Bravo Principal! Building Relationships with Actions that Value Others

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Sandra Harris. Dr. Harris is a professor and dissertation coordinator at Lamar University and is the author of Bravo Principle, Building Relationships with Actions That Value Others.

[00:31] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:34] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Harris, welcome to Principle Center Radio.

[00:37] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin.

[00:37] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'm excited to talk about building relationships. And for our audio listeners, BRAVO Principle is an acronym, Building Relationships with Actions that Value Others. Tell us a little bit about where this book came from. Now it's in the second edition. But tell us what in your career prompted you to write this book for Principles.

[00:57] SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know... First of all, I started off as a teacher, and then I became a principal, and then I became a superintendent, and then I moved to higher ed. But in all of those different positions, jobs, responsibilities, whatever you want to call them, I've grown to acknowledge how important it is to build relationships. I mean, it doesn't matter what you're doing.

[01:24]

if you can build a relationship with the people around you, you're probably going to do it better than you would have done it if you were either focusing on negative relationships or not even trying to collaborate and build relationships with others. And so I know when I first started thinking about this book, I visited at length with the publisher. At that time, it was Bob Sickles. at Eye on Education and we went round and round about whether we should talk about building relationships with attitudes that value others or actions that value others And ultimately, we decided that an attitude without an action really was meaningless. And so we focused on the notion of Bravo with the idea that it's what people do, it's the actions that they do that builds those relationships and sustains them over time.

[02:24] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's talk about that distinction between actions and what we might call attitudes or intentions. And I know I can think of many examples of situations when, as a principal, I knew I had the right intentions. I knew I had the right attitude towards someone. And I knew that I valued them and the work that they were doing for some reason. And I can tie that directly back to what I actually did rather than just what I was feeling for some reason that that was not communicated to them or that wasn't, you know, made apparent through the things that I was doing. So let's get into some of the specific actions that do send that message to the people that we work with.

[03:06]

What do you see as the starting point for building that type of relationships with our staff?

[03:10] SPEAKER_02:

Trust, without a doubt. And that's why even in the book, I started off with the notion of how principals must establish trust. Because without that trust, it's impossible to follow through with those kinds of actions. that are going to make a difference in your school. So being able to collaborate on this shared vision, being able to demonstrate your confidence in others as you empower them. When you do that, you literally build trust at every level because when I talk about leadership, I'm not thinking of just the principal, although the principal is really the leader of this school family and how the principal responds to things that your actions as principal really change the atmosphere of the whole campus.

[04:01]

And so, which is ultimately why this particular book focuses on the principal. I actually did another book a couple of years later called Bravo Teacher, where we talked about the teacher aspect. But in this particular book, I'm focusing primarily on what principals can do to implement this notion of relationships that are positive and that help people grow and that helps you grow. in addition to helping others grow. And others can be students, it can be other administrators, it can be teachers, it can be parents, it can be people in the community. It's this notion that your leadership affects everyone around you.

[04:45]

And so the power to build a foundation of trust which enables you to become a relationship builder just makes all the difference in the world.

[04:57] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I think that foundational aspect of trust is also one of the things that's a little bit frustrating because when trust is present, we don't necessarily know how we got there. We can't always trace back the specific steps that got us to be trusted. And I think for leaders who are transitioning to a new school, often we find that the trust environment is very different. If we're well-liked and well-known and trusted in one school, then we move to another school, I think a lot of people find that what worked to build trust, or at least the trust that they inherited, just does not carry over into that new environment. And I think you've really hit on something with this idea of action, because trust feels like something that should come kind of automatically if I say what I'm going to say and I follow through with it.

[05:53]

If I keep my word, I think we tend to believe that people will trust us, that we will establish trust simply by keeping our word and following through and doing those kind of integrity basics. Let's get into some of those specific actions that you mentioned around collaboration on vision and empowering others and demonstrating confidence in them. What do those actions look like? Because I think it's so easy to miss what takes us from being new or being unknown or not really being trusted into actually deserving that trust.

[06:28] SPEAKER_02:

Well, when we talked about trust, I say we. me, but when I talked about trust to some degree, in addition to my own experiences, I pulled from a couple of years ago, I did a book with two other colleagues, Julie Combs and Stacey Edmondson, called The Trust Factor. And so when I did this second edition of The Bravo Principle, I kind of chunked a lot of what I had done in the first book and pulled to some degree from my own experiences, but also a little bit from The Trust Factor. But in this notion of building trust, it is so important for everyone to be part of this vision. You know, we talk about a shared vision, but too many times it's not really a shared vision. It's the principal sharing his or her vision.

