Episode 031: Mastering Clear and Effective Communication with Dr. Meghan Everette

Unlock the secrets of effective communication within the classroom and beyond as Dr. Meghan Everette joins us to share her expertise in the educational sphere. With a focus on crafting concise messages that resonate, our enlightening conversation with Megan is a treasure trove for educators grappling with the challenge of reaching diverse audiences. She brings to the table strategies born from the chaos of the pandemic, emphasizing the power of understanding your audience and the art of simplicity in messaging. Whether you're dealing with policy changes or boosting event attendance, Megan's insights on avoiding assumptions and truly engaging with the community are invaluable.

This episode is a deep dive into the art of dialogue in education, from the state level down to the intimate parent-teacher exchanges that shape our children's learning experiences. We dissect the subtleties of communication frequency, the importance of predictable messaging schedules, and the undeniable value of two-way conversations. By inviting feedback and fostering channels that encourage parental engagement, Meghan illustrates how schools can strengthen their community bonds. This session isn't just about refining your communication tactics; it's about transforming them into tools for building lasting connections with families and students alike. Join us for a session that will leave you inspired to elevate your educational communication game.

Meghan Everette serves as the State Director of Utah Leading through Effective, Actionable, and Dynamic Education (ULEAD) at the Utah State Board of Education. She is a veteran educator and taught elementary school in the National Turnaround Model School, was a mathematics coach, and recently served two years as a Full-Time School Ambassador Fellow in the U.S. Department of Education. She co-founded and served as Executive Director of the ASCD Emerging Leader Alumni Affiliate and co-authored the ASCD book Forces of Influence: How Educators can Leverage Relationships to Improve Practice. Meghan was the 2013 Alabama Elementary Teacher of the Year and a 2015-2017 Hope Street Group National Teacher Fellow. She co-designed PoweredBy Teach to Lead Utah and spent six years as a blogger for Scholastic sharing classroom practices on everything from curriculum design to classroom libraries. She was a Digital Promise Micro-Credential Leader and served on the CCSSO Teacher Recruitment and Retention Educator Steering Committee. Meghan earned her doctorate from the University of Florida with an emphasis on how mass communication theory can be applied to improve trust through school communication.

Today's episode was brought to you by Plan Z Professional Learning Services, Forward Thinking Educator Support. Find out more at www.PlanZPLServices.com. Follow us @PlanZPLS on Twitter and Instagram.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

Welcome to the Minimalist Educator Podcast, a podcast about pairing down to refocus on the purpose and priorities in our roles with co-hosts and co-authors of the Minimalist Teacher Book, Tammy Musiowsky-Borniman and Christine Arnold.

Speaker 2: 0:34

In this episode, megan talks about simplifying communication to keep messaging direct and being mindful of your audience. Her pair down pointer is five things to keep in mind when planning your communication. Dr Megan Everett serves as the State Director of ULEAD, utah, leading through Effective, actionable and Dynamic Education. She is a veteran educator coach and recently served two years as the Full Time School Ambassador Fellow in the US Department of Education. She is an ASCD author and affiliate leader and former Alabama Elementary Teacher of the Year. Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the Minimalist Educator. Today, tammy and I are here with Megan Everett. How are you, megan? I'm great, thanks. How are you? Yeah, good. And how about Tammy? I'm pretty well, thank you, awesome. So I'm really excited to have you here with us today, megan, to talk about communication. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with communication and how you are now the expert that we can call on?

Speaker 3: 1:43

Expert might be a stretch. Yeah, so I actually started my career in the field of communication I have a background in advertising and public relations and got a master's degree and that worked in that for a little while before returning to get a master's in education and then a doctorate in education, and when I was approaching my dissertation topic, one of the things I was really interested in is drawing different areas of expertise together. I think in education sometimes we get too much influence from the business world, certainly, but sometimes we're not great about pulling those pieces of information and knowledge from the world around us, and so I wanted to bring communication theory to the field of communication. At the same time, covid was happening and I was seeing a lot of communication errors and mistrust in what was going on in the field of education, and so thinking about how communication is a tool for building trust with our communities fed into that as well.

Speaker 4: 2:48

Yeah, that was a really interesting time that you were writing that, because there was so much mass communication going out, especially, you know, we live in a school world, right. So what were you finding were some of the biggest maybe errors or challenges or miscommunications that were happening because there was just so much confusion at that time.

