Tag Archives: community

Building Community

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It takes thought and intentional action to build community in a classroom or a school. The chances of it happening organically are small, and even if it does build this way, it is likely to be uneven. Community building takes effort, it takes vision or at least cooperation in a focused direction… And even then it isn’t guaranteed.

It’s easy for students to form small groups and these groups can be open and accepting or they can be closed and cold. The art of community building is creating scenarios or activities where students must work together outside of these naturally forming groups. But that’s just the first step. The next step is to ensure that these scenarios or activities are ones where these organized groups can and will find success working together.

The next step is around expectations. It’s about explicitly showing and helping groups work together through conflict. Whether students or adults, there are times when we need to work with people who are a bit challenging to work with. They can be bossy, lazy, distracted, distracting, and even annoying. Not everyone is easy to work with. How is conflict handled? Are groups left alone to sort it out for themselves? Or is problem solving both provided and explicitly taught?

In teacher organized groups, are roles clearly defined? This can be done by the group, not just the teacher, but division of roles in a group help to provide the group with guide rails. This increases individual accountability and reduces the opportunity for conflict. And when groups of people can find mutual success in a project, that helps to build community.

Common goals, common practices, high expectations about how we treat each other, and planned opportunities to share common positive experiences all contribute to fostering and building good community. It doesn’t happen on its own. And if there’s one more thing that can help build community it’s food. Opportunities to eat together and celebrate together enrich the community’s familiarity and collegiality. Expecting community to build without consciously working to develop it will usually end in a disappointing way. And while the effort to build community may not always be rewarding, it is much more likely that the effort is rewarded far more than just expecting community to build organically.

Special Events

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I was recently at a special event that was held in a venue it was never held in before. I had amazing seats that let me see not just the event up close but also the people who worked the event up close too. What I saw was an amazing community of people who all knew what their job was, and who did it with joy and camaraderie.

You don’t always see that in large organizations. You don’t always see that when a team needs to work in a totally new environment. It takes a special kind of organization that can make a large production work in a new environment, where stresses are different, and yet everyone still understands their role and can still create a really positive environment for themselves and their customers.

It’s hard to build a team where a positive culture permeates so well, and when you see it, you know you are seeing something special.

AI and the collapse of a shared reality

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TikTok has introduced me to some very interesting content creators. One such person is Morten Rand-Hendriksen, who goes by the username @mor10web.

He shared this insight recently:

@mor10web

#AI image generation, the destruction of our shared perception of reality, and the inevitable collapse of democracy. Inspired by posts on the same topic from @Paige | AI Ethicist

♬ original sound – The Mor10 of the Web

After discussing the fact that people stuck in an echo chamber of like-minded people start to call a real photograph an AI generated fake… he says,

“Here’s what keeps me up at night: We’re converging on a point where it is easier to claim that real images are fake than it is to prove that images are generated using AI, or manipulated using AI. And that means we have no reasonable expectation of any image or any video or any audio being real. And we don’t have the tools or the media literacy to really do this analysis.

…and we are in the situation we’re in now where people can choose their own reality and live in a reality dysfunction. And AI provides the tools and capabilities to make that reality disfunction into our lived reality.”

Indeed, our shared reality has collapsed. AI generated fakes spread like wildfire through echo chambers of like-minded groups, and even when discovered to be fake, there is no effort to make corrections if the fake fits the group’s narrative… and any real media that doesn’t fit that same reality is easily dismissed as a fake.

Maya Angelou said, “We are more alike, my friends, than we unalike.” I would agree with that when we had a common shared reality, but I question it now in a world filled with AI generated fakes, and a lack of media savviness to determine what really is real. The collapse of a shared reality is a threat to our world, whether the split is socioeconomic, political, or religious. We are increasingly growing unalike.

