Teaching as a Spiritual Endeavor

I’ve been thinking lately about how work in general, but especially teaching, is a spiritual endeavor. Not spiritual in a religious sense but in the context of satisfying the human desire to connect to something larger than ourselves, to live lives that mean something, and to do work that reflects our dreams, values and beliefs.

No doubt, that for some, work is just that, ‘work’. It’s simply a way to make living and pay the bills. But for many of us who spend the most productive part of our day and the most productive part of our lives at work, our profession is a crucible in which ‘who we are’ and ‘what we believe in’ is made public and tested. It’s through our work that we encounter challenges that bring us to the frontiers of our knowledge, experience, values and beliefs. It’s in the workplace that we face a variety of difficult choices and must take action, or refrain from it, having only our own ‘soma’, (mind, body, and spirit) to guide us. It’s in this unfamiliar place, in the midst of an unfamiliar crisis or challenge, an unscripted moment of truth, and left without a roadmap, that we find out who we really are, not who we think we are. Spiritual, no?

If we’re open to viewing work both  as a professional and spiritual experience we can use it as a mirror that reflects back to us what the external world, in our case our students, experience when they interact with us. They reflect back to us our best qualities and our gifts, as well as the places where we don’t quite live up to our own values and beliefs.

An example that’s seared into my memory from the early part of my own career is an incident with Kelly, a quiet and earnest young seventh grader. I had corrected 125 essays over the weekend and after handing them back to my students was stopping at each desk to point out an item or two that I thought stood out in their essay. I arrived at Kelly’s desk and quickly began pointing out her tendency to write in sentence fragments and run-ons. My finger was on her paper pointing to one of her errors when suddenly a teardrop splattered on the page near my finger smearing the blue ink. Before I realized what was going on another fell, and then another. I stood up and though Kelly’s head was down her entire body was heaving in silent sobs.

It struck me like a thunderbolt that Kelly had written about the death of her pet dog. Obviously it was very emotional for her and yet I hadn’t stopped to acknowledge it. I was too concerned with my own agenda and my own focus on sentence mechanics to even give her a pat on the back. Any show of humanity or connection would have done the trick, but I was rushing. I wasn’t thinking of her as a real human being with real feelings, but simply dealing with her role...student. I use this example because I had a belief at the time that every student had a unique gift within them, and that every child had great value and should be treated that way. It was crystal clear to me that there was a huge gulf between what I believed and how I had been acting. Kelly’s tears mirrored back to me my own hypocrisy.

Yes, this was certainly a professional issue, but it was also a spiritual one. I vowed never to have something like this happen again. But how would I go about opening my heart in such a way that I would begin seeing my students as people, not just extras in the movie of my life? How would I learn to slow down, be present in the moment, and stay connected to my values and beliefs? The answers to these questions lay in my spiritual growth not in any textbook.

Over the years, as my new narrative, “work as a spiritual endeavor”, took hold within me; I profited professionally as well as personally. The better person I became, the better teacher I became…and it worked the other way too…the better teacher, the better person.

So, it may be that our definition of what it is to be a professional is in need of a major upgrade and that professional development and personal development are often two sides of the same coin. We can try to compartmentalize our ‘real self’ from our ‘teaching self’, but the truth is we have only one self. It can’t help but show up in our teaching.

If we’re open to it our students can be important partners in our personal and professional growth, and since we teach who we are, they also reap the benefits of our inner journey. It seems like heresy to say it, but the teaching profession is a great place to perfect our spirit.

Pete

Transformative Change

“For public education to benefit from the rapidly evolving development of information and communication technology, leaders at every level–school, district, and state–must not only supervise, but provide informed, creative, and ultimately transformative leadership for systemic change.”
– From the National Educational Technology Plan

There are several elements involved in transformative and systemic change. First, there is the content of the change message; second, is the condition of the audience who will be receiving the message; and third, is the the condition of the person who will be delivering the message and leading the change.

For the purpose of today’s post, let’s pretend we all agree on the content of the message. We believe that technology can be a catalyst to transform teaching and learning so that students are more active and engaged in their learning. Now, let’s explore the environment into which this message, or any message of change, is being delivered.

The Environment- We all know that a school building culture can be complex environment and like any organization one description of the culture does not fit all. However, it is clear that some buildings, over the years, have devolved into an ‘us and them’ atmosphere. The ‘us’ being the teaching staff and the ‘them’ being the administration. In these situations there is a feeling that administrators are nothing but political animals who want to look good; but don’t understand or truly care about how difficult the teacher’s job is, nor are they fully supportive of the staff. There is little trust.

or

The building may be experiencing destructive levels of triangulation on a daily basis. The Principal holds a faculty meeting, or the technology committee or the curriculum committee holds a meeting and the staff participates; but as soon as the meeting breaks, there are people in the hallways or lavatories complaining about the Principal, the presenter, the committee chair, other members of the team, or the entire committee process. Rather than raising these issues in public where they can be discussed and remedied, they are relegated to private conversations. When people aren’t being candid with one another it erodes trust.

