Messaging Matters. William D. Parker
decisions helps you tie the mission of your school directly to the people serving students. And this serves as a great example when communicating with parents. For example, if you choose teachers with that question in mind, you can tell parents with confidence, “You can trust that this teacher is focused on your child’s best interest.” Messaging about great learning is so much easier when you have team members producing great learning. It is the school leader’s responsibility to seek out and support the right team members.
Develop Strengths
Developing strengths in your team members, students, and parents means you are committed to recognizing and supporting the best characteristics in every member of the school community. Communicating these strengths happens in many ways—with specific feedback during daily interactions, with reflections from observations and evaluations, by celebrating successes, and by providing ongoing professional development.
For example, I once observed a mathematics teacher during an Algebra II class as he showed a video clip on a fascinating study involving chaos theory. The video itself was not directly tied to learning standards for Algebra II, but it provided an excellent hook for connecting students’ learning to other applications beyond algebra. The teacher was helping students see how plotting numbers on a random sequence was actually not as random as expected. This use of hooking students with an interesting mathematics application was a strong instructional choice. I affirmed the choice by sharing a link of the video clip via email with all teachers along with an explanation of the teacher’s lesson. By highlighting the strengths you see in someone else, you affirm what he or she is doing well, and you can inspire others to think about how to keep developing their own strengths.
Interestingly, nowhere in the study do Gallup (2013) researchers find a positive correlation between focusing on weaknesses and increased productivity. In fact, the opposite seems true: when you focus on the strengths of others, not the weaknesses, you inspire them to improve.
Enhance Well-Being
Promoting the well-being of those in your school involves a comprehensive approach to relationship building. Your messaging in this regard should be personal as well as organizational. With students or teachers, provide eye-to-eye contact and consistent feedback on successes and struggles to build relationships and stay connected. In addition, the kind of structures you create for schedules, calendars, and job descriptions should influence the kind of culture and environment that encourages, not discourages, positive well-being.
Avoid Using Only Feel-Good Incentives
During Teacher Appreciation Week, educators often receive many wonderful gifts from the school, parents, and members of the community. But if doughnuts, flowers, and other gifts are the only feel-good incentives the school provides, it has missed the mark for encouraging strong team engagement. The Gallup (2013) study finds that engaged employees are more motivated than those who simply work for perks or incentives. In other words, just because you commit to treating others like you want to be treated doesn’t guarantee good performance. Schools are not for-profit institutions. And proponents of strategies like merit pay, for instance, often fail to understand the point of what makes a true incentive. The Gallup (2013) research asserts that engagement means giving people well-defined roles, helping them “make strong contributions,” staying “connected to their larger team and organization,” and “continuously progressing” (p. 28). In other words, people who understand the purpose of their work and find significant meaning in it derive motivation from it. Messaging cannot simply be built around feel-good moments. As important as those moments can be, you must also keep your communication centered on meaningful contributions and achievements—whether that is in individual conversations, group talks, or digital communication.
The Gallup (2013) report concludes with an amazing statistic:
When organizations successfully engage their customers and their employees, they experience a 240% boost in performance-related business outcomes compared with an organization with neither engaged employees nor engaged customers. (p. 55)
The next time you gaze at a full moon, remember you are seeing only the side that is visible. As school leaders, we cannot always show others the full perspective we have of our school, but it is still our responsibility to attempt to try to show others as much of that perspective as possible. Can you imagine what kind of experience students, teachers, staff, and parents could have if they were fully engaged with the vision, mission, and goals of your school? This kind of engagement is only possible when leaders commit to a comprehensive approach to leadership and communication. Messaging must involve words, images, and digital tools, but it can’t only include these things. Messaging must also enhance, celebrate, and support the strong practices of a school dedicated to achieving positive outcomes. Entire school communities can’t reach these outcomes together if members do not engage with the message.
Now It’s Your Turn
• When was the last time you reflected on the mission and vision of your school?
• What goals are you moving toward where you see positive momentum building? How can you encourage messaging around those achievements and goals?
• What steps are you taking to communicate high expectations?
• What steps can you take to increase your own engagement and that of your teachers and school community?
• Think about a classroom activity, student, or teacher who is modeling the main goals of your school. How can you share that story with your teachers, parents, and community?
Build a Foundation for Effective Communication
After spending eleven years in the classroom, nine years as an assistant principal, and four years as a high school principal, I have many varied experiences to reflect on when considering my career in education. When I think about my years teaching, I don’t have a lot of regret about my curriculum decisions, although I always had room for improvement. And I don’t feel regret for the duties or responsibilities I have managed in school administration, although I always have room for improvement there too. During reflection, any regret I feel almost always centers on times when differing perspectives caused conflict, misunderstanding, disagreement, or letdowns.
For example, when I was a classroom teacher, I once had a parent conference with a mother who told me that her son came home upset when I refused to give him credit for a test question he said he had marked correctly. When he brought the test to me, it appeared he had erased and rewritten the answer after I had passed back the test. I told him I couldn’t give him credit at that point because it was too late for me to know whether he had corrected it after I passed it back or I had marked it incorrectly. His mother expressed that my assumption that the student had practiced academic dishonesty was crushing for him; he had great respect for me, and it hurt him that I did not trust him.
Now when I reflect on the situation, I can see both sides. This mother was not aware of my experiences in the classroom of observing students attempting to hide notes under their desks during assessments, or others who tried to share copies of tests with classmates via their mobile phones. I had gone over the answers with students after passing back the test because it is good instructional practice. I was a young teacher, however, and didn’t think about asking students to put away their writing utensils while we reviewed their answers.
At the time, I’m sure I didn’t think about how to address the situation with the student without seeming dismissive. It was likely a twenty-second interaction with a student that frankly I never thought about afterward until the mother brought it up. She explained it to me very politely—not because she wanted her son’s points corrected but because she wanted me to know how much my opinion had mattered to him. When I think back to that situation now, twenty years later, I don’t regret that I made a judgment call with the best information I had at the time. But I do regret that I was unaware of how powerful a twenty-second interaction could be with a student. The good news is that I took the mother’s story to heart so that I became more mindful in my interactions with students. The bad news is that I may have made the same mistake a thousand times and not even noticed it.
What if we flip this