TL;DR:

• Reflecting on a book study of Upstream: How to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath, and the educational impacts of the book.
• Upstream thinking involves addressing problems before they even begin.
• When we focus all of our attention and energy on the problems right in front of us, our ability to plan and organize is diminished. 
• Instead of being purely reactive, we should strategically prioritize the issues in front of us.
• Create slack to escape the tunnel and unlock upstream thinking.

As a nation of educators were settling into our respective shelter-in-place orders in spring of 2020, I was delighted to see an open invitation for great teachers from all over the country to join a book study. The book study was initiated and structured by members of the Teach Better Team.

What really piqued my interest was that study members would not be reading a book selected from the education shelf. Instead, it would come from the leadership shelf. And it was by one of the Heath Brothers! I was so in.

Upstream Thinking

The book drew me in with its catchy parable about two people enjoying a riverside picnic, when all of a sudden they are pulled into rescuing drowning youth after drowning youth, who continually bob downstream.

Eventually one yells to the other, “Hey, where are you going? Who’s going to save all these kids!?” The other yells back, “I’m going upstream to stop the guy that keeps throwing these kids in the river in the first place!”

That’s upstream thinking—stopping the problems we tend to busy ourselves with before they even start.

And on this topic of problems, public education in America—for all the good it does—has no shortage of problems. And as I read the book, I found application after application for our field. As I was rattling around different takeaways I could share publicly, I settled on one that is pertinent to our current situation in education: tunneling.

I’m left wondering, what, if anything, keeps you in a tunnel? Where do you find slack, so that you can unlock the upstream thinking needed to work toward solving your biggest problems? Click To Tweet

Tunnel Vision: A Barrier to Upstream Thinking

In chapter 4, Dan Heath demonstrates this barrier to upstream thinking. Let’s hear from him first when he asserts, “We don’t have the bandwidth to fix everything.” He continues, “Researchers have found that when people experience scarcity—of money or time or mental bandwidth—the harm is not that the big problems crowd out the little ones. The harm is that the little ones crowd out the big ones.”

In my own practice, I have accustomed myself to saying, “It’s just easier to do what’s most obvious, what’s most concrete.” 

When there are too many fires to put out, the ones that are brightest and hottest right in front of us are the ones that will get our attention and energy. Essentially, the ability to plan and organize becomes so diminished, we become purely reactive.

Heath puts it like this: “When people are juggling a lot of problems, they give up trying to solve them all. They adopt tunnel vision. There’s not long-term planning; there’s not strategic prioritization of issues.” He finishes by saying, “[Tunneling] confines us to short-term, reactive thinking. In the tunnel, there’s only forward.”

Lost in the Tunnel

As a high school English Language Arts teacher in Southern California who tends to teach 175 students each year, I find myself in the tunnel quite often. There are always lessons to prep, objectives to write on the board, emails to respond to, papers to grade, and meetings to attend.

I can go weeks where I feel like I am merely reacting to everything coming at me with no space to breathe. And that whole block of time I struggled to find room for something that is really important: connecting with my students who were falling behind, or the ones who just needed extra support. Talk about demoralizing.

Heath suggests the way to get out of the tunnel and tackle a problem worthy of our time and energy is to create slack. Heath says to think of slack as “a space that has been created to cultivate upstream work. It’s collaborative and it’s disciplined.” What immediately came to mind when I read that was, “Oh, that’s what Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are!”

So I began to reflect on my 10 plus years of experience in PLCs, about how I was a part of teams who tackled big problems together, about how much I had learned from those experiences that made me into a better teacher. I should say, I tried to reflect on that.

But I came up with nothing.

Okay, I’ll be fair. There were times when I would learn from colleagues and get better as a teacher, but those were incidental; they were not the focused purpose of the PLC meetings.

Stop Reinforcing the Tunnel to Unlock Upstream Thinking

Instead, as I thought more and more about PLCs and the concept of tunneling being a barrier to upstream work, I saw that the PLC—the very mechanism that was supposed to free my colleagues and I from the tunnel—was still part of the tunnel.

