Category: Organizational Change

It’s the Development, Stupid

Posted on | by Sam

(This article first appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Two years ago, my wife and I signed up to receive monthly emails charting our son’s development. When he was still in utero, the emails began with visual markers of his growth – he was the size of a grape at one stage, the size of a kumquat at another. Now, as he toddles his way through the world, the information is more focused on his behavior, reassuring us, for example, that a recent rise in meltdowns actually means that his development is “right on track.”

Across that same period, I’ve been part of a founding group that will, in August 2011, open a new public school here in DC (a school my son will one day attend). And what I’ve learned is that, for reasons I can’t fully understand, most of our country’s pre-schools maintain this evaluative focus on child development – and most middle and high schools abandon it altogether.

Why is this? If we know that up to two-year spans in development are normal in any area of a child’s overall growth, why do we recognize the value of flexible, developmentally-based evaluations when children are smaller, and then shift almost exclusively to inflexible, time-based evaluations when they are bigger? How might our schools be different if we valued all children’s social and emotional development as much as we revered their academic growth?

Luckily, this is not purely an abstract question. Since 1968, renowned Yale University child psychiatrist James Comer has administered the School Development Program (SDP), a research-based, comprehensive K-12 initiative grounded in principles of child, adolescent, and adult development. As Comer explains, “SDP is not an add-on program. It’s an operating system for the school, based on the recognition that development and learning are inextricably linked. Both are needed to adequately prepare young people to be successful in school and in modern life. And schools are the only organizations strategically located to help all children grow and compensate for the difficult conditions that interfere with the growth of many.”

Despite the clear logic – and sound research – supporting the Comer model, most people outside the innermost education circles have probably never heard of it. Dr. Comer is rarely mentioned amid the media’s infatuation with the newer generation of education reformers. Yet ask any group of parents what they want their children to know, feel, and be able to do as adults, and you will hear talk of not just academic goals (and test scores), but also physical, psychological, verbal, social, and ethical development – the very things the Comer model is designed to help educators tend to, monitor, and support.

I don’t know why the current national conversation about education reform is so mute on the developmental needs of children – regardless of whether they’re 5 or 15. I do know our school will listen to what the experts are telling us. And the good news is I see signs elsewhere that people are creating more flexible structures in which all children and adolescents can learn and grow. This year in Kansas City, for example, school officials will begin switching 17,000 students to a new system where, instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools will begin grouping students by ability. And despite its lack of media attention, the SDP continues to work effectively with schools across the country and throughout the world.

Of course, before shifting from a narrow focus on academic content to a broader focus on developmental processes, we must require a different, more finely attuned skill set in our teachers. This is something the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which just released a new report on the importance of development in teacher preparation, clearly understands. As NCATE puts it, “The essential task of any educator is to combine a depth of knowledge about subjects with a thorough understanding of the subject under study and to bridge the two with appropriate instructional plans and pedagogical tools. Indispensable to that process is the knowledge that human development displays complex patterns and variation, and effective teachers are able to draw upon that knowledge in service of the growth and learning of their students.”

We can create this sort of system – our teachers and students require this sort of system – but we won’t get there unless we’re willing to invest in the necessary structures and supports that can create a long-term teaching profession in this country, not just a short-term teaching force. Learning and development is not a simple, linear march into the future; it is a complex, nonlinear circling of ourselves and our places in the world. Understood that way, perhaps more Americans will start to pay more attention to how children and adolescents develop – and start to think differently about exactly who can, and who can’t, teach.

The X Factor of School Reform

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The X Factor of School Reform

In case you missed it, there was a great piece in yesterday’s New York Times, the core message of which has a lot of relevance for those of us who, barely a week removed from not one but two major reports of misleading test data being used to evaluate schools and school districts, continue to search for the simplest way of evaluating what may be the most complex undertaking in the professional world — creating a challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential learning environment in which all children can learn.

