At a recent gathering of retired school administrators, I listened to conversations that I have titled “what gets noticed.” What I mean by that title is the following comments from administrators in the room are experiences that caught their attention—“what got noticed.”
A standout athletic event or performance involving their school
Difficult personnel matter
Working with difficult parents
Working with difficult governing boards
A student who succeeded despite difficult odds.
While each of the remembrances shared common qualities—emotionally charged, a challenge or conflict, a human story—they all lacked any connection to what school mission statements point to as an aim of schooling—raising the level of student thinking and reasoning. If the men and women seated around me were pursuing mission-driven goals, then the following experiences would have caught their attention—“what got noticed.”
The nature of student work.
The substance of lessons
Student sense-making
Classroom discourse
Teacher responsiveness
My takeaway from that retirement gathering, the same takeaway I had from numerous administrative meetings, is that the primary function of our occupations as school administrators is improving teaching and learning in our schools. Mission-driven leadership asks leaders to notice not the most visible moments of schooling—but the most meaningful ones—the moments where thinking is being shaped, extended, and revealed.
In a discussion about what should be included in school curricula, Dewey argued that the age-old debate over curriculum content was misguided. In his words, it is not “what” should be included in the curriculum, but rather the habits of the mind and methods of inquiry that each discipline develops. As we can all attest, and as cognitive research documents, most of what is in the curriculum — names, dates, locations, rules, categories, classifications —is often taught as isolated pieces of information. Students memorize them long enough to pass a test, and they are quickly forgotten minutes after leaving Friday’s test. When students engage in the methods of inquiry for a discipline, information becomes durable because it is repeatedly used.
For Dewey, every academic discipline represents a distinct way of investigating the world. In science, facts become tools for explaining phenomena. In history, dates become anchors for understanding causation and narrative. In mathematics, formulas become instruments for solving problems. In economics the exchange of good and services become a method for trade-off analysis. In political science, policy analysis becomes a tool for how power is organized and exercised.
As I have argued in past blogs, systems of accountability require measurable outcomes—-tests, benchmarks, and documentation that demonstrate compliance with institutional goals. These compliance systems privilege the recall of information: names, dates, rules, classification, and procedures. What they struggle to measure are the far more important outcome Dewey emphasized—habits of inquiry, disciplined skepticism, interpretative judgment, and the capacity to investigate complex problem.
The result in predictable. School increasingly organize the curriculum around what can be documented and tested, even when educators know that what matters most for long-term intellectual growth are the ways of thinking students repeatedly practice while learning the content of a discipline.
I just completed reading a summary of Suzy Welch’s book, Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career.” One of the themes in the book that is relevant to the role of school guidance counselor is the mismatch between the values a student carries into the guidance office and the aptitudes they have documented on various personality instruments. The chart below is a summary of some of the values and aptitudes explored in Welch’s book.
The role of a school guidance counselor is typically framed around three functions: academic planning, emotional support, and college and career planning. While guidance preparation programs emphasize the therapeutic side of the work– meeting with parents about academic and behavioral concerns and providing counseling for stress, anxiety, conflict, or adjustment– the day-to-day reality in many schools is dominated by administrative responsibilities. Graduation audits, standardized testing coordination, student scheduling, college applications, and financial aid advising often consume far more time than direct counseling.
What is missing from both the ideal and real world of guidance counseling is a process to confront a central problem highlighted in Welch’s book: addressing the mismatch between students’ values and their demonstrated aptitudes when they enter the guidance office. I will not describe the various assessment instruments Welch and her associates use to develop a value-aptitude profile. The purpose of this blog, like most of my writing, is to examine the disconnect between the goals of institutional schooling—the objectives guidance counselors are directed to pursue—and the therapeutic educational goals so often highlighted in school mission statements.
Recognizing and addressing this disconnect has become even more critical with the rapid development of AI technologies, which are beginning to destabilize traditional pathways to well-paying work — college credentials, internships, entry-level white-collar positions, and managerial career ladders. In turn, the conventional tools long used by guidance counselors — standardized tests, transcripts, and college entrance requirements — are losing some of their predictive power and relevance.
Setting aside a curriculum and school structures built around the conventional tools of guidance counseling, what now matters most are school organizations and programs that intentionally connect students’ values with their aptitudes—what Welch describes as the crafting of an authentic life and career.
