Author: Alan Jones

Dr. Alan C. Jones

“The Reflective Practitioner: Part 3- WHY there is no WHY in Main Offices”

by Alan Jones

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.

“The Problem with Subjects”

by Alan Jones

      A topic I will keep returning to is the subject-centered curriculum. All schools organize their curriculum around subjects. As a means of organizing facts and procedures into a meaningful explanation, subjects appear on the surface to be a logical response. Of course, the other function subjects serve very well is the institutional goal of documenting student progress, which, in this case, amounts to attaching a credit to each subject. The source of the credit system was developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The unit system, developed in 1906, measures the amount of time a student has studied a subject. For example, a total of 120 hours in a subject meeting four or five times a week for 40- 60 minutes each year earns the student one unit of high school credit.

      While managerial main offices value the documentation ease of the credit system, the subject-centered curriculum fails to serve students or future employers well. The problem with a subject-centered curriculum is this particular organizational structure sets up a firewall against any form of interdisciplinary learning and relates poorly to the ill-structured problems and processes that control real-world organizations. Subjects never pose the critical real-world questions that are asked daily in the private sector: What do we know? “What will we do?” How do we do it?

      The distinction between information and knowledge is missed in schools. Curriculum guides and textbook are organized into subjects, which treat the mountains of information they contain as if they were imparting knowledge. Information in transformed into knowledge when it is applied to a problem, a process, a plan, a strategy. The only application in the subject-centered curriculum is to pass a test, earn a credit, and eventually earn a diploma. In the world of institutional schooling earning subject matter credits for the memorization of information underlies the organization and delivery of the curriculum.

      For facts and procedures to become meaningful in a real-world context, they must submit to a method of study and a disciplinary framework that systemizes cause-and-effect relationships where these floating-around facts and procedures take on a predictive quality. To put it another way, classroom instruction ought to focus on assisting students with seeing relationships rather memorizing discreet pieces of information. The distinction between information and knowledge is just that: the former asks students to file in their minds around names, dates, theories, concepts, and procedures; the latter asks students to see and establish relationships between those same names, dates, theories, concepts, and procedures. The primary pedagogical function that teachers serve is creating problems or dilemmas where those relationships come into play.

“The 10-80-10 Rule”

by Alan Jones

      In one of his appearances, the late Steve Jobs described what he termed, the “10-80-10” rule of leadership. The rule is a leadership principle that prescribes where effective leaders should spend their time:

  • 10% of the time should be spent communicating your vision for “the thing.”
  • 80% of the time should be spent moving the “the thing” forward.
  • 10% of the time polishing the thin, and helping others to understand why and how you are tweaking “the thing.”

      “THE THING” in this leadership principle is any product or outcome the organization is set up to create. Applied to schools “the thing” or “things,” are listed in school mission statements. Popular things listed in these documents are as follows:

  • “Well prepared for college and a career path”
  • “Life-long learner”
  • “Productive global citizen”
  • “Learn to think critically and deeply”
  • “Develop diverse skills, talents, interests, and abilities”
  • “Nurture each child’s curiosity”

      The obstacle that school leaders run into when trying to emulate the 10-80-10 rule is school offices that fail to address the first 10% rule: “10% of the time should be spent communicating a vision of schooling.” Yes, most schools do write a mission statement; and, yes, the mission statements are a mixture of many worthwhile educational goals. The schools I led, however, were designed around two conflicting purposes for schooling. The first reason, which was articulated in school mission statements, was to create critical thinkers or to put it another way, thinkers that would distance themselves from conventional wisdom.

      The second reason, the reason that schools were designed to implement, and which school communities supported with their tax dollars, was the goal of socialization: accept the world as, with all of its rules, requirements, and constraints. The school facility, along with the organization of curriculum and instruction, established a schooling regime, founded on standardization, conformity, regulation, credentialing, accreditation, and accounting.  There was little space in our school where mission-driven goals—love of learning, democratic participation, asking challenging questions—were valued or promoted.

      Numerous surveys of student attitudes towards schooling have reported student discontent with a school organization and curriculum that values a grammar of schooling grounded in memorization, recitation, and quantitative measures of what has been memorized and recited on a test. Each of these values establishes an instructional regime that endorses the following principles of teaching and learning:

  • All knowledge is fixed and resides in a textbook
  • Teachers are truth-tellers
  • Practice makes perfect
  • Points are deducted for incorrect answers
  • Facts first/meaning later
  • Timed tests indicate speed and learning
  • Abstractions describe reality

      I could on, but, will stop here to point out that each of these principles, and many more I could list, have no basis in the research, and, create learning environments that are antithetical to engaging the minds of children and adolescents. I will not go into detailed refutations of the reach learning principle. Suffice it to say that an instructional regime founded on fixed knowledge, accumulation of facts, repetition, correctness, and replication, not only distorts the educational values written into school mission statements but turns the remaining elements of Jobs rule of leadership into a problem of engineering rather than enacting.

