RELATIONAL TRUST

On my ride to the airport, out to my last round of school consultations for 2008, I listened to a radio interview with Parker Palmer on the role of relational trust. Those of you who have participated in my coaching trainings or my professional learning community workshops know that I speak about the role of building trust and relationships in supporting people and creating teams and organizations that serve students. I thought relational trust an appropriate topic for the year’s end and the setting of New Year’s resolutions.

For administrators and coaches, I often discuss the need for trust to be present in evaluation, supervision, mentoring, and coaching relationships. What creates trust in each activity is somewhat different. Therefore, it is critical that teachers know which activity they are taking part in so that they know the behaviors that communicate trust. For example, evaluators build trust by teachers knowing the criteria of evaluation and then having the evaluator work from those criteria consistently. Peer Coaches (who can be my administrator) build trust by staying on the focus that the teacher set in a pre-conference.

We build trust by saying what we are going to do and then doing it.

In PLC’s, when members make themselves vulnerable…sharing struggles…and find respect and trust with colleagues, a sense of team is formed. These PLC’s become more successful and teacher learning leads to increased student success.
In Coaching and Collegial PLC’s, trust increases vulnerability which increases learning.

Parker sites the work of Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider, two scholars at the University of Chicago, who studied school reform in Chicago through the 1990’s.[Trust in Schools: A Core Resource in Improvement]

"What factors, they wondered, made the difference between schools that got better at educating children over the course of that decade—as measured by improved test scores—and schools that did not? The answer was not money, models of governance, up-to-date curricula, the latest in teaching techniques, or any other external variable. The answer was “relational trust” between teachers and administrators, teachers and parents, teachers and teachers. Schools with high relational trust, and/or leaders who cared about it, had a much better chance of serving students well than schools that ranked low on those variables." (Center for Courage and Renewal)

Bryk and Schneider identify respect, competence, personal regard, and integrity as elements of trust.

Respect- Do we acknowledge one another's dignity and ideas? Do we interact in a courteous way? Do we genuinely talk and listen to each other?

Competence- Do we believe in each other's ability and willingness to fulfill our responsibilities effectively? Incompetence left unaddressed can corrode school wide trust at a devastating rate.

Personal regard- Do we care about each other both professionally and personally? Are we willing to go beyond our formal roles and responsibilities if needed to go the extra mile?

Integrity- Can we trust each other to put the interests of children first, especially when tough decisions have to be made? Do we keep our word?

The above is from The Daily KOS.

As you return to a New Year in January with a push to building student success in the remainder of the 2008-2009 school year, the questions above may make a great opening for faculty, team, or coaching meetings.
Parker Palmer says listen to the stories that people around you want to share. The more we know about each other the less likely we will distrust one another.

A great place to start the New Year...I’ll be back here January 11, 2009. Have a wonderful holiday!

INQUIRY FOR STUDENTS, TEACHERS,AND ADMINISTRATORS

I found a great article, School as Inquiry, by Steven Wolk in the October 2008 issue of Phi Delta Kappan.

The article matched some thinking and presenting that I have recently been doing.

Wolk uses the terms Transmission Teaching and the Illusion of Learning. He asks, “When students sit at their desk as teachers talk, are they really hearing what the teacher is saying? Are they intellectually engaged?”(pg 117)

I’ve examined this as the struggle between being focused on teaching and being focused on learning.
The biggest change that has occurred in my work with coaching over the last 15 years is an increased focus on observing the learner vs the teacher and studying the teacher’s choices as they impact the learners’ choices.

Wolk has a great statement that captured the observation of the learner for me.

“Teaching through Inquiry considers our work a failure if students do not leave the school filled with questions and the yearning to explore them.” (pg 117)

I’d suggest that school administrators, coaches, and staff developers could voice a similar goal; we consider our work a failure if teachers do not leave our conferences, conversations, and workshops filled with questions and the yearning to explore them.

