Are you ready for a simple truth: NOTHING that you are doing in your school — not your 1:1 technology initiative, not your focus on higher order thinking or complex text, not your project-based learning or your Genius Hours — is more important than the strength of the relationships that exist between the ADULTS working in and beyond your classrooms.
Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash
That’s the case that Roland Barth, founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Principals’ Center, makes in this Educational Leadership article.
He writes:
“The nature of the relationships among the adults within a school,” he writes, “has a greater influence on the character and quality of the school and on student accomplishment than anything else” (Barth, 2006, p. 8).
Those relationships, Barth argues, typically fall into one of four categories:
Parallel Play: Parallel play is a concept Barth borrowed from literature on the development of preschool children.
It is the two toddlers sitting next to each other in the same sandbox but playing independently. Sure, they are engaged in the same task – but they aren’t working together. In fact, at times they don’t even seem to be aware that they are sharing the same space with someone else.
As strange as borrowing a concept from preschool development may seem, parallel play probably sounds familiar to you. It is the two teachers who work across the hall from one another for eight hours a day, year after year, without ever showing any real interest in what is happening in each other’s classrooms.
Adversarial Relationships: Some adversarial relationships between teachers are self-explanatory and easy to spot. It is the two teachers who openly criticize one another in front of parents, principals or peers.
But others are more subtle, characterized by the withholding of resources or information. It is the veteran teacher who refuses to share lesson plans with the struggling rookie next door or the teacher who discovers a highly effective teaching practice and then keeps the strategy to herself.
Congenial relationships: Congenial relationships are the most common relationships in many schools.
It is the team of teachers who gather on Friday afternoons at the local coffee shop to celebrate the end of the week or who bring in homemade cookies to celebrate special occasions with one another. It is the colleagues who are willing to drop everything to prepare emergency sub plans for peers who are out unexpectedly. It is the school where every staff member wears their faculty t-shirt and cheers with pride at the annual district-wide kickoff to the new year.
While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with congenial relationships – in fact, pleasant experiences with agreeable people can help us to look forward to our work day – they have little impact on improving practice.
Collegial relationships: Collegial relationships are those that really do improve classroom practice.
It is the teacher who finds a peer or two who are committed to studying instruction with them. It is team that spends time researching and testing and revising teaching strategies together. It is the group of colleagues who willingly share craft knowledge with one another – and who are genuinely interested in seeing one another succeed.
For collegial teachers, relationships are more than personal. They are powerful tools for building pedagogical capacity.
Interesting descriptions, right? Which one sounds the most like your current team?
Because if you want to have a positive impact on student learning, you have to move beyond parallel play, adversarial relationships and congeniality and strengthen your collegial behaviors.
So, what does “strengthening collegial behaviors” look like in action?
It is the team that has a clear set of norms that members agree to and that defines their expectations for one another. It is the team that develops a specific process for coming to consensus and resolving conflict. It is the team that keeps their meetings focused and chooses agenda items deliberately.
Nothing about strengthening collegial behaviors is left to chance on high-performing teams. Instead, explicit structures are put in place to manage personalities, create consensus and develop a positive team identity.
Interested in setting up some of those explicit structures for YOUR learning team?
Then check out these handouts, which I’ve used over time with tons of different learning teams:
Template – Creating Team Norms
Template – Coming to Consensus
Template – Resolving Conflict with a Colleague
Template – Establishing Team Roles
If you check ’em out and use ’em, I’d love to know what you think of them!
Hope they help.
And if you are interested in more resources or ideas about how to successfully structure the work of learning teams in a Professional Learning Community at Work, give my first book — Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year a look. It’s a good one!
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Related Radical Reads:
https://buildingconfidentlearners.com/2019/02/28/why-this-why-now-why-bother-the-plc-edition/
https://buildingconfidentlearners.com/2019/02/21/using-tangible-products-to-reinforce-atplc-processes/
https://buildingconfidentlearners.com/2013/03/25/five-resources-for-school-leaders-starting-plcs-from-scratch/
