Leading Workplace Change™

I don’t remember when it started – just a general unease when everyone around me seems to agree – but I think I started becoming aware of my unease when I was teaching at night in a suburban junior college in the mid ‘60s. The Dean had said – “when teaching adults you have to be creative and find ways of getting your students involved in the classroom.”  

Well, my grand idea to engage my students was to juxtapose the principles of the Nuremberg trials with the arguments for and against the exodus of draft-age American men to Canada. To my surprise, I found myself the only one in the classroom on one side of the argument – all thirty some odd of my students were on the other side of the argument. So much for engagement - enter outrage - so creative was I that my teaching contract was terminated.  

But I persisted in my teaching and later became an instructor at a major state university while earning a graduate degree - bright young students, all 18-22, white, from middle-class (and up) families. As with any profession that puts you in front of people for long periods of time, all professors have to enjoy hearing themselves pontificate (interjecting, of course, the obligatory joke or two during each class period). But after a while, it becomes boring.  

My fellow graduate students – from all over the country – could debate the finest points over multiple pitchers of beer for hours at a time. No such luck when it came to the undergraduate classroom. I continued to spray my lectures and prayed that some of my students picked up some of the pearls while I entertained myself. (This, of course, is the widely used “spray and pray” method in teaching.) But I did begin to realize that I was unlikely to be successful in eliciting student participation if no one in the room had any “different” ideas. 

Next stop in my career – a large urban university in the center of a major metropolis – students from throughout the country, around the world – different backgrounds, socio-economic, cultural, racial/ethnic. I learned everyday – so did my students – I learned that if there are no “different” ideas to exchange, no one learns. Diversity is an antecedent of learning. I stayed awhile — 28 years — and learned something new everyday. Perhaps there’s a message here for organizations that aspire to be “learning” organizations.

Tags: Personal-Ah-Hah Moments //