Fearless Schools: Building Trust, Resilience, and Psychological Safety

By Douglas Reeves

Schools need psychological safety, resilience, and trust now more than ever. These are the essential prerequisites of learning for both students and staff.

If we are truly going to make schools inviting places where all students can flourish, then educators must be fearless as they build trust and set high expectations. In this book, Douglas Reeves outlines the conditions for such fearlessness, which include refusing to tolerate mediocrity, confronting reality, listening, being candid, and learning from mistakes.

He also answers questions such as:
• Why is trust so essential to learning?
• What are some examples of fearless organizations characterized by high levels of trust?
• How can schools support the emotional and mental health of students?

Whether you’re an educator, administrator, school leader, policymaker, parent, or student, this book will help you move forward as a fearless school in a fearful environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Dec 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665730532

Douglas Reeves

Dr. Douglas Reeves is the author of more than 40 books and 100 articles on leadership and education. He was twice named to the Harvard University Distinguished Authors Series and several other national and international awards for his contributions to education. Doug is the founder of Creative Leadership Solutions and the nonprofit Equity and Excellence Institute, serving schools and educational systems in fifty states and more than 40 countries.

Book preview

Copyright © 2023 Creative Leadership Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of nonfiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author

and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of

the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of

people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3055-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3054-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3053-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022917695

Archway Publishing rev. date:  12/12/2022

For the Reverend Doctor Robert Allan Hill,

a fearless leader and faithful friend.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Psychological Safety for Every School

Part I: The Trust Imperative

Chapter 1: The Trust Advantage

Chapter 2: Building Trust

Chapter 3: Maintaining Trust

Chapter 4: How Trust Is Destroyed

PART II: Resilience

Chapter 5: Physical Resilience

Chapter 6: Emotional Resilience

Chapter 7: Organizational Resilience

Part III: Fearlessness in Practice

Chapter 8: Fearless Classrooms

Chapter 9: Fearless Leadership

Chapter 10: Fearless Change

Chapter 11: Putting It All Together: Fearless Systems

About the Author

References

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Footnotes and reference lists are wholly inadequate to describe the debt of authors to their sources. Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson is a pioneer in global research on psychological safety. She shares her research and work with many publications, including her extraordinary book, The Fearless Organization. It should be required reading for leaders at every level. Dr. Carol Kauffman, founder of the Institute of Coaching, an affiliate of McLean Hospital and part of the Harvard Medical School, provides a rich international perspective on best (and worst) practices in leadership coaching. She brings scholarship and rigor to a field that often lacks both of those qualities. Dr. John Hattie is perhaps the most influential educational researcher on the planet and also, in his Kiwi vernacular, a fine mate. Kim Marshall’s Marshall Memo provides an indispensable source of research from more research sources than most people could read in a lifetime.

My colleagues at Creative Leadership Solutions devote themselves to taking on the toughest educational challenges, and they do so with a wonderful combination of intensity, intellectual curiosity, and good humor. They take their work, but not themselves, seriously—I am lucky indeed to have them as colleagues and friends. They include: Allyson Apsey, Michelle Cleveland, Washington Collado, Lori Cook, Alan Crawford, Karisa DeSantis, Howard Fields, Kate Anderson Foley, Emily Freeland, Rachael George, Pam Gildersleeve-Hernandez, Amanda Gomez, Jessica Gomez, Cedrick Gray, Neil Gupta, Rodney Harrelson, Nicole Johnson, Jessyca Lucero-Flores, Kim Marshall, Jonelle Massey, Ann McCarty Perez, Peter Ondish, Christine Smith, Melissa Stephanski, Bill Sternberg, Majalise Tolan, Dru Tomlin, Greg VanHorn, Pam VanHorn, Jo Verver-Peters, and Michael Wasta.

The production team for this book included Faye Lewis of Archway Publishing and editor Dory Mayo. I am especially indebted to Fiona Dwyer for managing the project internally and to Lisa Almeida for reviewing and improving the manuscript.

