Ed-Admin

Scott McLeod has, once again, called for a day of posts related to leadership - Leadership Day 2010. While Leadership Day was yesterday, I'm hoping I can extend it to "Leadership Weekend."

For me, leadership is intensely personal. The simple answer to finding your leadership style is this -- imagine the best version of yourself... the version of yourself that deepens your best traits and mitigates your worst ones... and then try every day to be that person. You'll fail a lot. Most days, you're not going to be that person, because that person doesn't exist. You're chasing a ghost that doesn't exist. But the effort to be that person will bring you closer to them. And in doing so, you'll realize that person is a moving target, because you're changing, and that best version of you will change. That's a good thing.

Here's another way to look at it... try every day to be the person the all the people in your charge need you to be. It is the essence of servant leadership. That's a tricky thing, though, because you will lead many people, and people's needs will be different. That's the difference between "all the people" and "each of the people." Worse, you're going to have to figure out what people need from you personally and professionally, and those two things are always in play, and they don't always work in concert. You have to be the person they need you to be professionally, and that means deeply taking into consideration their humanity (and yours), but it means that there are times when what they need from you on a personal level, and what you need to do on a professional level both for the person in front of you and for the organization as a whole are in conflict. Those are soul-searching moments, but the ability to be a good person who can care deeply about the person in front of you while still acting in the best interest of the whole organization is one of the great challenges of leadership.

Robert Pirsig once wrote, "Want to paint a perfect picture? Be perfect and paint what you know." The best advice about leadership I can imagine is "Be a truly good person and lead from there." You'll fall short of being that best version of yourself a lot, but for me, it's the only path to follow.

I spent too much time this week having hard conversations with many students and parents around some incredibly difficult issues. As I tweeted out at one point, "lately, the things we cannot write about / blog about have been taking up much of my time." We can write about theory and practice and ideas and successes, but we can't write about the things that break our hearts for obvious reasons. But those moments when we try to help our kids and their parents deal with the most difficult things are some of the moments we need the most help, the most guidance, the most understanding, because there is no handbook, and there is often no clear right answer or clear best thing to say.

So we do the best we can, we get council from trusted colleagues, and we work with kids, and we work with families. And then we reflect on our decisions and try to figure out how to be better tomorrow than we were today. As a principal, there are days when I wish there was some handbook, some great big chart with an X and Y axis of issues and severity, so that I could follow the lines and figure out exactly what I was supposed to do, but of course, there isn't, and there can't be, because those kind of proscriptive rules never come with nuance, and short of the situations of mandatory reporting, those moments always contain nuance.

For me, the answer is to never fall in love with my answer... to always question... to always wonder... to always reflect... and to always remain self-critical. I say all the time that we should be humbled before the enormity of what we are trying to do. Weeks like this remind me of that painfully and powerfully... as I am confronted with my own flawed humanity as I try to help my students deal with theirs as well.
 
Kids are facing a more and more challenging and confusing world. They need us to be the best versions of ourselves we can muster. And that means we have to listen as best we can. And we need to never grow cold to the problems of children, and we can never think that we have all the answers.

I tried to be the best principal I know how to be this week. I sincerely hope I did right by the children in my care. Whether I did or or whether I fell short, I promise to try to be better next week.

[Couldn't resist Scott McLeod's call for Leadership Day posts...]

So... I'm going to come at this from a strange place. I think most folks in the edu-blog world would agree that trying to affect meaningful change is frustrating, and at one time or another, we've been incredibly frustrated by the pace of chance -- or even convincing others of the need for change.

But let's assume one is in a situation where the obstacles to change have been overcome, and the need for change has been understood -- then what?

I think one of the most important things we can do at that moment is to be very deliberate -- and even dare I say slow -- in how we manifest that change.

Be it technological reform, pedagogical reform, policy reform, I think the road is littered with too many failures because leaders did not allow most people to follow them.

I had the opportunity to meet Ron Sofo - Superintendent of the Freedom Area School District near Pittsburgh. He's been there for decades, and he and I spoke at length about how he took an initiative and rolled it out over several years... about building teacher buy-in, parent buy-in... about building a broad coalition... about listening and changing. And ultimately, about success.

