How Do We Collaborate When Tensions Are Running High?
How Do We Collaborate When Tensions Are Running High?
These are all great ideals for effective teamwork and highly desired. They are
the traits that every team building, empowerment, and collective-efficacy
article will cite about how to get things done and build a culture of unity.
But what do we do when we are in the middle of confrontation, as so many of
our school leaders are currently? Is seeking unity and collaboration worth the
energy and worth the risk? There is a genuine and justified apprehension from
many that collaboration is just too difficult or too risky when the attacks
are becoming more heated and more vitriolic.
A natural human reaction is to hunker down, not make waves, and keep a low
profile. This is understandable. Our school leaders have been through two
years of unprecedented change in both pedagogy and school management. They
have lived and experienced students, families, and staff suffering as they
have juggled muddling policy directives—or more often the absence of any
policy directives. They have somehow kept classes going, students learning,
and staff safe, only to be faced with growing unease and unrest at the school
board, PTA, or at community forums.
It would be understandable if they said that they—and their staff (and their
communities)—are too exhausted to undertake another round of rancor.
What do we do when we are swimming in a tide of confrontation?
This analogy may not work exactly, but the surfer—caught in a riptide—doesn’t
fight against it, but instead lets themselves move along with it until it
weakens. They don’t confront the rip, they don’t face it head on. Knowing when
and how to use our energy may be as important in addressing confrontation.
It’s not just what we say and do but also when and how we say it.
And the needed and opposing question to be asked must be: What do we lose by
not engaging with those who are clearly concerned and passionate? Do we
alienate ourselves or those in our community by not seeking collaboration? And
do we unwittingly curtail the chance of meaningful change and meaningful
understanding of an issue by seeking a collective response?
These times are not easy, and they probably require more thought and
deliberation into what we have done naturally for a while. Collaboration was a
clear function when things were good. It is probably a more necessary endeavor
now that things are stressed.
So how do we establish and grow collaboration in the midst of confrontation? I
asked several education and transformational-change leaders for their
perspectives: Lacee Jacobs, head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at BTS
Spark; Cindy Rogan, a leadership coach and former superintendent; and Chaunté
Garrett, a current superintendent in Rocky Mount, N.C. Their responses have
been arranged by their key themes.
Cindy Rogan: It’s the art of leadership! I see it as a dance with moves that
include courage, compassion, and curiosity. Courage to be willing to take that
risk of leaning into deep listening before jumping too quickly into your
response or problem-solving mode. It can be challenging when you’re feeling
defensive, tired, or simply caught up in the emotion of the moment.
Compassion
Lacee Jacobs: How can we be compassionate enough to understand we are all a
work in progress? Creating a safe space to dissent, make mistakes, and
contribute ideas without fear is where true collaboration and commitment
begins.
Cindy Rogan: Compassion for the other person/people in this dance is key. What
are they thinking or feeling that’s causing these strong emotions? What
beliefs or values are coming up for them? Where might you find a glimmer of
common ground or alignment?
Curiosity
Lacee Jacobs: Curiosity starts when we forget what we think we know about
people and meet them where they are in the moment. Dropping our agendas and
showing genuine interest in others’ experiences by asking questions we don’t
know the answers to fosters psychological safety and promotes collaboration.
Cindy Rogan: Curiosity is key as you listen with your head and heart. Asking
questions to draw out those beliefs, their “why” that is causing this
confrontation. By balancing your courage, compassion, and curiosity, you might
find you are in a more steady state to have a more collaborative dialogue.
Lacee Jacobs: Growing our quotient for discomfort is one of the best ways to
become an adaptive leader who is prepared to face the challenges of today.
This will build our strength to collaborate and allow us to recognize there is
more than one worldview we need to consider.
Chaunté Garrett: As a leader, you may need to decide I’m not the person to
lead this. I may meet to be a listener in this conversation and I’ll be a
learner in this conversation.
Lacee Jacobs: Collaboration is not about getting others to see our point of
view. Collaboration is an opportunity for us to shift our own mindset and
prioritize our relationships over being right.
Chaunté Garrett: By seeking other voices and collaboration, ownership doesn’t
just fall on the person who may be wearing the hat or the title. The ownership
falls on the community to help the community become better and stronger.
Collaboration is more than cooperation. It is more than going along with
something that you may not agree with or something you may not have had a say
in deciding. We’ve all been “volun-told,” and merely cooperating is the next
step on that same continuum—we agree to go along, but it hasn’t been anything
we necessarily agree with nor see or value as our own. The “co” part of the
word has more to do with being co-opted or co-erced to be part of something,
and our co-operation has more to do with us showing that we are cooperative
rather than having any investment in the outcome.
For it to rise above cooperation, we must have taken part in the development
of the action or desired solution, from its conception, as a group, with joint
ownership and common-owned desire for success.
But collaboration is less than abdication. It is not submitting yourself and
your beliefs to the viewpoints of others. For anything to be truly
collaborative, it must be owned by the team or the group. Submission to others
does not result in ownership, and, in fact, it will do the opposite and
relegate the solution to being someone else’s responsibility.
Collaboration requires others, and often, others bring dissenting voices. One
cannot collaborate with oneself, and to exclude others from the process may
set whatever you are doing on a path toward irrelevance.
