Too much to manage

Any organization wages a never-ending war against chaos. It commands an army of rules, forms, processes, and procedures to force the naturally occurring complexity in a set of manageable, similar things that can be dealt with in a uniform manner. Otherwise, chaos will take over and make any mission impossible to implement. Chaos is simply complexity that got out of control. Universities, for example have courses, programs and other requirements fixed in catalogues, and schedules that map these out in repetitive time blocks called semesters. Students aided by an army of advisers must turn the complex catalogue information and apply it to their schedules, while taking into consideration their jobs, families, and other obligations as well as availability or scarcity of class offerings. Like in any war, it is important to not underestimate the enemy. Sometimes complexity is too great to manage, chaos becomes inevitable, and it is time to retreat.

Here is one example. Many of our freshmen cannot translate the catalog requirements into a sensible schedule in their first year on campus. Advising notwithstanding, they make so many errors, that the chaos creates real damage to their academic careers, sometimes delaying graduation by years, and sometime derailing their college plans altogether. To reduce the errors, we implemented a program of block scheduling, where every freshman receives a pre-created schedule. This was designed to reduce the errors and relieve freshmen orientation anxiety. That is a wonderful, sensible idea, not at all unique to our institution. However, we discovered that creating over 3000 individual schedules for 64 bachelor's degree programs with 70 concentrations, and registering them all was… hard. OK, it put our resources on the brink of total collapse. Why? – Because the entire university registration system was designed around the minuscule act of a student registering for a course. The system was error-rich, but required no direct management. Once we centralized it, we became like the Soviet Gosplan, a body that was so spectacularly unable to cope with running the huge planned Soviet economy. While market economies are prone to terrible errors, and unintended consequences, they are not trying to manage the unmanageable. In the long run, the distributed self-regulation works. I remember when someone in Gosplan forgot to plan for toothbrushes, and the entire country went into a panic-fueled buying spree that Soviet stores of any toothbrushes for years. Then it was sugar, pantyhose, toilet paper, jar lids, and almost everything else. A contemporary economy with tenths of thousands of consumer products is too complex to manage. Student schedules are very close to that, although the university can figure it out, albeit with much effort. Like any borderline situation, its value is in demonstrating the limits.

Now we are thinking about the Fall re-opening. We do not know what the health regulations will be in effect: do we still need to maintain the 6-feet social distance and an hour break between classes for cleaning? Or will it be just a request to reduce the campus population to a certain level? Will we be asked to impose an absolute cap on class size? We do not know how many students, faculty, and staff will not be able to return for health reasons, and how many will not want to return, and what kind of policies we may be able to have to compel people to return. Most importantly, we do not know when we will know what we do not know now. With seven thousand sections, any major revamp of the master schedule will take many weeks. No one knows what the solution should be, and I am no exception/ However, I am pretty sure it should not involve a team of tired chairs and associate deans manually assigning students to classes and classes to rooms. The quest is for a solution that would allow for thousands of informed micro-decisions, and somehow make the whole puzzle work relatively quickly.

This is just in case you are wondering what they mean by “Planning for the Fall re-opening.”

Past mistakes do not set precedents

Precedents are important in law and in all policy applications. Considering a precedent helps to ensure consistent and therefore fair application of any law or policy. However not all precedents should be followed. Something that has been explicitly recognized as an error or as an aberration should not create precedents. Here is an example: GOP leadership denied Obama the right to nominate a Supreme Court member in the last year of his presidency. While there were many people who objected to this new rule, the Republicans themselves never repudiated it as a mistake. Now they refuse to follow it without any appeal to the soundness of the general rule. That is, of course, a very low point in the partisan politics. For a body so distinguished in their legal and political expertise, the Senate on a brink of a shameful episode.

The recognition or non-recognition of previous mistakes is an important criterion for precedent setting. For example, in Academia we sometimes hear appeals to what appears to be a precedent, but was really an error. A student may say: I did not meet this one requirement in the past, and you passed me. You actually have only to answers here: (1) Yes, I made a mistake in the past, and am under no obligation to repeat it again, or (2) yes, you are right, I will pass you as well. Admission of past mistakes is almost the only ground for denying a precedent. When we are revising a major policy, it is an explicit acknowledgement that the old one had issues. Therefore, appeal to the old policy as precedent is not exactly a valid argument. We would not have revised it if it were OK.

The argument about the “Catalog rights” is similar, although not as clear-cut. On one hand, students who were working toward a degree under certain assumptions, deserve to finish under the same assumptions within reasonable time. On the other hand, this works only insofar as they can show that the change in requirements affected their planning. It is very difficult to do, so we grant them a blanket right to stay with the old catalog. But this right is not unlimited, and not unqualified. After all, we revised the degree, because we thought the old one was not good enough anymore. So, no you cannot get a degree you started in 1971. The world has moved on. The same applies to faculty members, hired under a different set of T&P guidelines: it is a valid argument, but not an unqualified one. Like many other things in the world of policy, it is a balance between two or more competing considerations. Policies rarely have a simple, on-sided justification. Almost always, they are compromises between two or more competing priorities.

