Zak's Weekly Musings (January 17, 2022)

Last week, I wrote a bit about the relationship between our professional goals and the structural barriers that might impede our ability to realize them. When you examine the grammar of a school day, there are likely myriad features that you could point to that are preventing you from attaining your goals. These range from class size to contact time to the sheer strain of a 6-class day. In education, there are sacred cows all around us – those things that we do because we’ve always done them that way. 

Great and innovative as John Dewey and Francis Parker are, let’s not forget that the progressive education model that they founded is a system that was created over a century ago in a time before computers, before televisions, before airplanes, before cell phones, before radios, before the Internet, before satellites, before brain research, and before equality. 

If we are going to meet our professional goals this school year – or, at least, any goal that’s truly worth pursuing – we are going to have to challenge the longest and longest-held acronym I know: TTWWHADI (That’s the way we have always done it).

Of course, challenging “TTWWHADI” isn’t simple. It’s risky and vulnerable to venture beyond what we’re familiar with. So, how can we know where to start? 

Well, there’s an old saying that goes, "You can tell what's important to someone by looking at their checkbook." I would suggest the same can be said for a gradebook. To help you think about what some of those structural barriers might be that are preventing you from meeting your goal, take a look at your gradebook. Is there coherence between what you value and what students are being graded on? 

We can tell students that they should be open to making mistakes, but our gradebooks might reveal that we reward them for performing in an errorless manner. We might tell students to not pay test scores too much heed, but our gradebooks reveal that test scores are our main source of grades. If there isn’t that total coherence between what we value and what our gradebooks tell us we value, what’s preventing it from happening? Whatever it is, that's the structural barrier that you’ll need to remove to achieve your goal. 

Once you actually identify a structural barrier, what do you do next? This is where IDEO comes in. Check out the Resources Archive to read IDEO’s Design Thinking for Educators toolkit.