“You can regulate the worst abuses out of a system, but you can never regulate goodness or excellence because goodness and excellence exist in the hearts and the minds of the people within the system.” – Tom Sobol

“Be curious, not judgemental.” – Ted Lasso (but not Walt Whitman)

For the purpose of some posts I have kicking around in my head, I’m going to define policy as something people have to do, and regulation as something people cannot do. And we have plenty of both in schools.

So much of what we do in schools are meant to prevent the worst things from happening – both kid actions and teacher actions. It’s important. Thoughtful policies and regulations make schools safer, make teacher lives and student lives better, and highlight what we value most in our schools – in short, they honor the lives of the people within the system.

But policies and regulations are, too often, blunt instruments that operate from a deficit model of thinking about the people and often have unintended consequences that don’t necessarily move us closer to creating the schools we need. Before we implement a regulation or a policy, we need to get better at asking more thoughtful questions or we will end up stifling the creativity and – as Prof. Sobol would have said – the goodness and excellence of the people within the system.

As such, before we reach for policy tools, we really need to question their use, because when we over-regulate and over-proscribe, we create all kinds of unintended consequences that can do the opposite of what we intended. So what might that look like in practice?

Let’s examine a classic regulation that many teachers have to follow all over the country every day.

Policy / Regulation: Teachers must post their aim and the state standards on the board every day.

I imagine that this policy is supposed to make sure that teachers have actually done their planning and have considered the standards that are being taught. And I’m sure it seems like a somewhat benign regulation. What could be wrong with this mandate?

There’s a few procedural things that always bothered me about this regulation — first, I’ve yet to meet the student who was excited to walk into class and see that they were going to learn about “CC.1.2.9–10.E: Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text.” But I’ve seen hundreds of classes where kids dug deep into a text to figure out both what an author meant and how that meaning might have influence and relevance in their lives.

Second, are the aim and the state standards always (ever?) the most important thing that students see when they first sit down and look up at the board when they come into the classroom? (And let’s take it one step further — do kids even read the Aim / Standards when they sit down?) Often times, the start of class is about a check-in on a project, or a journal entry to help students get ready for work of the class, or a chance to review work before a presentation or number of things that would make putting the aim and state standards on the board unnecessary. And, let’s own this, there are days when the standards are a shoehorn fit or are so broadly defined as to be unnecessary to put on the board.

One might say, “It takes a minute to do, who cares if we make teachers do it on the days its not important, if it means they do it on the days it is important?” First, this is one mandate out of many that can take up too much time in a teacher’s day, because it’s not just the ‘on the board,’ it’s trying to figure out which standard is at play that day which also takes time, and second, and second, clutter – visual, intellectual, temporal – gets in the way of learning, and if we want our classrooms to be intentional places, we want to remove the clutter for everyone – teachers and students alike. Moreover, classrooms – more often than not – shouldn’t feel like we’re pulling a rabbit out of a hat when kids learn, so being transparent about what’s going on is a good goal.

Finally, we should ask ourselves about whether or not the regulation, if not followed, means that our goals are not being achieved. There’s every reason to think (and ample evidence to demonstrate) that teachers are being intentional and transparent, even when the aim and the standards aren’t listed on the board. And moreover, just because a teacher wrote the aim and the state standard on the board, that doesn’t mean that there’s a thoughtful plan to achieve those goals. So the policy of posting the aim and state standards on the board doesn’t really achieve its stated goal.

And we can agree on the goal of the regulation – we want our classrooms to be intentionally designed, and aims and standards can be tools to achieve that goal. But I don’t think a regulation is the way to get us there. We can (to quote Ted Lasso) be curious, and ask better questions – as a matter of practice and routine – to achieve those goals of intentionality and transparency.

• What are the goals of the lesson today?
• How will students internalize and understand the goals of the classroom today?
• How do today’s goals relate to / further / build toward the goals of the unit?
• How does this build toward the overarching goals of the class?
• How does this help students become more thoughtful scholars of the discipline?

And yes, broadly, the way we answer these questions need to be captured somewhere. But maybe not every day, every class by every teacher. I don’t know that SLA’s veteran teachers go through this explicit iteration every day, but everyone does this when they think through their curriculum. And I want to make sure that the things I ask SLA teachers to do, writ large, matter. And yes, we have had new to SLA or young teachers who needed to work on the craft of creating curriculum, and as such, we’ve asked them to use tools that have made their daily teaching explicit every day as they were developing the basics of the craft of SLA teaching.

So how do teachers play with these big questions, and what do we do as a school keep track of it?

For me, this is the realm of the unit plan, and we do have – as a matter of policy that SLA teachers need to post their unit plans. (And it took me eighteen years and countless iterations of different ways to make it easier to do this, we finally have a good tool for turning in, archiving, and sharing UbDs that makes this policy finally become truly transparent.) The unit plan is the place where teachers can, should and do articulate goals and standards, and the means to achieve those goals. Every teacher should have a unit plan for every unit, and as such, it is appropriate that every posts their units. It’s policy that (I hope) makes sense to our teachers… that achieves its goals… and that doesn’t feel like an extra step.

And since there is a policy that SLA teachers must do this, there are systems in place that make the policy make sense. First, everyone uses Understand By Design as our unit planning tool so that there’s a shared language of how we conceptualize curriculum. Then we use UbDs in our Professional Learning Communities. We peer review UbDs in both inter and intra-disciplinary groups. We use our UbDs as a way to build vertical alignment of curriculum, and to build horizontal alignment in the way that we use grade-wide essential questions and themes. Finally, creating archives of our curriculum means that not every new SLA teacher has to recreate curriculum from scratch and we can build thoughtfully, year over year. The policy of handing in Unit Plans means that all these systems and structures are more robust for everyone. That’s how the intersection of a policy (handing in unit plans) both enables and is supported by our systems and structures of curriculum design and teaching.

And that’s what we need to do — when we ask everyone to do (or not do) something, we need to ask ourselves some basic questions.

• Who does this policy serve the most?
• Does this policy / regulation achieve its stated goals?
• Does this policy / regulation move the school closer to its overarching goals?
• Is this something that applies to everyone or is it something that should be implemented judiciously?
• Does this policy / regulation approach the work from an asset model or a deficit model about the group of people it affects?
• Does this policy become “one more thing” or will people see its use and value?
• How easy or hard is it folks to actually abide by it?
• What dynamic and human systems and structures are in place that allow the policy to make sense?
• Who tracks its efficacy and use?

And this is true at the school level and the classroom level. These questions could — and should — apply to how teachers conceive of their classroom policies and procedures as well. We want everyone’s lives to make sense in school in ways that allow us to be safe, thoughtful and healthy in what we do in schools.

When our policies, procedures and regulations are thoughtful and supported by systems that allows everyone to understand what we do, why we do it, and how it makes us better at what we all do together, then our schools can be healthier places where the hard we do makes sense, and allows us to create places of profound learning.