Great Hollywood Teachers
What great movies about teachers come to mind? Dead Poet’s Society, Mr Holland’s Opus, and, strangely enough, School of Rock are some that people mention to me, and all have a consistent theme or storyboard:
- Students with some sot of disengagement, or social or other disadvantage
- Most, if not all other teachers not connecting, caring or (most importantly) believing in the said students
- The eccentric, out of the box or even accidental teacher believing in, listening to, challenging and yet unconditionally respecting the students
- Hitherto disengagement is replaced with inspiring outcomes
As Hollywood as this is, it is a formula still replicated in schools around the world. By enlarge, and in spite of working as hard as ever, large numbers of teachers are crunching curriculum crowding, battling behaviour and facing decreasing time resources.
This is not the fault of teachers: indeed, school systems currently act to disengage teachers from students what with the intensity of curriculum measurement and accountability. Still, about 5% of teachers are able to replicate the Hollywood greats with a strong sense of presence and connection with students. Listening to, unconditionally respecting and believing in students.
It’s more than a shame that it remains so few – it’s a tragedy. Our world is starving for engagement, for engagement is the key to managing the complex and time-critical learning needed in our fast changing (and seemingly, degrading) world.
The Ten Best Questions for Growth or Change
10 Best Questions for Reflection, Clarity, Insight and Growth
The list of questions below are proven questions to help another person, or yourself, find reflection, clarity and insight around an issue. The intention is to show the general structure of these questions as examples, rather than ‘exact’ questions that you would quote verbatim. Shape them to your needs as required, considering the content and context.
You can use these questions as individual points of reflection, or as a sequence.
- If things were perfect tomorrow (with regard to the issue), what would be different (in what you see and how you feel)?
- What aspects of this situation are you happy with?
- How would you rate your effectiveness/satisfaction here, say out of 10?
- What rating would be pleased with, or would help you meet the current challenge?
- What do you need to do to move towards your preferred/needed rating?
- How is your current thinking or feeling impacting on the outcomes, results or goal?
- What thinking or feeling do you need to have to meet your goal(s) or challenge?
- What learning emerges for you (either from your experience, the situation or these questions)?
- What are the implications for your next steps?
- What are your next steps or actions?
Bonus Question Group: Johari Question Set
Based on the Johari Window concept, the following four questions are powerful and can be asked in many contexts (reflection, conflict management:
- How do I see myself? (skills, behaviour, attitudes, thinking)
- How do others see me?
- How would I like to be seen?
- How do I need to be to be effective? (or to find resolution, or to meet the challenge)
The irony of influence…
Most people I know would like to think that they are influential. Anything from being able to influence the decisions of their children to wanting to influence whole populations. You may not want to be a President or Prime Minister, but what would being able to influence others more effectively be worth to you? How would it change your world?
The thing is, the more you try to influence, the less you actually influence. Influence is passive, not active. It emerges more from who you are and what you do (which stems from who you are) than what you say. Take, as an example, the person who has influenced me most this year. Matt Church is a Sydney based entrepreneur, author and public speaker. His message, his content is first class. His influence comes not from the quality of his content, but his attitudes and behaviours. Indeed, his content is validated by his authenticity. Through this combination of a powerful message and high integrity, I learn much more than his content. I learn from his generosity, from his family and community orientation, and I learn from his commitment to adding value to others.
Your most influential teacher will have had this dual ‘channel’ of connection: great content/content delivery and great people engagement skills. Like Matt, the clarity of integrity allows them to listen, believe in, unconditionally respect (or love) and challenge. One of the quickest and most effective ways to create ‘influence capital’ with others is to listen well. We use optimistic and observational listening as training models to help others re-learn their listening skills for greater influence.
Influence can only be achieved by consistency, integrity and unconditional respect. Trying to influence is really only coercion. Are you a coercer or an influencer?
Can’t decide?
Jonah Lehrer’s book the Decisive Moment gives strong insight into how we make decisions. Insight that helps to explain why we are at a turning point in human and societal development.
The instinctive decisions related to survival come out of our reptilian brain and are reasonably obvious. If we are about to be hit by a bus the decision to move out of the way is taken rapidly and instinctively. This part of our brain has had hundreds of millions of years of evolution and is very, very fast and efficient. From a conscious perspective these decisions just happen.