Speaker 3: 3:12

I think there was a lot of confusion and that was really hard for everybody. You know things were changing you can even say day to day, they were changing hour to hour in a lot of cases and so schools, I think, were doing their best to get that information out quickly to families. One of the principles that I talked with told me that the way that their communication really changed is they moved from trying to be storytellers and presenting their school in ways that we feel really comfortable and good with to very targeted, simple, bulleted messages, because when you have to get communication out like that, it has to just be so caught and dry about what people need when they need it, and so, unfortunately, they had to let go of a lot of those other kinds of messages, especially as COVID was starting and we were figuring things out.

Speaker 2: 4:06

Yeah, it makes sense, and people had so much going on in their lives anyway. So, yeah, I can see the purpose of that for sure. So do you have any strategies for us about how we can be clear and concise and sort of cut through some of that ambiguity that we have in our world in education?

Speaker 3: 4:26

Sure. So I think some of the best research in this area actually comes from Todd Rogers, who's a behavioral scientist at Harvard, and he's done a lot of work with attendance works, and they talk about truancy and how we get parents to attend to these messages of importance regarding coming to school, and a few of the just cut and dry things that he talks about are you know, you don't need images cutting back the text of whatever you have. So they have run studies side by side with longer messages and shorter messages, and even in the case of trying to persuade somebody to attend one of their sessions or register for an event, they have found those short messages, direct to the point with an action step in them, is what garners the most attention. Now I disagree a little bit in terms of telling your school story. I think you still need those images and they can be really powerful, but when you're trying to be very clear and concise, saying exactly what you mean becomes really, really important.

Speaker 4: 5:31

Yeah, for sure. I think also some of that confusion came with. And still, you know, when you look back at some of the old communications that have come out from schools, or even things that I've sent out, like what was I really talking about here? Did I get my point? Because we're talking with so many different stakeholders right? So we're talking with potential like school board members and parents and students and colleagues or staff, like, depending, what your role is. So how do you use the same type of strategy for each of those audiences, or is there a different style that you need to use?

Speaker 3: 6:11

Yeah, that's really important. So in my research I took mass communication theories and kind of pulled them together to see what were the like threads, and there were five, but the one that undercuts all of them is this idea of audience. So you can't communicate until you know who your audience is, and what I found in some of the work I did with schools was a lot of assumption, making around what the audience could or couldn't do, what or wouldn't be interested in, without ever really going and talking to them, surveying them, reading out what they wanted. So a great example is a principal that told me well, you know, our school really doesn't have the connectivity that they need and so we can't do. We don't worry with our website, we don't do online messaging or anything like that. We'll come to find out. No, they didn't have the connectivity that they needed for the classroom with computers and devices in that way. What they did have was phones, and so almost every parent actually had a cell phone and would have preferred messaging and forms that they could do from their cell phone. And so that's just one way that knowing and understanding your audience and actually going and talking to them sets you up to have a really powerful message.

Speaker 3: 7:32

So to your point, Tammy, about do you keep the same message. You can have the same intent, but you have to tailor it to who you're talking to you and there's more to it than that. You have to tailor it for the medium that you're using. How often have you gotten an email where you said, well, I really needed a meeting to understand this. Or you've gotten an email, or you've sat through a meeting that you're like this should have been an email. So making sure that your medium is matching your message is just as important as the words you're saying.

Speaker 2: 8:06

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We're talking here a lot about, I guess, text-based written communication. Do you have any different suggestions for when we're communicating face-to-face with different stakeholders?

Speaker 3: 8:23

Yeah, absolutely so. One of the easiest ones with education to think about is the jargon that we use. We roll off acronyms all the time and we just take for granted that people know what they mean, even when we're talking amongst other educators. So what I call a PLC might be something totally different to you, but we're really talking about the same thing, or even concepts. We think we understand. I know what coaching looks like here, but coaching might have a totally different connotation somewhere else. So, thinking about those kinds of things, and then, yeah, there's just lots of things to consider when you're talking face-to-face, because now it's not only the words that you're using, it's your gestures, it's your eye movement, it's your.

