Category Archives: Teaching and Education Reform

School Security That Works

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Recently, a middle school teacher that I know returned from a faculty meeting about his Catholic school’s beefed up security. A police officer explained that when they respond to an incident they do so with “overwhelming force”. He assured the faculty that thanks to their proximity to downtown, they’d have “150 officers at the school within five minutes.” He also explained why visitors will have to pass through additional security checks and why they have to teach with their classroom doors closed.

Credit Columbine and Sandy Hook for the “schools as fortresses” movement. It parallels our post 9/11 airport experience. A rural Colorado school district is allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons. A USA Today reporter tells the story of Wisconsin teachers that were “being trained to urge kids to keep a can of soup in their desks to throw at a gunman who might enter their classroom.” I’m sure that won’t contribute to a further uptick in childhood anxiety disorders. Maybe we should start putting cans of soup in our carry-on baggage.

Few people are aware that despite the recent spate of tragic, high-profile shootings etched in the public’s mind, schools are safer than they’ve ever been. Some statistics:

• Since 1992, the rate of “victimization,” which includes violent crimes such as assault and rape as well as non-violent crimes such as robbery, purse snatching and pickpocketing, has plummeted, from 181.5 incidents per 1,000 students to 49.2 per 1,000 in 2011.

• Overall, the number of reported “non-fatal victimizations” has dropped by 71%, from 4.3 million in 1992 to 1.2 million in 2011.

• During the 2009-2010 school year, researchers found 1,396 homicides with victims ages 5 to 18. Of those, only 19 took place at school. During the 2010 calendar year, only three of the reported 1,456 youth suicides took place at school.

• Though rare, homicides, suicides and deaths involving intervention by police at school or on the way to or from school dropped 46%, from 57 in the 1992-1993 school year to 31 in the 2010-2011 school year. Over 19 years, researchers counted 863 deaths, or about 45 per year. (Federal data don’t yet include 2011-2012 or 2012-13, when 27 died in the Sandy Hook shooting, including gunman Adam Lanza.)

“Things are better,” a school safety experts concludes, “but they’re not fine.”

So what’s working? Researchers attribute the decline in school violence to a handful of measures:

•Heightened awareness of a school’s culture, including how safe students feel there and how well they get along with teachers and classmates.

•A renewed focus on bullying and mental health issues, with teachers trained to spot troubled kids and intervene before bullying incidents get out of hand.

•Simple security steps such as locking exterior school doors, requiring all visitors to check in at the front office and offering students easy, anonymous ways to report classmates’ threats.

After Sandy Hook, a national school safety leader said, “It’s a huge struggle trying to bring people’s focus back from emotion.” My friend’s faculty meeting is evidence of that. “The enduring lesson of Sandy Hook,” another school safety leader added, “may be the importance of having a well-conceived — and well-rehearsed — emergency response plan. Sandy Hook really reinforced that. By all accounts, the staff really responded well, and they really saved lives.”

Sandy Hook parents, like Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was among the 26 victims, are pushing to expand mental health and wellness services for troubled or isolated kids. Hockley says, “We’re much more focused on, ‘Let’s reach out to the kids who are inside the school and prevent the violence from ever happening in the first place.'”

Ten years ago, American film critic Roger Ebert offered another idea that would also help. Post Columbine, he was asked by a major news network if television and film violence were contributing factors to school violence. Ebert turned the tables on the unsuspecting reporter:

Events like this if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.

Here’s hoping Hockley and Ebert-like common sense prevails over concealed guns and soup cans.

On The Challenges of Groupwork

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I doubt anyone is terribly interested in what goes on behind the scenes at my workplace. I share this abbreviated story in the hope that you’ll apply it to your own life. The basic question is this: how does a medium or large sized group of people—a school faculty, a church council, a local government, a non-profit organization, any work team really—reinvent their work?

My colleagues and I are redesigning our university’s undergraduate teacher education program again. Instead of annual incremental tweaks to individual courses, we wait until dissatisfaction builds to a breaking point. Then, instead of identifying and building upon existing strengths, we commit to a complete overhaul. We repeat the process every five to seven years.