The Times article had nothing to say about school reform — it was about the Fed’s inability to decide whether to stimulate the economy now or later. And it was about how even in a social science flush with quantitative data, the “social” aspect of the science — i.e., human behavior — is sufficiently complex and nonlinear to make certainty a chimera. “One point I always make to my graduate students,” said Robert Solow, a Noel Prize winner and MIT professor, “is never sound more certain than you are.”

Would that such caution were commonplace in our current conversations about education reform!

Of course, the message is not that economics is a boundless free-for-all discipline that uses numbers to hide its own guesswork — charges that are sometimes made to rebut the growing push in education circles to embrace a greater use of student information to guide adult decision-making — but one message seems clear: beware the worship of “data” in your search for certainty, as long as human beings are part of the equation. “The entire question of how emotion will change people’s behavior is pretty much outside the standard model of economics,” said Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke. “Pride is not in the model. Fear is not in the model. Revenge is not in the model. Even simple things like disenchantment of people who are fired from their jobs — the model doesn’t account for how devastating that experience can be.”

Reform leaders, are you listening?

Live Chat Today at 10:00am EST — Michelle Rhee and the Future of School Reform in DC

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Live Chat Today at 10:00am EST — Michelle Rhee and the Future of School Reform in DC

For anyone interested, I’m about to do a live chat about Michelle Rhee and the future of DCPS. If you have a question or an idea, click here. The conversation will run from 10:oo-10:30am EST.

The Fake Revolution

Posted on | by Sam

If you spent any time in front of the TV last week, you may believe a revolution is underway in America’s classrooms. NBC dedicated a week of its programming to seed in-depth conversations about how to improve our schools. A new documentary about public education opened across the country to sold-out audiences. And a young billionaire – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – pledged $100 million of his own money (on Oprah no less!) to help the city of Newark transform its public schools.

I wish I could participate fully in the optimism, yet I keep thinking of the old adage that says there are three types of reform efforts:  traditional, transitional, or transformational. And despite the high-powered pomp and circumstance of last week, two moments in particular convinced me that our current path is likely, at best, to yield cosmetic changes to a system in dire need of an extreme makeover.

Continue reading . . .

A New Must-See Film About Public Education (no, not THAT film)

Posted on | by Sam

Tomorrow night, I’ll be attending a DC screening of the new film, World Peace . . . & Other 4th Grade Achievements.

This is not a movie that will touch you emotionally — and leave you at a loss for how to really improve the system. It will touch you emotionally — and leave you with a clearer sense of what highly effective teaching looks like, and requires.

Click here for a full list of screenings (the DC event is set for Tuesday, October 5th, at 7pm). Check out the trailer below. And please help spread the word!

Questions for the Next Schools Chancellor

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Questions for the Next Schools Chancellor

Today, presumptive-next-mayor Vincent Gray will meet with presumptive-ex- chancellor Michelle Rhee to discuss the future of DC public schools.

In a way, this is a lose-lose meeting for both. As Rhee has made clear in her typically tin-eared style, she is skeptical Gray shares her commitment to a particular set of reforms. Meanwhile, Gray’s ultimate decision about Rhee is guaranteed to disappoint a significant percentage of his electorate – either those who voted for him to register their disapproval of Fenty’s and Rhee’s style of leadership, or those who voted against him to see her reign continue.

