Building trust

Sometimes building trust is difficult. Sometimes building trust requires a level of humility and humanity that isn't always easy to access given the pace of our days. Building trust takes vulnerability and it takes the ability to listen. Building trust happens when the important is prioritized over the urgent.

And building trust cannot be rushed. Building trust takes time.

I wonder if, perhaps, that's why we use the verb "building" to talk about trust. When building anything, one must be careful to go about things in the right order. Foundations must be surveyed and established first, and it is not always easy to see immediate progress when building. But for those intimately involved in the process? Progress is always happening, just as the quiet seed is laying roots beneath the surface...progress moves, however slowly, however unseen by the naked eye.

That's kind of like trust.

I have the following image on the notebook I carry with me everywhere. It comes from Patrick Lencioni's book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and it is used to illustrate the hierarchy of dysfunctions.

 

At the bottom of the pyramid there's ABSENCE OF TRUST. According to Lencioni, in the absence of trust, each of the other four dysfunctions will be evident on a team (and yes, that means any team, all teams). Without trust you'll have a
Fear of conflict; 
Lack of commitment; 
Avoidance of accountability; 
and Inattention to results.

Sounds like a recipe for failure, right?

Well, my classroom is made up of human beings (myself included) who operate as a team and today I had the pleasure of watching my dear friend, Laconia Therrio (our school's artist-in-residence for the month of February) build trust with my students.

He made jokes.
He learned their names.
He asked them where their families are from.
He held space for their questions.
He told them stories that were hard to tell--stories that came from his experience, his heart.

Yet,
he also mispronounced their names.
He told jokes they didn't think were funny.
He embarrassed himself.

(and he does it on purpose)

But in each of those instances, he owned up to it. He showed them that he valued pronouncing their names correctly. He apologized for the bad jokes that landed poorly or whose impact differed from his intention. And he admitted his own insecurities.

By the end of his 50 minutes with my students...they trusted him.

Trust cannot be rushed. It takes time. It might feel like the time is wasted, but I assure you it is not.

My students' trust in me is the only reason they feel comfortable coming to tell me they need an extra day to study because they've been underslept and overwhelmed by the week they've had.

My student's knowledge that I won't shy away from conflict enables them to be committed. Because my expectations are reasonable and I'm willing to listen to their needs, they want to do well in my class and are committed. As a direct result of their commitment, they allow me to hold them accountable and to seek out a higher standard of engagement. And because they embrace accountability, they care about the link between their effort and their results.

They are active participants in their educations because they have relationships.

It starts with that. Kids will run through walls for you if they believe you value the time it takes to build trust.

As much as trust feels like it is an outcome-driven exercise, it is a different type of "building."
Trust is about the product. Things that are built exist, after all. But for trust to be built it must be 100% about the process. And that process takes time.

Different Brains

Today I asked my students to draw a diagram that illustrated the way they spatially understand the year.

We can all agree that a year measures one trip around the sun.

We can all agree that a year contains 52 weeks, each of which has 7 days.

We can all agree that there are 12 months and that 365.25 days fit into them.

But how we see the year when we picture it in our minds is entirely different.

And this tells us something about our brains. It tells us something about the way we think.

One student explained that they see the boxes of a calendar extending like a number line, beginning in January and ending in December.

Another admitted that they associate each month with an image and an animal (May, for example, is mist and morning doves).

Yet another sees the months like a circle, but September through May appear larger than the other months.

Finally, a student sees each month as its own color!

In all, we had 15 different perspectives, each fascinating and unique.

This got us to a conversation about our minds and the ways that things make sense. Eventually, we found ourselves discussing note-taking. There are hundreds of ways someone can take notes. As a visual learner, I know the impact that writing something down (and revisiting it afterwards) has on my life. I walk around constantly jotting ideas and observations into my notebook and I sometimes find myself stricken with fear by the possibility of not having a notebook or pen when I have an idea or insight.

I know, deep down, that if I don't write it down I will forget it.

I even take notes on family life and relationships with friends. I jot down the names of my friends' kids. I jot down reminders about how to care for each of my kids and my spouse. I want to study them to better understand them...and not in a creepy, weird way, but in an authentic exercise of understanding them better and evolving my ability to love them well.

So today, we discussed what it means to take notes and the ways it can be done.
-full sentences
-pictures or images
-diagrams
-fragments
-bubble charts

The list went on and on...and for each of us, the ways we make sense of external stimuli is different. Some of us need a graphic organizer to make sense of information while others among us need to follow up with the teacher the next day.

The key here, though, was not really about note-taking. Rather, it was about holding space for students to embrace the ways we all learn differently, and the variety of needs each of us has.

We are all learners and we all have specific needs. Talking about our differences and the ways we learn best is a trait that will help each of us to learn better and to hold space for the ways others learn as well.

In Defense of Art

I'm reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with my 8 year old daughter right now. Each night we make our way through a chapter. One of the conversations she and I have had is around one of the topics that Harry and his classmates take at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: Defense against the Dark Arts.

Among my daughter's many questions have been, the following:

What is a dark art, anyway?

Why are those arts dark and other arts not dark?

Can't all art be dark and angry and mysterious, after all?

What makes something an art in the first place?

If art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, is there any creation that actually isn't art?

Okay, so that last one wasn't her, but you get the point.

