I have a memory of a thesis, one weathered by time and filtered by context – that in the book Heretical Empiricism, Pasolini laments the loss of Italian dialects as a result of modern progress. Where isolated communities once lived in valleys and the terrain offered the isolation needed for dialects and pidgins to grow, now stretched roads and highways, media and technology, the colonizing force of the dominant. In the middle of last century, he felt that the voice of the individual and few were being subsumed by that of the masses.
With the discussions around generative text (like ChatGPT and the future iterations to come), much ado has been frothed about the affects this technology will have upon … well a lot of things. White color jobs, school assignments, coding, social engineering and more. In my other life as a person looking for opportunities and scraps of potential that I can turn into food for family, I have considered the practical applications of this technology. Accepting limitations, like its inability to maff effectively, its propensity for bullshit and its purposefully stochastic (intentionally random) output, the actual options for application become narrow. But one role I can see it serving is the standardization of an institutions voice, a megaphone for leadership to multiply their words and message.
The Centralization of the Organizational Voice
I can only speak from my experience within international schools, but I wonder if these musings are not more relevant to other industries.
One of the challenges that organizations face, and that middle leadership is tasked with ensuring is a consistency of purpose and voice throughout the organization.
In International Schools, teachers are regularly producing:
- Unit plans
- Task descriptions
- Assessment comments and feedback
- Letters to parents
- Report cards
Across any school, there will be a wide discrepancy of quality, format, style and frequency dependent on the teacher, program, subject, and any number of other factors. At most well managed schools, each of these writings will have style guides and requirements that teachers must follow. There will be a hierarchy of proof-readers who must review the texts and make corrections. There will be a well-established process for rewrites and reviews.
There will generally be three camps of enthusiasm that teachers fall into:
- The dedicated – who produce regular, high quality and personalized texts
- The complacent – who dot their is and cross their ts
- The minimalists – who have discovered the least amount of work necessary to get through approval
And then there are the teachers who can’t meet the requirements, through no fault of their own, because perhaps they teach too many classes and students or are not native speakers of the language they are expected to produce.
Throughout all organizations, there will be inconsistency, and the inconsistency needs to be addressed. Given fixed standards for what needs to be produced, generative text offers management a powerful standardization tool across an organization.
The Bland Sepia of the Adequate
As a teacher, I took pride in the work I did – the connections and feedback I gave to students, the quality of my units. As a principal, I struggled to reconcile student and parent expectations, so that they could accept classrooms and teachers that didn’t go the extra mile. A small minority of very strong teachers will divide a school into tiers and classes (har har). Where the quality of the few will highlight the inadequacies latent in the mandated minimum.
I have seen teachers fired (and fired teachers) because they could not live up to their predecessors and the boil of parental and student anger required a blood sacrifice.
So what of a standardization of prose and documentation throughout the organization?
Within a typical school, our academic and subjects heads along with coordinators will define a schools path through the standards of the curriculum and pass this down to teachers. The teachers, in service to their mandates will build units and lessons, tasks and assessments in accordance with the framework provided.
Generative processes give the leadership the capacity to automate the production of text in line with their standards. To inculcate a robotic voice and rise up the poor to adequate while pulling the exceptional down to the realm of the average.
The organization will learn to speak and not be a collective of voices. The pains of turn-overs will diminish with the organizations autonomy, but so too will we dull the spark and enthusiasm of the individual teachers expression… through their written reports.
The Composition of a Teacher
One of my common refrains:
“Good teachers and students will shine regardless.”
Is a teacher’s worth calculable against the sum of their written product? Of their lesson plans and feedback, of their reports and communications?
We often assess teachers based on what we can see, but it is a small fraction of what they actually do. The true worth of a teacher is in their human interactions with their students, with the passions they share and the enthusiasm they kindle. The best teachers are the ones who genuinely connect with students and help them discover, not knowledge, but the ways to seek out what is interesting and actualize ambition into reality.
What we take away from our K-12 schooling is less the knowledge of facts and dates, but the ability to work within a system to support each other and realize our goals. Real student growth and development is in the ability to confront the new, and to establish oneself as a person you want to become, it is not in the recitation of facts or the quantification of knowledge gained.
The Imperial March of the Organization
In this article, I do not offer answers, but instead musings.
Leadership will value the ability to standardize and project a unified voice across an institution, this is a relevant and applicable model for the new technology that reduces the burden on an institution caused by the inherent human contrast between our employees and staff.
Perhaps it is a way, for a teacher who took pride in the work produced and in the work produced to reconcile the dulling of their flame.
As the tsunami of the next new thing washes over, what can we do but anchor ourselves in the warmth of purpose found outside of what we’ve lost.
Because in that comfort, we find more time to be with our students and focus on the parts of our job that actually make a difference.
As an administrator, quaking at the disruption to come, how do we frame the march of progress to wash away the detritus and reinforce our own institution?
Technology and innovation are like natural disasters but through their disruptions, we evaluate what we will become.