      The distinction between both processes—engineering and enacting—is how school administrators respond to student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling. Typical indicators of student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling are low test scores, poor attendance, high drop-out rates, and high disciplinary violations. When questioned on these quantitative indicators of low student engagement, school administrators offer an engineering fix: lower class size, hire more support staff, lengthen periods, adopt a program, and drop electives. Rarely in these conversations do administrators return to Jobs first 10%—their vision of schooling, and whether that vision— mission-driven values and goals—is being realized in classrooms that surround their school offices. Instead, they proceed to tinker with an engineering solution—the other 80%/10%—with little or no effect on schools that for most students (74% in a recent survey) feel like a prison.

      Schools intent on living up to their school’s mission statement must return to Jobs first 10%—the purpose of schooling or more broadly what it means to be educated. Presently, the purpose of schooling has been reduced to institutional goals: replicate on a test what a teacher tells a class or what is assigned in a textbook. The alternative model of schooling, one which John Dewey and a group of progressive educators pursued at the turn of the century classrooms where students are asked: to see relationships; reexamine practices, habits, assumptions, and biases; to decide how to live their life; to challenge the final vocabularies of their parents.

      Dewey’s model of schooling or what it means to be educated, would require a complete redesign of the structure of schooling and teaching methodologies to restore agency to student learning. I will not go into the particulars of what these classrooms would look like—well, in fact, there would be no classrooms per se—but the remaining Jobs 80%/10% rule would be devoted to moving the “thing” forward, the thing being learning environments that encourage students to think about what they know, what they care about, and what they want to know more about.

“Dad, I have to cancel our dinner date, I need to meet with my studio manager and architectural engineer”

by Alan Jones

      For the last few months, my wife and I have been trying to schedule a dinner date with my daughter. She is in the process of opening up her own Pilates Studio, whose demands seem to have her on call 24/7. Even when we reach her by phone, she keeps interrupting the conversation with an urgent call from one or more of the agents involved in opening up the studio. In these brief conversations, however, I have been surprised at how quickly and expertly she has mastered the details of finance, personnel, architectural design, constructional management, logistics of all kinds, and the intricacies of governmental rules and regulations.

      I should not have been surprised, she has always been a hard worker and very goal-oriented. Where my doubts might have arisen about her ability to open up and run a studio were her experiences with formal schooling. Although she was diligent in her studies and did fairly well in college, she always struggled with formal academic studies. In a recent family discussion of the gap between the abstractions of the academic world and the realities of acquiring building permits my son made the following comment: “You know Dad, what schools measure matters very little in the real world.”

      Both my wife and I, who spent our entire careers in teaching and administering in schools, were, to say the least, unable to mount a modest response to my son’s insight. Our failure to author a persuasive response to my son’s claim was our personal experiences in schooling where the various talents and abilities we developed in our various school positions were never measured in a formal academic setting. In that same conversation, I recounted the comment by my high school algebra teacher who repeatedly told the class that if we didn’t do well in Algebra our career choices were doomed. Of course, in the real world of teaching and school administration, where I was fairly successful, I never used algebra again.

      As I recounted my experiences in the classroom and school offices, there were numerous talents and skills—team building, communication, critical thinking, perspective taking, self-control, planning, and social-emotional awareness– I employed that were never taught or measured in schools. This brings me to the theme of this blog which will be a summary of the ideas that David Brooks wrote about in a recent Atlantic journal piece.

      Brook argues that the definition of merit in this country was established by a committee formed in 1892 by James, Conant, President of Harvard University, to standardize the high school curriculum. The committee began the project in response to two problems with the current system of college admissions. The first problem was high school transcripts filled with course offerings that defied any form of quantitative analysis. The second problem was a college admission process that looked passed student grades and instead looked at their parent’s bankbook. Conant believed that American Democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.”

      The fix that Conant’s Committee of Ten presented to high schools throughout the nation was a college admissions process that prized academic achievement over any other human trait. Academic achievement in this redesign of college admissions was based on grades in a series of prescribed academic subjects and scores on standardized tests. The committee’s report assumed that intelligence—again measured by grades and test scores—was the highest human trait. College admissions offices would become the primary players in the sorting system segregating the smart from the not-so-smart. The other assumption Conant made was intelligence was randomly distributed and thus would achieve a broad mix of student backgrounds sitting in college classrooms. This later assumption proved false when parents, parents with money, orchestrated a set of skill-building processes—from college coaches to SAT/ACT preparation programs—to sort their son or daughter into the premiere university programs.

