"Teacher." That is the answer to every final examination in every course I have taught my aspiring principals for the last seven years. It's a "pass-fail" proposition. You get it or you don't. Oh, yes. The question: "In school, 'principal' is an adjective that modifies what noun?"
Somewhere in the ebb and flow of history, education practitioners and policymakers dropped the original term conferred upon individuals who would lead a school. Archival evidence shows that, rather than the legally-appointed middle manager manifest in the contemporary principal, the leader of our earliest schools was a kind of step-ahead teacher.
Mostly he (and believe it or not, time was that only men were permitted to teach) was the most accomplished, well-respected teacher in the school. People understood then that as the dance company has its principal dancer and the orchestra its principal violinist, the school has its principal teacher.
This line of thought is important for present purposes only to the extent that aspiring principals would do well to promote what, in my mind at least, is the most important role a teacher can play. That role is action researcher. The proposition is really not as radical as it may at first appear.
Action research is traced to John Dewey and the progressive movement arising in the first quarter of the 20th century. By definition, "Action research is any systematic inquiry conducted by teacher researchers, principal, school counselors, or other stakeholders in the teaching/learning environment to gather information about how their particular school operate, how they teach, and how well their students learn" (Mills, 2011, p. 177).
A careful reading of the definition comports very nicely with what we are learning about effective teachers, particularly if one extends to teaching, specifically, peer review as a necessary component of scientific research generally. As in the peer review process required for professional publication, collaboration among teachers, such as that advanced in professional learning community, results in a better mousetrap.
If some strategy worked in my classroom, maybe it will work in yours too, so goes the thinking. But how can teachers say with certainty what worked in the absence of systemic inquiry around a particular area of focus, collection of data, analysis and interpretation of those data, and subsequent action based on findings? The answer is, of course, they cannot.
Bottom line: Effective principals are principal teachers who themselves engage in action research even as they expect it of their teachers. I will repeat now and with even more certainty what I wrote for Phi Delta Kappan nearly six years ago reporting on the SERVE Teachers As Researchers Academy:
"As well-meaning reformers work to create community, expertise, and a professional knowledge base for teachers, we submit that TR [Teacher Research] is an avenue whereby such conditions may be more authentically and powerfully created by teachers themselves" (Bingham, Parker, Finney, Riley, and Rakes, 2006, p. 688).
Monday, March 26, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
A World in a Grain of Sand
What a wonderful storyteller is the mind! Under the slightest provocation, it may weave coherent wholes from random parts. My preparing to teach a master's class in Case Study Methodology tomorrow has elicited from my own mind a story on leadership, interpretative research, and William Blake. I'll start with Blake and work my way back to leadership.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour. . .
You may have recognized the first stanza from "Auguries of Innocence" without necessary having known that William Blake wrote it. Two years as an English major and this is what I recall! It is fair to say that I am a charter member in the Club of Knowing a Little About a Lot.
So what do Blake's words mean? Most literary critics suggest that the poet was reflecting on the state of apprehending wholes from parts. Even contemporary physicists are beginning to believe that reality is kind of like broccoli--each little stalk is a microcosm of the stalk of which it is a part. What might one learn about broccoli by examining a little piece? Can we see a world in a grain of sand?
My training and experience with case study research suggests that it attempts to do just what Blake wished for his reader--to create from a unique and bounded case a universe of meaning. It does so by exposing the theoretical frame of the researcher, selecting with precision whom or what is to be studied, drilling deeply into the peculiarities of examined people or programs, and validating its findings through collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from multiple sources.
While serving a doctoral internship with the regional education laboratory in the 1990s, I authored a case study of teacher leaders in a comprehensive high school. Even before its being codified in the North Carolina Teacher Evaluation Process, the concept of teacher as leader was gaining nation-wide currency as a strategy in school reform efforts. The principal, so goes the thinking, is a leader of leaders, one who leads not from the front but from the center.
My study, conducted as part of a class called, Interpretative Inquiry, occurred over the course of one school semester. I assumed an ethnographic stance, looking in as an outsider, an interested but objective observer. My data consisted of hours and hours of personal interviews and examination of archival documents, including journals and meeting minutes in a Piedmont North Carolina high school. I used a member-check strategy involving teacher-subject review of interview transcripts. Assisted by a software program called HyperQual, I distilled emerging themes from my tomes of data.
My attempt to remain a dispassionate observer, however, frequently left me sleepless. For example, after several meetings with the female head of the math department, I listened to a poignant story of how the teacher had been excoriated by a parent upset with a grade she had given a student, a grade which the principal ultimately changed to favor the disgruntled parent. Her eyes watered up.
