My first year at RIC

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

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.

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When is now?

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

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

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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

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

Vikings vs homies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the Earth did not have this weird tilt in its axis, we could have been very different species. But it does, so we have seasons, which force us to live within specific cycles. It also spins, which not all planets do, and gives us day and night. The time is given to us as a predictable and inevitable change. We even add to that by creating an arbitrary date in the middle 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 how we will exercise, eat well, and be organized, and even nicer to others. Even though it is somewhat predictable, we still perceive time as a wave of newness rushing towards us like at a sea shore.  We want to both keep our memories, and yet not let them dictate every future step. The belief in newness is a way of archiving, 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 cannot do 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 can change – we don’t know. What a bummer of a world; too bad there isn’t any other. The universe quickly hardens right behind our backs; push and the cement of completeness will not even budge. And the other end of the universe just barely appears out of the fog ahead – visible enough to be scary, but not clear enough 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 be predicted, prepared for, and tamed.

The New Year for me is the crunch of snow under my feet, and a cold wind stealing my breath when we face each other just the right way. I was probably four or five, and my mother was taking me to the day care, so early, it was still dark. I was all bundled up as only children in Siberia are dressed – 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 huge before disappearing. My eyelashes are sticky, but it is really warm. There is no 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

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

The recognition of freedom is not therefore given to us individually, but to professional communities to which we belong. For example, to get hired, one needs a doctoral degree, which is conferred by other scholars. To publish a paper, one needs a collective judgment of peers on merits of it, which is done either through peer review, or subsequent critique/study replication, etc. Grant proposals, IRB, tenure and promotion are all instruments of collective judgment. In other words, nothing about the academic freedom is arbitrary or whimsical. You’ve got to prove your point to your peers, even if the public in general, or your dean won’t understand anything you’re saying.

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

We have relatively weak institutional controls to maintain quality of teaching. For example, there is no blind peer review of syllabi, and no routine peer observation. We rarely demand actual data on student growth in our classes (the irony of teacher preparation – we expect our students to develop a work sample, and to actually assess their student learning, but don’t do what we preach). How many of you routinely do a pre- and post-assessment in your own classes? Raise your hands… one, two. When the institutional controls are week, we need to create them, and in the meanwhile strengthen ethical controls. Academic freedom is a deal based on trust; if public loses trust in us, the deal is off.

It is very tempting to just talk yourself into believing how good you are. “I know I am doing a great job in my classroom, and don’t need anyone to check on me.” I don’t know how many times I heard this in one form or another. 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? Would you use any of these “data” in your research? If not, why do you believe it is good 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 a dean comes to your classroom or looks at your syllabus, she or he probably has no idea how your field works. In those cases, you should claim your academic freedom and stick to it. But you cannot claim academic freedom against your peers, and you are obligated to be a part of a community. And the community must prove it acts for public good, not to promote its own interest. That was always a part of the deal. 

Teacher quality as an ethical dilemma

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

The screening mechanisms we have are imperfect, and could not be counted on to work all the time. GPA, course grades, and observation forms – all are needed to provide a degree of objectivity to the process, but in 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 right personality or enough knowledge and ability to be a good teacher. Someone can lack social skills, or have a disability incompatible with teaching. Just like blind people cannot be allowed to fly your airplane, a severely dyslexic person cannot be an elementary teacher. Moreover, such students often do not know or do 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 can make their personal choices in every respect, except for this one. We belong to a profession, and must protect school children against someone who can potentially cause a lot of harm.

In a recent conversation, a colleague brought up the fear of law suits if we dismiss someone without a proper procedure. It is true, that dismissing or counseling students from a teach preparation program should not be arbitrary, or motivated by personal irritations or dislikes. The rule of thumb is this: if you are the only one who is worried, find other colleagues and cooperating teachers who have the same concerns. Put these concerns in writing – at any point. If they are critical, send them forward immediately. If they are borderline, make it a personal task to follow up on the student at the next stage of the program.  Involve program coordinators, chairs and the Dean’s office. Can you explain your concern to other professionals? If yes, go for it, but don’t worry too much about having a good story for a broad public. It is not necessary. I remember a few years ago one of young program coordinators told me she wants to fail a student teacher. I looked at transcript – nothing unusual there. Why, I ask? – The student lied about her mother having cancer and about other weird things like that. We check the facts, talk to cooperating teacher, and realize the student does have some serious personality problems; she is a habitual and imaginative liar. We’re not psychiatrists, but we just know this student in this mental state cannot be an effective teacher. I am not sure if a non-educator would have the same reaction, but I argue, we should not really care that much. We dismissed her from the program, and took some heat from parents, of course. There were threats of law suit, but it never materialized. Again, our primary ethical obligations are not to our student, 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 who has very little chances of winning a case. Dismissal from a professional program is almost never a winnable case, unless there are signs of discrimination based on unrelated factors. But even if a case goes to court, our collective professional judgment, outweighs whatever myths the fear of legal actions create. Second, if laws were perfect, who would need ethics?
Some students argued with me that they have received good grades and good recommendations before, and therefore cannot be excluded late in the process. My reply is this: just because we made a mistake with you one or a hundred times before does not mean we are obligated to make the same mistake again. The opposite is true – we should correct our own mistakes.

And finally, if you have a good case and your colleagues are with 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 someone else’s concern. 

