It's all about building culture

I have been mulling over the theme "reconciling standards with 21st century learning" for a few weeks now, or to be honest, for the last sixteen years or so (I have been in education for seventeen years). The first year of teaching, there was no mulling or reflecting, just surviving.

Since I an relatively new to the world of blogging and tweeting, I thought I would first tell a brief bit about myself and so you could put my thoughts into some sort of context. I began my teaching career in a very large, urban elementary school in the early nineties as a Teach for America teacher. I absolutely loved it, became a certified teacher, and stayed for a total of five years at my placement school, three years beyond the two year commitment most TFA members serve. I served at my school during an interesting time period because I taught there before there were any sort of state standards and while I served standards were put into place by the state of Maryland. I have to be honest, I am not anti-standards in any way, shape, or form. Before standards were instituted, my school was the education version of the wild west. Everybody just did their own thing and there certainly was no sheriff in town to keep things orderly. I survived on some old textbooks, an educator's library card from Baltimore County that allowed me to check out vast amounts of books, and my wits. My colleagues, once they saw I was not a quitter (which was well into my second year of teaching) started to help me too.

Toward the end of my tenure in Baltimore, standards were put into place. I felt a certain a sense of relief that I did not have to come up with everything myself. I also liked that I had some sort of measure to strive for with my students. I also knew our school, with new leadership along with the state standards, began to take the education of poor, minority children much more seriously than they had before.

Fast forward ten years and I am now an elementary principal in Albemarle County, Virginia in a school that is a majority minority school with two thirds of our students qualifying or free/reduced lunch. I was placed in the school, my second as principal, to "turn it around". Turning a school around, in case you have not been reading anything for the past five years or so essentially means getting those test scores up. My first year at the school in 2007, I was confident I could raise those test scores from I guess my sheer presence. That first spring, the test scores actually went down.

That began the major "aha" moment that has carried me through the last three years of leading my school. With the scores going down that year, we qualified for a school improvement grant from the state and used some of the money on some powerful staff development the folks from Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning. What I started to learn that year from this professional development that I experienced with our staff was that it was all about building our culture and it was not just about test scores. Sure, we went on to significantly raise our scores two years ago (with a dip in reading this past year) but we started to make some intentional changes in our community of learners, adults and children, that have allowed us to attempt the reconciliation between 21st century learning and the standards movement (for the purposes of this post, 21st century learning standards equals our work with expeditionary learning, hands on learning, authentic products, public audience etc.)

So now, a few years later, our school is on a continual path of working deeply and thoughtfully with state standards in a way to make them meaningful to 21st century learners, our students. We have a long way to go in the process, but I have learned some things along the way as a leader that I think, helps support teachers in public schools to deal with the tests and also make learning engaging and meaningful.

• All learners in the building must have social and emotional needs attended to through respect and basic human kindness. Our work through Responsive Classroom has been powerful and transformative and has taught us that adult learners have a need for support and connection as much as kids do. Most of our meetings have some sort of connective time that allows to value each other or just plain have fun.
  
• To borrow a phrase from Bob Sutton, the principal must serve as a "human shield" from this awful world of punishment and corrective action that we experience with NCLB. A true leader never uses threat and "if we don't get the scores up bad stuff is going to happen" kind of language with a staff. Of course, I have probably resorted to this a time or two over the years, I am human and have been in a high stress position. But as soon as a staff is threatened, innovation and change end. And I have not done it in a long time.
  
• The leader must model not only good quality instructional practice, but also be completely honest when things go wrong. When you ask a staff to innovate, mistakes will happen all of the time. They are wonderful mistakes, and they will happen a lot, but mistakes must be seen as reflective opportunities and we must model that constantly. People will want to take more risks when they see a leader or colleague to the same. When I lesson plan a meeting, and the lesson does not go according to plan or was just plain bad, I admit it. That can be a powerful thing.
  
• Leadership must be distributed throughout the school. I am lucky to work with a very powerful group of people. I used to try and make all or most of the decisions, and I did it poorly. Now, we are creating structures to tap into the real leadership that is evident throughout our building and are helping us to build a culture of honesty and collaboration at a level that I have never experienced before. In a committee meeting just two days ago, teachers were having a lively and spirited discussion about what true achievement in math really means in an elementary school. If that comes from me in a meeting, it is about a tiny fraction as powerful as it is when it happens among colleagues.
  
• A leader needs to set in place feedback loops from both parents and staff that help keep us on course and also help us realize where we are not communicating very well. Everything always makes perfect sense in my head. My first year at my current school, everything was in my head and no one had any sense of what was wanted. Beginning this fourth year, I am trying relentlessly to see if people are understanding all of the goals and trying to get feedback about where we are in terms of that communication.
  

