Tag: Ministry of Education

Groupthink…Does it Exist in School Districts and on Boards of Education?

Groupthink is defined as “a process of flawed decision making that occurs as a result of strong pressures among group members to reach an agreement”.

“Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when the desire for group consensus overrides people’s common sense desire to present alternatives, critique a position, or express an unpopular opinion. Here, the desire for group cohesion effectively drives out good decision-making and problem solving.” mindtools.com

RELEVANCE TO PARENTS: This could be why specialty programs never evolve, why some programs designed to fail are accepted by Boards, why some programs are described as a “dumpster on fire” and how they slip through the cracks. How things that are obviously broken in schools, stay broken, and how systemic oppression to marginalized groups are rarely challenged.

Does anyone remember the NASA Challenger disaster that exploded in space? When they analyzed the process that led to the deadly decisions, they concluded it was partly due to Groupthink.

Groups that are too cohesive, too tightly bonded, too tightly dependent on each other, too tightly socially connected, and are too similar, will bread an environment where it’s best that everyone just agree. Even when the evidence is laid out in front of them, it will be ignored and the pressure to agree will push people to just go with the flow and carry on. Conflict, even productive conflict, will be discouraged. An environment will become the norm where no one speaks up…even when they should. Groups that are too cohesive apply social pressure for everyone to conform.  Disagreement is then seen as a negative trait, insulting to the members, or that person is labelled a trouble maker and their input is disregarded.

It takes a specific type of person to want to be a teacher. Many teachers have similar personality traits and temperaments, a common thread amongst all of them. For the people who have the desire to advance their careers, and for the ones who fit the tight mold of administration, I feel it’s a fair assessment in concluding they are all expected to belong to a very exclusive highly dependent social-work group.

Groups that create an environment where it is safe to disagree with the topic, are the level that we want our district and Boards to function.  Especially because open system groups are the most responsive to change and feedback from their community. **Feedback is a crucial part of the program management cycle.

Points of impact:

  1. Program development and program maintenance
  2. Whistleblowing, staff not being able to bring up concerning issues
  3. Discrimination – exclusion
  4. Racism
  5. Ableism
  6. Policy development
  7. Workplace toxicity (Employee depression, bullying, etc)
  8. SYSTEMIC CHANGE

One way to tell if the Board of your school district is potentially stuck in a Groupthink path is to conduct an interaction diagram.

When you attend Board meetings…is everyone just agreeing? Constructive conflict is healthy. If you are doing an interaction diagram and all you see are support lines…you might have a poorly functioning Board.

Common Roles in Groups:

Task Roles

  1. Defines problems
  2. Seeks information
  3. Gives information
  4. Seeks opinions
  5. Gives opinions
  6. Tests feasibility

Group Building and Maintenance Roles

  • Coordinating
  • Mediating-harmonizing
  • Orienting-facilitating
  • Supporting-encouraging
  • Following

Individual Roles (Non-functional)

  1. Blocking
  2. Out of Field
  3. Digressing

After a few meetings you can start to identify if statements are ones that are asking questions for clarification, which statements are supporting other points of view, which ones are blocking, disagreeing, requesting more info etc.  Pick a few that you observe as repeated the most often and then start plotting. For every statement/question put a line. The arrows that go into the center of the group are statements that are said to the group. The arrows that directed at a specific person go directly to them. Then for any repeats of similarly purposed statements get a tick on the same arrow. This allows you to get a visual of how they function as a group. Too many supportive statements aren’t necessarily a sign of a functioning healthy group.

If school districts are interested in auditing their staff meetings from time to time, to get a birds-eye-view so to speak of how they function, the person doing the tracking, can’t be involved. Some meetings move really quickly and it will take practice for people to quickly identify and assess the types of statements/questions made. This is a quick way to take a pulse of the group for anything on the surface, and groupthink could be obvious.

