Self Sabotaging or inhibiting your career in Education

Self sabotaging is something I've watched a lot in education, it can be devastating to a career.  Self sabotaging is doing things that will inhibit your progression as a teacher or administrator.  One of the self sabotaging criteria is underperformance and a lack of reflective practice. This is at the heart of doing things that are the opposite of what is desired as a teacher or administrator.

Signs that a teacher is underperforming:

- Hiding performance / resisting transparency measures

- Student performance is lower than standardised metrics or moderated results with other classes

- Attempting to deflect/criticise/identify/draw attention to other teachers that may also be underperforming

- A lack of self reflection / lack of evidence that underperformance is being addressed

- An inability/unwillingness to collaborate effectively with all members of the team

- Student/Parent complaints

- Requests for others to do their work or be paid extra for work that is part of their job description

- Unwillingness to contribute outside of 8.30 to 3.00 

- Requirements for admin to regularly intercede due to conflict 

- Lack of modification of identified undesirable behaviours

- actively seek to avoid classroom teaching

- personalising criticism rather than seeking to address an issue

- Fear and discipline is the main motivator to encourage learning

If someone is seeking promotion to HOLA, Student Services or Administration they need to have support that they have the ability to perform in that role and evidence that they have recently performed in that role.  Staff don't often realise that when a leader is requested for a recommendation they cannot over inflate the negative and need to identify what they can do as well as any weaknesses.  All staff have weaknesses that can be addressed over time.  That notwithstanding, underperforming staff seeking promotion are typically unable to show the qualities that would make them competitive for promotion and have some of the following qualities:

Signs of self sabotaging:

- Alienating those whose support is required for promotion

- Creating factions seeking to undermine initiatives to improve student performance 

- Promoting the good old days without promoting the changes that have been successful 

- Being inflexible / cantankerous / obstinant / passive aggressive / passive defiant / avoidant

- inflated opinion of ability

- Not seeking or taking opportunities to display skills and attributes

- low self esteem (depression) / highly inflated self esteem (narcissism) 

- are not clear about their career aspirations

- have not sought assistance with their application / have attracted few mentors

- Seeking to get their own way by "bullying", aggressive or emotional language

These behaviours need to be discouraged as they are not good for the health of the organisation, or the person exhibiting these behaviours as they will often be unaware of why they are not getting the recognition or promotion they believe they deserve.

Bullying is an important one. In today's society no-one should promote someone known for bullying.   This is an absolute headache for admin as a bully will create work for those working around them for the sake of "efficiency" benefits that rarely exist or put people down to raise their own self esteem causing anxiety, low morale and turnover of staff.

Good leadership requires making it clear what desirable and undesirable behaviours are and providing a clear organisational vision. Management is required for compliance issues, where leading staff willingly fails and/or where corrective instruction is required.  Leadership tends to focus on macro decisions regarding the pathway of a faculty (relying on professionalism to interpret correctly the direction given), "micro" management should be minimised to what is absolutely necessary to get a person to fulfil their responsibilities.

Unmanageable staff need to either be limited in scope (typically because they are highly functional in a subset of roles needed by an organisation) and/or be informed that their behaviours are unacceptable, informed as to why, the possible consequences of these behaviours and given a period of time to rectify their behaviour. It should be clear that Management is not bullying, but management should be underpinned by an evidence base, clear communication or an instruction from higher in management.

Covid and Good Enough Teaching

I was talking with a colleague on Friday and conversation returned to online education.  The premise was if online teaching was good enough and more cost effective than online delivery, would schools move to online delivery for students in courses where it was reasonably effective.

The hypothesis was that is is possible for a highly skilled teacher (top 10% of teachers skilled in delivering the course) to deliver highly effective content for a Methods course to a large number of students (>1000).  If this was possible, it would have the potential to reduce costs significantly, as the IT infrastructure has already been significantly implemented (and tested during Covid) and face-to-face teachers would not be required.  If each class is about 20 students, that's 50 teachers at $24000 per year, $1.2 million dollars.  If a fifth of that was allocated to online tutors and markers, that's still a saving of about 1 million dollars.  Where schools are struggling to run small courses and SCSA prevents mixed year classes - this could be a godsend.  Schools wouldn't even run classrooms, just timetable time for students to be at home working.  After the content was created it could be re-run year after year.  This is already happening in University mathematics courses.

My colleague took this further and said that the online course would deliver better instructional content than current classrooms in face-to-face mode.  Information could be standardised more easily to the intent of syllabus writers, typically teachers delivering courses face-to-face are not in the highly skilled category, teachers have competing demands in different courses and may have issues impacting on performance from outside the classroom.