The problem is whole scale curriculum redesign is very difficult to pull off. I’ve lived through multiple attempts at two institutions. This time, despite different people in leadership, we’re following a nearly identical path as all our previous efforts. In our last meeting I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

We never improve the process because no one makes the time to carefully consider alternatives. That’s the point of this exercise in self-efficacy.

The basic challenge is to improve the preparation of our teacher candidates by: 1) eliminating curricular redundancies; 2) filling in curricular gaps; 3) reversing “credit creep” by reducing the total number of semester hours needed to complete the program; and 4) updating the curriculum to address changes in K-12 education, changes like the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Things always start positively with creative and invigorating whole group discussion about “essential elements” or “themes” that everyone wants included in the new and improved program. Then we add in additional content determined by professional standards and (jargon alert) a new high stakes performance based student teacher assessment (otherwise known as a student teaching test). Next, advocates for specific curricular interests—technology integration, special education, reading instruction, etc.—remind everyone of just how important all of that content is. Then we try to pinpoint what will be taught when. That’s when enthusiasm wanes and things inevitably bog down.

We struggle at this work for many reasons. Two in particular. First, we’re much, much better at adding content than we are removing it. And second, it’s nearly impossible to do the careful type of deep thinking, tentative and creative sketching, and initial draft writing that program redesign requires in large group meetings.

We would make more progress in less time if we did three things:

• First, take whatever time is necessary to reach a consensus that it’s impossible to include everything our candidates might need to succeed in their first few years of teaching. Come up with a written statement to that effect and communicate it to the students at different points throughout the program. Our inability to embrace our limits is like a misaligned brake rubbing against a bicycle rim, no matter how hard we pedal, we tire before making ample forward progress.

• Second, delegate the drafting of a new program outline to one or a few people. This means trusting they have the students’ and all of the faculty’s best interests at heart. Ask that person or those people to talk with individual faculty members about what they like most about the existing program and what they’re most intent on changing. Count their curriculum redesign work both as service to the department and as scholarship of teaching.

• Third, use large group meetings primarily to receive suggestions on how to improve the most recent program outline draft, and in the end, to reach consensus on a final draft.

What College Writing Students Get Wrong

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Recently, I did a mid-semester check of how things are going in the first year writing seminars. I asked my students to complete the following phrases: I like. . . . I’ve learned. . . . I wish. . . . Things seemed to be going well, so it was nice that most of their feedback was positive.

About one-fifth of them said something to the effect of “I wish it was clearer what you want”. My syllabus is detailed, and I think, quite clear. The writing prompts too. And I teach what my colleagues and I hope to see in student writing. But sometimes I also say, “There’s more than one way to do well on this paper.” And this annoys some of them who want me to cut to the chase and tell them the one way to be successful. You’ve heard of “paint by numbers”, some students want to “write by numbers”.

The students most disappointed with what they earned on their first two papers are the ones most prone to say,”Just tell me what you want so I can give it to you.” The irony is, by thinking that it’s far less likely they’ll succeed on future papers. Why? Because excellent student writers embrace complexity and delve into the subtleties, nuances, and ambiguity inherent in most every topic.

I wish every high school teacher in the country taught writing by plastering this equation all over their rooms and schools—subtleties+nuances+ambiguity=complexity. The more complex one’s ideas, the more imperative it is that they communicate them clearly. So the challenge for writers is two-fold—1) to embrace subtleties, nuances, and ambiguity to the point that interesting insights bubble up, and 2) to clearly communicate those complex insights in writing.

The first of those challenges requires repeated close readings of other writers who embrace complexity. Discussing ideas with others equally or slightly more adept at critical thinking helps immensely too. The second challenge requires learning how to illustrate complex insights with specific examples.

Every first year college student struggles with both of these intellectual challenges to widely varying degrees. Some get it very early in the semester, others struggle with both until the semester’s very end. Those who struggle the most think the second challenge is most important and they’re convinced they’d turn their “C’s” into “B’s” if their professors would just describe the required formulas more explicitly.

In actuality though, the first challenge is most important. Until students learn to embrace complexity and communicate complex insights clearly, there’s not an explicit writing formula in the world that will help them engage, inform, or move readers.

“Rip Your Hair Out” Pressure

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That’s a Los Angeles, California Harvard-Westlake high schooler describing her Advanced Placement heavy course load. HW is L.A.’s preeminent private high school.

