More Respect, Less Stress, Better Solutions - When Listening to Teachers is a Way of Working in a School System

April 17, 2024

By Kippy Smith and Erica Crane

While working as a consultant a few years ago, our founder was facilitating a special educator PD session to support a district with a transformative shift in grading practices. To generate better system-wide solutions for supporting students with learning disabilities to meet competencies, special educators from across the district were asked to share and codify the promising approaches they were using in their settings. Our founder Kippy overheard a creative, compelling idea in one small group, and encouraged the teacher to document it so the district leadership team could draw on his promising practice. The teacher shrugged and said, “The district doesn’t give a crap and they’re going to do what they want anyway. Why should I write it down?” 

If educators are asked to haphazardly contribute ideas and insights apart from school improvement processes - say, only during a single PD workshop facilitated by a consultant! - it can feel disingenuous and be ineffective in shaping smart solutions. When harnessing the collective knowledge and creativity of the team is a central way of working, schools develop better solutions and also reduce teacher stress and improve teacher respect. As Gosner (2021) in Edutopia explains,

While leaders must still be the stewards of a school’s mission and day-to-day operations, relying too much on hierarchical structures and top-down messaging leaves teachers feeling disconnected from their most likely source of daily solace: their peers working alongside them. (para 5)

Schools are not tackling simple problems that can be resolved with a pre-determined, technical solution and an implementation checklist managed from the top down. School goals address complex dilemmas that require new ideas and innovative solutions. Generating such innovations requires the collective genius of the whole organization (Hill et al., 2014). This means elevating the role that teacher knowledge and creativity play in the system.  

Since so much of a teacher’s work stays contained in one classroom or team, it’s hard to scale across a whole school or system the idea-sharing and storytelling that generates creative, new solutions. We created a tool to capture and disseminate educator insights in a way that serves the system – and the individual educator, too. We know it doesn’t make sense to teachers if sharing practice and collaboratively learning aren’t authentically connected to their own day-to-day work with their students. Educator reflection on their experience is at the heart of the Small Wins Dashboard, empowering individual teachers to lead their own professional growth by becoming reflective practitioners. The dashboard also combines teacher experiences and observations to illuminate system-wide patterns, and to enable bottom-up solutions. 

Taking the stories and ideas of teacher genius seriously contributes to an organizational culture of learning. Improvement Science for Equity researcher and lifelong educator Brandi Hinnant-Crawford explains how supporting adult learners is about “tap[ping] into the genius they possess” (Staton, 2024, para 7). When teachers are seen for the strengths and expertise they bring to the work of setting goals, embarking on learning journeys, and seeing what’s working and what’s not, the entire school system is better for it. Hill et al. (2014) emphasize how, “Great leaders of innovation, as we’ve said, see their role not as take-charge direction setters but as creators of a context in which others make innovation happen” (p. 102). Leading by building an ecosystem where teachers are seen as capable innovators allows school leadership to share the tremendous workload and ownership of strategic goals. And most importantly, it can lead to better culture and outcomes. 

References:

Gonser, S. (2021, February 5). Building a culture that respects teachers and reduces stress. Edutopia. George Lucas Educational Foundation. https://www.edutopia.org/article/building-culture-respects-teachers-and-reduces-stress

Hill, L. A., Brandeau, G., Truelove, E., & Lineback, K. (2014). Collective genius. In Harvard Business Review, 92(6), 94-138. https://hbr.org/2014/06/collective-genius

Staton, M. (2024, March 18). Teaching innovators: Brandi Hinnant-Crawford. Clemson News. Clemson University. https://news.clemson.edu/teaching-innovators-brandi-hinnant-crawford/