This puts Mr. Gray in a bit of a pickle, but he might as well use the opportunity to think about the essential questions he would want to ask any potential candidate to be the next Schools Chancellor. Here are five he might want to consider:

  1. Thank you for meeting with me this afternoon. Clearly, this most recent election was in part a referendum on leadership in general, and on the different approaches people take to decision-making, community engagement, and working with the forces of change. With that in mind, tell me about your personal philosophy of leadership, about what you believe are the central characteristics a leader must possess, and about how you intend to leverage those characteristics in your work with the many stakeholders of our public school system?
  2. IMPACT, the new teacher evaluation system in DC has received national attention – and both praise and scrutiny – for its increased emphasis on a diverse set of data points to determine teacher effectiveness, a more frequent use of third-party observations, and a commitment to link student test scores to individual teacher evaluations. Tell me, when you imagine your ideal system for evaluating teacher effectiveness, which aspects of IMPACT would you stop using, which would you keep using, and which new features would you want to start using, and why?
  3. In any system, a leader has to identify in which areas of the system s/he wants to seek traditional changes, transitional changes, and transformational changes. Based on what we know about systems change, it’s often wise to pursue all three types of change at the same time, and in different parts of the system, so that the pace of change is neither too slow nor too fast, and so people will experience both the up-close significance of short-term wins and the galvanizing power of a long-term vision. Knowing that, in which aspects of the system would you pursue the most traditional changes, and why? Where do you think the opportunities exist for a transitional set of reforms in DCPS, and why? And how do you feel those changes will help prepare our city for a more transformational set of changes that will help our current 19th and 20th century modes of schooling start preparing children for the unique set of challenges and opportunities posed by the 21st century world they will enter when they graduate?
  4. The past four years have seen DCPS focus relentlessly on improving student results on 3rd and 8th grade standardized exams in reading and math. Banners have been hung in front of schools trumpeting these scores, and for the average parent or community member, schools are still deemed successful or unsuccessful based on these scores alone. When it comes to evaluating the extent to which children are learning, what is your ideal balanced scorecard of indicators, and how would you revise the city’s assessment and accountability system to ensure that future performance data reveal not just who isn’t learning and what isn’t being learned, but also why students are struggling and how DCPS teachers can address their needs?
  5. My final question to you has less to do with any specific changes you hope to make, and more to do with how well you understand the equally important role of communicating those changes to the residents of this city. Let’s imagine it’s four years from now, and we’re looking back to see which central words, ideas and messages the average citizen associates with your tenure as Schools Chancellor. What do you want them to say, why do you want them to say it, and how will you go about executing an outreach strategy that helps ensure the residents of our city feel an alignment between the actions and the aspirations of your administration?

Why Adrian Fenty Lost The City – and How Vincent Gray Can Win It Back

Posted on | by Sam

Now that the dust is beginning to settle from the DC mayoral race, it’s worth examining what outgoing mayor Adrian Fenty failed to understand about leadership and systems change, and what Vincent Gray will need to understand – and do – if he wants a different result.

This is an issue I explore in my most recent book, in which I argue that any organizational leader, whether s/he is an elementary school principal, a Fortune 500 executive, or the mayor of an urban city, needs to develop three foundational skills: self-awareness, systems thinking, and strategically-deployed collaborative decision-making. I also explain, in greater detail than I can here, how each skill is necessary and insufficient by itself, and how, in an organizational context, each functions in a nonlinear fashion. It is only through the combination of these abilities that leaders become more effective, and there is no strict and surefire order one should follow in order to cultivate these skills in himself and in others. As with everything else, human beings refuse to behave so predictably.

There is, however, a general continuum of which we should be aware. At the personal level, we begin by reflecting on who we are, what we value and where we are most likely to thrive and struggle as leaders. At the relational level, we start to become more aware of how our behaviors contribute to the culture around us; gradually we develop the capacity, with the help of others, to “see the whole (chess) board.” And at the organizational (or city-wide) level, we resist the urge to sell “our” ideas, opting instead to consistently invite others to co-construct the ideas – and the responsibilities – we will share.

When these three skills start to take root in individuals and the organizational culture of which they’re a part, a palpable shift takes place. Transformational change, and the collective will and clarity needed to achieve it, becomes possible. This doesn’t mean transformational change will necessarily occur, only that the proper conditions will have been created. At this point, we need a fourth leadership skill: ensuring that people have the understanding, motivation and skills they need to continually work with the forces of change.