Wolk provides an inquiry process including, plan reflect, discuss, debate, ask more questions, make connections, and rethink inquiry. Wolk adds that having questions that guide inquiry is key, but behind the questions are “big ideas”. (pg 118)

Again, Wolk’s comments fit for instructional leaders’ work with teachers. “Big Ideas” about teaching and learning should connect with coaching questions that promote teacher inquiry. Here is a diagram I use to illustrate teacher and coach inquiry conversation:


I suggest that the coach works from inside this circle, asking questions and providing input that increase a teacher’s observations (often the coach sees, hears, and feels, things not obvious to the teachers). Coaching questions and conversations increase teachers’ thinking (inquiry) that generate a desire to produce or create an idea. When teachers engage their students in a learning activity, they are experimenting, then identifying if the activity is producing the learning requires observation and thinking, which leads to the teacher’s next decision.

Wolk captures the importance of a culture of inquiry:
“The best teachers… live a life filled with learning, thinking, reading, and debating. Because inquiry is an important part of their lives, inquiry becomes an essential part of their classroom.” (pg 119)

As instructional leaders, we need to be “teaching” in ways that cause our staffs, our students, and ourselves to be living a culture of inquiry.

INTERNATIONAL LEARNING: THE SMALL WORLD

I’ve just returned from an international two weeks.

I began attending and presenting at the European Council of International Schools. My two day preconference was on coaching and mentoring skills and involved participants from at least 10 different countries and several continents. I also had two breakout sessions dealing with Teacher Collegiality and Student Effort. After a workshop, I meet a teacher who lives in my local community in Pennsylvania! I was impressed throughout the conference with the dedication of teachers and administrators to the ideals of international schools that prepare students academically and culturally to be citizens of the world.

Steve with Sir Ranulph Fiennes- Explorer with his book


I left Nice and headed to Istanbul, Turkey and spent a week with the staff of two schools.

At ENKA School, I followed up earlier training that I had done with the entire staff on peer coaching. The school is implementing strategies to encourage all staff to find ways that they can build coaching into the K-12 school culture. Several teachers videoed their classroom and instruction for our coaching practice so I got a close up view of the dedication that I mentioned above. Watching Turkish High School students discussing the Helen Keller story with their teacher and watching Turkish first graders playing games to master those nasty English sight words which don’t follow phonics rules the way their Turkish language does, we practiced coaching skills of observation and conferencing.

Pre-K Principal and Students at the ENKA School

I worked with teachers and administrators at Darussafaka, a boarding school for fatherless, 4th -12th grade students from around the country. Teachers explored Student Effort, Learning Styles, and Questions for Life for instructional strategies to increase student achievement. The administrators added an extra day to explore their role as teacher coaches and the value of administrators coaching each other, as well as teacher peer coaching.

A special treat was in store for me at Darussafaka when I got to attend a celebration recognizing students from the school who had traveled to Norway during the summer and students from Norway who were now at Darussafaka. Turkey and Norway’s foreign ministers were present for the program. Listening to these high school students share their experiences and insights in English as the common language, I watched the world shrink. Students were very clear, explaining how their views of “others” and openness to differences were positively impacted by the experiences. They all commented on how their similarities outweighed differences and how the differences were intriguing rather than threatening.

Paul Sanders was the neighbor I met in Nice. He sent me the following note regarding his interest in values education / intercultural understanding and technology. Please contact Paul with any of your ideas.

I was the guy from New Hope you met in Nice, and I just wanted to let you know that I found your session on student achievement and faculty collegiality fascinating and useful. I'm writing, in fact, from Stony Hill Road-- what are the odds of going to Europe to meet someone who lives half a mile away?

I don't know if you do much in this particular field, but I wonder if you might be of some assistance pointing me to literature that explores the future of the international education ‘movement.’ I am just beginning work on my PhD at the University of Hull in England, and I am interested in ways in which schools—not exclusively international schools, but my focus will be on American IB schools—might be able to use technology to offer values instruction, particular around the topics of intercultural understanding, tolerance, etc. I feel as though values instruction around intercultural understanding, compassion, respect, and peace might be deliverable, at least in some useful sense, via technology. But I have been a bit disappointed (and surprised) thus far in my admittedly preliminary research, as I’ve found nothing that directly and explicitly looks at this.

I have an intuitive feeling that technology might be a powerful way to reduce American psychological (rather than actual) isolation, help all students develop the values that the IB admirably advocates, and allow students to begin to see the interconnectivity that has come to define our world. An intuitive feeling does not make for much of a PhD dissertation, though, so I would be tremendously grateful for any advice or direction you might offer.

With appreciation,

Paul Sanders
English Department Chair
The Dwight School
New York, NY
psanders@dwight.edu.