[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Fred Endy and Megan Everett. Fred is the Director of Curriculum and Instructional Services for the Putnam Northern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services and a board member in ASCD's Emerging Leader affiliate. And Megan is a mathematics coach in the Salt Lake City School District and the executive director of ASCD's Emerging Leader Alumni Affiliate, as well as a past state teacher of the year and a board member of both the Utah Council of Teachers of Mathematics and Utah ASCD. And I know there's a lot of ASCD connections.
[00:49] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:52] SPEAKER_00:
I wonder if we could start there and tell us a little bit about how this collaboration came about through ASCD.
[00:57] SPEAKER_01:
So yeah, so you noticed a lot of the ASCD in Justin's intro. And no, we're not paid ASCD employees. We just play them on TV. But Megan and I had actually met as part of ASCD's Emerging Leader Program. So ASCD, like a number of other educational organizations, has programs for members who are kind of embarking on different parts of their career. And so this program provides an opportunity for either educators who are, let's say, shifting roles or really want to explore where they are as educational learners and leaders to apply and have the opportunity to kind of meet and work with other educators who are in similar positions really across the world.
[01:43]
And so Megan and I found ourselves as members of this program, and we shared a lot of the same interests and a lot of the same kind of thoughts across the roles that we have, these two different roles, and that led to some conversation. eventually some presenting, and then the ideas for the book.
[02:02] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is forces of influence, how educators can leverage relationships to improve practice. Megan, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the origin of your shared interest in relationships and the relationship between relationships and improving practice.
[02:18] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, well, I think anytime Fred and I have discussed our different roles and then shared with other educators that we know, everything comes back to how people are interacting with one another, the relationships that they have, the trust that they've built, or the trust that isn't there for that matter. And I think that it's one of those areas where there are continued need for growth and improvement and attention all of the time. And so when people talk about culture, often what they're referring back to is those relationships between people, even when they're discussing things that are hard, when we want to shift change or leadership or mindset, any of those things relate back to how we deal with one another.
[03:00] SPEAKER_00:
I'm glad you drew that both distinction and relationship between culture and relationships because certainly everyone in an organization, everyone in a school has a slightly different experience of what that school's culture is based on the specifics of their relationships. And we know sometimes people get into a positive circle. They have relationships that are fulfilling and helpful. and other people tend to gravitate toward relationships that maybe create a very different experience for them within that school. So you have a model called the Forces of Influence Leadership Matrix. Take us into that and help us understand how relationships work within a school based on that model.
[03:42] SPEAKER_01:
So Justin, I know you've kind of spoken about this with some of your other guests too. The thing is, one thing we know is that In the education sphere, people can't do their jobs, right? I mean, whether I'm serving as a student or a parent, a community member, a teacher, a leader, unless I really have an understanding of what people's needs are, right? I mean, I have to understand the needs of the people that I work with, the people I serve in order to really make sure that I can deliver the goods, right? I can provide the support that people need. And so one of the things Megan and I kind of realized is that across our roles, there were like these similar situations we find ourselves in where we were taking on the same practices, utilizing the same strategies, despite the fact that our roles are different.
[04:40]
As we started to talk a little bit about how those interactions with people in different groups developed, we realized that we could actually separate out those interactions into that matrix, into that four frame that you find in the book. And what we realized is that kind of like the The quadrants of that model were separated by the amount of work that, let's say, Megan and I or anybody would put in at the start of an interaction. And then the amount of work that somebody would need to keep investing to keep that practice, initiative, project, whatever it is, moving forward. And because all of what we do is based on how we interact with other people, we really start to think about, well, hey, you know, if we can look at these as living in like four different quadrants, then maybe this is a way to think about helping people support the growth of their relationships and to really understand, you know, we've all been in those situations where you're working with somebody on something and it falls flat, right?
[05:45]
And you wonder like, what just happened? You know, how did I get into this mess? And then the other time where things just, it's like a beautiful thing, right? Like everything works out perfectly and everybody feels really good. And we started to realize that, yeah, like there are definite reasons for that. And it's really always about matching what people's needs are with the types of methods and strategies we use to interact with them.
