Today’s post is the first in a series sharing specific ideas on how districts and administrators can make life better for teachers, create a better learning environment for students, and cost very little!

Respect Teachers’ Time

For 16 years, Diana Laufenberg taught 7-12 grade students social studies in Wisconsin, Kansas, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. In 2013, Laufenberg partnered with Chris Lehmann to start Inquiry Schools, a nonprofit working to create and support student-centered learning environments that are inquiry-driven, project-based, and utilize modern technology. She currently serves as the executive director and lead teacher for Inquiry Schools:

Here are three suggestions:

1. Find anyway possible to retain prep time.

This is incredibly tough post-pandemic but is one of the top ways that you can support your teachers. The job cannot be done within a school day as it is, and when they also do not get prep time, it further degrades their ability to stay healthy, feel successful, and be effective.

Find the money for a building sub, require central staff to regularly cycle through for subbing, bring health and wellness resources to the teachers. There are a ton more ideas here, but pick a few and get to work.

2. Only convene meetings when they are necessary. Stop with all the meetings.

If you need feedback from teachers on something important, schedule 15-minute rotations through folks prep time to chat and then GIVE BACK that time at the next scheduled staff meeting by making it shorter. If you just need to relay information, write as few words as possible to convey the information and then offer a time when they can get clarity if they need it.

Use staff meetings to reflect, create, and produce meaningful outputs for teachers’ daily classroom existence. If you are reading a PowerPoint to folks, just stop. Create space for folks to collaborate with meetings; let them get actual work done that will help them in their classroom. Schedule these meetings only when you believe that being in community will add to the experience.

3. Make professional learning generative and/or interactive as much as possible.

You will have lofty goals at the start of a school year. All admin do. Think long and hard about how you will engage your community in learning. With each professional learning experience, ask yourself what the teachers will leave with that they can use in their classroom soon. Name it. If you cannot nail that down, skip it.

With each professional learning experience, consider breaking folks up based on level of proficiency. If it involves tech, you don’t need someone that can teach themselves working at the same pace as someone that needs significant support. Know when to break folks up into smaller groups based on demonstrated need.

With each professional learning experience, use the strategy or approach to teach the idea/concept. If you want folks to engage in inquiry, use inquiry strategies. If you want folks to incorporate tech, incorporate tech. If you want folks to work on goal setting, have folks work on goal setting. We often spend too much time talking *about* something but not actually doing the thing.

‘Stop Calling My Classroom’

Renee Jones was the 2023 Nebraska Teacher of the Year. She teaches AVID and 9th grade English at Lincoln High School. Follow her on Twitter @ReneeJonesTeach:

1. Stop guessing what your people need. Ask them, instead. Or provide them with options. Here’s an example: “Out of the three following options (listing things that admin has control over and do not cost much), what would best support you?”

2. Stop calling my classroom in the middle of the hour. If you need to see a student, come to them. Interrupting my classroom tells me that your meeting is more important than the lesson I am teaching.

3. Send handwritten notes. Intentionally look for something the staff is doing. Take three minutes once or twice a day and write a hand note to that person. Keep track of who has received a note and who has not. Pay attention and recognize your staff!

‘Trust Is Everything’

Anne T. Henderson, a co-founder of the National Association for Family Engagement in Education (NAFSCE), specializes in the relationship between families and schools. She has written, by herself and with others, a small library of books, reports, articles, and tools over the past 35 years. Her most recent book, written with Karen L. Mapp, Stephany Cuevas, Martha Franco, and Suzanna Ewert, is Everyone Wins! The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships and Implications for Practice (Scholastic, 2022):

Trust is everything! Without trusting relationships, nothing works. This holds true across all relationships, including families and schools.

In our research-based book on family-school partnerships, Everyone Wins!, the biggest story that emerged was the importance of trust. Similarly, in Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement (2002), Bryk and Schneider found that schools with high levels of relational trust were far more likely to have high levels of student achievement and to continue to improve over time. Cooperation among teachers, parents, and administrators is essential to success.

How did the researchers measure trust? You may think demonstrating your competence is enough to win the confidence of your students, families, and colleagues. But it takes more than that. Bryk and Schneider identified four “considerations” that determine the quality of social exchanges: Respect, Integrity, Competence, and Personal regard.

Respect is reciprocal. It is earned and given. It develops when people take time to listen to each other and recognize the value of what they hear and learn. Families are experts on their children and have valuable information that teachers can use to engage students.

Integrity means that we keep our word and do what we say we are going to do. Students thrive in learning environments where adults admire and respect each other, are committed to helping students do well, and make efforts to discover everyone’s strengths.

Personal regard is the linchpin. That means taking time to help each other, going to bat for someone struggling with a problem, making the extra effort. As the old saying goes, children don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

In another study, “The Schools Teachers Leave,” Allensworth, Ponisciak, and Mazzeo found three factors that predicted teacher retention: teachers’ relationships with parents, student behavior, and a strong collaboration among teachers and the principal.

So how do we develop trust? The short answer: Put relationships first! It’s not the only thing we need to do, but it’s the first thing. Most schools have a transactional culture: Get the job done, fill out reports, implement the curriculum, follow the handbook. By putting relationships first, they shift to a relational culture, where work still gets done but happens within the context of collaborative relationships.

Where to start? With George Otero, the director of the Center for Relational Learning in Santa Fe, N.M., I developed three operating principles for relational practice. Each one builds on and reinforces the other. When we introduced those principles during a Relational Leadership Institute, school, district, and state leaders immediately began to see how to apply them not just to school settings but also their daily lives.

The operating principles are:

• Activate well-being, first. Smile, welcome, meet and greet, listen, accept, honor, acknowledge, invite. One district director for family engagement changed the way she held staff meetings by placing the chairs in a circle instead of in rows all facing the front.

• Make sure everyone is seen, heard, understood, and valued. Structure events and meetings so that people have a chance to talk to one another and connect. Hold “listening circles” with families and students. Ask participants for their ideas: What do you like about the school? What would make it a better place? What do you wish the staff would do to support learning?

• Practice ongoing discovery through continuous conversation. Do relational home visits. Change parent-teacher conferences so they are student-centered and there is time for teachers and parents to share insights and ideas to support learning. Greet families as they drop their children off at school. Develop a plan to contact each family once a month with some positive news about their children. Adopt a two-way text-messaging system.

When we transform a transactional culture into a relational culture by putting relationships first, dozens of studies have documented results like these:

1. Students feel supported and reassured.
2. Teachers gain insights into students’ strengths and challenges.
3. Families gain skills and confidence.
4. Schools become more welcoming and inclusive.
5. Family and student engagement increase.
6. Teachers, students, and families feel greater satisfaction.

In other words, Everyone Wins!

References

Resources:

· Center for RelationaLearning

· Parent Teacher Home Visit Program

· National Association for Family, School and Community Engagement

Thanks to Diana, Renee, and Anne for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

What are one to three actions you think a district or principal could take that would make life better for teachers, create a better learning atmosphere for students, and not cost much—if anything?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

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