Professional Readings
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Professional Readings includes reviews of recent publications and highlights of reports on current issues that affect schools. Your contributions are welcome. Send them to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap
Pfeffer, Jeffrey, & Sutton, Robert I. (2000). The knowing-doing gap: how smart companies turn knowledge into action. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Several years ago Ronald Edmonds, a noted educational researcher and reformer, admonished us all that we already know what we need to know to make sure that every child learns. He observed that it only remains to be seen if we have the resolve to do what we know to be right. The authors, too, have used this admonishment to discuss the barriers that prevent us from actually implementing successful Professional Learning Communities. Since there is ample and compelling evidence to show that Professional Learning Communities will dramatically make schools more effective for students to learn, the question then becomes, why haven’t more schools developed into Professional Learning Communities? The authors call this discrepancy the gap between knowing what to do and doing it, that is, the “knowing-doing” gap. They cite 10 barriers that sustain this “knowing-doing” gap and offer ways to overcome these barriers:
- Substituting a decision for an action. Often school teams will come to a decision. They will be pleased that they have decided on a course of action. But once the decision is made, there is no follow-up to make sure the decision is carried out. Or the planners assume that the decision is being carried out, without any monitoring of the plan or any products requested associated with the plan. It has been my experience that teams will get down the road and someone may raise the question, “Whatever happened to our decision to…?” To overcome this barrier, monitor plans and request specific products associated with implementation.
- Substituting mission for action. Often teams will labor over developing a mission statement. Once accomplished, they write it up, publish it, and proudly promote it. However, the work is just beginning. True mission is revealed by what people do and not by what they say. The authors suggest that teams must move to clarify the characteristics of their school that are in compliance with the mission. The teams must be relentless in asking “Is this practice consistent with our mission?” The specific commitments of each member must be identified and specific indicators must be identified that serve to let them know when they reach their benchmarks.
- Planning as a substitute for action. There is a tendency to plan more activities than can successfully be implemented or monitored. Often the terms “action steps,” “goals” and “results” are used interchangeably. Teams often congratulate themselves when they have completed an action step. This does not mean that the goal has been reached. Continuous, collective, short-term experimentation, with continuous judgment and adjustment rather than annual planning is suggested to overcome this barrier.
- Complexity as a barrier to action. Often educators hide behind complex language and concepts rather than simple language and description. The authors suggest organizing complex ideas into a “big idea” to guide day to day decisions with a series of small, incremental steps that goad people into action. For example, the big idea might be: All decisions are made with regard to what is best for the student. If that is the case, we do not suspend a child because he is misbehaving. Rather, we look for incremental steps to get the child rehabilitated back into the classroom.
- Mindless precedent as a barrier to action. Most educators recognize this barrier as the one when staffs rely on unexamined assumptions, beliefs, expectations and habits that constitute the norms of the organization. This is the barrier that says, “We’ve always done it this way.” The anecdote to this mindset is to engage in “advocacy and inquiry,” by building shared knowledge among the staff and then having open and honest dialogue about their differences, similarities and assumptions.
- Internal competition as a barrier to action. People can learn from each other and build shared knowledge in a “sharing culture” when they are not competing with each other. The emphasis for leaders shifts from evaluating and supervising to building capacity in individuals. This comes about through cooperation and recognition of the cooperative effort.
- Badly designed measurement systems as a barrier to action. When the focus is on end-of-the-process measures (summative) rather than in-process measures (formative), people don't know how well their students are doing until it is too late. Then you end up with winners and losers in essence. When measures are taken in process, there is time for corrective measures so that all can be winners.
- An external focus as a barrier to action. Looking to conditions outside of the organization that impedes its success is a barrier to action. Instead, organizations must look to conditions that are within their sphere of influence to affect student achievement. When educators look inwardly to find solutions to problems, they create a results orientation to their problems.
- A focus on attitudes as a barrier to action. Often a school team will say, “we cannot move because we do not have 100% buy-in.” A leader will go forward with a “critical mass” of support. Small successes will create more buy in and new behaviors.
- Training as a substitute for action. Often, ambitious, long-term training programs delay the implementation of Professional Learning Communities. The authors advocate learning by doing. The most powerful staff development is job-embedded with teachers learning together as part of their work.
The benefits of establishing a professional learning community are that the staff will have a greater sense of accomplishment and efficacy, the job will seem more satisfying and manageable, there will be greater connections and support among colleagues, and the organizational climate will make a more positive difference in the lives of their students.