Granted, most of us don't have years to make change happen, but we also don't have the ability to make mistakes because we rushed.

So some thoughts on how to affect change in a timely, and yet, deliberate fashion.

• Know why you are changing... and know what you are giving up by making this change. Every change creates winners and losers, so be sure to think through what you gain and what you lose (thanks to Neil Postman for that framework.) which leads to...
  
• Always ask "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" Do it for two reasons - one, because if you can't live with that consequence, don't do what you planned, but two, because the process of thinking this through will help you (and your team) mitigate the problems and you won't be as surprised when the thing you didn't think of comes up.
• Research like crazy. Who has tried what you are doing? Who has tried something close to what you're doing? Who is talking about it? Who is writing about it? Who says the idea is already crazy? There aren't many truly new ideas in education, so figure out the history of your idea and learn from who has come before you.
  
• Get lots of opinions - Come up with a smart, sensible, honest way to explain your idea and then listen. Listen a lot. Listen to the folks who don't like the idea, and ask them why.
  
• Be honest - Don't oversell, don't overpromise, and don't pretend that the idea is perfect.
  
• Build consensus - If only a few people are on-board with the idea, it won't work. But consensus doesn't mean taking something from everyone and sticking it onto the original idea until what you have is the worst of committee-based decisions. It means listening for the truths in what other people are telling you and being willing to make substantive change when it makes sense.
• Know when to move forward. Don't let ideas die in committee because the team gets hung up on the final 5% of an idea. 
• Set realistic expectations for initial success, and then set up a plan to get there. If it's a tech idea -- get the tech right. (Nothing worse than getting everyone excited about a new innovation and then getting everything but the tech side of it right. It took us a year to get our website even close to where we wanted it at SLA, fortunately, we got enough right that folks kept at it.)
  
• Finally, keep communicating throughout the process.
  

There are too many reasons effective innovation seems so hard in education. We should make sure that we, as change agents, are thoughtful and deliberate enough to make sure that we aren't one of them.

Tags: leadershipday09

I've been thinking a lot about coaching lately. Partially, I'm sure, because I'm reading Making Learning Whole by David Perkins (thanks, Gary!) but also because I think so much of the way we learn and the way we set up smart systems can be seen in smart coaching.

When I first became an Ultimate Frisbee captain in college, one of the former captains of the team told me, "Don't try to do everything in a time out. Give everyone three things to think about and nothing more." It was great advice because it was always very tempting to go over EVERYTHING I saw on the field in every time out. But whenever I did that, folks never retained everything, and now everyone walked away with a different piece of what they thought was important.

This became great advice as a high school coach as well... and not just for timeouts. One of things I learned as a coach was not to try to do everything at once. Before every season, I laid out all the skills and concepts I wanted them to master, and then I laid them out across the season -- how I would introduce ideas and then constantly spiral back to them... so that we could build slowly and smartly together. But I also learned how to focus on certain ideas, certain concepts, player by player, skill by skill. And I learned that, whenever possible, connecting ideas together, so that players could see how what they did related back to the whole was incredibly important.

But I also realized that I couldn't teach everything. I know coaches whose teams had twenty plays with multiple offensive and defensive sets, and more often than not, those teams could be beat just by out-executing them. Our teams did what we did very well, and what we did was rarely scripted, but rather we put in systems that relied on players to know what they were doing very well and then make smart choices based on what they saw in front of them.

Yeah... allegory, right?

But what made me think about this was not about teachers teaching kids, but how too many places deal with teacher learning and school improvement. So much about the current school improvement ideas are about trying to improve twenty different things at once, and I don't think that works. It sounds good -- especially because we can all see that there are often many, many problems in schools -- but it rings hollow, because the sum of all those parts rarely add up to a whole.

What amazes me, more and more, is how few schools have a clearly defined pedagogical practice that can be articulated simply and powerfully, and are therefore, even more susceptible to this kind of problem.

Let us think about how we build smart teams and build smart schools. Let us realize that we're better off picking the things we want to do well and then work tirelessly to do those things well. Let's be smart about what we want to be, how we want to get there, and how we get there collectively and individually, and then let's stop trying to go over all the ways we want to get better in a 30 second time out.