[07:18]

And what I was trying to get across is that everybody needs to participate in creating the vision. It's hard to have a trust foundation if... my vision as principal is completely different from the vision of the teachers, the parents, you know, the community. And so therefore, as principals, you've got to be really cognizant about What kind of a vision is going to be workable in this setting?

[07:51]

Because it may well be different from the one you came from, assuming you were a principal someplace else. I also talk a little bit at length about framing the vision around student success. I think too often we confuse school success with student success. I think there's a big difference sometimes. we think of ourselves we work at a school but what we're really doing is working to help students be successful and so to get everybody on board with that notion of what helps students be successful and there again you have the issue and I talk about that in later chapters of Success for every student is somewhat different because our students come to us with a myriad of different abilities and with experiences that are different.

[08:44]

And even their experiences and their abilities are viewed differently by different people within the school family. And so as principal, you've just really got to be in tune with what the kids need at your particular school to be successful.

[09:02] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I wonder if that gets us into the question of cultural responsiveness and kind of understanding where our students are coming from and committing as a school to cultural responsiveness. Could you get into that a little bit for us, that issue of demonstrating cultural responsiveness?

[09:19] SPEAKER_02:

Actually, that's interesting that you landed there because in this particular, I talk about it a little bit in the first book, but in the second edition, I have a complete chapter that focuses on demonstrating cultural responsiveness. And I think that could be due to several things. Part of it is due to my own growth as to how our populations of kids are very different from the population of kids that were in our schools 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. And unfortunately, my experience at the university especially has brought because I work with many, many students who are teachers, principals, superintendents. But a consistent concern that they often discuss is that they have teachers on their campus who still think they're teaching well.

[10:19]

a population of kids 20 years ago. And I don't say that to demean teachers because, well, I just don't. And I want to make that very clear. But unfortunately, whether it's a teacher, whether it's a parent, whether it's a community leader who wants the school to teach the way it did 20 or 30 years ago, It's the principal's responsibility to acknowledge the kinds of kids that are in his or her school and to acknowledge that their needs may indeed be different. And so this notion of cultural responsiveness means that I've got to understand how the demographics are changing. I remember one superintendent that I worked with within the last 10 years who was telling me that his particular district, 20 years ago,

[11:09]

was 90% white kids and 10% kids that were typically African American. Today, that school district has completely flipped. It's 90% kids who are African American and Hispanic primarily and 10% white middle class kids. In addition to that, the socioeconomic status of that school has completely changed also. And so if he goes in and leads a school the same way he led the school 20 years ago or the principal did, he's not going to help those kids be as successful as they could be. And so the first thing we have to do as principals, I believe, is to understand that the demographics are changing.

[11:59]

But it's not enough to understand that they're changing. Once I understand that they're changing, then I've got to make sure that I lead my staff, my school family, because that once again includes everyone, in how to be more culturally responsive. How do they help them see that kids who perhaps come from poverty bring some very positive attributes. They may not have been viewed as positive a few years ago, but they're very positive. These kids can be self-sustaining, these kids can be quite creative, and yet sometimes the notion of a kid coming from a low socioeconomic home has a very negative reaction. I hear teachers and principals say things like, well, you know, our parents, they just don't care.

[12:53]

Well, I would say, I don't think they don't care. I think they're probably working a couple of jobs, maybe more than that. They have numerous responsibilities, and so they may not have the freedoms. And so if I as a principal understand that, then I'm going to enact and implement some programs on my campus. that encourage those parents to be more a part of the school. Maybe we have meetings in local neighborhood areas as opposed to always have the meeting at school.

[13:23]

Maybe instead of having meetings at a certain time, we change the time. Maybe we offer refreshments maybe we offer child care and so it's just this notion that difference is not deficit difference is just difference and it's my job as leader of this campus to have an attitude that acknowledges this but then have the courage to implement the kinds of and the creativity to implement the kinds of actions on our campus that are going to encourage those parents and help them be a support in this notion of how do we parent kids who come from a background that culturally is different from perhaps the background we grew up with. In fact, we know that the greater majority of teachers, some I think it's 75 to 80 percent, basically are female from a white middle class background.