Community of Learners

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Yesterday we had the incoming Grade 8 class join us for the day. Our Grade 9’s, under teacher supervision, organized the day. We welcomed our nervous, shy Grade 8’s with some icebreakers and a challenge to work in groups to do maximum 3-minute a skit that showed a challenge of working in groups. Then a 1-minute solution.

One example of a skit students came up with was a team worked hard to get a presentation ready and then the day it was due the person responsible for building the PowerPoint was away and didn’t share anything… and hadn’t actually done what they were supposed to do. The solution the students came up with was asking for a one day extension. The other things our teacher and other students suggested as a solution included:

How could they share their knowledge without a PowerPoint? Could they come up with about 5 slides in 10 minutes that would be a good backdrop to their presentation? And going further: What could they do to ensure that this student does more visible work before the presentation next time? And/or what would be a better role for that student next time?

The skits were not judged on how good they were, they were about a team facing a challenge and seeking a solution. They were dissected to learn, as a community, how to work effectively in a community. The skits were humorous, and often included things like dealing with tyrannical teachers with unrealistic actions or expectations. One skit had a teacher that threatened to beat kids up with a ruler. But even in this silly scenario, there were lessons to be learned.

Our Grade 9’s made sure everyone felt welcome. Our teachers made sure students worked together and shared what we expected from learners at our school. And the Grade 8’s moved slowly from nervous visitors to members of our community. After school a few students stuck around for an hour waiting for their parents to join us for our PAC (Parent Advisory Council) pot luck and then AGM Meeting. During that wait, the Grade 8’s mingled with the Grade 9’s that were also waiting, and it was great to see them all in cross-grade groups chatting and laughing.

We will continue the community building in September, and the beautiful thing about hosting a visit like yesterday is that there is already some momentum built. We won’t be starting from scratch, and our new students will start in September excited to reconnect. It’s so much easier to build a positive learning environment when a strong community of learners is established.

Passion Project Presentations

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I’ve had the privilege of watching a few final presentations for our IDS courses – Independent Directed Studies – at Inquiry Hub. Our students choose a topic and put 100-120 hours of work into research, design, and creation of their own courses. The topics vary considerably from making a movie to learning to suture stitches, to designing a facial recognition doorbell, to creating a tabletop role playing game based on the student’s heritage.

I love seeing the diversity of the presentations, and the passion and enthusiasm students have sharing their work. I’m so impressed by both their presentation skills and so their slides. These students could teach a thing or two about how to create a slideshow to many professional presenters I’ve seen.

That’s because they get a lot of practice designing presentations and presenting. They have to do so in groups and on their own many times a year… more than in any typical school. And they get feedback, lots and lots of feedback, from peers as well as teachers.

For these final presentations parents are also invited, and even if parents can’t make it, students still have an audience beyond just the teacher. Students can invite anyone they want to watch, and we’ve even had two of our secretaries invited because they have similar interests in the topics, one on hairdressing and another on embroidery. The community aspect of these with parents, mentors, and community members joining in is absolutely wonderful. Our assistant superintendent also joined for a couple presentations.

It’s pretty special watching these final presentations. I think that every student should get a chance to delve into an area of interest that they choose. Learning shouldn’t just be about transmitting knowledge but about knowledge construction, and what better way to do this than to have students design their own learning experience?

All Around Wonderful

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Last night our school put on a spring formal for our senior students. The event was a huge success. I had a chuckle at the end of the night when I got feedback from three students. The first from a gushing student telling me what an amazing night it was. “It was so wonderful, I didn’t know what to expect, but this was such an amazing night, thank you!”

The second was a student who thanked us and said how impressed she was. One of my teachers said, “See, start with low expectations and things always turn out great.” The student replied, “Actually I had pretty high expectations, I knew it was going to be good, and it still exceeded my expectations.”

The third one I’d like to share was actually said to me between these two. This student, who always calls me by my last name with no ‘Mr’ (which I don’t mind) said, “You know, Truss, any time you do something the first time, you can expect things to go wrong, but I have to say that tonight was pretty good. You got so much right, and I can’t think of anything I’d change. Good job.” Now that’s from a kid who understands radical candour and isn’t afraid to give hard feedback, especially to me, because he knows I want to hear it.

