Several summers ago, I spent the better of a week trying to piece together the perfect fantasy football schedule. It was a big job, but I was the commissioner, and that duty fell on my shoulders. I worked for hours and hours, jotting notes down by hand, crafting spreadsheets. In the end, I had failed, so I did what any rational person would have done from the beginning and searched "fantasy football schedule maker" on Google. In seconds, it presented me with the optimal 10-team, two-division schedule. After swallowing my pride, I felt a sense of relief that this saga was over. However, when I took a look at the schedule this fancy algorithm had generated, it wasn't perfect either. The perfect schedule didn't exist.
The search for a perfect solution that didn't exist may sound familiar to school leaders and community members after this past year and a half. Throughout the state, country, and world, we faced the added burden of facing public scrutiny after every decision, big or small. It's led us to new decision-making processes and successes. So how do we capitalize on these new learnings and walk into future school years with improved decision-making frameworks?
We've established that we can learn a lot from decisions made this year to guide decision-making in the future. That isn't a new thought. What's new is we may have "cracked the code" on making decisions in the future. In the words of fantasy football stud Aaron Rodgers, it turns out we all need to relax.
Yes, this keyboard warrior just suggested a relaxed approach to decision-making near the end of one of the most high-stress school years we hopefully will ever experience. No, nothing is relaxing about making potential life and death decisions at the building and district level while facing angry community members at every turn. The relaxing I'm referring to is the relaxing of constraints we've often placed on the decisions we make in education.
It's a bit ironic in a school year thought of as restricted and constrained; it was actually the flexible thinking and relaxing of constraints by our leaders that led us to some of the best solutions.
Whether it is building a fantasy football schedule or planning your family's most efficient route through Adventureland, your success and sanity will most likely come down to your willingness to relax the constraints, and believe it or not; there are a lot of parallels to these examples in education.
Computer scientists face this dilemma daily. In the book Algorithms to Live By, authors Tom Griffiths and Brian Christian discuss three different types of relaxation techniques that computer scientists use to solve the problem they are working on; Constraints Relaxation, Continuous Relaxation, and Lagrangian Relaxation. Let's take a look at how we can apply these three techniques in education.
Constraints Relaxation
We are often guilty of brainstorming reasons why new ideas and initiatives won't work. We can become prisoners to the master schedule and "the way we've always done it." Over the past year, leaders had no choice but to throw the status quo to the side and relax the constraints. There was no clear path to a perfect solution. Leaders tackled this impossible problem by solving an easier version of it first while working back toward a realistic outcome. As an example, the social distancing guidelines left schools in a scramble to find space. For many schools, this was akin to searching for Big Foot. This brought up the question, "What if we brought in only half of the students each day?"
Sometimes in education, we wish we had the problems of other classrooms, schools, or districts. We believe we can't progress on certain issues in our own arena because of structures outside of our control (constraints). Sometimes there is merit to this thought process. Many times there is not. "Pie in the sky" thinking has a negative connotation inside the walls of schools, most likely because we have not been good at leveraging this line of thinking to our advantage. When we are at a crossroads and making little progress, we can take what we've learned from computers and start making progress on the problem we wish we had by relaxing constraints and starting to reign it into reality when appropriate.
Starting with a clean slate helps provide clarity to our decisions and keeps us in line with our values and objectives in life and education. In trying to make decisions for ourselves, we often include too many variables. When we advise others, we focus on the most important factors (Heath, 2013). We may encourage colleagues to take risks and always make decisions that are best for kids. Are we doing the same for ourselves? We can and we should, and our response going forward to the statement "We can't do that because..." should be "What would it look like if we could?" We've learned during this year that some obstacles that have muddied decision-making aren't quite as daunting as we once thought.
Continuous Relaxation
One evening, standing in front of the drink dispenser at Subway, I was flummoxed with an impossible decision. Light lemonade or Mountain Berry Blast Powerade? I don't drink pop (a constraint I imposed on myself to relax the stress on my waistline), so my options were limited, but options nonetheless. I did enjoy both of these drinks. The light lemonade had fewer calories, but the Powerade had a smoother taste. So what was a guy to do?
