PD for Peace and High-Performance

Do you work in an environment where employee morale is high? How is that achieved? How is that maintained and encouraged to flourish into something beyond extraordinarily high employee morale?

Building-level educators have been searching for this Holy Grail for years. What does high educator morale look and feel like? How about this aspiration:  Educators aspire to be able to be "at peace" while performing at their highest level? What do you think?

While working as a teacher and alongside teachers for over two decades, one very frequent and relevant obstacle to educator peace is classroom management. Most educators love their content and invest time and energy into beefing up their content knowledge. Many educators love to mix up their instructional delivery and in-class activities and will invest time and energy into this endeavor. Lots of educators love to incorporate proven instructional methods, such as Socratic Seminar, PEAK, UbD, Paideia, Inquiry, etc and will spend considerable time and energy here. All of the above are interesting and fun educational "stuff" to learn about for many, if not most, invested educators.

While working as a teacher and alongside teachers for over two decades, one very frequent and relevant obstacle to educator peace is classroom management. Most educators do not love unacceptable student behavior that interrupts anything involving the previous paragraph. This is a recurring theme, year after year. Perhaps the morale issue lies somewhere in this puzzle...the puzzle of student behavior.

Invested educators, in order to attempt to enhance morale, need to take a deep dive into getting a better understanding of student behavior. This cannot be surface level and it cannot continue to be the blame game. The latter refers to the following: 

• "This is a parenting problem. The parents need to fix this." 
• "This student does not belong in this class, the disruption is impeding the learning of other students. Fix this."
• "Administrators are not supporting efforts to take control of discipline. Fix this"
• "Student consequences are not punitive enough, a message needs to be sent to all who do not obey the rules/expectations. Fix this."

Just wondering how the above bullet points might impact the morale of parents, students, and administrators. Not to mention the educators in the building who may have already invested in a deeper understanding of student behavior.

What does this look like...this deeper dive into understanding student behavior? Three key elements come to mind for ongoing professional development for all educators who are student-facing (sorry central office and district folks - just stay in your office buildings, nothing to see here).

• Root Cause Analysis - introductory information here.
• Conflict Resolution - introductory information here.
• The concept that student behavior is a form of communication - introductory information here.

Learning more about these elements would be time well-spent along with the other fun stuff from paragraph #2. However, the deep dive into these PDs may not be fun, but are necessary...kind of like answering the 25 odd-numbered questions on the Pythagorean Theorem worksheet, perhaps not fun, but necessary for growth and ongoing learning and personal/professional development.