When is capacity build?
In the life-cycle of a school year, May marks the beginning of the end; we're pulled though the months of May and June by the gravity of 'completion' and 'conclusion'. The atmosphere within schools shifted as PSSA's (standardized tests) ended mid-April and now the end is in sight. Fellows, too, change the focus of their work. We begin now to review and assess our work to pave the way for next year's capacity building efforts.
This lens-shift towards 'review' makes me wonder: when does capacity building happen? In my support of different projects this year, I've noticed that projects the follow a Plan-Do-Review cycle function in a whole different category (both in terms of capacity building/growth and in quality of execution) than project that do not follow this cycle. Of course, anyone who has ever been a teacher (or lived with one, perhaps) knows all-too-well that the single scarcest resource within the teaching profession is: TIME. It takes time to plan, time to grade, time to call parents, time to develop teaching tools, time to research best practices, time to build relationships with students, time to teach, time to connect content to other classes, time to gather materials... never enough time. And when time is a scarce resource, “non-essentials” are the first to get neglected. Teachers perceived reality looks like this:
Do-Do-Do-[Begin school day]-Do-Do-Do-Do-Do-Do-[End school day]- Do-Do-Do-Do-Do. Repeat.
Actually, this is not quite right... the pattern probably looks more like a fractal. A what? A fractal: geometry or patterns that repeat within themselves such that elements are recognizable no matter at what scale/level they are observed. In this example the pattern repeats at the “year”, “month”, “week”, and “day” levels.
So back to my original question: when does capacity building happen? It seems to me that in a Do-Do-Do cycle, there is no room (no capacity?) for capacity building. No matter how tight the iterations become, every moment is a “do” moment, and therefore unavailable. By contrast, a context that operates under a Plan-Do-Review paradigm seems to have a lot of room for capacity building. That is indeed the point of having a “plan” and “review” time on respective sides of every “do”. Think again of the fractal, only this time imagine that the se
lf-repeating element is a Plan-Do-Review cycle. Capacity building (growth) can happen at every iteration and in every level.
Let me take this thought one step further. What happens if within each Plan-Do-Review iteration we have the ability to make a change? What if instead of repeating the exact pattern over and over, we can adjust the pattern a little bit? Wait a minute... where have i heard this before? Oh! It's a growth mindset!