Mindful Listening Leadership

This fall, I've been reading Shane Safir's The Listening Leader with a group of colleagues.  The subtitle reads "Creating the Conditions for Equitable School Transformation." 

The text captured my attention right away.  It speaks to my desire to grow a collaborative, dynamic community of adults in our school as a way to increase student achievement and support school culture.  One of my favorite phrases in the whole book is in the introduction, which explains that Listening Leaders are able to "unleash unrealized energy" in their team.

My experience is that educators have a great deal of energy for the areas of practice and experience where we feel successful and empowered.  Where we have a deep, in-the-gut feeling that something we are doing with, or for, our learners, is making a real difference.  Conversely, finding the energy to tackle the things before us where we are less connected and involved is much more stressful and less inspiring.

Safir argues that leaders who adopt a Listening Mindset are better able to transform culture and release this energy.  He suggests four specific strategies to accomplish this:

Slow Down

Listen before Making Decisions

                                             

Harness the Wisdom of the Group

Distribute Leadership

                                                 
By approaching change in this super-intentional, recursive, and thoughtful way, Listening Leadership becomes a powerful driver for change.

I understood what he was talking about as I read these early chapters.  Applying it to daily practice became another story.

I had an experience with some members of my team heading into the break that really tested my understanding of these principles.  We were working through a super challenging situation with one of our very complex students.  Emotions and fatigue were running high, the student was not responding to the interventions or strategies we had in place, and the team was discouraged.

I jumped in to look for ways to support everyone.  I got a referral into our district's Inclusion Support Team, brainstormed with our Student Services teacher for ways to change things up, grabbed a few new visual tools and tweaked the student's timetable and the EA Schedule.  I hurried to get everything into the team's hands so I could help stabilize things.  I dug into my toolkit, built from all of my years supporting unique students and their teams toward success.

It was a disaster.  The strategies, even the ones that had been wildly successful for numerous other students in the past, did not improve the situation.  This young man's Classroom Teacher and Education Assistants were still frustrated.  Now they were becoming angry.  I started to feel defensive.

Two things happened that shifted my stance from defensiveness to something more open.  To nudge me from the feeling I had to hurry, to find all of the answers and allow me to be ready and able to listen for the ideas, emotions, and other information, that were needed to find our way through this difficult period.

The first was a conversation with a courageous colleague who laid it all out for me.  She identified exactly how she was feeling as a result of some of the decisions that I had made, and shared some key information about the situation with this learner that I was unaware of.  While I didn't agree with everything she said, it was an open dialogue that re-framed my perspective, and helped to shift the direction things were taking.

The second was observing the way that our Inclusion Support team interacted with the student's teacher when they visited our site.  They asked a ton of questions, about the challenging situation, strengths and interests of the student, the rhythm of the classroom, the student's needs, the adults' needs.  Every single question was one I knew to be critically important.  In hindsight, I realized that some were questions I had already made up answers to without checking to see how accurate my assumptions were.

I have worked in the area of student support for many years.  I have lots of knowledge about how to support highly complex learners, how to individualize programs, how to create visual supports and structured routines.  And a lot of the time, I believe I know how to listen and work with my team.  In reflecting on how this situation got to be so complicated and stressful, I  realized that I had been focusing on the TOOLS, not the PEOPLE who needed to use them.

Thanks to the perspective afforded to me through slowing down long enough to really listen,  to share the leadership, to harness ideas from everyone involved, we headed into Christmas break in a much better place.  We have some new tools and routines ready to go for the new year, and resource people coming to help us implement them.  We had a productive team meeting before heading off, I feel like we've mended some of the strained relationships and I'm hoping my efforts to really listen to everyone have allowed me to tweak some of our other structures and routines moving forward, so that we really can slow down and be super intentional moving forward.

Safir argues that to really do this well, Mindful Listening needs to occur with a bias toward action.  In reading a little more of this text over the break, that piece has landed as a bit of a "New Year's Resolution" for me.  My action step is going to be focusing on his metaphor of "watering for deep roots."  Safir argues that "strategic listening [can] create the mental space that can lead to more thoughtful action."

I believe I know how to leverage some of these strategies with the "big picture" stuff-  I feel good about the work we did in creating a school vision statement, planning for PLCs, building our tiered support structures by reflecting on student data.  What I learned through this experience is that it's much harder to do when emotions are running high in a crisis situation.  The irony of that is this is that mindful listening has the potential to stabilize things much faster and more effectively than digging in and handing over tools without real consultation.

Fortunately, Safir has a suggestion in this regard, as well.  If I had followed the three steps of Mindful Listening, I would have created the space I needed to navigate things in a much different way.  Being strategic and aware in approaching collaboration-  whether it's for a whole-school initiative, or problem solving with only a few members of the team, it's important to:

1. Look in the mirror....reflect on your own role and interactions.
2. Step into the other person's shoes...no matter how different their perspective, the individual involved has life experiences, information, emotions that need to be considered in moving forward...begin with a bit of empathy.
3.  Step up onto the balcony....take on the stance of a neutral observer watching your interactions with others during the discussion

This situation was an important reminder that our whole team wants what's best for our students, and that the real power to support our learners lays in our collective wisdom.   After all, They're All Our Kids.