Relational disorder and the question of power

Writing these blogs made me so transparent, there is no mystery anymore. Those who read them probably know already how I think and what I worry about. However, there is a whole set of things that cannot be disclosed, that will never make it to these blogs, other than in abstract and metaphoric form. Those are, of course, problems related to other people.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a professional development workshop for School Directors, entitled “Things that keep you awake at night.” What transpired from the conversation is the common concern about faculty. Specifically, when someone’s behavior negatively affect students, programs, and other faculty, and we have very limited range of options to address the situation. The frustration comes from the very nature of our position: it is our job to make sure the environment is good, and people - all people - are comfortable: students, staff, and faculty. Because we are the lower-level managers, we receive all the complaints. None of the school directors believe everything we hear. All agreed that one should always listen to all sides of a dispute. These old tried techniques work well, and most of conflicts can be resolved with time and patience and with a little bit of luck. All human cultures have developed some mechanisms of forgiving and forgetting, otherwise no social life would have been possible. Thank god for holidays, breaks, parties, and other things that help us forgive and forget.

However, each of us had some cases where complaints are numerous, credible, and persistent. They seem to be rooted in certain personality traits rather than from miscommunication, specific conflict, or differences of opinion. We all have troubling and troubled individuals who seem to invite conflict, complaints and resentment. None of these people realize they have a problem; they always place the blame in others, no matter how numerous those others are. The power of denial is a tremendous force; people sometimes come up with a completely irrational, far-fetched version of reality just to avoid acknowledging “I have a problem.” Unfortunately, in an academic setting, we have little power to protect other people, especially students, from individuals with the relational disorder. Once someone is tenured, supposedly to protect one’s academic freedom, it becomes very difficult not only to let one go, but also to effect any changes in behavior.

At least some of my colleagues believe that the solution is in more power; wouldn’t it be nice if we could fire someone who is clearly a trouble. I don’t think so. I don’t like to have power, and dislike exercising it. There is a risk in having power concentrated in someone’s hand, both for others, and for those who are given power. It is an old tradition among Russians, which originates in the Orthodox theology, to treat power with suspicion, and try to avoid it as something spiritually corrupting. In my view, the collective power of faculty should be sufficient to solve problems such as relational disorder. However, I would like to comment on a systemic problem: all the good news are openly shared, and people tend to know about each other’s achievements. The bad news, however, accumulate in my file folders. Complaints are dealt with discretely. I am happy to share some of the bad news with the Dean, but he is in the same position: there is no way to make the bad news public, for the obvious reasons. However, faculty have a lot of say in peer evaluation but they basically operate without inadequate information. Some of it, of course, gets through the rumor mill, but that’s just it, the rumor.

Because of this curious mismatch in information flow and decision-making power, administrators sometimes look like the bad guys. They make a decision that, given equal access to information, everyone else would have made exactly the same way. However, because others did not have the same information, they may see the decision as unjust or frivolous, or worse, motivated by personal likes or dislikes. The power balance between faculty and administrators is needed, in part, precisely because of the difference in information to which they have access. However, for it to work well there should be some initial trust on both sides. When I learn of someone’s decision which I consider to be erroneous, I must first assume that the person who made it is not an idiot and not evil. Most likely, she or he know something I don’t. This does not prevent me from questioning, and demanding clear answers, but the initial hypothesis to be proven or disproven should be exactly this: something I don’t know has led to the decision I do not understand.

Thinking with Ursa

A significant portion of my week was spent working on curriculum changes. It is an interesting work, actually, because a lot of it deals with imagination. When you set curriculum as described in catalogue, you have to imagine all possible implications such changes may have. For example, we have found a few bugs that created problems in this registration session; none of these were on our radar screen last year when we introduced the changes. For example, we added a certain prerequisite because program faculty who teach it believe the course should be taken later in the program. We missed of course that it is mathematically impossible for students to fit the specific course so late in the program, because of other requirements. So, they all need to be manually cleared, which is exactly the problem we were trying to solve in the first place. Here is another example: some courses had Provisional admission to a program prerequisite. However, some students went directly to Full admission, and skipped the provisional. In any person’s mind, full supersedes provisional, but computer read these two as separate codes, so it wont’ let fully admitted people to do what provisionally admitted can. We failed to think like a computer, and in a contemporary organization, such a skill is a must.

It is funny how we talk about Ursa (our registration software). She is really a person, but then she is a very peculiar one, with her own logic, her own quirks and obscure rules. We say “Ursa thinks they have not met the requirements,” or “Ursa read this course on their transcripts, and she cannot read the attribute after that.” Ursa has its own logic, so we need to learn to think like Ursa. We wonder how to make Ursa understand something, how to translate our point into Ursa’s logic. YOU cannot argue with her, but you can trick her into doing what we want, only if you understand the way she thinks.

It is all about imagination. We consider possible implications of our curricular changes for students, programs, faculty. It is all but impossible to anticipate all consequences of a change, but we need to see at least the major ones. My wonderful curriculum team, Vicky and Karon, and I take one change, one specific adjustment, and then we basically let our imaginations run. How is it going to affect A, B, and C? What about past and the future? Let’s imagine those students two years from now? What about all these special circumstances we know about? In a way, it is like writing a fiction story, where circumstances are imagined, but they need to have some level of plausibility to them. I guess other people would call it modeling. It is an interesting intellectual and creative challenge though. It requires contextual knowledge of the multiple programs. Funny how computers themselves are not capable of doing such imaginative work. Computers relieved us from a lot of tedious work, but it seems like there is even more demand for human brains that can connect seemingly unrelated dots, and imagine real-life scenarios. Human brains can pick on subtle patters that computer completely ignore, and their owners actually enjoy doing it.

Junior high politics

Junior high politics can be brutal. Adolescents discover the world of relationships, and engage in it with enthusiasm of zealots. One essential feature of human relationships is their selectiveness. Being a friend with certain people means you’re not friends with other people. If you are friends with everyone, this removes any meaning from the concept of friendship and renders it empty.

Of course, by definition, adolescents have not yet established long-term relationships; they are trying it out. So, there is the constant sense of being unsure. The affiliations and alliances change, shift, they fail and are reestablished, and consequently, not much trust exists among adolescent friends. And because power comes with the quantity and quality of friends one has, the constant fears of betrayal are only heightened.

What comes with mistrust and insecurity? It is constant demands to prove loyalty, and to dispel suspicion. For example, if Lucy your best friend, and Sarah is your worst enemy, Lucy may not be friendly with Sarah, even in passing, even briefly. And if she is, she has some explaining to do. This is about the appearance of friendliness. However, if Lucy openly suggests that she would like to be friends with both you and Sarah, well, that is an open invitation to break the friendship.

Adults develop a lot more sophisticated understanding of relationships. First, they will learn the shades and gradations of friendship, and will develop a repertoire or f relationships that is much richer than friend/enemy dichotomy. Second, they will realize that no relationship is truly inclusive, even the most intimate ones like marriage: spouses must still have their own friends, and a whole range of other working and personal relationships. Healthy relationships of all kinds require certain amount of trust and predictability. Adults also learn to calibrate their assessment of relationships. Someone who disagrees with you, or who even has lost temper with you, is not necessarily your enemy or dislikes you. We learn this one way or another, to a different degree.

This is how things normally work. However, when adults experience certain traumatic, dysfunctional communities, they sometimes revert to junior high level of politics. This has little to do with individuals, or their maturity. It’s just the lack of trust that comes from past experiences. If you do not believe the relationship you develop with someone is safe, you will be scrutinizing the other person’s behavior for signs of betrayal. You will interpret her or his friendliness with your enemies as a worrisome sign.

Whoever is in the position of leadership has to be careful treading the relational waters. She needs a support group, those people who most close to her in outlook, and just simply people she draws emotional support from. However the leader cannot engage in junior high politics. He cannot ensure the support of his base by alienating the others. The temptation to anoint friends and enemies is great, especially if there is some genuine dispute within the group, and especially if the leaders feels he has the majority’s support. Nothing unifies your base group as a defined enemy, the others. Nothing brings people closer than a warm discussion about shortcomings of those not currently present. But that is exactly the strategy that would erode trust and plunge the whole group into junior high politics. This has to do with power asymmetry. Although in an academic setting administrators’ power is severely limited by faculty governance, faculty and administrators still have different kinds of powers to balance each other. It all goes wrong when an administrator or a faculty member attempt to tilt that balance by augmenting their powers by personal relations.

Social systems are powerful, but not all-powerful. Systemic problems can nudge a person towards reverting to junior-high politics, but we all have the choice to remain adults.

Just-in-time scheduling

We live in the midst of an incredible information technology revolution. We ask questions that were never asked before, we can know things that otherwise simply could not be known. For example, here is a simple question: how many students will need class X in the next semester, and what time of the day will accommodate the most? To answer this question, we usually use the last year’s experience, some informal feedback, and whatever other hunches we might get. To prepare for especially hard-to-plan course like student teaching, we use some sort of application process. However, we can never account for fluctuation in numbers and scheduling conflicts.

