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Design Revolution Road Show

Apr 2nd, 2010
by mbasnage.
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The Design Revolution Road Show is in its third month on the road, and if you’re lucky enough to live in one of the midwestern places where it is coming, you’re in for a treat.

The road show consists of a great old Airstream trailer filled with real products that have been designed with humanitarian ends in mind. Among the products, my favorites were the ones designed for ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ customers. This isn’t design as in “Design Within Reach” or Michael Graves tea kettles, this is design for sustainability and improving lives.

And design as a process– as in “design thinking.”

If you’re looking for a good intro to design thinking or just some inspiration to bring it into your school, you should checkout the toolkit on their site. Download the toolkit here.

Posted in: Administrators, Career, Creativity, Design Thinking, Imagination, Innovation, Uncategorized.

Top down plans or distributed expertise?

Jan 1st, 2010
by mbasnage.
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Writing about bureaucracy as a response to terrorism, David Brooks writes in yesterday’s New York Times,

At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.

There are two points relevant to education. First: are the systems we are building in the name of “reform” equipping teachers and students to take advantage of the information in front of them in active, entrepreneurial, concrete ways? Or are we building (in Brooks’ words) “more protocols, more layers and more review systems?” These diverging approaches are built on two very different understandings of what knowledge looks like.

I’ll let Brooks make the second, regarding the inherent fallibility of bureaucracies:

we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Posted in: Knowledge, Teachers.

Telling stories

Nov 3rd, 2009
by mbasnage.
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As teachers, school leaders, and parents, the stories we tell exert a profound influence on our students, communities, and children. What matters is not only what the stories are about, but how we tell them.

This is point of a nice little essay by Richard Gamble over at the Front Porch Republic. He quotes Wendell Berry’s character Hannah Coulter (from the eponymous novel):

Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different. Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place. Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm. Doesn’t that finally unmake everything that has been made? Isn’t that the loose thread that unravels the whole garment?
And how are you ever to know where the thread breaks, and when the tug begins?

How can we tell stories to (paraphrasing C.S. Lewis) “fire the imagination and strengthen the will?”

Of course, schools are not the only storytellers, nor should they be:

“Education happens in many contexts: in the family from the time children are infants; in the extended family of grandparents and aunts and uncles (including the memory of ancestors long dead); in the alleys and sidewalks and playgrounds of neighborhoods; in the church; and within the classroom walls of more formal education.”

But are our schools telling compelling, jargon-free stories? Do they fire the imagination? Build civic culture? Or are we stuck talking to ourselves, confusing big storylines with incremental improvements in metrics?

Posted in: Administrators, Character, Imagination, Scope of Education, Stories, Teachers, Unstuck.

Inside the Black Box of Teacher Quality

Sep 16th, 2009
by mbasnage.
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There’s a famous Sidney Harris cartoon that shows two mathematicians near a chalkboard working out some long, complicated theorem. In the middle of the board, connecting the two halves of the formula, is the phrase “and then a miracle occurs.” One of the mathematicians tells the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”

See the cartoon here.

We seem to have the same attitude when it comes to teacher expertise and effectiveness. There now (finally) seems to be great agreement that teacher effectiveness is a major factor, indeed the major factor in student achievement. On some level, everyone–from administrators to the policy community and politicians–now seems to acknowledge this, even if they are not familiar with the research on which it is based.

Unfortunately, some of the proposals developed on top of this idea seem to ignore what expertise is, and how it is developed. They leave these critical issues inside a black box. Measuring teacher expertise based on student test scores may be helpful, if done well, but it provides none of the critical insight into how teachers may develop this expertise. Nor can it help schools to know how to nurture these qualities among their faculty; how to create environments in which more teachers can support student success. In a good case, schools will hire teachers from among the most vetted, certificated, and tested candidates, wait for the miracles to occur, and then measure the teachers against test scores to see which teachers are “effective.”

In a worse scenario, however, there are even more alarming problems. First, research points to no correlation between short-term student test scores and long-term achievement. If the evaluations only relate to standardized tests from that particular year, they will not drive the kind of long-term boost to achievement that schools, parents, and states are looking for. Second, any connection to short-term test scores will drive teachers not only to teach to the test, but encourage them to game the system. Third, this approach reinforces the mistaken notion that teaching is a solitary activity done apart from peers, and destroys incentives for teachers to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways.

