The Danger of Groupthink in Schools

As much as I continuously tout working together as a positive solution for education, there is a dark side that we are more vulnerable to than many other profession: groupthink. It explains what I think may be our gravest obstacle to progress: a continuous leaping from bandwagon to bandwagon rather than simply moving forward.

Groupthink, as explained by workplace psychologist Dr. Jennifer Newman on CBC earlier this month (Early Edition, April 3), is a kind of group peer pressure that leads to bad, even unethical or immoral decisions. Teams that lack diversity are most in danger of falling into groupthink and educators, given their very similar education and mindset (by and large, a certain kind of person chooses the profession), are a fairly homogenous group. Add a strong leader, either a charismatic or autocratic one, and the danger of groupthink increases. This is further exacerbated, in education, by the fact that most of us have never left school – high school to university and back to school as a teacher – because we are good at “doing school”, that is, doing what we’re told.

Groupthink begins, of course, from a positive position. We want to do the right thing. We want to improve. We want to get beyond talking in circles, dithering, and scattering our energies to move forward. Perhaps where the switch to groupthink occurs is at the point where we believe that to work together effectively we must have consensus and cohesion above all else. Dr. Newman points out that this focus leads to “dehumanizing others”: it is “us” – the cohesive team – against “them” – the dissenters.

The team then builds its coherence around a set of beliefs about what’s right and what actions ought to take place, gathering information and opinions that shore up their beliefs – and ignoring what doesn't. As the “evidence” stacks up, the team begins to believe that they have right on their side and grow what Dr. Newman calls “unchecked arrogance.” They have no need to listen to the dissenters: they are right. Even if some people on the team have a niggling feeling that something is wrong, they don’t speak up.  They want to be team players.  And more insidious, they fear rejection or even job loss. In fact, instead of dissent, the opposite happens: the team starts to hold back any information that doesn’t fit, and what pioneering groupthink researcher Irving Janus termed a cadre of “mind-guards” actively keep dissenting information back from the leader or team.

It’s hardly surprising that another symptom of groupthink is an illusion of invulnerability – whatever the team does will work because they are in the right! They succumb next to collective rationalization: if something doesn't work out as envisioned, it can be explained by the fact that “the others” are not being team players. After a while, as the group continues to shut out, exclude and guard against dissenting voices, the illusion of unanimity grows: “everyone” agrees (at least anyone who is anyone – or wants to keep the job).

Perhaps it isn't so dangerous in times of plenty. But now, “in difficult financial times, when hard decisions must be made” (the pat phrase), continued lavish spending on the in-group’s projects and special positions means deeper cuts everywhere else, even at the expense of foundational programs: libraries, for example, special education, the basic support for classrooms from secretaries to educational assistants to custodians, books, teaching supplies.

It is unsurprising that after a while, when the wildly optimistic promises are unfulfilled and the unchecked bad decisions (these deep cuts made to key programs, positions and resources to continue to fund the team’s vision) begin to erode the well-being of the enterprise, the in-group is dismantled.  Unfortunately, all too often, they are replaced by yet another strong leader who promises that the problem will be eradicated:  he or she will build a cohesive team!

And we begin again.

Powering Education by Unplugging

Working together isn't easy. It is more often awkward, frustrating, time-consuming and humbling than it is meaningful, joyful or inspiring. But the trouble is, when you’re doing big things like teaching children, you simply can’t do it alone. You either give up (you still go to work each day, but you’re only going through the motions) or you deplete your energy in the effort.

In education, small groups joined by common interests, goals and passions often work together. The hard work, though, and the work that matters most to our children who can only rarely pick and choose their teachers, is to make sure that we all work together even when we don’t exactly agree, when our methods differ, our personalities clash. What matters most is that the community where the children learn is one of connection, that if their teacher is overwhelmed, someone in the next room is ready to help; if a teacher is sad or frustrated, there is a team on hand to buoy them up; if a teacher struggles to support a particular child, he can reach out to say, I don’t know what to do; if a teacher’s methods are no longer supporting the students, the team can provide side-by-side help for learning new approaches. And the teachers each know it will be all right that they don’t know everything, that they find things difficult, that they need help. They know that they, too, are needed to support colleagues who don’t have all the answers, who struggle where they are strong, who need a shoulder once in a while.

