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How Do We Collaborate When Tensions Are Running High? (Opinion)

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8 months ago

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Sharing the load. Working together. Getting buy-in.

These are all great ideals for effective teamwork and highly desired. They are the traits that every team building, empowerment, and collective-efficacy article will cite about how to get things done and build a culture of unity.

But what do we do when we are in the middle of confrontation, as so many of our school leaders are currently? Is seeking unity and collaboration worth the energy and worth the risk? There is a genuine and justified apprehension from many that collaboration is just too difficult or too risky when the attacks are becoming more heated and more vitriolic.

A natural human reaction is to hunker down, not make waves, and keep a low profile. This is understandable. Our school leaders have been through two years of unprecedented change in both pedagogy and school management. They have lived and experienced students, families, and staff suffering as they have juggled muddling policy directives—or more often the absence of any policy directives. They have somehow kept classes going, students learning, and staff safe, only to be faced with growing unease and unrest at the school board, PTA, or at community forums.

It would be understandable if they said that they—and their staff (and their communities)—are too exhausted to undertake another round of rancor.

What do we do when we are swimming in a tide of confrontation?
This analogy may not work exactly, but the surfer—caught in a riptide—doesn’t fight against it, but instead lets themselves move along with it until it weakens. They don’t confront the rip, they don’t face it head on. Knowing when and how to use our energy may be as important in addressing confrontation. It’s not just what we say and do but also when and how we say it.

And the needed and opposing question to be asked must be: What do we lose by not engaging with those who are clearly concerned and passionate? Do we alienate ourselves or those in our community by not seeking collaboration? And do we unwittingly curtail the chance of meaningful change and meaningful understanding of an issue by seeking a collective response?

These times are not easy, and they probably require more thought and deliberation into what we have done naturally for a while. Collaboration was a clear function when things were good. It is probably a more necessary endeavor now that things are stressed.

So how do we establish and grow collaboration in the midst of confrontation? I asked several education and transformational-change leaders for their perspectives: Lacee Jacobs, head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at BTS Spark; Cindy Rogan, a leadership coach and former superintendent; and Chaunté Garrett, a current superintendent in Rocky Mount, N.C. Their responses have been arranged by their key themes.

Art of leadership

Cindy Rogan: It’s the art of leadership! I see it as a dance with moves that include courage, compassion, and curiosity. Courage to be willing to take that risk of leaning into deep listening before jumping too quickly into your response or problem-solving mode. It can be challenging when you’re feeling defensive, tired, or simply caught up in the emotion of the moment.

Compassion
Lacee Jacobs: How can we be compassionate enough to understand we are all a work in progress? Creating a safe space to dissent, make mistakes, and contribute ideas without fear is where true collaboration and commitment begins.

Cindy Rogan: Compassion for the other person/people in this dance is key. What are they thinking or feeling that’s causing these strong emotions? What beliefs or values are coming up for them? Where might you find a glimmer of common ground or alignment?

Curiosity
Lacee Jacobs: Curiosity starts when we forget what we think we know about people and meet them where they are in the moment. Dropping our agendas and showing genuine interest in others’ experiences by asking questions we don’t know the answers to fosters psychological safety and promotes collaboration.

Cindy Rogan: Curiosity is key as you listen with your head and heart. Asking questions to draw out those beliefs, their “why” that is causing this confrontation. By balancing your courage, compassion, and curiosity, you might find you are in a more steady state to have a more collaborative dialogue.

Comfortable with being uncomfortable
Chaunté Garrett: We have just got to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Lacee Jacobs: Growing our quotient for discomfort is one of the best ways to become an adaptive leader who is prepared to face the challenges of today. This will build our strength to collaborate and allow us to recognize there is more than one worldview we need to consider.

Chaunté Garrett: As a leader, you may need to decide I’m not the person to lead this. I may meet to be a listener in this conversation and I’ll be a learner in this conversation.

Collaboration

Lacee Jacobs: Collaboration is not about getting others to see our point of view. Collaboration is an opportunity for us to shift our own mindset and prioritize our relationships over being right.

Chaunté Garrett: By seeking other voices and collaboration, ownership doesn’t just fall on the person who may be wearing the hat or the title. The ownership falls on the community to help the community become better and stronger.

Collaboration = > cooperation but < abdication

Collaboration is more than cooperation. It is more than going along with something that you may not agree with or something you may not have had a say in deciding. We’ve all been “volun-told,” and merely cooperating is the next step on that same continuum—we agree to go along, but it hasn’t been anything we necessarily agree with nor see or value as our own. The “co” part of the word has more to do with being co-opted or co-erced to be part of something, and our co-operation has more to do with us showing that we are cooperative rather than having any investment in the outcome.