The Third Kind of Intelligence

A recent HBO documentary Future of Work shows how computers and humans are intelligent in different ways. For example the world-class chess play is hard for humans, but easy for computers. Yet a task like picking up an apple off a table without crashing it, is still very hard for a computer. Similarly, organizations can be thought of as another, third kind of intelligence, different from that of an individual human and of a computer. Theirs is the intelligence of the third kind. Certain things are easy for humans or computers, but hard for organizations, and vice versa.

Take memory, for example. Humans are very good at marking important memories with emotional markers, and wiping out everything else. Computers never forget anything, as long as they have enough storage and a retrieval system. Organizations remember routine, repeatable processes very well. In general, you will get consistent, more or less efficient treatment when asking for travel reimbursement. Your paycheck will generally come on time. At universities, classes will be scheduled, and grades given to students, degrees conferred, and faculty evaluated. However, organizations are bad at learning new things. For example, a university decided that all event announcements will be access-friendly, and offer accommodations. Yet it is not happening, because there is no routine yet to make sure it happens. Just a commitment, a decision to do something work for individual human being, but not for an organization. It needs to establish a routine, otherwise nothing will happen. The trick needed is something like this: OK, where all events come to be announced? Well, there are newsletters sent by Communications. That’s the one control point where we can enforce the new procedure. So, someone has to be told in writing, that from now on it is an extra check, an extra requirement. And by the way, the deadline for announcements has to be pushed back, for we need a week to schedule a captioner or an interpreter.

Organizations rely on written policies as a special kind of memory, but those are very imperfect, often contradictory, hard to find, and slow to update. Moreover, these little proсedural tweaks tend to accumulate over time, making organizations slow and inefficient. Every little procedure makes sense, taken altogether, they may become too much.

Organizations, just like computers, are very bad at forgetting. Once a policy and procedure is established and institutionalized, it keeps going even if the original impetus is forgotten. One example I wrote about is the catalog; there are many more. Individual humans are much more adaptable. Once a routine becomes obsolete, they are able to ignore it, and eventually forget. Computers can be rebooted, and all the software junk wiped out, but this doesn't happen with organizations. They have deep structural memories, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Organizations are both dumber and smarter than humans and computers that comprise them. They are incredible for coordinating specialized efforts of multiple individuals and machines for a large and complex task. Nothing of importance can be achieved without organizations. However, many of their species are denied the gift of mortality, which can also be understood as the gift of reset. Forgetting and death are friends of the human and machine intelligence. They both prevent clogging and excessive growth. Organizations are immortal like gods, and like gods they suffer from knowing too much, and failing to adapt.

Kill the Catalog

Catalogs were the primitive foreshadows of websites before the websites. You would get a thick book with everything about a university in it. Most universities do not print them anymore, but they continue the existence as a separate section of a university’s website. It is a curious atavism, a testimony to the peculiar conservatism academic institutions. Look at Sac State’s catalog, for example. It has 21 sections, most of which really should be elsewhere on the university’s site, or they simply duplicate the information already provided elsewhere. For example, it has its own faculty directory (just names, without the contact information!!) in addition to the regular site’s directory. The President’s welcome is in the catalog, but it should be in the About section of the site, or on the President’s page. Who would go to the catalog to look for it? The same could be said about the Accreditation section – it should for sure be on the main site, normally under the About menu. But wait, the catalog has its own About the University section, with Mission and strategic planning – exactly the same as on the main site. It has yet another directory of the campus’ Leadership, with just phone numbers, but no e-mails or office locations. The catalog has two big sections called Campus Life, and Colleges. The information on them repeats the websites. Academic policies in the Catalog either cite or repeat what’s already in the University’s Policy Manual. The Bursar information on fees is exactly the same.

Just imagine how much time and effort is going into keeping the main website pages and the catalog pages in sync. Should I mention that despite best effort, such efforts are not always successful? Some program pages on the site contradict their twins in the Catalog’s parallel universe. This partially explains why we need so many advising resources for students. We confuse students with a chaotic information environment, and then hire people to explain what’s really going on. The question is – why are we doing the silly, costly, confusing thing?