A good leader of a public school in this country is in constant reconciliation mode between standards and 21st century learning. If you put supportive, honest, and strong structures in place to help everyone in the building learn and take risks, I firmly believe that we can live well with the standards without losing engagement and deep understanding. It is a long hard journey, but in my mind, the only one worth taking.

Lesson Planning for Administrators

In my seventeen years in education as a teacher and administrator, I have taken part as a participant or a leader in hundreds or even thousands of meetings. As a principal, I would always really plan with participating teacher leaders any sort of staff development that was offered at my schools over the years. These staff development sessions would include pre-service week meetings and school based staff development days. But these staff development sessions were only a fraction of our time together. We would also spend a large amount of time in "meetings". For meetings, I would prepare an agenda, with letters on the side and if I was really organized, time allotments next to the items. Sometimes we would do a reading and have a great discussion in these meetings, but they still felt like meetings.

In the past three years, I have been very lucky be a part of my school's involvement with both Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning. Every time I have ever taken part of any sort of staff development or meeting with folks from either of these organizations, the time together is as well planned as a master lesson from a strong teacher. In fact the meetings have a very powerful feel, time is well spent and purposeful. Everyone who attends is asked to participate and that participation is valued. I have learned greatly from this experience.

Learning only really happens if it causes new action of some sort. During these past years, I have planned some of my meetings, but this year I am committing to lesson planning every single meeting I lead and sharing my lesson plans ahead of time with the participants so I can get feedback. These lesson plans will include learning targets, both short term and long term, focused reading and structured discussions, and maybe most importantly they will lead to some sort of committed action. These are all strategies that we our teachers are working on so I need to do the same.

It is perhaps embarrassing to say that I am really coming to this in my tenth year as a principal. Already though, it has me more excited for our meetings and I think our teachers are more engaged.

I know I need to find more ways to use Assessment for Learning strategies in my meetings so that will be a goal of mine as the year goes. It is a motivating and empowering to realize that every time we meet should be well planned and thoughtful.

It also makes it hard when I attend meetings outside of my school that use the typical agenda outlines with times attached. But hopefully I can find ways to influence that as well as the year goes on.

Leadership Thoughts from Netflix

Reading Dan Pink's blog this morning, and then looking at the Netflix slide deck shared on the blog, got me thinking about a question posed to me a month ago in a school leadership class at the University of Virginia that I was visiting as a practioner. A student in the class asked me a classic question, "when trying to turn around low performing schools, what works better, the carrot or the stick?" Since I don't come to visit graduate level classes very often, I stumbled around for a while before answering, "neither". I know, I was not very impressed with that answer either.

So in typical fashion for me, that question has been stewing around for quite a while with the thought of trying to blog about it. It took some thoughts from the leadership at Netflix to get me writing this morning. Here are some choice quotes from the slides:

"The best managers figure out how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control their people."

When things go wrong, "ask yourself, what context did you fail to set?"

"When you are tempted to control your people, ask yourself, what context you could set instead. Are you articulating and inspiring enough about goals and strategies?"

And finally, "high performance people will do better work if they understand the context."

I love all of these quotes because I think they get at the ideas that truly define leadership. It is about building culture (I word I do use a lot) communally, and about setting context (I word I don't use but will now) or another way of putting it is it is all about framing things for people.

The thing I also love about the quotes/philosophy of Netflix is that it puts the responsibility to respond and reflect on the leader. If things are not going well, how can I communicate better, is a question I typically ask myself. I am not always sure other leaders in education do the same.

There is a lot of "blame the teachers and principals" in the current education policy world and blogosphere. As a principal in a building, I always cringe when I hear other administrators talk badly about teachers in any sort of way. Teachers, any sort of employee or humans in general, are largely creatures of their context.

In my school division, we are in the midst of pre-service time for teachers. It is THE Time to set up context for the staff.

What contexts have we tried to set up a Greer during this time?

• Shared and distributed leadership
• Shared focus on instruction
• An "all out" effort to reach our community
• Giving people some time to wrestle with our school improvement goals and strategies

We will see over time this year how successful we are with these contexts. I will be able to see through implementation in the classrooms. I will be able to see through carefully looking at feedback loops from both staff and community. And I will have to keep asking myself the tough questions when things do not go well, like, "where did I go wrong in setting the context?"

Here's to a great school year at Greer and schools everywhere!

The Power and Potential of Planning

There are lots of cliche/quotes about planning. Failing to plan is planning to fail comes to mind. Or the planning is more important than the plan. Which, is a quote/cliche I actually like. But, needless to say, the word planning really gets no one excited in the world of education reform. It is, however, an extremely powerful action that would help us bring the "change" in education that we want.

