Tag: communication

I Hate Little Buts

Cigarettes - I hate cigarettes, but it's so good. :)


One of the first rules of improv – the most important rule of improv – is to embody a sense of “Yes, and…” Chris and I wrote about it in our book, and this post served as the early draft of that chapter. Sit in a conversation with me for any decent span of time, and you’ll hear me say it. Sit a little longer, and you’ll hear me say it again. I can’t stop myself.

What you won’t know is how often I hear it in my head while I listen to others speak. A colleague in a brainstorming session in the office may respond to someone else’s idea, “Yes that’s a possibility, but here’s why it won’t work…” My brain, fills in the but with an and and begins to imagine where that brainstorm could have gone. It also wonders how the person with that initial idea heard the response. Did she hear what linguists say is actually happening when a but is deployed and process the response as actually not agreeing with her idea?

My Pavlovian response to the little buts sometimes gets me in trouble when I’m faced with a big but. A few weeks ago, when editing a piece of writing from a colleague, I went on a replacing rampage and suggested the removal of every but he’d used throughout the draft. Having satisfied my compulsion, I sent the draft back.

A day later, the next draft arrived in my inbox. All of the little but-to-and revisions had been accepted. Midway through the piece, a comment, “These ideas don’t go together. If I use and here, people are going to think I support the bad policy I mention first, and the more appropriate policy I pose after the but.” He was right. In my flurry of ands, I’d obsessed with form and ignored function.

The answer is moderation. Each of the other edits I’d made set a tone of unity of ideas. The new ands pulled concepts together and tore at false dichotomies. That last but, the one that stayed, wasn’t little. It was deployed to draw attention to why a common misconception needn’t be so in readers’ minds.

This is the danger of Pavlovian responses. We hear the bell ring, but nothing is in the dog bowl. In my instance, I’d become so accustomed to the frequent mindless use of language that I began mindlessly dismissing what they were saying. Not everything is a little but. Some buts are big and necessary. As is the case with so many words, when used without thought, buts used without thought can also start to be buts used without meaning.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

The Easiest Thing We Learn from the Classroom May Be the Thing We Teach Worst

This is funny on so many levels.

Whatever your training was or has been in a classroom space, that’s the easiest skill to transfer to other spaces. If we are doing it decently, our classrooms offer spaces for the free exchange of ideas. If we’re doing it a little better, those ideas are new to many of the people in the room. If we’re operating in the top percentiles, those ideas are being pushed, pulled, and resisted in ways that leave everyone thinking, feeling heard, and knowing they were cared for.

Executing that last one is difficult. What’s easy is the transference of whatever habits of conversation are the mode for a learning space into other spaces as well.

You’ve maybe in meetings with folks who answer every suggestion with why it won’t work, why you’re wrong, and why the whole effort is doomed from the start. Rome is burning, they’ll tell you. This is Rome, the’ll claim. While there’s surely a mode of conversation these people experienced within their homes that could align with what you’re experiencing, we’ve seen enough of the power of school to know that it is a path that could have shifted long before they became professional buzzkills.

Teaching in FL, this was one of the key components of setting the best expectations of what we would collectively establish as our classroom culture. We’d talk to each other in ways that recognized the human foibles of the other people and took the stance that all ideas were worth our examination. (When working with 8th graders, I may have phrased it differently, but that was the underlying concept.)

At SLA, it was built into two of the school’s three rules – respect others & respect that this is a place of learning. If those are the guidelines and you begin to build practices around it, buzz kills in training can start to explore social career paths. Over the years, many students walked through the door suspect of the kinds of things we were asking them to do at SLA. They were suspect of working with other students, and for many, it was the first time they were asked to interact in interdependent ways with people from backgrounds different from their own.

And that was the work. That’s what it means to focus on citizenship. We’re in an election year, so it bears repeating. The little things we do like helping students think about how they talk to and about one another and how they discuss new and different ideas matter in ways that can corrode or build up a community or a republic more deeply than an economic policy that runs afoul.

How we talk to one another, now, as adults, was the easiest thing of our classroom experiences to pull forward into adulthood, and it can be one of the most difficult things to change once we’re here.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.

147/365 So, what I hear you saying is…

Moving around a meeting room today examining the products of a group chalk talk activity, I notice someone has written, “‘So what I hear you saying…’ is a sign of active listening.”

I pause.

I write, “Does it always?”

At some point, when I was likely in middle school, my mom had a conversation with me about active listening. She told me this phrase, or one quite similar to it could be deployed in conversation to make sure we were on the right track.

