Revisiting relationship with Terry Duty . . .

On August 9th I shared a post about relationship and asked you to consider sharing what you thought the students on the New York trip told us about what teachers do that demonstrates that they care. Crystal shared the following in response to my question.

*The teachers treated the students with respect and talked to them like adults

*The teachers made an effort to get to know the students on a personal basis: what do they like, what do they do outside of school

*The teachers shared their lives with the students as well: showed them pictures, talked about their weekend adventures, etc

*The teachers created a 'safe environment' where it's ok to be wrong as long as you're trying; everyone is learning together

Her response accurately mirrored what the kids told us. Interesting how we know this information, yet as Terry describes below it is so very difficult to change the perceptions.
What follows is Terry Duty our high school principal sharing some of his thinking and reflection during and after the trip to New York and how this resulted in teachers and students coming together last week around the issue of relationship. I was able to participate in the meeting on August 28th that he refers to and was impressed by the skillful conversation that resulted around the need for relationship and the focus on it being seen not as one way, but that what students say and do also communicates to teachers a message about the importance of school. They are in the process of identifying commitments that all students and staff can make to influence the perceptions currently held by many at the high school that I believe have the potential to finally influence student and staff perceptions.

My recent trip to New York, with 4 students, 2 teachers and Mike to attend the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL) conference gave me the opportunity to learn more about systems thinking. Systems thinking sounds deep and complex, which it is, but it’s also a simple way to look at a system, organization, or in our case a school. What I’m learning now is that true change requires interdependency; it’s not linear, or a simple tweak. Sustainable change in organizations’ requirements is much like an ecosystem; a complex, living systems.

Over the past 5 years our school has tried to gain insight into whether our students perceive Tahoma as a place in which they are known, supported, challenged, and inspired. We’ve surveyed our students for 5 years using the Quaglia Institute “My Voice Student Aspirations Survey.” We have asked our teachers to focus on positive student-teacher relationships, tried an advisory model, shared personal stories, set school goals, and still over half our students are bored at school and don’t feel like our teachers care about them. Yet despite vision, motivation, and considerable effort we can’t seem to close the gap between our students and teachers.

Some say; ”who cares” your test scores are very good, your school is recognized as one of the best in the country, kids aren’t even supposed to like school or their teachers, that’s just part of being a kid! Wouldn’t that be an easy answer, that’s just how it should be, simply focus on what teachers do; teaching, and ignore the soft data, the touchy feely relationship stuff.

So, at the SOL conference, we were talking with our students about school, and the conversation came up about “teachers just don’t care” if they did they wouldn’t give us tests on the same day, big assignments that are all due all at once. Pretty harsh data but honest and coming from some very mature, academic students…I asked them, “What do students do to show their teachers that they care about their learning?” (multiple absences, tardies, not turning in homework, not preparing for class, let alone paying attention during class.) We had two very different mental models and ladders of inferences that stretched up to the sky.

It finally occurred to me! Our ability to achieve the relationship results we truly desired were being eroded by two groups; students and staff, with very different perceptions about each other, walking up two separate ladders of inference one rung at a time:
* Our beliefs are the truth.
* The truth is obvious.
* Our beliefs are based on real data.
* The data we select are the real data.

As educators we were trying to address an important aspect of our school; teacher/student relationships as well as our larger school culture, without establishing a mutual vision or a sharing responsibility within our school community. Put simply, we never asked our students to take any responsibility, to help, or to even sit with us and address the problem. To use a systems approach analogy; we were trying to solve world hunger, without addressing the system needs of; world poverty, education, water resources, healthcare…we can make small gains but will never solve the problem unless we look at the larger system needs.

It sounds so simple, so obvious, yet for the past five years we would look at what our students would say on the surveys and then try to solve the problem alone. After all, what more could they tell us? We’re the teachers, the adults; it’s our job to have the answers.

On August 28th we are a hosting an event called “One School.” We are bringing in our ASB officers, and 90 students, and teaming them with our entire teaching staff to build new ladders, new feedback loops asking new questions and putting more responsibility on the students for outcomes as well as the teacher to look at our school as a community, a system. 14 Focus groups will establish a vision, make commitments, and set measurable long and short-term goals around relationships, respect, and our school culture. We will use techniques like dialogue and skillful discussion, we hope these teacher/student focus groups can team to transform their collective thinking, and learning about our current state and mobilize energies and abilities greater than the sum of individual members’ talents.

Through this journey I have come to believe that enhancing teacher/student relationships can’t merely be an add-on, but rather it is fundamental to education for this generation of learners. I think kids are starving for real, authentic, human relationships, not virtual relationships found in; Facebook, My Space, texting, IM… I call them “e-relationships.” And our teachers are the real heroes, the guides of learning and they too need the support to allow authentic learning relationships to be cultivated and grow. Understanding the role of relationship in the classroom will help our school be more effective, achievement will increase, particularly with challenging students and our students will reach a greater potential. As we continue to ratchet up state and national standards, raise accountability measures, and increase expectations for both students and teachers, we can’t just ignore that student achievement increases with improved student/teacher relationships. Just ask anyone who their favorite teacher was and why; because they cared about me, inspired me, challenged me, saw me as a complete person, not just a “math student.”

We don’t need surveys to tell us that authentic relationships are important to learning and increasing student achievement.