Let’s assume the Math school decided to move their MATH 283 two hours down, simply because they cannot have faculty who can teach it during their regular hours. This means that Elementary kids cannot take our EDRD 419 class. So, a lot of them decide to try it in the following semester, and we cancel a low-enrolled class. Yet in the following semester, there is a bubble we have no idea about: kids whose time is it to take 419, plus all those who delayed last time because of Math, all want to take the class. They try to get in, they cannot, and then they start complaining to the Dean. So we realize there is a problem, create a sign-up list, struggle to find an instructor, and finally offer it anyway. All of this is OK, but costly: students are upset, our FT faculty maybe underemployed when we cancel, but then we have to pay an adjunct extra. School Director’s valuable time is wasted.

What we need is a data management system. Students will develop their four-year tentative plans, so the system will know how many students need what when, for at least a couple of years in the future. The closer it gets, the more accurate picture of student demand we will have. We would also have a better idea of our expenses in the future, and could plan our budgets accordingly.

Then if Math 283 will happen to get scheduled first, the system will know that students who need it also need EDRD 419, and will suggest the best times for it and other yet unscheduled classes, so most students do not have conflicts in their schedule. Of course, if we schedule first, Math folks have to use the free time available.

Of course, something like this does exist already; just check out all these products. Yet it does not appear any of them have the capacity to look several years ahead; they basically play one semester in advance, and help match people’s preferences (they ask students and faculty when they would like to teach or take classes). Of course, no student wants to drag his or her behind on campus at 7:30 in the morning, and faculty may have their own preferences. So, the system can keep track of three factors: how many people need a class, when they are available to take it, and when they would rather take it.

It is not really that complex, and probably not that expensive to develop. Other industries such as shipping may have used similar algorithms to manage different processes. Any takers?

Morsels of the Real

This is my sixtieth blog, and I am not sure how many more things I have to say about all this life. I have something today though.

We had a good conversation with my Philosophy of Education class last week. We talked about Buber, and about I-Thou relations. Basically, Buber says that what’s important in our lives is not necessarily what takes the most time, nor is it something you can pinpoint as a behavior or a principle. The brief, infrequent, fleeting moments is what’s most important. Otherwise, the routine of everyday work and home worries and interactions sweeps away the very humanity we all possess. Buber suggests that the usual lives we live are not completely human, that the only way to become a full human being is to seek and appreciate these fleeting moments, when another person comes in direct relation with me, and as Buber writes, fills the heaven. It is when we relate to another person outside of restrictions and considerations of our relative positions, characteristics, stereotypes, and expectations. Those moments are the morsels of the real that actually make our lives worth living. Just thinking about scheduling, budgeting, big and little conflicts, programs, curriculum, etc, etc. – just thinking about this is actually quite depressing without some sort of a window to the real.

Our lives in big bureaucratic institutions and impersonal suburbs actually make this worse: we do not go to war, do not get lost in the desert, do not think about survival. The opportunities to reflect on our lives are not that plentiful. So, small problems tend to look bigger than they really are, petty fights look like big fights, and generally, the routine tends to eat us alive. How do we develop the capacity to always be on for the real? How do we manage to also pass this capacity on to our students?

What I am talking about may or may not be spiritual life. It’s basically, the ability to encounter other people without BS, directly. Lots of deeply religious and deeply atheistic people develop such abilities, although many others never do. Some people are a lot better at it than others. The problem is, we never specifically learn or teach how to seek the I-Thou, and how to recognize it once found.

What worries me is that this will sound crazy to many people. Then you ask them to tell a story about their lives, and how they sometimes feel a very deep connection to another person in a specific moment of a specific conversation, when the outside world somewhat disappears. And they suddenly remember, and agree that yes, it felt real, somehow profound. So, here is my suggestion: let’s amend the Performance-Based Standards for Colorado Teachers as following:

Standard Nine: I-Thou relations

The teacher has demonstrated the ability to:

1 Seek dialogical relations with his or her students
2 Maintain openness to the Other
3 Develop the need and ability to experience live in its fullest
4 Create classroom situations conducive to spontaneity, complexity and carnival

Or something like that...

I look at the list of my 59 blogs and wonder: how many of them about the real, and how many are about the superficial? Hmm, perhaps not that many.

1. How to alienate people and damage relationships
2. The Nomadic conference
3. Authority and power
4. Going with the flow: On the horizontal transparency
5. On-line is on the line
6. Playing the “you”
7. Switching gears
8. The Organizational Drift
9. Can you ever go home?
10. Dances with Data
11. Churchill and tenure
12. Freud for teachers, amended
13. Weddings, rituals, and memories
14. Curriculum and communication
15. Shift Left
16. The 90/10 rule
17. The cost of fairness
18. What is the most important
19. Zeno, Buddha and Program Development
20. What makes me angry
21. Gospriyomka and NCATE
22. Time density
23. The clouds glide by
24. The ethics of rumoring
25. Time Management and Sorry
26. The Lake Wobegon Effect
27. The “B” Word, or How do you know what you say you ...
28. Notes from AACTE, or American Absurdities
29. On Scholarly Productivity
30. Memories and time Symbolic violence
31. Merit, Shmerit, or “Evaluate not and thou shall no...
32. Why are we poor?
33. Midwives, matchmakers, Napoleon, and Kutuzov
34. On failings of humans
35. On the Money
36. What makes a problem hard to solve
37. UNC’s Organizational Culture and Change
38. Community and innovation: On the Academic Plannign...
39. Neo-prog’s Educational Agenda
40. Neo-progs wanted: Toward a new educational progres...
41. The Academe and other Soviet states
42. Teaching as research
43. Justice is good bureaucracy
44. Fall, foliage, and intrinsic motivation
45. Notes from the Dark Side
46. Accreditation and ambivalence
47. Levine Report
48. Cultural cycles
49. On human errors
50. The anatomy of human conflict
51. How to stop turf wars
52. Your director's list of task, abridged
53. On the nature of human knowledge
54. On authority
55. Big ideas
56. Complexity and catch-22
57. On vision, geeks, and technology
58. WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT

How to alienate people and damage relationships: A comprehensive guide for college professors

Introduction

Relationships with colleagues and with students are the least important asset you have, so why not take some time to diminish it? There is no easy way of ruining your relationships, because people tend to be forgiving, and generally avoid conflict. They will give you a long time and overlook your efforts. Besides, you probably have a great deal of likable traits which can outweigh your poor relationship skills, at least in the beginning. Be persistent; many small offenses will accumulate over the years, and eventually you will reach a point when almost everyone will hear your name, roll one’s eyes and say, “Oh, this person.” Poor reputations take years to build.

Dealing with Authority

When you talk to students or staff, always emphasize rank and assume the air of superiority. You can do it by ignoring their suggestions, by patronizing them, and by making it clear you are in charge. Do not allow them question your decisions, and perceive any doubt as a direct challenge to your authority and a personal affront.

Emphasize other forms of authority you may have over other people. For example, if you’re talking with people not from your field, make sure to mention that by definition, you know more than they do.

Flaunt your special expertise whenever you can. Bring it up in any conversation, even if not called for.

When talking to someone with a higher rank and more experience, make sure to ignore the rank. Send a message that you know it all already simply because you do. Always challenge the other person’s knowledge and judgment.

Dealing with mistakes

Whenever possible, point out people’s mistakes, just for the record. Find a way of reminding everyone around you about other people’s mistakes, especially to the offending individual. Imply incompetence s a reason for every mistake.

Whenever you make a mistake, make sure it is traceable to someone else’s mistakes. Remember, it is never your fault. Never acknowledge or remember your own mistakes, never refer to them.

When your mistake is made known to authorities, find out how the information got through, and make sure this does not happen again.

People skills

Nothing alienates people more than yelling at them. Do it often, with or without a reason. Let them know how frustrated you are at their lack of competence, of intelligence, and their ethical flaws.

See the intrigue everywhere. Any negative comment or unexplained action is but an element in a complex chain of intrigue. They are out there to get you.

Select someone as an object of intense dislike, and make everyone know about it. Give the most irrational reasons for dislike you can come up with. This not only will put an end to your relationship with the person in question, but will also damage your relationships with everyone. No one wants to be a partner in hate, so your friends will eventually turn away from you, too.

Write long, angry e-mails about any disagreement. Always CC the Dean, the entire department, and everyone’s brother.

The art of the argument

Never change your opinion. If you mentioned something, however briefly, it is now your position and you should stick to it. Whatever else other people say, no matter how reasonable, simply stick to your guns. Remember, you cannot ever agree if you previously disagreed. Compromise can save deteriorating relationships, so avoid it at all cost.

If you have certain experiences, or qualifications, use them as arguments sufficient on their own merit. The logic is like this: 1. I know more about A. 2. We are talking about A. 3. Therefore, all my opinions are more valid than yours.

Do not engage in substantive discussion; imply that your opponent wouldn’t understand.

