School is not like chess

School is not like chess.

It's a bad analogy.

It's a bad analogy because if we equate school to chess, we will be led to believe that the role of school leadership is to merely manipulate the pieces in the game. In chess, it makes sense to move your pawns around like pawns.

But education's stakeholders are not pawns.

Students are not pawns.

Teachers are not pawns.

Parents are not pawns.

Change by decree is wrong regardless of the quality of the change, and leadership is sometimes about following the rules only so you can change them. But the rules in chess haven't changed forever, and if we resign ourselves to making school like chess, we might forget that the rules of school are mortal and can be changed.

Prescriptive vs Personalized

Metaphors are important.

For too long, parenting and schooling has taken on the metaphor of the factory. At one time, this was convenient because factories are predictable. And therefore can be prescriptive.

The problem with the factory model is that life isn't predictable and so when we attempt to be overly prescriptive, things go awry.

Alfie Kohn explains in his book Unconditional Parenting that prescriptive parenting and teaching is a ruse:

I might as well warn you now: What follows will not be a step-by step recipe for How to Raise Good Kids. First of all, I would have to be a nearly perfect parent myself, which I'm not, before I presumed to offer other people a definitive, fail-safe guide to raising their children. Second, I have my doubts about the wisdom of such an approach in any case. Very specific suggestions ("When your child says x, you should stand at location y and use z tone of voice to utter the following sentence...) are disrespectful to parents and kids alike. Raising children is not like assembling a home theater system or preparing a casserole, such that you need only follow an expert's instructions to the letter. No one-size-fits-all formula can possibly work for every family, nor can it anticipate an infinite number of situations. Indeed, books that claim to offer such formulas, while eagerly sought by moms and dads desperate for a miracle cure, usually do more harm than good.

For some, the conditional nature of rewards and punishments have grown tiresome, and there are many teachers and parents who are eager for a new game plan.

However, making the leap from something as prescriptive as if this happens, say this, do that and stand there, to something that resembles less of an instruction booklet can be intimidating.

The factory metaphor is prescriptive and dehumanizing, and it has reached the end of its shelf life.

The organic metaphor is personalized and humanistic.

Rather than guiding our actions with an instruction book, we need to draw on good pedagogy. Here are two very powerful adages I use to guide my teaching and parenting:

Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

There is a big difference between doing things to children and working with them.

Because one-size-fits few, these adages play out in all sorts of different ways. Rather than standardizing our approach to working with children, they need our personalization.

We're lost, but we're making good time

My sister sent me The Eight Irresistable Principles of Fun, and I was immediately taken by its message. I especially found rule #7 to be appealing for me.

When it comes to the professional development of teachers, we tend too often to add more and more stuff that we have to do, but rarely do we ever consider the things we need to stop doing. Too often we see the Teacher's Toolbox as one that should have more and more tools. After all, having more tools is better than have less tools? Right?

Well, maybe not.

Metaphors can be fun. And they can be accurate, but sometimes metaphors get us in trouble. There are tools in the Teacher's Toolbox that are broken. Duct tape has no place in a plumber's toolbox because quite frankly, if it's there, he might use it. Good plumbers don't plumb with duct tape.

Alfie Kohn uses apples metaphorically in his article Education's Rotton Apples:

One recalls the bit of folk wisdom—confirmed by generations of farmers and grocers—warning that a rotten apple can spoil a barrel full of good apples. It would be pushing things to postulate a kind of educational ethylene released by traditional classroom practices, analogous to the gas given off by bad fruit. But it does seem that the quest for optimal results may sometimes require us to abandon certain practices rather than simply piling other, better practices on top of them.

I think his point is well taken. Teachers are mistaken when they take on a 'more the merrier' kind of approach. Here are but a few things that teachers and parents need to stop doing.

• Teachers need to stop grading.
• Parents and teachers need to stop rewarding and punishing students
• Coaches need to stop being distracted by the pursuit of winning
• We all need to stop blaming their kids
• Schools need to stop chasing high test scores
• Teachers need to stop giving multiple choice exams

Yogi Berra who once said, "we're lost, but we're making good time." Too often we are a little careless, a little mindless about our practices. That's not to say that we have bad intentions. In fact, I am prepared to say that most teachers and most parents are good people with the best of intentions who just need to rethink the pedagogy behind what they are doing.

So when step #7 from The Eight Irresistable Principles of Fun says "If it's the wrong hole, you need to stop digging," the problem is most people don't know they are digging the wrong hole. If they did, they would have stopped long ago. But when we are challenged by others to rethink the hole we are digging, we sometimes meet them with defensiveness or even disdain.

Nassim Taleb put it this way:

People reserve standard compliments to those who do not threaten to their pride; the others they praise by calling "arrogant".

Am I threatening your pride right now? I might be, especially if I am challenging the way you teach or parent. There's no doubt this could all be a little threatening, but it's what you do with this challenge that really matters. In the end, I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just here to influence you. To get you to think and rethink.

What hole are you still digging that need not be dug?

Good, Bad & Ugly Metaphors

There are a mountain of metaphors out their for education - some are good, some are bad and some are ugly.

The good metaphors for education are those that label learning as being organic and natural. Making a seed or plant metaphorical of learning is good.

The bad metaphors for education are those that label learning as being man-made. Making sports metaphorical of learning is bad.

And the ugly metaphors are those that imply that learning is both conditional and unnatural. Making business or work metaphorical of learning is ugly.

School is like work. Students need to be like a good employee - good students get paid with good grades while bad students risk being fired. These are all ugly metaphors.

School is like sports. Three strikes and you are out, everyday class is a tryout and you better perform or risk getting cut, and you must compete with others if you want to win the game of life - these are all bad metaphors.

School is like a seed. You plant it and nurture it. Provide it with a healthy environment with the conditions necessary for healthy growth and development. You mindfully observe growth while knowing when to measure and when to trust it. You know that growth requires a certain amount of faith and intuitive thinking - you can't dig up the seed too often for precise measurment without killing it. This is a good metaphor.

Not all metaphors were born equal. Some are better than others, and we must be careful which metaphors we subscribe too.