Besides the PAUSE strategy, coaches have three additional actions they can take to address bias head-on and proactively engage diversity.
1. Create a list of unstructured processes, and structure them: What activities do you do that don’t align with a specific purpose or process? Consider, for example, the teachers you engage with daily. How did you make the decision to focus on those teachers? Are they your friends? Do you have pleasant and comfortable interactions with them? Do you primarily interact with the predominant ethnic group in the school? Do you tend to give more praise to certain teachers, regardless of the evidence you collect? Also consider your feedback system. Have you structured it to align with previously established goals, or have you based it on your own presuppositions about teachers?
Once you develop your list of unstructured processes, create an unbiased structure. Ensure your daily interactions include all teachers. Create feedback processes that align with co-created goals. (See chapter 5, page 49, for more about feedback.) Structure allows us to make sure that all teachers have opportunities to be nurtured, embraced, and successful and to grow.
2. Engage with teachers who are different from you: As noted earlier, diversity does not only refer to demographics. Different from you means more than just race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. It also includes thinking style and personality. Although a coach is expected to work with all teachers, undoubtedly, coaches may tend to favor having more frequent interactions with teachers who are more like them. As our schools become more diverse, so will (or should) our faculty. Personally and professionally, I have observed that the more we get to know someone, the more differences we become familiar with and even embrace subconsciously.
3. Encourage others with opposing viewpoints to speak out: Dissenters and devil’s advocates can often frustrate us, especially when we are pushing our own ideas or ways of working. Organizational change often gets pushed through by those teachers who speak the loudest and who talk over those with opposing viewpoints. But if coaches preach to challenge the status quo in education, they must listen to and act on well-reasoned dissonance and criticism from teachers. Which teachers disagree with you or often try to derail your efforts? Give those teachers the opportunity to reason through their thinking by having thoughtful, reflective dialogues in a safe environment. This encourages collaboration through embracing diverse ideas and freely giving trust. (For more on dissonance, see the next section beginning on this page.)
Of course, schools must also address diversity in recruiting, hiring, and onboarding practices. In his book Originals, psychologist Adam Grant (2016) advises organizational leaders seeking to build more innovative and successful organizational cultures to hire for cultural contribution rather than cultural fit by actively seeking diversity in experiences, skills, and personality traits, rather than hiring those who think in similar ways. To ensure diversity, coaches must take part in the hiring decisions made by leadership. These practices foster dissonance that can lead to collaborative strength.
Dissonance
Dissonance occurs when some elements of collaboration don’t seem to work in concert with one another. It can damage collaboration if not harnessed in the right way. In an attempt to foster collaboration, principals often ask their coaches to facilitate collaborative common planning to discuss standards, normed assessments, and instructional strategies. Oftentimes, this looks like a rushed gathering focused more on logistics than on strategies. Although it’s appropriate to ensure we stay productive, we should utilize our collaboration time in the most meaningful way. This valuable face-to-face time together provides opportunities to create goals, discuss strategy (for example, personalizing learning), and articulate progress. A culture of collaboration is only possible when all teachers feel affirmed as educators and valued as contributing members of the team. However, this does not mean that coaches should aim to eliminate all dissonance. In fact, some forms of dissonance can actually be beneficial.
When working with existing faculty, how can coaches champion dissonance when visioning, creating new ideas, and monitoring growth? Grant (2016) suggests identifying the person who commonly acts as a loyal opponent or devil’s advocate, instead of randomly assigning someone a devil’s advocate role, because the assignment becomes just that: a role one plays. If the identified person doesn’t truly have a passionate feeling for or against an idea, he or she won’t have a compelling argument, and the argument won’t truly represent an opposing viewpoint. Dissonance must be authentic so that emotion and experience translate to thoughtful communication of ideas.
A school building contains plenty of opinions to harness. We should look not to create opinion bash fests but to leverage dissonance in a way that leads to purposeful change in teaching and learning. Coaches can discover where dissonance exists in their school through the use of a survey that contains statements meant to invoke emotion or reaction. Figure 1.2 features sample responses to a list of dissonance-discovering prompts that coaches can pose to teachers and have teachers answer anonymously or in confidence.
Figure 1.2: Dissonance-discovering prompts.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.
After teachers respond to these prompts, compelling statements, outlandish ideas, and dissenting opinions can emerge. This process gives teachers an outlet to share their expertise, practices, and purposes transparently and frequently. Coaches, in a sense, take a cultural pulse and invite people who have differing views to the table. After receiving these responses, coaches are able to leverage dissonance by acting on teachers’ specific desires and wishes. We, as coaches and school leaders, oftentimes do a really great job collecting copious amounts of assessment data or listening to the latest education buzz, but we frequently struggle with using the data to change our practice. It takes courage and perseverance to act on the information we discover and allow those who hold different viewpoints to take the microphone.
Balance
While collaboration is important, having team members collaborate excessively and not allowing them time to think and work independently leads to danger. Further, collaboration may cater to certain personality types over others. For these reasons, coaches must carefully ensure balance when working with teachers in a collaborative setting. Coaches can begin to understand how to strike this balance by examining the concepts of groupthink and introversion versus extroversion, considering a variety of balancing methods they can incorporate into their practice, and following three important principles of working as a team.
Groupthink
Collaboration is most definitely in your repertoire of educational jargon, but groupthink probably isn’t. Groupthink refers to the conformity that results when a group of people come together. This phenomenon, for example, is present in a study by psychologists Jamil Zaki and Kevin N. Ochsner (2012), in which fMRI scanners measured brain activity and identified that if an individual views a photo of someone with a group of people, and the group expresses that it finds the person in the photo attractive, the individual will consider the person in the photo more attractive than he or she would have without that group. Zaki and Ochsner (2012) find that the reward networks of the human brain respond to the photo of the person after it has gained exposure to the positive judgments of fellow group members, which can lead to the conformity present in groupthink. Coaches, however, have an opportunity to facilitate collaboration in a way that doesn’t lead to groupthink.
