Educational Pivoting Is Needed: Meanness is But One Example
The Concept of Pivoting
Recently, my co-author Ed Wang and I, submitted an article to The Learning Professional for possible selection for their upcoming October 2024 issue on pivoting in education. It is that topic — “pivoting” — that I want to address here in several additional contexts.
The description from The Learning Professional, reflecting their desired content for their forthcoming issue, is worth excerpting as a starting point. In their call for articles, they write:
“Teachers and schools have to pivot all the time, in ways both big and small, whether to incorporate new research, adapt to changing student needs, or address a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic. This issue will examine opportunities and moments where educators and systems have needed or wanted to pivot and how professional learning enabled them to make needed changes. Topics might include….how to introduce or improve professional learning in a system that is resistant to change.”
In our forthcoming book from Teachers College Press (Sept. 2024) titled Mending Education: Finding Hope, Creativity and Mental Wellness in Times of Trauma, we address a counter-narrative with respect to how education fared during the Pandemic. Yes, bad things happened and that is what the media and many educators and parents and communities have been focused upon over the past several years. We don’t deny “the bad.”
But during this same period of time, there were what we term “Pandemic Positives.” These Pandemic Positives were actions and behaviors and activities that educators tried and used across the PreK — adult educational pipeline during the Pandemic that improved education in material ways.
To be sure, these were not done systemically or systematically but as educators were building the plane of education while it was flying with closed schools and online/hybrid learning being the norm for an extended period, they developed remarkable, powerful changes to education. We have identified over 30 of them in Mending Education, positives that are undergirded by theory and practice.
What has been troubling is that as the Pandemic waned and we returned to brick and mortar learning, these Pandemic Positives were discarded as if they had no value moving forward. Nothing could be farther from the truth and we seek to show how these Pandemic Positives can be game changers, instilled in education writ large with stickiness.
In a sense, all of the Pandemic Positives were evidenced by educator pivots. Indeed, in our submission, we refer to these as “Positive Pivots,” ways educators made choices and changed directions and exercised creativity to alter and improve what they were doing with and for students. Sure, some efforts did not succeed as well as others or at all even. But, educators made many Positive Pivots during the Pandemic. We would be wise to own them and use them with tenacity.
Identifying Other Positive Pivots in Education
Although I am sure there are many, I want to focus on two additional positive pivots in the educational arena: student pivots (about which I have written at length) and prospective pivots we need in education and beyond related to meanness.
Let’s start with positive student pivots. In a book titled Breakaway Learners: Strategies for Post-Secondary Success with At-Risk Students (Teachers College Press 2017 and forming part of a trilogy (a triptych) that includes Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door (2020) and Mending Education), I address why some students whom we anticipate would fail in college actually succeed. Looking at what enables this success, I created a concept called “lasticity,” something that is present in these succeeding students. It’s a term I hope still will enter the lexicon.
One of the five components of lasticity is the need for students to “pivot right” — not as in Right Wing politics but right as in making good decisions when confronted with choices. In a chapter dedicated to how pivoting right operates (and its importance), I emphasize the many choices that students confront in all aspects of their lives. With the abundance of choice, it becomes harder and harder to make the choices that will propel students to success in the near and longer term. And, sometimes, these choices are even more difficult because someone is going against the flow of loud and strong voices from family and peers and even sometimes educators.
To be sure, we can make wrong choices and correct along the pathway forward. And, we can nudge students to make better choices. Moreover, we can create a culture within schools that encourages pivoting right. Caring adults, supportive positive strength-based approaches to learning and role modeling all encourage students to pivot right. Augmenting student voice and quality listening improves pivoting right. Understanding rules and rulemaking help students pivot right as well.
The Breakaway Learners’ chapter on pivoting is accompanied by a student piece of artwork displaying a rock headed straight at the seated student. Rocks are not easy to move; pivoting isn’t easy either. But, quoting from Breakaway Learners, “[p]icture pouring some grease or oil on the pivot to loosen it up, to enable it to move more freely, to spin….That’s what helps breakaway students to pivot right. We [educators and educational institutions] provide the grease and oil. We unstick the stuck pivot.”
The idea of positive student pivots were not eradicated by the Pandemic. We need to continue to consider the increased number of students who have become stuck and are not making good choices. And, as educators, we should do our best to help students get unstuck with the educational equivalent of grease and oil. That way, we help students “pivot right.” In a sense, we could say they are also then pivoting forward.
Positive Pivots.
