If I Know, I "No" ... If I Don't Know, I "Yes"

I was recently given the privilege of working in a training environment where old school philosophies were being challenged by new school tactics. The old school culture won out.

It was fascinating to watch the clashes and chaos as old school could not comprehend or navigate within the new school opportunities. It was as if two languages were being spoken and no common ground could be found.

Within the ranks of the training group were many strong and capable visionaries who were invited in to transform the existing situation. Then, in mid-stream, they were pretty much "bound and gagged" as if they were enemies. Suddenly the highly capable were being fired and sent home with polite thanks, while the incompetent and the weak were herded off to be absorbed into the old school way of thinking. It was as if the powers-to-be believed they had won by converting a few newbies to their droning resistance. I guess the person in managerial power immediately above the process perceived the chaos as a threat and swept the table clean of its examinations, issues, and solutions. Isn't it interesting when ignorance overcomes curiosity and exploration?

I take a bit of pride and solace in knowing I was one of the many who were fired for being too willing to help improve things. It was amazing to watch the verve and zeal of a dozen leaders, the cream of the crop, be let go in favor of lemmings. Why does corporate America prefer the comfort of traditional thinking instead of the profitability and organizational strength of advancements beyond their comprehension? We were all so dedicated and committed to creating a huge victory for all involved, and yet, we did not fit their way of dysfunction.

Is preferred dysfunction a real force, or is it simply ignorance that wields its deceptive veil across the eyes of those with power? If given a day, any one of us could have aligned the resources, formed a plan, clarified the content, strategized the delivery, and set the process right. But, those who do not know, and will not look, are scared of being seen as incompetent, so they run head long into walls and prove it.

I chuckle at my freedom from the anxiety, but I also grieve the loss of what could have been accomplished. Why are people so afraid to learn?  Is it because they were raised in schools of “being corrected”, of being forced to memorize someone else’s ideas instead of exploring their own?  As a society we are paralyzed by the fear of being wrong, of being embarrassed for not knowing something, and of being compared to someone else.  Do we not realize that no one knows everything and as a whole we can build a greater library of knowledge between us?  We never learned how to value our own curiosity, our own ability to explore, and our own sovereign right to be different, interested in different lessons, and having something unique to offer.  If we had… we might be more comfortable with other people offering something else, believing something different, knowing something different from what we know, and we might even be comfortable with trying to explore and learn by being open to new knowledge.  Who knows?

Isn't it interesting that we learn from a motivation of knowing more, and yet many organizations support a culture that only values what you already know?  How can a culture that wants to increase its knowledge – which requires admitting it doesn't know as much as it needs to – simultaneously profess and bully based on how much it does know? 

When we get real honest, everyone would have to admit there is a lot more we don't know than what we do know.  The prosperous journey of gaining more knowledge begins with the confession, "I don't know."   To say, "I don't know," isn't the death knell of progress.  The key part is what comes right after.  Is the next statement "And... I don't want to know" or is it "I want to know more"?

If I say "I know" and mean "I know enough" I am really saying, "No" to the next bits of knowledge that may pass my way.  I am saying "No" to the very process of receiving, let alone seeking, new knowledge.  This is a closed mind.  The bosses of the training group I was fired from were closed-minded.  They were afraid to learn.  Think of that.  People who were in charge of a learning process were opposed to learning themselves.  There is no cure for an internal source of such poison.  A learning culture must disrupt the closed mind foundations that prevent it from moving forward.  The frozen river must be thawed so it may flow and churn.

When I say "I don't know" I follow it up - not with embarrassment - but with intrigue.  I am intrigued with what I may have missed, what may have kept me from knowing, and most important, "How can I now gain what I did not have?"  I follow my "I don't know" with a "Yes" to the filling of my void, the erasing of my ignorance, the progression of my mind.  Is that not my responsibility?  What more responsible choice could I make?

Leaders in education need to be the most interested learners we have on the planet.

They need to seek training in heavy mining machinery to move this mountain forward faster and faster.

Becoming a Leader for Learning

The advancement of learning is not about teaching and technology. The advancement of learning is about leadership. The advancement of learning happens when someone learns in a better way than they did before.  Creating the initiative to make such a change occur falls to the leader.  If a leader who is charged with creating quality learning fails to maximize the advancement of learning, new students will fall behind other opportunities they could have chosen.  More so, their lesser progress and lower levels of knowledge will put them at a disadvantage when they graduate and enter the highly competitive global economy.

