One Simple Strategy to Overcome Resistance to Your Vision

One of the most important parts of leadership is communication. And no matter how much you try to communicate, it seems there is always room for improvement. But why is it that so many new ideas flame out before they really get established?

In Adam Grant's book Originals: How Non-Comformists Move the World, he writes about the exposure effect. People tend to gravitate to ideas or methods that are more familiar, while they tend to avoid things that are less familiar.

The mere exposure effect has been replicated many times—the more familiar a face, letter, number, sound, flavor, brand, or Chinese character becomes, the more we like it. It's true across different cultures and species; even baby chickens prefer the familiar. My favorite test was when people looked at photographs of themselves and their friends that were either regular or inverted, as if seen in a mirror. We prefer the regular photos of our friends, because that's how we're used to seeing them, but we like the inverted photos of ourselves, because that's how we see ourselves when we look in the mirror. "Familiarity doesn't breed contempt," says serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman. "It breeds comfort."

The exposure effect might explain why teachers tend to teach as they were taught. And why parents can get a little anxious when their child's schooling deviates from what they experienced as a student. It might also explain why new ideas may not gain traction right away, even if they are great ideas that might be game-changers for student learning. People need time to warm-up to a new idea, and the research seems to prove it.

So if you want to move your vision forward, you have to help people become more comfortable with the vision. You have to overcommunicate the vision. But usually the opposite happens. Leaders often communicate far too little and too infrequently. Grant writes that leaders tend to assume everyone else is familiar with their ideas. They spend hours thinking about the vision from just about every angle. It seems easy to the person most familiar with it.

You know the lyrics and the melody of your idea by heart. By that point, it's no longer possible to imagine what it sounds like to an audience that's listening to it for the first time.

It's easy to forget the perspective of the audience. But perhaps they aren't on Twitter all the time discussing the topic. They might not be constantly engaged in conversations with other forward-thinking educators. They may not have the opportunity to go to as many conferences or attend as many workshops. To them, the message seems foreign and difficult to understand. It's hard to take the message and fit it with their current thoughts and ideas. You possess a clarity they do not.

As I read this part of the book, I was reflecting on my own communication as a leader. I can actually think of lots of ways I've failed to consistently communicate our vision. It's easy to add just one more thing and make our goals too complex. Then the communication is just a muddled mess of one new idea after another. There isn't opportunity for people to really adopt an idea, get behind it, and see how it works in their world. The next new thing is just around the corner.

Just last year, our district admin team was reading Finding Your Leadership Focus by Doug Reeves. But in spite of the study of priorities, I don't think we eliminated a single initiative. We just continued spinning plates. You work on spinning a few over here, and then give attention to some others before they come crashing down. Because nearly everything seems to be a priority, in reality it means that nothing is a priority. We are killing any chance at a transforming vision by initiative fatigue.

Retrieved: https://workingmomadventures.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/man-spinning-plates.jpg

But I actually thought of one example that was a success. So let's focus on the positive, right? 

In the years leading up to our 1:1 initiative, we didn't have the budget to make it happen. We just didn't have the money. That provided plenty of time for staff to warm-up to the idea. They heard me tell stories of other schools who were going 1:1. I constantly was dreaming about how awesome it would be when all of our students had consistent access. I talked about it a lot. And other people talked about it too. I think all those years helped most everyone embrace the idea. Our budget woes may have been a blessing in disguise. The delay was probably helpful in setting the stage for the success of 1:1 at BHS.

In the fall of 2015, when 1:1 became a reality, we totally hit the ground running. I'm not saying it was perfect. But the buy-in was at a high level, and our digital transformation was off to a great start. For several years, our team was getting ready for this future reality. There was plenty of time to become familiar with the concept of 1:1, why it was important, and how it could be helpful in each classroom. We communicated the 'why' of 1:1 over and over again. 

As Grant suggested, "If we want people to accept our original ideas, we need to speak up about them, and then rinse and repeat."

So as your leadership team plans to move your vision forward, consider the importance of the exposure effect. Really listen to the feedback from your team to understand how the ideas are being received. And make sure you don't underestimate how much exposure your audience needs to understand your vision and embrace it.

