Thinking about thinking in education
I’ve been thinking a lot about how stuck the educational system is right now. I’ve been working in and adjacent to educational systems for the better part of 15 years now, and the stress I see from pre-K through doctoral programs is super intense. You have national concerns about student performance on evaluations; Harvard deciding to limit the number of As they hand out; student behavior in the class spiking; outrage about digital tools in the classroom; the University of Oregon shuttering dorms to close budget gaps; and so, so many more. As one of the last public institutions that people routinely interact with, education seems to be proactively demonstrating so many of the concerns we’re having as a society.
From my work as a consultant, I see this work in educational teams all the time. At this point, I’m generally not working directly with students outside of my own university classroom. However, I have broad access to leadership teams, cabinets, and school faculty meetings. It gives me an interesting vantage point. A recurring issue I'm seeing is teams struggling to look objectively at their own situation with an open, problem-solving mindset. Specifically, I am struck by how many systems have such weak tools to self-assess. Even in places where teams and leaders have access to high-quality research and scholarship — higher education colleagues, this is where I’m looking at you — I still see weak deployment of metacognitive processes to help make stronger decisions.
Let me use an example of a team I’ve worked with for a while (who will be thoroughly de-identified so y’all don’t feel put on the spot). In observations and interactions, this team makes very limited use of planning tools during team meetings. They are a large enough system to have some staying power, but they also face serious headwinds in outcomes, enrollment, and AI's impact in their settings. They also have mixed political support from state and federal interests. Their formal team decisions among staff and leadership do not use some tried-and-true tools: no premortems, no ladder of inference, no open discussion of competing commitments, and, really, noafter-action debriefs.
Furthermore, working with this team, I experience a lot of meetings after meetings. Spaces where conversation between team members is open and direct, which very rarely occurs in formal settings. When I asked both team members and leaders about this, I was met with almost universal surprise at the observation (for a while). For a bit, I felt like maybe this was a psychological safety issue. That was certainly a proximal cause in this fishbone, but as I dug deeper, I started hearing a lot of“this is how we do things here”.
Now, I’m not a spring chicken in this work, and I’ve certainly heard this kind of resistance from systems before, but as I dug with folks in the system, I kept hearing it again and again. Even more, as I worked to get under this to the thinking that underlay the process (I am a therapist by training after all), I kept hearing a lot about how folks encouraged that kind of thing with students but didn’t want to do it themselves. They could recognize that it was a problem, but staff after staff member kept turning away, even when we started to connect the historical thinking to the current problems. Even when I introduced tools to folks with a good understanding of the overall research, I still saw limits in their ability to use them effectively
So, predictably, I got pretty frustrated, which is not a great place to be if you’re trying to help someone. Thankfully, I remembered some solid advice from a mentor in grad school, John Mooradian: always look for what’s likable about your clients. It was one of his two core rules for young therapists, so I faithfully completed a strengths inventory for each team member I worked with. The trend I saw as I worked through it was exceptionally helpful. A pattern of receptive team members began to emerge that I couldn’t originally see. Many folks who had experience with internal self-reflection (from being in therapy, working in some capacity in the social service industry, and often serving in non-educational settings prior) stood out from the mess I was seeing. These folks had an above-average capacity to receive the feedback I was giving the team. Moreover, they were often able to walk through a tool with me, even when I introduced it informally, without naming it a formal process.
The pattern was really helpful, and honestly, it has shaped some of how I’m thinking about my doctoral work. The people who could engage the tools most honestly were not always the people with the most formal authority, the most experience, or the strongest opinions. They were often the people who had spent time developing an internal capacity for reflection. They could pause. They could notice their own assumptions. They could tolerate feedback without immediately defending against it.
And that is the part I keep sitting with: are our schools and universities actually stuck because we don’t know what to do, or because we haven’t built the adult capacity to think together honestly about what we’re doing?
