Using Thinking Environments within School Communities
As a Teacher, School Leader and a Coach I have been reflecting on the impact coaching has had on my career.
The concept of 'Thinking Environments' is an area that bought about immediate change to the quality of conversations and meetings that I had as a school leader. My knowledge and understanding of this area developed when I learnt about Nancy Kline and her book - 'Time to Think'.
Schools are busy places and as school leaders there is a lot to consider across a school day, week, term and academic year. This can have an impact on how well we listen and the attention we give each other.
Nancy Kline identifies behaviours that form a system called a 'Thinking Environment'. It is fundamentally a model of human interaction that dramatically improves the way people think.
“Everything we do depends on the quality of thinking we do first”
This quote by Nancy resonated with me, especially as change implementation is now more prevalent than ever in schools. Nancy's work helped me to prioritise time for thinking not only for myself but for my whole team.
I started by looking at where I could integrate the 10 components of a Thinking Environment into systems and processes already in existence. An obvious starting place for me was to look at how I could apply the 'Thinking Environment' to meetings. The team approached this new way of working with enthusiasm and interest. Like any new process we gave it time to embed and would revisit the structure when we needed to improve the quality of our thinking.
Our agenda items were configured as questions enabling the team to think about these before the meeting. We would begin each meeting with a positive reality and everybody was given space and time to speak. Interrupting is touted as a strong, assertive, intelligent thing to do but in fact it is none of these. It is an assault on the thinking process and is selfish and costly. We identified assumptions and asked incisive questions in our meetings. We would divide into thinking pairs to re-ignite thinking, gave permission to tell the truth and allow people's feelings. We always finished our meetings with a positive - appreciating the meeting and each other.
We soon began to see progress of outcomes from our meetings. We were all listening and giving attention to each other more and this improved the quality of our thinking. This continued as I rolled out the 'Thinking Environment' across the school community including teacher and maintenance meetings and supervisions.
In my role as a Coach I now work with schools and other educational establishments to develop their coaching cultures . This has a positive impact on student, staff and family agency.
