable, to construct a good instrument to measure growth, and people mayset learning objectives as too high or too low. Every incentive is to set themtoo low though.

There is a comprehensive lesson observation and teacherevaluation tool developed on Charlotte Danielson’s framework. RIDE estimatesa principal will spend 10 hours a year on evaluating each teacher. I think itis an underestimation, because the learning curve needs to be factored in. CoventryHigh School has 172 full time teachers, and Frank D. Spaziano Annex ElementarySchool has 8; onaverage 42. Even most optimistically, it adds to 420 hours, or 56 full days(if you assume 7.5 hour workday) or 11 full weeks. One third of the entireschool year time is gone from the principal’s time budget, if she or he did italone in an average school.

And then again, enter the human factor. Most of observationcriteria are by necessity vague, the time is very limited, and the stakes arefairly high. From my experience, this is the recipe for the “regression to theexcellent” phenomenon, which we are struggling with in teacher preparation. Ifyou are a principal, checking 80 items within 50 minutes, and you know it actuallymatters, you will be tempted to evaluate everyone high, just to be safe. Thenyou get flat, uninteresting data in the end, where everyone is above average.Looking at the data will reinforce your low buy-in. That is the real danger.Once people lose faith in the system (even when they are at fault), their nextcycle of observations becomes even less accurate. Why should I care if thisdoes not tell me anything useful anyway? You can probably tell I am speakingfrom experience here. What begins a big scare ends up being a biggest joke.

Now, I don’t want any of these things to happen, and I hopethey won’t. This is not a call to abandon or dismantle the new evaluationsystem. We should give it a very serious try, and work earnestly on using whatwe all learn. Expect years of finding new unintended consequences, notdespairing, but fixing them all, one by one.

I do, however, believe that the timelines set by the FederalGovernment are utterly unrealistic. The State’s educators led by the “RIDErangers,” no matter how competent and hard-working, simply cannot deliver afunctioning evaluation system within a couple of years. It would be alsoabsolutely unrealistic to count on that system to work properly within the nextfive years. So when we pin our other items on the reform agenda on thisunrealistic hope, we only increase the uncertainty. For example, moving theprofessional development requirements from certification into new theevaluation system is just a hugely risky. We are dismantling one qualitycontrol mechanism, on pure hope that the new one will be better. Yes, the oldsystem was not that great, but at least we know it worked somewhat. RememberAmerican education has been slowly improving over the last thirty years byalmost every measure available.

There is a huge distance between a promising idea and aworking public policy, with all its underlying processes and procedures. Thenew evaluation system elevates the level of complexity tenfold, because of thesophisticated information technology requirements, and the number of decisionsthat needs to be made and recorded. One cannot expect the Great Leap Forward. Didn’twe try this before? The Goals 2000, anyone? We all remember what happened- thefinancial collapse, the stimulus money, the mad rush to spend it. Mistakes havebeen made, but they must be corrected. The sense of urgency is great, but notwhen it can actually make things worse rather than better.

This is not really a message to RIDE – they cannot doanything about the timelines in the Race to the Top grant, on which the entireState (with the exception of higher education) has happily signed. The fedsscrewed up (which never happened before, right?) We should try to persuade ourCongressional delegation to work with the Federal Department of Education toallow for more flexibility.

I worry that every new failed reform undermines ourcollective ability to hope, to learn, and to trust each other. And we do needall of those three things to move education forward. Hope, learning, trust iswhat we need the most. It is easy to get cynical, and just wait for all this topass, for stuff to hit the fan, etc., etc. That is not much of an option,really. Educators in this State have already invested an ocean of energy intothe reform. Let’s just do it right this time.

Arne Duncan should check his facts

2011-09-30T15:05:00.000-04:00

Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, has just spoken torelease his planfor teacher education reform. Once again the plan cites the McKinseyreport : “only 23% of all teachers, and only 14% of teachers inhigh-poverty schools, come from the top third of college graduates.” OK, let’sgo to the report. It in turn, cites these numbers and the source is “Derivedfrom the US Department of Education, NCES, 2001 Baccalaureate and BeyondLongitudinal Survey.” Well, this does not shed much light on the methodology,so I asked them. But in the meanwhile, let’s look atthe raw data to see how they foundit out.

How do you actually identify the top third of collegegraduates? Note, they don’t cite the ETS report on SAT scores, also erroneous. Wecertainly do not rank students in our graduating class, unlike some med schoolsdo. The survey has only a few categories related to performance:

Overall Undergraduate GPA
GPA in Undergraduate major
Graduated with academic honors
Received incomplete grade
Repeated class to earn highergrade
Withdrew from course due tofailure

What do we see? Graduates who work in Education (which ismainly school teachers) have the third highest average Cumulative GPA, thehighest GPA in the major, the second highest number of people graduated withhonors. They are in comfortable thirds and second quartiles on the three otherquality measures. This is consistent with ourdata for just one institution. I don’t know if mydata table will re-run for you, but you can easily rebuild it, or see myexported table.

Anyway, as Russian say “Either I am stupid, or these skis don’tslide” (Don’t ask). But I really would like to know how is it that thesecretary of education finds is acceptable to cite a non-refereed source in amajor policy speech, and how that source can publish data without at leastexplaining its methodology.

Do master’s degrees matter?

2011-09-23T16:10:00.001-04:00

In the last few months, I happened to have many exchanges onthis particular question. Does it make sense to require teachers to continuetheir professional development in a formal academic setting? Do master’sdegrees or their equivalents matter? All these talks made me realize howdifferently people view research depending on how they perceive and understand it.In any public debate it is important to assume that your opponent is neitherevil or stupid, and that differences may arise from different, unspokenassumptions, which in turn, created by different life experiences.

Those of us who struggled through a doctoral dissertation oranother research project, walk away with a deep but ambivalent feeling. On onehand, we know just how messy the research process is, and how deep is ourcollective ignorance about the world. On the other hand, we learn to tell thefew things we really do know from the mountains of common sense, nonsense, and politicalhype. Having a doctoral title does not make anyone smarter, but it does addboth a specialized expertise and a particular ethos of looking at researchclaims.

For example, here is the summary of current findings, whichI borrow from DanGoldhaber and Michael Hansen’s recent article:

First, teacher quality, measured byvalue-added models (VAMs), is the most important school-based factor when itcomes to improving student achievement. For example, Rivkin et al. (2005) andRockoff (2004) estimate that a one standard deviation increase in teacherquality raises student achievement in reading and math by about 10 percent of astandard deviation – an achievement effect that is on the same order ofmagnitude as lowering class size by 10 to 13 students (Rivkin et al. 2005). Second,teacher quality appears to be a highly variable commodity. Studies typicallyfind that less than 10 percent of the variation in teacher effectiveness can beattributed to readily observable credentials like degree and experience levels(e.g. Aaronson et al. 2007; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Third, while the evidentiarybase is thin, it appears that only a strikingly small percentage of teachersare ever dismissed (or non-renewed) as a consequence of documented poorperformance.

I am not going to dispute any of these. But when I read it,I think immediately: “the most important school-based factor” is teaching, yes,but the school itself is probably 15-20% of influence over student outcomes.The rest of it is the social circumstances, so why are we focusing so muchattention and money on the 15%, while almost ignoring the rest: early childhoodand expanded learning programming, and taking care of children’s nutrition,health, and young parent education? Even if a miracle happens and we put anoutstanding teacher in every troubling school, it is not going to solve theproblem.

I also reflect on how pathetically little we know about thereasons the good teachers are good. The definition of a good teacher Rivkinuses (I believe it is actually Sanders and Rivers definition from their 1996 paper) istautological. You’re good teacher when your students progress well, this is howwe know you’re good. This is more of a mystery than a finding useable in publicpolicy decision-making. We don’t know how to predict who is going to be good,nor do we know how to improve people’s performance. We don’t even know if theirsuccess is owed to some intrinsic features of their mind and character, or totheir training, or to the kind of work environment and support they receive whenthey start. It is very likely that a combination of all three is at work, butno one could back this up with a large-scale study. And finally, on the pointthat academic credentials do not predict teacher performance. I also happen to knowthatnone of these studies so far disaggregated between degrees in education andall others. Of course, if you a teacher of Chemistry and are doing a degree infashion design, it is likely to detract you from doing your job. But if you arean elementary classroom teacher, and you are in, say an M.Ed. in Reading orTESL, we can expect impact on student learning – no one just got around measuringthem.

And that’s the problem – most people do not realize howlittle research is done in education. Same scholars who are now so excitedabout the teacher factor (economists, mostly), were commenting for decades thatteaching does not seem to matter at all. It does not mean the quality ofteaching was unimportant for 30 years, between 1966 (The Coleman Report) and1996 (Sanders and Riversmpaper). The reality did not change, but our thinking haschanged somewhat, and will change again. Just because no one has done a goodstudy on measuring teachers’ academic credentials on their performance, doesnot mean it does not exist. It is also frustrating that much of great researchthat is outside of the simple linking factors to student test scores, gets nopublic recognition, and is routinely ignored by policymakers (just browsethrough recent papers of P. Grossman, D. Boyd, M. Cochran-Smith, L.Darling-Hammond, B. Floden, and many others).

But someone else looking at the same paragraph, has a verydifferent reaction. Of course, they think, we need to find out how much studentgrowth each teacher is responsible for, and get rid of bad teachers. Of course,they say, we need to stop requiring master’s degree of practicing teachers,because they do not matter. A similar inconclusive set of research findingsexist about teacher certification, so let’s get rid of teacher training whilewe are at it, and replace it with short alternative training programs.

Research is a funny thing, it is double-edged. It exists tocorrect our common sense assumptions. However, in unskilled hands, tidbits ofgood research can be used to make huge policy mistakes. With the researchinformation becoming readily available to anyone, many smart, well-intended,but unprepared people are trying to interpret it. It happens not just in education– we have millions of amateurs reading medical research, and forming passionateif not militant interest groups. Thank god, very rarely do they make a visibleimpact on policy.

Within the educational research community, most people aretrying to behave honorably, and always disclose the limits of what we know. Buttheir caveats and disclaimers don’t make it into the media, and ignored by overeagerreformers at all levels. For example, DineRavitch spelled out in May of 2010 that none of the key provisions of theRace to the Top program can be backed up by research. To my knowledge, no onehas disputed her claims. And yet thousands of people around this great country believeas if they are acting on a program of reforms backed by research.

We must work on reform, but only when we know our plans aregoing to make things better, not worse. How do we know? Research is the bestoption; it often cannot answer questions we are asking. The next best thing isprofessional consensus: it is not always reliable and subject to professionalbiases, but at least it provides some ways of sorting nonsense from good ideas.But we must rule out one way of reforming our education; it is when a fewpassionate, smart, but unprepared people misinterpret research findings andconvince themselves that they know all the answers. Many of them tend tobelieve that things cannot get worse. In that, they are sadly mistaken.

Mushroom picking in the Rehoboth forest

2011-09-18T18:36:00.002-04:00

An early autumn day can make air so transparent, you half-expect to see the past. I almost expect to see my father, mother, my brother and me when I was five in the next clearing. The air is not thick with fragrance like in the Summer; it is colder, lighter; it breathes light covetously while it lasts. The light is different; colder and yet more penetrating, as if coming from a different direction. And the sound too has changed slightly; it is crisper and less crowded. Svetlana and I went to the Rehoboth forest; the name seems to be picked from Tolkien’s books (although it is Biblical, oh well, the same thing; the name is inviting of giants and creepy things). We went to enjoy the early fall’s air and pick mushrooms.

Picking mushrooms is a multisensory game, which very few Americans seem to enjoy. Good, more mushrooms to us! It is biologically programmed in us: walking in the woods, searching, recognizing patterns, shapes, and colors, reading tracks of looking for food. Just like watching water or fire, one never gets tired of it. And then, of course, there is the inevitable talk about which species are edible, and which are not, with touching, smelling, breaking the fungus in question. Ah, we’re two days late, and worms have feasted on mushrooms that could be all ours. We compare our respective families’ folk traditions, remember how we learned this in our childhood, and who taught us. Our fingers turn black and sticky from some mushroom juices. The dog is happy sleuthing without a leash, engrossed in knows what private doggie fantasies.

People generally overestimate the risk of eating wild mushrooms. Only a couple of species are deadly, and those are easy to recognize. I remember colorful pictures of common poisonous mushrooms – mulhomor and poganka shown in my preschool. My mother points them out to me every time we go to the forest. Many inedible mushrooms will give you a diarrhea, or will taste bad, and not much more. Driving to the forest is a lot more dangerous than eating the mushrooms we pick, with our average Russian knowledge of the forest. I think about risks we take and do not take. I think about my own life – did I take the right risks? Too many or too few? Who knows what the right amount is? Perhaps the dog, but he is preoccupied with his own thoughts, and won’t tell.

I know the future

2011-09-11T21:04:00.001-04:00

Like everyone else, I remember the morning of 9/11/01 very well. I was teaching two Foundations classes back to back; it was at BGSU in Ohio. The second plane hit the building at the end of the first class, and during the break, the scale of the event has began to sink in. I told students that if they want they can stay in class and watch the news with me, or go home. I remember telling the students that many people died today, and please think about them and their families.

Two recessions and two wars later, I keep thinking about both fragility and resilience of the human civilization, and this fine country in particular. That nine guys with box cutters can rattle it to this degree is scary and disconcerting. The fact that that the Lower Manhattan now has more businesses - small and large - than before is also quite astonishing. I just came back from the PARCC institute, where people from 24 states enthusiastically and systematically work on new common curriculum standards for children. This somehow impresses me even more, maybe because it was going on exactly ten years after 9/11.

Educators are optimistic not just by inclination, but also by job description. We do things that usually take years and decades to materialize, and we never quite know how exactly our work is going to turn out. We cannot believe that the world is about to end – according to Mayans, or if the Rapture is just around the corner. No one knows the future, except for us. The future has many names and faces; it brings us homework and asks us questions. It wants a better grade, and it cannot quite get things right away, but we can help. But it is quite real; you can look it in the eye.

Teacher Education Innovation Lab

2011-09-01T09:42:00.002-04:00

Over the summer, I started to think more and more about innovation (see this June blog). One reason for that is that we failed to get ourselves into the news in any meaningful way. And it just occurred to me that we do not have any news, in the sense that the media would recognize. I also was listening/reading a lot of Harvard Business Review, the Economist, and the Financial Times, paying attention to the discourse of innovation in business. One simple lesson learned is this: you need to actually spend time and effort on innovation, support and nurture promising ideas, kill the dead branches, and generally have a strategy. It does not happen on its own, or in occasional spurs. And we don’t have a strategy of innovation.

So, here is my plan for this year. We will have a group which I called TEIL. I only have a rough outline of the beginning – first two or three meetings; so we will spend some time talking about our own process. We start with thinking about everything but teacher education: about the world of business, non-profit entrepreneurship, politics, products, services, the internet, the social media, etc. There may be some homework here, where the group’s members will investigate a favorite company, or an organization to see how it innovates. Then we will take a very thorough look at ourselves – what do we spend our time on, how new ideas are born, introduced, how they are implemented or dropped, why and why not. I want to talk about the quality of experience as the key criteria for improvement – our students’, our faculty and staff’s. Then we should try several structured brainstorming sessions to try to find several new ideas, especially if they fit together.

Just one example: Let’s think about the ritual. For us to make a stronger impact on our students, we need to employ what all cultures in the world do – ritual. We have a few; none is specific to teacher preparation. Why don’t we have admission to Feinstein to be a memorable event? Why don’t we ask them to take a teacher’s oath?

Perhaps at some point we will split into smaller project-oriented teams, and each team will develop a proposal, while other teams will provide feedback. Perhaps by Spring we will have a clearer idea on what innovation support structure we should have in place, and what resources we could muster to support it. By that time, we should have the Advisory board operating, and perhaps it can help by bringing an outside critical perspective. We also do need to look at a few truly innovative ideas that exist in our field today.

That’s what I have so far. Not much, I know, but this is going to be a collaborative and evolving process. How can I sell it to faculty and staff? How can I convince at least some people to come and spend a few Friday afternoons doing something in addition to their regular heavy workload? Well, only this: teacher preparation as a field has not shown a lot of innovation. We placed all our bets on the continuous improvement process spearheaded by AACTE and NCATE. While it is useful and in the long run is going to be effective, it is just simply not enough.

Another argument: I came to work to higher education, because I like to talk to people about ideas. If you do, too, sign up. You only need to make the majority of meetings, not every one of them.

Google, the Big Brother

2011-08-26T23:44:00.002-04:00

Here is what happened: Google deleted this blog, and then it was brought back from the dead within a few hours. After a half-billion settlement for advertizing fake Canadian pharmacies (RI prosecutors did the work, I am so proud), the Google team is just a tad paranoid. Who can blame them? Apparently, they now delete first, and ask questions later. My son Gleb guessed, the algorithm thought my blog was about gay porn. I must confess, I learned about all the bear connotations much later, after the blog was published for a while. I was actually going after the Cold War imagery of the Russian Bear; you know the one always invading the neighbors. But the algorithm did not know that. It happened to me before – the Providence Public Schools’ spam filter put me on their junk sender’s list, because I include the word Russian in my signature. The stupid machine thought I am trying to hook up all those fine eligible district bachelors with Russian fiancés. Thanks to Spencer, I was white-listed. Oh joy of being white-listed.

The challenge Google faces is enormous. I own dozens of documents, most of published on the web. Other people may have hundreds and thousands. The size of the Internet is approaching astronomical scale. How do you police all of that info-space, if you could be found liable for the content you host? The only way is to use the digital Robocops – computer algorithms that will kill bad blogs by the hundreds. Google’s human capacity is limited; its server space is not. It is probably cheaper to kill automatically, and then restore by hand than the other way around.

But I have to tell you, it does not feel good to be on the receiving end of the cyber justice. You want to update your blog one fine Friday afternoon – and it is just gone. Coincidentally, someone marked my Weekly Updates Google Doc as inappropriate – who knows, by error or as a prank. Maybe another stupid machine did not like a word or two in it. Now try to prove you’re innocent! The presumption of innocence does not seem to be working on the internet anymore. And the human mind is paranoid; it tends to believe the machine on the other side is just like us. Two things occurring at the same time look like a conspiracy. Am I being attacked? And then, on the same day, Google decided to check my password on the Droid phone. Well, I don’t wear reading glasses (although I should), so I simply could not see their scrambled pass code, you know the one you need to enter to prove you are human. Not fun; I must have tried a dozen times. With each attempt, I could feel how the Big Brother is becoming more and more suspicious. Each attempt made me a little more guilty. But I just could not see the damned made-up words! I had to come home, find a pair of glasses, and only then prove I am human. How did we get to the point where we must prove the machines we are human, over and over again? And since when having good eye sight has become a pre-requisite for being human?

And you want to please the Big Brother; you don’t want to offend him, oh no! Those of you who share with me the totalitarian past know exactly what I mean. You want to make sure the Big Brother knows you’re OK, while being angry more at oneself than at him . You don’t want to pick another fight with him, because those fights are just plain exhausting. You are ready to challenge him and die, but please spear me the small little every day fights, over every single little thing. Totalitarianism does not threaten; it exhausts you.

This is new, and paradoxical – Google is desperately trying not to become the Big Brother, and yet it is being dragged into the role against its will. Americans, who are genetically allergic to all these annoying things, may soon learn how is it to be watched. Life is surely full of irony. What Stalin could not do to the free word, its own technology may just accomplish.

The planting season and risk management

2011-08-19T15:48:00.003-04:00

Summer is the planting season for us, college administrators. We plan, anticipate, try to see what’s coming, prepare for what we don’t see coming. Some of the seeds are easy to plant. For example, I started a whole new journal in a matter of days. It already has about half the editorial board (more people from around the world will be joining). No one knows whether this particular plant will thrive or even survive. But the idea seemed to be good, the cost is minimal, and potential return on investment can be significant. This is a no brainer, really. Another easy picking: we figured out a simple way of collecting students’ Praxis II scores and sub-scores (which we always need for accreditation and quality assurance). No one could see potential downside, and the time commitment is minimal.

Risk is best measured as ratio of investment size over likelihood of success over the potential benefit. OK, for those mathematically inclined, I*B/S, or I/S/B (I is investment, B is benefit, S is likelihood of success). If the investment is small, and return is large, even less likely to succeed projects should be attempted.

Other examples are less certain. There seems to be support for some program revisions, and new programs to be developed. These things are expensive in terms of time and effort. The outcomes are more certain – the programs will be improved, but it is never clear to what degree. The more radical is the change, the larger is our investment in development and implementation, but since the rate of return is uncertain, at some point radical changes become unwise. Now, once you tried a specific practice and found it to be both effective AND replicable, then a more radical change becomes less risky. But there is always cost to change: time we spend trying to change is not spent on tiny every day improvements, which are sometimes more efficient in the end than the large change with uncertain outcomes. However, if a program’s enrollments are dropping, or it has not been revised in 20 years, a higher degree of risk is quite justified.

This is not exactly math, because too many variables are in place. For example, I really want to start an innovation lab. Why? - Because we don’t spend nearly enough time and resources on innovation. It is not a priority for us. We may say it is a priority, but we do not act as if it were one. A real priority is something you spend a lot of time on. So, in this particular case, the investment is relatively large. I plan to spend several hours every week to work on it, and am planning to ask other people to do the same. The likelihood of a radically new and effective idea is not very high: there are hundreds of institutions just like ours, and most try something new once in a while. However, there are significant side benefits that are almost guaranteed: it is a lot of fun, and quality of work experience is going to be better for me and all those involved. Activating creative collaboration is very likely to bring better morale, better communication across departments. At the very minimum, these conversations will help us learn about each other’s work, and it is not a small thing. Even if the big idea never materializes, many small ones will be shared or created.

And one last concern: we only have so much of a garden plot; time and human resources are limited. Planting too much leaves no breathing room; we end up working too hard, chasing too many projects, and doing none of them really well. I always try to overplant just a little, because not all seeds germinate, but not too much, so we don’t have to weed out perfectly good plants. And of course, one can never plan for floods, droughts, and hail.

How do we really do?

2011-08-12T13:17:00.000-04:00

As I am working on the State of the School talk for the faculty Fall retreat, some very simple questions come to my mind. The simple questions are not necessarily easy to answer. For example, how do we do? Of course, I can simply give my enthusiastic assessments, like, “The School is in a terrific shape!” Or, “The School is in trouble!” It becomes just a rhetorical choice; what do I want to do more, to raise the morale and cheer people up, or to create a sense of urgency? The choice somehow feels wrong. Mainly because my colleagues will immediately see through whichever rhetorical choice I chose. Who are we kidding?

So, how do we really do? Any time you cannot answer a question, you should step back and ask – what kinds of things would help me answer that? That’s what a researcher does, and so should all people.

So, OK, there is the court of public opinion. No one has asked Rhode Islanders what they think about RIC’s School of education. And I am not really sure if there is a good way to ask. Judging from the local media coverage, we hardly exist at all (did we try to pitch our stories? You bet). But then again, the media creates, as much as reflects, the public opinion. Judging by the Fall elections, there is a lot of good will toward public higher education among the voters, who approved some serious money for our new Art building. We are definitely lucky to have a Governor who believes in public higher education. But that’s about all we know.

Next, there is the opinion of our professional community: teachers, principals, superintendants, RIDE, various non-profits, the two State boards, etc. Again, it is hard to tell. The last thing these people want is another survey. Because I have been specifically asking many of them, here is my summary, highly unscientific: “You have good traditions, but the place is not dynamic of forward-looking.” And yet another big question – are these people right about us? I personally I don’t think it is a fair assessment. RIC as a whole is on the move, and our School is no exception. But to I know it or do I simply believe it? What’s the argument, “Yes we are, no you ain’t?” Is there a dynamism index somewhere?

External evaluators? NCATE thinks we are wonderful, for we are continuously accredited for decades. They have liked our recent report, and are coming back in November to verify it. NCTQ, on the other hand, does not think that much of us – our student teaching is rated week, believe it or not. The first is a national professional association, but have been criticized for approving not only good, but also marginal institutions. NCTQ, in my opinion, has very little research credibility, but they surely can publish sleek reports and generate publicity. The sticky pint is this: neither can actually prove that their approval means an institution is producing better educators.

How about some hard data? Our students have high GPA, pass both basic skills and professional licensure tests (some are slightly above the national average, and some are slightly below). We know for sure that our future teachers do not come from the bottom third of the class, contrary to some popular myths. They score higher, for example on SAT than non-teaching majors, have higher GPA and more honors. But still, is this good enough or what? It would be great to report that we score much higher than the national average on all licensure tests, but it is not clear if the tests are good proxies for quality. There is a lot of internal data, but none of it compares to other institutions. We develop our own measuring tools, so whatever they show cannot be used to say how well we do for sure.

And of course, there is our own self-perception. Most of us believe we are doing a good job, just by seeing our students perform, and by being tired all the time. I, for example, always think that I was not nearly as well prepared as are students these days. But I don’t know for sure. Can one trust self-perceptions? I am sure people who worked in all of those companies that go bankrupt every year were tired, too, and believed they are doing a good job. But we don’t have market or bottom line to provide the final judgment on quality and competitiveness.