Give non-replies. Just dismiss your opponent’s arguments with a quick come-back that has nothing to do with the essence of your conversation. Remember, replying is more important than figuring out a sensible position.

Always have the last word. One-upmanship is an excellent tool and works every time.

Interpret differences of opinions as a clear sign that other people are wrong.

Imply ill intentions: if people disagree with you, it is because they are either (a) stupid, or (b) evil.

Conclusion

Never reflect on your relationship skills. Don’t worry about it, don’t think about it, don’t discuss with anyone. You’ve got a doctoral degree, so you’re perfect already. There is nothing else to learn, especially about such silly things as getting along with other people. People get pissed at you only because they are really bad persons; it may never have anything to do with you. Only idiots actually worry about an impression they make on other people. Smart people are smart all around. The end.

The Nomadic conference

Most of us love to travel. Tourism, of course, is not the best way to do it; far from it. First, it is very expensive. Second, you do not get to interact with locals; waiters and hotel clerks are the extent of your local friendship circle. Third, you get to experience pre-packaged, touristy things, mainly because you don’t know where to find places with real-life flavor. And did I mention it is expensive and not tax-deductible?

What if our School made a deal with a teacher education college in another country? It goes like this: a group of us come to your institution for a few days, say, during Spring break. We stay in your homes, and hang out with you. We put together a conference on teacher education, so we exchange our thoughts and experiences. Next year, or in the Fall, we do the same in reverse: you come to us on the same terms, we do another conference. Not only this would be more meaningful, and more fun than tourism, but we also could claim professional development funds to cover some of the expenses. The rest we can legitimately claim to be professional expenses on out r tax returns. Then we hook up with another institution in another country, and do the same thing again; perhaps inviting the first one to join as well. So STE’s traveling circus snowballs in a global network for teacher education.

One rule: No elite institutions. It’s just hard for us to relate to, say, Tokyo University or Beijing University, or Moscow State. We are in a different business, so we need someone like us, who trains teachers, and does it well. So, let’s call it “ The Off-Center Nomadic Conference”

I figure, if we go to, say, Siberia, it would add to about $2000 per person, half of which can be paid for by professional development. Perhaps Office of International Education and other University bodies will pitch in some more (Eugene? Got cash?). After all, we’re building the best kind of international collaboration, based on personal contacts, which can and will result in greater opportunities for students. This will also let us build the sort of experience that makes us a community. Just imagine fun of having been left behind in the middle of trans-Siberian railroad, or playing a drinking game with some very determined Russians. On the other hand, I am sick and tired of Russians, of our railroads and our drinking games. Perhaps some other country would be more interesting.

Here is my wish list:

• Morocco
• Brazil
• Israel
• Norway
• Czech Republic
• UK
• Chile
• Singapore
• Egypt
• Ireland
• Swaziland
• Georgia
• Japan
• Germany

What is yours?

Authority and power

A certain meeting in the State’s capital made me think about power. How come people who are incompetent also inevitable feel the need to exercise authority? These two seems to be coming hand-in-hand. If you meet a bureaucrat, who begins a conversation with a not-so-subtle “who’s the boss” theater, -- be sure, whatever he is going to tell you is going to be poorly thought out, unorganized, and lacking rationale. This is true not only in management; teachers who suck at teaching will pay excessive attention to maintaining their treachery authority. They act preemptively; making sure everyone around knows who the emperor is, so the emperor’s nakedness will be ignored by the crowd. The less secure a person is about her competence, the more authoritarian she becomes.

Authority in general comes from weakness. The lavish medieval theater of authority reflected the incredible weakness of medieval rulers: they had no real economic or military power, so all they did was pretending to have authority. In modern democratic societies, government power stems from public consent and assumption of competence. Incompetence quickly erodes consent, and diminishes power. Hence the theatrics of authority make their come-back. Presidents suddenly start worrying about looking presidential when their failures become obvious. In our little neck of the woods, a state agency that butchered review process suddenly is keen at pointing out how the Law of the Land (capitalized) is behind their demands. If those to be reviewed come up with a better idea, it is even more threatening, because by definition, those in authority must be more competent than those underneath. What they do not understand is this: recognizing and supporting a good idea requires higher competence than developing it. Absorbing and supporting someone else’s better idea allows the persons of authority rightfully claim ownership over its results.

Worrying about authority too much actually makes one’s power weaker, because it destroys the foundation of modern authority – its claim for competence. Worrying about authority is self-defeating and counterproductive, in management, in teaching, and elsewhere.

Going with the flow: On the horizontal transparency

The Dean is asking for goals again. He needs to know what our goals are for the year. I chatted with Mark, my fellow School director yesterday, and he commented about how 90% of our jobs are not really goal-oriented. He is right; most of the day is taken with small tasks such as talking to faculty, listening to student complaints, doing paperwork, answering inquiries, figuring out solutions for problems.

An example: We had an adjunct faculty arrested for sexual assault this week. So, it's probably 8-10 hours’ worth of work; absolutely not planned for. Other, less dramatic things happen all the time, like, say, a glitch in our new database that won't go away. OK? Two hours or more this week. A TB testing event turned into a disaster, because health clinic ran out of vaccine, partly because we changed somewhat the procedure for keeping track of TB tests... another two hours or so. This stuff is not trivial, and needs attention, because it touches real people's lives and in the long run, makes or breaks the organizational culture. So, let's call it the flow - the flow of unpredictable events.

The best part of the flow - it is unpredictable, and therefore never boring. Each little event teaches something about human conditions, about behavior of organizations, and about my very self. Some of these happenings are just so delicious; no fiction will ever measure up to the novelty and amusement value. Some are just annoying. However the common quality of the flow elements is this: one does not plan for them, and does not cause their appearances. The worst thing about the flow - one has no sense of control whatsoever over it. They come and go, uninvited, unexpected, and unknowable in advance. Things just happen to you, and they always have the initiative, while you always have to be on defensive, improvising a response. The flow eats up your time without having really anything to show for it. Jobs like mine are judged by what we accomplish, hence the Dean’s request for goals. So, only offensive moves really count. The defensive ones remain largely unknown. There is simply no one to report them, to – no one is interested. Would you want to know the results of my negotiations with four Social Foundations faculty about teaching Spring classes? No, you’d never be interested. My wife asks me to tell what I did today as a sleeping aid. It does not sound exciting when you tell people, although this work is actually quite interesting. The Dean has even less interest in those, because he’s got enough of the flow of his own.

The danger is that people like me will be tempted to neglect the flow, and concentrate on showy, visible projects. After all, when we get a big grant or open another program, everyone notices. When we avert a crisis, no one does. I suppose the CIA makes the same claim. And this is not only about school directors, of course. Program coordinators and faculty deal with the flow a lot. A problem student, a need to rework curriculum on the spot, because something is not quite working… All of these things are invisible and certainly cannot be put on one’s yearly report. If you become too goal-oriented, you create problems in the flow; the unresolved problems accumulate and will blow up in your face. If you just keep up with the flow; people think you’re not really doing anything important. I suppose there is a balance somewhere there.

I am not sure there is a good measure of how well one deals with the flow; not sure if it can be worked in the evaluation system. However, I think it is important for us to know what our colleagues are doing, without becoming an impossible bore. The illusion that one works more than everyone else is a common problem in higher education, because we work in isolation from each others. We need to have some horizontal transparency, so we do not come to a conclusion that so and so is not working hard enough just because we do not see her or him working, or do not have people complaining all the time. By the way, the complaining is a strategy for making the flow more visible for others, a reassurance against your work becoming invisible to and underappreciated by others. Some people really excel at it, but I don’t believe complaining is the most effective way of establishing the horizontal transparency, because it is ultimately misleading and makes our work look unappealing.

But what is? I don’t know. Maybe we should have a bulletin board of some sort where people will post the flow notes? I mean, these things can be amusing, even if small. But then we all are too busy to post and to read someone else’s diaries. Weekly lunches could help, but those are hard to schedule practically. Right now, I am open for any suggestions. I think some sort of horizontal transparency could be very beneficial, so we know who’s done what, who has been dealing with what issues, so we can coordinate and value each other better. It’s a matter of counteracting the flow with diffusion of information horizontally. I am certainly not interested in knowing all the flow of all my faculty and staff; this is way too much information. However, I am really interested in faculty A knowing what her colleague B down the hall is actually doing, with as much detail as possible. I can just ask people to talk more, but it does not always work. So, again, I am open to any suggestions.

If anyone is interested, I would love to include one-paragraph long Flow Notes into the weekly updates. Tell us just one story, one unexpected little thing you were dealing with? I think those might be fun if enough people will start doing them.

On-line is on the line

We had an interesting, productive discussion on the on-line offerings. I was arguing that we should move rapidly towards acquiring expertise in this area and perhaps converting some courses, while many of my colleagues questioned such a move. All had some doubts about effectiveness of the on-line pedagogy, especially for methods courses that require a lot of demonstrations and modeling. The main question was, however, why we should do that. Just to jump on the bandwagon? Just to make some money? What, they wondered, is, exactly the problem we are trying to solve? Why fix it if it ain’t broke? I was not quite prepared to answer the why question at the time, so I am trying to do it now.

