Leaving

The news is definitely out; I am leaving RIC at the end of this school year. I have accepted position at the Higher School of Economics, in Moscow. Svetlana and I are moving to Russia this summer. What were some of the pros and cons of this decision?

Cons:

We like it in Rhode Island. Our two children, our son-in-law and our granddaughter live nearby. We grew to like the city, and the rest of the State. We have a great house in a nice neighborhood. I really enjoy working at RIC, have wonderful colleagues, and would like to see some of our projects to fruition. I have met many people in this State, and developed a great professional network here. The size of the State makes it a little easier than in some other places. And most importantly, I think I just started to figure out this job, and stopped making rookie mistakes.

It has been over 20 years (I came in 1991 first, Svetlana joined me in 1992, and the kids – later in the same year), and in many ways we all have become Americanized. Of course, the kids went almost completely native, but neither Svetlana nor I can pass. Yet we feel like we belong here. Notre Dame, Seattle, Bowling Green, Greeley, Providence – all of these are our home towns. From that place in my chest to every one of these places, the invisible emotional threads are tied. Pull on them, and you wake up memories, images, places, names and faces of friends. This is home, and we don’t want to leave.

Pros:

We were always reluctant immigrants, with one foot in the old country. Our extended families are still there, many friends and professional connections. We did not flee poverty or prosecution, and have no bitter feelings towards Russia. We have gone back many times, almost every year since 1996. Fundamentally, we came here for education – to educate our children and to learn about the world and about this country. Well, that mission is almost accomplished. We always wanted to go back one day, although after years of telling that to people, they stop taking your seriously. I have been actually asking my Russian connections for years about a possible job back there, but nothing came up (although I interviewed for another job in Moscow in 2006). So when this opportunity came to my attention, we were intrigued. It is going to be an interesting and challenging work, but that is what adds spice to our lives, doesn’t it? The university is commonly known as Vyshka is one of the newer ones, founded in 1992 (as opposed to Moscow State University, 1755). It has become one of the leading research universities, now expanding into social sciences, humanities, and education.

We lived in Moscow in 1987-90, and still have many friends there. Maria went to her first school there. There is another invisible thread leading to that wonderful city. It has changed remarkably, and yet at some deeper level it is still the same – incredibly eclectic, both sophisticated and profane. The city has 164 stage theaters, and 116 movie theaters. And yet you could find places there that you really don’t want to find. It has some of the worst traffic, but also some of the most efficient public transportation systems in the world. It’s a maddening city, and we don’t mind that.

It is not easy, you see, and this all may be one big mistake. But we would never know until we tried.

The Value-Added Scandal

A scandal broke out at the 2013 AACTE conference. A session brought together several proponents of the value-added model of evaluating effectiveness of teacher preparation programs from Louisiana, Ohio, and Connecticut. After their upbeat reports on how their respective states implement the model, Cory Koedel, a respected researcher reported that all of their models are based on incorrect interpretation of statistics. Judge the quality of his evidence for yourself in an earlier paper on the same subject. In previous studies, there was a significant clustering error; to prove it, Koedel and his co-authors employed a clever technique: they assigned teachers to teacher preparation programs randomly and still found something that looked like a statistically significant “difference” between the purely imagined programs. The random assignment should have shown no difference at all, but it did, which proves the clustering error. After adjusting for the error, they re-run the analysis for real programs and found virtually no statistical differences among the programs. It may be because we still do not have large samples, or because teacher preparation programs are similarly effective, or because other unknown factors like school leadership or culture are more important than we thought. There may very well be differences among teacher preparation programs, but using test scores of its graduates’ students is not a good way of measuring them. Variance within each program is way more important than the variance between programs.

The scandal is not in the error itself, but in the fact that we now have an entire federal policy based on the error. Both the Race to the Top and the NCLB Waivers regime include a push for states to develop teacher preparation evaluation systems based on the value-added model. Many states, including Rhode Island, have it as at least a stated goal. Louisiana has already ranked its teacher preparation programs, and may have closed some, based on the same error. Of course, Koedel’s discover happened after RttT became fact, but the question remains: how can Federal Government implement a very significant policy on the national scale without proper piloting, and without rigorous analysis of the underlying statistical methods? I don’t think each state can be blamed for adopting the idea; after all, the US Department of Education demands it – and puts its name and reputation behind it.

The next step would be re-analyze Louisiana and other states’ data to see if correction of the error will produce different results. I don’t believe it can be the case even in theory, because of the Koedel et.al’s falsification experiment. It is just too darn compelling. But what is next policy-wise? The emperor has been shown to have no clothes. Will the policy change, or will the Department keep pretending that nothing has happened?

Scholarship at a teaching college

Institutions like RIC face a dilemma. On one hand, we are a teaching college. Despite a few kinks, the culture of quality teaching and advising is extremely strong here. The absolute majority of faculty members take teaching very seriously; they spend enormous time and effort on getting better at it. They expect and demand much from each other. Our graduates would recommend RIC to their family and friends at the rate of 3.35 out of 4 (3 is agree, 4 –strongly agree). On the other hand, the institution needs a mechanism to ensure that faculty keep current in their academic fields. The only known way to do it is to check if they write and publish; preferably in peer-reviewed journals. The institution is interested in your writing only as much as it makes you stay relevant. It is especially important in graduate education: one has a very hard looking credible without a record of original scholarship.

With teaching, there is a powerful structure and incentive; your classes are scheduled, you have to show up, and look competent to your students. With scholarship, there is no schedule; it is entirely self-paced and self-motivated. When the time is precious, it is very easy to put it off for another day or a week, or a month – until after I am done with my SPA report, after I am done with grading, after I revise that course, etc. Just like with exercise or any other discipline, rewards are distant, and sacrifice is immediate. It is also ethically complicated, because teaching, advising, and most service make visible impact on lives of real people. Publishing may feel abstract, remote and not that consequential. Google tells me all my writings in both languages over quarter of century were cited 425 times. For comparison, Eric Hanushek’s scholarly writings were cited 30,462 times. Let’s admit it, most of us aren’t influential scholars. Even this very obscure blog had 64,822 page views since 2006. Give me just one motivating reason to keep writing scholarly papers and books.

Organizational needs often conflict with people’s life circumstances, psychology, and interests. Organizations and people adapt and accommodate. For example, RIC/AFT Agreement allows for a great variety of evidence of professional competence. While peer-reviewed publications are still the gold standards, it is reasonable to expect faculty integrating their teaching, service, and scholarship in many different ways. Publications for practitioners, certain forms of grant writing, service to professional communities – all these count. More can be done if we listen to some of the behavioral economic advice; see for example the Nudge blog and book. They basically say that small tweaking of rules and incentives can sometimes produce significant changes in people’s behavior. It happens when we consider the actual circumstances in which people live and work, and are not trying to change them. Here are some possible ideas:

• Syllabus, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes good course syllabi. Oh, wait, this has been done already :)
• “What I am working on” web page. It makes one’s work more public and less isolated. 
• Encourage/incentivize writing groups among faculty. Even a small nudge here could make writing more fun, more engaged, and more visible. 
• Encourage class projects that result in publications. In general, co-writing with students may feel like great service to them, and allows one to stay current. 
• More specific tracking and accountability (to include publications) after new faculty reassigned time, AFT research reassigned time, and sabbatical leave. 
• Serving as a reviewer for scholarly journals can be a great way to continue reading current research, because it does have deadlines, and expectations of quality. We should learn value and acknowledge it more as a form of real scholarship. 

And finally, I wonder if we can shorten the logical chain: Reading new literature->writing one’s own papers->using new knowledge in teaching. The middle link is there only because we could not figure out another way to prove that one is keeping up with one’s field. What if instead of publishing a paper, one would curate an on-line resource that reflects the new development in one’s field, for example with http://www.academicroom.com, or with a libguide – something that our Adams Library encourages people to do anyway. I know this sounds risky and won’t work for all academic fields, but still, why not rethink the whole problem within the new informational world we live in now? The trick is to figure out an equivalent of peer review – the only known way of controlling for quality of scholarship. But curating in general emerges as more and more important knowledge activity. I would rather read a well-curated secondary source than a mediocre piece of original writing. 

Selling student teaching and the communicative ecosystem

For the last two years, we have been worrying about student teaching placements. The new teacher evaluation system is making it harder with every semester. Teachers worry about student achievement, and are reluctant to give up control over their classrooms even for a few weeks. Many also feel stressed about the new system and don’t have time and energy to give to student teachers. They are especially disinclined to spend time bringing them up to speed on their immediate worries – SLO’s, teacher evaluation artifacts and rubrics. District officials further restrict our options, rightfully worrying that for some schools, student teachers would be a distraction.

