Think Positive

This week I had several ideas about what I should write about in my blog. For the life of me, I can't recall them this morning because I have been wrapped up with the fact that our legislature hasn't passed a budget and that as of last night, they went home. It makes our jobs harder and literally takes money out of our pockets and it infuriates me. But I'm letting myself focus on the negative.

October is traditionally a tough time to teach. The newness of school has worn off and things got difficult. Students get too comfortable and their bad habits become irritating. If you didn't hold out on expectations or communication like you should have, October hit you hard. It happens every year. But today starts November and all of a sudden, the end of the semester seems like it is just around the corner. Teachers start talking about getting ready for exams and before you know it, you will be sitting in test training getting ready for the end of another semester.

So with the start of a new month, it's time to think positive. It's time for encouragement for students to give their best to finish better than they started. It's time to support colleagues as they push hard to be leaders in our building. It's time to check in on those beginning teachers because we all remember what they were going through. It's time to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work to finish. We have to think positive and let the negativity of October go. We owe it to our students and ourselves. Happy November everyone...let's do this!

Five Things I Learned in Peru

My trip to Peru last week as a study abroad experience with ECU was truly an experience that I will never forget. I learned so much about the culture and the people there and the struggles that people experience in trying to keep up with a modern world, especially in the field of education. So many of you have asked me about my trip, and I seem to think of something new each time I answer the question. So here's a list of five things I learned in Peru:

1. Poverty is relative to where you are. So many people in the cities of Lima and Cusco live in conditions that we could never imagine for ourselves. Homes without heat or air conditioning are the norm for middle-class families with good jobs. Sanitation is an ongoing problem everywhere except in tourist areas. Lower class families have "apartments" with tin roofs, missing windows and no running water. And this is in the cities, where it is best. Public school teachers there earn about $600 (US money) a month and that is double the minimum wage. A family of four can probably survive the month on that.

2. They have common problems with us. In regards to the advancement of education, they seem to share common problems with the southeastern United States. While we know where jobs and the future of employment are headed, we also find ourselves holding on to many outdated things in our schools as a last-ditch effort of preserving our way of life. In Cusco, schools are forced to teach the indigenous language of Quechua.  If you speak to the students, they are eager to learn English and other world languages (and most speak at least two languages) and want to study outside of Peru to experience the world around them. Meanwhile, the ones that control schools and curriculums speak one language and have a more narrow view of what students should learn. We are probably guilty of the same.

3. We could learn some things from their university systems. Peru offers free college to students after high school. (They finish high school at 16 there). While this offer is limited to a certain number of students with high enough test scores, it does provide access to thousands of students each year. There are private college offerings as well. Some families that can afford private schools prefer it because they feel that the school is superior to the public option, however in most cases, the public college is the best educational option. What I found unique was that the colleges only offer degree programs that relate to jobs that are central to the economy of Peru. There are no communications degrees or liberal arts programs that are not connected with an industry. Simply put, college education equals jobs.


4. Children can learn whatever you teach them. One of the most impactful experiences I had was visiting an after school program for young children whose families work on the streets. It provides them with a place to be and someone to feed them and help with homework. In this place, there is no running water, so when it was time to clean up from snack time, I saw children walk to a five-gallon bucket and wash their dishes and then rinse them in a second bucket. Each child did this without being prompted and then put their dishes away. Also, schools in Peru are mandated to have one psychologist for student mental health needs for every 500 students. This is dramatically more than what we provide for students and you can tell it in how students interact. While their school curriculums may be behind ours, they are beating us in this arena, and it's our own fault.

5. Experiences change people. While I saw this trip as a unique opportunity to see the world as a part of my university experience, it quickly became something that changed my outlook on the world and my profession. A person's experiences change how they view the world around them and the opinions they have about others. As educators of one of the richest and most advanced nations that has ever existed, we owe it to our students to provide them with experiences that cause them to think globally and act locally. While we may not be able to take students on foreign excursions, we can expose them to the world around us in so many ways. We need to do more of that.

World's Best Driver

On Tuesday evening I was leaving my daughter's tennis match and headed to get food before going home. I got behind a slow driver that was obviously confused about where they were going and it was annoying. I followed them all the way to the drive-through, where this must have been their first experience with a drive-through line as well. I tried to get over it and headed home, only to get behind another car that refused to go faster than 15 mph BELOW the speed limit. I was stuck behind them almost the whole way home and I was furious. Bad driving has always been a pet peeve of mine. So much, that I would work driving questions into my history tests as a teacher.