We cannot reach certain populations otherwise, and these people need us the most. For example, our Alamosa Early Childhood project won’t work without at least some of the courses being on-line. The Four Corners project working with Ute tribes is in the same position.

As our on-campus enrollments decline, we need to seek new audiences for our programs. Prospective students, especially graduate working students come to us with certain expectations. While some got burned by bad on-line experiences, and crave human contact, others, especially from outlying areas, would like to do substantial part of work on-line; that is simply more practical for them. We must accommodate both groups.

Higher education is competitive, and we are a bit behind in the on-line game. As our competitors learn to use the on-line tools, they are likely to improve overall quality of their programs, and we will be forced to catch up. That’s the main reason I think we should pursue on-line technology. It is a sophisticated educational tool, and it does improve quality of regular face-to-face instruction. I cannot prove this with research, but I bet instructors who have on-line expertise are also able to transfer many of the skills into a regular classroom. For example, Blackboard grade book tool is vastly superior to any hard copy or electronic grade book you might use, because it allows students instant access, gives ranges of scores, is directly linked to assessments, etc. The testing tool of Blackboard is a lot better than anything you could come up on your own, if you do multiple choice or short answer or similar assessment. The threaded discussion is pedagogically superior to other forms of journaling, because students can read each other’s entries and learn from them. There are dozens of ways of creative use of threaded discussion. Using threaded discussions enhances classroom discussion, because it allows more time and space, and encourages shy students to participate. How many times have you walk out from felt like a great discussion, only because three or four good students participated, and the rest just sat there? Blackboard allows fight plagiarism; it also reduces cost of printing to the university and to students.

The on-line teaching experience is a powerful professional development instrument. Instructors are forced to reexamine the content of their courses, and look at them in a different light. What feels good in a face-to-face classroom is not necessarily effective instructionally, but many of us cherish the warm and fuzzy feeling of human connection over the instructional effectiveness. Say what you want, but some professors tell too many random stories, listen to too much discussion, and waste too much time on demonstrations. While hands-on experiences are often productive and necessary, they are not always effective, and quite often are not challenging enough. The ensuing reflection and discussion is important, but the activity itself takes the bulk of time. The on-line format, with all its tremendous limitations, and because of these limitations, forces one to see what exactly students should know, and which skills to develop. It allows for greater individual feedback.

Of course, some people say that what they use now is just fine and works for them. However, this is a claim that is often stems from lack of desire and experience. Some people still prefer typewriters to computers, because they sound so well, and make you be careful with words, etc., etc. However, the refusal to use a more efficient tool is not benign. It is every professional’s responsibility to stay at the level of productivity comparable with other professionals in the field. Just like when computers were implemented, many professors believed in a God-given right to have someone around to type their handwritten manuscripts. They were wrong, and were forced to change. The same is going to happen with on-line tools.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of very clever and very honest people who make an effort to figure out how the new tools can be used to improve instruction. Even though the tools have their own limitations, and are not a panacea, those people will succeed in finding something useful in them. In general, variety of tools used makes for more effective teaching. The advantage is not marginal; it will add up to a substantial one over the years of trying. So, if we refuse to join the process, too bad for us.

In reality, people who refuse to learn on-line instruction will still do it, but because they were slow to react and lack skills, they will do it badly, thus reinforcing their own initial belief. People who hurry too much, and jumps into it for the wrong reasons, also will do it badly. What we should do is to take the challenge head-on, be thoughtful and creative about it. We should develop some quality standards and measures, implement peer-review process to ensure quality, and, most importantly, build expertise. Only from the position of knowledge and strength can you say “no, this is not going to work in the on-line environment.” Only then will you have credibility and authority to say so.
On-line is on the line

We had an interesting, productive discussion on the on-line offerings. I was arguing that we should move rapidly towards acquiring expertise in this area and perhaps converting some courses, while many of my colleagues questioned such a move. All had some doubts about effectiveness of the on-line pedagogy, especially for methods courses that require a lot of demonstrations and modeling. The main question was, however, why we should do that. Just to jump on the bandwagon? Just to make some money? What, they wondered, is, exactly the problem we are trying to solve? Why fix it if it ain’t broke? I was not quite prepared to answer the why question at the time, so I am trying to do it now.

We cannot reach certain populations otherwise, and these people need us the most. For example, our Alamosa Early Childhood project won’t work without at least some of the courses being on-line. The Four Corners project working with Ute tribes is in the same position.

As our on-campus enrollments decline, we need to seek new audiences for our programs. Prospective students, especially graduate working students come to us with certain expectations. While some got burned by bad on-line experiences, and crave human contact, others, especially from outlying areas, would like to do substantial part of work on-line; that is simply more practical for them. We must accommodate both groups.

Higher education is competitive, and we are a bit behind in the on-line game. As our competitors learn to use the on-line tools, they are likely to improve overall quality of their programs, and we will be forced to catch up. That’s the main reason I think we should pursue on-line technology. It is a sophisticated educational tool, and it does improve quality of regular face-to-face instruction. I cannot prove this with research, but I bet instructors who have on-line expertise are also able to transfer many of the skills into a regular classroom. For example, Blackboard grade book tool is vastly superior to any hard copy or electronic grade book you might use, because it allows students instant access, gives ranges of scores, is directly linked to assessments, etc. The testing tool of Blackboard is a lot better than anything you could come up on your own, if you do multiple choice or short answer or similar assessment. The threaded discussion is pedagogically superior to other forms of journaling, because students can read each other’s entries and learn from them. There are dozens of ways of creative use of threaded discussion. Using threaded discussions enhances classroom discussion, because it allows more time and space, and encourages shy students to participate. How many times have you walk out from felt like a great discussion, only because three or four good students participated, and the rest just sat there? Blackboard allows fight plagiarism; it also reduces cost of printing to the university and to students.

The on-line teaching experience is a powerful professional development instrument. Instructors are forced to reexamine the content of their courses, and look at them in a different light. What feels good in a face-to-face classroom is not necessarily effective instructionally, but many of us cherish the warm and fuzzy feeling of human connection over the instructional effectiveness. Say what you want, but some professors tell too many random stories, listen to too much discussion, and waste too much time on demonstrations. While hands-on experiences are often productive and necessary, they are not always effective, and quite often are not challenging enough. The ensuing reflection and discussion is important, but the activity itself takes the bulk of time. The on-line format, with all its tremendous limitations, and because of these limitations, forces one to see what exactly students should know, and which skills to develop. It allows for greater individual feedback.

Of course, some people say that what they use now is just fine and works for them. However, this is a claim that is often stems from lack of desire and experience. Some people still prefer typewriters to computers, because they sound so well, and make you be careful with words, etc., etc. However, the refusal to use a more efficient tool is not benign. It is every professional’s responsibility to stay at the level of productivity comparable with other professionals in the field. Just like when computers were implemented, many professors believed in a God-given right to have someone around to type their handwritten manuscripts. They were wrong, and were forced to change. The same is going to happen with on-line tools.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of very clever and very honest people who make an effort to figure out how the new tools can be used to improve instruction. Even though the tools have their own limitations, and are not a panacea, those people will succeed in finding something useful in them. In general, variety of tools used makes for more effective teaching. The advantage is not marginal; it will add up to a substantial one over the years of trying. So, if we refuse to join the process, too bad for us.

In reality, people who refuse to learn on-line instruction will still do it, but because they were slow to react and lack skills, they will do it badly, thus reinforcing their own initial belief. People who hurry too much, and jumps into it for the wrong reasons, also will do it badly. What we should do is to take the challenge head-on, be thoughtful and creative about it. We should develop some quality standards and measures, implement peer-review process to ensure quality, and, most importantly, build expertise. Only from the position of knowledge and strength can you say “no, this is not going to work in the on-line environment.” Only then will you have credibility and authority to say so.

Playing the “you”

I often tell future teachers that their bodies and selves are the most important instruments of our profession. Just like a violin player must know what her violin can and cannot do, and how to tune it, and how to care for it; the same way teachers should learn about themselves. What keeps you going? How do you rest an recharge? What can you do, and you cannot do? Can you manage your emotions? Can you tweak your thinking processes? In other words, can you play the “you” well?

Not that I am myself a great player: I do get stuck, get anxious, and sometimes cannot generate energy, etc. However, a few tricks I have learned over the years; and these are just a couple.

Yesterday, I walked over to the library. Not that I needed to go; I am sure one of our helpful work studies could have done it for me. But a five minute walk in early September does wonders. The light is just so slightly changed. It is not autumn yet, but there is a little promise of an autumn in the air. Our magnificent dark-haired pine trees outside of McKee stoically ignore the hints of the changing season, as they will stubbornly try to ignore the coming winter. The deciduous trees are not like that; they are still green but somehow more fragile, a yellow leaf prematurely shows now and then. I see all this, inhale the cool air, squirm at the sun; the emotional engine in my brain hums and spins, and voila, my mind is clear.