The problems that most need to be solved so that each child has a teacher who is working at an optimal level are never ones that can be fixed by clicking for answers on Pinterest. In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s the opposite, a way to bury ourselves in busyness, so that we don’t have to think about hard things. I’m even beginning to think that an educator’s global connections, our twitter conversations, on-line seminars, Google hangouts, blog feeds and Facebook follows matter only marginally for our kids. Worse, I worry that these virtual communities have seduced our attention away from the connections in our schools that do matter. And who can blame us? When we can work with the whole world, we need only pick people who think like us. There is none of the frustration of diversity. We can turn our connections on and off as we get busy. We can “support” our global colleagues with a simple “like” or happy face. And if a particular group or individual no longer inspires us, we just delete them from our feeds. Best of all, in the virtual world, we can be polished and interesting as we craft our replies and showcase the good moments. In real life, we can’t air-brush out the stack of unmarked papers at the back of the classroom, the boy with his head on his desk refusing to work, the failed lessons, the exasperation and weariness: we can’t pretend that we are fine.

Working together day-to-day is hard and humbling. But I’m not sure there is anything more important. In fact, I'm almost certain, despite my continued infatuation with the promise and possibilities of technology, that the answers to our complex problems won’t be found by plugging in to the global community, but by unplugging to join hands with the people nearby.

Is it possible that being bored is a good thing for kids?

When I was a girl, I lived “off the grid.”  We were raised in small logging communities: no TV – or at best, one fuzzy channel on a clear day – no movie theaters or malls and even the radio reception was spotty. What’s more, I lived miles away from my friends – a long bike ride unless we could cajole our mother into driving us. Our world was slow. And quiet.

But now, even I wonder what we did all day. Weren't you bored, my youngest son often asks when I tell him about my childhood. I do remember sometimes telling my mom I was. Are you, she’d say in her dangerous tone of voice. Then I’ll find you something to do. And we’d scurry off, because of course she meant that she’d send us out to weed the garden or stack wood or pick up sticks in the newly plowed field.

I remember long, long stretches on a rainy weekend playing gin rummy with my brother or hours and hours of complicated Barbie play with my sister that included using the Sears catalogue, cardboard and my mother’s box of fabric scraps to create additional props. I’m reading Why School by Will Richardson right now. He extols the creative capacity and independence that virtual game play facilitates in our children. He shares the story of his son who, one boring rainy morning, learned how to play the online game Minecraft, creating, by the end of the day, a beautiful house, completely furnished, on top of a mountain. He marvels that his son figured it out on his own by reading online manuals, watching videos, connecting with friends. But, thinking back, no one taught Kim and me how to design our Barbie houses and we cobbled them together, not from pre-fabricated parts in a digital space, but from whatever we could find. It seems to me that the play we engaged in, even though it wasn't tweeted about, posted on Facebook or immortalized as a YouTube video, was at least as creative; we were certainly independent in our play in a way that gamers can’t possibly be. We created the game. We designed (and revised at our convenience) the rules.  We built the game pieces.

Richardson acclaims the digital world where “real learning happens anytime, anywhere, with anyone we like.” Certainly, given a choice, my brother would never have played with sisters and I wouldn't choose to play with a little girl three whole years younger than I. Our game play would have been much more sophisticated. Who would choose scraps of paper, fabric and cardboard if you could have virtual castles and luxurious furniture in any colour you wanted. But thinking back, learning to play with whoever is in the room and creating with whatever you've got are important skills, that even now, in the 21st century, I use daily.

On the other hand, I rarely have to fill long empty stretches of time. I have emails to respond to, a twitter stream to read, Facebook posts to ponder, Pinterest boards to peruse. I listen to the beeps and chirps from my phone, the notifications from my computer; I have a stacks of book everywhere and if the one I want isn't available, I download it instantly. I am connected to everyone, everywhere; I have instant access to everything. There are no quiet moments.

It’s easy to get used to being always busy. Just recently, while waiting for a ceremony to begin, I was sitting with a table of people I didn’t know well; I was peripheral to the desultory conversation and itched to take out my phone to scan my twitter feed. The wait was too slow. I was…bored.

Kids today, of course, have no qualms about taking out their devices. In Ontario, a school board recently moved to block Netflix and YouTube. One third of their bandwidth was being used by students to stream their entertainment, rather than for education. One girl said in the interview, that yes, she often watched her favourite shows on Netflix whenever things got dull in class or when she was finished whatever she was meant to do.

