Blogg-Ed Indetermination

In today’s post, I pick-up theme from a previous post based on Robert Evan’s (The Human Side of School Change) regarding age and the reluctance to change. Evans goes into this in much greater detail in his chapter entitled “Understanding Reluctant Faculty,” and having now passed the age-mark where I qualify (at least among those under the age of thirty) as a bona fide old fart, I can’t resist weighing in on this.

I don’t recall specifically where I saw a particular poster or what the image on it was, but I remember the words on it:

If you don’t think ageism is relevant to you, just wait awhile.

This is not a prelude to my accusing Evans of being ageist. And the research he cites is indeed troubling. Here’s what he has to say:

• “No innovation can succeed unless it attends to the realities of people and place.” Right on, Robert!
• “Looming behind every aspect of the [change] debate about schools is a profound demographic shift among educators: almost en masse, they have become a veteran, middle-aged, immobile group.” (The average age of an American teacher is 45.)
• This veteran group is furthermore much less mobile, tending to stay within a few school systems and a geographic area compared to other professionals.
• “…teachers’ dissatisfaction is broad and deep but it is closer to passive resignation than to active indignation, closer to dejection that deflates energy than to anger that inspires action.” These feelings of inconsequentiality often lead to burnout.
• Yet another problem that may confront older teachers is that of being “underchallenged.” Bingo! Dr. Evans. Some teachers are indeed simply bored. They have taught the same subject, perhaps exceptionally well, for a number of years and it no longer holds the same challenge for them.
• Evans further asserts, and here is where we begin to disagree more fundamentally, “Crisis is not inevitable in our middle years, but ambivalence is.” This ambivalence about our careers as we approach our maximum effectiveness and earning potential, while at the same time starting some physical decline, can lead to a kind of fixed mentality that he calls the “‘help-rejecting complainer’—someone who is chronically dissatisfied but resists all assistance and advice.”

Given that much of our teaching workforce is mid-career, and that indeed there are useful generalizations to be made about mid-career professionals that can inform the change-agents strategies (such as boredom and the resulting leveling-off of performance, a greater focus on material job rewards, the reduction in challenge, and growing isolation among colleagues), it is possible that for some teachers, they will end up in a no-growth zone, something that Carol Dwek would call a “fixed mindset.”

Evans’ produces a wonderful continuum, which he labels the “Midcareer Continuum of Growth and Performance.” How interesting it might be for each teacher, and her or his supervisor and colleagues, to place herself or himself on this continuum.

Evans is eloquent in his description of each of these stages.

So this if the above arguments about the effect of age on ease of change is the “what,” what is the “so what?” and “now what?”

In a word, “revitalize.” Evans says that the job of the school agent is “not just to reform schools, but to revitalize staff.” To return to a previous metaphor he uses, to “unfreeze” their thinking.

Herein lies my bone to pick with Evans, and admittedly it is based on my own limited experience and current situation. I find no correlation between time in service or age an willingness to change or adapt to new ideas. If the teachers in my school were to “act their age” according to what national norms are for mid-career teachers, we would not be the forward thinking, dynamic organization that we are.

Perhaps the exception proves the rule.

What do you think?