Responsive communication and relationships

ISTEs need to communicate and relate to people in ways that help them to make meaning collaboratively through joint inquiry. This means that they need to understand the ways in which people learn and to adapt the ways in which they communicate and relate to others in response to the changes they observe. It is becoming increasingly clear that the ways people make meaning of new ideas depend on complex interactions between three dimensions:

• their existing cognitive structures, including their knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes;
• their situation or context;
• the ways in which the new ideas are represented. (Spillane, Reiser, and Reimer, 2002)

Learning involves changes in these dimensions and in the interactions between them. To facilitate ongoing learning, then, ISTEs need to monitor: changes in people’s knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes; changes in the teaching context; changes in the ways people communicate about ideas; and changes in the ways in which those dimensions interact. They also need to observe the effect that their own involvement and the ideas they are presenting are having on the learning of the members of a particular community and respond to this by adjusting the ways in which they communicate and relate to them.

Emotionally intelligent leaders are better able to notice, recognise, and respond to the impact of change and new ideas because they are aware of their emotional as well as their cognitive impact. They understand that the same ideas and changes can have different meanings for different people. Waters, Marzano, and McNulty (2003) use the terms “first-order” and “second-order” change to describe these differences. Emotionally intelligent leaders are able to gauge the magnitude of change they are calling for and find ways to communicate that will support people through second-order change.

Fullan (2001a) uses the term “implementation dip” to describe the sense of dissonance people experience when they encounter innovations requiring new skills and understandings that challenge their sense of identity and competence. He suggests that emotionally intelligent leaders vary their style in response to people’s changing needs.

Leaders who understand the implementation dip know that people are experiencing two kinds of problems when they are in the dip – the social-psychological fear of change, and the lack of technical know-how or skills to make the change work. It should be obvious that leaders need affiliative and coaching styles in these situations. The affiliative leader pays attention to people, focuses on building emotional bonds, builds relationships, and heals rifts. The leader as coach helps people develop and invests in their capacity building (Goleman, 2000).
Further, elements of authoritative leadership help. Enthusiasm, self-confidence, optimism, and clarity of vision can all inspire people to keep going. The problems start when you are only authoritative or only affiliative or only a coach.

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Effective professional learning incorporates processes for making people’s current practices, knowledge, assumptions, and theories explicit. These processes help ISTEs and those they are working with to:

• identify the needs and strengths of their community and the individuals within it;
• generate the shared understandings that are essential for building strong collaborative relationships and establishing a shared vision for improvement;
• establish a culture of inquiry in which it becomes a habit to critically reflect on the impact of practice and use evidence to make decisions about future action. For ISTEs, this reflection includes considering what needs to change in the ways in which they communicate and relate to those they are working with.

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