As I began a new administrative job a few years ago, I was introduced to a new form of teaching evaluation–at least, new to me. It was a three page long self-evaluation form. It might be startling to some, but in twenty plus years as an educator, both public and private, I had not been part of a system that had used written reflection as part of an annual performance evaluation. I was eager to try it.
After observing in classrooms as an administrator, I filled out a form for each teacher while my teachers filled out their own. It felt hospitable. “You evaluate yourself, and I will too.” We met and exchanged papers, reading through comments and discussing them page by page. We were all new to the practice.
Some teachers left their comment sections blank while others left copious notes. Those who filled in every comment box were often harsh on themselves while those who left entire pages blank didn’t see a need for it, revealing much by omission. Both choices allowed for good discussions, but I quickly realized that two forms versus one still left a gap. The two-part system was fair and decent, but I wondered how much we could gauge, or better yet, how much we should.
Measures require standards, and we need concrete measures in our employee records. My husband has filled out dozens of these forms for decades in the IT world. In business, a good employee is a productive one. Standardized years ago, words like integrity, accountability, timeliness, leadership, dedication, populate any annual performance review. The key is in the title since entire sections ask how well you maintained the company vision. Did you increase scale and scope? Did you step up to challenges? Did you architect projects? Did you streamline support? Did you handle requirements? Were you, in fact, productive for the mighty corporation?
However, an annual performance review or regular feedback can only measure a handful of character traits and job skills, never the whole person. I’m convinced no evaluation truly can, nor should it, if we look at work alone. I must manage my teachers in one sense, but how do I measure part of a person if my chief goal is success? Is success my chief goal?
It might sound strange, but I am not looking for a new evaluation form for myself or my teachers. I don’t need another checklist with skills, observations, behaviors, virtues or vices. How should I really assess a person? Or more importantly, how do I think about measuring myself and others? As Dorothy Sayers said in her 1942 essay “Why Work?”, we might need a “thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude toward work.”
Job Crafting
Twenty years ago, Yale researcher Amy Wrzesniewski and business professor Jane Dutton focused on the personhood of employees in their 2001 study, Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work and in dozens of articles like “What Job Crafting Looks Like.” Their intention was not to address job design, but rather to talk about job crafting, which “revises employees’ work identities and work meanings.” In the world of organizational research, the individual psychology of an employee and how they see their jobs matters most. Because job crafting consists of the “physical and cognitive changes that individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work,” it means seeing work as active, creative, adaptive, and personal. In other words, changing our perspective of how we view our work affects our identities and the meaning or purpose of the work we do.
To me, Wrzesniewski and Dutton landed on a spiritual principle, echoing Sayers’s thoughts from 1942. We are not cogs in a machine. We are humans creating and crafting as our Creator has designed us to. Our lives are more than work, but work remains a part of us. As I read more of Wrzesniewski’s research on meaningfulness in the workplace, I discovered a prior study.
Calling
In Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work, Wrzesniewski considers how we the employees view our work. A job provides pay and benefits so that we can do the things we love outside of work. A career perspective allows us to look for advancement, long-term goals, and even healthy competition. But a calling is about vocation, who we really are as a person. And yes, in this study, calling held a spiritual connotation. Those of us who see work as a calling feel a personal and emotional connection to our work. We are enthusiastic, purposeful, and willing to work harder and longer to make a contribution. In Wrzesniewski’s employee surveys, workers’ answers split them evenly into the three groups, regardless of whether they were a custodian, secretary, or executive.
Not surprisingly, those who saw work as calling felt the most satisfaction in their jobs. From a business perspective, it was startling. It was not about success. To Dorothy Sayers, it is obvious and always has been. Work can be seen as
a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.
In The Call, Os Guinness adds that humankind has two clear callings—a primary one as a follower of Christ and a secondary one that is often equated to our jobs. Our corporate calling is to be a disciple, one who must follow Christ. In Romans, our work is being an emissary on Christ’s behalf since we are called by him, being called according to his purpose (1:6; 8:28). Our primary calling must remain primary while our personal one is defined by what we believe our purpose in life to be. “Calling insists that the answer lies in God’s knowledge of what he has created for us to be and where he is calling us to go.”
For Guinness, our primary calling imbues all that we are, all that we do. Our secondary calling is individual to the person, ideally the thing we live to do. Secondary calling can also be described as strengths or giftedness, the things we are naturally good at or passionate about. Guinness cautions that we cannot concentrate on our giftedness exclusively, or we become spoiled as if the universe only existed to fulfill our gifts. The secondary must commingle with the primary as Sayers writes, the worker “must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation.”
Imitation
I want to look past forms, files, and evaluations. My teachers are people—not commodities— whole persons who love God. If together we see work as calling, how then do we measure ourselves? Our mindsets concerning relationships might be key.
Beyond mentorship models, far in the past, lies the ancient practice of imitation. Sayers alludes to it, in that “man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.” Creating as God created. Worthy work. In the everyday, imitating a life can be a rich learning experience because Christ and others teach and challenge us. Clement of Alexandria wrote, “Our tutor Jesus Christ exemplified the true life and trains the one who is in Christ . . . He gives commands and embodies the commands that we might be able to accomplish.”
Clement provides two distinctives—one, that we have a close relationship with Christ. Christ is our rabbi. We are his talmidim, his scholars, as we learn and live. Two, that Christ embodies all that He has commanded because he could only do what he saw his Father doing (John 5:19; 14:24). Jesus became like us so that we could become like him. As He was sent, so are we. This is the imitation that matters. It follows our primary calling, and it can be every strength to a Christian school and community.
But Clement’s voice is also wisely cautionary. Not all are worthy of imitation all of the time. I know I’m not. He writes that we should “live in accordance with the injunctions of his [Christ’s] will, not only fulfilling what is commanded, or guarding against what is forbidden, but turning away from some examples, and imitating others as much as we can.” Discernment, wisdom, and maturity matter. We imitate the good in others as much as we can because it is possible that “The Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to the kind of people that will produce its fruit” (Matthew 21:43).
Fruitfulness
As the heart changes and grows in maturity, so do our actions. Hopefully healthy imitation leads to fruitfulness. As the months of the school year pass, I see it in the relationships my teachers have with each other and in the relationships they do (or don’t) have with their students. I hope I am imitating both Christ and other leaders well, learning from my mistakes, and moving forward. I encourage that in my faculty, but fruitfulness is never about control. I can’t demand it. We can’t control the choices of others nor will we get along with everyone in our work or church place.
What I do look for in my teachers is that they continue in their efforts to encourage, to be involved, to engage in the small talk and the big talk that lets students know they matter. Their hearts matter. No form, no questionnaire can measure that respect, camaraderie, or love, but in my written evaluations this year, I am making every attempt to describe and praise specific interactions with students from lunch time to class time and the moments in between. It is a type of success, but not the one society expects. In Bread for the Journey, Henri Nouwen explains that “There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. . . But fruitfulness is about vulnerability.” And vulnerability is about real relationships.
