Pace Yourself

This week was a momentous week in my district’s IT history: We moved from an ancient Exchange email server to Gmail. I am pretty sure that aside from our IT Director, no one in the district is more excited about this than me. I’ve been asking for this to happen for at least the past five years, but it was never on the radar for any IT Director prior to our current one. He transitioned into the role from the classroom a little more than a year ago and has been firm in this intention since day one. But it still took him 384 days from taking the reins of the department to make the change happen (and he got the official go-ahead more than half a year ago). What I’m saying here is that even with all of the various pieces in place, it didn’t happen quickly. And this is a thing that I have found to be a big difference between being a teacher and being an administrator: The timescales of making changes as an administrator are simply longer than those that teachers experience. Things don’t tend to happen quickly, and big things never do.

When I was a teacher, I could make tectonic shifts in what I was doing in my classes as quickly as I wanted to. Looking back on it now, I’m amazed at some of the moves I made, and the speed at which they happened (ex. shifting Honors Chemistry to a Standards-Based Grading system from soup-to-nuts two days before the start of the school year, or changing the entire structure of the AP Biology final project the week before I deployed it because a better idea suddenly became apparent). Administration doesn’t work like this. Changes happen on a time-scale of months or years. It’s probably obvious when considering the types of big changes that administrators effect, but even relatively minor things can take a long time to happen if many different people are a part of the process.

This is not me complaining or wishing for something else. I am totally at peace with the slower pace of change in administration compared to the classroom. Once I moved to a place where I was no longer responsible for just myself, and my students, I quickly gained a new appreciation for incrementalism. It seems clearly obvious that fundamental changes are much more likely to work if they are brought about deliberately. The culture of a department, or a school, or a district is generally not something that should be altered without a lot of careful planning.

One consequence of the differential in change pace between the classroom and the system is that sometimes teachers don’t understand why things aren’t changing as quickly as they might want them to be. I think back to me-as-teacher, and I realize that some of my biggest gripes about practices and processes that were handled at the administrative level were not the fault of any particular person, they were the consequence of the difference in change pace. In my administrator-experience, this has been a useful thing to keep in mind. Sometimes teachers aren’t clear on why some initiative or project is not being implemented as quickly as they think it should be. One of my roles is to help them get that clarity.

Of course, none of this means that there are not aspects of what I do that can’t be altered quickly. I’ve written about some of those previously, and there are quite a few others. But in each of these cases, I was able to work quickly because there were relatively few pieces and people involved. Part of my admin-education has been learning to figure out which changes belong to which timescales, and the times that I’ve gotten “stuck” seem to always be times where I misjudged this. Not that it’s been a problem, I’ve just had to stop and understand that something I might have figured would happen quickly is going to take longer than expected.

What do you think about the pace of change in administration? If you’re inclined, drop a line and let me know how much you agree (or disagree) with me.