Fundamentally, the catalog is simply a part of a website that follows a different, stricter set of editing rules. Certain descriptions and policies may not be changed on the whim, without a proper chain of approval, and even then, they can only be changed once a year. I would say there are three kinds: (1) certain academic policies, such as admission requirements, degree requirements, the rules about dismissal, student rights, etc.; (2) program requirements, and (3) is course description. If the catalog is truly intended for students to use, we must admit that students do not care what rules we follow to update the information. Therefore, the special status of catalog pages should not be visible to the user at all – it is our inner workings. Any information published anywhere on our sites (or given out as paper handouts) is official, and will be taken as such should a dispute arise. We need to kill the catalog as a stand-alone user space, while certainly keeping it as a quality control mechanism.

As a first step, we should delete the parts of the catalog outside the three areas, and integrate the content with the existing sites and pages. In the second step, we should make sure these three things only appear in the catalog, and are in no way replicated elsewhere on our sites. The program sites should be allowed only to link back to the catalog or pipe the info. This needs a little technical problem-solving, so that the catalog’s content is “piped,” not simply linked, but it is a trivial problem to solve.

What is not trivial is finding the will and the resources to take the informational ecosystem of the university seriously. Perhaps we should ask students to audit what they see, because most of us faculty and administrators get used to the byzantine maze of the information on campus; we fail to see its problems. Perhaps we can hire a user experience expert to do this for us. We are now trying to rebuild the website, perhaps it is a good time to look at the catalog.

To pay or not to pay, that is the question

I will declare the next year the year of curriculum. For a variety of reasons, we have accumulated curriculum revision needs. Some programs just need a face-lift: a minor adjustment, sexier course titles, add or remove a course or two. Others need to be converted into the online form. Still others need to be completely reconfigured in terms of scheduling, sequencing, and switching to a cohort model. We also need to develop several new curricular products, like certificates and full programs. We are also considering at least two brand-new degree programs: A Youth Development BA and a Maker Education MA. All of these changes are needed because of the competitive pressures, and with changing patterns in demand. Our competitors are many and growing: other regional universities, online universities (both public and private). California also has a number of non-university providers, like County offices of education, CalStateTeach, that is run out of the Chancellors office, district-run programs, etc. Some of our competitors beat us on flexibility, and convenience; we still have an advantage in name recognition, price, and, most importantly, in faculty quality. Some of our graduate programs for in-service educators, suffered during the crisis, and never quite recovered. Therefore, it is an all-hands-on-deck situation. We just have to update, and delays are no longer feasible.

How do you do this? Curriculum revisions take significant work: first conceptually, as a list of courses, and their sequence, then each course and program requirements, the catalog entry – all had to be discussed, and put on paper. Because of the curriculum approval process on campus, and in many instances, at the Chancellor’s Office level, all of these tasks have to be accomplished in about two months – September and October. Otherwise a program risks to miss the catalog deadline.

On one hand, the curriculum development is traditionally a faculty service to the institution. The contract says something like that. So, the mean part of my mind tempts me to say to faculty: “Hey, if you want to save the program and teach in it, you should work on it as a part of your service. After all, curriculum is a faculty responsibility!” On the other hand, my more rational and compassionate part says something different: at least some of these projects are quite substantial. Faculty at CSU teach 12 units per semester, plus we have service and scholarship expectations. It is just hard to add this extra effort on top of everything else. If you expect quality work, you need to find a way to give people time. And there is no point revising, if you are not producing the absolutely the best, the most creative, a world-class program.

Back to the one hand – we really do not have the resources to pay to everyone, or release too many people from teaching. In the end, assigned time is also money, but also the program quality and reputation. In addition, if you compensate one group, but not the other, there are equity considerations. Plus, don’t forget the power of precedents. Once you set an expectation that all curriculum revisions deserve assigned time or a stipend, that becomes the norm. Precedents do not remember the nuance; they do not remember that there was an exceptionally hard project, or that the person in charge was very busy. The precedent remembers the naked fact.

Ok, now back again to the other hand: the projects are not all equal. Some are more of a minor tweak, others require ten brand new syllabi in subjects we have never taught. Some projects are very likely to be successful, and bring us students, glory, and revenue, while others are a lot riskier, and will really of interest one or two faculty here. If they want to do it, great, but not on the College’s dime. In some of them, chairs and program coordinators, who already have assigned time, can be central or help a lot, while others will be done by faculty only. Some people are more organized, while other do unnecessary work, talk a lot about scheduling the next meeting, argue endlessly about the titles, etc. Finally, some faculty think it is their work, and are interested, while others think the dean should revise all the programs, and their jobs are safe no matter what. The multiple overlapping considerations make a consistent approach very difficult. Therefore, I may have to resort to individual negotiations, which are not the best of solutions, but perhaps is the best in this circumstances. Now, individual deals tend to create suspicion and resentment among faculty, because they are not transparent. Is this too high a price to pay?