We saw this coming for a while, and planted some seeds. Eileen Sullivan and Rainy Cotti, with quite a few of our colleagues from HBS and some other partner schools have piloted the Co-teaching in Student Teaching model; something we adopted from St. Cloud’s University in Minnesota. The Blackstone Valley School pilot is another version of the same idea. We kept talking about it, accumulating ideas. What if student teachers brought something with them, like a resource or a cool PD idea? What if we could guarantee that they know something about SLO’s?

There is a time when you have to collect all the smaller ideas and assemble them into one larger package. Why? Because what we need to do is to send a simple and clear message – a student teacher is not a liability, but an asset. You do not lose anything, but gain something. That’s the thing with messaging – sometimes you cannot get across a series of small incremental improvements; you need to make a case that we’re qualitatively changing the whole concept of student teaching. So this week, Karen, Eileen, Kim and I went to Donovan for lunch and tried to assemble the package. Here is the resulting draft.

The act of collecting a number of small ideas, trying to see a theme, a pattern – this is an increasingly important method of our work. We live in the age of hyper-effective communication. Thoughtful messaging is very important, simply because the communication space is so crowded. Our audiences are slowly developing the skill of message triage: if they suspect that someone did not work hard on making the message effective, they will tune out. In the past, the investment into communication was measured by expensive paper, good print, glossy photos. However, as these old signals become less and less expensive, it is the quality of the message itself that begins to play this role. Did you assemble small messages into one? Did you address my needs? Do you know me? Do you care enough to edit your message to the essential? Does it look good? Is it skimmable? Most of us by now have learned to ask these questions of the communications directed at us, but we’re long way from being able to answer them when we’re the messengers.

We live in the world where every communication becomes an act of advertising. It may rub someone in the wrong way, but I would argue this is going to a better world. It is a world where more and more people will learn to be better communicators. Teaching is better when we carefully craft and edit our messaging. Working with colleagues is better if we respect each other’s time and attention spans. (I am still being copied on two colleagues’ attempts to set up a meeting for just the two of them J). The ecosystem of human communications is definitely evolving. The species of smaller, purer, more powerful messages is evolving, and it is the survival of the fittest out there.

So, we need your wisdom and your help. We need this draft to be perfect. For example the name of the re-branded student teaching is terrible. (We briefly considered Teachers-In-Training, but disliked the acronym). The whole thing is still too long and confusing. We need to tailor it to superintendents, to principals, and to classroom teachers; all with different needs and agendas. Please edit, comment, brainstorm!

We have not yet considered if we can actually add these new requirements to students, but that is a parallel, and important conversation. Don’t worry, we will go through it item-by-item with chairs. But it is also the feature of the new world that we must weigh our actions not only by their internal merit, but also by how communicable they are.

Things to do during storm

To do 

1. Watch bad movies out of Red Box 
2. Play board and/or video games 
3. Snack 
4. Drink tea, then wine, then whisky 
5. Look out the window 
6. Remember previous storms’ stories 
7. Wear pajamas all day 
8. Play with the dog and/or cat 
9. Watch nice houses on coastline flooded 
10. Catch up on Facebook 
11. Fantasize about the end of the world and your survival strategies 
12. Write a very short blog 

Not to do

1. Any kind of useful work 
2. Walk the dog 
3. Drive anywhere 
4. Answer work-related emails 
5. Clean the house 
6. Watch good movies 
7. Wear nice clothes (skip the shower, too) 
8. Exercise 
9. Shovel driveway 
10. Stock on food, water, and batteries 
11. Watch the Weather Channel 
12. Grade

Peripheral awareness

I don’t know much about most of the things that are going on in our School. Each course is a little novel, with its plot and character development; every faculty committee is a think-tank or a management team, with its own dynamics. We have many projects, big and small, successful and so-so, long and short. I cannot know about all of this, and this is just fine. The only problem with not knowing –I cannot thank and recognize everyone and learn from their work. 

There is a class of things I am directly involved with, know many details, and sometimes help plan and execute. It is not always a rational choice, and I should definitely learn to be better at delegation. Sometimes there is simply no choice, because no one else can do it, or there is no time to delegate.

And then there is a vast area in between – things that I am peripherally aware of. That means I simply know the story, but not in any detail. It is an incredibly important sort of knowledge. What it allows me to do is to match various people’s interests, resources, experiences, precedents to problems we are trying to address. And this belongs to the core function of academic leadership – the ability to match problems with solutions. The trick is to know enough to see a possible connection, but not too much to be overwhelmed by the information. The half-way, vague awareness of what people are doing or are capable of doing has its own specific nature, probably its own laws of memory we do not quite understand.

Here is a small example: last night I was at the School Support network fair RIDE put together for turn-around schools. We were offering just three packages: TESL, Ed. Leadership, and the Restorative Practices course. However, a principal asked if we have something for parent support. I said no, nothing in a form that we can offer. However, a couple of hours later I finally was able to remember – yes, we have a PD project proposal Andres submitted on RICPD.org last year, which is about a workshop for Latino parents. Now I can reach out to them and make a match. And things like that happen quite frequently. If I can’t make a connection, I will reach out to A-Deans, chairs – people who are also aware and peripherally aware of many things.

People tried to solve this problem with the help of technology, and in some cases, it can be done. However, a problem and a solution often do not recognize each other even when they meet; they describe themselves in mutually incomprehensible terms, and the potential link is lost to a computer. A human brain is still the best machine for identifying loosely defined patterns, or for connecting seemingly dissimilar things. I wish I knew a way to get better at peripheral awareness. I would also like to get more essential updates from people. Like anyone else, I hate being copied on messages where people discuss something that is their business. However, I always truly appreciate “I think you should know what we’re doing” messages; I’d like to have more of them, even though it is a little more work to summarize what happens than to forward me a 20-page long e-mail string (of which I am also guilty of, with respect to my superiors). But ultimately, it is my job to be aware of many things, if only vaguely.

The Age of Flexibility

Our programs developed in the era of oversupply of candidates. At stake were both quality and crowd control. We designed rules and policies, in part, to keep someone out. In most cases, it was because their academic background or dispositions were not right for the profession. But we also wanted to know if the student can follow a few rules, and if they could not, that did not speak well of their organizational skills.

The two functions – the quality control and the crowd control – got intertwined in interesting and sometimes problematic ways. For example, some of course prerequisites have firm academic grounding, because students need skills from the course A to be successful in the course B. But in other cases, it was simply a way to sequence a program, to screen out enough students early enough, so more advanced courses that require much personal attention do not get overwhelmed with too many students. And of course, most instructors want to work with more advanced, more mature students, and want someone else to work with younger, more numerous, and less prepared ones. Therefore the clear statement “they need specific knowledge and skills to take this course” has been gradually replaced with “they are too immature to take this course,” or “it would be better if they took three other courses before.”

When we had the large numbers, the excessive harshness was at least somewhat justified. After all, we wanted the most persistent and the most dedicated students. However, with smaller numbers, our requirements suddenly become even harsher. We cannot offer courses every semester, and cannot offer multiple sections of them. Suddenly, more and more students get stuck in sequences of courses or schedule conflicts. So the numbers dwindle even more, and the whole ecosystem is ratcheting itself down. I am not sure this systemic feedback loop is visible to everyone.

I was never a fan of hard course sequencing, because life gets in a way. The proportion of transfer students is steadily increasing, and those are especially hard-hit by course sequencing. The more rigidity you introduce to a system, the harsher and more exclusive the system becomes. And do I need to mention that the most vulnerable experience the unintended exclusion first? We also tend to ignore students’ work commitments and family lives. However, those are more and more important, and not exactly optional for the majority of our students. It is also reasonable to expect a certain number of errors students commit, and the imperfection of our advising support. So when one mistake throws a student a whole year back, I don’t really care whose fault it is. If we work with humans, we must build in some tolerance for errors.

It is time for a hard and honest look at our course prerequisites, and other policies. Which ones are truly academically sound, and which ones are mostly motivated by crowd control considerations? Which sequences are really justified, and which ones just sounded like a good idea back in the day? This is not an attempt to increase our enrollments, although I cannot deny I am worried about that too. But we are entering a different environment, and the systems that worked fairly well in the past may not be working as well anymore. The mantra should be – maximum flexibility without sacrificing quality.

