Happy Hour 2/5/09

I wasn't here for the initial activity as I was at work involved in a long, drawn out and painful budget reduction meeting. We did an exercise where you have a list of all significant and important positions and programs and you have to rate them in cut order from 1-40something. It is infuriating to thing that those cuts are literally taking the progress of the district back almost 6-7 years. I question the motivation of politicians that feel that education is being overindulged in some way and in need of trimming when something as simple as raising taxes could aleviate the burden on state agencies at least somewhat. That is probably over simplified but all I can see is years of past work done for the good of kids being placed on a cut list because there truly is no other funding.

Now on to the second issue. The community of practice that I am using for my research is truly involved in day to day learning and sharing in order to do their job. They document processes and create departmental procedures ongoing as issues and needs arise. There is a constant communication link that exists between them and among the members a strong alliance is present. I think the alliance is tied to their shared knowledge and common interests around technology and learning. An underlying problem however is that distrust has grown among two factions of the group that has generated some feelings of resentment and anger. It seems that although the groups continue to work well together, they are hypersensitive to each other's reactions, comments, and general demeanor. With regard to these two factions, they have begun to break out into two separate groups so that anytime a big technical type incident occurs, the two groups begin to ban together in defense against the other. Where I have tried less formal interventions to encourage the group to interact more, my efforts have not proven to be very effective. My intervention was to have the community create an expectation and procedure around how they will communicate in light of big incidents. They did do this. I also created an expectation that the group would meet face to face at least once a month to monitor the intervention and interact with each other. This scheduling proved to be a challenge, but everyone committed to working within their schedules to make it happen. So, I'm hoping the affect of the intervention will be positive as a first step to stop some of the negative communication patterns that have become so prevalent.