A recent article in the LA Times described it as a place “. . . where some families view anything short of an Ivy League admission as failure.” Next week in my graduate sociology of education course, we’re watching a documentary titled “The American Dream at Groton”. Groton is the East Coast version of HW. Check out the tuition at Groton.

HW thrives because even very wealthy parents suffer from economic anxiety. Consequently, they’re desperate to extend their privilege to their children. They think HW = highly selective college = a high paying job = a comfortable life. But not necessarily a meaningful one. Parents don’t send their children to HW to ponder what makes life most meaningful.

But to HW’s credit, apparently students sometimes end up doing just that in classes like “Ethics: Philosophical Traditions and Everyday Morality”. After fourteen students dropped out two years ago citing depression—some at the school have “pulled back”.

Like Matt LaCour, the baseball coach. Recently a player of LaCour’s told him he wanted to try out for the school play, “Hairspray.” Lacour encouraged him to saying, “I’ve got to allow a kid to find himself in high school.”

Theater arts instructor, Ted Walch, said he would like to see more time for his students “to be bored and to daydream and to be kids.” “We are a powerful enough school,” he explained, “that if we pull back just a bit it’s not going to hurt anyone’s chances to get into Harvard, Yale, or Brown.”

The school is planning a workload study this year to determine whether demands on students have become excessive. HW limits homework to three hours per subject per week—more time than most college students spend studying in a typical week. The school’s new president, who was at Groton previously, has identified “academic pressure and stress” as a recurring theme and tension needing more attention.

Private elite schools always do a better job preparing students for selective colleges than the larger, much more economically and intellectually diverse world. But HW, and the new president in particular, deserve credit for recognizing that, in his words, “The great challenge. . . in schools where excellence is a value is to simultaneously have balance as a value.”

It’s important to have some ambition, the problem is when students become hyper-competitive and sacrifice their integrity and health in pursuit of especially ambitious goals. To razzle-dazzle college admission committees, many high schoolers think they must push themselves endlessly, and in the process they often end up cheating and ignoring mental and physical warning signs.

We need to rethink and redefine ambition as fulfilling one’s potential to effect positive change in some small corner of the world. Instead of striving to do well in school in order to graduate with honors, earn lots of money, and gain social status, do well to become the very best nurse, social worker, businessperson, teacher, writer, plumber, and citizen as possible.

Schools should define ambition more broadly and encourage alternative, healthier, more selfless forms of it. Don’t just single out the National Merit scholarship winners and those accepted at Ivy League schools. Pay equal attention to students who serve others on or off campus. And those who show improvement or demonstrate excellence in the whole gamut of extracurricular activities—including the arts and minor sports.

That’s one way to keep students from ripping their hair out.

What College Professors and Adminstrators Get Wrong

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In the age of social media and smartphones, what expectations—if any—should professors have for privacy for lectures and communications intended for students? That’s Colleen Flaherty’s question in Inside Higher Education. The larger question is what expectations should any of us have for privacy?

Flaherty tells the story of Rachel Slocum, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, who was. . . 

stunned earlier this month when what she thought was an innocuous. . . email to students about why they couldn’t access Census data to complete an important course assignment became national news.

Her email. . . blamed the “Republican/Tea Party controlled House of Representatives” for the shutdown and consequent U.S. Census Bureau website blackout. Then it appeared on Fox News, the Daily Caller, and in her local paper, after a student posted a screen shot on Twitter. It also caused uproar on campus, prompting numerous calls and emails to Chancellor Joe Gow, who sent an email to students, faculty, and staff distancing the university from Slocum’s ‘highly partisan’ comments.

Slocum said she probably wrote the email too quickly upon hearing her students couldn’t access the site, without sufficient explanation of her political reference. But the chain reaction was hard to believe, given that she never intended—or thought—that her email would be seen by anyone outside of her geography course.

Stunned, really? Michael Phelps can’t smoke a joint inside a dark fraternity house without smartphone pictures of it appearing in major newspapers. Why was it “hard to believe” your email was tweeted? It could’ve just as easily been forwarded, uploaded to Facebook, and blown up and pasted on the side of La Crosse’s busses.

