Возвращение

Вначале немного об этом блоге. Начал я его в 2006, когда стал директором отделения подготовки педагогов в университете Северного Колорадо, и с тех пор пропустил, может быть, три или четыре недели. Парадокс работы с группой людей в том что ведь каждому не объяснишь как ты пришел к тому или иному решению. Поскольку мотивация руководителя не всегда понятна, то его коллеги сами заполняют зазоры в понимании. Так просто человеческий ум устроен – нам нужна история, нужно объяснение. И там где его нет, возникает некоторый когнитивный диссонанс.

Ну вот, началось все как инструмент управления, но блог стал для меня чем-то большим. Это и тот ящик в столе, в который складываются мысли на потом, и попытка просто разглядеть какие-то общие черты в повседневной работе и суете. Поскольку я перехожу на работу в Вышку, то и язык решил сменить. Но мои американские друзья тоже хотели продолжать, поэтому пока буду по очереди – одну неделю по-русски, другую по-английски. Все-таки за семь лет накопилось 81 тысяча просмотров. Из-за правой рамки экрана можно вытащить переводчика – робота. Он хотя и не умеет пока, но сильно старается.

Вопрос, который постоянно задают и мне, и Светлане, и россияне, и американцы – почему. Почему после 22 лет в Америке мы возвращаемся в Россию. Ведь у меня в Штатах хорошая работа, у нас много друзей, дети и внучка здесь. А ответ достаточно простой если на него взглянуть абстрактно, без имен собственных – хороший университет предложил интересную работу в одном из самых увлекательных городов мира. В таких выражениях и загадка как-бы снимается, не правда ли?

Теперь не времена железного занавеса, и переезд – это просто переезд. Мы уже живем в пятом штате (Индиана, Вашингтон, Огайо, Колорадо, теперь Роуд Айленд), и в России до того жили подолгу, по крайней мере, в трех местах. В университетской среде, времена пожизненной оседлости и пожизненной работы на одном месте проходят. Мобильность полезнее для самих университетов, и для переезжающего человека, и в конечном итоге - для его семьи. Светлана, конечно, со мной не согласится, поскольку ее карьера постоянно прерывается с нашими переездами. Но это уже другая история.

Goodbyes

Saying goodbyes is an interesting experience. One rule seems to be - De profectus nil nisi bonum. Even though it reminds eulogies at a funeral, I like it! My colleagues have given me a wonderful Memories Blog of Sasha, with so many very thoughtful and kind comments and wishes. Thank you all for your warmth and welcoming spirit. RIC and its people have given me great three years. I have learned a lot from you all. Despite the eulogies, I am also aware of the many mistakes I have made. And if I offended someone, please forgive.

Unlike dead people, I will have an e-mail account, and you could always find me on my website sidorkin.net. Keep in touch. I will be very interested to know how some of the projects we started together turned out. I am also willing to help and answer questions, especially with numerous moving pieces of technology we’re using. But also, if any of you need advice, help, or a couch in Moscow, don’t hesitate to write.

There is the question of this blog. I started it in Colorado, in 2006. It has 292 posts including this one, and shows a little over 80,000 page views. Some of them are from robots that crawl the blogosphere for who knows what purposes. Most of the traffic, however, is from my colleagues, because I usually write about my work-related experiences and whatever random thoughts in relation to it. It started as a management tool, more or less. But it became something more for me, a discipline, like yoga or running or tai chi are for other people. No matter what, I will write a few sentences, no matter how poorly conceived and misspelled. It actually helps a lot to keep my mind sane (although this may be a self-delusion).

Anyway, I thought I would switch to Russian, for many of my future colleagues do not read English fluently. At the same time, I wanted to keep in touch with my American friends, most of whom do not read Russian. With John’s and David’s (and white wine’s) help, a compromise was found last night– I will alternate languages, and see how it goes.

Actually, Blogger has a translation tool. If you hover over right side of the screen, a menu slides out, and the top button instantly translates the text. It is still quite awkward, although immeasurably better than some ten years ago.

OK, enough already. Thank you all again, and if I don’t see you next week, good luck and goodbye.

Chosen peoples

Both Russians and Americans cherish the illusions of being special, different from other peoples. Let’s be fair, not just these two. Similar fantasies are cherished by many others, from Jews, the original chosen people, to Turks, to Chinese, and continue down the list. It is understandable, because any claim of national or ethnic identity simply implies a being somewhat different from others. But if you take those ideas a bit too far, they become impediments.