      This brings me to David Brook’s sins of meritocracy, which are now trapping schools and households into a giant sorting system:

Sin #1: The system overrates intelligence: As in the case of my daughter, the many skills my daughter is employing to open up and manage a Pilates Studio are not measured on standardized tests or are revealed in grades in academic subjects. Relying on some quantitative measure of school performance, in the words of David Brooks misses, “70% of what we want to know about a person.” Intelligence, in other words, is not the same as effectiveness.

Sin #2: Success in schools is the same as success in life.  As a lifelong educator, I can testify to the fact that success in schools is entirely dependent on the ability to jump through hoops that adults put up. In the words of David Brooks: “grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant, but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership, ability, creativity, or courage.”

Sin #3: The game is rigged: A true meritocracy would sort people by innate ability, but what the college admissions process has become is sorting students by how wealthy their parents are. Well-off parents are investing massive amounts of money in all manner of college preparation programs to make certain their children are admitted to an Ivy League school.

Sin #4: We have created an American caste system: We now have in this nation a deep divide between those who are well-educated and those who are less well-educated. Those less well education suffer from a variety of ills: divorce, drug addiction, and obesity. The cognitive elite withdraws to gated communities with six-figure incomes and a range of privatized services that cater to health and well-being.

      All of these sins of meritocracy have not only failed at Conant’s goal of creating a natural aristocracy of talent but created a host of blowbacks that have led us into several foreign quagmires, shattered our trusts in institutions, funneled talented elites’ jobs in finance or consulting; and, presently, provoked a populist backlash that has divided our nation into red states and blue states.

      Brooks ends his article with a call to “humanize meritocracy.” The concept, in and of itself, is a worthwhile goal. We live in a society, whose complexities, demand smart people. The big change must become how we define merit. The qualities so admired by Conant—quantification, objectification, optimization, and efficiency—need to be replaced with non-cognitive skills that are harder to quantify: emotional flexibility, grit, social agility, curiosity, sense of drive, and mission, agility, and social intelligence. Few schools in this nation possess the organizational structure and instructional methodologies that would accommodate and advance this new definition of merit. I have written numerous blogs on what these kinds of schools would look like. For the most part, however, our schools will continue to mirror the goals and processes developed by Conant. Placing humans on a single scale—the bell-shaped curve—is easy. The difficult question school administrators should be asking themselves, one which is often professed in school mission statements is: “What is each student great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?

“Dad, there are no bad decisions”

by Alan Jones

(Daughter to Father)

The idea for this blog originated with a conversation I had with my daughter regarding a new business venture she was orchestrating. Both my wife and I had managerial backgrounds, so, we were questioning her recent business moves—a lot of “what if” statements. She patiently responded to all of these queries with what was in my mind sound business and organizational logic. At some point in the questioning process, I sensed my daughter was becoming somewhat frustrated with the barrage of “what if” questions. In the middle of one of my “what if” questions she made the comment that introduces this blog: “Dad there are no bad decisions. People keep looking for certainty, for safety, for decisions that are not bad. But, you don’t grow in a job, in life, in anything you do without learning from bad decisions. You have to find out what works for you.”

     As I thought about my daughter’s comment, I reflected on the countless decisions I had made in my job and personal life. They all fall on a continuum from the highly rational to the highly emotional. As an individual prone to a rational decision-making model, I focused on the decision-making process: identify the problem>gather information>evaluate alternative solutions> and select the option with the highest utility. I discussed my thoughts with my wife who said to me: “Al, you missed the point of what our daughter said.” She went on to explain that it is not the process for making a decision that should be examined, but rather the process you use when it turns out to be a bad decision.

      What struck me with this response is the feedback function, which is what my daughter was focusing on, and the most important function in the act of learning, is exactly the function schools pay little attention to. Yes, schools do provide feedback, in fact, mountains of feedback, but, it is in the form of red pen notations or perfunctory recitation of correct answers on a forced choice testing instrument. There is little attention paid to the “why” of a wrong answer, or a process for checking for wrong answers, or for considering how some wrong answers but be corrected in different circumstances. The source of these poorly designed feedback functions is in assessment instruments that are not designed to analyze decisions, but, to identify wrong answers. After school, however, in the real occupational world, bosses are not looking for the right answers, but rather the effective enactment of goals, policies, and plans.

      The source of the effective enactment of goals, policies, and plans is a repertoire of leadership and managerial moves that are built around bad decisions or the often-repeated organizational axiom: “I won’t do that again.” This short axiom illustrates workers in the trades and professions engaging in a feedback function that has examined the causes and effects of a process that resulted in bad outcomes. Most importantly, within that process, the worker has determined what he or she ought to have done. Those of us in leadership or managerial roles have our private thought process for analyzing bad decisions—mine in particular was the “five whys tool” which for me always led to the root cause of the bad decision.

      Returning to my daughter’s comment, over time the knowledge base developed over the analysis of bad decisions, produces sound professional judgment and what works for you—there are no bad decisions.