[06:09]
And that's kind of the basis of those four forces that are built into the leadership matrix that we talk about.
[06:16] SPEAKER_00:
Well, let's get into what those four forces are then. What are the four forces that you describe in the book?
[06:24] SPEAKER_02:
We talk about pushes, pulls, shoves, and nudges. And those are kind of our four different areas, depending on how much you put in on the front end and how much you put in on the back end. And I think important to add to that is they're not distinct, right? So within any one quadrant, you might find yourself at the far edge of that. You might find yourself more towards the origin if we think about Cartesian plane in the math world, those kinds of things. So in a pole situation, you kind of have this high initial involvement and high ongoing involvement.
[06:54]
And so I always like this picture of I'm with my friend, I want to dance, I pull them to the dance floor. So I've made this commitment to be there with them along the way. And I also, you know, had that kind of background of I know how to move. I have this confidence, you know, in pulling them into what I'm doing. And a push is a little bit different. A push feels to me a little more like a student teacher.
[07:17]
You know, they're never going to be fully comfortable, but you push them out. You see how they do. Right. And then we support them along the way. as a follow-up, but you kind of have to get that initial baseline going on. I think we see that a lot in coaching.
[07:32]
I'm going to come in and observe. And then based on what I observe, we're going to build some ongoing work from there. And then just as it kind of sounds, you know, a push is a gentle move towards that where a shove is maybe a little more abrupt move towards that. And I think shove comes up a lot for administrators. And because shoves tend to have this time component to them where they're I don't have a lot of initial involvement to put into this. And then once the decision's made, I need you to go off and enact that and put it into motion.
[08:04]
Like a shove to me is not, it sounds like it could be negative and it's not necessarily. A lot of times it just means that you're trusting in somebody else to do the work. Maybe you're a master delegator. And then the nudge is really, really subtle. So you kind of lose control of the ongoing involvement when you're in a nudge situation, but you're trying to kind of affect the situation from your position. And I think a nudge becomes really powerful when we think of people who maybe don't have the positionality to have authority, but they still want to drive some decisions.
[08:38]
So this is some subtle nods to research that we found or some dropping off of articles or, you know, some me doing the legwork to take the hard work of decision making out of it for somebody else.
[08:52] SPEAKER_01:
I think, Justin, there's a couple of ways you can look at it, too. Right. So like you can think of a nudge as being, as Megan was saying, like a great way to manage up. Right. You know, and really support. your supervisors in making effective decisions based on the expertise you have that they might not, right?
[09:12]
And doing it in a way that feels really comfortable and helping your supervisors come to the decision on their own. You know, shoves, we tend to think of as managing down, right? It's often a directive that tends to occur because as Megan was saying, either time's a factor or you can't provide any more flexibility, right? Change has to happen. And then too, with pushes and pulls, sometimes those work best when they're managed across, right? You know, when you're working with somebody who either you're in a similar role with, a similar position, or it's not really an evaluative stance, right?
[09:49]
Where that doesn't come into play. And the other, so like, that's one way of thinking about, and the other way too, is thinking of the niceness factor that gets involved in interactions. In the case of a poll, what Megan really shared is that there is tremendous involvement throughout the process. It's a force that requires the person who's going to be enacting it to be in it for the long haul. And as we know from our own experience, where we are learning or leading hand in hand with others, Not only are we building people's capacity, right, we're also building the connections that occur, right? Whereas with, for instance, with a shove, while it doesn't have to be negative, you know, because of the lack of involvement generally in the person who's initiating it, you can't necessarily expect the relationship to grow from that, at least not initially, right?
[10:46]
So there's a lot of different ways to thinking about and making connections between these forces and the work we do as educators.
[10:54] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, we talk about relationships as they kind of exist, right? And because you've been able to build this relationship, you're then able to leverage that influence that's built. And the forces are really a means to how that leverage works. plays out.
[11:09] SPEAKER_01:
I think that's exactly the idea. The forces are kind of the underlying process behind how we think about leveraging relationships and moving work forward. And then to utilize those forces, right? Whether it's a push or pull, a shove or nudge, there's a number of different strategies and steps you can take to doing that. So we know that relationships are the basis to the work that we do. We know that it's our ultimate goal, regardless of our role, to have successful outcomes for the people we're supporting.