"I don't think they understand why I gave the grade I did or why I teach as I do," she told me. "They accused me of 'not caring.' That really hurt. I do care. I love my students so much that I demand only the best from them. I care in the long run." When I left the high school that day, I think I cried a little, too.
For present purposes, the results of my study are unimportant. What is important is this: At the end of residency and return to my district to be a principal, her words became a cornerstone of my leadership code of conduct. I decided then that I would love my teachers so much that I would expect the best of them. And I would support them in doing their best. I would care in the long run. I hope that I did.
My University of North Carolina at Greensboro professor, Svi Shapiro, encouraged me to publish my case study. I was not as confident then as I later became, but I did present my paper at a research conference. And you are reading about it now. Despite a novice researcher's lack of courage in submitting his work for peer review, maybe it is enough that you may be encouraged to conduct a case study that could inform your leadership practice.
I can honestly say that of all the research that I have read, evaluated, or produced none have more influenced my career than the lesson offered me by that teacher leader on a cold, overcast Monday nearly 20 years ago. A world in a grain of sand.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour. . .
You may have recognized the first stanza from "Auguries of Innocence" without necessary having known that William Blake wrote it. Two years as an English major and this is what I recall! It is fair to say that I am a charter member in the Club of Knowing a Little About a Lot.
So what do Blake's words mean? Most literary critics suggest that the poet was reflecting on the state of apprehending wholes from parts. Even contemporary physicists are beginning to believe that reality is kind of like broccoli--each little stalk is a microcosm of the stalk of which it is a part. What might one learn about broccoli by examining a little piece? Can we see a world in a grain of sand?
My training and experience with case study research suggests that it attempts to do just what Blake wished for his reader--to create from a unique and bounded case a universe of meaning. It does so by exposing the theoretical frame of the researcher, selecting with precision whom or what is to be studied, drilling deeply into the peculiarities of examined people or programs, and validating its findings through collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from multiple sources.
While serving a doctoral internship with the regional education laboratory in the 1990s, I authored a case study of teacher leaders in a comprehensive high school. Even before its being codified in the North Carolina Teacher Evaluation Process, the concept of teacher as leader was gaining nation-wide currency as a strategy in school reform efforts. The principal, so goes the thinking, is a leader of leaders, one who leads not from the front but from the center.
My study, conducted as part of a class called, Interpretative Inquiry, occurred over the course of one school semester. I assumed an ethnographic stance, looking in as an outsider, an interested but objective observer. My data consisted of hours and hours of personal interviews and examination of archival documents, including journals and meeting minutes in a Piedmont North Carolina high school. I used a member-check strategy involving teacher-subject review of interview transcripts. Assisted by a software program called HyperQual, I distilled emerging themes from my tomes of data.
My attempt to remain a dispassionate observer, however, frequently left me sleepless. For example, after several meetings with the female head of the math department, I listened to a poignant story of how the teacher had been excoriated by a parent upset with a grade she had given a student, a grade which the principal ultimately changed to favor the disgruntled parent. Her eyes watered up.
"I don't think they understand why I gave the grade I did or why I teach as I do," she told me. "They accused me of 'not caring.' That really hurt. I do care. I love my students so much that I demand only the best from them. I care in the long run." When I left the high school that day, I think I cried a little, too.
For present purposes, the results of my study are unimportant. What is important is this: At the end of residency and return to my district to be a principal, her words became a cornerstone of my leadership code of conduct. I decided then that I would love my teachers so much that I would expect the best of them. And I would support them in doing their best. I would care in the long run. I hope that I did.
My University of North Carolina at Greensboro professor, Svi Shapiro, encouraged me to publish my case study. I was not as confident then as I later became, but I did present my paper at a research conference. And you are reading about it now. Despite a novice researcher's lack of courage in submitting his work for peer review, maybe it is enough that you may be encouraged to conduct a case study that could inform your leadership practice.
I can honestly say that of all the research that I have read, evaluated, or produced none have more influenced my career than the lesson offered me by that teacher leader on a cold, overcast Monday nearly 20 years ago. A world in a grain of sand.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Demagogues Also Lead
For the last several weeks, regular readers of "Future-Ready Leaders Now" have witnessed a kind of roll-out. I have made no secret of my fascination with the ideas presented in behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I have shared them with weary colleagues and hapless strangers at every opportunity. Tonight is no exception.