Who would benefit from the proposal to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores? Students? If a student is fortunate enough to bounce from one well-rated teacher to another, and if a sustainable system somehow evolves (the miracle again) to attract only these top-testers as teachers. Teachers? Perhaps not. If the question of teacher expertise development is left inside the black box, only those teachers who have by luck or craft managed to navigate the system to improve student scores will be clear beneficiaries. But even they will not benefit as much as they could if their own development were being actively guided. The rest of the teachers may not know what to expect, and it is hard to imagine any default benefit. Parents may feel like they are benefiting, but only if they find ways to get their kids into the classrooms higher-ranked teachers. Administrators will get clearer numbers to look at, but their accountability for creating environments that produce good results will go down. Outside vendors, developers of tools like data systems and services like professional development, may do pretty well.

This is precisely the specter that stands in front of us now: that at the very moment the importance of teacher quality has become widely acknowledged, that knowledge will be misused to create another layer of systems which help neither teachers nor students.

The US Department of Education’s recent Race to the Top Fund will provide more than four billion extra dollars for states’ reform efforts, provided that they do “not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers.” Section C(2) of the guidelines lays out the requirements to tie student data to teacher evaluation, and from there to teacher feedback, professional development, promotion and compensation. There has been a bit of brouhaha about this program in states such as California and New York, which have legislation forbidding the use of student data in teacher evaluation and tenure.

States are, of course, free to write proposals for funding which do acknowledge what we know about developing expertise among teachers: the role of collaboration; the role of trust in schools; the required stance of continuous improvement and self-reflection; the importance of physical environments; and a more sophisticated view of knowledge that recognizes its social, tacit, and generative aspects. Unfortunately, there is no new incentive for states and schools to push in these directions.

Posted in: Uncategorized.

The Meanings of School Gardens: Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard

Sep 10th, 2009
by mbasnage.
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No question about it, the Edible Schoolyard garden at Berkeley’s King Middle School is a beautiful place: an acre of land right behind the school, well tended with lots of well-planned growing plots, learning spaces, and resources. But what is the meaning of the garden? What is its role in the school?

Food is precious.

Food is precious.


You would not be wrong if you said the garden was there to teach children about growing and eating healthy food. But that isn’t the whole answer, and the fact that it isn’t raises interesting questions about how we think about education and educational programs.

I have been involved with a number of teaching gardens over the past 20 years, on both the east and west coasts–which is what made me want to visit the Edible Schoolyard garden. In every case, the gardens seemed to have a main philosophical rationale, a justification for their construction and staffing and maintenance. In one case, an urban teaching garden in North Philadelphia recreated bits of a local habitat in the middle of acres of concrete and macadam. There, I had the privilege of creating curricula that would help the school’s teachers bring science classes outdoors for high-quality science explorations. Other school and teaching gardens have other themes: butterfly habitat gardens remain especially popular, for instance.

However, in almost every case, the uses that the gardens allow exceed these narrow definitions. One area private school had a small organic garden, with a number of fruit trees, a chicken coop, and beds of herbs and vegetables. Did students learn about growing food? Absolutely. Science? Yes, that too, in both explicit and subtle ways. However, social-emotional learning was a big part of what happened during students’ time in the garden, as well. So students took away much more than simply how to garden organically.

School and teaching gardens have great “affordances,” to use the word as Greeno does. It allows many kinds of interactions among its users, unlike highly constrained school classroom environment.

The Edible Schoolyard garden takes advantage of this, building in relationships between the garden program and the science curriculum; and between the kitchen program and the humanities curriculum. But you can’t reduce the garden to being a subset of the science curriculum, nor the kitchen to the humanities. And I think that makes some school heads nervous: how do you justify these gardens if you cannot easily label their impact? We want to be able to reduce the effect to a simple statement.

I think the gardens’ justification comes in something irreducible, though simple enough: it is the ‘ecological validity‘ of the learning that happens in these spaces that seems to be so powerful. In other words, unlike learning a subject in an artificially constrained classroom environment and then having no idea how to apply it in the real world, garden learning by its nature allows students to see “what really happens” in a big, loosely controlled space.