One is to refuse to learn from others. The American educational reform establishment is essentially isolationist. While there is a lot of rhetoric about catching up to other countries, very little actual learning from other countries is taking place. Finland has become the new darling of international school reformers, yet Americans manage to strive to catch up with Finland by doing everything opposite to what Finns have done. Russians right now are living through another corruption scandal connected to their state testing “YEGE.“ Many want to get rid of the tests altogether, despite the fact that every major country they are trying to catch up to use one or another form of achievement testing. Why? Of course, because of the mysterious Russian soul, and what works in the West and the East, somehow is not working in Russia.

The less exposure one has to other cultures, the more naïve is the sense of exceptionality. English is the most difficult language! Russian is a unique and most difficult language (neither is especially unique or especially difficult). The great American democracy gave the world public schooling (no, the idea was stolen from Prussian kings). Russia has the greatest original literature, music, and ballet traditions (No, all three are relatively young, and all borrowed from someone else). Etc., etc. Interestingly, the exceptionalism sometimes takes the form of “we are the worst.” For example, Russians widely believe that their country is one of the most corrupt in the world. However, it is very unlikely to be true. In the same way, Rhode Islanders think their state is the most corrupt in the nation, and it is definitely not true.

Those who interact deeply with foreigners (not just as tourists), sooner or later realize the fundamental similarity of all human thinking and especially of feeling. We are just not that different from each other. It would be interesting if we were, but we are not. While cultural practices vary, the underlying mental and affective wirings are remarkably similar. Policies and reforms that work in one place are likely to work in others. One should not ignore the demographics, but yet again, poor people in different countries have similar challenges, and resemble each other. Language learners in public schools will have similar needs and similar solutions will work for them.

Campbell’s Law

Donald T Campbell, a well-respected social scientist, came up with this pessimistic law:

• “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

His own examples are numerous and compelling. Measuring effectiveness of police forces by the proportion of crimes solved leads to “Failure to record all citizens’ complaints, or to postpone recording them unless solved.” More seriously, it encourages criminals to confess to crimes they did not commit in exchange for plea bargains, because police wants to count those crimes as solved and are desperate for plea bargains. It is important to know that not only the data will become inaccurate, but the practice it is supposed to measure actually gets worse. He also examined an early version of high stakes testing: “when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.” This was in 1976! In a much darker example, he explains how Nixon administration switched from estimates of enemy casualties (which were utterly unrealistic) to enemy body counts. This bureaucratic trick lead to the My Lai massacre of 1968, and who knows how many unnecessary casualties.

Here is one example from our field. In the early zeroes, I was working in Ohio, and Praxis II passing rates were just beginning to be used for accreditation of teacher preparation programs. We learned that in the neighboring Michigan, all programs made the Praxis II passing a program completion requirement, hence achieving a 100% passage rate. Voila! Problem solved. Almost every institution in the country has done the same thing since.

Another more recent example: the new RI graduation requirement is to pass NECAP test. However, if one failed the first time, but has shown growth in the second attempt, one still graduates. I told about the rule to my non-educator neighbor, and it took him about 5 seconds to come up with a corrupt scheme: fail the exam on purpose for the first time, and then try hard on the second. I have no doubt high school seniors will come up with that idea sooner or later. No matter what your score is, you will improve. Of course, this will also lower the average passing rates for the State, which is the effect opposite to what RIDE intended.

What do we do then, abandon all measurements? This does not seem to be a viable option. Campbell himself entertained such solution as the use of external and independent evaluators, and finding measures immune to corruption. He also believed that the use of multiple measures, each of them imperfect, will reduce the corruption pressures. Basically, Campbell called for always paying attention to the corruption pressures, and carefully constructing methods that address them. It has been almost forty year, and many of same themes were discussed well before him. I am not sure how much we’ve actually learned. Numbers have a certain seductive simplicity to them. This is why sophisticated measurement experts are suspicious of numbers.