[11:45]
And so those forces of influence are the tools to let us use relationships to get work done.
[11:51] SPEAKER_02:
And I think important to that is one thing that you can do with these forces is you kind of identify the ones that you tend to use. where you tend to fall in the matrix, where you work best as the influencer or the person driving change. You can also look at it in situations where what works best for you? What is it that you need from others to be able to change your own practice or to have success or to feel that relationship grow? And then sometimes when you're not able to create the change that you want to see, maybe taking a look at what force you're using And considering some of the alternatives and some of the other pieces of the toolkit that you might use could actually help make a shift both in terms of outcomes and in terms of the relationship that you're building.
[12:41] SPEAKER_00:
Do you ever find it to be the case that different parties in a professional relationship see the force differently? Like one person thinks that it's a pull, another person feels like it's a shove or a nudge? Yes. Yes.
[12:57] SPEAKER_02:
And I can say, Fred and I have talked about this this week, that I've had a personal experience in which I thought that I was nudging and being fairly subtle and providing some support there and they felt that I was shoving and being directive and, you know, people bring a lot to relationships and depending on where they are, how they receive feedback, what they've worked with before, what they've come to expect of other people and how they deal with them. Um, there can be different ways that people find those forces to feel when they're, when they're used on them.
[13:31] SPEAKER_01:
And Justin, I'll say, I think one of the reasons why Megan and I were so excited to write the book, um, was to address precisely that, right? Because if you can help people start to think about interactions and how to move work forward in a similar fashion, right? I mean, if you're thinking about terms and language in the same way and thinking about our work in the same way, then you start to avoid some of those situations where you leave a meeting and you're scratching your head like, you know, huh, you know, like what just went on there, you know, or something you thought would take two weeks to complete and takes two months, you know, it provides you with a similar frame to think about moving work forward. And so the four forces are one way to do that, right?
[14:22]
And if we all recognize situations when nudges might be appropriate, then maybe we can all think about applying them at a similar time or in a similar way And maybe reduce the amount of time where interactions go sour, or where we have to spend more time rebuilding trust than sustaining it. And so that's part of the hope for the book and the ideas within it.
[14:50] SPEAKER_02:
I think it also helps you to understand what to ask of people. I think sometimes You know, in my role as a coach, I think sometimes people don't really know what to ask of me. They need help, but they don't know what that is. Or I need something from them and we haven't quite identified what that is. And when I think about it in terms of the forces, I can say, oh, you felt like the ongoing support wasn't there. Or, oh, you felt like the initial support wasn't there.
[15:16]
Or, oh, you felt like you were being shoved off the edge, right? And so I think when... you give somebody a tool to kind of identify their needs, that can also be really helpful.
[15:29] SPEAKER_01:
And that's what we do in the text too, Justin. We felt like thinking about relationships is really kind of sticky, right? Like, because it's not only at the foundation of all that we do, but it's also really hard, right? Because we can only really ever understand our own perspective, right? So when we're engaging in work with others, you know, it's always...
[15:50]
infinitely more difficult, right? We can all think of those times where we were like teachers and we worked with the student, right? Who always wanted to work alone, right? And part of that reason is because it's infinitely easier. You only have to worry about your own way of doing things, right? And it's the same with adult learners too.
[16:09]
So we have to be really cognizant of that. What we've done is we've built a number of tools which are included in the book to help people sort through how they would apply some of those forces and some of the steps they might take to actually making sure that it's a good fit. If I'm going to attempt to utilize a pull here. Does it really make sense for me to do that? So we don't get in the situation where we've started down the road to using a force only to find out that it was the wrong force to utilize.
[16:46] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, let me jump in with a scenario for you here. One of my personal soap boxes for administrators is that we need to stop using the feedback sandwich when we meet with teachers. The, okay, I came in your room, so I have to give you a compliment, a suggestion for improvement, and then another compliment. Sandwich that critical feedback in the middle of two compliments and you're good to go. That I see everywhere. So many people are trying to do that, but what I see happening every time is teachers are confused about which piece of feedback is really authentic.
