The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Director of the Educator Community Sari Laberis.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Building Trust in Education with Frances Frei
Frances Frei, a distinguished professor at Harvard Business School, graces our podcast to unravel the secrets behind building trust in education. Her insights into the trust triangle—comprising authenticity, logic, and empathy—can transform how educators connect with students. Embrace the opportunity to learn how to enhance your teaching style, boost student engagement, and tackle those "wobbles" when trust falters. Frances shares her guidance on diagnosing and mending trust breaks to strengthen teacher-student relationships, ensuring that educators can maintain a nurturing and effective learning environment.
Watch Frances' Ted Talk: bit.ly/2rn9Yz0
Listen to Fixable: apple.co/4fteKSs
Read Curriculum Associates' blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Extraordinary Educators podcast. I'm Sari, and this week I am joined by the incredible Frances Fry. I have been a fan of Frances for a while now, always listening to her podcasts and reading articles she writes, and it's really fascinating to talk to her about helping global leaders and strategy can also apply to educators and their students. Global leaders and strategy can also apply to educators and their students. So Frances is a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School, and her research investigates how leaders create conditions for organizations and individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations and culture. She regularly advises organizations embarking on large-scale chain initiatives, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for significantly improving performance.
Speaker 1:A global thought leader on leadership and strategy, frances is widely recognized for her breakthrough scholarship and high-impact teaching. She developed one of the most popular classes at HBS, which explores business models that reliably delight customers. She also led the design and launch of HBS's innovative field curriculum, built around learning experiences that are experimental and immersive. In 2017, frances was tapped to become Uber's first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy, with the mandate to help thousands of employees excel in a context of hyper-growth, strategic change and an evolution in culture. Her firsthand experience in Silicon Valley gave her a new lens on the urgent topic of trust, which she and I discussed today. In 2018, frances delivered a TED Talk viewed by millions on how to build and rebuild trust, and we will link that in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Frances is the best-selling co-author of Uncommon Service, unleashed and the newly released Move Fast and Fix Things, the Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems. I highly recommend that book. It is fascinating, a very quick read. I could not put it down. Move Fast and Fix Things is hailed as a masterpiece on trust, leadership and business and inspires readers to accelerate change while also taking care of their customers, employees and stakeholders.
Speaker 1:Frances and her co-author, anne Morris, recently launched Fixable, a breakthrough leadership advice podcast from the TED Audio Collective that helps guest callers solve work problems in 30 minutes or less. We will also link that in the show notes. They recently had an episode on happiness in the workplace that I thought was fascinating. On Fixable, frances and Anne diagnosed callers' leadership challenges and helped them make progress with quick, actionable coaching. Frances holds a PhD in operations and information management from the Wharton School at UPenn and she has been recognized by Thinkers 50 as among the world's most influential business thinkers, and we got to talk to her for this podcast. So here's my conversation with Frances. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Welcome, frances, we are so excited to have you on the Extraordinary Educators podcast. Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. So tell all of our listeners what exactly is the trust triangle.
Speaker 2:So the trust triangle reflects that trust has three component parts. You think of it as three legs to the trust stool. So trust has three component parts, and when all three of these things are present, we trust people, and if even one of them is missing, we don't. So what are the different parts of the triangle? It's a cliffhanger, isn't it?
Speaker 2:So the different parts of the trust triangle are authenticity, logic and empathy, and what that means is that, for me to trust you, I have to experience your authenticity, that I'm experiencing the real you. I have to experience your authenticity, that I'm experiencing the real you, I have to experience the rigor of your reasoning. Logic, and I have to experience that you're in it for me.
Speaker 1:Empathy so how can the trust triangle be applied to relationships that teachers have with their students?
Speaker 2:Oh, so something very near and dear to my heart. So I can tell you that when new faculty come to the Harvard Business School, a classic mistake they make is they try to impersonate what they think a Harvard professor is like. So they go into the classroom and they're not authentic and it goes terribly and they get bumped and bruised. And then they realize the best way they can become a teacher is to be themselves as a teacher. So that's one way. Is that figure out your way of teaching? On the logic part, it's like when we have our lesson plans and there's structure, there's rationale. After the class people feel like, oh, that was worth it. That's going to be from the logic side of it. And then empathy is am I giving myself credit for saying things or am I giving myself credit for students learning things? And empathy is I'm paying deeply attention to what you're learning and I'm not giving myself a participation trophy for what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Right, that's really powerful trophy for what I'm saying. Right, that's really powerful for providing that. You also have talked about wobbles. So when that, when that trust essentially breaks. So can you describe a wobble, please, and what teachers can do after they think there's been a?