or

The teachers are open to the leader’s message; but they are overwhelmed. There are multiple initiatives going on and many committees meeting. The teachers feel like they cannot take on another thing. They don’t have the time or the intellectual shelf-space for another ‘high priority item’.

or

There may be a few staff members who are not meeting the teaching profession’s basic standards. In some cases these folks have been ignored and tolerated for years because engaging them will take an enormous amount of effort and has the potential to generate lots of political controversy.

or

The pedagogy in many classrooms within the building, especially secondary classrooms, is fairly traditional: teachers have the answers, they follow the curriculum, they talk a lot, while students listen and then take written tests. Also in the realm of pedagogy and transformation falls the ‘personality driven classroom’, where teachers who like to exert control or be the center of attraction find that the personality traits that have made them so successful, do not serve them as well in a more creative, project-based, student-centered classroom.

The point here is that bringing a visionary technology message, or systemic change initiative into these building cultures will be exponentially more difficult than bringing the same message into a building with a healthy, trusting, culture that has shared values and a shared vision.

“When you want to foster more responsible behavior in people, you can’t just legislate more rules and regulations,” says Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, and the author of the book “How.”  “You have to enlist and inspire people in a set of values. People need to be governed both from the outside, through compliance with rules, and from the  inside, inspired by shared values.”

Tthere are many elements of existing building cultures that need to be addressed before we can move ahead with transformative technology initiatives. Think of it as tilling the field before planting a new seed. We need to deal with existing building cultures so that our staffs are open to creating a new shared vision and implementing it.

The Leader – Last, but not least, there is the messenger; the leader. How prepared is the building administrator to lead systemic and transformative change? No doubt a challenge like shifting a building culture and introducing systemic change will be the challenge of a lifetime. Have we trained for this? or are we stepping up to the starting line of a marathon without having done any roadwork ahead of time?

If the building leader is like most of us, he learned on his own, and through his studies as part of his graduate certification program. There were courses in School Administration, School Law, Business Administration, Personnel Management, Supervision of Instruction, and School-Community Relations.  He read, he attended class, he discussed, he wrote, and occasionally he presented; but little of his certification work had to do with leading transformative and systemic change.

Take just one of the scenarios above…If there is even one staff member who everyone in the building knows is not doing their job and the leader ignores them and lets them continue with business as usual, how much credibility will he have when he lays out his vision for the future? The staff will look at him and say to themselves, ‘Sure, he says he wants to make this school ‘world class’, ‘the best it can be’; but he turns his eyes away from the people who aren’t doing their jobs because it’s too much work to confront them. It’s too politically risky. Why should we stick our necks out if he won’t?” They’re right. In order to build trust with the staff the leader has to walk his own talk.

I am not trying to discourage us from moving forward. I have designed my life to help lead the effort; but if  we are serious about transforming teaching and learning, we need to get serious about identifying the enormous challenges we face; and once we have done so, we need to take some serious steps to prepare ourselves, as leaders, to meet them.

It’s my belief that we’ll never get there if we continue to prepare our leaders in same manner as we have in the past. As the National Educational Technology says…”leaders at every level–school, district, and state–must not only supervise, but provide informed, creative, and ultimately transformative leadership for systemic change.”

Where will these leaders come from?

pete

Dysfunction

Definition: ” a consequence of a social practice or behavior pattern that undermines the stability of a social system.”

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Dysfunction?

• When it’s normal to attend meetings and pretend to go along with the flow and then leave the meeting and complain about it… and undermine the decisions that were made…it’s dysfunction.

• When it becomes commonplace to pretend to trust each other and at the same time secretly solicit information and opinions from others because of a lack of trust… dysfunction.

• When people who work for us, or around us, are not competent but we ignore it because they are ‘nice’ people…dysfunction.

• When the administration and staff are okay with stapling new cover pages on old technology plans to meet compliance deadlines…dysfunction.

• When we have standards and norms and they are routinely ignored…dysfunction.

• When we write a beautiful mission statement and we all know, collectively, that there is a ‘snowballs chance in Hell’ that it will ever be achieved and most likely will be forgotten after being written …dysfunction.

• When it is part of the culture to expect people to talk about each other critically and secretly…dysfunction.

• When it is normal for the school culture to be cynical, critical, and dismissive of new ideas, vision, and change…dysfunction.

• When people commit to things and then don’t keep their commitments and it’s okay with everyone…dysfunction.

• When the staff feels they’re just mushrooms growing in the dark! Dysfunction.

• When we can’t talk about our team and our possibilities because in our school culture we look at the world ‘us and them’…dysfunction.

• When it’s common in our school to turn our backs and say, “Not my job!” Dysfunction.

People are people and from time to time we might behave poorly, it’s part of being human. We aren’t proud of our slip up; and we make up our minds to do better next time; and most of us do

What is most troubling is when we allow these things to become so common they seem normal. They become part of the culture. We don’t expect better. It’s just the way things are. We accept it. We live with it.

It may be that some of these behaviors have become normal in our situation; but they come at a price: lot’s of drama, lot’s of distrust, anger, and frustration.

We know better. We can do better.

