Collaboration and Competition

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life is very tough.  For example, I am a terrible competitor.  I do not like me when I compete, do not like what I become, what I am willing to do and say for the sake of winning.  I hate the feelings I have when I am in the midst of competition.  In fact, I do not like winning and I hate losing.  If I win, you lose and I have never felt good about that.  For me to feel good when I win, I must ignore what you must be feeling when I beat you and I cannot do that and remain human.  So when I win, I really do not win and feel worse.  From early in my life I knew that if there was something I had that others wanted it always made me feel better to share, that if I desired something that others had I could ask, but if they wanted to keep it I could learn to live without it.  I don’t feel that way if I play Solitaire because a win there is not another’s defeat.  Hurting others hurts me, and when I win I often hurt others.  Where is the victory in that?  I deeply worry about the joy I see on the face of the victors.  That thrill of victory, of vanquish, of conquering others is frightful and exists only while we remain immune to the feelings of the defeated. 

The roots of these feelings come from childhood I suspect, though that sounds very Freudian.  I was the oldest of 4 and when playing with my siblings I typically won.  There was no real fun in that, no real joy, because I could win every time.  And when I did, I saw the looks on the faces of my brothers and sister.  Why would they even play with me if I always won?  I learned that if I “let” them win, I felt great and they felt great as long as they did not think I had thrown the game in their behalf.  What a totally different feeling.  In time, even playing my best at whatever, they could win and I would feel terrible, defeated by younger siblings.  I do not like hurting my brothers and sister.  I do not like being hurt by my brothers and sister.  There is no feeling so good to merit hurting each other.  So one of the most difficult questions in all theology and philosophy and psychology emerged and haunted me as I matured:  So, who are my brothers and sisters?  Who is in, and who is out?  Does the victor merit the spoils, all the spoils including the quality of life of the losers?  I do not like win/lose scenarios.

As you can imagine, I gave up playing football in high school because I did not like hitting people, hurting people for a purely invented number, fictitious points accumulated based on turf advancement and lines crossed.  Is there a score so important that it merited the pain of others, the ruined knees and ankles and shoulders?  I ran track.  Felt good, just me against the clock.  I liked practice more than meets.  At meets for a time I could ignore the looks of pain on the faces of those in my heat when I won.  Until I lost, and then I was hurt by the victory dances of the winners, celebrating their best was better than my best after I had just given it my all.  Was I really a loser after all those hours, all that effort, all that ceaseless running in circles?  Yes, I was.  And eventually, even achieving my personal best against the clock was not motivation enough to keep trying, to continue to run in circles.  It also gradually dawned on me that track was structured to have fewer winners than any other sport.  50% of the football teams that compete will win.  If 100 sprinters compete, only 1% will win.

I gravitated to the collaborative efforts and found them in fine arts.  I learned that a group working together on a common score or script, each performing their part to the best of their ability could result in a tremendous sense of accomplishment.  Nothing touched my soul as standing on the stage, receiving the applause of everyone present for a performance where all the participants had done well.  Goose bumps.  I loved band, choir, theatre.  I loved the hours of rehearsal to get it just so, and then share it.  A performance was a place where everyone wins, all the performers and the entire audience.  Watching the faces of the spectators leaving a band concert and leaving a football game tells me the story:  half leaving the football game are miserable, mad, depressed and sad.  100% of the faces leaving a concert are happy and content.  What a spectacular feeling.  How does this happen?  Collaborators work as hard as those who compete, but they work for each other, they worked to help each other get better, they collaborated.  Win/win.  (It is still amazing to me how competition has crept into the fine arts in high school forever changing the nature of collaborative performance, but that merits another post.)

As a people, as a nation I wonder if we should be promoting competition or collaboration.  Should we prepare young people to be on a competitive team or a high performing collaborative team?  Most will argue we need to prepare them for both, but mostly to be on a competitive team. 

We are and have been restructuring public schools to be competitive, not collaborative, and it is taking its toll.  I trace it back to the earliest school reforms in Texas.  As a teacher it gave me great joy to share my plans with others, to see all our kids do well, to learn from fellow teachers, to collaboratively plan for success, designed in a way that no kid would lose.  I celebrated the test where all made a 100!  I celebrated the growth I both received from and provided to my colleagues.  That ended with the Career Ladder, when teachers started getting ranked like football teams, and those who were winners received more money and quickly stopped sharing their secrets.  We moved from a culture where all teachers worked hard for the same cause together to a competitive team where a few would be rewarded.  And the reward was minimal, but the damage was done.

We moved to rating schools, rating districts and announced that parents whose kids attended a losing district could go elsewhere.  School districts stopped sharing resources and started competing for resources.  Vendors began to hawk wares to promote student success so your kids could win.  And the system was designed so that there were few winners and mostly losers.  If as educators too many of us figured out the system and began to win, the Legislature with a competitive mind set would change the rules to create fewer winners and more losers.  The competition got steeper, the standard of success got higher.  Now I feel like I used to feel in track: I run as hard and as fast as I can, practice till the cows come home and somehow still can’t win.  Where’s the joy in that?  If I do win, and other systems lose should I feel joy?  Should I celebrate their defeat on behalf of their kids?  If I know something that will help other adults help children should I share it or guard it?  What in the world are we doing?

Collaboration is harder than competition.  Life is pretty simple, jungle-like if you will, when there are good guys and bad guys, us and them, eat or be eaten.  Collaboration assumes we all come to the table, we talk, we lay our cards on the table and we are willing to risk sharing what it is we want and believe so that we can find a win/win.  That is hard and it is risky.  If any of the players are competitors or ambitious or withhold cards, then the collaborator will lose, not really knowing what the game is. Still, when well meaning adults can be honest about what they want, what they fear, what they really seek, then I deeply believe there is a way to find win/win.  I’ve seen it happen too many times.

As a school system we are improving.  We are improving because we collaborate.  School Board and supe, supe and administrators, administrators and teachers, teachers and aides; District Team, Campus Teams, Cabinet, all of us working for the success of the kids.  All the kids.  We will not do better if we compete with each other.  The tide will raise all ships, big and small, experienced and rookie, gifted and disabled.  We must work together, we must be mutually supportive.  My mental model for the accountability system is not preparation for the big game; it is preparation for the symphony of learning where we each achieve virtuoso levels while performing in and with a group.  We ensure a quality education for all.  We want all to win.

Teaching kids must, absolutely must, be from a picture bigger than win/lose.  We must think about promoting every child to win, every student to be successful, every teacher to be effective, every school to be high performing and every district to be a winner.  We cannot be competitors for a future where some kids win and some do not.  If so, we all lose.  I believe the path to achieve at that level is collaboration.  I am not inspired by my victory and your defeat.  I am inspired by working with each of you.  I am inspired by doing my best to ensure a quality education for all.  Sounds like missionary work to me.