Alan Jones

“My Two Occupational Worlds”

November 15, 2024 by Alan Jones

Growing up in my household I was apprenticed into the world of trades. My Dad was an electrician. He loved his occupation. He told me that one of the trades was in my future. To whet my appetite for an occupation in the trades I became his apprentice on weekends where he earned extra money working side jobs. Under his tutelage, I learned the rudiments of the basic trades—plumbing, carpentry, electricity. Although my Dad was a great teacher, and extremely patient with an individual whose use of hand tools was always problematic, I found these jobs boring and poorly aligned with my hand/eye coordination. My hidden distaste for the trades became public when I applied for college in my senior year in high school.

In the years I attended college, I studied during the day and worked at several blue-collar jobs at night and during the summer. My rudimentary background in the trades proved helpful in these part-time jobs. After college, I went into careers in teaching and school administration. What follows are lessons I took away from my journey between the occupational worlds of the trades and the professions.

Lesson 1: Abstractions, Abstractions, Abstractions:

In classrooms, you are drawn into a world of abstractions that have little or no relationship to the problems I encountered on the factory floor. This does not mean on the factory floor there were no abstractions, but the abstractions relate directly to the use of tools that produce tangible outcomes. In the classroom, the abstract tools you acquire are applied to other abstractions, which, often produce unclear outcomes.

Lesson 2: Well-defined skills:

In the trades, there are well-defined skills that can be observed and rated for performance. In the classroom, the grades you receive tell us little about how well the abstractions you have learned will be applied in real-world situations.

Lesson 3: Depersonalization

In the professional world, you are subjected to a policy and protocol world that fits a particular role. That role may or may not fit the realities of the world the professional works in. In the trades, however, you come face-to-face with the realities of your job, with clear functions to be performed and clear standards of performance.

Lesson 4: My Bad

Working on the shop floor mistakes are up close and personal. Although the mistakes are recognizable by fellow workers, they also recognize and expect that the mistake will be corrected. In the professions, you are working with many unknown variables that are interacting in unpredictable ways. The uncertainties built into professional tasks make it difficult to determine blame for a bad outcome or how to remediate a bad outcome. Often these bad outcomes are blamed on the implementation process—unproven theories, poorly designed plans, lack of resources—which result in no professional assuming direct responsibility for the bad outcome, and, a feeling amongst decision makers that they are infallible.

Lesson 5: Loss of Agency

The concept of agency is activities directed to outcomes that the worker has determined to be worthwhile and under their full control to determine the worthwhile outcome. In the world of professions, the concept of agency becomes marginalized with functions and tasks that are of questionable value and in which the professional has little control over outcomes. Simply put, the agency comes down to who determines the ends. On the shop floor, ultimately the worker will have direct control over outcomes. In the office, outcomes are dictated by individuals lodged on the office floors above them.

Lesson 6: Coherent Principles of Practice

Each of my part-time jobs in assorted trade-like occupations possessed a set of specific skills and routines that resulted in concrete outcomes. Although the type of tasks I was assigned were rudimentary, the tradesman I worked with demonstrated the depth and breadth of the principles that guided their craft. In the professions, I was confronted with goals, functions, and tasks that were often abstractions from the roles I was asked to perform. So much of what I performed in school was founded on theories and practices that were incoherent, uncertain, and difficult to quantify. In actual practice, we based much of what we did on our own experience and attempted to make collective sense out of the research in our field, which, each article ending with the section termed, “limitations of the study.”

What I have attempted to describe in this blog are the differing goals, values, and practices between the trades and the professions. These descriptions, however, were formulated by what I would term the golden age of labor—where clear distinctions could be made between manual and white-collar work. In the last decade, however, both manual and white-collar work have been drained of their cognitive elements. The shop floor is now dominated by robots and the office floor is dominated by AI. The global economy is working at turning all occupations into assembly line work. The loss of status in both occupations field is having terrible social and political consequences.

