Pedagogy, process and empowerment

We gathered yesterday for our back to school night, which my school holds two days before the start of the academic year. In the past, the evening has been a “frontal” affair. We welcomed families, applauded the teachers and reminded parents to contribute to the annual fund before sending them to classrooms. This year was different. A lot different.

Our focus for the year is “excellence in educating the whole child.” It’s not just a slogan. We have identified five areas where we have begun to develop benchmarks for excellence. These include a high quality of classroom teaching practice, good communications, effectiveness in meeting the needs of diverse learners, measurable outcomes of authentic achievement and demonstrable achievements in learning social skills. During our back to school night, we spent a valuable evening developing benchmarks around these goals, in active collaboration with faculty and parents.

Having already guided our faculty through one exercise (see my earlier post: How I Got Daniel Pink…), I tried something that felt revolutionary and even a bit frightening. In place of our usual, frontal presentation, we divided the entire parent body into small break-out groups. Each group was assigned a specific topic, for example, “If a child has learned the social and developmental skills that we think are essential, what will that child’s behavior and interactions look like?” Teams of two faculty members led each group, and parents received clear directions. “Tell us what getting it right in this area looks like.” I cautioned parents not to waste time discussing what doesn’t work—and promised that our faculty group leaders would redirect them if they went into negative turf. Finally, group leaders held pink sheets to record comments that were valuable, but off topic, so that we could honor this parent input…but keep ourselves focused.

Once we sent our full parent body into their break-out groups, chit-chat and side conversations faded. Faculty and parents gathered in circles, heads hunched together. As I circled the room, I heard parents speak passionately about knowledge that went deeper than rote learning. Their yearning for more focus on group-building and social skills. Their desire to see portfolios and authentic problem solving instead of numerical test results at the end of a year. The room echoed with good ideas…many that we had been afraid to try for fear that parents or staff would not support them. How wrong we were!

After the breakout sessions, several parents approached me to describe their sense of excitement. They felt activated, listened to and engaged. The ideas we had discussed were inspiring to them. They were ready for our program try new things. Then the real surprise: At the end of the evening, one of my most seasoned, veteran teachers approached me to say “thank you for empowering us to moderate the conversation and speak from our own expertise.” In one fell swoop, the two most important constituencies of my school had bought in to a dialogue that included their input.

Within the next few weeks our snapshots of “getting it right” will translate into a set of rubrics, and by October we will begin the hard work of assessing our own professional and institutional practice. While there is more work left to be done, I am personally impressed at several things. First, I am delighted at the level of sophistication that our parents bring to their thinking about education. We have good partners in our parent body, and have so far demonstrated that we can make the school stronger by listening to them. Second, our faculty feels that they can trust this process of goal setting, since they have been integral partners in it from the outset. Last, I am personally thrilled to see good procedural thought translate into real success in practice.

In the launch phase of an important school improvement initiative, we seem to have gotten several crucial things right. We gave significant responsibility to our key stakeholders at the same time as we vested leadership authority in the faculty. We opened a broad conversation from the bottom up. We created safety for all participants by conducting a dialogue in accordance with well defined ground rules. Ultimately, we took a major step towards diffusing ongoing and ill defined parental concerns about the quality of our program by engaging the issue head-on. And we avoided making our faculty defensive by focusing the conversation on institutional practices…not people.

While it will take several more months to discover how effective this benchmarking process will be in raising the quality of my school's program, we have already built deeper bonds of trust and burnished the prestige of our faculty…simply by virtue of our willingness to listen attentively. Today, in the school parking lot, I bumped into one of my most demanding parents with a smile on her face. “It feels like there is a whole new energy to the faculty,” she noted. Indeed, there is.

For a snapshot of the rubric which framed our discussion, follow this link.