A long time ago, I was in a job I didn’t like too much.  It was a matter of interpersonal dynamics rather than a problem with the job itself. In some ways, the fact that I wanted to succeed so badly made everything worse. I worked hard, I did what I was told, I was technically stellar, but my inability to achieve a fully productive footing with my supervisor seemed like a humiliating disappointment.

One day, annoying little things happened and I dashed off an angry text to a friend. We’ll call him Jim.  His name isn’t Jim.

Me:  “When can I quit this job?

(two minutes pass)

Me: Give me a date…A specific date so I can count down – I want to mark those days off on a calendar. I need a date.

(another two minutes)

Me: How long EXACTLY do I have to work here?

(eventually)

Jim: Until two weeks before your next job starts.

It’s a phrase I keep in my back pocket for everyone who is disappointed in their job. Jim’s response reminded me that flexibility is critical for happiness.  There was absolutely no point in getting frustrated (with myself, my boss, or the organization) because this wasn’t my fairy tale ending – my perfect combination of personal fulfillment and organizational benefit.  Not every job can be that.  People happen.  Situations happen. Life happens.

It was time to reframe my expectations.  Maybe I don’t get to leave an indelible mark on this organization.  Okay, change the game.  Why not let the organization make an indelible mark on me? Identify the professional development opportunities.  Work hard. Learn something. Move on.  The less-than-fairytale job becomes much more palatable when it is framed as a learning opportunity.

Featured Image: Jon Liu, flickr.com

A while back I was talking to someone about power struggles and leadership.  At the time I was new in my position (this was a couple of positions back) and, just by being present, had upset the power dynamics in the office. There was a lot of boundary testing and partially disguised storming.  It was a challenging time for everyone.

One day I was describing a specific work situation to a friend. I ended with a list of possible next steps: I could (a) be confrontational and force a conversation which may or may not benefit me in the long run OR I could (b) trust that I’d already handled the immediate situation appropriately and stay the course…if I continued to make right decisions, then I should trust that all would work itself out.

My friend (pithy by nature) responded, “The second is probably the braver choice.”

It was the “braver” that caught my attention.

In conflict and power struggles, we often have to decide whether to speak up or to endure.  Speaking up is often considered the “brave” thing to do; consider Sara Bareilles’ Brave:

Say what you wanna say
And let the words fall out
Honestly I wanna see you be brave…

Or John Mayer’s Say:

And, for sure, sometimes bravery looks like that.  However, sometimes speaking up can be self-indulgent or impulsive.  Sometime being brave means staying to course, being patient, and not running away.  Sometimes, staying the course requires more self-confidence and more faith in one’s plans and obligations than blowing up the apple cart.

Endurance is often portrayed as the grimier, more thankless sort of bravery.  It tends to hurt, like in the “Heartbreak Scene” in Bridges of Madison County.

Or in Paul Simon’s Cool, Cool River: 

And these streets
Quiet as a sleeping army
Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven
For the mother’s restless son
Who is a witness to, who is a warrior
Who denies his urge to break and run

Who says: Hard times?
I’m used to them
The speeding planet burns
I’m used to that
My life’s so common it disappears
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears

But it’s still brave and important and often the right way to go.  We all want to be brave, we just need to make sure that we value the different expressions of bravery, and call upon the right one in the right moment.

Featured Image: My own (Laura Gogia, flickr.com)

 It’s an interesting phrase that can mean a couple of different things.

Today I mean it in terms of trying again after a failed program. I was talking with someone the other day who had been a part of numerous failed programs, each of which was based on a specific instructional design meant to promote social and informal learning.  Thus far, the design has inspired both, but never on an appreciable scale (and scale is important; you can’t sit back on your laurels bragging about the three students who really got it when 30 did not).  That being said, we both believe the design can work if implemented correctly.

Herein lies the key of dusting oneself off: Take a deep breath, brace yourself, turn around, and stare boldly, dispassionately at your mistakes. Don’t hope that a different context will fix things (“Next time will be different”). 

Learning from one’s peers (social learning) in a classroom setting is founded on two underlying assumptions: We are willing to listen to our peers and our peers actually have something valuable to say.

Quite frankly, I have found both to be lacking at every level of my educational career, although now that I am out, I learn from my peers all the time.  This is a contradiction worth examining.

Q. Why don’t people say more interesting things in classroom assignments? 

A. Because they don’t see the relevance/don’t fear the consequences of phoning it in/don’t apply themselves in the classroom in the same ways they do in the “real world”/have other more important things to do.  Also, they may fear the consequences of making themselves vulnerable.

Q.  Why don’t we listen to our peers?

A.  Because it is a less efficient way of absorbing information; they will say all sorts of things with some small nuggets of truth wrapped up in the middle, whereas an instructor – who has spent hours reading/thinking/refining the message will lay out all the nuggets in a 50 minute power point (which we will swallow like pablum, fail to learn well enough to apply, and forget in one year)

Rather than hope a new group of students will finally “get” the joys of peer learning and use that instructional design like it was meant to be used, let’s address the problems at their very pedagogical root:

Make the assignments more interesting. Integrate peer work into the formalized instruction – lecture from it, discuss it in class, use it as examples.  Limit your input to responding to theirs’. You’ve got to raise the stakes to catch their attention.

