As mentioned in my previous post, I am quite taken by Robert Evan’s, The Human Side of School Change. One of the reasons for this is that I consider myself to be both a kind, compassionate person and a change agent and mild-mannered provocateur. In Evan’s chapter on “The Meaning of Change,” he asserts that change “encourages resistance… provokes loss, challenges competence, creates confusion, and causes conflict.”

Me? Afflicting the comfortable instead of comforting the afflicted?

Your's Truly at Our Minnesota Going Away Party

Among my treasured possessions when I moved from Minnesota to California in 1997 was a Dilbert t-shirt given to me by my Minnesota colleagues. On it is a picture of Dilbert, with the caption “Change is good. You go first.” This perfectly encapsulates Evan’s notion that when it comes to change, “we exalt it in principle, [but] we oppose it in practice.” Our daily lives, he asserts, are built around predictability and continuity, and anything that threatens those will be resisted. As Jean Piaget postulated regarding learning, we desire to assimilate new knowledge into existing mental schemas rather than create new schemas, new accommodations. In other words, we want new experience to fit into our view of the world, not to challenge it.

As a technologist, I am given to rational explanation and argument. But I also recognize the power that emotion has over us, and Evans persuasively argues that we need to understand the emotional component of change to be effective leaders. Let me summarize some of his thoughts on the nature of change:

• Change represents loss. We must take into account people’s attachment to the status quo, and give them time to grieve its diminution.
• Because the meaning we have constructed about our current world is cumulative and grows more fixed over time, “change is less welcome to the old than to the young.” (more on this in a future post)
• The logic of the change agent is not enough to win the day. People must “discover their own meaning in… changes before they can accept them.”
• The bad situation, as untenable as it may be, may not be enough to spur people to change. “The pattern we construct builds its meaning by continuity, not happiness.” [emphasis added] Another way of saying this is reflected in the old adage “better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t’.”
• “Change challenges competence,” Evans asserts. By proposing change there is an implicit charge that what we are currently doing is no longer adequate, we’re not cutting the mustard. The simple act of endorsing a new approach throws doubt on those using the current method.
• Of course we know that change creates confusion. Evans did not surprise me here. Even those who “pressed for the change—experience the stress of uncertainty.”
• Finally, Evans describes how change causes conflict. I think that change actually reveals conflict that is already present within the organization but underground, hidden within the shadows of hallway conversations, passive resistance, and snarky comments over coffee. From this point of view change can be a healthy way of surfacing the unspoken tensions within an organization, as long as leaders are willing to address those tensions head-on before working on the change itself.

As someone who has worked in both schools and industry, as has Evans, I appreciate his description that within schools “there is a strong tradition of conflict avoidance.” Amen, to that, brother Evans.

As a newly-minted teacher in the 1970’s, I came out of college full of piss and vinegar, ready to change the world. After getting slapped around a bit, I learned a the hard way about the need for patience in the change process. And indeed, when an idea that I am pressing for is put down by others, I have faith that the idea (if it is a good idea) will surface again in organizations comprised of smart, well-meaning people. When it does, the idea may even be claimed by someone else as theirs. So be it. The important thing is that something good may ultimately happen.

With this in mind, I will hopefully become more understanding of the resistance to change I see all around me and, if I look closely, in me as well.

But I must confess that my understanding and patience does wear thin, and having recently entered that decade of life where people like me are supposed to be planning for retirement, I fear that some changes will tarry too long for me to fully enjoy and experience personally. So while Evans has it right that some “older” folks may be less open to change than the young, there is also a cadre of us who are impatient to see a lifetime of work and hope for change further delayed.

It took me a weeks longer than my usual pace of a book per week to read Robert Evan’s The Human Side of School Change: Reform, Resistance, and the Real-Life Problems of Innovation (Amazon citation). This was not because the book is hard to read, or uninteresting, or because I think the author’s premises are wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. It took me a long time to read because it caused me to really think and to reflect on my many years of experience in schools, universities, and the education industry.

Evans had me from the Introduction, where he states: “…the futility of school change is legendary. Perhaps no American institution has been reformed more often, with less apparent effect, than the school.” Harsh words perhaps, but resonant in me.

For 14 chapters Evans cites research from education, psychology, and business to describe how difficult it is for people and institutions in general to change, and how many of these difficulties are magnified within the school community. Despite millions of dollars and millions of person hours invested in change, “never have so many teachers and administrators worked so hard or so long and felt less rewarded or alone.”

Evans divides his book into three major sections:

1. The Nature of Change
2. Dimensions of Change
3. Leading Innovation

Each section is replete with examples of how difficult change is to manage. One could easily come away from this book feeling that the situation in schools is, at the end of the day, hopeless. But in his final chapter, entitled “Reach and Realism, Experience and Hope,” Evans brings those of us who are trying to affect change in schools to a better place. In a section that perhaps the Obama campaign subconsciously noted entitled “The Triumph of Hope,” Evans acknowledges that the pace of change in schools  can be discouraging, taking a generation or longer. A generation of hard, often thankless labor and persistence. He upends Samuel Johnson’s jest about remarriage by suggesting that such a triumph of hope over experience is precisely what we do need, and ends with a moving quotation from Vaclav Havel:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how if turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to love and to continually try new thing, even in conditions that seem hopeless.

Evan’s book has given me much to think about, and perhaps much to write about. I am more committed than ever to change and innovation, but more clear-eyed about what can be accomplished under even the best of circumstances. Discouraged, no. Better equipped, absolutely!

My spouse (and personal shopper) was recently looking through my closet, assessing my wardrobe for the coming school year. I love her for this, for if I trusted my own sartorial sense I would surely look the slob. So each year we trek off to the mall, an almost viscerally painful experience for me, and we purchase new clothes for the year, to be supplemented later by a couple of holiday additions. I’m free to purchase clothing on my own that can’t be readily seen, such as underwear and socks, both of which I consider to come in two colors: white and not-white.

As you might guess, I don’t pay much attention to fashion, but I have listened in on a enough lunch-time conversations among faculty and staff to know that there is a certain shared angst about what to wear to school each day, the rising costs and decreasing quality of what we purchase, tips for where to find good deals, and even offers of clothing loans and swaps. My gaze then falls upon our school’s maintenance staff, each wearing an olive colored shirt with jeans to ask my self “what-if?”

Our school has a long tradition of a uniform for students—a tradition not likely to fall by the wayside. While some students may try to push the boundaries of the uniform form time-to-time, I think deep down they like the notion of having less choice at the start of the school day. Public schools are adopting uniforms as a way of instilling pride among students, while lessening the economic burden on cash-strapped parents to keep up with the latest fads in clothing, thereby equalizing the school fashion runway for all students.

So why not extend these benefits to faculty and staff? Think of the gains:

• Less time figuring out what to wear in the morning, resulting in less stress.
• Group purchasing power can bring down the cost of school clothing; certainly an economic boon in “these tough economic times.”
• Uniforms could be sourced from organic, fair trade sources helping us fulfill our school’s mission statement regarding sustainability and justice.
• Students would spend less time talking about faculty and staff clothing, and more time on, well, Facebook where they can talk about what they’re going to wear outside of school. (This one needs some work, granted.)

Maybe such a dream is a “guy” thing, but I think not. I think  it’s a “green” thing. Better for the pocket-book, better for the environment. Fashion can still flourish among the uniformed through accessories (or in my case underwear and socks.) I’m already designing the Tech Department’s shirt in my head. I wonder if I could add a Dilbert embroidery to denim?

Hey, there’s a serious idea in here!