Full Court Press – School Version

I remember from my short time with sports such as water-polo and basketball the idea of a 'full court press'. Essentially, in games where possession and scoring are important and it is allowable to exert pressure on all or almost all of the opposing team at once, this is the strategy of exerting that pressure in order to force errors and hasty play. This post is dedicated to LKW and HYC, the guys who taught me everything I know (which is sadly a lot less than I had the time for) about water-polo. As I was reading Huberman on classroom teaching, I happened to bump into one of these guys online. That's why this post exists.

Huberman, in his 1983 piece 'Recipes for Busy Kitchens', pointed out that teachers face at least four major pressurising factors in their working life:

• the press for immediate responsive action, estimated at 200k interchanges per year with students, staff and stakeholders, all of them wanting something 'right now';
• the press for simultaneous multiplex action, in which teachers must do many things, monitor, evaluate, provide different levels of interaction – all at once;
• the press for continuous adaptation to changing circumstances, because every student and every batch and every year's situation is different;
• the press for meaningful personal interaction, because education is a human thing.

This is the 'full court press' – school version.

The problem of facing this battery of pressures is that education is very much a human, personal art, even though we may try to see it as an extremely complex science. Any science that is too complex must necessarily be handled by qualitative, human-intensive approaches. Therefore, each of these pressures is made more debilitating by a corresponding truth about the teaching environment:

• immediate responses may be tactically useful but seldom make for a coherent strategic vision;
• humans are not good at handling more than a handful of simultaneous tasks with the degree of excellence required;
• it takes time to change and adapt effectively;
• meaningful personal interaction falls off rapidly as numbers of interactions increase.

This is what makes the 'full court press' a terrible thing. The debilitative effects on teachers in general spawn not from these truths, but from the pressures that make us deny or attempt to compromise them.

What are these debilitating effects? The question might very well be asked in a different way: "Why are we losing the game?"

We are losing in four ways related to the four pressures which act against the four truths I've mentioned:

• we are forced to focus on short-term gains, perspectives and results at the expense of the long-term view;
• our energy is exhausted by a drunkard's walk kind of approach to getting things done in all directions and ways;
• we are not given time for reflection on what is and is not, but are forced to survive rapid change and consider that a victory;
• we are deprived of collegiate fellowship and the true development of whole persons because of the lack of quality interaction.

Most schools end up like slightly dysfunctional factories, while remaining half-effective as schools.

This is what the full court press is like in the school context. It's a lot like water-polo or basketball: four quarters per game, and if you are continually under pressure, you will lose unless you are very, very talented. And even then, how long will you last?