One of the things I like most about the work of the educationalist Viviane Robinson is her concept of ‘open-to-learning conversations‘. These are interactions about performance, improvement, or educational problems between leaders and teachers. Robinson advocates a particular approach to such conversations, one whereby the leader is ready to have the validity of their assumptions brought into question. She describes how difficult such conversations can be:
“Conversations about the quality of performance are difficult because they have the potential
to threaten relationships by triggering discomfort and defensiveness. In the face of such
threats, leaders often experience a dilemma between pursuit of their change agenda and
protection of their relationships. Leaders may want to address what they see as a
performance issue yet believe they can not do so without running an unacceptable risk of
increased stress and conflict. In other words, they feel that they can not address the
performance issues and maintain relationships with the staff member. They feel caught
between the two.”
There are two objectives of open-to-learning conversations: getting closer to achieving the goal (solving the problem) whilst building relational trust. Both must be achieved for the conversation to be deemed a success. Building trust is important because it will make problem solving in the future easier. Loss of trust is too high a price to pay for the sake of advancing your cause.
Robinson’s model is powerful for three reasons. Firstly, the dilemma she describes – how to have that difficult conversation that could easily backfire – arises frequently and is a real concern for educational leaders. Secondly, its two outcomes are memorable and the model provides a simple heuristic for judging success. Thirdly, the approach offers a pathway to organisational change as it has viral qualities. What I mean by this is that teachers who walk away from a conversation with leaders feeling positive about educational improvement will in turn have more constructive conversations with other people. They will be more likely to talk up the change, to speak well of school leaders, and to keep an open mind about their own assumptions and biases.
Complex social organisations such as schools have fractal qualities. A fractal is a repeated pattern that can be observed when you zoom in or out in your perspective (think of a snowflake). When we talk about abstract concepts such as school culture, we are invoking the concept of a fractal because we expect to see the qualities of the culture whether we look at the organisation as a whole, or if we zoom in to look at each action and interaction. Fractals occur throughout complex systems. They are an emergent feature of a system in that they are not designed and built, but rather they grow chaotically and organically. It is said that no two snowflakes are the same. However, that doesn’t mean that anything goes in snowflake construction. There are rules and patterns wich mean we can recognise a snowflake as a snowflake.
The snowflake example suggests that we cannot ‘design and build’ a culture in the same way an architect would a building. This idea gets pushback as it seems to offend a certain kind of school leader, the kind that talks a lot about vision and hedges their bets on implementation science (the idea that school improvement begins with a rational plan which will be executed precisely). However, it is possible to be intentional about culture building. We can state that we want a culture in which… [people work together to solve educational problems]… [leaders are open to have their assumptions questioned]… [there is a desire to continuously improve] – insert your own ‘vision’. But to achieve these intentions, it is sometimes (perhaps often) better to start at the level of the individual actions and interactions, rather than take on the whole system!
The problem is that you need the right culture for the right culture to spread. For example, excessive use of command and control management approaches will act against any attempt to create culture through micro-interventions. By micro-intervention I mean focussing attention on one action, decision or interaction as an object of change. Robinson’s model is a micro-intervention as it concerns itself with one conversation between two agents in the system. It aims to spread change rather than impose it.
Robinson chooses a particular type of conversation as the basis for her model, those between a leader and a teacher about a performance issue. These are not the only kind of interactions that occur in schools. Might there be a similar heuristic to guide other interactions, for example a conversation between a teacher and a student over their behaviour?
As with Robinson’s model, it is important when addressing students’ misconduct not to achieve the goal of holding them to account at the expense of making it more difficult to do so in the future. In this way, we might say that there are two goals. The first is accountability (for their behaviour) and the second is mutual respect. Why have I chosen these particular terms?
Accountability for your conduct is, at its most basic, where your behaviour is noted and addressed by someone in a position of authority. There are three features of effective accountability for behaviour. Firstly, it is consistent. Secondly, it is immediate. Thirdly, you are held to account by someone you respect. In other words, misconduct must be quickly addressed whenever it is seen by someone who the student cares has noticed. I suggest that the power of accountability for misbehaviour resides predominantly in the interaction that occurs between the student and the teacher. This is not to say that sanctions cannot play a part – they often will. However, we know that a sanction can backfire when the student feels it is unjust and this often occurs because they do not respect the person who has caught them in the act.
An accountability conversation should identify the undesirable behaviour, remind the student of the reasons why the behaviour is undesirable (ideally a chance for retrieval practice – ask them, don’t tell them), then make clear the expectations of the student going forwards. In ticking these boxes, we are already beginning to address our second goal, which is to build mutual respect. Why is respect so important?
I have deliberately avoided ‘build relationships’ as the second goal. We get a bit confused in education about relationships and conduct. One school of thought says that good behaviour is achieved by creating good relationships. The other school of thought maintains that good behaviour is a prerequisite for relationship building. It all gets a bit binary. The term ‘relationship’ is also not helpful as it can mean many different things. So, I will avoid using the term and have opted instead for respect.
Respect ranges from an acceptance of authority (I’ll do it because you are in a position of authority and you’ve told me to) through to a feeling that you are acting in my best interest (I’ll do it because I know you are on my side). At one end of this spectrum, we can tip over into authoritarianism, at the other end into a desire to be liked. Neither is healthy.
Respect is a two-way street; you have to give it to receive it. The teacher must signal respect in the process of holding students to account. The implicit messaging might be:
“I’ll hold you to account, but I am a reasonable person.”
or
“I’ll hold you to account, but I will afford you the respect of explaining why.”
or
“I’ll hold you to account, but I am also interested in you as a person.”
Students may reciprocate signalling respect by apologising, responding promptly to the teacher’s request, making eye contact, being polite, and so on. They won’t always do this, but that is all the more reason for the teacher to signal respect. Mutual respect is a social contract and each side must come to believe that the other will deliver their side of the contract.
If the student is recalcitrant, it can be difficult to build mutual respect whilst holding them to account. So be it. Sometimes you have to settle for compliance in the short term. The important thing is to avoid degrading respect. If the encounter leads to conflict, this is a sure sign of failure. Conflict scales up in a fractal system to become a corrosive culture. The next time you have an interaction with this student it will likely be more difficult. Furthermore, over time, all of your interactions with students over their behaviour will become more difficult if a conflict culture takes hold, making it more likely that adults will lean towards authoritarianism.
So, here we have an interactional heuristic for managing behaviour which is not a million miles away from Robinson’s open-to-learning conversations. Both models move us towards our goal whilst avoiding making it more difficult to do so in the future.
Interactional heuristics are useful because they guide human behaviour in the moment. They speak to the culture we want to build. They replicate and spread.
We might see such heuristics encapsulated in a mantra. Warm-strict is one such mantra, which to me evokes the heuristic described above. For open-to-learning conversations we might say ‘Move forward; build trust’. Mantras remind us of the behaviours we should adopt and of the culture we are trying to create.
It feels like a gamble for school leaders if they place a bet on culture building through a focus on micro-interactions. However, it can achieve rapid results, quickly making the school a better place to be for everyone. And if the culture is built on positive interactions, those planned, whole-school change initiatives (the ones that get written up in school development plans and launched on INSET days) stand more chance of succeeding. So think big, start small.
Matthew Evans 