These last few weeks, we’ve been talking to our younger students about expectations. In our wrap-up today, I’ll be playing them this video: “Be Kind to Yourself” by Andrew Peterson. The more I listen to it, the more I am moved by it.
You can find the song on Peterson’s newest album, The Burning Edge of Dawn.
One of the most profitable parts of The Advantage for me was Lencioni’s distinction of values in the chapter on creating clarity. He write a good bit about the mission statement fad of a few years ago and how easy it is for the things that should bring clarity to bring more confusion in the long run.
Lencioni sees four kinds of values: core, aspiration, permission-to-play, and accidental. Core values, he asserts, are “two or three– behavioral traits that are inherent in an organization.” These are things that have been at play for a long time, long before someone sits down to figure out core values. Aspirational values, on the other hand, are the values you hope to encourage and instill in those you work with. These are not things you already possess (but would like to). Permission-to-play values, according to Lenin, are “the minimum behavioral standards that are required in an organization.” Lencioni lists honesty, integrity, and respect for others as examples of this kind of value. Finally, you’ve got the accidental values. These are the things that creep in over time, things that no one set out to make important but that became important regardless.
While I find permission-to-play and accidental values interesting, core and aspirational values are the ones that I imagine most organizations need to tackle first. “Who are we already?” and “who do we want to become?” are vital to any kind of moving forward.
I mentioned in a post last week about how “lone ranger” teaching can seem. It’s always interesting (and jarring), then, when you have to work well with others in some broader context. That’s when words like “team” get thrown around.
I really like the take that Patrick Lencioni has on the concept of the team in The Advantage. From the chapter on building a cohesive leadership team:
The word team has been so overused and misused in society that it has lost much of its impact. The truth is, few groups of leaders actually work like a team, or at least not the kind that is required to lead a healthy organization. Most of the resemble what Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, authors of the book, The Wisdom of Teams, call a “working group.”
A good way to understand a working group is to think of it like a golf team, where players go off and play on their own and then get together and add up their scores at the end of the day. A real team is more like a basketball team, one that plays together simultaneously, in an interactive, mutually dependent, and often interchangeable way. Most working groups reflexively call themselves teams because that’s the word society uses to describe any group of people who are affiliated in their work.
This distinction would constitute fighting words for some of the athletes and coaches that I know. I get the sense and distinction that Lencioni is going for, though. There’s something about the give-and-take you find in a real team dynamic that isn’t repeatable (or even possible) in other group situations.
Somewhere over the course of the last ten years, I found myself interested in systems and the way things work (or don’t work). I think part of this is rooted in my last two years in college, when an organization that I was a part of got a major facelift (and some might say heart transplant). Every now and then I’ll pick up some kind of book made for systems-people, usually a marketing book (a la Seth Godin) or a communications books. A co-worker recently mentioned Patrick Lencioni to me, particularly his book on team dysfunctions. I recently bought (and quickly devoured) one of his more recent books: The Advantage. The premise of the book is that organizational health is more vital to success that organizational smartness. Check it out:
Even a cursory look at Jesus’ teachings in the four gospels reveals a sense of the significance of health: plants growing, producing fruit, giving shade. Vines, branches. Paul jumps in later and talks about a body put together and working well. I like the idea of health being just as vital as (and more foundational than) smarts. Smart, it seems, can be easy. Health? That’s a lot of good work.
A couple of weeks ago, Molly Worthen of UNC-Chapel Hill posted an op-ed piece to the New York Times that got a nice bit of traction in some education circles. “Lecture Me. Really.” was a reminder of the significance of the lecture as a means to an education. Anyone who spends anytime in the classroom or keeping up with teacher talk knows that the lecture format is a highly-debated thing (who wants bored students?). From the essay:
In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the “sage on the stage” with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences — fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.
I like what Worthen has to say about “lecture as argument.” She goes on to say:
Those who want to abolish the lecture course do not understand what a lecture is. A lecture is not the declamation of an encyclopedia article. In the humanities, a lecture “places a premium on the connections between individual facts,” Monessa Cummins, the chairwoman of the classics department and a popular lecturer at Grinnell College, told me. “It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument.”
Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice. Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.
The Week‘s Damon Linker liked the essay but felt like Worthen didn’t go far enough. He suggests that something more should be added (but that it’s something that humanities professors are ill-at-east to do):
A more powerful and compelling defense of the humanities lecture course would have to proceed differently — into terrain that professors of history, philosophy, and literature often find exceedingly uncomfortable these days. Such a defense would require that they confidently assert that professors in the humanities possess knowledge, that this knowledge is valuable, and that the most effective way of conveying it to unknowledgeable students is to explain it to them in a lecture format.
