Education Innovation

Overcoming “The Search Barrier” in Professional Learning Communities

This is the third in a series of four posts about barriers to collaboration in Professional Leaning Communities.

According to Berkley and INSEAD professor Morten T. Hansen, author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, “The Search Barrier” concerns people who are looking for information and people, and but are not able to find them easily.

“Many companies are familiar with the adage, ‘If only we knew what we know.’ By that they mean that somewhere in the company, someone knows the answer to a problem, but the rub is that one who has the problem cannot locate the one who has the answer. That’s the search barrier…. the search barrier concerns the inability to find information and people in the company.”

Schools are becoming no different. As the increasing need for meeting state and federal accountability standards combines with increasing shifts toward more technology, transparency, and complexity, members of Professional Learning Communities are being asked to solve problems of student learning, manage data information systems, and leverage the knowledge and expertise of many who are outside of the team. As these trends continue, the search barrier is going to become more of a problem that teams will need to confront.

According to Hansen, the search barrier manifests itself in four typical ways.

1. Company Size
“The bigger the company, the greater the search problem.”

Obviously, not every school or district is going to face this issue. But, many schools and districts are so large that one hardly knows all the staff and finding who has the information, knowledge, expertise, or data to help Professional Learning Communities solve problems is a challenge.

2. Physical Distance
“Companies that are spread across cities, regions, countries, and continents have bigger search problems than those that reside in one place. People prefer to interact with others who are close by.”

Many school districts cover many cities and regions. Making a trip to the district office for some is often quite a trek. Some school campuses are immense is size. We naturally like to interact and work with people who are near us. If it takes a great deal of time and effort to go to the district office to find support, or we would rather not walk all the way across campus, we will limit those whom we can collaborate with and the expertise from which we can draw from.

3. Information Overload
The trend of data-driven instruction has resulted in students taking a multitude of grade level, district, and state assessment. This data is aggregated into data management systems such as Data Director or Edusoft. Combine this with other student data such as attendance, demographic info, etc and the result is a massive amount of available data on students. Teachers are awash in data and struggling to cope with it all.

All this data creates a paradox. “In a rush to help people get the information they need, companies have put in place databases, intranets, and knowledge-management systems, but these have created their own problem: too much information.”

Professional Learning Communities must struggle with the “Total vs. Useful Ratio” of data.

“Information overload makes search harder because of information noise—the ratio of the total amount of information available to the amount of useful information. Information systems, including knowledge-management systems, increase the noise ratio by making too much information available, and that complicates the search for the right type of knowledge or person.”

Professional Learning Communities have enough to accomplish without having to swim
through a mountain of data. What is needed is not all the data or information available, but the right data or information. That is why common formative assessments in the classroom are so useful. It is real time and focused on the current needs of the current students.

4. Poverty of Networks
How many steps does the average teacher have to go through to find someone who has the expertise or knowledge they require? For some very well connected teachers, those types who seem to know everybody, it might not be more than one or two. But teachers who are new to the district, new to a school, or new to a department, it might require that they go through three or four people before they find the person with the expertise of knowledge that they require.

“It may be a small world for a few well-connected people, but it’s a big world for many others, and that’s a formidable barrier to search.”

Professional Learning Communities offer a bit of a remedy in that members can begin tapping into each other’s connections when searching for expertise, information, and data. With the advent of social media and the resulting ability to create Personal Learning Networks, searching can become easier and wider as PLC members share and tap into their Personal Learning Networks. This shift toward a technological element that creates “virtual members” or “useful outsiders” is at the heart of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative model. It is a model designed to overcome the barriers of size, distance, and poverty of networks.


K.W.O.K. Knowing what others know is a term that I use when talking about the power of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative to harness networks and groups through technology to bring a greater amount of knowledge and expertise to the team. Be it a PNLC or a PLC, overcoming the search barrier is going to become an increasingly larger issue as the educational landscape becomes more diverse, more transparent, more accountable, the need to being able to find the right information or the right expert to help PLC or PNLCs meet the needs of their students is going to increase.

Professional Learning Communities and the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative are going to have to adopt networking and data analysis into their core competencies to be able to overcome the search barrier to collaboration.

Part 1: Overcoming the "Not-Invented-Here" Barrier in Professional Learning Communities

Part 2: Overcoming the “Hoarding” Barrier in Professional Learning Communities.

