Conversations For Action
Fernando Flores' ideas in educational leadership and instructional coaching
I was turned on to Fernando Flores’ work at some point in the fall of 2021 through Oliver Caviglioli. I’d been sitting in on a variety of collaborative teacher meetings for a few years, thinking about school-wide structures for professional learning, and interfacing instructional coaching paradigms into one-to-one teacher-feedback conversations. A few of the big things we’d studied in those three or four years were Solution Tree’s structures for Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and Daniel R. Venables book on Facilitating Teacher Teams and Authentic PLCs. In a teacher-leader learning session we conducted a Consultancy Protocol as outlined in that book, wherein I proposed a dilemma from collaborative meetings and the team brainstormed obstacles and solutions.
However, as amazing as the Consultancy Protocol went, and as useful and informative the Solution Tree information on PLCs was, some other road blocks were occurring in the teacher collaborative discourse I encountered. While protocols and structures really did help us orient our work around student artifacts of learning, teacherly practice, or data review and action, there were other, day-to-day dynamics of teacher collaboration that made protocols sometimes fall flat, made dialogue or discourse feel a bit ineffective, or created some discord and tension amongst team members, teams, and the teacherly work at hand.
It strikes me now that some remarks from Peter J. Denning in his Foreword to Fernando Flores’ Conversations For Action and Collected Essay are apt here:
From Fernando’s essays I saw like a lightning bolt that my traditional view of information as a collection of facts, and of coordination as exchange of information, completely missed the side of language in which we make commitments, build our identities, and cope with our moods. (Emphasis added)
As as relatively analytical fella, I’m often tempted by technocratic solutions—systems and structures, protocols, cadences of meetings, clear processes, etc. In fact, the dilemma I brought to the Consultancy had to do with challenges in getting teacher collaborative teams to examine artifacts of student work in their shared meeting time. One of the big takeaways from the Consultancy for me was the idea that a series of meetings did not have to have the same structure, follow the same protocol, or adhere to a stable structure. This helped me approach the scope of teacher collaboration over a school year in a different way—another technocratic solution wherein we developed a scope and sequence for PLC meetings which signposts on what might be best to examine at each point in the school year (e.g., key diagnostic assessments, previewing culminating, summative tasks, collaborative planning, examinations of historical student achievement for new cohorts, etc.).
Yet all these stable structures do not dismiss the personal, human realities of schooling, teaching and learning; and this is why I appreciate Denning’s phrase regarding how “we make commitments, build our identities, and cope with our moods.” The impersonal agenda with time allocations, the lesson planning protocol, the unit study guide with nine discrete steps, each of these has enormous value in their context and place; however, the day-to-day reality of schooling invokes lots of personal identity work, negotiation of commitments, and affirmations of mood and sentiment. I’ve quipped a bit recently about dismissing “protocols” as a whole; quipped that meetings (or dialogue more broadly) happens all around and between protocols, on the margins and frontiers of systems and structures. An example here is the “parking lot meeting”—or the real talk that happens outside of the auspices of the structured time, the realities of positional leadership, and the politics of school organization, leadership and reform.
What Denning also notes in his Foreword as “management breakdowns” might be exceptionally familiar to school leaders: Challenges with developing “buy in” for new school initiatives; Conflicts with implementation of new programs or curricular materials; Interpersonal tensions between teachers, instructional coaches, administrators and other staff; etc. What Fernando Flores’ work offers to educational leaders is an investigation into the “question of communication for getting work done.” I’ll leave you with this bit of language from Flores’ in the Preface to Conversations For Action and Collected Essays; and I look forward to continuing this dive into Flores’ work in coming blogs:
Language has many dimensions. We have words and sounds and writing. But language also has the dimension of acts—the way that we do things with language, and that language does with us.
Source: Conversations For Action and Collected Essays by Fernando Flores