The Inputs-Outputs Question

Several months ago, I was having a conversation with a small group of colleagues about stewarding our lives well as secondary educators. One member of the group was Laura Gersch, who teaches in the Boston area. Laura asked a question that stayed with me for a while.

What's the work within the Inputs-Outputs sweet spot?

If you put inputs on the y-axis and outputs on the x, Laura asked — what's in the sweet spot of low input and high output? It was a super smart way of framing a question I come to constantly in my writing and in my classroom. It's another way of saying, “What's the work that matters most?”

Let me make it a bit clearer with some visuals.

1) Anything we do in the classroom that's low effort for us and low output for students is basically indefensible. Our job is to help students learn (outputs). If we're not even trying (inputs) to increase outputs, we're not doing our job.

But, if you're the kind of person that reads articles like this, you didn't need me to tell you any of that.

2) Now we get into territory that you and I know a bit better. Tons of effort in (inputs), only to arrive at the end of the lesson or unit or semester and realize, “Dang! The students didn't learn!” This is the kind of stuff that burns us out, and it's super common when you're early in your career or when you're susceptible to edu-fads or when you're caught in the Workload-Pressure Cycle.

3) And NOW we arrive at the big-time bogeyman: situations where we put in maxed-out, quality-of-life-reducing effort (inputs) and get amazing, give-this-teacher-a-prize student learning results (outputs). There are plenty of folks who accept this as the ideal and strive for it with never-ending workweeks. And there are plenty of others who believe that this is the only way to get maxed-out results, and that since they don't have that kind of time or energy or skill, they're not ever going to get great results in their classroom.

But what if there were ways to produce more learning with less stress?

4) Once you start sniffing down the more-learning-less-stress trail, you start to make some interesting discoveries. You start to skip or satisfice things that you suspect might not be contributing to outputs. You start to see, “Wow! It turns out that some of the stuff I spend lots of effort on (stuff that I input) isn't actually doing much for student learning (the thing I'm trying to output).” But what if…?

5) If you make it as far as #4, you start having a new goal: how do I shove my circle as far as I can to the right without letting it go up a micron? How do I produce more learning (moving the circle to the right, increasing output) with less or the same amounts of stress (keeping the circle from moving upward into increased input)?

So, good news: I'm not a perfectionist kind of guy any more, so I'm not really aiming in my practice or my research or my writing for that mythical Circle 5 in the preceding graphic. Basically, I think getting there would take a superhuman amount of effort and, for me, that'd kind of defeat the purpose. Instead, what I'm after are strategies and practices in a kind of Target Zone — that bottom-right quadrant in Laura Gersch's Input-Output question.

Cool, right?

So Dave, what's this got to do with where the blog is going in early 2022?

I mean… weird question to ask. But timely. Thank you.

In the next couple of months, I'm going to head back to the topic that I speak to teacher groups about the most these days: student motivation via the five key beliefs. When I was speaking with a high school faculty group at Walton High School earlier this week, I closed our time by saying, “I can't think of anything in my career that has given me more bang for my buck” — in the language of today's blog post, more output for my input — than becoming strong at instructional practices that are highly conducive to 5KB cultivation.

So, stay tuned. Tell a friend about the newsletter. Lots of fun things that I want to write for you these next two months.

Best to you and yours,

DSJR

What's the work within the Inputs-Outputs sweet spot?

So Dave, what's this got to do with where the blog is going in early 2022?

By a teacher, for teachers.

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