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In this episode, host Lindsay talks about discourse as change leadership. She dives into the research-backed best practices and theoretical frameworks that help drive meaningful change, especially when facing staff resistance.
Drawing on the work of John Morgan and adaptive leadership scholars like Heifetz, Lindsay emphasizes the importance of constructive disorientation and staff-led discourse to address resistance and foster sustainable change. Why? Adaptive challenges, as defined by Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsy, are “ typically grounded in the complexity of beliefs, values, and loyalties rather than the technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis." To then address these multi-faceted challenges, educators and teams must bring empathy and strategic discourse to their problem-solving efforts, rather than technical methods alone. Ignoring the intense emotions that come up only does a disservice to your team in finding meaningful solutions. What? When faced with adaptive challenges — or “messy” challenges, as Lindsay calls them — comes down to having a plan that enables leaders to lead with confidence, honor staff humanity, and stay true to the pursuit of educational justice in the face of resistance. Here are some tips that will help you begin this process:
Lindsay dives into all of these tips, using scholarly research to back up best practices for leaders and teams. And, remember, investing in this work not only helps address the current adaptive challenge at hand, but also builds capacity to address new ones in the future. Final Tip Align assessments with the organizational values of growth and risk-taking so that teachers and educators are not penalized for prioritizing change and new ideas. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Reframing Discussion Prompts with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 267 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
Lindsay Lyons: To another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 267, and today we're talking about discourse as change leadership. So how do you respond when your staff resists change? We've done some blog posts and podcast episodes before on this topic, but really wanna bring it back to a blog post, um, and kinda synthesize some other things as well. But mainly, this episode is thinking more deeply about a blog post written in 2020, which is based on the work of John Morgan, who was one of my professors at Antioch University in the leadership and change program, who talks about constructive disorientation. And so constructive disorientation and staff-led discourse can help address resistance in a humanizing way and craft a better path towards sustainable change. Let's think together about how to do this. Here we go Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky say, quote, "Adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of beliefs, values, and loyalties rather than the technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis." End quote. I have said that quote so many times, but it's still so good. So whether you're leading a school turnaround effort, pursuing equity and belonging amidst harmful political discourse, or maybe implementing a new high-quality instructional material, change is hard. And if you're dealing with a long-standing challenge, it's likely adaptive, and adaptive challenges are gonna require an adaptive approach. We talked a few episodes ago how discourse is really critical to addressing a lot of, uh, change leadership and adaptive challenges. And having that clear approach, like, "What am I gonna do?" Having that plan when you are faced with a messy challenge is going to enable you as a leader to lead with confidence, honor staff humanity, and stay true to the pursuit of educational justice in the face of resistance. When faced with a disorienting dilemma, which is when our experience doesn't fit with our expectations or beliefs. So for example, we encounter evidence that our way of teaching has not improved student learning, right? We're like, "Oh, like I think I'm a good teacher. That is in my head. I think this is the way to teach." However, I'm noticing that none of my students, uh, improved, you know, whatever it is, their critical thinking or their reading scores or whatever that thing is. When we encounter that disorienting dilemma, research tells us that we actually learn best in the presence of others, when we can try on others' perspectives. So facilitating emotional conversations about change is gonna require intentional structure. So if it's like, "Oh, we gotta talk to people about this to be able to do this well. Okay, well, that's hard. How do we structure it?" When we have purpose-specific discourse protocols and a lot of the foundation and context built up around this, um, we can build capacity to both plan the structure to respond in the case of, uh, maybe a deficit-based comment or a conversational detour, um, we're gonna feel ready for leading change. So my goals for the episode, this is a little ambitious, but we are gonna try to, um, first, I guess, recognize that adaptive challenges require human-centric responses, and the diverse ideas of staff are