Then the library itself: the trick is to find one code, and then just browse through the entire shelf, look for the unexpected. I was thinking about writing a piece on learning motivation, and found just two books that somehow strike me as interesting. So, I will ignore the books I must read, but will read these two, simply because it is a torture to read boring stuff, and one should always read in the path of the least resistance. But most importantly, I had an idea. There is nothing more pleasurable than to experience what appears to be a new thought. I know that most of them in the end turn out to be duds, and that’s OK. Yet the very moments when something pops into your mind, something that should not really have been there, something unexpected – these are difficult to describe and wonderful to live through. It is does not have to be big, or earth shuttering, but you know when you just might have had an idea. And it works like this: reading random stuff, making connections, talking to colleagues, having an idea – feeling great. I don’t really do scholarship to improve the world, nor do I do it primarily to achieve recognition. It is more of a drug; I just need my fix now and then. It’s the endorphin balance I am after.

What I am telling here is quite trivial. All of us professional educators have found our own ways of playing the main instrument, ourselves. The tricks are all different, the result is the same: we learn how to manipulate our emotions and intellectual work so we can stay and shape and enjoy ourselves. How do we teach young teachers to do that? My unscientific guess is that the inability to control and enjoy oneself is the main cause for teacher burnout. We teach our students to model good practices, and to exhibit certain behaviors. Who is going to teach them to learn about themselves, to regulate their own minds and bodies?

Switching gears

It has been a difficult week. The regular beginning of the semester stuff (not enough sections, waiting lists, small classes, etc.) coincided with the new procedures we implemented (checkpoint courses), overlapped with the last-ditch efforts to find and write up data for the NCATE reports. I actually like a good crisis now and then, but this was not a crisis. It felt like I was constantly interrupted by small and big things, forgetting where I was, and I am afraid, not terribly effective at any of my tasks. Also, you cope with time crunches like this by postponing working on other important things that need long-term attention, and thus planting seeds for future time-crunches. This is what happens when you run out of time: you don’t work on the future and by doing that, you make sure it happens again. It’s worked out OK in the end; however, I noticed a subtle difference in my reactions to information that comes my way: in the course of a normal week, I always look through the information in search for opportunities for my School and for myself. Last week, all I asked myself was: “Can I ignore this for now?” In other words, when you are too delete-happy, you may miss on something really important for the future, either a sign of danger or a promise of an opportunity. So, I don’t want things to stay they are; I need time and space for thinking and being creative.

The reasons for this less than splendid week are entirely obvious, and almost all are traceable to my own errors. Want examples? OK, there just a few: should not have taught Summer class so late; could be a week ahead on NCATE now. Should have been more careful scheduling Fall, and avoid last-minute searches for faculty, etc., etc. I am reasonably tolerant to mistakes, mine and those of other people, so no guilt feelings here, trust me. Yet, I need to learn something from this, but what? I am still stubbornly clinging to this lesson-finding expedition, although I could have spent this time catching up. And that’s what I think we all should do: invest time in understanding how we work, and maybe make the process a little better, rather than keep working same way, and running into the same problems again and again.

OK, maybe this: I need to learn to switch gears and work in a different mode when needed. Many years ago, I had a privilege to work with a wonderful interpreter, Andrey Falaleyev. He is a professional, with many years of experience; he interpreted for Yeltsyn and Gorbachev. He told me once: you are doing a good job, but you need to learn to work in different modes. If someone speaks slowly, you translate almost everything. Someone speaks really fast, OK, you do not panic but translate only the basic meaning. Someone speaks poetically, you look for metaphors; someone loses one’s train of thought, you force the sentences to make sense, even if quite generic. It’s like tennis; you need to have a defense for every kind of attack.

We took turns every 30 minutes (you cannot interpret for longer than that; you brain goes mush; it is a highly stressful job), and he was clearly better than me – not because his knowledge of both languages was better, but because his repertoire of modes was richer, and he could move from one to another instantly. I could almost see him switch gears; he never stressed out even in most complicated situations (we sometimes translated highly technical stuff). Not once did our audience notice any loss of meaning in translation. Now, I saw some losses, of course, but that was his point: meaning is lost in any communication, translated or not; you need to make sure the main ideas are getting across.

Here is what I should have done last week, if only I could remember Andrey’s advice: I should have set specific time for e-mail replies, and not try to read them all through the day. I should have shut my door, despite my open-door policy, at least for a few hours every day. Instead of constant multitasking, I should have only done a few things well, rather than many things so-so. Oh, well, there is always another week.

The Organizational Drift

Several contradictory experiences of the last week allowed me to see a pattern. I had a few frustrating moments trying to navigate through UNC’s on-line catalogue. To say it is a mess is an understatement. Just try to find Elementary PTEP, the largest teacher education program on campus. The system of internal references broke down, the Index is incomplete, inconsistent, and confusing. No one can navigate it. At the same time I know that the University’s IT team is highly competent, and the web administrators are also very knowledgeable and dedicated. We have a problem that like most, cannot be blamed on individuals.

Our School had a retreat, a very productive one. It made me appreciate again the professional strength and dedication of my colleagues. Meetings like this make me remember why I chose to work in higher education: to hang out with smart people. I also had to look at some curricular pieces in the last two weeks, and was again impressed with the thoughtfulness and expertise that went into development of the programs and individual courses. Yet our programs seem to have gaps and overlaps.

What happens is what I would call organizational drift; it is somewhat related to the concept of organizational entropy. What happens is really simple. Let’s say a group of faculty have developed a new course together; they have a good understanding of the course, and all teach similar things. Then some of the original group members are replaced, so they teach the course slightly differently. The original authors also change and update the course as a matter of good pedagogical practice. While each section of the course is improved in comparison to the original design, they also drifted apart, sometime significantly. This creates a problem of inconsistency: the same course taught by different professors looks completely different.

Of course, the original course was designed to fit into a specific program or even to several programs. While the program was originally designed in a certain way, each of the courses have been continuously improved or just changed because of the faculty turn over. The drift is natural, inevitable, and wholly expected. The same happened to the catalogue: it is a complex system with internal references among multiple parts. Different people are in charge of the individual parts, and no one can have a view of the entire system. As the parts drift apart, the references disintegrate and the system collapses. Our programs are not in the Catalogue’s position yet: the systems were designed relatively recently, and designed rather well. They are small enough for some communication to take place and to maintain their integrity. Yet the tendency is evident; where there is flexibility, there is also the drift.

One solution is to limit change: to redesign once and for all, and them limit any change. Some organizations do that: here is your syllabus, here is your textbook, and this is how you’re going to teach. It leads to stagnation and turns people off, but such a solution hold the drift in check. It also very difficult to enforce in Academia: people chose to work here because they are creative, and like to experiment and be independent. Without change, we simply would not survive for a long time, because education is in constant flux, and we need to run just to remain on the same place. The standards movement is another version of the same solution: it seeks to limit certain parameters of change by introducing a permanent set of references around which everything must order itself. It does not work like this, because professors largely ignore the standards. Or, rather, we claim to follow the standards after the fact of delivering curriculum. We do this not out of stubbornness or defiance, but because standards are too crude to keep the system organized. We understand that standardization means the death of the system that loses its ability to innovate. On the local level, the curriculum approval process seeks to limit the drift. However, as everyone know, most people ignore officially approved syllabi, for the same reasons.

Another solution is to make all changes transparent and encourage all parts of the system to react to every change in one individual part. In other words, the solution is to have constant meetings, and make all changes totally visible, while adjusting every little part to every little change. We are planning to do something like this in our in-service days. Smaller institutions do that constantly, and are often very successful in designing coherent programs. They can do this over a lunch meeting with a few people. But for a larger organization like ours, such efforts if they are continuous would take enormous resources. The constant information flow will become incredibly taxing in terms of time and resources. Going back to the catalogue example, the second solution of that problem looks like this: all school directors plus the registrar staff plus IT (about fifty people?) would have to spend a day or two going through the catalogue page by page to ensure the coherence of the entire system. Of course, we simply cannot do that even if we wanted to. If I remember correctly, groups of Microsoft staff at one point read together millions of lines of code to eliminate bugs; this was a very expensive solution, and their programs are still buggy, mainly because they are so huge and because of the drift.

The third solution is, I a way, a combination of the first two: you’d break the system into smaller chunks, explicitly define responsibilities of each one towards another, limit any changes in relationships among the chunks, but allow changes and abundant information exchanges within the chunks. This solution has its own limitations. For example if we were to create small teams, one in charge of literacy instruction, and another in charge of, say Social Studies and Math methods, and then another working with Art, Music, and PE, OK, they would work fine to improve their specific area, but then the areas will start to drift from each other. As a result, we would have no unity on matter that run across different areas: knowledge of diversity, classroom management, sound assessments, etc. In other words, we would export entropy to a different level, as biologists might say, but there will be about the same amount of it in the system. And this is what we have been doing anyway.