I hear it often from students. I’m “done.” What do I do now? They are uncomfortable in the quiet space between activity, the space of day-dreams and doodling, wondering, reading, adding, extending, pondering, consolidating, rethinking, and creating a whole new world with from nothing more than scraps of paper or bits of wood and whoever is nearby to imagine with you. And while the Internet is certainly a place of connection, creativity and passion, it is more often used to effortlessly consume, to fill time, to pacify our mind’s search for meaning and meaningful activity.

One of the great criticisms of school is this: it’s boring. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s a bad thing.
 

Should children listen more and talk less in school?

Recently, a Snuneymuxw elder came to speak to my students. She softly insisted that they keep still, sit up straight, remain silent. You cannot listen if you are moving or talking, she said. She gently removed the pencils they were doodling with, placed her hand on tapping fingers, gestured slouching students to straightness and soon, like some sort of sorcerer every teacher wishes she could keep, she had lulled the class into quiet, calm and still. They listened. A student tried to ask a question, but she stopped him: now it is time to listen, she reminded him, not to talk. 

Such a classroom, one of an elder sharing her wisdom and the children, silent, still, attentive, listening – is now, according to the latest pedagogical theories, considered outdated at best and at worst, detrimental to the students. We are told to be a guide on the side, a facilitator, a coach with the children constantly talking, experimenting, discovering concepts rather than listening, following their passions rather than receiving information or ideas. If we must talk, we are to give students doodle paper, fiddle toys and special bounce or wobble chairs so they never need to be still. Every 20 minutes, we should have them run, dance, skip, jump, clap.

Yet anyone who knows children knows this: they can sit silent and unmoving for hours in front of a television, computer or game system.

What, I wonder, is the wisdom they are absorbing as their attention is thus captured? What values are instilled as they stare at the screen, attention complete, watching reality shows and playing first person shooter games?  

And what wisdom from their years in school - or do we now believe there is none - do we hope they may take with them into the future? Do they have to listen, I wonder, to hear it?

Taking Time to Notice

I've been thinking about what we notice. Mostly it’s the noisy moments, like the Olympics, when athletes in obscure sports like bob-sleighing get a chance to shine and then sink back into obscurity for another four years, eking out a living to follow their passion. Or the noisy people like Justin Bieber or the Kardashians (I’m still not sure who they are, but they keep coming up in the magazines I read while I’m waiting at the supermarket checkout).  

In smaller circles, the noisy people are those willing to tell their story. When you think about it, most people simply do things, rather than tell about them. They don’t even think they have a story to tell. When I was working with teachers to use technology, I fought an uphill battle with social media, not so much because they were technophobes, but because they didn't like to express themselves in such a public forum. They didn't feel that what they thought ought to be shared widely. Who wants to hear about us, they’d say.

So we are told only a handful of the stories worth telling and we listen to even fewer. It isn’t surprising, since most of us are busy with our own tasks and trials, that we lift our eyes only when there is sufficient noise. When I first started at my new school in my new position teaching in an entirely different world (elementary verses secondary), I was hit by the tsunami of new things that left me reeling. I scarcely noticed anything except the challenge directly in front of me.

But lately, I’m starting to lift my head a little.  I watched the Olympics. I read a few books. I paid attention to some of the things my colleagues do. And I was reminded of how much I wish we would make more noise about their work.

Here’s one small story.

Every Friday after school (on Friday – after a gruelling week of teaching hard-to-teach students), my colleague runs an open gym for basketball. Anyone can come, but the grade 6 and 7 boys are the most regular attenders, along with a scattering of girls and little boys, some only in grade one. They split into teams and play a game, the big boys, learning that a team is whatever you make of it, become coaches themselves as they pass to their smaller and clumsy team-mates, yell at them to run forward, to fall back, to hold up their hands, to follow their check. It's loud and raucous; there are often quarrels and drama, hurt knees and bruised feelings, but the gym is open. Every Friday. For two years.

The students, of course, don’t thank her. Parents don’t really think about her commitment when they pick up their children. It just seems like another thing schools do; they don’t realize that she could be sitting at home with her feet up reading a book, at the pub drinking an end-of-the-week pint with colleagues or even just in her classroom reorganizing and planning so that she has one less hour to work on the weekend.  Instead, she’s running up and down the basketball court.

