Dave's Whiteboard

My grade school was St. Brigid’s, in northwest Detroit. The parish has been closed for 22 years, and I suppose the school closed before that. I remember getting half a day off school for Father Brennan’s feast day. I remember teachers like Sister Patrick Elizabeth and Sister Mary Eamon (Eamon, as in de Valera–the school had lots of green on St. Patrick’s Day).

More than anything, I remember my sixth-grade English teacher, Mr. Strunk.  He was only the second teacher I’d had at St. Brigid’s who wasn’t a nun, and the only one who was male.

In hindsight, I suppose I didn’t have a mental model for what a male teacher would be like.  I was disconcerted at first by how different he seemed.  I need to say that I had some very good teachers:  I don’t recall any of that whacking-with-rulers stuff that people seem to assume was mandatory in pre-Vatican II Catholic schools.

But Mr. Strunk was really different.  He said things that were funny, wry, unexpected.  He read to us from Mad Magazine–and may have been planting a crop of critical thinking with the seed-starter of parody.  He went far beyond the stuffy borders of our textbook.

Early in the school year, when he’d said something funny, I responded with with a sarcastic laugh.  (I suppose it was my ten-year-old’s critique: teachers weren’t supposed to be cracking wise.)  He said, not harshly, “If you don’t think it’s funny, don’t laugh.”

That was a door he opened just for me, but he spent a lot of time opening doors like it: “Think for yourself.  You can do it.”

He’d open them by assigning sixth graders a 1,500 word composition.  Topic: The Dime.  That was it; a two-word topic and a length.  What can you do with that?

Another assignment: a 48-line poem.  This time, he assigned the title: “The Last Voyage of The Albatross.”

I don’t recall anything I wrote–but I have a vivid sense of enjoying the writing.  I have an even more vivid sense of what he wrote on my paper, because it leapt into my memory and has never left:

Your poetry improves, my friend,
with each brand new endeavor.
I wish that I had words to lend
to serve you as a level.

But while such things as kings and men
on your mind’s sea do toss,
don’t let this be the last voyage
of your young Albatross.

School was never the same, and a few teachers after him suffered by comparison.  I lost contact with him after going out of state for most of high school.  In pre-Facebook days, it was hard to track down someone out of state; in post-Facebook days, it can still hard to connect with someone who was over 25 when John Kennedy was assassinated.

Through a friend of my younger brother’s, I learned last year that Mr. Strunk was still in the Detroit area; he spent 40 years teaching and coaching.  The friend sent me an address, but warned me that his health was poor.  I wrote a letter that week; I’d sealed it and stamped it, then realized he might not be up to a written reply.  I reprinted the letter and included a phone number, on the outside chance that he might remember me and might be up to calling.

No such luck, but that was all right.  The important thing for me was to say to him directly, more personally, the kinds of things I’ve talked about here.

I have not seen Mr. Strunk since, I suppose, 1963.  Many of my classmates will remember one of his weekend gigs at the parish’s activities building: hosting a hootenanny (and that’s a word well on its way to joining “floppy disk” and “antimacassar” ) .  One of his standards was The MTA Song – about a hapless Boston commuter who lacked the “exit fare” and so couldn’t pay to get off the train.

And did he ever return?
No, he never returned
And his fate is still unlearned.
He may ride forever
‘Neath the streets of Boston:
He’s the man who never returned.

For me, Mr. Strunk was the man who always returned.  I decided to become a teacher in part because of his example. Even after leaving the education field, I would recall his intelligent encouragement, his genuine interest in his students, his respect for their intelligence that included challenging them.

I learned only today that Mr. Strunk died last month.  One woman wrote in the funeral home’s online guestbook, “My all time favorite teacher and I will never forget how honored I felt when he told me to call him Frank.”

It’d be hard to top that. I am grateful to be able to say “Mr. Strunk” and still feel his presence.  I’ve read comments from people who were students in his final years of teaching, and from classmates of mine–we who were the first class he taught, more than 50 years ago.  There are teachers I will always cherish–Brother Leo and Brother André, Father McKendrick and Dr. MacDonald, Professor Bauder — but there was only one Frank Strunk.

When I read about the Organize Series plugin for WordPress (a focus of Monday’s post), I thought, “This could do it.”

No I didn’t.  I don’t know about you, but I rarely think to myself in complete sentences.  Phrasing like this is how we capsulize a more complex experience.  What I believe was going on at the time was something like this: I had a situation I wanted to change (the way I used to manage a series of posts here on my blog no longer worked). And the Organize Series plugin at first glance looked like it could accomplish at least two things:

• Provide automatic navigation between posts in a series (so I wouldn’t have to hard-wire the links).
• Display a list of all the posts in a given series (for me to use as a summary or as a table of contents for the series).