[17:20]
What do you really think? Is my main takeaway the critical feedback? Is it the compliment? If I get two compliments and one suggestion every time as a teacher, I don't really know what you mean. I don't know whether to interpret that as a nudge, a shove, a push, or a pull. And you see teachers responding very differently based on their personality.
[17:38]
You know, is this something that I need to run home and spend all weekend correcting, and next week I'll come back with a whole new approach to my class? Or is this kind of just, you know, think about it and maybe consider implementing it, but, you know, kind of up to you. I see massive confusion resulting from that ambiguity. Thoughts on that? How can we use the four forces to understand that kind of situation?
[17:59] SPEAKER_01:
So you take a situation like that and now you think like, OK, you've just come to the realization that that's happening. Right. Let's say you were a department leader in a large high school. OK. And and you've seen this going on and talking with your colleagues. You know, they're they're really sharing, you know, not and not even in a negative way, just, you know, not really being sure like how to act on the feedback.
[18:21]
Let's say you have a great relationship with your building principal, where this is originating from. Being respectful of that person's position, you might choose to apply a nudge to get that person to think a little bit about their feedback practices. It could be everything from... Dropping off an article you came across in Educational Leadership or, you know, another another journal and, you know, hey, you know, I came across this.
[18:51]
I was thinking about. a lot about some of the conversations we've had about observations and the sharing of feedback. And I read it and thought it was great. And I'd love to speak, you know, I'd love to chat with you about it. It might be something where, you know, hey, I got a sense from a colleague I know in, you know, any district next door, you know, that they were doing some really interesting things around the feedback they provide. to their teachers after observations.
[19:18]
And so I'd love to go and, you know, chat with a couple people there and love to have you come with me too, and just kind of engage in conversation about it, because I know it's a topic that's come up before, right? So you can use a force like the nudge to help make people aware and while not necessarily shifting their practice, helping to expand their thinking so they can shift their practice on their own, right? So that might be one case where depending on your role, you could utilize a force to hopefully move somebody in a certain direction.
[19:54] SPEAKER_02:
And this is where I think Fred and I have a good relationship in working on this together, because he comes at it from this kind of district administrator, I need to kind of talk to my principal and that. And I come at it from the teacher sitting in that office. And so I think if a principal and a teacher have a shared understanding of what this matrix is, then they would be able to have a conversation around that. A teacher can say, I feel like you've been kind of shoving me. You've told me to go do these things and I'm not getting the support for it. And I'm not And a principal can say, oh, well, I didn't realize that I needed to be pushing you, right?
[20:34]
I needed to just, whether it was through me or through somebody else, find you that ongoing support and connect you to a coach or connect you to resources that you need. Or they can call it for what it is like. I've been kind of leaving you some hints here. I've been nudging you along and you are picking up on it. And now we need to kind of move into some other space. So I think anytime you create a common set of vocabulary and understanding to work from, then you make it easier to talk about what practice is and how you need it to move and how you need it to shift.
[21:07] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, well, I think that common vocabulary is so powerful, especially for navigating things that are a little bit ambiguous or a little bit awkward or have been kind of unspoken for a while, and maybe that's led to some confusion. And I wonder if we could apply this specifically to the relationship between coaches and principals who share responsibility for improving teacher practice, who have overlapping but distinct roles. How do you see coaches and administrators working together using the four forces in forces of influence?
[21:39] SPEAKER_02:
Coaches in our district are non-evaluative, and that's one of the biggest differences with administrators and coaches. We're also subject matter coaches. So I coach in the area of mathematics. There's somebody else to support you with behavior. There's somebody else to support you with ELA. And the conversations that my principals and I have together are around what do teachers need and how are we going to best support them?
[22:06]
So where a principal maybe doesn't have the background information, the time, the expertise to speak to the little details about, you know, the mathematics curriculum, they rely on me for that. So that's where I can come in with this kind of high initial involvement where through no fault of their own, they're really not even in a position to do that. Also, there's some distributive leadership there where they can support the teacher in certain kinds of connections, but they can't support them in an ongoing way the way that the coach can. So a lot of our conversations are around, okay, as the principal, I'm going to make this push to this teacher and my ongoing support is going to be here. And you as the coach are going to do this background work and this ongoing support in this way. And so we kind of have a lot of conversation around what is the initial support, what's the ongoing support and what are the different layers that are coming in from the different players.
