Dealing with Collective Trauma with Eric Makelky Transformative Principal 506

This week is our next installment of seeing how Eric is doing in his new school. As a refresher, here is last month’s update.

Last time, we gave him three strategies: - Strategy 1: add 15–30 minutes to however long you think each meeting will be. - Strategy 2: You seem upset, what’s the best way to contact you when he gets back at X? - Strategy 3: intentional Drive-bys - Schedule time to go be visible.

We checkin on those ideas and then talk about what he’s facing today.

Eric shared a great strategy today:

Strategy #1: Create a “canned response” in your email provider to send to people when they are upset inviting them to talk in person or on the phone.

It’s never a good idea to get in an email war. Much better to have a conversation with a person who is upset. Creating a response you send that always invites someone to meet with you and resolve differences is a sure-fire way to stop email wars and keyboard warriors.

Strategy #2: Schedule to send out that email! Don’t send it immediately after you write it. Give everyone time to cool down.

Today, Eric asks the question, “How can I help teachers have confidence that I’ll stick around so they’ll stop avoiding digging into the work?”

This is a valid question.

Teachers want to know you’ll stick around before they commit, but that is really just smokescreen for trust issues. They don’t trust you yet. People don’t actually care how long you’ll be around if they can trust you now.

Eric and I discuss some ways to make sure they are experiencing that trust, including doing the exact opposite of what a teacher specifically requests.

We highlight how to deal with past issues of traumatic experiences and how to do better in the future.

We also share one of the great books i’ve read recently: What happened to you.

Finally, I gave Eric two pieces of advice: 1. Preplan how you will exit when you do exit the school (spoiler alert: everyone leaves the school!) 2. Create different experiences around what were bad experiences!

We’ll be back with another interview with Eric at the beginning of December!

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