Whether you are interested in hands-on learning, or nutrition, or connecting schools to their communities, you may want to visit the Edible Schoolyard garden. It is a teaching garden done very well–and a model for many other similar efforts around the country.

Learn more about the garden at the Edible Schoolyard site. Of course, if you live close or can find a way to get out to the San Francisco Bay area, you can check out one of their free monthly tours. If you attend a tour, you will have a chance to purchase some of the related educational curricula and other publications at the end.

Back on their site, you can find standards-oriented classroom lessons, as well as recipes for your own garden or kitchen.

Finally, a few pictures of the garden in the spring of 2009:

Posted in: Uncategorized.

California’s Digital Textbooks

Aug 17th, 2009
by mbasnage.
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Today KQED’s Forum program broadcast a bit about the current state of digital textbooks in California. The first twenty minutes relate to K-12 education; the rest concern higher ed.

The important development in California for K-12 education has been the governor’s digital textbook initiative. The project was launched during the state’s budget crisis, and consequently its potential for saving money was played up, perhaps a bit too much: there is a lot to be worked out to bring quality curricula to scale, even if the materials are all open-licensed for free access to teachers and students. In times of crisis, a promise of an eventual 300 to 500 million dollar savings sounds especially tantalizing.

Criticism of the existing K-12 textbook market comes from many non-budgetary angles, including:

  • the approval process, its politicization, and consequences for the content;
  • the sheer weight of paper texts (80 pound kids carrying 40 pounds of texts);
  • the dead trees critique;
  • the inflexibility of the format, where updates take years, and adaptations stay only in the teachers’ hands;
  • the ability of digital resources to teach complicated material in interactive ways;
  • the “digital natives” argument, i.e., the current generation needs digital resources because that is their context and milieu;
  • the recognition that the number of media formats for communicating information have exploded in the last five (and even fifty) years.

Krasny talks with California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas about the progress of the state’s initiative, including its recent approval of the first ten texts.

Here’s the entire hour broadcast:

In the segment on California’s K-12 initiative, there are some hopeful signs: the first phase of the initiative has found ten resources that meet at least 90 percent of the states standards. (See the scores of all submitted materials at the California Learning Resources Network, along with links to the texts themselves.)

But as Scientific American has pointed out, one thing that hasn’t changed with the approved resources is their production model: the highly rated resources are still single-author or at least paid author teams, even if they have been open-licensed.

Secretary Thomas reminded listeners that this initiative is about “letting a thousand flowers bloom,” about being open to many models of what digital “textbooks” could look like, even while insisting on high standards. So it may not be every kid with a Kindle.

But plenty of hurdles remain, including naive thinking around budget implications. There are also big implications for the role of teachers if schools want to engage with open materials in deep ways. In any case, an interesting space to keep an eye on. A few additional resources to explore, if you have not met some of the players:

CK-12
Curriki.org
Connexions
and Creative Commons

Posted in: Curriculum, Innovation, Teachers, Technology.

Getting unstuck: design thinking

Aug 14th, 2009
by mbasnage.
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So what do you do, when you’re working project, and you just get stuck? Here’s what design thinking will advise: Don’t just stay there, and try to think it through, or analyze it to death. Think: “Who can I go to?” and “What can I try?”

This was one of the gems from George Kemble’s talk this morning at New York’s Chautauqua. See it here:

George is the executive director of Stanford’s d.school (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design)

One more thing among the many that resonated. Kemble said that if you want innovation in your organization, don’t focus on the innovations (the discrete products). Focus instead on the innovators, your staff that need to be doing the innovating. Exactly.

Posted in: Administrators, Creativity, Design Thinking, Innovation, Teachers, Uncategorized, Unstuck.

Ken Robinson on Creativity and Schools

Aug 10th, 2009
by mbasnage.
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In the last few years, Ken Robinson has spoken widely about the need for a transformation in schools, and the missing role of imagination in education. I have tried to gather a number of his talks below, so that you can follow some of the threads he traces.

