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My wife and I grew up in two very different households. One that was very Catholic and zealously celebrated Christmas. The other was a Chinese immigrant family that didn’t celebrate Christmas, owned a Chinese restaurant in New York, and worked earnestly during the holiday period. As a team, my wife and I have not only re-engineered much of what my mother was famously known for, decorations and baking, but we managed to create quite a few new holiday traditions. One new tradition my wife is most pleased with is going out for Chinese Roast Duck on Christmas Eve.
For many years my wife abhorred the long-haul travel to stay with my parents for Christmas during the 2-week holiday period. 12 of the 14 days were mired in bickering, endless errands, and family visits. This all changed, though, when we had kids and my wife began experiencing Christmas through their eyes. At that point she began to actively participate in the event planning, ensuring to a small extent that the events satisfied some of her own needs and wants, thus ensuring her buy-in.
Festive holiday events can be magical, but being caught up in all the planning and conflicts leading up to it can be quite traumatic, especially if you aren’t bought into the purpose. Having purpose and being bought into the outcome is what helps us navigate myriad obstacles and controversies. It also helps when we get positive reinforcing feedback from those that we did all the planning for and with.
If you are mid-way through your school year, I hope you have gotten and been energized by some form of positive reinforcing feedback- whether it be verbal feedback from students and colleagues or tangible artifacts of learning that is evidencing your hard work. It is quite possible that you are able to get that feedback without having to collaborate, which means there is less incentive for you to fully invest yourself in team planning activities. Or perhaps you, or other colleagues, have already set your sights on the future, especially the new school you or they may be moving to. If this is the case, there isn’t much incentive to get too involved with people we won’t see next school year. The pandemic aside, there are many reasons to justify keeping collaboration simple for the remainder of the year.
Unfortunately, when educators retreat to the safety and certainty of their own classroom, students across the school lose out. The events and activities that we are capable of planning ourselves, despite getting good feedback, will definitely not be as impactful as those that incorporate the perspective and energy of other colleagues. Other students not only lose out on the great things happening in your classroom, but your own students lose out on great things happening in other classrooms.
What always drives me as an educator is simple: “How can I make this better?” How can I ensure every student is better able to understand and apply what I want them to learn and do? The only way to answer this question is by opening myself up to the feedback and ideas of others, as well as committing myself to incorporating that input into my work. When I do that, I grow as an educator and my students get something better than I could have produced alone.
So, how do we do this during a pandemic, when our team feels stretched beyond it’s capacity and when those we would ordinarily collaborate with may not be similarly bought into the prospect? Its Simple: Improvise It Man! I spent my holiday binge watching “The Beatles: Get Back” documentary and it has done more than just inspire me, but has evidenced every aspect of transformational collaboration that I teach and coach about. Strangely, I connected this documentary to teaching teams almost immediately.
I am not sure if it was John more interested in Yoko than the band or Paul’s leadership falling flat or George’s disconnectedness or Ringo’s fence sitting, but those 4 behavioral traits reminded me of a typical teaching team without a common purpose. This production was going to be their final collaboration and Paul was trying as hard as he could to get the band to realize the vision he had, which he wrongly assumed was shared by the band.
The leadership lesson really became obvious when George walked out and quit the band. At that moment, they could have all walked away and the only losers would have been the fans. But there were some embers still burning from before George left. Something still worth pursuing to see if the fire could be reignited. The three remaining members re-evaluated what it was they wanted to achieve and Paul came to the realization that he needed to compromise and be more open to a different outcome. In the space of 8-hours, I watched a team, with a lot of baggage, regroup and produce some of their most prolific music ever. The Beatles did this all in the space of 4-weeks and delivered a live performance on the roof of their recording studio to top it all off.
Another interesting similarity with teaching teams, is that even though Paul was the assumed leader, like any peer on a team, he didn’t directly own that role. In fact, he repeatedly mentioned how much in need the band was of a father figure. He longed for the time when the band had similar ambitions and didn’t see jamming and producing as work, but as fun. Paul just assumed everyone wanted the same thing, to film a documentary, make an original live album and perform live. The band use to enjoy those feats and he was struggling to understand why it was so difficult at their more seasoned age why they were struggling to collaborate.
Do you feel like Paul right now? That it’s incumbent upon you to get the team to work purposefully. You want to achieve something as a team that will improve teaching and learning but don’t want to force it. You want everyone to put students at the center of the team’s work and put individual priorities and differences aside. So, how do you get a team that is stuck, where team members are discouraged and exhibiting individualistic behaviors, to collaborate purposefully mid-way through the year? How do you get buy-in from colleagues that are more interested in getting through the school year than they are doing something above and beyond their remit?
Fortunately, Jere Hester, in this New York Times Essay, has an answer for us. An answer that I assure you relates directly to teaching teams that are stuck, or even worse, finding it difficult to even be collegial with one another. The only loser when a team doesn’t collaborate and work purposefully are students. So, if you truly want to put students at the center of your work, consider this advice:
- Set an audacious goal with a very short time horizon. Something that all team members can get excited about and get a quick return on.
- When the going gets tough, come together and identify what is working for the team and do more of it. Get buried in some planning that each team member can take into their classrooms.
- Mix Structure with improvisation by establishing clear work processes and then empowering each team members to develop their own prototype for what they envision the outcome will look like and how the team can achieve it.
- A Change of Scenery — and Goal — Can Help, especially if the prototyping process and subsequent discussions are surfacing new information and obstacles. Iteration is essential to achieving audacious goals.
- New Blood Can Freshen Things Up. There are other teachers in and outside your school that have the same interests as you. Find them and invite them into a few meetings.
- Always Be Working. Everyday commit time to the teams purpose and even if there is nothing to report for a meeting, still meet.
- Creativity Can Be Repetitive and Boring, Until It’s Transcendent. Failure is an option; in fact, it is encouraged. Keep working your project until it satisfies the needs of all your student’s and elicits the desired artifacts of learning.
I wish you all a fruitful New Year,
Michael
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