Earlier this month, our intermediate boys had their first basketball game of the season. They won handily. The best part for me, watching them, was the full bench of players from our small school rotating onto the court regularly, the way they played as a team, the way the strong players passed the ball or ran a screen to let others get the glory – and, above all, the stories they told about themselves the next day.

Behind the scenes, not even a part of the stories they tell – what do they understand, after all? – is Twila. Thank you.  I just wanted to say I noticed.

A Dream Team for Education

I've been thinking about football.

Photo by Craig Letourneau

This season the John Barsby Football team won the BC High School AA Championship. Again. Against the odds. A tiny high school in a low socio-demographic area. How? “We’re a resilient team,” says player Kyle Vollet, "We could be down by 20 and this team, we're going to come back to the huddle, we're going to look at each other and say, we've got this, we can do this." Team-mate Brody Taylor tells us, “With this team…we never, ever lose focus. We never give up and we play to the last play.” And I dream of a team like that for education: that day by day, year over year, bouncing back from losses, never losing focus, we make it possible for students, all students, to win the big cup in their final year – graduate at the top of their class and have every door to future paths flung open for them.

Why can’t school be more like football, one of the Barsby Bulldog players asked me one day as I tried desperately, fruitlessly, to engage him in a task for English. I wonder, too – or, at least, I wonder if the teams’s ongoing success and latest victory can yield fresh insights into possibilities for education. I know that if it weren't for football, the student wouldn't even have been sitting in my class at all.  Sitting isn't quite the word – lolling, perhaps. Every day (when he showed up), it was an enormous effort to cajole him to pick up his pen, write a sentence, read a page, engage in a conversation. Yet I watched him arrive at school before light even broke to practice football. He committed to long extra hours every day, to pushing himself to the limit, to team play, to fierce competition.

Of course, football has two strong advantages: students choose to play and the coach can choose to remove the player if he acts inappropriately or does not participate fully. But there’s more than that. I keep trying to figure out the magic, that something that I can take and use for education.

I have thought that the key is simply being a team – working together – in schools and across school districts. I worry that the extraordinary efforts in each classroom aren't enough: after all, the game for each child is 13 years long. If we were a team, gains made in one year could be built on in the next as we reviewed game tapes and players’ notes together, solidified winning plays, honed successful practice routines. By the time I met the football star in grade 11, he had shut down so thoroughly that it seemed improbable that our five months together could open new vistas of learning for him. (But I tried.  Hard. As did each individual teacher before me.)

I just don’t know how we can make a cohesive K-12 team possible. After all, it’s not as though we don’t make the effort to work together in education. We are endlessly creating visions, mission statements, goals, and strategies. We are asked to adopt the same programs, administer the same assessments, use the same language, attend the same workshops, so that students can build on each year and we can track student progress over the years, intervene, support, and enhance learning gains effectively to make the “big win” possible. It makes sense, but it never seems to work.

The trouble, we’re most often told, is that teachers aren't team players. And it’s true – at least it’s true that a good portion of teachers don’t “buy in” to the “game plan.” But lately I've begun to suspect that many of us feel like we’re pieces on a game-board being played, rather than part of a team that plays. It’s hard to put your heart into another set of plans that, at best, do nothing to improve the day-to-day experience of our work in classrooms, and at worst, exhaust our energies through demands to attend yet another series of workshops to learn yet more strategies, to organize yet more resources, and to spend yet more hours in our evening and on weekends to revamp lessons.

It seems possible that we are missing some key ingredient for building a team that wins.  Coach Stevenson, in talking about his team’s success, shares some of his practices – goal setting, embedding your message in everything you do, hanging your hat on a good drill, finishing strong each day, and remembering “fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals” – but emphasizes that we need to first be clear about the difference between a strategy and a tactic.  A strategy, he says, must answer the following questions:
1.  Who are we?
2.  What are we trying to do ultimately?
3.  How will we do it?
4.  What resources and means will we employ in doing it?

