Update from the Bench

It has been almost 7 months since I posted the piece I wrote that named this Blog. What's interesting to me now about the image of the piano bench is how it has become a kind of metaphor for my entire professional life.

I'm seeing my work as change management much more than anything else. Plus there is the conversation I've been having with myself since I went to a gathering of consultants at which we did this "continuum dialogue" based on two "opposing" principles of our work: service on the one hand, and advocacy on the other.

My former colleague Doug Karpa-Wilson set this activity up - I can't remember if he got if from me or from my other colleague Eric Metzler, but since we steal freely from each other, it doesn't much matter. Anyway, Doug put these signs on the wall - on one wall the sign read "SERVICE" on the other it read "ADVOCACY". He asked us to congregate around the spot in between where we feel we do most of our work as instructional consultants. I gravitated toward the advocacy end. Mostly because I think it's not all that possible to deliver services to people without advocating for something. If I'm considered an expert in "best practices" of teaching in the classroom, then at least some of why people are coming to my office is to learn what those best practices are, and they expect me to advocate for those.

On the other hand, I know change is about learning and learning is about change, so built into that is the fact that people need time to learn and time to change. I can't start at the "end" with someone who doesn't even know about the basic theories of learning and the basic models of how people learn. I have to start in very practical places and in places that begin to solve problems for them immediately. There is always a bit of room for wiggle on the service-advocacy continuum - and some folks need more service than advocacy - but it's not really possible to operate in a position where I feel like I do only one of those things (i.e. serve or advocate).