Administrative staff as educators

It's common to consider professors or teachers to be the only people at a school who educate the students, but staff can be educators too, whether they are the president of the college or the janitor. As administrators, our leadership style can be a model which students follow when they go out into the world as professionals and as citizens.

What I hope to model in my dealings with students:

• Good leaders listen to the concerns of their people.
• Good leaders communicate honestly with their people rather than giving them PR BS.
• Good leaders take responsibility for their mistakes.
• Students can get good results if they approach people in a spirit of positive dialogue.

What I don't want my students to learn:

• Leaders should try to push their vision on other people without listening to the concerns of people affected.
• Leaders should put a positive spin on everything they have done.
• People who express dissent with leaders are troublemakers whose opinion is wrong.
• When dissent is expressed, the proper response is to take tighter control and shut out dissenters.

The correlation between ability and effort

One might think that students studying a subject that comes easily to them don't have to work as hard, and that the students for whom the subject is difficult are the ones who put the most work into it.

Or, one might think that when students don't do well, it must be because they don't work as hard, while students who do well must have put a lot of effort into achieving so much.

Someone I work with suggested a third hypothesis: students who do best work hardest, but it's not that the hard work is the cause of the success. Rather, when a subject comes easily for a student, that student will be inclined to put more time into that subject. When you understand the material, the time spent on it is time during which you are engaged and moving forward. When you don't understand the material, the time spent on it is time spent banging your head against a wall. It's hard to stay focused on something when you can't really get your mind wrapped around it. While time spent studying it may increase your understanding, the understanding that you achieve may quickly slip away. I find that certain topics just don't like to stick to my brain. I have a hard time getting them into my brain, and once I do get them in, they just immediately plop right out. In contrast, with other topics, any time a piece of information is floating around anywhere near me, it heads straight for my brain and embeds itself there. I don't even have to be studying the material, or even conscious of it. Some conversation happens near me that I'm not paying attention to, but somehow information from that conversation gets glued into my brain.

Listening to our enemies

Too prevalent in this country is the attitude that the way to deal with conflict is to destroy, intimidate, remove, or silence those who criticize us or disagree with us. Our government invades other countries, tortures prisoners, increasingly curtails civil liberties, and fires people for political reasons. When someone in power is criticized, the person often responds by denying that the offense occurred and/or by arguing that the actions were not only justified, but necessary for national security. When faced with criticism, people go to great lengths to do anything other than admitting that the criticizers might have a legitimate viewpoint. Although refusing criticism and invading a country are very different acts, what they have in common is the absence of listening and dialogue. Silencing dissenters may seem effective in the short run. However, although suppressing dissent, limiting freedoms and imposing punishments may result in obedience it will also fuel rebellion. It's better to inspire people to cooperate willingly than to intimidate them into an obedience which they resent.

Often, dealing with conflict by trying to destroy the dissenters is seen as a sign of strength. So many movies and computer games glorify violent action. In contrast, I see this approach as a sign of weakness. It's a sign that a person lacks the intelligence and mental flexibility to listen to and think about different points of view, and lacks the diplomatic skills to resolve the conflict. Negotiating a solution with someone who has very different goals can be a monumentally difficult task. That's why people resort to violence and punishment, because they are unable to solve the problem with diplomacy. Diplomacy takes a lot of work, a lot of skill, and a lot of time. We resort to violence, intimidation, and deception when we fear that something dire will happen before we are able to solve the problem through diplomacy. There are many times when diplomacy doesn't work and it's necessary to take punitive measures, but we need to remember that punishment/violence/intimidation is not the only approach and it's not something to be glorified.

After a suicide on the campus where I work, and the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, administrators at my campus held an open forum. I was glad that they seemed to truly listen to students about the problems that occurred in connection with the administration's handling of the suicide.

One thing discussed was that both the incident here and the incident at Virginia Tech were caused by people in distress. Administrators at the meeting emphasized that students who are concerned about the behavior of other students, or who need help themselves, should reach out for help. One administrator said caring for each other is the most important thing we can do for our safety. I think we have to be careful not go so far with our concern that we force anyone with an unconventional personality into psychotherapy to turn them "normal," but I was impressed with the acknowledgement of the important role that caring for each other has in preventing violence.

The Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation was created in honor of Peter M. Goodrich, who was on one of the planes which hit the World Trade Center. The foundation supports the education of children in Afghanistan, and also helps young people from Afghanistan attend high school or college in the U.S. By educating and befriending the people of Afghanistan, we can help reduce terrorism.

There are times when it's necessary to stop someone who is behaving dangerously. There are times when it's appropriate to arrest someone, or dismiss them from a job, school, or organization. But too often, people see the punitive approach as the only answer. It should be a last resort, not the only resort. We need to work on strengthening communities so that violent or punitive solutions are less often necessary. As college administrators, when we hear students complain about our actions, we should invite those students in so that we can hear those complaints in detail. Then we should try to address the concerns as much as possible. If the students ask for a change that we don't think we should make, we should respectfully explain to them why we aren't going to do it. In doing this, we not only address the concerns of our students, we also model for them an approach to dealing with dissent which we hope they will carry with them as they go on into their careers.