The Bad Apple theory

Over many years, I have seen this particular theory in action many times, in different kinds of communities. It usually afflicts strong ones, with a high degree of cohesion and of the collective self-regard. People locate all their problems in one or two particular members. If only this person, - the theory goes – would have left, we would be so much stronger, and things would become so much better. In some cases, it is the official leader of the community that gets the bad apple designation, but in most cases, it is just one of them. The one thing I am sure of – it does not work. Whenever one bad apple leaves, someone else immediately takes his or her role, and a new schism ensues. In the worst case scenario, a community gets worse with every round of the bad apple removals, and eventually tears itself completely apart. It does happen, and I have seen it happen. (This does not mean I have not – in the past – embraced it; I did, and am not proud of it).

Where does it come from? Again, it afflicts groups who have a strong collective sense of themselves. Their collective expectations are perhaps a little inflated, a little unrealistic. Real people have a hard time meeting those. Next, we all have a tendency to personalize evil. In other words, when things go wrong, it is incredibly liberating to us to see that it is someone’s fault. This is why we have such a hard time dealing with natural disasters, and why we cope brilliantly with acts of terrorism. An enemy is a gift of a sort, a place where we could deposit our rage. On a smaller scale, this is how the bad apple phenomenon works. Once we start picking apart one of us, - and sometimes with good reasons! – the negative bias becomes self-perpetuating. Keep looking for bad things in one particular person, and reinforce your findings with your friends and colleagues – and viola, you will find a lot more bad things. Moreover, this one person’s real or imagined failings become the cause of the general malaise. We as a community are not what we can be because of the one bad apple. This thought is as comforting as it is misleading.

Next, a lot of time and energy is diverted from positive things into routing out the bad apple. As a results, fewer good things are done, the community falls behind of its own expectations even further, and there are even more reasons to blame the bad apple.

Of course, the bad apple is a position, a role rather than one person’s intrinsic qualities. Not one of us can sustain the prolonged negative attention of an entire group without eventually starting to behave badly in response. So the bad apple is created, albeit unintentionally. And bad apples tend to fight back, making the whole cycle even more vicious and eventually self-defeating.

Great communities find a different way of dealing with the bad apples. They still have their outliers; by definition, if a community has a set of expectations, someone has to be less conforming than others. It is just a statistical fact. But great communities embrace their bad apples, even treasure them in a weird way which I cannot quite pin-point. Rather than removing the bad apple, everyone is concerned about finding the right place for it.

A doze of humility is an essential component of a great community; it includes the general realization that humans are very flawed creatures to begin with, and that none of us the “good” apples is that great either. There is also a healthy tolerance for imperfection: we as a community is not perfect, and things do not always go as they should. And finally, great communities are focused on the outside, and are not obsessed by their own internal relational dynamics. They simply don’t have time to worry who is a better apple; they have a lot to do.

Big data and big-enough data

Big data is information that is too big to process by any kind of manual data analysis tools. For example Walmart has databases equivalent of 167 times the information in all the books in the Library of Congress. But besides purely technological, there are also significant institutional limitations to process data. For example, in our old assessment system, one data manager was able to process most of the reports within six months or so. It was always too late to make any decisions for the following academic year. It just took too much work to bring our puny (in comparison to Walmart’s) amount of data into a usable form.

Now we are working on a new system, where many different people will be entering data more or less in real time, into one integrated and publicly accessible warehouse. But even with those efficiencies, the question remains – is it the right size and the right quality of data we can actually digest? Is it too big, or too small? Is the quality of data good enough to make it actionable? And finally, are the time and resources used to collect and aggregate it justifiable? Can it actually improve the quality of our decisions? Those are all questions that can only be answered through experiences.

Various accrediting bodies, including NCATE and most states’ departments of education tried to impose the culture of data onto its member institutions. That first attempt more or less failed, because no one knew what the right size of data is appropriate for a particular kind of institution. As a result, most of the teacher preparation institutions contracted the compliance disease. I venture to guess that the quality of data collected actually got worse because of these miscalculated policies. They are now trying to correct their own error by encouraging institutions to think deeper about what data is needed, and how it can be improved and used. Data that is generated for compliance reasons only is always too big. Therefore the ownership of the process turned out actually a lot more important than the size of the data.

In a sense, we all are starting from square one again; and this would be true not just for the teacher preparation programs. The questions to ask in the square one are not what we can collect and what does RIDE or CAEP or a SPA want. Those are entirely wrong questions. The questions should be like this: What do we not know, but would like to know? How can we be surprised by data? Is it interesting to look at? What can we feasibly collect and store? What and how can we process quickly, in time for some decisions to be made? What tools and resources do we have to make all of this possible?