Some of his work helps to draw personal maps of creativity in individuals’ lives, like his recent book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. However, he also is very keen to describe the need for organizational transformation in our schools and organizations. In 2008, he spoke to the Apple Education Leadership Summit, and Edutopia.org has generously provided access to the video of that speech. The first segment lays out the need for change, pointing to factors like the economic ‘revolution’ of globalization, and the crisis in human resources that allows California to spend almost three dollars on its prison system for every dollar spent on higher education.

It might be easy to miss the second segment (the link isn’t obvious), but don’t. In part two Robinson looks more deeply into what creativity is, and how schools might better address it. Creativity, he says, is the making of “original ideas that have value.” It should not be the special domain of a particular echelon of teachers; instead we should find ways to catalyze creativity broadly, systematically. (Currently, we do the opposite.)

How? Not through yet another policy mandate. Nor only by developing new curriculum resources on creativity. Rather, because the “heart of education…is pedagogy,” improving teaching is the way to improve schools. Collaboration and the bridging of separate disciplines will be hallmarks of this effort, which should consist of powerful pilot projects supported by new technologies.

More recently, Robinson spoke at length to a group of business leaders in Los Angeles, and expanded on these thoughts. Click here, or watch below.

In particular, while acknowledging the role that strong science, math, engineering and technology curricula (the so-called STEM subjects) may play, he notes that they also benefit from an approach which recognizes imagination’s central role. After all, he says quotably:

The Renaissance didn’t happen because the Medicis had a math strategy, and standardized tests.

The other inescapable part of his argument is that school systems are not just anonymous bureaucracies of content delivery. As organizations of humans, we have to pay attention to how they are managed to nurture creativity and imagination sustainable sustainably. “The organization is the people. Their relationships, their motivations, their energy, their values, their aspirations or lack of them. It’s a living breathing thing.” Farming provides the appropriate metaphor: you don’t cause corn to grow, you create the conditions for it to do so. All great leaders, Robinson says, share an expansive (not reductive) view of human capacity in their organizations.

For more information on his ecological view of human resources, check out this paper (PDF) he wrote for the Change This blog.

Or if you want to sample a few more of his off-dry speeches, you may want to start with his TED appearance, “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity”.

Also see his warm and funny commencement speech from this spring at the Rhode Island School of Design. Finally, his books on personal and organizational creativity, including The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
and Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative are worth checking out.

Posted in: Administrators, Creativity, Curriculum, Imagination, Innovation, Scope of Education, Teachers.

Merrow and Ravitch on education, teachers

Aug 4th, 2009
by mbasnage.
1 comment

John Merrow, who does features on education for the News Hour, as well as longer documentaries for PBS, just posted a good interview with Diane Ravitch on his blog on learningmatters.tv.

In the short interview, Merrow gets her to weigh in on standards, NCLB, and the prospect of more privatizing public school system.

Among the gems is this comment on the purview of public education: “The biggest downside of NCLB is that it has promoted false, anti-educational values. Certainly high test scores [in reading and math] are better than low test scores, but that is not all that matters in education. What about science, the arts, history, literature, foreign languages?”

Are these tests a lever to push the whole, or do they end up consuming the whole?

Math and reading as a lever? Or at the expense of the rest?

Math and reading as a lever? Or at the expense of the rest?

(For more information on NCLB testing, see the FAQ here.)

Also of interest are her comments on teacher evaluation, a topic which has gotten a lot of press after studies revealed teacher quality as a major factor in student success. Measuring teacher quality or effectiveness, however, is problematic. Ravitch says “There is a ton of evidence that evaluating teachers based solely on student test scores is a bad idea,” mentioning Jesse Rothstein’s work in this area.

Apparently, Professor Rothstein is now at Berkeley, but on leave this year while he serves on the Council of Economic Advisors. You can download his paper “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement” (forthcoming from the Quarterly Journal of Economics) here. Rothstein makes the point that simple “value added” models of teacher evaluation based on student achievement may reward the wrong thing (short term achievement versus long-term performance) and may be gamed, especially if the evaluations entail high-stakes pay-for-performance.

Posted in: Scope of Education, Teachers.

