An Effective Teacher Needs An Anti-Bureaucratic School

“When I talk about becoming ‘effective’ teachers, I am not talking about becoming ‘good/loving/caring’ humans. You already have to be a good/loving/caring person.”

  - Umes Shrestha, EdD., Head of Center for Innovative Pedagogy and Learning (on LinkedIn)


What if being a caring and effective teacher depends on being embedded in a particular type of school situation that enables caring to be expressed? 

What if being a caring person is not a stable characteristic, but one that requires the organization in which the individual exists to provide specific types of support to each individual in it? 


When a school places arbitrary requirements on teachers that interfere with their caring instincts then the teacher can be prevented from expressing the caring behaviors that would otherwise have occurred. 

In fact, researchers have found that the pressures that undermine teachers caring behaviors come from above, below, and within (Reeve, 2009).

(Being systematically prevented from expressing caring in this way can cause moral distress which can eventually progress into moral injury. Moral injury is being added to the list of diagnoses in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, according to the New York Times.)


My point being that assuming caring to be a stable reliable characteristic of an effective teacher is not consistent with what psychology has found. 

Being an effective teacher in mainstream classrooms requires both expertise in instruction and having a teaching situation (school) that supports the teacher to be a caring person. 

When teachers are in schools that undermine their caring instincts it is not far fetched to suppose that their presumed instructional expertise is also compromised when their situation leads to moral distress and moral injury.

Effective Teachers Require Supportive Schools 

If we want effective teachers we must attend to both their skills as individuals and the situational context of the schools in which we place them as teachers. 

Assuming that we want them to utilize their instructional skills optimally we must put them into schools in which the teacher’s primary human needs are satisfied, their motivations are autonomous (not controlled) and they engage agentically (not just behaviorally). 


This raises the question: What properties of situations matter most for satisfaction of needs? 

A related and more easily answered question is: What properties of situations matter most for the thwarting of needs? 

The answer to the second question is bureaucracy and the answer to the first is anti-bureaucracy. 

The problem with bureaucracies is that they are impersonal formal hierarchies that are predicated on the assumption that human beings are consistently rational. 

I will address rationality later, but the impersonal aspect tends to undermine relatedness while the formal hierarchy tends to undermine autonomy. 

These particular properties of bureaucracy undermine well-being according to what has been discovered in psychology about human nature, primarily within the research tradition of Self-Determination Theory (Ryan, Deci, Vansteenkiste, & Soenens, 2021). 


I’m using “human nature” in this instance to refer to scientific knowledge about how the satisfaction of our psychological needs creates well-being. 

Let’s assume that any organization requires the humans within it to be functional in order to maximize the value they can co-create with them (or extract from them). 

A functional human being is one that is capable of grasping the reality of a situation. 

Grasping the reality of a situation requires the person to manage their attention in a way that reduces their inherent delusions about reality. 

Human brains operate in a way that produces inherent delusions due to the fact that there are always neurons intermediating our experiences. 

Neuronal systems can be more attuned to reality or less attuned, depending on a combination of the internal properties of the brain and the external structuring of the situation in which the person is embedded. 

The crucial properties of a situation that support human function must include supports for the primary needs for air, water, food, shelter, sleep, relatedness, autonomy, and competence. 

The last three needs are not familiar to many folks, but they have been studied scientifically for over 50 years and proven to be just as necessary for well-being as all the others. 

As I mentioned before the nature of bureaucracies as impersonal formal hierarchies tends to undermine two of those needs (relatedness and autonomy). 

The psychological well-being that follows from the satisfaction of the primary needs is a necessary prerequisite for being a functional human who can attain a reasonably good grasp of reality.

Effective Teachers Require Schools to be Anti-Bureaucratic 

What psychology has revealed is that we are caught in a double bind with regards to reality. 

The first half of the bind is that we can never grasp reality directly. 

We all have a persistent illusion that our perceptions deliver to us an accurate accounting of the reality in which we exist. 

That illusion forces us to hold our concepts of reality skeptically, which is why science, jurisprudence, journalism, and academically respectable history are crucially important institutions. 

That skepticism requires us to rely on those social mechanisms to validate our concepts of reality. 

However, that leads us to the second half of the double bind: given the unreliability of individuals, how are we supposed to trust groups that are, by definition, made up of unreliable individuals? 


The answer is that we have to structure our organizations in specific ways that can encourage the better angels of our nature while suppressing the worst devils of it. 

Bureaucracy is not one of those forms of organization. 

All the main concepts that define bureaucracy assume human beings are rational. 

Due to the influences of our needs and the largely non-conscious operations of our brains, the human mind regularly deviates from ideals of rationality. 

If humans were consistently rational that would necessarily mean that we could reliably be manipulated into conforming to the demands of those higher in an organizational hierarchy. 

Those demands of the organization could be formulated through some combination of implicit incentive structures and explicit orders (which can be couched in polite language to reduce resistance). 

But since humans are not reliably rational bureaucracies do not work as intended. 

As humans we are better suited to non-bureaucratic forms of organization, such as adhocracy and self-regulated organizations (Martela, 2019). 


This creates a problem for our mainstream school systems. 

They have a long history of bureaucracy, but in order to do right by children and support effective teachers they must figure out how to transform themselves into a reliable source of support for the primary psychological needs for relatedness and autonomy. 

To be effective, teachers need supportive schools that are anti-bureaucratic.


If you want to grapple with the requirements for taking an anti-bureaucratic stance in your school you can check out my page on how to how to teach with equity and/or my page on teacher and student engagement. 

If you would like to discuss this topic with me I encourage you to join an advocacy call through Deeper Learning Advocates.

Resources

Martela, F. (2019). What Makes Self-Managing Organizations Novel? Comparing How Weberian Bureaucracy, Mintzberg’s Adhocracy, and Self-Organizing Solve Six Fundamental Problems of Organizing. Journal of Organization Design, 8, Article No. 23. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41469-019-0062-9

Reeve, J. (2009). Why Teachers Adopt a Controlling Motivating Style Toward Students and How They Can Become More Autonomy Supportive. Educational Psychologist 44(3), 159–175. DOI: 10.1080/00461520903028990

Ryan, R. M., Deci, E. L., Vansteenkiste, M., & Soenens, B. (2021). Building a science of motivated persons: Self-determination theory’s empirical approach to human experience and the regulation of behavior. Motivation Science, 7(2), 97–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000194


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