For it to rise above cooperation, we must have taken part in the development of the action or desired solution, from its conception, as a group, with joint ownership and common-owned desire for success.

But collaboration is less than abdication. It is not submitting yourself and your beliefs to the viewpoints of others. For anything to be truly collaborative, it must be owned by the team or the group. Submission to others does not result in ownership, and, in fact, it will do the opposite and relegate the solution to being someone else’s responsibility.

Collaboration requires others, and often, others bring dissenting voices. One cannot collaborate with oneself, and to exclude others from the process may set whatever you are doing on a path toward irrelevance.

Be curious, show compassion, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You may not change mindsets immediately, but you are creating space for voices and establishing environments that are more likely to include rather than exclude, empower rather than disengage, bring communities together rather than push them apart.



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Adnan Syed of ‘Serial,’ Newly Freed, Is Hired by Georgetown University

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3 months ago

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December 23, 2022

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Adnan Syed, who was freed in September after he spent 23 years in prison fighting a murder conviction that was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” has been hired by Georgetown University as an associate for an organization whose work mirrors the efforts that led to his release, the university has announced.

Mr. Syed, the subject of the 2014 podcast and pop-culture sensation that raised questions about whether he had received a fair trial after being convicted of strangling his high school classmate and onetime girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, will work for Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative.

Mr. Syed, who was 17 at the time of Ms. Lee’s death in Baltimore, has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

The university said that Mr. Syed, now 41, will help support programs at the organization, such as a class in which students reinvestigate wrongful convictions and seek to “bring innocent people home” by creating short documentaries about their findings. The program, founded in 2016, “brings together leading scholars, practitioners, students and those affected by the criminal justice system to tackle the problem of mass incarceration,” according to its website.

Georgetown University, which is in Washington, said that in the year leading up to his release, Mr. Syed was enrolled in the university’s bachelor of liberal arts program at the Maryland prison where he was incarcerated.

“To go from prison to being a Georgetown student and then to actually be on campus on a pathway to work for Georgetown at the Prisons and Justice Initiative, it’s a full circle moment,” Mr. Syed said in a statement. “P.J.I. changed my life. It changed my family’s life. Hopefully I can have the same kind of impact on others.”

He added that he hoped to continue his education at Georgetown and go to law school.

The new job this month culminated what has been a remarkable year for Mr. Syed, whose case has again received widespread public attention after a flurry of recent legal activity.

In September, Mr. Syed was released from prison after a judge overturned his murder conviction. Prosecutors said at the time that an investigation had uncovered various problems related to his case, including the potential involvement of two suspects and key evidence that prosecutors might have failed to provide to Mr. Syed’s lawyers.

In October, prosecutors in Baltimore dropped the charges against Mr. Syed after DNA testing on items that had never been fully examined proved Mr. Syed’s innocence, officials said.

Ms. Lee’s family filed an appeal with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals after prosecutors dropped the charges.

On Nov. 4, the court said in an order that the appeal could be heard in court in February.

Marc Howard, the director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative, said in a statement that Mr. Syed’s “commitment to the program and to his education was clear from the moment he stepped into the classroom.”

He added that Mr. Syed “is one of the most resilient and inspiring people I’ve ever met, and he has so much to offer our team and the other students in P.J.I. programs.”

In a Georgetown University article about the hiring, Mr. Syed said that he was in disbelief when he first saw a flier for the program.

“It became this domino effect to see us be accepted,” he said. “It made it become something real in the eyes of others, that there are opportunities. There can be a sense of hope: a sense of hope that things can get better, a sense of hope that I can work hard and still achieve something, a sense of hope that I can still do something that my family will be proud of.”

His attachment to the school was evident on Sept. 19, when he walked out of prison for the first time since he was a teenager.

Amid a throng of reporters and his supporters, Mr. Syed walked down the courthouse steps in Baltimore, smiling. He gave a wave.

And in his hand, he carried a binder with a Georgetown sticker. His graded papers and tests were inside.

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At Berkeley Law, a Debate Over Zionism, Free Speech and Campus Ideals

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3 months ago

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December 21, 2022

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“Supporting Palestinian liberation does not mean opposition to Jewish people or the Jewish religion,” the group said in a statement to the Berkeley law community. Members of the group did not respond to messages seeking an interview.

After learning about the bylaw, Mr. Chemerinsky met with the university’s Hillel rabbi and spoke with several Jewish students, but, aside from concerns within the law school, the reaction was relatively muted, he said.

That changed, he said, after Kenneth L. Marcus, the civil rights chief of the U.S. Education Department during the Trump administration, wrote about the bylaw in September in The Jewish Journal under the explosive headline “Berkeley Develops Jewish Free Zones.”