Pareto efficiency and charter schools

Is there the right balance between charter and district schools? It is raised over and over again across the country where legislators of different levels consider the limits the growth of charter schools.

On one extreme of the debate some argue for unrestricted growth of charter school, citing parent choice and unrestrained competition. This in effect, may lead to disappearance of district schools, or perhaps reducing them to special service providers. I don’t believe this would be a good policy outcome. Dismantling an entire public institution is risky; it inevitably wastes a lot of resources invested in it. There is also something to be said about having the provider of the last resort. The district schools do not close, accept all, and provide safety net if charter or private schools close. Additionally, district schools provide competition for charter schools in the labor market through the conditions and pay levels of their unionized labor. Without them, charters would be tempted to keep down pay and increase work day. The district schools are better at delivering some services that require significant concentration of resources (just a few examples would be severe and profound disabilities, athletics, career and technical education). Larger districts may be better at providing teacher induction and professional development; they tend to have better facilities. There is also a theoretical argument against viewing education as a market of consumer goods.

One the other extreme, there are people who say that charter schools should be completely abolished, for they drain resources from districts, and in effect remove the best students, leaving only the neediest in districts. That is also not a positive policy outcome, because the proposal addresses none of the benefits provided by charter schools. Good charter schools provide better alternatives to families. They are also intended as laboratories of innovation, and many do innovate. Charter schools provide an important pressure for district schools to innovate or lose students to competition. More broadly, our educational system becomes more and more heterogeneous, splintering further and further to serve different needs of various populations. It now included district and charter public schools, a number of schools of choice within districts, parochial and secular independent schools, homeschooling, and online schools. It is more than likely that district schools will have to learn to co-exist and collaborate with all of those forms of education. In many instances, charter schools can serve special populations much better than the district schools (young parents, the deaf and hard of hearing, for example). In any case, it would be an extremely poor policy to eliminate already existing and effective schools. As I said to one of charter school principals recently, don’t let any of my doubts prevent you from actually giving good education to even one child.

The question of the right balance is then not trivial. Is there a point of no-return, after which a public district will collapse under the weight of its obligations and diminishing resources? I am not aware of any scholarship that helps answering this question, nor do I think we have precedents where that actually happened. Finally, the answer may be very different for a large public school district and a small one. While it would be tempting to suggest a specific number (10%? 40%) of students to be allowed into charters, I don’t think anyone really knows. It is important, however to establish that a question is answerable, before trying to answer it.

One possible principle to apply here is what economists call the Pareto Efficiency. It is basically, a situation where no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off. In other words, the ideal Pareto balance is when not one more student can take his or her funding into a charter school, without damaging the remaining district students’ chances to get good education. But even to begin to talk about the Pareto balance requires a common understanding of the end game. If we only agreed that both charter schools and district schools are here to stay, then our contentious conversations would move from the realm of politics to the real of policy, where they belong. The Pareto efficiency may not lead us to a universal answer, but it can be an important way of considering evidence. For example, when debating adding another charter, we can ask – what will happen to the district if another 200 students left? Not in theory, not in the realm of abstraction, but specifically? What effect it will have on finances, staffing, facilities, etc.

Tinkerers

This last week, I had some chance to work through a few computer-related problems. One was designing a form in Word, another had to do with a malfunctioning Survey Gismo instrument, and the third – with layout issues for the Syllabus journal.

To you understand the nature of the thinking machines one has to appreciate their enormous limitations and their profound advantages over us. The same works with dogs and children – you need to see clearly where are the limits of what they can possibly do, but also where can go much farther than you. Software is a creature, and the intelligence and errors of their creators is constantly visible. Of course many people that dogs and children are similarly created, but even if it is true, their creator would be so profoundly different from us that we can have no idea what he was thinking. Software is written by someone like us, which makes reading the intent possible.

Computers are ultimately predictable. There is always a solution. Dealing with machines, you will not be faced with the profound mystery of the naturally evolving universe, or with unpredictability of human behavior. Machines do not yet have their own will, interests, and rights. They don’t have moods, tempers and mid-life crises. But they are also profoundly autistic and cannot understand our language, our emotions, or read our simplest intentions. Communications have to be in the language they are able to comprehend. Like savants, computers have incredible memory and a gift for crunching numbers. They don’t get tired of endlessly repeating the same task a million times. And yet their intelligence is so limited that they cannot recognize the simplest patterns in the world we occupy.

The only way to be on good terms with computers is to enjoy tinkering. Many people tinker. All good teachers constantly tinker with their courses. Gardeners tinker with plants and soil. Tinkering is really experimenting with something of which you have no deep knowledge. Most of us will never become software engineers, or understand how computers actually work. But tinkerers acquire a different kind of knowledge, an intuitive sense of what’s working and what’s not; what is achievable and what is unlikely to achieve. It is understanding without really understanding. Tinkerers develop their own metal maps of whatever they tinker with, which have little resemblance of the “real” maps the creators used. I tinker with software, and you may tinker with old cars, but I recognize the kindred spirit. 

Tinkerers of the world, unite!

The rule of rules

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

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

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

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

12/21/12 A.D.

Driving through the rain, in a flash,
I suddenly saw myself looking at a Christmas present,
                                                    all wrapped and bowed,
intended for my child who cannot receive it anymore.
What do you do with all that?

Partnership markets

Rhode Island is a small state, but it is rich in various non-profit, academic organizations, government and businesses. The RI Foundation’s Directory lists 2743 non-profits. Very often they overlap in their activities, do not know who does what, and duplicate efforts. There are 35 school districts (about the same number as in Colorado which is three time bigger in population and 67 times bigger in size), and 12 colleges; their issues are the same – transparency, coordination, efficient use of resources. Like in any other state, RI has developed a slew of government agencies that often work in parallel, and trying to help the same populations. One unintended consequence of professionalization is that the different professions become incomprehensible to each other: social workers, teachers, nurses, psychologists, counselors, youth development workers, courts, police and non-profits may be working with the same families with little coordination and little synergy. None of this is bad news. In fact, this speaks of the rich civic tradition and a sophisticated system of social support (by American standards) that exist in RI.

The other side of this richness is that matching needs and coordination of efforts become a special new task, which no one has figured out yet how to do. Just in the last couple of weeks, I was involved in at least three very different conversations which essentially were trying to solve the same problem: how do you match potential partners?

In the mainstream monetized economy, the problem has been mainly solved. With the invention of money – the universal measure of value – and of efficient and regulated markets, people who need something can almost always find people who want to sell it. The progress is far from over, just think how eBay, Amazon, and now price checking apps on your smartphone continue to revolutionize the market of goods and services. But partnerships are different. For example, RIDE wants to put the identified turn-around schools in touch with potential partners. No one has much resource, but they are guessing correctly that more efficient matching between charitable organizations and schools can result in pulling together smaller pools of resources. Use of local groups with volunteer or semi-volunteer labor can be hundreds of times cheaper than using expensive out-of-state consultants. In a similar dilemma, the State needs to match potential providers of professional development with all schools. The Campus Compact is trying to match higher education institutions with community partners. We are constantly solving the problem of matching student teachers with cooperating teachers.

These are just a few examples of inefficient markets, where finding each other is difficult, transparency is hard to achieve, and most importantly, each transaction is not converted first in a common unit of value measurement – money. In a regular market of goods and services each transaction is only half the exchange – you exchange your labor or good for money. It needs the second half – exchange of money for something you want. The splitting of exchange into two makes transactions simpler.

A case of more complicated, non-monetized markets is marriage and/or dating. The matching is based on many criteria, each match is unique, for no too people are the same, and no money change hands. But still for these markets, there are solutions that improve efficiency. Matchmakers are people uniquely knowledgeable of market offerings, and able to make matches better than random. Newer computerized matchmakers like eHarmony.com or okcupid.com solve the same problem by vastly improving transparency, enlarging market place, and creating sophisticated profiles.

So, here is a start-up idea for you, given away for free. Create a virtual space for non-monetary matchmaking outside of dating and marriage games. There will be hundreds of possible applications, one of the most obvious is matching charities and schools with each other, matching volunteers with people in need. If you figure out a way of matching student teachers with cooperating teachers that is better than the existing clumsy system, I will buy it.

Goofing off

At lunch, people complain about cold. That’s what we do, because Paula and Kim are trying to enforce the no-shoptalk rule during lunch. So, the temperature in the office is a topic of choice; the conversation is literally inexhaustible. In an older building, it is always either too cold or too hot.

