By Mark

It sounds like Tom has a budding pilot on his hands–and he's absolutely right that any good lesson, whether in the cockpit or the classroom, is going to have a lot of the same "pieces."

My boss forwarded me an article that took a different angle on the plane analogy. This connection, though, was not about teaching a young, intrepid pilot. Rather, it was about what happens when the plane goes out of control.

On page of 41 Bryan Goodwin's McREL 2010 publication "Changing the Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most," the author draws an example from the book Everyday Survival by Laurence Gonzales: 

In the early days of aviation, the spin was a mysterious event, a death spiral from which pilots rarely recovered. Knowing that, a pilot who found himself in a spin would bail out if he happened to be blessed with a parachute. And then people began to notice something strange. After the pilot bailed out, the plane would sometimes right itself and fly on until it crashed or ran out of fuel. A clever pilot proposed this: the airplane wasn't at fault. The pilot was doing something to keep the airplane in the spin. Remove the pilot, and you solve the problem. Pilots began to learn how to recover from spins by doing less, not more.

No, I'm not suggesting we all just eject. 

Goodwin explains: "The problem: Pilots, frantically thrashing about at the controls, exacerbated the spin stall. The solution: Engage in a few calm, controlled, and fluid movements to right the plane" (emphasis mine).

At this time of the school year–or, let's face it, at any time of the school year–it is easy for teachers and administrators to feel overwhelmed. Consider our acronym soup or initiatives, policies, procedures, and mandates. So much to do, so much to do, one more thing and then one more thing. Goodwin continues (again, emphasis is mine):

Like pilots in those early open-seat biplanes, many schools in the "spin stall" of low student performance appear to be frantically thrashing about at the controls–implementing canned reading, writing, and math programs; bringing teachers together to sift through data and make data-driven decisions; creating new teacher committees to focus on specific student needs; exploring new ways to engage parents in decision making; adopting new programs to improve student behavior and motivation; and bringing in experts on all manner of topics. When there's time, they may work on improving instruction.

Obviously, that's far too much activity for any school staff to keep in their heads or take seriously. Consequently, the school continues spinning out of control, which leads to more anxiety and thrashing about. If they do see improvement, it is minimal, and they are exhausted and discouraged.

No wonder some teachers follow that impulse to just eject.

If public education is in some metaphorical spin, the first thing we clearly need to do is just calm down. 

I encounter teachers who are frustrated and angry and confused about–you name it: Common Core, TPEP, PBiS, PLC, technology integration, parent communication, curriculum alignment… the list is truly never ending. It is easy to thrash about.

The answer is not to abandon all of these things any more than the pilot needs to simply disregard his controls and gauges. All the things the pilot must attend to, altitude, pitch, wing angle, whatever, are all part and parcel of the act of flying a plane. All those initiatives and acronyms we take on or which are dumped upon us are part and parcel of the job we do as well.

It can all be done. My goal for this summer and next school year: engage in a few calm, controlled, and fluid movements.