The House of Cards of School Reform Failure

November 9, 2024 by Alan Jones

In my four decades working in different positions in schools I have experienced several national and state school reform initiatives designed to improve student achievement. As a participant in these waves of school reform, what I observed firsthand mirrors the findings of several research studies of the two most recent national reform initiatives: the standards movement of the 1980s and the accountability-based reform of the 2000s. The research concluded the following:

The rise in student achievement was meager.
Teachers adopted surface-level features of the reform initiative (materials, student group arrangements), but did not make fundamental changes in how they taught.
Overall the changes in instructional practice were piecemeal and superficial.
School leaders, for the most part, were satisfied with these same superficial changes.

My involvement in both small and large efforts to change teaching practices all ended with the same dismal outcomes documented in the research. At times, those of us in school offices played the standard managerial blame game—poor parenting, recalcitrant teachers, lack of resources—to explain, what became for me, the grammar of school reform failure. From my perspective, I assumed that our administrative team had drawn up the perfect plan to fully implement the goals and practices of the reform initiative. The failure of these reform initiatives to take hold in the classroom must be due to forces outside the control of my colleagues and myself.

Later in my career, when I was consulting with school districts struggling to implement a reform initiative, I was able to assume a third-party person’s objective view of the implementation process. At first, I noted some missing components to the plan: poorly designed staff development; lack of a defined curriculum process; confusion over the goals and practices of the reform initiative. I noted these particular shortcomings, but, these deficiencies were just that—particular shortcomings.

What pulled these particular shortcomings together was a private sector framework developed by James Clear. He titled the framework: The 3 Stages of Failure.” Below is a brief summary of each stage of failure:

Stage 1 is a Failure of Tactics (HOW Mistakes): Failure to fully develop systems supporting the initiative or failure to pay attention to the details of implementation. You had a good plan and a clear vision, but, as the saying goes: “the devil is in the details.”

Stage 2 is a Failure of Strategy (WHAT Mistakes): The agreed-upon strategy fails to deliver the results expected, your team is clear about why you adopted the initiative and how to implement the initiative, but chose the wrong WHAT to make it happen.

Stage 3 is a Failure of Vision (WHY Mistakes): Your organization does not set a clear direction for yourself, a direction that is not meaningful to you or fails to provide an understanding of why you do things you do.

Clear’s framework brought to light the fundamental shortcomings of main office plans for implementing a new organization or instructional change. During the summer, when these plans are developed, school administrators follow the tired and true managerial components of running a school well. In their careers, school administrators become adept at aligning the certainties of management—budgets, personnel, timelines, logistics, workflows, and scheduling—with institutional goals—efficiency, stability, standardization, and accountability. Where all three stages of failure creep into main offices are initiatives that ask school administrators to implement initiatives that require working with the uncertainties of teacher backgrounds and dispositions; the uncertainties of theory-based pedagogies; the uncertainties of goals; and the uncertainties of administrative commitment.

In the summary below, I will place the shortfalls in the implementation of the district I worked with into Clear’s three stages of failure framework:

Stage 1: Failure of Tactics: The instructional systems required to support the reform initiatives required to support the initiative —professional development, curriculum materials, expertise, release time, space, scheduling—were nonexistent, poorly resourced, or unevenly delivered.

Stage 2: Failure of Strategy: The managerial norms for rolling out a new instructional initiative—announcement, distribution of materials, scheduled workshops, documentation of benchmarks, assessment schedules, and instruments—were poorly aligned with the depth and breadth of training and organizational changes required to implement the substance of the reform initiatives.

Stage 3: Failure of Vision: The reform initiatives were poorly aligned with mission-driven goals and values and were often in conflict with the goals and values of recently adopted initiatives.

