9 ways you know a school culture is in trouble

You know a school culture is in trouble when…

1. Truly honest conversations are most likely to happen in parking lots…

2. The only honest things people say in meetings are complaints…

3, Leaders don’t show up for meetings as promised, or show up late and/or leave early…

4. Cynicism triumphs over healthy skepticism…

5. “Authorities” of all sorts — from the principal to the district office to consultants — are reflexively distrusted and dismissed…

6. “Good enough” could be the school’s mission statement…

7. Being “crazy busy” is a sufficient reason for not doing what you said you would do…

8. After just a few years new teachers begin to sound and act like grizzled veterans who are deeply entrenched in their ways…

9. Educators feel more professionally connected to followers on Twitter they have never personally met than to grade-level, department, or PLC colleagues with whom they share students and common purposes.

What are other signs of a troubled school culture?

6 ways you can influence others

The most common question I’m asked by system administrators, principals, and teacher leaders is some variation of, “The people I work with are unwilling to change, and I don’t know what to do to get them to open their minds.”

Put another way, these leaders are interested in being more influential.

I respond that while countless articles and books have been written on that subject, and that there are no formulas, I can offer a few suggestions for their consideration.

1. Leaders can make demands. While demands are occasionally necessary, they only work in a very narrow set of circumstances, and their long-term effects are usually limited. Demands won’t work, of course, unless there are meaningful negative consequences that will be invoked for noncompliance.

2. Leaders can make requests. Motivation is increased when individuals feel that are choosing a course of action rather than being required to do it. That means that often the most direct and effective way to motivate others is simply to ask them to do something. The key is to invite, not to require. The energy created can be astounding, although it may take a while for members of demand-oriented cultures to believe that there will be no negative consequences for declining the request.

3. Leaders can delegate meaningful responsibilities and provide the necessary developmental experiences and support to enable success. Tapping the strengths and resources of others is a multiplier of leaders’ direct influence, particularly when distributing leadership improves the performance of teams within schools.

4. Leaders can engage in dialogue. Dialogue is most effective when participants listen carefully to one another as assumptions are surfaced and examined in the spirit of inquiry, not judgment. When those conditions are met, conversations move to deeper levels and participants slowly open their minds to new perspectives. In this way, leaders can initiate “crucial conversations” that respectfully perturb the status quo.

5. Leaders can share stories that illuminate important values, ideas, and practices. Because human beings are hardwired to listen to and be affected by stories, storytelling is often a way around emotional and cognitive resistance to new ideas and practices.

6. Leaders can provide novel experiences to promote breakthrough thinking in which everything about a subject is viewed in a fresh and more empowering way. Such experiences – like well-designed field trips for students – are only useful, however, when participants are appropriately prepared for them through dialogue and background reading and when extended opportunities are provided to reflect on the meaning and significance of the experience.

What would you add to my “starter list” of ideas to increase leaders’ influence?

How changing just one belief can help create schools in which everyone thrives

“You haven’t taught it until they’ve learned it.” – John Wooden

It seems like such a simple idea – that the teaching isn’t over until students have learned it.

And yet decade after decade we continue to hear some variation of the phrase, “I taught it, but they didn’t learn it.”

The professional development version of that statement is: “We inserviced them, but nothing’s changed.”

So, let me officially declare with the full weight and authority bestowed by a WordPress blog that:

• Teaching isn’t over until the students have learned it, and

• Professional learning hasn’t occurred until educators have changed their hearts, minds, and/or practices in ways that support the success of all students. 

Or, put another way, professional learning hasn’t occurred until all teachers and administrators believe what they haven’t believed, understand what they haven’t understood, say what they haven’t said, and do what they haven’t done, all with the intention of high levels of learning for all students in all classrooms.

Changing just that one belief will go a long way toward creating schools in which all young people and adults thrive and in which teaching, learning, and relationships are continuously improving.

Why it’s important for leaders to believe in teachers’ capacity for growth

Many school leaders believe that virtually all students can learn at higher levels given skillful teaching, time, and persistent effort.

But I’m not sure, however, that all leaders believe that virtually all teachers can learn to teach in ways that enable high levels of student learning.

Let me tell you a story:

Some years ago I was working with a group of 50 or so teacher leaders in a large U.S. city. I asked them a question I often asked in such settings: “How many of you believe that virtually all students can learn more than was previously expected of them and that it is their teachers’ responsibility to teach them?” Every hand in the room immediately went up.

My next question was one I had never asked before: “How many of you believe that virtually all teachers can learn how to teach in ways that enable higher levels of student learning?”

An unanticipated pandemonium broke out in the room as some participants vociferously expressed their confidence that they could prepare teachers to be more successful with all students while others complained loudly that my questions had unfairly lead them into a trap.

