Efficiency as ethics

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

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

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

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

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

THE PROGRAM GRILL

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

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

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

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

The Contribution Revolution

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

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

Well there are two lessons from this:

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

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

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

The five goals, or how do we impress people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Type C innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The think week

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

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

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

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

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

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

The non-linear text

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

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

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

Several issues came up at different stages of production:        

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

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

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

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

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

Notes from the underground

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

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

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

My first year at RIC

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

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

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

Laughter and chaos

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

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

·  

When is now?

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

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

Looking for joy

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

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

Limits of the self

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

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

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

To be or not to change

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

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

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

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

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

Vikings vs homies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building and gardening

A theory:

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

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

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

The evaluation season

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

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

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

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

Playing the system

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

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

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

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

Toward the permanent past

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

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

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

Defensible rules: A short story in emails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housekeeping

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

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

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

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

Course	Main texts	Key concepts	Key assignments	Skill/indicators

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

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

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

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