The radical solution will have to be based with self-organization processes and with alternative ways of information flows. I don’t have the solution; I just have a vague idea, even less than an idea, an image, a dream. Somehow, I see our students keeping track of their own learning needs: what they already know, what skills they still lack and need to work on, and what they should learn. I see them constantly checking these skills and knowledge with a constantly available testing service and then entering requests for specific knowledge into a database. Here is what I need to learn in the next semester… Then the computer matches those requests against our faculty’s expertise, and voila, it delivers a schedule. It does not look like our present schedule; it is a lot more complex: we have courses that last from one day to the whole semester. They have long names like: Elementary Social studies curriculum with use of storytelling and ideas on classroom management in urban classrooms. Or: philosophies of education plus professional writing skills plus research skills. The schedule is different every semester; it prompts professors to gain expertise in areas that are in high demand, and constantly update what we already know. Those professors whose expertise is not in demand, have to leave or work as assistants to other, more effective professors. Students are in charge of their own learning; those who cannot master skills, are forced to leave; those who can do most of their learning on their own, save time and money. The distributed knowledge makes the system self-organizing: no one knows everything, but everyone knows what she or he needs.
Anyway, that’s my Saturday afternoon dream?

Can you ever go home?

My Russian in-law family, six of them, stayed with us for a while. We had a lot of fun, and some very good, very Russian conversations. A visit like this always brings forth questions of identity. This country versus that country, where one should live, how do we lives, what makes one Russian, and what makes one American. The precarious bridge to the old country has been briefly reestablished, and at least in imagination, crossed back and forth. Svetlana and I have always considered going back; we have been held back because of practicalities such as lack of good jobs in Russia, kids that went native and the large American debts. There are other considerations though. In 16 years we were gone, Russia has changed dramatically, not once but twice: from crumbling Soviet Union to the deepest economic depression imaginable, back to oil revenue-prompted relative prosperity and stability. From the excitement and hope of Glasnost era to despair of chaotic democracy and lawlessness, it then became a semi-authoritarian, but stable and mostly functional state. I watched two coupe d'etates on CNN, have seen and heard tragic and uplifting news from what seems to be an intensely familiar, but also more and more mysterious country. I traveled back five or six times, each time struck by how little have changed, and how completely different the country has become.

Like all immigrants, I am caught in this interesting space in between two cultures. People like me are foreigners everywhere. With virtually non-existing English, I came to Indiana at the ripe age of 29, thus the accent that is impossible to eliminate. Moreover, the accent itself becomes a part of one’s identity; you become known as the Russian guy with an accent. Even if it were possible, I would not get rid of it. I could have become a generic Alex, but instead insisted on remaining an exotic Sasha for the same reason: Russian Alexes whose number is a million are too eager to blend in; they are afraid of remaining foreigners fearing discrimination and sometime wishing to forget. Anyway, foreigner I am, which is a mixed blessing. The American Academe tends to be remarkably tolerant to foreigners (especially to White Europeans); tolerance matched only perhaps by that of the business community and unparalleled in the world. As a foreigner, one can always claim the bogus authority of an outsider, of someone with a different perspective; the Academe values that. At the same time, people often expect you to be naïve and know nothing about simple things, and having little facility with the English language. Especially touching are complements on the comprehensibility of one’s accent, and on the fact that I can actually write. I had a very hard time getting my first teaching job, chiefly because of the obvious foreignness. But this was a long time ago, and now my job is great, and at least some people in the field claim to respect my scholarship. All’s good.

Of course, the Russians treat me like a foreigner, too. Their attitude varies between patronizing to hostile, but the message is always the same: you did not go through this with us, so you wouldn’t understand. Or, you have been away for too long, you forgot how this is. The deep seated anti-Americanism of many Russians stems from the wounds to the national dignity. The wounds are mostly self-inflicted, but when it hurts one must hate someone, anyone. The Russian Americans will always get some flack on behalf of the entire American nation for everything from obesity to the Iraq war. One sure sign of becoming a foreigner is this: you cannot criticize Russia anymore. What is perfectly allowable to a real Russian (for example, criticism of Putin’s slide to autocratic rule) will not be permitted to you, the emigrant, because you are no longer one of us. Americans do not always understand this sensitivity, because their tolerance to criticism of America is rooted in implied assumption of own superiority. What a sentence… My writing has been ruined by the practice of philosophy. Anyway, back to the point: People like me are foreigners everywhere, and we end up always defending Russia in America, and defending America in Russia. In both cases we are basically defending ourselves, the parts of our identity that do not sit easy with people around us. It is much easier in a third country, where you’re simply a tourist, and no one gives a damn about your identity.

This place in between has been described many times by dozens of immigrant writers. They all try to make people appreciate how rich and complex the creatures of cultural border crossings are. So there, see how complex I am? Can I get some respect for this? The truth is, our experiences are not at all unique, and are a variation on the universal human story of going away from home; the home to which one can never return. It is a story of nostalgia, of growing up and betrayal of one’s youth, of embracing new things but longing for the old. We are all immigrants from home; even those who have never left the home town.

I feel sad for people who have a hang up on national culture, and cannot see past it. I doubt the very notion of culture, especially applied to such large entities like the Americans or the Russians has any usefulness. In other words, one can always make some generalizations: Americans are that, Russians are this, and Chinese are something else. But how would you use such generalizations? For what? If you try to apply them in any kind of real-life situation, they will turn out wrong more often than right. In my pragmatist epistemology, that means national cultures do not exist; they are fiction, myth useful to manipulate people, but useless to do anything good. But that’s another blog.

We could go back one day, when the practicalities of such a move are resolved. Russia is so much more unpredictable than the US, it is so much more frightening and exciting, it is hard to resist.

Dances with Data

Carolyn, our NCATE Queen, and I were dancing with and around data a lot. Our dependable work studies have been diligently punching in numbers; our smart graduate assistants played with spreadsheets and produced nice tables. Program reports are due soon, so we are having a close look at what information we have gathered, and which of it makes any sense.

We have learned several things so far. One is that when you set up some data collection process, you don’t really know if the data in the end is going to be useful. You also never realize what will be missing. When it is aggregated, it looks differently than when you are looking at a single item or few items. Data can look really boring, when there is no variation, and everyone is proficient. Data can look weak, because it does not prove what it is supposed to prove. We also realized that data collection must be systematic from the get go: we collect too much data, actually. Each individual sheet or form has been added sometime in the past for what seemed to be a good reason, but now many serve no purpose, or are never used for anything. So, when you have too much data, you end up spending more time digging out what is somewhat useful from what is obsolete. So, it should be very limited, very focused, and have some validity. Not just what statisticians like to call concept validity, but what I would like to call the gut feeling validity: can we actually believe it measures what we say it measures? Can we stand by it?

In the institution of our size, bureaucratic procedures for data collection are crucial. Someone has to visualize the journey a piece of paper makes, and find that critical point where we can get a copy of it, and then enter it into a database. A lot of things could go wrong here: an instructor may forget to turn his or her sheets; a staff person can be recent and not realize that certain piece of paper needs to be collected, or may not know what it looks like. A paper may be filed improperly, or not filed at all, then the information may never be entered into the database, so we have to pull paper out of files, and enter it. Time also plays tricks with us: “I believe I turned it in to A,” says B about an event that happened many months ago. “I don’t remember receiving anything from B,” says A. Both suspect C might have the stuff, but C is no longer working with us C says he turned everything to D, who is also gone and out of reach, so I go into the D’s office where stuff might be, but find nothing. End of search. Now this may look like a lot of incompetence, but it is not. Data collection is a complex process highly vulnerable to error and to organizational changes. It easily disintegrates under pressures of time, large volume, and lack of strong motivation. Data needs evolve constantly, because of changes in various laws, program revisions, turnover of instructors, administrators and staff, and changes in technology.

However, the most important reason for our difficulties with data is that colleges have not learned yet to deal with accountability data. Of course, teacher education is on the forefront of the accountability movement. Most of our A&S colleagues are really behind us, and may have no idea at all about any of this. Most are making their baby steps in learning to dance this dance. However, even for NCATE accredited institutions like ours, the data collection challenge is still relatively new. Institutions have different scale of time: what is a long time for an individual, maybe just a blink in institutional time. While individuals can learn things quickly and remember what they have done, institutional capacities and institutional memories are very different – not as quick, not as reliable, and heavily dependent on writing things down. Having someone highly competent around does not necessarily solves the organizational problem.

In the end, a lot of data comes out a bit unconvincing. I treat it as a learning experience: I certainly learned a lot about dancing with data in this NCATE cycle, and many of my colleagues did the same. My worry is how to make the institutional memory and skills stronger. So, OK, we are starting fresh in this coming academic year. We need not only to revise the list of data items we collect, and revise out instruments; we need not only develop logistics for collecting and analyzing it, but also somehow make sure this process is sturdy enough to withstand changes. When we have new faculty, new secretaries, new work studies, etc., how will they know what to do with data and why we’re doing it? Next time we change something in information collection, how will that information spread? Who will make sure little pieces of data come together? How do we make this process less time consuming and therefore less expensive? And most importantly, how on Earth do we collect only meaningful data, and stop collecting crap WITHOUT failing our next NCATE review?

