Beginning in the fall of 1999, I had the privileged opportunity to spend two years as an engineer-on-load from Hewlett-Packard Company to a local school district. This allowed a unique opportunity for an outsider to view a school system from inside of the system, without having gone through an acculturation process. These are my observations and thoughts from that and subsequent school engagements.

In this assignment as an engineer-on-lone I was embedded with a group of teachers in much the same way as reporters have been embedded in military units in Iraq or Afghanistan. My salary was paid by Hewlett-Packard Company, but I was simultaneously considered an unpaid employee of the district, with full access to students, teachers, administrators, and to district facilities.

While I was embedded with the faculty as if I was a teacher, I did not actually teach. My background is in software development, not education, and I don’t hold a teaching credential. My task was to work with teachers, administrators and the business community to develop school-community partnerships. The idea was to bring real-world application of math and science into the classroom to help maintain student interest in those subjects.

When I completed this assignment and returned to Hewlett-Packard two years later, I left having made little progress toward building those school-community partnerships. It turns out to be pretty challenging to build collaborative relationships with an organization lacking a culture of collaboration.

To be clear, I have nothing but the highest regard for the faculty and administrators I worked with while embedded in their school. I was constantly impressed by their subject matter knowledge, their ability to work effectively with kids, and especially their dedication to their work. But being embedded in a school without actually having been acculturated to the environment provided a particular advantage of perspective. What I observed was that, as W. Edwards Demming has been quoted as saying, “A bad system will defeat a good person every time.” The system was perpetually stuck in what Tuckman called the “storming” phase of group development.

The organizational behaviorist Chris Argyris describes organizational dysfunction as a third order problem. There is an unresolved conflict, this is the first order problem. But the conflict has become undicussable, which is the second order problem. Finally, the fact that it is undiscussable, has itself become undiscussable. This is the third order problem, and the thing that masks the underlying conflicts which are at the root of the dysfunction.

I don’t purport to have the background to tell anyone, especially not a certified teacher, how to teach. But here’s the thing: You get seven certified teachers, supposedly teaching the same thing, and what I observed was, not only could they not agree on technique, they couldn’t agree on what they were teaching.

Thus, with content largely subject to individual preferences, subjective evaluations were made of colleagues efficacy based on curricular preference, not quantifiable student progress. It was not uncommon to hear teachers berate each other for this difference of opinion, creating inferences that such curricular preference correlated to the ability of those teachers to facilitate student learning. Over time, animosity built up between faculty members, which sometimes became quite overt.

So these aren’t posts about teaching or about curriculum or about pedagogy or any of the many other aspects of education for which I certainly have no expertise and for which it would be impudent of me to even make suggestions. They are an outsider’s perspective, having seen the inside of the system, about dysfunction, and opportunities to improve that system so that the dedicated individuals who work in the system are constantly learning, in order to deliver increased value to our students.