Culture and Relationship Building
To quote Roland S. Barth, “The nature of relationships among the adults within a school has a greater influence on the character and quality of that school and on student accomplishment than anything else”.
In all schools there is a vast diversity of approaches in the core business of teaching and learning, differing opinions, pedagogies and styles. This applies to both teachers and school leaders.
Unfortunately in most schools, due to ‘busyness’, these are not discussed in a formal and structured way. Too often, they are only discussed in small groups at informal gatherings such as over lunch or chats around the school in staff rooms.
To avoid entering into structured regular and meaningful dialogue on our core business, stunts the growth of a healthy culture and maintains relationships at a superficial level. Culture to a school is like personality to an individual; it must be nurtured. The same can be said for relationships.
Hoping that these opportunities to enter into dialogue will just happen, points to a lack of educational leadership and organisational health in need of a tonic. Marzano, noted American educator, through research has found the staggering statistic that conversations in schools are 95% operational (busy work) and only 5% strategic (core business). Schools have plenty of good teachers; the pivotal challenge is to provide time and opportunities for them to share pedagogies, learning and teaching approaches and formally learn together from each other.
One positive and effective way to build relationships and introduce regular and structured dialogue is to ban operational issues being discussed at staff/faculty meetings. These can be communicated through group emails, white boards in the staffroom and staff bulletins.
The agendas would contain only issues and strategies relating to our core business of teaching and learning. Conversations about sharing:
• professional practices/approaches
• classrooms management strategies
• visions about what we want our students to look like, act like, sound like, know and can do because of our teaching and influence.
Another excellent strategy to build staff relationships is to encourage and fund professional time release for WOW opportunities; Watching Others Work (see the professional reading on WOW). When adults work side by side and face to face, the benefits are amazing:
• enhanced role clarity - being aware of what each member has to do on a daily basis to achieve the team’s vision
• effective peer appraisal and recognition -providing developmental and non judgemental staff team feedback
• ongoing professional learning -a sincere team commitment to nurture rich relationships through regular and meaningful dialogue
• authentic participative decision - enabling distributed leadership and a willingness to seek and value everyone’s diverse input
• greater motivation and morale - enjoying a sense of belonging, self motivation and belief that all team members can and do make a difference.
Relationships are the key to high performing schools. The adopting of ‘strategic blindness’ and ‘things not to be talked about’ mentalities are unacceptable.
It’s time to start, it doesn’t matter where. It is not an option not to start.
“Give yourself permission to shine” Anon