Trying to Do the Wrong Things Better

Last week the BIG Questions Institute released their bi-weekly update and their message to their readers was spot on:

“Here’s a frame for thinking about our approach to education in this fraught moment.”

“We’re trying to do the wrong thing righter.”

“Let us first say that we really believe that the vast majority of people who go into teaching and school leadership care about kids, want them to learn, hope for them to thrive and be joyful in their lives.”

“But what if despite our best intentions, our current practices and pedagogies are really serving us instead of serving our kids?”

“We’ve asked questions like these for years, but right now, as the time-worn narrative around ‘education’ seems to be buckling, they feel like they need to be asked again.”

“Do kids learn better and become more prepared for life today when we separate out the content into different subjects, or is it just easier for us?”

“Do kids learn better and become more prepared for life today when we have every one of them pretty much go through the same curriculum in the same way, or is it just easier for us?”

“Do kids learn better and become more prepared for life today when we have them turn off all of their technology in school, or is it just easier for us?”

“Do kids learn better and become more prepared for life today when we rank and sort them by grades and test scores, or is it just easier for us?”

“Increasingly, there’s a compelling argument to be made that the experience we create for kids in schools is the wrong experience for the learning that kids need to do today. And, that the ‘improvements’ or ‘transformations’ that we aspire to are really just trying harder to do the wrong things righter.”

“And that the righter we are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger we get.”

“I get it. There’s not a lot of bandwidth or energy to really step back and ask ‘are we doing the right thing?’ or ‘are we trying to do the wrong things right?’”

“This is really hard because it’s hard to admit we may be doing the wrong thing. That would force us to look deeply not just at practice but at the way we think about our own value and expertise.”

“And yet now, as more and more people around the world begin to reflect deeply on what’s most important in their own lives, and life on the planet in general, as hard as it is, it may be the perfect time to go there.”

“Frankly, the future may depend on it. (No pressure.)”

Hire better teachers.

Hire better principals.

Develop improved curriculum.

Utilize better teaching strategies.

Develop improved tests.

Those five intentions above pretty much describe my nearly 35 years in public education – from 1984 to 2018. And yet, it would be safe to say that the public education system I worked in all those years didn’t do what it needed to do to make more of our kids smarter and stronger – especially those who were black, brown, and poor.

The BIG Questions Institute tells us that “[They] get it. There’s not a lot of bandwidth or energy to really step back and ask ‘are we doing the right thing?’ or ‘are we trying to do the wrong things right?’”

Wrong!

I lived a career of trying to do the wrong things right, and what did that get the kids who most needed a different approach to learning? Learning opportunities filled with frustration and failure.

So, today, we must answer the question “Are we doing the right thing?” with a resounding “NO!”

Let’s stop “trying to do the wrong things right” and instead do the right thing by creating new, out of school learning opportunities for all young learners to access, choose from, and profit by.

Til tomorrow. SVB