From the preface to the revised edition of How Children Fail, by John Holt:
After this book came out, people used to say to me, “When are you going to write abook about how teachers fail?” My answer was, “But that’s what this book is about.”
But if it is a book about a teacher who often failed, it is also about a teacher who was not satisfied to fail, not resigned to failure. It was my job and my chosen task to help children learn things, and if they did not learn what I taught them, it was my job and task to try other ways of teaching them until I found ways that worked.
For many years now I’ve been urging and begging teachers and student teachers to take this attitude toward their work. Most respond by saying, “Why are you blaming us for everything that goes wrong in schools? Why are you trying to make us feel all this guilt?”
But I’m not. I didn’t blame myself or feel guilt, just because my students were so often not learning what I was teaching, because I wasn’t doing what I had set out to do and couldn’t find out how to do it. But I did hold myself responsible.
“Blame” and “guilt” are crybaby words. Let’s get them out of our talk about education. Let’s use instead the word “responsible.” Let’s have schools and teachers begin to hold themselves responsible for the results of what they do.
I held myself responsible. If my students weren’t learning what I was teaching, it was my job to find out why. How Children Fail, as I said, was a partial record of my not very successful attempts to find out why.
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[…] The talk by Christopher Avery on leadership was worth mentioning, if for no other reason than that it was an interesting counterpoint to an earlier blog post. Like Holt, Avery makes the point that responsibility is important and doesn’t mean wallowing in guilt and blame. And like many consultants, he has a list of stages; his is “Denial, Lay Blame, Justify, Shame, Obligation, Responsibility”. In any given situation you typically proceed through these steps, frequently getting stuck at one; you may also go to a special stage “Quit” at any step of the process. […]
7/24/2006 @ 4:03 pm
I appreciate the mention and appreciate Holt’s views as well. I also acknowledge all those teachers who take responsibility for themselves, the child in front of them, the class, and the system in which they operate. There is much to confront in that role and in the system. And I know it is challenging — especially over time. I had a cousin who earned a Masters in Education and was going to change the world in the NYC school system. Ten years later he was completely broken down. In response to my astonishment he said “How am I supposed to do my job when a third-grader flips me off in the hall and I can’t do a thing about it?”
We look forward to bringing our Responsibility Redefined work into the educational community. It will happen. It’s in our vision (http://www.christopheravery.com).
Re “like many consultants, he has a list of stages,” our work on Responsibility Redefined is research-based. We’re certainly not the first group to evangelize about personal responsibility. What is different about our work are the research-based descriptive and prescriptive models. This allows us to focus on uncovering truths about raising the level of human functioning (if that word sounds strange, then contrast it to our common usage of “dysfunctional people,” “dysfunctional teams” and the like) rather than morality or right and wrong.
11/30/2006 @ 2:30 pm