Monday, September 3, 2012

Leadership Week 3- Cheese and Spark Plugs

I'm going to mix analogies a bit here, starting with your "Who Moved My Cheese?" story. The message of that story is that when a method no longer produces the results you want, you need to move on to a new method instead of blaming other people or lamenting that the world is so unfair. And old methods will always stop producing results. It's an important message, but one that I hesitate to apply 100% to schools.

In the discussion forum, I alluded to schools chasing every new reform, as described by Diana Senechal, despite a questionable need to do so. This would be like the mice running to a new location when there is still plenty of cheese left, just because they heard there is also cheese somewhere else. It may be more, it may be less, and that is something that should be considered before making the move.

And that is where the cheese begins to be the spark plug described in the Systems Thinking video. Schools will quickly add a new reading program, or embrace a new method for encouraging positive behavior without considering the role the old system took. Perhaps the old system had played an important role in another area- the old reading system was used in Science and Social Studies, or the old behavior model played a role in many teachers' classroom rules. But when the new program or model is put in place, nobody accounts for the sudden loss of the old supports.

This is a problem that results from authoritarian, top-down leadership. Too often, an administrator makes a decision to incorporate a new program or idea without consulting staff to see if it would actually be the best decision. Or, a committee is formed, but it later becomes obvious that it was a committee on how to incorporate the new model, not if we should incorporate it. A leader who empowers the staff and uses input from everyone in decision making would not constantly chase the new trend.

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