Strengths Finder

Do you have a language to talk about your strengths? I'm not talking about how you're a "hard worker" or "good with people." No, see, that's what everyone says. If you think about it, the traditional terms and expressions used to describe personal strengths rarely do them justice. You may be a hard worker sometimes, but aren't there times--perhaps in a spreadsheet, an email, or a whole project--when its just impossible to get started? What about "good with people"? Please--as extroverted as you might be, there are just times when your people skills fall short, whether through a lack of empathy, patience, communication skills, or leadership.

So how should we understand and talk about our strengths? And why does it matter whether or not we do?

Understanding our strengths dramatically affects everything we do.

Why? The most basic essence of our functioning in society, the bar that we measure ourselves against, the elusive, ill-defined, stress-inducing phenomenon we call success hinges on our strengths. The problem is that we--students and teachers (both which we all are at different times both in and outside of school, see 4/24 post)--don't really know how to individualize our paths or goals optimally. We want to be bankers or doctors, artists or athletes, yet what kind? What innate propensities will make us good in these fields? How should we be positioned on a team? What kinds of tasks are we most likely to regularly struggle with, as opposed to those which we will consistently perform well on?

The Clifton Strengths Finder tool is one of the most powerful modern tools to help us define ourselves. It's a little like Myers-Briggs, except that, as a framework, it more readily applies to a range of personal and professional pursuits. Whether it's goal setting, team building, cover letter writing, or critical decision making, results from Strengths Finder offer a language that reveals the common threads of success throughout a range of activities over time.  I'll let you read their marketing about how it was created and how it exactly it works; instead of going into that, allow me to share with you one of the most powerful examples of how the Strength Finder changed my path.

I first took the Strength Finder test in 2006 and learned that my strengths were: strategy, input, learner, woo and futurist. After examining the meaning of these strength patterns, I reflected on the threads of success woven throughout my past. As the trends emerged, presenting a narrative of my historical successes (and failures) suddenly had unprecedented coherence and meaning. Not only could I then apply this to teamwork and leadership situations: I could use it to market myself.

And market I did. Here is an excerpt from my Teach for America application cover letter, written in February 2007:

As a potential TFA corps member I possess a few key strengths. First is my ardent desire and capacity to learn. As evidence I graduated with departmental Honors from Haverford College and after achieving near fluency in Spanish I have recently began the independent study of Chinese. Thus the extensive new learning TFA requires not only suits my strength—it attracts me like a magnet. Secondly I have an innate ease with people. In college I played important behind-the-scenes and leadership roles on committees, all which led to successful organizational re-structuring, fundraising and event planning. I have also navigated foreign cultures far beyond the range of a tourist, having visited 20 foreign countries and worked or studied in five. My ease with people will allow me to effectively work with parents, students, co-workers and superiors. I am also disciplined, seek innovative solutions and set high standards, all strengths that have brought me success academically and in my extra-curricular endeavors. Finally I have a unique contextual background of travel, education and volunteer service that help me understand the cycle of poverty and the complexity of pedagogical and human development questions.

In this portion of the letter, you will see that I didn't exclusively focus on the strengths highlighted from my 2006 test results. However, I do have a coherent framework for organizing my past successes not around categories like "education" and "work experience" or vague skills like "technology" or "detail-oriented." Instead, a unique constellation of personality traits that can support success in various settings emerges with the results of the Strengths Finder. You'll notice above the "learner" and "input" traits (a skill and desire to learn combined with an ability to take in lots of information) mixed with some "woo" (I like to meet new and different people), and a dabbling of "strategy." I held off on "futurist."

After joining Teach for America, I continued to refer back to my Strengths Finder results to decide what projects to take on or leave aside and how to position myself on a team. I've also used Strengths Finder to clarify my leadership style and envision my career path; I'd venture to say that I'd be much less secure in both without the language from Clifton.

While it may not be cutting edge brain science, there is an abundance of research that recommends this process. From my personal experience, I do too.

Unions (Part 3) : Teacher Support, Protection, and School Reform Flexibility

Today we will reflect on two aspects of unions that are very important as it comes to how schools function, but that often are overlooked by outside observers. These two aspects are (1) support for teachers and (2) flexibility with school day, structure and management approaches.

Teaching is hard work. Between planning, managing student behavior, grading, contacting parents and administrative duties, teachers have many different "buckets" to tend to, and it takes a good deal of energy, hard work, talent and experience to effectively manage all these areas. For the average teacher (especially in their first few years) doing the job well means getting support, and the sad truth is that managers in the workplace don't always operate from this support framework, but instead act strictly as evaluator, delegator, or punisher. While this could thus open up a discussion for us about school leadership, let's instead look at how unions respond to this reality:

1) Unions protect workers from unreasonable or unfair management practices, giving the teacher room to learn, make mistakes, and grow without the unnecessary stress of unbearing supervisors.

2) Unions offer avenues for professional development that otherwise might not be accessible to teachers. For instance, unions offer generous course catalogs of credited and non-credited courses teachers can take to advance up a salary scale and maintain their licensing. These courses are low cost or cost free, and address critical needs for staff. Unions also protect teacher time, which gives them the opportunity to pursue areas of growth through fellowships, independent research, travel, and graduate study. 



