Creating Stories that Impact Culture

“Humans are hardwired to remember and act on the basis of a story.”

-Deal & Peterson, Shaping School Culture (2009)

Our culture is based on the art of storytelling.  It permeates everything that we do from, arts and entertainment, to stories of past successes, family memories, and speaking engagements.  These are just a few of the ways that stories impact all of our lives on a daily basis.

In their seminal work on the impact of building positive culture in schools (Shaping School Culture: Pitfalls, Paradoxes, and Promises, 2009), Terrence E. Deal and Kent D. Peterson, guide the reader through research and examples on the importance of culture and climate in education.  In this book, they speak about the impact storytelling can have on the understanding of the history and future endeavors of a school.  Deal and Peterson state that through telling and retelling, these “little stories” carry values, convey morals, describe solutions to dilemmas, and shape the patchwork of a culture.  In reading this statement, it made me reflect on the story of my school and what we have done, and what we can do, to keep stories “positive and long-lasting.”  

If stories are indeed the patchwork of a culture than I must do everything we can to leave positive memories.  The building-block of leaving and creating positive stories is to ensure that I have a full understanding of my values and mission in both life and education.  Through the work in my educational leadership courses, I created a document called a “Focus Circle.”  This circle contains the values that anchor my thoughts and actions.  At the epicenter of my circle is the word students.   This word helps to remind me that everything I do can have a positive or negative impact on the life of a child.  Creating the focus circle brought my values to fruition and helped to deter and negative elements that might extirpate my “Focus Circle.”  If stories are the foundation for building culture and climate, than values and mission statements are the anchor for stories.  Creating a “Focus Circle,” is a great way for colleagues to build self-awareness that ultimately creates positive stories.

With a better understanding of myself, I will have an easier time building positive relationships and trust with my colleagues.  But, I cannot look forward to the future without remembering my teaching history.  As a teacher out of college, I felt overwhelmed and under prepared. I began my teaching career at a time when education was starting to realize a paradigm shift in the way we instruct, assess, and collaborate.  I was lucky, in that I had great leadership that challenged and questioned my actions and abilities to become the teacher I wanted to become.  Through these years I began to read professional works, join committees, and serve in more leadership roles.  Anthony Muhammad (2009), refers to people like me, starting educational careers as, “tweeners.”  I had the chance to either go a more negative route towards those that held those roles, or join the “priests and priestesses.” (Deal and Peterson, 2009). The priests and priestesses are those people in the school doing everything they can do promote a positive culture and mission of the school.  In reflecting upon my story, I believe I chose the positive path.  While there were times that I would become negative, I think that overall, I was able to bring myself back to a positive role.  For example, there were times when curriculum change was implemented that did not necessarily agree with.  Over time, and with help from “priests and priestesses,” I embraced the change and grew professionally from the experience.

Culture is the most important element when improving in our professional careers.  This element permeates the entirety of an organization and the possibilities for success.  At my current school we have developed shared expectations for students and staff, we have instructional elements that hold us accountable to improving student learning, and professional learning communities that focus on student achievement.  We have new leadership that has embraced these areas of culture and has already worked to enhance these areas of our climate and culture.  My role will be to commit to creating positive stories with teachers to help develop and maintain a lasting culture.  Since I will be working directly with teachers, and not students, I have the unique opportunity to enhance this element of successful schools.  

To conclude, culture is the anchor for everything in our lives.  Especially in the realm of education, culture and climate permeates every element of what Robert Marzano (2014) calls a “High Reliability School.”  In order to build culture staff must first know themselves.  They can do this by creating a “Focus Circle” of values, developing, a mission statement, and understanding how their personality can affect others.  Once self-awareness has been fulfilled, we can understand our role in building a positive culture.  At that point, staff can develop “stories” that will add to the patchwork of culture, and leave a positive and lasting history with the school.  If humans are hardwired to remember and act on the basis of a story, it is our charge to create as many positive stories as we can to improve the lives of our students.

Deal, T. & Peterson, K.  (2009).  Shaping School Culture:  Pitfalls, Paradoxes, and Promises             

San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.

Marzano, R. & Warrick, P. & Simms, J.  (2014).  A Handbook for High Reliability Schools: The

Next Step in School Reform.  Bloomington: Solution Tree.

Muhammad, A.  (2009).  Transforming School Culture:  How to Overcome Staff Division

Bloomington:  Solution Tree.  

