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Put three educators in the same meeting, classroom, or school situation, and they may walk away having noticed three completely different things.
One may immediately think about time, resources, and whether the plan is realistic.
Another notices the people involved, the relationships, and who needs to be included.
And someone else is already thinking about the possibilities, the message, and how to get people excited.
Why?
In this episode of Enneagram for Educators, we introduce the three Instinctual Biases - Preserving, Navigating, and Transmitting - through the Awareness to Action Enneagram framework and explore how they can show up specifically in education.
While your Enneagram type can help explain the strategies and patterns you tend to rely on, your Instinctual Bias adds another layer: What does your attention naturally notice and prioritize?
We all have access to all three. But we tend to favor one—and that bias can influence what catches our attention in a staff meeting, how we respond to a new initiative, what we prioritize in our classrooms, and even what we think everyone else should be paying attention to.
The 3 Instinctual Biases in Education
Preserving: “Do we have what we need?”
Preserving attention tends to notice resources, time, energy, capacity, practical needs, and sustainability.
In education, this may be the teacher asking whether there's enough planning time to implement the new initiative, making sure the classroom has the supplies students need, or thinking about whether a great idea is actually sustainable.
A Preserving school leader may naturally pay attention to staffing, budgets, schedules, resources, and protecting the capacity of the people on their team.
And while that can sometimes be interpreted as resistance, “Why are they already pointing out what we don't have?," hey may actually be asking an important question:
Do we have what we need to do this well?
Navigating: “Who are the people, and how does this work?”
Navigating attention tends to notice people, relationships, roles, expectations, influence, and the dynamics within a group or system.
In a school, a Navigating educator may quickly notice who needs to be involved in a decision, how different students or colleagues will respond, who has influence, and what approach will work best with a particular person or group.
They may intuitively understand that the lesson that works beautifully with one class won't necessarily land the same way with another, or that a conversation with one parent, coworker, or administrator requires a very different approach than a conversation with someone else.
For leaders, this attention can be especially valuable when building teams, introducing change, understanding school dynamics, and getting the right people involved.
Transmitting: “How do we get this out into the world?”
Transmitting attention tends to move toward energy, ideas, expression, impact, excitement, and getting something moving.
These may be the educators asking, “How can we make this more engaging?” “How do we get people excited about this?” or, “What could this become?”
Think of the inspirational teachers we often see portrayed in movies like Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus: teachers whose energy, ideas, and ability to engage others become part of what makes the learning experience memorable.
A Transmitting school leader may naturally bring vision, enthusiasm, innovation, and momentum to a team.
The watch-out? Sometimes there can be a lot of launch and not quite as much landing.
Same situation. Different attention.
Imagine a school announces a major new initiative.
The Preserving educator may ask:
Do we have the time, training, staffing, and resources to do this?
The Navigating educator may ask:
Who's leading this? Who needs to be involved? What's expected of me?
The Transmitting educator may ask:
What's the vision? How are we introducing this? How do we get people excited about it?
None of those questions is wrong.
In fact, your school probably needs someone asking all three.
The challenge comes when the question our brain asks first becomes the question we believe everyone should be asking.
That's where understanding Instinctual Biases becomes useful.
For teachers and education leaders, this framework can help explain why coworkers respond differently to change, why certain priorities feel obvious to one person but not another, and why people can experience the exact same meeting or situation very differently.
It can also give school leaders a practical lens for communicating change: Have we addressed the resources and capacity? The people, roles, and relationships? The vision, message, and possibilities?
And for your own self-awareness, try noticing this week:
What does my brain notice first?
Resources, capacity, and practical needs?
People, roles, and relationships?
Ideas, energy, and impact?
Then ask one more question:
What might I be missing because my attention went there first?
That's where awareness becomes something you can use.
Enneagram for Educators explores how teachers, school leaders, administrators, and education teams can use the Enneagram to better understand themselves, improve communication, navigate conflict, strengthen relationships, and better understand the people they work with and serve.