Another Needed Positive Pivot related to Meanness
We have, in a word or two, become meaner in a wide range of contexts. We have been hearing about meanness among student peers; we have been hearing about meanness among educators; we have been hearing about meaning among students and educators; we have been hearing about parental meanness to educators and administrators. And, we have been hearing about administrator meanness to anyone and everyone.
Meanness poisons the atmosphere. It makes learning hard, if not impossible. It makes teaching hard, if not impossible. It makes leading hard, if not impossible. It makes parenting hard, if not impossible. It makes us feel unwanted and uneasy and sad; as one educator observed, meanness wipes smiles away.
So now what?
This is where we return to another utilization of the term “Positive Pivoting” that we invented for the earlier referenced submission to The Learning Professional. We need to put in place a way to change the cultural acceptance of meanness and enable a grand pivot away from meanness to kindness or decency or civility. We don’t all have to be friends. But we do need to live together in a world where we respect each other and handle our differences without nastiness and deprecatory behavior. And make no mistake about this: while sticks and stone do break bones, words can and do hurt. That old adage needs to be debunked.
Leaders, Educators, Students Pivoting Positively
We need to pivot our cultural norms such that meanness is unacceptable (although it will no doubt not fade from view in all instances forever). This involves a multi-tiered approach that has to work simultaneously if possible. We need leaders to model behavior that is not mean and that demonstrates and exudes support and kindness and empathy. Seriously, we need our leaders to step it up. They need to own the meanness in their buildings, whether they caused it or not.
Next, we need educators to convene among themselves and thrash out why there is so much meanness among them. This isn’t easy and it is one of those hard conversations that need to happen. Sure, it can and should happen between one educator to another. But, we need to name the problem and then sort through why it exists and persists. And, we need our educators, along with our administrators, to be positive non-mean role models for students, as students take their cues from the culture in which they are operating day in and day out (which gets to a larger point momentarily about social meanness).
Then we need to focus on students and finding ways to show them why pivoting positively to kindness or decency or civility is in their individual and collective best interests. Students tend to be self-focused so we need to find ways to show them the downsides of meanness on themselves. Does meanness make you liked? Does meanness make you a better romantic partner? Does meanness make you a better friend? Does meanness make you a better student? Does meanness make you a better worker?
Possible Positive Pathways
One starter approach is to institute widespread kindness and decency events within schools. I don’t mean a single day of kindness. I mean activities that take students into the community to exercise kindness. There are lots of ways to do this — delivery of kindness rocks among them. Visiting seniors and listening to and writing their stories is another way of doing this. We need things that activate our empathy engines NOW.
I was struck to the core by a recent event at a school in my state. White students were auctioning off black students during Black History Month. I wish I could say I was making this up. So, the matter apparently has been turned over to “authorities.” But what I want to know is why this happened and what can be done at this school and others (don’t get me started on the idea of bringing the national guard in to deal with violence in Brockton, MA high school).
We have more than enough examples of meanness outside of school that one wonders whether we can help students process these events. Suppose we gather students to discuss what can be done with respect to meanness that is happening in their community or the larger world. The examples are plentiful. Shootings, domestic abuse, fighting, nasty rhetoric. With a quality set of discussions, can we help students express how these events make them feel and what solutions they might have. In other words, get at the issues by moving first outside their school and then returning with insight.
Suppose students who gathered had a set of possible solutions. What if, with educator help, they wrote them down and shared them in a local newspaper? Suppose they wrote a “white paper” (I dislike that term of art) and shared their ideas. Activated their voices. Spoke up and out about meanness.
I recognize that outside behavior does not always translate. We’ve seen many people espouse a philosophy outside their own home but within their home, they behave differently. Hypocrisy abounds and when it occurs among folks in positions of authority, all the worse. If you preach about leading a good life and then traffic in minors, all is not well. And kids are excellent hypocrisy thermometers.
The Time is Now to Pivot Positively
For me, we are at the point where the meanness is so huge an issue that we need an organized campaign to pivot against it — like we did with smoking. The first Wednesday of every month, the Virtual Teachers Lounge I help oversee with several other amazing educators, might be a place to start. Visit our website at VTL4today.com. Join us on April 3 when our conversation on meanness continues. And ponder strategies to combat meanness. It is a war against meanness that we need and an embracing of civility and kindness and decency.
And yes, we need to understand the many serious root causes for meanness that included deeply entrenched prejudice and poverty and classism and racism and ethnic bias. And yes, we need to address these deep seeded social inequities. But, as we do that, can we start by lowering the level of meanness? I don’t think eliminating meanness is a realistic goal. Surely, though, thousands upon thousands of us can message that meanness isn’t OK. It really isn’t.
