Listening is good

As a school principal listening is good, listening to your staff, listening to students, listening to parents, listening to experts.  Listening to experts is not alway good, but if you don't listen you have no basis for not accepting what they are selling.

I have a confession to make.  I always found it difficult when I felt that those around me were coercing me into various forms of team or group membership.  I recall being on a one month live in leadership programme.  We were broken into teams with which we stayed for the duration of the program. On one occasion we were asked to critique a presentation which we had all experienced.  I thought the presenter was too one way, talking at us, and I was still critical of this despite his expertise.  The rest of my team thought he was tops and set about trying to coerce me into their point of view.  I would not budge and this created unease within the rest of the team.

On another occasion when I was a Superintendent of Schools I was on another in-service that included exercises on learning to trust one another.  I felt that one of these was irrelevant as were a lot of the rest of the experiences on that course.  From memory I quietly faded away back to my district.

The point of my confessions is to show that one should not feel obliged to buckle under if one feels strongly enough. At NASA a 'group think' process, in which they participants could not see the wood for the trees, resulted in 5 astronauts losing their lives.

You may as a Principal experience one or two mavericks on your staff who are very effective practitioners in the classroom, but not too good at operating under a hierarchical administration.  Listen to them.  My experience is that they are usually someone I would want on my staff.  I can think of actual mavericks who worked on my staff and thank goodness they did.   I urge you to have an ear for the staff member who has an out-of-left field idea that benefits the learning in the school.

I watched for the second time the true story of Alan Turing who invented a computer to break the enigma code in WWII.  At first none would listen to him but eventually those experts around him could see what he was on about and they melded into a team and the code was broken.

I am all for team work that improves the learning of the students and makes for a happier settled staff cohort who love coming into their school community each day.  Teaching in teams is well known and very effective if the team members listen to one another and provide continuity of learning for the students.  It is still common that a teacher is alone in class with a group of students, especially in the secondary (high) school situation.  Opportunities need to be given to those secondary school teachers to communicate regularly with the teachers from other specialised learning areas so that they develop a common understanding about each child.

Effective staff teams also lend support to one another in the general sense of morale and a feeling of wellbeing.

In my next post I will say more about listening to students. There is some interesting primary research in good old Australia on this score.


May the Force be with you!


GD