To make a larger point, most of the projects and problems that I deal with on my job are like that, messy. There are two or more sides, a good deal of uncertainty. Almost every move has a potential cost. In the end, you often have to take a leap of faith and decide on something without ever being sure it is the best solution. It is not like you can always follow clear principles. Or, rather, you can, but then you have to ignore other principles, and you won’t get anything done.

Having said all this, I am very open for suggestions. I have at least 17 potential curriculum development projects on my list. How do we do it?

Complexity and Justice

At a typical American university, we create insanely complex rules, and then waste enormous resources explaining them to students. Just consider, for example Sac State’s Gen Ed requirements. First, it is 48 credits plus the language requirement. The national norm is closer to 40, or about 1/3 of a BA degree. Plus there are layers of overlapping rules, which should be applied simultaneously. Those are rules of residency (so many should be taken at CSU), the rules about upper and lower division, and the rules of distribution (areas of A, B, C, D, and E). On top of it, there are graduation requirements, such as American History, American Institutions, Intensive writing, English composition, Race and ethnicity, and foreign language. In other words, every course choice should be checked against the five or six sets of rules. Those decisions have to be made by 18-22 year olds, a lot of whom just transferred from community colleges, and have a whole set of issues with equivalent courses, some of which are articulated, while others are not. Only few faculty on campus actually comprehend the rules and even fewer can explain them to students. So we have to have several professional advisers, and train older students to help. It takes years to actually master the working knowledge of curriculum. And with this level of logical complexity errors are absolutely inevitable. The complexity of rules requires the maintenance of three separate technological platforms: the course planner, the registration system, and then the data analysis system. The latter is needed, because we have no idea how many sections of which course will be needed in the next year. I am not just picking at the gen Ed; the same can be said about majors, teacher credentials, and everything else.

Now, if you have a mom and dad with a college degree, you can call them up, and ask to interpret the catalog for you. If you are a first generation in college, and your parents speak another language at home, you may not know what is the upper division and the lower division. So, the complexity affects different people differently. We always proclaim the values of diversity and inclusion, and yet our own indifference to student experiences is partly responsible for drop-outs and forces students to stay longer than they would like, to incur extra debt.

All of this is done with the best intentions, to make sure we educate the kids well. OK, let me take this back – the system evolved because of trivial turf wars, where every department is concerned about its status, its enrollments, and its workloads. The wars are fought with the rhetoric of best intentions, usually, so the combatants re confused where is the real motive, and where is the high-minded rhetoric. A significant part of the problem comes from various mindless bureaucratic decisions done outside campus, too – in various accrediting, and state government bodies. It really does not matter who we are to blame. The bottom line is that chasing complexity with various technologies is an arms race we cannot win. It is not a solvable problem. Yes, we should provide students with good advising and technological tools. But the problem is not solvable without some movement in at least partial simplification of curriculum.

The radical solution is well known: it is cohorting. It works in many cases, for working adults, for professional degrees, for non-traditional students. Some students are willing to give up choice in exchange for stability and the guaranteed timeline. In fact, this is how most of Russian and Chinese students go through college. I would not support the radical solution across the board; there is enormous value in the ability to choose one’s learning path, and in the flexibility of the non-cohorted environment. The rigidity of a cohort system also has exclusionary qualities; it does not accommodate for all life circumstances. Instead, we must simplify the admission and graduation requirements, and other processes by the order of magnitude to actually walk the walk of justice. There is no evidence whatsoever that more complex rules add anything to the quality of education. For example, Brown has abandoned the general education requirement altogether, which did not have a demonstrable negative effect on its graduates. There is no evidence that, say a 72 credit major is more fruitful than a more typical 40-credit major. Only a few of prerequisites actually have pedagogical sense; most are there to force students into a more manageable path.

The main funding of the entire fiel of behavioral economics is this: if you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy. So if we want more diverse population in our student body, if we want to more teachers of color, we have to make it easy, less intimidating; not less rigorous or less demanding; just easier in the process. Let’s move the rigor out of our processes into our classrooms.

The blight of dual use

Every university generates a fair amount of paperwork. Among other things, paperwork is essential for curriculum quality control. These are standards, program and course proposals, catalog descriptions, web pages, then syllabi, rubrics, scoring guides, assignment instructions, etc. One particular problem comes from those documents intended for dual use. Most notably, course syllabi are subjected to this particular blight. In theory, syllabi are written for students, and should contain only information relevant to them, in the language that is the easiest for them to understand. In reality, all sorts of overseeing and accrediting bodies also would like to take a look at syllabi to understand what is being taught. To make their jobs easier, such bodies apply certain pressure on instructors to include a little more information relevant to them. For example, list not only course objectives, but also mark them with standards. This way, an accreditor can just check course syllabi against the list of standards, without reading the actual thing. Accreditors in general like to transfer most of control on those being controlled. It makes the accrediting visit go a little faster. Then university lawyers come along and ask everyone to include on their syllabi standard statements on students with disability. A provost will ask to put in a little blurb on plagiarism. And then - add some information on how the course grade is calculated. A department chair or dean, frustrated with poorly taught courses will try to make sure something very basic is present in all syllabi, to make teaching a little more fool-proof.

