xSELeratED: Kindness Before the Crisis
This piece is from the xSELeratED SEL initiative on The Worthy Educator, led by Leigh Reagan Alley, Heather Lageman and Walter McKenzie.
View the fully formatted version here.
Leigh Reagan Alley, Ed.D. for xSELeratED
October is about the time when we begin to see how the school year is really going. The beginning-of-the-year energy has settled, routines are taking shape, and calendars are getting fuller. We know more about the people around us, too. We know who is always willing to help, who seems rushed every morning, who has stopped coming into the faculty room, and who looks more tired than they did a month ago. Most of us notice these things. What matters is what we do with what we notice.
Schools can be remarkably caring places when something goes wrong. When a colleague experiences a loss, receives difficult news, becomes ill, or is facing something that everyone recognizes as hard, people often step forward quickly. We cover classes and duties, organize meals, send cards and texts, make accommodations, and tell people to take care of themselves. These gestures matter. So does asking why someone sometimes has to reach a crisis point before we make life a little easier for them.
The healthiest school communities are built in small moments.
They are built when someone covers a duty because a colleague is having a rough morning, when we notice that someone has become unusually quiet and check in without demanding an explanation, or when we make room for someone in a conversation and acknowledge work that might otherwise go unnoticed. Sometimes it is as simple as sending the text we considered sending and then almost didn’t: You seemed a little off today. Just checking on you. Or, I know you have a lot going on. I can take care of this part. School culture is made of moments like these.
Care as Part of the Infrastructure
We usually talk about care as an individual characteristic. Some people are naturally thoughtful. Some are especially good at noticing what others need. But the relational health of a school cannot depend on whether one of those people happens to be nearby.
People need repeated experiences of being noticed, included, respected, and treated with generosity. Over time, those experiences shape what it feels like to belong to a community. They influence whether people feel comfortable asking for help, admitting that they do not know something, making a mistake without being defined by it, or trusting that colleagues will generally assume good intent while still holding one another accountable. This has consequences for more than morale. It affects communication, collaboration, problem-solving, trust, and ultimately the experiences we create for students. Adults create the climate in which children learn, and the climate adults experience with one another matters, too.
Care belongs in conversations about school improvement for the same reason relationships belong there.
We often talk about systems, structures, outcomes, and implementation as though relationships exist somewhere outside the more “serious” work of schooling. But there is no schooling that happens in a silo separate from relationships. Schools are relationships because schools are people. People participate differently when they feel respected, supported, trusted, and able to speak honestly.
A school can have a strong strategic plan and a weak relational culture. It can have carefully written values and mission statements while the people inside the building feel invisible. It can say that wellbeing matters while relying heavily on the same people who quietly absorb whatever additional work needs to be done. Culture is found in the everyday experiences of the people living inside of our systems, not simply in the language used to describe them. Ordinary kindness is part of that experience. It affects how people work together and whether they believe they matter to one another. And as I wrote in my last blog, mattering is deeper than belonging.
What Might I Not Know?
One of the practices we return to in xSELeratED is understanding behavior before assigning meaning to it. That becomes harder as the school year gets busier. Someone misses a deadline. A colleague who is usually warm seems short. Someone stops volunteering. An email lands differently than we expected it to. We can quickly fill in the missing information ourselves and decide that someone does not care, is being difficult, is angry with us, or is not pulling their weight. Sometimes one of those explanations may be accurate. Sometimes we simply do not have enough information yet.
Understanding Others asks us to leave some room between what we observe and what we conclude. A useful question is, What might I not know? Asking it does not excuse poor behavior or eliminate accountability. It keeps us from treating an assumption as a fact and gives another person room to be human.
People carry things their colleagues will never know about, and they may prefer it that way.
Caring for someone does not require access to the details of that person’s life, and compassion should not depend on disclosure.
Schools can inadvertently make support conditional on explanation. We become more patient once someone tells us what happened. We become generous once we understand the circumstances. We make an exception once the situation seems serious enough to warrant one. But people should not have to present evidence of hardship before they are treated with humanity. Sometimes we will know the whole story. More often, we will not. A culture of care makes room for both.
The People Who Make It Look Easy
The dependable people in schools deserve particular attention. They answer the email. They volunteer. They solve the problem. They remember the deadline. They notice what has been forgotten and often take care of it before anyone else realizes there was a problem. Because they are dependable, they are frequently the people we ask again. Competence can make need less visible. When someone is consistently capable, we can begin to mistake that capability for unlimited capacity. Those are not the same thing.
