Читать книгу Time for Change - Anthony Muhammad - Страница 8
ОглавлениеFinding Balance for Systems Change
If there is one thing people can likely all agree on, it is that change is hard. Whether individually battling a personal vice, like smoking, or striving to change other long-held habits, people find it difficult to will themselves to abandon an unproductive behavior for a more productive behavior, even if they have overwhelming evidence for change. Schools face an even more daunting, complex challenge than individual change—systems change, a challenge that many school and system leaders have failed to meet.
Daniel H. Pink (2011) writes, “Too many organizations—not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well—still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science” (p. 9). The challenge of change is tough enough with the right skills and research-based strategies, but when a system operates from its own conjecture, folklore, and gut instincts, it makes the task nearly impossible. Pink (2011) points out that gut instincts lead to one of two very ineffective assumptions.
1. People are motivated through force—the stick approach.
2. People are motivated through incentives—the carrot approach.
He notes that both assumptions are incorrect because people have much more complexity and nuance than their fears or material desires.
Educational leadership practices and educational policies reflect this lack of insight into the complexity of human nature. Richard DuFour (2015) eloquently dismantles these incorrect assumptions and ineffective policies and practices in his book In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better. DuFour (2015) documents seven assumptions, which have roots in neither fact nor science, that continue to guide change efforts in U.S. public schools. These assumptions have not worked or even come close to changing schools for the better.
1. Charter schools will improve other public schools.
2. Providing vouchers to send students to other public or private schools will improve public schools.
3. More testing means more accountability.
4. Intensive supervision and evaluation will lead to the dismissal of ineffective teachers.
5. Value-based testing provides a valid way to reward effective teachers and dismiss ineffective teachers.
6. Merit pay will improve teaching and therefore improve schools.
7. Closing low-performing schools will improve remaining schools.
Schools cannot continue to support such assumptions and go down the same path of sticks and carrots (punishments and rewards). These old and tired strategies just don’t work! We need to empower a generation of leaders who truly understand the science of human motivation to bring out the best in the professionals who serve our students. Unfortunately, as the history of education in the United States shows, changing education is easier said than done.
In this chapter, we examine change in education and change in school culture, how balanced leadership is needed for change, and the three investments and one condition leaders must make to develop intrinsic motivation for change in those they lead.
Change in Education
Schools are not much different than they were in the late 19th century. Many staples that characterized education in the 19th century have gone unchallenged in the 20th and 21st centuries. These conditions include the following (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).
▶ The teacher is the content expert and directs students’ learning.
▶ Students assimilate to the teacher’s educational and behavioral expectations and receive positive feedback for behavioral assimilation and successful regurgitation of facts.
▶ Instructional autonomy is considered a teacher’s professional right, and that right typically goes unchallenged, regardless of evidence of teacher effectiveness.
Not only do many school conditions remain the same for students, but the personal and professional experiences that teachers encounter add yet another layer of challenge.
In his groundbreaking book Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, Dan C. Lortie (1975) uncovers some obvious barriers to change and helps us understand why change in education is so difficult. In fact, he declares that schools present more challenges than any other institution. Schools go largely unchanged, according to Lortie (1975), because of two major factors.
1. The traditional system has socialized educators into its standard practices and expectations since they themselves were in kindergarten, and their teacher preparation programs reinforced those same values. Lortie (1975) refers to this as the apprenticeship of observation. People who have never had exposure to an alternative find it difficult to envision change.
2. The vast majority of educators performed at a relatively high level as students, so they have not had enough adverse experiences to motivate them to advocate for systems change. In fact, Lortie (1975) argues, they would more likely protect the system than deconstruct it.
Colin Lacey, a contemporary of Lortie, validated Lortie’s conclusions in 1977 with the first printing of his book The Socialization of Teachers. In a 2012 edition of the same book, Lacey concludes that the exposure to school and educational norms at a young age socializes teachers to acquire the same dispositions and paradigms today that Lortie observed in 1975.
The challenges to achieving substantive school change are real and intimidating. Not only must educators face a changing job market that requires students to acquire more skills, but leaders have to combat a system that has not changed much since the late 19th century. Also, leaders have to confront the hardened expectations of educators and parents who were socialized in the system that leaders seek to change. Schools have to find a better way to prepare new and current leaders for these challenges, or they will continue to recycle the same ineffective methods of the past. We propose that leaders should start by changing school culture.