Speaker 3: 9:12

One of my favorite is proximity. How close you're standing to somebody else can impart a lot, and a lot of those things are cultural too. So we know how we would feel if it were our family, our friends, our workplace. But how does that feel to, maybe, a family member that comes from a different background, and what does that mean to them? Is it rude to stand too close? Does it feel like you're pushing into their space, or is that how you make somebody feel comfortable? And so, again, it goes back to that knowing your audience piece of what they're comfortable with.

Speaker 3: 9:49

There's also one other piece in verbal communication, non-written communication, that I find really interesting. That's called this idea of matching, and what that is is a little counterintuitive. But let's say that you're in a discussion with somebody and they're very angry and they're very loud. Now we know that we match with our friends, right? If I'm talking to my friend Tammy and Tammy's being kind of quiet, that I will also be quiet to match her. But when somebody is really angry and I rate sometimes matching that energy mirrors to them what they're doing and can actually diffuse the situation, which sounds completely counterintuitive, right.

Speaker 3: 10:30

Right, you're telling you should have get loud back, but there's a lot of nuances that come in. You mentioned how communication is so complex, and it really is and anytime you're adding all those facial cues and physical cues and tone into what you're saying, it just becomes that much more complex.

Speaker 4: 10:54

Yeah, it does. And I think about working in a small school and kind of our levels of communication, where we're facing parents a lot of the time and that's like a daily, multiple times daily occurrence. Of course. We're students facing all the time or working with teachers all the time and there's so much information being shared in different ways, even on a small scale, so we have that face to face. You know, first thing in the morning we see everyone and then sometimes there's a text message.

Speaker 4: 11:28

You know we use remind as one of our ways to communicate with parents for essential things. Then teachers are also communicating through like a weekly email so they share some stuff that's happening in classrooms with pictures, and then we have things like progress reports and parent teacher communications and things like that. So they're all. They seem like all essential communications. But how do we balance? Like because sometimes we work on the side of over communicate so that we know everybody's getting the message. But is there like a magic, something magical where you're like OK, I know everybody's got the information, that's essential? You know what I mean. Like, how do we strike that balance? It's really hard.

Speaker 3: 12:14

Sadly, there's not one perfect thing, even in the, even in the world of advertising, where they spend a lot of time thinking about the frequency of messages, how often somebody needs to hear it and the intensity of that message. There's no perfect formula for that. If it was, if there was, you would go out and buy whatever product every time. Right, it would be the silver bullet theory of advertising, where it's like I've advertised it to you perfectly and so clearly you're going to follow through.

Speaker 1: 12:45

And if we could do that?

Speaker 3: 12:46

everybody also know their multiplication facts, right? Like we would, we would use this force for good. So there's no one perfect way, but one of the things that you're talking about is a suggestion around planning where it's really important to write down all and I suggest physically writing it down or putting it in a spreadsheet what are all the different channels that you're using and it's important in a school system to think about? Ok, there are messages coming from, probably, the state or district or LEA level. There are messages coming from the school. There's messages coming from your classroom, right? So what are all these different channels of communication that a parent might be hearing from? And then one thing you can do is just monitor the things that go out in a week or two weeks time, see the volume that people are getting and look for overlaps, because we know that there are people that are going to attend to a message on Facebook. Better than that, they're going to attend to a message on a piece of paper in their child's backpack, right? We don't all hear things in the same way, so there is some need to see where there's different messages are, but there may be places where there's redundancy that's really not needed or where you could be more strategic about the things that you're doing.

Speaker 3: 14:05

Another piece of that is creating an expectation for parents around when and where messages come from.

Speaker 3: 14:13

So imagine that my child's school always does home calls or texts or their calling system at four o'clock in the afternoon. If there's something important, it's going to ring right after school and get to hear that, and then I get a message on a Tuesday morning. So one is I know to expect that afternoon call. I know the level of attention that I need to pay it, I know it's a reminder for the next day or whatever. Another thing is that when something comes out of the ordinary I'm like, oh, crisis communication, I need to pay attention to it. So anytime you're building in some systems of expectation for families, then if they've missed it, they know where to go. Right, if I know this is in my child's backpack every Monday, then whether I checked it or not on Monday, I at least know where to go and when I should expect it, and so that can be really important and, like I said, it can also help you really attend to those messages that are out of the blue, that are crisis communication that you need to focus on.

