Tag Archives: calling

When Trust Is Reciprocal, Great Things Happen

Posted on by
Reply

“In my last visits to your classroom, I was not certain I was in a math class.  You and your students were talking about current events on three consecutive days”, her principal told her.

“It’s my classroom and I will determine what my students do there”, she told her principal.

“All of your students made good progress this year as we look at fall and spring assessments.  Your tier 2 attention to a handful who had some significant gaps last fall really paid off”, her principal said in the last weeks of the school year.

The tension between a principal’s supervision of teaching and student learning and a teacher’s freedom to teach is real.  Principals and teachers each have skin in the game of what is taught, how it is taught, and the outcomes of student instruction.  The tension is a positive force when both parties understand their roles and responsibilities.  Tension becomes negative when either party strays into the other’s role and responsibility.  At its best, the tension is shared, and each trusts the other as a professional.  At its worst, it is a drama and a showdown.

A principal’s role and responsibility.

Principals are the working interface between school board policies and approved curricula and the classrooms, theaters, libraries, and fields where teaching, directing, and coaching take place.  In theory and practice, principals are instructional leaders.  It is important for all faculty to know the why and wherefore of a principal’s role and responsibility.

Principals are legally authorized to supervise teachers regarding the teacher’s curriculum and instruction.  Wisconsin state statute 118.01 directs school boards to “provide curriculum, course requirements, and instruction consistent with the goals and expectations established” in the next section of that statute.  Further, statute 118.24 speaks to the employment of a district administrator and school principals to “supervise the professional work” of the school district.  And statute 120.12(2m) directs school boards, typically through school principals, to “evaluate the effectiveness of each teacher … using either the system established under (statute), or the equivalency process established by rule …”.

School boards use this authority to set the principal’s job description and responsibilities.  One of the universal duties of a school principal is to supervise/evaluate the professional work of the faculty and ensure fidelity of instruction with the school board’s approved curriculum.  This responsibility, as written, does not belong to anyone else in the school district, even districts with significant central office staffing.

“What” principals are to do is enunciated in policy and job description.  “How” they do it is not specified and the “how” contributes to the quality of the tension.  The best analogy is this – teachers instruct children in the classroom and principals instruct faculty and staff in the schoolhouse.  Using this analogy, a principal’s curriculum and instructional strategies are designed to cause high quality instruction in every classroom.  The “how” lies in the principal’s personal and consistent conversation and oversight of each teacher’s classroom work.  Oversight can be a talk over a cup of coffee, a focused conversation about children and their learning needs, provision and discussion of personalized coaching, and informal and formal classroom observations.  A principal’s “how” relates to her personality and ability to keep instructional leadership a top daily priority.  Too often the other principal responsibilities, like student discipline, campus supervision, filling in for absent faculty and staff, and responding to general school problems, erode a principal’s time for teacher talk and classroom visits. 

A teacher’s role and responsibility.

Teachers hold a license to teach specific subjects and grade levels of students.  Typically, school districts provide each teacher with specific students to teach and an annual curriculum to teach to those students.  These are the “who is to be instructed” and the “what is to be instructed”.  There is no language regarding “how they are to be instructed”, beyond the effective educator provisions of WI statute 120.12(2m).  Teachers have a broad reach in their choice of pedagogies to use in their teaching.  This choice is their “freedom to teach” in ways that best meet their contractual responsibilities.

Teachers are responsible for the “how” they teach.  A teacher’s instructional decisions in the units and lesson plans she designs are fully hers.  A teacher’s instructional “toolbox” will contain strategies for direct and explicit instruction, inquiry-based instruction, problem- and project-based instruction, outcome-based instruction.  Each of these strategies can be effective in causing children to learn a curriculum and one strategy may be most effective for the curricular unit being taught.  Teacher’s choice!

The concept of a teacher’s academic freedom is real.  It relates to the teacher’s decisions of how best to cause all children to be successful learners of the school curriculum.  All teachers have freedom in choosing their instructional tools.  Academic freedom, however, does not extend to decisions about what to teach.  The teacher’s contract designates the teaching position and curriculum related to the position.

Shared responsibility for learner outcomes.