actually what enable effective change. Also want you to hopefully have a spark of an idea for how to actually create that constructive disorientation for your staff, like how to facilitate it. Um, W-Worgan defines, just so you know his definition, he defines constructive disorientation as, quote, "An experience that unsettles us and sparks our curiosity both at once, and does so in a way that we perceive an opportunity to change how we see the world and for the better." I think there's a lot of, like, inviting stakeholder stories and values and imagination here. I also would invite you to consider how you might plan for a structured generative discourse opportunities, and maybe get an idea for how you wanna respond if a, like, a harmful comment or, like, a deficit thinking comment comes up in staff conversations. Okay, so let's think about what we do. Number one, I think we have to identify that we're working with an adaptive challenge, right? You likely already know this, but be open to what the problem is, really digging deeper than only looking at the technical issues. This is where we're gonna find our disorienting dilemma, as Mezuro puts it, which is, like, the starting point for our change. So Heifetz, who is an adaptive leadership scholar, encourages leaders to ask socially relevant questions that force members to clarify their values and deeply consider outcomes of oppressive actions. So we have to kind of juxtapose, like, the reality, which is often, like, this isn't working or this is marginalizing a group of students or a student, right? With, like, what are the values? We gotta surface both of those. The factual reality, here's what's happening, it's not good, and what are the values that you hold as an educator, right? And then s- then often just surfacing those, um, may create kind of that disorienting dilemma. Um, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, I just saw the name, they liken the adaptive leadership model to evolutionary biology's concept of thriving, where they're saying, you know, the essential components are preserved. The unnecessary ones are discarded. A new arrangement facilitate resi- resilience to future changes. So investing in this work, I think this is important to name. Investing in this work is a, a really sustainable approach to not just dealing with the one issue in front of you, but creating a culture that is adaptive. Like, building capacity for everyone to lead and enact positive adaptive change. That's gonna serve you in the next adaptive challenge that comes up. Okay, so you've identified there's an adaptive challenge. You're starting to think about, you know, the disorienting dilemma. Step two, we gotta build the foundation, and specifically thinking here the social capital. So John Morgan says there is a direct correlation between the amount of social capital in an organization and the degree to which meaningful conversations can be had. So we have to. If we wanna have that discourse, which is critical, we need to up the amount of social capital. So regular community building, story sharing opportunities, sharing appreciations of one another. Like, I like that you did this. Uh, I saw you doing this. Great work. These can be little notes. They can be verbal. They can be at the end of the story sharing discussion. Um, but utilizing staff time for this is not a waste of time. It enables you to have the adaptive conversations when necessary as you pursue change. Um, I can link to the discussion resource bank I have around some pr- particular ideas, um, prompts, formats, things like that. But a simple one I often say to start with is just like what's the story of your name, right? This can be a great get to know you activity if you have new staff members, but it also is something that maybe other people have not shared yet. Another one, who's a person you value? Could be a superhero, could be a fictional person, could be a family member, could be a student, right? Like th- there are some quick prompts that you could do a circle discussion format for and just start to build that community All right, step kind of 2A perhaps. This is like another part of building the foundation. We gotta build the discourse foundation. So to enable stakeholders to reflect on their disorientation and listen to others' points of view with empathy, there needs to be a discourse foundation. So one, that has to be like, you know, we have to have some sort of shared goal. Literally, it could just be John Morgan says, like reminding everyone we're all here for kids, right? Like, we have to have like some lofty shared goal, and it doesn't need to be super specific, um, but shared goals are, are really a prerequisite. Ideological diversity and an openness to hear contributions from all members is a second necessity. So really, we need to identify, like deep listening or seeking to understand is a core discourse agreement. So if we're coming up with how we interact with one another, like we have to seek to understand, right? And, uh, we need to focus on, um, identifying those shared goals and underlying values, of course, before we debate how we're gonna move forward, what the policy is gonna be, right? We need to make those happen if we haven't already in, in the earlier step that we