Donald Schön’s book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, elaborates on what is the professional norm for implementing policies, procedures, initiatives, or solving difficult organizational problems. The first part of that norm—“reflection in action” is a mainstay of all main offices. The second part of that norm—“reflection on action” is largely ignored in those same main offices. If a reflection on an action question randomly appears in a main office or around a conference table, the response from the administrator sitting at the front of the table would go something like this: “Interesting point, Peter. We are under a time crutch, so let’s move on to the next item on the agenda.” If you were to further question administrators on why they ignore WHY questions, they would offer the following rationale for moving on to the next item on the agenda:
The WHY has already been decided upon
School administrators at the middle management level have been trained to implement. The assumption when a policy, a procedure, or an initiative, lands in an inbox, is the WHY has already been determined at offices and governing bodies.
Time
All new policies, procedures, and initiatives, land in an inbox with a time frame that typically starts with the beginning of the new school year. That time framework leaves little room for asking WHY questions, and, perhaps, answers that would require lengthy discussions and revisions to the initiative.
Schools are institutions
Although all school mission statements pursue aspirational goals—agency, interests, relationships, novelty, diversity—the organization of schools pursues institutional goals—efficient, predictable, quantifiable, and accountable. A deep dive into WHY questions will end up with aspirational answers, which will call into question the institutional substance of most school-wide policies, procedures, and initiatives.
Lack of vocabularies
Main offices are dominated by institutional vocabularies—budgets, procedures, logistics, timelines, regulations—with little or no academic vocabulary present in the main offices—theories, concepts, and ideas. Even if an academic term were to be uttered in the main office, the managerial mindset of school administrators would be unable to connect a theory, a concept, or an idea, to the goals and plans of an institutional policy, procedure, or initiative.
Career Paths
The course structure for certification in school administration and the career paths for aspirating school administrators’ value “getting stuff done.” Early on in the career of a school administrator, he or she learns that padding your resume with institutional accomplishments—balancing budgets, passing referendums, completing building projects, implementing technology plans—are fast tacks to school and district leadership roles. Not so much for resumes filled with teaching and learning accomplishments—curriculum rewrites, designing teacher training workshops, implementing new pedagogical programs, supervising classroom instruction.
An Impatience with Ivory Tower Talk
Although all school administrators have a background in an academic specialty and have earned multiple university certifications in school administration, when administrators graduate from universities they quickly abandon the goals and values of the academic mind for the institutional goals and values of the managerial mind. This abandonment is on display in a look of impatience or sometimes sarcasm from fellow administrators who detect a conversation or meeting is taking an academic turn. Always, in the background of these conversations and meetings, is getting stuff done—not questioning what stuff should be done.
Alan C. Jones 