Clarence Fisher (@glassbeed) tweeted out the other day:
I replied:
And several folks asked me to elaborate on that second part --

That's more than a 140 character response... so here goes.

At its most basic, the skill sets that allow you to be successful as a teacher are not necessarily the skill sets that set you up to succeed as a teacher. For example, any photographic evidence of my desk and office back when I was a teacher / tech coordinator would show a cluttered mess. It was o.k., I have a really good memory and I could put my hands on just about anything when I really needed to. I enjoyed that mess, honestly. I felt comfortable in it, and I was pretty effective in it. However, when I became a principal, I found that methodology didn't work for me anymore. I had to change a fundamental part of the way I worked. There was too much to keep in my head so that a major part of how I worked had to change. I had to become more organized. I had to develop new systems if I was going to be successful as a principal.

That may not sound that much, but for a lot of us (and I include myself in this), how we work often is part of who we are. I loved being that messy teacher. And it wasn't enough for me to say, "I need to be more organized." I had to say, "I have to be a more organized person." Now, I don't leave most days unless I go through the pile of papers on my desk. And moreover, I've noticed that I've changed the way I think about a messy desk. It actively bothers me now, which I never would have thought.

That's a somewhat easy answer, but there's a deeper level of this as well. One of my mentors pulled me aside as I was taking on more administrative roles back at Beacon and said, "Up until now, you've had a lot of success on the faculty being a passionate advocate for your own ideas. Now, your job is to support other people's ideas." That was a shift. There's no question that being a principal -- especially a founding principal -- means having a vision and being able to articulate it passionately and powerfully, but after that, unless you want every idea to come out of your office, you really do need to be able to step back and let others inhabit that vision -- sometimes (even often) in ways you have never thought of.

Those are two examples that are specific to me, but I'd posit that everyone needs to go through this process when they become a principal. Many of us who are teachers have made being a teacher a fundamental part of our identity. And while I don't think administrators should ever stop thinking of themselves as teachers, there is a shift that must happen in the way we see ourselves. It requires different strengths, different skills, to be a successful principal than the skills that allowed us to be successful in our career up to that point. Going through that process can involve a bit of a sense of loss, but it is a necessary thing to do.

So now I'm wondering... for any admins who read this -- do you agree? What did you have to give up or change in self-examination when becoming an admin? And for other folks... what skill or trait or tendency that serves you very well as a teacher could you see being less of a positive thing as an administrator?

Tags: admininstration

So I was at the Penn State 1:1 Conference this week. Sunday night and Monday, I was working with administrators from all over the state -- mostly from smaller districts. I was struck by the way they talked about their schools and districts. Principals talked directly to superintendents, priorities were set by administrators who had been there for a dozen years. I spoke to one superintendent about what it was like to be in his job long enough to see the kids who were affected by a kindergarten initiative graduate... and talking about building support for initiatives over a number of years to get the kind of buy-in necessary to do it right. In short, it was the complete opposite of the experience so many of us in urban education have.

In the three years that SLA has been open, we have had three CEO / Superintendents of the school district, four regional superintendents, multiple changes to our School Reform Commission (a school board of sorts) and even the regional structures have been changed several times. We have seen initiatives come and go, and we have spent a ton of time and energy teaching the new administrations about SLA and what we do that is different than many other schools.

I'd assert that one of the keys to true sustainable innovation is sustainable leadership. We haven't had a superintendent for more than five years since (I think) Constance Clayton in the early 90s. I wonder what that does to the ability to cautiously and wisely affect change. I wonder what that does to teachers and parents and school-level administrators who live through change without innovation.

I have no doubt that there are plenty of days when the problems that the smaller districts face feel as frustrating as the problems we face in urban structures do. However, I admit that talking to the leaders I met at Penn State made me wonder what it would be like to run a school in a smaller district. I'm not leaving SLA or anything, and I'm an urban educator at heart, but I'd be lying if I didn't feel a touch of envy when I thought about how much easier it'd to be to sustain innovation if the support and leadership structures weren't changing all the time.

