Permission to Ponder?
Sometimes you need to just sit and think—just like our kids do!
When I was growing up, my Mom had a cartoon on our cork board. It was Ziggy, a hapless, good natured guy who philosophizes slices of life in a way that rang true to me. The cartoon showed Zig sitting as Rodin’s The Thinker, with a word balloon that read, “Sometimes I sits and thinks. Sometimes I just sits.” I’ve been remembering this more and more lately, as I’ve designed professional learning for educators around the country.
American education has always had a problem with efficiency and utility. No, not that American education lacks utility or is inefficient. The problem is that American education glorifies (fetishizes?) efficiency and utility to an absurd degree, to the point where not only must something be useful it must be useful tomorrow. To the point where we devote amazing resources to measuring (and rewarding or not) the pace of learning, but not the quality of learning. To the point where something as basic as “focusing on relationships” is only valued if it can “leverage achievement of learning goals.”
I remember talking with educators from the Hawai’i DOE’s Nā Hopena A‘o (HĀ) project seven years ago. Cheryl Lupenui and Kau’i Sang described a framework in which the ultimate goal is kids belonging to their community/society. “Belonging is the relationship that can’t be undone.” Breathe that in. Another value was “Hawai’i”—what did it mean that the kids lived and learned in Hawai’i? In this particular place? How did the ecosystem of the island and the ecosystem of the learning co-exist? A third was the value of “aloha,” the development of respect for the self, community and the world. An appreciation for the mutuality of all. All of these values were drawn from and informed by native Hawaiian culture.
I was floored. I looked at our own project—which we would be presenting to them in 5 minutes—and I thought, Dang, they are striving for the relationship that can’t be undone. Our project promises … college and career readiness? That was the moment that changed everything. Encountering those ideas for the first time changed my life, my career, my values, my writing, and my vision of what education is and ought to be.
But it was not immediately useful. In fact it was very not useful. Not only was there nothing I could bring to my work the very next day, but it was going to upend all the work I’d been doing until that point. I’ve been working with the implications of that moment ever since. It has made me immeasurably better at what I do, but it was not efficient.
You may object! “But in the long run,” you may say, “it made you better. That’s useful.” To which I would reply, “True, but the rhetoric of utility as it’s used in our professional development circles is very much about the short term, not the long. We’re more interested in test scores than we are in elevating a generation. Efficiency, by definition, is a short term phenomenon.”
Another example of an important-but-is-it-useful thing. My favorite book on leadership and change is Ron Heifetz’s book, Leadership Without Easy Answers. It was my introduction to the ideas of adaptive and technical changes, and it played those ideas out through a variety of contexts, and did so much more. Also, Heifetz is just a great storyteller. The chapter on MLK’s relationship with LBJ is worth the price of admission.
And, the first time I read it I hated it. I threw it—I am not exaggerating—across the room. Why? I joke that it was because I was really hoping Leadership Without Easy Answers would have some easy answers, but it’s also not a joke. You can buy the LWEA workbook, and make lists on the Adaptive/Technical Change T-chart, but the book takes you very much deeper than that. Absorbing the lessons are, in and of themselves, an adaptive change. Sometimes, though, it feels more like Victor Frankl’s deep philosophical/therapeutic looks at our limitations. The adaptive/technical dichotomy really is, in a way, a thoughtful variation on the Stoic razor used to discern between those things we can influence, and those things we cannot.
“Don’t read this book unless you are willing to be changed by it,” wrote poet James Dickey. I was changed by Heifetz. It took four readings, an amazing number of conversations, and years of pondering, but I learned how to be on the dance floor and on the balcony simultaneously. I learned how to navigate situations in education that are infused with uncertainty (i.e., all of them). But it was not efficient or, in the short term, useful.
Two final, brief, and powerful examples. At a professional development session in Londonderry, NH, I heard my colleague, Carisa Corrow, remind teachers, who were talking about “authenticity” and “real-world relevance,” that play is authentic. I had never heard it put quite so succinctly and beautifully. A few years later, at a conference in Kentucky, I heard the author Chris Emdin talking about kids needing freedom in order to learn (the way humans do), and wondering how do you know if a school allows their kids freedom? What would it look like? What would you see? He shared this revelation, “Freedom looks like joy.” I don’t know if I’ll ever stop sitting with those two ideas.
Take some time to live in the sit/think world. Not all the time. It only works if you float between the sitting/thinking and doing. Eventually sitting/thinking must influence your behavior. Do some reading. Sit with it. Have a conversation. Let it sprawl. Learning requires sprawl. Test it against the values you say you believe in. Be willing to be changed by it. Then change your behavior accordingly. It is not efficient, but it will make you better at what you do, and what you are.