When Harvard professor John Kotter studied change agents years ago, he found that they typically undercommunicated their visions by a factor of ten. On average, they spoke about the direction of change ten times less often than their stakeholders needed to hear it. In one three-month period, employees might be exposed to 2.3 million words and numbers. On average during that period, the vision for change was expressed in only 13,400 words and numbers: a 30-minute speech, an hour-long meeting, a briefing, and a memo. Since more than 99 percent of the communication that employees encounter during those three months does not concern the vision, how can they be expected to understand it, let along internalize it? The change agents don't realize this, because they're up to their ears in information about their vision. 

So as a result of Grant's ideas, I'm considering ways I can be more consistent, focused, and systematic in my communication. I need to refine the message and then use the "slow-drip method" to keep it in front our staff. And I want to listen to feedback and revise the vision as needed. Ultimately, the vision should belong to the team. It's really about giving an idea time to "percolate" so there is opportunity to process, evaluate, and ultimately act upon it.

An unfamiliar idea requires more effort to understand. The more we see, hear, and touch it, the more comfortable we become with it, and the less threatening it is.

Question: What are ways you are communicating a focused message to your team? I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below or respond on or .

Too Many Want To Quit As Soon As It Gets Hard

This past weekend, I decided to teach our 15-year-old daughter Maddie how to mow the yard using our zero-turn-radius mower. We have a pretty large yard to mow, and it takes about three hours to do the job. All summer I've relied on the two older boys to take care of mowing the grass, but now they are both at college.

Maddie is doing a great job learning to drive, so I thought it would be no problem to teach her how to mow. She was very excited about doing it, and I was happy to have help so that I'm not spending three hours every week on this task.

Well, it didn't go as well as either of us had hoped. She had a little trouble at first getting the mower to steer in a straight line. And at times, she was missing sections of grass. A zero-turn mower can be a little tricky till you get the hang of it.

I was coaching the whole time. I would stop her and give her a little feedback, lots of encouragement, and even hop on the mower myself to demonstrate.

But in spite of my best efforts to keep everything positive, I could tell it was stressing her out a little. She was struggling. And I was just a few steps away when the mower hit a pipe right next to the wall. It broke right off. She was crushed. Her head dropped, and she looked so sad.

I tried to reassure her, but there were tears and she said, "I'm terrible at mowing."

I really felt for her. I explained that everyone is a beginner at first. I did my best to comfort her. "You are just learning. You're not terrible at mowing. You're just new to mowing."

I asked her if she wanted to take a break, and she said yes. I mowed for a while, and then she got back on and did fine until we finished. I felt it was important for her to get back on the mower, even after the accident. But I stayed with her the whole time.

As I was reflecting on this, I was thinking about how many kids feel like Maddie when it comes to school. They may be excited at first, but then it gets harder or doesn't go well, and they really want to give up.

Our job as educators is to stay at their side and help them. We shouldn't rescue them, but we shouldn't leave them floundering either. We have to find the right balance. They need support and encouragement, but they need to learn perseverance too. These skills will serve them well for their entire lives.

A few of our teachers participated in an externship program this summer with GOCAPS (Greater Ozarks Center for Professional Studies). The main purpose of GOCAPS is to provide intership experiences for our high school juniors and seniors. But they also have a summer experience where teachers get to work in business and industry and get a better understanding of the working world outside of education. It's called an externship.

At one of the meetings, business leaders were asked what schools could do to better prepare future employees. What is the one thing you wish your new hires could bring with them from their school experience? The response: We need people who don't give up easily. Too many want to quit as soon as anything goes wrong or gets hard. We need young people who can face challenges and keep trying.

In the end, I was very proud of Maddie for not giving up. She didn't enjoy mowing nearly as much as she thought she would. But she finished the job. Together we did it. And even thought it was hard, it was a good learning experience.

How are you teaching your students to be resilient? I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below or respond on or .

5 Challenges to Your Best School Year Ever

As the new school year is just around the corner, it's a great chance to commit to making learning more effective and meaningful in your classroom or school. Here are five challenges to make it the best year ever. 