Theoretically we could run schools in an online/offline more, where students come to school for socialisation, tutoring and assessment and stay at home for the rest of the time learning online.  Content would be superior and the teaching environment could be better utilised in a cheaper "good enough" solution - the ultimate aim of any bean counter.  Schools could support a greater number of students and become much more efficient delivering content.

Could a compromise be that all ATAR courses be delivered online/offline and students only attend schools 2.5 days per week?

The obvious counter to all of this is that not all high school students are motivated enough to work online for a long period, schools do more than deliver content, context and socio-economic factors impact implementation and research is required to analyse how students impacted by covid perform at University and other higher learning online. 

Education has not evolved for 100 years and is predominantly still delivered in the same mode despite significant changes in technology.  Education appears to be on the precipice of a technology disruption.  Will we too be the victims of automation, or will we navigate it somehow to continue to be an integral part of society?

The bucket

Alan Hughes (Level 9 HOLA) introduced me to the idea of the bucket.  The bucket represents the resilience of a student.  Each time a student offers an answer and gets a negative response (laughing, teasing, being wrong) they lose a little of themselves out of the bucket.  If they get a positive response, the bucket starts to fill again.

As the bucket gets more and more depleted, they get more unwilling to put themselves out there.  When it is near the bottom, they will protect what is left by refusing to answer, refusing to try, being defiant and protective of what little self esteem they have left in the bucket.  Adolescence is a difficult time, between hormones, increasing academic ability, fragile confidence, peer issues, seeking independence and protective parents, a lot is drawing out of the bucket.

It is important to ensure that students never reach the point of protecting themselves.  The bucket should be overflowing with enthusiasm with opportunities to build self confidence - not everyone outside of the classroom will understand that this is important or why you are working with this student.  It starts with a welcome, hello and something positive that they can contribute.  

When a child has little in the bucket it is important to provide opportunities to refill it before it reaches the point of self protection.

When a child is at the point of self protection, a caring person will let them know it is ok and help them refill the bucket - preferably assisting with diminishing demands on the bucket from outside the classroom.

Since it was first introduced to me, I have appreciated the bucket analogy and it assists in understanding why Alan is such a great person and teacher.  He lives the analogy and has assisted many students refill the bucket.

Performance Anxiety and measures of success

Anxiety is a two edged sword.  Can't perform without it, can't perform with too much of it.

Understanding how success impacts anxiety is an important part of the performance anxiety picture.  Where we set the bar for students is important as it provides them with what sort of performance constitutes success.

One measure of success is achievement - this is where a student is able to do something expected at a prescribed point in time.  A student that can write their name consistently is an achievement in pre-primary, but an area of concern if they were still trying to do this in Year 4.

Another measure of success is progress - this is where a student is able to do something later that they could not do at a previous point in time.  A student that could not tell the time in Year 6, but can do so in Year 7 is an indicator of progress.

A third measure of success is a normalised ranking.  With normalised ranking, a student is doing better compared to their peers longitudinally over a period of time.  A student was 5th in the class for spelling in test 1, was 1st in test 2 and consistently in the top 10 for the year.  Achievement is measured for each test, progress is monitored as they move up and down the class ranking.

Traditionally schools have used normalised ranking to give students feedback as to how they are progressing towards year level achievement standards.  This allows students to feel successful as they measure themselves against peers and do better or worse dependent on effort (something that they can control).  Whether a child is meeting the Year level achievement standard is irrelevant as long as they are making progress with their peers. 

Movement to a national achievement standard changed this to having an achievement focus, and as consequence a large group of students now encounter constant failure with D/E grades.  In extreme circumstances, students would also face failing "assessment after assessment" being measured against grading standards that they had no ability to reach, to support the awarding of D/E grades.

This focus on achievement rather than progress increased performance anxiety and is currently at epidemic levels in schools.  Success lowers performance anxiety and anxiousness caused by the fear of failure.  If students only face constant failure then anxiety will rise to unbearable levels preventing progress.  An outlet is needed for anxiety to be released.  This is where we are today and it will take academics to prove this true with the benefit of hindsight.  

Should we set student success to be:

- achievement of excellence (eg. through a focus on Year level Achievement Standards);
- progress (eg. improvement in skills over time); or
- ranking (eg. position in a class of similar students).

Should we frame this within an understanding of:

- Constantly seeking excellence (with an understanding that the bar moves with the definition of developmental "excellence");
- Always doing your best (with an understanding that continuous effort is required); or
- Putting in the effort where required (with an understanding that you can only do what you can do and develop reserves where possible).