If you get the strategy right but tactics wrong, he says, you can remedy the tactics and succeed.  If you get the wrong strategy, you can refine forever, but still "lose." Or as Sun Tzu said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

So who are we and what are we trying to do ultimately? If our efforts don’t enhance our work in the classroom, it’s hard to understand what the goal of the game is anymore. Certainly we can’t be a team and we don’t have strategies. Instead, we relentlessly employ tactics and the noise is deafening. We rush madly off, it seems, in all directions, depending on the latest government initiative – exhausting ourselves as we run the ball from back-to-basics to passion-driven education – and then around in circles with ongoing district “innovations”. We pause now and then to notice a pocket of excellence somewhere and relentlessly borrow their tactics to shift directions once again, dashing down the field toward yet another goal, leaving behind us the assorted debris of abandoned plans:  phonics cards, literacy texts, hands-on science kits (with most of the pieces missing), math texts (a new set for every new approach), giant blocks (we found some in our storeroom recently and no one could identify their purpose), colour-coded booklets to support a program we no longer have, kits, rows and rows of binders.

Yet while education leaders in university think tanks, ministry boardrooms and district offices may have lost sight of the goal of the game in the noise of initiatives, roll-outs, glossy hand-outs, expensive speakers flown in from around the world to show us all the latest research, teachers haven’t. They go to work each day, no matter what goes on around them, despite cut-backs in resources, new demands or changing policies, to do their best to coach a diverse group of students to do their best each day.

That’s who we are, after all, and what we are trying to do.  And despite all the sound and fury, we know, too, how we will do it. What, says Sir Ken Robinson, is the irreducible minimum of teaching and learning? The answer is simple:  the relationship between the teacher and the learner.
    
So how do we ensure the final win for each child? Maybe the extraordinary work of classroom teachers is enough. Indeed, perhaps it is the only thing that matters. Learning, after all, is intimate, individual, even quirky. Each day is a new game and any teacher with a modicum of experience will tell you that sticking with the game plan created the previous day, never mind one drafted in a board office by people who have never met the students, is impossible if you mean to meet the changing needs of students in a dynamic group. There is no magic and the diversity of students is surely met best by diverse teachers.

But what would happen, I wonder, if we put all our time, resources and energy into the game that matters? What if teachers weren't distracted and exhausted by all the noise of “change” while they focused on their classroom needs? What if they were given the autonomy and power and resources they needed? What if, instead of asking teachers to do more, to add, extend, change, improve, we changed and improved everything around the teacher and ensured that everything that was not directly related to learning in the classroom was provided by a community of support. What if she had only to say – I’d like to show a series of engaging video clips about different careers – and the clips arrived, ready to use. (This is something I actually spent several hours working to find, download and save; how wonderful to imagine that done for me.) What if the structures for ensuring student health were seamlessly integrated, the organization for parent connection designed and maintained, access to data and information at our fingertips, help for problem-solving a call away, time to work with colleagues available in an “as needed” basis, flexible spaces for team teaching a priority (my colleague and I recently squeezed two classes into our multipurpose room so we could work and learn together, wedging tables for our students between extra TVs, storage boxes, a popcorn maker, a piano and trolleys for the lunch program).

I still get stuck on my worry that students need connected coaching over time. Yet perhaps, free from the need to implement plans that don’t mean anything, free for the burden of doing everything from planning lessons to assessing students to organizing field trips and extra-curricular activities, to filing, photocopying, phoning, finding resources - classroom teachers will reach out to build a systematic and intentional network to support students and each other, to share practice, to create meaningful connections for students, with students and as learners ourselves. Perhaps, free to focus on work that impacts their students, teachers will build connections that are flexible enough to meet in-the-moment needs, dense enough to support a wide variety of needs over time. Indeed, I don’t doubt it.

Coach Stevenson, in his interview after the Bulldogs' big win said, "I'm bubbling. I feel like I could be Maria, swinging around in the meadows of the Swiss Alps right now singing the Sound of Music theme."  I can begin to imagine that teachers, buoyed by meaningful support, might want to sing with joy at the end of the day – and even in June – rather than dragging themselves out, exhausted and discouraged.  And outside the school building, I can even picture reporters vying to interview them, asking how they managed to get Jimmy to read this year when he didn't even recognize letters until November and Tom to engage in collaborative tasks without hitting anyone, and Joanne to find a way to love learning when at the beginning of the year she sat under her desk and cried.

