Long Term and Short Term…
Ever had a similar conversation?
A teaching and learning coach had a request for training at a school. She met with the principal and, after a debrief of the goals of the training, the coach said that to build relationships with staff and fully train them to implement long term change, the principal would need to find 2 hours a month for the staff to meet to train and discuss the changes in addition to weekly coaching sessions for the next 2 school years.
The principal objected, saying that they could only commit for the year and offer 30 minutes at the biweekly staff meeting. She explained that she only knew the budget for this year, and to make some changes it likely wouldn’t take the staff that amount of time to build relationships and learn the material.
You may have been on one side of this conversation or the other. This is the tension between Hofstede’s dimension of short term and long term orientation. Great examples of this occur in business, where some cultures orient around the next quarter or how something will impact immediately. Cultures of long term orientation tend to prioritize how something will impact long term relationships or the health of a company over the next 5 to 10 years. Other aspects of short term vs long term is the tension between temporary alliances vs lifelong loyalties, concern of Truth vs Virtue, and the priority of leisure (short term orientation prioritizing it more).
As an educator, I’ve seen this spectrum play out with the commodity of time, particularly when it comes to what time is given to teacher professional development or relationship building with students. Long term orientation holds to the understanding that things like relationships or learning take pain-staking time…over a long time. Short term orientation understands that to get results there needs to be actions that can be measured in a relatively soon outcome. Sound familiar? Neither are wrong, but there are clear contradictions when both are at work. An either/or situation, unclear or mismanaged outcomes can occur when we try to stuff long term relationships and learning into short term actions. Recognition of how people and the system operate on this spectrum would provide better communication and expectations in schools and districts.