For Whom Do We Work?

Or, Continuous Improvement

A funny thing happened when I was interviewing for an Assistant Professor job at a university, recently. I was talking on Zoom with a three-member Search Committee. We had only a half hour (it was a first interview) and they each had a pre-prepared question to ask me. It's not unusual to script out the questions and then distribute them to members -- I've been on Search Committees myself. But I didn't realize until I was the applicant how unnatural and sort-of...lame it seems. To make things worse, the questions weren't all that original.

The one that sort-of stumped me went something like this: "Tell us about a time you have failed, and how you came back from that failure?" In my opinion, this is a pretty weird question for a half-hour screening interview. I assumed they weren't asking me for a deep, philosophical review of my life and a probing of disappointments and reconciliations. It seemed to me they wanted to know about a teaching situation or a piece of curricular content or an assessment that went off the rails. Or a class that students hated; how I reacted to that. Still, I was a bit stumped.

It didn't really occur to me until later, when I was reviewing the interview in my mind, that I don't typically think of my work in terms of success and failure. Rather, I assume I'm trying to get somewhere and then make continual adjustments as content or techniques seem to be working better or worse, to steer toward my goal. I suppose the fact I didn't express this in the interview was a failure of sorts (I didn't get a second interview). But I'm not going to sweat it. I learned something.

The discovery I made, which I can express in the future as I continue to apply it, is that I seem to prefer working in an atmosphere of immediate feedback and continual improvement. Clausewitz said something to the effect of, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy", which Mike Tyson paraphrased as "Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time." The point is that if you stick with your plan rather than adjusting to the new situation, you're probably going to get knocked out. I think I try to assess what seems to be working well and what seems to need improvement or adjustment, and then immediately begin adjusting.

Technology provides a lot of help in this area of real-time improvement. I don't have to wait for a new edition of a commercial textbook to be published or go to the trouble of teaching around it or against it, before I can improve my course. I can edit the Open Textbook I've created n Pressbooks. As soon as I save the change, it becomes "live" in the online ebook and in the Open Textbook Library. People (students, other instructors, or curators) who have "forked" the path and created a local version might have to update their copy, if they want to stay up to date with my changes. But the document I’m creating is improving continually.

This is a bit of a new paradigm in content creation, and I think it echoes into what I do in the classroom. It means I can't really say, "yeah, this technique or that course failed," because I should be adjusting and improving things long before that point. I suppose it's also impossible to say that something is a complete success, if it's continually a work-in-progress. People do, of course, react to and review the version of a course or a text that they encounter (so there ARE reviews of my OERs in the Open Textbook Library), but the criticisms in a review from last year have probably been addressed in the version available today.

There are probably some consequences of this approach that I haven't fully thought through. One thing I will say in its defense (and I think this applies to the "failure" question in the interview) is that it puts the agency and responsibility for improvement squarely on me. The tone of the "failure" question seems to be that I'm a supplicant, waiting to be judged by an authority figure and then abjectly doing whatever I have to do to redress the failure. I'm not saying that the judgments of others are not important. But I am saying that assessing those judgments of my work and responding to them is my job, not someone else's.

The tenure and promotion application I didn't do this year (because the administration said they wouldn't be able to respond to it in time, before my layoff, for it to be valid) included a similar question. When he coached a bunch of faculty preparing to write their applications, the Provost said the thing he most wanted to see was a "failure and response" narrative. I would probably have interpreted this as a "challenge and response" if I had done the application. There have certainly been enough challenges like COVID lockdowns to respond to, in the last few years. I wonder whether he meant it that way, or simply as a "you were told you were doing something wrong or poorly; how did you respond?" type of thing. The way an old-fashioned teacher might have said to a student, "I gave you a D on that paper; how are you going to improve it?" I suppose that type of hierarchical relationship represents the world of work fairly accurately -- but aren't those the jobs that are all about to be replaced by AI anyway?