Preparations for a lesson on causal-comparative and experiment research for students in my Master of Educational Leadership for School Executives class led me to reread part of a famous text, a single quote from which pretty much sums the reason for the course I am teaching and our need for Kahneman's book. Leaders would do well to commit it to memory. Here's the quote:
"Our predilection for premature acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose that our assumptions have been confirmed.
Even in the case of failure, we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of circumstances. . . Science represents the safeguard of the [human] race against these propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the special appliances and methods. . . slowly worked out in order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and results are tested."
The quote is attributed to noted philosopher and University of Chicago professor, John Dewey, writing nearly a century ago in his landmark book, Democracy and Education.
As you will remember, Kahneman asserts that our "System One" brain is quick, associative, and often wrong in its conclusions because of its tendency to "cut short the process of testing" to borrow from Dewey. On the other hand, humans are alive today because of System One's thin-sliced responsiveness to fight or flight information.
Consider now "System Two." Kahneman says this system of thinking is logical and methodical. In theory, it has the capacity to analyze all the data and seek more. Alas, System Two is lazy. To paraphrase Dewey, System Two is all too readily "satisfied with superficial and short-visioned application." If there is a way to merge both systems of thinking to a greater good than either one of them could have attained alone, it lies in the scientific method.
I think, for example, about the pseudo arguments to which our elected officials sometimes subject us, ignoring for political gain evidence produced by disciplined inquiry around issues ranging from climate change to the evolution of the species.
In my mind, our only defense against hogwash from demagogues who would purport to tell us "how it really is" is to demand empirical evidence to support their assertions, examine rigorously the evidence and how it was produced, and push back against error when it occurs.
Someone once wrote that we are always but a generation away from ignorance. If any leader reading this blog needs a reason for acquainting him or herself with the methods of science, remember that demagogues also lead.
Preparations for a lesson on causal-comparative and experiment research for students in my Master of Educational Leadership for School Executives class led me to reread part of a famous text, a single quote from which pretty much sums the reason for the course I am teaching and our need for Kahneman's book. Leaders would do well to commit it to memory. Here's the quote:
"Our predilection for premature acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose that our assumptions have been confirmed.
Even in the case of failure, we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of circumstances. . . Science represents the safeguard of the [human] race against these propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the special appliances and methods. . . slowly worked out in order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and results are tested."
The quote is attributed to noted philosopher and University of Chicago professor, John Dewey, writing nearly a century ago in his landmark book, Democracy and Education.
As you will remember, Kahneman asserts that our "System One" brain is quick, associative, and often wrong in its conclusions because of its tendency to "cut short the process of testing" to borrow from Dewey. On the other hand, humans are alive today because of System One's thin-sliced responsiveness to fight or flight information.
Consider now "System Two." Kahneman says this system of thinking is logical and methodical. In theory, it has the capacity to analyze all the data and seek more. Alas, System Two is lazy. To paraphrase Dewey, System Two is all too readily "satisfied with superficial and short-visioned application." If there is a way to merge both systems of thinking to a greater good than either one of them could have attained alone, it lies in the scientific method.
I think, for example, about the pseudo arguments to which our elected officials sometimes subject us, ignoring for political gain evidence produced by disciplined inquiry around issues ranging from climate change to the evolution of the species.
In my mind, our only defense against hogwash from demagogues who would purport to tell us "how it really is" is to demand empirical evidence to support their assertions, examine rigorously the evidence and how it was produced, and push back against error when it occurs.
Someone once wrote that we are always but a generation away from ignorance. If any leader reading this blog needs a reason for acquainting him or herself with the methods of science, remember that demagogues also lead.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Klingon Warships
You need not have attended a Star Trek Convention to remember the dreaded Klingons. Here is a little Klingon trivia I have been thinking about lately: Faced with impending attack and nowhere to run, Klingon warriors engaged a cloaking device rendering their spacecraft invisible. When you're the most reviled being in the galaxy, that's a pretty good tool to have, isn't it?
Sometimes I think our mental models, our maps of the world and ourselves, are like Klingon warships. Invested in our livelihood and the stories we tell ourselves, our models are self-protective. In their drive for preservation, our stories and models trump even scientific fact. I offer one example from Nobel-prize winning economist, Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Several years ago, Kahneman consulted with a prestigious group of investment advisors whose clients were among the wealthiest people in the United States. In the course of his work, Kahneman acquired a spreadsheet summarizing the investment outcomes of 25 anonymous advisors, for each of eight consecutive years. Note that advisors' year-end bonuses depended primarily on their outcome score.
