Preparing School Leaders for Hard Conversations to Dismantle Educational Injustices

• In Event: Transforming Educational Leadership: Righting Wrongs of Race and Difference

Abstract

Purposes: This study explores how emerging school leaders were guided to prepare for, enact, reflect on, and follow up after hard conversations with colleagues. Communication skills are the most influential components of effective leadership (Berber & Rofcanin 2012; Gurbuz et al. 2013; and Schyns & Schilling 2011), and though challenging to implement (Henderson, Hurley & Hanley 2020), they are essential for organizational success (Raina, 2010). When communication is directed toward dismantling racial and other educational injustices, specific strategies and perspectives are needed to facilitate difficult, hard conversations (Abrams 2009; Singleton 2008; and Sue 2015). This study’s purpose was to enact, document, and evaluate a set of pedagogical strategies to understand how they impacted development of perspectives and skills of emerging leaders to conduct hard conversations aimed at transforming educational injustices and inequitable “routines” (Diamond & Gomez 2023).

Methods and Data: The research question was: How did preparation for, enactment of, reflection on, and follow up after simulated hard conversations impact perspectives and skills for conducting actual hard conversations? After reading and discussing scholarship on dismantling injustices, this study’s methods had all 17 students in a graduate principalleadership class participate in an iterative four stage process. 1. Reflect (Prepare by reflecting on a specific hard conversation that did not have a satisfactory outcome). 2. Remix (Write a remix of that conversation as a dialogue that illustrates how it could be conducted differently). 3. Role Play (Enact and receive feedback on the conversation remix). 4. Record (Make a ten-minute video that identifies areas of growth and continuing development).
Data sources (N 17 for each source) were written reflections on class readings and discussions, written reflections about initial incidents, written remix dialogues of incidents, video recordings of remix enactments, video recordings of class responses to enactments, and video recordings of students identifying their growth and continuing development.
Content analysis was conducted by the researchers across the written and video texts to identify indications of growth and continuing development of perspectives and skills for conducting hard conversations for all 17 participants. .

Findings: Initial findings across the study participants were: 1. The written remix and the role play of the remix provided templates that increased abilities to enact actual hard conversations.. 2. Applying the templates required differing approaches and perspective taking, and also invoked differing levels of anxiety when engaging peers, versus supervisors, and versus subordinates. 3. Increased skills to break down conversations into different moves and strategies. 4. Preparation for hard conversations contributed to building trust. 5. Enacting the process itself was useful for surfacing inequities, even if problematic perspectives and practices did note immediately change. 6. The process increased understanding of racial dynamics and contexts beyond the hard conversations themselves. .

Scholarly Significance: This research provides insights into a viable pedagogical process to equip emerging school leaders with advocacy perspectives and skills for initiating hard conversations to surface and work toward dismantling injustices revealed in human actions, structured policies, and routines in schools.

Author

• Jabari Mahiri, University of California - Berkeley