Another tenured professor of creative writing at Michigan State University had his teaching duties reassigned after he embarked on “. . . what’s been described as an anti-Republican ‘rant on the first day of class in August.”

And Facebook helped Santiago Piñón, assistant professor of religion at Texas Christian University, make headlines last month, when a student he invited via email to a study session for “students of color only” posted the message on her page. Almost instantly, the invitation, which many said discriminated against other students, went viral.

Timeout while I replay in my peabrain what I said in class yesterday afternoon. Yikes! When discussing education reform I took shots at Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Tom Friedman, and 44. When those deets are made public my university’s administration will probably throw me under the bus of public outrage too. If this blog goes dark sometime soon, don’t be surprised. Know that I cherished you dear reader.

Slocum said she saw close monitoring of professor’s words by watchdog groups as potentially chilling to free speech, and as a means of waging the nation’s current political battles on a new front, to the detriment of higher education overall.

Fear is the lifeblood of watchdog groups. And spineless administrators. That’s why tenure is so important. Slocum shouldn’t retract what she wrote, instead she should explain it to any upset students. Granted, they probably won’t agree with her reasoning, but their only concern should be whether Slocum’s politics prevent her from fairly assessing their work.

Gow, Slocum’s chancellor, said that. . . he would have responded “exactly the same way” if Slocum’s email had blamed Democrats or any other group for the shutdown. Both he—a longtime communications scholar—and La Crosse value free speech and academic freedom, he said, but now more than ever the actions of faculty and staff can influence public support for higher education.

Ultimately, Gow said, the Internet has “greatly blurred” the line between what’s public and what’s private, “and we do need to remember that what we’re saying to students may be shared more broadly.”

Come on Gow, “greatly blurred,” really? Try erased. “Blurred” might make more sense if Gow had actually come to Slocum’s defense. Read Gow’s words again. He’s saying maintaining public support trumps free speech and academic freedom.

Gow said that ideally, a student who was offended by a professor’s speech would try to settle the matter internally, first through a conversation with that professor, then through more formal complaint mechanisms as needed. La Crosse also takes student evaluations seriously in personnel decisions, he said.

Could Gow be any more out-of-touch with college students? This generation doesn’t do direct interpersonal conflict. For shitssake, they break up with one another via text messaging. Then there’s Gow’s mind numbing student evaluation hammer. All these years I thought student evaluations focused on whether students learned anything of value in their courses, but I guess they’re at least partly designed to determine whether students are ever made uncomfortable by a professor’s politics. Note to Assistant Professors at Wisconsin La Crosse—wait until you get tenure to express anything that could be deemed the least bit political.

Slocum expressed similar views, saying that taking complaints to the Internet before the institution “seems a breach of trust” and removes them from their context.

Of course that would be preferable, but it’s naive to expect it. Wisconsin La Crosse can update their student honor code, and implore students not to take their complaints to the Internet, but some still will. This generation lives on-line. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

At La Crosse and other institutions . . . Gow suggested that professors make up their own rules and include them on course syllabuses—as some faculty at various institutions. . . already do. But, the chancellor said, enforcing those policies could be another complicated matter. “That’s kind of uncharted territory there, isn’t it?”

Now I’m starting to feel sorry for Gow. And this excerpt heightens my sympathy for Slocum:

This had never happened to me before so it was a new, unexpected and unpleasant experience, Slocum said in an email. And I didn’t expect it because my emails to students are the boring stuff of ‘Why didn’t you turn in that’ or ‘Here are some important points to remember,’ rather than anything that might cause fury on the Internet.

Here’s some unsolicited advice to my syllabi writing brethren whether Packer fans or otherwise: Do not expect the Internet Generation to come to your office to discuss their concern with your politics. And don’t be surprised if they take surreptitious screen shots of you* and your communication. Or tweet something you’ve said or done. Or post about something you’ve said or done to Facebook. Express partisan political views at your own risk.

* I was a recent victim of surreptitious screen shoting while Skyping with the college senior. Told her about a fun Saturday night out where her mother and I watched Flamenco dancing at a downtown Olympia pizza joint. To give her a little flavor flav of the evening, I demonstrated my pretty astounding flamenco skills. Unbeknownst to me, she took a screen shot midway through the demo. Within a few minutes some of her friends on Facebook were eating it up. The worst part of that whole infringement of my privacy? You need video to fully appreciate my mad flamenco skillz.

