Jane, a high school principal, decides that it is time to change the daily schedule of classes for the next school year. Her goal is to maximize instructional time. Many staff members like the current schedule. It rewards the most senior teachers with the best sequence of classes. Other teachers are ambivalent, as they have accepted the status quo. In proposing a major change like this, a leader will often face intense opposition from those with the most to lose, while those with the most to gain will sit on the fence. Jane recognizes that this will be a significant event and begins the groundwork to prepare for the battle ahead.
First, she floats the idea past two veteran teachers, Jim and Marge, who are the gatekeepers of school tradition. Wisely, she frames the idea in the form of a question and defers to their history and prime position in the pecking order at the school. Jim and Marge like the idea and begin to spread the word with colleagues. After a couple of weeks, the principal proposes the schedule change to her leadership team. They form a study group to examine different schedules. A veteran teacher, Alice, who is five years from retirement, heads the group. She assigns tasks and develops a time-line. Kurt, who has taught for 15 years, and Isabel, a 12-year veteran, research schedule options and report back to the group. Hannah, who is four years into her teaching career, compiles data and prepares a PowerPoint presentation to make to the staff. In a number of staff meetings, facilitated by a focus group, consensus is reached and plans begin for implementation of a new schedule of classes. In September, the school year begins with a new block schedule.
What Is Your Generational Intelligence?
In the preceding scenario, Jane strategically assigned tasks based on the experience level of her leadership team. She displayed an intuitive sense of situational leadership and generational awareness. Many school leaders have explored the issue of diversity when it comes to students, teachers and staff. Their focus typically has been on gender and ethnicity. Generational diversity has received less attention. However, it is an area of diversity that warrants serious consideration.
School principals provide leadership for teachers who range in age from their early 20s to mid-60s and beyond. If you look at each generation in terms of a 20-year span, this means that a principal must manage three or four generations. Each generation is formed by its life experience and the reaction to the actions of the generation that preceded it. For example, the Baby Boom generation rebelled against the stereotypical Ozzie and Harriet conformity of the Eisenhower years with flower power, sit-ins and self-actualization. Members of Generation X, born between 1960 and 1980, grew up in a period of diminishing expectations, during the 1970s in particular, and are characterized as self-reliant and skeptical of Boomer authority. There are many implications for educational leaders hoping to bring about change in schools. Any new idea proposed by a school principal will be evaluated according to the generational outlook of the different constituencies on campus.
In Generations at School: Building an Age-Friendly Learning Community by Suzette Lovely and Austin G. Buffum (Corwin Press, 2007), the generational intelligence such as that displayed by the principal in our hypothetical scenario is given a theoretical and practical framework. The authors describe four generations commonly found in any school organization and outline practical strategies to help these diverse groups get along. I spoke with Lovely, assistant superintendent of human resources in Placentia Yorba Linda Unified School District in California, this past July about these four generations (see sidebar).
Why Look at Generational Intelligence in Schools?
Generational intelligence is important today for two reasons. First and foremost, schools are expected to improve student learning. No Child Left Behind mandates a 100 percent student proficiency level by 2014; the stakes have never been higher. Teamwork is essential to meet this challenge. Second, generations tend to view the needs of students differently and will advocate competing solutions to improving student learning. For example, Boomers will emphasize the mastery of a defined body of knowledge and will advocate hard work and individual responsibility. Generation X teachers will emphasize mastery of transferable skill sets as the technological age constantly redefines knowledge. These teachers will emphasize teamwork and problem-solving approaches to learning. A school leader must learn to accommodate both orientations to improve student learning.
Suzette Lovely's Generational Profiles Veterans were born between 1922 and 1943 and lived through some of the most definitive events of the 20th century, including the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor and World War II. These events formed their worldview and molded their core values of hard work, fiscal conservatism and traditional values of home, family and patriotism. This is the generation that built the infrastructure of the country and, in educational terms, built the school system as we know it, with the emphasis on hierarchy and the paying of one's dues based on seniority. Some Veterans still work in our schools, where they tend to hold positions of high status.
Baby Boomers, born between 1944 and 1960, are numerically the biggest generation and currently hold most positions of power in government, corporations and schools. Defining events to Boomers include the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement and the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Boomers challenged the world as they found it, making their own rules as they set work and social norms. This is the group that brought us 40 as the new 30, 50 as the new 40, and now 60 as the new 50. This group is so large that it dominates American culture. In the world of schools, Boomers championed equality with Title IX and never-ending school reform (Boomers just can't help but innovate and break new ground), and they created a cottage industry for collective bargaining in labor relations in schools.
Generation X, born between 1960 and 1980, has lived in the shadow of the Baby Boomers and has had to survive the excesses of that generation. For example, Gen Xers grew up in the era of latchkey kids, sky-high divorce rates, oil embargoes and stagflation. This makes them skeptical of authority and reliant on themselves and their network of friends, associates and co-workers. Their survivor mentality, as Lovely and Buffum describe it, makes this generation resilient and innovative; this is, after all, the group that ushered in and survived the Internet and dot.com eras. Gen Xers tend to favor equity over hierarchy in the power structures of schools, and they thrive when given options and opportunities to work in teams. Many of our newer school leaders are from Generation X.
Millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, are the newest generation. The high school class of 2000 is typically seen as the first of the Millennial wave to hit the workplace. Every fourth generation, generational cohorts tend to recycle, so that Millennials are most like the Veteran generation in terms of their optimism, confidence, respect for order and can-do attitude. This generation grew up during the financial booms of the 1990s and the dot.com bubble. It was a time of laserlike emphasis on the family, with highly structured activities for children. Soccer moms were a large voting block, and child safety became paramount after Columbine and child abductions made the headlines. This group has never known a world without computers, and most can't remember life without the Internet and social networking sites like Facebook. The first Millennials are showing up in our teaching ranks.
Lovely realizes, of course, that these descriptions are general in nature and that individual differences will abound. Still, they offer useful guidelines for how school leaders may make progress with school reform.
The professional learning community approach, espoused by Richard DuFour and Roland Barth, places meaningful and focused teacher collaboration at the heart of any attempt to improve student learning in a systematic and successful way. This collaboration goes beyond mere congeniality or “getting along,” as teachers must address tough questions about the nature of learning and teaching. Lovely states that school leaders must understand and plan for generational differences to make teacher collaboration pay the dividends expected.