He goes on to list reasons why this can be a difficult stand to take (thanks, post-modernism, verifiability, and certain aspects of democracy). But then:
Why do students of history need teachers who will stand at the front of a classroom and lecture? Because history is hard. It presupposes the knowledge of thousands of facts (names, dates, events) and how they fit together into an enormously complicated, multi-dimensional causal sequence. Until the students absorb those facts and grasp that causal sequence, “group work” and other forms of interactive learning are premature.
That’s why lecture-based courses that do the introductory work of explaining the past must come first — and why such courses are typically followed by smaller, more advanced seminars that foster conversation and debate and raise questions of historiography (competing and conflicting interpretive traditions about the past). By that point, students have learned enough — they know enough — to begin participating more actively in their own education.
That’s not easy for many to read or hear: we’ve become a culture of academic instant gratification. But Linker is definitely on to something. You should read the rest of the article here. The question of “best practices” is a real and powerful conversation taking place in schools all over the country. Because lecturing well isn’t something that everyone can do, it’s much easier to promote a “coach from the side” mentality. It’s to our loss, though. And in the long run, to the loss of our children.
I have often wondered if Steven Curtis Chapman would get around to making a “worship album.” When the trend hit years and years ago, I was dismayed. I’m one of that rare breed that sees the praise and worship movement as “that which killed CCM.” So as each major recording artist put together collections of popular worship hits and personal additions to the mix, I cringed a bit and backed off. But SCC seemed to mostly stay away.
Turns out that he has a worship album dropping in the spring and that the first song from the album, “Amen,” is already available online. And I have to admit: it’s pretty good. Why? Because it’s simple and obviously and consistently scriptural. I’ll be curious to see what he does with the rest of the album. I’m hoping to pleasantly surprised.
I’m about a week into Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. As is often the case when reading about a given topic, you start to notice it everywhere once it’s on your radar. So while I’ll get back to Turkle’s book later, I thought I’d share a snippet from a recent interview with Wendell Berry from The Modern Farmer. As I’ve mentioned before, something about Berry’s non-fiction resonates with me in a way that his fiction hasn’t. I think it’s way of giving us a brilliant picture of a particular way of life that doesn’t over-romanticize it.
In the interview, Berry speaks some of farming. Then, at the interview’s end, he reflects on the connections made by farmers and what is being lost the more that that way of life fades. His response when asked if he sees that kind of connection being rebuilt:
Our neighbor with a CSA was telling Tanya about his little boy who wanted to pick the cherry tomatoes, and did. To have your heart thus warmed is part of a farm’s income. Neighbors working together have an income that’s never booked.
The old way of neighborly work-swapping here involved much talk. Neighbors worked together, a matter of utmost practicality, with a needed economic result, but the day’s work was also a social occasion. Is this a “spiritual” connection between neighbors, and between the neighborhood and its land? I suppose so, but only by being also a connection that is practical, economic, social, and pleasant. And affectionate.
That whole thing of looking somebody straight in the eye and saying something—my goodness. “I love you,” right into somebody’s face, right into their eyes, what a fine thing. Who would want to miss it?
People who talk only to communicate are different from people who talk for pleasure. People who talk for pleasure, as opposed to people who talk to communicate, become wonderful talkers over the years. They have eloquence.
One of the things that has surprised me most about teaching is its particularly solitary nature. Granted, you’re in front of dozens of students a day. But it’s possible to go the entire day and never really connect with another adult. And while it’s not the same as farming, there’s still something to be said for work conversation that transcends “talking only to communicate.”
In a recent post at First Things, Leah Libresco shared three simple ways the church (in her case, Catholic) could strengthen the sense of congregational community without embracing unhealthy practice. Her second suggestion was to bring in more things to connect with “winter Christians.” She explains:
Winter Christians are both intensely engaged with their faith, but also intensely stymied by spiritual dryness, doubts, a persistent sin, or some other difficulty. (They’re unlike “Summer Christians” who are joyfully drawn to the faith, and completely unlike people who like or dislike the church, but don’t yearn for it).
Community and worship done wrong often result in a short-circuited life of faith. You can’t ignore the rain when it’s falling (and sometimes you don’t get to go out and dance in it, too). A recent song from Andrew Peterson’s, “The Rain Keeps Falling,” lines up well with the “Winter Christian” concept, I think. Here’s a performance of the song at the “launch party” of Peterson’s latest album.
