It's Worth Being Negative About Unforced Errors and Scope Creep

Why am I so negative?

Somebody asked me that in the comments yesterday and they said they had read my book and didn't get the same vibe from the book.

And if you subscribe to my emails or if you read either of my books, you don't see a lot of negativity, but you do see what you might think of as negativity here on TikTok.

And I think there are two main reasons for that.

And I think we should all be negative about these two things.

is unforced errors.

We're doing things in education that we don't need to be doing that are making things worse that we can just stop, right?

So I'm happy to be negative about unforced errors that we should just stop.

And one area in which I've seen that we're making a lot of unforced errors is in student discipline.

Like we've just stopped doing things that work and started doing a that are pitched as alternatives but don't really work, and I think it's a pretty clear no-brainer to just stop doing those things.

So I'm negative about unforced errors.

The other thing I'm negative about is scope creep, that in our profession, We already had a very big job, right?

Education was already a very difficult and very big job within society.

And now I feel like educators are being asked to take on more and more different professions, roles in society.

And sometimes it's a little, you know, it kind of sneaks in, like when it comes to student well-being and kind of mental well-being especially.

students' behavioral health, students' behavior at school.

We are responsible for part of that.

We're responsible for classroom management and maintaining a safe environment and teaching expectations and things like that.

But the scope creep that has continued to happen over the last couple of years around student mental health has really put us in the position of being asked to do the work of therapists and healthcare providers and other professionals that we're just not trained for.

We don't have time for.

And if we try to do those things in the classroom or in the school setting, we can't do what we're here to do, which is teach.

So I am very positive about teaching and learning.

I'm very positive about instructional leadership.

I'm very positive about school in general.

But that requires that I be a little bit negative about things that get in the way, right?

The unforced errors, the things we've started to do that just do not work and make things worse, and the things that really just don't fit within the education domain, things that are just examples of scope creep.

And I think this kind of thing happens naturally because everybody wants to do something new, right?

Everybody wants to have some sort of innovative approach.

program, innovative approach, and genuinely people want to better serve their students.

But that results in both of those things, those unforced errors and that scope creep that often end up making things worse.

So I think there has to be kind of a natural flushing of those things as we realize when we've made a mistake, when we've brought in something that is not making things better.

And if that sounds like negativity, I'm okay with that because that's what it takes to to preserve the good stuff that we're all here to do, right?

We're here to teach and we're here to make a difference for kids.

So let me know what you think.

Am I being too negative or do we need to get rid of some of this stuff and focus on what we've always focused on teaching and learning and the stuff that works?

Leave a comment.

Let me know what you think.