1. Greet Your Students at the Door

Everyone can make it a point to greet students at the door each day. But it's also easy to get busy with other things and neglect the doorway greeting. It's easy to get pulled away by paperwork or visiting with colleagues or other things. That's why I decided to include this as a challenge. It's a challenge for me too. I always try to greet students in the morning, either at one of our entries or by mingling in the hallways. But sometimes I let other things get in the way. I want to commit to make this a top priority all year long.

Greeting students is helpful for several reasons: 

• It shows students you care and want to interact with them. 
• It allows you to read students' body language and see how they're doing, if they're ready to learn.
• It earns buy-in from your students and motivates them to engage in your classroom. You might be surprised how much difference it makes when you make greeting students a top priority.

2. Teach Your Best Lesson on the First Day

I think it's fair to say there is too much teacher talk overall in K-12 classrooms. Learning would be better served if students were more actively processing content and skills instead of so passive receiving. And that's and every day concern. But is there any school day with more teacher talk than the first day of school? 

Teachers talk about the rules, the procedures, grades, the seating chart. We talk about the syllabus, about the class objectives, and more. I remember a teacher who even discussed at length the organization of the textbook. Really?

Why would we want the first day of school to be the most boring day of the school year? Shouldn't we want students to actually be excited about returning to school for the second day? I think the first day should create enough excitement and intrigue that students are more excited about learning tomorrow than they are today.

I recently read that we tend to make first impressions of people we meet within the first 7 seconds and then spend the rest of the conversation trying to convince ourselves why our impressions are true. I'm betting that's true in the classroom, too. Your students will make assumptions from the first day that may be hard to change later.

So I'm suggesting you try to teach your best lesson on the first day. Make it so great that students will be rushing to your class for day two. Don't talk about all the boring rules and procedures on day one. You can communicate all that stuff a little at a time the first few weeks of school. Some of it you can address as teachable moments arise. I understand the importance of rules or procedures, but don't start the year with that stuff.

Instead of the boring pitfalls of the first day, here are some alternatives. Challenge students with a problem. Have them work in groups to create something. Use a team builder to get students active. Here is an Epic List of Team Building Activities. Use Brain Teasers to get your students thinking immediately. Here's another set of Brain Teasers that might be a little less challenging. You might even be able to use the brain teaser to illustrate something about your rules or procedures, if you are determined to squeeze some of that in on day one. 

Another possibility would be to jump right into your content. Have students read something interesting and even mind-blowing from your subject. Have a discussion about it. Get everyone talking and sharing as much as possible right from the start. Set the stage for high levels of engagement on the first day.

And another possibility, I would always do this when I was teaching high school English. I would tell my students on the first day that I was going to learn everyone's name, today. I had six classes with nearly 30 students per class. So this was always a big risk. It's tough to learn 180 names. And I always failed. But I would try. And I would learn most of the names on the first day. 

Think of the lessons that flowed from this. The kids were interacting with me. There was suspense. They couldn't wait to see if I would remember their name on the next cycle through the class. It was a great chance to talk about taking risks and failing forward. We would laugh together at my mistakes. I also did this to emphasize the importance of relationships. I try to learn your names because I want to get to know you.

Whatever you do, make your first day memorable. Try to teach your very best lesson!

3. Make Questions More Important than Right Answers

I'm guessing many students have come to believe that success in school is closely tied to delivering right answers. And if you deliver enough right answers you get a good grade. But this type of learning doesn't necessarily stick. Students will deliver right answers on the quiz or test that is right in front of them, but what about months down the road. Do they still retain much of that information? I'm guessing no.

But focusing more on questions can lead to deeper understanding. And when students have deeper understanding, the learning tends to stick. It helps with applying information, seeing the big picture, and transferring learning to new contexts. Questions are the foundation of all inquiry. Physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said, "There is NO learning without having to pose a question."

But not all questions are created equal. Many questions are asked in the classroom that do not generate deeper thinking. These questions are the ones that seek a single right answer with very little explanation of thought. But my challenge is to make a shift. Try to make your classroom more about questions than answers.