This is the age of sound bites and clips. I have no problem looking into a camera and saying,“ We are the best in the State and one of the best in the nation,” and actually believing it. It would be nice though to add “And I can prove it to you.” The truth is, I can’t, and neither can you, or any of our peer institutions across the country. We want to, but we cannot. The entire higher education cannot figure out a way of objectively measuring an institution’s comparative effectiveness. The US News and World Report rankings are simply entertainment: they all are based on measuring inputs, none of which has proven to affect outcomes.

In the absence of real evidence, the next best thing is to do what you and your colleagues believe is right. Whenever the belief can be reinforced with actual research, it should be. In the rest, it just an opinion. The important qualifier is this: we should acknowledge that and live with the uncertainty. If you are clear on it, it is easier to change your mind when new evidence comes in. When you deny your own ignorance, you end up defending an empty dogma.

The technology dilemma

2011-08-05T16:44:00.002-04:00

In the last twenty years college campuses went through an extraordinary revolution. Here is how RIC home page looked on November 13, 1996; nothing before that survived. Anyone remembers Gopher? Mouseless Word? Registering for classes by phone? IT departments grew in size and sophistication, the information infrastructure has been evolving, and there is no end in sight. Right now, we live through a peculiar moment, with some unique tensions. I am an outsider, not a part of the IT world, so you should not take my comments too seriously.

One relatively recent big shift was adoption of integrated data management solutions that include human resources, financial management (purchasing and payroll), records, financial aid, admissions, reporting, and almost anything else, including custom applications. There are two main competitors: PeopleSoft (Oracle) that we use at RIC, and Banner (SunGard); there are probably others, as well as home-built systems. They address the mind-boggling challenge of multiple data systems that colleges were and still are suffering from. Heroic IT teams all over this country have more or less tamed the beast, which is very difficult even with the help of either of the two commercial providers.

But here comes the dilemma. The comprehensive data management systems are so complex, you need to have specialized knowledge to mess with them. This is not just because of security (which is very important). Allowing many non-specialists deeper level of access can clog the system with repetitive and bloated quires, create redundant and improperly related fields, and generally destabilize the system. It’s like letting airline passenger kids play with flight controls. However, faculty and administrators on campuses got used to instantly available data, online workflows and forms, and functional websites. They do not understand why cannot be more of this stuff. But because everything is locked into one or two data management systems with little backroom access, all requests go to the same few exhausted IT people. They become the organizational bottlenecks unintentionally, and at no fault of their own. Of course, those on the academic side usually cannot even comprehend what sort of challenges the IT deals with, so there is often disconnect.

Here is an example. I received an e-mail today from one of our partner schools; their new hire for second grade fell through, and they wanted to find a year-long sub with permanent prospects, preferably within a few days. I am thinking, all I need to do is to export the class roster of those who did Elementary student teaching in the Spring, and send them an e-mail. One of our grads may land a great job, and we may help out a partner. OK, but the course ID number from Spring Semester is not available on schedule, at least I could not find it. NO roster can be exported without an ID. This is Friday afternoon; by the time I get someone at IT to do it, it will be a few days, and too late to be helpful. And besides, I cannot afford to spend my time, and commit the IT resources to this task. And what is frustrating – the data I need is right there; potentially at my fingertips.

Another example is the websites. They are not easy to figure out, as I have mentioned before. You need to try, to experiment, preview every step, tweak, play; it is a dynamic and highly interactive learning process. All of this is very time consuming as it is. However, if you add to the task the need to schedule a meeting with someone else (a web master), sit down and explain your needs, then check how it turned out, and ask for fixes and revisions – if you add all this, it becomes simply impossible. Most academic departments just give up; they type up whatever they need to publish, and ask these files to be uploaded. They print out handouts, and just keep them in the front office. Students come in, take them, and the life goes on. The web site in the meanwhile becomes a graveyard of past projects and old announcements that no one remembered to remove, and did not have time to update. So, students learn to mistrust the sites; they learn to come and ask someone at the office, or send an e-mail; just to make sure. As a result, chairs, advisers and secretaries become burdened with volumes of unnecessary advising, and hundreds of e-mails a day. They get so busy, there is even less time to update websites; the task becomes a chore rather than a way to communicate more efficiently.

What’s next? I am quite convinced the next will be the devolution of access. Many more people on campus will have to be able to edit websites, create queries, put together online forms, collect data, and collaborate online. There is just too much of it for a few IT types to handle, and I don’t see a sudden hiring splurge. The cycle is going to repeat itself: from chaos to centralization, and back. Hopefully, it will be done with less chaos than in the earlier age of information technology. But we need to learn to accept a little more risk in exchange for access. We also need to accept more fragmented and less coherent solutions. We must re-think our over-reliance on the comprehensive, complex, and by definition fragile informational superstructures, and look into outside providers. It is already happening, and will happen regardless of what we decide. It is much better to control the process somewhat, rather than just let it happen.

In our School we already use several unrelated platforms: People Soft, SurveyGizmo, Chalk and Wire, Google Docs, SharePoint, Twitter, Blackboard, Face book, networked drives with Access, Nabble… there may be a few more I cannot remember. They all suffer from inability to link data easily from one to another. None of the products (except PeopleSoft) are professionally designed and carefully edited. They are buggy, glitchy, have typos and possibly factual errors. But so what? The other option is stagnation, relying on the involuntarily bottlenecks, the loss of dynamism. We all did manage to use word processing, spreadsheets, email and online shopping. Now it’s time we all learn to build websites, surveys, forms, collect information, share it, and most importantly – maintain clear, simple and accurate information flow to benefit our students and ourselves. The overworking is self-inflicted; we need not to work more, but work smarter.

Technology does not move forward only. Just this week, we figured out it would be simpler and less work to collect hard copies of OPR, and have our work-studies to enter the data manually, then to train and support hundreds of cooperating teachers to use Chalk and Wire. The same goes for faculty – they all can, of course, enter the data online, but then again, perhaps they are over-qualified for this kind of work? It is still hard to take a laptop into classroom for observations, so most take written notes, and then enter on-line. It is really not hard, but subjectively may feel a little boring and unproductive. But then, others may do some thinking and writing when they fill out the form online. Anyway, there will be a choice for people and an experiment for us.

All-volunteer workforce

2011-07-29T13:56:00.003-04:00

One business writer whose name I could not track down, noted that in creative industries, we deal with what is essentially an all-volunteer workforce. What he meant to say is that to motivate people to work, he needs to create an environment where they are challenged, interested in problems they are solving, and enjoy working together. Otherwise talent just leaves and goes where it is more interesting. Or else, they stay, but you cannot make someone be creative. It is no longer just about pay. Money is a great motivator in the industrial society, where many jobs are routine, boring, and repetitive. Not so in the knowledge society.

Higher education is a creative industry, and the same observation applies. I realized long time ago that it is very hard to make faculty do something they do not want to do. And even if I could, people are not terribly effective in such situations. The best thing to do is support someone who already has a passion for something, or try to ignite the passion for a project I find important. People also do things out of the sense of solidarity with their colleagues or the sense of duty to the institution – this is how many service jobs are done. And this is not true just about faculty – support staff is a lot more productive and effective if they see the point of doing something, and find the work somewhat enjoyable.

However, colleges are weird organizations. They have the core of highly independent and creative workforce, but also a large bureaucratic structure that is a result of the complex logistical operations and government regulations. What happened to the higher ed is not unexpected, but still a difficult situation. Many of the creative types learned to be creative alone. They select a few things that are of interest to them, their research, or teaching, or a particular community engagement. And they shut the door. They cannot be blamed for it, because collaboration with others is time-consuming, is easily marred in politics, and just plain inefficient. I always rant about the way faculty committees often operate – meeting every month for an hour, and taking at least a year to accomplish anything.

Fun is a serious business; it is both the condition for our success and it is an important component of success. If we learn how to be creative together, we are in a great shape. First, because we will nto only retain, but attract the best people. Second, because fun is contagious, and our students will be happier here, more self-confident, and ultimately more successful in the field. This ability to be creative working with others is not just an extra bonus; it constitutes the core of a good educator.

Fun is a difficult business. Community building is like raising fragile, delicate, and exotic flowers. Many things can go wrong, and there is no good recipe. It is also difficult because of the organizational structures in place. Most people simply do not have the time, and our schedules do not easily match. Unlike young Google engineers, most of us have obligations at home. Some have to drive for an hour to get here.

I don’t have a lot of ideas on how to get there. As I said before, we should stop doing what does not have to be done. We need to become a lot more efficient and shift all routine and repetitive work on computers. And we need to set the priorities straight: this place has to be a lo of fun to work in, and this cannot be an individualistic type of fun only.

Efficiency as ethics

2011-07-23T13:04:00.000-04:00

Inefficiency steals time from faculty, staff, and students. When we do anything routine, boring, or unnecessary, it takes our time away from doing things that are important, innovative, and long-term. That much is obvious, I hope.

But there is also a deeper ethical issue with inefficiency. For example, Rhode Island is to my knowledge the only state that requires student teaching certificates. To get one, our students must complete a form, which includes exactly the same questions as the BCI background check, sign it, then we take a stack of them to RIDE, then students must stop by and pick them up. The whole procedure is completely unnecessary, and takes a lot of time. However, I am even more concerned with the message we are sending to our students, most of whom are future teacher. The message is, yes, the system is absurd, don’t fight it, don’t question it, just get along with the program. This is not what we want to say, but that is what we are saying. Most of them will end up working in public school districts that sometimes even more bureaucratic and ossified than we are. They teach their kids the same values, and then we get them as freshmen.

I picked on one hoop to jump through, because it is imposed by the State. It is an easy target, so no one inside RIC is offended. But take an honest look around, make a list of all things we do and even more importantly that we make students do. How many of them are not essential, how many of them exist only because someone put them in place many years ago? Sometimes it was done for a good reason that no longer exists. Some were ill-conceived to begin with. And most importantly, how many of them do we have control over? If you want examples, write me an email.

Everyone should look around and examine critically his or her own work. We just cannot afford to send the message of mindless compliance to our students and to each other. Not everything can be fixed right away for many reasons. We have a number of organizational and legal constraints, and the College’s leadership is working on addressing them. But it is also a manner of the institutional culture. Everyone should notice the little inefficiencies. You don’t necessarily have to have an idea on how to solve every problem, but you should at least raise the question – why are we doing this? Do students understand why we’re doing this? If we have to, can it be done better, faster, more conveniently? Complacency is not going to get us anywhere.

Next week, I will put a discussion feature on our Faculty page, where both faculty and staff can raise those questions.

THE PROGRAM GRILL

2011-07-15T13:14:00.003-04:00

Advisory board meetings are usually boring affairs. Some distinguished dudes and dames come to visit a college or a school such as ours, once a semester or so. They listen to us bragging about accomplishments, and how everything is just hunky-dory, or on the verge of total and complete excellence. We give them handouts with stats and achievements, parade our distinguished faculty and students. All eat dinner and go home. We have an advisory board – check!

However, there is also a great need for us to hear the voice of practitioners in everything we do. We are a professional school, after all. And even though our connections with teachers, principals, counselors, school psychologists and nurses are rich and continuous, we rarely ask them to sit down with us and help us improve. Some of our programs actually do. For example the Early Childhood programs have a robust advisory board that I saw providing very specific and very good input on program redesign. There are probably others I do not know about. In my talks with superintendents, almost everyone offered some ideas on what we should change or improve. The problem is not in unwillingness of practitioners to participate.

I want to reinvent the advisory board, make it a little more fun, a little more pointed. Imagine a program grill, something like what the Comedy Central Roast. Of course, it will be a lot more polite, with no F-bombs thrown at the F-School, - but just a little livelier than your normal meeting. We would ask programs to send the board members a brief run-down on what they do: coursework, admission and graduation requirements, maybe some policies. Another option is to bring the plans for future revisions. But they can grill our website, our admission process, our outreach – any aspect of the School’s work. The board members would grill faculty on why and how they do things, what they teach and what they do not teach, and then come up with some recommendations on the spot. I’d ask for one wacky plus one serious advice as a package. I imagine it to be a public meeting, with some role for the audience, consisting of our students, friends, faculty, and other partners. Part theater, part business, all in good fun, with mutual respect and concern for quality and nothing else.

Of course, we don’t have to listen to the advice, which can make it fun the way optional things often are. If we had to listen, it would be called the state approval or the NCATE accreditation visit. Those two are good and necessary ways of getting feedback. But they are infrequent, bureaucratic and quite often do not penetrate very deep. Something more informal, more direct, and less official can give us insights and motivations not available now. What do you think? Vote now!

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The Contribution Revolution

2011-07-08T16:02:00.002-04:00

Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, coined the term. Basically, it is how companies use volunteer contribution of their customers to improve their products and services. Here is a little taxonomy with examples to make sense of it. But we all know it already. When your hair drier or remote control, or your Word break down, you probably google the question, and yep, there is a forum somewhere. No matter how obscure or unlikely your problem is, someone somewhere had exactly the same, figured out how to solve it, and is kind enough to share. I remember when Microsoft was starting, they tried to answer every question, and absolutely failed at it. Now they have user groups, and everyone is happy. Facebook does not even have anyone at all you can contact. All they have is user input; someone from Facebook read them, figures out the most complex issues, and posts.

Which brings me to the issue of college advising. Here is how it goes: We create very complicated rules and procedures, then we explain them in the language no one can understand, and we place our explanations in multiple places no one can find. And after we have done all of this, we spent an extraordinary amount of time translating what we created into a human language to one student at a time. We call this advising. Very little of it is about actually giving anyone advice: how to live one’s life, which career choice is better for you, etc. Most of it involves reading the catalog, the bulletin, the websites, and handout sheets together with each student, explaining them what it all means, - And then doing it over and over and over again. Highly educated people spend their time translating what they themselves wrote, hundreds of times. What a waste! Sometimes we get frustrated and create yet another advising sheet which explains a particular topic, but then we create so many of these sheets, pages, catalog entries, websites, and handouts that they start contradicting each other. To bring something to students’ attention, we mass-email, talk to their advisers, and generally have to yell at the top of our lungs to cover the information noise created by ourselves and others like we. It becomes even more difficult for students to find the right piece of information. So they come to us for help. It’s not like they want to talk to us necessarily; they simply cannot figure out what to do! This creates a vicious circle: a student who cannot figure out a simple thing learns to mistrust the written word, and next time goes straight to the advisor to get the only form of reliable information.

Well there are two lessons from this:

One: our “manual,” or a book of rules has to be very clear, very brief, and be located in one and only one place. Why do we still have the catalog AND the bulletin, AND the websites, AND handouts? Those are all vestiges of pre-internet technologies. If we had only one authoritative information source (I suggest the website), we would invest more time and energy in making it simple and clear, and we would actually keep it current.
Two: we need user forums just like anyone else. We need the contribution revolution. There is no replacement for the collective human experiences. Hundreds of students figure out our policies and procedures, and some would be happy to share it with others. Moreover, the user forums can go beyond policy and procedures; they can extend into the world of learning, too. How do you create a killer work sample? What does effect size really mean? What kinds of paper Dr. A actually like in the end, despite what his rubric says? How do you explain multiplication when everything else fails? And then who knows, maybe our students will give us ideas how to improve, revise, streamline, simplify?

It will probably take us a while to address the lesson # one. Don’t ask, it is complicated. An organization has its own rhythm and logic, very different from the normal human rhythm and logic. I still think there is no imaginable alternative. In the long run, we need to do it; figure out the outstanding issues like archiving of old websites, control over their accuracy and quality, some sensible and clear structure. But I cannot imagine printed catalogs and semi-dead websites twenty years from now.

On the lesson two, I encourage all to experiment and think together. OK, here is a prototype on our website. What if we embed them in most of our websites? Let the kids speak right there, as they read our pages. I am curious if it is going to change anything.

The five goals, or how do we impress people

2011-07-03T22:18:00.002-04:00

The conventional wisdom in teacher preparation is that outcome-based education actually works. We measure student performance, analyze the data, and then figure out how to improve instruction, and once we get it right, it is going to move us forward. This seems logical, and I certainly believed for a long time the concept is sound, if actual implementation is always flawed. But I have my doubts, too.

Our own or any other assessment system is not designed to bring about innovation. It is a diagnostic tool (and it can be a much better one), but diagnostics is not treatment. Taking patients’ temperature does not make them any better. Building a sophisticated and reliable assessment system is very difficult (and I wish our colleagues from Arts and Sciences talked to us before building their own). But even in its ideal form, such a system can report on what is working and what is not, but only within the parameters of the existing structure. We can learn to rely a lot more on the data as it improves, to gradually improve our existing approaches. But even then, it won’t give us what Clayton Christensen call disruptive innovation.

I am taking stock of what I have and have not accomplished – here at RIC, but also at UNC and BGSU. A lot of my energy has been spent fixing the irritating little things and occasionally working on opportunistic improvements. You know, the kind where a course or a program need to be overhauled to address practical needs, and we slip something in hoping to make it more powerful. I tried to improve morale, faculty governance, bring financial stability, fought my share of little fights over regulations and resources, etc., etc. The thing is, I can keep fixing things for the rest of my life, feel useful and still not see any significant change in teacher education. It is quite likely that none is currently possible. Not every era offers a possibility of real change. The times may not cooperate. But I would rather try and fail then simply assume it is not possible.

We now see how far outcomes-based education can go. We should try to put the theory into its proper place, recognize its limitations, and try to move forward without putting all the eggs in this one particular basket. How? I have been listening to Harvard Business Review Ideacast for a couple of years now, just to get a sense of what is going on in other worlds. What businesses do is both measuring their effectiveness and investing time and effort in innovation. The first is much easier in business – there are the corporate profits and share price – hard numbers. This is why in no way am I suggesting dismantling our assessment system; no sane economist would suggest destroying the accounting standards and practices. To the contrary, we need to improve, simplify our assessments, and learn to read and use them casually. But in the business world, newcomers routinely displace established companies, because they invest in innovation, take risk, and invent new business models instead of improving old ones. They do it by thinking about their customers – not just asking what the customer wants, but by imagining what the customer would want. For example, Google engineers reportedly ask “Wouldn’t that be cool”? When Microsoft was just starting, they imagined that one day everyone would need a small computer at home – a crazy idea at the time, really. Of all old technology companies, IBM is the only one that survived, because they reinvented their business model twice.

As I said in the previous blog, I don’t want to do anything crazy, or innovate for the sake of innovating. Tried that; not working. A small change in perspective is all that is needed. This time, we should start with neither learning outcomes, nor with standards. This time, we start with actual experiences of the people involved. My theory is very simple: if people who directly deal with us will start talking about great, interesting things that we do, the word will spread, and we will actually improve. Trying to sell something improves the product you want to sell.

Let’s begin with five overarching goals. What would make these groups of people to say these things, and mean them?

1. Our faculty and staff to themselves: “I love this job” every day.

2. One superintendant to another: “Job applicants from RIC stand out.”

3. Our student to a younger sibling “This program at RIC is amazing.”

4. One student another: “My teacher is a RIC graduate, and she is the best.”

5. A parent to a principal: “I want you to hire more RIC graduates.”

Sometimes we think it is too cheap or unprofessional to try to impress people. Hell with that, I want us to impress. Tired of explaining to the great outside what we do, and how we do it. No one really cares. It is impossible to convince the public that that we are doing a good job, if we are armed with numbers and charts. Politicians like to talk about accountability, but they really are not that interested in data. The public may believe it wants accountability on actual outcomes, but no one can or wants to read statistical tables. When we have data evidence, no one can understand what it means. When we don’t have this evidence, we are blamed for inability to produce the impossible. The more you defend yourself the guiltier you look. The more defenses you create, the more people think you need defense. The core of our work we should keep to ourselves – how do we make the best teachers out of the kids we get. And we should have evidence for those who truly care. But we need to impress people; it will also be good for us.

Type C innovation

2011-06-24T15:40:00.000-04:00

Svetlana and I went to London, Amsterdam, and then to Russia. It was all fun and we had a great vacation. This is about as much as I want to know about other people’s vacations, unless they went to the Amazon or were kidnapped by pirates. This is how much I suspect most people want to know about mine! So, no travelogue, for those are lame.

Summer is time for thinking through the next year. DLC is trying to organize itself better, to spend more time on identifying the critical projects we need to accomplish, to reflect on what did and what did not work last year. Among other things, we’re thinking about our innovation strategy. What should we improve and why?

It is usually not too hard to see the closest horizon of improvement. For example, we should realign curriculum to ensure consistency and coherence, better sequence field experiences; we must consider strengthening our classroom assessment component, doing more with instructional technology, career guidance, perhaps also classroom management, differentiation, etc.; we should keep working on improving our assessment system. Those are not trivial tasks, and will take time, creativity, and effort. I actually enjoy thinking of small and medium improvements, because you can see them work right away. Fundamentally though, those are not game-changing ideas. We can continue working on these things indefinitely, gradually improving our programs; there is never an end to this stuff. Let us call this the innovation A. It may be the case that is all that is possible right now.

But then again, there may be more. How about some radical change? Let’s call this the innovation B, where whole large structural components are rethought, reshaped, cut out, and replaced. I have been in at least four brainstorming groups trying to “reinvent teacher education.” And what I learned is that it is very difficult, and looks impossible. Whenever we think of institutional limits in which we operate (credit hours, gened, state approval, accreditation, labor arrangements, etc.), they seem to significantly limit possibilities for innovation. Once you start imagining breaking those barriers down, it quickly becomes implausible, and somewhat silly. OK, so you get rid of typical 3 or 4 credit courses, and replace them with what? – oh, let’s do, er… shorter modules. - But how do you approve them, pay for them, register students for them, and maintain their original alignment? All of these problems can be overcome with great effort, but… remind me why exactly are we doing this? What is the big gain to justify going through all the trouble? Isn’t this just a solution in search of a problem? And it is like this with every single big structural change – by the time you estimate the scope of work, the gains do not seem to be that significant. Radical change eats up its own purpose. Besides, when you spend a lot of energy on implementing some radical change, you do not spend it on Innovation B, and your programs are stagnant.

Perhaps there can be a third kind of innovation, type C. This is something like what Apple has been doing so successfully for so long. They don’t really invent anything radically new. Instead, Apple takes a look around, and identifies ideas that are already there, and are somewhat tested, but not quite measure up yet. They combine and improve several existing technologies, package and market it smartly, and create a break-through product that way. It is sort of the Excedrin effect: it contains acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine, neither of which is that powerful. Together they created a completely new block-buster drug.

Here is what I want to do next year. We continue the several critical curriculum and operations improvement projects. At the same time, I would like to run an informal think tank, consisting of people that are interested in looking just around the corner in terms of where teacher education is going. We will agree from the start that nothing crazy or totally new is expected. However, several slightly altered, or new components can create the synergy to put us ahead of the pack. We need a vague vision to guide us. I don’t want us to focus too narrowly on AACTE or any SPA standards, for example; we already have done that. Of course, would need to look into what Linda Darling-Hammond calls the “powerful programs.” But I would not look too closely to what already exists; it is intimidating and hurts creativity. We should see what really works in our circumstances, and what else we can add, and especially – how a combination of several not too radical changes can merge into building truly innovative programs?

Rather than putting forth a set of learning outcomes, I want to focus on student experiences – how can we make it a wow-kind of college program? The one that they will later say changed their lives? What are known cultural and organizational tools to create loyalty, commitment, the sense of community? I want to focus on employers’ experiences: how do we make our kids to stand out in job interviews? Greg Kniseley is really onto something very important with his CURR 480 class. After all, interviews make or break our reputation. Our kids might be the best prepared, but if they cannot shine in interviews, no one will find that out. Can our graduates present themselves, sell themselves? Talk like a duck, not just walk like a duck? How about focusing on K-12 students’ and their parents’ experiences? Maybe we should have rigorous actor’s training? Maybe we need to practice parent communication? Maybe our students should watch hundreds of hours of video? I don’t know, but we should identify several simple and tangible goals, and examine what tools there are to get there. Goals like “This program is amazing,” “When RIC graduates interview for a job, you can always tell them apart from others,” “My teacher is a RIC graduate, and she is the best.” Those kinds of goals, not like RIPTS or other such boring stuff.

Again, let’s follow the likes of Apple and Google. They are intensely focused on not what their customers may want, not on what the customers think they want. We have a whole set of customers: the public, our own students, their students. What is it they want, but don’t yet know it? How can we pleasantly surprise them?

The think week

2011-05-20T15:05:00.000-04:00

The undergraduate Commencement is tomorrow, and the weather seems to be cooperating, knock on wood. Spring is the best time in education, like fall is in farming, I imagine. The fruits of our labor are over there, happy, naïve, proud and so young. I am still cleaning up the paperwork hills accumulated from the NCATE era, but we are thinking about the next year and beyond.

The Economist, my favorite magazine, has just published “What do bosses do all day,?” a review of the new Harvard study. The study indicates that bosses may “spend only 3-4% of their day thinking about long-term strategy.” That is probably true for college administrators as well. I’d say it is much less than 3% during the busy time; hopefully a little more in the Summer. We crave summer, love summer, because it is the only time to think. Another quote: “Bill Gates took regular “think weeks”, when he would sit alone in a cabin for 18 hours a day reading and contemplating.” This is great, except I would prefer to do it not alone, but with a small group of people. The article also does not mention that many major innovative companies have something like this not just for the bosses, but for everybody. We all need some think weeks.

