The Four Agreements and "Heart Currency"

I should have taken out my copy of “The Four Agreements” during my team’s RTI meeting on Friday.

Things started out fine, with my team’s teachers sharing updates about students with the RTI facilitator and RTI coordinator. (The RTI facilitator is a fellow teacher at the school who gives up one of her preps once a week and the RTI coordinator is a fellow teacher at the school who is on release from her usual teaching position for the whole year.) Then, when conversation moved to a student I’ll call Sam, things became a bit intense. Earlier in the year, they tried to have Sam keep track of his behavior with a behavior chart, but that didn’t work, so the teachers decided that they would do the charting themselves. When the coordinator asked to see the teacher’s charts so that she could input the data into the computer, the teachers told her that they didn’t have the charts. The facilitator reminded them that they had agreed to do it and if they were not on board with this particular intervention, then they would have to decide on something else.

Some words were exchanged and from my point of view it seemed like there were two different conversations happening between the coordinator and one of the teachers. As a peer, the coordinator was just doing her job and trying to collect the data from the teachers. She wasn’t out to “get” the teachers in any way. She said several times that she knows keeping track of so many students is not easy and that her team last year often struggled with this as well. The teacher, on the other hand, was trying to make the point that she doesn’t believe in the premise of data collection. From the teacher’s perspective, she knows her students from observations and conversations, without this “bean counting.” Unfortunately, the teacher broke one of “The Four Agreements” when she took one of the RTI facilitator’s comments personally, seeing it as an attack.

As an outside observer, the comment seemed neutral, but of course, I am not sure of the history between these two. They are PEOPLE and people often butt heads because of personality differences, previous conflicts, etc. This is where the second Agreement, “Don’t Take Anything Personally” and even the third Agreement, “Don’t Make Assumptions” come into play. It seems like the two weren’t communicating as clearly as they could have, so the meeting wasn’t as productive as it might have been.

Despite the tension that hung in the air, I still left the meeting hopeful because both teachers had Sam’s best interests in mind. Though they have different beliefs about how to best help him, this conflict wouldn’t have occurred if they didn’t care. As Dr. Cook mentioned in seminar, we teachers operate in “heart currency,” and sometimes our hearts put different values on different items and goals…