I am fairly confident we will pass most of this cycle, partly because Carolyn and others did a great job setting data collection in motion before I ever got here, and the process of actually writing the reports is well organized. Partly I am confident because NCATE has shown appreciation to the challenges of the institutional learning curve, and was not indifferent to the issues specific to large units. So, this is not a grade anxiety, but thinking about converting this whole accountability dance into something we can actually enjoy and look good doing.

Churchill and tenure

Professor Ward Churchill was just dismissed from UC Boulder for plagiarism and fabrications. He claims the accusations are false, and he is really being fired for his 9/11 essay. Of course, people started digging in his research after the controversial essay have been publicized, but this unfortunate fact does not negate the strong evidence of actual plagiarism and other misconduct, including fabrications. Interestingly, the Committee charged with investigation questions the timing and the motives of the University’s investigation, but cannot ignore the evidence. Churchill did cut a lot of corners to inflate his academic standing. He actually hurt the cause of the freedom of speech, because of the unrelated transgressions. Now people may be threatened to speak, seeing what happened to him. Thanks, Dr. Churchill, thanks a lot. Everyone by now knows the story; I just want to comment on academic tenure and its uses.

Does a professor have the right to say controversial, offensive, stupid things? Yes, of course, because academic freedom is a special, especially protected form of freedom of speech, and it serves an important social function. This is why the institution of tenure was created in the first place. It cannot, of course, shield from plagiarism and other misconduct. It is in the interest of university faculty to make sure tenure is used for its intended purposes. Let’s imagine for a second that tenure will be widely abused: instead of protecting academic freedom, it will be used to protect lack of effort and leisurely life styles. It is very likely that wide-spread abuse will result in a public backlash, especially in state schools supported by taxpayers. Such privileges are always conditional, given by someone for a reason, and should never be treated as unalienable rights. Everyone has the freedom of speech, or freedom of associations, but the privilege of having permanent employment is not such a right; it is a privilege granted to university faculty on certain conditions, in exchange for a specific public benefit.

Generally, anyone given special privileges – either political power, or wealth, or immunity from prosecution, or perks – should make sure these privileges are used properly, or they will be taken away. The basic human and civil rights should be guarded against governments, the conditional privileges must be self-policed. The Bush administration clearly abuses the executive privilege and thus jeopardizes having such privilege for all future presidents. So, this is not about this or that person, but about institutions, their long-term survival and efficiency.

And as an administrator, I see this as my primary concern. When I see someone abusing the privileges of tenure, I worry about other faculty, the overwhelming majority, who do not. For example, our university signs a 15-credit contract with faculty, which typically includes 9 credits of teaching, 3 credits of research and 3 credits of service. Roughly, that means that each faculty member must spend about one full day a week doing research, and another full day providing service to the institution and to the community. So, 38 or so weeks of the 9-month contract should result in some 300 hours of research activities and the same amount of service. It’s 38 full days of work for each research and service. What if someone does research for, say, only 50 hours a year? That, of course, constitutes fraud, because the person in question have signed a contract (promised to the University) to do research for 3 credits. Let’s assume a faculty member clearly cannot account f for all 15 credits of contractual work load, and can really show for, oh, just 12, or 80%. This amounts to stealing 20% of the salary; or if you earn $70,000, a $14,000 a year theft. Now, if I, the School Director, saw someone actually stealing 14 K in cash from the University coffers, I would, of course raise alarm, and try to stop this. Now what’s the difference with salaries? What if I cannot, in good conscience, account for the 15 contractual credits actually being performed? I cannot hide this, and moreover, there are other people, who are not necessarily friends of higher education, who can do the simple math. So, they will go ahead and cut our budgets, because they conclude, justifiably, that we might be inefficient in use of our current budgets.

Of course, we make it only because other faculty, both pre-tenure and tenured, put in 50, 60 and 70 hours a week to keep the things going. They do it because they care about the world, and about their profession. And many of those do not mind tolerating a 30-hour a week colleague, because of the sense of solidarity. But we cannot afford to do this anymore, because the whole institution is in jeopardy. If we continue to be too nice to each other, our tenure will follow the path of the labor unions, into the sunset. And with that, the true purpose of academic freedom will disappear also. The society as a whole will become more efficient, but less dynamic, and less free.

Freud for teachers, amended

It’s been very hot in Northern Colorado, and air-conditioning was, of course, scheduled to be repaired exactly at the same time. Not in March, not in October, when the weather is mild, but in the dead of the summer, in July. I could have done most of the work at home, but solidarity with our classified staff prevented me from going home. Here we are, sitting in our hot offices, trying to concentrate on work. We could not rent or buy window AC units, because we have no windows, and according to the laws of physics, to cool something, you must first heat something. The laws of thermodynamics apply to human relationships: we take in before we can disperse. Our good emotions and bad emotions need to go somewhere, and other people are most readily available conduits (although there are others like art, religion, etc.).

I have spent a few hours grading my students’ educational autobiographies, the first set of papers from this graduate class. It is actually a pleasure to read these: most of our students are very good writers, they are intelligent, and experienced. I feel good about our graduate programs. Of course, most are still lacking the powers of analysis and conceptualization, but hey, this is what graduate school is for, and I am certain we will make significant progress by the end of the semester. What strikes me though is how vivid, how sometimes painful the memory of early schooling are for most people. Those successful, and those deeply wounded, the A student and the special education students – all have a story to tell; all remember particular events rather well. All seem to link their present selves with those distant school children from many years ago.

Freud was right that the experiences of childhood determine who we are as adults. He was wrong, however, to concentrate on the early, pre-linguistic stages of human development. IN Freud’s view, it is precisely because we cannot directly access many of early memories, they become untamed, unprocessed, and perhaps more traumatic. This is all true, but early schooling can be as significant, and as traumatic, because we allow ourselves to remember only certain parts of it, and in the context f a specific discourse. For example, most people believe that since they are successful now, and since success can be attributed to learning (and schooling in particular), then whatever pain and humiliation they have experienced was ultimately good for them. It’s the same reasoning as in “My dad used to beat me up, and now I am OK, therefore beating children is OK.” Now, people do not make such conclusions because their power of reasoning is weak; rather, there is an active suppression of memory that is going on. Childhood is supposed to be a happy, care-free time; kids are not supposed to understand what is good for them; it was all worth it; schooling is child’s happiness, while manual labor is a curse – these are the boundaries of our predominant ideology of childhood. We do not dare to question those assumptions; thinking otherwise is unacceptable. (A well-informed reader may notice influence of Valentin Vološinov’s take on Freud here).

Raising your own children is an unending, continuous dialogue with your own parents. Similarly, teaching is always a dialogue with your own teachers. Teaching is impossible without some grasp of one’s own educational path, without making peace with your teachers, your parents, and your own earlier self. What is it that I have done? What was done to me? Why am I the way I am now? In psychiatry, the focus is, understandably on understanding one’s fears, frustrations, and other things that make us suffer. However, teachers must also understand the sources of their own compassion, empathy, and desire to do and be good. Otherwise, this desire to help can be tragically misplaced, when doing good takes precedence over those for whom the good is intended. Teachers must know not only the dark corners f their souls (which everyone has), but also the brightly lit corners. In what I am doing, how much is what have been done to me?

Weddings, rituals, and memories

OK, these are the threads I need to tie together: being back from vacation, my daughter’s wedding, and one year on this job. Too much for one blog isn’t it?

OK, here are some wedding pictures. My son Gleb made an entire DVD with movies and slide shows, if anyone cares to see it. It was actually a lot of fun, mainly because Maria and Alexander did not want it to be too formal, and too planned ahead (smart kids). They held their expectations open and vague, so there was no disappointment, but a lot of improvisation. We were incredibly lucky with the capricious Seattle weather. Weddings are just so hopeful and so optimistic; they charge up everyone involved, and help renew people’s relationships.

We form major memories by coding them with emotion. Those events without an emotional coloring quickly fade away, reduce to a bare minimum or to nothing. This is how we keep the storage capacity of our brains available for new memories. However, memories colored by strong emotions tend to stay much longer, and thus become significant in helping to explain the stories of our lives. Rituals such as weddings are simply cultural methods of infusing memories with emotion. We make ourselves remember certain events and give them more significance. A good ritual is an emotional one, hence the songs, the readings, and processions. Then, of course, every culture has a way of periodical recalls of significant events, when people activate their memories and verify them against each other’s.

In reflecting my one year on the job, I see the same pattern: many events I cannot recall at all, others are reduced to a stub of a memory. Sometimes, inconveniently, the important decisions and agreements cannot be recalled at all, so I need to search Outlook. Thanks god for e-mail that remembers all the boring stuff. However, other memories are right here, available for recollection on demand, with vivid details and attendant feelings; I will have them many years from now. In sum, the year’s memories add up to something very good for me. I have met and got to know many wonderful people, managed to get a few things done, had a lot of fun, and many opportunities to think and be creative. Isn’t that what life is all about? Among regrets, I have not been writing much of anything besides these blogs, and made a few mistakes on the job. Let’s not get into details here, OK? So, it is great to be back, even though there is always catching up to do.