For the parents attending board meetings, it’s great practice. Board meetings tend to move slowly so it’s a great place to practice and build your skill. Soon, you’ll be able to identify roles people play in PAC or school meetings.

Ideally, we want Boards of Education and district teams to have a high level of trust and respect in the group, where discussion or disagreement is welcomed, critical thinking is expected and they are open to feedback.

Sites of interest:

 * https://sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2020/10/07/how-groupthink-played-a-role-in-the-challenger-disaster/

https://sma.nasa.gov/news/sma-news-archive/watch-out-for-groupthink

https://medium.com/disruptive-design/tools-for-systems-thinkers-the-6-fundamental-concepts-of-systems-thinking-379cdac3dc6a

https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/systems-thinking#:~:text=Systems%20thinking%20is%20a%20holistic,the%20context%20of%20larger%20systems.&text=According%20to%20systems%20thinking%2C%20system,of%20reinforcing%20and%20balancing%20processes.

Systemic Impacts of Scarcity in Education

I’d like to bring up the subject of scarcity and the concept of applying the impacts of limited resources in the education system. It could be physical, social, emotional, or mental scarcity.

Limited resources change how people interact and behave at the most primal survival levels. There are already many scholar reports on how scarcity affects decision making and neuropathways.  Scarcity is when there are limited resources and people are not getting what they need.  Animal and human behaviour will change in these environments. When something is scarce, people will put a higher value on it. People will use social capital, aggression, secrecy or whatever strategies they can to obtain those limited resources for their own unfulfilled need. This is evolution and not a personality deficit.

Whittling the education system to bare bones and creating an environment of such limited resources will turn Mary Poppins into Cruella Deville in just a few months. Work environments can become toxic. Communication and information among staff can be used as a source of power.  Confidentiality among staff can be used as a social manipulation tool to build a sense of belonging or exclude.  Subgroups become even more exclusive. People are being set up to fail. It’s not personal. It’s systemic design. Evolutionary instincts will kick in, and not the kind ones. Stress bubbles will burst. People will snap. Children included. Recruiting and retaining quality educators for any length of time, will be challenging. This will have more of an impact on students with disabilities and those in marginalized communities. I repeat. This will have MORE of an impact on students with disabilities and those in marginalized communities.

Understaffing is a form of scarcity. When there aren’t enough people to fill the job duties that are required for functioning, and people need to step over their own job description boundaries to fill in for other people’s work, that has multiple direction points of impact. If it’s chronic, then you’ll see the ripple effects of scarcity.  Work environments will become “unhealthy” and over time people will become very dissatisfied with their work, ultimately pushing them out of the system and creating a deeper wedge in the cycle and it just goes on and on.  Underqualified staff just filling “the body” in the role, is not the solution.  Take a look at the number of job postings for school districts and take a look at the ones that are just continuously on repeat.  The districts are all in the same basket. They are even competing with each other trying to coax staff out of each other cities with advertisements.

School districts are extremely complex human systems. The number of connections and moving parts is overwhelming to me when I try to put this system into a visual representation. It looks like a large spiderweb post wind storm. Not only do I look at all of the individual parts when I look at a system, but it’s the connections and relationships and what is generated out of those connections that also makes my head spin. Now put this very complex system in a situation of scarcity. This has disaster written all over it.

The alarming fact is that the direction the current climate of education in this province is heading, will require people to become even more competitive over the limited resources. Money won’t solve all of society’s problems; however, chronic underfunding is definitely the fuel to this education fire…amongst other things.

Brainstorming exercise:

Let’s list all of the resources that someone seeks in the education system. (I will list a few, but really, I am hoping to encourage the conversation and for people to start making their own lists)

Resources in education. (Staff and students)

  • Social relationships- support, sense of belonging, attention, power, purpose
  • Mental stimulation, communication, information, choice, adequate training, knowledge, context & meaning…blog about context and meaning for students coming in the near future!
  • Physical space, food, water, access to washroom, fresh air, safety…and yes all of this applies to staff too!!
  • Access to tools to complete tasks/goals with success
  • Time to process, time to complete work, alone time, enough sleep – proper work hours (homework or class planning)
  • Currency – (staff) to access resources in their personal life and avoid scarcity

Now take all of those resources to function. Put someone in the situation of abundance. All the time in the world, lots of attention, all the communication and information they need to understand their environment. Now take the minimal of what you need and cut it in half.  Survival mode kicks in. You will have very different people on your hands.