The challenges on the horizon are both new and somewhat unpredictable. For example, if things continue to go wrong, we may lose a significant part of our graduate enrollments. We should be responding creatively, not just with defense. Please think how we can stop this particular absurdity from becoming the law. I am trying everything possible through all available channels, but perhaps there is something I am missing. If things just continue to go as they go, we face an increasing pressure to modernize, to improve our programs smartly and be able to prove it. What we need is not just good honest work, but a real break-trough to question the very essence of education, of colleges, of educator preparation. That’s one item of homework for you all – come up with a brilliant idea to change the name of the game for us.

We have a number of other priorities; these are just a few:

State-wide collaboration for teacher preparation: the vision, common placement policies, PR.
Complete modernization of operations: Feinstein admissions, program information, student advising, digital
Update and modernize faculty processes: applications, annual reports, evaluations, asking for funds, etc.
Make Chalk and Wire work for us to the maximum extent. This is not a technological challenge only: we need to get all programs to undertake a critical review of their assessment systems, make sure the Unit-wide assessments are used to the maximum, extent, stop collecting data no one can use, and in general, reduce the number of hoops for faculty and students to jump through.
We need to make sure curriculum is discussed routinely, frequently, and with actionable outcomes. We should have no lose ends, no gaps, no redundancies; with every course in each program tightly fit in a way every student can explain.
Need to review and update the fundamental documents: governance, conceptual framework, mission, etc.

This is just a brief list of things right off the top of my head. The next step would be to make a detailed list from what we started and di not complete this year, from the Strategic Plan, from what we know is coming next year. Then we need to see what we can actually accomplish, and how and how would do it. If we cannot do it all, what is the priority, and what should be put off.

The non-linear text

2011-05-13T14:07:00.002-04:00

The institutional report we just turned in (enjoy) is a particular case of the non-linear text. It is designed, produced, and read differently than a linear document. NCATE has been long encouraging the so-called “electronic exhibit rooms.” Those were to save time and space, and make all documents available online. However, as M. Turner (2007) notices, experts often “offer learners a ‘flat’ body of text on screen that imitates the presentation of a paper document. But what is on screen is not a ‘page’ of text. It appears that a ‘page’ of text on screen is more difficult to make sense of than the same information presented on a printed page […] Linear content fails both to engage with the medium and, to use its unique expressive resources.” She claims that

[T]he starting point for writing online media needs to acknowledgment and embrace the medium’s different structure that is distributed rather than linear; and for the content to be constructed and presented to take advantage of that difference. The structure of the Internet, as an example of this type of media, is an ephemeral network of distributed nodes in potentially continuous connection. In this network there is no centre, no beginning or end and no certain direction—just islands of stored information; hosted it is true, on real hardware housed in a multitude of real buildings across the world, but the Internet itself is not a ‘thing’, in the way a book is a thing. (Turner 2007)

We all are only beginning how to deal with a non-linearity of the information. There are no conventions, only the gut feeling on when to link and when not to link. We still tend to write in long sentences, and cannot produce website friendly chunks of text. Those habits of mind that professional web masters learned perhaps a decade ago, are elusive to most of us, who do not build websites every day. Several issues came up at different stages of production:

1. Architecture. The website we produced has 1935 files in 122 folders. Of course, a couple hundred of them are not text – they are pictures, backgrounds, bullets, logs, style definitions, and other machinery that makes any website work. Several hundred are student work samples and course syllabi that all our programs graciously submitted. But the rest are text or data files. There is a limit to human ability to keep track of only so many documents. This makes possible the errors of redundancy – when text is re-produced, and in some cases versions of the same text may contradict each other. Every web designer knows to avoid redundant information, for it creates challenges for maintenance. To manage that, one can use a flat structure, where all files are in the same directory, or a hierarchical architecture, where everything is in folders and subfolders (Say, /Standard 1/St1Evidence/data). The hierarchy is much easier to navigate in production, because files can easily be found. It makes no difference to the reader. However, the flat structure encourages reusing of the same documents for multiple purposes. We ended up using a mixed design – documents of a similar kind – program reports, syllabi, student work samples – were in separate folders, while the main body of the report, documents and supplementary reports were flatly positioned in the main directory. Looking back, we should have used just a little more hierarchy (even though we had naming conventions, it was hard to remember what each file was called). For example, we should have a folder called assessment instruments, and samples of activities, etc. We did not have money to hire a professional web designer; learning curve is to be expected.

The challenge is to produce the most information-rich environment which requires the least amount of reading. I know our Reading faculty will object me saying this, but the new literacy is all about how to read less, and learn more. The non-linear text allows to write very briefly, and put most of text and data n the contingency pockets – in case the reader wants to learn more, or needs help understanding, or simply wishes to check the accuracy of information the writer provides. Skillful readers have always known how to scan and skip; the non-linear text allows all to do what only the best were able to do before. This is really the architectural challenge for the non-linear web-based text. Of course, NCATE does not know any of this, so they still expect a 30 page narrative. This confuses and discourages the writers from taking advantage of the non-linear writing. Even in fiction writing, only the most sophisticated of readers could read the allusions to the earlier parts of the story, and to larger cultural references. This is an important part of enjoying fiction – figuring out the allusions. But it also alienates children and less educated people. It makes serious writing an exclusive experience, a marker of class. But it does not have to be that way. If you are well-read, and encounter, say Ulysses as referring to the novel in your book, you just keep on reading. But someone else can digress, learn about it, and keep reading. All writing in all ages is already hyper-texted. It is just the case that many of these links are hidden – some on purpose, and some out of pride and arrogance.

2. Collaborative production. Different parts of the report were written by different people, some of it directly on the web. We had to limit the number of authors to avoid a complete chaos on the site. But then dozens of other people contributed to the report – they had to send us the information, we would then edit, format, and position on the site, link, etc. That is a tremendous waste of time and energy (thank God for low cost/high expertise labor of graduate assistants). In the next generation of report writing, all people would be able to submit their pieces directly onto the site, with a few people editing and linking these resources. That is the Wikipedia approach to text production. I wish it occurred to me eight months ago when we started; otherwise we would have done the report as a wiki book. It would not look as fancy, but would be a lot more efficient in terms of labor. The budget office and the library director could just paste something on pages we created for them, or create their own pages. It is ironic, because I actually have an experience producing a wiki book with my students, and should have considered that option. The other advantage – my co-authors would not have to learn the Dreamweaver, which is actually a professional tool, not for amateurs like us. If you never use it again, it is a waste of time. Of course, we made a number of technical mistakes that all cost time to fix. Another lesson – I should have been the editor, and not write any parts of the report myself. There is a different mindset for each role, and it is a conflict to be both. We should have planned for much more editing time to avoid burning midnight oil, and develop an explicit set of instructions in what to look for.

3. Reading. The author used to have most of the power by structuring the text in a linear fashion, with a beginning and the end. Even if one wanted to skip a portion of the text, the rules of such skipping were laid out by the author who supplied a table of contents and the index page to guide the reader through the experience. Now the power balance has shifted radically toward the reader. She can move in any direction, including leaving the author’s text entirely, and going somewhere else. The boundaries between the author-produced and external text are almost completely obliterated. The color of your banner is the only thing that reminds the reader where he is. How any author does still manage to say what one wants to say? Who is responsible for accuracy of the information? It is even more important for the genre we were engaged in, the report writing. The non-linear text needs a test reader, someone who would examine it, and talk about one’s experiences, critique, and help organize the site. In linear text writing, most of us can easily imagine a reader, because we all have had much experience as readers. We cannot yet imagine a reader of non-linear text, who skips most of the text, hops around, comes back, scans rather then reads, and needs help staying focused on the message we want to get across.

These are my linear thoughts on the non-linearity of the new written media.

Notes from the underground

2011-05-06T08:08:00.002-04:00

My email is on auto-reply: “I am going partially underground until May 13 …” I had to clear some time to finish putting together the NCATE report. We are doing it as a website, http://RICreport.org, rather than one long text, for a couple of reasons: first, it is easier to use the same documents for different sections of the report; and second, it allows us to include resources already on the web. The disadvantages are mainly technical: several people had to learn how to use Dreamweaver, which is neither easy nor very intuitive. There is also an organizational challenge: it comes to the point – within the next week or so, when one or two people only can edit, make sure there are no contradictions, gaps, or weird things. While the main body of the report is not that large, perhaps 50 pages, building the architecture of the report’s web site is a challenge. The site already contains 1827 files in 113 folders, more are coming online. The site was put together by about dozen different people, each able to edit the site directly. Faculty members, chairs, and many offices on campus have been exceptionally helpful in providing many different bits of information. The challenge is: we sometimes don’t know which of us has what data. With that many files, we can lose track of which is the most recent, and which is an older version. We can link wrong files, and override each other’s writing. Different sections may develop inconsistencies, redundancies, or gaps. That’s what really takes time, and only so much of it can be done by many people.

It is actually fun, believe it or not. Organizing information is an interesting challenge, like putting together a puzzle; except you get to design pieces. I especially enjoy finding bits of data that allow our programs shine. Did you know, for example, that 74% of our classes are taught by full time faculty? This is much better than in any number of peer institutions. Did you know that 97.5% of our FT faculty members have doctoral degrees? I am sure my co-authors experience the same thrill of a good find. You should take a look at the description of our assessment system put together by Susan, our field experiences (Eileen), and our Diversity section and a number of different key pieces, including the monumental Curriculum and Assessment Chart nurtured by Karen. The site is still under construction, of course. I am fully aware this admission of having fun is somewhat contradictory to all my misgivings about NCATE. But putting all this together is actually an enjoyable exercise; it has an element of game in it. I also enjoy the crisis mode; sorry to admit it. When time runs out, and things happen fast, it is exciting to try to direct all the flying pieces to the same goal. Not that it always works, of course. Thanks to the NCATE leadership team, working on the final stages of the project: Susan, Karen BR and Karen C, Eileen, Patrick, and Monica, and to our assistants Melissa, Erica (a.k.a. the queen of Dreamweaver), Paula, Kim, Dottie and Rose.

My former colleague and partner in crime Carolyn Edwards just reminded me yesterday how we had to miss the undergraduate commencement last year to put some finishing touches on the NCATE report. Yes, we did; perhaps the only commencement I missed in my career. But isn’t she a beauty? http://www.unco.edu/ncate.

My first year at RIC

2011-04-29T13:01:00.003-04:00

I was considering writing a report to my colleagues before asking them to evaluate me, but there were two problems with that. First, it would take too much time, which I would rather spent on doing something rather than on making a long list of heroic deeds. If you’re really curious at how your Dean spends his time, take a look at my calendar – all 47 pages of it. But second, if we accomplished something this year, most credit is due to other people – my colleagues in the dean’s office, department chairs, committees, faculty and staff. Karen Castagno took on huge tasks to make this place run AND covered significant part of the NCATE data collection. I am especially grateful to her. Many other people within and outside FSEHD were gracious, patient, and forgiving. Thanks to all for a great year. OK, forget reporting; I have learned a few things and will talk about them.

RIC is a dynamic place, willing and able to change. To find the College leadership to be supportive and interested in mine and my colleagues’ ideas is encouraging. People ask hard question and challenge what we’re trying to do, but out of diligence, not resistance. Of course, not all offices are equally responsive and flexible, but there is a sufficient critical mass to make this place tick. Yes, some things drive me nuts, but none of them fundamental to the institutional culture, and all of them can be overcome with time and effort.
A lot of my time was spent on establishing connections throughout the state. I met with eight superintendents in one-on-one situations, trying to figure out what they really think of us. I also insinuated myself on a few committees – with RIDE’s various projects, some advisory boards; met with several journalists, community organizations, etc., etc. Sometimes it is hard to judge how productive these efforts are, but they surely helped to shorten my learning curve. Well, rumors about Rhode Island’s parochialism and backwardness are greatly, greatly exaggerated. Perhaps they are spread by those Massachusettsers and Connecticutians, who want to feel superior to someone next door, a smaller kid. I met many very intelligent and forward-looking people here. Of course, my knowledge of local politics is still very basic, but nothing I saw or read about strikes me as unusual. Take corruption, for example. There are only 16 countries less corrupt than the United States (Russia is on 127^th place, just above Sierra Leone, Congo and Venezuela). But within the US, Rhode Island is actually the 24^th most corrupt state – right in the middle of the pack (Glaeser and Saks, 2006, page 1069). Did you know that?
Picking the essential apart from unessential is not an easy task for me. I don’t know if anyone ever figures it out. Life just does not match your plans. What I was hoping to achieve in August and what I ended up actually doing only partially coincide. Take a look at the Call to Arms document, with brief status reports. And another, a much more sensitive issue: the strategic plan FSEHD developed before me. I always liked it and agreed with the majority of the items. But did I actively pursue all the things planned for this year? – not really. Why? Partly because I thought other things are more important, partly because there was only so much one could do (which is, in the end, the same thing). Anyway, however you put it, I let some of this slip without an open discussion. It is OK to change the plans, but it should be done deliberately, not by omission.
The whole NCTATE reporting saga is both sad and inspiring. It was very sad when we spent so much time pleasing both the State and NCATE only to find out that never mind, RIDE is not interested. Department chairs for years collected data for annual reports to meet RIDE’s requirements. The saddest part is to have to ask people to submit certain data and documents and know they will never be looked at. Accreditation is an act of compromise, and sometimes I am not sure if all the compromise is worth the benefits – also real, but sufficient? A part of me wants to say good bye to NCATE, and just collect data and samples we believe is useful. The other part of me is dutifully typing pieces of the institutional report, because the national recognition is a wonderful thing, and we have spent so much time and effort to do it. The inspiring part of it is that most of my colleagues fully share in these uneasy dilemmas, and do what they are asked to do, even without a full conviction that every little piece of the puzzle is really meaningful. And looking at these data and documents is useful, and sometimes surprising. Showcasing our successes is a lot of fun. The project took so much energy, we have to celebrate when we’re done.

OK, enough lessons for one blog. See if I have others next week.

Laughter and chaos

2011-04-22T14:48:00.000-04:00

It is one thing to acknowledge the world’s imperfections, and quite another thing to deal with them. The world of many human beings is chaotic, forgetful, shifty and just not working well. When moved from small hunting and farming communities into big cities with complex organizations, our brains were not prepared for this. Thankfully, we had evolved a laughing animal. Simply put, when something is too strange, or too frightening, or too stressful, we show our teeth (it originates in aggression), and feel fine after all. OK, I could not figure it out, and this is too complicated, and this should not happen, but I can ignore it, because it is funny! But what does it mean when something or someone is funny? It simply means we don’t have to deal with it in a regular way, don’t need to know why, don’t need to apply ethical judgments, don’t need to feel angry or guilty about it. It is dismissed – to funny. Laughter is a non-resolution that allows us to resolve problems. When someone is trying to crack a joke in a meeting, one is inviting the others to get pass the problem, to set it aside, and just take it lighter. There is too much chaos in the world to deal with it, so we laugh.

Funny when people want to spend a lot of time talking about unimportant things, and run out of time to talk about the life and death situations. I do the same all the time; still funny. Why does everything in higher ed take at least a year to accomplish? Because we spend half of each meeting finding the time for another meeting next month. Next month, we forget where we left off last month. First eight meetings we spend talking about silly details, and there are only nine working months in a school year. In the last meeting, we make tremendously important decisions in the last fifteen minutes, without thinking too much.
The inability to admit and say openly what is at issue – extremely funny.
Funny how I assume you want it, and you assume I want it, while neither of us want it. So we do it anyway and both hate it. Then we forget what we did and wonder why we hate each other.
Complaining about doing things we brought upon ourselves is funny. Not always, but most of the time.
Funny when we won’t let other people do something, because it is our job to do, but not doing it because we have too much to do.
Worrying is funny, mainly because it never helps, but we keep doing it.
When you sit down and talk to someone, you are reasonably sure you can do this and that, only to realize later on, you can’t really do it. This bias to over-promise and over-commit is just so weird, it’s funny.
How we push deadlines earlier, because we figure, people won’t be on time, so we need extra time. People figure out we figured it out, and assume the real deadline to be much later, but they don’t know when.
With more education and more experience, we are less likely to admit doing stupid things. It should be the other way around, isn’t it? People with Ph.D. unable to figure out the simplest thing – I am one of them – now, that’s really funny.
When we don’t understand someone’s motives, we just make them up. Funny how we cannot tolerate the unexplained, but are fine with the completely fabricated.
How only little stupid thing that happens once every hundred years prompts everyone to implement new rules that take time to comply with every day.
Funny how bosses’ suggestions become directives, while directives may remain suggestions.
Repeatedly saying stupid things because of speed-reading habits, and yet doing it again.
Forgetting whole conversations, as if they never happened. Remembering the conversation in detail, and well as all arguments on both sides, but completely blanking out on the resolution… Remembering what you decided, but completely forgetting why you decided it is hilarious, because you have to quickly invent another rationale.

When is now?

2011-04-15T16:55:00.002-04:00

One side effect of my job is that I have to deal with longer timelines. Many projects have to be calculated like this: “If we start it in the Fall 11, it will take us to the next curriculum approval cycle in Spring 12, which means we’d start phasing in the new program in Fall 12, and first graduates will complete in Spring 16.” If you keep thinking in such terms, the reality of now is easily forgotten. I was sure, for example, for a few minutes, that we are in 2010, only to be reminded this is 2011. Have you done this? We also start forgetting how old we are, because years become increasingly short, and simply not as good and long as the old kinds of years. When you are six, a year is an eternity. What a torture to wait for two months for a summer vacation. Then waiting becomes a luxury; things come our way much faster than expected. Oh, really, it is already April 15? Oh, shoot, I am missing a deadline. This may be age-related, too, but when I am losing my mind, my instinct is to make a theory out of it. Denial is a wonderful thing.

This is not just about perception of time. It fascinates me to see that the now is just a construction of our minds. The present is nothing but a convention, an agreement; it is adherence to an arbitrary concept of time. We learned to use certain astronomical features of our world to create a particular theory of time, consisting of a sequence of consequent simultaneities. It is one but one of many possible theories. For an ascetic, for example, the subjective time is much more important than the calendar time, because he or she does not need to meet other people, so times do not need to be synchronized. This is what the present is: a device to synchronize individual timelines. As with any other great inventions, the invention of simultaneity both gives us much and takes something away. We can get along and cooperate, but we completely ruin our inner subjective time. We act before we are ready, and grow up before we mature; we limit our freedom to slow down or fast-forward time. We become complete prisoners of the linear time. And when we forget when is now, we are either losing our minds, or are returning momentarily to the primordial bliss that had to point in time. I want to skip to June 15 now.

Looking for joy

2011-04-08T17:33:00.000-04:00

Spring semester is always hard. You cannot predict when exactly, but the cabin fever eventually hits. Because college life is seasonal, there has to be a point where it just becomes hard. Warm weather helps, and so does the natural winding up of the school year. We can see the end, and though the view is obscured by the mountains of work yet-to-be-done. In most Christian calendars, it is the time of great Lent, repentance, and meditation, which culminates on Easter. In the Jewish tradition, it is Passover, the release from Egyptian slavery (sometimes I feel like the Pharaoh, when I ask someone to do one more thing). The Islamic calendar has nothing to do with climatic seasons; the holidays cycle through the astronomical year. However, the Hijra is celebrated annually on 8 Rabi' I, a Spring month. (The Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina actually happened in September… Well it’s complicated, but it is about moving, changing, meditation).

Anyway, besides looking for release from bondage, I recommend finding joy where you can. I, for example, had a blast today talking with a people from URI and CCRI about improving our transfer articulation agreement for early childhood majors. Yesterday, mine was a guilty pleasure imagining how a new schedule grid may look like. Why? It’s fun to pretend you can change things! Sometimes people think – oh, well, I will get done with all the boring, routine, compliant stuff, and then I will have time to change and improve things, to be creative, to write and compose. This may make sense practically, but not psychically. Our souls wither and shrivel, if we cannot experience joy for a long time. And within the confines of our work lives, moving, changing things is as close as it gets to real joy. It invites the unexpected, and gives us a sense of possibilities. The joy of agency is the same as the joy of creativity.

Limits of the self

2011-04-01T12:39:00.000-04:00

In the last few days, I have hit some limits within myself, not institutional, or fiscal. Those realizations are the most humbling, and somewhat cathartic.

First, I got sick with a bad flu. This is the third day, and I am still flat on my back, writing delusional emails. It happened in the worst possible time: we had to finish a grant; I missed an important partnership meeting with RIDE, and Svetlana and I were trying to celebrate our 30^th anniversary this weekend. Only in the last one I am irreplaceable, the first two will be OK, because other people can pick up the slack. But it helps to remember than none of us irreplaceable, and things will go on with or without us. And of course, we can celebrate a couple of days later.

Second, I was reminded once again of the flaws in my character. All Sidorkins actually have this problem to a different degree: my late father did, my brother, I, and my two children may have inherited some of it. We are impatient, and tend to insist that we know how to do things best. We just know it; we can immediately perceive the one true and best way of doing something, and get annoyed with people who cannot see it the same way. It has to do with the way we think – holistically, trying to grasp the essence of complex problems at once, rather than analytically of relationally. Sometimes (but far from always!) we get get things right. But it also can be very damaging, for example, when I bombard various offices in this college with incessant and insisting e-mails, telling everybody how to do their jobs. Mt wife, of course, have many stories to tell about the Sidorkin syndrome. It comes out more in the time of stress, and then I have to patch up relationships, and make them right again. I am still learning to control this, but obviously did not yet succeed. For that, I am sorry.

To be or not to change

2011-03-24T14:26:00.000-04:00

That is the question, really. I don’t have a particular desire to change all things around me. However, I have my instincts and ideas about where things go and how do we prepare for them. Here is a list of conditions that make an organizational change difficult.

Change is offensive. Championing change is always perceived as a criticism of other people. Many people invest their time and names in particular ways of doing things. Suggesting to do it differently is almost inevitably an indirect criticism of others. You imply that either they did not do a good enough job when they developed the current system. Or that they somehow missed the need to change. Suggesting a change shifts the focus on the conversation from good things onto things that need to be improved – by very definition, to bad things.
Change is risky. It involves a comparison between two very different things: one is a tried and proven, real thing. It may not be perfect, but we know for sure it works, and does not cause disaster. The other is ephemeral, imagined. It may or may not be better, but for sure carries a lot more risk with it – simply because it has not been tried before. The way human imagination works is this: it is very easy for us to imagine dozens of situation where the proposed new thing is not going to work. People can sit for hours and come up with new and new scenarios of how a new rule could be abused, loopholes found, and how it all can be ruined. That’s what we’re built to do: before leaping off a cliff, our mind predicts what could go wrong. There were people without this kind of imagination, but they all died out millions of years ago.
Change is work, and no one likes to add something to one’s work load, unless it is necessary. While people may agree in principle that this and that need to change eventually, it is a very different kind of thing to say something needs to change now. What’s the urgency? It may be the case that just doing regular every day work well is more important that throwing time and resources at trying something new. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, right? (I like another one, If we can’t fix it, it ain’t broke). But however you cast it, change is work, and work needs to be justified differently than abstract ideas.

These are just the three top problems; more can be added. Yet no one was able to fool the need for change. It comes in either small voluntary increments from inside, or as hard, abrupt and painful changes from without. The small steps may look very large and very painful at the time, but it is a matter of perspective. When we neglect to change, stories like this one in Ohio happen. And such blunt and destructive changes could have been prevented. We do not need radical changes – just a message that things gradually improve. Professions that have learned to innovate and self-regulate, thrive. Those that only learned to defend their rights, but offer neither innovation nor self-regulation, get vilified and marginalized. Not changing is not really an option; it never has been.

I believe that if we add peer feedback mechanism to our evaluation system. It would be a great PR message, and it is actually very useful for culture building. The benefits are obvious to me, while the cost is relatively minor. The School already has very good faculty communities; we actually have very few conflicts, and a lot of support. The next logical thing would be to extend those traditions deeper into professional collaboration. It’s building on strength to gain more strength. It is a long-term project, results of which will only become apparent 2-3 years later. Learning about each other’s business takes a while; learning to trust one’s colleagues on professional matters is also not easy. But neither it is very hard; it has been done before. Here is another list:

Change does not have to be offensive. It is not about you personally.
Not changing is even riskier. Control your urge to see the worst-case scenarios.
All good things in life are more work. Take it one step at a time.

Vikings vs homies

2011-03-17T17:40:00.000-04:00

The origins of the Russian state are unusual. People of Kiev invited foreign mercenaries, two Viking brothers, to rule over them. Until these days, when a manager is hired from outside of an organization – government, college, or business, - Russians refer to it as hiring a Viking (varyag). The logic of it is clear to all – bringing an outsider who has not yet created friends or enemies may sometime be beneficial. It allows to either move past a conflict, or to move an organization forward in a new direction. Another strategy is to promote someone from within. The advantages are continuity, avoidance of major disruptions, and recognition of someone from within. An organization seeking change will benefit from a Viking; one seeking stability is better off with a homie. Being a Viking myself, I truly appreciate both homies and Vikings.

