Why Dysfunctional Adult Relationships Hurt Children (Good News: There is a Solution)
What matters most when it comes to school quality and students’ academic, social and emotional learning? In thinking about school quality, that may be the single most important educational question that parents, educators, researchers, and policy makers must ask themselves. Roland Barth, a former school teacher and later a Harvard education professor, offers an answer that may surprise you. He writes,
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.
Some would undoubtedly take issue with Barth’s bold claim and might point to students’ socio-economic status or teacher quality as stronger predictors of student learning. But one would be hard-pressed to argue that adult relationships don’t matter.
The relationships among adults in schools have influence, but so too do the interactions among adults online, on cable news, and in our local and national civic spaces. The young among us are watching, and they’re learning. And based on the recent rise of cyberbullying, mental health issues, and chronic absenteeism among our youth, many are mimicking what they see. And, they’re paying a price. (I should note that Barth wrote these remarks nearly 20 years ago, long before the recent spike of political polarization and the education culture wars.)
There is much that we as a nation must do to counter this trend, but I will point to one critically important thing schools can do to make a difference.
First, they must take a long, hard look at the relationships among administrators, teachers, staff, and parents. Is there trust? Do they communicate respectfully and effectively? Is morale high? When the answer is no, the first step is to acknowledge the harm that is done to the adults themselves (like “quiet quitting,” lack of collaboration, and burnout) and to the students who are learning about the dysfunctional ways that adults go about their business. Then, of course, they (especially administrators and teacher leaders) must be willing to do something about it.
Discussing the “Non-Discussables”
Part of the challenge is that this phenomenon is one of several (like race, leadership, and underperforming teachers) that Barth says are the “nondiscussables.” Educators avoid having them because of fear over how such discussions might go. “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,” Barth writes.
The good news is that adult relationships in schools—even when they’ve hit rock bottom—can be restored. From my experience, working as a partner in many schools where trust has been lost, deep divides have formed, and students are struggling to learn, the adults often agree on this: they hate working that way and welcome a way out if one is available.
When I headed up the School Turnaround Center at WestEd several years ago, my colleagues and I were hired to provide support for some of the country’s lowest-performing schools. In almost every case, we discovered that before we could focus on strengthening leadership and teaching, we had to address school climate issues. We simply could not have productive professional conversations if the people in the room didn’t trust or like being with one another. We had to find a way to make that discussable. We’d start by conducting a simple survey asking people to indicate how much they agreed with statements like, “This is a supportive and inviting place to work.” In one of our partner schools, 75% disagreed with that statement, which is not an unusual finding in other schools where we asked the same question.
Next, we met as a group and discussed how school climate affected their work, morale, and job satisfaction. Most educators we worked with welcomed these conversations and found them cathartic. The “good” news is that most would acknowledge that poor relationships and the absence of trust made them miserable and hindered their work. Why good news? Because they were motivated to explore ways these dynamics could change.
My colleagues and I would begin the process of restoring trust and professional relationships by having them define the values they thought were needed to guide their professional working relationships and describe the actions that supported those values (like offering to assist one another if it was clear a colleague needed help or simply offering a greeting in the hallways rather than ignoring one another) and the actions that should be avoided (like gossiping or not using personal devices during faculty meetings). And finally, we would ask if they could make a good-faith commitment to adhere to their values for the coming school year. We never encountered a case where staff would not make such a commitment.
But these conversations about school climate were only the beginning of a longer process. Each month, we would meet, problem-solve, and work on ways to keep staff committed to their new vision, even when mistakes or misunderstandings caused some to question whether change was possible.
At the partner school mentioned above, 75% of the staff did not think their school was a supportive and inviting place to work, and only 12% responded this way to the survey we conducted a year later. That same year, this school, which had been the lowest-performing school in a district with more than 50 schools, demonstrated the highest rate of academic improvement. That happened, in large part, we believed, because morale was up, staff were generally more eager to participate in professional learning, and they were working together to solve problems like improving parent involvement.
Focusing on adult relationships, building trust, and improving communication might seem to some like a silly, new-age distraction from the real work that teachers and administrators should be doing. In fact, however, this is what some, like my guest Peter Coleman from Columbia University, would call a “first-order problem” – the kind that exists at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and must be addressed before one’s ultimate goals can be achieved. Students coming to school hungry; students with unaddressed health issues; students who are homeless are clear examples.
A less obvious example is the strained and dysfunctional adult relationships that exist in some schools. However, the problem can be solved if educators have the courage to discuss it. Addressing this first-order problem, when it exists, may be one of the most effective ways to improve student outcomes.
Resources:
Barth, R. (2006). “Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse,” ASCD.
Darling-Hammond, L & Cook-Harvey, C. (2018). “Educating the Whole Child: Improving School Climate to Support Student Success,” The Learning Policy Institute.
Swisher, A. (2022). “Building a school climate that makes teachers want to stay,” The National Council on Teacher Quality.
Guidi, C., Nguyen, L., Magby, N., Southall, A., Chavez, J., Farias, A., Berkowitz-Sklar, J., & Cerna, R. (2022). “Cultivating caring relationships at school: 15 Activities that promote staff and student connection,” WestEd.
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In an upcoming BLOG post, I will describe what educators can and are doing to help students have better conversations among themselves – about politics, about controversial issues, about social media, about the things students really care about. In the meantime, I’d urge you to listen to these podcast episodes we published recently on this subject.