The results of all these manipulations not only make the document larger and therefore less usable; that would only be a half-problem. The real problem is that students will immediately detect that the document is not written for them, and lose interest in using it. Only a minority of students read syllabi before the course, I believe. The rest rely on what instructor is saying in class, or on reminders, or on course calendar. Only a small minority of professors are stubborn enough to produce two versions of the syllabus – one for students and one for accountability. Most will stop at producing only the latter. In every university, the power rests with academic bureaucrats, not with students?, and increasingly – not with instructors. Bureaucrats will find a way of shaping all documentation into formats that are useful to them, to their particular limited function. Very few have enough vision and experience to see that the pressure actually damages the use of university’s documentation. What was invented to make things transparent and user-friendly, ends up adding more fog and in the end alienating both students and instructors from learning. Pretty soon people forget what the original intent of any document is, and learn to produce correct but meaningless text, sole purpose of which is to keep oneself out of trouble.

This is how an organization undermines itself by doing everything right, and makes itself worse off by trying to make itself better. One solution is to treat business writing as any kind of writing. It should have a specific audience and clear purpose. And we should try to refrain from the dual use of documentation.

More generally, we should learn to control bureaucracy in universities. One obvious way to do this is faculty governance. Alas, I have seen many a faculty who become the most zealous bureaucrats once they join a curriculum committee or any other such body. What to do about that, I do not know. It is perhaps in the human nature to focus on the correctness of a process and lose sight of its purpose. So, all university offices should have an inscription on their walls: “Why are we doing this, again?”

The rule of rules

Here is an existential question for you: how do you know a policy exists? In what sense does it exist? Does it exist because we have been applying it before? Where is the line separating policy from custom? Does a policy have to be written somewhere, and where exactly (the catalog, the website, a program advising sheet, a syllabus, scribbled on someone’s notebook)? Should a rule have a traceable history of adoption? If no one can remember the reason for the rule to exist should it still be enforced? How do rules die; does someone kill them? Who has the authority to establish and to abandon it?

Anyone who knows anything about organization theory will find these questions familiar. For people who learn to work in and manage organizations, the most difficult mental shift is to recognize that the organization is an entity of its own, separate and distinct from the people that comprise it. In a very real sense, rules and policies do exist. It is equally important to recognize that their existence comes in different degrees and forms; their lives are weird, messy, and often unpredictable.

In this office we deal with rules every day. Thankfully, none of our decisions are about life and death, but they do involve real people, their careers, their money, and the potential impact they will have on their students and clients. Many of these decisions have to do with interpreting the rules and policies. One typical decision goes like this: do we let someone to continue in one of the teacher preparation programs, or do we enforce a rule to the fullest extent? A policy is a rule with a specific intent, a rule that hopes to achieve a specific objective. And this is why policies contradict each other – their intent is different (not necessarily because some rule-making body screwed up, which also happens). For example policies that protect student rights conflict with those that protect the right of their future students and clients to have a qualified teacher or counselor.

The rule of rules is this: Interpreting rules is an exercise in ethics. Sometimes people invent rules to relieve themselves from making a hard decision. In a way, every policy indeed is designed to make an automatic decision. So when someone’s GPA is lower than we demand, we can just say, sorry, rules are rules; it is not my call to make. A policy separates decision-making from context, both for efficiency reasons and for considerations of fairness. Yet it is very important to recognize that such automatism has very clear limits. First, it is because very few policies are intentionally designed to have no exceptions. Second, because there is almost always a counter-policy that may or may not overrule the one in question. And finally, no policy can force one to act unethically. A little unethically – yes, but totally wrong, no. For example, we may have a rule that is unenforceable because of the technical error we made. So we let a marginal student to go on. It is not a big deal, because we don’t know for sure how good or bad a teacher she or he will finally make. However, if I see someone I am reasonably sure will not ever be good, no policy flaw or past errors will prevent me from using the full arsenal policies, or even making new ones to stop this person from ever entering a classroom full of children. I may fail at the end, but not for the lack of trying. Another way of putting the rule of rules is this: rules are important, powerful, dangerous, but only means to an end.

Who is in the audience?

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.

The Contribution Revolution

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:

1. 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.
2. 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 Organization Animal

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. 

Learning the ropes

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. 

NCATE worries

Carolyn and I sat down to review the NCATE report we need to produce by May1. Even though the new process we're piloting seems to be simpler, there is a long list of documents and materials we need to produce. How long? - Exactly 54 categories, some if which require a few different documents; see below. Some of it we have, some we know where to get, and a few need work. And of course, there is the report itself, which runs about 45 pages and addresses the six NCATE standards.