These aspects of unions are important and should not be dismissed by critics. At the same time, these services do draw criticism. For instance, critics could respond by saying:


1. teachers need to be held accountable, and unions protect bad teachers
2. unions shouldn't be in the business of providing professional development--it's not their core function, so it shouldn't excuse unions from obstructing reform and improved schooling.
3. while some teachers might advance their practice with time off, others might not. 


So unions protect teachers, and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. Big surprise. What can we learn from this little exercise? Well, it clearly places the union between the teachers and the management. So if management is working for reform and teachers are lazy, unions are the enemy. But if management is incompetent or corrupt and teachers are hardworking and skilled, the union is the hero! Clearly, on the teacher side, we know that neither extreme is the truth. Perhaps we should look at a corollary issue--what does management in a school actually do? How does management interact with, or should it interact with, the union?


While politicians make the rules, unions are still instrumental in setting them and this is frequently sited as an obstacle to reform. School leaders find union reps to be a thorn in their side, disrespecting and subverting well-intentioned efforts, and calling out minor infractions of work rules that might be counter-productive in the first place. Leaders cannot manipulate their staff when a vigilant union rep is around, and this truth can go both ways for the students. With tight budgets, principals can't ask unionized teachers to stay late without paying them overtime, and a series of issues stem from just this one conundrum. Questions abound about what schools could be without unions, and charter schools are a laboratory testing these hypotheses. We ask: What could we do with a longer school day? Longer school year? More flexibility with staff assignments? More options for holding teachers accountable? 


With experience as both a unionized teacher and a non-unionized teacher, and through my observations of what is going on at other schools across the nation, here is my conclusion on this point about unions, teacher support, and flexible school rules. I'd argue that the union is not the problem--though it also does not contribute enough to the solution. Rules in schools are not set by unions, they are set by politicians who are accountable to voters and donors. The unions do have a voice and this voice is generally used to do what unions do--protect workers rights. I would argue that this is not such a blatant cost to the students, because protecting teacher time, privacy, and academic freedom actually serves the students in many ways. By contrast, having longer days (one of the most sought after goals of school reforms) is not a recipe for higher achievement by itself. Instead, higher achievement comes from this equation:


longer days+good curriculum+good teaching+good social support=higher student outcomes


Charters that produce better results with longer days often have better teachers, better leaders, smaller classes, excellent enrichment courses and STILL work hard to protect their teachers. Taking away unions might take away some of the bureaucratic headache associated with reform efforts, but it would not guarantee that all the building blocks for achievement are in place--it could just as easily lead to more burn-out for teachers and students as bad/desperate managers pressure the school to do more, but not better. 


With all that is said here in support of unions, I want to emphasize that I do not support tenure nor do I support union "protections" that run counter to sound research about good student learning. 

Finland, Big Schools, and The College Dream

As our nation today struggles though divisive debates about education reform, Linda Darling Hammond would have us look at the recent accomplishments of Finland, the world's number 1 school system based on the PISA scores, "an international test for 15-year-olds in language, math, and science literacy" (Rethinking Schools, Vol 24.4). In discussing the high performance of students in Finland, Hammond argues that Finland's "teaching and learning system" achieves results because of decentralized curriculum design and assessment, emphasis on qualified teachers, and thoughtfully supportive school environments. 

Hammond's account makes important claims about what a good educational system needs. Placing this in context of another recent development, we get an interesting picture of what makes good education and where it is happening. A September 27th NYT article called "4,100 Students Prove ‘Small Is Better’ Rule Wrong” discusses the turn-around of large Massachusetts high school that now outperforms 90% of the schools in the state. The reason was almost simple: according to Mr. Driscoll, who since 2007 has headed the National Assessment Governing Board, “In schools, no matter the size — and Brockton is one of the biggest — what matters is uniting people behind a common purpose, setting high expectations, and sticking with it.”

Yet not all the reforms in this school, particularly cultural ones, correspond with the finding in another recent piece of scholarship, this one called “College for All? Exaggerated Claims and Overlooked Options Prevent Some Students From Finding Their Way” (Rosenbaum et al. American Educator Vol 34.3). This lengthy treatment of the misperceptions and realities of the college experience and outcomes demonstrates how the one-size-fits-all mentality that we often recognize as problematic in pedagogy is also flawed when it comes to counseling for higher education. The statistics are staggering. While 89% of high school students in 2004 planned to earn a BA, the reality is that most of these students never will, and probably shouldn’t. High school students and Americans at large are misinformed about the benefits of other forms of post-high school education besides the BA, such as certificate programs and Associates degrees, credentials that are cheaper, attained more quickly, and often yield satisfying and lucrative career opportunities. In fact, students in the bottom quartile in their high school class who go on to earn an BA earn less than their top quartile high school peers who never earn a post-secondary degree (Baum, et al. Education Pays 2010, NY: College Board, 2010). The critiques from Rosenbaum, Stephan, and Rosenbaum provide a clear picture of how our educational system and expectations are flawed in their narrowness. All too often we prescribe BAs to students without giving them the information and preparation to earn them, or to consider alternatives that are both rewarding and utilitarian.

Just to look at these three articles in the same posting, especially with such a brief treatment, may seem transitory or shallow, but the purpose of this discussion is to reveal a pattern of efficacy even in these articles’ contradictions.  Teachers, schools and school systems that are successful hold students to high expectations, but more importantly differentiate their instruction and support to help students achieve ownership of their education. They leverage all available resources, emphasize the provision of accurate information to students, and use assessments strategically, whether they are locally produced or standardized.