Disrupting the Power Dynamic

Friends, this place I live in, the intersection between parent, teacher and visionary, is sometimes a wild ride.  Here, I work through conversations from each vantage point and then have to make peace among the three.  But it's an incredible space of introspection, and I want to share today what I've discovered there, this year.  But first, my main conclusion: We don't need more meetings where parents and teachers sit as strangers across tables from each other to discuss data.  We don't even need more meetings with food as bait, where staff members serve hungry parents food and wait for them to eat it.  What we really need are scheduled times for families and staffs to sit, break bread together and learn each other's stories--which translates into learning each other's humanity.

BACKSTORY:

My school has stumbled on a game-changer that I never saw coming.  It is so deceptively simple that I can't believe it took THIS long.  Last summer, I had an impactful conversation with our school's parent consultant that shifted my thinking.  She'd said that the parents at our school did not see us, the staff members, as people.  We were representatives of the school, the establishment--not mothers, uncles and even sons and daughters ourselves.  No, we only lived to speak for the school and to stand in stead of all things wrong they'd experienced in schools.  I was shocked to hear this.  After all, we as educators are keenly aware of our own stories--how school encouraged or discouraged us from feeling smart, how this or that teacher inspired us to step into their shoes...but to realize that our parents could see none of this was a jolt for me.


There are lots of steps in between (which I can blog about another time), but after an interesting set of revelations this year, I landed at the realization  about our school.  Our super-low parent involvement in the testing process was a problem that we probably should tackle creatively instead of continuing to repeat the approaches from the past.  Testing in our state has changed several times and this most recent iteration, computerized and quite complicated, befuddles our families.  But my feeling is that most really don't feel empowered to connect to the process at all--unless forced to when their child is retained.  (We are a state with a Third Grade Reading Guarantee.) Yes, we may have scheduled informative sessions to school them on testing requirements in the past, but few have plugged in.  I decided that we should try to get their interest through a series of parent meetings this year.  Talk straight, inspire them, help them see who we are and why we care.  I talked to our parent consultant and assistant principal and convinced them to join the vision.  Together, we created a 6-session series of parent talks involving mindset shifts, practical helps and yes, food.  This week we completed session 5 of 6, and here are some of my realizations so far:

1. Parents want to feel seen and heard in school.

This is true any any space--but in urban environments, parents being seen and not heard is such a common expectation that we probably don't know that we hold it.  If the same families we lament being un-involved showed up in droves, we probably wouldn't know what to do with ourselves.

2. Staff members are probably secretly fearful of seeing family members as equals, even if we don't know it.

We closely identities as saviors and all-knowing rescuers, which we fear might be ruined if we found ways to connect with parents beyond our norm.

3. Any school that could get parents in the door--or even show up where they can be found--just to build relationships around their shared work--could probably change the world. Or at least theirs.

Getting many parents to plug into school is hard...but what if we could build a culture where families find help and partnership in their child's success and that support becomes (for lack of a better term) addictive?  Maybe we haven't truly made it worth their while yet.

In our sessions, we have seen staff and teachers sit and enjoy meals together and discuss everything from their children's assessment experiences to traumatic losses and their effect on their children, to sharing strategies for teaching their kids in and out of school.

4.  The simple shift of position changes everything.
In my building, we believe the age-old wisdom that to get our population of parents in school, we have to feed them.  While this seems largely true, I think our posture in the process could change.  Typically we assign ourselves to man the food service, doling out lasagna or building sandwiches.  Yet we remain in the giving position, with the families as recipients.  What an amazing thing has happened, however, when staff members have been sitting on a horizontal plane with families breaking bread!  We present relevant learning information at our meetings, but before it's all done, we eat with the families.  We all get to be human, together.  I dare anyone doubting the power of this to try it! It's building such a different kind of tone that we're looking into continuing the meetings throughout the year!  Love what's happening here...To be continued about where we go from here.  All I know is, we've gotten something started...