If I had known then, what I do now about the benefits of continuous relaxation, the decision would have been quite simple and much quicker, but alas, I still stumbled on it by default. The answer was to have my cake and eat it too. Why not have a little bit of both these beverages mixed? It took a few visits to find the optimal ratio of lemonade and Powerade. I found success by turning a binary decision (lemonade or Powerade) into a continuum-based decision (some lemonade, some Powerade).
We've been conditioned in education to think of many decisions involving the word "OR." Substituting the word "AND" into those decisions seems like blasphemy. Continuous relaxation helps in the process of reigning our perfect world solution back to reality. In a perfect world, I would have purchased two drinks: one Powerade and one lemonade. In reality, there was no way I could explain to my wife why I bought two drinks for myself because I couldn't make a decision. Explaining my mixing strategy wasn't much easier...
Many districts used continuous relaxation by changing the virtual or in-person learning decision into a little bit of both with the hybrid model. Other schools shifted the mask mandate or no mask mandate decision to a classroom by classroom basis depending on the size of room and class. Continuous relaxation allows for the ability to try multiple options simultaneously and re-calibrate as more evidence is collected. This can help speed up the decision-making process.
There are times in every aspect of life when change doesn't happen because we don't want to admit defeat. We decide to continue a little longer or troubleshoot more instead of shifting the course to a better solution. Our own biases are in play here, and many times this is because we made an either/or decision when we didn't have to.
The good news is we now know we can start making "and" decisions and ooch towards the optimal balance of different factors by dipping our toes in the water. For example, a classroom teacher may struggle with embracing a new instructional strategy in fear it will not work as effectively as what they are currently doing. Likewise, a building principal may struggle with making adjustments to a long-standing master schedule. In both of these instances, using continuous relaxation and starting with one day a week to try the new strategy or schedule can help them make progress and test out these new approaches without as much risk.
Lagrangian Relaxation
Several years ago, I was at a fall wedding reception. As luck would have it, my favorite college football team played a game simultaneously, a conundrum many college football fans face every year. The reception was outdoors with no televisions or Wi-Fi signal to be found. I had a couple of options, but none of them included missing this game. If I had known then what I know now about constraint relaxation, I.......still wouldn't have relaxed that constraint. The go-to solution in this situation for many wedding guests is usually a form of continuous relaxation and bouncing back and forth between the reception and the hotel bar to catch a fraction of both.....and as the night progresses, weighted much more heavily toward watching the game at the bar. Additionally, my wife and I had the added responsibility of caring for our 9-month-old daughter during this wedding, so trying this back and forth strategy would result in an angry wife, a missing baby, and missing out on some of the biggest plays of the game. Not good.
Thankfully I did have a phone with streaming capabilities but with a minimal data allowance. It was a tough spot, but I ended up biting the bullet and paying the data overage charges to watch my beloved Cyclones lose in overtime. The important part here is not the outcome of the game but the outcome of my decision-making process. I was able to decide by turning impossibilities into penalties (Christian & Griffiths, 181). I was using a form of Lagrangian Relaxation without realizing it.
"An optimization problem has two parts: the rules and the scorekeeping. In Lagrangian Relaxation, we take some of the problem's constraints and bake them into the scoring system instead." (Christian & Griffiths, 178)
Education leaders faced impossibilities at every turn this past school year. Ultimately, they were forced to start considering some of these impossibilities and the consequences associated with them. They consistently tried to make decisions that were best for kids. Many faced issues this year because kids' safety didn't always appear to align with what was best for kids' learning- a tough spot for any leader to be in. As an educator and parent, I'm very thankful a high priority was placed on student and staff safety.
With so many items to consider, it can be hard to make progress and arrive at a decision. We've all sat in meetings where no stone has been left unturned, only for those stones to be sitting in the same location they were when we walked into the room. We can help avoid this by following up when impossibilities are mentioned. Who is this a detriment to? How big of a drawback is this? Can you assign a value to this hurdle?
The last question is crucial. Bringing up hurdles and potential roadblocks is an integral part of making decisions, but we often suggest them as absolutes. When we attempt to assign values to the drawbacks, we can start to make traction on the problem at hand. No longer are minor, and major obstacles treated equally. The values won't be perfect, and they don't have to be. The goal is to shift the thinking from impossibilities to penalties.