Your Right Job

Jul 23rd, 2009
by mbasnage.
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In recognition of the current economic climate, I wanted the first interview here to be relevant to people who were personally struggling with the tough job market in some way. I was fortunate to get some time with Brian Golter, whose book Your Right Job, Right Now: Unconventional Wisdom, Unbelievable Results from My Boss June has just hit the shelves. Golter’s work is to connect great candidates with great jobs, and although his main work is not in the education sector, he has good advice for candidates in any field.

One of the things that makes his book so effective is its story-based format, which takes you through Golter’s own formative education and professional development under the influence and guidance of teachers and bosses good and bad. Most prominent among the great mentors was his boss June (also the inspiration for the book’s URL: http://mybossjune.com/). The book is timely, of course, but also timeless in the sense that positioning yourself for the market always tempts you to compromise in some way, as does staying in a job. The power of his book is both in its insistence that success requires courage and its assistance with getting you there.

MB: The recession is hitting everybody, including people in education. For someone who hasn’t read your book, how would you describe the strategy for job seekers in this market?

Brian Golter: I would say this: it’s not what you do that counts, it’s who you become that will define your success and fulfillment. This has always been true. The success of a teacher–of someone in education–and the security of their career will not come from what they do, or how much they make, or how highly other people think of them–not even if they have tenure. It comes from the growth of their character. And this growth of character only comes under adversity. It’s during this time of adversity, when all of the fears are being brought to the forefront, that we really have a chance to grow, in the true sense of what growth is.

What I’m here to say, having watched careers over 25 years, is that it’s that level of growth that really matters. [I mean] in terms of true financial security and intellectual and emotional growth, which equals fulfillment and success. So adversity is absolutely the fertile ground on which growth really happens. There’s a whole paradigm shift, where the culture wants to say, “Oh, look at this adversity, you’re not qualified… there’s something wrong with you… you had better start worrying about your basic provisions in life.” That’s what the culture says. But it’s lies. It’s all absolute lies. The truth of it is, this is the best opportunity to deal with the very fears, insecurities, doubts, that were defining you when you had your ‘good’ job.

MB: But with the economy the way it is, wouldn’t the best option be just to get a job quickly?

BG: It may be an option. But that would be turning away from the opportunity. So what I would say is, if you can get a job, do it. But, do it without turning away from the opportunity. And most people can’t do that, and I think that’s why culturally, there’s a correction going on. This is getting a little bit big and large here, but there are certain things in the universe–if you want to say nature or God, however you want to look at it–there are some underlying truths that work throughout life. One of them is that there are forest fires that don’t destroy the forest, they actually make the forest stronger. And so if the tree runs from its place, you can certainly understand it, but it will never be part of the new, stronger forest, and probably it will die. So don’t run away from what is happening. Understand what is happening.

MB: Something you said in the workshop was that adversity was helpful if you have interpretation. So where do you go to get that?

BG: You have to seek out wise counsel. You have to find those people who have done that for you, or that group of people who have done that for you. What I find is that this is a point of confusion for a lot of people. One, people will start with “Well, I don’t know anybody like that.” Yet, I have not met the person yet that when I press into them they did not know somebody like this. It seems that everybody has met somebody like that at some point in their life. A big central part of my message is that the reason it seems like they’re not out there, the reason it seems so unattainable, so “luck of the draw,” or such a high mountain to climb to find that person, is because we’re not focused on it.

The new reality is that what we need for security isn’t a lot of money in our 401k, it is wise counsel. When that shift begins to take place, and we go after wise counsel the same we went after retirement security, we will find it. Because they are out there, and they are ready. It’s the old adage, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” This is an overwhelming reality of what I see in career management. When I see students wanting the great teacher more than they want other things, then it happens.

MB: This is related your idea that you should be looking at the leadership of an organization more than anything?

BG: Absolutely. There are two overwhelming realities that I see in career counseling. One is that most people know how good an environment is, and have a sense for how good the leadership is, almost the minute they walk into the building. They have a sense for the amount of synergy, for the sense of fulfilment, for the sense of meaning and purpose within the environment, almost from the beginning. So we have this place of wisdom within us. We really don’t need other people for it, because we have it. What we need other people for is to remind us that we have it. That’s what great teachers do. They point us back to the places in us that are wise. That have good discernment, that are instinctive and deeper. It’s no accident that when you make decisions from those powerful places within yourself, you get better results.

