1. September 24, 2002 Parents: Using Spaghetti to Build Trust & Community
A school in rural Hawaii reports success attracting parents to the campus by offering a monthly 99-cent spaghetti dinner. Dinners--later changed to weekly!--were cooked at the school by parent and staff volunteers from part-donated and part-purchased groceries, and served in the school's cafeteria. The simple goal: first steps to make the campus a safe, friendly social place for parents to gather, to encourage relationship-building, trust-building, and to offer occasional relief from cooking. In a similar vein, a Big Island principal describes learning--at a mainland conference--that a Minnesota PTA had installed automatic coin-operated clothes washers and dryers in its cafeteria, for the same purpose.
2. September 15, 2002 Getting Results from Vision-Building: Focus, Motivation, Cooperation
Shared vision is a clear, jointly-built and jointly-held view of what you and your colleagues want to create, as a provider of services to students and parents, as a community focal point, and as a workplace. (An individual teacher, administrator, staff member, department, class or student could also develop a vision.) For a faculty group, it can be challenging work--often supported by an outside facilitator--to create a focus that involves the entire staff. However, there are many payoffs. Creating jointly-held vision
- leads to clear, defined group goals
- facilitates individual/group decisions supporting the goals
- focuses action on community needs
- promotes creative, cooperative action
- reduces conflict over "pet" solutions and power plays
- values philosophical differences
- improves interpersonal understanding
- enriches professional relationships
- celebrates developmental and style differences
- motivates professional growth for individuals
- encourages strategy-sharing and reflection on practice.
Helping faculty groups and businesses build shared vision is part of my consulting practice.
3. September 1, 2002 Helping Resistant Staff Embrace Change School restructuring involves new standards, procedures, and strategies. Restructuring pressures and initiatives are met with varying enthusiasm or resistance, trust or mistrust. Administrators wonder why change efforts - always well-intentioned (and sometimes extraordinarily creative) - often die quickly. Why is it so challenging to get staff to adopt new ideas? Encouraging change is not about doing a better sell job, or about including teacher reps in decision-making, or about consensus-building, though such techniques may ease the way. The best results happen when leaders invest in the time and processing necessary to allow faculties and individuals to (a) discover their needs, and (b) articulate and "own" those needs and (c) take responsibility for planning how to meet those needs. When leaders do these things themselves in top-down revisions, changes are more likely to backfire or meet resistance. Great power to energize staff and stabilize change comes from joint vision-building with a faculty, but this is not a quick-fix process. Consultant Bob Garmston calls this process school re-culturing (re-building school culture), which he defines as the systematic re-defining of values, vision and ideals, the joint answering of critical questions such as
1. Who are we? What are our values and identity?
2. How are we are doing things now?
3. Why are we doing things this way now?
4. What do we want? Who do we want to be?
Making an employee group responsible for building a vision of identity - who we want to be - unleashes energetic, creative approaches to problems. Vision-building can mold and focus staff energy in elegant ways, and can powerfully change individual perceptions and staff relationships. The process takes skill, time, care and patience. The benefit is a much greater likelihood that solutions or strategies for change will be successful and stable. Re-culturing is often focused on one issue of concern, such as discipline, curriculum, parent relations or teacher evaluation. The process could also be used to define or prioritize issues. I facilitate vision-building in an important part of my consulting practice.
4. August 29, 2002 Encouraging Trust & Collegiality
Christine Norvell, Principal of Pacific Elementary School (Manhattan Beach, California) shares a unique way of encouraging teachers to learn from the practice of others, and to discover personal practice-improvement goals. Each teacher is required to observe ten others, unannounced, for five-minute blocks each year. A signal system announces the visit without other interruption. The observer's goal is to find a strategy or reflection that will improve his or her practice, and to write a summary of this learning. The summaries, observations and reflections on ten visits each year for every faculty member are filed in the Principal's office and become a goal-setting foundation for each teacher's performance review.