• Whoever is asking the most questions is doing the most learning. Students should regularly develop their own questions.
• The most interesting questions don't have one right answer.
• The least interesting questions are those with straightforward, factual answers.
• Use questions to help reveal and uncover your students' thinking. A right answer doesn't provide any clues to how the answer was achieved, unless there is elaboration and explanation of the thinking.
• Curiosity fuels learning, and questions build curiosity and give curiosity an outlet.
• How to Bring More Beautiful Questions Back to School
• 5 Powerful Questions Teachers Can Ask Students
• "I Wonder" Questions: Harnessing the Power of Inquiry

A couple of years ago, we asked our students to select schoolwide essential questions to guide inquiry across all subjects. Our students actually voted on the questions. We had one question each quarter of the school year. You could do the same thing in your classroom or school. Here's a Giant List of Really Good Essential Questions.

4. Put Students in the Driver's Seat

If our goal is to create independent, lifelong learners it's important to create classrooms where students are taking greater ownership of their learning. We know that a student-centered classroom is more effective than a teacher-centered classroom. So how can you put your students in the driver's seat this year? 

Our school went 1:1 last year with Chromebooks for every student. Many in our community probably thought this was about keeping up with technology. But the greatest benefit to every student having a device is student agency, the ability for each student to make some of the decisions about the direction of their learning. Access to a device and consequently access to the sum of human knowledge via the internet creates opportunities for empowerment.

But we can't keep teaching the same way and expect empowerment to increase. Just giving a student a device will not lead to empowerment. We have to give up some of our control and help guide and facilitate learning instead of making every decision ourselves.

Here are some questions for you to consider about agency and empowerment in your classroom?

• How often do students have input on how they will learn?
• How often do students have input on what they will learn?
• Are students given opportunities to lead conversations?
• Are classroom goals developed by the teacher alone or in partnership with students?
• Do students have some time to pursue their own goals?
• How often do you ask students for feedback on their experience in your classroom?

In classrooms where student ownership has flourished, I've noticed that it's usually because teachers really listen and spend a considerable amount of time understanding their students' perspective, what's important to them, what their experiences with learning have been in the past. There is a feeling that the students and the teacher are co-creating the classroom together, instead of the teacher delivering lessons.


5. Eliminate the Trash Can Finish

Where does most student work ultimately end up? Unfortunately, most of it is destined for the trash can. It will never be shared with anyone beyond the classroom. The teacher will review it and assess it, and finally it comes to rest in a landfill. Sometimes, the work will be shared with other students in the classroom. But why aren't we seeking more authentic audiences for student work?

When students know their work will be shared with a real audience, it changes the mindset. Instead of just producing work that is good-enough to get the grade, they will want to produce work that represents their best efforts. The sense of audience is an opportunity to practice empathy and try to see the project through the end-users' eyes. It's what professionals do in their work all the time. Our students need to be practicing the skills that all people use when they are completing a project or developing a product that will no doubt be presented to a real audience.

And there are more ways than ever to share student work. With social media and other digital platforms, student work can be shared across the world. Students can create blogs, produce podcasts, or compile digital portfolios. Twitter is a great way to share out links or images of student work. The #Comments4Kids hashtag is one great way to connect with audiences and get feedback too. 

According to a Forbes magazine article, your online presence will soon replace the traditional resume. But most students haven't done anything intentional to establish digital presence or personal brand. Your classroom could help change that. You can find ways to share student work so that their great ideas and best efforts can be accessed in the present and the future.

Besides digital sharing of work, there are other ways to make learning visible and include real audiences. Elementary schools are great at displaying student work throughout the school. Why don't more secondary schools do this? One idea a teacher developed in our school invites professionals in our community to examine student projects. It's kind of like Shark Tank, with students pitching their ideas to a panel of "sharks." Schools can also have maker faires or other showcase events where student work is on display for parents and community.

Avoiding the trashcan finish can be as simple as a Tweet or as complex as a schoolwide fair. Everything students do can't be shared out, but we need to start sharing more. It brings relevance to learning and allows kids to contribute ideas and products to the world right now. Students shouldn't have to wait until they are out of school to make valuable contributions.

Question: Which of these challenges will you try this year? Let me know what you think. Leave a comment below or respond on or .