Change in School Culture
We have established that schools are not wired for change. This is not a recent development; it is built right into the DNA of the educational system. To make an impact on this profession, leaders need to understand culture and know how to change it. Terrence E. Deal and Kent D. Peterson (1999) are widely credited for shaping the study of school culture. These authors describe school culture as a school’s collective norms, values, beliefs, rituals, symbols, celebrations, and stories that make up its persona. They also provide a prototype of the optimal school culture, which they call a healthy school culture.
A healthy school culture produces a professional environment in which educators unwaveringly believe that all students have the ability to achieve academic and social success, and they overtly and covertly communicate that expectation to others. Educators in these environments are willing to create policies, practices, and procedures that align with their beliefs and are rooted in their confidence in universal student achievement. To paraphrase, educators in a healthy school culture believe that all students can excel, and they willingly challenge and change their own practices to meet that end. This is the environment necessary to create the required change that can prepare students for the 21st century’s skill-based job market. We argue that an educational leader’s inability to create a healthy school culture is the primary reason school performance goes unchanged or declines and the achievement gap remains wide.
John Hattie (2012) has measured the impact of many important factors that predict and influence student learning. Those factors include environmental, economic, professional, and cultural factors. In his book Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, Hattie (2012) identifies the top-three factors, which all relate to culture and belief in or prediction of student achievement.
1. Teacher estimates of achievement
2. Collective teacher efficacy
3. Student estimates of achievement or self-reported grades
Hattie’s (2012) findings show that students will learn more and have more success in an environment in which all educators believe that the students can learn at high levels. Those educators work together to convince students that they can achieve the lofty academic goals that their teachers set for them. A leader who understands how to cultivate this type of culture will place a school clearly on the path to improvement and sustainable growth. The skills necessary to create a healthy culture greatly differ from those on the ineffective and destructive path to change, which the field of education has experienced in the past.
A healthy culture operates from two important assumptions. The first expects that everyone within the organization believes that students can and will learn at high levels. The second assumption is that the educators who work within a healthy culture are willing to change or adjust their behavior based on objective evidence about student growth and development. Coupling lofty expectations for student success with a willingness to change practice based on those expectations creates a very effective and balanced school culture.
Balanced Leadership
Past approaches to systemic change have lacked balance. For example, the federal educational policy No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002) demanded that schools achieve a standard of annual academic performance on state assessments in both mathematics and reading (adequate yearly progress, or AYP) or face state and federal government sanctions. This sent a simple message: improve or face punishment (a stick approach). This approach certainly got people’s attention, but it did not stimulate the level of moral and personal commitment necessary for deep change. This totally coercive method led to states lowering their academic testing standards so they could prevent schools from receiving the label of failing (Peterson & Hess, 2008). And some states created loopholes in their accountability systems to omit counting students with certain risk factors so that schools could falsely boost their test scores (Dizon, Feller, & Bass, 2006). Ultimately, this punitive approach led to nearly net-zero student achievement growth between 2002 and 2013 (Ravitch, 2013).
President Barack Obama’s administration tried a different approach to improving schools in 2009. Though it did not eliminate NCLB as a federal policy, it allowed states leeway on some provisions and offered them incentives through federal programs like Race to the Top to reward schools into improving (U.S. Department of Education, 2013). Many states offered teachers merit pay for better student test scores and created outcome-based teacher evaluation systems to reward effective teachers financially (a carrot approach). This type of approach might create short-term commitment or interest until the educator no longer considers the incentive a priority.
The preliminary evidence from the shift from stick to carrot reveals that the latter approach has not effected tangible student learning outcomes much more than the former approach, especially as it pertains to closing the achievement gap for students at risk (Lee, 2014). Decision makers and policymakers have not learned that human beings are much more complex and nuanced than these policies, aimed at stimulating motivation to improve performance, suppose.
A lack of balance in leadership approach is the biggest factor in leadership ineffectiveness (Bass, 1981). We propose that transformational leaders must strike a balance between the important elements of focusing on the task and focusing on relationships and between providing support and requiring accountability.