Our Facilities friends have recently revealed the mystery of the heating system in Horace Mann. The thermostats in each room will start the heater fan when the temperature drops below 69. Well, the temperature at my feet level is close to freezing, while the thermostat is five feet up on the wall, and it is smugly enjoying its own micro-climate up there. Besides, it looks like an old thing to me, and may not feel much of anything.

I take a can of air - you know the thing for creating the disgusting storms of the bread crumbs and beard hair from keyboards – and blow it into the thermostat. It cools down, and the heater kicks on, to the general delight. It is unsettling to have a machine in your own room that does what it wants when it wants it. A modicum of control over the beast feels great. So we go around the offices blowing cold air into the thermostats. Their tiny insect brains are confused, and we all find it hilarious. Don’t judge us, it has been a long and difficult semester.

And then Liz suggests a great improvement. If you simply put an ice-pack on your thermostat, it will think the ice age just began, and give out the last drop of heat. However, I can’t quite let go of the canned air. If you squeeze its straw mouth and release some air, your fingers vibrate, and make a fleshly sound; not like a fart, but more like rodent squealing. If it is annoying to Paula it is good enough for me. Moreover, you can learn to modulate the sound by squeezing the straw opening more or less tight. In theory, you could play a tune on it.

That is what we do here all day, in case you are wondering.

Join the teaching profession, become a selfish bastard

TEIL, the Teacher Education Innovation Lab is one of my favorite parts of this job. It is very low-key; we just come and talk, but it always gives me an idea or two to ponder. Today, for example, we started with how to get across our messages in the overcrowded information space – to our students and to potential students. Then we somehow switched to the messages themselves. And then the idea of joy of teaching came back again – we discussed it before, more than a year ago. That is when we came up with the humorous tagline (we had a few others).

However, there is something very serious about it, too. The teaching profession is dominated by the hefty language of self-sacrifice and service, and it is just not healthy. The martyr squad is easy to respect, but its ranks are not easy to fill. The thing is – there is a lot of fun and stimulation, and novelty to teaching, especially if you know how to find it. It is never dull and boring, and it makes one’s brain work all the time. The kids are never the same, and there is energy that is coming from them. But the complication is – these joys are largely an acquired taste. We’re not born with many of them. But we do not teach our students to cultivate the taste for these little joys. There is nothing about it in our professional standards, no evidence of it in our instruments or statements of belief; we do not measure or recognize the importance of it. Our training is all about behavior, all about performance, but we rarely ask where the high performance comes from. What is the internal motivator for teachers? If it is not fame or money, then what is it exactly? The privilege of serving others is just not enough. Teachers have to actively look for opportunities to enjoy what they do; they should train themselves to be stimulated, entertained, and transformed by their jobs. For real connoisseurs, school is better than the movies, more interesting than fiction, more engaging than exotic vacations.

We’re still fairly fuzzy on the language here. Clearly, not all kinds of enjoyment are appropriate (“Oh, I had such an easy day today” clearly does not cut). Narcissism is not good for teaching. And yet we all agreed that the ability to see the non-monetary benefits of the profession brings is very important. Would it not make our Conceptual Framework distinctive and unique, if we included something like that? Even if we manage to turn our students’ gaze inward for at least some time, - would it not be great? It is just so important to know oneself, and to know what makes one tick. Imagine a conversation between a supervisor and a teacher candidate after a lesson observation:

“At what point did you feel stimulated, engaged, excited today? Why do you think it happened? How long did it last? Did it help you to perform better? Did children also benefit from it? Did you learn something about yourself, and what motivates you? Do you know how to replicate this?”

Yes, you can go home again

Strange things are brought back from trips home. I am not sure if Thomas Wolfe’s truism, you can't go home again, is really true. He implied that as we change, we can go home physically, but there is no way to return to the earlier state of being. One of my friends says nostalgia is about time, not place. Yes, OK, but it is only true if you think the point of going home is to go back into a happier state. I think past is a wild territory, full of treasures and dangers. It is an adventure, not a search for the paradise lost.

For example, I just realized this week that I really like dark, cold, snowy nights – not in any kind of a metaphorical or nostalgic sense. No, I just physically enjoy the cold on my face, and the squeaking dry snow of snow under my boots, and the peculiar sensation of gasping for air in the wind. Our minds are weird, weird machines. We can override the basic physiological distinction between pain and pleasure. We can learn to hate what must feel pleasant to others and love what should feel like discomfort. Old pains are new pleasures. I enjoyed the smell of cheap gasoline leaking through badly tuned engine of an old truck. Why? Because I remember riding in the cab of one of those trucks as a child, over an endless white road in the Siberian country side. Don’t remember why and with whom, but the smell brings me there. You are wrong, Thomas Wolfe, I still can find my Siberia; not all of it, but enough to know it’s there.

Moscow too has changed much. It became a sophisticated worldly metropolis, rivaling Paris, Berlin, and London. It is a city of $10 lattes and free WiFi in every café, of expensive cars stuck in traffic jams, and well-dressed multilingual crowds. And then suddenly a glimpse of subway tile teleports me somewhere else in an instant. From within the stranger’s face, familiar features emerge, of a much simpler city where we lived in the late 80-s. And I begin to recognize my Muscovites – their peculiar gait, their fast talk with certain vowels swallowed, and others unduly stretched. They talk to themselves on earpieces, but these are the same people.

I saw my father’s grave, found my old rasp, my mother’s wardrobe, talked to my teacher Nelli Petrovna; still sharp and curious. It is all still there, all of it. To find it, I just need to go home once in a while, and look.

Compartmentalizing

They say men are better at it than women. They say we can put work into one compartment, life into another, and just keep them separately. I don’t know about that, but we all have to do it, and I don’t think any of us are really doing it well.

You hear about a friend‘s tragedy, and within 30 minutes you have to go back to doing the most mundane tasks, or answering simple, routine e-mails. The people on the other side of these e-mails do not know anything, and don’t care you’re upset. Your mind wants to think about the life and death; it wants to reach out, to connect. Yet PeopleSoft sends you reminders twice a day – “you have timesheets to approve.”

We all can do it; it is not an issue of capacity. It is just somehow feels wrong, no matter how you justify it. There is a dissonance, a gap here between the unevenness of simple human experiences, and the routine of our lives, especially of work lives. We cannot stop.

Sometimes, going back to the mundane offers solace. It helps to imagine that life is back to normal. I will never forget the story I recorded from F.F.Briukhovetski for my Russian dissertation in late 1980-s. The Southern city of Krasnodar was destroyed before and during its liberation in the winter of 1943. One of the few buildings still standing was the school #58. People thought, if only children can go back to school and sit behind their little desks – it would the best thing. And they did make it happened first, before there was water or food, or anything else. There was no ink, and they had to brew it from a local kind of thorny bush. There was no heat, and kids, teachers, and parents cut and split enough wood to keep the building warm till spring, when the rest of the city struggled to keep warm. It was not because they valued education; they craved normality. The city still loved that school with unusual devotion forty five years later, although very few of them remembered why, exactly. There is such a thing as elevated normality; we just need to find another meaning in it. The compartments in our minds do exist; we just need to learn to connect them.

Communications should cost more

As we are preparing for marketing campaign for our 2013 off-campus cohorts, I am worried and wondering about getting the word out. As the cost of communications got very low, the supply understandably increased. Anyone can communicate with anyone in the world for free. In the past, every piece of communications had cost: books were expensive to print, postage and paper used to cost real money. The labor of handwriting or typing something up was significant. Now it is all very cheap, which is good, right?

However, when distributing information used to cost more, the cost served as a barrier. You would not put up money to print a book if you did not believe it was important. Now anyone can self-publish, and we have no idea if it is even worth taking a look. More recently, it took some significant skill to put together a decent-looking website. Now with Work bench and Google Sites, it takes no skills at all. Anyone can s end an e-mail to thousands of people for free, so we are drowning in e-mail.

The information market, however, did not go away, because while the supply of information is limitless, the supply of human attention is not. People simply ignore most of the information they receive. This is why it is so frustratingly difficult to get anyone’s attention, even though it does not cost anything to send them a message. For example, we do not have teacher’s individual e-mails, but we do have principals’ emails. So when we have a program for teachers, we send it to principals. But a school principal’s inbox is a graveyard of information. I suspect they won’t even open most e-mails, not to mention trying to read it, consider, and forward.