Digital Media Double Failure = Blocked Access + Lack of Access

Overcoming the “Hoarding” Barrier in Professional Learning Communities

This is the second in a series of four posts about barriers to collaboration in Professional Leaning Communities.

Some Professional Learning Communities struggle with team members who do not share ideas, do not share knowledge, do not share data, and seemingly do anything they can not to participate or cooperate with the rest of their team members. They are “hoarders.”

I previously addressed this barrier to collaboration in my post “A Hoarding Culture vs. A Sharing Culture.” In a hoarding culture, teachers and schools keep their expertise, their knowledge, their ideas, and their innovations to themselves.

According to Berkley and INSEAD professor Morten T. Hansen, author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, “Unlike the not-invented-here barrier, where people do not want to ask others for input, the hoarding barrier concerns people in the opposite role: those who might provide help but do not offer it.”

Professional Learning Communities and Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives are built to share. Not only should members be asking for help, members should be constantly sharing and offering their help, ideas, strategies, knowledge, and expertise. This is why we call them communities or collaboratives.

According to Hansen, the “hoarding” barrier is manifested in four typical ways.

1. Competition
“Competition inside a company undermines people’s willingness to collaborate.”

Schools that put individuals teachers against one another in a competition for resources, for status, or for test scores are creating a culture of competition and creating a barrier to collaboration. When teachers, schools, or districts believe they are in competition with others, then they are going to hoard their ideas, creativity, innovation, data, research, knowledge, expertise, and wisdom.

All students suffer when educators compete against each other. Professional Learning Communities and Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives leverage their ability to increase student achievement on their abilities to collaborate. Competition prevents this. Competition has no place amongst our schools and our teachers.

2. Narrow Incentives
“When people are rewarded only for how well they do their jobs, they tend to focus attention on their jobs exclusively.”

Teachers or schools that are only acknowledged or esteemed for high-test scores unwittingly sabotage their ability to further raise student achievement through greater collaboration. If it is only about the test score, if a single score for a single test is how teachers will be judged and evaluated, they natural result is that they will turn inward and focus on themselves and “hoard” their best from the rest of the group.

It is absolutely essential that Professional Learning Communities, Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives, and administrators reward and judge each other on sharing and collaborating, rather than a narrow test score.

3. Being Too Busy
“Paradoxically, the emphasis on performance management over the past decade has created what Harvard Professor Leslie Perlow calls a ‘time famine’ at work.”

Every single educator I know is suffering from time famine. Educators are being asked to teach more standards the same amount of time or even less time. Educators always feel behind in the classroom and then have the added burden of outside meetings, trainings, etc. Time famine is running rampant.

“As people are pressured to perform, they feel that they don’t have the time to help others; reasonable requests for help are seen as burdens that put them behind in their own work. So people are faced with a trade-off—to do their own work (but not help others), or to help others (but get less work done).”

The current economic crisis has forced many schools and districts into layoffs and reductions of support staff, district staff, etc, but the work still needs to be completed. The pressure to keep up and complete just one’s job responsibilities is increased when those you work with and depend on are laid off or transferred.

Time saving measures need to be pursued vigorously. Further, instruction time and collaboration time need to guarded jealously. It will take creative thinking and innovative solutions, but time famine must be defeated to increase collaboration time.

4. Fear of Losing Power
If knowledge is power, then the one with the knowledge has the power. And those with power are often loath to give it up.

“…why share that knowledge with others and thereby make oneself less powerful and ultimately redundant? If people fear they will become less powerful and less valuable to the organization by spreading their wisdom, they will be inclined to hoard it.”

Professional Learning Communities and Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives must overcome the collaboration barrier of the fear of losing power by ensuring that all members are empowered through access to data, information, knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Empowered teams do not fear losing power, but rather feel empowered when their share their knowledge. Sharing is empowering, hoarding is disempowering. When PLCs or PNLCs share, they overcome the fear disempowerment. They empower collaboration and reap its rewards.


Professional Learning Communities and Professional Networked Learning Collaborative must overcome the “hoarding” barrier and create a culture of sharing. Sharers know that their fellow teachers, their fellow principals, and their fellow schools should benefit, can benefit, and will benefit from their knowledge, ideas, creativity, and information. Sharers get a “reward” out of helping others benefit from what they know. Sharers attempt to overcome silos by sharing with others so that the entire school or school district can benefit.

