Klingbrief

People decide to leave their jobs for myriad reasons – a partner or spouse gets a new job in a different place; an employee reaches retirement age; a person, seeking growth or facing burn-out, leaves for greener or more peaceful pastures. Despite the near constant “war for talent,” Harvard professor Ethan Bernstein, Clayton Christensen Institute co-founder Michael Horn, and CFO of the Re-Wired Group Bob Moesta find that organizations stubbornly “continue to rely on the same hiring and retention strategies they’ve been using for decades, even though those approaches aren’t working.” Instead, these authors insist, organizations including schools should be seeking to better understand, through frequent and structured interviewing, the reasons why people leave them, and what would help them to stay. Through their own qualitative research on employee attrition, Bernstein, Horn, and Moesta share a salient framework describing four quests that employees embark on when they jump from one job to another: the quest for satisfaction, the quest for control, the quest for alignment, and the quest for growth. Along these quests are a number of factors that can pull (feeling balanced, valued, recognized, appropriately challenged, and supported) or push (feeling disrespected, over-managed, bored, or overtaxed) employees to stay or go. This research into why employees leave their jobs is particularly useful for schools to consider in the wake of COVID-19 and significant shifts in the makeup of the nation's teacher workforce.

Character-building is, of course, just as important today as it was for prior generations of parents and teachers. But the ground has shifted. The Making Caring Common (MCC) Project at Harvard University, missioned with promoting moral development in children and youth, has used its robust mandate to provide an accessible program and clarion voice for research, problem-solving, and strategies to address how to increase caring for one another in these times. This recent video, featuring Dr. Richard Weissbourd, Director of Making Caring Common, is one of many substantial professional growth offerings for teachers and parents on the project’s website. It looks first at two documented problems and then at strategies for schools and families to use. The problems are linked: the elevation of personal achievement and hyper-individualism over caring for others, and the demotion of morality noted in the documented amounts of meanness, polarization, and aggressiveness around us, both on social media and in community. Weissbourd outlines specific interventions and invites wider perspectives in our curricula. While imparting key moral and social justice capacities may involve an uphill climb, there are steps at the steepest places. These include service work, valuing a culture of gratitude, linking our students to the generations before them and those to come, learning to listen to those who think differently, and kindness. Being kind neither is a reach too far nor is it only available to some. It is an act of caring and courage to teach as if there is nothing more important.

In this podcast, Chávez-Moreno highlights ideas from her latest book, which explores bilingual education as a racial project, specifically in the way Spanish language education racializes and demarcates the category of Latinx. Placing her work in the context of an American political climate where the teaching of race is under attack, she points out that, no matter the political climate, schools teach race in several direct and indirect ways. One powerful indirect way is language education, which is typically decoupled from any genuine attempt to consciously teach the complexities and plurality of Spanish speaking ethnicities. In the American education system, this pure language approach results in an overly simplistic racialized category of Spanish speakers and often leaves high school students craving more complex ways to discuss race and ethnicity. Highlighting the apathy she observed in high school students who are bored with the “middle-school” or “Sesame Street” approach to race as a celebration of identity, Chávez-Moreno argues for “ambitious teaching” in education. Ambitious teaching would draw from frameworks in Ethnic Studies to be more intentional in the language classroom about teaching race as a structure meant to consolidate power for certain groups. Chávez-Moreno’s approach is a refreshing call to uncover and tackle the many options available to anti-racist teachers in a political climate where the teaching of race is under attack.

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This article discusses research around feedback literacy and the shared understanding (or lack thereof) between students and teachers at an Australian university. Researchers recorded and analyzed approximately fifteen hours of conversation between groups of six teachers and students. While some groups remained in the “venting” mode, only discussing the constraints at play and why it’s so difficult to provide timely and effective feedback, some groups entered a more solutions-focused dialogue. In the latter groups, students had more of an active role in the conversation, and offered ideas to which the teachers could respond. These productive groups also acknowledged the challenges to providing and receiving feedback (e.g., school-wide policies that prevent effective feedback strategies, lack of time to provide feedback when it would be most impactful, and student disengagement with feedback). Next, they moved on to a deeper discussion that challenged traditional viewpoints about what feedback can look like (it doesn’t necessarily need to be specific to every student in order to be useful) and who can give it (students expressed an interest in more peer feedback). They also talked about the need to disrupt traditional power dynamics in the classroom so that students can feel safe, supported, and willing to ask for help from the teacher. This article provides a fascinating starting point for a conversation in any school around the purpose of grading, feedback, and assessment.

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell chronicles trends of behavior that she has noticed in our modern world and the cognitive biases that influence those behaviors. With chapters on everything from the halo effect and Taylor Swift to the IKEA effect and AI art, Montell touches on topics that will feel relevant to educators. The book is filled with potent observations, such as the tangible effects of idolizing celebrities instead of close adults, or the ways that the human brain is wired to believe things it has heard multiple times whether they are true or not. Montell’s observations about belonging, the role of AI, fact-checking, and public discourse common in many educational settings feel timely and interesting. This book might help educators think about the environments and mindsets of their students (and themselves!); additionally, its chapters could also be compellingly used with high school students to unpack issues of language, communication, society, and technology. Each chapter blends research, anecdotes, and observations, making this a quick and potent read with sections that can stand together or alone.

Derek Thompson’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” invites reflection and discussion among educators. Its compilation of data is powerful, revealing our dramatically amplified isolation in recent years. Portions of Thompson’s piece focus on adults, while others focus on young people, particularly children and teens. Essentially, Americans, especially young people, are spending far less time than ever with one another. Thompson describes how “self-imposed solitude” is “rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity” and synthesizes his research, saying, “The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise – in other words, democracy.” Surely schools are among these villages. In an increasingly “phonebound” and “homebound” age, Thompson’s article challenges us to maximize our unique potential to build connection, health, and citizenry. While, as Thompson describes, our self-imposed solitude is making society “weaker, meaner, and more delusional”, connection and community are the antidotes. How can schools, then, nurture healthier individuals in a healthier democracy?

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