That evening I read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Put simply, it's the psychological belief that you know something that you really don't. Because of this feeling, we trick ourselves into thinking that we are above average or superior at something, when in fact we are just average, or maybe worse. When I read this, I realized that my judgment of everyone's driving is based on the fact that I believe myself to be the world's best driver. Everyone slower than me is an idiot with nowhere to be and everyone faster than me is reckless. Apparently, I'm not alone in this belief though. It's actually VERY common and can be seen in everything around us, especially our jobs.

Studies show that close to 50% of people believe that they are greatly superior in their jobs when compared to their peers. It doesn't take a math teacher to know that everyone can't be better than most. Most people have to be average. That's how statistics work. The crazy thing is that when we study this effect more deeply, we find that often the people that do the worst at a job, tend to overrank themselves the most. Inversely, the people that are actually the best, tend to under rank their abilities. This is true in assessing leadership, raising kids, constructing an argument and lots of other things, including driving. People with a little bit of knowledge tend to think that they know a lot more than they actually do.

So how good are you as a teacher? What are you really good at and what do you just think you're good at? Chances are, you don't actually know unless you're willing to look at data that shows you. And you can't pick and choose which data to accept and which to ignore. Great teachers are more likely to be humble and constantly seeking to do better and learn more. Average or below-average teachers, just proclaim that they have this teaching thing down. That's an important thing to know when we are talking about personal growth related to your strengths and weaknesses. We can all be better than we are if we are willing to accept a growth mindset and let go of the voice in our brains that fills us with confidence.

Maybe I'm not that great of a driver after all.

Trust Me

A recent report published by the Pew Research Center examined the public perception of trust in people that hold various positions of power. (You can read the Washington Post article on it here) The report found that the public has lost trust in many traditional positions of power. Despite that, one position did surprisingly well in the survey. School principals rated consistently high or highest in all parts of the survey. That's interesting, but I don't think that the story should stop there. School principals are extensions of the school. Nothing that I say would matter, if the teachers and other adults in the building did not validate those words through actions. I can say that we want the best for your child, but it is usually others in the school that perform the tasks of teaching, caring, feeding, clothing and all of the many other aspects expected of educators today for students.

In a world that seems more divided and jaded than ever, the public seems to have a renewed trust in the adults that their children spend the most time with. This is exactly why we have to continue communicating with families, no matter how hard it is to fit that into our schedules. It is easy to be anxious or nervous about calling home, with thoughts of what may happen on the other end of the line. And while every experience may not be a great one, that shouldn't stop the important work of talking to families about their child's progress in school. This has been something that I've tried to push for a few years now, and since then, I've had numerous teachers who either did or did not receive information from their own child's school tell me how important they realized communication was as a parent.

People believe what I say, because of what you do. My words without your actions would lead to distrust. This survey simply validates the work that our school and so many others are doing to include families in the education of their children, rather than it being our responsibility alone. So trust me, your efforts matter.

Teams

I recently read that basketball was the sport where teamwork and coaching mattered least, and individual talent mattered most. The argument was that while a football or soccer team of average players can overcome a team of less than average players with one star, a basketball team with one star can often do very well. I talked with Coach Edwards about this and he quickly agreed, especially in today's NBA. He talked about how NBA players often get confused when they play international teams because the international teams still utilize a more teamwork-styled play.

Despite the fact that a star can make a difference, it's still very important that the star be with the right team. Victor Oladipo is a great example. While with the Magic, he averaged between 13 to 17 points per game over three years. He then goes to the Thunder for one year and averages just under 16 points per game. But when he moves to the Pacers, he finds the right fit on the right team and the same player now averages 23 points per game. That's a huge difference. Being on the right team has been studied quite a bit in the working world as well. One study showed that surgeons perform much better at one hospital over another despite their years of experience. The same can be said of pilots. A study found that 75% of airplane crashes happen when the pilot is put with a new crew. Even sleep-deprived flight crews and pilots dramatically outperform crews that do not usually work together.