Working with the natural forces of change is very different from “managing change,” just as co-creating a common vision is distinct from getting people to “buy in.” In one approach, organizational systems and the individuals who inhabit them are managed like machines, and people are given pre-packaged “solutions” that supersede community input; in the other, people and organizations are seen as complex, living systems, and the inherent creativity and commitment of the people being asked to change is what drives all decisions.

The fact that so many initiatives struggle to change core behaviors or processes is particularly troubling when one considers that, in essence, learning itself is change. But the greater truth is less that people resist change (though they do), and more that they resist being changed.

Knowing what will be easy and what will be difficult when it comes to systems renewal is essential for working with the natural forces of systemic change. And although there is no single way to be successful, there are different stages of the change process that can guide Mr. Gray in his work with us.

The Three Stages of Change – Mind, Heart & Voice

In everything the new mayor does, he should be mindful of how his constituents will experience the changes in three areas – their minds, their hearts and their voices.

Here’s what I mean by that: Before we are willing to change anything about our work or our behavior, we must first understand why the change is necessary and what it will require of us (mind). To actively participate in a major change initiative, we must feel intrinsically motivated in some way to contribute (heart). And to follow through on our individual and shared visions of our future community, we must have the skills and capabilities to not only demonstrate new behaviors, but also ensure greater alignment between our internal passions and our external actions (voice).

Often, what happens in massive change initiatives is we pay attention to some, but not all, of these stages. Teachers are asked to adopt a new teaching style before they fully understand why they should do so. Schools in search of more parent participation fail to explicitly consider what it will take to motivate greater numbers of adults to get involved. And students are invited to play a more active role in school governance before they’ve been equipped with the skills they need to do so effectively and responsibly.

Implicit in all of these scenarios is the recognition that implementing systems-wide change requires an approach that encompasses individual, group, and organizational learning needs. Some of these needs will be simple, visible and straightforward, such as providing basic information; others will be intangible, invisible and elusive, such as addressing basic human emotions.

To me, the most accurate (and damning) criticism of Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee was that they failed to understand, or even value, the importance of addressing the human elements of change. Some might say that such a statement is too soft-hearted, old-school and quixotically progressive to have any currency in the modern world. Yet this is what I learned in business school, not education school. For example, in Big Change at Best Buy, their book chronicling a major restructuring initiative at the consumer electronic retailer, authors Elizabeth Gibson and Andy Billings underscore the universality of these distinctly human elements of change. “Getting merchandise out on the shelves at the right time, staffing the service counter with the right number of people and within the labor budgets – these are the ‘hard’ or concrete issues,” they write, “and they are the easiest to assess and change.

“By contrast, the ‘soft’ issues are more difficult  . . . and they are the heart of transformational change. The tangible features may represent the face of change, but the human factors – dealing with uncertainty, motivating and energizing people, and creating behavioral change – are critical to success. When soft issues are not addressed, the organization and its people appear resistant to change. As with any large system, organizations have their own inertia. Resistance, though an inevitable feature of change, becomes the convenient term for failure to address the soft side of change.”

Understanding the forces of change in this way places a unique set of challenges on a mayor, or a schools chancellor, or an organizational leader, because it means they must balance the community’s attention to both hard (visible) and soft (invisible) issues.

Other insights from the private sector underscore this point, and help clarify the optimal role for leaders to play in systemic improvement work. Harvard Business School professors Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat explain: “The most effective managers [in a multiyear study] recognized their limited power to mandate corporate renewal from the top. Instead, they defined their roles as creating a climate for change, then spreading the lessons of both successes and failures.” Management consultant Jim Collins puts it another way: “True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.”