Flipped Classrooms

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A few weeks ago, I showed a 75 minute long documentary to my graduate students. That only left us 25 minutes to discuss it. Next year, I thought to myself, why not assign the viewing of the film before class and then use class time to explore it and a related case study in greater depth.

“Flipping” classrooms is a promising new educational phenomenon. Here is how a New York Times education blogger describes the flipped classroom:

Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

Initial experiences and findings are positive.

My favorite education reform metaphor is an ocean storm. The water surface is dramatically changed by high winds. There’s also unusually dark skies, lightening, and extremely high surf. But the farther you go below the surface, the less significant the changes. Until, on the ocean floor, the animal life, water chemistry, the entire environment is unchanged. In education reform, the teacher-student relationship is the ocean floor. Schools change bell schedules, require uniforms, buy tablets for students, and implement site based management, but the teacher-student relationship remains the same as one hundred years ago.

Flipped classrooms and schools may mix up the ocean floor.

What Amanda Ripley and Her Amazon Reviewers Get Wrong

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Ripley has written a book titled “The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way“. Thanks to my brother (shout out to Ohio, not California), I recently read an article by Ripley based upon her book. Given my frustration level while reading the article, I’m not sure I could get through her book. Her Amazon reviewers loved it though.

What does Ripley and what do her reviewers get wrong? That you can improve schooling in the U.S. by arguing that Finnish teachers are far, far superior to American ones. I assume Ripley wants to help improve American schooling. She’s right that teacher education programs in the United States are not nearly as selective nor rigorous as Finnish ones. But in the excerpt at least, she doesn’t even bother exploring the reasons why, let alone propose solutions to the problem.

Dear Ms. Ripley, there are lots of reasons why teacher education programs in the U.S. aren’t as selective and rigorous as in Education’s Holy Land ( let’s create some ed jargon baby, EHL). Maybe the most vexing one is best illustrated through a question.

Whose recent performance is most impressive, Peyton Manning’s or Dexter Filkins’? To which most people in the U.S. would ask, who does Filkins play for and why haven’t I heard of him? Filkins is an outstanding writer, who, when he’s not writing books, plays for The New Yorker. And he just published an amazing story on Qassem Suleimani. Who does Qassem Suleimani play for and why haven’t I heard of him? Two teams really. Iran and Shiites worldwide.

You haven’t heard of him because American culture is anti-intellectual. How can anyone expect teaching to be a deeply respected profession when we reserve our highest pedestals for athletes, actors, and other entertainers?

Ripley also illustrates how dangerous a little knowledge can be. She’s critical of how short teacher candidates’ apprenticeships are in the U.S. I am too. Just the other day I was cringing in my office as colleagues next door weighed the merits of eight-week long professional apprenticeships.

But the problem is even worse than Ripley lets on. Not only are they far too short, increasingly candidates spend a lot of their time co-teaching because of growing standardized test score anxiety. Given the momentum for tying teachers’ evaluations and compensation to students’ test scores, an increasing percentage of principals and teachers are reluctant to “hand over” their classrooms to teacher credential candidates. Ripley doesn’t bother peeling that onion at all. Literally and figuratively shortchanging future teachers’ professional preparation is just one of other unintended negative consequences of standardized test score mania. We’ve lost our minds.

Absent from Ripley’s article, we obviously have to improve teacher compensation to have any hope of raising the profession’s profile and making teacher preparation programs markedly more selective. Related to that, we have to improve the work conditions—meaning fewer or smaller classes; more time to develop curriculum, prepare for classes, and assess student work; and fewer authors, elected officials, and businesspeople ripping teachers for not being more Finnish.

Postscript—peel more of the onion by reading Anu Partanen’s December 2011 essay in the Atlantic, “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success“.

What School Principals Get Wrong

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Third in a series of overgeneralizations (installment one, two). So fun, I just can’t stop.

Principals get human nature wrong. Despite what you assumed as a child, teachers don’t retire to the coat closet in their classroom at the end of the day only to miraculously reappear the next morning. Teachers are human beings, meaning every one, to some degree, is insecure. In part, that’s why the best principals are impartial. Especially when it comes to public praise.