Of course, we can call them on the phone and leave a message, but this would cost much in time. We could design a viral campaign, using the social media. But it requires an enormous creative input, because people won’t recommend their friends something that is boring. We would be competing with real marketers who can hire the best creative talent. You see the paradox – as information is getting cheaper, it actually becomes more expensive to communicate. The proposals for e-mail tax have been around for a while. Just try to Google for it. They have encountered much resistance, but I would welcome it any time. Just stopping the African scam alone would be worth it. Indeed, marketers like us should pay for the school principals’ attention and time. After all, it is taken away from running their schools. Of course, we’re not selling cologne, we’re selling better teachers, but they don’t know it when they see our e-mails. So I want to pay, if I knew how. Ideas?

Keeping still

Our species evolved to do something – run away from danger, find food, hunt, fight – to solve problems. Our languages evolved to help with doing: we have categories words for objects and for their qualities and actions. We are not very good at dealing with situations when there is nothing to do and nothing to solve; nothing important to say. Those include death of someone we love, despair, love, natural disasters, and many, many others. We live in an unpredictable and chaotic world, and we only learned to control a small part of it. We like to pretend that we can do more, but it is not true – the most important things like life and death, we cannot control.

In some traditions, meditation keeps the mind clear of all language-derived thought. In other traditions, including many Abrahamic prayer practices, the technique is to repeat the same words to the point where they lose literal meaning. Those are the things we do to overcome our propensity to always do and say something. The abilities to act and to speak are hindrances as much as they are assets. Humans are perpetually frustrated with their inability to solve problems – from love to death, from justice to beauty. Sometimes it is good, for it makes us move. However, it also causes us to suffer when no solutions can be found and none should be sought.

People’s experience with meditation and prayer are different from each other, but collectively different from those of every-day life of work, leisure, action and speaking. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain the universal spread of spiritual practices among people of different religions or no religion. Keeping still and stopping our brains from the constant search for solutions is good for us. With some practice, we reach Bodhi (awakening) or are able to see the divine light/the Holy Spirit, which is essentially the same thing. How “real” that is depends on what you mean by reality and, even more importantly, why you need the concept of reality. The point of these practices is exactly to get pass the real/imagined dichotomy, so it would be unfair to measure something with what it is trying to overcome. People who ask if this is real miss the point. 

I can sometimes see the objects and people around me starting to disintegrate. It is as if the whole world is painted on glass, and someone from the other side of the glass is slowly hosing the paint down. The paint is very strong, but I can see some spots washed away, and white light shining through. I cannot see the light directly; I just know it is there. 

The autumnal light

The light is different. Even if it is just as warm, and when you find a completely green patch to look at, the light is undeniably autumnal. The sun is lower, the shadows are longer. The light is yellowish, and somehow a little more desperate. Even the air is somehow more transparent than in the summer; one can see further back and further forward.

And then there are leaves, the little yellow signaling flags: “It is time to think about the winter! Warm weather is not forever! You have been warned!” I was going to write about ideas, issues, solutions, and dilemmas – like always. Aha, but the light and the leaves can switch my brain gears easily. Their intrusive thrust of beauty and nostalgia makes the life of mind less important and less self-absorbed. A little tree in the distance has succumbed to the temptation; it is but a brief flash of the radiant red. I can see it through the row of those big trees that are still strong and green, and so sure. They disapprove of the little red tree – it is changing too early and too fast. “Everything in its own time,” they say. “I know, I know,” – says the blushing red tree, and “Too late, too late,” – it thinks, excited and dreading the inevitable. They really don’t care what I think, and it feels so great to know that.

Another giveaway is smell, even in the car with windows up; even in the office. Even when nothing is burning, I almost always sense the distant smell of burning leaves. It is the aroma of soil and pickled leaves, and of yesterday’s rain; of steps and worries dissolved in little puddles, of autumn. Take a chestful of fall air before sleep, every night. I guarantee activation of memories you forgot you had.

Stories we tell

Every week, I look back and try to find a story, somewhat entertaining, and hopefully not too narcissistic. Many a blogger succumbs to the temptation to justify themselves. And even in portrayal of own weaknesses, one is often secretly proud of one’s own repentant righteousness. But each of us is not really that interesting at navel-gazing. The other temptation is to present a history of one’s own thought rather than a story of oneself. We talk about ideas rather than our selves. This does not often work, because people want to read about well-considered, not half-baked ideas. Very few can improvise thought of good quality; one needs time to produce something of importance. Blogs and tweets suffer from low production value, which is basically, the volume of effort and time put into writing per unit of output. I have no illusions on how many genuinely new ideas appear in my 263 entries; probably not that many. Like many others, I also sermonize without a license. Let’s be that or this way, let’s do this and that; all of this is addressed to an audience that is pretty busy as is, and with fairly established beliefs and preferences.

Despite typos, ill-considered topics, and sloppy writing, my little writing exercise has received 51,206 page views since it started counting in June of 2008 (I actually started in July 2006). I am very grateful to those who look at this blog even briefly, for it keeps my only non-email writing discipline going. Thanks to Google’s relentless tracking, I know which entries drew the most views, although it is hard to know why.

• Learning with TFA, Jul 26, 2012, 540 page views 
• The non-linear text, May 13, 2011, 375 
• In the woods, Aug 17, 2012, 204 
• Alice and Wonderland, Jun 13, 2012, 182 
• My ideal community, Feb 26, 2010, 181 
• The other education, Jun 1, 2012, 173 
• The Peace House, Jul 17, 2012, 170 
• The Hunger Games, Apr 28, 2012, 167 
• Reinventing email, Jun 21, 2012, 162 

This may be a case of graphomania, but I am not giving it up just yet. We all constantly construct narratives of our own lives. We stitch the chaotic flow of events together into quilts of memory and meaning. Those are not necessarily beautiful or profound stories, but they go beyond personal use. There is a point in sharing them with each other, because we live and work together.

The joys of curricular cooking

In the last couple of weeks, we held a series of meetings to check on the multiple curriculum projects we're undertaking this Fall; 18 projects to be exact, three of which are already completed (they all carried over from last year). These are some of the most enjoyable and intellectually stimulating thing in my job. First, I get to dream, to imagine things done in the right way, and to solve problems. Second, it is a lot of fun to think through each challenge with others. The synergy of thinking within a small group is always impressive to me. My colleagues all have remarkable knowledge of the nuances of their programs, which often cannot be formally represented. But it comes out in these conversations, where we imagine how a program may be changed. If set up properly, a brainstorming session by a small team can be very effective in seeing the unintended consequences, but also in finding creative solutions.

Program development is a special kind of thinking, which I am only beginning to really dig; I don’t think anyone has a firm and scientific grip on it. We always operate within a set of multiple constraints. Some of them have to do with the limited fundamental options. What I mean is, there is only a certain number of ways you can slice a teacher prep program, or a masters’ program. You will probably need a student teaching at the end, and a few other practicum experiences before that. You probably need some methods course, and ed. psych, and a social foundations course. Of course, it is also a lot of fun to think of more radical changes (we have TEIL for that).

Then there is the political landscape within the College – how would this be perceived by faculty within and outside our School? There are economic considerations – if we design a program that is too scary to students to come into, - that would be a mistake. We need to think how program design affects student schedules, and how that schedule fits into their lives. How would they register, how does it affect their financial aid, etc., etc., etc.

One remarkable quality of human brain is that it can tell a holistic story of something that did not happen yet. We can imagine alternative realities. And that allows for a fairly quick modeling of available options. In most cases, we can quickly identify dead ends in our thinking, then go back and try another route. It will probably take computers a very long time to catch up with us in that capacity to imagine.

This process is somewhat similar to cooking – you throw in well-known ingredients, and a couple of new ones, and think about how they fit together, and how they interact. There is an element of accident to it, an element of traditions – we know what works and what does not, - and an element of creativity to it. I highly recommend it.

Selling experience

It is not clear what higher education is all about. For centuries, people believed it was about wisdom or virtue. For a few centuries after that, they believed it was about knowledge. Now all of it is in question once again. Knowledge seems to be abundant and cheap, and expensive teaching services seem to be replaceable. What are we selling then? It increasingly looks like we’re hawking credentials rather than actual knowledge. This is probably an overstatement, but it is plausible that we’re selling knowledge at a higher price than market is willing to bear. We cornered the market through the peculiar regime rooted in three things: academic credentials, accreditation, and professional licensure laws. Yet the cozy arrangement may not be as stable as we may think. There may be an unlikely coalition forming to shake the system up: social conservatives suspect we’re pushing an ideology on students; fiscal conservatives think we may be wasteful; and the creative Left thinks we’re too conservative and not innovative enough. All of them are looking for a technology that makes higher education less expensive if not obsolete. Literally, hundreds and thousands of very smart entrepreneurs and engineers are working on ending higher education as we know it (and as we learned to value the paychecks coming from it). No one yet came up with a plausible technological miracle. Although the media, TED talks, gurus and other such exulted things make it feel as if the Messiah is already here. No, he, or rather it – the revolutionary technology - is not here yet.

