Schlechty Center

By Phil Schlechty

In my last blog post I talked about the fact that to make complex ideas “stick” (a term I have borrowed from Chip and Dan Heath), it is essential to distill the ideas down to their core elements. My goal here is to illustrate what I mean by this assertion by discussing a problem I have confronted for a long time.

            Three sets of ideas have driven me since my earliest days as a teacher. First, as a student at The Ohio State University, I came into contact with many professors in the School of Education who helped me to understand that learning is an active process and that students learn best when they are confronted with compelling problems and issues that call upon them to reflect and create solutions. I never got over these ideas, and I am still struggling to understand all that I think I know about them.

            Second, as a result of experience and study, I have come to the conclusion that the bureaucratization of schools, the removal of schools from the control of communities, and the embedding of control of schools in governmental agencies is a major impediment to quality education—especially if creativity, problem solving, inquiry, and knowledge work, as well as mastery of traditional subjects, is included in the definition of quality. 

            Finally, I have concluded that the primary job of the teacher is to create conditions in which students became emotionally and intellectually engaged in the pursuit of solutions to problems and in the exploration of possibilities, and that these conditions should be orchestrated in a way that encourages students to learn what they need to learn to participate fully and meaningfully in the society and culture where they will live out their lives. 

            Now, that is a lot to unbundle, and in spite of over 40 years of disciplined work and having written nine books, I still feel that I am on the “cutting edge of ignorance” with regard to these issues. In the past couple of years, however, I have come up with some simplifying statements that seem to me to come to the core of what I think I have learned.

            First, while I say that I am concerned with transforming schools from bureaucracies to learning organizations (and I am), stripped to its essential core, what I am really up to is transforming schools from teaching platforms to learning platforms.

The terms teaching platform and learning platform seem to be ideas that stick. They invite further discussion and exploration, whereas the terms bureaucracy and learning organization are not especially inviting terms and sometimes shut discussion down. Indeed, unless one has a relatively sophisticated understanding of the literature on complex social organizations, the words bureaucracy and learning organization are apt to be viewed as nothing more or less than buzzwords and jargon. I have found, however, that when I say that what we must be about is transforming schools from teaching platforms to learning platforms, the ideas seem to resonate more and stick longer.  

This is a beginning. But if the conversation stops there, all we have is a slogan. If, however, we use the idea of platform as a beachhead from which to launch a larger assault on conventional ways of framing the problems of schooling, we may be on our way to thinking about schools in more productive ways. 

            Second, in recent months I have taken to suggesting that a part of this transformation is moving schools from being a push environment to being a pull environment. Sometimes I use a picture of a person with a megaphone to illustrate what I mean by a push environment and an image of student doing a computer search to illustrate what I mean by a pull environment. Sometimes I illustrate these points by showing pictures of bored students listening to what must be a poorly constructed lecture and then contrasting the photos with a video of students actively engaged in querying an expert about a subject of interest to them.

            I have found the ideas of push and pull to be “sticky ideas” that lead to discussions about notions such as “learning is an active process” and why working on the work, rather than working on the students, is a preferred strategy for improving the performance of students and of schools. The push/pull idea also opens up discussions of why discovery, inquiry, and problem solving are so important and invites teachers and school leaders to consider the ways bureaucracy serves as a barrier to pulling information from the environment and how bureaucracy works best to support pushing information down from the top. 

The following are some additional sticky notions I have found especially useful in unbundling my thoughts:

Transformation requires more than change—it requires metamorphosis. Imagine something like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly or a tadpole becoming a frog. Transformation goes across forms; reform stays within the limits of the existing system. 

One goal is a goal, two goals is half a goal, and three goals is no goal at all. I often use this sticky phrase to invite people to consider the importance of having a clear conception of the core business of their organization and the superordinate goal toward which this business is oriented.  I also use it to invite people to consider the possibility of exploring the linkages among goals and selecting for action that goal which if pursued will lead to progress toward other goals as well. 

The cutting edge of ignorance is a phrase I use to suggest that transformation requires one to go beyond the research and the safety of the known and be prepared to explore unknown territory and travel more by assistance from a compass (which keeps direction clear) rather than a road map—which can specify destinations (goals).

Work on the work rather than on the students. This is a dangerous sticky idea and too often becomes a slogan. What I mean to convey is that teachers can either design schoolwork in a way that encourages students to perform or they can induce students (through rewards and punishments) to do whatever work they design for them to do. Many teachers, however, hold on to the view that it is their performance rather than the performance of students that determines what students learn; these teachers are therefore not in a position to hear what is being said about the motive power of the work students are assigned or encouraged to undertake.                    

Teachers are leaders and those they most often lead are students. This is an old idea and one that has appeal to teachers once they accept the fact that it is the performance of their putative followers that is of most importance in school. The performance of leaders can make a difference in the performance of followers, but it is the performance of followers that determines the effectiveness of the performance of leaders. Teachers are more dependent on students than students are dependent on teachers. Teachers cannot teach without students being present, but students can learn without teachers and increasingly they can learn anytime and in any place. Schools are no longer as essential as they once were and they will be increasingly less essential if they are not transformed into learning platforms. Teaching is increasingly available to those who are motivated to learn, and schools are not the only places where teaching and teachers exist.