Featured Image: Austin Ban

I have this person in my life – I hesitate to call him a friend…more like a self-designated, long-distance mentor.  He likes to challenge me when he thinks I’m getting solipsistic. That time I temporarily included “Dr.” in my Twitter name.  That time I played around with what self-promotion might look like in the middle of my own Twitter thread.  That time I wrote a blog post announcing that I was going to blog everyday and then promoted the blog post on Twitter. “Why,” he asks (and I’m paraphrasing), “do you do that sort of thing when I know you to be a good, cool, and worthy person?”

Most of the time I think he’s full of shit, gazing at me through white man lenses. I have to admit, I kind of like him challenging me.

I have a friend who writes in public as a hail mary for intimacy. Another says it holds him accountable, like throwing down a very real, very challenging gauntlet.   It’s true that sometimes I hit the publish button because I think what I have written could be useful to others. There’s a lot of earnest academic practice in my work. Other times, I hit publish because I like the performativity.  I like thinking about my words and actions through the eyes of others.  I like the strangeness, the unpredictability, the almost-but-not-quite risk.   It keeps me on edge and balances me, all at the same time. There is something to be said for questioning why we blog in public. It’s not all rainbows and ponies, tassels and mortarboards all the time.

I’m okay with it.

Featured Image: Daniil Kuzelev, unsplash.com

I was watching a diversity panel years ago (and at a different university than my current home), and there was a lone white man up there on the stage. I suspect he had important and relevant knowledge to share but he didn’t seem to know what it was and the panel never really got to it. Instead he got mixed up in race, gender, and sexual identity conversation that dominated. It was clear he did not know anything about those things. Rather than sharing his important and relevant information, he became the mainstream white male foil for the others.  It was cringe-worthy to watch – educational for those in the audience who haven’t spent hours watching or participating in the same take-downs on Black Twitter – but cringe-worthy none the less.

Afterwards, I thought about the panelist. He had not been in a safe space.  I knew it. He knew it – he left looking half the size that he had been when he walked in. I struggled with this: Why should the mainstream voice get a “safe space?”  Isn’t it his responsibility to do his homework, put in his time, know when to shut up and listen?

Yes to all of that.

However, strategic thinking would require us to take ourselves out of the current situation to consider the big picture.  What’s the desired outcome, really?  That guy might deserve the shaming.  The others on the panel probably deserved the opportunity to shame him. It might have made them feel better, or maybe not.  But which is more important: the shaming or the changing of his perspective?

Shame is the least motivating approach to inspiring change. Like all people, the gentleman deserved a safe space to learn.  Outreach.  Resources. Respectful constructive criticism. Access to conversation.  Modeled language and behavior. He should not be put up on that stage to let that happen again. I can’t imagine asking or expecting the others on the panel to do this work, but it’s something that I – as a privileged white woman still in the process of learning- could do.  Hypothetically speaking (because it was years ago), I’d like to get him back up on that stage, but for the purpose of talking about what he was there to talk about and not as the foil of others.

Paradigm shifts are notoriously hard to facilitate.  I’m in a position now where I am trying to trigger faculty to think strategically.   I suspect it’s a lot like faculty trying to trigger students to think critically.

I remember the exact moment I learned to think strategically.  I was a second-year resident, rounding with an attending on our high-risk obstetrical floor.  We had about 50 patients and rather than going from room-to-room, we were running the “list” –  a paper-based table of all the patients, basic demographics, admission diagnosis (e.g. bleeding, mild preeclamsia, etc), plan for the day (e.g. ultrasound ordered, lab work to-be done), and long term plan (e.g. delivery at 36 weeks, etc, delivery if/when —-,etc).

Except the columns on the table weren’t really called anything and the examples weren’t as clear cut as the ones I just gave you (obviously they are clear cut because I get it now…I didn’t necessarily get it then).

For every single patient (a table row), I would run through the columns left to right, and with every patient, the attending would frame her response in the exact opposite order as my presentation:  “So what is the best we can expect for this patient?  So what should we be doing today?”

She said the exact same thing 25 times in a row before my brain picked up on the pattern and saw the light: the big picture (the best mother/baby outcomes) must drive the short term plan and not vice versa.  The attending physician *finally* got to stop asking the same questions on Patient 26, and we got through the second half of the list a lot faster than the first. It wasn’t that I didn’t have all the information in my head, it was only a matter of re-prioritizing it.  And I’ve never looked back.

The thing is…she and I never discussed the significance of the re-orientation…not before, not after.  My discovery of strategic thinking was entirely situated – situated learning.  It’s only now, after years of PhD school and exposure to educational theory and training, that I can call it was it was (strategic thinking) and apply it intentionally across other contexts.

This leaves me to wonder:  Why do we expect people to learn things like strategic thinking and critical thinking by hitting them over the head 25 times with situations that require it (or the information needed to perform it), rather than weaving in an explicit,  “meta” sort of approach that labels it, values it, and identifies it when it happens?  The hitting over the head with information and situations is important too. I get that. However, the meta discussion makes it easier to explore and transfer.  We need more meta.

Featured image: Nick de Partee, unsplash.com