Creating Healthy Cultures: Living Our Agreements
By: Jill Thomas
You’ve already decided you want to have community agreements. You’ve set aside time to have a rich process for co-creating these with your team. And now it’s been a few months. The agreements are becoming a faint memory. How do you move from community agreements being just words on a page to something that is “alive”? And by alive, we mean that the agreements are present in the convenings of your team members. They are in everyone’s hearts, minds, and actions. They are a guidepost when things get a little rocky (and things will get a little rocky).
Here at The Teaching Well, we’ve been innovating around this process of keeping community agreements alive and bringing our favorite ideas to some of our partners too. We want to move away from the scenario where the community agreements get read out, deadpan, at the beginning of meetings, to something more embodied, and frankly, fun. Believe it or not, this is possible.
Below you’ll find a list of different ways to bring your agreements into the space with some examples organized by culturally responsive processing tools. We’ve divided these into “dramatic,” “metaphoric,” and “strategic,” but these are all ways to support the brain in making sense of the agreements in a deeper way. Tapping into metaphor, music, and movement are powerful ways to fire the brain’s neurons and trigger “a cascade of chemical and electrical impulses…the neurons connected to that element begin to fire in sync with neurons coded with the new information. As they fire together, they ‘ wire’ together, making a permanent association in the brain” (Hammond, 126). What’s best for student learning is also good for adult learning.
We recommend trying on a variety of these. Some team members may really struggle to engage with charades while others will love it. Some team members will prefer to stay in the literal realm while others will love having the chance to get metaphorical in a meeting. Mix it up. Keep it fresh. Meet everyone’s preferred way of meaning-making over the course of the year.
DRAMATIC:
Charades: Choose an agreement and act it out by yourself or with a partner. The rest of the team guesses, using the Community Agreements as reference.
Tableau: It’s like charades without the movement. You become the still life portrait of whatever you are trying to convey. The rest of the team guesses, using the Community Agreements as reference.
Associated Action: Name the agreement. Pair it with an action. Repeat. Example: If one of our agreements is focused on collective care, I might put my arms in a big circle as if hugging the whole team.
METAPHORIC:
Meme / GIF / source a visual image / create a visual image: This is an opportunity to get those art supplies out, or tap into your favorite GIPHY website. Lots of possibilities here from selecting an image that corresponds to the agreement and explaining your rationale to actually generating these images. Who knows, you might even end up with a multi-dimensional understanding of your team’s community agreements.
Musical playlist: Select an agreement and choose a song or song snippet to go along with it. Curate a community agreement playlist co-created by the team.
Zoom video filters: If you meet virtually, you might think some of these ideas don’t translate as well to Zoom, but there are lots of built-in Zoom tools to play with too. One of our favorites is the video filter feature. Pro-tip: make sure to turn off your filter before going on to another Zoom meeting or you might be caught wearing a pizza on your head when meeting a funder.
STRATEGIC:
Focal Agreement: Set a focal agreement for each meeting. Your team can rotate through these each time. The purpose would be to look for examples or non-examples of the agreement within the meeting or shared space. Share out at the end.
Distributed Focal Agreement: Similar to the strategy above, but this time you would have each teammate track one of the agreements across the meeting or across time, sharing out the findings.
Shout-outs in Action / Awards: Everyone gets a teammate’s name and then creates an award or shout out for that person connected to the community agreements. Pro-tip: promote inclusivity and a sense of belonging by ensuring all teammates get celebrated. We did this using the Wheel of Names, but you could also randomly assign pairings.
After engaging in one of these processing tools, be sure to build in a time to reflect on the process and the trends you are noticing. You’ve just collected some data on team alignment with the agreements and this data might inform shifts you make mid-year or ways you want to reinforce in future meetings, in supervision, or other communication. Below is a sampling of questions you might consider.
Reflection Questions:
After engaging with one of the processing tools above, consider the following:
Which agreements were not selected?
Why do you think that is?
Which agreement was selected multiple times and why?
Are there agreements that get left behind time and again? What might this tell us?
The best part of returning to community agreements is that not only do you reinforce the co-creation and continued meaning-making of the agreements, but this process absolutely doubles as a community builder. Teammates get to know each other better through the process as they see which agreements their teammates gravitate toward, which processing tools are at their edge, what makes them laugh, their relationship to play. Bottom line, this is the work of building and sustaining a community, and it can’t be bypassed if you are trying to make meaningful change.
What are some ways you have kept community agreements alive on your team?
We’d love to hear your ideas too and add them to this blog as a resource for others! Follow us on Social Media and comment on this post, or drop us a line at info@theteachingwell.org.