When Doing Everything = Doing Nothing or Worse
Social-emotional learning. Trauma-informed care. Solutions-focused therapy. Tutoring. Career academies. Universal Cognitive-Behavioral Supports. Gatekeeper Training. Wraparound services. Positive Youth Development. Positive-Behavioral Interventions and Supports. …
The list of ways we have learned to “help” in schools is long. On their own or even in some combination, each of these frameworks have their own merit and a wealth of research to back its utility. They are powerful methods of intervention that have promising outcomes for children and youth.
However, doing it all sometimes means we’re not doing anything. In 2018, we brought a group of teachers together in partnership with the Brown School Social System Design Lab and Educators for Social Justice. They were given poster paper and a marker, and through facilitated group model building, they mapped out the system structure that leads to students thriving in schools.
Educators told us that though it was with supportive intentions, the more “good programming and frameworks” that they were asked to include in a school, the less likely it would be implemented well across the board.
They said that trying to keep up with the training and implementation of these robust evidence-based programs actually took time away for planning effective instruction, which diminished the time they had to do their core functions, and ultimately stressed them out. This led to less consistent delivery or enthusiasm to stick with programs over time. Instead of doing it all — they were doing nothing and some even suggested worse — that they were doing it all poorly.
The key, they suggested, was to pick one framework and go deep — to get really good at that thing they could do well on top of instruction BEFORE adding it all.
Their suggestion was to be wary of throwing all the whole-child initiatives into the mix before the school as a whole has a good grapple on any one practice. Though evidence-based programs and frameworks are meant to solve a number of challenges that result from racial and economic inequity, implementing multiple frameworks can overload the school system’s resources and actually create more challenges over time.
This insight they gave us was a great example of humbly looking at oneself as “endogenous” or a part of the system and the challenges it must tackle. This doesn’t mean don’t do these things — it just means pick and choose what you want to do well and be wary of the capacities and resources you have (your people) as you do it.
#systemsthinking #systemdynamics #urbaneducation #communitybasedsystemsthinking #STEEP #educationalequity
