Right now, the overarching vibes in education are not good. Narratives on teacher shortages, burnout, and school board drama have stolen the show. Pessimism is paramount, and it gets fed easily in social media likes, retweets, and shares. Each new idea increases in magnitude until the story we tell of education makes a Stephen King novel sound like a fairy tale. We are up against some unprecedented challenges in education, and the easiest story to tell is pessimistic at best. Why is this, and is it accurate?
We can learn a lot from our stories about money and finance. Here is an excerpt from The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel:
Assuming that something ugly will stay ugly is an easy forecast to make. And it's persuasive, because it doesn't require imagining the world changing. But problems correct and people adapt. Threats incentivize solutions in equal magnitude. That's a common plot of economic history that is too easily forgotten by pessimists who forecast in straight lines.
Sound familiar? It does to me. Housel spoke of stock market crashes and economies recovering after wars, but I think the lesson applies to the stories we are telling in education. We don't know all of the solutions to our current challenges yet, and it's easier to paint the picture of continued demise, myself included, but the current threats facing public education will produce solutions in equal magnitude.
If you are a sports fan, you have undoubtedly experienced the "availability heuristic"; it just may have been labeled or described as momentum. A team that has won several games in a row, we feel, is more likely to win the next one, and a player that has made game-winning free throws recently is determined to always "come through in the clutch." We use the stories available to us to craft narratives that help us fill in the gaps of our incomplete view of the world. Right now, many of the stories available to us are bleak, and the only natural thing to do is to assume the future is as well. History tells us this assumption is a mistake.
Lessons from finance once again tell us to be wary of the current narrative surrounding education right now.
"...money is ubiquitous, so something bad happening tends to affect everyone and captures everyone's attention." (Housel, p.181)
This isn't the case with things like the weather. Iowa educators reading may think of the derecho that ripped through the state in August of 2020. Readers outside of the state (if there are any) may not. The weather event made national news for a short while until the next ugly thing took precedence. Victims of natural disasters and isolated events can feel like they are in a bubble as the news cycle barges on, while they are left to pick up the pieces in the aftermath. Educators may feel like they are in a bubble right now. I disagree because, like money, education is ubiquitous. It affects everyone. This has contributed to the snowball effect of pessimism because everyone is a stakeholder and has skin in the game. The good news is it should also, in turn, increase the urgency of discovering solutions.
During a recent professional learning day, my colleagues and I were engaged in using the "5 Why's" protocol to establish the root purpose of our work. One group's thinking took a macro-level approach and resulted in a final "why" of helping students become productive members of society. That helps illustrate the point that the work educators do influences everyone. There is no choice but to continue building and strengthening our public education system. It's not hyperbole to state the kids we are educating today are our future.
This is our collective and productive struggle as educators. No one is better suited to tackle the productive struggle than educators themselves. Educators help kids tackle skills and find solutions they didn't know were possible every day. In our classrooms, "I'm not any good at math, and I never will be" is shifted to students multiplying for the first time or solving quadratic equations. We are masters of helping others embrace the productive struggle, and it's time for us to embrace it ourselves.
I'm not advocating for toxic positivity. It's okay to acknowledge there are challenges. In fact embracing a pessimistic mindset can be helpful at times when troubleshooting and identifying barriers. I am advocating to give more fuel to the solutions and ideas presented across the landscape while exhausting less cognitive bandwidth on the "sky is falling" narratives that offer the path of least resistance. While we don't have all the answers yet to the challenges we are facing we do have control over the narrative we choose to believe and portray about education and if we aren't willing to craft our story, someone else will.
Here's to problems correcting and people adapting in 2022.
"Teaching is the greatest act of optimism." - Colleen Wilcox
References:
Housel, M. (2021). The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons, on wealth, greed and happiness. Harriman House.
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