Love & Learning

Everywhere, we learn best from those whom we love."
- Goethe

Bernard was sipping something.

"What are you drinking" I asked.

"Green tea," he said with an excited grin. "Do you know about this? It's supposed to be really good for your heart."

"You just getting around to reading old periodicals, Bernard?"

"What?"

"Never mind," I waved my hand. "Green tea sounds good. Can I get you anything else?"

"It's kind of bland," he volunteered. "I had to put about six packets of sugar in it."

I got a green tea and a scone and sat back down. "Hey Bernard," I queried, "What do you make of all this talk about education reform?"

"Ha! Those will never work. All the ideas start with the system as it is."

"You just know this? That the education reforms will not work?"

"Sure. It's obvious," he blinked. "I mean, they think that education has to do with the head."

"It doesn't?"

"We always underestimate the importance of love in learning. We think that learning starts and ends with the head but the head is almost incidental. Learning starts with a condition of the heart."

"But by heart you mean hypothalamus, the seat of emotions, so really you are talking about the head."

"Don't mask your ignorance by spouting trivia," Bernard scowled.

"Sorry," I bent my head and sipped my tea.

"If a person doesn't feel loved, doesn't feel safe, they're not going to open up. If they don't open up" Bernard spread his hands flat, "no learning."

"So how do you make a child feel loved when teachers can get fired just for touching a child?"

"You give them space to be heard. Rather than grade their efforts to learn, you encourage them. You accept them. People who are judged on every move, every test, every action, become guarded, become careful. As children become more self-conscious and more careful, they learn more slowly. The emphasis shifts to avoiding mistakes rather than trying something new - the essence of learning."

"So what do you do? I mean, practically speaking. What does this suggest?"

"The first step would be to stop grading."

"You really think that's a habit schools can give up?"

"You either make children feel safe or you make them feel judged. It all depends on whether schools want to encourage learning or encourage defensiveness. You can't have both."

“But you need some kind of feedback. Kids can’t just float free.”

“Right!” Bernard nodded enthusiastically. “Feedback on their progress towards learning, towards mastery. The point is not to grade children on differences – probably many of them that are innate and defy techniques to change them. The point is to let all the children become proficient in what they need and what they have potential for. You don’t give them a C instead of an A. You give them more time, or use a different approach. Or even steer them in a new direction. Children need feedback, which is very different from being judged.”

I laughed. "Well, I'm sure that the kids would love not being graded."

Bernard smiled as he stole the rest of my scone. "The love has to start somewhere."

The Futility of Grades and Performance Reviews

Once or twice a year, supervisors all over the world sit down and solve for X in the following equation:
Y * X = 47

X = the employee performance.
Y = the system they perform within.
47 (or whatever value) = what the employee was able to create within that system.

There are so many things that are wrong with this equation, literally.

For one, the value of 47 is itself subject to massive amount of measurement error. The performance of an individual in a system typically results in indeterminate and hard to measure outcomes.

If Y is the value of the "system" in which the individual performs, this system is constantly changing. Even if the company is static, its environment, its markets, its technology are all changing. Y is a dynamic variable, not a static value.

Nonetheless, supervisors around the world are sitting down right now to solve for X. The scariest thing? Most will actually think that they've found "the" value of X and will never realize that as long as they attribute complementary values to Y, they can justify any value of X that they want.

[And yes, alert readers, this is basically a recap of an argument that Deming repeatedly made onto deaf ears. Apparently, the millions of administrators demanding grades and managers giving performance reviews all understand systems, and variability more than the departed Dr. Deming. Either that or they just don't get it and feel compelled to continue with a system of grading and ranking only slightly less archaic than sinking women in water to determine whether or not they are witches.]