Is this a useful exercise? Perhaps it did force us to collect and consider data. However, we used to collect a lot of useless data, just for the sake of compliance. We have a much better, cleaner system now. I just with NCATE, the national organization, would be more logical in their accreditation approach. For example, it has a standard on candidate's knowledge, skills, and dispositions, and then another one on the assessment system. But the only way to know your candidates know anything is to show some assessment instruments and data – exactly the same you need to show that you have an assessment system. Then they have the standard on field experiences – but those are also ways of ensuring our candidates learn, and we assess those as a part of the assessment system. Then there is a separate standard on diversity – which should really be an integral part of the standard on knowledge, skills, and dispositions. It just makes very little sense. Compare, for example, exhibits #7, 26, and 29. They ask for the catalog twice, etc. etc.

Anyway, we will produce the stuff; and we will get the national recognition. It probably will take a little more work than we expected. I will have to take some significant time away from running the everyday business of the School to do that. This is fine. I just wish the effort would be a little more meaningful in terms of the actual outcome. My worry is not about the amount of work, or the possible outcome; it is more about the usefulness of it all.

1. Links to unit catalogs and other printed documents describing general education, specialty/content studies, and professional studies
   
2. Syllabi for professional education courses
   
3. Conceptual framework(s)
   
4. Findings of other national accreditation associations related to the preparation of education professionals (e.g., ASHA, NASM, APA, CACREP)
   
5. State program review documents and state findings. (Some of these documents may be available in AIMS.)
   
6. Title II reports submitted to the state for the previous three years (Beginning with the 2010 annual report, Title II reports should be attached to Part C of the annual report and will be available to BOE teams in AIMS.)
   
7. Key assessments and scoring guides used by faculty to assess candidate learning against standards and the outcomes identified in the unit's conceptual framework for programs not included in the national program review process or a similar state process
   
8. Data tables and summaries that show how teacher candidates (both initial and advanced) have performed on key assessments over the past three years for programs not included in the national program review process or a similar state process
   
9. Samples of candidate work (e.g., portfolios at different proficiency levels)
   
10. Follow-up studies of graduates and data tables of results
    
11. Employer feedback on graduates and summaries of the results
    
12. List of candidate dispositions, including fairness and the belief that all students can learn, and related assessments, scoring guides, and data
    
13. Description of the unit's assessment system in detail including the requirements and key assessments used at transition points
    
14. Data from key assessments used at entry to programs
    
15. Procedures for ensuring that key assessments of candidate performance and evaluations of unit operations are fair, accurate, consistent, and free of bias
    
16. Policies and procedures that ensure that data are regularly collected, compiled, aggregated, summarized, analyzed, and used to make improvements
    
17. Samples of candidate assessment data disaggregated by alternate route, off-campus, and distance learning programs
    
18. Policies for handling student complaints
    
19. File of student complaints and the unit's response (This information should be available during the onsite visit.)
    
20. Examples of changes made to courses, programs, and the unit in response to data gathered from the assessment system
    
21. Memoranda of understanding, contracts, and/or other documents that demonstrate partnerships with schools
    
22. Criteria for the selection of school faculty (e.g., cooperating teachers, internship supervisors)
    
23. Documentation of the preparation of school faculty for their roles (e.g., orientation and other meetings)
    
24. Descriptions of field experiences and clinical practice requirements in programs for initial and advanced teacher candidates and other school professionals
    
25. Guidelines for student teaching and internships
    
26. Assessments and scoring rubrics/criteria used in field experiences and clinical practice for initial and advanced teacher candidates and other school professionals (These assessments may be included in program review documents or the exhibits for Standard 1. Cross reference as appropriate.)
    
27. Proficiencies related to diversity that candidates are expected to develop
    
28. Curriculum components that address diversity proficiencies (This might be a matrix that shows diversity components in required courses.)
    
29. Assessment instruments, scoring guides, and data related to diversity (These assessments may be included in program review documents or the exhibits for Standard 1. Cross reference as appropriate.)
    
30. Data table on faculty demographics (see example attached to NCATE's list of exhibits)
    
31. Policies and practices for recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty
    
32. Data table on student demographics (see example attached to NCATE's list of exhibits)
    
33. Policies and practices for recruiting and retaining diverse candidates
    
34. Data table on demographics of P-12 students in schools used for clinical practice (see example attached to NCATE's list of exhibits)
    
35. Policies, practices, and/or procedures that facilitate candidate experiences with students from diverse groups
    
36. Data table on faculty qualifications (This table can be compiled in the online template from data submitted for national program reviews or compiled in Excel, Word, or another format and uploaded as an exhibit. The information requested for this table is attached to NCATE's list of exhibits.)
    