However, it would be foolish to ignore our precarious position. The fundamental ritual of college – a lecture – can be cheaply broadcasted. It is not clear why thousands of professors should deliver a similar lecture across the country. The other fundamental interactions – a discussion, even a lab – can be reproduced online, and become potentially less expensive to deliver. We can circle our wagons, but the monopoly may not hold anyway; not because of the technological threat, but because of the massification of higher education (I published a paper about that very phenomenon recently).

What we could do is the same thing other industries have done, when their goods became less expensive and more widely available: we should sell experience. The essence of human life is experience; it’s the adventure, the challenge, the struggle and triumph, the making of memories, and writing one’s own life story. You can buy a pair of shorts for cheap online with minimal effort. Or you can dress up, go to the mall with your significant other, do some people watching, check out what’s new in the stores, see some colors, eat some ice cream, catch a movie, and, by the way, buy the same pair of shorts at twice the price. Although there is an element of unpredictability here, like in any game – you may run into a sale, and feel even better. What did you just buy, shorts or the experience? Are shorts merely an excuse, a byproduct, an extra benefit to what is the real commodity here – your experience, your life.

It is the same for college. It can either go to the inexpensive no-frills Wal-Mart-like transaction, or become experience-rich, experience-centered enterprise with knowledge as a bonus. How this can be done is not yet clear.

Decision-making is a contact sport

I teach a doctoral class on organizational theory, leadership and educational policy. This is my sermon to them for the next week (double-dipping here).

Here is how decisions of managers – mine and others’ – often go wrong. You get a report on an issue or a problem from someone who does not have the direct involvement with it. No one normally has the time to go and talk to the people directly involved, or to the other side of the conflict or issue. You weigh the options within the context of my horizon of the organizational knowledge. It becomes very clear which options are unacceptable and which we can live with. Because your view of usually broader (that’s the reason people came to you with the issue in the first place), you simply assume that the priorities you see outweigh whatever priorities of the parties involved in the issue. So, you ask/direct people to solve the problem in particular way, and figure out the details on how to get there. You’re done and move on to bigger and more important things. And it often goes wrong; more often than not. Why? Because it is a contactless decision.

First, the solution you see – oh, so clearly! – as a correct one, may turn out to be completely unattainable. Your particular view of the organization just does not allow seeing what could go wrong. There is simply too much context that easily escapes the view of a manager; some of it may be irrelevant, but some may be critical – you just never know. Now, asking people to perform impossible things is not a good management strategy. They will either fail or do something that makes sense to them, and won’t tell you. Either outcome is not good for a long-tern health of the organization.

Second, a fair decision must be based on hearing both (or all) sides of a story. We tend to trust people who we work with every day, and it feels weird to reach out for an alternative opinion. But the problem is not in the intentional misrepresentation. We all tend to remember and highlight facts that support our version of events, and forget or demote facts that do not. Again, time crunches tend to make this problem worse, for there is no time to look for alternative narratives. We then end up with an unfair decision. Most people will not get upset if they had a chance to state their case, and are overruled nevertheless, especially if they understand the reasons. They will inevitably get upset if given no chance to present their case.

And third, if you keep making all the decisions, you short-circuit all responsibility on yourself. As a result, you get overwhelmed with a constant stream of problems to be addressed. You train your people not to make decisions, but always defer to you. So they feel less responsible for the overall well-being of the organization. You also spread the word that none of the other people in the organization matter; unless it is you say yes or no, everything else is not important.

Decision-making is a contact sport. You need to be in touch with people who are actually involved in the issues you’re trying to solve. But because you in your position cannot be in touch with that many people, you should not make that many decisions. You should be there to listen and to mediate relationships with those above you or outside organization, but people closest to the issue should be making most of the decisions, and figuring out most of their own solutions. Only when and if they fail or ask for help you should step in. And once you delegate responsibility, you cannot constantly yank it and give it back – this discourages everyone and makes it impossible to take one’s responsibility seriously.

And the last point – just because I know this in theory does not mean I always do it. The instinct to make a quick call is very hard to suppress.

The many species of time

We’ve been saying “Happy New Year!” to each other. Yes, our year starts in late August. That is when we wipe our slates clean, make the New Year resolutions, and try to set things in motion. For me, the first few weeks of a Fall semester is a sensitive time with its own temper and its own wonderful mood. Over the years, I learned to treat it with special respect.

The start of classes hits like a ton of bricks, manifesting mainly in the oversized inbox. It is not about glitches necessarily; faculty and students just need to figure out many things at the beginning of a semester. But this is also the best time to set in motions certain processes (which is why we have to think about which projects to commit to in the summer). If you wait until October, sometimes it is too late. For example, if we are thinking about an off-campus cohort to start a year from now, and it is for a program that needs some revisions, the timeline is like this: to recruit students, we learned to start in November; it is hard to get teachers in December, and in February it may be too late. Why? - Because we need time to admit students, and before that, they need some time to take a GRE exam. Also, despite the instant information transfer, it takes at least four-to-eight weeks for our message to penetrate the teacher’s consciousness. In order to take an email from a stranger seriously, people need validation from someone they trust. OK, back to November: to start recruiting, we need to have a very clear understanding of the program for ourselves, we need to schedule information meetings, and before that, we need a web page with program description, and copy for advertisement. It does not have to be fully approved by curriculum committee until Spring, but we at least need to agree internally on what it needs to look like. To get to that point, we need some time to meet and figure it out. To set up meetings in September, it is better to start now, because calendars get full quickly, and people start grading, and engaged in other hundreds of projects. Time is uneven; some months are denser than others, some months and weeks are more suitable for specific purposes than others.

We get in trouble when we assume time to be all even and homogeneous. But it has texture and fibers, and different viscosity. Here is one example I probably already have written about (I have 257 posts, not including those I had to take down; it is easy to forget). Our use of committees for curriculum design is often wrong. It takes a long time to agree on a meeting time. A one hour meeting is really a 30 minutes meeting, because 15 minutes go into trying to remember what the last meeting was about (it could be a month or more ago), and another 15 minutes for trying to set up the next one. It is simply too short for a substantive discussion. Plus people need to catch up, chat, etc. So almost every program revision takes a year or two, and it is before other departments get involved. Now, this is not how the rest of the world moves, and we simply cannot afford to continue working like this.

In my view, the best schedule to fit the task may look like this: a very small core team of people gets together for a brainstorm, figures out the problems, and possible solutions; just the options available (a 1.5 hour meeting). Then one person creates a draft, or a set of alternative drafts. Assemble a panel (or just make a few phone calls or emails) from the practitioners in the field for their feedback; rewrite. This would be also the best point to work with administrators and other departments if they are affected. Then a larger group of people who have the stake and know the program gets together for a retreat (at least 2 hours, better 3 or 4), and discusses/critiques, offers alternative solutions, imagines unintended consequences. Then one person takes the consensus and the ideas into consideration and writes the final version. Send it out for the larger group’s review and consent; include external audiences, and anyone who may have an objection; incorporate all good ideas. Push the proposal through the curriculum approval process. It is done – in 4-5 hours of meeting times, and in only two scheduled meetings. Remember, the scheduling itself takes a long time, and is an unproductive activity. Forgetting and failure to follow up on assigned tasks are the two major contributors to inefficiency. Our regular way of doing things like this would involve 6-10 meetings stretched over the period of one year or more.

Of course, the task at hand determines the time configuration. Policy-making committees will probably need more meetings, with people doing specific research in between. Curriculum alignment among several existing courses may also take a combination of individual work with committee-based fact-finding, and consensus-building. Wherever context of a conversation may not be shared, more face-to-face interactions will help reduce misunderstanding and build trust. A large portion of our tasks can be more efficiently accomplished by one person alone, with others involved as needed; we all need to work on the art of soliciting feedback from right people at the right time.

One should learn to recognize the different species of time.

