Baseball Coach II: How Joe Maddon Helped Me Today
I data dive with the manager who broke the Cubs' curse
Joe a few years ago. Image credit: The Philadelphia Inquirer.
I think this is part two of a three-part series responding to baseball-related quotes around coaching. Because today, pitchers and catchers reported, and I had a really really really big data dive with a department I’m working with. I was nervous about it, but it went really well, and I think part of it is because of a quote I encountered on Monday and shared this morning.
I’m reading a biography of Joe Maddon, former manager of Rays, Cubs, and Angels, right now. It’s pretty good: a tad repetitive. But there was a moment where my eyebrows shot up in recognition, and I had to highlight some of his words on my Kindle. Maddon, who was known as a cutting edge guy early on in his career–a guy who used computers in the minor leagues before it was cool–had some words to say on the (rather contrived and played-out) conflict between whether a baseball manager should use data and analytics to make in-game decisions, or whether they should trust their “gut.” He said this, which wound up on a slide in my introduction of engagement data to teachers today.
I love math incorporated with experience. You should not have math void of experience. You should not have experience void of math. There’s a balance to be had.
I told these teachers that I had the math and they had the experience with their students. Today was the day that we were to marry those two things together, and Joe Maddon explained how that interaction would help us find the best path forward.
My earlier worry, that teachers whose data didn’t look great would wind up shutting down and not listening, didn’t materialize. Teachers had already seen their numbers twice: once 2-3 weeks ago when I first sat down with them, and again a few days ago when I emailed data to small PLC teams (so teachers who shared a prep could see their colleagues’ numbers from the same prep, but not from other classes). Giving everyone the opportunity to look at their numbers a few times before we discussed them turned out to be a really good idea, as teachers showed up curious.
My plan was to talk for a quick 12 minutes to remind everyone what the numbers were and what they meant, but that wound up taking 30 minutes because teachers were asking intelligent questions and making thoughtful observations. I can live with that: curiosity is what is going to cause teachers to become experimental, not me yakking at them.
When I divided them into their PLC teams to talk, I heard a number of people asking colleagues what they had done to create relatively better numbers. I noticed at least one teacher setting up a time to watch a colleague. And while we didn’t get to the point where I had planned (setting up goals for how to improve engagement numbers between now when kids leave for summer), we had deep enough exchanges–professionals picking the brains of professionals–that I am confident that they will be able to set a goal and a means to get there next week. I’ve even sent them some sentence stems to help them out.
I think that the marriage of data and experience is looking to be a happy, productive one.
Much of this, I think, is simply because the engagement survey data provides us with a third point. When we’re all looking not at each other across a table, but at data on the table, it’s far easier not to take things personally. Our experiences are not an end in themselves, but a means of understanding and clarifying the data in front of us (and vice versa).
My next challenge will be to try to take this information to humanities teachers.
Most of my success in this kind of data analysis has been with math and science teachers. They speak the language of data and of the kind of analysis that numbers invite. In my years as an English teacher, I found that my colleagues (as well as past versions of me) tend to loathe looking at data and numbers. They believe that they aren’t teaching literature and writing to generate numbers…that looking at data is somehow an affront to the work they do with young souls in front of them. I would like to see if they would be as willing to add data to their experiences as math and science teachers are. I would hope their curiosity about data would be as strong as it is about words.
I will have to find this out another year. Meanwhile, I’m going to chalk today up as a victory and see where the wonderful teachers I worked with today take their kids this next semester. We’ll find out when students give us more data after Memorial Day.