Tags: life, education

One of the questions that is hardest for me to answer about the path we've walked at SLA is, "Yes, but what about those of us who don't get to start from scratch?"

It's a fair question, and while I believe it is possible -- in fact necessary -- for existing schools to change to become more humane, forward thinking institutions, there's no question that those schools have a disadvantage that we don't have. Although I do always point out that starting a school from scratch, while having many advantages, also means you have to start a school from scratch -- re-inventing every process from curriculum design to the ways by which faculty place orders for classroom supplies when we run out.

But, the more I talked to people about the ways we established norms at SLA, the ways we got everyone to pull in the same direction on curriculum and assessment, the more I have come to believe that the thing that is our greatest strength is the necessary first step for schools and leaders who aren't starting from the beginning.

I really think the key is consensus-driven decision making. I think the only way to really reform existing schools is to be willing to take a broad vision and then let that vision be changed and embodied by all stakeholders... and not just on the big ideas, but on any of the important implementation pieces as well.

So what does consensus-driven decision making look like? First, it's important to understand that it does not mean that everyone agrees with every decision. That's just about impossible, I'd think. What it means is that everyone agrees to live with and abide by decisions, and that everyone trusts the process enough to know that everyone has moments when they give up their sacred cow, and everyone has moments when their idea forms the backbone of what we decide.

Perhaps most importantly, consensus-driven decision making means that when there are disagreements and concerns, those concerns are aired and attempts must be made to both address and ameliorate them. People have to commit to the idea that we'll all sit around the table until everyone feels comfortable moving forward. And people have to commit themselves to being willing to listen and move forward.

This isn't the kind of thing that people learn and trust overnight. It's not something that you can just decide, "O.k., now we're going to do this. Everyone, get on board." I think it requires taking a ton of time. I think it's summer work to get started. And I think it's the kind of thing that can make some people decide to leave when an organization is obviously pulling away from their core beliefs. But I also think it can be something that can make schools healthy, strong places. The upfront work of building consensus can lead to all kinds of amazing leaps forward when it comes time for implementation. It can build trust, and it can build community.

One of the things that people have to realize in this kind of process -- and where it can go horribly wrong -- is that it does require a willingness to build true synthesis of ideas. Where this can go horribly awry is when what comes out of the process is some sort of fifteen-headed monster where to appease everyone, everyone's idea gets stuck onto the main idea until what you have is some sort of completely unimplementable idea that bears no resemblance to the original. For consensus to work, people have to be willing to change. People have to be willing to listen to opposing ideas and find the places of common ground and work from there. It doesn't work any other way.

And the find thing is that in time, folks can trust the process enough that the meetings do get shorter. Our recent discussions about capstone have been amazing in that one person comes to the table with a general framework, many ideas are tossed around, and then, folks do come to a point where they trust the process enough to either say, "Hey, I'm going to put some time in on the committee to revise what we've got and represent it," or they say, "I was heard, now, let's see where we go."

It's hard work, and I won't lie, as a leader, I've had plenty of moments where I thought that it would be easier if everyone just did it the way I wanted it done. But I've always been pleased with the outcome of this process... not always right away... but in the end. It means that everyone -- me included -- has to have a strong enough ego to let their ego out of the process. It means that everyone has really be willing to listen. But it means that, in the end, you can get to a point where everyone does indeed agree on how to move forward. And that's how change can start.

I think I first came across McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y in a educational administration class. When I read about Theory X, I was struck by the idea that anyone could think this way about management. From the Wikipedia entry on Theory X and Theory Y comes this definition of Theory X:

The problem is that so much of education is defined by Theory X. Much of NCLB is a Theory X model... that schools and teachers somehow are to blame for all the problems of our kids, and if you read the much of the level of discourse about what is wrong with school, and you find Theory X ideas behind much of it.

Michelle Rhee's proposal to pay teachers $120,000 / yr with the caveat that their jobs are then tied to the test scores speaks to this idea. The many districts we see implementing scripted "teacher-proof" curriculum with standardized assessments, in my opinion, is directly related to the idea that we cannot "trust" teachers to work hard in service of their children.

