Better Faculty Meetings
Some unorthodox thoughts about blowhards and raccoons and some fun almost first Friday links
How is your faculty doing as we head into October?
A few weeks ago I wrote about the uncanny valley-like feeling of this fall’s ‘return to normal” and how it seems that no matter how much someone reassures you their pandemic experience was “fine,” everyone has, in fact, been changed, even if we can’t quite put that change into words. We’re all part of a big puzzle that had been carefully fitted together, was carelessly knocked on to the floor, and now no one seems to quite know how to satisfactorily put it back together again.
My general sense is that things continue to be weird in school communities as well. Not terrible or bad or crisis-like but, like pretty much everything right now, kinda weird.
For (Almost) First Friday Links, I have a few wide-ranging and perhaps even downright oddball articles that made me think of ideas for managing faculty meetings. Or, as I think it would be more productive ultimately to frame it - faculty communication strategy.
I know - there is recoiling going on as some of you read that. It feels so corporate! It feels so cold! But it’s actually not - it’s a way of framing it that can make you refocus and become more intentional, and help connect the dots as you bring your intentionality towards internal communication. And while I think we often get stuck in thinking of the field of communication in schools as one way - the magazine, the social media feeds, the all community letters - communication isn’t communication without two ends. Thinking about the engagement and response you want to evoke is key.
So, back to faculty meetings. Faculty meetings are featured as moments of comedy in novels and academia skewering shows such as The Chair (So good! Go watch it!) often referred to by higher ed academics and k-12 educators alike with eye rolls, for different reasons on the part of faculty members and administrators. To bowdlerize a line from one of my all time favorite films, 1987’s Withnail and I, faculty meetings seem like winter and the common cold, something that inevitably sets in.
Three recent New York Times articles made me think about some ways to reconsider aspects of your faculty communications strategy to move to less eye rolling and more true professional connection and communication.
One article is about how talking it out with the incentive of reaching a common outlook works well in small motivated groups with some other kind of social commonality (a shared work setting, perhaps?). This would argue in favor of the small group breakouts as your community grapples with the continued adjustment to Life Post Pandemic. The small group breakout is one of my favorite tools in a faculty meeting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/science/group-consensus-persuasion-brain-alignment.html
However - when a “blowhard” (named as such in the piece) dominates the conversation, it can derail progress. Ouch. Most human groups have at least one of these. Something to keep in mind.
Then there are the raccoons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/science/raccoon-learning-urban-wildlife.html
(Side note: I feel like the culture has become mystifyingly raccoon obsessed in the past five years. I remember when visiting Seoul my adorable Korean translator getting really excited when I asked about raccoon cafes, insisting we visit one whereas I had been fascinated, amused and terrified by this video. We did not go after I put my foot down. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/06/02/519102966/video-animal-cafes-are-cool-but-does-a-raccoon-cafe-go-too-far )
The gist of this piece is that the less aggressive raccoons who were given time and space to quietly explore and investigate ultimately ended up being more troublesome to their suburban human neighbors than their cousins whose more blatant behavior was the focus of wildlife management efforts. They were the ones who figured out how to unlatch a chicken coop or pry open a trash can cover. But wildlife management tends to put all its focus on managing the aggressive raccoons whose behavior makes them hard to ignore.
My takeaway as related to faculty meetings is this: While robust conversations are ultimately effective at moving the community forward, you need to factor in the “blowhard effect.”. However, if you focus your efforts on motivating or shutting down the blowhards (i.e. the aggressive raccoons), you are going to miss out on the potential human capital in your midst. Create that environment where the reflective, quiet thinkers can keep processing, experiment with ideas they hear in faculty meetings and keep iterating.
Blowhards gonna blow. They also blow over.
And I will add a few words of empathy for blowhards. I live with a 13 pound furry loudmouth. He will not be denied. He is opinionated about many things. However, what I have discovered by watching him closely is that, due to what I understood to be a pretty unstable time before he came to me, he is afraid of just about everything and his tools to cope are limited and when he is stressed he regresses. Many, many things stress him. He is relatively easy to manage with some tasty treats although it is sometimes exhausting to keep managing him, over and over. But he has a heart of gold and once he is your friend, he is your faithful friend for life.