Later in the year I will return to these ideas and share some of the stories I tell to help further clarify what I mean by these phrases that I hope will stick with my audience.

By Phil Schlechty

Some time back I read a book by Chip and Dan Heath entitled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Clearly this book stuck with me, since I am still pondering some of the ideas the authors present. From time to time I will use this blog to present the results of these “ponderings.” Here we go!

The Curse of Knowledge

            One of the ideas the authors present is something they call “the curse of knowledge.” In my early days I spent a great deal of time reading sociological theory, especially theory intended to explain life in complex social organizations, and I clearly became cursed by the knowledge I acquired. In 1976 I produced a book entitled Teaching and Social Behavior: Toward an Organizational Theory of Instruction. The title alone should have warned the reader that I had been “cursed by knowledge.” I had learned a lot about organizational theory and I cared a lot about schools. My goal was to take what I had learned and apply it to something I cared about.

            What I failed to appreciate is that to understand and embrace what I was trying to say about schools one needed to know at least as much as I had recently learned about organizational theory. Unfortunately, most who knew what I knew about organizational theory didn’t really care much about schools-they were more interested in studying life in corporations, hospitals, and the military. Even more unfortunate was the fact that most of those who cared about schools really didn’t know much about organizational theory. (I even wrote a chapter about what I called the “psychological bias of American educators” in which I lamented the fact that too few educators seemed interested in the study of schools as social organizations.) The result was that the book was a flop. A few university professors liked it, some graduate students read it, and my mother was very proud. The fact is, however, that what I wrote had little impact on the direction of schools and school reform.

            I sincerely believe that if I had known how to present my ideas in a “sticky” way I might have made a much greater contribution than I did to the school reform agenda that was beginning to emerge in the late 1970s. For example, in Teaching and Social Behavior I describe 36 different types of schools and try to show that the way schools are organized affects the performance of both teachers and students in schools and in classrooms. Among other things, I show how and why demographic shifts in student populations so often lead to increased reliance on bureaucratic structures and coercive means of student control. This does not happen by intent and it does not happen rapidly-rather it is a form of social drift that operates more like the classic frog in the pot of water being brought to a boil. Leaders can stop this in its early stages, but often they fail to act until it is too late and crises arise. If what I wrote in 1976 had been understood as I intended it to be understood, policymakers might have been discouraged from some of the ill-informed actions some of them have taken in the name of school improvement. Unfortunately, I failed to present my ideas in a sticky way. I hope I have learned something about this business since 1976.

            Here is a story that might make what I am trying to communicate more “sticky.” (Stories are a powerful way to make ideas stick.)

One of the wisest men I have ever known is Jay Robinson. Jay, who passed away several years ago, was, when I first met him, superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina. (He later became vice president of the University of North Carolina.) I met him about the time the book mentioned above was published. Jay read it and here is what I recall him saying to me: “Phil, you are going to have to make up your mind whether you want to write books for people like me (by which he meant practicing school administrators and teachers) or for professors and graduate students. I read this book because I like you, but believe me I wouldn’t have gone beyond the preface if I had not known you. There is good stuff in that book, but I had to work too hard to find it.” (By the way, Jay is the person who introduced me to the work of Peter Drucker.)

            I started working with Jay in 1977 and I worked hard to meet his standards. I knew I was getting someplace when, in the early 1980s, I was invited to testify before the education committee of the Tennessee legislature. After I testified, one of the committee members gave me a ride back to the airport. On the way back I recall him saying, “Son, you sure can get the hay down to the ponies.” Obviously, he was pretty good at getting the hay down to the ponies himself. In one brief and pithy statement he both summarized the problem presented by the curse of knowledge I referred to earlier and suggested a solution as well. Those who have knowledge must seek the core of what they know and what they want to communicate and they must state what they know in terms that are familiar to their audience. (By the time we took our ride, the legislator was aware that I was born and raised in the country and knew something about horses, ponies, and haylofts.) 

            Stating a complex notion in simple ways is, according to the Heaths, one of the first steps in making ideas stick. To do this, one must get to the core of the idea and strip away everything but that core. In doing this, however, one must be careful not to strip so much away that the essence of the idea is lost. Moreover, the core idea should be stated in a way that invites others to later explore the subtleties, nuances, and additional insights that have been stripped away to make the idea more sticky.

            Here I am reminded of the maxim that anyone who wants to present a complex notion to an audience that is not already familiar with the contours of the notion should have a 30-second message that states in clear and simple terms the core of the message he or she is trying to convey,  a 3-minute statement for those who find, as a result of the 30-second message, that they want to know more, and a 30-minute statement that expands and develops the core idea to a more sophisticated level-thus the simple idea of the 30-3-30 rule for conveying new ideas.