Perhaps this is our best hope: each teacher in her own room, never giving up, never losing focus, doing her best to coach the team in her class, then passing the students on to the next teacher who does his best to coach them. Each of us has an eye on the main prize: ensuring that each child builds the knowledge, skills and attitudes to reach their potential and to contribute to the world we all dream of. Each of us uses our strengths and gifts to build on the work of the previous coach and support the efforts of the next coach. And all around us, a team of support stands ready to help with whatever we need – and fans cheering wildly.

I’d love to be a part of such a dream team.

Dear teachers, you need to do a better job of teaching our kids. Sincerely, non-teachers.

In Matt Walsh’s blog post, entitled “Dear parents, you need to control your kids.  Sincerely, non-parents,” he describes a mother in a grocery store who is dealing with a toddler in a tantrum.  The mom was “sticking to her guns” and refusing to buy the shrieking toddler a sugary breakfast cereal.  A fellow shopper said loudly to Walsh, “Man, some people need to learn how to control their f**king kids.”  Walsh, a father of twins, unsurprisingly disagreed:  as he put it, people calculate in this simple equation – misbehaving child equals bad parent.  “I’m no math major,” he writes, “but that calculus makes no sense. A kid going berserk at a grocery store doesn’t indicate the quality of his parents, any more than a guy getting pneumonia after he spends six hours naked in the snow indicates the quality of his doctor. Grocery stores are designed to send children into crying fits. All of the sugary food, the bright packaging, the toys, the candy — it’s a minefield.”

His post is a response to the critical bystander:  “Parenting,” he says, “is the easiest thing in the world to have an opinion about, but the hardest thing in the world to do.”  Not quite, I would argue.  Teaching, I think, is the easiest thing in the world to have an opinion about, but the hardest thing in the world to do.  People – and whole systems – use this metric:  under-performing students equals bad teacher.  They don’t take into consideration that the environment – in schools, in our current culture, and, in many cases, in homes as well – are designed to ensure failure.

First, we don’t just have two or three children, but up to thirty.  We don’t get to watch and learn and understand our children over time, but have them dropped in our lives for a five or ten months.

We spend six hours with them, with occasional forays out – in a single room.

We are expected, in the grade 6/7 class I currently teach, for example, in a ten month span, to use phrases from the newly reduced BC curriculum, to get them to understand that language and literature help us find meaning and joy, to respond to and create multiple types of texts; to think critically and creatively, and connect with others; to use language with increasing artistry and precision; to use multiple strategies to develop, construct, and apply mathematical understanding through problem solving; to inductively and deductively reason and use logic to explore, make connections, predict, analyze, generalize, and make conclusions; to assess and compare the significance of people, places, events, and developments over time and place and from different perspectives; to ask questions and corroborate inferences about the content and origins of multiple sources.  That’s just a fraction of the list for Socials Studies, Math and English.  Add Science, PE, Health, French, Fine Arts.

And I won’t even begin to list the variety of needs of each individual child, their unique challenges, their varying capacities to meet complex learning outcomes or to sit in hard plastic chairs crammed in a single room with many others.  Like the aisles in a grocery store, it’s a recipe for tantrums.

What’s more, it’s even more problematic than it was even thirty years ago and not only because all children, no matter how many learning challenges they have, are now integrated into the small space:  children are used to a fast-paced, high-colour, individualized world.  Most children in Canadian communities have a vast assortment of toys, yards or parks to play in, after-school clubs and activities to choose from.  At the very least, you would have to look for a long time to find a child who didn't have TV with a gazillion channels and a stack of video-games for fast-paced, action-packed, just-right entertainment.  School, on the other hand, is slow.  We are not even close, in our district, to having the capacity to personalize learning with technology. Learning comes from books, photocopied sheets, teacher lessons, videos.  Students are always waiting for others or waiting for help while others move ahead, slotted into schedules that are never quite right for everyone.

And in addition (as though there are not sufficient difficulties), children today are raised to different norms than they were when the notion of universal education was conceived: mindless obedience to adults is no longer instilled in children.  And while this is a positive change in many ways, it isn't helpful if you are a sole adult in charge of 30 children for a day in a small room.  Everything a teacher asks is contested over and over.  The pace, already slow, begins to crawl.