We get caught up in the teaching and delivery process, and the in-system behaviors instead of seeking ways to increase the student's willingness and their ability to access useful knowledge. With many involved in education, the mark of greatness isn't so much about actual learning by students, as it seems to be about owning the credit for a superior instruction process. "My way" of teaching becomes the source of pride for experts instead of "My, how very well they learn."

The shift from traditional perspectives on what a teacher should deem a mark of success requires an initiative from a leader.  It requires inspiring, defining, and sustaining new priorities, new teacher roles, and new expectations for all involved.  These are the achievements of a leader.

Everyone in education has a different opinion on what is "good teaching" with no real and unbiased  way to measure and validate one claim over another.  Every nation, state, county, district, school, teacher, student, and parent have differing opinions about what constitutes "good teaching".  However, when learning is used as the yardstick, it is easy and very clear to see what is effective, leaving opinion and rhetoric to be irrelevant topics.

All people learn, but each person learns differently.  The advancement of learning has to include the adaptation of learner-centric principles, strategies, metrics, and instructional practices.  Leadership directly accelerates or hinders the advancement of learning, so, any discussions about teaching and technology are pointless until the influence of the leadership is known.

Many who become leaders of school systems arose from the system itself and as such are frequently products of its culture, advocates for its traditionalism, and blind to what else is possible.  Good leaders have vision that pierces through walls and across vast distances.  They can see how databases for employee records could be converted to a student registry, how librarians need to become experts on managing digital content, and teachers need to allow e-learning to do the heavy lifting in the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy so they can take on the upper levels.  Good leaders must be able to share their insights and ideas in such a way as to inspire and alter people's thinking.

Good leaders are not "found".  They "become".  People who care enough to pay attention to what works, to what people care about, to what needs to be changed, and to what moves ideas into reality.  If they don't know these things... they can learn them.  And, it is often seen that a person who has been entrusted with a leadership role finds in their heart the motivation to care and learn beyond what they may have believed possible themselves.  Their own transformation is as relevant and representative of what changes they will bring about as any other model one might find, but they BECAME that new version of themselves.

True leaders learn how to express their caring in effective ways of initiating, inspiring, explaining, and including.  The best leaders learn how to translate their caring into servitude for the sake of the many.  With students as their cause to champion, leaders of education must become learners of what is possible, useful, economic, acceptable, and eventual.  The ones who actually excel at learning will be the more effective ones at bringing about useful and strategic changes... for the sake of the students.

In a landscape of decorated administrators, principals and superintendents who are the epitome of what the existing system and culture proliferate, new leaders can grow out of the ranks of parents, teachers, volunteers, community members, and even students.  Anyone who cares enough to learn about what else is possible, casts their eyes upon alternative applications for technology tools, and seeks to make a difference will become an influence and will initiate changes in the way others think.

Will learning actually advance?  Will we be able to measure our progress and see how students are competing internationally?  I hope so.  In the mean time... let's encourage our leaders to become learners so they can become leaders for learning.

Good Leadership for Schools

Strong leaderS, according to Jim Collins in his heralded book "Good to Great" are those who serve the growth and strength of their organization, employees, and innovative culture by allowing change and development to happen without rigid control.

Organizations, such as large corporations and school systems are living, breathing organisms that are constantly changing, growing, failing, trying, and moving.  Change is a constant given and new directions for change must be chosen wisely.

Innovators see new possibilities and want to move things in that direction.  Maintainers are managers who try to keep the lights on, "Did everyone show up?  Does everyone have their name badge?  Are we all doing things the way I told them to?  Can we please minimize the changes?  I can't keep things steady and within established expectations if things are going to keep changing!"

Leadership is about moving the organization forward, and good leadership requires two important things - vision and servanthood.  First, the leader must have a great ability to see what is ahead, what will be "needed and best" tomorrow, and what can be done today to get everyone there.  Second, and most important, the good leader seeks to serve the organization's progress, its healthy desires, its needs, and its permitted processes of change.

The good leader serves the organization's progress by advocating for change, by wanting things to change - wanting things to be new and fresh - by looking for people who want to do new things in new ways and then releasing them to the task.

The good leader serves the organization's direction of change and forward progress by enabling the healthy desires to strengthen, and alternately, by deliberately starving the unhealthy desires.  New markets, new processes that work, and new cultural norms are all needed, but each can be unhealthy.  New markets can be disastrous, processes that work can become too dominant or expensive, and new cultural norms can include bullying, an erosion of ethics, sexual harassment, oppressive managers, and many more issues that can actually destroy morale, retention, and performance.  The good leader's job is to see where these changes are headed and where they are taking the organization.  Then they must prune off the bad and feed the good.

