Which Came First, the Autonomy or the Great Teaching?
Tonight, I was sitting at a Teacher of the Year awards ceremony and each principal I spoke to mentioned some variation of, "This teacher is so excellent, I just stay out of his/her way and trust them to do what's best for kids." This is the epitome of Daniel Pink's idea of autonomy. But I got to wondering . . . Did the fact that the principals gave these teachers autonomy motivate them to become great teachers? Or did principals give them autonomy because they were great teachers? In other words, which came first, the autonomy or the great teacher? Or was it some combination (i.e. they were good teachers, got autonomy, and became great)?
I'd love to hear your opinions on this. Please share your experiences below.
In Carol Dweck’s keystone book, “Mindset,” she explains that there are two different philosophies about human nature, intelligence, and talent.First is the “fixed” mindset where people believe that you’re either born smart or dumb, talented or incapable, good or bad and there’s little or nothing that can be done about it.Then there are those with a “growth” mindset who believe that with hard work, learning, and practice, you can literally increase your intelligence or talent.
People who have a fixed mindset are often resistant to change and defensive about feedback.Since they believe that they have a fixed amount of intelligence, any feedback makes their ego crumble because they believe that it reflects an innate ability that they have no power to change.What’s worse is that people with this mindset may also believe that students don’t have the ability to grow or change in their intelligence.These are the teachers or principals who think that the only way to improve a school is to recruit better students.These are the superintendents (think: Michelle Rhee) who think that it’s impossible for a teacher to improve, so instead we need to fire them if they’re not up to par.
People who have a growth mindset believe that they can change the intelligence of a student and thus the trajectory of their future by teaching them well and giving them good learning habits.These are the principals who mentor the teachers that are under their care instead of trying to get rid of the “bad ones.”These are the teachers who perform miracles with students who struggle in other classrooms.Parents fall into these categories as well.The growth-mindset parent will never say, “My kid is just no good at . . .” and will ask “What else can we do to improve his/her learning?”It’s all about how to work harder to improve for those with the growth mindset.
This really sounds like a semantic difference, but it is not.A fixed mindset is the end of the education conversation.[I should note here before being misinterpreted that I do NOT believe that it is necessarily the teacher’s fault when a student fails to learn.But I DO believe that the teacher is the only one with the power to fix it regardless of whose fault it may be.]One of the hallmarks of the fixed mindset is blaming everyone else when results aren’t delivered.I see this regularly in my school improvement work the teachers and principals who blame students, parents, the district, or the “system” for failure and concede that there is nothing that can be done about it.When an educator believes this, then there is no reason to read a book (or a blog) or improve lesson plans or take professional development seriously or go to a conference or subscribe to a journal.If it is someone else’s fault . . . why should they change?This is not semantic, this is gigantic.
The next few posts in the blog series will explain how an administrator can recognize a fixed mindset and a growth mindset in teachers (or themselves) as well as how to transition the fixed mindset to a growth mindset.This one change has the power to shift the entire culture of a school from “We do what we can with what walks through the door” to “We have to power to overcome any problems our students walk through the door with.”One of my AVID Coordinators once told me “Give me two years with any student and I can get them back on track.Give me three years and I can overcome any problem they have and make them successful.”And she does exactly that!Now that’s a growth mindset!!Here’s an interview of one of her students who was first in her family to graduate high school, never mind go to college, and earned more than a dozen scholarships her senior year and now attends UCLA.
What did Daniel Pink miss in his three factors of motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose?Relationships!If your teachers don’t like you, don’t trust you, and don’t believe what you say, all of the autonomy in the universe is not going to help with the motivation.Stuart Diamond, author of “Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve your Goals in the Real World” has read more than a half a million pages of research to determine that in negotiations, relationships are far more important than any of the facts, figures, or processes.He uses a pyramid to summarize his point where he shows that successful negotiations are 8% substance, 37% process, and 55% people.Diamond uses an anecdotal example that the reason that the jury in the OJ Simpson trial found him innocent despite a mountain of evidence is that they didn’t like or trust the prosecutor.