And it’s really that simple. It really is that simple. It’s about making wise decisions, and finding the part of you that has the power to do that.

MB: In the education world, you see schools and other educational organizations with powerful, compelling, human-centered missions. What’s the relationship between the compelling social-improvement mission, and that great leadership? Is there a relationship?

BG: That’s a great question, and the answer is that there’s zero relationship. How many of us make that association? You know, great mission: “We’re out there feeding the poor” And you hear about it and think,”
Oh, how wonderful. How great these people must be that are feeling the poor. How could a corrupt person be out there leading the charge to feed the poor?” Yet, when you think a little more deeply about it, how easy would it be for someone who just wanted the approval of other people to be starting something like that? And how that approval of other people would make them a very poor leader. What [my former boss and mentor] June understood, and what she got at, was that it’s never the cause, it’s never the company or the mission, it’s the motive. She always brought it back to motive. So a person could be running a garbage company, and doing it with more integrity, more pure motive, in terms of wanting to do something that’s exceptional, that treats its people exceptionally, that lifts its people up with respect and admiration and appreciation and the desire for them to grow, than the organization that’s feeding the poor that doesn’t have those qualities.

MB: So you are raising a red flag that bad leaders may hide behind a good mission?

BG: Yes.

MB: And the message for prospective employees is that they may be misled by mission, so use a different yardstick to evaluate an organization?

BG: Yes, and all you have to do for proof of this is look at your own career. We’ve all done this. Look, even thought it sounds esoteric, all you have to do is look at your own resume to see that you’ve gone through this. And I would invite people to do that. Look at the quality of the experience in terms of meaning–how much fulfillment, what sense of personal meaning, these basic, intrinsic needs we have as people–go through and look at each position and then correlate it back to the quality of the leadership rather than the mission, the pay, the responsibilities, any of the factors. I think it becomes self-evident. Having said that, it makes us aware of how quickly we are fooled into thinking without those truths, and making decisions without those truths. We are all being fooled. The wool is being pulled over our eyes.

MB: When you write about how your gut feel about a work environment can be overridden by rationalizations, it reminds me of part of Made to Stick, where Chip and Dan Heath talk about emotional appeal may be overridden by facts and analytical information. They give the example of a charity appeal. Unsurprisingly, people who learn about a specific poor child in the third world give more in an experimental appeal than those who only get a list of facts about childhood hunger and poverty in that country. But the surprise is that people who get both sets of information also give less, suggesting that the analytical mind has interfered with the emotional, gut appeal.

BG: That’s a very good metaphor. The only thing I would add is that you cannot just trust your instincts. Instincts follow priorities. So if my priority is that I want other people to think well of me, because of what I do, and I go somewhere and they’re giving me a job that these people would be very impressed with, then my instincts would say that this feels pretty darn good.

So instincts only will follow priority. At the end of the day, it only becomes instinctive once the priority of [seeking good] leadership is firmly in place.

MB: So get your priorities straight, and…?

BG: The instincts will follow. Then it becomes…it’s almost playful. Your instincts are so powerful, and speak so clearly. Even people who have not used them for the last ten years will suddenly find them speaking pretty loud. I want to be clear that, yes, it’s instinct, but it follows priorities. And the biggest battle is, what’s your first priority?

MB: When you are looking for work, it is crucial to present yourself with confidence. But if you’re not feeling confident, for whatever reason–you have been out of work for a long time, you didn’t know you’d be looking for work, you are coming from a position where your boss made you doubt yourself–then where does that confidence come from?

BG: That’s the million dollar question. I’m tempted to give easy answers, and I don’t think there are really easy answers here. Where my mind goes first of all is the principle of “fake it until you make it,” that comes in to play here. When I’m counseling someone to go out on interviews who’s been pretty beat up, I try to get them to think about times when they weren’t. When they were really living most fully in their life, whether it’s a vacation, or with a friend, or even wild times in college or what not.

