Today in our Leadership Academy Monthly Cohort meeting we discussed two readings — Rigor on Trial by Tony Wagner and Chapter 13, Passion and Persistence, from “Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement” (Richard Dufour, Robert E. Eaker). We used a protocol that required each of us to choose a passage from one of the two readings and discussed why we found that particular sentence or passage significant or striking. I chose the following (which is a quotation from Patrick Dolan included on page 283 of Chapter 13):
“What we need, very often, more than anything else, is a “grace” with one another. This grace comes from understanding how difficult this business is, and from making the very best assumptions about people and their desire to change, understanding the reality of past experiences and the culture so often in place. It is hard to make these changes, and we will never get it right at the very beginning… It is the giving of grace to one another that very often allows us to move through the early sticking moments and gather enough momentum… [to] stay the course.”
I found this particular quote very striking because what it describes was familiar to me and it put into words for me what I felt at a time when I was part of a highly functional school improvement team in an environment where everyone was energized, enthusiastic, and inspired to do the work. This sense of grace very often feels elusive to me now — but I believe that more than ever it is exactly what we need a whole lot more of if we want to have hope of making the changes we need to make in ourselves as well as within our education system…
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What does “giving of grace to on another” look like? (Just a few ideas off the top of my head…)
It means supporting one another through all initiatives…
…rolling up our shirt-sleeves and diving head-first into the work together…
…trusting each other… REALLY trusting each other — especially when we disagree about methods, processes, or plans…
…listening to each other’s ideas and giving opposite viewpoints equal airtime and consideration…
…having compassion and forgiveness…
…trying out each other’s ideas…
…no egos and no blame…
…positive humor when things get difficult…
…playing devil’s advocate with one another…
…helping one another “problem solve” and “trouble shoot” when ideas, projects, or initiatives don’t work out quite as well as we planned…
…never saying “I told you so”…
…providing support to each other as we go through our individual learning processes…
…approaching the work — especially the hard work — with a sense of adventure…
…approaching each other with acceptance and appreciation…
What else would you add? What does “grace” look like to you?
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
[...] In response to what happened to Kathy Sierra, a social networking site has been started by Andy Carvin at Learning Now for discussion and resources to help educate everyone on Cyber-bullying. If you would like to add your voice or find out more you can go to Stop Cyberbullying and join in. Friday March 30 has been designated as Stop Cyber-bullying Day. This is a good time to talk with your children or students about the subject and maybe incorporate some ideas into your lesson plan. Bullying only works if the victim is alone – Stephanie Sandifer has a great post on giving each other grace at Change Agency that I think is timely, well…anytime. [...]
Stephanie, I agree. We need grace because without it we don’t have the human capacity to let go of our own desire enough to build something together. It is grace that allows us to see past the words and actions of a child to what is lying underneath. Grace gives us the chance to say we’re sorry when we have made a mistake and mean it. Grace allows us to accept an appology with humility and then let the incident go. Grace is deciding to see the good in someone instead of anything else. Grace allows us to go on persevere through the difficult. Thanks for letting us remember we are in the business of making people better – no matter what.