John Hattie in “Visible Learning” showed that the effect size of Teacher/Student Relationships on student achievement is 0.72!That’s incredibly high, higher than reducing class size (0.20), homework (0.29), Problem Based Learning (0.15), teaching test taking (0.27), Cooperative Learning (0.41), and effective principal leadership (0.36).It’s as John Maxwell says, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."While the magic of classroom management and student achievement is the student/teacher relationship, the magic of motivational leadership is leader/teacher relationships.
When I was teaching, I had a young man I’ll call Paul who would play Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh in my classroom.This group of boys and Paul specifically really appreciated that I allowed them to hang out in my room because they may have been the type to get picked on at lunch time.They were even more impressed that I talked to them and showed an interest in their card games.Only one or two of the group of about two dozen were even enrolled in one of my classes.This lasted about two and a half years before most of them graduated.It wasn’t until later that I realized how I had influenced this group.As a teacher who used many AVID strategies, there was a lot of college-going information in my classroom.It was clear what my goal was for all of my students, but I had never actually mentioned college to this group.When I saw Paul more than 3 years after graduation as the drive-thru attendant at Taco Bell, before I could even say a word he literally broke down in tears and said, “Mr. Horton, I am so sorry I’ve disappointed you and I haven’t enrolled in college yet.I’ve gotten so busy working, I haven’t had a chance.I’m going to meet with a counselor at the community college next week!I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”The influence that I had on Paul because of the relationship that I built with that group of students communicated unstated goals that lasted many years after the last time I’d spoken with him.
As part of a county office of education, I get to visit schools every year who have applied for awards from Distinguished Schools, to High School Models of Excellence, to AVID National Demonstration Schools and Blue Ribbon Schools.Those of us who visit these schools have made sort of a running gag on the way into the schools; we take bets how long it’s going to take for the first person to say, “It feels like family when I’m here at school.”Without fail, at every single one of the several dozen highly successful schools I have visited, I’ve heard this comment from someone within the first 60 minutes of my visit.I can’t believe that this is a coincidence.It should be every leader’s goal to set up an atmosphere, a relationship with the people in the school, so that it feels like it is one happy family.They should shake hands and greet the faculty on the way into school on Monday mornings.They should salute every one of them on the way out on Friday afternoon with baked treats.They should make faculty meetings feel like social celebrations.They should barbeque for teachers on special occasions.They should ask them five questions about their family and hobbies before asking one question about their lesson plan.The idea is similar to Steven Covey’s “Emotional Bank Account.”If you do 5 favors for them, they’ll be far more likely to be supportive when it comes time to ask for their support.
I love Chris Widener’s quote, “You cannot decide if you’re going to be a leader.You can only decide if you will become the type of person that others want to follow.”I have seen that from the classroom, from the administrator’s office, from the district office, or from the county office, the greatest way to influence others is to have a relationship with them such that the last thing they’d ever want to do is disappoint you.
How do you build relationships with your teachers?What effect have you seen as a result?
Tags: motivate, teachers, principal, Daniel Pink, autonomy, mastery, purpose, Stuart Diamond, Getting More, motivation, chris widener, the art of influence, steven covey, michael horton, blog
Peter Senge says that “Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.”In education, we often refer to shared vision as the mission and vision of the school.Senge added, “Shared vision is not an idea, but a force in people’s hearts.” He also points out that “People begin to see [the shared vision] as if it exists.”
I’ve worked with many schools on creating or updating their mission and vision and I have a couple of warnings, a suggestion, and an un-suggestion (if you allow me to make up such a word).The warning is a practice that I’ve seen in many schools and early in my consulting career, I encouraged this as well.The warning is to avoid trying to create a new vision too soon or too suddenly.A shared vision is something that evolves over a period of many years with teachers gradually enrolling as the vision begins to correlate better with their experiences or “stories that we tell ourselves” (as Kerry Patterson in Crucial Conversations calls it). Senge lists several strategies to enroll teachers in a vision including: 1) Be enrolled yourself (live the vision) 2) Be honest about your vision (don't exaggerate the results) 3) Don't try to force people to follow the vision, it'll never work.
According to Peter Senge, creating a shared vision begins with the leader creating their own personal vision, sharing it, living it, and ensuring that their goals, words, priorities, and policies all align with it.This alone could take a matter of years.Then, it’s a matter of enrolling the leadership team, the faculty, the students, the parents, and the community in that vision.This can also take a matter of years.The mistake that I see is a principal’s first faculty meeting at a new school, breaking out the “Let’s rewrite the school’s mission statement.”It’ll never work.