I have to say that the challenge for someone who’s really been in a toxic situation or their confidence is really beaten up, is to be able to remember one. I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve talked to someone, and the one they come up with isn’t really one that brings them back alive. It’s only after more prodding that they remember this other thing that happened to them…they have actually disconnected from the best times of their lives. So the answer to our question is that the best way to instill confidence quickly is to fake it, and the best way to fake it is to make it a “real fake,” to remember something that is true, and to bring that into your interview.

The last piece of advice that I send people out with when I’m preparing them for interviews–after giving them all the downloads of “Don’t say that, say this, know your story,” and all these things–the last thing I’ll say is forget all that and remember this great time of your life. When you’re being asked about your last company, use that emotional state as your standard. You can talk about negative things, you can talk about uninspiring things, you can even talk about painful things from your place of confidence.

I’m reminded of a marriage counselor I knew. People would come through after years of marriage counseling, and still be at each other’s throats. Her technique was to say, “I want to make a deal with you. I want you two to treat each other like you did when you were first in love. There may still be things to quarrel about, but just give it 48 hours. If you agree to do this, then we’ll talk about each other’s problems, but first you have to agree to do this.” The results were absolutely transformational. The point here is that confidence, good feeling, all that will follow behavior. What I’m really trying to get people to do is to behave confidently, act confidently, and then sometimes the truth of that will start to follow.

MB: In your book, you suggest that the longer term strategy for building confidence is to do things that take courage.

BG: Yes, that’s the ultimate thing. Real confidence comes from doing things that you didn’t think you could do. It’s that simple. So what I’m talking about is borrowing from past confidence, but to build present confidence — there’s always that opportunity, I think, every day. It’s really funny when you’re looking for a job or when you’re in a job, isn’t there a place within all of us that knows that if we had a little bit more courage we’d say this thing or do that thing?

Again, that’s where good leadership comes in. Good leadership would always point me to that thing. My [former] boss June would always point me to that thing. And she’d also know when I needed a rest from it, because you can’t do it all the time. It takes effort, it’s tough, and you have to honor yourself when you do do it. It’s not about becoming some stalwart, fearless warrior. On the other hand, it’s about not running scared either. Confidence comes from doing those things over time.

MB: I want to shift gears now, and talk about your own experiences in education. In your book, you use examples of inspiring professors as metaphor for bosses who can bring out the best in you. But I want to go back further, and ask you about Mrs. Brown, your fifth grade teacher, who seemed to play a big role in your early education. Can you tell me a little about her? What made her so effective?

BG: Mrs. Brown loved teaching. She was in the moment. It wasn’t a means to an end. It was just her joy to be teaching. It was who she was. So I’ll start there.

Second, she had a love of life, for lack of a better term. And she had a love of each student. I’m sure that someone more eloquent than I has a better terms for it. I have to say that’s what makes for a great teacher–and I think that most of us have been influenced in our career choices by seeing people that were moving in this fulness of life, this fully alive, this passion, this love, this “light unto the world,” and we think, “Wow, I want that.” That’s what made Mrs. Brown. She brought life, she brought joy, everything good that life has to offer.

MB: Are there any particular moments that stick out for you?

BG: I am still blown away, what is it–40-something years later–that we could make paper-mache dinosaurs. It could have been papier-mache missions like everyone else had to make. But for her, it was dinosaurs. She knew the pulse of the class, and knew that’s what would be exciting for us.

MB: Did everybody make their own?

BG: Yes, we were allowed to. I made a Brontosaurus, and it kept falling down. But I can’t tell you how much passion I had for that project. And I’m not an artsy person, I’m not good with my hands. But it didn’t matter. I just wanted to make that thing.

Another thing is that she would have us sing, and then she’d give us ice-cream if we’d sing well. With other teachers, it was like “We want to get you all to this level,” and then pass you off… to the abyss.

I think we’ve all known people like this [Mrs. Brown]. Those are the people I think we should be following. And they just show up in these little unexpected places.

MB: Your earliest experience in school wasn’t so positive, though. It sounds like your came into school with a mind on fire, and even some pretty specific career goals. Knowing pretty definitively that you wanted to be fireman, you hit a big roadblock when you got to school.