In a lot of ways, the PLC was reinforcing the tunnel we found ourselves in week after week. The PLCs were committing each of us to deliver assessments we didn’t believe in, interpreting results we could not care any less about, and recording instructional actions we were never going to take, all in the name of complying with directives handed down to our site leadership, which were handed down to them by the central office. That thing that was supposed to be slack, space that has been created to cultivate upstream work, was just taking up even more of our bandwidth. 

It turns out that PLCs were not only keeping me and my colleagues in the tunnel, they were reinforcing tunnel work. PLCs were the rock bolts that made the tunnel even stronger. PLCs (the way they were used at the sites where I taught, at least) became the stabilizers that upheld the tunnel.

How? Students needed support learning content; we were focused on getting higher test scores. When the data showed that some of our students were scoring lower than others, we just tested more. And we spent a significant amount of our bandwidth paying attention to data. We didn’t have much left to support the individuals who were most vulnerable, and most at need, in our classrooms.

PLCs were supposed to be pulling us out of the tunnel and help us focus on what was most important, but they just took time away from such important work.

Escape the Tunnel to Unlock Upstream Thinking

After connecting these dots, I thought, “But I have grown as an educator, haven’t I? If so, when were the times I was challenged to see the big picture? Where were those collaborative spaces where I teamed up with other educators to create better learning opportunities for the students in my classroom?”

When I framed it that way, many answers sprang up at once: conferences, books written by teachers, podcasts, blogs, Facebook groups, and Twitter. None of these were provided by my district; I found them on my own. And they have been the most fertile grounds of growth and affirmation in my professional life.

If problems and questions came up from my experience as a practitioner, there were answers I could find on the internet. Since my brick and mortar location wasn’t providing what I needed, I ventured outside those walls. I connected with others who were experiencing the same problems, educators who shared the same values, who were finding success in areas where I was struggling.

Each of these out-of-site experiences kept pulling me and my practice out of the tunnel just a little bit more.

Now, if you’re reading this and thinking, “Wow! He really doesn’t like Professional Learning Communities,” you are partly right. When it comes to the impact they have had on my growth as a teacher, the impact has been very little.

But I’m just talking about the impact on my instruction with students. PLCs have been effective in helping me name and frame the frustrating experiences in my classroom and form some long-lasting bonds with a few of my colleagues. And to the extent I have convinced a few colleagues to join me in outside reading and networking, we have pushed one another.

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Remove the Barrier to Unlock Upstream Thinking

Also, when I think about the possibilities of what PLCs could be, I remain hopeful, with a small measure of excitement even. I mean, imagine if a site set the parameters that teachers could identify barriers preventing the student body from fully achieving one or more of the success goals decided by the community.

Then teachers could self-select to join a group of teachers, parents, and students who would come together to work toward removing that barrier, dismantling the structures that uphold that barrier, and/or help support students to get over that barrier. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it?

I’m not saying that Professional Learning Communities are the problem. They aren’t. The structures that some districts and schools have in place, the values that are forced on the PLCs from the outside, are what is holding teachers inside the tunnel.

PLCs are being used to uphold harmful structures all in the name of improving teacher efficacy and student achievement. But if we can stop and reimagine what a PLC could do for a school and its community, we can unleash the potential of the educators and families within the community to work together toward solving the real problems.

Finding the Slack to Unlock Upstream Thinking

Circling back to what instigated the musings above, it turns out that a Teach Better book study centered on a leadership book was just the kind of thing I needed to find slack to pull me out of the tunnel of my shelter-in-place teaching experience.

I am grateful for the new perspective and growing connections with colleagues from around the country.

I’m left wondering, what, if anything, keeps you in a tunnel? Where do you find slack, so that you can unlock the upstream thinking needed to work toward solving your biggest problems?

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About Jeffery E. Frieden

Jeffery E. Frieden has over 15 years experience teaching high school ELA with over 10 years of experience serving on site and district level committees, grants, inter-district teams, and chairing two ELA departments in the Alvord Unified School District. Believing that he could increase his impact beyond the four walls of his classroom, in 2020 Jeffery founded the website SurthrivEDU.com, a platform that encourages teachers to connect and amplify their impact in their schools and classrooms.