The unchecked truth

At the heart of many conflicts is a belief about the nature of truth. Two or more people will construct their version of “what happened.” In some cases, they have been the direct participants of the past events, and therefore they claim the right to know the truth of events as they happened. In other cases, they heard it from people they trust. However, almost inevitably, their versions of events in the past are very different. In the absence of conflict, such disparate versions of reality happily exist in different heads, and their owners either do not know or do not care that someone else remembers the same events very differently. However, when they are asked to recall it in a confrontational situation, those differences come up against each other, clash, and tend to deepen the conflict rather than resolve it. When someone else is retelling the story with which you grew comfortable, it creates a whole set of questions about the other person’s motivation, truthfulness, the attack on your integrity, etc.

Why is this happening? First, because we’re the story-telling creatures. We have the deep need to construct a coherent narrative. Therefore we fill in the gaps in our factual knowledge with guesses, especially about other people’s motives (which we cannot read). We have to; otherwise the story does not hang together, and bothers us. It remains in what some psychologists call the cognitive dissonance. Only a few people have developed a habit of constantly challenging their own version of events. Self-doubt is a relatively rare skill; most of us do not have it. But the need for story-telling makes us create a total, holistic story. And how does a story become complete? - By providing an explanation to the actors’ motives. Aha, I know WHY he did this; I can now rest easy, and archive the event. To commit an even to our long-term memory, we need a label, a value judgment: “a bad person story,” “an incompetent person story,” “a nice person story.” This is why we actually have the social memories – to keep track of our friends, enemies, and who we owe a favor, and who owes favor to us. The evolutionary function of the brain is largely to provide for this kind of accounting. It worked well in small bands of early humans with exhaustive face-to-face interactions, and repetitive events. It does not work that well in complex organizations. Our brains are seriously deficient for the world we have created.

In complex organizations, where many transactions are by e-mail, through a third person, or spread over time, we simply do not have access to the whole set of facts. This is especially true in interactions that include many people. But no matter how little we know, our instinct is to create a full story.

In addition, human memory changes the story every time we recall it. The more often we recall a certain event, the more details we add to it. Most people know about the phenomenon of false memories, or confabulations. Unfortunately, we all suffer from the very mild version of it. Take any of your youth or childhood memories, preferably one that you have recalled many times, and try to fact-check with other family members. You will see that certain details of it you have made up. But because in our society there is such a premium on honesty, and on good memory, we tend to balk at a suggestion that we misrepresent a factual event. The mechanisms of self-justification kick in powerfully when we are doubted.

The solutions to this dilemma have been around for a long time. One is to agree that no one has the whole truth. No matter how righteous you feel, and how noble your motives, you do not possess the whole truth, nor are other people obligated to buy your version of events. The second solution comes from the ancient Greek and Roman laws. It is still the cornerstone of our judicial system. There are rules for public contest between the conflicting versions of the truth. Basically, the public, or its representatives have the right to construct their own version of the truth by challenging and considering the individual versions.

And finally, my favorite philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin made a more general claim. He said that error is not the only source of multiple voices. If two people disagree, it does not mean that one of them wrong. It may be the case for a narrow set of empirically verifiable disputes, but does not apply to the vast majority of human interactions. The ability to internalize dialog, to be able to challenge and check your own truth is becoming an essential skill for living in the contemporary society. The truth is irreducible to one story, it is always a set of mutually addressed, but distinct stories.

Moscow

Moscow is a strange city. Like New York, it offers endless variety of people, most of them walking too fast to care about you and whether you’re staring at them or not. Yet it also has the Boulevard Ring around its center, where elderly dogs slowly lead their elderly owners forward – who knows where? This is the entirely different rhythm and reason.

It is so familiar – we lived there for three years between 1987 and 1990 – and yet so profoundly different. Imagine a house that you grew up in, and new owners remodeled it completely. Here and there you can recognize it, and know that underneath all the shiny covers, there is probably more things you could recognize.

The most unnerving thing is not the city itself, but my own eyes. I lost my old eyes; I see things differently now. Perhaps it is simply a function of age, perhaps of 22 years of emigrant existence. It is just difficult to find the one connection where what you’re looking at is the same, and your eyes are the same as before.

