Tag Archives: culture

Resilience #OneWord2020

If I were to pick 2 words for 2020, I might pick “Growth Mindset”, but if I’m only choosing a single word, it would be:

Resilience

The world needs this word right now. Here are some specific places I see a need to pay attention to this #OneWord in 2020.

In Schools:

Student anxiety seems to be on the rise, and anxiety lowers resilience and the willingness to try new things. Words seem to ‘injure’ students in ways that victimize them rather than make them stronger. This is not to say that students should tolerate bullying or inappropriate language or slander, rather they should speak up, defend themselves, and report poor behaviour. Instead it seems that they feel wounded and do not act. This is a sensitive topic, but one where I’ve seen a greater awareness of adults who want to support students and at the same time I see students allowing words to hurt them deeply, giving too much power to the transgressor.

In Politics:

I said this in Ideas on a Spectrum, “In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary.“ – We need to be resilient when hearing opposing views, and understand that, “…we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.” When we can’t have conversations with people that have different political views, we don’t grow as a culture or as a society.

In Online Spaces:

People will make mistakes online. They will say things that are unintentionally hurtful, or blindly offensive. This is different than someone being intentionally biased and rude. If the slander is intentional, it should be reported. If it is unintentional, even to the point of ignorance, we need to be more resilient about what our responses are. When every transgression is treated with an attack, the most severe/bigoted/rude/biased transgressions are not given the heightened alarm that they deserve. With lesser errors and mistakes, we need to let people have a venue to recognize their errors and invite conversation rather than damnation.

Growing up, I heard the playground retort to taunts, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me.” We are past the era of letting nasty people say whatever nasty things they want, and just turning the other cheek to pretend we are not hurt. This is a good thing. We want to live in a world where that behaviour is not acceptable. But it does not serve us well to treat the attacker like they can not repent or be sorry. It does not serve us to let the words said hurt us too deeply. By being resilient we can speak up, clarify our perspective, and engage in conversations that help us feel empowered rather than victimized.

Resilience allows us to be strong, flexible, and engaged in a society that is the kind of society we want to live and thrive in.

A conversation about culture

I had a great conversation last night with colleagues, Principals and Vice Principals, at our Professional Development Dinner. We broke into table groups based on the books we had read, or in my case listened to. Culture Code is a great book, and one that I listened to while on my treadmill this summer. I really enjoy audio books but this is one that I wish I had a hard copy of. It is filled with gems of ideas, but I didn’t bookmark them and it is too hard to go back in an audio book to find specific sections unless they were bookmarked.

Luckily for me, the book was just a launching point to a great conversation. I tried to summarize some key ideas at the end of the talk and this was what I came up with. I’ll start with a quote Bryan shared with us, (I’m not sure of the source):

“You have to belong to a place before you can transform it.”

We talked about the challenge of coming into a place as a new leader and how people need to feel safe before they are willing to trust and work with you. Until you build a relationship it is challenging to meaningfully lead and offer up your strengths. We also discussed 5 other ideas that we thought were really important:
  1. Agency – We all want to have agency and feel empowered. If we don’t help to give others agency, they won’t feel valued.
  2. Listen! Be present – Give people your full attention. This is especially important when someone comes to you with something that is urgent to them, even if you don’t think it is urgent.
  3. Listen! Rather than solve – Don’t try to fix or share a similar example. Coming from a teacher background, we all want to help fix the situation, we all have experiences that are relatable, but we should start by truly listening and recognizing that it is better to be heard than to be related to. 
  4. Show vulnerability (as a colleague and a leader). Be willing to say ’sorry’ and to let your staff know that you don’t know everything. 
  5. Willingness to go to the hard places. It’s not enough to gloss over things and hope they go away, or to make decisions because they are popular. 
 
Final thoughts:
Culture doesn’t develop on its own, and if it does, it’s probably not the culture you want. Building a good culture can be a slow process and yet destroying a good culture can happen very quickly. We had a great conversation at our table and I am glad that I work with an amazing group of leaders who have made these kinds of conversations part of our learning culture.

Love, work, and being human

This is a very powerful movie: HUMAN Extended version VOL.1

Most of it is subtitled, and so be prepared to read what you are listening to. Make yourself a coffee, or pour yourself a drink, sit back and step into the lives of some people that you would not otherwise get to meet. Share in the humanity, the struggles, and the hearts of some people from many walks of life that are significantly different than yours. What does it mean to be human for people that did not grow up the same way you did?

Here is the description:

What is it that makes us human? Is it that we love, that we fight ? That we laugh ? Cry ? Our curiosity ? The quest for discovery ? Driven by these questions, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand spent three years collecting real-life stories from 2,000 women and men in 60 countries. Working with a dedicated team of translators, journalists and cameramen, Yann captures deeply personal and emotional accounts of topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness. The VOL.1 deals with the themes of love, women, work and poverty.

This is a powerful look at love, at work, and at the heart of what it means to live life bound by geographical, cultural, and economical status.

T.I.C. Chinese School PE Program Inspection

via qik.com

This routine is practiced almost daily for a few months before the inspection. At the start of the year it involved skipping ropes, but our school (neighbouring theirs) showed a lot of interest in basketball, so they incorporated basketballs into their spring routine.

Every student was asked to bring a basketball from home. The small items on the ground near them are cardboard rings that they made to keep their ball from rolling around at the back of their classrooms. Often during PE classes you’ll see the younger students wearing these like bandanas on their heads. Cute!

Watch to the end to see the speed at which they run to their line-ups to head back into the school. It’s that fast even when there isn’t an inspection happening.

A neat look into a very different school culture.