37. Licensure information on school faculty (e.g., cooperating teachers, internship supervisors)
    
38. Samples of faculty scholarly activities
    
39. Summary of service and collaborative activities engaged in by faculty with the professional community (e.g., grants, evaluations, task force participation, provision of professional development, offering courses, etc.)
    
40. Promotion and tenure policies and procedures
    
41. Samples of forms used in faculty evaluation and summaries of the results
    
42. Opportunities for professional development activities provided by the unit
    
43. Policies on governance and operations of the unit
    
44. Organizational chart or description of the unit governance structure
    
45. Unit policies on student services such as counseling and advising
    
46. Recruiting and admission policies for candidates
    
47. Academic calendars, catalogs, unit publications, grading policies, and unit advertising
    
48. Unit budget, with provisions for assessment, technology, and professional development
    
49. Budgets of comparable units with clinical components on campus or similar units at other campuses
    
50. Faculty workload policies
    
51. Summary of faculty workloads
    
52. List of facilities, including computer labs and curriculum resource centers
    
53. Description of library resources
    
54. Description of resources for distance learning, if applicable

Cataloging trouble

The Catalog working group, of which I was a member, just finished its tasks of redesigning the University catalogs. The group was great to work with; it was UNC at its best – willing to change, innovative, informal, and deeply caring about students. I think we made a lot of progress, and 2010/11 catalogs will be much more user-friendly, and easier to navigate. I am still wondering why a simple question – Which courses do I need to take? – requires such a complicated answer. We have the Catalogs, check-sheets in various offices, four-year plans, and a whole host of advisers who interpret the mysterious written word of the catalogs for students. The paradox is, by trying to make college easier, we make it a lot more complicated than it has to be. To off-set this complexity, we spend a whole lot of resources trying to explain the complexity away. Here are some examples:

• As one of our group members noted, the Catalog reflects the logic of program creators, not of program users. For example, faculty members divide courses in core and supporting, major and Liberal Arts Core, within the main discipline and in other disciplines. But very few of these categories matter to students; they simply need to know which courses they have to take for sure, and with which they have some choices. They also want to know which courses can be more useful for the future, which are easier to get into, which are fun, and which require too much work. It becomes a simple conflict of categorization. It's like going to a pharmacy and finding the medicine arranged by price rather than by the kind of trouble you might be experiencing.
  
• If we leave students to their own devices, their rate of error in planning the coursework would be very high. We then require them to see an advisor to get a PIN, so they can register. But getting to see an advisor is another obstacle, another hoop to jump through. Most of the advisors on campus are faculty, who are not here all the time. Every year, many of them are new, and have their own trouble reading and understanding of the catalog. As a result, in an effort to reduce errors, we introduce a whole new layer of complexity which generates new errors and more frustrations.
  
• The whole Liberal Arts Core idea is very old and venerable, and designed with the best intentions. Ideally, it should give every student a broad education, and allow easier transfer to another institution. However, people have been messing with the LAC for years. For example, when they simply wanted to expand the major, certain LAC courses became "Specified required LAC courses." This move, of course, defies the purpose of choice and transferability. Instead of calling it what it is – a larger major – these programs just add a level of confusion. Moreover, some of the major courses proper also satisfy the LAC requirements, and therefore can be double-counted. So the two categories overlap significantly, and make figuring them out very difficult. The LAC list itself is a maze of categories, subcategories, and rules.
  
• Then, of course, the State of Colorado requires the majors be different than teacher education programs (PTEPS). It comes from an obscure ideological stance requiring teachers to know enough content. Therefore, we list PTEP courses as a different set of courses, further confusing students. And of course, the difference between PTEP and major courses makes no sense, and the two categories overlap also. In some majors, some of methods PTEP courses are also counted as major courses, and in others, they are not.
  

It is not only that these things are difficult to explain to an 18-year old, who is fresh out of high school. What strikes me as absurd that we need to explain these things at all. They truly don't care, and should not care about these categories. What makes it complicated for students is that they also have no idea how often courses are offered, how hard is it to get in them, and which courses are "stacked," which means some are pre-requisites for others, and cannot be taken just at any time. Here are my conclusions/recommendations:

1. Advising is supposed to be important, and it connects students to faculty on a more personal level. But if much of it s spent on explaining the same catalog mysteries over and over again, perhaps it is not what we hope it is. We need to make another, more radical step in making the catalog easy to understand by purging the categories relevant to program creation. Maybe we should ask students for help.
   
2. Students need to have easy access to the same data faculty have access to: history of course offerings, how full do they tend to be in the past, as well as the schedule as it is being developed. Last year, I copied advanced schedules from the report portal and e-mailed it to two thousand teacher education students. Many were very grateful, because it allowed them to plan better. But why is this information hidden from them in the first place?
   
