Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life by Diane Tavenner

Author:Diane Tavenner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: education, nonfiction
Publisher: Currency
Published: 2019-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

FORMING, STORMING, NORMING, AND PERFORMING

During the summer of 2003, our differences didn’t seem to matter. The Summit staff was in the first phase of developing as a team, what psychologist Bruce Tuckman calls the “forming” stage. All of us had taken a huge leap of faith to start a school we deeply believed in and the optimism and opportunity were palpable. Plus there was so much work to be done and it was so much fun to do it with other people, rather than alone, which is what we had all experienced in our previous teaching and leading roles. There were a few moments when someone would say something that rubbed another the wrong way, but we were all being polite and so we just pushed those moments aside and continued forward. And then the kids showed up and it got really hard, really fast. That’s when we entered the second phase as a team: “storming.”

It was the second week of school. As a team we met two to four hours a day and yet it wasn’t enough time to make all of the decisions we had to make to get a brand-new school going. Because we were aiming for a fundamentally different outcome (helping all kids succeed), and therefore a fundamentally different culture (collaborative versus competitive), we couldn’t afford to simply transport systems and ways of doing things from our previous experience into our new school. Rather, every single thing, from how we served lunch to how we calculated grades, had to be designed to match our values and drive toward our desired goals.

None of us were sleeping very much and all of us were engaged all day long in an effort to establish relationships and expectations as quickly as we could with our students. It was emotionally exhausting work and we were all a bit stressed. Five minutes past the time that our meeting was supposed to begin, everyone sat at the conference table except Adam. He was late again. Kelly was visibly agitated. “He’s always late,” she remarked under her breath just as Adam entered the room. Sensing this could mushroom into something more, I reminded Adam of one of our core values, respect, and that arriving on time and ending on time was one way to show respect. He earnestly turned to the group and said, “I’m sorry. There’s just so much to do, I don’t have a minute to waste, so I make sure everyone is ready to go in the meeting before I come in.”

I thought Kelly might explode. “So I’m supposed to waste my time sitting here getting ready for you to enter, so you don’t waste your time? How is that fair?” At the time I didn’t understand the phases a team will go through to get to a productive and collaborative rhythm. If I had, I would have felt more comfortable with the discomfort, or storming, and led productively through it. Instead, I said the first thing that popped into my mind to try to lighten the moment.

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