And yet, as I was exiting Polyanka subway station, the warm wind blew in my face just so, with the smell of railroad ties mixed in, and with the sound of the train leaving the station. Where my eyes fail, other senses come to rescue. Hello again, Moscow.

Rhode Island State University

Very few things are more annoying than frivolous renaming. They tend to have a tint of change without a substance. Yet in some cases, name changes are very helpful, for they signify real change.

RIC changed its name twice, from the Normal School to Rhode Island College of Education. The last change from RICE to RIC happened in 1959, and I have met people who graduated before that. The change of name recognized the fact that the College became a comprehensive institution, no longer focusing exclusively on teacher training. Now teacher preparation includes a relatively small minority of all students.

I think it is time for another renaming. The college has built significant number of graduate programs; it shares a Ph.D. program with URI, and may create one or more doctoral programs. There is a great variety of undergraduate programs, a much more robust scholarship record of faculty members, a sophisticated infrastructure, including a very good library. IN other words, the place has all the features normally associate with a university.

In the US, “college” only weakly connotes with a junior type of institution. However, this connotation is much stronger in other English-speaking countries and internationally. As RIC faculty participate more more in international organizations, and as we are trying to attract more foreign students, these semantics make a much larger difference.

Of course, RIC is a great short name, easy to remember and to pronounce. It has a comfort of familiarity; perhaps a bit too much familiarity? It brings up an image of a jovial local guy named Rick, a nice neighbor in a baseball hat. I am not sure though if this is the connotations and allusions we want. RISU or RIU are not as handy to say and to remember, but I am pretty sure the benefits would outweigh the cost.

Thanks for showing up

Last night, at the (Ad)mission Accomplished ceremony, I was somewhat overwhelmed by a wave of gratitude to those faculty and staff members who just showed up to support the event. They did not have to be there. They were not on the committee to put it together, and had no speaking parts. They just came to be there at 6:30 on a Thursday night, and to welcome the newly admitted students to our professional community. A different group of people came to one of the three Central Falls lab district meetings. Someone else always comes to commencements. Other people come to other things, but someone is always there.

Communities do not build themselves automatically. They require much effort, planning, tolerance to each other, supporting structures, shared values and many other things. But the essential smallest building block of any real community is showing up. A small symbolic micro-sacrifice does not do much, and yet it accomplishes everything. The act of bringing one’s own body into an event of co-being, of turning one’s face towards others, of sharing the space and time with others – this act is as important as it hard to appreciate.

Some people say they enjoy things like commencements. Yeah, no, this is not exactly an entertainment venue, nor is it hugely varied or exciting. What one learns to enjoy is exactly the ritual of bringing one small symbolic brick and putting it on top of a large common building. That is usually the real motivation, and only people who are able to see the value of small contributions can develop the taste for it.

I am a dean, and have to show up for many of these things by the virtue of my job (not to all of them, and I am sorry if I missed yours!), so I do not deserve much credit. It is people who chose to show up that I want to acknowledge. Thank you for making our community possible.

Time to transition

By necessity, I have to switch to more of a clean-up mode, trying to finish the unfinished, to put in writing what I know. There are little skirmishes we need to finish fighting, and unresolved issues to put in a more manageable state. I am trying to avoid making any new commitments and come up with new ideas because other people will have to follow through on them.

People around me are changing their strategies, too. They now think – “Oh, I have to take on this responsibility,” and this simple thought makes planning a lot more pragmatic and realistic. A few minor projects will inevitably be abandoned, because I failed to get wider support for them. The majority of traditions and initiatives were put in place long before me, and will continue to go on. And many things we started together in the last three years will continue go on without me. Someone will take the lead; they already have.

My role is changing ever so slightly. I am asked more for advice and opinion rather than for approval and for commitment. This subtle shifting of gears is very encouraging. I think I wrote about this several times, but here it is again: Administrators have to deal with the future in a little more concrete and tangible way. We always think one to three years ahead, because organizational processes tend to be longer than in the everyday life. For example, the next NCATE visit comes in 2018, and we already have a shared folder for evidence, and are building a data depository to prepare for it. But the point is – I can actually now see this future without me; the sketchy outlines of events and routines, of faces and issues, without me there. I am helping to plan myself out of the picture. It is slightly weird, like an out-of-body experience, and yet somehow also very comforting.