VALUES
APTITUDES
Achievement Adventure Competition Cooperation Creative Economic Return Service Structure Variety
Generalists Specialists Brainstormer Idea Processor Problem Solver Fact-Checker
At a recent family gathering, I noticed several of my relatives scrolling through their phones. Periodically, they would lean over to another relative and share what they were viewing. I happened to be positioned in the room to be in relative proximity to these sharing sessions. Although I am not a member of any social media site, I decided to take the plunge and ask one of my teenage relatives to show me what they were viewing. “Sure, grandpa…come on over.” Over the next half-hour, I was introduced to a steady stream of images across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X. Instagram centered on visual images of success, travel, and beauty. Facebook transformed personal life experiences into an archive of mini events. TikTok rewarded visibility itself—reaction became performance, and everyone was cast as a performer competing for attention. Twitter was the only site that appeared to be interested in current events, yet its dominant topics were not depth or understanding, but speed, volume, and provocation: being first, loudest, and most incendiary.
As I viewed each site, I could not get out of my mind the themes presented in Daniel L. Boorstin’s book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Although the book was published in the early sixties, his definition of “pseudo-events” fit perfectly into the images I was viewing, sitting next to my grandchild. Boorstin argued in the book that Americans were increasingly living in a world of manufactured images rather than direct experience or reality. These manufactured images promoted image over substance, celebrity over hero, the illusion of abundance, the marketization of experience, and turning politics, news, and public debate into performances. Each platform structured reality around how it appears, circulates, and is consumed—rather than how we lived it or understood it.
At the same time, I was reflecting on the themes in Boorstin’s book and the social media platforms I just viewed, I began to consider how schools might respond to a technological environment saturated with a steady stream of pseudo-events— an environment increasingly crowding out the habits of the educated mind. When I questioned my social-media tutors, sitting beside me on the couch, about how their schools were addressing the presence of these platforms in the classroom, their answer was succinct: “They ban our phones during the day.”
Having spent my career teaching and administering in public schools, I was not surprised by my social-media tutors’ responses. When institutional schooling perceives a threat to how it organizes curriculum and delivers instruction, its default response is to ban and regulate that threat. Rather than studying it- or, more importantly, asking hard questions about how the educational values and habits proclaimed in the school mission statement might counter or reshape it—central offices and classrooms rely on institutional procedures to keep the threat outside the classroom door.
Of course, the problem with this line of thinking is that the classroom door always swings open into a world dominated by pseudo-events, where young people are becoming accustomed to an artificial reality. The central stumbling block to a school- wide response to these media-saturated realities lies in institutions that have devoted their instructional platforms to the accumulation and documentation of ever-increasing amounts of information. In contrast, the habits of mind listed below—if taken seriously in curriculum deliberations and instructional practice—would begin to pose a fundamental challenge to the habits of the performative mind.
Habits of the Educated Mind Reflection over immediacy Depth over attention Historical and contextual awareness Intellectual humility Judgment, not mere opinion Commitment to truth-seeking Resistance to extrinsic rewards
In a recent conversation with my daughter, she attributed her success as a small business owner to what she termed her Superpower. I questioned her further on what she meant by her “Superpower.” She explained to me that while her experience in school, college, and the corporate sector looked good on a resume, in real job situations, she could find workarounds for tasks and problems that proved valuable.
My next question, of course, was: “What is a workaround? Well, Dad, my Superpower is finding alternative paths when the obvious one is blocked—the ability to adjust, improvise, and still get the job done when your training, rules, and chains of command make a straightforward approach impossible. You know, Dad, to be blunt, in schools and corporate settings, workarounds are defined as cheating. I define workarounds as finding an individual, a system, a supplier, a source of information, a venue, or a skill set that is off the grid, so to speak. You know you are working off the grid when your boss and colleagues give you that look—I don’t know how you pulled this off…but it worked.
I then asked her why others in the organization were not using this Superpower. Well, in her words, most of my bosses and colleagues have been taught and have been relatively successful at following the rules—they are very good at following scripts. She reminded me of her struggles in the academic world and several corporate structures, where following the rules was simply what was expected. In her case, early on in school and college, she developed workarounds—extra credit, tutors, smart boyfriends—to get by in her courses. In the corporate sector, her proclivity to work around standard operating procedures allowed her to solve problems and complete tasks that no one else in the organization could resolve.
She then went on to explain how AI, for her, was becoming the ultimate workaround. I interrupted her by asking if she wasn’t concerned that AI could eliminate her business. Her response, “Dad, not at all.” To summarize her response: Dad, the service I am offering is something no AI can replicate. What AI does provide me with is the mechanics that surround the services, which frees up my time to further develop the service I am offering.
As a lifelong educator—teacher, administrator, professor—I had worked my entire career designing curricular and school organizational structures that taught students how to follow the rules. As my daughter pointed out, the concept of workarounds, her Superpower, was considered cheating in the schools I worked in. What struck me in this conversation is that we may be entering an era where various technologies reward those who find workarounds and challenge traditional rules—while punishing those who simply follow them. To put it another way, schools should be rewarding Superpowers—unique talents and problem-solving abilities—rather than just super achievers who simply meet standard expectations.
Alan C. Jones 