Thou shalt not watch training videos

In the ongoing effort by a particular cadre of über-Christians to emphasize one or two tenets of their faith and pretty much ignore the rest of it, we have the case of a worker for the Social Security Administration who has said he would rather be fired than watch a seventeen-minute video on respecting diversity (particularly with respect to LGBT individuals) in the workplace.

David Hall, of Tolono, Illinois, has worked for the SSA for fourteen years.  This year, supervisors have required all employees to watch a training video on LGBT inclusion as part of a drive to decrease workplace harassment and increase tolerance and respect.  Hall, however, has refused, and claims he's being discriminated against because he's a Christian.  "I think this is an issue they are prepared to go to the mat with," Hall said, "but I’m not going to give up my faith or compromise my beliefs just to go along and get along.  I don’t believe God wants me to do that."

A few things about this particular case stand out.  First, Hall is claiming discrimination, even though the SSA is requiring everyone to watch the video.  If Hall, as a devout Christian, had been singled out to watch the video, he might have a case to claim he was being targeted.  In this case, however, it's hard to see how he's being discriminated against, given that the definition of discrimination is "the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A more important point arises when you consider why the video is being mandated.  Remember that the video is not saying (1) being gay is moral; (2) Christian ethical codes are wrong; or (3) you should all run out and have gay sex right now.  What it's saying is that we should treat people with kindness, tolerance, and respect whether or not we are like them or agree with them.  Sorta like what you read in the following quotes:

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. -- Ephesians 4:32 

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.  And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. -- 1 John 4:20-21 

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. -- Matthew 6:14-15 

But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.  Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. -- Luke 6:35-36

And, most strikingly:

Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.  We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. -- 1 Thessalonians 5:11-13

Oh, and the whole "judge not, lest ye be judged" thing.  That, too.

In fact, have you noticed that the bible has a lot more passages about being kind to others than it does about condemning homosexuals?  Funny thing, that.

Because that's the most annoying part of this whole emphasis on LGBT individuals being sinners; it requires you to pretend that a substantial fraction of the bible doesn't exist.  Besides the fact that there is a great deal more emphasis  in the bible on treating people compassionately than there is on the sinfulness of homosexuality, there are a whole slew of other things besides being gay that are considered sins (in fact, some are worse than sins, they're "abominations") and that Christians today pretty much ignore.  Eating shellfish, working (even collecting firewood) on the Sabbath, wearing clothing made of two different kinds of thread sewn together, men trimming their beards, having tattoos, and women speaking in church are a few that come to mind without even trying hard.  Oh, and the fact that no one born of a "forbidden marriage" -- and their descendants, to the tenth generation -- is to be allowed in church (Deuteronomy 23:2).

And then there's "biblical marriage."  Such as the provision requiring young women who were raped to marry their rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), a verse that allows men who conquer other nations to keep any virgins as concubines (Numbers 31:17-18), a rule that when a man dies, his wife must marry his brother (Genesis 38:8-10), prohibitions against marrying outside of your tribe (Deuteronomy 7:3) , and so many instances of deity-blessed polygamy that I won't even try to name them.

So don't even start with any bullshit about the biblical definition of marriage being "one man and one woman."

The bottom line is that here we have this guy who has been given divine revelation that he's not supposed to watch a diversity in the workplace video because to do so would make him naughty in god's sight, while he apparently doesn't give a damn about most of the things in the bible that god supposedly does prohibit.  It's more and more looking like he's using the bible as justification for a lawsuit and his own bigoted inclinations rather than because there's been any real infringement on his right to practice his religion.

The most frustrating thing for me about all of this is that this is the same subset of Christians who accuse us atheists of having wishy-washy morality.  Just yesterday, I saw a comment on Facebook (apropos of the ongoing foolishness about having "In God We Trust" on police vehicles) that said, "Don't give in!  Atheists only whine about their rights being trampled because they don't have the moral backbone to know what is right."  Myself, I'm much more comfortable with someone whose moral code comes from careful consideration than one whose sense of right and wrong was determined by cherry-picking verses they like from their favorite religious text -- and ignoring the rest of it into non-existence.

The price of micromanagement

It's pretty clear, from a number of different studies in various contexts, that micromanagement doesn't work.

