EMR: A Simple Reflection Strategy for More Intentional Relationships - John Norlin

So this week, I wanna highlight one called EMR.

You might have heard of it, but here would be the question: Have you ever had a goal that you wanted to accomplish, but it didn't happen? Well, welcome to the CS Weekly, a quick idea or strategy to help you transform your daily work.

Now, the weight of the work that happens in education, we know is a lot.

We know that at the foundation, relationships matter.

The work we do with students, the work we do with our fellow staff, the work that happens with our families, how can we be more intentional in that space? Well, one evidence-based strategy by our very own Dr.

Clayton Cook, who at the time was at the University of Mini- Minnesota, is called EMR, and it stands for Establish, Maintain, Restore.

And it's actually a simple strategy.

This week, take your class roster if you're a teacher, take your staff roster if you're an administrator, and simply conduct a reflection exercise.

Look at each of those names, and next to each name, put either E, M, or R.

If you put an E, you're still establishing a relationship with that student or person.

If you put an M, you're in the maintaining phase.

You've established, and now you're in that maintaining mode, and that's ideal, right? Still takes work, but that's the ideal.

That's what we wanna get to.

It's where you wanna be, but it still takes work.

Or you put an R.

And in some cases, we need to restore a relationship, especially in education when you're trying to manage sometimes 20, 30-plus students.

Now, after you do the reflection exercise, the whole goal is that you can't do everything.

You can't be all things for all people at once, so you zero in.

In most cases, we're zeroing in on especially those Rs, right, that we need to restore, and take some real intentional actions to restore those relationships.

We can also focus in on some of the Es.

Maybe we pick one E this week that we're still in the establishing phase.

We can use one of the other strategies we've shared during a CS Weekly to be more intentional to establish that relationship.

We can be more intentional with the relationships we have each day.

As we like to say at Character Strong, at the core of our work, it's all about relationships.

So remember, taking a little extra time to reflect and be intentional in this way, although it might cost me an extra three minutes here or five minutes there, this is not one more thing on the plate.