Pushing Past “Good”

I take exception to the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Other than my own highly misguided hubris, I could never put my finger on why exactly the pragmatism and detachment of that saying rubbed me the wrong way; but then I saw this tweet from Dylan Wiliam, an absolute giant in the pedagogy research space, that almost made me fall out of my generic office chair:
By and large, it’s fair to say that most educators feel that what they are doing is, at the very least, “good” — whether that means they feel it is objectively good or simply “good enough.” It does suggest an air of intractability though, because why mess with a “good” thing?
The thrust of what Wiliam is saying, if we take it to be an acceptable proposition, is that a key role of the educational leader is to push people beyond “good.” There is some severe baggage that comes with that responsibility: dealing with the emotional response of feelings of inadequacy and the defensiveness that arises from that push, deciding what must be stopped or dropped in order to move forward (because you can’t do it all), and trying to determine what the bold, new, better-than-good future will look and feel like.
I suspect we can trace a lot of ineffective educational leadership practices back to not wanting to deal with said baggage. Peter Cole (2012), for example, suggests that most professional development (especially those delivered as short-term workshops) is isolated, fragmented, and ultimately non-impactful in terms of both professional practice and student achievement. The best work happens in-between professional development, where educators wrestle with the contrast between what is and what should be, work through the inevitable failures, and negotiate which practices and procedures must end for new ones to arise. No matter how much improvement science asserts how cleanly we can conceptualize that work, in practice it is an extremely difficult, intense, and messy process that needs the intentional and constant push of a leader to work through.
However, with tragic frequency, we as educational leaders choose the path of least resistance: a couple of workshops sprinkled here and there, the initial spark of hope of a few teachers, and the trust that if it’s meant to be then it’ll stick. Life happens, practice regresses to the mean…and nothing changes — and we’re OK with that because it was already good or good enough to begin with. At some point, our aversion to the undesirable aspects of pushing beyond “good” leads us to prioritize on things that are ultimately of little import, little impact, or low-stakes, creating the illusion of substantial change with none of the baggage.
That said, a culture of “good” or “good enough” sees this radical conception of educational leadership and desires nothing more than to flatly reject this kind of disruption. To set the stage for the cultural shift needed for this kind of educational leadership, leaders must do the following with regularity:
- Challenge people to define “good.” Asking people to provide data to substantiate what is “good” or “good enough”, both quantitative and qualitative, opens the opportunity to create the tension needed to promote change. More importantly, it helps unearth the assumptions that people and the organization hold and, at the very least, determine the gap between individual and shared perception of success.
- Provide spaces for people to unpack expertise. Faculty collaboration should be less about talking through memos and more about involving opportunities for people to see the processes that help create today’s “good” or “good enough.” Professional practice is not some sort of spontaneous manifestation — rather, it arises out of some perceived need for change and/or improved performance. Allowing people to talk through their practice offers another opportunity to unearth assumptions and beliefs as well as understand that professional capacity is malleable in pursuit of pushing past “good.”
- Model “conscious incompetence” — authentically. Goodwin and Slotnik (2018) argue that the critical junction in what separates 30-year expert teachers from teachers who teach for 30 years — one year, repeated 30 times — is pursuing the knowledge of what we don’t know (“conscious incompetence”) and then engaging in “deliberate practice” — reflecting on current learning and searching for new methods and knowledge to stretch ourselves in more learning and relearning. It takes some vulnerability, but making explicit and visible one’s own process of deliberate practice in response to conscious incompetence lets people know of the level of investment and empathy needed in a culture that pushes past “good.”
Above all, I think there is a certain level of conviction paired with a great deal of professional research and expertise required to move forward with the idea of “stopping people doing good things to make time to do even better things” — a sort of call to both the head and the heart needed to facilitate and operate within this kind of cultural shift. Ultimately, it calls us to move past the handyman mindset that conceptualizes things in schools as “broken” or not and to something with much more intricacy and beauty.
