Better Conversations: note-taking and reflection

Better Conversations by Jim Knight

I have been enjoying reading Jim Knight’s books relating to professional learning and instructional coaching. His books were well-structured and easy to follow. He often provides concrete examples and useful practical strategies to implement coaching conversations. This blog post records my visual notes and personal reflections from Jim Knight’s work, Better Conversations, published in 2016.    

Habit 1: Demonstrating empathy
​Habit 2: Listening with empathy

Before we can listen with empathy, step one is to demonstrate empathy. This can be practiced by “sharing or mirroring another person’s emotions”, and “making imaginative leap and recognizing that other people have different tastes, experiences, and world views than our own.”   

Listening with empathy, the idea sounds easy, but it is very challenging to adhere to this principle in a conversation. We often have to make decisions under pressure at school. If decisions are not made, that often means another meeting, and finding a common time to meet during school hours is not always easy. I sometimes find myself multitasking on my computer when the topic was not relevant to me in a meeting. I was also sometimes eager to present my ideas and opinions, being conscious of the time, and interrupted other people’s thoughts. I do think this is rude and shows my lack of respect for others.  I want to work on this and practice being an effective listener. I want to remind myself of the importance of pausing in a conversation and listening without judgment in order to understand other people’s world views. Jim knight provides four strategies to become an effective listener in his book.

Habit 3: Fostering dialogue

Dialogue is not going to occur without asking effective questions. The two habits go hand in hand. When reading books relating to cognitive coaching, the definitions of dialogue are often deeply explored. In this book, Better Conversations, the author explained that dialogue is a learning conversation, in which participants listen with empathy and they respect and encourage others’ views. The most important idea for me is Paulo Freire’s idea (1970) that “dialogue cannot exist without humility.”

Fostering Dialogue, we humbly let go of the notion that there is only one right answer⎯our answer!⎯and instead, we choose to see conversation as a testing ground for ideas. A dialogical conversation is something we co-construct with others so everyone in the conversation can learn and grow.    

(Jim Knight)

The reminds me of what’s mentioned in TheAdaptive School. “Dialogue honors the social-emotional brain, building a sense of connections, it connects us to our underlying motivations and mental models. This way of talking forms a foundation for coherent, sustained effort and community building. In a dialogue we hear phrases like: 

• An assumption I have is…
• I’d be curious to hear what other are thinking about this issue.” (Garmston and Wellman, 2016)

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Simply put, in dialogue, interlocutors who hold equal status take time to listen to other voices and possibilities. It’s an opportunity for us to invite collective intelligence, build relationships, and engage intentionally to achieve mutual understanding. It’s caring behavior. Our assumptions, however, often prevent us from having a dialogue. They reflect our worldview, emotions, moral perspectives, culture, and beliefs. Once our assumptions are challenged, we feel threatened and activate our fight-or-flight response. Therefore, dialogue is also a process for us to discover our unknown assumptions. 

The author explained that we can foster dialogue by balancing advocacy and inquiry. As stated in the book on page 78: 

• Advocacy means speaking what you think, speaking from a point of view.
• Inquiry means looking into what you do not yet understanding, or seeking to discover what others see and understand that may be different from you point of view.

“Balancing advocacy and inquiry means stating clearly and confidently what one thinks and why one thinks it, while at the same time being open to be wrong. It means encouraging others to challenge our views, and to explore what might stop them from doing so.” 

This highlights the benefit of using protocols to encourage participants in sharing their voices and asking questions to clarify, probe and reparaphrase. 

​Habit 4: Asking better questions

To build relationships through dialogue, we ask better questions. Through questions, we listen to other ideas and opinions which is a way for us to understand other people’s worldviews, and discover our own assumptions. 

I made a close connection with Bréne Brown’s Dare to Lead. In dialogue, we need to prepare to be wrong and embrace our fear and have the courage to ask better questions. She created a cheat sheet to show one can be brave and keep their mind open for productive conversations in her blog post, Let’s Rumble. I personally found this cheatsheet very useful. ​

The missing ingredients in most conversations are curiosity and willingness to ask questions to which we do not already know the answers.

(Edgar Schein)

Habit 5: Making emotional connections

If we want our relationships to flourish, we need to reach out to connect by responding positively to the bids received (turning toward). By the same token, we also want to express our bides to others in order to make connections to the people we care about. In this process, we pay attention to verbal (e.g.a question, an invitation, a response…) and nonverbal bids (e.g. a smile, a hug, a gesture, a physical touch…). To practice this habit, we can observe how people interact with these bids. As the book mentioned, this strategy is best practiced by sitting in the coffee shop for people watch. Have our eyes, ears, and heart open and pay attention to subtle verbal and nonverbal communication.  

Habit 6: Being a witness to the good

We all like to feel motivated, encouraged, validated, and boosted when we hear positive comments about the word we do. I think being a witness to the good is one way for us to show our gratitude and respect to other people. When sharing positive information with others, we do have to be mindful of the language we use; otherwise, our comments will sound phony. Show our appreciation by detailing our experiences with them by using intentional language. In terms of sharing positive information with others, where do we start? We make an effort to find the strength of others and keep a journal to record what positive behaviors are observed. For example, at KIS, our staff participate in What Wonderful Work (W.W.W). Toward the end of each term, teachers write to nominate their thankfulness and appreciation to colleagues they have interaction with.    

Habit 7: Finding common ground

To start a connection, we can also focus on finding healthy common ground. I found the acronym ICARE (Interests, Convictions, Activities, Roles, and Experiences) is easy to remember and provides good entry points to find the common ground. I think this is also a way to show others that we want to get to know them and hear their interesting stories and experiences. Having identified the common ground, it is easy for people to identify the similarities and differences. It provides an opportunity for us to hear the stories and worldviews of others. 

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