I’d say “all” would be inaccurate. One business stream I
work with is education, in particular assessing and improving
school effectiveness. Typical of schools that we work with,
you’d have the leadership team plus a few enthusiastic teachers
leading the charge, some ambivalent staff members and a few, say
20-30%, who go out of their way to avoid raising their game.
The ones who are interested in effectiveness focus upon ways of
improving performance. That last 20-30%, on the other hand,
waste their breath and everybody's time listing out all of the
difficult things about their jobs (inattentive kids, parents not
doing what teachers are paid to do, etc.) and personify the old
saying, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”.
One of the sad realities of management is that there are almost
always going to be a few people who drag their heels. Some
come to the party after you’ve read the riot act to them, and for
the others, the only thing to do is carry out a mercy killing and
call it performance management. Some performance-focussed
sectors (aerospace and finance are good) get with the program,
probably as a matter of surviving against the competition, while
others like education seem content to carry a certain proportion of
dead weight. Sadly, there are still a number of idiots out
there who still see teaching as an iron rice bowl, and believe they
have the right to continue collecting their pay while applying a
misguided cookie-cutter approach to their jobs instead of taking
the trouble to understand what they are there to achieve.
So, we get to the obvious point here: what can be done in this
situation? Well, it’s not going to take too much tea-leaf
reading to see that this teacher is simply not receiving support
from her colleagues. After all, barring career-ending enmity,
who would allow a colleague to place such grievously stupid
comments on something to be handed to a student, and in turn to the
student’s parents? If she’s going off doing such dumb things,
I’d say that she’s unlikely to be mature enough to confer with her
colleagues about the best means of getting students’ attention and
motivating them. That being the case, and seeing as how a
certain proportion of the staff needs to be spoonfed, the
school’s leaders might be best off putting a peer review and
feedback process into place. If the lagging staff members
still don’t raise their game, it’s time to clear out some dead
wood, employment arrangements permitting.
Ya, i agree with you that there are alot of such lagging staff
members around putting a bad name to the profession.
2 points to raise here:
1) There is already such a process in place, as common in the
civil service. But it is precisely this program which is
obstructing efficiency, since the performance review follows a bell
curve, and the current situation seems that this system favors the
laojiaos. The newbies can only suck thumb and wait for their "turn"
for better grades and subsequent promotion.
2) yes, dead wood should be cleared out. but can school
administrators afford to let their staff go, regardless of how
ineffective they are? To become a teacher requires specialised
training, which takes time and money, and clearly, MOE obviously
won't spend extra money hiring addition teachers outside their
projected figures.
Each year, if you have individuals who voluntarily leave the
system, and if you still want to clear out the "dead wood", the
school might end up with a shortage of staff, affecting the
student-teacher ratio. I don't think not many principals would want
to risk that.