One of my fears moving forward in life is being unable to articulate well the place of pain in the Christian life. Something about how we have set up our explanations for evil and pain has created an unnecessary and dangerous disconnect with life the way God seems to see it in the Bible. We ought not ignore the rain, but we shouldn’t be defeated by it either.
Shots from the Eagle and Child, October 2015.
I recently took part in a quick work discussion about the place of joy, whether or not one can expect it or in some way legislate it. Joy, of course, was what C. S. Lewis was surprised by. It became a kind of lifelong pursuit for him. I’d be curious to hear what Lewis would say about James K. A. Smith’s recent take on the topic in his essay, “The State of Joy.”
In the essay, Smith points to personal experience, the thoughts of Pascal, and the writings of David Foster Wallace to get a better grasp on the way joy might work in the modern world. I found his section on “the conditions of joy” well-rendered:
First, it seems to me that, while joy can by crystallized into discrete “experiences”—that is, joy can have episodic “highlights” that bring it to the surface of realization—nonetheless such experiences of joy actually relate to a more baseline, steady-state posture of receptivity, bound up with gratitude, as the condition of possibility for such epiphanic moments. Such “moments” of joy tend to be revelations and recognitions of the giftedness of one’s world—which, in those moments, is recognized to be a reality even during the routine and everyday moments when one isn’t necessarily aware of it. Perhaps we could say that joy is intimately linked to a sense of blessing, a sense of grace.
Second, it seems that such joy is relational: not only is it shared with others, and occasioned by relationships, but it also wells up from a sense of having received a gift from someone (Someone?). In a relational context, joy emerges from a sense of resting on someone who gives; in such a context, having received—being a recipient—is not experienced as a debt but as the basis for joy. So the stance of receptivity that seems integral to joy points to another—a giver or givers (or Giver). Perhaps one could say that joy is a mode of enjoying gratitude. That is, joy is the enjoyment of being a recipient, where receiving a gift fosters not resentment at being indebted but an open welcome of such gift-ing. It presupposes recognition of one’s “indebtedness” as a good feature of a blessed creaturely life. (One wonders, then, if only those creatures who can be resentful can also be joyful.)
I certainly like the connection of joy with a sense of recipient gratitude. Perhaps joy is hard for many of us to come by because gratitude exists beyond our grasps.
By the essay’s end, Smith asserts that joy should be at the heart of the Christian mission in this period of late modernity: “What if both the cultural mandate and the Great Commission were reconciled as sharing the good news of a great joy, not just telling, but showing?” It’s a noble and necessary part of our task. If we take that part seriously, God just might surprise us.
As I mentioned a few posts ago, I had the opportunity to take a gaggle of students and a handful of chaperons to England for about a week. We spent much of that time in places of interest to fans of literature: the Lake District, Stratford-upon-Avon, Haworth, Bath, and Oxford. We ended our trip with a couple of days in London. It was my second time taking this particular tour; it was my first time actually leading it. Many lessons were learned. Some examples:
Lesson One: Misspeaking is such an easy thing to do. Even saying the wrong thing one time (especially the first time) can set things off. When you can, write it down. Read from the script you make. Granted, there’s no guarantee that anyone will hang on every word you say because . . .
Lesson Two: Mishearing is such an easy thing to do. Even when you actually say the right things correctly multiple times, there is no guarantee that what you say will sink in (even if those listening nod their heads in approval or “understanding”).
Lesson Three: “Taking the same trip” doesn’t mean you’ll actually be taking the same trip. So many things boil down to the weather of the moment, the time of day, and the day of the week. A good bit of my trip was learning to check my expectations and make the most of any given moment. A place of chaos on the last trip (sunny, crowded weekend in the city) was almost quaint on this one (rainy, empty Monday morning in the same city). Self-guided tours are nothing like guided tours (even if you’ve been on the tour before). I think the only thing that was truly the same between my two times in England was the coronation chicken sandwiches I had for lunch in Bath. Really. That’s about it.
Lesson Four: Rely on those around you (and surround yourself with reliable people). I was fortunate to have a great tour director and a great group of chaperons. Everyone contributed in an essential way. Egos seemed to stay out of the picture (my director’s words, not mine). Flexibility and reliability go well together.
Lesson Five: Jersey Boys is more enjoyable the second time around.
Lesson Six: Sometimes you just don’t get your Cornetto. Oh well.
Space Enough, and Time 