Task and Relationship Balance
Leadership researcher and pioneer Bernard M. Bass (1981) felt that the most critical mistake most leaders make is placing too much emphasis either on the task at hand or on relationships with others. Bass (1981) describes leaders as tending to be either task focused (emphasizing rules and procedures for getting the task done) or follower focused (emphasizing concern for people).
Task-Focused Leadership
A task-focused leader initiates structure, provides vital information, determines what people should do, issues the rules, promises rewards for compliance, and threatens punishment for disobedience. The task-focused leader uses his or her power to obtain compliance. Task-focused leadership produces some benefits.
▶ Clarity of focus
▶ Outcomes orientation
▶ Predictability
▶ Clear expectations
▶ Strong protocol and procedures
Task-focused leadership will also generate some disadvantages.
▶ Fear of failure or lack of job security
▶ Alienation
▶ Lack of professional creativity
▶ Lack of commitment
▶ Passive-aggressive behavior and informal protest
Follower-Focused Leadership
A follower-focused leader solicits advice, opinions, and information from those he or she leads and checks decisions or shares decision making with them. The follower-focused leader uses his or her power to set the constraints within which he or she encourages followers to help decide the organization’s course or direction. Follower-focused leadership produces some benefits.
▶ A sense of appreciation and respect
▶ Multiple perspectives
▶ Fostered collaboration
▶ Shared sense of ownership
▶ Reflective practice
Follower-focused leadership will also generate some disadvantages.
▶ Slow progress
▶ Philosophical conflicts
▶ Constant change
▶ Disorganized systems
▶ Lack of focus
Bass (1981) concludes that leaders must balance emphasis on the task and emphasis on the human relationships. A one-sided approach would meet some needs, while simultaneously creating problems because of unmet needs. The goal of leadership is to build the organization’s human capital—to transform the relationship between leader and followers so that unity of purpose and mutually shared goals energize and motivate participants. Transformational leadership is based on the conviction that the people in the organization constitute resources rich in ideas, knowledge, creativity, and energy, and leaders can fully tap into their power only by creating organizational environments that are motivating, inclusive, organized, and focused on outcomes.
We argue that developing the human being (relationship) provides the context for the important job of demanding performance (task). In fact, we believe that leaders cannot ethically demand performance without first preparing people for the task that they expect them to perform. To attain the level of balance that Bass (1981) advocates, leaders must strike a profound balance between support and accountability.
Support and Accountability Balance
To simplify the concept of support and accountability balance, we describe support as an investment and accountability as a return on investment. In the world of finance, an investor would understand that it is very illogical to expect a return on investment if he or she made no initial investment. He or she would see gathering the capital to invest in a business, stock, or venture as a very simple and logical prerequisite to entering the world of financial investment. We will prove that it should not shock leaders that they do not reap a dividend when they make no real investment in their employees and simply demand performance.
The first job of a transformational leader is to examine how much investment he or she needs to make in order to receive a substantial return. We believe that school employees require three essential human investments or supports in order to improve practices and outcomes: (1) communication, (2) trust, and (3) capacity building. These supports align with the skills a transformational leader must possess that we outline in chapters 2–4 of this book.
Conversely, we believe that a leader who simply analyzes needs and makes investments without any expectation of improvement has only wasted time and resources and will not witness substantive improvement. An investor who works hard to gather and invest capital but does not expect a high rate of return on investment has wasted substantial time and energy. School leaders who create positive relationships, solicit input, communicate priorities, and provide training for improvement but do not articulate higher performance expectations and do not monitor improvement have wasted substantial time and energy. The second job of a transformational leader, then, is to demand accountability. This aligns with the fourth skill we outline in chapter 5 (page 83)—that leaders must get results.
In order to get results, transformational leaders must also understand the dynamics of motivation and resistance to change. Leaders may find this hard to accept, but most resistance to change is a rational response to ineffective leadership.