In the woods

Breaking with the bad habit of eating over keyboard, I went out for a walk on campus. We are about to dive head on into the new school year. Many are trying to do something to clear their heads a little, to reset the emotional clock. So I ended up on a dirt utility road behind the Anchorman field. Someone has made a little path that starts at the back entrance to the Field. I am pretty sure some adventurous students did, because right now it is overgrown and thorny. There is some trash, but not much at all. I did walk through though, and met a young family of wild turkeys: a graceful mom and four awkward adolescent chicks. They were not particularly scared, but neither did they want to talk. We nodded and went our separate ways. It was so quiet, I could hear their footsteps.

I like forests, always have. It gives me this particular sense of solitude without the self-absorption. The forest is a whole world. It will let you in, but is too busy to care about you. The forest can be counted on to quiet down the noisy lists of things to worry about.

This little wooded patch could be a lovely little reprieve space for our campus; just imagine a short walk through the woods in the middle of a day. I am not sure who the land belongs to – not to RIC, judging from the maps. But I just wonder if people who live on Fruit Hill and on Belcourt Avenues would like to share with us a few paths through the woods in their backyards.

As I stare at the list of projects, THAT would be a fun project to add on. All it would take is a truckload of wood chips, and a few volunteers with hand tools. And we would need one person who understands water flows and walking paths. I image a warm September Saturday, a few faculty and students show up with shovels, saws, and wheelbarrows. We cut some bushes, throw some wood chips on the ground, rake them, and voila, we have our own little forest path! Not a park, not anything formal, no ribbon cuttings, please! - just a little path through the woods. Of course, we’d need to start with finding the owner, getting RIC and neighbors on board…

Any one wants to do this with me? A FSEHD Woods exploratory committee? Something tells me this is perhaps what we need the most.

The six tricks everyone should know

Many simple time-saving technologies are underused in the academia – by staff and/or by faculty. This results in hundreds of thousands of wasted work hours, not to mention the frustration of tedious work. Here are the six technologies everyone should learn to be a little less tired, and to save time and energy for more creative, more fulfilling and meaningful work. The first five are at least 20 years old, the sixth one is a little newer.

1. Mail merge is extremely useful in communication with students, especially if you teach larger classes. The essential tension of teaching is between the need to provide personal attention to each student and the lack of time to do so. The mail merge provides a small but effective way of addressing it. You can write 60 individualized emails to your students in a few minutes. Imagine something like this: “Dear …, thank you for sending me your paper titled ….; I enjoyed reading it. Your strength are … However, you still need to work on ….. Here is the break-down of your grade: Mechanics … out of 10, clarity … out of 10, insight … out of 10; total … out of 30. I am looking forward to reading your next paper. If you have any questions regarding your grade, please do not hesitate to write me back. However, if you think I made an error grading, please send me a detailed explanation with specific references to your text.” It is virtually impossible to write these emails individually; no one has the kind of time. However, with Mail Merge, all you need is a table with brief comments that fit into the fields. It creates a bit of an illusion for students, but there is nothing unethical about appearing a little more personal and attentive than you actually can afford to be. 
2. AutoText is an equivalent of old rubber stamps some professors used to have. If you grade many papers it could be a life-saver. For example, I used to type dm, and then F3. In the text of the student paper, the following entry would instantly appear: "THIS IS A DANGLING MODIFIER (DM), A WORD OR PHRASE THAT MODIFIES (DESCRIBES, CLARIFIES, OR GIVES MORE DETAIL ABOUT) A WORD NOT CLEARLY STATED IN THE SENTENCE. DON’T WORRY, IT IS A VERY COMMON MISTAKE, BUT YOU NEED TO LEARN TO AVOID MAKING IT IN THE FUTURE. READ MORE ABOUT DANGLING MODIFIERS HERE. There is no need to copy and paste, AutoText will remember this entry for as long as you own the computer (it is stored in the Normal template). It requires a minimal initial investment of time, but save much time subsequently, and provides better service to students. 
3. Tables of Content. Anyone who writes longer documents – books, dissertations, reports – should learn this thing. If you consistently apply styles to your headings, go to References, and Insert Table of contents. It’s kind of magic. 
4. Online surveys. Any time you’re asking several people a series of questions, you probably want to end up with a spreadsheet rather than with a stack of index cards. The reason is obvious – it takes less time to process: you can sort, filter those, and use for Mail Merge to communicate back. When to use online survey-like forms? The answer is – ALWAYS, unless there is a legal reason to collect original signature. This covers 99.9% of all office paperwork, and many cases in teaching. Any time you are receiving an email from each student to get a particular piece of information, you are wasting your time, and should instead use a survey. Several commercial providers have been around for a long time; most will let you do a small survey for free. Google Forms is completely free and you can publish the result link. 
5. Pivot Tables. Anyone who works with large sets of data in Excel should invest a little time in learning Pivot Tables. If you find yourself constantly sorting, filtering, cutting and pasting, “stacking” columns on top of each other, you probably will be better off with pivoting. Just select the data you are trying to make a sense of, go to Insert, Pivot Table. Persist for a few minutes playing with it, and your life will never be the same. 
6. Google Docs and Google Sites (now also the Google Drive). This is the only “newer” piece of underused technology, that started in about 2007. Any time you catch yourself sending a document for review, then receiving comments, and incorporating them back into the original document, you should feel a pinch of guilt and think of docs. A large part of our work is collaborative, and it results in a document being published online. This technology allows to skip most of the steps in between. If you end up with a website anyway, why go through all the preliminary drafts? Just create a blank site or document, let many people contribute their pieces, read, critique and review – all at the same time.

Learning with TFA

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague and I went to NYC to attend Teach for America’s Summer Institute. We are starting a collaborative program with them and this was an attempt to learn about the experiences the Corps Members have before they will come to our classes.

The relationship between TFA and the teacher education community is anything but easy. We sometimes end up on the opposite sides of educational debates. At the same time, in many states colleges collaborate with TFA and help their members to obtain state certification.

Some in our field perceive TFA to be the main existential threat. I never thought this to be the case. Their model of teacher preparation cannot be scaled up significantly because of its cost, and the high level of idealism it requires of Corps Members. Yet it would be completely foolish to ignore the organization’s success in recruiting people who would not have consider teaching as a career, and in creating a large following amongst a large segment of school principals and superintendents. When we started working with them, part of me was just very curious about what it is they do, and what we can learn from them. So, if you think they are our friends, you agree we should learn from them. If you think they are our sworn enemies, well, it is even more important to learn from them, right?

We have been working with a local TFA in various ways for almost two years now, and I already knew quite a bit about them. Still, I was going in a bit skeptical. What can you do in five weeks training? The very phrase “five weeks training” is often repeated in our circles with sarcasm. Of course, we spent decades our lives in teacher preparation, and just know a thing or two about what goes into training a decent teacher. Well, I had to admit that I was wrong. One can actually do a lot in five weeks, and evidence was pretty undeniable.

The secret is very simple: when what you lack is time, you compensate by the intensity of the experience and by strong organization. In other words, if you make the experience super-charged, and eliminate the waste, you can achieve good results.

Yes, TFA members teach only about 20 lessons over the course of the 5 weeks to small classes of 6-15 children. But every single lesson plan is critiqued ahead of time, and every lesson is observed by at least one experienced teacher; often by two or three. Every lesson observed by a TFA mentor is analyzed and critiqued in an hour-long one-on-one session. It is a hard drill on a certain kind of thinking, not on behavior. TFA uses the Teaching as Leadership rubric. It is not that superior to what we use, but they stick to it for years, and of course, learn how to use it. Corp Members also attend seminars, right in the schools where they teach, lead by curriculum specialists. They are expected to apply directly what they learned in their classrooms within the next couple of days. The whole thing has a feel of a boot camp, and it is not just a superficial comparison. The military discovered the value of short and intensive experiences a very long time ago.

We observed a few lessons taught by the corps members. Were they perfect? Not at all, but they were darn good for someone in the second week of one’s teaching career; definitely better than my first few weeks of teaching. We could see how the Corps Members struggle, and where they need help. In this sense, there are no miracles; it takes a lot of effort to learn the craft. But it can be done faster under the right conditions.

Of course in this model one has to sacrifice something. There is no time for reading much theory, or for in-depth discussions about the dynamics of learning and relationships in classroom. There is no time to search for great creative ideas in lessons design. This is where we hopefully come in with four RIC classes, a part of the RIC-TFA collaborative program (http://RICTFA.org). But I got an impression that TFA people are fully aware of what they are sacrificing, and what they are gaining.