The other realization I took away from Clear’s framework was the implementation of the goals, values, and practices of new approaches to teaching and learning required a commitment from administrative offices that all THREE stages of implementation—tactics, strategy, and vision—be in perfect alignment. In looking back on my efforts at fully implementing new approaches to teaching and learning, I had to honestly admit to myself, that one or more of these stages was not fully developed or fully aligned with the other stages. The time and resource pressures from outside governing agencies and central offices to implement a mandated change initiative too often result in cutting corners or one more of Clear’s stages, Like a house of cards, pulling one of Clear’s cards (stages) out of the implementation deck, results in the collapse of the goals, values, and practices of a school reform initiative.

“Coding is the future: Or, is it?”

October 28, 2024 by Alan Jones

Several years ago, I was at a graduation dinner for a relative’s son. Similar to the scenes in the movie The Graduate, several attendees were giving the new graduate advice on future career fields that were both lucrative and secure. Top among the suggestions was the field of “coding.” Simply put, a coder is a professional who builds programs for websites and apps. Based on what I was reading in the media, it appeared to me that this was sound advice.

Recently, however, the media has offered a different read on that piece of advice. Three of the major tech companies—Google, Cisco, Microsoft—have laid off thousands of tech workers. All of these tech workers were in the six-figure income bracket. The companies involved have blamed slowing demand, supply chain constraints, cost-saving measures, and changing technologies as the source for the layoffs.

I watched several YouTube videos featuring laid-off workers expressing their feelings about being laid off. In these conversations, I could not help but be impressed with their educational backgrounds—all attended top computer engineering universities— and their work experiences—all were loyal, made significant contributions to the company, and had advanced to top management positions.

What made these confessions foreign to me was the career path I had experienced. My career background amounted to years of training in one profession, entering that profession, and then retiring forty years later. For the most part, the profession changed little from when I entered it. What I read in the media and listened to on the YouTube videos is a job market now dominated by uncertainty. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person will change careers 5-7 times during their working life. Approximately 30% of the total workforce will now change jobs every 12 months. All of these changes require significant retraining.

As a retired educator—teacher, principal, professor—these job market findings call into question the following axioms we educators have preached from auditorium stages and classroom lectures.

Axiom #1: The more education, the better the job.

Axiom #2: This subject is a gateway to a good-paying job.

Axiom #3: What we measure in schools aligns with real-world knowledge and skills.

Axiom #4: A school platform—rules, courses, credits, bells—aligns well with real-world working conditions and expectations.

Based on recent job market findings, the axioms we preach are woefully out of step with real-world occupational realities. The static nature of our current schooling model is opposed to developing employees who are adaptive learners who can navigate ever-changing personal, academic, social, and economic environments.

All school mission statements speak to these real-world realities but, in practice, revert to institutional goals of schooling that value telling overdoing, uniformity over novelty, accountability over responsibility, efficiency over effectiveness, control over autonomy, and competitiveness over mastery. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a group of progressive educators who promoted a school design and pedagogy more attuned to twenty-first-century occupational demands. administrative “progressives” in urban school systems adopted a school model that was cost-efficient and accountable—the same model that our sons and daughters now attend.

If schools are serious about preparing our sons and daughters for real world occupations, they must abandon instructional platforms installed at turn of twentieth century and experiment with pedagogical models more attuned to working in a Google world. School districts that decide to part ways with an antiquated model of schooling should question how talent is treated in classrooms. Presently, talent in our nation’s classrooms is a one size fits all definition: scoring high grades in academic subjects and standardized tests. In a Google world, however, talent is broadly defined as a quality with the following attributes.

Different talents complement each other;
Any large-scale projects demand multitude of talents;
Different talents bring different and often fresh perspectives (major inventions in our century were developed by individuals at the margins of our society);
Diversity prepares societies for change.

With this expanded definition of talent in place, schools would need to rethink and reconstruct the entire test-driven subject centered curriculum. I have written a number of blogs on what that restructured curriculum would look like. Suffice it to say the “assign and assess” curriculum would be replaced with a “question and experiment” curriculum housed in a variety of learning environments that provide students with different experiences and opportunities to learn.

