The Linchpin Educator

            Recently I’ve immersed myself in some work with a group designing a new program for independent school leadership. One guiding premise stresses non-titular leadership. As part of that, I revisited some of Seth Godin’s work. While I read his blog each day, I decided to re-read three books: Tribes, Linchpin, and Stop Stealing Dreams. Tribes explores groups connected to each other, a leader, and an idea. Linchpin considers the indispensable employee. Stop Stealing Dreams is a manifesto about traditional schooling. Together, they prompted me to try identifying the key qualities of a linchpin educator.

            Three of Godin’s regular themes apply here. First, digital technology changes everything, meaning we should re-examine old models. Second, Godin contends everyone has the potential and means to lead in meaningful fashion. The question is not whether someone could lead. It is will that person lead. Then come matters of what, where, when, and how. Third, merely answering those questions affirmatively falls short. One must produce and ship their particular form of art, the way in which their work touches and changes people.

            Those who do become linchpins. As Godin explains,

What the boss really wants is an artist, someone who changes everything, who makes dreams come true. What the boss really wants is someone who can see the reality of today and describe a better tomorrow. What the boss really wants is a linchpin.

If he can’t have that, he’ll settle for a cheap drone. (Linchpin, 38)

           

That passage comes a few pages after the following:

Let me be really clear: Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don’t like great teachers. They’re organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average. (29)

In Stop Stealing Dreams Godin thoroughly derides the assembly line model of education. I’d add this is not just a school problem but a societal problem, in that cultures have created their typical school in a way that reveals beliefs and values. Consider what resonates in a politician’s platform regarding education. Ultimately, schools are human constructs.

            Of course, that means humans could change them, provided we muster the collective fortitude. That’s where linchpins come in.

So what makes for a linchpin educator? Nothing in the following is about the nuts-and-bolts of teaching, although those matter. But they can be learned and really are secondary. Much more important are certain personal qualities. We need people who can enhance, perhaps even transform education through shaping a particular type of culture.

Curriculum as Markers

            The etymology of the term curriculum refers to a set path. Through time, as more and more traverse a path, the ruts become deeper; a traveler can have a harder time deviating from the preferred route. In education this has played out in greater standardization, the curriculum becoming almost a script for the teacher. Content becomes paramount, and pedagogy takes on a degree of mechanization.

            To a linchpin educator, however, curriculum serves only as markers. It provides a general sense of direction, but the educator wants to embark on expeditions with the students, often through exploring interesting problems. The linchpin not only ignores the map, but shreds it. After all, here during the fourth industrial revolution, we have no reliable maps.

Questions Trump Answers

            As a general rule, questions can be organized into two categories. The first require factual answers, those sort of lower-order bits of recall that may win someone a Trivial Pursuit game. The second provoke higher-level analysis. Perhaps discourse of some sort may help articulate the stages of determining a possible answer. They don’t work on bubble tests or robo-graded essays.

            These questions beget even more beautiful questions in some sort of epistemological evolution. They allow us to unlock even the thorniest problems. They urge us to question everything. A linchpin educator swims in a sea brimming with “What if’s…” and “How might we’s…,” all the while yelling, “Come on in! The water’s fine!”

Appreciate Weird

            We shy away from weird. Even sometimes its less-threatening synonyms such as unusual, novel, original. It defies our created limits, and thus we cannot measure it. That rocks the stability of the average. We feel unsafe because of how it scoffs at our expectations.

            The linchpin educator embraces the specialness in that which is unique. The English teacher who sees beyond the misspellings or usage errors to see the passion, the imagery. The math and science teachers who delight in a loopy proof or wacky hypothesis and cheer, “Give it a go!” After all, they reason, a standardized education fosters standardized people…and we have plenty of those.

Comfort with Discomfort

            Fear, confusion, lack of certainty, resentment, jealousy, anger (on all sides)—the discomfort can manifest itself in these and many other ways. It’s resistance. It comes from those comfortable with the status quo, and even those who aren’t but feel secure. Or the resistance might be internal, the lizard brain gnashing its fangs and spitting venom, fed by cynics.

            The linchpin educator, though, continues to create art, both drawing on rich traditions and experimenting with new forms. Just as an education should, the best art jars us into a new consciousness. It broadens and deepens our perspectives. It does so through taking risks mitigated by idealism and faith.

A Shrunken Head

            All of this requires a secure, under-control ego. Recall the function of a linchpin: to hold other pieces in place so that the whole can function. Ultimately, school is not about teaching. It’s about learning. Ideally, everyone’s learning. Ironically, an oversized head gets in the way of learning. Egocentricity causes someone to wrest too much control, to reject possibilities, to lessen others. It becomes about the I.

            The best educators shrink so that others may grow. It is about us and them. They challenge and affirm, reflect and imagine, prick and caress. In urging people to become better, they invoke our higher selves. Linchpin educators thus give us gifts wrapped in passion.