Because systems change is such a nonlinear experience, and because it requires leaders both to engender a sense of order (as opposed to control) and give people the freedom to co-author the process, it’s easy to imagine Mr. Gray feeling overwhelmed about what to do. I believe the three-stage framework of mind, heart and voice can help him for two reasons: first, it will provide a guide for him and his staff that helps explain human, group and organizational behavior in any major change initiative; and second, it can be used as a framework for outlining a specific set of knowledge, skills and dispositions that our schools and community agencies should strive to cultivate throughout their student, faculty and parent communities.

Election Day

Posted on | by Sam

It’s Election Day here in DC, and in my neighborhood of Columbia Heights, a diverse mix of citizens – old and young, wealthy and struggling, black and white and brown – have been casting their votes all morning in the basement of an old Baptist church. Inside, cheerful volunteers explain the ins and outs of the paper and electronic ballots. Outside, supporters of the prospective candidates line nearby streets to hand out leaflets and answer questions. As they do, two major construction projects – one a new restaurant in an abandoned storefront, the other a new apartment complex in an abandoned building across the street – fill the air with the sounds of power saws, hammers, and the voices of workmen.

Election Days are supposed to be about possibility, hopefulness, and the promise that comes from a system of accountability, transparency, and the will of the people. And yet in my neighborhood, amid the din of new development and community renewal, the primary feeling, paradoxically, is of disappointment and discontent. In DC this year, the election is less a contest between two candidates, and more a referendum on the leadership of mayor Adrian Fenty. And if the polls are at all accurate, it is also the beginning of the end for him and his high-profile schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee.

As I’ve already written, Fenty’s demise has been brought on by a self-inflicted march of strong-armed, tin-eared words and decisions. That same approach to leadership has characterized his choice for schools chancellor, Rhee, even as her tough-minded style has been celebrated nationally. But what the media reports gloss over – and what this election is likely to demonstrate – is a simple fact: the only way real change occurs is if you invest equally in technical expertise (so people will have the knowledge and skills they need to bring about a new way of seeing), and emotional commitment (so people will have the motivation and passion required to see a difficult set of challenges through). The art of democratic leadership comes from loosening one’s grip, at least partially, on what the exact “end result” needs to look like. This doesn’t mean ceding all ground or any core ideas. But it does mean painting a picture for the electorate that is intentionally incomplete, thinking strategically about which broad brush strokes must anchor the work, and leaving ample room for others to fill in the remaining blank space on the canvas. Only then will whatever emerges truly reflect the collective wisdom of a community.

In elections like this, however, too many observers still frame the issues as a false choice between choosing the path of reform or maintaining the status quo.  As always, it’s more complicated than that. In the DC schools, there are undoubtedly some serious issues with the teachers union. There are undoubtedly some horrible teachers in our schools who deserve to be fired. There is undoubtedly a shocking injustice at our continued inability to guarantee each child the same basic opportunity to a high-quality public education.  But history tells us – not to mention common sense – that you can’t address those issues by recklessly demonizing a majority of the people you will need to bring about a paradigm shift in the school system. This style of leadership is media-friendly because it provides a clearly defined cast of heroes and villains. And, as we’re about to see in DC, it will also get you voted out of office by unnecessarily polarizing the electorate.

The language of hope will not always unite. But the language of division will always divide.

I don’t know what type of mayor Vincent Gray will be. If history is any indication, he is as likely to disappoint – and become a victim of his own hubris – as the countless candidates who have gone before him. Still, I cast my vote for Gray this morning because of the possibility that he will take heed of his predecessor’s implosion.

A good first step would be to heed the insights of Edith Warner, the woman who spent her life living along the Rio Grande, and writing about the delicate balance between humans and the natural world. As Warner clearly understood, there is a subtle ecology we all must maintain, and our public leaders are the primary stewards of that human ecosystem. Words matter, in other words, since it is the words of our officials that shape the possibility of our collective action – or alienation.

“What we do anywhere matters,” Warner wrote long ago, “but especially here. Mesas and mountains, rivers and trees, winds and rains are as sensitive to the actions and thoughts of humans as we are to their forces. They take into themselves what we give off, and give it out again.”

