Peer To Peer: Making that Change
Post date: Feb 19, 2017 9:52:23 PM
From Feb 2016
Boston Teachers Union newspaper
By Mark Lonergan with Anne Slater
I love a great movie montage, where people can change by leaps and bounds over the course of one song. In the 1984 movie Footloose, for example, it only takes 3 minutes and 9 seconds of beautiful 80's synthpop for Chris Penn to learn how to dance. At the start of “Let’s Hear It For The Boy,” Chris can barely snap his fingers, yet by the end of the montage, under the careful tutelage of Kevin Bacon, he’s mastered snapping, stomping, twirling his kid sister and is fully prepared to impress everyone at the prom with his robot dance moves.
If only real changes were as easy as they look in the movies.
This is the time of year when New Year’s resolutions begin to fade. Our promise to get to the gym more often and our pledge to learn to speak Italian have been all but forgotten. For teachers, we may have decided that this is the time to change to a new behavior, or we may have been presented with a new situation that requires us to change in ways that we may not have wanted or may not have anticipated.
Experts say that real change is not just about willpower. Many of us assume that the best way to make a change is to decide to make a switch and have the emotional fortitude to stick to that decision. In the book Change Anything by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny and others, the authors discuss the 6 different areas of influence that can help or hurt your change effort. Will power (also known as personal motivation) is part of the equation, but the authors stress
that if willpower is the only tool in your toolbelt, you’re unlikely to make a lasting change. The other elements that can influence whether a change succeeds or fails are personal ability (learning new skills), social motivation (turning those around you from accomplices into allies), social ability (recognizing positive and negative social pressures), structural motivation (making use of short-term rewards and punishments) and structural ability (reshaping your environment so that it helps foster the change).
One example in the book is about AJ, a woman who wanted to stop smoking. She had the personal motivation to make a change, but needed more tools to make a lasting change. She read books on emotional triggers (personal ability) to understand
when and why there were times where her addiction was the strongest. AJ held “transformation conversations” with family members (social motivation, social ability) so that they would help support her change. AJ started planning a vacation with the $400 monthly savings accumulated from redirecting money she would have spent on cigarettes (structural motivation). In addition, she changed her commute pattern to avoid environmental triggers (structural ability).
Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the book Switch, use a terrific metaphor for talking about change. Making a change is an unequal endeavor, with a specific role for the elephant (our emotional side), the rider (our rational side) and the path (the environment, or social situation). It’s unequal because, “Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.”
If you’re interested in changing yourself or fostering change in your students, here’s some advice from the experts:
- Failure is part of the process. Making change requires trying out new habits and new techniques.
- These won’t all be a perfect fit and they won’t all be successful from day one. Patterson uses the mantra “turn bad days into good data.” This means that even our failures can be a useful learning tool to figure out which strategies work and which do not. Sheila Heen and Doug Stone, authors of Thanks for the Feedback call this the "J-curve" because performance often dips down before going back up. "The truth is, at any time you are changing your habits or approach, or working on a new skill, you are likely to get worse before you get better. And more important, you are likely to feel worse before you feel better. In these moments, it's useful to know that a common trajectory isn't further downward, but--eventually--back up."
- Have a Growth Mindset. As educators, we (hopefully) have internalized the idea that our students and their abilities are not “fixed” and instead believe that they can build skills and become smarter over time. We need to adopt this same growth mindset about ourselves. Think about how to strategically, systematically practice skills to get yourself “smarter” or to build new skills. A few years ago, I volunteered to be in my school’s choir to sing a gospel song at the graduation ceremony. With practice (and a lot of help from students), I learned the tune. However, I was completely out of my depth when I realized that the performance also required me to step and clap along with the rhythm. My gut told me to drop out so that I wouldn’t look stupid in front of the whole school, but I opted instead to have a growth mindset. With the help of another rhythmically-challenged colleague, we practiced stepping and clapping together during our common planning time (much to the amusement of the rest of the people on our team). And we made it through the performance with our dignity intact.
- Take baby steps. Switch has a great reminder that if baboons can be trained to ride skateboards, then we should be able to train ourselves to learn new skills as well. The authors tell us to mark off bite-sized steps along the way to your destination and celebrate each tiny step forward. Like Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz, we can choose to celebrate each step along the yellow brick road by saying “I’m one step closer to my destination,” instead of saying, “I’ve failed again to get to the Emerald City.” When we celebrate positive momentum, we’re more likely to stay on the path of change. And even tough guys can benefit from positive reinforcement. NFL coach Bill Parcells said,“I accentuate the positive at every possible opportunity. When you set small, visible goals, and people achieve them, they start to get it into their heads that they can succeed.”
- Plan for critical moments. If change was an easy process, then we’d all be able to do it all the time. But changes often have “critical moments” where we are tempted to revert to old habits. Both books advise us to anticipate when your critical moments happen and to develop a strategic plan to weather the temptations. AJ, the smoker in Change Anything realized that her critical moments where she most wanted to smoke were during her afternoon commute and on phone calls. So she made small changes in her route home from work so she wouldn’t be triggered to smoke in the car and switched to texting and emailing friends for a few months while she allowed her new habits to take hold.
- Write it down. Just writing down a goal makes it more likely that we’ll be able to achieve it. Both books also recommend planning ahead to give yourself an “action trigger,” a time and space to make the change happen. For example, don’t just say that you’ll write a book someday. Instead, be specific about when, where and how you’ll get it done. Maybe you’ll set aside a week of vacation to sit in a secluded cabin and write for 14 hours a day. Or maybe you’ll set aside 20 minutes each morning to put pen to paper. Studies have found that when you make your goals public (speaking them to others, writing them down, outlining them on paper rather than in the safety of your own head), you are more than twice as likely to reach them.
- Cry if you need to. For some of us, changes may be forced upon us that are unanticipated or unwelcome. MJ Ryan, author of How to Survive Change You Didn’t Ask For says that unwanted change can stir a “fight, flight or freeze” response and that we may sometimes need to get through the five stages of grief before we can move on. We may have to mourn the death of one pathway before we can come to accept our new circumstances.
Whether you’re changing how you teach or how you dance, we hope that you’ll move forward with a few more tools in your toolkit. And please don’t forget to seek out coaching and support from friends, partners, colleagues or administrators. Remember, Chris Penn had Kevin Bacon to help him learn his robot dance. Whatever your “robot dance,” we wish you luck and support on your journey. Please keep us posted.
Peer-to-Peer is a monthly column written by Anne Slater (from the Peer Assistance program) and Mark Lonergan (from the Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program). To find out more, visit btu.org/whats-working/peer-mentoring/