For five years I have been pleading with educators to examine an education model I have developed to empower teachers to teach and students to learn. https://melhawkinsandassociates.com/education-model-white-paper/
It is model in which everything has been tailored to remove obstacles that impede the work of teachers and inhibits the work of students. These are two of the most important jobs in American society! Having had the opportunity to work in classrooms as a substitute teacher and view the education process through the eyes of an organizational and leadership development consultant gives me a unique perspective.
The following is a true story about a small manufacturing operation I worked with over a six-month period. The company employed 120 people. The owner/CEO was frustrated beyond description that the products being produced were not meeting customer expectations and that production costs made it impossible to price it competitively. His fear was that he was about to lose customers to his competition.
What I discovered, very quickly was a manufacturing process that seemed purposely designed to make his employees’ jobs more difficult.
This was one of the littlest and most obvious things to the point of being ridiculous, looking at it from my objective perch. It was, also, one of many examples of archaic structure and design that had an enormous adverse impact on the people, the quality of the work, the cost of production and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. Archaic structure and design is just another way of saying archaic and self-defeating leadership.
While at lunch with the management team of another client, I received a call from a shop-floor supervisor with whom I had spent much time. He told me that one of the lines had been shut down for an hour and was causing a chain reaction of shutdowns of the other three lines that were dependent on the first. The problem, it turned out, was that the first line had run out of masking tape needed to prepare the work-in-process for the next phase of the production process. The masking tape cost the company one dollar per role.
I said, “help me understand how you could be completely out of masking tape?”
The supervisor answered, “Oh, we have plenty of tape in inventory but its locked in the supply cabinet.”
It turned out that the plant manager did not trust his people to have access to the supply cabinet, so he kept the only keys. That morning, the plant manager had instructed his shop floor supervisors that he would be in a meeting for four hours and was not to be disturbed for any reason. Clearly, the shop supervisors had learned not to disregard this plant manager’s directives.
The ultimate irony of the situation was not that all four production lines had shut down for four hours because the shop floor supervisors were not trusted with the key to the supply cabinet to access a one dollar roll of masking tape. Rather, it was that the plant manager’s meeting was a series of interviews with prospective new shop floor supervisors. His intent was to replace the current supervisors who could never seem to address production issues.
The moral of this little story is that a process—whether production, service delivery, or teaching children—must be designed to support the mission in every conceivable way. Literally, the process must be constructed around the needs of the person doing the job, just as the cockpit of a fighter jet is engineered to enable every single action the pilot might be called upon to perform. If the process consistently produces disappointing outcomes no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, the process is flawed and must be reinvented.
Now think about what happens to 5 and 6-year-old students, many of whom are away from their mothers for the first time, when they arrive for their first day of school.
The first thing they need is to bond as quickly as possible with a teacher who will be a surrogate mother. He or she will nurture the children during this first, most important transition in the lives of many of them, make them feel safe, secure, and special. How easy is it to accomplish this objective when it is one teacher for every 20, 25, 30, and sometimes even 35 students?
While handling that critical responsibility, the teacher must figure out how to prepare this diverse population of children with disparate levels of academic preparedness, motivation to learn, and parental support, to the point where they are ready to move on to first grade, as per criteria established state academic standards.
Oh, and I forgot, we would like for our teachers to reach out to the parents of these children in hopes that they will become partners, sharing in the responsibility for the education of their sons and daughters.
Clearly, academic preparedness, relationships between teachers and students, motivation to learn, and parental support are at the top of the list of essential variables in the education equation. Our teachers must accomplish all these challenging objectives knowing that the probability of their students’ success in first grade, and every grade thereafter will, in large part, be dependent on how well teachers do their jobs in that critical first year.
And, let’s not forget, at the end of their first nine months students will be separated from the only teacher they have ever known and with whom they may or may not have been successful in bonding. One of our colleagues, I believe @GetUpStandUp2 (Susan DuFresne), correct me if I’m wrong, likened this event to the trauma of divorce.
This is just one example of the many things teachers are asked to do for their students that the education process neither supports nor enables and for which it is not resourced.