But the reality is that the event was the success that it was because of the wonderful team I work with. Every teacher and one of my secretaries was there helping to make the night a huge success. This event was the vision of one of our counsellors, who wanted the kids at our school to have an event like students at bigger schools. And the entire team stepped up to make the event something our students wanted… and enjoyed.

A student prepared a welcoming toast. Another one did a full ten minute speech that had everyone laughing and repeating quotes he said. Not platitudes, but humour that resonated with our entire community of students and staff. And a parent raised so much in gifts and prizes that most kids left with a gift card that was at a minimum 2/3rds the cost of the ticket, and many students left with a lot more.

I feel blessed to work in such an amazing environment with a fantastic team, and wonderful students, who all understand and appreciate that an event like this is a lot of work… and appreciate the effort it takes to do it right.

Gimme a break!

It’s the last school day before the March break. I’ve got a few ‘To Do’s’ to get done this morning then we are taking our students bowling this afternoon. It has been a while since we did a bonding event with our community and I’m looking forward to it. Last year we took the students bowling around the same time and I was in so much pain with my herniated disk I couldn’t join in. It’s amazing what a difference a year can make.

On top of feeling physically better, last March break I went to visit my parents and my dad had a stroke about 5 hours after I arrived home. I spent my holiday sleeping on a couch and at a hospital. It was uncomfortable, stressful, and exhausting. I’m hoping for a significantly different kind of a holiday this year… I’m looking forward to a wonderful break.

Time on task

A running joke as principal of a school is that the biggest part of the job is ‘other duties as assigned’. It’s the things you don’t expect in your day, like mopping up a mess, or being first aid attendant, or problem solving an issue you never dealt with before, and never thought you would. A vice principal I had many years ago said, “Being a VP is only a 4-hour a day job, the problem is you usually get almost none of that work done between 8:30am and 4pm.

The thing that I find most challenging is time on task… and staying on task. When there are 1,000 little interruptions in a day, it often takes time to get back into what you are doing. Something that could be done in 20 minutes uninterrupted can end up taking well over half a day to get done, and 25-30 minutes on task to do because each time you come back to the task you’ve got to figure things out again.

I had an issue recently where I was going back and forth with a parent on email. It was for something we are planning together. He sent me an email, I followed up with the planning with a teacher and got back to the parent… except I didn’t??? He emailed a week+ later asking for my response. I went to my sent mail, searched my drafts, the response I thought I sent wasn’t sent. I did have a response and exchange with the teacher in Microsoft Teams but did not send a response to the parent. Everything is good now, but I hate the idea that we were both waiting on each other and the holdup was me.

Stuff like that doesn’t happen often but when it does, it’s usually when I’m juggling too many things at once. The ‘other duties as assigned’ add elements of both surprise and distraction to your day and staying focused on all the metaphorical balls you are juggling isn’t easy.

Using the juggling metaphor reminded me of another metaphor a friend shared a while ago: “Stuff, not people.”

“Stuff, not people. When things get really busy, and you can’t do everything, things will ‘fall off the back of your truck’. When that happens, make sure that it’s stuff, and not people.”

As we head into the holidays, a stressful and very busy time for many, this is an important reminder… at least for me… that a list of tasks can wait, a lot of interruptions are important parts of my day. And while my tasks can feel important, they aren’t as important as the people I work with and for.

Communities and Conversations of the Past

I’ve shared quite a bit of nostalgia about the old days of Twitter, and what a wonderful community it was. I was reminded of this a couple times on LinkedIn today. First was a post by Dean Shareski, shared fully here:

Are online communities still a thing? When I think about the last 2 decades I would argue that Twitter in the early 2010s was the height of educator community engagement. And yet I’d argue that was more network than community. Various mom and pop spaces have come and gone with the intent of creating safe and robust ways for educators to connect. During my tenure at Discovery we tried unsuccessfully to create such a space.
I still see attempts to make this work but I’m not seeing it. This platform currently seems to be the best option but still lacks safety and intimacy to take conversation and learning to the next level.
Maybe online communities are a white whale. What is the best we can hope for in terms of online engagement and community for educators?