One thing I learned for sure – longer transitions help. We all need a little time to wrap our heads around change, to get our imagination going, and to re-map the future if it changed. When I was leaving Colorado 3 years ago, we did not have much time. I just found my previous “Leaving” blog – it was on May 7, 2010. We had enough time for technical transitions, but not for the kind of imaginative ones. It was probably a little more disruptive there. Imagination is what makes communities possible. We imagine our common past – not very accurately, but convincingly. We also imagine our near future even though it would be difficult to articulate what that is. There is the unconscious imagination that prepares the background for the story of our lives to unfold. While change is inevitable and sometimes fast, having some time to reprogram our imagination is a good thing.

Don’t worry, you will be fine

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, many greetings and best wishes came my way. Many thanks to all! Sometimes a little worry would be mixed into these greetings. Although I am very flattered by it, I also know that the School will be just fine, and will move forward without me. The institution is just so much larger and stronger than one individual. If I was able to steer it a little to one or another side, it is only because it has its own tremendous power. Think of it as surfing: it may look like the surfing is controlling the wave, but he is only riding it. His skill is in staying atop, not in telling the waive what to do. Of course, I have my opinions on what should be done to stay on course, and I will lay it on you, in the best tradition of the lame duck advice.

First, try to keep all the things that have been working so far. Most fundamentally, the culture of attention to teaching and to student needs is worth defending and developing. It is the School’s and RIC’s largest asset. Several traditions should just keep going – the Promising practices, the Writing Project Conference, the faculty retreats, and now the Spring Conference, the Education Day at McCoy Stadium, the Special Olympics training day and the Admission Accomplished celebration of teaching …. I am probably missing a few. Departments have their own traditional events, celebrations and habits. The worst thing to do is to let go things that work. RIC as a whole has a strong tradition of faculty governance. It is important to maintain, to keep the rules explicit, and change them when they become obstacles. Faculty taken together present the most important power center on campus, and if you want something changed, all you need to do is get together. DLC has been an effective leadership center, where issues are honestly discussed, and collective decisions are made.

Second, we are a professional school, and you all should keep one foot in the respective professional community. It is important to be engaged – either in the local, or the regional or the national level, but we need to show up, know what’s going on, and involve ourselves whenever possible. Try to maintain and cultivate the myriad of existing partnerships and connections. The new Central Falls partnership may bring much more - and different - opportunities. It will be probably not one unified project, but a serious of smaller partnerships, which is just fine. Actually, a more flexible, more agile organizational structure will ensure the project’s adaptability and long-term sustainability. Engagement is difficult to do, for it requires additional effort without any additional compensation. But in the long run it is hard to imagine something more important. We cannot afford to fall behind in our fields.

And third, continue to tweak curriculum and programs. This has to become a habit – every year something needs to move, change, improve, and get reconsidered. I think it is extremely important to keep moving. And next to these incremental improvements, you should keep at least one or two more radically innovative things going, just to hedge your bets. We have built significant expertise in marketing of our programs, recruitment, off-campus and online delivery; these should be shared more widely, and become a part of every-day work. Again the CF project may be used as a lab for innovation. And we have a number of very good structures for free, open, innovative thinking – the professional learning communities, TEIL, informal reading and writing groups. It really does not take much to put one together, but those conversations may as well be the most enjoyable parts of our jobs. Undergraduate enrollments should probably bounce a little back, but will not be at the highest levels any time soon. And it is probably a good thing. The graduate programming is a lot more open question. If going to cohort model and off-campus is not going to save them, then online would be the next logical move. To be prepared for it, you will need to keep working on the right skills and experiences.

There are some decisions to be made in the next few years. One of the most important depends on the outcomes of the program approval process by RIDE. Depending on how well it is integrated with NCATE, you all will have to make a call on whether to stay with NCATE accreditation. It is a difficult conversation, for we have benefited, but also spent a tremendous amount of resources on it. Of course, NCATE (now CAPE) is also changing its standards and review practices, in some cases very significantly. So this is not going to be a simple call, and I would encourage you to spend some time mulling over it, weighing all pros and cons. But once it is made one way or another, it will lead to reconsidering the assessment system, perhaps the entire curriculum. Anyway, this can be a very long blog indeed. All I wanted to say is – FSEHD is a strong organization, perhaps stronger than you imagine; you all will be just fine.

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.