At our school, we try to plan more than the normal school. We have an annual retreat in June where teachers work together to either plan instruction or fine tune the school improvement plan. This summer, I also have spent several powerful days planning with our assistant principal and instructional guides trying to plan leadership retreats, our pre-service week agenda, and our school improvement plan. I still feel like it is not enough. We need time to plan our work together. And we don't seem to have the resources to plan enough.

Our highly progressive, high functioning school system has a June and August leadership retreat where we review goals for the school year and learn new leadership strategies. They are powerful days but nowhere near enough. We need time to work through some of our improvement issues together as a leadership team, but we don't have the time.

One of my summer reads, Quiet Leadership by David Rock, says that "to take any kind of committed action, people need to think things through for themselves."

When we plan together, we can plan learning activities that engage all of the activities in our school so we can think through things for ourselves. We just need to rethink our use of resources to make things like this happen.

If a school continues with the "summer off" method of scheduling, teachers and school leadership teams should have several weeks of planning to make the kind of powerful changes we don't see enough in classroom instruction. During summer time, or some other off time, people have the mental space to think through things for themselves, in order to change.

That does not really happen the way we want it to, because we do the majority of our planning on the fly when we all have a million things going on during the school day or after school.

I don't think change will start occurring until we start to rethink the way we structure adult learning in our schools. Give me the resources to gather teachers for a few weeks every summer.

And I will stop bothering everyone.

In the Trenches Part II

I regularly read Bob Sutton's blog called "Work Matters". Bob is a business professor at Stanford and I love what he has to say about leadership and the workplace. He created the following list of twelve things that good bosses believe and bad bosses ignore.

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is "what happens after people make a mistake?"
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do.
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

It is a powerful list because he has a way of clearing through all of the b.s. that is out there about leadership and distilling what we need to do as bosses and leaders in order to be effective.

I especially like number 2 and 3. Education is rife right now with policy theories and debates, especially in regards to what will make the American education system better. I know the policy world does not work this way, but what if we started to focus on supporting and developing school district leaders and school principals who try to do embody the twelve beliefs above. I don't pretend to embody all twelve myself. Anyone who works for me will tell you that I get some a lot better than others. That is why my focus is on number two and three on the list.

To lead my school well, I need embody both of those ideas. What does that mean? It means that I need to refine my instructional leadership and be a better evaluator, supervisor, and frankly, a better teacher. It means that I can have all of the big ideas I want but if I don't try to create the vision with the staff through thousands of small wins in our actions, the big ideas mean nothing.

I have a habit of trying to escape "the trenches" by getting into the world of ideas too much. This mainly happens through books, blogs, and simply thinking about how great things would be if all of the wonderful ideas in my head just simply became reality. Ideas are important, but without action, they are meaningless. Our school is in the early process of trying to change mid course into an Expeditionary Learning School. Everyone in the school has a slightly different idea of what means and some are much more excited about it than others. For a long time, the idea of an Expeditionary Learning School was simply an idea in my head. Now, it ever so slightly is starting to become a reality. But I am now realizing, in the day to day moment, it loses its power as a big huge goal and idea. Where the power resides is in the day to day actions of individuals at our schools who do something just a little more engaging with their students than they did before, and who expect to be a part of decision making and that their feedback is heard, and who create and recreate community each and every day through our morning meetings and circles. At this moment, that is the idea of Expeditionary Learning for me. I am also learning that it is becoming the idea of Expeditionary Learning for a growing number of our staff.

So to get reestablished back into the trenches and do some real work to make this happen, what am I to do? I need to get better at mastering the day to day workings of my school, be a better evaluator, give better feedback, or just simply give some feedback, and I also need to find ways to root out the negative that gets in the way of our best teachers from trying to implement the vision of Expeditionary Learning. I also need to become a better teacher. I need to do my job as boss, and do it very well, but I also need to become a better teacher, or better put, not forget that a large aspect of my job is teacher.

So yes, this "in the trenches" thing does not appear to be going away anywhere. I guess it is just my state of mind in this moment of my life. It is simply my way to validate what I do, and choose to do every work day morning (and many weekend ones as well). The trench work of helping to lead a school and hopefully help to make it just a little bit better every day and every year that I am there. And believe me, there is a lot of hope in that last statement.

Bob Sutton's list has so much meaning to me because he gets it. It is the thousand of little things I do or not do as a leader that makes the difference to the people I work with and the students they touch. I expect there will be more ruminations on Bob's work in the coming weeks if I find time.

On the value of being (and staying) in the trenches!

On the value of being (and staying) in the trenches!