But sadly, as teachers we've created a situation where that could happen in classrooms all over America. How many classrooms have you been in where Theory X was the dominant paradigm? How many teachers tell students that they have to do the work or else... how many teachers assume that the students will only do the work for the grade? When we consider how much the carrot and stick has dominated our classrooms, is it any wonder that this is now becoming the way our schools are being managed?

If we want to move away from Theory X, we have to offer a different vision of our schools. We have to create a vision of schooling that does not assume that accountability trumps responsibility. We have to create a vision of school governance that respects teachers and honors the work they do, while always being aware of how much more work there is to do. And we have to create classrooms where students are taught to value their own work, to understand the relationship between freedom and responsiblity, to understand how to dedicate themselves to an idea, a passion, to their work, not just for a grade, but for the sake of the work and for themselves and their community as well.

Tags: learning, motivation, McGregor

"We should tolerate flaws in other people in the vain hope that they will tolerate our flaws." -- I don't remember who first told me that, but it made a ton of sense to me.

One of the things that never seems to amaze me is when I talk to teachers and hear them talk about holding students to standards of behavior and work that they would never hold themselves. Ask yourself, in your school, does the teachers with the most draconian lateness policy often show up late to meetings? Does the teacher who makes a big deal about food in the classroom often leave trash all over the faculty room? Do the teachers who have the strictest policies often resist any administrative policies? And how many of us have made it through an hour-long PD session without passing a note or sending an email or daydreaming? And yet, so many schools expect kids to do so five, six, seven times a day. (And how many people -- aside from teachers -- go home from work and then work another three hours at home? And yet, we expect kids to do that every day...)

One of the things I love about SLA is that we try to remember everyone's humanity -- teachers and students. We talk about the things that frustrate us... students handing in stuff late being top of the list for many of us, but when we do, we try to remember how many deadlines we miss ourselves. Remembering the shared humanity of everyone in the building can really lead to putting in place policies that are humane. We must expect our students to work hard, we must expect our students to learn to make deadlines -- we must set the bar as high for our students as we set it for ourselves, but we must also remember to set up structures that help students when, inevitably, they sometimes miss the bar. We should do so if for no other reason than we hope someone does that for us when we fail.

Tags: compassion

Over the past few years, many administrators have asked me how SLA has such an incredible faculty, and while I think there are many reasons, not the least of which are the colleagues that you get to work with and the edu-blogger network that has made SLA more well-known than the average high school, I do think there are some things we do are replicable for schools that are looking to both get more candidates for teaching positions and find teachers more aligned with their school's philosophy in their candidate pool.

• Write a job description of your school that speaks directly to the mission of your school. For example, the first qualification we list on the page (after needs to be certified) is "Must believe we teach students before subjects." Don't be afraid to turn-off some teachers with it if you feel that it will excite the teachers you want.
  
• Increase your reach using online tools -- I believe that teachers will move to go places where they are valued. For progressive schools, I strongly suggest the Coalition of Essential Schools Job Board, but I know of schools that had success using the EdWeek job board also. A principal here in Philly has had success using Craigslist too.
  
• Don't forget about the ed schools. We reach out to education schools near and far. They have alumni lists, job fairs, departmental list-servs, and they have lots of teachers looking for jobs.
• Get out to job fairs -- send teachers, send students, send parents, send admins, but get to job fairs.
  
• Have an interview process that is designed to ask teachers to think about the things that matter most to you. A lot of schools design the interview process to find the "best" teacher, but I think that's a mistake -- I think you want to find the "best fit" teachers. So design an interview process that allows teachers to show you how their vision of education fits with your school's vision of education -- and include teachers, students, parents in that process.
• And then, of course, walk the walk of the vision of your school so that the teachers you recruit feel validated and excited by their choice. That's the hardest part.

I do believe that -- just like with students -- if more teachers found schools that matched their teaching and learning styles, we'd have a lot more success in our schools. And I think those teachers are out there -- especially all those who are leaving the system frustrated -- who could make our schools better. I hope someone finds this helpful.

Tags: recruiting, teachers, school_reform