[14:23]

Now that's changing a little bit, but it's not changing significantly the way our population of kids is changing from that demographic.

[14:31] SPEAKER_01:

Right. And for the foreseeable future, at least, you know, despite good efforts to recruit a more diverse teaching force, yeah, we are going to have mostly middle-class white female teachers. And depending on, you know, just the grade level and the subject area, of course, we'll see some variation there. But that idea of a deficit model, I think, is something that we just kind of can inherit if we're not careful, if we see, you know...

[15:00]

throughout our personal experience in our lives, perhaps we've worked with a certain population of students, students who maybe look more like us, and any deviation from that set of expectations about how you approach school or what kind of resources your family has, I think we so naturally tend to get into a deficit mindset and to see our students or their families as lacking something. But I think the framing of that you know, that you have in Bravo Principle of simply valuing others, I think is such a powerful starting point. And then committing as a professional to taking the actions that can actually respond to meet whatever the needs of... you know, of our actual students are.

[15:47]

Because I think too often we try to serve the students we used to have rather than the students that we have. Or we treat the students that we currently have as if they're, you know, slightly off-brand versions of the students that we think we should have or we used to have. And I think that's deeply disrespectful to, you know, to not start with who the students actually are as our starting point. Does that make sense?

[16:10] SPEAKER_02:

It really does. And I think you've stated it beautifully. I actually wish I'd written down a couple of those phrases and used them in my book. But I don't know any principal who doesn't have good intentions. I really don't. I have worked with, oh my goodness, over the last 20 years that I've been in higher ed, hundreds, hundreds of principals and superintendents, and I have never worked with one who didn't care if he did a good job, ever.

[16:40]

They all have good intentions, but what they all don't have or what they don't force themselves to do is to critically reflect, to acknowledge some of the biases that they have. And the truth is they do have biases. We all have biases. Prior to overcoming those biases, the first thing I have to do is acknowledge that I have them. There's something about acknowledgement that opens us up to being able to handle our biases in a way that allows us to overcome them. And so I do talk a bit in this particular chapter on demonstrating cultural responsiveness about how important it is to make time to culturally, to reflect on the cultural issues on my campus.

[17:34]

But then once I make time, and this is where the actions are so important, because I have to do things as a principal that provides time for my faculty, for example, to also reflect on their own beliefs and their biases. And then going back to this whole notion of trust, I have to have created such a trusting environment that people can acknowledge, not necessarily in a, I'm not saying we stand up in a meeting and we say, oh, you know, I have this problem or I have that problem, but privately and personally, they can come to terms with biases that they may have that are limiting their ability to work successfully with students. And once I acknowledge that, then I can begin to move forward.

[18:27]

You know, instead of this notion of saying, well, that's just me. Now I should be able to say, hmm, that is me. This is what I'm going to have to do to change that. or to respond to this child differently than I have been. And once again, you can't do it without acknowledging it. And so once again, I go back to this notion of it takes action on our part to encourage others to take action, which is going to result in kids doing a better job, not just academically, but socially and even emotionally in many cases.

[19:08] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a great segue into the topic of high standards and achievement, because I think one reaction that people tend to default to when we hear, oh, our population's changing or our students are coming from lower income backgrounds than in the past. No one explicitly says, therefore, now we should have lower expectations. No one says that. No one consciously thinks that. But in the absence of a better plan, I think we might tend to kind of drift in that direction. So what do Bravo principles do to really uphold high standards, to help people see the potential in their students and really...

[19:51]

you know, push for excellence and push teachers and every adult who, and push ourselves as principals to really, you know, provide an excellent educational experience for all of our students.

[20:02] SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know, there really are lots of things they can do, but one of the first things they need to do is to understand that standards are incremental. And I think This always brings a lot of discussion when I'm with my students or if I'm presenting someplace because we have this notion that, okay, here's the standard. Every child is going to read at a certain level by the end of the third grade. That's a great standard. But the problem is those kids that I'm talking about, they're at all different levels. They come with different abilities and different timeframes and different experiences.

