Adam Robbins Education

Hi I would really value your help. I have this idea that I think is new and I think is useful, but I am worried I lack perspective. If you read the below and have any feedback please get in touch via social media, the comments below or the contact page of the blog. Feedback is a gift.

Culture is often cited as the silver bullet of all things teacher development. Worried staff won’t be able to listen to feedback? Get the culture right first! Want teachers to take risks in the classroom? Set the tone by building the right culture! I’m interested in how this happens at a granular level and I think it starts by evaluating the current culture of the team. As such I have tried to define an approach that avoids the common pitfalls I see.

The black box of culture

The issue arises because culture can be seen as a black box. It exists but its inner workings are opaque to us. We can often only see the impact of our words and actions. As such a simple model might define all the teams words and actions as inputs and the reactions as outputs, which we then infer the culture from.

Fig 1 A simple model of the black box of culture

To help us focus our efforts it is helpful to consider evaluating an aspect of culture that directly impacts teacher development, for example openness to feedback or willingness to take risks. We could try to infer how open to feedback our team is. This might make us reflect on how open to feedback we are as leaders. This could be achieved by asking ourselves a series of self-evaluation questions and getting our staff to complete a short survey. 

While these mechanisms are useful to us, we need to understand their limitations. They are good starting points but we must be aware of why evaluating aspects of our culture is more complex than we might initially think.

Inferring the state of our current culture is made more challenging by our cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are the result of short cuts our brains have evolved to help us manage the large volumes of information they have to process on a day to day basis. Often they are useful but sometimes they can impact the way we critically examine things. There is a huge selection of biases to choose from that can make it hard for us to accurately judge our own actions and their impact. One of particular note is the introspection illusion. This bias revolves around people’s tendency to overestimate their ability to judge their own mental states, via introspection, and in turn, underestimate other peoples introspections or observations. Adding further complexity to this is the action of demand characteristics on the information you get from your team. Demand characteristics refer to clues or signals in an experimental setting that hint to participants about the experimenter’s expectations i.e. you, leading them to behave in a certain way to match these expectations, potentially biassing the results. 

When we evaluate the outputs of our team we need to consider the role of demand characteristics in the data we receive. This can make it very hard to trust the data we gather at face value. One of the ways to take account of factors is through triangulation. If a team’s actions, words and behaviours are congruent then the inference you make from them is probably accurate. When evaluating our culture, our aim is to form and then test a hypothesis. For example, if a leader thinks they are choosing the correct inputs to establish a culture where feedback is valued they can investigate this by looking for the outputs. They can ask team members, survey them anonymously, look at how often they provide positive and developmental feedback to each other and to the leader. They can also reflect on how the team responds to feedback and members readily change their behaviour based on it. If the words, actions and behaviours seem to all tell the same story then you probably have a good understanding of where the culture currently stands and the hypothesis of ‘we have a culture where feedback is valued’ can be accepted. They might also have a hypothesis that maybe the culture exists that feedback is not valued. This might also be confirmed if the outputs all seem to back it up. Either way this is good news! The most important thing is understanding where we currently stand. However, it might be the case that we thought we had established a culture of feedback but when we look for triangulation we find it missing. This lack of triangulation tells us that the hypothesis is not correct. This tells us the culture we thought we had established is not established, even though it might feel like it was from our perspective. 

Figure 2 below shows how these steps all link together. Notice that the key step is to generate a hypothesis and then assess its accuracy. There is no point sugar coating this, I need to be clear, this is the most important step. Failing to identify poor cultural conditions will risk undermining all the work you do subsequently. Make sure you are confident in your evaluation before moving forward.

Figure 2. Evaluating the black box of culture.

It is worth pointing out that you may notice these processes are already occurring tacitly for you. Different people have different levels of self-awareness and some can find self-evaluation easier than others. By explicitly creating the model I am not implying this must be formally completed on a template to be valid, I am just trying to provide a scaffold to support thinking and avoid these biases.

Once we have an accurate understanding of the culture as it currently stands, it is time to explore how we can adjust or improve the culture. No matter where it currently stands there will always be room for improvement, and fortunately for us there is a very consistent and clear way we can go about fixing any issues. 

Again thanks for reading any feedback appreciated.