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Dear Keystone Community,  

Warm May greetings to each of you!   

As we enter a particularly busy stretch at school, with graduation for our 12th graders planned just 2 weeks from tomorrow (on Saturday May 20th), let’s reflect on one of our five shared values, Ren. At Keystone we translate this complex and critical value as compassion. It is also often described as an essential humanness, and being the value that drives us to radiate love and compassion for each other, and the world around us.

Like all enduring or ancient values, there are modern strategies, tactics and frameworks that help us make meaning of the values and apply them in our lived lives.  For Ren, the notion of intercultural or cross-cultural or multicultural communication is one such framework. Compassion, or full humanness, can be realized every day through skilled communication.  An important skill associated with expert multicultural communication is the idea of assuming positive intent. This skill is quite easy to practice and meaningful to master-- you simply assume that in every interaction you are having, others are trying their very best with what they have. You assume that their intent in the interaction was positive and good.

At Keystone, we are, by design, a multicultural learning environment and the rewards and risks of intercultural communication are part of our daily lives. As a learner of Mandarin Chinese, like many of my colleagues, the first and most immediate challenge we face is the linguistic barrier. Earlier this week I ate a meal at a restaurant with another person who, like me, is not yet strong in Mandarin. We did our best to be what I call “polite tourists”.  This was simple for us because neither of us had any food allergies and if we didn’t get a dish that we thought we ordered we wouldn’t starve, and if we got an extra one, we would happily try it.  And we assumed positive intent: we assumed that the servers and the staff in the restaurant wanted us to have a positive experience and were also doing their best to do their jobs well with the information they had.  Also, we had another thing on our side—the situation was low stakes: We were going to be okay if we didn’t effectively communicate what we wanted to eat. We were not married to a particular outcome.  

The restaurant experience was a good context for us to practice our intercultural communication skills (not to mention a little bit of our linguistic skills). At school, we also create lots of opportunities like this for our children and our employees. Along with a little over a dozen colleagues I attend a weekly KAP where secondary school students teach us conversational and practical Chinese. Same thing—low stakes, assuming positive intent—super fun. When humility, low stakes and positive intentions combine, things are joyful, learning abounds. 

And, as we all know, learning can also be powerful when things are high stakes. Exams, performances, difficult negotiations, a difficult conversation with a child, a parent, a boss, a colleague or even a friend, these are all real-life examples of high stakes learning environments. Ane even when the stakes are high, we always have access to the skill of assuming positive intent, and it can often be a powerful way that Ren shows up in our lives. Whether we are talking about compassion for ourselves, or for others that we are communicating with, assuming positive intent can turn a difficult conversation into a transformative one. 

We are all better at communicating when we assume the other person or people in the conversation are trying to do their best with the information and skills they have.  It is a transformative tool for joyfully working and living in a global community. Over the next few weeks, I welcome you to think about this notion of assuming positive intent and how it relates to our shared value of Ren.  Send me an email or teams message or catch me in the hallways or around campus—I'd love to hear how some attention to this may help you make our community even stronger.

Warmly,

Emily