Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?Shakespeare
In our efforts to be the best, are we eroding our ability to be good? Everyone tends to agree that high expectations are best and, of course, no one rises to a low expectation, but sometimes our expectations are unrealistically high. Sometimes we take the self-flagellating view that only the best is good enough. There are some who might argue that ‘good enough’ eliminates better and best and others still who counter that our understanding of ‘good enough’ is always subject to a raising of our collective aspiration and what was once seen as satisfactory comes to require improvement. Faced with this kind of cliff edge, good is in danger of becoming the new shit.
Who knows? The point is that everything comes at a cost.
When considering our expectations of ourselves, what is the cost of being outstanding versus the cost of being good enough? The price in education is calculated primarily in time and effort. Yes, of course, money is hugely important – especially if you haven’t much – but our time is strictly finite; we can only spend it once. This is the opportunity cost.
Aristotle saw any form of extremism as unhealthy and held up the golden mean – the desirable middle between excess and deficiency – as chief amongst virtues. You can have two much of a good thing. Too much of courage results in recklessness, an excess of accountability erodes trust. How many schools have fallen foul of the desire to be judged outstanding and lost sight of the great good contained in simply turning up and teaching?
Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian engineer and sociologists noted that 80% of most tasks can be completed in 20% of the available time. Conversely, completing the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort. Achieving absolute perfection might be possible but more often increasing our effort results merely in diminishing returns. Increasing frantic urgings to work ever harder become increasingly inefficient. Pareto’s ‘Law of the Valuable Few’, suggests that in most fields of endeavour, we spend most of our time on those activities that produce the least impact. This sounds like a counsel of despair until we reverse the formulation: what takes the least time probably accounts for most of the impact you achieve.
Good enough might best be represented by a ‘Pareto improvement’: “a change that can make at least one person (e.g., a student) better off without making anyone else (e.g., a teacher) worse off.” There’s little point asking a teacher to enact change which will have a significantly negative effect on their well-being.
When Voltaire wrote that “the best is the enemy of the good” he meant that by striving for unrealistic goals we often miss doing the next good thing. These principles might be a useful guide:
- Do it if it makes a difference.
- Do enough, not more: 20% of effort = 80% of results.
- Focus on the areas of greatest uncertainty which need the earliest answers.
- Iterate, iterate, iterate.
- Make assumptions, but treat them as hypotheses to test.
These economic principles – opportunity cost and the Pareto improvement – deserve more consideration in education. Joe Kirby’s thoughts on Renewable Resources are an example of what can be achieved when we free ourselves from the tyranny of outstanding in order to focus on being good enough all the time.
I always resisted the pressure to include ‘Always do my best’ in the codes of conduct/school rules we’re asked to churn out every year. It’s an impossible expectation and therefore undermines the message. The other one I refused to include was something along the lines of ‘Always be cheerful’. Really?
I think I’m in total agreement with you on this David. I continue to think that in order to make teaching a genuinely sustainable profession, there is a need to settle for ‘good enough’. At the time of the workload consultation, the response to this by the DfE was of no value (meaningless twaddle was, I think, the phrase I settled on). I contributed a blog post that contiues to summarise my feelings on the subject https://dodiscimus.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/teacher-workload/ Having launched another cohort of NQTs since then I feel intense concern about what they are letting themselves in for, and I think that is absolutely about the drive for the last 20% and the expectation that it should be possible to achieve continuous improvements, and for schools to totally eliminate the influence of children’s backgrounds on educational outcomes.
The role of the teacher is often defined by powerful unconscious phantasies which are prone to projections and transference. As teachers we are ideally placed to become transfer relationships where past experiences are re-enacted in both the students and ourselves.
The powerful anxieties and projections that surround these relationships creates an environment where teachers are often idealized or denigrated. I wonder whether the idea of good and bad teachers has an existing template informed by our phantasies about good and bad parenting. There is as much debate surrounding what ‘good’ parenting means and I have often felt that the same judgements, language and feelings surround teachers. At any one point, one can be seen as too caring and not setting clear enough boundaries or too strict and not emotionally open. There does seem a deep desire in educational institutions amongst students, staff and senior leaders to fit teachers into the good / bad dichotomy. The reality is clearly much more difficult.
A much more useful approach is to consider whether one can be good-enough and to resist the dynamic of the ideal or outstanding teacher. D.W. Winnicott suggests that a good-enough parent is one who provides opportunity for steady growth and development, one who is able to help an infant move from dependence to independence.
It seems clear that there might be some similarities in the capacities needed by Winnicott’s good-enough mother and the notion of a good-enough teacher. A good-enough teacher will be someone who can make contact with the emotional factors of learning and offer some form of consistency and containment. A good-enough teacher will be able to sensitively adapt to the changing needs of the students without being too diverted by their own psychic agenda.
Thanks for your post David. I have long been interested in the micro economics of schools. We are riddled with inefficiencies particularly bought about by pursuing low leverage policies which don’t make much difference often to appease the inspectorate. If the marginal cost (the cost of the last unit of input) of a strategy either in money, time or opportunity cost is greater than the marginal revenue (benefit) then no more should be done as it is economically inefficient to do so. As you correctly point out the opportunity cost in planning, thinking reflection is very often greater than any marginal benefit to the children. Too often policies are pursued up to and beyond the point where marginal benefit is zero with no thought of the cost if it is not financial.
The problem is that the marginal cost is not paid by the school but by the staff. It also rises. An hour of leisure time lost means there are fewer to be had and those remaining become more scarce and of even greater value. Therefore marginal cost rises with each unit. It is also externalised onto the teacher’s family, partner, children etc. I understand we have 13 weeks holiday but one cannot pick up time in August and use it in February.
The school has a fixed financial cost (pay) The additional economic cost is effectively paid by staff who forgo leisure time, sleep, parenting, volunteering etc. This is poor leadership and the inspectorate should look at this because it adversely affects the system. Leaders assume that because there is no financial cost there is no economic cost or the economic cost is of no consequence. It is and it will impact on the school. Obviously the distraction from higher value work but also illness and turnover. I would be very interested in even a rough calculation of the financial value of goodwill to the teaching profession. We, like a lot employers introduce insecurity to access a pool of free labour over and above contract while the genuine voluntary sector suffers. Try and recruit a Scout Leader!
My own test is to ask myself have I done the best I can with what I have? Skills, time, resources. Also ask leaders to justify policy and supply evidence. This is self reflective professional practice and I suggest it is a good question for leaders too. If you have too much work either you are in need of support because you are not up to it; a training issue, you are ill or someone somewhere is guilting you into working for free and externalising a cost which should be borne by the employer. Either way it’s a leadership problem.
The basic economic problem is to efficiently allocate scarce resources and is what managers are supposed to do. Of course get full value from your workers but to fail to recognise the rising marginal economic (non financial) cost is poor leadership and short termism. To look to the inspectorate or employ consultants to guide on how best to run your school is not leadership and dereliction of what leaders are supposed to do. Those inefficiencies will become systemic in the longer run as staff take time off, leave you or worse the profession which externalises the cost to other possibly better led schools which is already happening.
I think the quotation is from Sonnet 103 …
My son had a school report that stated: “He never makes more effort thn necessary.” When I challenged him on this, he replied with flawless logic: “Why should anyone ever make more effort than is necessary?” Not quite your point, but not off-field I think.
I’d also like to add, that since humans are actually incapable of making reliable judgements of degrees of ‘good’, I prefer to go with a more pragmatic approach of ‘useful at the time’.