The (DC) Odyssey

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The (DC) Odyssey

(NOTE: This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

A decade ago this month, I taught The Odyssey to a 9th grade classroom for the last time.  Today, I’m reminded of Homer’s central lessons – now nearly 3,000 years old – as I watch Adrian Fenty’s tenure as DC mayor speed towards a potentially spectacular, and tragic, end.

I mean ‘tragic’ the ways the Greeks did – as a form of art based on human suffering in which some people find pleasure, but all people find wisdom and insight. And although the election is still a week away, no doubt political scientists are already scrambling to understand why a young leader who, just four years ago, began a presumptively-lengthy reign of the nation’s capitol by winning every single precinct, may now soon be out of work.

“He would have evaded his doom if in his blind folly he had not talked so arrogantly.”

As befits a Greek tragedy, most of the mayor’s wounds are self-inflicted – chief among them his decision, in a multiracial city, to replace black leaders with non-black replacements in four of the city’s highest-profile jobs within the first six months of taking office. Of those replacements, only one is known both locally and nationally – DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. And of those replacements, only one has chosen to hitch her fate so directly to the mayor’s, and to next week’s primary election.

“Only a fool would challenge the friend who is entertaining him in a strange country.”

From the start, Fenty and Rhee have behaved as strangers in a strange land. In Fenty’s case, it was by turning a tin ear to many of the core supporters who had been most essential to his victory in 2006. With Rhee, it was by repeatedly making public comments that demonized the group most essential to her efforts – the city’s teachers.

“We came to grief through our own senseless stupidity.”

The lesson here – both today and in Homer’s day – is not that conciliation and collaboration are all that is needed to change a calcified system filled with entrenched interests, habits and resistance. Real change is complex and evasive, and part of the tragedy in DC stems from Fenty’s and Rhee’s potential to succeed where so many others have failed. There is still hope that they will, and that a dramatic victory coupled with deep reflection on past missteps will awaken in them a greater awareness of the long-term promise of collective capacity, as opposed to the short-term power of individual glory. But time is running out.

It may also be, as Andy Rotherham wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post, that the very system thought to be so essential to their success – mayoral control – helped assure their undoing. “It decreases the political demands on the leader of the schools,” Rotherham writes, “but it does not decrease the political challenges of running a school system . . . As we’re seeing now, with or without mayoral control, urban education reform is as much about politics as it is about technical expertise or results.”

“I have learnt to use my brains by now and to know right from wrong: my childhood is a thing of the past.”

The Odyssey survives in our collective memory because Odysseus’s long and difficult journey home mirrors the universal journey of life itself. Along each of our respective paths, there will be temptation, suffering, missteps and misfortune. Our only hope is to reflect on what happens and learn as we go.

Win or lose, the mayor and the schools chancellor have given us all an opportunity to learn from the journey that has led to this point. They have brought about massive changes to a system desperately in need of a new way of operating. And they have done so in a way that has likely, in typical Greek fashion, sealed their own fate. There is a third way, but to take it we would be wise to remember the advice the aging warrior Menelaus gives to the young and impressionable Telemachus: “There should be moderation in all things.”

The Science of School Renewal

Posted on | by Sam

(NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

There’s a revolution underway in the scientific community, and it’s changing the way we understand both the structure and the inner workings of the universe. These insights have far-reaching implications for all of us – and none of them are being heeded by the leading voices of our current efforts of transform America’s antediluvian public education system.

This is a serious problem.  Here are three examples of what I mean:

1. The Relativity of Learning – Almost everyone is familiar with Albert Einstein’s game-changing theory of relativity – an insight that, overnight, overturned an idea that had governed human thought for more than 200 years. Fewer among us can explain the theory in any depth, but we know this much: Einstein demonstrated that time itself is not, as had been assumed by Isaac Newton and others, a fixed construct that is experienced uniformly, but rather a malleable construct that is experienced relative to something and/or someone else. This seismic development in human thought moved us away from the Newtonian notion of absolutes, and toward a deeper understanding of just how fully we experience the world in particular ways.