Of course, the metaphor of “in the trenches” is a bit extreme, but I imagine in every profession it exists. In my case, the metaphor stands for people who stay in schools to work with kids, parents, and teachers. Once you leave to work in central office, the university, or a non-profit, you have left the trenches of building level work. I need to start by saying that I find many folks in central office helpful and sometimes inspiring, deeply value the close work I do with a couple of professors at the university level, and am constantly impressed by some of the new education non-profits that seem to be sprouting all over these days. So, this is not an “us vs. them” dichotomy.

But when you live in the trenches, life can be tough sometimes. When we are working in a school day in and day out, we can deal with volatile emotions and behaviors that sprout up at a moment’s notice and come from unexpected directions. Our valuable think time and less valuable paper work time is done late into the evening or on weekends. That is just the way it goes I guess. So every once in a while, when you are in the trenches, motivation is important. I found two great examples recently.

One is the example of Principal Mike McCarthy of King Middle School in Portland, Maine. Mike has been the principal of King for a couple of decades and has implemented Expeditionary Learning during his time there and transformed it into a model school. His list of ten “must do’s” for school leadership are totally quirky and honest, a hallmark of someone in the trenches doing the work. I love number six on the list: Take Responsibility for the Good and the Bad
“If the problems in your school or organization lie below you and the solutions lie above you, then you have rendered yourself irrelevant. The genius of school lies within the school. The solutions to problems are almost always right in front of you.”
That is the creed of the “in the trenches” principal. We have no job description, really, except that we take responsibility and help people to figure out the way through issues.

Mike’s work has supported and validated me for years in a vicarious manner. Years ago, while teaching in Baltimore, Jeannette’s school worked with Mike and his teachers on developing interdisciplinary units. That was my first introduction to Expeditionary Learning and I have had the dream of implementing this kind of education for years and am now finally starting to do it. Mike also inspires me because he has stayed at his school for so long. In the world of education leadership and policy, many of us are constantly looking for the next job, promotion, speaking gig, whatever instead of focusing in on what really matters. Mike, obviously a talented leader, chose to stay. We need to recognize people like that more often.

My second bit of inspiration comes from someone outside of the trenches, Richard Elmore of Harvard. Writing in the latest Harvard Education Letter (unfortunately not fully available online), he decries the glut of education grad students currently who taught for two years and now want to change the world through policy and leadership. When Elmore sees these students, he wants to tell them “use your time in graduate school to become a better practitioner and get back into schools as quickly as possible. You will have a much more profound effect on the education sector working in schools than you will ever have as a policy actor.” Why do so many leave school though to become “actors” at another level. I would argue that the school work is just plain hard.

I am sure Mike could have been an assistant superintendent or policy expert but he chose to stay in his school and have a profound effect on students.

I do understand the desire sometimes to leave the trenches. When a student tears up my office in a momentary rage or after a day (or many) of spending inordinate amounts of time supervising the cafeteria, bus duty, hall duty (you get the picture) I sometimes think that I should be doing more than this.

When I am able to step back though, and think, and find some motivation from people like Mike, I realize that it is through that kind of work, the day to day “trench work”, that allows me to have the impact on students that I have and hope to increase in the future. It also allows me to have credibility with all of the people I work with without going through my credentials. That is a valuable thing to have and something I don’t want to give up for another twenty to twenty five years at least.

Why no posts?...The dissertation moves slowly along. An interview with myself.

I just realized I have been away for a month but I definitely have been writing. I have been busily trying to finish Chapters 1,2,3 of my dissertation to get ready for my proposal defense, hopefully held by the end of March. And, I have most of it done. I am still trying to finish Chapter 3 but hopefully I have completed most of my work with Chapters 1 and 2.

What is my focus?
I am doing a descriptive study on elementary grade level classroom organization. In other words, how do the elementary schools in Virginia organize their classrooms in relationship to what a teacher teachers. Do teachers teach all subjects? Do teachers specialize? Do they teach somewhere in between?

Instead of trying to prove what model works over another, I am stepping back a bit and just trying to find out what exists out there in terms of models and then ask a few secondary questions of elementary principals in terms of why that particular model is used in the school.

Why this study?
There is remarkably little research on it, and I am interested in the rise of standards, especially math in elementary school, and whether that has forced more schools to have specialized teachers.

Why a dissertation?
This is a question that one asks himself quite a bit in the midst of the process. Why in god's name do this?
As I am deeper into the process now, I can now see that that was more of a procrastination question more than anything. It is enjoyable, it is very intellectually engaging, and it is a powerful feeling to be able to contribute a little piece of dust to the mountain of educational research.

I am working with two professors at UVA that are really forcing me to think and be as analytical as possible in this work. In the age of twitter, I find really spending some time and thinking completely through a body of research to develop a conceptual framework to be important to my growth as a professional.

Will this cut down on the blogging?
Yes, it will, but I think my three readers will understand. Three might be a little optimistic.