I was invited to one school where the principal was in the middle of enrolling teachers in his vision.His vision was that every student graduate from high school with the opportunity to get a college degree and that the racial graduation and college-going gap was completely unacceptable.So, we collected the data for his school and planned a series of activities for the next few faculty meetings to put a face on the achievement gap at his school.First, we had an economics professor come from the local university and speak about the future of students who drop out, graduate high school, or get a college degree.It does no good to talk about graduation and college if teachers haven’t considered the fate of those who do not graduate.We spent several meetings addressing this part of the question since the reason I was working with the school was their low graduation rate.
Then we culminated by inviting 100 students to come to a faculty meeting.We had used the district student information system to find out at what point students dropped out of the system.For this example, I’m giving the numbers as I remember them and they may not be perfect.We had someone calling out grade levels and we had instructed the students when to step out of the circle as the grades were called out.We found that less than 1 in 100 students drop out in grades k-5, so things were looking good so far.By 6th grade, we had 1 in 100 students dropping out, 2 more in 7th grade, and 2 more in 8thgrade.By the end of middle school, there were already 5 students in the dropout circle.We paused here to point out that statistically, 3 out of 5 of these students were Hispanic, 1 was African American, and 1 was white.All 5 qualified for free and reduced-price lunch.By 9th grade, another 9 students left the circle.In 10th grade, another 8 left and moved to the dropout circle.We now had 22 students in the dropout circle and 78 left in the school circle.In 11th grade, another 8 left the circle and in 12th grade, another 4 left.There were now 34 in the dropout circle and 66 in the school circle.That was more than half in the dropout circle and it was a powerful visual.We stopped here with statistics about the demographics of each of the groups.This was that point at which I saw the first tear roll down a teacher’s cheek.
Teachers had an idea what percentage of graduates went on to college, but that percentage was of those who made it to the end of 12th grade, not the total number.Of the 66 remaining in the circle, 12 went on community college and moved to the community college circle.16 went to the university circle.The other 38 moved to the dropout circle.We couldn’t go year-by-year in college, so we fast-forwarded 2 years.Half of the community college students failed to complete a degree or transfer to a university, so 6 community college students moved to the dropout circle.Of the 16 university students, 4 had not completed one year of credits in two years and moved to the dropout circle.By the end of four years, 2 community college students moved to the associate’s degree circle and 2 moved to the university circle.There were now 14 students in the university circle and 84 in the dropout circle.Of these, 9 completed a bachelor’s degree and 5 moved to the dropout circle.
In the end, we had 2 associate’s degrees, 9 bachelor’s degrees, and 89 “dropouts.”Again, we discussed the demographics and the likely future of those 89 students who never achieved a college degree.Here, I saw a least three teachers with tears streaming.For the next several meetings, we had a series of student speakers share their stories with the faculty from those who overcame gigantic obstacles to those with infinite unfulfilled potential.
Not until after all of this did we even begin to approach the re-writing of the school’s mission and vision.Even then, we did not have unanimity in our goal for students.
The worst attempt that I ever saw at coming to a shared vision was the principal who had teachers compete to see who could write down in 2 minutes the most reasons why students weren’t successful.He then went on a tirade about how these were all excuses and had each teacher put their list of “excuses” through a shredder.I had the pleasure (read in a sarcastic voice) of presenting right after this activity and the mumbles and grumbles about the excuses in the shredder continued for hours.
Doc Searles of UC Santa Barbara and Harvard pointed out that one reason that Walmart outperforms K-mart so greatly is the shared vision of “Everyday Low Prices.”Walt Disney had a vision of creating the first feature length cartoon that spread slowly and the Disney Corporation is now worth $68 Billion.Martin Luther King Jr. changed the trajectory of the country by enrolling the masses in his vision of equality.At my office, every single employee knows that our shared vision is “Extraordinary Service.”
What benefit could be realized by creating a shared vision at your school?How will you do it?What have you already done?Share your ideas in the comments section.
Here’s a video of Daniel Pink answering the question, “After all you’ve learned, what do you think is the most critical attribute for a leader today?”