“Do all the even problems on page…”

September 25, 2024 by Alan Jones

The latest trend in school reform is the call by some educators to eliminate homework from the daily grammar of schooling. Alfie Kohn, in his book, The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of Bad Thing,” summarizes the research findings on the effects homework has on student achievement, which, in his words, is “all pain and no gain.” Other studies that have looked at the assignment of homework describe the social and emotional fallout that occurs in homes where parents and their children engage in the daily struggle over the when and how of completing homework assignments.

The question that is never asked is the why of the assignments. When parents, school administrators, or teachers are questioned on the why of assigning homework, they will respond with one or more of the following debunked whys of homework policies.

Homework teaches valued work habits;
Homework increases student achievement;
Homework provides the practice necessary to master skills;
Homework offers students an option to earn additional points for a higher grade.

Even when parents, school administrators, and teachers are confronted with research debunking a popular why of daily homework assignments, the practice of assigning homework has become the norm for judging effective schools and effective teaching. The only fly-in homework ointment occurred during COVID when parents observed up close and personal the mindlessness of the homework assignments their children were asked to complete. The typical homework assignment appeared to be afterthoughts at the end of class that sounded something like this: “OK, class, do all the even problems on page ____;” “That was the bell, finish reading the chapter and do the five-chapter review questions.;” “Finish the review sheet I handed out at the beginning of class.” All of these off-the-cuff assignments lack the fundamentals of a carefully designed homework assignment and, as parents noted during COVID, just appear to be “busy work” with little or no instructional value. Although the research offers mixed conclusions about the value of homework, all the research is clear about the following elements of an effective homework assignment: assignments are engaging; the purpose of the assignment is clearly understood; tasks are clearly explained; the assignment is related to course content; the product format is varied and clearly explained; the assignment asks the student to think deeply about questions that matter; assigned activities are particularly suited to the home.

I recently finished a book titled, “Standout School Leaders: Connecting the Dots.” The book is published by Corwin and will be out in March. The theme of the book is the qualities of school leaders who are not only good at managing their schools well but are also leading their schools in doing the right things. The establishment of a research-based stance on the assignment of homework is a prime example of an administrator who stands out from their colleagues in doing the right thing.

“The Reflective Practitioner Part 2: Doing the Right Things”

September 12, 2024 by Alan Jones

In Part I of this blog I summarized Donald Schön’s description of how professionals go about “getting stuff done.” His description was a significant departure from most organizational theorists who viewed the implementation function as a rational process controlled by research, plans, and strategies. Schön on the other hand viewed the process composed of continual ad hoc adjustments to what were thought of as “best laid plans.” Embedded in this ad hoc process was the function of reflection—continually assessing whether the particulars of implementation—goals, budgets, time, space, expertise, resources—were in alignment.

While Schön’s ad hoc reflection process was certainly a significant departure from most organizational theorists’ conception of implementation, it was the second part of Schön’s theory that was a radical departure: “reflection on action.”

The question that is rarely if ever asked of the implementation process is are we “doing the right things.” The charts below list the two sets of questions that administrators would posed in the process of reflecting on action. The first set of questions are philosophical in nature. Each question is not interested in the how, what, where, or who of implementation, but, rather the WHY of mission driven goals and values. Based on the answer to these reflective questions, the administrator may decide to revise the original goals and strategies of the initiative they were implementing. The revision process involves reconnecting theory to practice, which in turn, would require a rethinking of the plans of action and reframing the narratives explaining the how, what, and who of implementation.

The question remains: why do most main offices ignore asking the question: “Are we doing the right thing?” Part III of this blog will address that question.

TO REFLECT
*Why did we do this?* *Why did you try that?* *What did you expect?* *What did you get?* *What was the gap?* *What was the cause?* *What would you do differently?*

REVISE
DOING THE RIGHT THINGS
RECONNECT	Theory to Practice Practice to Strategy Strategy to Organization
RETHINK	Strategy Training Organization Assessment
REFRAME	Target Audience Practical Argument Instructional Narrative