I commented:

While I’ve missed the edutwitter era dearly since that time when I engaged in a wonderful community, I also know that even if that era came back, I wouldn’t engage as much now. The engagement then was more raw, more honest… dialogue was sincere and challenges to ideas were met with discourse not anger or defensiveness. Now, as you mention, the safety and intimacy seem to be lacking.
Yet, I saw the shift in community use that was a turning point. It was pretty quick, and it was about our own community engagement. For example, I can remember seeing the move from someone reading a blog post and responding in the comments or on Twitter, to suddenly getting instant retweets that came out faster than it was possible to read the whole blog post. There were people auto posting, and there seemed to be a race to share something first, to be first to engage, but with shallow engagement.
I no longer go to a blog feed reader anymore. I don’t see social media feeds that keep my attention. I see a lot of useless advice: https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/advice-for-everyone-and-no-one/ … and these kinds of ‘self-help’ posts are why LinkedIn can not be the tool I’m looking for, and yet like you I think it’s the best tool of the lot right now.

I didn’t answer his question, but that’s mostly because I don’t have an answer. I can’t see anything replacing the community I had on Twitter, and yes, I use the term community and not network. We didn’t stick to Twitter, we were on blogs, and other networks like Ning, and connecting on UStream, sharing videos on Blip TV, sharing links on del.icio.us, reading on Google Reader, and tracking our comments on CoComment… all defunct now. It was truly a different time. There was also a different tone to the exchanges as I hinted above. Discourse was rich and now it seems to be shallow… Mostly accolades and praise or very cautious.

Shortly after seeing Dean’s post, I saw William (Bill) M. Ferriter’s post about leaving Twitter, also on LinkedIn:

After close to 20 years on Twitter, I deactivated my account yesterday. It’s an incredibly toxic space where you are just as likely to end up in an argument as you are to think together.
Planning on moving my social interactions around education to LinkedIn.
Hoping to build consistent routines in both posting new ideas and resources here — as well as learning alongside all y’all.
Thanks for having me.

Bill is/was one of those community members that made Twitter great. We conversed many times on Twitter and on our blogs, for at least a couple years before meeting face to face. When we met, I connected with a digital colleague, one of many digital neighbours who I often engaged with more than I did the educators across the hall from my in my school. The friendship was already fully built. I also met Dean face-to-face years after I started learning from him. I’ve read so many of Bill and Dean’s blog posts, tweets, and comments that I think I actually do know more about them than I do some close friends.

Now Bill is off of Twitter and I may leave the site too before the end of the year. I’m left wondering the same things as Dean, “Maybe online communities are a white whale. What is the best we can hope for in terms of online engagement and community for educators?“

High versus low trust societies

I love when someone adds to my perspective on social media. That’s exactly what happened after I posted Basic assumptions a couple days ago. The post reflected that, “people no longer give each other the benefit of the doubt that intentions are good. This used to be a basic assumption we operated on, the premise that we can start with the belief that everyone is acting in good faith.”

I shared the post on Twitter and Chris Kalaboukis and I had the following conversation thread:

Chris: Reading your post: could we be transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society?

Dave: Yes, that seems like an appropriate conclusion. Is there an author that speaks of this idea?

Chris: Not that I can recall, however, if you look at the attributes of low-trust societies you see a lot of what is happening now.

Dave: So true! The circle of high trust seems to be shrinking and it really seems like a step backwards… tribalism trumps the collective of a greater community.

Chris: It is. It seems that even our institutions are driving us towards more tribalism and division.