If people have options, they will leave the system. We all have our breaking point.

Who is controlling the resources to this system?

It’s not the school districts. They may be managing…I mean struggling, with the system, but they aren’t the Wizard of Oz at the end of the road. The Ministry of Oz is hiding amongst ambiguous unanswered questions in their huge castle.

Provincial systemic issues, are going to need a provincial intervention approach, and will require a provincial response.  Let’s start with some resources, shall we? Adequate funding please.

The Impending Education Tsunami

This year has been hard for the education system and everyone in it. I’d love to tell you that there is great news ahead, but there isn’t. There is also an education tsunami out there on the horizon. I can see it just starting to show itself, but it is still far enough away that it hasn’t caught the attention of too many parents. Some parents though are starting to notice it while standing on the beach.

For other reasons than budget and capital projects, I have been attending monthly Board meetings since Nov 2019 and committee meetings since they started up during COVID.  Without purposefully seeking to understand the education system more, I have been exposed to some educational realities that I would not have normally been exposed to, which has led me to see the oncoming tsunami.

At these meeting, I have become a witness to some of the workings that school districts and Boards of Education allow the public to witness.  Meetings always feel to me like a show. I wouldn’t even describe them as the tip of the iceberg because even what is discussed or presented on, I don’t feel is a true reflection of what public education is. When you attend meetings over time, patterns start to emerge. Themes will cycle. Personalities of the Trustees will unfold.  (At least in my district, it is comforting to see that care for the children from our Trustees, is not the issue.) When attending meetings, you need to look at not only what is being discussed, but also what is not being discussed.  What I also find very interesting is comparing Board of Education pages on the different school districts websites. It would be fascinating to have a provincial connected team of parents, that shared information about Board meetings across the districts. Got a monthly snapshot of what was happening on a provincial level.

I was doing some research months back and I came across an archive picture of a school Board meeting in my district in the 1970’s. It was incredible because it was standing room only. It was packed with people! I can tell you that when Board meetings were in person pre-COVID, I could count on one hand how many parents showed up that were not part of a delegation, for the whole year.

The financial situation that my school district is in, concerns me. It concerns me a lot. Don’t let the most recent financial drop intended to be spread out provincially from the Ministry for “pandemic related” recovery fool you. It’s the temporary pacifier meant to sooth you. The next few years are going to be very interesting. The kind of fascination of watching a building topple over when they take a wrecking ball to it, but with the added layer of fear.

I expect staffing qualified people is going to get much harder and based on the budget and capital realities, public education in every way shape and form is going to slowly deteriorate. We are frogs in hot water with the dial creeping up. The correlating factors affecting education are all linked to the changes that have been occurring in our society, on top of a foundation of chronic under funding.  Because the government has a reactive approach to education, they are always years behind, playing catch up.

I’d like to throw out a consideration for people to think about. I am asking for people over the summer to consider either themselves to start attending their school districts Board meetings, or get a group of parents together to take turns and take notes. We need to have our eyes on the tsunami.  School district’s need to know that the public is following, and the Ministry of Education needs to know that the public is aware. When governments think people aren’t watching them…that’s when they start to turn up the dial. They’ll find their sweet spot of what they can get away with, and what will create public outcry. They are testing us. What are parents begrudgingly willing to accept?

*** This blog, most of it, was posted as a letter in the Burnaby Now local news.

https://www.burnabynow.com/opinion/letter-not-enough-burnaby-parents-watching-as-budget-cuts-happen-3885761