A similar, but not identical set of choices exists in hiring of new faculty. There is an advantage to growing your own – you can identify talent with certainty, shape its growth, and acculturate it in your ways. Those are people who are hired from the ranks of part-timers, temporary types, or graduates of your own programs. They can hit the ground running, and free us from nasty surprises. They usually have strong ties to the local community, bring valuable social networks with them, and tend to stay longer. The opposite strategy is to bring outsiders; those tend to have a different, fresher perspective, are more likely to be innovators, and tend to make your institution closer to the national norms. Again, both are important, and one can only advocate for a sensible mix of the two, while understanding of value and risks associated with both.

Both strategies can go wrong. With homies, there can be simply too many of them, which makes the organization stagnant. A large majority of homies won’t even know how things can be done otherwise, so their sense of the norm may eventually drift away from the larger context. The standards may slip, and a person may be hired on the basis of personal sympathies – being just like us, fitting in. This leads to nepotism, which is not only unethical, but is also illegal. Once the word spreads that such and such institution searches are mere formalities, good Vikings will just stop applying. The reputation will suffer, and it is very hard to get it back later. Most importantly, the self-respect will suffer. See my blog “Refuse to be second-rate”

Another version of the same problem – hiring only people who share the organization’s values and beliefs. It is really hiring people who look like Vikings, but are really crypto-homies. It is less of a problem for business, but we work in academia, where open debate and difference in opinion is essential for credibility. So every liberal department should have some conservatives, and vice-versa; every analytic philosophy department must have at least one continental philosopher. Otherwise, we just create many isolated conversations, where our thinking is no longer challenged – because we all agree with each other. It is a dangerous, and ultimately, a self-defeating game.

Over-relying on Vikings can also go wrong. Some institutions never hire their own graduates – as a matter of policy, or a matter of tradition. This is probably taking it too far. It is hard to maintain traditions, the sense of organizational culture in an organization full of vikings. It may degenerate into a collection of academic stars, each very good in a small niche, but incapable of forming a community. It may lose its uniqueness and its peculiarity, which is often needed to maintain an identity. In many industries, including ours, uniqueness is a valuable asset. Vikings tend to have less loyalty to the organization, they leave more often, and may create large disruptions. Finally, once in a while you hire someone very incompetent, or unethical, because interviews are not perfect, and they definitely worse a tool than knowing someone for years.

I am talking of tendencies, not hard rules. Plenty a Viking stay for a long time, and many homies turn out to be the most daring innovators. Just trying to hire the best person available would be the best strategy; it will minimize risks associated with all strategies, and random events will take care of good balance. Trying to control our biases – for or against Vikings or homies – is the best strategy.

Building and gardening

2011-03-11T15:03:00.000-05:00

A theory:

Managers come in two large categories – architects and gardeners. Starting a project, architects have more or less exact plans; they like to oversee every step of the project, and make sure it goes as planned. If the progress is delayed, or the plans are violated, they worry a lot. Good architect are not afraid to pick a shovel or a hammer; they will never ask someone to do something impossible or unproven. It is a reasonable strategy; after all we do not want our buildings and bridges to collapse.

Gardeners have an entirely different mentality. They enjoy putting something in the ground, and then forgetting for a while, and checking back again. They marvel at the unexpected –oops, this was a wrong seed, and see, how well this squash is doing where a flower was supposed to be. Gardeners have a much higher tolerance to failure – so, half of my seeds died off, perhaps more or less water is needed next time, or this is a wrong kind of soil. Life and death of their projects are not consequential. Gardeners trust the inner forces of nature – the genetics of the plant, the natural ability of soil to produce. They start and shape processes, help them, but do not really understand every little detail – no one does. Gardeners may keep a beautiful weed, or they may pull out something they planted, because it did not turn out good enough. They do get disappointed if things go wrong, but believe there is always another season. Their time is circular, while the architects’ time is linear. Managers of that type like to start a lot of projects, fully expecting some to fail. They check back, and happy to see something different, or something completely unexpected. They trust other people to carry on, and freely admit ignorance of how exactly things happen.

I am more of an architect than a gardener, but am striving to move on that continuum more towards the middle. Simply put, some things need to be constructed, because they cannot fail. Many others should be allowed to grow however they want. I wish I had the wisdom to know which is which. I wish I would stop trying to build a squash, and stop hoping a house will grow – just give it time.

The evaluation season

2011-03-04T10:43:00.000-05:00

My desk is crowded with tenure and promotion dossiers and annual evaluation forms. It is a lot of work, but also kind of fun to see what people were doing. I am learning about courses someone designed, new journals and conferences I have never heard of, and many projects we are involved in. It’s a good feeling – to belong to a group of people who work hard, are creative and successful. Overall, we’re in a good place. I was very happy to confirm my impression that the absolute majority of our faculty members are very thoughtful and dedicated teachers.

Of course, no one likes to be evaluated and judged, but it seems to be a universal feature of any organization now. Why is that? What does annual and comprehensive evaluation actually do? Some people believe they make people work harder. I don’t believe it is true. In academia, people are driven primarily by their interest, the sense of pride and accomplishment, and by ethical considerations. Faculty also react well to financial incentives, but the core of their work is very difficult to improve with administrative force. Instead of being a stick, the evaluation process should be used as a tool for building a common culture. The brief annual reports we write should be read not just by small DAC groups and chairs, but by everyone in each department. This is the best way to actually know who is doing what. It helps common standards and expectations to evolve; it shines some public light on individual accomplishments and struggles. We would have a much higher return on sharing than on hiding. If you’re doing great in some areas, more people will know about it, and some will be inspired, and others will want to collaborate. If you experiencing a problem, there will be more help available. Many more colleagues will want to help than Schadenfreude you. It is sometimes hard to believe when you’re being evaluated, but from my experience, it is invariably true.

It is the same with the comprehensive and more consequential evaluations. In most of the academia, all tenured faculty members vote on tenure. In some places, these responsibilities are placed on a small elected committee and on chairs. In my view, the first approach is much healthier. First, because of the reason described above. We need to know each other’s business to develop as a strong community. Second, small committees only work where they are completely trusted. It backfires with any personal or professional conflict. You’re lucky when your friends happen to be on the committee, and unlucky when your foes are there; both cases are bad for the organization. A larger group vote averages those influences out. It also gives a much more balanced picture to chairs and to deans on where the person’s colleagues stand. Third, a small committee has a hard time staying anonymous in its decisions. Because of that, people on it may feel more pressure, and feel less free to express their opinions. Fourth, the system places a greater burden on chairs to make the call. These calls can be not only excruciatingly difficult to make, but chairs may be under a direct conflict of interest – the same small committee that recommends for tenure and promotion also evaluates the chairs. We sometimes have untenured chairs – such decisions place an unfair pressure on them. But above all, I believe that a group of self-regulating professionals must take a broad collective responsibility for the most important decisions. They should cultivate mutual respect, which only comes with being fair but demanding to each other. Our bargain for academic freedom included an explicit promise to self-regulate, and do it effectively and transparently. You don’t want your deans – much less the general public – to meddle in your professional judgment, because they do not have the same specialized knowledge of your field as you do. To achieve that, you must express your professional judgment to each other freely and openly. It will then carry much more weight, so I won’t have to make any decisions you are better qualified to make.

The funny thing, our contract is allowing the broadly based vote. All you have to do is to either forget to elect a DAC, or specify that DAC is the committee of the whole. More democracy is possible; all we need to do is claim it.

Playing the system

2011-02-21T09:03:00.002-05:00

Every system gets played; that’s the nature of complex organizations with many rules. There is always a loophole that can be exploited; there is always too much going on for anyone to notice everything. But there are definitely degrees and shades of this phenomenon, ranging from minor things to debilitating pervasive corruption. Given the particular configurations of our system here at RIC, the instances of the system playing are quite low, although they inevitably do occur. Examples would be the reconfiguration of courses from 3 credit to 4-credit, just to make instructor’s workload a little more manageable. The Contract is full of special arrangements and deals, for this department and that department, for these kinds of classes, and other kinds of classes. There are probably many more deals off the books. Some are fair and equitable, while others are not; most were made in a hurry and fall somewhere in between.

Many years ago, in a graduate class I took, a professor in public administration argued how playing the system can never really be ethically defensible. I disagreed – systems that are devised without one’s participation and consent, and judged by its participants to be unjust – those could be justifiably undermined. For example, if students believe that certain class is pointless, and the instructor is not offering anything of value to them, but imposes arbitrary and rigid rules – I would have a hard time condemning them for trying to bend the rules. I may still have to pursue administrative sanctions – for the sake of the larger system’s stability. But ethically speaking, students have a good point. Would you condemn the Egyptian youth for breaking the emergency laws imposed by the now ousted president Mubarak?

People play the system not because they are bad, but because the system itself is perceived as less than fair. However, the sum of total perceptions of the system IS the system. For example, when one person thinks there is unfairness and favoritism in the organization, he or she would feel justified to get even by skipping on work a little, by inflating one’s work just a bit, and by playing the system somewhat, sometimes without realizing it. Lack of transparency perpetuates the notion – almost everyone feels that the next person is treated better, therefore, I am entitled to a little something. Some people complain and argue for a special deal for them, because they have heard of a special deal for others; while others just quietly take what they think is theirs. The end result is the same: the organization will be crawling with a number of exceptions, unwritten deals, and special arrangements. Each unfair deal was made to balance off another unfair deal, so we end up with two. The more of those you have, the more evidence of unfair treatment become apparent to more people. I am not at all saying we’re there, far from it; it’s just the general direction I really wish to avoid.

What does a manager do? In the abstract, it is pretty clear; I have written about it a few years ago. Transparency, clear, fair and simple rules, and the ability to justify and publically explain exceptions – that is what is needed. In the real life, it is not so simple. For example, old deals may be not quite fair, but breaking them would make more harm than good. An institution is as good as its word. Breaking past arrangements encourages short-term thinking, and intensify the playing of the system. There is also a genuine diversity of circumstances that make it difficult to apply fair and consistent rules. People just do different things and have different strengths. The complexity is difficult to comprehend, and not easy to make transparent. But we should try anyway. The bottom line is – even when no one is asking, we should be able to defend and explain any special arrangement at any time – convincingly and reasonably.

Toward the permanent past

2011-02-12T11:52:00.002-05:00

My memory is average – not the best, not the worst. An idea or a concept is easy for me to remember, a name or a year – much harder. I may go blank on a name when I unexpectedly see a familiar face. For most people of my age, some words just become irretrievable in a conversation, only to surface again later, when they are not needed. Hundreds of conversations a month are part of my routine; most involve decisions, small and large. A few months later, I often remember the conversation, but cannot recall what the agreement was. In rare occasions, I have absolutely no recollection of even having a conversation. This happened perhaps 4-5 times in my life, one last week. It is both funny and embarrassing, when a colleague sent me a copy of an email exchange, of which I had absolutely no memory. Often, it is somewhere in between – I have a vague memory, but cannot recall neither the details of the conversation, nor the decision. And of course, sometimes, for whatever reason, I remember very clearly a particular dialogue that happened many months, or even years ago. Memory is a strange and unreliable thing. It is known not only to fade, but to recall incorrectly, filling the gaps with imagined details as vivid as reality, and yet wholly invented. We would all do much better if we remembered how human memory works, and what it is capable and not capable of doing. It is hard to believe that another person does not remember a conversation which you remember clearly. And yet it is very common. When someone recalls a conversation very differently, with details that seem invented – we all suspect ill intent, what else? But it could be just one of the many malfunctions of memory – yours or the other person’s.

It is fascinating to observe how the human society changes. We live through the writing revolution 2.0. The first one allowed recording certain important conversations. Neither law nor commerce is possible without writing, a solid if very limited image of the past. But now we have a way to write down much more - exponentially more, and easily retrieve what is needed. On the eight day God created email and Google. Many if not most of decisions involve email. And when they don’t, I usually either write an email or ask others to write an email to me. Those things are indestructible, and live forever, if you only know how to archive. Google Desktop is another wonderful helper. It searches and indexes your entire hard drive, and will instantly find emails, files, even web pages you visited containing a specific word or expression. Those things are vastly superior to old manila files with paper. The direct result of this artificial memory enhancement is, I believe, reduction in human conflict. Thirty years ago, if there was no memo typed on a typewriter (a huge investment of time), different versions of the past would inevitably clash, lead to misunderstanding, to mutual accusations, and to conflict. Now, I search Google Desktop, and it three seconds it brings every email and every file that has to do with the conversation. The past is becoming more and more permanent, and less and less a collection on competing stories. The past is a clear picture with many more details.

One day, everything will be recorded, and all events will leave a permanent impression – all conversations, small talk, important and unimportant decisions, all gossip and table conversations; all sins and moments of grace. How is it going to change us, when we cannot deny and rewrite the past? What would be the world in which every fact in every memoir could be checked, and literally every lie exposed? This is not about privacy – we should fight to keep our personal histories private. However, just imagine that even our work lives will be completely recorded? But also imagine your private life had a record – only if for your own personal retrieval. Would you want to know what you told your child or your spouse on February 12, 1991, at noon, in case you disagree what exactly happened? My guess is – we will get to used to it, we get used to anything with time.

Defensible rules: A short story in emails

2011-02-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

Here is an epistolary short story; it is a series of quite recent emails, slightly abbreviated. The exchange is between me and two people from another institution.

C., “Thesis and Dissertation Specialist” to a doctoral student: Your request [to schedule a proposal hearing] was faxed Friday night at 5:37 pm. At this point, since it’s within one week, we cannot process it without an emailed explanation from your advisor as to why it must take place without the two weeks requirement, and at that point, I will get a decision from Dr. W. [Dean of Graduate School].

Sasha to C.: S. and I are co-chairs, and we forgot to file the written portion form on time. I do not remember what the rationale for the two weeks gap was in the first place, so it is hard to argue why there has to be an exception.

C. to Sasha: It is Graduate School Policy to turn in the forms at least 2 weeks prior to the Exam/Defense. When in doubt, turn in the form, even if the written comp results have not been turned in yet. Her request should have been turned in by January 18 at the latest, but preferably earlier. Her written comps arrived on the 18th. Per the Request to Schedule a Doctoral Examination form “This form must be turned into the Graduate School at least two weeks prior to the Exam/Defense. The deadline is Thursday at noon. Exceptions to this rule must be accompanied by an explanation of the late request and will be considered on a case by case basis. No exam/defense will be allowed with less than one week prior notice.” We are unable to approve the request for February 1. Please reschedule and submit another date allowing the 2 weeks notice.

Sasha to C.: A citation from the rule book is not a rationale. What was the rationale for the initial rule?

C. to Sasha: The Graduate School policies are the foundation of our school, and were set for years before I started here, so I’m not aware of the original rationale. Deadlines are in place to allow everyone time to get through all of the required processes and maintain high quality in our work. We appreciate your efforts to help us maintain our high standards of education at [the university].

Sasha to C.: The origins are probably going to the age when things needed to be mailed, or delivered through a courier service. But in any case, holding on to policies without understanding their rationale is not the best way of maintaining the high standards, don’t you think?

C. to Sasha: Neither is ignoring policies. We have made changes where we feel they are necessary to keep up with the digital era. Deadlines are still necessary to maintain order. Please have her reschedule and get the forms turned in in a timely manner.

Sasha to C.: I would not feel comfortable enforcing a rule intent of which I do not understand. I consider it to be my ethical responsibility to know why I am telling “yes” or “no” to someone for whom it is an important decision. That is what makes me a professional and a public servant. Otherwise, it all becomes a game of power without any tangible benefits for the students or for the general public.

C. to Sasha: I am saying no because you and the student did not meet the policy deadline. I do understand the meaning of a two-week deadline and the policies which I am enforcing. I do not know why our forefathers chose to write the rules the way they did, but I respect that they did so with the student’s best interest in mind. I understand that when I came into the graduate school 5 years ago, I helped clean up those policies and clarify them to fit not only the traditional student but the off-campus community as well. It is my responsibility to make sure the faculty and students follow the stated rules, policies and procedures. I’m sorry if you don’t like that.

Sasha to C.: It’s not that I don’t like your answer; it’s the fact that you don’t have one that bothers me. You’re not saying “I don’t know, but will find out for you.” The message is quite different – that we are supposed to trust every rule without questioning it. I am sorry, I grew up in a country where you were supposed to tell on your neighbors to the authorities – and most people did not, because they have questioned the rule, and obedience without questioning just rubs me the wrong way. This is not about [the doctoral student’s] proposal.

Dr. W, the Graduate Dean to Sasha: I understand that it must feel like we just sit around and come up with silly policies, but honestly we don’t. The rationale that guides this decision is that oral comps, dissertation proposals and dissertation defenses are to be open to the public and the policy indicates that they must be announced twice during the two weeks prior to the date of the event. The student missed the deadline. All we are asking is that the comps be moved one week later so it can be publicized as required.

Sasha to Dr. W.: To be honest, I knew that. I was just bugged to no end that she would not know the rationale and be perfectly comfortable enforcing the rule. And she had the audacity to tell me to basically get lost and stop asking questions. She did not say – I am terribly sorry, I don’t know the rationale, but will find it for you. No, it was like – rules are rules, get along with the program. This is no way to talk to a faculty member, hope she will get it one day.

Housekeeping

2011-01-29T14:40:00.003-05:00

A couple of programs are thinking or already started to re-map (sequence) their curriculum. These are critically important tasks, which I will support very enthusiastically. Every program should consider doing something like that.

Curriculum drift is quite natural; it is actually an evidence of a healthy program. When programs are designed or redesigned, there is usually a broad agreement on what should be taught in each course. However, people tweak their courses, change them a little, improve, and try new things, as they should! An unintended consequence of it is that curriculum pieces drift apart: gaps and redundancies form, expectations begin to vary, and program coherence deteriorates. Fractures appear between core course, and even among several sections of the same large course. Individual courses may actually improve with time, but the program as a whole may suffer. For example, students would read the same book two or three times in different classes, but never learn other important texts or concepts (everyone assumes they learn it somewhere else). Students may hear about the basic difference between formative and summative assessments three or four times, but never actually manage to build or critique either. Lesson plan formats is another drift-prone entity. There are dozens of them around, most are not substantially different from each other, but have different structure and look. Yet every instructor has a favorite, and student never have a chance to improve on what they have already done in a previous course. I observed very similar concepts to be sometimes called differently in different classes, so students do not see the connection, and cannot build on existing knowledge. A group of students told me that in their various practicum courses, one may get no experience working with small groups of kids, or miss the on-on-one tutoring, depending on which individual instructors happen to teach those. We may have two sections of the same class, but field component in one is twice the size of that in the other. A student may write three substantial papers in one section, and none in another.

The only way to fix the curriculum drift is the academic housekeeping; really routine maintenance. It is not a big deal if done frequently, but as it is the case with any maintenance, defer it and problems accumulate. Ironically, most accreditors miss the curriculum drift entirely; curriculum cohesion is not on their radar screen. They would only request one official master syllabus – who has time to read them all? But we should mend and align our programs anyway – it gives students better experience, and makes them more effective teachers. We also look a lot better in our students’ eyes, if we act collectively. Our professional judgment is the biggest accrediting body.

There are several ways of curriculum alignment/sequencing. One can just collect all syllabi and map what is being taught now. Gaps and redundancies would become visible. Here is an example:

Course	Main texts	Key concepts	Key assignments	Skill/indicators

A teacher preparation program, together with major is probably about 40-60 credits, or 12-20 courses (depending on how well the major is integrated with the pedagogy cycle). But completing the table is a lot of work, and syllabi are always imperfect reflections of reality.

Another way of doing it is taking programs apart, and sequencing, for example, literacy cycle in Elementary, or the Foundations cycle (Ed Psych, Social Foundation, generic methods, content methods, etc.) in Secondary. It is much more feasible, for you could have 4-5 people around the table, rather than 20.

And finally, faculty can just start with not what is, but go straight to what should be, skipping an entire time-consuming step. It would be the same, or a similar table. Identifying a few cross-program curriculum threads, as well as common expectations is the essence. Some ideas and concepts are course-specific; only a few can be managed to go from course to course and develop. And those are not necessary global ideas, but also very simple things like the lesson plan format or a writing rubric everyone uses. Programs do not have to get it all – just a few stepping stones to cross the creek. One interesting trick is to start with a curriculum map that is addressed to students, rather than to other faculty. It forces to use simple. Straightforward language, and encourages students to understand their own program of study, which may add a little pressure for faculty to stay within the negotiated limits.

I asked Chairs to plan departmental or program retreats and submit curriculum sequencing agendas and budgets. Perhaps we could manage to do some of this work right after the end of the school year, or right before the next one begins. When I see faculty sitting around the table and talking about curriculum, my heart sings. That is what we should e doing, not running around trying to write accreditation reports, collecting student work samples, and filling out paperwork.

An incubator for innovations

2011-01-21T14:45:00.000-05:00

My personal organizing system is fairly simple. From any meeting, I usually walk out with a piece of paper, which has doodles on one side and a list of actionable items on the other. Back in the office, I take the list of actions, and do one of several things: If an item can be dealt with immediately, I try to do it on the same day, unless it is really crazy – send an email, make a phone call, or ask someone to perform a task. If it is important, I try to create an Outlook task with a reminder. Items that require a longer process are moved on my to-do list, next to the monitor. Other actions, after consideration, are ignored as not worth pursuing. After all that, the piece of paper goes into the recycling bin, which is very satisfying. Whatever comes to me through e-mail follows the same logic: messages sit in inbox until they are processed in one of the same way. If I am waiting on a reply, they go to the “Waiting” folder.

Yet there is a class of things on my lists that are very difficult to process. Those are ideas that cannot be acted on, but interesting enough to not throw the paper away. They either come from whoever I meet with, or they occur to me during the conversation. Here is an example. One of superintendants I met with last week, said that our student teachers should think about how they can be useful in the schools of their placements. For instance, they can share some new technology, or a new science lab experiment, etc. Now, that’s a very interesting thought. What if we asked student teachers to prepare a presentation for their cooperating teacher, and perhaps for other teachers in the school. Something that could be valuable in the process of a regular peer—to-peer professional exchange? A professional development requirement? The problems are a ton: we already have too many requirements, there may be no chance to present it at school, etc. Yet the potential payoff could be significant – our partners might develop an expectation that RIC students always come in with something new to share. That would change s lot I our relationship.

Another superintendant asked if we can offer a data literacy workshop for teachers – how to read and interpret assessment data, and use it in the new teacher evaluation system. That’s not a new idea, but it made me thing that someone could offer the simple service of taking someone’s data and making it digestible with summary tables, graphics, and interpretive statements. Can our School serve as a think tank for the local schools? We have plenty of people who could do it, but no organizational way of processing such requests. Anybody wants to set up a small business? There will be demand for sure.

Those are just two small examples. The point is – we all probably have these ideas that are too vague and unproven to be immediately evaluated and converted into actions. But they may be promising enough to keep them alive. That’s my question for today – how do you keep them alive? How do we let them grow, incubate them, give them a chance to prove their worth? Innovation is really a systematic process – ideas have to be invited, collected, supported, nurtured, and examined; most of them would have to be rejected. But a small percent could turn out to be very fruitful. And there is always a chance that one of them will change everything. One of my fellow Deans said we need a system to incubate new programs, especially those crossing the boundaries of Schools. That’s a great idea; we also need an incubator for ideas.

Anyone, an idea about what to do with all the ideas?

On planning

2011-01-13T16:21:00.000-05:00

How much of long-term planning should we do? On one hand, it seems silly not to have a strategic plan of some sort. And the School has developed a good one before I came on board. On the other hand, things change faster that we can say “strategic plan.” For example, the School has planned to develop new graduate certificates. However, the suspension of I-Plan and uncertainty about the future certification made these efforts much riskier. Another example: we spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to synchronize the national accreditation visit with the State approval process – only to discover that the latter is suspended. We need to be flexible and opportunistic, especially now, when the whole profession is in flux, and our future is uncertain.

Here is another consideration: how much should the big plan change with the new Dean? I find all the ideas laid out in the plan sensible, but what should I do if I see a different set of opportunities, and perceive different things as priorities? What if I don’t believe certain projects will work out? What if I have certain expertise that can be used, and lack some other expertise, and the combination does not quite fit the plan neatly? It does not seem like I should hide any ideas and misgivings; I was hired to think and lead, not to just accept and follow. However, the last thing I want to do is to damage something valuable, or overwhelm people with changes.

I don’t want to be all philosophical and contemplative; this is just a request – do let me know if you think I am neglecting something important – either from what was planned, or something that just came up.

VISION 2020

2011-01-07T12:33:00.003-05:00

OK, it’s time to get proactive and define our own destiny. The public wants us to do that, our profession has moved and our partners in the State expect us to define how exactly we are going to improve quality of teaching. I believe we should build a coalition of various groups, and identify a specific agenda for teacher education in this State. Here is a rough draft below, developed with input from PC’s Dean Brian McCadden and URI’s Director of Teacher Education David Bird. I am calling on faculty members to organize and think about what we need to achieve. I don’t care if the draft below would change dramatically. As long as we have a short least of achievable objectives, and get our partners to join us, we will be in a good shape. The goals should be few, very realistic but still aspirational, and be placed in the context of the national and professional conversation. We need to get a clear vision. Let’s just do it!