Micromanaged employees have lower productivity, lower job satisfaction, and less willingness to work in teams than employees given more freedom.  A 2011 study at Concordia University's School of Business by researchers Marylène Gagné and Devasheesh Bhave made it clear that when workers have more autonomy, they are happier and work harder.

"Autonomy is especially likely to lead to better productivity when the work is complex or requires more creativity," Gagné said.  "In a very routine job, autonomy doesn’t have much impact on productivity, but it can still increase satisfaction, which leads to other positive outcomes.  When management makes decisions about how to organize work, they should always think about the effect on people’s autonomy."

Some companies have taken this to heart.  Consider the software company Atlassian, which several years ago initiated a new policy called "ShipIt" Days -- once a month, employees are given a day at work of total autonomy.  You can do whatever you want, as long as you're willing to share what you did with your coworkers and employers.  Here's how Atlassian's website describes "ShipIt" Days:

Atlassian’s ShipIt Days have influenced companies from Ennova to Yahoo! to encourage employees to step out of their day-to-day mindset, think creatively about anything that relates to their business and then deliver a solution.  ShipIt Days are inspired by the idea to “ship in a day.”  Participants are given 24 hours to develop a working prototype that “scratches an itch,” innovates around an area related to their personal or team operations, or demonstrates something awesome and inspiring.  The competition is fueled with Atlassian-sponsored pizza and beer and concludes with an edge-of-seat “show-and-tell” where employees vote for a winner.  Along with company-wide recognition and personal bragging rights, the winner takes home a trophy and limited-edition t-shirt. 

“With Atlassian ShipIt Day, employee creativity and team spirit soar,” said Carol Ganz, director of business development for Six Feet Up, a developer of open source web applications.  “ShipIt Days are like playtime which is ironic because this is probably the 24 hours when we work the hardest.”

Now, compare this to the teaching profession in the United States, where teachers are micromanaged from the first bell to the last.  Under the guise of "accountability" and "improving standards," teachers are given scripted "modules" to teach from.  We are not only prohibited from designing our own assessments -- something we were trained to do -- we are prohibited from grading our students' final exams, because of fears that we'll cheat.  There is a drive -- not yet implemented, but likely to be in the next couple of years -- that will prevent principals from observing and evaluating teachers in their own buildings, because apparently the upper administration doesn't even trust the principals.  Teacher observations have to be done by administrators from other schools, thus tying up more of principals' time, and assuring that the people writing evaluations are ones who know little about the teacher or the students they're watching.

It's like educational administrators read the Concordia study upside down and backwards, or something, and concluded that productivity rises when Big Brother Is Watching You.

It's something I found out years ago as a teacher; when I tried one-second-to-the-next micromanagement of the students in my classroom, it always backfired.  The best approach has always been freedom within structure.  In my Critical Thinking classes, the final project is a personal essay describing how your ideas and attitudes have changed over the course of the semester.  I tell them that the instructions are "follow your nose."  If something we studied in the class really made an impact, tell me about it.  Take your thoughts and go deep.  I want a coherent essay that is, in essence, a critical analysis of your own brain, not a list of answers to questions I've created.

"What's the grading rubric?" I often am asked.

My answer:  "I don't have one."

Some students get pretty panicky when they hear that.  We've trained them for years that life is a giant fill-in-the-blank test, and you better fill in the blanks with the right answers.  But nearly all of them rise to the challenge of this project -- some afterwards telling me that it was one of the hardest essays they ever wrote -- and I've seen phenomenal results, despite naysayers telling me when I first started doing this, "This is just giving kids license to bullshit."

I've shown some of the doubters examples of the papers that come out of this project.  They're not naysayers any more.

There are places in the world where teachers and students are given more autonomy.  Schools in Finland, for example, are often lauded as being exemplars of excellence.  Pasi Sahlberg, visiting fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, suggests why this is:

Teachers [in Finland] have time in school to do other things than teach.  And people trust each other.  A common takeaway was that Finnish teachers seem to have much more professional autonomy than teachers in the United States to help students to learn and feel well. 

We do know that teachers’ workplaces provide very different conditions for teaching in different countries. 

First, teachers in the US work longer hours (45 hours/week) than their peers in Finland (32 hours/week).  They also teach more weekly, 27 hours compared to 21 hours in Finland.   This means that American teachers, on average, have much less time to do anything beyond their teaching duties (whether alone or with colleagues) than teachers in most other OECD countries. 