BG: I always expect more people to nod their heads when I tell that story. Am I the only one who felt like school was a big setback for my goals? For me, the realization, the mindset that you have to do something to be who and what to be–that it’s all conditional. For me looking back on my day to day, Monday morning, “What do I expect?”–it had a major influence on my emotional state of mind that you have to do well at something in order to be and have what you want in life . And this just continues. Now I have my company and it continues. Now the book has to sell. And after the book, the workshops have to do well. After that, I have to become king of the universe. So it’s a constant thing.

Fulfillment, satisfaction, meaning, purpose, the ability to be a Mrs. Brown, is always put off on to some condition. That’s why I bring up the school example in the book, because for me, that’s where it started. And it was a big letdown to discover that we’re in a world where you can’t be what you were designed to be, and that was the message for me there. I hope it wasn’t the same for everybody, but that’s what I heard.

MB: Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to that Kindergarten teacher, or to the principal or school board? On one hand, people are measured by SAT scores, resumes, grades and so on. On the other hand, like you people are coming to school with a sense of their particular, very special mission in life.

BG: I heard it the other day. Richard Petty, the famous NASCAR driver who was so successful was asked what advice would you give to kids. He said first of all, I’m not going to give it to kids, I’m going to give it to the parents. Your children have to grow up with a strong need and desire for something. They have to want something. He said, I wanted to be a race car driver, with a passion. Everything I did in life, I was so hungry for it, everything revolved around it. So if I had to take a test, it was the next step to becoming a race car driver. The need was so strong. I’d replace the word need with desire. The desire was so strong.

So in Kindergarten, if someone had said, “Let me connect reading with [you] becoming a fireman. Let me connect math, (of all things) to being a fireman. And let me connect art…” then they would have had me. I wouldn’t have been conditioned as I was. Then there wouldn’t have been this thwarting of desire, there would have been a building of desire. I think as a system, both for education and parenting, we do the exact opposite. We try to take care of so many needs, that we’re not building desire. We’re not building need. And need is essential. That’s exactly what Mrs. Brown was able to do.

MB: Speaking of need, even before you wanted to be a fireman, you wanted to be Spiderman. He was your hero. Do adults need heroes? Do all of us need heroes?

BG: Yes. That is ultimately the path we’re all on, to become the heroes and heroines we were designed to be. We all know that that there’s something in us that was made for that. It may have been denied, it may have been crushed up, it may have been diminished beyond all repair, but it’s there. I haven’t met the person yet, where if you dug on it that the spark wasn’t ignited. It’s one of those truths that’s true for all of us. How great the educator that knows that. How great the boss that knows that.

MB: So if you were giving a high school graduation speech, what would the take-home message be?

BG: Honestly, it would be: you’ve been duped. You’ve been duped. You’ve been told that if you do well in elementary school, that would help you do well in junior high school. And if you did well in junior high, that would help you in high school, and you could get into a good college. And if you get into a good college and do well, then you could be on track to be become the person you’ve always wanted to become. And it’s a lie. It’s a damned lie. There’s no truth in it.

So let me tell you what is true. You become that person by seeking out the people that bring out the best in you. It’s not something down the road, it something here right now in this moment, it’s possible in every moment. And so it’s not something in the future, it’s right here.

Surprisingly, you might expect that if you think that way, you would drop out of school or you wouldn’t try your best. No, the opposite happens. With the freedom of understanding that being your best isn’t conditional on your performance, that actually brings out better performance. More importantly, it brings out what’s true in the person. It connects them back to desire, to their passions, to relationships and instincts. It leads them back to their natural destiny. Performance without connecting to what’s true in you is a lie. A very very damaging lie.

Also, I would say to those kids, I understand your temptation to drugs and sex. I really do. Because there’s life in that. There’s pleasure. And this life that we’ve spelled out around performance, there’s no life in that. So I get it. But, it’s actually part of the same sell out–that’s just the medication, from the same enemy. So when you choose that path, you’re no different than these people that you think have just become high performers. You’re on the same path of selling out. My invitation to you, if you want to be a radical, is to connect back to what’s true, and stay away from these lies.

For more information about Brian Golter’s book and related workshops and materials, see his website at http://mybossjune.com/. Naturally, you can also find the book at Amazon (click on the image to go there):

Posted in: Career, Character, Innovation, Interviews.