A New Generation of Growth and Evaluation Part III

Estimated Reading Time: 5-7 minutes

As a conclusion to this article series, I am naming the elephants in the room for this topic, and I realize that if we hope to change the systems and structures of how we evaluate and grow in education, we will need to confront these together. If you are reading this without Part I or Part II, you may want to go back, but no matter what order you read these articles in, it won’t change how hard this particular system and culture will be to change. Here is an unfiltered list of the barriers that feel obvious to me:

• Holding people capable instead of accountable sounds good—feels good—but removing judgment for some is like removing their identity. The unconscious and systemic reasons why people will not like this idea are many, and there is no shortcut. The only way around is through this issue. Leaders in education have a higher calling than judging others’ work. Teachers have a higher calling than judging students’ work. Judgment is an addiction of the mind and ego, not an intellectual end to pursue.

• We judge, evaluate, and grade in education reflexively. Whether that is related to holding a chip on our shoulder about a lack of respect or professional status, or because it was how we went through school, it is unclear. We do these things unconsciously, and even if people want to change, the change feels slow, clunky, and like emotional and cognitive labor. Our jobs are already harder than most; do we really want more work?

• We live in a culture of projection—it is the water we swim in. Social media is the equivalent of a mental liquor store—quick shortcuts to dopamine at the expense of human connection. The result of this is a widespread mental health crisis. We hear adults say, “Kids are experiencing a mental health crisis.” This is a projection. When we see kids struggling, we are seeing ourselves, and we think the students are the source, but they are just a reflection of us. Adults are struggling, and these old systems of judgment help to shield us from the experience of feeling our feelings. This is a classic “rescuer” behavior on Karpman’s Drama Triangle. In order to own our struggle, address it, and impact young people differently, it starts with us. We have to first reclaim our projection and build systems of agency. Evaluation and growth are pieces of this larger issue.

• Money—it costs money to partner with L+D to do this work, and some haven’t planned for this. We spend money to write a new strategic plan, we spend money on search firms to replace leaders, we spend money on new positions, curriculum, or fancy new MacBooks, and often the money we spend on these is in the hundreds of thousands. We feel fine spending millions of dollars on the human talent that makes up our schools, but we struggle to budget for and afford the investment it takes to support talent. If we want to unlock the value of our talent, we have to risk investing in the creative potential trapped by oppressive systems of judgment, control, and compliance. Why would a talented young person want to be an educator if we don’t make the field dynamic, creative, and open to their influence?

In 2025–26, we chose to write about design as a theme in our newsletter. We are a human-centered design firm, and we think about design as a chance to “be more human” and as a chance to practice this humanity by being “more curious than certain.” How do we do this with a list of barriers like the one above?

Learning Is a Verb – We Must Have a Bias Toward Action Together

We act! At L+D, this is one of our core values.

Once we have started, the answer is to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, learn, learn, learn, learn, and to iterate and use our learning as we go. You don’t do something hard quickly or by yourself. You go slow, and you go together.

I have been training and helping adults in education learn how to use this mindset and the requisite skills of giving judgment-free feedback as well as listening and connecting with the response, regardless of the emotional or cognitive tenor, for more than 15 years. Adults are out of their comfort zones when they are not good at something, and there is a 6–18-month period of time when learning these skills will feel hard or even stuck. Senior leaders, faculty, and staff will struggle to improve. They will repeat the same mistakes over and over, and they will habitually and reflexively get defensive and organize around control without ever intending it. It is normal to question the pedagogy and the skills, and to struggle with the ability to produce outcomes that make the juice worth the squeeze.

But it is.

The Juice Is Worth the Squeeze

To write this article, I went back to Sir Kenneth Robinson’s first TED Talk in 2006. Before TED Talks were cool, and now after they are no longer cool, his message hits at the core of why this work matters. Apparently, I am not alone—it has been streamed 80 million times.

Agency—human creativity—deep connection with other people rooted in a celebration of the diversity of intelligences and the complexity of experience is what is at stake. School isn’t a factory churning out educated citizens. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2022, 2.1 million students dropped out. Depending on the source, between 40 and 60 million Americans are diagnosed with a mental illness, and this doesn’t include the millions who do not have access to care.

We fix, solve, judge, and fight for control with good intent, but I think what resonates with most people about holding people capable vs. holding them accountable is that people are capable. When we have agency, when we are expressing our creativity, when we connect with the part of us that is an artist across mediums, we are capable of wholesale institutional and cultural revolution. Education is still the best investment we can make in young people, and if we are brave enough to change the way we do it, we stand to gain in ways that I am excited to see emerge. If you want to reimagine your evaluation and growth systems and build the habits, skill sets, and mindsets in your professional community aimed at agency and creativity—reach out. We are building a brave and mighty cohort of schools that want to team up in 2026–27 to lead in this work.