It takes courage to confront the dysfunctions of a school culture. It starts with stepping forward to say that we can do better, that we should hold ourselves to higher standards. It takes a commitment to create those standards as a team, and monitor how well we live up to them.

In order to transform teaching and learning, we need to deal with the cultures which exist in our schools, otherwise, change will be a long time coming.

pete

The Sword

Not long ago I received an e-mail from an old friend,

“Pete, our administrative team is a mess. We have a new superintendent who is being undercut by one of the principals, who just happens to be head of the administrators’ bargaining association, and is also personal friends with the Board president. We need your help.”

I connected with my old friend for lunch and heard the whole story in great detail. Eventually, after a few meetings with the superintendent, he invited me to work with his team.

I found the team to be very complimentary to each other. They had an extremely high opinion of themselves and they presented a unified façade that said “everything is okay here”. There wasn’t a lot for me to work with, so I set up private meetings each of them.

In these private meetings, the administrators started to open up. It turned out that everyone knew that this principal was undercutting the Superintendent. He had applied for the Superintendent’s job and been passed over. Many of the young administrators expressed fear of this principal who had been in the district for more than 30 years and had a ‘back door’ to the Board of Education. When pressed, they admitted that there was little trust on their team because of the way this principal wielded his power; in secret, rewarding those he liked, and stealthily undermining those he didn’t.

It was clear to me that the behavior of this individual was at the root of the team’s dysfunction. There was no trust. If the superintendent wanted to lead an initiative that this individual didn’t like, he would quietly sabotage it with other administrators, parents, and, of course, the Board President.

I met with the Superintendent and shared with him what I had found in my individual interviews. As I thought, the Superintendent was not surprised. He knew this was going on. He had chosen to ignore it. My suggestion was to remove this person from the team. The individual was of retirement age and maybe we could entice him to leave with “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” The Superintendent wanted to take some time to think about it.

A month later he still had not made up his mind. Later still, he declared that he thought the individual had “turned a corner” and was no longer undermining him or sowing the seeds of distrust with the team. He had made up his mind that it was better to do nothing than to face the problem and take action to fix it.

Many leaders take this route. They have a difficult choice to make and eventually they choose not to act. It’s so easy to live with that status quo, even if it is not ideal. It’s so easy to convince ourselves that things, or people are changing. It’s what we want to believe. It colors our thinking to the point where we ignore reality and find ourselves living in hope.

I’m sure the Superintendent in this story felt, that had he acted, there is no telling the hornet’s nest he might have riled up. The person he was trying to get to retire might have taken it as an insult, he might have stirred up the Board and parents against him. On the other hand, it was imperative that the Superintendent do something to rescue his team and himself from this unacceptable situation. Imagine trying to captain a boat with one of the crew stealthily poking holes in the hull.

So, the new Superintendent decided to live with things as they were. He decided to keep his ‘sword’ sheathed.

When I checked in recently I wasn’t surprised to hear that the Superintendent was not finishing his contract. He was “retiring”. What happened to his old nemesis, the administrator that few trusted?

He was the new Superintendent.

My friend who had sent me the original e-mail of distress let me know that many of the youngest and most promising administrators had “jumped ship”. They were taking jobs in other districts.

Sometimes we need to un-sheath our swords and take decisive action for ourselves, our teams, and most importantly…

…for the kids we serve.

pete

The Three ‘R’s

I recently listened to WIllard Daggett, Ph.D., founder and President of the International Center for Leadership in Education talk about the three ‘R”s.

What are the three ‘R’s’?

According to Daggett: Relationships, Relevance, and Rigor.

Daggett was referring to teachers working with students in the classroom; but I think there is something useful that we can take from this as educational leaders.

Daggett’s point about relationships was that learning is personal. When teachers have strong, trusting relationships with their students, they work harder and achieve more. The same is true with leaders. We may have lot’s of ideas about what needs to be done; but without trusting relationships with those we wish to lead, we will find ourselves charging up San Juan Hill alone. It’s so common and so human to get excited about the Rigor (this could be technology, new classroom pedagogy, etc.) that we forget to build strong foundational relationships before setting off on our journey.

Once there is trust we can move to Relevance. The more students understand how what they are learning is relevant to them, to their community, or to the world at large; the more motivated they will be to learn.

As leaders it is important to create change narratives that address Relevance. The most powerful narratives address Relevance in two ways: 1) How is this new action or way of doing things going to affect YOU, as an individual? and 2) How is this new action or way of doing things going to affect the world outside yourself?

Leaders who can create narratives that express the ways change will take care of the stakeholder’s personal concerns, and at the same time explain how the change will be making the classroom, school, or world a better place; have set the scene for great things to happen

I’ve known people with great ideas (rigor) that never get implemented because they have lousy relationships or have overlooked relationships with people that are important to their success. I’ve known people who can’t articulate their vision in a way that makes it seem relevant to those they wish to lead. I’ve seen people who focus on nothing but relationships. They are glib, backslapping, political types who want to be liked. They have the relationships but don’t use them to accomplish a larger goal.

Like most things in life it comes down to balance.

Relationships and relevance make rigor possible.

pete