Check Your Ego

I experienced a minor perturbation this week. It started on Monday with a less-than-perfectly evaluated training event.  By Tuesday, I was so irrationally perturbed that I was ready to throw in my lot with the feckless teacher who says, "I would have done better if I'd just had smarter kids to teach."

Of course, when kids fail to perform at high levels, it is never the intelligence of the kids that is at fault. Rather it is the lack of the teacher having designed and delivered high-quality lessons that engage all students. It's the same for adult learning. But thinking that way is way too much to expect for a man caught up in a self-justifying delusion fueled by ego and pride.

As I have intimated, the source of the perturbation were data proving that I may not be the effective service provider that I strive to be 100 percent of the time. Imagine that. The heck of it was that it was little more than a year ago that I was consoling a colleague for her upset about exactly the same thing.

Here's the thing: when you've dined on straight As, Bs are hard to stomach. Just ask the mom of the eighth grader who aced math until the boy, barely in the stage of abstract reasoning, gets slammed by algebra. Principals, you know what I am talking about.

After years of getting 4s and mostly 5s on TLA's five-point evaluation scale administered immediately after training, we got a few 3s on a new course we are piloting for Wake County administrators. Called Using Data to Focus Improvement, the course was originally designed by SREB, an educational research and policy organization based in Atlanta. TLA delivers four or five of their high-quality products, usually to rave reviews.

This particular course is designed to help building administrators pose better questions to improve their schools as they lead teachers in identifying, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data in a cycle of continuous improvement. What happened to the rave reviews for this course?

First, let the record show that the middling evaluations were given not in response to questions about facilitator expertise. Rather they were about participants' perceived sense of confidence and competence in actualizing the learning in their schools.

Still, we are challenged to discover why we facilitators did not create in these high-quality professionals near-mastery in their ability to focus and lead school improvement. Was it the instructional design that was at fault? Was it the week-long space between the training days? Was it the sheer amount of information to which they were exposed? All of the above?

One thing is certain: to improve anything--this course included--leaders need to give up perfection for the illusion that it is. And as a mentor once said to me, "Steve, if you do not want to improve, don't ask for feedback. You just might get it." My way of paying it forward is to share this with you: When things do not go as well as you have planned, check your ego at the door. You'll learn a lot more when you aren't so full of yourself.