VISION 2020: Goals for Teacher Preparation in Rhode Island

Teacher preparation institutions are inviting K-12 and community partners to develop a common vision for teacher preparation. We want to bring together the State’s educational reform agenda and the latest thinking in the teacher preparation profession to create a partnership dedicated to building innovative and comprehensive state framework for teacher preparation. We are inviting others to provide input:

1. Teacher candidates will be
o Recruited primarily from the top half of their class
o Required to demonstrate competency in all key teaching skills
o Will be licensed when they can prove impact on student learning
o Followed by their teacher preparation programs into the first years of teaching for mentoring, support, and research

2. K-12 Partners will
o Play a major role in designing teacher preparation programs, their assessments, and outcomes
o Take part in evaluating teacher candidate readiness
o Be supported and encouraged to play an active role in teacher preparation
o Help provide data on teacher performance to teacher preparation programs

3. Clinical instructors will be:
o Master teachers who demonstrated positive impact on student growth
o Specifically trained to provide coaching and mentoring
o Closely connected to full time college faculty
o Recognized and rewarded for their work

4. Teacher preparation programs will
o Implement clinically based model of teacher preparation
o Focus curriculum on student achievement
o Develop strong research components to use student performance data for program improvement
o Eliminate gaps and redundancies in programs, accommodate changing needs of K-12 partners, and reflect and surpass best national practices of traditional and alternative models

Potential Participants
RIACTE, RIDE, RIBGHE, Kids Count, RI Foundation, NEA, AFT, RIASCD

What do we do next?
1. Submit your comments, suggest your ideas on this public forum. Mention your name.
2. We will set up a faculty meeting to discuss where we are going, and who else do we need on board to get there.
3. We will also reach out to other programs, our K-12 partners, and other potential players.
4. We make it an actionable plan.

Starting over

2010-12-30T16:38:00.002-05:00

If the Earth did not have this weird tilt in its axis, wecould have been very different species. But it does, so we have seasons, whichforce us to live within specific cycles. It also spins, which not all planetsdo, and gives us day and night. The time is given to us as a predictable andinevitable change. We even add to that by creating an arbitrary date in themiddle of the winter to start over again. Why start each year mid-season? -Probably, because we want more seasons. We need an opportunity to forget our failings,and fantasize about the future, about how things now will be different, and howwe will exercise, eat well, and be organized, and even nicer to others. Eventhough it is somewhat predictable, we still perceive time as a wave of newnessrushing towards us like at a sea shore. We want to both keep our memories, and yet notlet them dictate every future step. The belief in newness is a way ofarchiving, and somehow discounting the past.

Time is such an interesting thing to think about, because –can you see? – both hope and possibility come from our relationship with time.The difference between the past and the future is freaking profound: We cannotdo a thing about the past, but we know it. We can do a lot about the future,but have no knowledge of it. Things we know – we cannot change; things we canchange – we don’t know. What a bummer of a world; too bad there isn’t anyother. The universe quickly hardens right behind our backs; push and the cementof completeness will not even budge. And the other end of the universe justbarely appears out of the fog ahead – visible enough to be scary, but not clearenough to be comforting. What do we do? We chat! We drag the past with us,portending it is still malleable. We pretend the future is real, and can bepredicted, prepared for, and tamed.

The New Year for me is the crunch of snow under my feet, anda cold wind stealing my breath when we face each other just the right way. Iwas probably four or five, and my mother was taking me to the day care, soearly, it was still dark. I was all bundled up as only children in Siberia aredressed – almost round, with a scarf over my mouth icy and wet. When I squirm,- and squirm I must - the lights in snow crystals grow large, large, and hugebefore disappearing. My eyelashes are sticky, but it is really warm. There isno past, and no future; none of that stuff. Yes, one can exist without time,and without the need to start over. It just does not last long.

Academic freedom is a contract

2010-12-16T16:53:00.003-05:00

1940Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure started it all.It is a short and simple statement, which is very often misunderstood. Thepreamble is especially easy to miss. “Institutions of higher education areconducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either theindividual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends uponthe free search for truth and its free exposition.” The intent of the documentis quite clear: the society must recognize that scholars and teachers knowsomething that the public in general does not and therefore should be trustedto research and teach the way they see fit. However, in exchange we promised touse the freedom for the common good, and the deal must be verifiable.

The recognition of freedom is not therefore given to usindividually, but to professional communities to which we belong. For example,to get hired, one needs a doctoral degree, which is conferred by otherscholars. To publish a paper, one needs a collective judgment of peers onmerits of it, which is done either through peer review, or subsequentcritique/study replication, etc. Grant proposals, IRB, tenure and promotion areall instruments of collective judgment. In other words, nothing about theacademic freedom is arbitrary or whimsical. You’ve got to prove your point toyour peers, even if the public in general, or your dean won’t understandanything you’re saying.

This obligates us to collaborate on program development. Noone can claim academic freedom as a simple right to do what one pleases inclassroom. If you know your version of the class is inconsistent with those ofyour colleagues, you are obligated to talk and make an effort to convince eachother, using actual evidence and rational argument. If there is no agreementamong you in the department, appeal to research and opinion of the professionalorganization. When no consensus exists, it is fine to experiment, but theresults of your experimentation should be discussed, and made public. The sameapplies to all instances of the curriculum drift: courses once designed as asequence drift apart, and create gaps or needless overlaps in what students shouldknow. Texts and methods get outdated, or isolated and marginal. Our knowledgeof the field may get rusty or lopsided. Our programs may get out of sync withthe most current thinking in the field; we may miss important research. Those thingsare impossible to do alone; we all need colleagues.

We have relatively weak institutional controls to maintainquality of teaching. For example, there is no blind peer review of syllabi, andno routine peer observation. We rarely demand actual data on student growth inour classes (the irony of teacher preparation – we expect our students todevelop a work sample, and to actually assess their student learning, but don’tdo what we preach). How many of you routinely do a pre- and post-assessment inyour own classes? Raise your hands… one, two. When the institutional controlsare week, we need to create them, and in the meanwhile strengthen ethicalcontrols. Academic freedom is a deal based on trust; if public loses trust inus, the deal is off.

It is very tempting to just talk yourself into believing howgood you are. “I know I am doing a great job in my classroom, and don’t needanyone to check on me.” I don’t know how many times I heard this in one form oranother. But hey, how do you know it?If you cannot explain it to your colleagues, how can you prove it to yourself? Oh,you just feel good? You see it in students’ eyes? You receive thank you notes? Wouldyou use any of these “data” in your research? If not, why do you believe it isgood enough for teaching?

We all need someone to check on us, and it better be a colleague(next door, or across the country), than the heavy hand of state agencies,accreditors, or administrative types like me. Because you know what? When adean comes to your classroom or looks at your syllabus, she or he probably hasno idea how your field works. In those cases, you should claim your academicfreedom and stick to it. But you cannot claim academic freedom against yourpeers, and you are obligated to be a part of a community. And the communitymust prove it acts for public good, not to promote its own interest. That wasalways a part of the deal.

Teacher quality as an ethical dilemma

2010-12-10T12:36:00.003-05:00

Social institutions and systems cannot work on legal rulesalone. Even such hard core mechanistic ones as financial markets depend on adegree of trust and an informal understanding of what is ethically acceptableand what is not. When people rely on regulations too much, the systemseventually collapse. Teacher education is not an exception. In the end, we putour names, our reputation, and our conscience behind every student we graduate.We are in this profession, because we want to be supportive and nurturing toall students. However, our ultimate ethical responsibility is to children ourgraduates will one day teach. The test is very simple: would you like to havethis particular individual to teach your own children, nephews, nieces, orgrandchildren? If you are not comfortable with the idea for any reason, youshould do something about it.

The screening mechanisms we have are imperfect, and couldnot be counted on to work all the time. GPA, course grades, and observationforms – all are needed to provide a degree of objectivity to the process, butin the end, it is your professional judgment, and your personal responsibility.Someone can get good grades and try really hard, but just not have the rightpersonality or enough knowledge and ability to be a good teacher. Someone canlack social skills, or have a disability incompatible with teaching. Just likeblind people cannot be allowed to fly your airplane, a severely dyslexic personcannot be an elementary teacher. Moreover, such students often do not know ordo not want to believe it. But it is not fair to them also to give out false promises,and condemn them to a life of professional failure. They are adults, and canmake their personal choices in every respect, except for this one. We belong toa profession, and must protect school children against someone who canpotentially cause a lot of harm.

In a recent conversation, a colleague brought up the fear oflaw suits if we dismiss someone without a proper procedure. It is true, thatdismissing or counseling students from a teach preparation program should notbe arbitrary, or motivated by personal irritations or dislikes. The rule ofthumb is this: if you are the only one who is worried, find other colleaguesand cooperating teachers who have the same concerns. Put these concerns inwriting – at any point. If they are critical, send them forward immediately. Ifthey are borderline, make it a personal task to follow up on the student at thenext stage of the program. Involveprogram coordinators, chairs and the Dean’s office. Can you explain yourconcern to other professionals? If yes, go for it, but don’t worry too muchabout having a good story for a broad public. It is not necessary. I remember afew years ago one of young program coordinators told me she wants to fail astudent teacher. I looked at transcript – nothing unusual there. Why, I ask? –The student lied about her mother having cancer and about other weird thingslike that. We check the facts, talk to cooperating teacher, and realize thestudent does have some serious personality problems; she is a habitual andimaginative liar. We’re not psychiatrists, but we just know this student inthis mental state cannot be an effective teacher. I am not sure if anon-educator would have the same reaction, but I argue, we should not reallycare that much. We dismissed her from the program, and took some heat fromparents, of course. There were threats of law suit, but it never materialized. Again, our primary ethical obligations are not to ourstudent, but to her potential students. That is a special feature of teacher education, which demands a different moral calculus.

The fear of legal action cannot cloud our professional judgment. First, it is greatly exaggerated. No lawyer will take on a client whohas very little chances of winning a case. Dismissal from a professionalprogram is almost never a winnable case, unless there are signs ofdiscrimination based on unrelated factors. But even if a case goes to court,our collective professional judgment, outweighswhatever myths the fear of legal actions create. Second, if laws were perfect, who would need ethics?
Some students argued with methat they have received good grades and good recommendations before, andtherefore cannot be excluded late in the process. My reply is this: justbecause we made a mistake with you one or a hundred times before does not meanwe are obligated to make the same mistake again. The opposite is true – we shouldcorrect our own mistakes.

And finally, if you have a good case and your colleagues arewith you, I will back you up with all I’ve got. Let’s just make a commitment –not a single bad teacher will come out of our College. And it cannot be someoneelse’s concern.

Personal lives

2010-12-03T16:12:00.002-05:00

Emergency rooms and OR waiting areas are tense places. Ispent some time in them this week with my son who had to have an emergency backsurgery (he is OK and recovering). It was hard to concentrate on work, althoughhospitals now offer internet access. Among other things, I was thinking aboutall my colleagues – these three have been fighting cancer, that one broke herhip; another person’s father or mother is dying, someone else is going in for aplanned surgery. But someone just simply had bronchitis, and someone else Idon’t know about had sick children, broken transmissions, family troubles, orfinancial crises. How do they all cope, and how do I know where my requests,demands, and messages come into their lives?

Somewhat disparagingly, It is called personal life; as if alife can be anything but personal. One is supposed to keep it separate fromwork, or so I was told by someone. Butcan we, really, any of us? – nope. It affects us, and sometimes in ways thatare not easy to trace. I found myself, for example, very cranky and critical(more than usual anyway) when I came back on Wednesday. Why? Because I amworried about my son, because I wonder if I could have done anything to preventhis injury; perhaps one more word of caution, one more doctor visit could havemade a difference. I am frustrated because unlike Windows, real life does not offera system restore point. But that’s just a theory; this may very well be a mildflu or something else entirely.

We are not rational beings, far from it. Our subconsciousminds do things for their own strange reasons. We do not understand much of ouremotions and reactions, sometimes until later, sometimes never. And if we donot understand or fully control our own actions, how can others? This is way humanshave developed the judgment gap, the ability to suspend judgment. “Well, he is rudebut who knows what’s going on in his life?” “She is absent-minded lately, butit will probably pass when she works through her issues.” That sort of empathicimagination is not given to us at birth; it is something we struggle to build;some with the help of religion, some without. It competes against our verybasic need to defend ourselves, to counter aggression with aggression. Ifsomeone is rude to you, you must feel very secure to blow it over, and allowfor complexities of a human psyche. If you are threatened, the empathicimagination shuts down, and forgiving becomes very difficult.

I am thinking – how can we help including our colleagues’personal lives in the fabric of our work lives? How do you mix and blend,helping both be good and worth living? Is it a too tall of an order?

Rhode Islanders

2010-11-19T11:50:00.002-05:00

This is the fifth state I live in (after Indiana,Washington, Ohio, and Colorado), plus two different cities in Russia(Novosibirsk, my home town, and Moscow). Regional differences are my privatedelight. Some people enjoy looking for big essential differences. For example,I am often asked about cultural differences between Russians and Americans. Ifind those conversations very boring and generalizations mainly wrong. Bothcountries are extremely diverse on many different levels, and almost anythingyou say about them in general sounds false. However, the tiny variations ofaccent and affect between, say northern Colorado and Northwest Ohio seem to befascinating and somehow more profound to me. For example, people in Novosibirskgenerally walk slower than the Muscovites; Siberians hate waiting lines andeveryone in them, while Muscovites tend to be somewhat more social in line andenjoy a good talk with strangers. One small thing that always gives awayRussians in America and Americans in Russia is the eye contact with strangers:quick and intense for Russians, longer and inconsequential for Americans. Ohioanscan say “I am fixin’ to…” in a sense “I intend to…” I have not heard that inany other state. Coloradoans still keepthe pioneer spirit – it is very easy to talk them into trying something new. Seattleis a city with subtle and sophisticated culture, which you can miss entirely ifyou stay there for a short time.

Because this is my private hobby, I don’t have to be rightabout anything. This is just a way for me to feel more at home in a new place. Wetell ourselves stories not only to learn about the world, but to create a frameof reference, to domesticate our experience. If I can at least understand orpretend to understand just one rule in the new place, I feel better.

Here is my scoop on Rhody. When a driver facing you wants toturn left, you should blink your headlights, and let him or her go. It isexpected, and makes a lot of sense on narrow streets with heavy traffic. You’renot going very fast anyway, so why not unclog traffic going in the oppositedirection? If you don’t, you can get a finger. Traffic lanes are more optional,so you should be hyperaware of your environment. Someone may drive on the wrongside of the street, so you need to scoot over to the shoulder. But there isalways enough space for you to scoot over – that’s the rule. Russians also havea whole set of informal traffic rules, not written anywhere, but clearlyunderstood by most people.

Rhode Islanders are not quick to smile; you have to deserve it.They are more of a wise-cracking, get-real bunch, rather than the sunny andsmiley Westerners, or chill-and-let-others-chill Seatleites. Ohioans tend to beexaggeratingly polite and welcoming, but it actually takes much longer to getcloser to them; there is a clear line between the locals and the outsiders. Ofall places, I found Ohio to be the only place where my foreignness mattered fora while at least. In Rhode Island, onceyou pass the initial test, and proves to be not a jerk, most people seem to bevery helpful and open, with actions more than with words. I had several experiences with DMV and otheroffices, where clerks all look somewhat unwelcoming, but are also willing to lookthe other way when your paperwork is not exactly perfect. The partings areinevitably much warmer than the greetings. This seems to be a place with astronger working class subculture, which I can relate to. Believe it or not, myworking class neighborhood in Siberia was not that different from those inProvidence. People will be suspicious to BS in all its forms, and expect somesolidarity in the common purpose to defy the authorities. But they are notabove trying to take you for a ride, if you look like gullible.

Of course, there is the Rhody accent. I still cannot hearthe differences between local variations within it, and perhaps never will. Butthere is also a specific mannerism in speaking – more loud and more direct; “Iam telling it like it is” seems to be the subtext, which I rather enjoy. In theMidwest and in the West, I sometimes get in trouble by arguing with people.While in Eastern Europe disagreement is a sign of respect (I am taking you seriouslyif I bother to challenge your thinking), it is not in the Western half of theUnited States, and I suspect in the South. You need to give out other signs ofrespect first, and only then can you openly disagree. Here I find a number ofpeople who like me enjoy a good argument, and mean no disrespect by it.

There are probably others who think differently, but they havenot come out yet and told me so. Please do if you’re one of them. We all comefrom somewhere, and bring assumptions with us. The big differences are easy tospot and deal with; the small ones can often go unnoticed and be attributed to illintent rather than to a cultural accident.

What do we want from the State?

2010-11-14T19:47:00.002-05:00

There is a group of deans and directors of teachereducation, RIACTE. We have met twice, trying to find our way into a moreengaged relationship with the State agencies in general, and RIDE inparticular. That we want a seat at the table, and contribute to solving theState’s education problems, is a given. It is a little more difficult to figureout what is it we – meaning all teacher preparation programs - really want fromthe State. From my point of view, we don’t want too much:

1. A sensible and less burdensome state approvalprocess. What we have right now is an outdated, excessive bureaucratic exercisespelled out in an 83page document. It consists mainly in providing a host of different charts,almost entirely on inputs. If we at least could use our national accreditation(which can also use some streamlining, no doubt) for the purposes of stateapproval, it would give us a gift of productive time. It is not that we don’t wantto be regulated; not at all. We just do not want to produce mountains ofuseless paperwork, that’s it. Something closer to the audit model would workmuch better. Come and see what we do – talk to graduates, read our internaldocumentation, our reports, our data, and make an informed judgment on theintegrity of our programs. Instead, we are asked to produce things we do notnormally use for our operations, and things that are unlikely to improve theway we work. This encourages cynicism and discourages professionalresponsibility. As we prepare to submitall of the needed information electronically, it becomes less and less clearwhy RIDE wants to send 20 people to review us, and why do they insist instaying in Providence hotels. Why not review all materials online and just send2-3 people to talk to faculty, partner schools, and to our candidates.

2. We need a support system to follow up on ourgraduates. Teacher preparation should be a system for long-term professionaltraining, which integrates pre-service training with meaningful induction andprofessional development. Right now, there is no meaningful state-wideinduction system, and no professional development system. It is very difficultfor us to conduct any follow-up activities, not just because no funding existsto support it, but mainly because there is no system to tap into. (We cannot even get information on how manyour graduates were hired, and where they work. Eventually, we are supposed toget data on student performance linked to teacher identifiers, which in turn shouldbe linked to their teacher preparation program. That would be a veryinteresting research data, but I doubt it can be readily used to evaluatequality of our programs.)

3. The State is planning to revise its teachercertification, which is probably a good thing. We would like an opportunity todiscuss some clear distinction between initial licensure and addedendorsements, mobility between types of licensure, etc. In general, anopportunity to provide input in policy decisions would be welcome.Policy-making is a messy business, and often leads to unintended consequences. Teachercertification changes may lead to revisions in multiple programs, which is verycostly, and tend to distract us from program improvement. A simple opportunityto provide input into the process is quite vital to our work.

There are probably other things we need and want. In theend, we want to be useful, and treated as a partner and as resource rather thanas an obstacle and a passive object of regulations.

The Pen and Line case

2010-11-05T18:03:00.001-04:00

Here is a great case study for an organization development course. This is, of course, an imaginary scenario.

A new Dean comes to a School that has decided to adopt a new electronic portfolio management system called Pen and Line (P&L). This is a second attempt for the School – the first one failed because the previous provider went bankrupt. The School has gone through a thorough process this time, evaluating several commercial providers, and the committee has unanimously selected P&L. It seems to have everything one may need for building a School-wide assessment system, with some great reporting features. Although no one had any illusions about the time investments into learning and customizing the system, the long-term benefits seemed potentially very high. Having a unified assessment database with multiple users would eventually save a lot of time and human resources. The Dean, however, still had nightmares from similar efforts at another institution and with a different commercial provider, that took five years instead of one year, and still did not provide an adequate solution.

Projecting too much from previous experiences is never a good idea, because it substitutes actual history of an organization with one’s fantasy; the fantasy will eventually collide with reality. After some internal debate, he admitted being wrong, delegated authority to a small but very capable implementation committee, and just asked them to go slow and begin with a small scale pilot.

There would be no story, if it went reasonably well. In a healthy organization, leaders should be told to back off, and to delegate; people should be able to correct each other’s mistakes. However, the committee, initially very enthusiastic about the platform, started to discover problems – none of them separately seemed too big, but together they just reached the level when the group should start worrying. It is probably worth it for students to pay $80-90 for a product that works well, but is it for a product that does not? Now, this is not a proof the Dean was right all along; no one had the understanding of the system, and he certainly had no greater knowledge than anyone else. The difference between stupidity and an accurate prediction is often explained by random chance.

Here are some problems: there does not seem to be way, for example, to enter lesson observation evaluations without creating an individual account for each cooperating teacher, and bringing them on campus for training. Given the significant size of the program, and very fluid cooperating teachers’ body, this would mean committing vast resources, and possibly causing a lot of frustration. There is no way to use evaluation instruments other than rubrics. There is no way to combine 5-scal rubric with a 2-scale rubric. The company’s customer support is very weak, documentation almost non-existent, which only means the School should hire someone to develop all these. Some of the features were never piloted before, so the School is actually providing an important field testing for the company, for free. However, let us not forget the strengths: the program has a great data reporting capabilities; it looks and feels modern, sophisticated, the company behind it seems to be stable, and there is a chance the bugs will be fixed at some time in the future.

There are two very important complicating factors:

No one knows of a much better provider. Adopting any other system may mean throwing away all the precious P&L expertise already acquired, only to buy into another product that may have a different set, but perhaps the same number of problems. Going back to paper and pencil with manual data entry is almost unthinkable – not because it is necessarily more expensive, but just because it would project a wrong image to students and partner schools. It is really going backward in the digital age. There is another – intermediary – solution, with using a free product that is not as sophisticated, especially with respect to reporting. It would meet most of data collection needs, but does not offer a true portfolio option (which could be easily shared with the world). In other words, none of the alternatives are perfect or risk-free.

Some faculty and programs took the implementation plan very seriously, and already invested their time in P&L. The product works well for smaller programs, and very well for individual classes. What is more important, the early adopters told their students to buy the product, motivating the request by the impending School-wide implementation. However, there is another group of faculty that do not see the need for the new system, feel they were not consulted enough about adopting it in the first place, and are generally tired and simply do not want yet another darn thing to learn. This happens to be a particularly difficult year, because it is the accreditation report writing season. The demands on faculty time are pushed to the limit; a revolt of a sort is not out of the question. The School leadership is now stuck in an unpleasant situation where either of the two decisions – to go ahead and eat the cost whatever it is, or to pull the plug on P&L – is guaranteed to offend and alienate someone. There is probably a group in between that does not care one way or another. However, this is not about the numbers. The early adopters are a very important group – they try things out, they take risk, they support the School’s initiatives. How can you afford to alienate them, considering they have not done anything wrong, other than trusting you? The active resisters are also a very important group; they keep the organization healthy by providing pushback and keeping the bureaucratic expansion in check. Those two are what ecologists call “critical species:” not necessarily most numerous, but a system falls apart without them.

The case study question for an aspiring manager/leader: what would you do? Keep in mind the group dynamic question: how much of an active role can the Dean play, considering he made a mistake of projecting past experiences and micromanaging once already? Who should decide and how? How does one make a decision in the absence of hard evidence? Consider group dynamics within the leadership group and between the leadership and all other faculty groups, with their diverse interests and cultures.

Analyze the situation and find a balanced solution. Consider general options below, but seek other creative options:

Commit to the product unquestionably, and implement as soon as feasible. Benefits: reduces the gap in implementation, provides stability for the early adopters, and enhances credibility of the office. Risks: What is the level of problems with the product will turn out so high that we cannot sustain it long-term anyway? We simply do not know the extent of challenges yet.
Pull the plug now; let programs use the P&L if they chose to, but switch to the intermediary no-frills-product for all School-wide data needs. Benefits: we know it can work, and it is free to students. Risks: The no-frills product may also have bugs; it still requires development and testing, and it will never get to a true portfolio level. Another risk: it is plain embarrassing to do that; we look like fools.
Delay full implementation, and continue piloting for at least another semester. Alternatively, ask the early adopters to pilot, wait with everyone else. Advantages: We will better understand the extent of the problems and feasibility of solutions; learn about the cost of implementation. Risks: We’re getting deeper into the product without guaranteeing that it will be fully adopted. This maybe just an unacceptable risk for the early adopters. It also creates a disincentive for active resisters – they may never believe us again. I n addition, keeping data in different places defies the entire intent of the project: creation a single data management system.

Isn’t this an interesting case? I bet someone can come up with a simple and elegant solution, which will keep everyone happy and yet provide the School with a useable, flexible, and modern data collection and reporting system. If you want to try, submit your comment here – signed or anonymous. The comments are moderated, because of spam robots, but all relevant ones will appear within a day.

