“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933
Change is hard inside schools. It’s easier to keep doing the same things over and over and hope for different results. Doing things differently takes courage, leadership, teamwork, and a results-minded focus.
Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools was published back in 2006 and was written by a team of educational researchers led by Tony Wagner and Robert Kegan. Wagner’s team wrote chapters on external forces of change inside schools, like bell schedules, curriculum, instructional strategies, and assessment. But it was the chapters written by Bob Kegan, a licensed psychologist and practicing therapist, that caught by attention as a principal trying to lead change.
Kegan emphasizes that whenever human beings decide on a commitment, there are several competing commitments that stand in the way of achieving the desired one. For example, if a school staff decided to make a commitment to decrease the 9th grade failure rate by half, then more than likely competing commitments will need addressing. A competing commitment might be a group of teachers thinking “we can’t decrease the 9th grade failure rate by half because there are too many 9th graders who don’t turn their work in on time.”
Kegan and his team go on to say that behind every competing commitment there is a hidden commitment. Hidden commitments are usually the truth behind the competing commitment, like “we can’t decrease the 9th grade failure rate by half because our 9th graders are just too lazy to turn their work in on time.” Sometimes, hidden commitments can demonstrate the worst of us, like “we can’t decrease the 9th grade failure rate by half because we have too many black, brown, and poor kids in the class that just don’t care.”
Kegan concludes by making the point that if you add up all of the competing commitments and hidden commitments interfering with the desired commitment, then you will discover something called your “big assumptions.”
And “big assumptions” are what prevent us from making change. Bell schedules, improved curriculum, instructional strategies, and better assessment practices aren’t the change makers. Confronting your “big assumptions” is.
Kegan tells us there are two “big assumptions” all of us struggle with in our daily lives. They are fear of failure and fear of the unknown, and sometimes it’s difficult to separate the two.
So, the real reason a school won’t think it’s possible to decrease the 9th grade failure rate by half isn’t really because of 9th graders not turning their work on time, being lazy, or being black, brown, or poor. The real reason is fear of failure and/or the unknown.
I ran across a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review titled “How to Overcome Your Fear of the Unknown.” It was written by Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr, the first a professor and the second an entrepreneur.
Furr and Furr being by writing:
“Humans are wired to fear the unknown. That’s why uncertainty – whether at the macro level of a global economic, health, or geopolitical crisis or at the micro level (Will I get that job? Will this venture be successful? Am I on the right career path?) – can feel nerve-racking, exhausting, and even debilitating. However, that gut reaction leads people to miss a crucial fact: Uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin.”
“Consider the achievements you’re most proud of, the moments that transformed your life, the relationships that make your life worth living. We’ll bet that they all happened after a period of uncertainty – one that probably felt stressful but that you nevertheless pushed through to accomplish something great.”
Furr and Furr offer four principles to help you confront “the big assumptions” of fear-related challenges:
- “Reframe Your Situation – Every innovation, every change, every transformation – personal or professional – comes with potential upsides and downsides. And though most of us instinctively focus on the latter, it’s possible to shift that mindset and decrease our fear.”
- “Prime Yourself for New Risks – Balance, understanding what risks you have a natural aversion to or an affinity with, and taking smaller risks earlier in the process are all important when confronting your fears.”
- “Do Something – Taking action is one of the most important parts of facing uncertainty, since you learn with each step you take. Research by Timothy Ott and Kathleen Eisenhardt demonstrates that most successful breakthroughs are produced by a series of small steps, not giant bet-the-farm efforts.”
- “Sustain Yourself – According to Ben Feringa, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on molecular machines that could one day power nanobots that repair the pipes in your house or keep diseases out of your blood, scientific discovery happens only after acing uncertainty. That means, he says, you have to ‘get resilient at handling the frustration that comes with it.’ His approach includes both emotional hygiene (attending to emotions – much as you would a physical wound – so that they don’t turn into paralyzing self-doubt or unproductive rumination) and reality checks (in which you recognize that failure is just part of the process.)”
I wish I could tell you that I was successful helping my traditional school faculty confront their “big assumptions” and rid themselves of their fear of failure and the unknown. The truth is that my faculty was much more comfortable working on bell schedules, curriculum, instructional strategies, and building better assessments. So, and it pains me to say this, I never really led real change inside schools for the betterment of my/our kids.
That’s one of the reasons I think it’s time for a new system of learning, one that can confront fear as only fear itself.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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