mentioned it. And the third thing we need is a collective responsibility for success, says Morgan. So that literally could just mean posing a question like, "What can I personally do to help us move forward as a school?" Sometimes in strategic planning, we have those locus of control tools or activities. Like this is basically that. You could ask a question, you could use that tool with like the, the bullseye framework or whatever, but we have to have this collective responsibility where no one is opting out. Like, okay, if the problem feels too big, yeah, what can you do though? Like, what is the thing that I can take on and, and commit to? Okay, step three, spark constructive disorientation. So this is John Worgan's term. We defined it earlier. There's a blog post I will link to in this blog post, um, the one from 2020. His tip is, like, make it clear, clear disorientation, but manageable. We gotta manage it. It can't be so overwhelming that people just opt out and shut down, right? Uh, Worgan says, quote, "We don't necessarily have to wait for a disorienting dilemma to hit us over the head and force us to pay attention," end quote. He suggests the practice of mindfulness or critical reflection can surface smaller kinds of disorientation. You know, a third source he says is, like, an aesthetic experience, so, like, a piece of art. Um, it could be student created. It could be, uh, created somewhere else. It doesn't have to be in your local community. He talks about, um, how this is a way for someone to try on the perspective of an artist at low risk to oneself, in his words. And so this could be, like, a Banksy painting or something, right? Like, some sort of, like, social, um, justice-oriented image. Uh, the example he gives is Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War statue, which was installed down the road from Richard- Virginia's Monument Ave. So something that, like, just kind of is like, "Oh, right, these two things are in juxtaposition," that is, like, making me have this little constructive disorientation moment. Um, a, a tip I would have is, yeah, bringing in student ideas, whether that's student art, videos about their experience, quotes. If you bring students onto, like, a Kiva panel and have a live panel with them sharing to staff about their experiences or family members, this could cause some constructive disorientation as well. Um, also some traditional data, like assessment data, bringing that into the space, um, as I said at the top of the episode, that can also kind of jar. Like, "Oh, I thought I was doing right by students. Hmm." Scores are not going up, right? Like, oh, that could also create the disorientation as well. Okay, step four. Now we're ready to have a group dialogue. We have had the constructive disorientation moment. Now we need to, like, process it. And this, this disorienting dilemma is uncomfortable, and it has to be, because that's what moves us to action. So having a multi-stakeholder group dialogue about the adaptive challenge lets each person be open to new ideas and perspectives to solve it. Remember, that's what the research says. We have to be able to hear other people's ideas and perspectives to try them on in a, quote, "low-risk environment." So what do we do? We set the stage. Worgan says it's necessary to have a setting conducive to deep work so that teachers can deeply concentrate and not be distracted by logistical tasks like checking email, right? So if at all possible, we take all tasks off teachers' plates, and they need to be able to be supported to be present fully in the conversation. This might mean that we are doing this, you know, in the summertime perhaps. I, I don't know. This could be, uh, like we say, "Okay, well, grading is due this week, so we're not gonna do it this week. We're gonna postpone it to next week once grades have been submitted." Right? Like, whatever way that you can take some things off the plates and make sure that we have as much focus as possible given all the things, like, that's the goal here Then as the leader or the facilitator, you need to choose a purpose-aligned prompt and protocol. I find that dialogue works best at first, because the goal there is just seeking to understand and getting a lot of initial ideas out there. We're not analyzing, we're not making decisions. So prompts could be as simple as, "What's coming up for you? How are you feeling? What does this make you think of?" So we just, like, have sparked the disorientation, and now we're just like, "All right. How are you feeling? What's coming up? What do, what are you thinking about?" Right? Very informal, like, initial thoughts. Now, if we're more ... If we're further down, if we've already maybe done that, w- we might go to discussion, where we're a little more topic specific at this point. And you could do more of, like, a dialogue. We're still just kind of, like, listening and seeking to understand, um, and we're just starting to process maybe, uh, a little bit more analytically. You might use some of the reframing discussion prompts, um, that are in the resource linked for this episode's, uh, blog post. Those encourage you to shift out of the binary, this or this, because that supports kind of this attack and defend position, into other spaces. So