Speaker 2: 15:15

Yeah, I have so many questions popping up in my head, but I'll try it. I'll try it. I like the idea of a Tuesday morning. Why did you choose a Tuesday morning? No reason, okay.

Speaker 3: 15:28

But just something out of the ordinary right? Yes, what I found when I was talking with schools here is a lot of times they had these messages that needed to go out, and what would happen is they would relay that information to the school secretary, who would put it into the all-call system. But that could happen at any given time. So parents were probably getting messages in the backpack or not, on a Monday or not.

Speaker 3: 15:56

They get it in their phone during the day after school, whenever, and that's fine. That's one way to do it, certainly, but then I never know which one of those is important and I've run the risk of kind of tuning all of them out.

Speaker 2: 16:13

We have our weekly news. Let it go out on a Friday afternoon, which I think works for us as staff members to do a summary of our week and think about what's needed for next week. But I do sometimes wonder whether that's the best time for the parents they're just launching into the weekend. Do they really want to? Is that the best time for them to process all of this information? So that's why I was like oh, Tuesday, interesting, Sorry.

Speaker 3: 16:41

Well, no, at least you're consistent, though right, and consistency is something that the parents can rely on, and they know. If something did pop up on a Tuesday, well, that's probably special and I should pay attention to it in some way.

Speaker 2: 16:54

Yeah, sorry, tammy, if I'm speaking too much, but I think one of the things with communication that schools often fall into the trap of is a lot of the communication is one way it's coming from school towards the parents, to the families. What have we been doing? Why are we doing what we're doing? What do you need to know that's coming up? What can we do to make it more of a dialogue, a two-way conversation, so that we also fully informed about what's going on with the kids?

Speaker 3: 17:33

That's a really important question, I think one it goes to systems and how you set up to operate. So that could be systems. In a lot of one is it's the heyday of two-way communication. They're building more and more of these systems like Remind, where you could text back, like Clostogio, or apps where you can converse in the app but you don't feel like you're being infringed in your personal phone space, right. But they build in these places where people can ask a question back or they can directly respond.

Speaker 3: 18:10

We're so used to that with email and text, but you're right, we don't often build it into our communication methods from school where we push out and push out. So that's one kind of system that can be put in place. But another thing is to be really intentional about the spaces and times that you're offering for that. If you send out a message and you don't tell somebody specifically I want you to respond, here is how you can respond. They're not going to do it right, they're going to take in that information or not, but they don't know that. That's what you need from them and so being really purposeful about the asks and where you put them right. You can't put that on absolutely every piece of communication, but you can when it's really important to you or as a reminder. If you're sending something once a week on a Friday, remember we want to hear from you. Please let me know Positive, negative question like and keep telling people that they can do that and should do that and how they can do it.

Speaker 4: 19:18

Yeah, I think the how often gets left off right, it's that called action, what do you actually need to do now? Because? And then that you know, when people know exactly what to do, it eliminates the confusion and there's the clarity there. We are about the time to wrap up our episode and we always ask our guests for a pair down pointer, which is some kind of tip that you suggest that would, in this case, help communication be clear, simple, more functional, more easier way to get out that essential information.

Speaker 3: 19:55

Sure, so this is gonna be oversimplified, but I mentioned before there are five key points to think about. So audience cross cuts them all, but the context of what you're saying, like the actual words. The medium, so the way that you're sending it via that email or piece of paper. The design, so what it actually looks like on the page with white space and fonts and things. And then the timing when you send it and how often you send it. All of those things have an effect, and so you're either making an intentional choice around them. That has an effect, or you're not doing them, and that also has an effect. And so I would say that those are kind of the key things to keep in mind when you are doing any kind of communication.

Speaker 2: 20:44

That was really helpful, megan. We really appreciate your time today. We've learned a lot and got lots of things to think about and refer back to, so thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, today's episode was brought to you by Plan Z Professional Learning Services Forward-thinking educator support. Find out more at Plan Z PL Services dot com.

Speaker 1: 21:11

Be sure to join Tammy and Christine and guests for more episodes of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. They would love to hear about your journey with minimalism. Connect with them at Plan Z PLS on Twitter or Instagram. The music for the podcast has been written and performed by Gaya Moretti.