Getting there

2010-10-29T18:33:00.002-04:00

In most cases, we know what is the right thing to do, buthow to get there is a much more difficult, and I would say, a much moreimportant question. It is actually fairly easy to see what is wrong in theworld – both in the larger world, and in our small world. Imagining how itshould be is also not that hard. The large swaths of the territory in betweentend to lay unexplored. People who go there are my heroes, even if theysometimes get lost. They come up with ideas about how things should be changed,revised, improved, and approved. To every objection, they have yet anotheridea, another plan of actions.

My son is reading Dostoyevsky now, and I was reminded abouthis descriptions of Russian intelligentsia: people who cared deeply aboutinjustice, and knew how a just and kind society should look like, but nevercared enough about how to get there. Their problem was in misunderstanding ofthe Czar’s authority. They simply saw the beginning and the end of the journey,and assumed that one in power should be either very evil, or very stupid not tomake the journey. Till this day, most people identifying themselves asintelligentsia perceive authority as something unclean, if not outright evil.Having never had been in power, they do not understand how it works, itslimitations and challenges. Only for some very brief periods of time some ofthem tried to run the country, every time with disastrous consequences. Theoptimism and moral outrage quickly turn into cynicism: if it cannot be changedright away, then it cannot be changed at all. That’s where I am the leastRussian, hopefully.

Peoples with democratic traditions have overcome thisdisease, to various degrees. Many Americans, for example, took part in runningsomething – a PTA, a club, a block party, a car pool. They have been toelections, where their voice actually mattered. Any illusions about a simpleway from A to B tend to dissolve by adulthood. But the human impulse behind it such an illusion is always in place; itis natural and one has to train oneself out of it. It goes like this: when A isso bad, and B is definitely so much better, why doesn’t someone DO somethingabout it? Like, RIGHT NOW? Well, probably, because there is no someone, orsomeone does not have enough authority, resources or time, or someone simply hasno idea how to cross that stretch of land.

This is all, of course, about the coming elections. Go andvote for someone who you think has a better idea on how to get there from here.

Talking Points, sound bites, and other useful ammunition

2010-10-22T12:47:00.002-04:00

Last night, I had a long conversation with someone very thoughtful, and knowledgeable about educational reform. Basically, she asked two things: how do you respond to various criticisms on the quality of teacher preparation, and what kind of innovation is happening at RIC. I tried my best, but in the process realized that I don’t have a list of talking points. Thinking on the fly is not hard, but formulating your thoughts is. And because I felt inarticulate last night, here is my attempt at the next morning come-backs, if you know what I mean.

1. Teacher quality is poor, - one should always ask, in comparison to what?

a. In historical terms, our graduates now are better prepared than any generation of teachers before them. Our grads know more about child development and learning theory than older generation of teachers; they know more about how to teach reading, numeracy, and other basic skills. They know much more about differentiated instruction, diversity, and English language learners. They have stronger content knowledge, and are more carefully screened.

b. In terms of international peers, there is no reliable data for these kinds of comparisons. However, there is no reason to believe that our new teachers are less prepared than those in any other country in the world.

c. If you are measuring up against an ideal – what a beginner teacher SHOULD look like, then no one can measure up to that. This is a moving target, and tends to be unrealistic. None of the pictures of an ideal teacher are based on any kind of research.

d. If you are comparing an average graduate to an exceptionally bright and charismatic young teacher that sometimes is also highly effective, it is a mistake, too. Just because exceptional talent exist does not mean we can count on millions of superheroes to fill the ranks of the most numerous profession. Traffic laws and roads are not designed with NASCAR drivers in mind; we should not assume the education system can operate as if every teacher had extraordinary talent.

2. Blaming teacher preparation for persistent achievement gaps in American schools is like blaming police academies for persistent crime, or blaming medical schools for persistence of the seasonal flu. How about blaming schools of social work for persistence of poverty? Where the problems are systemic, and solutions are elusive, looking for a scapegoat is a natural tendency, which reasonable people should resist.

3. Like in all advanced professions, pre-service training is only the beginning, and intensive in-service training and support are simply necessary. That need has been neglected for many years. Turning an 18 year graduate of a regular high school into a competent beginner teacher is already a miracle we accomplish in four years. Turning an 18 year old into an expert teacher equal to someone with experience is simply impossibility. We never promised that, and never will.

4. On innovation. While a radical redesign of teacher preparation is theoretically possible, not one has proposed it yet. Therefore, we concentrate on improving the existing approaches by learning to collect better assessment data, by organizing curriculum, and by improving quality of field experiences. We realize some people expect a more dramatic story, and a silver bullet, but we are not willing to produce a dog and pony show to entertain the public and harm our real work. It is an ethical and professional choice, not a lack of imagination.

5. We do have a lot of things to improve. For example we need to prepare teachers for classroom assessment, working with special needs and ELL kids, etc. You really need to be a professional to understand most of it. Just because you have children does not make you an expert on education, no more than having eyes makes you an ophthalmologist.

6. The way we are regulated by the State does more harm than good. Its review is all input-based, and takes our time and energy away from really important conversations about improving our programs. NCATE accreditation is marginally better, but the balance of time we spend on it versus actual improvements is still negative.

I am not saying we should always be on defense, but we simply must find a way of inserting our story into the public discourse. To do that, we need to make it accessible, and at least somewhat interesting. We should begin by challenging the most common myths, and knowing our evidence. For example the myth is that American education in general is in decline. That’s is simply not true by any account. International scores are slowly rising, the achievement gaps among ethnic and racial groups is still very large, but slowly shrinking. Teaching preparation is improving. What really does us all damage is the endless series of short-lived spasmodic attempts at reforms, which serve the purposes of building political capital in next election cycle. A lot of work is put in developing programs, which are abandoned as soon as there is a change of guard in state and federal offices. As an example: we looked at the list of state-wide initiatives which the State wants us to teach to our students. The document was revised in 2009, but about half of these initiatives are already defunct. Who can have any trust in reforms if none of them stick long enough to produce any results?

The why of the how

2010-10-15T19:02:00.000-04:00

If you have not seen the row of maples next to the Henry Barnard School, you definitely should. Wait for the next sunny day, and go. It is the beginning season of almost unbearable beauty. The color, the smell, the lazy movement of those leaves – all this will awake some wonderful memory of another fall, a memory you forgot you had. I remember my leafy Siberian places. I remember the contrast between the dark-haired pines, arrogantly ignoring the autumn, and the blond and read-haired deciduous species, desperately flaunting their new dresses, and shedding them at the same time.

Our minds are more likely to keep good memories and suppress bad ones. But there isn’t nearly enough memories floating on the surface, - not enough to feed our emotional selves. That is why you should go and see the maples next to HBS. They are available all the time, no appointment necessary.

That is what I do when I am tired or lose focus. We all have deal with many complicated tasks, with people who are just too many and too much, with lack of time, and with some nonsense that has to be done anyway. This entire onslaught we call life nowadays. This is not what human beings were originally designed to do. Our ape ancestors did not know multitasking, speed reading, report writing and deadlines. So we tend to lose the ability to remember why we’re doing all those things, and concentrate on the how they must be done. Maybe you’re different, but I need remindters. The how is an important question, but without the why it quickly runs out of room, corners itself, panics and becomes unanswerable.

And what I discovered over the years, is that the why does not reside in one’s beliefs, or priorities, or in jobs or whatever else looks like a reasonable habitat for the whys. No, the why resides in the maple tree leaves, and can be found there in most sunny October days. Of course, your why maybe living in a different place than mine; I just know they all like to hide and love to be found. It’s the hide-and-seek game for the whys; the hows prefer tag.

Always start from the end

2010-10-08T09:57:00.002-04:00

How do you design something new? - a new teacher evaluation system, a process of transition to new state curriculum standards? But also, how do you put together a faculty evaluation process, or a new graduate program; a new student teaching application, a new way of paying people for practicum and mileage, etc., etc.?

In one of those groups that think about implementing a project, I was involved in an interesting conversation. The leaders of the project argued that we need to first agree on principles, to lay out what has to be done, what is the right thing to do, and only then lay out specifics, address questions about logistics, feasibility, and perhaps scale the plan back. I was arguing that one should always start from the end, from specifics and the limits within which you operate. You need to see how much time and money (which is ultimately, the same thing) you can have sustainably over long time, then translate it into what maximally can be done. Then you need to visualize, to paint the picture of the end result. The next step is to share that picture with all people affected, so they are not scared of the future, and can ask questions about what really bothers them. And only then you should go into how to get there, which is the planning process.

My opponents argued that if you start with limits and specifics, you never set goals that are large and ambitious enough. My way, they say, encourages more-of-the-same kind of thinking. I am not sure that is true, especially for significant change that involves thousands of people who by necessity cannot be all included in the deliberations. If you set up abstract goals and principles, but do not communicate specifics, people will all imagine the worst case scenarios for their particular circumstances, where the new way of doing things works against them. As a consequence, you end up with resistance before you even have done anything. The imaginary stories take root in people’s heads, and soon become reality of its own.

However, if you start with telling people a story, paint a picture for them (but also show a form, a sample, a time estimate), that becomes a part of their imagination. People who are affected but excluded will always feel vulnerable, so they need to be able to ask their questions right from the start. If you tell them – oh, wait, we did not get there yet in our process, we will figure out how to do this later, - this does nothing to reassure them. It is just a poor communication practice. It is especially worrisome when very significant, fundamental (but unexpected) questions are put on “we will get to that later” list. Every time you do that, the anxiety level goes up, not down. It decreases confidence in your team’s ability to complete the change.

You can be both ambitious and start from the end. Just tell the person affected how this new thing is going to work for her or him. Is this going to be fair? Burdensome? How is it going to benefit each of us in the end? Educators have been the unwilling participants of perpetual reforming for many decades. Hosts of national, local, and district-wide initiatives were either not completed, or degenerated into a joke. Many have become suspicious of reforms – not because they are against change or don’t see the need for it, but because education reforms have never been implemented especially well. Most, I would argue, were not good ideas to begin with. That fact alone should merit a different approach to communication. You cannot simply make your journey from the abstract to the concrete public. In fact, you will be better off to keep your preliminary deliberations completely secret, until you have some clarity on specifics. By the time you go public, you need to start from the end.

Do I always follow my own advice? I wish that was true.

The information puzzle

2010-09-24T17:00:00.000-04:00

This week, I spent quite a bit of time playing with information. I was finally able to edit directly the School’s site (it will take another couple of days to publish the updated version), we were able to launch the bare-bones site for NCATE and RIPA Institutional reports (it is called http://RICreport.org), and we had another go at the on-line student teaching application. I actually enjoy this kind of work immensely. Every time a simpler, more straightforward way of conveying information is found, it makes me happy. Where does it come from? I am not sure; perhaps a hobby, an inclination.

Sometimes I wonder if a dean should be spending his time cleaning up the School’s website. Not normally, not routinely. But at this point of my life here, it is extremely useful. Understanding of information flows is understanding of the organization. Understanding something is simply organizing one’s thoughts, telling a coherent story about it.

Here is an example: NCATE and RIPA reports are both due in May. They have somewhat similar content, but very different structures. For example, NCATE wants to know about our technology resources in Standard 6, while RIPA - in Standard 2. We of course, could write two separate reports, but the problem is – each has to come with hundreds of pieces of evidence. It just becomes a logistical nightmare to collect and organize all of this stuff. However, we figured out that a website does not have to linear, and it allows the same document to be easily attached to two different outlines. Why is it important? Well, if you are working on the description of technology, we must wait until you’re done to incorporate it into the report, and you would put it in two different places. And then we discover an error, or additional piece of information – we then need to edit both places, and make sure it still connects to the previous and subsequent text. A website, however, can be used by all the members of the team as a working instrument – many pages can be edited at the same time, and retain their links.

Anyway, for me it is like a puzzle or chess – a somewhat abstract game of solving information flow problems. But in the meanwhile, I think I start to understand what we actually need to collect and how we should present the good work we do. I would not like to do it all the time – meeting with people, talking, listening are still by far more important and enjoyable parts of my work. But I like my puzzles, too.

Rainy mornings, worthy projects, and good stories

2010-09-17T15:15:00.004-04:00

Autumn is not here yet, but you can smell it. The tiny pungent aroma of wet leaves, still deciding whether to turn or not. The slow lazy rain openly invites all procrastinators and homebodies to stay put, get a Netflix movie, and do nothing. It is wonderful morning for me to break my usual frenetic pace and just think about things.
One of the issues I tried to tackle this week is that of our various partnerships, grants, and public service projects. Which ones should we support, and which we should not? And to what extent can we do it? All wondering comes from ignorance. Several requests for different kinds of support made me realize I have no method of deciding.
What if you found out your Dean has used School’s money to support a particular charity; let’s just say www.iorphan.org , which I happen to like. Just cut a check from one of our accounts, and sent it to them. Would that be OK? - Of course, not. I do not have faculty and administration consent, and there is nothing in our mission that would justify this kind of expenditure. Note, the project is undoubted worthy, and deserves support. But the intrinsic worth of a project is not enough.
OK, what if you found out we provide reassigned time for someone who offers free or deeply discounted classes to teacher of… let’s say Anthropology, in Rhode Island? This feels closer to what we do, and perhaps should be supported. But maybe not? The job of a Dean is really not that closely supervised, and I am not likely to be questioned on decisions like these. However, I always want to have a good story as if somebody asked.
So, let’s slice it. First, any kind of material support should be connected to our mission, which is, if you have forgotten, “is to prepare education and human service professionals with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to promote student learning and development.” Anthropology teachers pass the test, but Russian orphans do not.
Second, the needs of the community are immeasurable, but we have very limited resources. The public (represented by the Board of Governors) wants us to keep tuition low. If we teach for free, or offer deep discounts to one group of students, how is it fair to other groups of students? For example, we run a graduate class for Anthropology teachers for $50 per credit, and charge other students $342 per credit. The latter are, in effect, subsidizing the former. But did we ask students if they like to help out? Did we ask the taxpayers of Rhode Island if they would like to help out Anthropology teachers specifically, at the expense of, say English teachers? No, we did not. Therefore the project cannot drain resources from other programs, and it should at least pay for itself, no matter how worthy it is.
However, things get complicated when a subsidized project actually has direct benefits to our main programs. For example, if we manage to get a status of Peace Corps Fellows site, it may help us recruit completely new population students, which will increase revenues and help everyone. Just the free advertisement of RIC on their website is probably worth good money.
Here is another example of a paradoxical logic, from my previous institution. A colleague was asking for substantial reassigned time to edit a major national journal with 40,000 copies circulation. How is this not a pet project? How does it benefit the rest of us? I argued that every time the journal is printed, 40,000 people will see the name of the institution on its cover page. This kind of publicity costs a lot, and we are getting a great deal doing it for a few thousand dollars a year needed to replace him. Should everyone who edits a journal get the same perks? Of course not, the logic of equality does not apply here. A small journal with only a few dozen readers will not provide nearly enough exposure to justify the cost. It is also easier to edit.
That’s some of the thinking that goes into assessing all the worthy projects for material support.

Incentives and the Goldilocks Zone

2010-09-10T16:53:00.002-04:00

Much of this week, I have been thinking and talking about an incentive system for off-campus programs. I was also reading several recent books on higher education Educational Theory asked me to review. All books express concern over commercialization of the nation’s colleges. The decline in public funding forces many universities into endless pursuit of revenues, and may undermine their public purpose. It is all true, and there are many things to worry about. However, let’s look at a typical state college as a form of labor arrangement. It works reasonably well for traditional students who come on campus to get a degree. There is a well-defined distinction between instructors and a range of support services, from IT to the Bursar, to health center, the library, etc. Each specializes on one function, and because we concentrate a large number of students on campus, the economies of scale make it all work.

This arrangement fails spectacularly, when we are trying to go into the world of working professionals, such as teachers, or school psychologists, or principals. They don’t want to come to campuses anymore, and expect educational services to be available either at or close to their work places, or on-line. They want education to fit into their very busy schedules, families and commutes. These needs dictate cohort-based, hybrid or online, flexible schedule, but high quality programming from an accredited, reputable institution. But to put together and to see through a successful cohort, we need to send someone to another location, and be a jack of all trades: a marketer, a recruiter, a cashier, a mobile library and bookstore representative, an academic advisor, and a registrar and financial aid officer. While many faculty members actually can do all of these things, it is entirely unclear why they would. A full time faculty is guaranteed a teaching load and a stable salary on campus; it is entirely unreasonable to ask people to increase their workload.

It takes a different economic model, and a different system of compensation to get the off-campus behemoth moving. Many universities across the nation have realized it, and established cash-funded programs, financially distinct from state-funded programs. It goes something like this: a group of faculty believe there is a need for a graduate program at a specific location. They use their own social and professional networks, find out exactly what people want and need, and then create a cash-funded cohort. The institution decides whether the project is financially viable and academically rigorous (because remember, our reputation is our most valuable asset). After that, the initiator(s) do most of the leg work recruiting students, helping them to register, to buy books, to use campus technology, etc. In exchange, the cohort coordinator and instructors are paid stipends. At the end of the program, whatever profit the program generates, is divided up between the originating unit and the central administration.

The model works well, but it needs a careful balance. If the incentives are too strong, it may suck the life out of existing on-campus programs. Full-time faculty members become too preoccupied with cash-funded operations; they also tend to convert some viable on-campus programs into off-campus ones, just because pay is a better. If the cash-funded operations empty your campus, you end up wasting significant resources. It is unlikely to happen, because of the constant demand for traditional undergraduate experience, but it may.

If the incentives are too weak, they do not generate the needed level of initiative and effort. If you’re running out of space and capacity on-campus, and do not grow off-campus, you’re also losing opportunities and hurt your institution. The cash-funded programs need to be in this Goldilocks zone – not too hot, and not too cold. It also needs to be highly predictable. If you keep changing the rules every year, people will avoid taking risk.

Another inevitable side-effect of any “capitalist” system is inequality: some units just have naturally more opportunity to earn supplemental income than others. If you see a colleague next door buying laptops and cameras, and you have nothing but the bare paycheck, you start feeling unloved and forgotten. So the deal must have some way of sharing the riches, or it will collapse. Some honest conversations need to take place on what exactly does one promise to do, if one accepts the cash-funded program stipend. Those working exclusively on campus will then know exactly what they don’t have to do, because of the campus support services. There are other nuances. For example, you need to make the cash-funded courses be available as both in-load and overload, otherwise staffing flexibility is greatly reduced. To do that, you need a protocol for transferring money back from cash-funded accounts into the state-funded ones. Other quirks and deformations are possible, and you can only do so much to anticipate them. And we chronically lack time to do anything in a measured way, with all precautions. To start something in the Summer of 2011, we need recruit students in November. To recruit students, you need a clearly defined program. To get to the program, you need an incentives policy in place. To get a policy, you need to talk with at least a dozen people, and more than once.

Assessing the assessments

2010-09-03T12:00:00.001-04:00

Speaking forcefully to an audience with which one does not share a long history is dangerous. One subconsciously refers to one’s own experiences, and the layers of meaning associated with it. The audience refers to its collective experiences, and to the semiotic fields created by it. It is like carrying a conversation from one company to the next; you might be right in substance, but have an undesired effect. I would like to apologize to the Assessment Committee, the Director of Assessment, and all those involved in the developing of the School’s and programs’ assessment system, if I sounded dismissive of the work they have done so far or have planned for the future. It was not my intention at all. The work they have done so far is very impressive, and is certainly one of the much better examples I have seen or heard about. That is why I am still very confident we will get through accreditation by NCATE and RIDE next year, although with some considerable effort. My intention was only to encourage all faculty members to take charge and ownership over their parts of the assessment system, and make it a priority to use the data for actual decision making, and to improve what seems to be too burdensome or ineffective. That is the difficult part – to make all these instruments and data sheets actually work.

Most schools of education around the country are going through more or less the same journey. It started with NCATE’s new standards developed some 15-20 years ago, and requiring institutions to build comprehensive assessment systems, which rely on performance data. That was light-years ahead of the rest of higher education, and no one knew exactly what they want. NCATE made a huge mistake of requiring too much and being too specific (they are trying to fix it now, with various degrees of success). As a consequence, most schools, especially large and complex ones, scrambled to produce some data – any data to satisfy the expectations. Because there was very little incentive or tradition to collect and use data, many faculty treated it as a burden, as another hassle from the Dean’s office. No one had good technology to quickly aggregate and return data back to faculty. As a result a combination of not-so-good quality of data with late or difficult to read data reports emerged. By the quality of data I mean just how informative it is.

If I were given a task to develop a student teaching evaluation instrument, which must cover a number of SPA standards, plus a good number of state standards, I just made a long list of indicators, and check marks, with a rubric spelling out each indicator at 3-5 different levels. To begin with, those standards are not always well-written. Then I was not paid for doing this, and no peer review was conducted. I produced something that looks good and covers a lot of ground, but… let’s just say, not very useful. In the end, I got “flat” data – every student is OK or excellent, on every indicator. We also tend to mingle the function of passing students for the class with the function of providing them with meaningful feedback: the former is high stakes, and discourages honesty; the latter should be kept private, and merciless. Formal evaluation and coaching do not mix well. OK, so you I this report, with boring data I myself produced and inputted, and I lose faith in the whole enterprise of assessment, so I tend to be even less honest and less careful providing the data next time. That creates a vicious cycle I like to call the compliance disease. It is not because someone did a poor job; we all got it, because of the institutional restraints we operate in.

Most thoughtful assessment folks across the country understand the problem, to a various degree. However, they lack explicit mechanisms of fixing it. For one, there is only so much you can push on faculty before they rebel. You just convinced everyone to collect and report data, and now what?... Come again?... You want us to go back and revise all instruments one more time? But it is imperative that faculty own assessments. It is very hard for an assessment coordinator to openly challenge instruments designed by faculty, because the authority is supposed to flow from faculty members through elected members of the Assessment Committee, to the assessment director and to the dean. But authority is a funny thing – everyone says they want more of it, but no one really wants to have it. Many assessment coordinators have recognized the symptoms long time ago, and are now moving to the next generation of assessment systems. My aim was really to help Susan, the Assessment committee and program coordinators in what they are already doing, not to hinder their important work. Again, my apologies if at the meeting I did not express my full confidence in them.

What would the next generation of assessment look like? It will have fewer, simpler, more practical but more robust instruments, very selective but very focused collection of data, efficient technological platforms (such as Chalk and Wire) for instant input, analysis, and dissemination of data, and firmly institutionalized process of using data to improve instruction. But most importantly, it will require a change in the culture of assessment. The new culture will have faculty being active participants, fully engaged into constant re-design of instruments, and not passively taking orders from the Dean’s office. The last thing we want is compliance for the sake of compliance (we also do not encourage rebellion for rebellion’s sake). What we want is engaged critical minds that share the purpose, and are in dialogue about the means. We need to get this assessment thing right, because there is simply no other way to proof our worth to society. We need to be confident that our measures make sense to us and to our students. Then they will make sense to any accrediting agency.

How do you make it work?

2010-08-27T16:23:00.003-04:00

We had a wonderful faculty meeting this week, with considerable poetic talent displayed. The discussion was about where we are and where to go next. Now I am thinking about how to make it all work. It is a different question altogether. Operationalizing and institutionalizing ideas is the hard part. How to capture the energy, include all voices, and at the same time have a manageable number of projects and tasks, so nothing is forgotten and abandoned half-way. For example, we can hurry up and ask people to volunteer to join one or more of the projects below. But do I have the right list? We did not finish discussing which need to be done now, which later, and which – never? Is it worth waiting for the next DLC meeting for two weeks to finalize and edit the list of projects? How exactly do I ask for volunteers? Another survey? Just an e-mail? Ask chairs to identify some names, and then perhaps approach people more individually? Also, what happens if I call for volunteers, and very few people step up? Perhaps I should try to write out specific charges for each of the projects, so people understand what kind of commitments they are getting into. This is Friday afternoon, and it becomes clearer to me that I am not ready to answer most of these questions. However, it is not clear if the energy and enthusiasm will not dissipate somewhat. Those of you who taught for a while, know, that after classes started, but no major projects are yet to grade, there is this brief Indian Summer, a quiet moment in each faculty member’s life. I don’t want to waste it.

Here is another pressing issue: both the AFT-led Innovation consortium and RIDE are working on revising teacher evaluation systems. Both received substantial funding, but the two projects run in parallel. They are trying to merge them, but it is not clear if they can. It is very clear though that for us to compete for professional development business, an on-line portal of some sort needs to be created, where faculty expertise and specific classes/workshops are listed. In fact, if I could show something like that this week, we could plausible affect the proposed system(s). But we do not have anything comprehensive to show. Again, the dilemma for me is this: rush and get some info from some people now. Or go slower and get a better result. Doing it fast is likely not doing it right. Then we’d have to ask people again, for more information, and it just diminishes my credibility among faculty. However, if we go slow and deliberately, with a proper committee deciding how to build the PD portal, consulting with our partner districts, determining what questions to ask, etc., we may miss the boat altogether.