I don't claim that listening to each other and treating each other with respect will fix all the problems of the world. I think there may always be some psychopaths beyond the reach of reason. I just think we need to remember that violence or stricter rules or more punishment to silence dissent are not the only way to solve problems, and we need to glorify the heroes who fight for a better world using methods such as listening, teaching, negotiating, sharing, giving, empathizing, and learning.

School can be fun, so why isn't it?

When I was in elementary and secondary school, I was good at school, and there were some classes I liked more than others, but overall, school seemed to be about reading boring books and doing boring homework. It was a chore. I did a lot of reading and writing on my own, but for the most part, the things I did for school were things I would not have done if I didn't have to.

Then I got to college and it was fun. I felt like, "In all those years I've been in school, why didn't anybody ever tell us learning could be fun?" I could take whatever courses I wanted to. (There were some requirements, but taking whatever I wanted to take resulted in the requirements being fulfilled, so I didn't have to worry about them much.) In my free time, I had conversations with other students about the interesting ideas I was studying in class.

Now it's even more that way. Now that I have my degree, I don't have to ever take another course or get another degree unless I want to. And I have wanted to. Since finishing my bachelor's, I did get another degree and also took some nondegree courses and some training classes.

For me, the change from school being something I wanted to do rather than something I had to do took place when I started college. I know that some people had more positive pre-college experiences than I did. Those were generally people who went to private or magnet schools, or were homeschooled.

There are also people in college who look at school more as a chore imposed on them than as an opportunity to learn. When it's like that, it's not fun for the students or for the professor. Professors want to teach students who are interested in learning. They know they have a responsibility to make the material interesting and relevant for the students, but they can only go so far. Professors have to spend far too much time dealing things like cheating. You would think that a student caught cheating would be ashamed and accept the penalty, but all too often, they spend a lot of time arguing with the professor, acting indignant that the professor would accuse them, even when their guilt is clear. Also, students come to professors begging for higher grades. They say they need to pass the course in order to graduate, or to maintain a certain GPA in order to keep their financial aid. They think that the professor ought to increase the grade for that reason, that any decent person would. I just don't get why it doesn't occur to them that it's the student's responsibility to earn good grades, not the professor's responsibility to give good grades to anyone who asks for them.

The problem here is that for students, the goal of education is to get good grades and a degree, rather than to learn. The students want a degree because that is what will allow them to get a good job. It's very sensible for students to care more about the degree and grades than about learning, because that is the way the system is set up.

However, there are alternatives. Sudbury schools (named after the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts) are elementary and high schools in which students can learn whatever they want to learn. In that respect, it's somewhat similar to my experience in college, and even more so to my experience now as an adult who already has a college degree. I learn things that are useful to me to learn. I don't worry about degrees or grades.

Why can't all education be like that? I think the reason is because employers want to be sure that particular degrees represent particular knowledge. The current system is supposed to ensure that, though I'm not sure how well it does. I know some smart people who got bad grades and/or failed to graduate. And sometimes people graduate without knowing as much as they should. I guess employers should not rely on degrees as the sole indicator of knowledge, but they can use it as one clue.

I think schools believe there is certain information that students should know, whether it is for employment or for being a well-educated citizen of the world. Therefore, schools impose certain requirements. These requirements don't necessarily match what students are interested in learning. Therefore, we end up with students who are just trying to graduate but aren't particularly interested in mastering the material. I think it's true that there are certain areas of knowledge that people should know, so I don't know if there's really any way around this.

Presenting material in a way that makes sense to students

Once you have mastered something, it often seems pretty easy and obvious. Teachers need to remember what it's like to not already know the material they are teaching. They have to constantly remember to put themselves in the shoes of the students. They need to listen to students in order to understand where there are gaps in the students' knowledge, and then they need to present the material needed to fill that gap.

When a teacher does present material in such a way that it makes sense, we may be tempted to take it for granted, but it actually can take considerable effort and skill to put the material together that way. Although I'm not currently a student, people do sometimes try to explain to me how to do things, and sometimes it's frustrating trying to make sense out of their explanations. It's as if someone is giving you directions to get somewhere, and they say, "Turn right at the McDonald's. Three miles before that, bear right at the fork in the road. Before you leave, make sure you bring cash with you because the destination you are going to doesn't take credit cards. After the fork but before the McDonald's, take a left at the third traffic light."

Usually people do give driving directions in order, but when people try to explain other things to me, sometimes I find it as jumbled as this example.

It's a lot easier to understand things if we have a framework to fit them into. I'm bad at understanding mechanical things. Because I can't visualize how the whole thing works, when I learn one piece, it tends to fall out of my brain very quickly because there is no hook to hang it on. In contrast, it's easy for me to visualize connections between people. I am above average at remembering facts about the friends or relatives of people I know because I can envision how those people are connected, and then I can hang the facts on that framework.

When presenting new material, it is helpful for the teacher to present a framework for the information. A single piece of information will make more sense and be easier to remember if the student knows how it fits in to the big picture. It can be a challenge though. The way to help students understand bits of information is to first show them the big picture that it fits into, but the way to help students understand the big picture is to show them the bits which together form the big picture. I think it can be done though. You can start by giving them a general idea of the big picture, and then as you teach each bit, you can talk about how that bit fits with the big picture and with the bits that have been learned before.