Be curious, show compassion, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You may
not change mindsets immediately, but you are creating space for voices and
establishing environments that are more likely to include rather than exclude,
empower rather than disengage, bring communities together rather than push
them apart.
4 Protocols That Can Shift Your Teacher-Leadership Meetings From Drab to Fab
School principals and district-level leaders often have difficulty finding the
balance between completing management tasks and engaging in
instructional-leadership practices. However, one place where leaders can hone
their instructional-leadership skills are within the very meetings that have
already been established in their schools or districts. Unfortunately, taking
a meeting from a place where adults are talked at and switching it to a place
where adults learn from one another requires a shift in mindset.
In the work I do focusing on de-implementation, which is the abandonment of
low-value practices (van Bodegom-Vos L. et al. 2017), I often poll
participants in the audience to ask what they would most likely agree to
de-implement within their own practices. Meetings are one of the top answers.
I’m not debating that teachers and leaders may meet too many times. That is
for them to decide. However, I do believe that meetings could be a wonderful
opportunity for leaders and teachers to engage in learning together. And that
could simultaneously help leaders develop the credibility that seems so
elusive when it comes to instructional leadership, as well as provide a venue
where the voices and ideas of teachers can be elevated.
This is where protocols enter the equation.
If leaders truly care about the well-being of their staff and are also looking
for ways to support their staffs’ ideas, then they must be willing to engage
in meetings that focus on learning. They must also give educators the
opportunity to process the information they glean at those meetings, which
could now be referred to as professional learning and development.
4 Protocols to Consider for Your Next Meeting
Lately, I have had countless conversations with leaders and teachers who say
they don’t feel supported. The issue is that they have a common language
around the word “support,” but they don’t have a common understanding of what
support means. It’s almost as if lack of support is a go-to comment, but no
one takes the time to enter into a conversation to define the word. Protocols
can help alleviate this issue.
My friend Jenni Donohoo is an expert at using protocols, and I have learned a
lot from her over the years. Two of the protocols I am highlighting here are
practices that we have used together in some of our joint work, and she has
influenced me to use protocols much more often.
I have been using the first two protocols over the last few years both for
in-person work and my online courses. As with any blog post that I write in
which I focus on a specific number of books, strategies, etc., I know there
are many other options I could have highlighted. If you are interested in
sharing your go-to protocols, please feel free to do it on social media along
with this blog.
1. Success Criteria – Although developing success criteria is a valuable
strategy for teachers to use with students when it comes to highlighting what
students will learn during a lesson, I find that it is also a great protocol
to use with an audience of educators.
In the workshops, coaching sessions, or keynotes that I facilitate, I use
Mentimeter (learn more about it here) to ask the audience what they want to
learn while they are working with me. Believe it or not, I often find there
are educators in the audience who have been “voluntold” to be there and really
haven’t a clue what they will actually be learning. My goal as a facilitator
is to make sure I connect to the educators in the room as much as possible.
Success criteria help me meet that goal.
How it works: After providing the audience of educators with my success
criteria for the session, I then ask them to take a few minutes to provide
some specific learning they would like to engage in during our time together.
They have a code through Mentimeter and can input their success criteria that
everyone in the room can see on the Mentimeter screen. Here is a YouTube video
I created focusing on the topic of developing success criteria.
2. SWOT – When running professional learning and development, I see part of my
role as facilitating conversations among teams that often go unsaid back at
their schools or districts. If partners or teams want to authentically
collaborate with one another, then they need to challenge each other’s
thinking and engage in some difficult conversations.
SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats,
and the protocol allows educators and their leaders the opportunity to have
those difficult conversations, because it gives everyone the opportunity to
talk about positive issues and negatives ones. Of course, it’s up to the
facilitator to set the condition of psychological safety so the people in the
room feel comfortable having those conversations.
How it works: Typically, I provide the audience with the image below. They are
given 20-30 minutes to focus their SWOT discussion on whatever the focus of
the day may be while they are in the professional learning session. For my
work, it’s usually a SWOT analysis on instructional leadership, developing
collective leader efficacy, or beginning the de-implementation process.
As a facilitator, I believe it’s important for the audience to have time to
connect the content to work that they are already doing or ask me questions
that they still have about the content. When it comes to interesting, it gives
me the opportunity to see what parts of the learning is resonating for them
the most. And of course, the Q for question provides us with the opportunity
to explore some questions they have where the work is concerned.
4. Realm of Concern – Too often when educators come to professional learning
and development, they do not always see what they have influence over back at
school. What we know is that when educators and leaders do not see what they
have influence over, it can lead to a lack of agency and motivation.
Considering our present teacher shortage, and those who are leaving the
profession in droves, we should all do what we can to make sure educators
leave our professional learning sessions feeling motivated and empowered. This
is where the Realm of Concern protocol comes in, which is another that I
learned from Donohoo.
How it works: Using the image below, I make sure that all of the educators in
the room have access to Post-it notes, chart paper, and markers. Educators
need to write each area of concern they hold on individual Post-it notes. Each
participant can do this individually or if they come as a team, they can
decide together which concerns should be written on the notes.