It is unlikely that RI will simply expect a Master’s degree from its teachers as an indicator of professional development. Although many states do just that, RI probably won’t. There is a good reason for that: just any random degree does not help to improve teacher performance. However, there will be some professional development expectations. It can go two ways right now: either each district will just determine its own PD policy, or we will be able to establish some sort of a state-wide market place for PD, where at least some quality of offerings is guaranteed. To weigh in on the decision, we cannot just promise something or have good ideas. We need to demonstrate some capacity, and give people an image, a picture of how it can work. Otherwise, by default, it will go to option #1, which we don’t want. But then again, if we produce something half-baked, it would damage our credibility rather than enhance it. That’s been the focus of my week.

I also attended a Board of Regents meeting, which discusses an interesting issue: to go to two-tiered high school diplomas (like in New York – one can get a Regent’s diploma or just a district diploma), or simply deny diplomas to a number of high school kids. Will this affect us? Definitely, because much stricter graduation requirements will trigger an exodus of border-line students from high schools, if they figure out there is no point in attending when a diploma is not likely to materialize. This affects high school teacher jobs, and our own enrollments… Everything in education is connected. And results of small decisions made today may have large consequences in the future.

My both children, Maria and Gleb are both visiting, which makes my evenings wonderful. We do not get to see each other that often, but now both are within 1.5 hours away from us.

Here is a list of projects, slightly edited to reflect the discussion
1. Shock and awe. Promote graduate programs and ED@RIC in general. Develop a PR campaign: ED@RIC newsletter, mailers, radio sponsorships. Identify the ED@RIC “Brand” tagline. What is it people should have in mind when they think of School of Ed at RIC? Repeat graduate follow-up surveys and employer surveys.

2. Acreditación o Muerte!. Get through NCATE, RIDE, and NEASC reviews, or die trying

3. Wag the dog. Accreditation is important, but we must not let that tail wag the dog. Let’s review all our assessment instruments and processes, with these goals: 1. Stop collecting data no one uses, and 2. Trim down all instruments to the size where they are useful for coaching purposes, and make sense to us.

4. Chalked and Wired. Designing a single point assessment system, with data export capabilities that are useful to faculty in making decisions.

5. Common Core and Classroom assessment. Revise curriculum and assessment to infuse the new Common Core standards for K-12. Develop vertical curriculum threads for each program on how to design and understand assessments, how to make sense of the data.

6. Web 2.0. Working, flexible site with simple logic designed for different audiences, not to reflect our organizational chart (no one cares about that). Provide clear and consistent advising materials. Eventually take direct control over editing the site. Develop a face book page, videos.

7. Operation Off-campus. Market off-campus graduate cohorts (certificates and degree programs). Offer convenient locations, schedules, and hybrid delivery. Develop incentives policy for off-campus, online and hybrid programs. Create a faculty learning community to boost expertise.

8. PD or not PD. Research professional development needs of RI districts, build an online database of experts/ professional developer instructors; package whole programs. Establish a common pay scale, an easy way of requesting workshops or whole programs. Pilot of the Coop Teacher Professional Dev Course

9. Onlining and streamlining. On-line application to School, to graduate programs, to student teaching; requests for payments from teachers; requests for travel money for faculty, annual evaluation reports. Scanning/archiving paperwork. Helping faculty scan and upload reading materials to Bb. Review all department procedures, and kill off everything that is not essential.

10. CRC. Create a working committee with reps from each department to help the Library with their curriculum resource center

11. A playground of one’s own. Let’s take more risks, and return the meaning of “Lab” to the Lab School. Create inter-departmental innovation teams with HBS faculty included. Internship program for undergrads.

12. JERICO. Create Journal of Education at Rhode Island College, Online. It could be focused on what we’re strong in: a dialogue between practitioners and scholars.

13. Sorry, forgot to include this on the firsttry: SASS-Y (Student Assessment Support System?); A group to help students to get through the revised PPST admission tests

The ethics of simplicity

2010-08-19T22:23:00.002-04:00

Some years ago I was writing about complexity. It seemed to me mostly a question of efficiency. I now think it is also an ethical issue. When our programs are too complex, and our communications are too confusing, who is impacted? – The most vulnerable amongst our students. Those include the first generation in college, or unlucky enough to live in a wrong neighborhood and attend a wrong high school. Students who have not had enough exposure to official language and complicated procedures tend to be intimidated and less likely to pursue a teaching career or even stay in college.

It is often attributed to Mark Twain (although it probably belongs to Blaise Pascal), - "If I Had More Time I Would Write a Shorter Letter." This is not a joke; effective communication requires substantial time. To edit handbooks, websites, and guides takes much time, which we do not usually have. What seems a trivial matter, - where should admission requirements to FSEHD be posted?, - actually takes much thought. But this goes beyond communications. Adding requirements, forms, checklists, assessments, and procedures is not always done with the organizational ecology in mind. In other words, people who make a decision to introduce one of these are not always the same people who get to implement it. Moreover, they do not know how the new thing interacts with all other requirements, forms, checklists, assessments, and procedures, and how a student can navigate all of those. And because procedures evolve over years, they tend to accumulate. And we tend to get used to the complexity we create as we learn to navigate through it. However, our students are always new; this is something Hannah Arendt called the human condition of natality. If I am lost in the School’s website, imagine an 18 year old, with no knowledge of college systems, of teacher education conventions and no parent to call on for help.

And because we make things more complicated than necessary, and then fail to explain them clearly, we end up with an enormous burden of academic advising. Some administrators have a romantic notion of advising: deep conversations about meaning of student’s life and career, mentoring about life and professional choices. But most of us know that 99% of advising encounters consist of explaining the same thing over and over again, - simply because students failed to grasp the meaning of it through catalogs and websites, or did not understand how to complete a form. And then we get irritated at them for being so… young?

I am not being critical here; this is just a reflection on how things work, and how we can understand and resist the flow of complexity. This is just a plea to treat simplicity as a moral imperative.

The Organization Animal

2010-08-13T11:12:00.001-04:00

People often personalize organizations; they think a company or a school can have feelings, preferences, thinking and decision making processes similar to those of individual people. That is a misconception. I find it useful to think of an organization as a very large animal, like a behemoth in which we all live, but none of us can see the whole thing. As a whole, it is only partially self-aware, although it has many intelligent parts. The organization does have its logic; it operates and changes according to some rules and certain clock, but those do not resemble anything like you and I operate as individuals or as small groups. Certain practices that may appear as absurd, stupid and even evil, in fact may be artifacts of the internal logic of the organization animal. This is not to say that absurd, stupid or evil things do not exist; they are just much rarer than some people imagine.

An example may help to illustrate my point. Just a couple of weeks ago we discovered that the proposal for the new practicum pay developed late last Spring actually has no funding attached to it. Implementing it fully would put the School some two hundred thousand dollars in the red. We cannot allow this by law; RIC’s budget must balance. Why the fiscal analysis was not done at the time? Very simply, the organizations did not have a clear rule on who and when would check the cost of such a policy change. Several people involved were all assuming that other parties are responsible for checking and as a result, no one did. It’s like an animal without the sense of smell cannot be blamed for missing a stinky warning. Of course now after this experience, it will grow a nose for the future. Just as an aside, adding more organs does not necessarily improve the beast’s agility. Too many checks and balances can be as bad as too few. Simplicity of operations has its own value and its own cost.

Now, the proposal was approved, so department chairs have done the incredibly complex work load assignments under the new set of rules. Then the new Dean came in, and he is a bit jittery. Understandably, he does not want to screw things up in his first year, so he starts running some spreadsheets, and discovers the lack of funds. Here we have a typical organizational dilemma: on one side, there is a legitimate (and mostly fair) decision, on the other side, it is impossible to implement. The easiest thing to do would be to find money to honor what was agreed on. However, the organization has its cycles and rhythms, which, I remind you, are nothing like the human clock. The new budget year has begun, and to increase one unit’s budget would mean literally cutting someone else’s budgets. It could be done with advanced warning, but doing it in a matter of a week is impossible. It is like expecting an elephant to climb trees: perhaps an elephant would like to, but it is not an issue of will.

The solution we finally found is neither perfect, nor is it generous, nor inexpensive. It is a compromise, which still carries a considerable risk of overspending our budget. If you just see it, it may make little sense. For example, we had to take into consideration the exact title of the course as it shows in the catalog. Titles have little to do with the amount of work and therefore, with the expected compensation. Yet the animal has a set of organs related to the contractual obligations. Just think of it as high pitch sound; you cannot hear it, but your dog can. So, your dog’s behavior may make little sense to you, but the dog knows what it’s doing.

I am not writing this to somehow ridicule organizations and this organization in particular. To the contrary, I grew to respect the organization animal. Some are more evolved than others, but in the end, they remain a species profoundly different from their human creators. Our ancestors had to learn to cope with their natural and social environments; sometimes they tried to curse or bribe rain or sun, but it usually did not work. Adapting worked better. For example, living in a desert with a small band of hunters and gatherers is very different than living in a traditional village or a city; you just need to know how those settings work. Organizations are an important part of our environment, too. If you want to improve them, you need to understand how they work, where their strengths and limits are, and what kinds of things they can and cannot deliver. I am not calling for passivity or accepting things as they are. There is no great mystery to an organization. This was just a case against the anthropomorphic bias. Don’t like how your organization works? Don’t get mad, figure out how it can work better.

Knowing what we have

2010-08-06T12:41:00.002-04:00

It is very easy to see the threats to RIC. The policy winds are a-changing. Undergraduate enrollments will decrease because of the push for selectivity. Graduate enrollments react to lack of incentives for educators to get a masters degree. The national climate is also unfriendly to schools of ed, and the word “alternative” seems to indicate something good, regardless of its actual quality. The pressures are real, and tangible.

It is very important though to not overlook what we have. A sober and critical inventory of assets is crucial in any sort of transformation. It’s the set of card we are dealt with; important to know the weak ones, but even more important to see your trumps. One is the large base of loyal customers, if you pardon the business expression. Our students, current and alums, seem to genuinely like RIC, and their experience here. They are treated well, learn from competent faculty, and remember their years here fondly. It is huge, and not very easy for anyone else in the State to match. If we can come up with very attractive, well packaged graduate degrees and professional development ideas, and they will buy. An outsider, for example, will have a hard time selling on-line and hybrid programs to Rhode Islanders, but RIC is the name many of them trust. Of course, we don’t have a particularly strong expertise in that area, but it can be built – there is no secret in how to do it.

It is the same with professional development. Only if we learn to present and package the expertise we have to offer, school districts will use us. Why? Because we can do it at lower cost than out-of-the state consultants, and because many of the people in school district offices are our graduates.

Of course, we’re not popular with everyone. I suspect a portion of educators, especially those in top leadership positions, may not be our graduates, and may not think much of us. They think RIC is a bit old-fashioned, and is not offering the cutting edge education anymore. Some of this maybe well deserved, while some is just innuendo based on myths and no facts. Some examples where it may be deserved: we do need to teach our graduates how to work with data, and how to interpret contemporary assessments the professions actually use. We do need to catch up with the K-12 accountability reforms and methods. Examples of innuendo: your faculty are out of touch with schools; you should do more field experiences. We do not always present our best side to the public, and may not support high-visibility and high-risk initiatives. But that can be reversed in a relatively short time. And let’s be realistic, some people will never ever like teacher education, just because our very existence is contrary to their narrow ideological point of view. However, most people are not like that; most are pragmatic. If we offer something of value to them, they will come to appreciate us.

We also have a full-blown clinical model of professional education. AACTE is trying to toot is as something new, but it is not, at least not new for RIC. All our programs have very significant and rigorous field components. What is most important, practically all our faculty members spend significant time in the field. They can never be accused of being out of touch with their respective professions. We have thousands of personal and professional connections with practitioners. The social networks are a highly valuable asset. Private companies spend millions and millions trying to get the kind of informal networks. I wonder if there is a way to use technology to help those networks to connect with each other. But even as is, let’s not forget we have that in our possession. When we’re ready to market something, I will ask all faculty to give a few phone calls to their teacher and principal friends. It works much better than an ad in a newspaper.

As far as I can tell, we also have a good work ethic centered on students. That is an important asset, which really is the main source of the other. We need to preserve it by recognizing great teachers and advisors, by creating intolerable conditions for slackers, and by just taking pride in being there for our students. We need to protect people from burn-out, create spaces for informal conversation, creativity, and scholarship.

To review, our major assets are four: a loyal customer base, the clinical model, social networks, and the work ethic.

There are other things: we have about the right size, an OK physical plant (I know, needs sprucing up, but believe it or not, the bones are not bad). We have good people in charge, both on the administration and on the union side; competent support staff, and no major conflict on campus. Let us also remember that RI is not defunding us at the same pace as some other states do. It looks like we still have some public support and friends in the General Assembly.

So, let’s start with laying out our weapons and ammunition, like in that archetypal American action movie scene. We’re definitely well stocked; just need a plan. Remember how they always design a clever plan and it is not disclosed till the battle scene? That’s what we need.

Simple Math and the Curriculum Creep

2010-07-30T10:27:00.005-04:00

Formula Load Hours (FLH) seems to be the currency of this realm. The union has negotiated 12 FLH for all faculty, plus “other professional responsibilities” such as service, advising, etc. In addition, just our School reassigns the total of 309.5 FLH in the next academic year from teaching to other things, such as research, coordination, and various worthy projects. In a series of very interesting conversations, I was trying to figure out the logic behind the reassigned time and FLH we attribute to various courses. At RIC, we often give students 3 credits, but pay faculty 4 or more FLH for teaching the course. How do you know what project or course is worth in terms of time? I was looking for some underlying simple math that makes those things fair and equitable. What I am trying to avoid is the individual bargaining – I will do this for X FLH, but not forY FLH. Why? - Because in academia, everyone without exception is working harder than the next person. This is just how it is; we all are acutely aware of our own work, because we’re doing it. The other people’s work seems to be much smaller, no matter what. It is one of those existential biases we have by the virtue of being human.

Anyway, several people, quite independently of each other, have proposed this underlying math: a regular course is about 3 hours a week, for 15 weeks. So reassigned time, or more demanding field hours courses should be measured like that, too. If you can show 45 hours of work over the semester, it is equal 1 FLH. Makes sense? Not really. One thing about simple math – it runs in all directions. For example, the total load is defined at 12. Let’s just assume for the sake of argument, “the other responsibilities” amount to another 3 FLH. If you equate the FLH with 15 clock hours (one hour per week), this mean you’re only expected to work 15 hours a week. Imagine a headline in ProJo: “RIC faculty members admit their work week does not exceed 15 hours!” And then try to fight the public perception. Of course, it is not true, and everyone works much, much more than that. In fact, an average faulty member works 50-52 hours per week, with tenure-track but not tenured people working 52.5 hours. I would not be surprised is RIC faculty actually worked more than the average, because we’re a teaching-intensive institution, with very dedicated faculty. Each hour in class needs at least a couple of hours outside of classroom: developing syllabi, assessments, and teaching tools, grading, communicating with students, individual work, collecting data for accountability, etc., etc. There is no end to it, especially for someone new to the job, or someone developing new courses.

So the simple math should go more like this: my teaching takes at least four full days a week, and the other responsibilities take the fifth day. 15 FLH a week mean I work about 8 hours on each 3 FLH. Therefore, to be reassigned for 3 FLH, I will have a project worth about 15 full days, or 120 hours.

What we do is very hard to measure accurately. And the last thing faculty want to do is to become card-punching, log-keeping been counters. But some kind of a simple math underlying our reasoning is helpful I am not saying my math above is good or workable. The point is more basic: we do need some basic rationale for all these negotiations. One reason I enjoy working in higher education is that rational argument usually wins. I like to be persuaded by reason, and I like to persuade others the same way.

We also need to make sure our programs are sustainable. For each little bit of faculty work, there should be a clear revenue stream. There are two reasons for that.

We cannot pile more and more work on students without having their currency of the realm – the credit hour – reflect the actual work load. That is what I would call the Curriculum Creep. Everyone thinks students need to know more in one’s subject, so we add and add. But then students cannot do the work, because their week is too full. As a result, the general quality of their training dilutes, and we achieve the opposite realm. Does anyone still expect two hours of home work for each credit hour in class? Really? The real solution should be like with the Federal Budget: pay as you go: a. no extra work is added without extra credit hours; and b. no credit hour is added without cutting it somewhere else. If this means a little turf war, fight the war, and find a rational argument to convince faculty in other parts of the program that your course is more valuable.
We cannot kill the College’s budget by the death of a thousand small cuts. We make many small deals, and bargain for getting paid a little more, because of the curriculum creep. We start doing it on our own, because we care about students. But then at some point, it becomes simply unbearable, and we revolt and demand more pay – we forget that we created the situation, and just crave for justice. But then at the end of a year, those people who are responsible for the entire budget, take a look at the numbers and realize, there is no room for salary raises, and we do need to raise tuition. So, students who we were going to protect by not charging them enough, end up paying anyway. By haggling over a tiny pay increase for a small group of faculty, we may damage the chances of real increases. In the end, higher education is not exempt from the larger economic trends. Either we figure out a way of controlling our cost of doing business, or taxpayers will revolt.

I use the first person plural, because I have done all those things, and did not see them till I went to the Dark Side. So, this is the Darth Vader speaking; can you hear the heavy breathing behind the mask? And by the way, don't take this as a sign that I don't support the revision of our compensation for practicum courses. I really do and have been spending a significant portion of my time (I'd say about 1.25 FLH) trying to figure out that puzzle. I am very hopeful we can announce something next week.

How do you know what you want?

2010-07-23T23:31:00.000-04:00

It was a third meeting with various techies people today on how we can have a direct control over the School’s web site. what do you want to be on the site, -- I was asked once again. That reminded me one of those long and interesting conversations people have at conferences. My friend Bing and I were thinking about the connection between desire and cognition: How do you know what you want? How do you learn about your own wants and preferences? It is not really that simple; we are not born with a set of preferences; we both discover and define them from experiences.

As I am trying to figure out ways to work at RIC, the question comes up in many interesting forms. For example, what I really want is not having to express my preferences to the web master. I want us to change things quickly, to experiment, and to collaborate. By putting forth a specific web site structure, I would limit the ability to change it later. This is true for every choice we make: choosing one door closes many others. Another example: I needed some data exported from PeopleSoft. It was something simple, like a report on faculty loads over a few years. While the data was provided to me quickly (beautifully presented and formatted) I really wanted more – an ability design and run this and other queries on my own, whenever I needed. Ideally, we should be able to pull some numbers while talking to someone on the phone. In other words, what I want is to want many different things in the future.

But of course, it is not so simple. We have a centralized way of publishing the College’s web site for very good reasons. Such a site looks professional, consistent, and is quite accurate; it was designed in response to a chaotic situation in the past. If you let everyone run with their own sections of it, the site gradually deteriorates and will include dead links and inaccurate information. I don’t want that to happen either. The complication with our desires and preferences is that we have conflicting ones. Moreover, we very often want things that are bad for us, because we cannot imagine consequences of our choices. This is why the social world is full of tension: we must constantly check and balance each other’s desires. To put it simply, we cannot always get what we want. I am not someone who easily takes a no for an answer; I will keep pressing the issue until the reason for the no is very clear, rational, and considers all possible solutions. However, it is very important to not miss that point where a tentative and ephemeral no becomes a substantial no with which one must agree because it is consistent with other things one wants. Just want to let you know – we’re not there yet with the web. I still want the direct editing privileges; just don’t know how it could be done.

Learning the ropes

2010-07-16T15:32:00.002-04:00

As any good constructivist knows, the best way to learn about something is by changing it. By change I don’t necessarily mean reform or improvement – just making something work is already changing it. For example, you can read about how a new phone works, or you can just try to call someone. I want to defend all those people who get criticized by their domestic partners for not reading directions before assembling that IKEA furniture puzzle. Sometimes it backfires, and you need to take the darn thing apart and reassemble. But the approach itself is definitely sound. We learn about the world by manipulating it. That has been my approach to learning about RIC. For example, as I mentioned in my previous blog, we need to gain some clarity on our budget situation. That’s a perfect excuse to learn about the financial part of PeopleSoft. It became clear to me, for example, that we need another reporting tool, and I need access to another account. Some of it is quite confusing (for example, the info is kept in different ledgers, and their names make very little sense to me), but because there is a real problem to be solved, I have the motivation to make it work.

Another example: Kim, Eileen, Charley and I spend two hours today reviewing the current student teaching application process, and designing its next on-line version. In the meanwhile, I have learned from them about the technology on campus, about our accounting procedures, relationships with partner districts, and about the academic programs we have. If I spent same two hours reading the catalog and manuals, the result would have been much smaller, and easily forgettable.

There is still much to learn, of course. I attended a freshmen parent dinner last night, and could not answer many most basic questions. What are the meal plans? When do we learn about the dorm assignments? Trying to represent the institution, but saying “I don’t know” is not a very comfortable position. Thankfully, those people were really nice and gave me a break.

Being a new kid on the block (yet again!) is helping me to think about the nature of learning. Why do we learn, and how do we learn best; what are the existential implications of knowing and not knowing – everyone who is an educator should be reminded about these fundamental questions. I am greatful to this opportunity.

The first three days

2010-07-09T09:19:00.000-04:00

It’s Friday morning, my fourth days on the job. The moving in and organization took very little time, thanks to an incredibly efficient support by Paula McKeon and people from HR and IT. I spent the entire three days learning about this fine institution. The best way to do it is to meet with people face to face and ask them a lot of questions, so my thanks go to all those who took and will take their time to educate the rookie Dean on the intricacies of the School’s operation: so far, Paula, Karen, Eileen, Ron, Kim, Monica, Ellen, Pat Cordeiro and Pat Hays, Dottie, Bettie - all have been victims of my questioning and probing. How much do I really know? Don’t overestimate the level of my knowledge, especially if asking for a quick decision. However, it is amazing how many subtle trends are similar to those in the other four institutions I have worked before. There are parallel limits and challenges for all education professional preparation schools, so people independently come to similar solutions. Without that background, I would have been completely lost.

I managed to learn some of the alphabet soup, RIC style (FLH, DLC, PEC) and enough about our programs and operations to be impressed. This looks like a thriving, and a competent institution. The problems and issues also start to pop up, because different people bring them up independently. For example, the new practicum compensation scheme clearly landed on the top of my list. It needs to be addressed quickly, but I am still struggling to understand the financial implications of the move. The last thing this new Dean wants to do is to finish his first financial year in the deep red. It is interesting though, that I helped to devise similar pay-per-student schemes at my old institution – not because of the union contracts, but simply for the sake of transparency and fairness. People should get paid for the work they do, because money, besides its obvious value, also has an important symbolic function. From my experience, people do not mind working very hard, but faculty and staff want to be recognized by being fairly compensated.

Another list of projects I am trying to identify as a first priority has to do with operations. We will need to switch quickly to on-line applications to the School, and to practicum and student teaching. RIC has a powerful tool – PeopleSoft, but right now, it’s like driving a Jaguar in the school zone. IT and our staff here have done great work already, we just need to eliminate as much of manual data input and hard copy paperwork as possible. This will free time for Kim, Paula, Dottie, and Rose, so they can help us with the next line of projects that have to do with NCATE accreditation. One small but real achievement: I asked Kim to call to our partner school district to ask if they still require the TB test. Guess what – the absolute majority do not, and neither does the Health Department. We can kill that requirement right now, with DLC’s blessing. This means less hassle for students, less boring work for us!

I am also trying to set up more meetings, as I realize which other key people in and outside of RIC may help me learn. There are smaller projects, which most of the people will probably have little interest in. For example, I realized we need a faculty database to monitor and report on workloads and tenure/promotion/sabbatical processes. We need to develop a way to scan all the archival files, so we don’t run out of room in the office.

That’s my first three days. Am I missing a big iceberg ahead? Please do let me know! In the next week, I will put out a faculty and staff survey to get a more systematic input from all of you. Please think what you think are our priorities, which way we should move, and how we can help each other to have meaningful and enjoyable work lives.

On nostalgia

2010-07-06T17:36:00.002-04:00

As Svetlana and I hit the road a week ago, our nostalgic road trip began. Revisiting old places wakes up memories one did not think one had. It brings up little details, random segments of your life, and makes it richer, just a little more textured and nuanced. My entire life in America is connected to I-80/I-90 corridor. Along the desert roads of Colorado and Wyoming, giant insects - field sprinklers –look at a passerby with their mechanical eyes, wondering, wandering, watering. They greeted me as I drove another truck from Ohio to Colorado four years ago. Now we were leaving friends behind; their voices slowly fading, their faces turning into memories.

Around Chicago, I-80 merges with I-90; turn west on I-90 and you can get to Seattle. Almost 20 years ago, my two friends (one Kenyan and the other Sri Lankan) drove a drive-away white convertible that way. We had about $100 and one driver’s license among us. That was the city where we rented our first apartment, where both of my children went to their first American school and promptly turned into Americans. A warm, wet, hip, welcoming city, Seattle gave us home and many friends. This is the town my daughter still calls home, because she graduated from high school there. We did not want to leave it.

