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Remarks of Hayes Mizell on November 2, 1997 at the meeting, "Advancing Communications for Middle School Reform" sponsored by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. The meeting was held in Reston, Virginia and included small teams of persons representing the Chattanooga, Corpus Christi, Louisville, Long Beach, Minneapolis and San Diego school systems. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Foundation.


Communicating in Education:
Getting Beyond the "Blah, blah, blah"


Because this is Sunday, it seems appropriate to begin this meeting with a story from the Bible. With the tolerance of those of you from other religious traditions, or no religious tradition, I would like to share this story that is about many things, including communications:

Mark 10: 46-52

Then they came to Jericho. As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Jesus stopped and said, "Call him."

So they called to the blind man, "Cheer up! On your feet! He's calling you." Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came to Jesus.

"What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asked him.

The blind man said, "Rabbi, I want to see. "

"Go," said Jesus, "your faith has healed you. "Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road.


Clear, forceful, direct communication

If nothing else, this story reminds us that when we communicate we have to do it in a way that gets the attention of our audience. We have to know what results we want the communication to yield. We have to communicate clearly and forcefully, and we have to have faith that the results will justify our effort. I suspect these themes will emerge in various ways during our discussions over the next two days.

We have been looking forward to this meeting because it is an opportunity to do something we have wanted to do for a long time: focus on the role of communications in standards-based reform. We have, of course, "used" various forms of communications for a long time: letters, grantees" conferences, the U. S. mail, speeches, quarterly reports, Anne Lewis' books, site visits, requests for proposals, the telephone, e-mail, and more recently the tabloids and the world wide web site produced by the Focused Reporting Project. But while we have communicated in many different ways, we have not spent time as a group talking about communications per se or communication strategies that will advance standards-based reform. I hope that by tomorrow afternoon all of us will be more thoughtful about communications and better prepared to lead our respective efforts to communicate more effectively.

I suspect many of you find this whole subject of communications and communication strategies somewhat perplexing. You are comfortable with tried and true communications "media" such as brochures, newsletters, videos and annual reports, but what does the Foundation mean when it talks more broadly about "communications" and "communication strategies"?

I agree that we have too mushy in "our" communication about these concepts. I am not surprised that you have found them too slippery and imprecise to serve you well in the concrete operational realities you encounter every day. I hope our discussion during the next two days will help to sharpen your thinking, and ours, about the practical aspects of communications.


We can learn from our own personal relationships

As I have thought about this subject, I have found it helpful to consider communications in the context of what we all know about personal relationships, by which I mean personal intimate relationships. I would suggest that if anyone in this room is a husband or a wife or a lover or a son or a daughter or a mother or a father (and if anyone here isn't one of these categories, please identify yourself immediately), you know a whole lot more about communications than you think you do.

You also know a lot about what happens when communications are not effective. You know, for example, that even where there is love and respect, good communication doesn't just happen; you have to work at it, you have to be intentional about it. You know that when each party in the relationship is not clear about his or her expectations and needs, misunderstandings occur, resentments build up, and conflict is often the result. You know that when communication issues are left unattended, it dramatically increases the chances that relationships will wither, marriages will dissolve, and children will become alienated. You know these things because you have experienced them, and because you have experienced them you bring a lot to our consideration of communications and standards-based reform.

I would argue that it is not much of a stretch to take what you know about communications in personal relationships and use it as the basis for creating an intentional communications strategy to advance standards-based reform. For example, I wonder if any of you has ever had an experience in your personal life where your partner had an expectation for what you would do or should do but failed to communicate that expectation to you? Maybe your partner expected the two of you would celebrate your birthday by spending a quiet evening at home, but you expected to go out for dinner. You weren't communicating.


School systems are not always clear about teacher expectations

In the same way, school systems are not always clear about what they expect of teachers in standards implementation. We know that a lot of teachers think that they are implementing standards if the standards are posted on their classroom walls, or if they are working hard to "cover" all the standards, or especially if they go to the trouble of aligningtheir curriculum with the standards. If teachers don"t "get it," there is a good chance it is because the school system has not made the effort to communicate its expectations clearly and consistently. Don't tell me that the school system sent out a memo or provided every teacher with a binder containing the standards. That is the equivalent of your partner saying, "Well, I left you a note on the refrigerator," or handing you a sex manual. We have to keep in mind that communications in our institutions, as in our personal relationships, has to be personal to be effective and it has to engage both parties. It isn't communications unless "both" parties are talking "and" listening.

Here again, we can learn a lot from our experiences in our homes and relationships. How often do we assume we are communicating when in fact what is happening is that partners are talking "at" rather than "with" each other? Perhaps only one person is truly listening; maybe neither person is listening. This happens most often when we are focused primarily on getting our feelings or ideas or agenda across, or when we are intent on mentally framing points of argument while the other person is talking. The interaction that occurs between many parents and their teenage children is a good example.

It is kind of like that famous cartoon of a man standing over his dog. The man is looking down at the dog and saying, "Roll over! Roll over! Roll over!" But the balloon above the dog"s head reveals that the dog only hears the man"s commands as " blah, blah, blah. " Well, I think a lot of principals and teachers are hearing the central office's talk about standards as so much "blah, blah, blah." It goes without saying that on any given day in any given classroom, we can find many other examples of this kind of miscommunication where one party is doing most of the talking and neither party is doing much understanding.

Addressing this and other problems requires a communications strategy, just as it take a communications strategy to solve many problems in our personal relationships. On both fronts, it is hard work. It is difficult to make the time necessary to communicate. It requires effort to turn off the television or put down the newspaper and pay attention to your partner. It is hard to bite your tongue and wait until after your partner stops talking before you begin speaking. It takes even greater effort to listen, to really hear what your partner or your child is saying, or feeling, or just "trying" to say.


Most educators are terrible at developing a communications strategy

The truth is that most educators are terrible at doing this. They are busy, they are stressed, and everyone wants to tell them what to do. No one has ever taught them to be effective communicators because "their" teachers and mentors think communications skills are primarily about writing a good memo or speaking before an audience. It is not surprising, then, that many school site councils are so ineffective; neither the administrators, parents, or teachers now how to communicate effectively. It is also not surprising that the communications between schools and families are equally bad. There is not really a school communications strategy. The school sends out notices, announcements, pronouncements, and directives " mostly in print, mostly verbose and badly written, and often neither readable nor understandable. The school expects parents to listen and comply and shape up, and it bombards families with missives that all too clearly send these messages. Then schools wonder why more families are not "involved. "

It seems to me this will not improve, and it will not be possible to mobilize educators, families, and communities to help students perform at standard, until school systems and schools have more effective communications strategies. We can begin here. We can begin by keeping in mind that even in the context of public education, communications is about personal relationships. Unless there are more venues for educators to communicate with each other and the public about serious matters related to improving teaching and learning, standards implementation will amount to little more than a rock skipping on the surface of a pond. Unless educators become more effective communicators with each other and with their students' families and communities, the performance levels of most educators and most students will not improve.

Finally, I want to recommend to you a book about communications. Actually, it is a novel: "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines. You may know it as an Oprah Book Club selection. On the face of it, this book is not really about communications at all, but if you read it I think you will find that one of its subtexts is communications. We can learn a lot from this book, whether it is the power of the book's short declarative sentences or the story's rich and moving accounts of the characters' struggles with and use of communications.

As we talk during this meeting about "our" struggles with communications, let's remember that this is an issue that is more than two thousand years old, but that over those years we have learned a lot about how to use communications to improve relationships between people, and between institutions and their constituents. We look forward to working with you to apply what we know to help standards-based reform take root and increase the performance of low-achieving students.

Thank you.