one might be critical analysis. So we ask about potential impacts or root causes of an issue, right? So e- let's use an example. If we are initially inclined to say, "Okay, we're gonna have a discussion. The question is, should we adopt this new policy?" Instead, if we're thinking about critical analysis, we might say, "What might the impacts of this policy be?" So we roll this policy out, like what could happen, right? Critical analysis. We also could ask about, like, the root cause, right? Like, why, why is this factual reality, this par- this issue coming up? Like, what is the root? Policy could be another framing. So narrow the scope about how to address the factual reality. Some questions are already about policy. Like our sample one, how should we... Like, should we adopt this new policy? Instead could be turned into, how would we like our community to respond to this factual reality? So for example, if you have students who are, like, very into, like, I don't know, all of, like, the misogynistic, like, stuff. Like, h- how would we like our community to respond to hate speech, for example? Like, if this is a given in our community, we are grappling with this issue, how do we want our community to respond when this happens? Because it has, right? Whatever the ha- whatever the thing is. Like, insert factual reality there. How would we like our community to respond? It gives you a sense of, like, we're talking about policy, but we are way more expansive at this point than deciding, like, decision-making, right? That's a later stage. Deciding yes or no on a particular policy. We're still generating and thinking about ideas. You could also identify values. So invite participants to name their values and the community values that you all hold that should inform a policy or could inform a policy. So for example, should we adopt this new policy could get translated into What values would you want to inform our policy? Right? So again, we're speaking more from the "I." We're, we're being able to listen deeply to other people's ideas. A final pivot could be civic imagination, which is always a favorite of mine. So this is where we're inviting a brainstorm of alternative policies affirming dignity. So maybe we had this initial policy, and your thought was, "Okay, should we adopt this or not?" But instead you say, "Okay, how could we move forward in a way that advances our key values?" Right? And you could name the key values. So for example, if you're coming up with, um, like let's say you have kids who are, I don't know, wearing-- Let's just... This is not a good example, but, like, wearing headphones, and some people are saying, "Well, it's a safety issue. They need to be able to hear, you know, whatever in the hallway." And other people are saying, "Well, it's a freedom issue. Like, let kids just be expressive, and, like, what's the big deal? Like, you need them to have a little bit of autonomy in school where they have none." Right? If you have safety and freedom as two identified values that are in tension with one another around a particular policy or issue, your question could be, "How could we move forward in a way that advances both safety and freedom?" Right? And then insert whatever the key values that are in tension are at the end of that question. All right. Once you have figured out the prompt y- and the protocol, like are we doing a circle or are we doing small groups, and then are we journaling and then we're coming, right? Like whatever it is, you need to make sure that you are facilitating intentionally. So make sure we're gonna tell us to be aware of anxiety levels. We wanna keep people at the edge, but not let people fall over it, so they're just like completely overwhelmed, then shut down or, like, completely overwhelmed and, like, yelling, right? We want to maximize autonomy of participants as well, and everyone has different entry points and comfort zones around style of participation, and so we might provide different ways that teachers can participate in conversation. Examples, writing. Maybe we do a journaling activity, so it's completely private at first just to get ideas, right? Some think time. We might do a write around or a collected display where actually it will eventually be public, but it might be anonymous, and they're writing quietly and the verbalizing is not the, the method of communication. Then or/and addition, um, in addition to the writing, we could do a mix of maybe it's small group at first and then it goes whole group, or maybe it's just small group for a little while, or maybe it just goes straight to whole group. But you know your group, and you wanna make sure that you have a... Over the course, I always like to think, like, discourse is not one day. I think a lot about Matt Kay, who wrote Not Light But Fire, and he talks about threading a conversation. We can't just like have one conversation, uh, about a thing for the rest of, of eternity, right? We have to thread the conversation. So we're gonna come back to this discussion. Maybe one day it is writing in a small group conversation. The next day it is a whole group conversation and a small group conversation to debrief it or something. Um, a, a tip that working chairs is to Um, or was this my tip? Now I can't