Bob Hill, to whom this book is dedicated, shepherds his global flock through the darkest times of the pandemic and other calamities, global and personal. When the world is fearful, he is fearless. In our darkest hours, he encourages those in despair, gives hope to the hopeless, and always leaves us with the confidence of a brighter day ahead. Every week, he reminds his listeners in Marsh Chapel in Boston and around the world that our mission is not only half a world away, but also half a block away. He carries on the tradition of the Irish-American poet Finley Peter Dunne to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, reminding us that to whom much is given, much is required. Whether he is serving as a Boston University Dean; a professor preparing the next generation of religious and secular leaders; a prolific writer whose erudite words instruct the reader one moment, to be moved to tears in the next; a visitor to the sick, bereaved, and dying; or a faithful Methodist fighting for justice within his own denomination—Dean Hill is the person whom his students aspire to be when they grow up. On top of all that, he is a true, courageous, and loyal friend.

Douglas Reeves

Boston, Massachusetts

September 2022

INTRODUCTION:

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

FOR EVERY SCHOOL

If you are not safe, you cannot learn. Students cannot, teachers cannot, and entire systems cannot engage in the learning that is at the heart of our mission as educators. Psychological safety, and the resilience that accompanies it, are prerequisites for learning (Edmondson, 2018). The need for physical safety is obvious, and schools spend an extraordinary amount of resources on security systems and personnel. But there is no scanner that detects the fear that stalks too many students, teachers, and administrators. That is the fear of humiliation, shame, and embarrassment that is associated with making mistakes in an environment that tolerates nothing less than perfection.

The most important job of the teacher—more important than mastering curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, and technology—is to have a fearless classroom in which students can learn without fear. Thanks to the masterful work of John Hattie and colleagues (Hattie, 2013; Donahoo et al., 2018), we have a treasure trove of research that will allow us to make continued improvements in professional practices and our impact on student learning. But those practices will have little effect if students are too scared to make mistakes and engage in the active learning that mistakes, feedback, and response to feedback provide. Leaders and policymakers also have the obligation to create psychologically safe environments for teachers and administrators. When board of education meetings feature and televise the most vicious attacks on staff members and their families, we should not be surprised that a growing number of teachers and administrators are leaving the profession.

This book shows you how to turn that tide and restore respect and psychological safety to our educational system. The research foundation of this book is broadly based, including quantitative studies, qualitative studies, meta-analyses, and syntheses of meta-analyses. In addition, my own field studies in 50 states and more than 40 countries inform the ideas presented in these pages. While I recognize that each school and classroom has unique characteristics, our professional practices are best served by the preponderance of the evidence standard (Reeves, 2020a). There is no perfect study, and certainly no perfect researchers. Therefore, teachers, leaders, and policymakers are best served when they find conclusions that are supported by researchers who use different methods, operating independently without any commercial influence, to come to similar conclusions.

Despite what I hope the reader will find is a comprehensive list of references at the end of the book, I want to encourage you—the teacher and leader reading this book—to conduct your own action research. This is especially valuable regarding issues pertaining to equity, where national data associating high-poverty schools with low performance masks outstanding student performance and professional practices in high-poverty schools. I specifically encourage the science fair approach in which a teacher or team of teachers identifies a specific challenge, engages in a professional practice related to that challenge, and then displays results. These simple three-panel displays are extremely effective, especially when skeptical colleagues say, that research was interesting, but it doesn’t apply to us. If you engage in the systematic comparison of your students, comparing the same students to the same students, with the only intervention being a professional practice that the teacher provided, then you have clear evidence of the impact you had on student results. It wasn’t the socioeconomic status of the students, their skin color, or their home language. Those results were caused by the classroom teacher. An essential part of rebuilding psychological safety in schools is letting teachers know that—as a matter of evidence, not inspirational rhetoric—they made the difference for their students.