That’s why Centennial Elementary principal, Alice Drummer’s quote in this morning’s Olympian, made me cringe. Drummer, referring to Laura Currie, a Centennial teacher in her 45th year of teaching, said:

In my 38 years as an educator, I have worked with many teachers and can say without reservation that Laura Currie stands out as the best and most distinguished teacher kids could ever have.

Then, later that night at dinner, she announced to everyone at the table that her middle child had always been her favorite.

In fairness to Drummer, she communicated that in a “Teacher of the Year” letter she wrote on Currie’s behalf. Then again, Drummer willfully shared the letter with The Olympian.

Almost every teacher works hard in the hope that their students, their students’ parents, and their principal will think that they are the best teacher kids could ever have. Take that possibility away, the way Drummer’s public proclamation does, and a little bit of motivation may be lost.

There are two types of faculty cultures—one where professional success is a zero-sum game and one where everyone’s professional success is sincerely celebrated. Most are zero-sum, meaning if you’re flourishing in your classroom—the kids love you, parents extol your virtues all over town, and the principal says you’re the best and most distinguished teacher of all time forever and ever amen—I’m inclined to feel worse about mine. It doesn’t matter if it’s unflattering, it just is. Call it the “chopped liver” syndrome.

The most enlightened principals know most every teacher wants to be “the best and most distinguished” teacher possible and so they are mindful of how they parcel out praise and tend to highlight faculty team accomplishments.

More importantly, it’s high time teachers recognize “Teacher of the Year” awards as the scam that they unfortunately are. Here’s how the scam works. Instead of reinventing the profession more generally, by which I mostly mean improving compensation, throw some crumbs of recognition to a few teachers. I’m still waiting for a “Teacher of the Year” to reject their award on the premise that it’s a poor substitute for strengthening the profession.

Easy for me to write since I’ve never won a teaching award*. If I do some day, here’s how I’ll start my acceptance speech.

Thanks, but no thanks. I refuse to be a token. Until our work is a respected profession with much improved compensation, I’d rather not be singled out for the hard and excellent work most of my colleagues do day in and day out (exits the stage to either stunned silence or appreciative applause).

There’s one exception to my teacher award cynicism. Anyone with 45 years in the classroom deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award so you go Mrs. Currie.

* In actuality, I did win the World’s Greatest Educator award once in 1999 when I taught a social studies lesson in my daughter’s second grade Centennial Elementary classroom. It was a slide show discussion based upon a trip I took to China. I asked her how she thought it went. “Dad,” she said, “it was perfect.”

Still Progressing Toward the Standard

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That phrase is from my favorite sentence in Dahlia Lithwick’s recent funny-sad Slate essay (penultimate paragraph). Thanks to Dahlia for saying aloud what all of us have long suspected, educational jargon is out-of-control.

Why so? Because education is so much more complicated than in the past? That might explain a tenth of it. More consequential, educator’s confusing language reflects muddled thinking.

Here’s a recent fav example from the torrent of acronyms and tortured language I have to wade through daily. It’s from the promotional materials of a highly sought after teaching consultant.

Students advocating for educational improvement, researching classroom climate, and leading new approaches to learning and teaching stand together in the architecture of involvement, effectively demonstrating what school change looks like when the hearts, heads, and hands of students are infused throughout the process.

Come again? The “architecture of involvement”. Please stop. The more times I read that sentence, the more confused I become. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to appreciate his brilliance.

I should start a contest for the best example of educational jargon by a non-computer, and by “best” of course, I mean worst. But participants would probably cheat by using this educational jargon generator. The situation is so desperate that humor is the only viable response.

Switching gears, I added the briefest of postscripts to Friday’s triathlon post. Basically, a link to the results. If you take the time to skim the results, you’ll see that I HMAHTM (that’s a triathlon acronym which stands for Had My Ass Handed To Me). Props to Kennett. I can’t complain. I raced well and was only 2 seconds slower than two years ago. At this stage of my life, I’ll gladly give Father and/or Mother Time one second a year.

