What we have here is a failure to communicate

I never realized it before, but after watching this video, I realized that under-communication is definitely an issue in our district. One of the best examples I can think of occurred several years ago, when the decision was made that we were going to start using UBD (Understanding by Design) as the method for our lesson planning. We received one or two emails about the change, and then were thrown into inservice training before school started for the year with very little explanation for why the change had been made. We sat through a year’s worth of professional development about UBD, and all the while, everyone questioned why we needed to make this enormous change to the existing system. UBD might have been a useful and effective method, but because of the way it was communicated, or under communicated, it failed. I’m sure that a lot of planning and thought went into the selection of UBD by our administration, but none of that ended up being shared with the people who were going to live with it on a daily basis, the teachers.

Where the district went wrong wasn’t in the choice of moving to the UBD model, but in how and when they shared that information with the staff who would be most affected by it. The few emails we received came over the summer. Many teachers spent the summer lesson planning, only to find that their hard work was going to have to be redone to fit the new model. Others didn’t check email frequently, so it was easy to miss the email that was sent. Then we were thrown into inservice on our first day back, when all we want to do is get our rooms set up for the year, and were told that everything we had been doing in terms of lesson planning had to change. Had the district done a better job communicating the idea behind UBD and its implementation, they may have been able to convince at least some of the teachers that it was a valuable change, and built support from there. There needed to be a marketing campaign, executed over time and via multiple platforms, to sell the idea to the people they wanted to buy it. It wouldn’t have been difficult to start sending the message about UBD months earlier, via meetings, emails, flyers, and kick-off events. Instead, the district under-communicated their plan and didn’t provide the necessary ground work to get faculty support, so the change never took root.

References

Kotter, J. (2011, March 23). John Kotter - communicating a vision for change [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGVe3wRKmH0

#change #communication