To determine whether there were persistent differences in skill among the advisors and whether the same advisors consistently achieved better returns for their clients, Kahneman ranked the advisors by their performance in each year and made the appropriate comparisons. He then computed correlation coefficient between the rankings in each pair of years: year 1 with year 2, year 1 with year 3, and so on up through year 7 with year 8. The result was 28 correlation coefficients, one for each pair of years.
What happened next was not a shock to Kahneman whose theories about the persistence of skill foretold the outcome. Are you ready? The average of the 28 correlation coefficients was .01. In other words, there was no relationship between investing skill and portfolio performance. It was impossible to predict the former from the latter.
"Our message to the executives was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign that they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analyzed their own results, and they were sophisticated enough to see the implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I have no doubt that our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before" (pp. 216).
Kahneman explains our tendency to excuse statistical fact from individual cognition as an artifact of System 1 thinking, that is, our drive to create a story based on often-faulty memory to give meaning to otherwise unpredictable, disconnected, and therefore psychologically untenable circumstances. Over time, these stories become, and then reinforce, our mental models. And like Klingon warships, those models cloak themselves in invisibility, protecting themselves from existential threat.
So what is it that educational leaders need to know that their mental models have rendered invisible? What maps need to be redrawn? Clearly, throwing out extant models and leaving everything to chance is foolish. We can indeed draw a clear and convincing arrow from degrees of skill and varying outcomes in many things. Playing a musical instrument, shooting a basketball, and driving a car come to mind. If you don't believe me, experience a middle-school band concert; then go to a concert performed by a professional symphony.
Kahneman's work does suggest, however, that in highly-skilled professions like developing school principals and teachers and educating children, critical contributors to outcomes may not be as apparent as one might think. And then there is the matter of chance.
Since focusing on chance and things over which we have no control gets us nowhere, we can and must think strategically about the educational outcomes we seek, as well as on how we intend to get them. From our thinking, including the results of correlational research, we will build better models; but first we must see the models. What Klingon warship will you uncloak today?
Sometimes I think our mental models, our maps of the world and ourselves, are like Klingon warships. Invested in our livelihood and the stories we tell ourselves, our models are self-protective. In their drive for preservation, our stories and models trump even scientific fact. I offer one example from Nobel-prize winning economist, Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Several years ago, Kahneman consulted with a prestigious group of investment advisors whose clients were among the wealthiest people in the United States. In the course of his work, Kahneman acquired a spreadsheet summarizing the investment outcomes of 25 anonymous advisors, for each of eight consecutive years. Note that advisors' year-end bonuses depended primarily on their outcome score.
To determine whether there were persistent differences in skill among the advisors and whether the same advisors consistently achieved better returns for their clients, Kahneman ranked the advisors by their performance in each year and made the appropriate comparisons. He then computed correlation coefficient between the rankings in each pair of years: year 1 with year 2, year 1 with year 3, and so on up through year 7 with year 8. The result was 28 correlation coefficients, one for each pair of years.
What happened next was not a shock to Kahneman whose theories about the persistence of skill foretold the outcome. Are you ready? The average of the 28 correlation coefficients was .01. In other words, there was no relationship between investing skill and portfolio performance. It was impossible to predict the former from the latter.
"Our message to the executives was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign that they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analyzed their own results, and they were sophisticated enough to see the implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I have no doubt that our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before" (pp. 216).
Kahneman explains our tendency to excuse statistical fact from individual cognition as an artifact of System 1 thinking, that is, our drive to create a story based on often-faulty memory to give meaning to otherwise unpredictable, disconnected, and therefore psychologically untenable circumstances. Over time, these stories become, and then reinforce, our mental models. And like Klingon warships, those models cloak themselves in invisibility, protecting themselves from existential threat.
So what is it that educational leaders need to know that their mental models have rendered invisible? What maps need to be redrawn? Clearly, throwing out extant models and leaving everything to chance is foolish. We can indeed draw a clear and convincing arrow from degrees of skill and varying outcomes in many things. Playing a musical instrument, shooting a basketball, and driving a car come to mind. If you don't believe me, experience a middle-school band concert; then go to a concert performed by a professional symphony.
Kahneman's work does suggest, however, that in highly-skilled professions like developing school principals and teachers and educating children, critical contributors to outcomes may not be as apparent as one might think. And then there is the matter of chance.
Since focusing on chance and things over which we have no control gets us nowhere, we can and must think strategically about the educational outcomes we seek, as well as on how we intend to get them. From our thinking, including the results of correlational research, we will build better models; but first we must see the models. What Klingon warship will you uncloak today?
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