Our mammalian brain has had 65 million years to evolve an effective means of learning from experience. Many of our decisions come from this part of our brain and appear as feelings – something feels like the right thing to do (we also call this intuition). This covers a surprisingly large range of decisions. In effect, this part of our brain has a feel for anything we have experienced before and can synthesise a wide range of inputs into a single decision. It takes about 10,000 hours to become expert at something – typically taking ten years to accumulate so many hours – and once expert we “know” what the best course of action is. In a stable environment experts will provide the best decisions and we have relied heavily on experts in the past (and even now in many areas of life). A reliance on experts will show itself in a hierarchical model of organisation, the person higher up makes better decisions and thus should be deferred to, all the way up to the most powerful person at the pinnacle of the organisation or political system.
The neocortex is the third part of our decision-making apparatus that brings some very powerful tools including logic, calculation, extrapolation, modelling and metaphor. These are ideal for solving problems that we have not come across before. In effect, this allows us to create something, a solution, an idea, a process, a product that did not exist before. However, the neocortex is only about 100,000 years old – young in evolutionary terms – and remains energy intensive and not very efficient, for example we can only hold about four variables in memory at one time. Thus if we have a new, complex problem (i.e. with many more than four variables) the only way we can solve it is through a collaborative process involving diverse views – sufficiently diverse that all variables are held by someone – and an environment in which all views are properly aired and then synthesised into a solution that no individual would be likely to come to by themselves but is accepted by all participants as the best solution. This is a distinct departure from relying on experts and leads to organisational forms that are much more inclusive, collaborative and flatter – or networked – in structure.
One of the difficulties for the individual is to know when to use which decision-making process. Buying a house we should rely on feel (too many variables but a well known problem). Buying a corkscrew we should rely on logic (ease of use, look, price, perhaps being the variables you might use). From a societal point of view, when we move from a stable environment to one in which the problems we face are predominantly new, how do we change our organisational forms in a timely way?
As a world we now face issues and problems that we have not faced before: peak oil, aging populations, limits to growth, climate change and rapid technological change. To solve the problems that these issues create we need new organisational forms. These forms ARE struggling to emerge but are being limited by old organisational forms and their embodied decision-making processes trying to maintain the status quo, sometimes harshly. The best decision? Keep on plugging away building the new!
The Success Zone publishing updates
The Success Zone
Our new book, “The Success Zone” is in its final processes of publishing and should be available for sale later this month (Oct 09).
Pre orders are available at http://www.gr8education.com/book/thesuccesszone.html
Some thoughts about insights and visions
I am writing this on a plane between England and Australia. I have been in England doing a mix of work and marketing, essentially talking with a lot of people about our work and testing new ways of both articulating what we do and delivering it. As this was happening I began to get an inkling of some major new insights stirring in my mind. I emailed my partners and said what was happening and that I was confident that on the flight home these insights would crystallise. I wrote this because my experience over at least 15 such flights in the last 3 years is that this always happens, insights crystallise on long haul trips. I am writing this now after some of the biggest insights of the last 5 years have appeared, fully formed in my mind.
Coincidentally, before this flight I went into my daughter’s bedroom looking for a book to read on the flight and my daughter, like me, is an avid and wide reader. I picked up Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” which contains two essays, one about Huxley’s experimentation with the mind altering drug mescalin and the second about how we open our minds to new thoughts or visions. At the risk of simplifying too much, he argues that our minds are open to new thoughts (amongst other conditions e.g. low sugar through fasting) when the oxygen level falls or the carbon dioxide level rises in our brains. This occurs, for example, through singing or chanting such as achieved in churches (when chanting we tend to breathe out more than we breathe in thus depleting our oxygen levels) or, as many traditions do, through meditating at the top of a mountain … or in a plane.
As a trade off between hull strength and human survivability, planes are designed to have an internal atmospheric pressure equivalent to being at about 8,000 feet above sea level once they are sealed and up in the air.
So, unbeknownst to me I have been putting myself 20 odd hours at a time in the perfect state to have new thoughts, visions and insights, just after I have had a range of new inputs, ideas and experiences. The perfect conditions to crystallise new thinking. On this particular flight everything has been enhanced as it is an old 747 with no backseat screens and, in any case, my whole audio/visual display controls are not working, including the overhead light! So I am sitting in the dark half dozing, half thinking as insights form in my head.