[20:41]

So whereas I might have that standard, and that's probably actually generally standards are minimal standards. We tend to deal with standards as minimal points in growth. And so I have to be able to stand back and say, OK, now, if our standard as a school is that every child in the third grade, you know, read at the third grade or at second grade level by the end of third grade, I mean, whatever the standard happens to be. And I ask myself, okay, now, I've got this child who can't read at all. I've got this child who's already reading at that level. So how am I going to use this notion of standards to help this child who's not reading at all and this child who's reading beautifully?

[21:31]

How am I going to help them achieve a high standard? And so I have to understand that standards are incremental. And they may, for the child that can't read, I have to look for success in those small pieces. But they are success because the child is moving forward toward that minimal standard. For that child who's already reading that way, I've got to find the time and the creativity, and I have to do this with any level of kid for that matter, but I have to find a way to help that child go beyond where they are. And so there's this idea that a standard is not a...

[22:16]

a rigid place, it should be flexible. And it has to move up and it has to move down in order for you to really say that you are going to uphold high standards. If I go into a school, and let's say I take over a school that's low performing, and that's what we call them in Texas. Well, actually, we used to call them that. I think now we have a different terminology. But if I take over this low performing school, it's clear that the majority of students in this school are not meeting standard.

[22:47]

In order for me to help my campus and the kids on my campus be successful, I may have to say, okay, our standard for this year, it isn't going to be that everybody passed the test. Our standard is going to be that instead of 80%, which is what's recommended, we're going to move from 20% to 40%. My standard has to be reasonable. And when we do that, we're going to all exult. We're going to begin to feel more successful. The children on that campus will feel more successful.

[23:22]

The teachers will feel more successful. But then we're going to keep moving. In other words, a standard is a flexible standard. piece of information. It's like a living amoeba. It shouldn't be a rigid.

[23:39]

And so my job is to help people see that. We're going to challenge the status quo. This is the way it's always been. Well, then we're going to make it different. We're going to do things that we haven't done before. We're going to implement tutorials.

[23:53]

We're going to implement mentoring programs. And these things don't necessarily cost money. Because one thing I've tried to do in the book is to come up with actions that people can use that don't require them to go out and spend a ton of money. I know of schools. I did a book a few years ago on best practices where I interviewed elementary principals, another book on secondary principals, and another one on superintendents. And I went in and interviewed leaders of those campuses that were high achieving campuses across the nation.

[24:30]

And across the board, these people said, one of the things that we do is we see where our students are and we implement the resources that they need to meet a standard and then we move that standard up and we implement new resources which could be such things as peer tutoring, teacher tutoring, reading buddies, all kinds of things that aren't necessarily cost. Now what they might do is they might take more time and so I have to be creative and find a way to adjust the time frame so that I'm not killing my teachers in the process of meeting these needs.

[25:22]

But maybe I bring in community people who will volunteer their time. Maybe I involve parents in such a way that maybe I use the internet in some way. Now, I'm not as understanding of that because I call myself a digital ignorant, not a digital immigrant, and I am. But at the same time, there are all kinds of, I see this with my little grandson who's going into the second grade. There are programs that if the school can provide computers or provide laptops for parents to use, There are ways that kids can get some support help, sometimes at home or at night or after school. You just have to be creative and step back and say, hmm, this is not a challenge that can't be met, but I may have to meet it a different way than I thought I might have to meet it.

[26:24]

And I've always said, if there's one thing we learn to be as principals, and I know every principal is going to agree with me, if we can't find a way to accomplish something, we keep working until we do. We may not do it in a straight line. We may have to deviate a little bit, but we find a way. And that's the role of a principal, to find a way to help kids be successful on that campus. And a standard...

[26:55]

has to be a standard with a heart. I don't know how else to say it. Because, you know, you can't beat up a kid for where they are. You have to help them. I tell this to my dissertation students all the time. You can't write a dissertation overnight.

[27:12]

That's the standard. So we're going to do it in little bits and pieces. And then you know what? Ultimately, they're going to meet that standard of writing this dissertation, but they're going to do it in small bits. It's incremental.