In Finland, teachers often say that they are professionals akin to doctors, architects and lawyers.  This means, they explain, that teachers are expected to perform in their workplaces like pros: use professional judgment, creativity and autonomy individually and together with other teachers to find the best ways to help their students to learn.
 In the absence of common teaching standards, Finnish teachers design their own school curricula steered by flexible national framework.  Most importantly, while visiting schools, I have heard Finnish teachers say that due to absence of high-stakes standardized tests, they can teach and assess their students in schools as they think is most appropriate. 

The keyword between teachers and authorities in Finland is trust.  Indeed, professional autonomy requires trust, and trust makes teacher autonomy alive.

Did you catch the gist of all of that?  Finnish teachers teach fewer hours per week, are given more freedom, don't give standardized tests... and they get better results.

I've often wondered why American educational leaders are so far behind the curve when it comes to taking psychological and management research and incorporating it into the structure of schools.  We've known about these results for years; but due to fears of failing schools and anxiety over what would happen if the leash is loosened, we've seen an increasingly oppressive top-down management style that is known to decrease productivity and job satisfaction.

I've said it before: I've taught for 29 years, and by and large have loved my job.  But if I were a college student today, no way in hell would I become a teacher.

It's to be hoped that we'll wise up one day.  But the delay comes at a cost; there are students now, in classes today, who are being harmed by our attitudes toward teachers and schools.  Maybe it's time we take a page from Atlassian's playbook.  Let go of the reins a little, and see what happens.  It could hardly be worse than our current module-driven, exam-laden, joyless world of the Common Core.

A matter of trust

I had something of an epiphany yesterday regarding what's wrong with American public schools.

This light-bulb-moment occurred because of two unrelated incidents, one of them banal to the point of almost being funny, the other considerably more serious.

The first occurred because there is something wrong with the "heater" in my classroom.  I use the quotation marks because despite the fact that this is upstate New York and we've been having cooler weather for almost a month now, this machine has been pumping out continuously cold air into my room.  Yesterday morning it was quite chilly outside, and my room was almost at the seeing-your-own-breath stage.  So I took my digital thermometer, and first wandered around my classroom (getting an average temperature of around 61 F, warmest near the exit into the hallway); the air coming from the "heater" registered 58 F.

So I let the fellow who is the head of buildings, grounds, and maintenance know.  In short order I got back a curt note that my room was actually between 70 and 75 F, and the air coming out of the "heater" was at a comfortable 68.  "No, you're wrong," was the gist of the email.  "You're actually warm."

Or perhaps this is part of the new "Common Core" math, that 61 = 72 and 58 = 68.  I dunno.

Much more troubling was an exchange I had last week with an administrator regarding the implementation of "scripted modules," a new-and-improved way of micromanaging classroom teachers by giving them day-by-day lesson plans with pre-prepared problem sets and assignments, and scripts that are to be read to the students verbatim (some of them even tell the teacher what to answer if students ask particular questions).  Apparently, this administrator has gotten a good deal of flak over these modules, with complaints that they are rigid, lock teachers into going at a particular speed regardless of whether that speed is appropriate for their classes, and rob teachers of the creative parts of their job.  So the administrator sent a broadside email to the entire staff -- not only to the teachers affected, or the ones who had complained -- telling us that the modules were fine, that any frustration we felt was just that we were clinging to old ways of doing things and didn't like change, and that the new modular approach didn't take away any creativity from the act of teaching.

Well, I wasn't going to let that pass, so I answered as follows:

Dear _________,

I considered not responding to this, as the whole “module” thing has yet to affect me directly, but after some thought I decided that I could not let it go.

The whole idea of handing a professional educator a script is profoundly insulting.  The implication, despite your statement that it is not meant to replace the art of creative teaching, is that the policymakers and educational researchers know better how to instruct children than the people who have devoted their lives to the profession, who know the children in their classes personally and their curricula thoroughly.  This DOES take the creativity out of teaching, and that fact is not changed by your simply stating that it doesn’t.

More and more, we are being mandated to approach educating children by the factory model – everything done lockstep, everything converted to numbers and trends and statistics.  If it can be quantified, it exists; if it can’t, it doesn’t.  The mechanization of education robs it of its joy for teachers, and more importantly, for students.  All of the pretests and post-tests and standardized exams are simply providing a bunch of specious, meaningless numbers so that the policy wonks in Albany (and elsewhere) can pat themselves on the back and tell themselves that they’ve accomplished something.  I have yet to see any of these “value-added models” provide anything but percentage values whose error bars approach 100%.

