What the Washington Nationals and the Chicago Cubs baseball teams have in common with St. Louis and California Schools.

In today’s NY Times sports page there’s a photo of dejected looking players sitting in the dugout of the Washington National’s Baseball Team – dejected because the team is off to another poor start of what looks like another poor season. In Chicago, long suffering Cub fans (I’ve been one since my childhood.) won’t be surprised if the Cubbies don’t win their division, or any other post season title. In St. Louis, everyone is dismayed because their schools are doing so poorly that the State of Missouri is going to take them over. And in California, as I wrote about in my last post, Stanford University reports that the state school system is doing so poorly that the entire system needs reform.

So here’s what’s going to happen: Players doing poorly in baseball, or any other sport, will be scolded (except not so if they play for champions such as Tony Dungy or Lovey Smith) and cajoled. They will be shown what they’re doing wrong by performance coaches, and all of this will mostly give them a mind set that constantly reminds them that they aren’t playing well. In school systems, teachers will be given new curriculum guides, new programs, more tests to administer, and lots of pressuring reminders that the system is not doing well. They too will have a basic mindset of negativity, just like the athletes.

Athletes and teachers, and all others performers need to have positive mindsets if they are to perform at their best. But focusing on what’s going wrong with a team, an organization, or an individual performer is like teenagers with zits. It takes over their attention (I remember it well.), even though 99 percent of the rest of their body may be doing quite well. The trick? Flip the practice over and focus on what’s going well. What are a given player’s best skills, what does the team do well, what are a given teacher’s best practices, what is the school doing well? Begin to build on these and the weakness will begin to turn around in far more sustainable ways than focusing on the negative.

Before a player or a team can turn around each must do an APPRECIAITION INVENTORY of best skills and practices. In sports, I’d show a lot of videos of each player and the entire team doing things well. At half time, or in the dugout, I’d have these videos always there and I would focus on these strengths, not on the weaknesses. Athletics is a kinesthetic form of learning and athletes need to feed it in their muscles. Once they feel kinesthetically in rhythm, then their muscles will send positive images to their minds. The same is true of a team.

Over a century of focusing on school failures has not helped reform our schools. But, just like an athlete or a team, a school can be transformed by doing an APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY to find the bases of strengths to build on. And just as with a team, when a school first focuses on its strengths, it will be transformed in sustainable ways. This is what I write about in my book Crisis in School Management, and you can read it free by downloading it from my home page.

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