Interconnectiveness & Independence

I have just watched a great webcast:



In it, David Logan, a professor in Business at USC, says there are five stages in tribal development: 1] "Life Sucks; 2] "My Life Sucks"; 3] "I Am Great, But You Are Not"; 4] "We're Great"; and 5] "Life Is Great".

There appears a distinct parallel to Kohlberg's stages of moral development, progressing from self-centered to principled. I like that Logan's schema is more applied to daily life, and that one can use it in his interpersonal interactions.

He states that a leader perceives all stages of tribal development, is able to monitor the status of his tribe, and is able to motivate growth up to the next stage of tribal development. Logan states that a person in a tribe can only understand the stage above or below his own status. Thus it is the leader's responsibility to "nudge", as Logan says, the level of the tribe members to the next higher level.

I look back upon my teaching career, and see how this tribal schema applies to where I was at certain times.

At my teaching career zenith, twenty years ago, I was in an organization that was level 4, and we were great. My most effective teaching took place in that situation, and I was my most successful, and I now can see that it was because of the great support I had from my colleagues and superiors. We openly perceived each other's strengths in the organization, and built on, and encouraged those strengths.

One of the very bad situations in my teaching career was in a district when I taught in stages 2 and 3. In one case I could see that the parents inculcated the attitude in their children, "I am great, but you are not", where both the parents and students condescended to me. The administration colluded in allowing the parents and students having control over us of perceived lower status in the "customer driven district." After all, isn't the customer always right? Even when they are wrong, they are right.

My absolute worst teaching situation was in California, another district where the administration bought into the stage 2 belief that "my life sucks", i.e., that the teachers in the educational system are broken (a fallacious assumption from the neo-cons, and the basis of "No Child Left Behind"), and that they were going to autocratically impose an arbitrary new method of pedagogy on all teachers and students. The worst part was that this district indiscriminately recruited teachers, giving us NO disclosure of the pedagogy, myself included, with the assumption that the admin could intimidate all new staff to teach effectively according to the new pedagogy. The admin hired us regardless of whether we agreed with the methods, or willing or able to conform to them; we were simply kept in the dark until we arrived. They treated us like mushrooms: kept us in the dark, and fed us a lot of horse manure. After all, we were probationary, and therefore expendable; that particular district got rid of half of the rate of new hires every year, i.e., hire eighty newbies, get rid of forty, like a quota. This is the form of intimidation the admin put on new hires.

On a daily basis, I remember that the admin reinforced their intimidation to motivate conformity to the new teaching methods. Basically, the threat was, "either do it our way, or we will show you to the highway." The admin took a philosophical base of stage 2, "my life (you teachers screwed up the educational system) sucks" and implemented an instructional strategy based on stage 3, "I (the admin) am great, but you (teachers) are not," i.e., we were perceived as too incompetent to know what to do instructionally.

It makes me shudder to think about this again. The only conclusion I can come to is that the district there was highly dysfunctional. My response was simply, "OK, let me out on the side of the road, thank you."

I will need to think on this schema, and find other applications for this in my personal life.