From then on, I had the keys to the conversational kingdom.

People responded differently when I dropped this paraphrasing gem into conversations.

“Oh,” their faces seemed to say, “You really were listening to me.”

And I was…sort of.

Largely what I was doing was listening to the words they were saying so that I could cut out a few adjectives, adverbs and prepositional phrases and turn their last sentence or two back on them.

In an attempt to make them feel heard, I wasn’t really listening.

This paraphrasing technique forgoes the whole in favor of the part. It’s akin to hiring highly-qualified teachers without considering all the other factors that might contribute to students’ learning.

Real paraphrasing, if we were to attempt to check in with folks on the messages they’re sending might look more like this:

So, what I hear you saying is, “INSERT ABBREVIATED SENTENCES HERE.” Plus, you’re standing with your arms crossed, which I interpret as you not feeling comfortable speaking your whole truth. This is in addition to the fact that you checked the clock on the wall twice during your last statement. All of this, taken with your friendship with the chair of the committee that spearheaded the initiative that caused the problem we’re attempting to solve, leads me to believe…

It becomes apparent that repeating what we’ve just heard might not be the check-in we mean it to be – not the whole check-in, anyway.

Paraphrasing, pausing in a conversation to seek clarification so that everyone involved remains on the same page is a helpful and necessary piece of communication.

I worry, as with any other helpful tip, that doing a thing can start to pass for doing THE thing.

81/365 Listen to Understand

Faculty meetings can be fascinating places.

Sit in the corner o f a faculty meeting of any given school, just listen, take a few notes, and you’ll be able to say much about what goes on in that school’s classrooms based on what you see.

Author Robert Fulghum writes about his time as a teacher and how he will go down in the history of his school as the guy who tried to kill himself with a pencil to get out of a faculty meeting. To be sure, in no other setting does a pencil present itself as a weapon as in a faculty meeting.

This needn’t be so. One important skill to put into practice for transforming school culture among faculty is to practice assuming positive intent.

Another tool, equally as powerful, and perhaps more important, is that of listening to understand.

In the schools we need, adults listen to one another to understand. They listen to the children with this goal as well. If what we want for students we must want for teachers as well, then it makes sense to begin with the teachers.

Listening to understand is not a new concept by any means. For many, it is as simple as Atticus Finch’s advise in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

This may seem like a long and drawn out process, trying to figure out all of the things contribute to a person’s thinking and then attempting to take on that perspective. If you were trying to do this for each member of a faculty, you’d likely retire before you’d completed the project.

Instead, listening to understand means marshalling the forces of focus and curiosity to truly hear what another person is attempting to communicate. It means hearing not only what they are audibly saying but moving from those initial utterances to questions that show that you were listening and want to understand at a deeper level.

Here, too, community will be co-created. Building understanding of those we work with helps us to understand how their goals, needs, and drives find common cause with our own goals, needs, and drives.

To listening to understand can take many paths, to get started, though, here are a few suggestions:

Look and listen. It’s commonly known that the majority of communication is transmitted through non-verbal means. If you were are truly listening to understand, you must listen with all of your senses. Pay attention to physical cues being sent your way.

Ask. So often, our gut instinct in conversation when others are trying to explain themselves or make a point is to react with a statement of agreement or disagreement. If we take an extra beat, consider the information we have, and ask the next logical question, then the conversation and our understanding will be all the better for it.

Say what you think you heard. In any line of communication, there is interference in the form of mishearing, getting distracted, or pouring our own thoughts into the process. By taking a moment to say to the person you’re seeking to understand, “Here’s what I think I just heard you say…” we open the path for clarification.

Listening to understand is different than listening to hear. While both are preferrable to remaining quiet until it is your turn to talk, listening to understand has the benefit of developing purpose that is specific to those to whom we are listening.

72/365 Say More, Talk Less

We talk a lot in classrooms. We talk a lot in schools. We talk a lot in education.

We talk a lot.

Sit in any traditional classroom in America and you’re likely to hear much talking. Traditionally, this will be the teacher. Oftentimes, it will be in lecture mode. If you (and the students) are lucky, the class you are watching will feature a lecture from the teacher and then time for the students to practice…alone…no talking.

If fortune turns his back on you, the lecture will last the entire class period with the expectation that notes are taken the whole way through.

In the schools we need, we say more and talk less.

Improvisational theater gives us an appropriate structure for considering this approach – economy of dialogue. In her book, “When I Say This…,” “Do You Mean That?” Cherie Kerr explains, “What this means is the improv player can say only what is absolutely necessary during any scene in any show.”