And, on a personal note: you can consider this my official refusal to teach from a module, should one come down the line for any of the courses that I teach.  And the day that I am mandated, by you or by any other administrator, to read from a script in my classes will be my last day on the job.

Cordially,

gb

I have yet to receive any response to this email.

Well, the whole thing has been weighing considerably on my mind in the last few days, and yesterday -- in between rubbing my hands together to restore blood flow to my fingers -- I realized that the two incidents really came from the same fundamental source.

A lack of trust.

No, we're told; what you're experiencing, what you're thinking, what you're feeling, isn't real.  Your perspective is skewed.  We know better than you do.  Despite the fact that you were hired for your professional expertise, and know how to run a classroom (and, presumably, read a thermometer), your viewpoint is invalid.

Here, let me tell you what reality is.

A study conducted cooperatively by Working Families and Unum Insurance Group of worker satisfaction and productivity found that trust was the single most important factor in both employee well-being and the performance of the organization as a whole.  Susanne Jacobs, consultant and lead researcher on the study, said:

Truly understanding how individuals are motivated at work provides not just the gateway to optimal performance, something sought by every organization, but also an environment where every person can flourish.

Trust and psychological well-being are the answer; the equation to reach that answer starts with individual and team resilience, plus the eight drivers of trust (belonging, recognition, significance, fairness, challenge, autonomy, security, and purpose), together with a workplace that is built to support every human being within it. We know the solution and we know the tools, so let’s put it into practice.

A 2011 study by D. Keith Denton of Missouri State University's Department of Management supports that view.  Trust, clarity, and openness are critical, Denton concluded, after evaluating productivity and worker satisfaction at a variety of different businesses.  Denton said:

Companies with high-trust levels give employees unvarnished information about company's performance and explain the rationale behind management decisions. They are also unafraid of sharing bad news and admitting mistakes.  Lack of good communication leads to distrust, dissatisfaction, cynicism and turnover.

If there is a high level of engagement, the leader can expect that members of the group will express their feelings, concerns, opinions and thoughts more openly.  Conversely, if trust is low, members are more likely to be evasive, competitive, devious, defensive or uncertain in their actions with one another.

Contrast that with the current atmosphere in public schools, where teachers are trusted so little that we are now being micromanaged on the moment-by-moment level -- told, in effect, what to say and how long a time we have in which to say it.  Students are subjected, over and over, to high-stakes examinations to make certain they are reaching some preset, externally-determined bar.  We are trusted so little that at the end of the year, we are not allowed to grade our own final exams for fear that we'll alter student papers to boost their scores and make ourselves look more effective.

The contention by the anti-public-school cadre has been, all along, that teachers aren't professionals, that (in Bill Gates' words) "the educational system is broken."  I think that's absolute rubbish.  The teachers I know, with very few exceptions, are competent, caring, and intelligent, know their subjects deeply, and understand how to communicate their knowledge to students.  In an ironic twist that seems lost on most of the people in charge, we are instituting a model for education that doesn't work and evaluating the old model on its failure -- in effect, breaking the system to show how broken it was.

My own tolerance for this nonsense is, quite frankly, nearing its limit.  I am honestly not sure I can do this job much longer.  I am still passionate about the subject I teach; I still enjoy my students, and the daily act of teaching them about science.  Watching the light bulbs go on, when kids suddenly comprehend an especially difficult concept that they have struggled to master, is still one of the most rewarding things I know of.

But it is honestly hard to go to work, on a daily basis, knowing that in the most fundamental way, I am not trusted to do competently the job I have been tasked with.  The optimist in me keeps hoping that the establishment will begin to listen to the people who are speaking out against the current trends -- most notably Diane Ravitch, whose lucid and articulate indictment of such legislation as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top leaves little room for argument.

But the pessimist in me has, at the moment, a far louder voice.  I fear that things will get a great deal worse before they get better.  And if they do, they will do so without my participation.  I always thought that I would be one of those teachers that would have to be pushed out of the door at age 70, still eager to meet the new crowd of kids in September; the last few days, I'm wondering how I can make it to Thanksgiving.