I wonder if this works for other people as well!
Teachers as leaders
Our research shows clearly that leadership skills are learnable, this has very important ramifications.
The most recent definitions of leadership describe leaders as people who create the conditions for others to succeed. The example par excellence of this ought to be teachers – as parents we want their whole focus to be on creating the conditions in which our children can succeed and to succeed our children need to learn to be leaders.
Like many types of leaders this is not where teachers originated in the modern era, rather teachers were employees of the state charged with creating conforming and well-schooled children who would fit into the industrial (and military) needs of the state. It was the prohibition on corporal punishment (in the 1980’s in Australia, for example) that signalled society’s desire to radically change the purpose of schooling. This change in purpose demanded, and still demands, a different type of leader, a different type of teacher.
Organisations that take leadership seriously know that there are a number of basic rules to developing a strong leadership culture. The first is to recruit people who have developed leadership capacity to a minimum level. This does not necessarily correlate with high academic (i.e. cognitive) ability so should be evaluated separately, the leader needs both. Second is to give these new leaders the right experiences, increasing in challenge, at the right time, to allow the gradual development of capacity – leadership requires practice and experience. Third, young leaders need good role models and mentors so that they know the attitudes and behaviours that distinguish the leader from the follower and receive the assistance they need as they develop.
If we look at education systems around the world then none come to mind that follow the first basic rule, they mostly select on (sometimes minimal!) academic ability. This shows itself when young teachers enter the classroom. Those who have achieved the minimum level of leadership ability find that they can engage the class (i.e. lead!) and teaching and learning readily take place. The teacher continues on this track and, with engaged students, can take risks with their practice and develop strongly, often into outstanding teachers. Those young teachers who have not reached a minimum level of leadership find that they cannot engage their students and turn to using methods of control (which is what most other teachers are doing). Less teaching and learning can take place – some students are simply disengaged – but with persistence the teacher develops into a competent teacher, good classroom control and sound, if unexciting, instructional practices. But this teacher is not a leader yet today is in the vast majority.
Without breaking this cycle, giving people the right experiences at the right time has little effect, once teachers are developing as managers rather than leaders this is hard to shift. Similarly, if most of the teachers are not developing as leaders it is hard to have appropriate role models for the less experienced teachers so the cycle continues.
This cycle can be broken by senior leaders providing role models for other staff. It is well established that an outstanding principal can transform a school and this is how, by modelling the behaviours and attitudes of a leader.
If we want to transform our education systems then we need to (1) develop the senior leaders who are in place to be leaders (our work has shown this can be done) and (2) recruit new teachers who have reached the necessary minimum levels of leadership. Both of these changes are achievable – if we want to have education systems that help all our children succeed.
Listening is the Key
Most of our listening hard-wiring is set to interact autobiographically. In other words, when we listen, we are listening for ourselves, not for the speaker. Our listening for ourselves could be still noble in intent – listening to detail to solve the problem and help the speaker by telling them what to do for instance. Or, it could be that our autobiographical listening is truly for ourselves: listening to the conversation to be able to trump the speaker. The thing is, we are not wired, taught or shown how to listen for the listener.
Think of a time that you were in the presence of a person that just listened to you. No judgement, not opinion, no solution. How did you feel? What did you notice about your thinking? Has this, indeed, ever happened to you?
Now think of a time when you needed time and space to think, and someone to listen, but your listener hurried your thinking, proffered solutions and answers and gave you their opinion. Does this happen often for you? How do you react to this circumstance? Most would say that, while this is the more common outcome, the effectiveness towards learning, growth and an eventual solution is reasonably low.
The secret, as outlined by David Rock in Quiet Leadership, is to listen with the generous expectation that the answer will emerge from the speaker. For many this is a quantum leap in listening purpose. The urge to give the solution is hard-wired and habitual. Yet, when one steps away from analysis and just quietly observes, without judgement and solution seeking, the speaker is far more enabled to engage with their own thinking, potential and future.
Listen deeply, to the words, the pitch, the language, the body, the face, the eyes and to the thinking.
Listen with a quiet mind.
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