Personal lives

Emergency rooms and OR waiting areas are tense places. I spent some time in them this week with my son who had to have an emergency back surgery (he is OK and recovering). It was hard to concentrate on work, although hospitals now offer internet access. Among other things, I was thinking about all my colleagues – these three have been fighting cancer, that one broke her hip; another person’s father or mother is dying, someone else is going in for a planned surgery. But someone just simply had bronchitis, and someone else I don’t know about had sick children, broken transmissions, family troubles, or financial 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 a life can be anything but personal. One is supposed to keep it separate from work, or so I was told by someone.  But can we, really, any of us? – nope. It affects us, and sometimes in ways that are 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 am worried about my son, because I wonder if I could have done anything to prevent his injury; perhaps one more word of caution, one more doctor visit could have made a difference. I am frustrated because unlike Windows, real life does not offer a system restore point. But that’s just a theory; this may very well be a mild flu or something else entirely.

We are not rational beings, far from it. Our subconscious minds do things for their own strange reasons. We do not understand much of our emotions and reactions, sometimes until later, sometimes never. And if we do not understand or fully control our own actions, how can others? This is way humans have developed the judgment gap, the ability to suspend judgment. “Well, he is rude but who knows what’s going on in his life?” “She is absent-minded lately, but it will probably pass when she works through her issues.” That sort of empathic imagination 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 very basic need to defend ourselves, to counter aggression with aggression. If someone is rude to you, you must feel very secure to blow it over, and allow for complexities of a human psyche. If you are threatened, the empathic imagination 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

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 private delight. Some people enjoy looking for big essential differences. For example, I am often asked about cultural differences between Russians and Americans. I find those conversations very boring and generalizations mainly wrong. Both countries are extremely diverse on many different levels, and almost anything you say about them in general sounds false. However, the tiny variations of accent and affect between, say northern Colorado and Northwest Ohio seem to be fascinating and somehow more profound to me. For example, people in Novosibirsk generally walk slower than the Muscovites; Siberians hate waiting lines and everyone in them, while Muscovites tend to be somewhat more social in line and enjoy a good talk with strangers. One small thing that always gives away Russians in America and Americans in Russia is the eye contact with strangers: quick and intense for Russians, longer and inconsequential for Americans. Ohioans can say “I am fixin’ to…” in a sense “I intend to…” I have not heard that in any other state.  Coloradoans still keep the pioneer spirit – it is very easy to talk them into trying something new. Seattle is a city with subtle and sophisticated culture, which you can miss entirely if you stay there for a short time.

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

Here is my scoop on Rhody. When a driver facing you wants to turn left, you should blink your headlights, and let him or her go. It is expected, and makes a lot of sense on narrow streets with heavy traffic. You’re not going very fast anyway, so why not unclog traffic going in the opposite direction? 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 wrong side of the street, so you need to scoot over to the shoulder. But there is always enough space for you to scoot over – that’s the rule. Russians also have a whole set of informal traffic rules, not written anywhere, but clearly understood 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 and smiley Westerners, or chill-and-let-others-chill Seatleites. Ohioans tend to be exaggeratingly polite and welcoming, but it actually takes much longer to get closer to them; there is a clear line between the locals and the outsiders. Of all places, I found Ohio to be the only place where my foreignness mattered for a while at least.  In Rhode Island, once you pass the initial test, and proves to be not a jerk, most people seem to be very helpful and open, with actions more than with words.  I had several experiences with DMV and other offices, where clerks all look somewhat unwelcoming, but are also willing to look the other way when your paperwork is not exactly perfect. The partings are inevitably much warmer than the greetings. This seems to be a place with a stronger working class subculture, which I can relate to. Believe it or not, my working class neighborhood in Siberia was not that different from those in Providence. People will be suspicious to BS in all its forms, and expect some solidarity in the common purpose to defy the authorities. But they are not above trying to take you for a ride, if you look like gullible.

Of course, there is the Rhody accent. I still cannot hear the differences between local variations within it, and perhaps never will. But there is also a specific mannerism in speaking – more loud and more direct; “I am telling it like it is” seems to be the subtext, which I rather enjoy. In the Midwest 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 seriously if I bother to challenge your thinking), it is not in the Western half of the United States, and I suspect in the South. You need to give out other signs of respect first, and only then can you openly disagree. Here I find a number of people who like me enjoy a good argument, and mean no disrespect by it.

There are probably others who think differently, but they have not come out yet and told me so. Please do if you’re one of them. We all come from somewhere, and bring assumptions with us. The big differences are easy to spot and deal with; the small ones can often go unnoticed and be attributed to ill intent rather than to a cultural accident. 

What do we want from the State?

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

1.       A sensible and less burdensome state approval process. What we have right now is an outdated, excessive bureaucratic exercise spelled out in an 83 page 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 state approval, it would give us a gift of productive time. It is not that we don’t want to be regulated; not at all. We just do not want to produce mountains of useless paperwork, that’s it. Something closer to the audit model would work much better. Come and see what we do – talk to graduates, read our internal documentation, our reports, our data, and make an informed judgment on the integrity of our programs. Instead, we are asked to produce things we do not normally use for our operations, and things that are unlikely to improve the way we work. This encourages cynicism and discourages professional responsibility.  As we prepare to submit all of the needed information electronically, it becomes less and less clear why RIDE wants to send 20 people to review us, and why do they insist in staying in Providence hotels. Why not review all materials online and just send 2-3 people to talk to faculty, partner schools, and to our candidates.  

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

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

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

The Pen and Line case

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:

1. 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. 
2. 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. 
3. 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.