At the end of the proverbial day achievements in student learning are the responsibility of both principal and teacher.  School boards and superintendents smile when student achievement demonstrates growth but look for faults and blame when achievement is not what they expect.  Then, principals are teachers share the hot seat. 

In the post-pandemic the relationship between principals and teachers has been stressed.  Some students readily re-engaged with school.  However, other students returning from remote instruction and those who fully disengaged from school instruction demonstrate a wide range of patterns in daily attendance, lost or forgotten learning, and socio-emotional problems.  Finding solutions has not been easy.  Schools with positive principal/teacher relationships sorted issues, tried solutions, and adjusted solutions together.  In other schools, disconnected students only added to the tension.

One of the indicators of relationships is teacher attrition in schools.  The patterns of principals and teachers who are leaving public education or seeking different school districts are closely related to their feeling of partnership and collaboration. 

Trust is earned.

In the decades of my experience as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and school board member, I found that trust is a reciprocal relationship.  To be trusted, one must trust.  The quickest way to create mutual trust is to recognize and honor the interfaces of roles and responsibilities of others, personally engage in consistent and constant professional conversation with every employee and celebrate not just enjoy the synergy of the environment.  When teachers trusted my leadership, they relied on me to trust them to form positive relationships with students and to use all their instructional tools to cause all children to learn.  Also, we trusted each other to always work for the best interests of our students.  Trust does not need to be complicated.

Synergy in a school is not openly discussed as much as it should be.  Call it a special place in time, synergy or the good times, happens when everyone from the superintendent to teacher to custodian to bus driver is in synch with each other.  It is when all the stars of the school universe congregate together and shine.  I observed good times that lasted from months to years.  “Lasted” is the operative word.  Schools that are recognized for excellence enjoy the synergy that creates excellence for a period but then those stars of the universe begin to drift.  People retire or move on to other positions.  Teaming that coalesced for effective work becomes individuals left to carry on.  The new personnel, as good as they may be, just don’t jive as well.  Schools still can be successful in their programs, but that special aura of camaraderie does not last.

When everyone in the schoolhouse seems happy, trust is never discussed.  When there are troubles, lack of trust is the first word spoken.  Troubles quickly divide personnel by roles and mutuality and reciprocity are abandoned.  Distrust becomes the byword.

So, what are we to do?

At their core, teaching and principaling share this similarity – they are callings.  Those who are called have an innate motivation to work with children and to help in shaping children’s lives through learning.  When we discard all the other issues of public education and recognize our mutual calling, understand the roles and relationships of a school’s organization, and place ourselves in our role with a commitment to contribute to the school’s commonwealth, it is relatively easy to synthesize a successful school.  It is when we add back all the other issues that the work becomes difficult.  So, keep it simple.  Know and build trust in each other.

Esprit de Corps Elevates Teacher Capacity to Cause All Children to Learn

Posted on by
Reply

Noble purpose and fraternity.  These are two aged concepts, yet they are the time-tested bonds uniting a band of people committed to a cause and to each other that allows them to move the proverbial mountain while others around them shovel gravel.  They are words that, if you must speak or define them to others, place the listener outside the circle of understanding of the power and force of esprit de corps. 

Esprit de corps is real.

What is it that causes collaborative work to reach a recognized higher plane of excellence?  As a French language term, esprit de corps is associated with both fictional and real-life manifestations.  We conjure D’Artagnan and the three musketeers yelling “One for All and All for One” and charging the guards of Cardinal Richelieu in the Alexander Dumas novel.  We hear the Marine Corps motto of Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful) and remember actual stories of courage in battle that are part of American lore.  Beyond Musketeers and Marines, how does esprit de corps apply to the work of teachers in a public school?  Or does it not?  I believe it does.

Esprit de corps cannot be manufactured.

We too often believe that teamwork and team management are the same as esprit de corps.  They are not.  I do not dis the value of teamwork.  Teaming adds the values of group membership, agreed upon group goals, concerted collegial work effort, and team recognition.  We form teams readily for our recreational activities, sports, and non-sports.  We team for organizational fund raising.  We team for a great number of spontaneous reasons – almost like crowdfunding – that draw us together for a short-lived purpose.

