Hate the Sin, Not the Sinner

I put it off long enough. I'm starting to clean out my office. My goal is to look at bare walls and bookshelves no longer than I absolutely have to, so the packing of the last item must be meticulously timed with the savoring of the last minute come the end of the month and my tenure here.

Not surprisingly, my slow and steady hand is surfacing one professional treasure after another. An inscribed pen here, a photograph there, a hand-written thank-you note from a principal beneath a stack of memos--all rememberances of my six years in the Triangle. Sometimes my treasures are less personal. Take today, for example.

Before me is a copy of an article from Educational Researcher, one of the American Educational Research Association periodicals to which I subscribe. As for why you should care, understanding this article and its implications promises to help you focus on what matters most in attaining sought-for outcomes, whether improving student learning or moving product.

The article by Mary M. Kennedy is titled, "Attribution Error and the Quest for Teacher Quality." In it, Kennedy evinces the ways researchers and policymakers overestimate the influence of personal traits and underestimate the influence of situations on observed behavior of teachers.

Kennedy argues that it is teaching quality, not teacher quality, to which we must attend if we are to appropriately account for improvement in student learning. The parameters of teachers' work--including schedules, instructional materials, and assignments--combined with students, school incursions into classroom life, and reform clutter are a few of the situational variables over which teachers have little or no control. My teacher wife reminds me nightly of the many things that cause her to be grading papers and planning lessons at our dining room table rather than at her teacher's desk.

Yet reasonable people firmly believe that "good teachers" may be evaluated for their caring personality, credentials, licensure test scores, skill sets, and personal values without giving a moment's notice for all the things outside the teacher's control that may also bear on performance. Situations matter.

Without treading deeper into Kennedy's weeds, I want to invite you to consider people you lead or manage. Are they resourced with what they need to do the job? Do workplace rules and routines facilitate or hinder job performance? What degree of autonomy do workers have in attaining expected outcomes? Are other workers enabling or disabling individual job performance? Students of TLA understand such questions as a search for sources of influence.

Bottom line: If you want to improve workplace quality and organizational outcomes, It's time to look beyond the worker to the working situation itself. Enable the worker, provide social supports, and structure the job to maximize what you want. Hate the sin, not the sinner.