Also see:

Part 1: Overcoming the "Not-Invented-Here" Barrier In Professional Learning Communities

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Dan Pink: Rethinking the ideology of carrots and sticks

Don't teach your kids this stuff. Please?

Can technology fix schools?

Beginning-of-Year Assessment Data: What Helps Teachers Most?

Hate The Plan, Love The Planning

10 Things I have learned from Apple Computers

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Essential Education: Social Media Revolution

Overcoming the "Not-Invented-Here" Barrier in Professional Learning Communities

This is the first in a series of four posts about barriers to collaboration in Professional Leaning Communities.

Professional Learning Communities and Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives must confront and overcome for typical barriers to collaboration. According to Berkley and INSEAD professor Morten T. Hansen, author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, these four barriers to collaboration are common in most organizations. Schools then, would be no different.

The Not-Invented-Here Barrier

“…the not-invented-here barrier, which arises when people are not willing to reach beyond their own units to input and collaborate.”

PLCs and PNLCs need to develop a collaborative culture that is open to ideas from outside of their teams, schools, districts, etc. Typically, the not-invented-here barrier will manifest itself in 4 typical ways.

1. Insular Culture
“People who work together can develop an insular culture. As they spend time with each other to the exclusion of outsiders, they restrict the influx of new viewpoints and reinforce their own beliefs.”

Schools are especially susceptible to this problem. Typically grade level members or subject level members spend a great deal of time together in PLCs. But they also eat lunch together, talk to each other before and after school. There is not the same level of interaction with the rest of the staff and almost zero interaction with teachers from other schools in the district, and near non-existent interaction with teachers from other districts. This creates a very insular culture. Professional Learning Communities should understand this problem and seek proactive ways to break out of these “silos.”

The reason I strongly advocate the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative is because it is built on the premises that information, expertise, knowledge, data, research, superior methods and practices, can be found outside of the typical PLC. The PNLC is designed to network and reach out of the typical PLC “silo” and connect with “useful outsiders” all around the school, district, state, or globe.

It is human nature that the, “…more close-knit a group becomes, the more the members turn inward and close themselves off from the world.”

An insular culture is lacking in cognitive diversity and perspective. PLCs must look for ways such as the PNLC or others, to free themselves from the problem of an insular culture to view ideas from out as a resource to be leveraged. “Not-invented-here” could actually become a reason to embrace a new idea, instead of a reason to ignore a new idea.

2. Status Gap
“If individuals think that they might have higher status than others, they will not reach out to collaborate with those ‘less worthy’ human beings.”

Fortunately, most educators at a school enjoy equal status, with the exception of those that are viewed as unprofessional, lazy, or inept by their peers, and those whom administrators tend to favor.

Occasionally I have discovered that within Professional Learning Communities members begin to feel like their ideas do not have merit. These people tend to feel like they are a lower status than the rest of the group. Consequently, the problem of “Information Cascades” can develop. These members do not feel comfortable to share with the group because of their perceived “lower status.”

Professional Learning Communities must ensure that all members enjoy equal status in the team.

3. Self-Reliance
“When a norm takes hold that says, ‘You should fix your own problem,’ people tend to resist reaching out for input.”

This is absolutely contrary to the purpose of the PLC and the PNLC. The purpose is to help each other solve problems and work together to better student learning. If the students belong to everybody, then so do the problems.

Professional Learning Communities must recognize that many have a deep-seated belief that they need to stay quiet about their problems and struggles so as not to burden others. These beliefs must be rooted out, exposed, and dealt with. No team member can be allowed to believe they must go it own their own because they would be a burden.

Further, the belief that “I know it all and don’t need others help,” is equally damaging. This belief must be confronted and dealt with if the PLC or PNLC is to have a truly collaborative culture.

4. Fear of Revealing Shortcomings
“Reaching out to someone and saying, ‘We’re not doing well in this area and need help,’ can be interpreted by others as failure: ‘These guys are not very good.’ People sometimes fear exposing their weaknesses to others, especially to experts. By asking for input, people expose their vulnerability, allowing others to stand in judgment.”

Judgment, failure, and weakness are very emotional terms. Most educators I know are very capable and very committed, but never the less, at some point, we all need help and we all have something to learn. A strong culture of collaboration does not judge, does not interpret calls for help as signs of failure. To the contrary, strong PLCs and PNLCs need members who are willing to ask for help and feel comfortable doing so because a safe emotional environment has been created in the team.