[23:01] SPEAKER_01:
As Megan was, was talking, I thought a little bit from the administrative standpoint, how, how much particularly over the last three years that we've been engaged in, in kind of researching for this and writing the book, how much I've applied it to my own self monitoring. Right. So like one of, one of my struggles, Justin is, um, I find myself a lot of times like engaged in too much, right? Like I spread myself sometimes too thin. And one of the nice things is I can do a quick assessment of some of the cooperative experiences I'm involved with people on my team and start to ask myself, you know, How many of these are pull types of scenarios? And how many of these am I pushing people or nudging or shoving them?
[23:49]
Because one thing that we talk a little bit about in the book is kind of like the level of energy that's really needed to sustain some of this work, right? And in the case of a pull, like when you're all in yourself along with somebody else or a group of people, I mean, you can only do so much of that. Right. And I think if we're constantly leading from like a pole frame, we're going to get burnt out super quick. Now, we might have amazing relationships and amazing experiences, but our tenure wherever we are and doing whatever we're doing is going to be over really quickly. Right.
[24:23]
So one of the great parts about using a tool like the Leadership Matrix and really thinking about the forces is. is it's been a great check on my own distribution, right? Because one thing that we talk a lot about is that none of these are inherently good or bad. It's in the frequency of use, how you use them and who you use them with, right? Like going back to the why, right? Why am I applying these?
[24:49]
That really makes the difference. So it's been really fun to take a little bit of time and reflect on my own use of these And how in some cases, my use has been well matched or not, you know, because that's part of the fun to like, really recognizing like, wow, I bomb this interaction, you know, and so it's, it's, yeah, it's been great for the personal piece, too.
[25:12] SPEAKER_02:
Well, and I think from a leadership standpoint, there's the which place are you living? Because you can't live in one of those places all the time. But then also understanding where our coaches are at and where our teachers are at. If you are expecting your coach to be the one pulling all the time for a large group of teachers, I work in multiple schools, the reality is nobody can do that. And so you're better able to manage your expectations when we see that any one teacher is getting shoves from the principal and from the coach and from the other coach. They're not going to be successful in that space.
[25:47]
And so you can kind of manage the ask that you're making of people.
[25:51] SPEAKER_00:
Well, and again, that's where I think that framework of understanding those forces can be so helpful to see where, yeah, maybe we are pushing people in different directions and sending mixed messages and need to as leaders and as leadership teams align ourselves a bit and make sure that those forces are aligned. And I love the magnet metaphor that you have on the cover of the book. So I wanted to also mention that the book is loaded with practical tools, with role play scenarios, with flow charts. What are some of your hopes for how educators will make use of forces of influence?
[26:28] SPEAKER_02:
I think with some of the tools that we've built, they can serve a dual purpose. I think these are things that you can read and reflect on in your own space and your own context, but I think they can be really powerful in a bigger group. I think when my coaching team gets together and we talk about the different challenges in our schools and different groups of administrators, different groups of teachers that we're working with, Having something common like this to talk through. And as we said, like if a principal and a teacher and a coach have a unified language because they've gone through some of these experiences and understand the forces together. then they're going to be able to do more work with them.
[27:06] SPEAKER_01:
And for me, I think that one of the things I always try to live, learn and lead by is that we have to put people first, right? And I think relational leadership, right? So letting our work be really tied to the relationships we form with other people is really important, right? That drives everything that we do or should, right? So my hope is that for those of us who are in this profession and really want to keep focused on the people that This will be a text, a series of tools, a way of thinking that will help make it easier to stay focused there. And if we shift back to, let's say, being product focused, you know, then we can really nudge ourselves back, you know, to using these forces, using the book as a way to keep ourselves focused on what we know is most important.
[27:58] SPEAKER_00:
So the book is Forces of Influence, How Educators Can Leverage Relationships to Improve Practice, published by ASCD. Fred and Megan, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.
[28:10] SPEAKER_01:
So great to be here, Justin. Thank you.
[28:12] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