[27:28] SPEAKER_01:

I appreciate that reframing of standards as not just ways to kind of hold ourselves accountable or to categorize students, but really to guide students in in making progress and not in saying, okay, well, this student is not at standard, therefore, you know, this is a failure situation, but using that information about where the student is to figure out what we as adults need to do, what actions we need to take to move them to the next level. And I think one of the... One of the counter examples to that, I think we got into a lot of bad practices around accountability because we knew we had to meet accountability targets and kind of lost sight of some of what our students need for us. This idea of bubble kids, that we have students who are about to pass the test, so let's dump lots of resources on them so that they go from failure to success, when really

[28:26]

All of our kids need to move forward, whether they were about to pass the test or not, whether they, you know, remain well below standard despite making a lot of progress, or whether they were just above the bubble and would have passed regardless. You know, that's our obligation to make a difference for all of those students and to figure out what they need, as you said so well.

[28:48] SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know, a frustration when you look at this whole notion of accountability, and I'm for accountability and against it. We definitely need accountability. Everybody needs accountability. But my frustration, and I think the frustration that I hear in my principal and superintendent and teacher students, is that when we're in teacher training and principal training, for example, we learn that there are multiple ways to understand accountability. And yet in most, throughout most of the United States, and other countries for that matter too, most of accountability is determined on one test. A standardized test for everybody.

[29:38]

Well obviously that's problematic. And so which causes so many educators to be against accountability as it is now seen. And yet without accountability, I mean, you just have a free-for-all. So I always say I'm for accountability. I'm not for the way that we always acknowledge accountability. You know, I would like to see accountability in terms of is every student progressing?

[30:09]

And if they're progressing, and is every teacher progressing in their ability and ways to teach? And is every principal progressing in being more creative and being more focused on all of this? And, you know, the reason this is so important, and the reason I fall back on this notion of building relationships is that there is a growing... body of research that tells us that when there are positive student teacher relationships, kids do better academically.

[30:46]

Bottom line. And who supports those teachers in doing all of this? The principal. And so instead of it being this warm, fuzzy, I mean, I'm really not talking about building relationships that are, although there's certainly some warm fuzziness to it, I'm sure. But this notion of building relationships is a much deeper kind of notion. It's the notion that says, I value who you are.

[31:17]

And I value who you are so much that I'm going to talk with you instead of to you, that I'm going to get to know about you. Now, I realize a principal of 500 kids at an elementary school or a principal at a high school of 2,000 kids can't know everyone, but they can get to know about you. those generalized experiences those cultural issues those issues of standard they can get to know who they work with even though they may not have a personal relationship with every student or even every teacher in that regard because that's it's almost humanly impossible and so i'm not trying to put that kind of responsibility on a principal

[32:08]

But I do think that there are certain things that they can do, and I think in my book I've listed seven or eight, seven I believe, that if they actively focus on actions that implement those kinds of behaviors, they're going to make a lasting difference on their campus.

[32:26] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. Very well said. Well, Sandy, thank you so much for joining us on Principle Center Radio to talk about Bravo Principle, building relationships with actions that value others.

[32:38] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I've enjoyed it, Justin. There's nothing I love to do more than talk about the good things I see principals doing. And I have the great fortune of seeing it all the time. And I would love to encourage others who might be struggling or maybe being a brand new principal. I'd like to encourage them that it's doable.

[32:56] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[33:01] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you think of my interview about Bravo Principal with Dr. Sandra Harris? I really appreciated the emphasis on action that Dr. Harris continually referred to and that you'll find in the book. This idea that relationships and trust and caring about our students and putting systems in place to...

[33:24]

provide great results for our students. These are not just about intentions. These are about action. And I really resonated with what a lot of Dr. Harris was saying because I believe that as instructional leaders, one of the places that we have to start is with listening. Listening with the language of learning is one of our kind of key points that we talk about in instructional leadership.

[33:48]

and then making decisions in dialogue and building systems for high performance. You'll find all of those on my website at eduleadership.org. But I think the more we can truly listen to the students that we serve, truly listen to the teachers who work directly with them every day, the more we make decisions together about how to move our school forward, about how to best meet our students' needs, and then the more we take action to build systems for high performance, to put those ideas and those decisions into practice. I think the more we can say that we are bravo principals or high-performance instructional leaders. If you're interested in more of the interviews that we do on Principal Center Radio, we want to make sure that you know about our mobile app.

[34:31]

You can get that at principalcenter.com app, and you may be listening to this podcast in that app right now. We also have videos and articles there. And if you're interested in our premium professional development content, I want to encourage you to check out the high-performance instructional leadership network at principalcenter.com slash leadership.

[34:52] Announcer:

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