No one wants to reveal shortcomings, but that is small price to pay if students will benefit in the long run. All educators need to realize that by opening up and confronting their shortcoming, they can strengthen themselves as professionals by learning from our peers and in the case of PNLCs, those in our extended Personal Learning Networks.

While we give many assessments through the year to become very familiar with the shortcomings and needs of our students and make efforts to help them overcome them, we as educators are judged on the results of but a few high stakes tests. Can we afford to wait to overcome our shortcoming until after the fact?


Professional Learning Communities must develop a collaborative culture that overcomes insular cultures and silos, is status neutral, overcomes the tendencies of self-reliance, and eliminates fear and judgment. PLC and PNLC that have done that will be able to overcome the not-invented-here barrier to collaboration.

10 Keys for Driving "Elegant Solutions" in Education

Matthew May, author of Elegant Solutions: Breakthrough Thinking The Toyota Way offers 10 practices that can drive the innovation necessary to discover elegant solutions. These 10 practices should be embedded into the work of schools, districts, leadership teams, professional learning communities, or professional networked learning collaboratives.

Let The Learning Lead
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first.” Or as Michael Fullan would say, “Learning is the work.”

No educator would argue with this. Learning is what we do. I have even gone so far as to say that teachers should be called “Master Learners.”

Matthew explains that, “Learning triggers creativity down the line…”

Learning is at the heart of what great teachers, Professional Learning Communities, Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives, school, and school districts do.

We should be constantly asking ourselves and assessing ourselves against the degree to which experimentation and inquiry is built into our core educational processes.

Learn To See
Matthew advises that we, “Live the customer’s life.” In other words, we need to view problems through the lens of the student, or the teacher, or the parents, or the administrator. “Watch the problem in the context and environment within which it occurs. View it from every conceivable angle.”

In other words, be an Anthropologist. View problems with open minds and through others’ perspectives.

“The phrase in Japanese is genchi genbutsu: go look and see to fully grasp the situation; then and only then, define the problem and design the appropriate solution.”

The key to finding the elegant solution is to make sure you are solving the right problem.

“Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.” Russell Ackoff (1974)

Ask yourself, how well do you understand the problem your student, teachers, or parents face?

Design For Today
“Focus on clear and present needs. Make sure you’re concentrating on a real need…don’t attempt to manufacture a need.”

There are many issues and problems facing teachers and schools. Focusing on a clear need will ensure the solution is solving a problem with minimal effort, time, and expense.

Many educational plans go wrong because no one bothered to ask what would happen if the idea or solution became a reality. Taking a moment to really assess if this if an idea will result in the solution you are looking for is important.

Think In Picture
There is a reason that one of Marzano’s 9 effective strategies is “nonlinguistic representations.”

Matthew explains, “Pictures and images connect people to thoughts and goals and help turn valuable ideas into action. So get graphic. Whenever you can, wherever you can, start building a visual element into your thinking—Storyboard it, diagram it, mindmap it, whiteboard it, butcher-paper the walls and go crazy.”

School leadership teams, Professional Learning Communities, and Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives should be creating nonlinguistic representations of their problems to help them “see” possible solutions. Are you including a means of creating and capturing images and graphics into your meeting planning?

Capture The Intangible

“It’s the intangible that differentiate and transform…Capture the intangibles that people truly prize, and you’ll find the most compelling elements of value.”

Find those intangibles that define, your school, your PLC, or your PNLC. Think about your values and your culture.

How does what you do in your classroom or at your school connect with you and others on an emotional level? What get you are those you teach and work with in the heart, mind, and soul. That is your intangible.

Leverage The Limits
“Restraining resources rule—resources constraints can spur ingenuity.”

This is about becoming imaginative with what you have. Teachers are some of the most resourceful people I know. Dealing with limited resources and constraining regulations can create a source of creativity.

“All artist work within the confines of their chosen media, and it’s the limits that spur their creativity.”

Education must deal with the restraints of time, location, standards, legislation, and limited physical and financial resources. With no barriers, things would be simple; it requires no creative solutions. But, the very nature of an educational system is “limiting” and so we are spurred to be creative and seek “elegant solutions.”