Kennett passed me early on the bike and then we leap frogged a bit. The first time he said, “You’re in the duathlon right (a separate bike/run division)?” To which I said “No.” Afterwards I thought of better responses like, “Yes” or “You don’t swim that fast.” A few miles later, when he passed me again, he asked me my name and I didn’t reply. Regretted that and so when I passed him back a mile later, I told him my name and asked his.

When racing I enjoy taking time checks on the guys ahead of me to see if I’m gaining ground or not. When they pass a landmark I glance at my computer and then glance at it again when I pass the same place. Throughout the middle of the bike his cushion yo-yoed from 11 to 31 seconds. By the 56 mile finish he had put about 2 minutes into me. I was hoping I could run him down, but he ran really well and beat me by 7-8 minutes. Based on athlinks.com, it was a career day for him. Afterwards, he didn’t bother to thank me for pushing him to a personal record and when I congratulated him on his race he barely acknowledged me. The only consolation was he could barely walk and looked like shit. In contrast, after a quick dip in the lake, and a change of clothes, I was my normal uber-handsome self.

Right now, according to edmunds.com, my 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid with 100k miles on it, is valued at $6,800. His bike cost well north of that. More triathlon jargon—Cervelo P5, Di2, Zipps. My old hand-me-down, heavyish, Dura-Ace 9 speed time trial bike is probably five minutes faster (over 56 miles) than my roadbike. I think I might gain another five on his bike. Then it would just be a matter of those pathetic/disastrous transitions. Send money so I can take revenge next year!

A jargon-related footnote. In my postscript I said I got spanked, which is of course, sports jargon. It’s a synonym for ass whupping. A few weeks ago, the GalPal said some team really “spanked the other”. To which I immediately said, “No!” “What?” she said innocently while smiling. She knew just how dangerous it was for her to start down the path of sounding like she knows what she’s talking about. I told her that you have to have an athletic background to use the work “spank” or “spanking” in a sports context. The zenith of her athletic career was when she laid the basketball in the opponent’s basket while “starring” at Peralta Junior High School in Orange, CA.

Fight the power this week, write and speak plainly.

Teaching Teamwork

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In May, 2011, Atul Gawande gave an insightful commencement address to Harvard’s Medical School graduates.

He reminded the graduates that the practice of medicine had changed markedly, and that increasingly, the best docs are members of teams.

Gawande pointed out that, “The doctors of former generations lament what medicine has become.”

I’m having my graduate-level teacher certification students read the address. On the copy I’m providing them, I’ve lined out “doctors” and “medicine” and written in “teachers” and “education”.

Here’s Gawande’s primary point:

The core structure of medicine—how health care is organized and practiced—emerged in an era when doctors could hold all the key information patients needed in their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard work, a prescription pad, a secretary, and a hospital willing to serve as one’s workshop, loaning a bed and nurses for a patient’s convalescence, maybe an operating room with a few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could set the fracture, spin the blood, plate the cultures, administer the antiserum. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to designing medicine accordingly. But you can’t hold all the information in your head any longer, and you can’t master all the skills. No one person can work up a patient’s back pain, run the immunoassay, do the physical therapy, protocol the MRI, and direct the treatment of the unexpected cancer found growing in the spine. I don’t even know what it means to “protocol” the MRI.

Today, isn’t it a workplace truism for nearly everyone that “. . . you can’t hold all the information in your head. . . and you can’t master all the skills”?

Gawande adds:

The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.

On my students’ copies, I’ve lined out “doctors” and “people” and substituted “teachers” and “students”.

Gawande acknowledges that medical education fails to teach docs to function like pit crews for patients. The same is true for teacher education.

Too often nursing, medical school, and teacher education faculty wrongly assume that novice nurses, docs, and teachers will naturally, through osmosis, form knowledgeable, skilled, interdependent work teams. Absent intentional team-building curricula, in which case studies would be an integral component, professional apprentices depend upon the modeling of their veteran colleagues, often out-of-step ones pining for old school independence and autonomy.

When in comes to intentionally teaching teamwork, what can and should professional preparation programs do to shift the balance from cowboys to pitcrews? More generally, what can employers do to teach teamwork?

They shouldn’t assume it’s something someone is either born with or not. Effective teamwork can be taught through case studies that illuminate what the best teams do and what commonly trips up most others. And by proactively providing pre-professional students positive examples of excellent teams during their fieldwork.