Feels Like Fifteen Below: Seeking to Understand and Prioritize Perspective
As a building principal I’m charged with deciding on indoor or outdoor recess depending on the weather. Driving rain is an easy one. If it’s pouring buckets we stay in. No harm no foul. But if you’re the recess czar at your school, do be careful about cold weather cancelations. The rule is that temperatures above zero are suitable for outdoor recess, and that temperatures below zero are not. However, as you know, meteorology categorizes temperatures in two ways: actual and feels like.
That categorization policy has always been fascinating to me. In my mind, if it feels like fifteen below, it is fifteen below. Until recently I wouldn’t have thought we’d get very far pulling that nonsense in education. Imagine telling a student that he’s meeting your expectations but that he’s going to be assigned a dentation because it feels like he isn’t. What about sending a report card home suggesting that Sally earned an “A” but it feels like a “B-.” Not so clear. Parents might have a few questions. I suppose it would work in a case like, “Tomorrow’s staff meeting will begin promptly at 7:30, but it will feel like 5:15.” Regardless, it’s kind of a goofy concept. Recently I’ve had cause to reexamine it.
A few weeks ago I read two articles on different instructional subjects that came to a similar conclusion. One was about learner-centered practices and the other was about autonomy-supportive classroom environments. Each article pointed to the various benefits of its respective embedded strategy, and interestingly, both connected data sets indicated similar result with regard to implementation. They suggested that it almost didn’t matter to what extent the teacher-participants believe they were planning for and delivering particular types of instruction. What mattered was whether or not their students agreed. Maybe perception is reality.
Student-participants in both studies consistently communicated that the instructional strategy or idea at hand was capable of enhancing their engagement in meaningful learning, but across the board they generally disagreed with their teachers about whether or not it was being used.
I have a good friend who’s also a building principal. She recently told me that her secretary received a frustrated phone call from a parent. The parent was upset because she feels like my friend has no presence at drop off or pick up time. This parent believes that the principal’s presence at the car line is critical to safety and relationship building. The only loophole in her concern is that my friend steadfastly plants herself at the car line daily for both drop off and pick up. She literally is, and has always been, doing the very thing that this parent would like to see her doing. Ironic.
How about digital messaging? Have you ever sent an e-mail on Monday, put a memo in mailboxes on Tuesday, followed up with a PA announcement on Wednesday, sent a carrier pigeon on Thursday, and then been asked, “why didn’t you tell us?” on Friday. Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us.
The fact is that perception and reality are at the very least extremely close cousins. Does it really matter what actually happened or who’s right about this or that in moments of individual and organizational confusion? Which matters more, what it is or what it feels like. I would suggest that from the principal’s office to the classroom, educational leaders should be hyper-focused on seeking to understand the stakeholders that we serve. We truly must be able to see and genuinely consider the world through their lenses.
If we know that students aren’t feeling supported we can reflect, adapt, and implement enhanced support structures…even if we believe that we’re already the most supportive people in the world. If we know that parents could use more principal-presence in their lives we can develop our communication systems and strategies to better convey the message that we’re around…whether or not we’re already hanging out at the car line.
Because much of life, and certainly much of life at school, is about diverse groups of individuals interacting in ever-developing circumstances with considerably significant implications, I would contend that knowing how the people we serve are feeling is absolutely critical to achieving our individual and collective goals. I also understand that that’s not possible all of the time, but I’m here to suggest that the consistent effort to do so is a great start!
What are you doing in your school to gather data on stakeholders’ perceptions? How are you using those data to provide and perpetuate the highest quality experiences for everyone involved?
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