Control - reinforcing Taylorism?
Monday, November 12, 2012 at 06:12AM Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody knows what's gonna happen next: not on a freeway, not in an airplane, not inside our own bodies and certainly not on a racetrack with 40 other infantile egomaniacs. - Days of Thunder
I've been thinking lately about the ideal qualities of a worker - especially a computer technician. A number of factors including a shortage of tech hours, increased amounts and kinds of technology for which techs are responsible, and the growing "mission critical" factor of technologies in the classroom have led to our district experiencing something this fall that it's not really experienced before: significantly delayed responses to technical problems in offices and classrooms.
The immediate, no-cost "solution" to this problem, it may seem, is better use of the technicians we have. Following the old Taylor efficiency model, we need to do a better job monitoring the Precision, Reliability, and Endurance of our technicians. Let's follow these folks around with a clip board to make sure they are using every hour of every day to the fullest. Punch the clock. No wasted motion, right?
Good luck with that.
Technical workers are among those for which Taylorism is least effective. I don't need these folks working harder, longer, or necessarily more uniformly. I need them working, as the cliche goes, smarter. Instead of looking for Precision, Reliability, and Endurance, i need technicians who model Innovation, Tenacity, and Intrinsic Motivation. For 90% of their days, they are among the biggest trouble-shooters, problem-solvers, and detectives we have operating in the school. The best techs analyze a problem, try creative solutions, and keep working on the problem until there is a satisfactory resolution. And only the intrinsically-motivated will consistantly demonstrate these qualities.
So here is my question: Are the qualities of a good teacher really any different? Instead of shoe-horning every teacher into a one-right-approach to instruction through control, shouldn't we be encouraging Innovation, Tenacity, and Intrinsic Motivation?
Oh, and if that's true for teachers, why not for students? Will children who demonstrate Innovation, Tenacity, and Intrinsic Motivation as students rather than compliance and conformity of be more likely to have these qualities as workers one day? Does attempting to control student behaviors work against building the dispositions needed to be successful in an entrepreneurial economy? Let's all face the same way, be on the same page, and get the same answers on the same tests. Hmmmmmm.
One of the things that got me thinking about this was watching Seth Godin's TED talk, “Stop Stealing Dreams” about his book of the same name. It's worth a watch and/or read if you haven't done it for a while.
Reader Comments (3)
It seems to me this is the essential conflict between the twin initiatives of Common Core and the current testing mania. Hopefully Common Core will not be turned into some kind of formula, which will ultimately destroy its spirit. I see a lot of panic over the CC - and a lot of district initiatives that are trying to force it into a mold. The idea is to encourage our students to step out of the safety of compliance to discover and reveal their unique creativity.
I would suspect that Steve Jobs was resistant to the shoe horn school of educational thought. And I know that I have seen far too many wildly talented (but divergent) students give up on education because of cookie-cutter /shoe-horn theories.
When will folks realize that people are not widgets?
We all need to figure out how we're going to be able to do more with less. How can secondary teachers manage a class approaching 35-40 students? No principal is going to announce that class sizes are going to decline any time soon. My boss isn't going to tell me, forget about data Nathan, "we've hired someone else to take on that side of our job." On top of efficiency, what's the little extra we provide in our job (as Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum write about in That Used to Be Us)? As Godin exclaims in the video - "standing out is a long-term strategy."
I think Innovation, Tenacity and Intrinsic Motivation are good replacements for my least favorite buzz term - 21st Century Skills. Now they just need to be branded.
Hi Jacquie,
I agree - people don't get that creativity and innovation and divergent thinking really can't be measured by one-right-answer testing measures. Performance-based assessments anyone?
Doug
Hi Nathan,
Hmmm, maybe if I had a clever acronym I could make my fortune!
Taylor was all about efficiency and cost cutting. That certainly has appeal to the general public as applied to education. I keep thinking of the old maxim: Fast Cheap Good - pick two.
Doug