The lesson to be learned from this seems clear enough: we should be wary of absolutist thinking in our own lives (and, certainly, in our organizations). Yet contrast this insight with the K-12 education landscape, which is still working in absolutes, and still basing its biggest decisions on a single, standardized measure of success: basic-skills reading and math scores. This doesn’t mean our interest in these subjects is unimportant – literacy and numeracy matter greatly – but it does mean we’ve failed to learn something essential about the nature of things. Otherwise, we’d be asking a different question when it comes to school accountability: If learning, like time, is relative, how can we develop less standardized (and more customized) assessments that will help us know if we’re being successful at helping children learn to use their minds well?

2. The Quantum Mechanics of Motivation – As you may know, although our general rules for understanding the workings of the universe on a macro scale – a.k.a. classical physics – work quite predictably and neatly, those same rules mean absolutely nothing at the messier micro level – a.k.a. quantum mechanics. What quantum mechanics reveal is that relationships are the key determiner of everything. Subatomic particles cannot exist without the presence of another, and the more we try to observe and codify their nonlinear behavior into a series of linear “if/then” statements, the less relevant our insights become. It’s just too complicated – even for quantum scientists.

Similarly, we humans are nonlinear beings, and the relationships we form (or don’t form) are the key determinants of everything in our personal and professional lives. Yet contrast this insight with the K-12 education landscape, in which both elected officials and philanthropic leaders are pursuing if/then incentive programs based on the belief that pay for performance will be the missing tonic our educators need. It’s the difference between a Newtonian view of the world – which views things in straightforward terms of cause and effect – and a Quantum Mechanics view of the world – which recognizes the inherent unpredictability of the entities it is observing.

The good news is we don’t need to be so abstract. Check out these insights from three different studies of human behavior and the human responses to programs, like performance pay, that are based on extrinsic rewards:

  • “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose interest for the activity.” (Deci 1971)
  • “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.” (Amabile 1996)
  • “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation towards the activity.” (Reeve 2004)

Why aren’t we paying attention to this? Or, more to the point, why aren’t we asking a different question when it comes to issues of motivation in the workplace: How can we move from a culture of extrinsic compliance to a culture of intrinsic commitment?

3. The Ecology of Organizational Culture – Finally, there’s the changing way scientists describe the principles of ecology, a word that literally means “the study of the house.” What’s becoming apparent is that order and balance in our house (whether it’s Earth or a country or an elementary school) are not achieved by complex, overly prescribed controls, but by a few clearly delineated simple structures, and with a healthy dose of freedom for individual entities to pursue what they feel is significant. As physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra puts it: “In recent years, biologists and ecologists have begun to shift their metaphors from hierarchies to networks, and have come to realize that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, cooperate, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Apply these insights once again to the K-12 education landscape and you see what to do immediately: move away from the Newtonian change model of “critical mass,” and toward a more modern model of “critical connections.” Educational scholar John Goodlad urged as much following his massive comprehensive study of schooling in America in the 1970s and 1980s: “Schools will improve slowly, if at all,” he wrote, “if reforms are thrust upon them. Rather, the approach having most promise is one that will seek to cultivate the capacity of schools to deal with their own problems, to become largely self-renewing.”

These insights have profound implications for how we structure the science of school renewal – as opposed to the business of school reform – in the years and decades ahead. Instead of a push toward greater standardization and absolute constructs, we should sharpen our assessment tools to become more finely attuned to the relativistic learning needs of children. We should create organizational conditions that nurture intrinsic motivation in adults and children.  And we should be more mindful of the networks and people we will need in order to do the difficult work of systems change, and begin asking ourselves the only question that really matters: Of all the things we can do together, what must we do?