So with all that this tells us, why do we focus on individual success and improvement? Doing that seems a little counter-productive. If we take lessons from the research, we should probably be focusing on how well our teams work together. Everything shows that this leads to individual improvement of all of the team members and wins for the group as a whole. This concept in education probably isn't that strange for elementary or middle school teachers. But the higher up in grade levels you go, the more you start to see teachers focus more on what is going on in their own rooms. But when you do see high school teachers that reach beyond their rooms to build a functioning team, great things tend to happen. So the next time you are sitting at a department meeting, ask yourself what all you are doing to build your team. Chances are, it's the single most important thing that you can
do to improve your own performance.

Disagreeable

When is it ok to disagree with your boss? It's a strange question and probably has more to do with the relationship you have with your boss and the culture of the organization than it does with the reason for disagreement. While this question usually brings about the idea of a confrontational or uncomfortable meeting, employees also do this in many other ways. Perhaps the most prevalent method is being passive-aggressive. We've all done it. We find ourselves putting off a task or doing a particularly bad job at something that we didn't agree with doing in the first place. We all have to admit that we have probably been guilty of that at some point and getting called on it is never fun.

But aside from being passive-aggressive, there are constructive ways to disagree with the boss of your organization in general that can lead to greater productivity. Most organizations fall under one of two categories. They can either be relational-oriented organizations that care most about the people or they can be task-oriented organizations that care most about getting stuff done. Despite the fact that they may not fit in, having people that are the opposite of the culture can be pretty important. Having leaders that are opposite of the organization culture can produce huge results. The problem is, we don't usually like those people. The principal that only cares about test scores would be hated by the teachers that work hard to build relationships. Likewise, the principal that worked hard to love and care for everyone, may not get good results for the school or value the teachers that do
. Every organization needs balance.

This week we will elect our School Improvement Team that will help guide our decisions for the next two years. I always like it when there are one or two people on that team that have the guts to question decisions and make us think about why we do the things that we do. I don't always agree, but I enjoy having to think about whether the decision is worth defending.

I encourage you to think about your classrooms in the same way. If you're getting pushback on an assignment or a practice, think about why we do it. If your only defense is, "because I said so" or "because I'm in charge," you might want to think about the practice a bit deeper. Sometimes having that misfit can make you improve in ways that you didn't quite understand before.

C.B. Aycock, Moral Licensing and You

This week our football team played C.B. Aycock High School. If that name doesn't ring a bell for you, then I'll give you a short history lesson. Charles B. Aycock was governor of North Carolina from 1901-1905 and is largely regarded as North Carolina's "Education Governor." As a former teacher and superintendent of Wayne County Schools, Aycock took North Carolina from one of the worst states in the nation in regard to schools, to one of the best in the South. During his four years, NC constructed 690 new schoolhouses and increased state spending on public schools by 1200%. Today, elementary students throughout eastern North Carolina visit his birthplace in Wayne County and glamourize his contribution to our state.

But there's another side to the story. Aycock was also a key player in what would become a systematic political regime that sought to restore white supremacy to politics and life in North Carolina. Aycock and others in the Democratic Party openly used race-baiting and overt calls for segregation to change the nature of state politics. Before his rise to power, there were 126,000 black North Carolinians registered to vote in 1896. By 1902, there were only 6,100 due to things like literacy tests and violent intimidation that were openly designed to restrict blacks from voting and holding office. Aycock helped start a political machine designed to "keep blacks in their place" for the next 30 years.

So why don't we remember him as a racist? It might have something to do with moral licensing. Moral licensing is a psychology term that simply refers to allowing yourself to do something wrong or immoral because you have just accomplished something good. Your self-confidence for your good deed gives you permission for the bad deed. Aycock's good deed of improving schools (even black schools) was a tremendously good deed, especially for its time. North Carolina went from one of the very worst states for education to a very progressive state that would lead the way for reforms for almost all southern states. In turn, we appreciate the good that he accomplished and tend to ignore the bad. But if you were a black voter in the early 1900s, you probably don't remember him for the good that he did.

This year we started off by asking what teachers as individuals and all of us as a school wanted to be known for. Much like Aycock, our reputations might depend on who you ask. But rest assured, there is something you can do about it. In what ways are you guilty of moral licensing? Are you a great classroom teacher that puts off grading or contacting parents as much as you should? Do you pour yourself into building relationships and put off the tough work of examining curriculum that best grows students? There are a million different things that we all do that can fall under this idea. It ultimately comes down to building our strengths and working on our weaknesses. Choosing to ignore a weakness in our profession, much like politics, can deny someone else of an opportunity.