The operational side of thing is remarkable – as an administrator, I appreciated the enormous challenge that comes with bringing 600 young people to New York City for five weeks, and trying to make teaches out of them. They also need to be fed, housed, observed, evaluated, taught, briefed, etc., etc. Because TFA has many more applicants than spots, they can afford to select candidates carefully. It helps to have bright and dedicated young people. TFA is also not skimpy on providing human resources – about 150 “adults” work to support the institute of 600 new Corps Members; it is a 1:4 ratio. It is very expensive (although TFA recruit their alums to help for relatively cheaply). The economy of scale and years of previous experience help, too. But here is my point again – if they did it for three months, the cost would become prohibitive. So the choice of the 5 weeks is not random; it is the only way to keep the cost under control. And if you have to do this, you may as well squeeze everything out of this short experience.

The lesson for me is that it is too easy to see our way of doing things as the only way. This applies to everyone, not just teacher educators. It is helpful to see alternatives, just to shake off these self-imposed blinders. It is like going to another country – you recognize the same things, but are surprised by how they can be so different. We are not going to become like TFA, for our constrains and resources are very different. But nothing prevents us from looking at shorter but more intensive field experiences – in addition to what we are doing already. I wish we learned to be less tolerant to waste and fluff, and more focused on what we believe is important.

The Peace House

In the Summer of 1992, we were leaving the Peace House, which is a big name for a small dorm in the Columbia Hall at the University of Notre Dame. We are: Aixa, Nepo, Jasmin, Bishu, Mike, Katy, Yousef, Ingrida, Marianna, Hong, Xiao Yun, Njubi, Cristian, and Sasha. We came from 10 different countries to spend a year in the International Peace Studies Program and. We were leaving citizens of 12 different countries, because the Soviet Union broke up within the first couple of weeks of our stay. Yesterday, some of the same people were leaving Providence after our 20 year reunion.

Surprising to me was how easily we could start where we left off, as if the 20 years were just a dream. We could skip the small talk and go straight to what is important – our children, families, truth, justice, faith, love, life, peace. People become friends when they share some history together. Friendship is literally a stock of stories held in common property. We struggle, work, learn together, make errors and fix them. Each scar on one’s psyche matches to other people’s scars. This makes us close.

And we had a plenty of scars that year; some from pain some from joy; after time passes they are the same. A human life does not have even density; some periods are much more significant than others. Well, that year was certainly very dense. With the exception of two Americans, we all were new to this country. All of us were new to graduate school. We built a community, got on each other’s nerves, argued endlessly and threw great parties. People fell in love and broke each other’s hearts, except for just a couple of us whose hearts already belonged to someone else. To balance that out, I spoke almost no English, and wrestled with the language more than anyone else. The frustration of speechlessness was perhaps the best learning experience that happened to me. I recommend it to everyone.

We remembered very few readings and classes, but we did remember the relational side of things – who were close, who had a crush on whom, and who did not get along and why. It made me think of a silly theory popular just two decades ago – that our brains have this tremendous reserve capacity we can tap and use. The theory was inspired by savants who able to crunch big numbers in their heads. However, it is because they do not have to use their brains for the high calculus of human relationships. Most people’s brains, however, work at full capacity to just keep track of other people in their lives. It probably takes up most of our brain power, because it has always been so critical to our survival. We live in the world crowded by humans, and little space allotted for everything else – from stars to algebra to big ideas.

As we become individuals of “certain age,” our lives’ narratives gradually appear out of the fog of forgetfulness and the confines of confusion. One does need friends to make some sense of it all, and I am just grateful to have many. It was a very good weekend.

The theory of the other

Research is not about helping us to develop theories. To the contrary, research is a way of preventing our minds from generating too many theories too quickly. Our brains are just pattern-seeking machines, and they will find patterns where there are none. For example, billions of people on this planet believe that you can catch cold by being cold, which it is simply untrue. But everyone has the experience of catching a draft, and then coming down with a sore throat – we remember it, because our culture reinforces this opinion. However we completely forget hundreds of times when it was just as cold, but no influenza followed. It is the same with premonitions – we all forget those that did not materialize, but remember the one in the life-time that did, by chance. Scientists learn to check their hunches and hypotheses against evidence; in other words, they learned to rain in their own minds, rather than release them.

This works in relationships, too. We develop theories about each other. Each person we know eventually becomes represented in our mind as a set of assumptions about him or her. She is helpless, he is careless, that one is funny, and this one is clever. Once those mental images are formed, they self-reinforce. We tend to forget and suppress facts that undermine the theory, and notice what supports it. Once we have developed a theory of someone, the natural flow of facts will support it.

Sometimes the theory of the other is formed on the basis of one event. For example, someone was late for your first meeting, and it was so memorable that you’re unable to shake the negative impression even if the same person was early 100 other times. The human mind is not designed to deal with statistics; it is incapable of treating different events as identical in some respect.

When the evidence becomes overwhelming, we cannot ignore it any longer, and the mind will revise the theory with what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” However, when we become angry and frustrated about something else, those safety mechanisms stop working. The negative theories tend to become self-sustaining and unmoving. In a group situation, people tend to appoint someone to be the problem, and then reinforce their theories each other. Just like with the flu – repeating the same thing tends to make the observer’s bias stronger. This simple mechanism feeds most of organizational conflicts.

How do we avoid turning each other into theories? It appears to be important to not over-interpret, or to keep our theory-making capacities in check. In qualitative research, one of the first rules is to avoid over-interpreting. We learn to suspend judgment and let more unfiltered evidence to come in. It is very important to recognize that every person is an unfinished story, not reducible to whatever little we know about him or her. Let us celebrate our ignorance, limit our imagination, and forget what we have learned.

Reinventing email

Email is like oxygen – it is essential to sustain life on this planet, and yet too much of it makes one dizzy. Many people are trying to “reinvent email.” Here is my little contribution.

The problem with email is that senders do not have a way of organizing their thoughts in a systematic and predictable fashion. We process information better and quicker when it follows a pattern. However, in half emails I struggle to determine what exactly the sender wants me to do, if anything. It is not because they are poorly written; not at all. After all, most emails I get are from faculty and other administrators. Those are all highly educated people with great writing skills. I do not miss struggling through undergrads’ messages! Still, in longer e-mails, it is especially difficult to grasp the genre of every message, because there are several. It would be so cool to know in advance, which is that – an artful epistolary piece, or a rambling manifesto, or a dry request for funding.

We all practice speed reading, which does not work so well. I miss important nuances because they were buried in the middle of the third paragraph. As every reading professor knows, you can only fake comprehension so far. As many others, I am also guilty of not identifying the genre of my messages clearly.

To make more time for reading emails, we recruited our smart phones. As a result, millions of emails are now read over urinals. I am thinking it is time to install phone holders on the walls just above every urinal, to keep hands free and the whole affair a little more hygienic. I don’t know what women do, but I am sure there is a business opportunity there, too. This is not good, of course. You cannot cheat time by slicing it into smaller pieces. Other people just do not read and respond. This is a symptom of a serious condition, an admission of defeat. It is also very disruptive to the organization to have people who habitually ignore correspondence. (Of course, sometimes a non-answer is the intended answer, but how would you know?). The real solution is to do less reading, more thinking. We all want those who send emails to do the work of editing, and organizing information for us. But we do not want to do the same when we’re the senders. Email onto others as you would like emailed onto you.

The real solution it is about nudging senders to organize their information. Companies figured it out a long time ago, and on most websites, you cannot just send an e-mail without answering some screening questions first. They will at least force you to choose among several pre-defined subjects: do you have login issues? Do you have a technical problem? Do you want a refund? At the extreme, corporate monsters like Facebook, Google, or Microsoft do not want any emails from you at all. It is too expensive to read. If you want help, you will be sent to forums, in search for people who already had the same problem, and it was resolved. You are forced to meander across the corpses of dead conversations in search for a morsel of useful information. I think Microsoft had invented this many years ago – there was the Microsoft/kb – knowledge base…

I don’t want that. I don’t want people to stop writing to me. Most of things I know are from faculty and staff, and the generous information flow is essential for me. I don’t want to appear to be less approachable. I don’t mind reading e-mails; just want to do it a little more efficiently. So, I am inviting everyone to pilot this new little tool at tinyurl.com/emailSasha. Let me know if this is annoying, or useful. If it helps to clarify the intent of a message, or makes it more obscure. Do you see a good way of improving it? How do you make the options fit the message better, without creating a huge list? This is strictly voluntary; feel free to use the regular email!

If this works, we can perhaps think of ways of dealing with student email intended for faculty. They often strike us as both impolite and poorly written. Perhaps a little training tool could make them both easier to digest and more valuable (in the educational sense) to write?