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CAN Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
oN With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation

 

 

 

SANDBOXES AND HONEYBEES

It’s difficult to spell. Hard to pronounce. Harder to define. It’s hardest still to establish in a school. Colle-
vidlity. After a lifetime of residence in different sorts of schools, | am convinced that the nature of the relation-
ships among, the adults who inhabit a school has more to do with the school’s quality and character, and with
the accomplishment of its pupils, than any other factor. The success of a school depends upon interactions
between teacher and teacher, teacher and administrator, and all school people and parents.

Yet, strangely, collegiality and the ideas it connotes have seldom shown up in the effective-schools litera-
ture of the past decade. It is not listed with such factors as strong leadership, emphasis on basic skills, a clear
sense of purpose, monitoring of academic progress, and an orderly school environment. Nor is collegiality part
of the vocabulary of recent national studies of American education. It is recognized as neither part of the prob-
lem nor part of the solution. I wonder why not.

| find that relationships among adults in schools--all schools, from preschools to graduate schools--take
several forms.

One of them is described by a wonderful term from nursery-school parlance, “parallel play.” Two three-
year-olds are busily engaged in opposite corners of a sandbox. One has a shovel and bucket; one has a rake and
hoe. At no time do they borrow each other’s toys. They may inadvertently throw sand in each other's face
from time to time, but they seldom interact. Although in close proximity, and having much to offer one
another, each works and plays pretty much in isolation. This description serves well as a characterization of
adult relationships in schools. Teachers and administrators develop subtle ways to influence the other group's
domain, but they seldom venture there. A third-grade teacher on one side of the hall carefully respects the
teaching space of the third-grade teacher on the other side. One principal in a system seldom visits the school
of another. University professors, too, have been described as a group of isolated individuals connected by a
common heating system and parking lot. We all seem to have an implied contract: Don’t bother me in my work
and | won’t bother you. Yet, in schools, as in sandboxes, the price of doing things the way we want to-of hav-
ing, personal control over what we do--is isolation from others who might take our time and have us do things
differently (and, perhaps, better).

But, of course, not all adult relationships in schools are independent. | observe three different forms of
interaction:

Adversarial Relationships. Recently, a Boston-area school principal made a sage observation: “You know,
we educators have drawn our wagons into a circle and trained our guns--on each other.” When adults in school
interact, all too often we attack one another. There’s no dearth of enemies outside education, of course, but
somehow we manage to create opponents under our own roofs.

A decade ago, Harry Levinson, author of Organizational Diagnosis, writing about the workplace of business,
used the phrase “emotional toxicity” to describe unhealthy businesses. He observed that “psychotic” organiza-
tions, like many psychotic individuals, are characterized by a siege mentality, a feeling of being under constant
attack. This mentality is also marked by preoccupation with self-preservation, constant scanning of the environ-
ment in search of potential threats, and a desire to avoid any close contact with others. It may be that adver-
sarial relationships among adults in school make “parallel play” a welcome alternative.

Competitive Relationships. The competition among adults in schools stems perhaps from a wish for all
those in the school to succeed, or for the school to become better than others, but mostly it comes from a desire
for me lo excel.

Typically, competition takes the form of withholding. Most school people carry around extraordinary
insights about their important work--about discipline, parental involvement, budgeting, child development,
leadership, and curriculum. These hard-won insights certainly have as much value to the field as elegant
research studies and national reports, but adults in schools have a strong reluctance to make the insights avail-
able to those who may be competitors for scarce resources and recognition--that is, to almost everyone else. Nor
does anyone want to be considered pretentious by professing this knowledge. Few teachers, for example, want
to subject themselves to the criticism of their peers by standing up in a faculty meeting and sharing a good idea

 

' ©) Program in Community College Education, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712

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