even read my notes. Embrace a human first approach that values the stories and emotions of students and their families. And so we wanna move beyond the off-the-shelf solutions to craft responsive initiatives. I think that's a blend of a lot of people. So, uh, Heifetz, again back to adaptive leadership, urges leaders to connect to members' hearts, not their heads, in order to elicit adaptive change. We cannot ignore the heart work and the feeling of this. We cannot just, like, intellectualize our way to a better solution to a highly emotional adaptive challenge. All right, and finally, step five. We wanna affirm learning and change behavior. So we are asking people to take big risks, right? We are asking them to change longstanding beliefs and loyalties and habits. That's hard. So we acknowledge the hard, we attend to the whole human, we think about the emotions, we respect and honor those, we give space for those, and we want to prompt participants to note how their thinking is shifting, right? I'm thinking a lot about Maria Nichols, um, and her work on, like, building ideas. And so she talks about students need to value different perspectives, and then the facilitator or the teacher in that case can nudge to be like, "How has your thinking changed?" And then students can have their own little disorienting dilemma like, "Oh my gosh, my thinking has not changed at all. I must need to seek out a new perspective," because their thinking should change and evolve. That's the point of talking to other people, right? So that is something that you can do, just nudge, "How has your thinking changed?" Right? Subtly encourage that valuing of different perspectives and have people seek them out. Highlight and validate when a participant evolves their thinking publicly. So if they verbally shifted, right, and they're like, "Oh, you know what? That made me think, actually, I do believe in this initiative," or whatever. Gr- oh my God, like, validate that. Be like, "Wow, that's incredible that you just took in new information and, like, shifted how you thought, and you, like, held it up against how your past thinking was and then you evolved your thinking. That's really cool." They might not do that publicly, but they might do it in other subtler ways that are not, like, verbal or they're not in that meeting. We also wanna highlight and validate that, right? We also wanna narrate when that's happening for us. So modeling is huge for discourse. That is very present in the research on discourse. Okay, encourage teachers to share their successes. So again, this is that positive deviance idea. Um, where is it working? If it's not working, it feels like it's not working anywhere, but it actually is working in one class. So, ugh, all ELA scores are down, or ELA scores are down for all of our multilingual learners except this one class. Actually, they are doing awesome. Okay, great. Like, what can we learn from that, right? It's not like I- I'm gonna discount right away if they're, like, different kids. I do not ever like that argument. Like, something is working here. What is working, right? Let's learn from it and try it out in other spaces. It might not work perfectly in other spaces. There might need to be some adaptation. But let's seek out the positive deviance. Where is it working? Or it might be even bigger, so our district scores are down. However, this school or this grade within the school is doing something right. Let's go visit them and figure out what it might be, or let's have them come to us and share some of their strategies, right? We wanna encourage that positive deviance, and we also want to encourage the people who are learning from that positive deviance to try things. Say, "Hey, this didn't work for me. I'm gonna try that, and I'm gonna report back the learning." That is huge, and so we wanna celebrate teachers for doing that and being committed to growth. We also wanna ensure that any teacher evaluations are aligned to that goal. So our evaluation rubric should be celebrating and commending informed risk-taking, not promoting the opposite, right? Not promoting compliance and rigidity. So we wanna measure what we actually value. If we say, "Hey, we value informed risk-taking. We want you to try this thing. We're gonna pursue change," we have to make sure that we're not penalizing that during evaluations. Okay. This was a very dense episode. Would love to hear your thoughts on how this is relevant for you, what your takeaways are, any tips to add. Would love to hear them. Feel free to comment on the blog post. Again, that is lindseybethlyons.com/blog/267. And again, the free resource for this episode that you can find there is the reframing discussion prompts resource. I am a firm believer that how we language the question up for discussion is critically important for how effective that discussion and discourse opportunity is. So that is a new resource. Please give me all the feedback on whether that feels helpful for you as a leader. Your staff can use it with students. Would love to get some feedback on that, 'cause that is, um, my new passion project, all things discourse. All right, until next time.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
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