cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Ed Schipul
“To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.” Daniel Pink
We have all heard it before…many teachers fear change.
As I think about this statement more and more, I think it is often an easy out. Just because you are doing something, doesn’t mean someone else should be doing it. That is not enough to get someone to embrace something. I am firm believer that teachers have different strengths and that there should be a variance of people that you connect with as opposed to everyone being a carbon copy of one another.
Often it is not that teachers fear change, but that people are bad at selling why change is better.
Here is an assumption that we need to make in our work, if we want people to change. Educators want to do what is best for kids.
With that being said, here are three ideas that we need to focus on that are all connected.
1. How will this save me time? No matter how many initiatives you want to implement in a school, the number of hours in a day does not change. When we see “shiny,” we want to jump on it, but we have to realize there are only so many things that can be done in any school day. Sometimes there is an influx of time at the beginning of any initiative, but in the long run, will this save time and if this is added on to someone’s plate, what is being taken off?
Which leads to the idea…
2. We need to focus on different, not more. As I have said before, we often make initiatives feel like they are something extra. For anything to happen, it is imperative that we focus on what will be different, not that we are doing more. But different is not enough.
Which leads to the idea…
3. Is this better? This taps back into the assumption that teachers want to do what is best for kids. If you can show why the time investment on doing something different makes something better, you will have a lot more buy-in than simply saying it is different.
If you can focus on those three things, do you think that you will be any closer to helping people embrace change?