If I’d thought about it longer, I might have articulated another goal: have some way to list all the different series I have.  But I’m not usually that strategic.  Still, what I came up with (provide navigation, display a list) acted as my critical-to-quality elements.  CTQs were widely used at GE when I worked there; I use that acronym partly tongue-in-cheek and partly to highlight informal criteria.

So, I put Organize Series to work, and within 10 minutes I had automatic next/previous navigation for posts in a series, along with an indication that they were part of a series:

(You can click the image to see the entire post.)

When I was still considering whether to use the plugin, I said to my wife, “Wouldn’t it be great to know how to write a plugin?”  On reflection, I realize this statement was another capsulization–a series of them, nested inside each other.  ”Know how to write a plugin” really means:

• “Know how to write a plugin” really means “write a plugin that works….”
• Which in turn means “write one that produces results…”
• Which means “write one that people use to accomplish things that matter to them.”

To me, this is an important distinction for workplace learning: You can learn on your own for your personal satisfaction, and if you’re satisfied, then that’s a sufficient result.  In the workplace, though, you’re part of a larger group (even if that group is you and one individual client), and so the result has to matter within that context.

What’s this got to do with my plugin tinkering?

Think of it as my own workplace learning.  At this point, I was still some distance from my (loosely articulated) end state.  I hadn’t moved much toward my other CTQ of displaying a list of all the posts in a series. In fact, I didn’t yet grasp all the options in the plugin, let alone know how to make them work in a way useful to me.

About 5% of the info from the plugin's page of options

But…In my first 15 minutes with the plugin, I’d achieved a result that I found valuable.  That left me more willing to experiment–which, put another way, says I was somewhat more willing to spend time trying to achieve the next valuable result.

To me, this is a core principle for any type of workplace learning: formal or informal, face-to-face or virtual.  I need to be able to accomplish something that looks to me like real work–produce something that I see has having on-the-job value.  And I need to do that sooner rather than later, which is why twenty minutes on introductions, half an hour on expectations for this workshop, and twenty minutes on learning objectives will invariably drive me to teeth-clenching frustration. Or to eating more of those lowest-bid-hotel pastries.

One of the unexpected outcomes of achieving an initial on-the-job goal is that you end up better able to visualize other goals.  In a sense, learning leads to new problems (or opportunites) because you’re better at grasping the current situation and at visualizing different ones.

In the course of my experimenting with the Organize Series plugin, I did find at least one way to display a list of all the posts in a series.  I can make a box like this appear alongside the title for each post:

The posts in my most complex series

You can click that image if you’d like to see the first post in the series, though I’ve turned this “series post list box” feature off for now, until I learn how to control the way it displays.  Having managed to produce it, though, I’ve picked up several more goals for myself.  I was about to write “learning goals,” but I want to stress that they’re all tied to accomplishment.

• I want to learn how to use code that’s part of the plugin to, for example, display a list of posts like the last example where and when I want it.
• I want to find out how to modify the plugin’s template (the tool it uses to display the full text of all the posts in a series).
• I may even want to learn how to modify the PHP or CSS code to make things happen.

That last is quite a goal for someone who doesn’t really know how to program.  But my various experiments to date, and especially the things I see as successes, have taught me that I can learn to successfully modify small bits of PHP code and achieve relatively high-value results.

So I’m accomplishing what looks like real work to me.

Dave’s Whiteboard marked its fifth anniversary last month.  (No, I didn’t notice, either.)  You might not think it, given my recent output, but my Whiteboard means a lot to me — so much so that whenever I think about changing the theme (the package of files that controls the appearance) I end up considering one that looks much like what I’m currently using.

Sticking with what I’ve had has more and more often meant I run into technical problems.  My current theme is out of date in several ways–for example, it’s not widget-aware.  That means is that I can’t take advantage of simple ways to customize and control the appearance.

I’ve occasionally written several posts on a single topic (a series of posts).  At the time I used a WordPress addon (a plugin) that automatically added previous/next links so that a reader could work through a series without worrying about date or about intervening but unrelated posts.  That same plugin created a table of contents as well, so you could tell where you were in the series.

That plugin stopped working a few months back; I have no idea why.  The effort to manually input the links–to hard-wire them, so to speak–was more than I was ready to expend.  Still, I plan to write a series or two in the coming months, and I wanted to have a low-maintenance way to present all my series.

So this past weekend I started experimenting with the Organize Series plugin. I tested to see if it could link the three posts in my series about the book Improving Performance, by Rummler and Brache.

And it could.  What’s more, with a $15 add-on, I’m able to use a little bit of code and automatically generate a list of posts in a series, like this:

Improving Performance (the book)

Rummler and Brache: Improving Performance

Three levels of performance

Process is a verb, output is a noun

Dirt in the performance engine

I had to do some tinkering, and I had to purchase a $15 add-on for the plugin, but I’m content so far: I’ve accomplished my short-term goal of making each of my series work like a series again–without a lot of hand wiring.