And it got me thinking about art (and my defense of art) and the role it's played in my life. Given who my parents were, I never really identified the activities I engaged in as a child as "art" or "not art." Instead, creativity and beauty and expression were entrenched in everything. Sunsets were art. Clouds were art. My block structures were art. The dams we built in Cummings Brook were art. The bread my dad baked was art. The letters my mom decorated before mailing were art.

Everything was art.

When I graduated from high school, the greatest honor I received was being awarded the Arts and Athletics award. I was so incredibly proud of the risks I'd taken as an artist. In fact, even today I have this poster on the wall of my classroom in an effort to remind my students that art is a language and integral to our discussion of culture.

So this winter I'm doing three really specific art assignments with my students. Two are taking place right now. One is the creation of compelling, thoughtful political cartoons that coincide with the Berlin Conference of 1884; another is a map project that requires each student to create a 2-map atlas plate that displays the correlation between two disparate data sets; and the third is a project about color. That final one is still in its infancy, but essentially, students will be given a color and asked to do some research about the history of that color (I was inspired by The Secret Lives of Color by Kasia St. Clair) and then they'll do a 60 second voiceover describing the brief history and connection to culture while a video shows them creating the color by mixing paints together.

I'm excited for it, and it's gotten me thinking about art and our commitment to it at my school. I ran some numbers and learned that my 8th grade students spend 7.7% of their time in art class. If they are in an Ensemble, that number jumps to 10.6%. One of my goals in the coming year is going to imagine a world where art is immersed more deeply into the fabric of the school day. How can we, as adults, model the creative risk-taking that it takes to be an artist?

Can we create clubs or electives that are connected to art?

• a Hamilton elective taught by a music teacher and history teacher?
• a math elective that looks at tessellations?
• a poetry and painting elective that uses student poems to inspire student paintings?
• a freestyle rapping club?
• an elective that looks at Fibonacci's Sequence and other related mathematical discoveries that have implications in art and nature
• an elective that looks specifically at color and the science behind it
• an elective inspired by Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses
• a club that watches TED Talks about art and creativity
• a club that pushes students to use the right side of their brain

The possibilities are endless and the impact would be profound.

For, after all, art is dark and art is light. Art is many things. But I believe it's always worth defending.

Why?

I really like why questions.

Perhaps it's because my own kids are young and love to learn and ask me Why? all the time.  But you know what? I don't mind for a second...in fact, love these questions and the places they take us. I'm innately curious and I'm an extrovert. In fact, I'd sit in my kitchen all morning, holding court with my three kids while they pepper me with questions that send us down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

You see, I love stories and I love connections and I love ideas. I also happen to love my children, but that's beside the point. I used to ask questions when I was anxious as a little kid. If my mother was late coming home, I would ask my father a series of questions, hoping that the divergent and spidering directions our conversation took us would distract me from my concern for my mom's well-being. We didn't have a television and cellular phones were not yet commonplace if they'd been invented at all. So I learned to listen and I learned to love the questions as much as the answers, themselves.

I was reminded of this recently when my dad sent me a text message containing the following video clip from the late physicist, Richard Feynman (start it at 55 seconds). My father wrote, among other things,

"...I came across a video clip that brought you and fatherhood echoing across generations..."

The Why questions are one of the reasons I'm a teacher as well. Schools ask these questions all the time, both in classrooms and around campus. Or, at least, they should. I know our faculty did earlier this year when we watched Simon Sinek's TED talk about starting with "Why?".

This week, as I reflected on my own dad, on my own childhood, and on my own fathering of my kids, I was drawn to these questions in my students.

It made me think of the ways that we question (or don't question) things in an effort to understand them: the ways we ask Why? of others and the ways we ask Why? of ourselves.

So much of my work with my students is about helping them see the value in skepticism, a trait that I believe rests at the heart of critical thinking.

So how does this all connect to what I did in the classroom this week? Well, I showed the Feynman clip to my students and pulled an old poster off my wall entitled "How to Build Global Community." It was made by Syracuse Worker's Union, had been a gift from my mother and has been on my wall for about four years.

I asked my students if they'd noticed it and most said they had not.

So off the wall it came.

I read off the list of thirty ways to build community and asked my students to select one of the items to work with. When each of them had selected something from the list (everything from "Oppose NAFTA" to "Join a cooperative" to "Learn people's history" to "Eat organic" was included), I told them to question the thing they'd chosen.

Sure, the list had a very liberal bias, but that was part of the exercise. I wanted them to question the bias...to decide for themselves whether there was merit in the list instead of just absorbing/ingesting/consuming it as truth.

I wanted one student to ask,

Why should I not wear corporate logos?

while another asked,

Why should I join a credit union?

What happened, was thirty minutes of magic during which my students didn't just settle for asking one Why question, they made whole lists of them! Some students even made lists of the counter-arguments and why someone shouldn't do the things listed.

Now,  through this simple exercise, we've begun to lay the groundwork for growing a norm in our classroom. My students know I will ask Why? but also that I expect them to question me as well. I want them to push me to defend why we're spending 45 minutes talking about Mansa Musa if he died seven centuries ago, or why the format of next Monday's test is open note.

If they're asking questions with one skeptical eyebrow cocked, I know they're engaged, and if they're engaged I can lead them to water with the hope that one day, when each of them are ready in their own way, they'll drink. Because for those 30 minutes, I saw how thirsty they were.

Why?

Because they were made for this.