At the core, how a school functions depends on the relationships and interactions among all its constituents. Right now I’m imagining the utter awesomeness of working in a school full of such people. More importantly, I’m thinking about how truly joyful that school would be for kids. I see them emerging as the people who solve all our current and future problems. And some of those kids will grow up and become educators, and we’ll have more and more such schools. And then more and more flywheels will spin faster and faster, each held in place by a linchpin educator.

The Real Enemy of Great

                The opening line of Jim Collins’ best-selling Good to Great declares, “Good is the enemy of great” (1). There is no telling how many times over the few years immediately after the book’s release I heard that line in a presentation or read it in some sort of piece. I don’t disagree with the notion; and I won’t argue with the many examples, the piles of data, and the behaviors that Collins presents. Ultimately, though, I’m not sure Collins identifies the real enemy. The closest he comes is when he writes, “That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem” (16).

                Agreed. But Collins doesn’t dig any further into the issue; in fairness, that is not really his point, as his real work lies in delineating the process for improvement. He does focus on qualities needed to make this happen, whether at Level 5 Leadership or in the various seats on the bus. Certainly important. However, the question of the real human problem lingers.

                Complacency, blind spots, limited abilities, narrow bandwith, practical constraints—I’m sure you could add to the list, and all are realities. But I think there is something more insidious at work.

                Cynicism.

                Hiding behind a cloak of cool, this jaded posture is quick to launch spears of negativity at new ideas, at the unfamiliar, at the original. It’s often the spawn of ego and fear, so it lashes out at any threat. And what’s required to become great—the risk, the uncertainty, the personal investment, the vision—threatens many.

                Sadly, reasons abound to have become cynical. People we’ve chosen as role models and leaders seem to let us down almost daily, i.e. cheating athletes and dogmatic, uncompromising politicians. So now cynicism seems to fuel much of what passes for humor. After all, do we laugh or cry?

                I cry. Mainly because of the effect on the target of the barbs, and those are the people who can move us toward becoming great. Instead, they begin to feel those tugs of doubts, to heed those cries of the lizard brain, to suffer bouts of paralysis. It also can erode the belief of those who support the move.

                More dangerously than anything else, cynicism carpet bombs the realms of possibility. Ideas are reduced to rubble; dreams, burned to crispy cinders. Unless we can construct ever-taller towers, how can we become great?

                Sometimes the move towards great is relatively easy, when we take small steps into the adjacent possible. The real gut-wrenching occurs when we leap into a place realized primarily in our imaginations. That calls for courage and faith.

I am sure this concept holds true for most areas, but I think it’s particularly true for education. At its essence, education depends on a steadfast, unshakable belief in the possibility of each child. It’s not just the adults who must have this belief. The child must internalize it.

                We also must embrace the possibilities of education—not what it can achieve, but what it can become. I know that I couldn’t do my work without grasping that ideal. That is particularly true now. This is my thirtieth year in independent schools; and, as I plan to explain in my next post, I think this is an amazingly exciting time to be an educator. Maybe the most exciting. An era to accomplish truly great things. It’s certainly no time to be cynical. It is time to conquer the enemy.

Taming My Lizard Brain: An Unforeseen Lesson from Blogging

                Renowned business writer and marketing expert Seth Godin frequently writes about the “need to ship.” To oversimplify, per Godin you can have all the great ideas you want; but unless you ship, they don’t really matter. In other words, you have to deliver the product. Literal in certain areas, the idea of shipping becomes a metaphor for just about any endeavor. When people don’t ship, says Godin, it’s frequently because their “lizard brain” takes over. This is the brain stem, the reptillian base of our brains, and we react in the simplest possible fashion and allow the fear to take over. If we could, we’d drop our tails and flee.

                Writing this blog, I feel real pressure to ship at least once per week. As someone pointed out to me, “You create a monster; then you have to feed it.” At first this was easy: I was new to my school, wanted people to learn about me and my ideas, had plenty to say. It was purely rational, grounded in my cerebral cortex. Now, shipping has become harder. I find myself asking questions that, while logical, still drip with juices of the lizard brain. What am I going to say this week? Haven’t I already written about that? Is this worth posting on? What are people thinking about my posts? Have I gone too far in some of my points and overly offended someone? Would anyone notice if I didn’t post for a while? If I stopped posting at all? Why isn’t my mind working the way I want it to? When did I forget how to write? How in the world does Godin manage to post every single day, and it’s almost always great?

                Suddenly I think about students, and the dominant emotion turns to empathy. We demand that they ship, on time and at a high rate of production. Some of the work is fairly mechanical, and students can simply churn out the product. But the really important higher-level stuff such as creation, analysis, synthesis? We bring kids along so that they can do that sort of work, and they often do it surprisingly well for their respective ages. At any level such work takes time and space for reflection, yet we keep kids hopping. I have to wonder how this affects deep, long-term learning.

Consider the demands of a school day for a developing child. (I’ve shadowed kids in various grades for a day, and it’s exhausting.) Now imagine that you have to go home and have products ready for the next day.  Meanwhile, the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex don’t fully mature until the late teens and early twenties. All told, it’s rather amazing how well kids can keep the lizard brain at bay.

Another blog post seems a bit less daunting.