An economic approach to talk in the classroom, well-deployed can increase the value of what’s being said. If a student no longer has to filter out the excess speech, it stands to reason those words he does hear will have greater value.

From a practical perspective, respecting the economy of dialogue also helps to adhere to Dan Meyer’s directive, “Be less helpful.” With fewer words to instruct them, students will find themselves the chief technicians of their learning, needing to parse out the meaning of the judiciously offered information from the teacher.

This only speaks to one segment of the classroom population – the teacher – but the rule applies to students as well.

When we ask students, “Why?” after they’ve answered a question or offered an opinion, we are creating a semantic implication that there is a right answer for which we are looking. Sometimes, there is. Much of the time, there is not. What we are after when we ask follow-up questions in class is more information from our students. We literally want them to say more to help us understand their thinking and help themselves to play out their nascent ideas.

If this is what we mean, then this is what we should say. In the cases where students have offered information and our instincts tell us there is more to be mined in their minds, rather than narrowing the scope of what they might say next, we can simply invite them to “Say more.”

You will note a discrepancy between the application of this principle to teachers and its application to students. It is true, teachers are being asked to talk less while asking students to “say more” and thereby talk more. As it turns out, this is intentional.

By and large, I’ve not noticed a dearth of teacher words in the classrooms I’ve seen. Students, on the other hand, are given little practice using those voices teachers are so quick to purport wanting to give to their students.

First, let us ask students to say more, get comfortable with playing with ideas out loud and finding the meanings they intend to make. After that, once teachers have practice themselves, let us begin teaching economy of dialogue.

71/365 Communication is Key (and We Can Do It Better)

Speak about mobile technologies in most any school setting and you’re likely to find frenetic conversation about the role of these technologies in facilitating learning. You’ll find educators trading app recommendations, discussing the productivity possible through mobile phones, tablets, and the like. They discuss notetaking, the dissemination of class resources, and the opportunities of all kinds of assessment.

Indeed, this makes much sense. A 2013 Pew Internet & American Life report found that 78 percent of 12-17 year olds have cell phones. Increasingly, those are smartphones. While access to these technologies are not universal across geographies and economic statuses, the trend is clear. More and more, students are walking around with computers in their pockets.

Strangely, and largely absent from that conversation is one key capability of these machines – communication. Not communication of what they’ve created to new audiences, but simple person-to-person communication of messages.

The schools we need must carefully consider communication ecosystems and how they can be leveraged.

The most common form of school communication to leverage possibilities is no doubt the school website. In a study published in 2008, Reenay Rogers and Vivian Wright reported that parents in their study “indicated using the computer to check the school website for homework information (50.0%) and important school dates (55.6%).” As websites were the prime tools to develop from the Internet, it’s not surprising these are the tools most utilized by parents.

If a school is going to do one thing to communicate with parents via technology, websites are certainly the most useful tool of the moment.

Considering communication between school, students, and parents from an ecosystem perspective, though, means taking account and advantage of all tools.

To begin this, we must think about the messages we send and the medium best suited for those messages. Websites allow for the posting of grades, events, and news stories. Phone calls, allow for longer synchronous conversations and are, unfortunately, most frequently deployed in reference to disciplinary action. Email, which 35.8 percent of Rogers and Wright’s parents reported taking advantage of, allows for asynchronous communication. Like phone calls, emails are often reserved for more lengthy and content-dense conversations. Also like phone calls, they are frequently dispatched when disciplinary issues have reached a critical mass.

The result, most parents are likely to come to view teacher-initiated communications specific to their children as harbingers of bad news.

While these are legitimate uses of these resources, they can be supplemented easily with other available tools to create thick relationships between schools, the students in their charge and students’ parents.

Text messages are a strong point of entry. A 2011 comScore report found a 59 percent drop in web email usage among 12-17 year olds. On the other hand, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported 75 persent of teens in the same age group reported using texting to communicate in 2011. If schools and teachers want eyes on their messages, they must send them to the correct locations.

Texting allows faster access to students and parents, it is also an immediate tool for reporting the positive news that rarely makes it into emails. Imagine the impact on a student who’s just arrived home at the end of the day to find a text message that says, “I was impressed by your level of participation in history class today as well as the depth of your answers. Keep up the good work.” Now, imagine if a similar version of that message is texted to that student’s parent or guardian at the end of the work day.

Such a leveraging of communication tools would surely improve home/school relationships.