Time
Looking back at the hours I spent (wasted) searching for the perfect fantasy football schedule, it is clear that the reward was not worth the time spent. Education leaders faced this same dilemma this past year and will continue to face it in the future. Are we trying to generate the perfect solution, or are we trying to find the best solution we can in an appropriate amount of time? Relaxation doesn't guarantee a shortcut to the optimal solution, but it does help us grapple with this time and solution quality tradeoff (Christian & Griffiths, 2016). What does this mean for leaders?
"....if we're willing to accept solutions that are close enough, then even some of the hairiest problems around can be tamed with the right techniques" (Christian 175).
On the surface, this seems to contradict the goal of always doing what is best for kids. But is it really best to settle for a solution that is anything but perfect? Yes, in many cases, it is.
Two common themes pop up frequently in education. More time. More money. We can get both by sticking to a timely decision-making process. As the saying goes, time is money. When we meet to make decisions, we use the resource of time and the resource of money in the form of salaries and hourly wages. By utilizing an effective decision-making framework, we can gain traction on issues and expedite the process. The benefits of this are two-fold: more time is left for staff to prepare, provide feedback or work with students outside of class, AND we see the implementation of what we've determined to be best practices for students in actual classrooms sooner. Fortunately, there is a way to help us get to the action steps sooner.
Tripwires
I recently started coaching my daughter's six and seven-year-old softball team. Practices and games are enjoyable because everyone wants everyone else to succeed. There is no score being kept, just a focus on getting better and having fun. At this age, coaches are pitching to players. Swinging a bat at a moving ball is one of the hardest things to do in sports, especially when you are that young....and your coach can't throw strikes. In short, there are a lot of swings and misses. When game time arrives, everyone wants to see their kid put the ball in play and run to first base. How many attempts should they get? How do we make sure everyone gets a couple of at-bats? We can set a "tripwire."
Fortunately, our league has guidelines on how many swings they get each at-bat, as well as the option to hit off a tee after those swings. Each girl gets her attempts at hitting a live pitch AND experiencing the success of putting the ball in play at the end of the at-bat, whether off the tee or the coach. Tripwires give us pre-determined criteria for knowing when to make a decision, shift course or move on. If you look, you'll find tripwires all around the world of education this past year and a half.
When decisions were announced this past year, many times, they came with disclaimers or caveats, including timeframes or options to adjust course based on the COVID data at the time. We used tripwires effectively in education this past year. They allowed us to get solutions in action quicker while reminding us that they need not be permanent.
If we are already following some of these techniques as part of our decision-making framework, consciously or unconsciously, why do we need to be aware of them? What is the point?
Intentionality
In a previous blog post, I discussed the power of positive reinforcement and focusing on "growing the grass" instead of "killing the weeds." It's important to be aware of what went well with our decision-making this year and why it went well so we can replicate it in the future.
With the benefit of hindsight, it can become easy to start questioning our previous decisions. At a systems level, it's just as important to analyze the decision-making process as it is the outcomes. Making decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves (Newport, 2019). Educators were caught up in making reactive decisions this school year, with guidelines changing literally overnight. With more time to breathe and approach issues proactively, it will be beneficial for leaders to look at their decision-making framework and determine what adjustments and improvements they could make to it after a year of ultra-high stakes decision-making.
Potential Action Steps:
Draft a "pie in the sky" master schedule. Then, share your thoughts with others in your building. Bonus: Try it out one day per week starting next fall.
Schedule one hour this summer to draft or revise a decision-making framework you can use in your role in education.
Allot 30 minutes this month to record times you've effectively used tripwires. If you are implementing something new this fall, is there a tripwire you can place to re-calibrate if needed?
Choose a hypothetical scenario to bring to your next PLC or Building Leadership Team meeting. Practice going through a decision-making framework and assigning values to roadblocks instead of treating them as impossibilities.
References:
Griffiths, T. and Christian, B., 2016. Algorithms to Live By. New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp.48-58.
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. Crown Business, 2013.
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