I am proud to be an educator. I think that our profession, and in particular teachers, are doing the most important work in the world knowing that they will never maximize their earning potential. Most are doing the work because it is truly their calling and they care tremendously about the students they serve. It feels awesome to type those words. It feels awesome because it is true and I am lucky to call this profession my own.
While all of this is true, the undoing of most school cultures is because of selfishness.
How can both be true? Easy, let me show you.
Joe and Sarah are sitting in their PLC with Deana, Jill, and Leslie. Joe and Sarah want to dig into the data of their most recent assessment to see how the entirety of the students in the PLC did. The PLC meeting started off as more a business or procedural meeting despite having an agenda that prioritized the four questions of the PLC:
- What do we want students to know and be able to do?
- How will we know if they know it?
- What will we do if they do not?
- What will we do if they do?
Sarah made a fairly direct comment about wanting to best utilize their time because she needed to get to a coaching obligation and get into the data. Deana passively acknowledged the comment and diverted the conversation to planning for their next celebration day. Sarah and Joe made eye contact knowing that real conversations about teaching, learning, and student performance were going to be ignored again at this meeting.
And . . . . . and nothing.
This happens over and over again in many different forms in our schools every single day. Conversations that should happen surrounding kids, teaching, learn, and (yes, the four letter word) data are simply not had. Over and over again for sake of preserving order and relationships important conversations do not occur.
What is worse is that many times we fool ourselves and claim these conversations are not taking place because we are trying to build climate. Sometimes we even mistake this as building culture. Well, we are only part wrong when we do this. We are building culture and climate with every action that takes place in our schools. The issue is that the culture and climate built when we do not engage in REAL conversations about practice is one that preserves the status quo and favors problematic adult behavior.
I have tried to write this several times in several ways – but there is no easy way to say it. There is only ONE person that wins when we fail to engage in these conversations. That person is the person choosing to not engage. It is a selfish decision. The failure to engage robs the person on the other end of the conversation from the opportunity to be challenged and to grow, it robs you of the discourse that might make you a better educator or change your paradigm, and it robs the kids of the potential progress of everyone involved.
Simply, a failure to engage in polite, respectful professional discourse about how we best serve kids is a failure to lead. And I believe if we are going to transform education into the system all of our kids deserve, we all need to be leading – all of the time.
So, please – choose to engage. Choose to lead.