The good leader serves the greater needs of the organization.  These are things like - the excitement, the improvement, the wise permissions, and the pursuit of potential at the risk of failure.  One of the most important areas of need in any organization's growth and improvement is its learning.  Each individual chooses to learn, retain, and use vital information on a daily basis.  The good leaders serves this area of need by facilitating accurate and accelerated learning practices making their people the "best and most informed decision makers" in the industry.  The good leader serves his organization by making his people smarter.

The good leader serves the organization by paying attention to the "permitted processes of change" which are chosen by the people of the organization.  Smart and inspired people select dynamic ways to improve things and the good leader is not afraid to let them make important decisions.  The good leader allows them to tear off in new directions, venturing out into unknown territories like technology advancements, new behavioral practices, new engineering ideas, as well as hiring new talent, allowing new perspectives, and trying new motivational practices.  The good leader knows his people, the history of the organization, its needs, and its hopes.   When the people are wanting to move forward, giving them the "permissions of what is allowed" makes all the difference.

While each of these areas needs at least five thousand more words to properly unpack their meaning and specific aspects, the point here is that good leaders expect change, see how to inspire it, determine which changes are best, and allow the people to move toward it. Bad leaders don't.
Bad leaders worry about change and minimize it.  These people are managers and administrators, not leaders.  Most often, bad leaders try to force change upon people who don't want it.  This requires forced and coerced pushing - which is from behind, not from in front.

A wise old man once explained that the shepherd guides his flock from in front and the butcher from behind.  Seems a fitting way to describe the different ways people in power try to get things done.

The good leader may take the wheel of the bus, but then asks the passengers where they want to go.

Find People With Big Shovels

There are people out there who want to help build better school systems.

I am not talking about bigger, or more beautiful schools.  I am talking about the process of matriculation.  The process of teaching, inspiring, feeding, and assessing the progress of minds.  Each and every parent who cares will be on this side of the issue - actually working to create a more functional, effective, and cognitively efficient learning culture.  They may only have shovels and wheelbarrows, but they have heart and drive - the grist by which things change and move forward - but they will make things better.

But, one of the more significant things schools can do to move their mountain forward would be to seek and find people with bigger shovels.  There are researchers, philanthropists, non-profits, armies of volunteers, companies, government grants, authors, and learning experts from the business world - all wanting to pitch in, but not invited.  Instead of shovels and wheelbarrows, these people bring mining equipment!

The problem, to be honest, is not a shortage of help.  The problem is weak leadership.

Most school leaders don't know where the system needs to go, which direction of change is best, or how to facilitate changes without losing control.  So, instead, change is a begrudgingly slow and unwanted process.

Good leaders invite the people with big shovels (mining equipment) to help and put them to work solving the issues that need fixing.

Grab a Shovel

Our students, each and every one of them, deserve the future of promise our great nation is reputed to offer.  Yet our schools loiter in the mire of past traditions.  There is so much that can be done to improve these students' experiences of learning, opportunities to become, and their level of preparedness to help move the world forward to better outcomes, but the schools that are supposed to be helping them, enabling them, encouraging them, and empowering their progress are actually the millstones around their necks.

So many who work in the school system claim to want a better tomorrow, but they just don't seem to know what is possible, pragmatic, or worth doing.  Instead they add more and more slag to a growing mountain of resistance to change.  They are like boulders that dig their heels in and refuse to move.  By now we have mountains of resistant boulders in every school system and every district in America.

I am not an insider.  I am a parent who has learned enough to know what is possible, what is available right now, and what is extremely doable,  If someone like me can learn about these things, why can't... or... why WON'T those who lead look up from their well-worn and circular path to see what is "out there" beyond the box they live in?

I am not naive and uninformed as to the discouragement and mind-numbing ludicrousness of the problems they face.  However, I am staunchly opposed to their acceptance of our school system condition.  If we don't start to move these boulders forward one rock at a time we will never get anywhere... which is where we seem to be getting when compared to the rest of the world.

Inertia keeps us from moving forward.  "A body at rest tends to stay at rest."  We need to move these boulders.  We need to move these mountains.  And anyone who isn't pitching in to help is standing in the way.  I may not have anything more than a single shovel, but I am willing to blister my hands to move every boulder, rock, stone, and pebble.

If you have anything to do with the school systems in our great nation, you have a choice to make.  Are you going to help or are you going to stand around?

If you care for our students... even slightly... I say, "DON'T be discouraged by the enormity of the task!  Become a leader who inspires one more person by stepping up.  Step forward.  Grab a shovel, and be someone others can see working toward a better future."