3. We need to learn to build logic models of student scheduling. Following the many complicated rules associated with course choices is better done by a computer than by a human mind. One simple step toward this: we already have a degree check feature in Ursa. However, there is no way for students to run their mock 4-year pan through the degree check, and see if they would graduate with a given set of courses. So if we allowed them to build a 4-year plan, and run through a pretend graduation, it would eliminate a lot of errors, and reduce the burden of advising.
   
4. In all out programs, we need to keep only those choices that make sense, and eliminate all of those choices that are only there to support the idea of choice. Many of the choices we announce are unobtainable because courses listed there are never offered, or limited to majors. In other cases, choices serve no discernable reason to exist, or are results of turf wars and turf peace-making. If we eliminate those, it will probably reduce the choices by 2/3. And when we keep the choice, we need to be able clearly explain what are advantages of each option, and what are implications of choosing one option over another.
   

 

Tinkering with the machine and crap shoveling

There is a side of our enterprise I like to call the machine: calendars, schedules, catalogs, web site, handbooks, policies, routines, and tasks. Those things do not directly affect what is going on in classrooms. However, when the machine is faltering, it can create a lot of problems. For example, students and faculty get confused or frustrated. In rare occasions, a poorly designed policy or procedure can have serious negative effects on people's lives. Thank god, this is an exception; otherwise we'd be in trouble, for the machine is faltering all the time.

When I just came to UNC, one of my aims was to simplify and fix the machine. Naively, I thought it could be done in a year or two, and then we all will have more time for the task of radical improvements of our programs. But the machine needs fixing all the time! I find myself tinkering with it again and again. For example, just in the last two weeks, I was helping to re-re-revise the student teaching handbook for the umpteenth time. And then just yesterday, I realized that the Diverse Experience form is not there. It is mentioned on the website, was discussed many times in many forums, and yet is not to be found in any of the student teaching handbooks. Besides, faculty found more need for revisions of what we have just revised last Fall. Fundamentally, those two factors cause a lot of machine maintenance: improvements and errors. Let's just say we want to revise the exit survey for students, common for three programs. Who can do it? Program coordinators are very busy this time of year. Our staff members are very knowledgeable and hard working, but they don't know all the nuances of the data we need to get. So, I am trying to do it almost solo. But, all projects done solo are bound to have errors, – both technical and of judgment, – because there is no one to check what I do. Carolyn and I will help each other when we can, but it is not the same as a deliberate, involved process of working with the entire faculty that is really needed. The choice is to let this little piece of machinery idle (skip the survey this year), or do it in the imperfect fashion. In other words, the option is to put the duct tape on it, which I did.

In addition, our machine is a part of even bigger machine of the University, which adds a layer of complexity. Who needs to know? Who gets to decide? How will it jive with the rest of the University? Here is another example. In December, I took large part of the Winter break time to revise the licensure parts of our catalog. It needed to be done badly, for no one could find anything in the catalog. However, we got only a few days for proofreading, and we simply missed the licensure part. Quite by accident, I discovered on Thursday that those changes were omitted. This is long past deadline, so I had to send some panicking e-mails, and the catalog people agreed to make the changes. However, every time you revise the catalog, other errors are introduced. For instance, Art Music and PE PTEP programs disappeared – inadvertently, of course. So, I had to put them back in. But the catalog is going off to the printer on Monday, so I did not have the time to consult with those programs, and I probably gotten these programs wrong, too. They will probably be mad at me, because the errors would be ultimately caused by my initiative to revise. So, we're virtually guaranteed that this piece of the machine will need another fix next year. Continuous improvement or continuous tinkering?

This tinkering work is absolutely endless. There is always something to fix, a process to improve, a form or a handbook to rewrite. It is fun at times, because sometimes I get to solve real problems, and find some new solutions. For example, on Wednesday and Thursday, I finally found a way to track our graduate admissions, something that eluded us forever, and costs us a lot of labor. However, it is one thing to find a solution, and quite another to make it work. Someone has to have it on their calendars, instructions need to be written, people trained, etc. Anyway, tinkering is mostly fun, but just in the last week got a little bit frustrating, and tedious.

And of course, quite independently of my tinkering, we were exposed to a case of irrational bureaucratic whim. Those of you in the School probably know what I mean, for those outside, it is not important. Tinkering with the machine – I embrace if not always enjoy. I understand why we have to do it. Shoveling crap is something else entirely. Here is my highly scientific definition of crap shoveling: dealing with unnecessary problems resulted from someone else's arbitrary decisions. So if I appeared cranky for this last week or two, now you know why. My apologies anyway, if I neglected or offended you in any way. I'll lighten up next week, promise.