Though we have many barriers and issues facing us daily in education, we are still required to meet our goals of improving student learning. To do more for students with less should drive our creative powers.

Master The Tension
“Breakthrough thinking demands something to break through.”

Think of the opposing ideas of doing more for students with fewer resources or more constraining regulations. That is tension.

Matthew warns that we must be careful because, “…we have a natural tendency to ‘satisfice’—give in too early and glom on to the solution that is inevitably less elegant, less than optimal.”

This happens in educational meetings often. Teacher and or administrators sitting around a table, many not wanting to be there, agree quickly to the first idea that seems to make sense. Often though, these are not the best ideas. Too little thinking, conversation, creativity, or analysis has gone into examining the problem and or the solution to have developed a truly elegant solution. We satisfice so we can move on.

What we need more of in education is “integrative thinking.” We need more opposable minds that can manage the creative tension needed to develop solutions for problems like increasing student learning while having more standards to teach and less resources. Or having to create time for learning a new curriculum while simultaneously implementing the new curriculum.

Managing this sort of tension can create innovative ideas for elegant solutions.

Run The Numbers
There is a reason data driven instruction is so in vogue. Data provides facts and insight to back up our instincts.

“Digging into relevant data helps fight the dangers of bias, convention and instinct. There’s nothing better to help make the break with comfortable patterns than solid evidence. Great innovations are based on much more than a feeling.”

Patterns and trends in student achievement data, attendance data, graduation rates, etc., can provide places for inquiry processes to be applied and new ideas explored.

Make Kaizen Mandatory
“Pursuing perfection requires great discipline—create a standard, follow it, and find a better way.”

According to Matthew, research has shown that the, “…average number of ideas submitted per employee annually is 100 time greater in Japanese companies than in U.S. companies.”

We are used to rewarding ideas that succeed. But Matthew thinks we might have the wrong approach if we want to encourage more ideas.

“We have it backwards! The bottom line is that the Western business practice of rewarding only accepted ideas has all but killed the creative drive in corporate America.”

Education does not really “reward” accepted ideas, but creative administrators could think of way to encourage and acknowledge idea, whether they are implemented or not. This would encourage teachers and parents to submit more ideas. The more ideas to select from the greater the chance are of hitting on a winner, an elegant solution.

Matthew says, “We need a better way—kaizen. Kaizen (ky-zen), the Japanese word for the American—made concept of continuous improvement, is all about idea submission, not acceptance.”

“Kaizen has three steps: First, create a standard. Second, follow it. Third, find a better way. Repeat endlessly. Trying to improve and innovate without a standard as a reference is like a journey with no starting point.”

The key to making Kaizen mandatory is finding ways to develop, encourage, and sustain a flow of ideas from teachers, Professional Learning Communities, and Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives.

Keep It Lean
“Complexity kills—scale it back, make it simple, and let it flow.”

Education, like any other bureaucracy has a tendency to make simple things complex. It kills the innovation and motivation within a great idea when we add layers of bureaucratic messiness.

Ask yourself, what ideas are being weighted down with unnecessary complexity. Ask you teachers, your students, and your parents, they will have plenty of ideas. Make it simple.

Following these 10 key practices will ensure that you are targeting the underlying principles of innovation. And through them, your classroom, school, or district may discover its own elegant solution. Remember the mantra, not best, just better.

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The "Ambidextrous" Professional Learning Community

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald was describing the integrated approach of concurrent focus that created what I call Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities.

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities have an “integrated” or "ambidextrous" approach to their focus and their function.

Focus:
In a previous post (The Integrated Approach of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative) I explain that Integrated Approach has a concurrent focus, both internal and external. They focus on developing strong norms, processes for communicating, problem solving, building consensus, etc. This is important, but Professional Learning Communities must recognize that equally important, is a clear understanding of how their work fits into the needs of those outside of the team.

They clearly understand that their work must fit within the greater goals of the school and the district. They are externally focused and internally focused. They do not wait to create and establish internal norms or practices for every aspect of their work, but rather, get on with the work meeting the needs of students, the grade level, department, school, district, and the team together, while simultaneously developing internal processes. They also keep an eye out for trends in technology, new research, and new strategies, and new compliance issues developing outside of the group.