A person may be able to do one more thing and still be carrying too much. They may agree because they care deeply about the work, because saying no is difficult, because they know the task will otherwise go undone, or because being dependable has become part of how others see them. None of those circumstances means the load is sustainable.
Nurturing others includes paying attention to who is repeatedly compensating for gaps in a system.
Who is always staying late? Who is unofficially mentoring everyone? Who gets called whenever something goes wrong? Who is doing emotional labor that never appears in a job description? Who has become so good at carrying a heavy load that everyone has stopped asking whether they should have to?
Sometimes care means helping with what someone is carrying. Sometimes it means looking more closely at why that person keeps having to carry it.
Nurturing Others in Ordinary Ways
Nurturing Others is one of our five xSELeratED competencies, and, fortunately, nurture does not need to be complicated. Nurture can mean listening carefully, giving someone credit, noticing who has been left out, asking rather than assuming what someone needs, or taking one small task off the plate of the person who is usually taking tasks off everyone else’s.
It can also mean respecting boundaries. We do not need to fix people, investigate what is wrong, or make ourselves responsible for another adult’s well-being. Sometimes care means giving someone privacy while making sure support is available. It can mean accepting the words “I’m okay” without pressing for more while still moving through the interaction with some added gentleness.
Nurturing others also does not mean avoiding difficult conversations. Care and accountability are a sort of sibling pair. They belong together.
Healthy relationships make honest conversations more possible because concern can be addressed without becoming a judgment of someone’s worth. Trust that exists before a problem occurs makes repair easier when something goes wrong.
Schools are complicated places. They are full of competing needs, limited resources, difficult decisions, and people who will sometimes disappoint one another simply because we are all human. A healthy community is not one in which nobody is ever uncomfortable or nobody ever gets something wrong. It is one in which people are not routinely left alone with difficulty and where respect remains intact even when conversations are hard.
Kindness needs to be present and practiced in our culture as a tier I intervention—before someone’s circumstance makes them desperate for it.
When Care Becomes a Norm
There is a difference between isolated acts of kindness and a culture in which people expect to care for one another. In one, kindness depends largely on the individual. In the other, it becomes part of how people work together. That does not require the adoption of yet another program. In fact, formalizing care too much can quickly turn something relational into another obligation to complete.
Leaders influence this culture in ordinary ways.
They can ask for help instead of treating constant self-sufficiency as a leadership virtue. They can acknowledge invisible labor. They can notice when the same people volunteer time and again and create opportunities for responsibility to be shared. They can make it possible for someone to say, “I do not have the capacity for that right now,” without requiring a detailed justification.
Colleagues shape these conditions, too. We can notice who has not spoken in a meeting, give credit when someone else’s idea is carried forward, stop treating exhaustion as evidence of commitment, and resist celebrating people simply because they continue exceeding what should reasonably be expected of them.
None of this is especially dramatic. It is unlikely to appear as a major initiative or become the centerpiece of a strategic plan, but these everyday choices tell people whether their workplace knows them only for what they contribute or whether it recognizes them as whole people with their own complexities and needs.
Before It Becomes a Crisis
October is a good time to pay attention not only because, as I shared, we are far enough into the year to see patterns, but also because there is still a great deal of the year yet ahead. We can make choices, right now, about the kind of colleagues we want to be and the kind of adult culture we want to help create.
That may mean noticing who we have not checked on lately, whose work we regularly benefit from without acknowledging it, whether someone is carrying a responsibility we could help to share, or whether we have formed an opinion about someone without enough information. It might just be as simple as following through on a small kindness we have already considered offering.
It is also worth asking what people have to do in our schools before we decide they need care.
Do they have to miss work? Cry in an office? Share something deeply personal? Say, explicitly, that they are overwhelmed, or reach a point where their struggle is visible to everyone around them? When those are the thresholds for receiving care, we have waited far too long.
None of us can prevent every difficult thing another person will experience. We cannot know what everyone is carrying, and we cannot carry it all for them. But we can make sure people do not have to prove that they are in crisis before we treat them with care. And if we care about the humans serving in and served by our deeply human systems, then we must.
Cover the duty when you can. Pull up the chair. Send the text. Give the generous interpretation when the facts allow for one. Notice when someone seems different than usual. Express fresh appreciation for the work everyone has gotten used to each other doing. These sorts of interactions will not solve every problem we face in our schools. They will, however, shape what people learn to expect from one another there, and that is exactly how we shape culture.
This post created by
Comments