Dave: And how do you suppose we correct this course? I honestly don’t have a clue, and see things getting worse before they get better.

Chris: I think that in reality, most people prefer to live in a high-trust society. We need leaders and media who support that vision.

Dave: I think the biggest problem right now is that most leaders do not want to step into a limelight where both social media and news outlets are only interested in focussing on the dirt. It seems everyone is measured by their worst transgressions, regardless of many positive deeds.

Chris: If it bleeds it leads. we’ve never been able to communicate with more people at the same time but the only communication which seems to get through is negative. It’s all about keeping your attention to sell more ads.

Dave: I sound like quite the pessimist, that’s not usually my stance on things, but I do struggle to see a way forward from here.

—–

The idea Chris shared that we could be ‘transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society’ seems insightful and really intrigues me. It isn’t happening at just one level, but many!

• Scam phone calls and emails are perfect examples. We used to operate from a position of trust, but now unknown calls and unsolicited emails are all necessarily met with skepticism.

• Sensationalized news leads with misleading headlines that are more about getting attention and clicks than about providing truthful news. And if the news slant doesn’t match your beliefs, it’s ‘fake news’.

• Sales pitches and advertising promises almost everything under the sun, you aren’t buying a product with a basic function, you are buying a product that is going to change your life or transform how you do ‘X’, or use ‘Y’… your results will surprise you and you’ll be amazed!

• If you are even slightly left wing you are ‘woke’ or ‘Antifa’ in the most derogatory way you can use these words. If you are even slightly right wing you are ‘Alt-right’ and racist. No one gets to sit on a spectrum, you are either viewed as an extreme on one or the other side. And even agreeing on one topic on the other side makes you less trustworthy on your side.

These are but a few ways we’ve become a lower-trust society. Ad hominem and straw man attacks get more attention than sound arguments. A well said lie is easily shared while complex truths are not. Saying a situation is complex and sharing nuance does not make for catchy sound bites, and aren’t going to go viral on TikTok, or Instagram Reels. No, but the snarky personal attack will, as will a one-sided, extreme view that packs a powerful punch.

What’s worse is that moderate voices get shut out. And in general many people feel silenced or would rather not share a view that is even slightly controversial. So the extreme voices get even more airtime and attention.

I feel this often. Writing every day, and sometimes picking controversial topics to discuss, I find myself tiptoeing and treading very carefully. I said in my Twitter conversation with Chris above, “It seems everyone is measured by their worst transgressions, regardless of many positive deeds.” I sometimes wonder what one thing I’m going to say is going to get blown out of proportion? If I write one single inappropriate or strongly biased phrase, will it define me? Will it undermine the 1,500+ posts that I’ve written, and make me out to be something or someone I’m not?

This sounds paranoid, but I wrote one post a few years ago that a friend private messaged me about, then called me and said I’d gone too far with my opinion on a specific point. I totally saw his point, went back and adjusted my post to tone it down… but I feel like that one issue, that one strong and overly biased opinion shared publicly put a rift in our friendship. And that’s someone I respect, not some stranger coming at me, not someone that doesn’t know my true character. My opinion in his eyes is now less trustworthy, and holds less value. That said, I appreciated the feedback, and respect that he took the time to share it privately. That’s rare these days.

The path forward is not easy. We aren’t just swaying slightly towards a less trustworthy society, we are on a full pendulum swing away from a more trustworthy society. Tribalism, nationalism, and extremism are pulling our world apart. Who do you trust? What institutions? Which governments? Who do you consider a neighbour? Who will you break bread with? Who do you believe?

The circles of trust are getting smaller, and the mechanisms to share bias and misinformation are growing. We are devolving into a less trusting society or rather societies, and it’s undermining our sense of community. We need messages of kindness, love, and peace to prevail. We need tolerance, acceptance, and more than anything trustworthy institutions and leaders. We need moderates and centrists to voice compromise and minimize extremist views. We need to rebuild a high trust society… together.