Reflection Questions
Wade into the following questions for team or individual reflection.
• What does swimming in the deep end mean for you?
• What deep-end challenges do you feel you are facing at this time?
• Before you read through the chapters that follow, what are you most intrigued by or think will be useful to you?
• What deep-end learning opportunities have you passed up? Which ones did you take advantage of?
• In what deep-end professional learning opportunities might you engage in the next few years?
• As you take the self-assessment with regard to a specific project or initiative at your site, where do you find yourself feeling validated? Where do you find some learning edges?
• As you reflect on items in your self-assessment that contain learning edges for you, which ones can you research online for more information, or which books can you begin reading to access some new strategies? To find books to access new strategies, a good starting place is the References and Resources section in this book (page 91).
CHAPTER 1
Thinking Before You Speak
Direction over speed.
—Shane Parrish
We have the responsibility to shape the message for our school, to communicate in a way that makes sense for our colleagues and in our context. We have the responsibility to know what questions we can still ask and have the answers for others before we roll out a new project. An assistant principal (who will remain anonymous) in a state with strong mandates for its schools once said to me:
What do I need to know about thinking and planning before we speak? Everything is just given to us from above. We don’t get to think. We are just the messengers. I have no control over what I implement. Just give me the answer to how to deal with the resistance that will come when I tell others what needs to change now.
I truly believe that however we feel about what is “given to us from above,” we still have the responsibility to frame it for our coworkers who will be implementing it. While it is true that the country, state, province, district, or school administration (whoever is “above” you in the hierarchy) is telling you to make it work, you still have the responsibility to shape that message and own your part in the process. This requires emotional intelligence and cognitive ability.
In an article for Psychology Today, Adam Grant (2014a), professor at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and author of Give and Take, cites a systematic review by researchers Dana Joseph and Dan Newman (2010) that examines comprehensive data from all extant studies at the time, testing the influence of emotional intelligence and cognitive ability on job performance. Grant (2014a) explains, “In Joseph and Newman’s comprehensive analysis, cognitive ability accounted for more than 14 percent of job performance. Emotional intelligence accounted for less than 1 percent.”
Well, boo. Does this mean our study of emotional intelligence is worthless and we just need to get cognitively more capable? Luckily, no. Read on.
Grant (2014a) says:
This isn’t to say that emotional intelligence is useless. It’s relevant to performance in jobs where you have to deal with emotions every day, like sales, real estate, and counseling. If you’re selling a house or helping people cope with tragedies, it’s very useful to know what they’re feeling and respond appropriately. But in jobs that lack these emotional demands—like engineering, accounting, or science—emotional intelligence predicted lower performance.… If your job is to fix a car or balance numbers in a spreadsheet, paying attention to emotions might distract you from working efficiently and effectively.
Teaching does not lack emotional demands. Educators are in the people business, the development business, the teaching and learning business, which requires us to possess emotional intelligence. And honestly, while we need to be aware of the emotions of those with whom we work, there are also those moments when we need to focus on being practical, look at the facts and use our noggins to plot out a plan.
Deep-end abilities are varied and complex. Some are more cognitive, others more social, and still others psychological in nature. It isn’t an either-or situation in the deep end. We need all of these skills, and in this chapter we focus on thinking before you speak and planning for when you do speak. First, we examine why planning is important for a new initiative, then we review each of the self-assessment questions for thinking before you speak, in detail, to help you gauge your strengths and weaknesses with each item.
The Importance of Planning
In classrooms, educators write lesson plans, instruct, and assess. In receiving feedback from students and learning what worked and didn’t work, we rethink and we revise. Many times, we may find there were misconceptions we didn’t plan to address because we didn’t lesson plan well enough and confusion among our students because we didn’t teach or scaffold certain concepts effectively. We know that when we don’t plan, things don’t go as smoothly as they could have.
The same happens on a larger scale with rollouts of initiatives in schools. For some reason, (maybe we weren’t given enough time to plan, or we have pressure from above to get it done now, and so on) we hurry, we don’t spend enough time thinking before we speak, and we roll things out in a sloppy way. It gets us in trouble, over and over and over. Aspiring and emerging leaders need to think before they speak. Direction before speed.
I can hear you already. This rollout is urgent. Students need our support now, and this change has to happen this semester. I understand these pressures, but to be clear, I am not suggesting we slow down to a snail’s pace, create endless committees to provide input, or navel-gaze ad nauseam. However, we can consider some deep-end thinking skills to put to use throughout the thinking and planning process.
Teachers reflect on lessons, review data, consider next steps, and make decisions about those next steps. They then plan the next lesson, teach it, and gather more feedback. Considering these facts, cycles of planning and reflection are most likely not absolutely new to you and, while it is different in the sense that you are now working with adults around a school change initiative, you already know those fundamental steps, so breathe easier. You have seen this cycle of action before. The next section will provide processes and decision-making tools to assist with this deep-end challenge.
A Deep Dive Into Self-Assessment Questions
You should have already completed the deep-end self-assessment around your initiative or project in the introduction (see figure I.2, pages 9–11). In the remainder of this chapter, we reflect on questions from your deep-end self-assessment that focus on the first of the four foundational deep-end skills—thinking before you speak—and determine for which questions you have a learning edge.
Question 1: Do I Know What Challenge or Challenges This Initiative Is Solving?
Deep-end leaders work hard at articulating the real challenge they are trying to solve. It is important for leaders to closely examine what the challenge is and then determine if what they want to have happen is congruent to that objective. Will the challenge be adequately addressed if this initiative gets rolled out? Will this new center, curriculum, or teaching strategy move toward the goal to lessen or