Summer 2006 | Volume 63 Best of Educational Leadership 2005-2006 Pages 29-33 Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse Roland S. Barth Relationships among educators within a school range from vigorously healthy to dangerously competitive. Strengthen those relationships, and you improve professional practice. One incontrovertible finding emerges from my career spent working in and around schools: The nature of relationships among the adults within a school has a greater influence on the character and quality of that school and on student accomplishment than anything else. If the relationships between administrators and teachers are trusting, generous, helpful, and cooperative, then the relationships between teachers and students, between students and students, and between teachers and parents are likely to be trusting, generous, helpful, and cooperative. If, on the other hand, relationships between administrators and teachers are fearful, competitive, suspicious, and corrosive, then these qualities will disseminate throughout the school community. In short, the relationships among the educators in a school define all relationships within that school's culture. Teachers and administrators demonstrate all too well a capacity to either enrich or diminish one another's lives and thereby enrich or diminish their schools. Schools are full of what I call nondiscussables—important matters that, as a profession, we seldom openly discuss. These include the leadership of the principal, issues of race, the underperforming teacher, our personal visions for a good school, and, of course, the nature of therelationships among the adults within the school. Actually, we do talk about the nondiscussables—but only in the parking lot, during the car pool, and at the dinner table. That's the definition of a nondiscussable: an issue of sufficient import that it commands our attention but is so incendiary that we cannot discuss it in polite society—at a faculty or PTA meeting, for example. (For more on this topic, see my article “The Culture Builder” in the May 2002 issue of Educational Leadership.) Consequently, the issues surrounding adult relationships in school, like other nondiscussables, litter the schoolhouse floor, lurking like land mines, with trip wires emanating from each. We cannot take a step without fear of losing a limb. Thus paralyzed, we can be certain that next September, adult relationships in the school will remain unchanged. School improvement is impossible when we give nondiscussables such extraordinary power over us. Relationships in Schools So let's discuss the elephant in the room—the various forms of relationships among adults within the schoolhouse. They might be categorized in four ways: parallel play, adversarial relationships, congenial relationships, and collegial relationships. Summer 2006 Page 1 of 6ASCD10/29/2006http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/template.MAXIMIZE/menuitem.459dee008f99653f...Parallel Play Parallel play, a wonderful concept from the preschool literature, is thought to be a primitive stage of human development through which 2- and 3-year-olds soon pass on their way to more sophisticated forms of interaction. To illustrate, imagine two 3-year-olds busily engaged in opposite corners of a sandbox. One has a shovel and a bucket; the other has a rake and a hoe. Atno time do they share their tools, let alone collaborate to build a sandcastle. They may inadvertently throw sand in each other's face from time to time, but they seldom interact intentionally. Although in close proximity for a long period of time, each is so self-absorbed, so totally engrossed in what he or she is doing, that the two of them will go on for hours working in isolation. Parallel play offers, of course, a perfect description of how teachers interact at many elementary, middle, and high schools. The term also aptly describes the relationship between one school principal and another whose school is only blocks away. One teacher summed it up with discouraging accuracy: “Here, we all live in our separate caves.” A playful(?) notice on the wall of a faculty lounge captured it even better: “We're all in this—alone.” The abiding signature of parallel play in education is the self-contained classroom, with the door shut and a piece of artwork covering that little pane of glass. The cost of concealing what we do isisolation from colleagues who might cause us to examine and improve our practices. Adversarial Relationships I once heard a Boston school principal offer this sage observation: “We educators have drawn our wagons into a circle and trained our guns—on each other.” Adversarial relationships take many forms in schools. Sometimes they are blatant: The 7th grade algebra teacher on one side of the hall lobs a metaphorical hand grenade into the classroom of the 8th grade geometry teacher on the other side, saying to parents, “You don't want your child in that classroom. All they do is fool around with blocks.” Reciprocal unfriendly fire is returned: “You don't want your child in that classroom; it's a grim, joyless place with desks in rows and endless worksheets.” One principal concluded his remarks to a large parent group with—I think—a slip: “Here at John Adams Elementary School, we all live on the bleeding edge.” No wonder so many teachers engage in parallel play. Barricaded behind their classroom doors, they escape the depleting conflicts so rampant among the adults outside. More often, we educators become one another's adversaries in a more subtle way—by withholding. School people carry around extraordinary insights about their practice—about discipline, parental involvement, staff development, child development, leadership, and curriculum. I call these insights craft knowledge. Acquired over the years in the school of hard knocks, these insights offer every bit as much value to improving schools as do elegant research studies and national reports. If one day we educators could only disclose our rich craft knowledge to one another, we could transform our schools overnight. But I find educators reluctant to make these gold nuggets available to others. Sadly, when one educator persists in repeating the failures of the past while another next door has great success, everyone loses. When a teacher does place value on what she knows and musters up the courage and generosity of spirit to share an important learning—“I've got