That list of posts in the Improving Performance series, for instance: to make it appear here after installing the Organize Series plugin and the add-on, I inserted the following code into my post:

[ post_list_box series=65 ]

Enough WordPress mumbo-jumbo.  I’m going to revisit this from the perspective of learning on the job.  My hunch is that there’s a kind tradeoff that a person’s willing to make when he has a problem to solve (or an opportunity to seize).  What going into figuring worth is the amount of effort expended, and the value of the results… as seen by the person with the problem or opportunity.

CC-licensed photo by Craig Bennett / theclyde.

In the few days since my last post, I’ve spent time thinking about how people get better at producing results on the job.  That’s a bit of a paraphrase, but “how people learn” is too broad for what I usually end up working on.  My projects vary widely, but what they have in common is the client’s desire to improve what people accomplish.

I believe that less and less of that improvement will come from the efforts of traditional, corporate training and development.  (Note that calling yourself “Organizational Learning” isn’t the same thing as having people in your organization learn.)  I do think there’s a role for planned, structured efforts to help people acquire and improve important skills — but it’s like the supporting role of the earl of Exeter in this clip, rather than the leading one of his nephew, King Henry (whom the king of France refers to as “our brother England”).

Some of the skills that learning professionals have specialized in — analysis, design, structuring, and so far — are moving out of their control, because other people need to apply those skills and can’t or won’t wait.  This is a topic I’ll pick up again  in 2012.  I’ve been considering what I know that’s effective and thinking about how to enable other people to be effective with that knowledge.  Like, for example, how to build job aids.

One way to look at a job aid:

• It’s information external to you (rather than inside your head)
• …that you apply on the job (rather than, say, reviewing beforehand)
• …to achieve acceptable results
• ….while reducing the need to memorize.

So in part this last post of 2011 looks ahead to what I’ll be working on in 2012.  And in part it’s a reason–as if I needed one–to (re)post my explanation of Robert Burns’s most famous song, one you’re likely to hear this weekend.  Auld lang syne is a Scots phrase. Literally, it’s “old long since;” it means “the days that are past,” and it has a sense of “the things that we shared.”

Even if you decide not to bother with my chart, you ought to take the time to listen to Eddi Reader’s singing.  The video is from the opening of the new Scottish Parliament building in 2004.  In the first half, she solos with a traditional melody.  In the second half, the attendees  join with a version you likely know better.

Lena H. Sun of The Washington Post, who often reports on health-related topics, has an article in today’s paper about the use in medical training of “standardized patients” — healthy people portraying patients.  (Here’s how Johns Hopkins Medicine describes its standardized patient program.)

Developing the capabilities of doctors, nurses, and other practitioners is a clear example of complex learning.  You have a wide range of skills.  Some are primarily procedural: when you draw blood, do it like this; when you’re checking vital signs, do it like that. Follow this process for obtaining and recording data.

Most of what we think of as medical training, though, involves skill for situations where there’s no single correct approach to a given problem.  So the standardized patient is an individual who’s portraying a particular type of patient–in other words, someone who’s acting as a realistic learning task.

Many [of the standardized patients] are actors, but actors don’t always make the best patients, clinical directors said. Improv is not allowed. People trained to portray a particular type of patient must work from the same facts and deliver responses in the same way to the students examining them.

“They can’t overact,” said Kathy Schaivone, clinical instructor and director [of the Clinical Education and Evaluation Laboratory] at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. “If I can’t guarantee that all five will cry, the ones that I know that can [cry], I have to ask them not to.”

(Here’s an overview of the standardized patient curriculum at U-Maryland Baltimore.)

One challenge for the standardized patients is to provide a structured debriefing: “Did the student palpate the sinuses? Listen to the heart in all four places? Wash hands before and after touching the patient?”

In this setting, I see two interconnected sets of skills:

• Those needed by the medical practitioners to relate to patients, interact with them, and arrive at a reasonable diagnosis based on limited information.
• Those needed by the standardized patients in order to believably and consistently portray someone with a particular condition.

Behind both of these, of course, is an intensive effort to design, develop, and implement the training.  Beyond the somewhat obvious (what conditions are both useful to have portrayed and suited to the standardized patient approach?), there’s the multilevel skill required of the patients: how do I portray the condition?  What do I share readily?  What do I tend to withhold?  What am I incorrect about?

In addition, the patients need to debrief the students, both via checklists and via face-to-face feedback. Program directors like Schaivone, meanwhile, need to monitor the performances of both the patients and the students.

To illustrate the complexity of behavior, the online version of Sun’s article has a link to this May 2011 article on how doctors struggle to show compassion, by Manoj Jain, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Emory University.

‘Standardized medicine’ image adapted from the CC-licensed original by Ben Weston (Tek F).