Organizational gurus work the circuit of conferences and book signings touting their recipes for increasing TEAM.  A common plan for increasing organization teamwork looks like this.

#1 – Know and communicate your clear WHY?

#2 – Create and communicate your value system

#3 – Live by your own values

#4 – Create a common aim

#5 – Hold a siege

#6 – Be aspirational

#7 – Celebrate

# 8 – Eat together

#9 – Communicate with passion

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nine-secrets-creating-culture-esprit-de-corps-within-your-brown

If real esprit de corps can be artificially manufactured in this way, why then do we keep talking about low employee morale and trying to find the next magic bullet that will align employees to employment purposes?  Why do we look for the next guru and keep attending the next conference?  Because true esprit de corps is not manufactured, it is birthed and continuously nurtured.

Teaching as a calling.

When interviewing teacher candidates, I often ask “Is teaching your calling?”  “Calling” is another of those seemingly antiquated concepts, yet it is a feeler question to discern those who understand what it is to be innately drawn to a purpose greater than employment.  It exposes a teacher’s intrinsic motivations to teach.  The “called” are passionate about teaching.  A candidate who understands the question typically hesitates to ensure she heard the question correctly and then explains how her itch to teach cannot be satisfied with scratching – she needs to teach to fulfill her greater needs.  This is not to say that all teachers must feel the calling to be successful teachers; they do not.  There are many teachers who cause children to learn and consider teaching their job not their passion.  An intrinsic passion to the noble purpose of teaching is a fire that burns brighter in the called and pushes them to do more than their job without questioning why.

Fraternity + passion = esprit de corps

Add fraternity to passion and the seed of esprit de corps is born.  The fraternity may begin with two teachers with similar assignments seeing themselves not as individual teachers in separate classrooms but as partners in the same assignment.  Collaboration and mutuality build fraternity.  Sharing concerns, combined problem-solving, and the enjoyments of success based upon passionate commitment build fraternity.  Fraternity often begins with the tangibles of friendship and grows to the intangibles of brother- or sisterhood. 

Cadre building is a contributor to nurturing esprit de corps.  Strong cadres form themselves when individuals identify their common cause.  Cadres can be differentiated from spontaneous or assigned teams by the bonds of their fraternity.  Perhaps, a cadre is a super team, a team that exceeds teaming because its members are bonded with esprit de corps.  Building a cadre of impassioned teachers is easy – you just give the time and opportunity and this key question – “what should we do?” – then let them go. 

Some argue that cadre building begets favoritism and the separation of faculty into factions.  I argue that every organization that achieves significant purposes over time contains a cadre or cadres of impassioned persons at its core.  Nurtured by institutional goals, cadres of impassioned persons are the heart of esprit de corps.  Consider the school organizations that are recognized as high performing, elite, exemplary – you choose the word meaning extraordinary – and you will find esprit de corps, cadre strength, and impassioned work at its core.

Leadership nurtures esprit de corps then gets out of the way.

If esprit de corps can be a powerful force in schools, why doesn’t it exist everywhere?  Simply stated, esprit de corps flourishes where school leadership also is driven by noble purpose and fraternity, understands its dynamics, and gives these time, resources, and opportunity to work.  Although it seems that leadership sublimates the cadre, it does not – leadership nurtures cadre work, including giving earned and appropriate internal and external recognitions.  Cadre work can outgrow the apparent work of leadership, and this is the pivot point at which leaders and cadre collegial extend their excellence or leadership extinguishes the cadre.  It is a control issue.  Nothing kills esprit de corps more than the artificial controls of leadership operating for other purposes.

Too often leadership and their cultural design cause teachers to become independent contractors working in isolation in closed-door classrooms.  This is a real phenomenon in school historically and today.  It is too easy when this condition exists to do nothing and allow education to sink into mediocrity.

Every period of excellent in student outcomes is associated with teacher esprit de corps.

In hindsight, we can identify many schools that enjoyed a “golden era” of student successes.  Peel back the layers and you will find an esprit de corps that flourished with enlightened leadership and a band of teachers whose passion and fraternal instincts caused them to excel in the noble purpose of teaching.