The five goals, or how do we impress people

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.