Shared Behaviors Fuel School District Performance
By: Etienne R. LeGrand, CEO Vivify Performance
The magic of learning and discovering that c-a-t spells “cat” or that sodium and chloride combine to make salt occurs in classrooms with high levels of engagement from students and teachers. Teachers with the know-how to manage their classrooms well increase the likelihood that their kids will learn spelling, math, or chemistry. But in these well-managed classrooms, are kids also acquiring the behaviors they’ll need to learn how to learn over their lifetimes?
It’s difficult to enable kids to learn in disruptive environments. But order alone does not assure learning happens. If kids are to learn, they must be engaged in and master what is being taught. That means, according to learning science, that their need for autonomy, effectiveness, and relatedness must be met through the learning process.
Rather than being passive vessels into which learning is poured by teachers, kids should be engaged in a process of discovery alongside their classmates and their teachers. Along the way they’ll make and learn from their mistakes, become more curious, learn to solve problems, learn to listen, learn humility and empathy, learn resilience, and develop a growth mindset among other behaviors.
In his book, “Learn or Die,” Edward Hess argues that high-performance learning organizations are comprised of people who demonstrate these “learning behaviors” and leaders who know how to create the conditions for them to flourish. In classrooms that are effectively managed, are kids acquiring and honing these learning behaviors? Do their teachers and the other employees in their school demonstrate these behaviors, too? Are leaders creating the conditions for these behaviors to take root and thrive in their school districts?
Shared Behaviors Serve as “Guardrails”
Most leaders will establish core values for their organizations. Few take their values a step further to define how kids and employees are expected to behave so those core values come alive in the kids and adults who work and learn together. Learning behaviors such as treating others with dignity and respect and actively collaborating and learning from others can serve as “guardrails” or “rules of the road” that can be leveraged into higher levels of engagement.
Kids benefit from the consistency of established (and then shared) behaviors that are defined, agreed upon and embedded throughout a school district: from school to school, classroom to classroom, in the cafeteria, an auditorium or on the playground. Established behaviors guide everyone to conduct themselves using the same playbook.
Kids should know how they can expect to be treated and how they are expected to treat their peers and school employees. The more definition, the less opportunity for individual interpretations of what is meant by excellence, for example. And kids, like employees, should be held accountable for meeting defined behavior standards.
Establishing “rules of the road” won’t prevent kids from pushing against the guardrails from time to time, but they’ll be clear they’ve hit one when they choose to misbehave. Misbehavior must be punished. But it’s equally important to acknowledge the behaviors we want to see in kids. Positive reinforcement of essential learning behaviors is the best way to ensure those behaviors become the things everyone does without thinking—like breathing. Next week I will share the steps and questions to ask your district’s leaders—these tools will improve your learning-behavior processes.