This is only one example of how schools and teachers can take on an ecosystems approach to communications, and it is based on the tools of the moment. As those tools shift, approaches must adapt as well. Rather than focusing on tools, here are some questions to consider when thinking about these ecosystems:

What do we want to communicate with students and parents – the positive, the negative, or as complete a picture as possible?

What beliefs or norms will such an approach challenge, and how can we plan for resistance to these challenges?

What tools are our students and parents predominantly using for communication, how can we shift into utilizing those tools?

Given the speed with which these patterns and tools change, how can we plan to review our approach so that our communications are adapting as nimbly as preferences are changing?

These are likely to be difficult conversations. Changing the way we do things is often difficult. Embarking on this process, it may be helpful to remember the importance of improving communication. In a 2002 synthesis of the impact of school community communications, Anne Henderson and Karen Mapp found, “Family involvement that is linked to student learning has a greater effect on achievement than more general forms of involvement.”

Learning Grounds Ep. 012: In which Steve Moore talks communication in education systems and the importance of fly-over states

In this episode, Zac talks with Steve J. Moore about how we think about systems of communication in schools and the limited discussion of rural education in America.

Play

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Things I Know 188 of 365: Their relationship changed in a second (The Lost Post)

Illiteracy is rampant. People are out of communication.

– Karen Black

On a plane for Atlanta.

The row ahead of me includes, from aisle to window, dad, mom, 3-4 year old.

While signs suggest this isn’t junior’s first flight, he’s also not quite ready to take over for the captain.

He cannot help moving. He is driven by the energy of a pre-schooler multiplied by the idea of actually flying – up there – in the planes. They look so sky when they sore over his house.

I sit at a safe observation distance in the aisle seat with a sleeping elderly couple providing suitable insulation between  my flight and this kid’s frenetic energy.

I’ve other work to complete, but can’t tear my eyes and ears off of the scene.

This little guy cannot stop investigating. He’s got questions, and his compact size allows him to wiggle to vantage points I’ve never enjoyed in flight.

I am loving the story he’s writing of the flight.

The flight attendants, all big hair and drink rations, are having none of it.

“Ma’am? Ma’am! He’s got to sit. He’s got to sit down. The captain’s got the fasten seatbelt sign on. Ma’am?”

The line is delivered with a smile reminiscent of the one the evil queen must have flashed when meeting her stepdaughter while courting Snow White’s dad.

Not above attempting help, the flight attendant tries to buy compliance from the little guy, “Do you like chocolate milk? I think I’ve got some chocolate milk in back.”

Motion stops in the seat, and the flight attendant turns toward the tail of the plane. To no one in particular, she flashes a face of “OH. MY. LORD.”

After the milk is delivered, our rows enjoy a period of relative calm.

“Uh-oh, mommy,” I hear.

Mom’s head looks toward the window seat and then turns to dad, “His armrest is broken. We should tell them.”

Dad, stereotypically non-communicative, nods his head and heads back to sleep.

Twenty minutes later, mom and kid work their way to the restroom. He’s gotta go. Plus, peeing on a plane sounds like an adventure.

While they’re away, flight attendants begin collecting trash. One meets another just behind my row.

“He broke the armrest,” she says.

A heavy, all-knowing sigh.

They continue on their way.

From that point, until we exit the plane, a quiet battle takes place between the flight attendants and the family seated in front of me. It’s as thought mom, dad, and kid have shown themselves to be incompetent as passengers. Several times, they are questioned as to the upright and locked status of their seat backs as we prepare for landing.

The kid has broken their plane and they will take it out on this family in the only way they know how – by flight attending them to death.

As I watch the situation turn from cute to funny to sad, I wonder at the seconds of miscommunication that shift how these two groups understand one another. An event took place for which neither was responsible, but both were party to, and it defined how they came to know one another.

It took only seconds.

Things I Know 239 of 365: My idea is good, and I like yours better

The focus of Improv leads to conversers being present, meaning they exist in the here and now. The acceptance in Improv leads to the speakers’ connection, meaning each becomes part of a co-creation team. The distance between the communicators is thereby no longer a gap to be closed. It becomes a connector, filling the space between bodies like a see-saw connects the two riders on either end. Each is dependent on the other for flow and movement. This synchronicity of focus and acceptance is what results in full body listening.

– Izzy Gesell

We sat in the breakout section of one of my courses yesterday. Once per week, small sets of students from the course sit with Teaching Fellows from the class to look into the readings and ideas of the week more completely than we’re able to in a larger lecture class. For an hour-and-a-half, we delve more deeply. Not quite a study group, the time still pushes my thinking.

Thus far, it’s been a way for me to better hear the plurality of views in the room.