Mr. Marcus wrote that the bylaw was “frightening and unexpected, like a bang on the door in the night,” and said that free speech does not protect discriminatory conduct.

The article went viral.

Mr. Chemerinsky said he learned about Mr. Marcus’s article, which he described as “inflammatory and distorted,” while he was in Los Angeles for a conference. Mr. Chemerinsky said he typed out a response to the article, which was appended to it, and then didn’t think much of it. That afternoon, he was deluged by emails. At an alumni event that night, the law school’s perceived hostility to Jews was “all anyone wanted to talk about.”

In an interview, Mr. Marcus, a Berkeley law school alumnus, said that he was contacted by law students there who were concerned about the bylaw. He said he spent weeks trying to support them and wrote his article after Berkeley did not “rectify the problem.”

Not allowing Zionist speakers, he said, was a proxy for prohibiting Jews. The provisions, he said, are “aimed at the Jewish community and those who support the Jewish community,” even while acknowledging that the policy could allow Jewish speakers and bar those who are not Jewish.

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‘Better Defined By Their Strengths’: 5 Ways to Support Students With Learning Differences

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3 months ago

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December 21, 2022

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“People with learning differences are human,” wrote Deanna White, a neurodiversity advocate and parent learning coach in response to a question we posed on LinkedIn. “Unique individuals and wonderful humans that are better defined by their strengths. So stop focusing on the weakness.”

We invited our social media followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to weigh in on the most effective way schools can better support students with learning differences.

Responses ranged from shifting educators’ mindset—like highlighting student strengths—to more far-reaching changes that would require schoolwide or district support.

Focus on students’ strengths

There are many ways of encouraging students to play to their strengths, as educators Winston Sakurai and Phyllis Fagell demonstrated in an August 2022 article by Education Week Assistant Editor Denisa Superville.

They detailed how they shared their own learning struggles as a way to connect with their students. Their personal successes show students, who may be struggling academically or socially, that anything is possible.

Here’s what other educators had to say.

1. Help them understand their learning strengths and challenges and growing them as strong self-advocates.

2. Devoting time and money to developing teachers’ abilities to differentiate.

– Amy S.

By having high expectations and giving them exposure to high-quality materials and experiences, even ones that seem “above them.” They will shock us with their insights every time.

– Angela P. 😒😒🥴

Meet students where they are

In a 2015 primer on the topic, EdWeek Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks wrote about how “differentiated instruction”—the process of identifying students’ individual learning strengths, needs, and interests and adapting lessons to match them—became a popular approach to helping diverse students learn together. Respondents largely agreed.

Time to work with every student. If you can meet with a child for a bit of time to help with exactly what she or he needs, it might ignite both learning and understanding.

– Alison K.

So many ways…start with environment, a.k.a. The Third Teacher.

  • Reduce obstacles

  • Increase supports

  • Meet kids where they are

(h/t @drncgarrett)

–Matt R.

Small class sizes, strong positive teacher/student relationships, differentiated instruction, and reflection.

–Yvonne E.

Smaller class sizes

In a 2017 Opinion essay, former teacher Marc Vicenti wrote about “the daily wear and tear on educators when trying to juggle a full teaching load and meaningful relationships with lively young people who all have different needs and experiences.”

“We can either choose to be less effective in our practice or exhaust ourselves—neither of which is beneficial to students or our own well-being,” he wrote.

Smaller class sizes are one way of mitigating the risk of burnout while working to meet each student’s needs.

Small classes, small schools, local control. I am the principal in a pretty small school in a small community and I know every child, and every family and we can build programs to meet our students’ needs. A country run or state run school system can’t do that.

– Ryan G.

Increase funding to actually lower the student-to-teacher ratio. This allows teachers to give more time to the individual.

– Cathleen W.

Fewer standardized tests

Standardized tests have long been criticized for narrowing instruction and for holding all students to the same standard when “students enter school at varying levels and learn and grow at different rates.”

The backlash against standardized testing renewed interest in alternative ways to evaluate students’ learning progress, like “performance assessments—the idea of measuring what students can do, not merely what they know”.

STOP standardized testing.

– Dawn W.

Fewer standardized or timed tests, teaching to mastery, not according to a schedule.

– Autumn

Give students a voice

Sometimes it’s best to go to the source to discern how to best tackle an issue. Giving these students a voice can not only empower them in their learning, but also help educators understand how to have the biggest impact.

Ask them how they learn and what helps. Give them a voice!

– Grisel W.

Yes! Listening to what students need and giving them a voice is something we need to do for all students, but especially those who need more help in the classroom.

– Victoria D.



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