Greetings mid January from rainy, chilly Seattle…er, London… no, weather to the contrary - Connecticut! In my adult life we have always had occasional southern New England winters without snow but for it to be in the 40s most days? This is weird stuff. But I have to admit - much better weather than the usual January for dog walking.
Despite the creepy weather, I hope your 2023 is off to a great start. Over the holidays I opened a fortune cookie and while I usually I get “eat more Chinese food” or “truth wins over beauty” and this time I got “Good news will come from afar.” A genuine fortune. I’ll take it. Sitting by my mailbox now…
I suspect your start to 2023 was partially filled with one of the following, if not all four:
ChatGPT panic regarding academic dishonesty
Rooting for Damar Hamlin’s recovery
Watching CSpan with great interest to see if we would ever get a Speaker of the House
H&M, and I don’t mean the fast fashion chain
You may not have realized it, but all four can be related to school leadership and I’m here to point it out. Law and Order doesn’t need to be the only thing ripped from the headlines.
Chat GPT: The jig is UP, content mavens
The vast majority of us don’t really understand the power of this technology at all, yet. I’ve listened to two podcast interviews with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. When I’m listening I think I pretty much get it, and then fifteen minutes later I stumble trying to summarize what he discussed. My conclusion as of January 2023 It’s too early to either celebrate or demonize, but AI will infiltrate out day to day in a much more profound way ultimately than helping kids cheat on English papers.
Not to go all “look at Y2K - we always overreact about technology” on you, but I have been around long enough to remember Facebook panic. And Wikipedia panic. And teachers-constructing-smartphone-jails panic. And while smartphones, Wikipedia and Facebook quite likely have had deleterious effects on society, they have not taken down the educational system as we know it. People still are people-ing. Kids are still trying to manage homework and their co curriculars and their own emerging emotional lives and characters and perhaps most surprising (and to me, disappointing) even after a global pandemic, colleges seem to be, more or less, looking for the same things they always were.
The vast majority of academic dishonesty I have dealt with in my career is usually in large part due to the assignment design. Sometimes that’s because it’s basically content regurgitation. (And of course, kids need content to develop skills but an assignment has to be about more than content for it to be worth everyone’s time.) Sometimes the assignment is confusing. Sometimes the assignment doesn’t take into account that kids think differently than adults and need more specifics and more scaffolding.
The point of assessments is to help the teacher gain insight into the student’s learning - how she is processing information, what connections he is making, how they can analyze or apply content knowledge to problem solving, etc. Anything with a “right” or “wrong” answer - forget about it. Forget about the smartphone jail or only giving assessments in locked down, sealed rooms where students are partitioned off from each other, supposedly preventing wandering eyes. Forget treating kids as if they are cheating time bombs, ready to go off at any moment. The world has called our bluff. Remember the old saw - we teach kids, not content. For real.
The NFL: Crisis Management 101
Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on the field was horrifying. And I totally get it, as an observer, one can’t fully appreciate what’s going on behind the scenes to deal with a crisis. Any head who led during COVID is painfully aware of being second guessed and wanting to scream, “you don’t understand how hard this is when it’s all flying at you!”
However, one of the basic tenets of crisis management is identifying what are the immediate decisions within your control that need to be made. You owe it to your constituents to provide a response and communicate that someone is definitely in charge. Use your power to lessen the overwhelming sense of chaos. These decisions need to be calmly communicated, along with reassurance you understand the gravity of the situation, expressing empathy and providing an idea when the next communication will be coming. Damar Hamlin collapsed around 9PM and he was in an ambulance by 9:25. The game wasn’t called until 10pm.
From where I sit, by 9:30 there should have been a statement, a cancellation of the game and most importantly, an expression of concern and empathy for the fallen player. Why the announcement of the game being postponed took an extra half hour is a mystery to me. Cancel the game at 9:30 and then spend the next 30 minutes managing the angry owners and advertisers and various playoff fallout in private. Step up, make the call, take the blowback. Be a human. Given the nature of football, it is also stunning to me the league did not have a clear communications protocol in place for exactly this tragic possibility.
Sports cannot exist without people. They are a huge business and a mighty cultural force and it’s not widgets or cars or microchips. The players are people and the game is the players. Just like in education - schools are the people and the people are the schools.
Know your values, as a head and as a school. Discuss them with your comms director. Discuss them with the senior team. A lot. If you deeply understand your priorities, responding in the moment is a million times easier than scrambling around behind the scenes, perhaps trying to figure out which constituency you need to prioritize in your care, focus and response. You’ll end up doing the right thing in a timely way.
Count your votes!
I know 435 is way bigger than your average faculty, but before you officially unroll that big change, count the damn votes. Make sure the predictable bunch that complains about every small change has been engaged before the meeting so you can respond to them knowledgeably when they bring up their complaint again before the entire faculty. Have your advocates lined up as well. Make sure the relevant senior leaders are aligned and singing the same song. Anticipate objections in your talk or slide deck. Do it in a real way, that demonstrates you understand the concern (“Yes, it’s a lot of work to revamp all those reading quizzes with Chat GPT now available.”) Don’t get upset when people complain but make sure to warmly invite them to speak to you in your office after the meeting. Don’t end up with egg on your face when, surprise!, a small but stalwart group resists and it becomes clear you will not yet be able to implement your change but will need to go back to the drawing board.
H&M and the First Rule of Management
Faulstich’s First Rule of Management: People Lead Complicated Lives
But maybe we don’t need to know all the details? Just a thought.
We are off to quite a start to the year!
TOOS will be back in two weeks. Maybe I’ll go back to weekly and start subcontracting this out to ChatGPT…I heard he’s cheap. :)
Enjoy the weekend -
Julie
Social media posts: Photo by Luis Cortés on Unsplash