In life, unless you’re driving a car, avoidance is rarely an effective strategy. Avoiding the school bully will only delay the inevitable beating that will one day come your way. Avoiding dull or difficult colleagues will make completing any task with them all the harder when the time eventually comes. And avoiding persistent school problems that everyone knows about—the parents who get extra favors for their child from the principal, the teacher who is not pulling his or her weight, or the budget that never quite adds up—creates a gradual corrosion of trust that eats away at a community from within.
But coming at problems head on rarely moves a school forward either. Confronting persistent absenteeism or chronic underperformance has to be dealt with directly at some point, of course, but most of the time, haranguing and hectoring people into compliance have few chances of success. Talking at people won’t get you far as a colleague or a principal, and avoiding talking to people at all will get you equally depressing results. Bad communication and no communication are the doom-loops that determine organizational decline.
So the answer to making improvement in almost anything has to be talking with people, not at them—all kinds of people, including ones you can’t stand. This is the art of conversation (talking with), and it belongs not just at dinner parties or at gatherings of political fund raisers, but it is at the heart of effective organizational life. In this book, Sommers and Zimmerman make accessible the art of professional conversations.
In the last twenty years or so, we have learned a lot about the value of professional collaboration in teaching—about sharing resources and ideas, giving moral support on a bad day, planning and brainstorming together, and even taking joint responsibility for the same classes. Mainly, working together beats trying to do everything yourself. But not all professional collaboration is effective. A big part of professional collaboration is rooted in talk and words. But talk isn’t always productive. The griping curmudgeon who lurks in the back corner of every meeting, the verbally incontinent colleague who rarely gets anything done, the pointy-headed pseudo-academic who wants to turn every issue into a theoretical debate for its own sake, the network meetings that go around in circles, or the purveyors of pleasantries who will skirt around all the important issues for fear of giving offense—these are the characters who provide little or no inspiration for the idea that more conversation will lead to better outcomes for students.
More collaboration is better than no collaboration. And some conversation is invariably better than none. But from this pretty low baseline of effective collegial practice, what we need to know next and now is which ways of collaborating are better than others. This is what Michael O’Connor and I call collaborative professionalism—collaborating together more professionally by using honesty, protocols, and rigor; and being more collaborative as professionals so that people build relationships as well as just completing tasks.
The same point applies to the Nine Professional Conversations described in this book. The issue is not to have more or less of it, but to determine and design forms of professional conversations that are most engaging and productive for the people involved and most valuable for the students who will benefit. This is the secret sauce of Zimmerman and Sommers’s insightful and practical book Nine Professional Conversations to Change Our Schools.
The authors aren’t the first to enter the field of professional conversation; indeed, they draw from many experts. They draw from advocates of reflective or mindful conversations that draw people out, encourage them to explore key problems and dilemmas, listen respectfully to others, and eventually determine solutions together. They take a fresh look at ways to handle difficult, challenging, or hard conversations; coach leaders and colleagues about how to talk tough; and raise difficult subjects in a respectful but nonetheless clear and direct way about underperformance or insufficiently high expectations. Finally, there are those who are persuaded by the value of data, evidence, or outside expertise to inform, provoke, or challenge existing and sometimes overly comfortable assumptions about how things must be and can only be. The authors stress that this outside information should inform professional learning; anything short of that wastes time.
In the wider community of educators, advocates of these approaches often fall into separate camps—supportive, challenging, or clinically evidence-driven. This book brings them all together. They are complementary skills sets, not competing ones, each having its time and place and needing to belong to a wider repertoire on which leaders, colleagues, consultants, and staff developers can draw at any time. In clear language and building on their years of experience as highly effective leaders in education, Zimmerman and Sommers take the reader through these different approaches, show them what they look like and what impact they can have, and then provide very clear tools and protocols along with illustrative examples that will help teacher leaders and school leaders put them into practice.
John Dewey taught us that we don’t have to and shouldn’t make a choice between work and play or theory and experience—that each involves the other. The same is true of the approaches to professional conversation. They all have their place. They all overlap. Sommers and Zimmerman’s helpful book shows just what this abiding and practical philosophy will mean for conducting positive professional conversations in real schools; and it demonstrates how to confront professional issues head on and take actions to support learning. After all, we are not driving cars—we are educating the next generation.
Andy Hargreaves
Boston College
January 2018