The internal focus develops key group processes, norms, goals, time-lines, etc. The internal focus is what great Professional Learning Communities do to build solid teams. But this is not enough. The must also have the concurrent external focus. They need to understand others' expectations (school or district) constantly update their information about available talent and knowledge in their network of useful outsiders, and be aware of the external situation in which they work. The external focus has at its heart the principles of The Expectations, Network, and Situation. (T.E.N.S.)

Being able to have the concurrent focus of the internal and external approach is to be ambidextrous.

Function
There is a commercial about Tiger Woods that say, “relentless consistency, 50 percent; willingness to change, 50%.” The commercial from the global management consulting firm Accenture sums up perfectly the concurrent focus of function; relentless consistency while at the same time continuously innovating.

Professional Learning Communities must have a strong unwavering and unyielding commitment to use best practices, research based methods, proven strategies, and all practices that are known to make a difference for student learning. Professional Learning Communities must practice “kaizen”, the continual improvement in their work. A strong Professional Learning Community is always seeking to gain a greater depth of understanding of their work and continual practice of those best practices. Their internal focus is to find those critical aspects of their work and apply the best-known methods without exception.

The other concurrent focus of the Professional Learning Community function is to continually innovate. If “kaizen” is getting better at what they do, the term “tenakaizen” is to make something completely different, to innovate. The Professional Learning Community should be continuously learning to do new things in new ways. The only way to even greater results is to find new innovative ideas.

The integrated, or ambidextrous Professional Learning Community demonstrates the ability to have what Roger Martin, dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, call “an opposable mind.”

The “opposable mind” allows a member of a Professional Learning Community to have the, "…predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”

Have an internal and external focus simultaneously. Have a focus on getting better at what you do, while looking for new ways to do it.

Professional Learning Communities that have “integrative thinking,” will be able to manage con-current focus and prove themselves to be... ambidextrous.

Education's Sacred Cows

Is there anything wrong with Sacred Cows? Well it depends. Maybe yes and maybe no. We need to question if our Sacred Cows are useful, relevant, and correct for the needs of the educational system. If they have outlived their usefulness then those “cows” need to be questioned. According to the authors of Death To All Sacred Cows: How successful business people put the old rules out to pasture, if education only looks to the past, it is putting itself at risk because schools or districts that, “...only look to the past to guide their futures can be doomed to failure. In a rapidly changing world, anything dated tends to be dangerous.”

“If the world was a stagnant, predictable place, then steadfast rules would be okay. They would guide us and keep everyone honest. But the world in which we live changes constantly.”

Change is the new normal.

“If we don’t question why we do things the way we do, we’ll never be able to do them better. If we resist new approaches, we’ll be stuck with more of the same all the time.”

When was the last time you questioned why you were doing what you were doing? 

^{by TerData}

So here is the Education Innovation list of Sacred Cows.

All students can learn at high levels of achievement
All kids should go to college
Teaching takes place at a school
Teaching takes place in the classroom
Students should sit at a desk
Students learn from teachers
Students need to learn what teachers are teaching
Always put the needs of the student ahead of everything else
The government knows what students should know
The government knows best what teachers need to know
We need a Department of Education
The best way to measure learning is to give a test
The best way to show what you know is to take a test
Books are necessary
Paper is necessary
Homework is necessary
Students should not have cell phones
Always do what is best for students
Research based instructional practices
Data based decision making
Principals should be “instructional leaders”
Only the best teachers should become administrators
Administrators are out of touch
Private schools, charter schools, and home-schools are in competition.
Schools don’t have enough money
School waste too much money
Teachers are underpaid
Teachers are overpaid
Unions are good for teachers
Unions are good for students
Smaller class sizes are better
Class size does not matter
Other countries are doing it better than we are
We need to teach more math and science
Art, music, drama, dance, etc, are nice to have, but not necessary
Howard Gardner is always right
Robert Marzano is always right
The DuFours are always right
There is nothing you can do about bad teachers
Standardized test scores matter, and they matter a lot
Teachers are better when they work as team or a Professional Learning Community
The more experience a teacher has the better they are at teaching
Teachers should not be compared to other teachers
Schools should not be compared to other schools
Mistakes are bad.
Parents are always right
Parents don’t understand
Put the most resources toward the lowest students
Technology is not important for learning
Technology must be in the classroom

Some of these "cows" should stay "sacred" and some of these "cows" need to be put out to pasture.

What Sacred Cows would you add?