Speaker 2:wobble? Yeah. So first of all, we lose trust all the time. Trust breaks all the time. It's it's not the falling down that we should get too precious about, it's the speed at which we get back up again. So when trust is broken first, it's only ever for one of these three reasons. So do a diagnosis and find out. Is it authenticity, logic or empathy? What what we call a trust wobble is for someone like me. When I lose trust, it's almost always for reasons of empathy. So I have an empathy wobble. I have looked at the patterns in the times I have lost trust and every single time the culprit is empathy. So I have a particular watch out for empathy. You might have a particular watch out for logic, and someone else might have a particular watch out for authenticity. So it's good to know what your watch out is, and that's what your wobble is.
Speaker 1:Got it? And how does one figure out their watch out? I know you said you've looked at patterns and stuff, but is it just figuring out where trust has been broken in the past with you and noticing patterns?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's just. You know, try to come up with what's the most recent time that I had a skeptic and the time before that and the time before that. Look at the collection of them. What's the pattern?
Speaker 1:For teachers or educators in any capacity. Do you think that that can show itself in a different way than, say, a boss in a corporate environment? Maybe the students are not engaged in the learning or they're not doing their homework. I think leading parenting, coaching, teaching.
Speaker 2:I think these things are pretty darn, similar. Yep agree.
Speaker 1:So I guess, if the teacher is noticing that maybe there's a student or a group of students who are not as engaged or they can't really establish that same type of relationship, what should a teacher do after there's a wobble?
Speaker 2:I guess the first step would be identify which one Realize that it's three different courses of action, depending on which the wobble is right. So if it's authenticity, you know what can you do to show up more as you. If it's logic, how can you improve the rigor of your plan? If it's empathy, how can you become a little bit more student-centric? So it's really important not to just blindly take action, but to do it responsive to the underlying diagnosis.
Speaker 1:And in terms of the authenticity piece I imagine similar to HBS. It's hard sometimes when you're a new teacher, right, you almost put yourself into a character and you're performing. How do you kind of figure out who your authentic self is or how to establish that?
Speaker 2:I think you said the magic word, which is experimenting. So experimenting with bringing different facets of yourself forward. So it's never going to work for you to pretend you're someone you're not. But behind what you were saying is like we have different facets that we can bring forward and you're going to experiment with bringing this up a little bit and dialing this down. And I think you want to experiment. Nobody knows how to do it the first time. Enjoy the intrigue of the experimentation. Take note of what works and what doesn't, and just be a super learner about it. Find yourself endlessly fascinating in the experimentation.
Speaker 1:That's great, I love that. Do you have any last words or advice for educators about building trust with their students as we think about kind of heading into winter and then after that stage?
Speaker 2:So I sometimes, when I talk to younger educators and they're trying to improve, they double down on being devoted to their students, and, if I can, I try to change that orientation and instead of being devoted to the students, I try to encourage them to be devoted to the students' learning. If you have a noble purpose, you get forgiven for a lot of things, and being devoted to student learning as an educator is quite a noble purpose. It might sound like they're similar, but they can really bifurcate being devoted to students and being devoted to student learning. I'm devoted to students. Take the semester off. I'm devoted to student learning. Stay after class, right, so it's actually so. My advice is to be devoted to student learning. Every single person in the world can trace back some important moment to an interaction they had with a teacher, and so my main message is thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for that, frances, and all of your expertise today. It was great chatting with you and I know our listeners are going to love this. All right, awesome, chatting with you and I know our listeners are going to love this. All right, awesome. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on X, at Curriculum Asoche and on Instagram at my Eye Ready. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest, or if you want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducatorsatcainccom. Please subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators, just like you, join the conversation and please leave a review. Remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The extraordinary educators podcast is produced by curriculum associates editing by Shane Lowe, social media by Atsiti Hannon, guest booking by Sari LaBarris and production by Haley Browning. This podcast is copyrighted materials and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.