The Long Game

My first blog post. Yes, all the normal thoughts - why me, what will I say, who cares. According to my GSE colleagues - because I can, because I should, because it's important for educators hoping to transform the world to share their messy, unfinished thoughts. I'm not a messy, unfinished writer but this is my challenge to myself: if I can write about the chaos in my head and my tornado of ideas for how to make the world a better place, maybe that will mean I can better explain my ideas to others. Which is important as a school leader. So, tits up (I mean tips...). Blog post #1.

I've spent two of my recent work days at a restorative practices training of trainers at the San Diego County Office of Education with counselors, coaches, teachers and administrators from all over the county. Today, the conversation turned to frustration at the difficulties folks will face when trying to bring these practices back to their school sites and convince their fellow educators of the value in being restorative. Proposed solutions sounded something like this: Admin just needs to tell their teachers to do it and if they don't there will be a consequence. Or just make it an expected practice and they'll have to fall in line. Given that this was a restorative training, I was a bit befuddled listening to the way we were talking about "those teachers" who wouldn't buy in immediately and who needed to be controlled or punished into action. We had, after all, just finished an activity in which we examined doing things "with" rather than "to" or "for" students and teachers. Then one woman spoke up and shared that she has a teacher leaving her school site because of all this "restorative junk" being thrown around that just isn't for her.

I got to thinking about a conversation I had on Saturday in my grad school class about buzz words. I am a horrible proponent of buzz words and I know I lose people when I start throwing them around (my mother). I began thinking about this teacher leaving, and other skeptical teachers, and thought there might be a connection. When we throw around buzz words, like restorative anything, some teachers – and particularly veterans who have been around decades of buzz words – will tune out. If we want to “win them over”, we have to stop saying the words and do the actions instead.

I proposed this to my training group: instead of forcing restorative practices and language on our colleagues, what if we instead played the long game? What if we spent a full year just being restorative ourselves, without calling it that? Asking teachers how they felt when a student exploded on them, what harm was caused and how could it be repaired? What if we brought colleagues and teachers and students together for debriefs after an incident and asked them to share their stories? What if we started every staff meeting with a circle and threw in some teambuilding here and there? And what if we did all this without ever using the word “restorative”? I argue that if we play it this way, and do a good job, we start to build the most important piece of school culture, which is the relationship between the adults in the building. When we’ve made progress in establishing that, and our staff knows they matter and they feel cared for, then we can introduce the language for what we’ve spent a year doing. Then we can help them reflect on the ways in which our unlabeled restorative practices have helped strengthen our school community. And then we can be explicit about the ways in which they can use these same strategies in their classrooms to continue to strengthen our school community.

And for those who are resistant – what are they afraid of? What do they stand to lose in these new strategies of ours? I’m reminded of a powerful idea in Heifetz and Linsky’s book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. When we face resistance to change, it may be because those who are resistant fear a loss. Whether real or imagined, this fear prevents them from engaging in a change idea, even when they may have supported it at one point. It is our job as leaders to figure out what losses our staff have at stake – and to then address those head on and support our staff through them. And even more potent than this is the understanding that every change we ask of our staff requires that they change the stories they’ve been telling themselves about their world, their work and their place in all of this. That's tough stuff. I want to make this change and in doing so, my staff begin to question their value, the quality of their work and what they may lose. It's quite possible that I have never once thought about any of this as I take action to implement my idea. But how powerful - and restorative - would it be if I did stop to think about this and started with supporting them first?

So…I guess I end with this. If we truly believe in the changes we want to make, our only choice is to play the long game. We can’t implement a single successful thing for students if we do not first implement it successfully with staff. I lead with students at the heart of all my decisions. Every single day, every single decision, goes back to them and their best interests. But in doing that, I run the risk of overlooking those who I rely on to implement any good idea. A powerful leader must think about staff as much as students – who are they, what do they need and what do they fear? To my colleagues in my training, I urge you to play the game this way instead. We’ve talked about, but haven’t seen, change in education for decades. So let’s do this differently.

Heifetz, R. & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership. Harvard Business Review Press: Boston.