Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 66, Reply D, by Hudi Cantrell Podolsky:
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 96 16:10:36 -0800
(Note from Joe: This response is from my wife, Hudi (Cantrell) Podolsky. Hudi is an HP manager who has been on loan to the Blossom Valley Learning Consortium. The BVLC is composed of people from one high school, one middle school, six elementary school, and one private school, all in the same "feeding chain" but in different school districts. In addition, the San Jose State University teacher training program is part of the BVLC. The BVLC is made up of administrators, principals, teachers, students, and parents. Hudi worked with the BVLC for about six months as volunteer before being loaned full time. Her loan period started in August 1995 and will end in June 1997.) ====================================================================== A few thoughts on two of Shulman's principles, community & passion. When I joined HP in 1976 we defined our community as HP employees. Certainly, we were aware (at least sometimes) of customers and competitors and suppliers and contractors and even (grudgingly) consultants, but they were all outside our community, and they were generally not welcome at the table when decisions were to be made. No, it's not so much that they were not welcome, it's more that inviting them into the decision making process, the place where a community defines itself, was simply not considered. In my experience, the most important change in HP in the 20 years I've spent here, has been the gradual shift in our thinking and behavior regarding the boundaries of community. Dan Keller, not an employee, has been an important member of our community for many years. He's not just an extra pair of hands, but a person listened to when decisions about education and training are made. And there are many "Dan's" now, people we have come to see as partners rather than as outsiders. This inclusiveness, expanding our definition of who is in our community, has enriched us, and very likely kept us alive. It has transformed our understanding of our processes and our products. The Blossom Valley Learning Consortium, one of five K-12 "renaissance teams" funded by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley (JVSV), is creating an educational environment that follows Shulman's six principles. Interestingly, the spark for the renaissance, and the driving strength of the five teams, is also an altered definition of community. JVSV invited teams to participate in this renaissance in a way that required a change in the definition of "school community". First, they had to be interested in a relationship with their funders modeled on venture capitalism, a model in which the funder is part of the community in a way that a traditional grant provider is not. Second, the schools had to apply in K-12 "vertical slice" teams, an unnatural act even in unified school districts. Third, the proposals had to demonstrate strong "community" involvement which meant real inclusion in decision making of parents, local businesses, non-profit organizations, and other citizens. This broadening of the community is beginning to create a transformation in the way schools see their processes and products. I remember an early meeting when we were talking about structuring cross-age projects. The teachers were quite excited by the novelty and the possibilities it opened. But one of the parents spoke up and said, "I don't see what the big deal is, we always work in multi-age groups at home." The simple truth of the statement caught us all off guard. Parents see children in a different context, not rigidly separated by age, not my child for sixth grade and then someone else's for seventh. This sort of shift in the discussion happened over and over, as high school teachers heard how elementary school teachers made decisions, as teachers heard how administrators made decisions, as everyone asked me and others about how business makes decisions. The inclusion of a larger community in decision making shook our assumptions loose, thawed our thinking, and generated the energy and passion needed for transformation. Which takes me to Schulman's second principal, passion. Joe says, "passion is obvious". And in the closed classrooms of great individual teachers it always had been. But a passionate school is even more of an oxymoron than a passionate corporation. Within the classroom, passion reigns because of the intimacy great teachers create with and among their students. But the gleam in the first grade teacher's eye, the sense of deep personal connection, disappears at staff meetings unless her turf is threatened. What we discovered was that the shift in definition of community opened a window through which the personal passion of teachers, administrators, parents, and others wafted into meetings. With the structure of community in transition, the walls that keep passion out were breached. I agree with Joe that we are naturally passionate as humans. What happens to that passion when we join in institutions? Why does it so often disappear? This question is as relevant to HP as it is to public schools. Because passion is necessary for learning and for survival. Passion requires a sense of connection, and the connections need to change from time to time to keep the passion alive. When the definition of a community becomes static, passion dies. One attempt to keep community fluid is the brilliant organizational structure Bill and Dave created. They defined community in the manageable sizes of our divisions, but they kept the boundaries fluid in practice by allowing lots of free movement between divisions, by maintaining stimulating relationships between divisions, and by keeping the existence of any particular division relatively fragile and linked very directly to its success in the marketplace. We speak of reorganizations or the closing of a division as painful, and thank goodness they are. If we don't feel pain, we're very unlikely to ever feel joy. Where HP has been brilliant about keeping organizational passion alive on a macro level, we have been less successful at nurturing it at the level of the individual or small work group. The reverse is true when we look at schools with their rigid bureaucratic organizational structures, and their intensely passionate classrooms. What can we learn from each other? Where an organization benefits from fluid definitions of community in maintaining passion, individuals seem to require personal commitment and connection to keep passion alive. It is this personal passion that I see in teachers, and miss in so many of my colleagues at HP. For even the merely good teachers, children matter. They feel a sense of commitment to them and connection with them. When I've discussed this difference with friends, the first comment is almost always something like, "well, it's a lot easier to care about a child than about a gas chromatograph". True, but I think there's more. When I look at the structure of teachers' jobs as compared to the structure of HP jobs, I see differences in several areas that I think are important for passionate work and learning: impact, control & ownership, and craftsmanship & variation. I'm not going to go into all this now, but let me just plant a few seeds. At HP, I think we put a lot of energy into taking variation out of work, and in some ways we probably have to in order to produce high quality. But product without variation is quality from a producer centered view. Quality one-on-one, customer centered quality, would have us turn our focus to putting variability back into products (but in a controlled and predictable way). People who were evaluated on their ability to manage rather than eliminate variability would probably be a lot more passionate about their work. I think it's a big part of the teachers' passion: each child is different each day, and the way the teacher behaves influences the different outcome with each child. Hudi