Hi Reader,

A teacher sends three behavior referrals in one week. By Friday there's a theory — classroom management. By the following Monday there's a plan: a walkthrough, a coaching cycle, maybe a book someone liked.

Every step in that chain is reasonable. Nobody was careless. But nobody stopped on the way to ask whether three referrals is enough to know anything at all.

It isn't a case of reading the evidence wrong. It's a case of not having enough of it to read.

You've seen the same shape in other places.

Two teachers resign in April, and by the May leadership meeting the building has a retention crisis. Two people. One followed a spouse to another state. One retired after a long career and had told her principal in November.

One grade level dips on one benchmark, and the curriculum goes under review. One cohort, one administration, one testing week that started with two snow days and ended with half the class out sick.

Two parents complain about a policy, and a building changes something that was working for four hundred families.

Here's what I think is actually happening, and it isn't sloppiness. Those leaders were being responsive — which is the thing the job asks for constantly. A number lands on your desk. Small numbers feel like signals; that's what makes them worth noticing in the first place. And waiting feels like negligence, because you're the person who was supposed to see it coming.

So we do the thing that makes the action defensible. We supply a story. Not dishonestly — we genuinely believe it by the time we say it out loud. The theory arrives to justify a response we've already decided to make, and once there's a theory, three referrals stop looking like three referrals and start looking like a pattern.

The plainest way to say it:

You don't have a finding. You have a number. A finding is a number plus enough of them to rule out coincidence.

Three referrals could be a classroom-management problem. It could also be one student having a hard month, or a schedule change nobody accounted for, or a teacher who started documenting what she used to handle in the hallway. Three doesn't distinguish between those. Neither does two resignations, or one dip, or two complaints.

The move is one question, asked before you act rather than after:

How many would it take before I'd believe this?

Decide that number first — before you know which way the evidence falls, while it still costs you nothing to be honest about it. Then look at what you actually have.

If you're above the line, act, and act with more confidence than you had a minute ago. If you're below it, you're not stuck. You just have a different sentence to say:

"That's not enough to know yet — and here's how I'll find out."

That's a leadership answer, not a dodge. It names the threshold and it names the next step. You can still do something: pull the referrals and look at what time of day they happened, ask the teacher what changed, sit in the room for twenty minutes. You're gathering the fourth, fifth, and sixth data points instead of building a plan on the first three.

And if you do decide to move early — sometimes you should — say what it is out loud. "We're treating this as a hypothesis" costs one sentence and buys you the room to be wrong without anyone losing face.

This week: pick one number you've acted on recently — a count of complaints, resignations, referrals, incidents, whatever it was. Ask how many data points it actually rested on. If the answer is under five, you may have been holding a hypothesis and calling it a problem.

See you next week.

— Eric

Eric Wicherski, M.Ed.

Next Step Educational Services

Reply anytime — I read every one.

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