Curriculum and communiction

My colleagues are awesome teachers. Out entire School’s student evaluations average 4.14 on a 5 point scale. If you take out a couple of problematic part-timers, the average raises to a very impressive 4.48. It may be a flawed, but fundamentally fair process; most students speak their minds. So, we must be doing something right. Some people question validity of these evaluations, mainly because student satisfaction with a class does not always reflect academic achievement. However, we must be doing something right here. The very possibility of identifying a problem speaks to usefulness of the process. Our students expect to be asked for feedback as a matter of course, and many of them provide thoughtful, engaged comments. We have our share of problems, but can feel good about what we do.

However, I have this nagging suspicion that although each course might be good or very good, and most of my colleagues are extremely competent and dedicated teachers, the sum of these courses is less than what it could have been. The very structure of academic courses taught by different instructors may be questioned. It is a very practical, time-tested structure. You have specialists in different subjects who teach their chunks of knowledge and skills. There is an opportunity for each instructor to perfect his or her chunk, and to create a welcoming, supportive environment. However, anyone who has ever tried to either put together, or revise, or evaluate a program, knows that the shortcoming of the subject/course system are as real as its advantages. First, it is extremely difficult to get people to talk to each other and align curriculum. We, university professors, derive both psychic and tangible rewards from success of our individual course, not from the overall success of the program. We tend to be solitary, non-conformist, and fiercely independent people. Certainly, this is one of the main reasons for people to be attracted to the Academe: we want to be in control of our own work. We constantly tinker with our courses, and those drift apart from each other. Inevitably, questions arise: Who is teaching A? Should someone also teach B? Are we all trying to cover C, and waste our students’ time?

Fundamentally, we have very good grasp of individual course, but we do not know what is the totality of curriculum. We know what needs to be taught in a course X, but we have more difficult time understanding what needs to be taught in the whole program. What does an Elementary teacher need to know and be able to do? The State of Colorado, of course, came up with the performance-based standards that try to spell this out; and we pretend to meet them in our various courses. But let’s take a look at them; this one for example:

The teacher has demonstrated the ability to:

5.1 Create a learning environment characterized by acceptable student behavior, efficient use of time, and disciplined acquisition of knowledge, skills, and understanding.

This is an extremely tall order. Our graduates are supposed to know how to make kids behave and to learn. But OK, it’s important. So, how do you even begin to teach them? What specifically, this ability to create a learning environment actually entails? Can anyone give a step-by-step instructions? Are there any exercises we can assign to train these abilities? And if not, if this is still a form of art, how can you demonstrate the ability?

The standards are actually a list of qualities of a superhero; no one living individual can claim to meet all of them. But teaching is a mass profession; we will always have some talented, and some average people in there. Maybe we should begin with a picture of a good-enough teacher, with a much smaller list of very specific, observable skills and specific knowledge? When we are trying to cover all the State standards, we inevitably stretch the truth, and pretend to teach something we do not really know how to teach. We have double-accounting: every one of us is a former classroom teacher, so we know in our guts what’s important, and what cannot be missed. However, explicitly, we proclaim adherence to the super-hero model, and try to cover a lot of ground. We go wide but shallow.

And then, of course, we discover gaps. What is called the classroom management is an 800-pound gorilla; this is where most new teachers’ anxieties are, and for a good reason; the inability to meet the standard 5.1 is probably one of the biggest career-killers in the world of teaching. And yet we treat it as one of many standards. Well, I disagree. I don’t think knowledge of school funding, or school law or even content knowledge are as important as 5.1. It is, of course, related to some other skills: the ability to plan instruction without killing yourself in the process, the ability to relate to children, and to read peer group, etc. One has to have a mental list of what kids of certain age can and cannot do, etc. But please, 7.4:” 7.4 Apply technology to data-driven assessments of learning…” Is it really that important?

All this super-hero stuff keeps us even more entrenched in our classes, because there we at least can prioritize, and ignore the rest. “At least they will have one good class” we think. That is where much of opportunity for learning is lost: we do not explicitly build on each other’s classes, we do not know what no one teaches, and we do not know what is being taught three or four times. We are not consistent in our own teaching practices that our students will inevitably model.

I am just wondering; I do not have an answer. I only know that simple appeals like “let’s talk to each other” are not going to work. I also know that NCATE and State reviews do not achieve their intended goals of forcing people to think in terms of programs, and specific evidence. So, how do we create programs that are less fractured, less territorial, and more focused, more consistent? Perhaps we should start questioning the idea of the subject-based class? Maybe I should have a group of students I will follow through throughout whatever knowledge and skills we want them to have?

Shift Left

I have spent a significant part of this week working on computer. Last Summer, as soon as I came aboard, a problem presented itself: the teacher education database run on Helix had to be replaced. The company that supports it went bankrupt; the program cannot be run on any PC and on new Mac operating system. The database was developed over some 15 years, and contains thousands of records, dozens of screens, reports, and other features. The dilemma we faced was that a new commercial product that would do the same thing costs about $30,000, plus it would require significant annual maintenance fee. The other option was to develop our own database, but we have neither expertise, nor resources to do so.

The Helix is something faculty do not deal with at all: tracking student admissions to PTEP’s, their compliance with fingerprinting, TB testing, and other State requirements, keeping track of their admission to PTEP status, making sure they took all prerequisite courses before proceeding to the next level, etc. Then we place students for their multiple field experiences, and finally, recommend them for licensure. I have to admit, it took me a couple of months just to figure out what is it we do here in STE office. Again, this is something faculty do not necessarily know or involved in, and in a university, what does not concern faculty directly tends to move to background. Our dedicated staff plugs away at all this ever-more complicated processes, without much attention or appreciation of their work. However, all these tasks are essential for the School’s operations, and I had no choice but to try to figure out a solution.

Eugene, the Dean was actually supportive, although he blinked when he heard the amount we are likely to need to buy the new commercial product. “If you really needed, we can find the money,” he said. Then we explored several competing providers, and met with one of them to discuss a possible deal. That is when I got anxious. First, we would be buying a product that does not exactly fit our needs. Then, in order to modify it, we would have to have endless meetings with providers. You see, with the techies, you have to explain in detail what you want, and they will do it for you. But figuring out what you want is well over half of the solution, so you pay them for the work you did. And finally, the new system they were selling to us would be difficult to modify: we’d have to pay them every time we want some change. And who knows if the company will go bust, just like Helix did?

I called for help on our wonderful staff: Karon, Vicky, Marita and Layne, and we brainstormed a solution. What we came up with is an example of the “shift left” strategy, or improvement through radical simplification. Read about the meaning of the expression here. What many people do not realize is that software industry has a vested interest in selling people ever-more complicated, bloated products. I am playing with Office 2007 right now, and boy it is bloated. It has some nice features, and some features no one will ever use, but it is a memory hog I would never pay my own personal money for. Why do they sell us all those monsters? Part of it is explainable with simple lack of imagination, and lack of attention to consumers. However, a bigger part of it has to do with money – in the absence of cheaper alternatives, consumers have to shell out cash for complicated, cumbersome systems. Anyway, I am proud to say, we resisted, and here is our solution:

1. We invented the checkpoint courses – the fake courses in which students will bring whole packages of paperwork, and we will give them credit. Thus, we will be using the existing Registrar’s data base to perform a function that was not initially intended for it. Thanks to the Registrar people for being such good sports and supporting us on this. This took care of more than half of the old Helix functionality, and is going to save us a lot of time on data entry.

2. We bit the bullet, learned Access and developed our own smaller, simpler database. Of course, as the geekiest person in the office, I had to do most of the developing, but the idea is that at least two or three people here would know enough to tweak it when needed: to add or remove a field, to put together another form, etc. Access is unlikely to discontinue; it is a part of the standard Office, and we can always find an expert if we run into difficulties.

3. And finally, we are going to integrate Blackboard’s test feature to collect information from students and then import into our new database. This part is still in development, but I am confident it will work. This will save us more data-entry time.

It is not only that we have saved 30K, plus some 5K annually, but we also were able to simplify and streamline the processes here in the office. One of our staffers jokingly asked, “if you automate everything, will we lose our jobs?” That’s just not the case. Our staff has a lot of expertise and experience, so they will be more closely involved with advising and guiding students through their programs. There is always more work to do; the trick is to replace boring, tedious work with more challenging, more interesting, and more useful work. Of course, in the meanwhile, I am sitting here designing forms, and it is not fun. But I am not complaining, and it is gratifying to see things that you first only imagined actually work.

The “shift left” move is very useful, and not only in software design. Nowadays, we tend to make things more complex, just because we can. We all need to learn to simplify, and to keep it simple.