Then, on the third day, we could not resist stopping by the University of Notre Dame, just a minute from the highway. In 1991, I rode a bus from the O’Hara airport to South Bend with my two friends, a Latvian and a Ukrainian. We were still from the same country, the Soviet Union, only to leave the place citizens of three different ones. An intense flood of delicious and painful memories passed through me as we walked on campus. Notre Dame is very beautiful; it always looked somewhat otherworldly for me. I had to struggle very hard here to learn the language and this new country. I had to claw through the cotton of incomprehension and misunderstanding. ND is a special scar on my psyche.

Later the same day, we passed through Ohio. Hwy 75 would take us to Bowling Green in no time. BGSU gave me my first professional job; I started there as an assistant professor at $36,000. That is where I learned how to teach and what a university is all about. We spent seven years there, amongst corn and soy bean fields, friends and colleagues. That is where we bought our first house, a war box fixer-upper. That is where my son’s high school is. We were now driving on the stretch of highway by which I took him to college in New York. On this road, I drove through the entire night to Kennedy airport to make it to my father’s funeral in Russia six years ago.

For me, highways are the best part of America. The rest stops, the beef jerky, tired truckers, messy family vans, “you are here” maps, gas stations in small towns, local radio stations; all of these and more, many more, make the stuff that feeds my memory.

Saying goodbyes

2010-06-12T12:32:00.000-04:00

Well, it’s down to less than two weeks. My last day at UNC will be June 24 and I have been saying many goodbyes, to many people. My thinking is about what I have learned from all of them. It is not that people gave me some explicit lessons. But everyone taught me something. Just to learn how someone may think and feel; how one prefers to work and interact, what people value and dislikes – those are all great bits of knowledge, collectively called “experience.”

For example, I learned how to be careful. Once you get in a position that exposes you to many people, with their various interests, quirks, and histories, controlling your impulses, and your ego becomes a critical skill. Don’t send that furious e-mail, keep that comment to yourself, and pick your fights sparingly. Those skills are largely invisible to most people, but the lack thereof becomes quickly apparent. Thanks, Eugene, for teaching me that. I don’t think most of the College appreciates how much you keep them all out of trouble.

Here is a much abbreviated list of thanks. If you’re not on the list - it is not because I am ungrateful. I am just trying to be brief, which is a trick I learned from one of you. Or else, you taught me something we should keep just between us J.

Carolyn, for teaching me how to love reports
Karon, for always telling the truth
Vicky, for always doing the right thing
Marita, for embracing change
Lynette, for pushing her own limits
Jon, for his practical jokes
Susan, for teaching me how to be interested in other people
Rick, for showing the power of joy in everyday life
Gary, for his quiet wisdom
Fred, for constantly reinventing himself
Mike, for his incredible work ethic
Jim, for his weirdness and normality
Madeline, for always speaking up her mind
Val, for just doing what needs to be done
Marsha, for having a real smile
Irv, for doing good without asking permissions
All the rest of you, for four best years of my life

I am going to take a break with this blog until early July, but then restart it. My intent is to keep the same name, at least for a while. The Rhode Island College’s mascot is the Anchor Man. I am certain it is a great team, but The Russian Anchor’s Diaries just does not have the same ring. Once a bear…

Winding down

2010-06-03T19:06:00.002-04:00

Winding things down is a whole new experience; it definitely puts things into a different perspective.

For example, I have abandoned pursuing any new major projects – on improving operations, or creating new programs, etc. It is somewhat liberating and only now I realize how much time change takes, as opposed to playing defense and just maintaining things. And of course, this is Summer, so the defense play is reduced, too. My time goes into writing down policies, proposals, memos, etc. Those are meant to document what we have been doing. As always, I can see what we can improve, but then I realize someone else has to do it now. Or, it is more likely, the next person may have a different set of priorities. As one of my colleagues commented, “The new person will change everything again.” I thought there was a hint of irony in his voice, and started to worry – are the changes I proposed and made were all for the good, or some were just for the sake of change? One hopes it is the former, but hmm, maybe other people think differently? I could not find any single change I thought was unnecessary (although there is definitely a short but painful list of failed projects). But how can I be certain?

I also discarded a lot of paper documents and books. The documents are destroyed because we either have electronic copies, or they are very unlikely to be used by anyone. With books, it is a different story. Somehow, at this point of my life, I lost the reverential attitude towards books. I used to treasure them all, just because they were books. But now, I look at a book, and ask myself – am I going to ever re-read it? And if the answer is no, it goes to the recycling bin. It is amazing how many bad, uninteresting books one can accumulate. I am irritated by ugly, uninspiring, or just outdated books. Not sure why, perhaps it is because in the middle age, one can see the end of one’s life, and is more realistic about what one can and cannot do. The illusions about finding a bunch of time and re-reading some dusty books are all gone. Vicky found my trips to the recycling bin depressing, and asked me to do it after hours or on weekends. But I must say, throwing things away does feel liberating. Here is where Svetlana and I are different. For an artist, an object may have a lot of potential – as a material for a future project, or just an object with a great shape or color or texture – it can inspire and be drawn. So, I don’t get to throw a lot of stuff at home. But it is my belief that purging one’s possessions is a good thing; it clears our minds, drawers, and hard drives.

Letter # 3: The expectations of civility

2010-05-31T03:49:00.002-04:00

Expectations are powerful. When people expect each other to behave well, most do. When we expect each other to behave badly, things go wrong. How does it work? - Very simply. We all sometimes have trouble controlling our emotions and thinking carefully. It is a given people will say silly things, and judge each other harshly. Such things will happen. However, once a thoughtless word is spoken, it is what happens next that is really important. A community that thinks of itself highly will treat a mistake as such – as an aberration to be sanctioned and then corrected. It won’t necessarily obsess about a mistake, or dwell on it; rather, it will be quickly dismissed and corrected as a mistake. A community that perceives itself as unstable, as prone to disintegration, will perceive each mistake as a normal action, as a further confirmation of its own negative self-perception. The expectations of civility do not simply reflect the norm, they create the norm. Therefore, if enough people go around and worry how things will deteriorate, they create the very condition about which they worry in the first place.

While the expectations of civility are a product of collective behavior, not all people in a social group have equal influence. Some are much more influential; they are opinion-makers and conveyors of social norms. They are the most important nodes of social networks. When these people’s expectations deteriorate, it may disproportionally affect the entire community. From my experience, most of these people do not realize the extent of influence over the community they actually have. Power is such a strange thing: everyone denies having it, and no one has ever admitted having too much of it.

To maintain high expectations of civility, the opinion-makers must recognize the extent of their influence. They do not have to be personally saintly; it is just a matter of articulating and upholding high standards of civility in dealing with each other. The expectations will be violated, but they still need to remain unchanged.

The Lame Duck’s Letter # 2

2010-05-21T16:15:00.000-04:00

The environment in which we work is changing rapidly; to thrive, you need to keep running and not hope the challenges will pass. Just over the four years I was at UNC, we have moved almost all graduate programs off campus, many of us acquired on-line and hybrid teaching skills, we redesigned largest teacher preparation programs, created several new ones, and moved most of operations and assessment into the digital world. This should not be an exception; the School needs to change and adapt. Change is the new normal. You should keep one eye on competition, the other on legislation, and the third on population and economic trends. Among the biggest challenges that I see on the horizon are:

1. Colorado is still a growing state, with a significant need for new teachers. However, it cannot continue indefinitely, and UNC can start overproducing teachers. That would prompt the state regulators to raise requirements, or to limit the size of teacher education programs in some other ways. So, STE needs to figure out a way of expanding its in-service education business. You need to hassle the partner school districts until you can figure out what they want and what you can provide in terms of services. This is the only way to compensate for the shrinking demand for pre-service undergraduate teacher prep. We need to get back to the professional development business.

2. All three Postbaccalaureate programs need to be revised to become smaller and less expensive, a lot more convenient and accommodating for working students, and more focused on field training. Those are areas of growth; UNC has a good name and good experience running those programs – you just need to maintain this position. But is cannot be done by doing the same thing over and over again. The elementary postbac, for example, has not been revised in 15 years – it has to be done soon.

3. And finally, the biggest challenge is the growth of alternative licensure programs (which is really an expression of public’s dissatisfaction with us – only partially deserved, but real nevertheless). Instead of fighting them head-to-head by political means, UNC would do much better by radically redesigning its own model of teacher preparation. Strike the middle road; borrow what’s best in traditional and alternative programs. I imagine cohorts of students, with two mentors: one a university professor, and another a master teacher. They follow closely a real K-12 classroom – both in person and via webcams. The mentor teacher explains what is going on and why, the university professors brings theory and research into the conversation. They do not take courses, but shorter, tailored modules taught by experts on specific topics: methods, assessment, child development, learning theory, classroom management, etc. Each of the experts will have to demonstrate the theory with clips from the classroom everyone is following. It is the “show and tell” model rather than just the “tell and hope they see it” model of instruction. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but one thing I know for sure: teacher preparation should find a way of linking theory to practice in a systematic manner.

The Lame Duck’s Letter 1

2010-05-14T11:24:00.002-04:00

Now that I am almost gone, some thoughts about what I have learned, and what I believe the School should do to thrive and flourish.

I’d stress the importance of institutions over personal politics. As I figured out quite a long time ago, there are two types of politics: one is based on personal favors, and another on some sort of an institutional authority. Every time I made a decision, I tried to treat it as a precedent. Many of my colleagues will recall my question: what is the story I can tell others justifying this decision? This is not just about our Charter (which may need some tweaks or revisions), but about a culture of appealing to the rules, to rational justification, and of demand for transparency. Looking back, I wish my decisions would be challenged more, and that people would read and use the Charter, the BOT Policy and other documents more often. Directors come and go, but the collective will and determination of faculty and staff must be institutionalized to maintain good political culture. The other option is to reduce the internal politics to that of personal favors and trade offs, of blocks and petty squabbling.

Our Charter and other university policy do cuments allow for a great flexibility, yet they spell out principles. For example, the Director has the power to assign people to classes. In addition, we have a pecking order of priorities AND the principle of rotating all perks and burdens (no seniority in class assignments). These three things balance each other. For example, when I assign someone to teach out of the pecking order, it is not an exercise in arbitrary power, not at all – I must have a good rationale for the decision. Not necessarily published or spelled out, but always ready if and when someone asks. My point is – people should ask; it is good for the system, and keeps the Director in shape. The same goes to all other decision makers. When a program coordinator says “I don’t want so and so to teach in my program,” there has to be a plausible rationale, some body of evidence, not just an arbitrary opinion. And was my job to ask for that. Many of these conversations remained invisible, mainly to protect someone’s privacy. However, all business should be conducted as if it could become public at any time. It is what Eugene calls the newspaper headlines test: would you like the story to appear in a newspaper, and would it still be defensible?

I am recommending one addition to out governing system: the Executive Committee consisting of all full professors, with advisory powers to the School Director, and with the charge to monitor fairness and transparency of major decisions. Some other schools have that, and I believe it would be good for STE, too. The committee would not have any actual decision-making power, but could help the new Director to get a sense of our history, traditions, and rules of conduct. It could be called as needed by the Director or any of the members.

Leaving

2010-05-07T17:36:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, have accepted the position of Dean, Feinstein School of Education and Human Development, Rhode Island College. The major attractions are: this is very close to both of our children, and this is a bigger job at an institution that I really liked when I visited.

It was not an easy decision. I realized how much I love UNC and my friends and colleagues here. UNC is exceptionally open to people and open to change; from day one, I felt welcome here. I learned a lot about work, about people, and about myself. I could see something grow from a simple idea to a real program or project. This is probably the most satisfying experience: seeing ideas become reality. It is magical, really. Hopefully, I am leaving the place in a little better shape than what I found it in. And I will always remain the Russian Bear, remembering my years here with fondness. Thank you all for giving me this wonderful chance, for supporting me, for disagreeing with me, for driving me nuts and for giving me such joy. Thanks for everything.

The NCATE report will be turned in tomorrow; immediately after I will start working on an orderly transition, writing up things I know, making plans, and helping whoever will be appointed an Interim Director. It’s going to be just fine. We have good processes in place, good policies and traditions; we have great faculty and staff; things will be get done and get better. In the next few weeks, I will write about what I believe should be done next to keep the School moving ahead.

To build and to maintain

2010-04-23T01:40:00.004-04:00

In most cases, building and maintaining relationships are closely linked abilities. However, I know just a few people who are reasonably good at the former, but are terrible at the latter. Let's call them achilleids, after Achilles who was famously refusing to forgive Agamemnon. It is a rare and a tragic flaw of character; it is incorrigible if the one does not know this about oneself.

Achilleids can be cordial and charming; they can be good friends, selfless and hard working. They get along with others just fine, until the moment the other person does something wrong to them. Most people have a series of strategies to overcome the conflict and get past it. We learn to forget and forgive, pretend bad things did not happen; we find excuses for others as we find them for ourselves; we make up and go on. Why? Because we figure that the benefits of maintaining a relationship outweighs the temptation of ending it. After all, our relational network (sometimes called the social capital), is crucial for our well-being; it is indispensable for jobs like ours.

The achilleids simply cannot do that. They measure relationships in stark black and white terms.Their imagination is easily taken over by fantasies of conspiracy and revenge. They find it difficult to imagine alternative - and more generous - explanations for other people's actions. They seek constant proofs of their friends loyalty, and insist on exclusive relationships. When such exclusiveness does not materialize, they become jealous, and impulsively rewrite their list of friends, scratching one person after another, until almost everyone is gone. Once an achilleid builds a cadre of enemies, he will see any relationship between his friends and his enemies ad a hostile act. If you are my friend, you may not be friendly with my enemies.

If this sounds like a case of fifth-grade logic of friendship, it is probably because it is. Achilleids are just immature in the ways of human relationships; they may get the strength of Achilles in many areas, but also inherit his vulnerable heel. They see the social world in starkly egocentric (not egotistical) terms. It all becomes about me - is this good for me or bad for me? Is this done to help me or to hurt me? The higher calculus of human relationships is just inaccessible to them, because they simply cannot see beyond the immediate circle of relationships between them and other people.

As it is the case with all human flaws, some achilleids find a compensatory strategy, if they are aware of their problem. Those moderate achileids will occasionally blow up, build a conspiracy theory, but then recognize their error (even without understanding it), and get to normal. The stubborn and entrenched achilleids do not know about their problem, and have no choice but construct elaborate conspiracy theories. Because if my friends fall away from me one by one, there must be a conspiracy against me, right? And one thing about conspiracy thinking - it manufactures a lot of proof. The stronger the belief, the more clear evidence our brain produces out of every day life to support that belief. Life is very hard for them, because no one can measure up to their expectations, and because reality provides a lot of proof of other people's evil intention.

The knowledge of one's own shortcomings is of the most useful kind. Denying or projecting one's weaknesses onto others is a recipe for a very unhappy life. I certainly have a list of my own demons, but the inability to forget and forgive is certainly not one of them.

The Netflix Effect

2010-04-08T17:06:00.001-04:00

When you log in to Netflix, it will remember who you are, who your friends are, all movies you saw in the past, and the movies your friends saw and recommended. It will take all of these factors into consideration, and offer you a movie you're will like; quite accurately, I must add. How is it possible that when a student walks into a classroom, the professor does not know her name, her academic history, her strengths and weaknesses – virtually nothing? Most importantly, we almost never know what the student already knows, exactly, and what she needs to learn.

The problem is that differential education, developmental portfolios, and other such worthy educational idea just never had the technology to make them workable and economical to use. Remember the buzz about electronic portfolios? Universities spent a lot of time and money on them, imagining how we will be able to track each student's learning journey. And it all failed miserably, because no one has the time to grade papers in one's own class, not to mention going back and reading each student's academic journey. Even looking up 25-30 transcripts is an ordeal no one has the time for. The same is true for pre-assessments. They are often crude, fragmentary, and give more of a snapshot than any real tool for individualizing instruction. The latter is impossible to do, because… you've guessed right, time.

The truth is, we need the same level of sophisticated data analysis tool the netflixes and the googles of the world just recently mastered. Their computers manage to learn from every search, every purchase, and every click you make. Learning from users, and then selling back to users what they have learned is the secret. Their algorithms analyze and store that information, and convert it into more helpful helpful information. That is what we really need to borrow from them. Every time a student looks for information, registers for classes, asks a question in class, writes a paper, completes a quiz – every time a computer will record, remember, digest, and spit it out for the students and for her instructor.

I imagine working on a new class a few weeks before semester begins. I pull up not just a list of names, but a set of graphics, of easy to read profiles, which assemble themselves into the whole class profile, recommend me content and strategies, assignments and assessments that will move these particular students forward the farthest. All of this would be matched with what I can offer – my strengths, my background, my research, and classroom experience. The Teachflix will even suggest who should teach a class, picking the best instructor for a group profile of students not by what department we happen to be in, or what expertise we happen to claim, but by what we actually know and can deliver. It will also write a professional development program for me as an instructor, scrutinizing what I did the last time around and mercilessly disrobing my weaknesses and gaps, the opportunities missed. And you know what? It is no more difficult or scary than the Netflix; the same algorithms can probably be used. All we need is some imagination, a lot of money, and people to do it. Looks like something a private company might pull off?

Nudging and Sasha’s challenge

2010-04-01T20:34:00.001-04:00

Subtle economic pressures often have large consequences. For example, the high cost of healthcare is, in part, a result of incentive for doctors to deliver more treatments. Individual doctors may not be aware of succumbing to such pressures, yet the aggregate effect is real. A book called Nudge
is about influences on our choices.

Here is an example from our little corner of the world. Teacher education institutions rely on part-time instructors for a significant part of their instruction. UNC actually relies less than many other schools, and we tend to have long-term, proven adjuncts. The existence of full-time and part-time faculty nudges us to use more part-timers for student teaching supervision, and rely more on full-time faculty for teaching other classes. Why? – it is partly a function of the cost: part-timers cost less, and every semester, we have a large cohort of student teachers. It is partly a matter of qualification: many former teachers and principals make very good supervisors, but teaching classes requires narrower, deeper expertise. It is partly a matter of flexibility: student teaching supervision is easy to break into smaller pieces (we pay $400 for supervising one student teacher), while full-time faculty's workload is normally expressed in 3-credit chunks.

In many ways, the division of labor is quite natural. However, it creates some unintended consequences. Some full-time faculty members have little opportunity to get out to the field, and to check how much their classroom teaching is still connected to the reality of K-12 schools. The strength of a teacher education program critically depends on the level of constant interaction of theory and practice. And although each individual instructor swears to know everything there is to know about real schools, the aggregated and accumulated effect of the disconnect may be larger than one person can notice. See our students in action on a regular basis may just spur more innovation in our own teaching.

As long as we notice and understand the negative nudging, it can be remedied with conscious counter-nudging. Here is my challenge: let's commit every faculty member, full time and part-time, to supervising at least one student teacher every semester. The School can pay a small overload (the same $400) per each student teacher, so the scheme remains cost-neutral. If we agree to this as a matter of policy, no immediate results may be apparent. However, in the long run, we would create a significant factor to keep our programs healthy. I will definitely joint the others, and supervise a one student teacher each semester.

Just to make it clear: the proposal does not save us any money; none at all. It is not a matter of cost saving, but simply a matter of counter-acting a negative nudge. We don't have to be passive in the face of economic pressures.

What is easy and what is hard

2010-03-26T12:26:00.001-04:00

As I was writing my annual report for faculty and for the Dean, I thought about things that are easy and difficult for me to do, and why they are simple or complicated.

Organizing information flows is easy. Perhaps I have a particular gift for visualizing how information flows from people to documents to computers. I usually can see right away where there is too much information, and too little; where it is not converted into another form properly, and what can be cut or collected/processed automatically. As much as NCATE report writing is a chore, I really had fun playing with all the data flows, data presentation formats, files, folders, websites. It's like a puzzle, which is not that hard to solve.

Making personnel decisions is difficult. Hiring, firing, evaluating, praising, reprimanding – I don't know if anyone is born with the natural ability like that, but it is hard for me. First, because the information is never objective or complete. It comes to me already strongly colored with human emotions, people's webs of relationships, past grudges and deals. I am always so acutely aware of my own imperfections when I have to pass a judgment on someone else. Not just a passing remark, but a serious, consequential decision that can affect someone's life, hurt one's feelings, or make someone happy. I am always torn between what I believe are the interests of the School and the college, and those of individual people.

Computers are easy. They have a hard, predictable logic. If something does not work, it is not because the machine is mad at me, or that I am stupid. I know there is a solution, even if I have to ask an expert. If it is really screwed up, you just kill the computer and create an exact clone of the old one minus the bugs. People are difficult: their hard drives cannot be reformatted; it is never clear what drives them anyway. They are all different, so each needs a different kind of work and enjoyment. The redeeming quality of people that they have the amazing capacity to self-repair. They adapt, they think, they are able to make peace, to forgive and forget. But there are no solutions, and no experts to call.

Doing things myself is easy; delegating is difficult. To delegate, I need to first see if a task is repeatable, and will likely be re-occurring again and again in the future. Otherwise, the investment in training someone else to do it won't pay off. Then I need to see if I myself understand the process, because teaching someone requires more than intuitive knowledge. Third, delegating implies asking someone to add it to his or her responsibilities, which is not always possible, and sometimes may backfire. Then I need to figure out if the new task is within the person's general level of skills, or slightly above. If it is too difficult, training may take too long, and be frustrating for both of us.

Structural changes are easy: changing or adding courses, reformatting courses, reshuffling coursework, improving individual assignments, instruments, data collection processes. Deep curriculum and pedagogy reforms are difficult. We don't really have an abundance of new ideas, we disagree on what should work. The institutional assumptions are very strong (try to avoid using concepts such as credit hour, a class, a field of expertise, the distinction between liberal arts core and major, and pedagogy areas; the distinction between class work, field work, and home work).

Easy things are pliable like clay; they usually require nothing but an idea, willingness to get your hands dirty, and to work. Hard things are hard like stone; you need to chisel away at them, have patience and right tools. But if you let your clay to dry, and if it get fired in the oven of human conflict, it becomes hard like a stone.

Genchi Genbutsu

2010-03-12T02:33:00.001-05:00

Genchi Genbutsu is a Japanese management technique. It roughly translates as "go and see for yourself." It addresses the simple fact that when a problem is reported to the management, it is by necessity simplified, and made abstract. When a manager who has not been on the factory floor for a long time develops a solution, it does not work. The Genchi Gembutsu principle invites them to go on site and see the problem and potential solutions in context.

We sometimes have solutions offered to us from above that show little knowledge of what is going on closer to the ground. For example, the problem is we have too many changes in schedule; those are hard to track and errors slip in. A solution is to document every change in schedule, with someone responsible signing on every change. But that just shows that whoever thought of it does not know the context in which schedules are developed, and why they change. It is not only top managers that manage to misunderstand the Gemba (the Japanese term for "the place" in this case 'the place where it actually happens' - Wikipedia). Faculty often create rules and programs that are very hard to implement for the academic support staff. Most faculty members never "go and see" what is going on in the world of the support staff. The financial services think they know how to fix the problems on the academic side of the house, and the feeling is mutual. I am probably also guilty of imagining Gemba rather than actually knowing it. Solutions for someone else always look more obvious and easier to come by. One's own world always look more complicated and somehow more nuanced.

This is where our reliance on assessment may be flawed. Classroom assessment is always a form of abstraction; data is only possible when much of context is ignored. Anything with a number is an abstraction. My talks with students always bring different kind of information that the numerous surveys and assessment data we collect. It is not necessarily more complete information; it is biased and skewed by the sample. However, when you just see or talk with someone, many hidden complexities are always revealed. If you want to improve and move forward – yes, collect the data, but don't forget Genchi Genbutsu.

What’s moving us?

2010-03-05T13:13:00.001-05:00

I am an unsentimental guy, or at least trying to act like one. But all said and done, only a few things are really moving. And the English expression "this is so moving" has a wonderful double meaning. To move somewhere, one needs to be moved emotionally.

Last December, our students and faculty collected and wrapped some 1000 gifts, I packages of 3-4 items. I was told yesterday that many parents who picked the gifts up to give to their children broke down crying. What were they crying about? If you are a parent and had not been able to afford a little gift for your child, you'd know. We have no fewer than 500 homeless children in Greeley, and about 10,000 on free lunch – not on reduced lunch, on free lunch. In comparison, the imperfections of curriculum, or inadequacy of faculty evaluation system all look… not small, but not very moving. That we also collected some food for homeless kids to take home in backpacks is moving – it is moving me to try to do more, for it was really a drop in a bucket.

A few month ago, a student came to me and said that her program changed her life – and not only because it is designed for working adults like her, and because all instructors have been knowledgeable and kind. It also so happened that she did not have a room to stay for a couple of weeks, and an anonymous donor paid for her motel. The donor did want to be named, and simply said he was helped in a similar way many years ago, and now is simply returning the debt. This story also moves – moves me to remember the debts I owe to many people.

I am also moved by small, almost invisible things – a kind word to a student beyond the job duties, by a question asked of a colleague about his family, by all small acts of kindness, but also by the acts of ingenuity, humor, persistence, and just an effort to do one's best within the given circumstances. Oh, man, that was really syrupy. Sorry about that; this is the last sentimental thing you'll hear from me ever.