Using Video to Dramatically Improve Instruction

I recently read a book entitled Focus on Teaching, by Jim Knight.  This book emphasizes the impact that video can have on instruction.  Teaching requires complex tasks and skills that can often be missed when simply conducting an observation, therefore, video allows the teacher, coach, or evaluator to identify specific elements of these complex tasks.  This is similar to how athletes have been using video to improve performance in complex tasks or skills.  For example, in football, when a quarterback is watching film of a certain play, there are many things to observe; therefore, the quarterback will focus on one or two elements of that play.  The focus might hone in on his drop back steps, or identifying a possible blitz and ensuring the correct audible is called.  Athletes have been using video to improve performance for decades, but why has this practice not been embraced by the educational community?
In his book, Focus on Teaching, Jim Knight poses the question, "What is the difference between watching yourself playing a sport and watching yourself teaching?"  He states that the answer is likely the complexity of the work.  "When we get feedback on technical skills, such as how to position ourselves while playing a sport, we are less inclined to take the feedback personally.  However when we get feedback on more complex or artful practices, we are more inclined to be defensive about what we hear...Talking about messy problems usually is messy."  His thoughts speak to why educators are more reserved in using video to impact instruction.  However, there are some things that we can do in education to help teachers use this powerful learning tool.
In researching the benefits of video in education, Jim Knight received frequent comments in interviews conducted for his book, Focus on Teaching (2014), teachers first need to have an atmosphere of trust.  Most often, video will be viewed with an instructional coach, administrator, or video learning team.  When viewing complex tasks within a lesson, teachers should have an established trust with others that are viewing the film.  Without trust, teachers will be more reluctant to experience professional learning through video.  Knight provides the following guidelines that will help coaches, administrators, and video learning teams increase the level of trust:
1.) Make participation a choice
-By forcing teachers to participate in the video learning process, may in turn have a negative impact on instruction, climate, and culture.
-All teachers have to engage in professional learning, but there should be choices in how they can participate.  Whether through book studies, observations, or video, choice provides autonomy in how teachers choose to learn.
2.) Focus on Intrinsic Motivation and Safety
-Jim Knight states that for video to be an effective tools, therefore, it must support and enhance teachers' intrinsic motivation to change." (Focus on Teaching, 2014)
-Recent studies have shown that when curiosity increases, it connects with neurons to improve retention of learning.  In this case, growth is not any different with students than it is with their educators.  Teachers must connect and be curious about their own professional growth, otherwise there will not be a desire to learn.
3.)  Establish Boundaries
-The property of the video is placed on the person that is being recorded.  Therefore boundaries should be created that allow the person being recorded to feel safe, knowing that they can share at their own desire.
4.)  Walk the Talk 
Simply stated...leaders should be willing to watch video of themselves before they expect it of others.
5.) Go Slow to Go Fast
Start with a few willing teachers, and then grow the learning as excitement builds.

These guidelines will help teams establish trust; the anchor of video learning development.  An interesting aspect of video research shows that it can actually increase trust.  While it may take trust to begin the video process, in the end, it is shown to increase trust.  This could potentially have a dramatic impact on climate, culture, and learning in a school building.  A potential cornucopia of benefits could impact instruction.  I strongly believe that video is the key to unlocking student and teacher potential.
The final piece of video learning development is to collaborate in teams.  As trust has been established and increased through video, a team can then be formed to collaborate and help each other improve upon best practices using video.  For more information on Video Learning Teams, I highly recommend Jim Knight's Focus on Teaching.

In Summary:
1.) Video allows the teacher, coach, or evaluator to identify specific elements of these complex tasks in teaching.
2.) Talking about messy problems is messy, but video can help identify specific elements of instruction.
3.) Establish trust before implementing video learning as a choice.
4.) The following items are guidelines for increasing the level of trust: make participation a choice, focus on intrinsic motivation and safety, establish boundaries, walk the talk, and go slow to go fast.
5.) Video can increase trust.

Knight, J.  (2014).  Focus on Teaching: Using Video for High-Impact Instruction.  Thousand Oaks:                 Corwin, A SAGE Company

Teaching to the Whole-Child

In preparation for the beginning of the school year, I thought I would write about teaching to the whole-child.  As standards have been prioritized and articulated, proficiency scales created, and planning templates established, it is just as important to think of how a teacher can develop immediate relationships with their students.  I recently had the privilege of attending a workshop presented by Clayton R. Cook PhD, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, on the topic of using the whole-child perspective in schools.  As teachers become inundated with pressure, regulations, and a focus on standards-based evidence, teaching to the  whole-child is often abandoned.  Dr. Cook states that academic, emotional,/behavioral, and physical functioning are all interconnected and that the best academic intervention is often a behavioral intervention.  As educators, I believe that we can forget that academic struggles often stem from issues with behavior.  In today's world with failed policy, or lack there of, in issues pertaining to mental health, it has become increasingly important that schools teach using the whole-child perspective.
Caprara, Barbaranelli, Pastorelli, Bandura, & Zimbardo (2000) & Malecki & Elliot (2002) have found that pro-social skills (cooperating, helping, sharing, and consoling) are a better predictor later academic achievement than is earlier academic achievement.  In thinking how the importance for dedicated time to content academic standards, dramatically increases with each revision, it is concerning to see how there is simply not enough time for teachers to explicitly teach pro-social skills.  That is where teachers have to become creative and proactive in teaching to the whole-child.
Fortunately some of the things that educators can do to create an environment of proactive classrooms are quite simple.  The following list in Dr. Cook's presentation identifies these proactive strategies:

In the slide above, many of these proactive classroom strategies are things that should be occurring naturally in day to day interactions with students.  For example, when seeing a student, a teacher should be smiling and nice, and positively greeting students at the door to precorrect and establish a positive climate.  Positive greetings can go a long way when a student has had a difficult night or morning before school.  The strategy of "Morning Meetings" can be used to build these proactive strategies and strengthen classroom relationships.  They provide an opportunity to explicitly teach to the whole-child. I view adult relationships in the same way when interacting with students.  For more information on the impact of "Morning Meetings" read the Morning Meeting Book, and Awaken the Learner (see below).  When connected, the ideas from these two resources will have a powerful impact on the lives of your students.  Teachers are not any different than their students in that they may have had an extremely difficult night before school, and simply need a positive interaction before starting the day.  What is important is that we are being proactive in establishing a positive environment for students and adults.

In his book, Unmistakable Impact, Jim Knight dedicates a chapter of this book to the importance of partnership communication.  In reality, these communication skills can be transferred to student relationships, personal and professional relationships, and parenting.  This type of communication relies heavily on the importance of a genuine love for your surrounding people.  Knight states that if love is the defining characteristic of successful airlines, food stores, running shoe companies, and car makers, surely it has an important place in school.  Most educators talk about loving their students, but that is about as far as the conversation goes."  He continues on to say how change leaders need to build this within schools, but I don't think it should rest all on the shoulders of these leaders.  If schools are built on the concepts of teams, than every person involved with schools should adhere to the idea of building the emotional connection of love.

To Summarize:

• Academic struggles often stem from behavior or emotional problems
• Remember the importance of teaching to the whole-child
• Be proactive!!
• Use proactive strategies to build emotional connections with students.
• Everyone can provide an environment of love.

Resources for further information:

-The Morning Meeting Book, by Roxann Kriete and Carol Davis

-Awaken the Learner, by Robert Marzano and Darrell Scott

-http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-management-relationships-strategies-tips

-Classroom Management, by Martin Henley

-Mindset, by Carol Dweck

-http://www.rachelschallenge.org/

Have a great start to the year!

A Partnership Approach to Instructional Coaching

I am extremely excited to start this school year at two schools as an Instructional Coach.  This role is new in my tenure as an educator, and it combines my two passions of praxis and improving student learning.  I first heard the term "partnership approach," when reading Jim Knight's book, Unmistakable Impact (2011). His work, through the Kansas Coaching Project, solidifies the importance of having a coach as one of the elements in dramatically improving learning and instruction.  As stated in Unmistakable Impact, "Coaches help teachers take all the ideas and practices they are learning and bring them to life.  Without coaching, too often, no significant change occurs." With the demand of intensive evaluation systems, state and federal regulations, and school management, principals simply do not have the time for coaching.  That is where the IC's and teachers can learn together to improve in areas noted by the principal in the evaluation process.
Knight states that at its core, the partnership approach is about a simple idea: treat others the way you would like to be treated.  In any relationship that is the key to gaining trust in learning from one another.
This summer, I had the opportunity to study the teachings of Gandhi.  Through this process I learned how I can use my mission, vision, and values, as the foundation for my learning, thinking, and decision-making.  In learning more about myself, I am now better able to understand other's viewpoints and how my actions can affect our relationship.  In using these principles as the core of my work as an educator, I believe it will dramatically improve my relationships when working with teachers through the partnership approach.
It will be a great year as I embark on a new journey in my career as an educator.  I am grateful to have the opportunity to work with such motivated and dedicated teachers.  I know I will learn so much from them as we work to improve upon best practices in the classroom.  As always, our goal is not only to improve student learning, but the whole child, and I hope we will see some great results!
For more information on Jim Knight and the coaching process, you can visit one of my favorite websites on coaching by clicking on the caption below to view the Kansas Coaching Project website.

This is the book referenced in the above post. It was written by Jim Knight of the Kansas Coaching Project.

Thank you for reading!!