Yesterday’s was the first of of the student-led sections. In pairs, we each have a week during which we’re responsible for leading 45 minutes of the conversation.

Yesterday’s leaders reminded me of one of the more difficult rules of improvisation, “My idea is good, and I like yours better.”

We each took three notecards.

On each card we wrote a quotation from or question inspired by the readings.

When everyone was ready, someone in the group started by stating their question and throwing the corresponding card into the center of the table (whether what was written on the card was relevant or not).

Whoever responded did so and threw one of their cards into the center of the table.

Conversation continued according to this system.

If there was a lull, someone would read a fresh question from the cards remaining in their hands.

If you ran out of cards, yours became a job of listening.

Often, people had selected quotations that could easily shift and be re-purposed to fit into the flow of the conversation.

Sometimes, though, the cards and what people wanted to say were out of sync. In these moments, folks were faced with a choice.

Enter, the rule of improv.

In grad school, like any other school (or any meeting of more than one person, really) conversations are often peppered with unrelated remarks. Though I’m as guilty as the next person of occasionally moving things to my point rather than appreciating and building off of others’. It’s a tough skill and not something completely in line with rugged individualism.

Yesterday’s process required us to make some choices. We were forced to evaluate which of our thoughts was worth sacrificing in exchange for access to the contribution – “My idea is good, and I like yours better.”

In an improv scene, two people enter a scene, often with only a single word as a suggestion, with the purpose of building of a narrative that looks effortless. In good improv, Person A will speak a line and Person B will edit whatever was about to come out of his mouth and speak to build on the idea of Person A.

In great improv, the whole process takes a fraction of the second and the audience has no idea.

It’s not a negating of a person’s idea, but a shifting of purpose. I could cling to my idea or I could work to build up another person’s equally valid proposition. If it’s about good ideas and the building of understanding, my plan can easily be abandoned so long as we’re building something.

And, if there’s a fire to my idea and what I’ve written on my cards is imbued with passion and inquiry – then I spend that card as is.

This is something we could do well to teach the children in our care, the adults at our sides and, most importantly ourselves.

Things I Know 194 of 365: We miss something when we fail to engage

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

– George Bernard Shaw

Working in Long Beach this month has meant one key change in my life. I had to find a new coffee shop.

A connoisseur of both coffee and coffee shops, with two weeks left on my stay, I’ve got it down to two possibilities.

Exceedingly different spaces, one element keeps them neck and neck – people watching.

As I’m listening in on the conversations around me, I’m astounded at how few people are listening to the conversations they’re actually in.

“My brain’s not all there today,” says the barista at Contender A. She means it as an explanation as to the joke she made in conversation or the point she attempted to interject into a discussion didn’t quite land.

The thing is, she says her brain’s not all there today every day.

Based on my informal longitudinal study, this event is neither a singularity nor properly named.

As I learned in freshman speech class, communication isn’t a one-way street.

Last week, I took special care to listen to the patrons eliciting this admission of a daily lobotomy.

They weren’t listening. Or, they weren’t ready for a conversation. These people filed through the door for lattes and bagels. When the barista commented on their tattoos, their piercings and their hair; they didn’t know what to do. They weren’t ready to connect with another person.

It was, as it turned out, their brains that weren’t all there.

When I realized this, I got sad.

Here she was, attempting to connect through more than caffeine, and they weren’t gaming up to engage.

She kept offering up volleys to person after person, “Oh, that’s a great T-shirt. Where did you get it?”

“Huh? Oh, I don’t remember.”

Five minutes later, “I really like your sleeve. What does the middle part stand for?”

“Sleeve? Uh, that part’s for my mom,” then change in the tip jar and out the door.

Though it saddens me to see the barista feel failure time and again, what troubles me more in these scenarios is what the patrons are missing.

More times than I can count, I’ve listened to complaints that social networks are taking the place of genuine communication. I’m not sure if these missed communications are a result of declining social skills due to increased social networking or if people were never that attentive in the first place.

Either way, it’s moved me to be more attentive. When I’m engaged in conversation, I’m making a special effort to actually engage.

A friend trying to drum up funding for a new school remarked that she’d started a conversation with the person next to her on a recent plane flight.

Normally a flight recluse, she told me the conversation revealed her row mate was a land developer and social entrepreneur. Cards were exchanged and my friend is a step closer to her dream.

I don’t know that my barista is going to hold the keys to conversations that will help her customers realize their dreams. What she does offer and what so many of them are missing is the chance to connect to someone – even if just for a few minutes.