It takes the smallest imagination to agree that teaching must be hard.  But you can’t go a moment without criticism.  Walsh identifies two types of people who criticize parents whose children throw tantrums in public. First are the non-parents, whom he can forgive.  As he says, they don’t know what they are talking about. The second, he says, are the parents with grown children who judge other parents.  I think all parents have had a mother-in-law or grandmother or “friendly” neighbour who reminds us that all of her children were sleeping through the night at three months and potty trained by the time they were 18 months old. Particularly galling, Walsh notes, are parents who state that their kids weren't attached to electronics like kids nowadays. Of course – given there were no electronics! Children, I often hear, listened to teachers back in the day. Yes. But now they don’t. And it isn't because we no longer have the magical qualities of those long-ago teaching wonders. (Anyone remember the strap? Does anyone remember what happened at home if you got in trouble with the teacher way back in those days? Now it’s the teacher who is more likely to be in trouble for not providing a sufficiently interesting and adequately adapted program and thus provoking the child to swear and throw chairs.)

A good swath of the public who criticize teachers are not teachers. One can hardly blame them for being better armchair teachers, yelling at the coach.  There is, of course, much more at stake than a Stanley Cup – it’s their own child or grandchild or neighbours’ children.  So much rides on our winning in schools.

But I’ve been thinking lately about educators who criticize teachers. Perhaps they are retired or are now university professors or district staff or principals or professional development “gurus.” When they were teaching, students listened, of course; they had routines that worked and every one of the students learned to think critically, to express themselves creatively, and to explore their passions. Having left the classroom myself for several years, I know that part of the problem is the kindness of memory. The daily grind mists over and the highlights stand out. We forget our numerous failures; we remember the wonderful moments, the big successes, the challenges that ended gloriously.

Perhaps most galling, though, are the classroom teachers with “good kids” who judge and advise teachers with challenging classes. They are in an affluent neighbourhood with parents who hire tutors, provide their students with healthy lunches, regular bedtimes, after-school care, who have read to them since infancy. Their students blog and tweet and create YouTube videos that everyone admires; the children work independently and thoughtfully and care about learning; the teachers share their strategies for this success. But these children have not spent most of their lives in ministry care, have never spent days without food, have not seen their parents going in and out of treatment for addictions; they have not missed hundreds of days of school.  The advice, always well-meant, fuels only an overwhelming sense of inadequacy or teeth-gnashing frustration that produces nothing positive.  Indeed, advice is perhaps the least helpful thing that can be offered.  Books, volunteer hours, coats, food, and toys might at least be of use.

Why do educators criticize each other (and truly, “advice” is always criticism) when they know they have the hardest job in the world? Happily - and horribly - I stand in a position to answer the question.  As a district learning coordinator, I have been such a person, an educator who criticized teachers, if not directly, then at least indirectly by bringing my workshops to a school I didn't know to teachers whose practice I didn't adequately honour. It’s not that I’m a bad person or even an arrogant one: indeed, I’m an appallingly passionate educator hoping to do my best to ensure success for each child.  I thought my best was to showcase “best practice” and to connect communities through common ideas and the latest research.

Five years out of the classroom convinced me that it wasn't helpful at all.  Back inside the classroom now, I keep asking: what will really help me?  I don’t know.  I know what won’t help:  yet another new strategy or a different program or a “new” approach to literacy.

I’m pretty sure we are on the edge of a revolution in education.  We simply cannot sustain schools in their current form.  How they should look next, I’m not sure.

But I do know this: teachers are not the problem. Teacher training is not the answer. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that answers are not the answer. As Peter Block says, "People want answers, tools, things they can use tomorrow: if you feed that appetite nothing will change tomorrow.” We keep seeking to “fix” rather than transform. Our world and our goals have changed so dramatically since universal education was designed that we need to rethink, but not by simply providing a series of new “answers.”  And although it feels good to be “doing something,” there is too much at stake to continually spend our time, energy and resources to follow yet another new trend.  We need, instead, to start with questions.  As Peter Block says, “Questions bring us together; answers drive us apart – everyone has an opinion."  Indeed.

The trouble with teaching is that everyone has an opinion and no one is willing to “shut up and listen” to use Ernesto Sirolli’s phrase:  people keep reorganizing the deck chairs around us.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if, instead, we committed to working together, everyone who has a stake in education (and surely that’s all of us), to ask questions - not questions that point fingers at individuals and how to fix them, but that point, rather, to a way for us to create a sustainable system before we sink.