Motivation and Resistance to Change
Leaders often respond to resistance as they would to a negative behavior—they address the behavior without assessing the cause. Most resistance to change manifests a need that a leader has not met, or a critical investment that a leader has neglected. Before a leader can criticize a follower for not embracing a vision or a directive, he or she has to first assess whether he or she has made all the necessary investments to warrant a return on investment. Leaders have to make three non-negotiable investments to create the right conditions for intrinsic motivation for change: (1) cognitive investment, (2) emotional investment, and (3) functional investment. When those three investments fail to stimulate change, a leader can conclude that the resistant behavior has resulted from more personal reasons or an exercise in power. At that point, a leader can fairly conclude that the individual, who has all the tools and opportunities for change, has drawn a line in the sand and challenged the leader’s authority. The only conclusion to such a standoff is coercion; the leader has a right to collect the return on his or her investment (the fourth and final condition for intrinsic motivation for change). In the following sections, we describe the three non-negotiable investments and the fourth condition.
Cognitive Investment
When parents reach their wits’ end when scolding a teenager who made a poor choice because of peer pressure, they might ask, “If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” This common question calls for pragmatism. Parents want their children to use good judgment, gather facts, and come to a rational conclusion. To understand why something is important and reach a logical and beneficial conclusion requires examining evidence, weighing options, and engaging in a dialogue, both internally and externally. We believe that leaders often deny educators these opportunities to logically understand the why of change, and this frustrates them, leading to pessimism and withdrawal from change.
Emotional Investment
Not all experience is good experience. As we will note in chapter 2 (page 23), school leadership has an astronomical turnover rate. When a leader surveys the environment and assesses its readiness for change, he or she has to consider the experiences that educators had with leaders who came before. Ignoring this reality is not wise. Past experiences leave an emotional imprint on a person. This imprint impacts anyone who seeks to enter into a relationship with that person. Would a person be wise to become engaged to a fiancé who has had five divorces in ten years, ignoring how past experiences have shaped the current reality? We believe that most people would say, “No!” Likewise, would a new superintendent be wise to ignore the fact that he or she is a district’s third superintendent in five years? Shouldn’t he or she consider the effect those previous experiences had on school district employees? Leaders must consider emotions when trying to create intrinsic commitment to change in a staff. When leaders ignore people’s emotions and experiences, that alone can stimulate a pessimistic view of change.
Functional Investment
Leaders cannot fairly require someone to complete a task that they have not properly prepared him or her to complete. In our work, we witness many instances where school or district officials introduce significant changes to professional practice and expect that one half-day workshop will sufficiently provide all the skills necessary to perform the newly introduced task. Considering that teachers receive at least four years of university-level practice to simply enter the classroom door, it is unrealistic for leaders to think learning needs stop once they become licensed. Poorly constructed professional learning experiences, inadequate resources, and little time for full implementation can be enough to give teachers a negative view of change.
Return on Investment
If a person clearly understands why change is logical and essential, has trust in leaders, and has received extensive training, adequate practice time, and essential resources to effectively execute the task, all that remains is to complete the task. This moment—when action can take place—marks the tipping point between support and accountability. Once leaders have made their investments, it is perfectly logical to expect a return on those investments. Demanding that a person change for the good of the organization takes courage; leaders must be willing to have some dislike them for the sake of a cause bigger than any individual. Here, the leader protects the organization’s heart and soul and draws a line between personal preference and organizational purpose. The willingness to coerce others when faced with illogical resistance solidifies a leader’s status as a person of principle. Allowing a few outliers to disrespect the will of the entire organization sends the message that change is a personal choice and, ultimately, that improvement is a choice. A transformational leader does not send this message, because it stifles change.
These investments tie in with the four skills of a transformational leader that we advance in the chapters that follow: (1) communicating the rationale, (2) establishing trust, (3) building capacity, and (4) getting results. Figure 1.1 illustrates this system of four skills.
Figure 1.1: The Why? Who? How? Do! model.
Conclusion
In an organization, resistance to change in practice or behavior is a symptom of individual or collective needs not being met. Those needs vary from person to person and from school to school. They include cognitive (why), emotional (who), and functional (how) needs. These needs are rational; they emerge out of negative personal and professional experiences. A perceptive transformational leader knows how to diagnose and respond to rational needs without taking the resistance personally.
While some resist change because of rational needs, others resist change out of an irrational and selfish need for power, without consideration of the impact that it will have on the organization, and ultimately on students. This behavior requires a leader to demand a return on investment and properly exercise leadership authority to ensure compliance without intellectual or emotional consent from the resisting party (do).
In the chapters that follow, we provide deep insight into developing a balanced leadership skill set that will equip leaders to meet these diverse needs.