We are all still managing a huge load of stress and exhaustion. It’s going to surface. It’s exhausting to manage it but it can’t be helped. Maybe some tasty treats will help your blowhard management.
I think we are all looking for a soft place to land at this point, as Pamela Paul points out in her excellent and funny column, “Don’t Bring Your ‘Whole Self’ To Work.” To summarize: Work can’t meet all your needs and it’s unfair to ask it to. Feel free to leave parts of yourself at home and embrace the opportunity to do so. This resonates with my popular “Quiet Quitting” post from a few weeks ago. As a mission driven workaholic, I get it. But I also see the cultural pressure to find your passion at work to now be a thinly veiled capitalist plot to get us all to work, all the time.
Embrace a multifaceted life! This might also make the blowhards of the world relax a little.
It’s Friday and I hope there is some well-deserved relaxation in your futures.
Julie
Other (Almost) First Friday links:
Governance Food for Thought - What is a Fiduciary?
The Two Fiduciary Duties of Professors
Jonathan Haidt’s thought provoking piece was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Ed but the link here was on the Heterodox Academy blog so there is no pay wall. There is a lot here to deconstruct and I know some people I respect disagree with some of Haidt’s analyses around social justice movements, but one aspect I was not expecting to resonate so deeply with me was his exploration of the meaning of the word “fiduciary.” It made me wonder if that really should be the core of all new board member training as he discusses at length what “absolute loyalty to the institution” really means in terms of university professors. This could easily be productively explored in terms of what the role of the trustee is as well.I think many trustees assume being a fiduciary means being responsible about financial decisions but it is much more far reaching than that.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-two-fiduciary-duties-of-professors/
“To Be or Not To Be a Trustee”
The above also relates also to the excellent post Greenwich Leadership Partner’s Stephanie Rogen wrote in the GLP blog a few weeks ago, https://www.greenwichleadershippartners.com/blog/2022/9/14/to-be-or-not-to-bea-trustee-that-is-the-question
Privilege, DEI and the Continued Hard Work of Reimagining Schools and Education
The Safe Space That Became a Viral Nightmare
A very interesting, lengthy NYT Magazine piece - when I have the time, I would love to do a deep dive to explore communications challenges presented here, how they were addressed or not addressed, and how to school leaders can better prepare and confront such complicated incidents in the future because I guarantee they will come your way.
“Privilege in Crisis”
A much shorter piece on a recent dress code kerfuffle at Grace Church school. (I find both the headline and subhead a head-scratcher - very dramatic and not completely reflective of the content.) I find dress code an interesting area to deconstruct because it is both endlessly complicated, important, and not important at all. If you can stay interested, looking at dress code can lead to insights into your culture and be good practice for where you can effect change and where it makes sense to let it go for now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/nyregion/trinity-grace-church-school.html
Just for Fun - Remember Fun?
Reboot
After several months post headship, post moving house, and a true vacation, my laugh seems to have been set free from my diaphragm. I would always laugh in the company of others but it had been a long, long time since I had laughed out loud by myself. Most likely, I would be quietly, silently amused by TV or a book or whatever. I would think - “that’s funny.” There is nothing like that spontaneous feeling that just has to burst forth. Recently, I was unable to contain my mirth at Office episodes I had seen multiple times. If you are trying to keep coaxing out the laughter in These Times, I highly recommend the new Hulu series Reboot. It’s definitely a bit salty so not family friendly but pretty hilarious and features Crazy Ex Girlfriend star and comic genius Rachel Bloom.
https://www.hulu.com/series/reboot-e8c26c94-e813-4160-b36e-1b367ebcebe8
And here are the links to The Chair and Withnail and I. Both are not family friendly. One features the amazing Sandra Oh whose situation and performance resonated with every female head of school I know and the other features charming British actor Richard E Grant’s breakthrough performance from 1987.
https://www.netflix.com/title/8120625
https://www.hbomax.com/feature/urn:hbo:feature:GXmlSrw8D5MNVoAEAAATP
And yet again - that NPR raccoon cafe video: