Messaging Matters. William D. Parker
the Three Cs
There are some mindsets you can cultivate with the teachers and other staff members at your school so that you are paddling together throughout the school year. Each one plays a significant role in how well everyone steers in the same direction—not just on the first day of school but all year long.
Encourage a Cooperative Culture
Your messaging should encourage team members to embrace norms and shared practices that create a supportive learning culture in which teachers feel safe to teach and continue to learn. You model culture by the way you behave. When you greet teachers with phrases like, “Hi. How can I help you today?” or when you stop and give someone a moment of undivided attention, you create an environment where he or she feels safe to learn and teach. Nothing damages a school culture more than a climate in which teachers feel unsure, unsafe, or unproductive.
Your messaging must help teachers feel confident, safe, and productive. The first place this happens for many teachers is during the interview process. Interviewing is the perfect time to communicate the values, outcomes, and priorities you expect and provide. Another ripe moment for messaging is in your very first faculty meeting of the year. Just like a classroom teacher needs to immediately engage students, school leaders need to engage teachers in the expectations, procedures, and processes everyone shares to encourage a positive school environment. Then throughout the year, re-emphasize this expectation of cooperation in conversations, emails, professional development, or faculty meetings. Make sure faculty handbooks include common expectations. Each faculty meeting, highlight best practices you are seeing among teachers. Acknowledge and talk about successes happening in classrooms. And then support teachers by expecting and maintaining a schoolwide environment that is safe and conducive to learning.
I remember working with one talented young teacher who was feeling overwhelmed with his responsibilities and requested a meeting. He brought with him a list of almost a dozen items he wanted to discuss. I responded to each item by reassuring him that the solution would be one that had his best interest and the best interest of his students in mind. I reminded him that teaching is hard but it is also rewarding. We navigated through his concerns, talking for almost an hour. When the meeting ended, he crumpled up his notes and threw them in my trash can.
“Thanks,” he said. “I can’t believe how much better I feel just having time to talk.”
Talking for an hour was a big commitment for both of us after a busy day of school, but that one hour of conversation provided weeks of relief from the stress and anxiety he had been facing.
Promote Collaboration
Professionals cannot grow their skills in strategy or procedure without collaborating. Your school might invest time in becoming a professional learning community (PLC; DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016), discuss how to target students in need of intervention, or organize data or test results as a team, so team meetings may be mandatory. Regardless if this is the case or not, collaboration must be meaningful. As a leader, you should encourage a culture of collaboration among the teachers in your school by embedding collaborative practices into the processes and procedures of your school. Some leaders create schedules that include additional or encore periods for teaming while others set up master schedules so that teachers can communicate as a team around common plans. Just as you celebrate student learning, be sure your messaging includes reminders for and celebrations of teacher collaboration.
One year as we were encouraging stronger collaboration among our teachers, I decided to show a TED Talk by Margaret Heffernan (2015), a businesswoman and consultant, who uses research by William Muir to inform others about what truly makes some groups more productive than others. Muir studied the productivity of laying hens by taking the most productive layers away from an existing flock and creating a “super flock” over six generations. Muir allowed another set of laying hens to proceed six generations without interference. He was interested in learning whether his super flock would outperform the normal, everyday laying hen.
At the end of Muir’s research, the results surprised him. The normal laying hens were far more productive than the super chickens. Why? The chickens in the normal group functioned interdependently while chickens in the super group identified the other super chickens as threats and pecked one another almost to extinction; in fact, only a handful of super chickens remained. Heffernan uses the research to point to some false assumptions we often make about groupings. So often we believe that if you group the most talented, smartest, and gifted individuals together, you will inevitably have more productivity. The truth, however, is that productivity is tied to elements so much greater than intelligence or giftedness. Heffernan (2015), after studying productivity in teams, finds three characteristics that make up truly productive teams (the kinds of teams where people are supportive, challenging, and collaborative). She states:
First of all, they [productive teams] showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. This is measured by something called the “reading the mind in the eyes test.” It’s broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better. Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. (Heffernan, 2015)
Heffernan’s important discoveries help communicate to teachers how important it is to keep growing collaboration skills. Here are some other ideas to cultivate better collaborative conversations at your school.
■ Build in time for teachers to collaborate around common subject areas.
■ Encourage teachers to collaborate around essential learning standards, outcomes, goals, and interventions.
■ Encourage and support teachers who want to attend inspiring and educational workshops and conferences.
■ Start a book club for staff members to discuss literature with a shared interest. For example, a principal friend of mine hosted a book study with his teachers to discuss Dave Burgess’s book Teach Like a Pirate as a way to encourage conversations about strong instructional practices.
■ Make it possible for new teachers to spend a day observing veteran teachers by hiring substitutes to cover classes.
Finally, you cannot expect collaboration unless you are a part of team meetings with teachers. In my building, we create data teams for teachers to track student essential learning skills. When I sit down with these teams, my main goal is to make sure that I understand how their students are learning. My secondary goal is to help teams demonstrate understanding of processes, clarify misunderstandings, or guide next steps. Being a part of these discussions means I am not just expecting but also modeling collaboration.
Strengthen Communication
Everyone loves good customer service; consider for a moment what it means to you. You probably think of a consistent, fair, friendly, and helpful environment. Everything about the company communicates this level of service. Now consider teachers as the customers. As a school leader, what could you do to communicate your intention to provide good customer service to your teachers?
■ Be visible throughout your building. If you want teachers greeting students, you should model the behavior.
■ Invite teachers to join you for conversations. Invite department or teacher leaders to meet with you before your next faculty meeting so you have their perspectives while building the upcoming meeting agenda.
■ Be friendly and helpful in your communications.
■ Respond to questions and concerns in a timely manner.
■ Provide reassurance even when you have to say no to requests you can’t satisfy.
■ Provide regular updates on important issues. These updates can be emails with quick summaries of the week in review, upcoming events, and important reminders. This way, teachers don’t have to wait until faculty meetings for consistent, helpful reminders on overall school procedures, expectations, and happenings.
■ Maintain an office environment that reflects the kind of classroom environment you expect. Obviously, the two settings