Through 2020 and much of 2021, schools remained shuttered, with attempts at distance learning having widely variable levels of effectiveness. As students returned to school for the 2021–2022 school year, teachers reported significant levels of learning loss and substantial regression in student behavior. A Harvard study (Anderson, 2022) estimated that student reading levels had dropped to the point that between 11 and 22 additional weeks of reading instruction would be required to catch up with the learning losses related to school closures. Given my direct work with schools during and after the school closures, I suspect this could be a substantial underestimate, especially in high-poverty school districts.

Learning loss, however is not the biggest problem that students and staff are facing. Anxiety and depression, already high among teenagers before the pandemic, soared as students faced unremitting isolation and fear (Chafouleas & Briesch, 2021). Moreover, at the very time when students needed mental health support from schools, the ratio of school psychologists to students was less than half the number recommended by the American Association of School Psychologists. This left them dealing with crises, but not able to treat chronic conditions such as anxiety and depression that can blow up into crises when untreated.

Federal funds flowed into schools during the pandemic, and billions of dollars were invested in technology, programs, and in some cases, staff members. Much of that was devoted to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs. Yet no intervention, no program, no curriculum, and no teaching strategy can be effective without an environment of psychological safety. The proliferation of programs, however, often led to a lack of focus and the failure of schools to implement deeply even the most promising programs (Hamilton et al., 2022). It grieves me to see schools that require training in social and emotional learning confident that they have found the magic bullet to aid in student distress, only to have them continue to pursue toxic feedback practices that render the rhetoric of social and emotional learning at best, inconsistent—and at worst, a cynical farce. To put a fine point on it, if you value SEL programs that seek to build resilience and perseverance among students and then tolerate a computerized grading system that uses the average to determine final grades, you might as well say, Remember all that stuff we said about resilience? Forget about it. Because our grading system will punish you at the end of the semester for the mistakes you made four months ago.

The challenge for emotional security cannot rest on teachers and psychologists alone. The daily decisions of leaders on how time and resources are allocated can either support or undermine student results. I have respectfully asked this pointed question to educational leaders around the world: Is your schedule and time allocation the same today as it was in 2019? If so, you are pretending that the pandemic and associated learning loss never happened. That illusion will perhaps work for affluent families with students born with an electronic device in their hands. But it ill-serves the cause of equity on which the future prosperity of our society depends.

There is an answer to this enormous challenge. In the pages that follow, you will see how teachers and school leaders are creating psychologically safe classrooms in which 100% of students are engaged (Reeves et al., 2022). You will see how leaders create environments in which teachers can engage in pilot programs to learn how best to improve student learning. You will see how the high-trust environment on which psychological safety depends can be built—and how it can be destroyed. You will, in sum, learn to have fearless schools.

58849.png

PART I

THE TRUST IMPERATIVE

Everything depends on trust. Personal relationships, the global economy, and our ability to have a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives—all depend upon the fundamental trust equation that our actions, resources, and emotional energy have value (Frei & Morriss, 2020). While we do not depend upon reciprocity for all of our work—the Newtonian dictum that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—we do expect that our investment of time, energy, resources, and emotions are not in vain, and this first section of the book explores that necessity.

Chapter 1 considers the research on the trust advantage. We will learn how trust not only improves the morale and confidence of students and staff members but also how high-trust organizations have better performance on every measure. This is a global phenomenon, with similar advantages to trust occurring in a wide variety of cultures, languages, and nations.

Chapter 2 provides practical guidelines for building trust. Schools and educational systems are hierarchical organizations with governing boards, superintendents, principals, department chairs, and other levels of hierarchy. And hierarchies, no matter how benevolent the leader may be, are breeding grounds for mistrust. Thus, good intentions and personal trustworthiness are helpful but insufficient to build trust in schools and systems.

Chapter 3 examines the maintenance of trust and how it requires a consistent effort and rhythm of promises made and promises kept. While leaders will be forgiven for many mistakes if they have credibility, none of their skills in analysis, communication, or planning will matter if they have failed to establish credibility (Kouzes & Posner, 2011).