Sometimes It's Appropriate to Be Negative About Bad Practices
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that constructive negativity — calling out practices that don't work — is necessary and shouldn't be dismissed as pessimism.
Key Takeaways
- The solution is often 'stop it' - Some school practices are so counterproductive that the best response is to simply stop doing them
- Negativity can be constructive - Identifying and naming bad practices is the first step toward eliminating them
- Toxic positivity silences improvement - A culture that demands positivity at all times prevents honest evaluation of what's working and what isn't
Transcript
I got a couple of comments yesterday accusing me of being negative and stirring up discontent.
This was one of them.
And certainly there is no limit to the number of things people could complain about.
But I want to be clear why I am against the things that I am against because there's a consistent theme here and there is a consistent constructive response.
I believe when we're doing things that waste people's time, that demean them as professionals, that treat them like children and not as the professionals that they are, that they basically make it harder for them to do their jobs.
I believe we need to be vocal about stopping those things.
And I believe stopping them is the solution, right?
I want to go full Bob Newhart here.
If you've ever seen the old Bob Newhart sketch where he's a therapist and all he does is yell at people, stop it.
That's what we need to do.
Like that is the right course of action for a lot of these practices.
that are really wasting people's time and making people's jobs harder.
And I'm aware that I am part of the industry of educational leadership and authors and consultants whose job it is to make stuff up for people to do that hopefully is going to make things better.
We have to be very, very careful about that.
Putting work on people's plates, taking up time in their day, adding new requirements in the name of improvement is risky and we have to be very careful about it.
In a lot of cases, we have enough information now to know that a practice is a bad idea, like collecting lesson plans.
I don't know of any experts who recommend collecting lesson plans, and I know a lot of districts require them because they don't really trust their teachers.
They don't have a good district curriculum in place.
They don't have a scope and sequence or a curriculum map in place.
So they require teachers to turn in lesson plans that nobody ever reviews anymore.
And I am happy to be critical of that practice because it was made up without any research behind it.
And it wastes just an enormous amount, like billions of dollars of teacher time is wasted on writing lesson plans solely for an administrator to collect and probably not even really look at.
So do I think we should speak up about that?
Do I think we should stop that?
Yes, I do.
Do I think that's being negative?
No, I think it's saying that teachers are professionals.
And that doesn't mean complete autonomy for everything, you know, unlimited autonomy.
I don't think we should just complain about everything.
But I think there are specific things that we do need to stop doing.
And there's no other solution other than stop it.
I think that's a perfectly good answer when we're doing made up stuff that's dumb, that wastes people's time, and that drives people out of the profession.
think that's that's really where I started in this TikTok series was people are leaving the profession and they're happy to tell us why they're doing so and I think we need to listen when they tell us why I'm tired of being treated like a child I'm tired of being physically unsafe due to student violence I'm tired of having to turn in lesson plans I'm tired of professional development and icebreakers that waste my time but we need to listen because if we don't people will still leave but we have the opportunity to fix these things if we're willing to make those changes let me know what you think