One teacher leader said, “How can we expect teachers to teach at high levels if we don’t believe we can successfully prepare them to do so?”

Another said, looking at me, “You don’t understand the teachers we have here. They are often poorly prepared and unmotivated.”

A provocative and soul-searching conversation ensued as it shifted back and forth between those two broad perspective — “of course we can” and “it is unfair to expect us to be successful with these teachers” — in the same way that it might occur among teachers discussing their responsibility for the learning of all their students.

A year or so later one of the event’s organizers told me that discussion related to the issue of teacher leaders’ expectations for their colleagues arose in one form or another at many of their meetings that school year.

I was pleased to hear that because it is a critically important issue.

Just as it’s essential for principals and teacher leaders to believe that student learning can be improved by skillful teaching, it’s essential that principals and teacher leaders believe that through well-designed professional development and teamwork virtually all teachers can become effective, if not masterful.

Believing in the capacity of students to learn at higher levels without a parallel belief in the capacity of teachers to successfully teach them — given appropriate support — can only lead to frustration and failure.

Put another way: Leaders’ belief in teachers’ capacity to perform at higher levels + appropriate support = student success.

Do you agree with my assessment, or not?

Choose continuous improvement over “good enough”

Successful leadership can sometimes be reduced to a small number of fundamental choices. Once those choices are made, they guide decisions and behavior in dozens of situations each week.

One of those choices is between continuous improvement and “good enough.”

Individuals and organizations are either improving or declining. They cannot sustain a steady state of performance for an extended period of time.

Continuous improvement is based on the assumption that is possible and desirable to find more effective and efficient ways to achieve important goals. It requires improving the processes of teaching or leadership and the acquisition of skills that improve both the quality of instruction and its outcomes.

The attitude of “good enough” views the status quo as either desirable or inevitable. It is closely linked to resignation in that individuals may believe that meaningful improvement is impossible.

“Good enough” asks us to do nothing more than accept the limitations of our current beliefs, understandings, and practices.

Continuous improvement has several benefits: 

• Students and the broader school community benefit with improved learning and stronger, more supportive relationships.

• When educators are successful, they feel energized, which fuels further improvement.

• School communities that are continuously improving are appealing places to learn, teach, and lead.

Conversely, when an attitude of “good enough” becomes embedded in the belief system of the culture, it limits the life chances of students and creates a slow-death spiral of energy within the school community.

In that sense, choosing continuous improvement is a moral imperative.

Choose stretch goals over modest, achievable targets

Successful leadership can sometimes be reduced to a small number of fundamental choices. Once those choices are made, they guide decisions and behavior in dozens of situations each week.

One of those choices is between “stretch goals” and modest, achievable outcomes.

A stretch goal, as its name implies, is so ambitious that its achievement almost always requires individuals to leave their comfort zones to make deep changes in their beliefs, understanding, and/or habits.

Like all big goals, stretch goals are achieved through many small daily actions over time.

Modest, achievable goals are attractive because most people prefer almost certain  success to the risk of failure inherent in stretch goals.

In addition, modest, achievable goals typically allow us to work within the comfort of our current beliefs, understandings, and practices.

Stretch goals have several benefits:

• Because stretch goals are almost always by their very nature inspirational, they create energy and bring out the best in ourselves and the school community.

• Because of the significant changes demanded by stretch goals, they typically produce outcomes that far exceed those originally thought possible.

• Because stretch goals are achieved through the accumulation of countless daily actions, they offer many en route milestones, each of which provides an opportunity to celebrate progress.

Stretch goals are risky, and they are demanding. But they also hold out the prospect of possibilities that far exceed those we usually imagine.

That prospect makes the pursuit of stretch goals worth the risk, particularly when students are the beneficiaries of our extraordinary efforts.

 

8 ways you can become a Positive Deviant

In Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, physician Atul Gawande describes a talk he made to medical students addressing the topic, “How do I really matter?” He decided to offer “five suggestions for how one might make a worthy difference, for how one might become, in other words, a positive deviant.”

(In yesterday’s post I defined positive deviants as individuals who with the same resources available to their peers achieved more favorable outcomes. They do so through identifiable behaviors that distinguish their performance from that of others.)

In his talk Gawande suggested:

• Ask an unscripted question. “You don’t have to come up with a deeper important question, just one that lets you make a human connection,” he wrote.

• Don’t complain. “[N]othing in medicine is more dispiriting than hearing doctors complain.”

• Count something. “It doesn’t really matter what you count… The only requirement is that whatever you count should be interesting to you.”

• Write something.

• Change. “[M]ake yourself an early adopter,” Gawande recommended. “Look for the opportunity to change…. Be willing to recognize the inadequacies in what you do and to seek out solutions. As successful as medicine is, it remains replete with uncertainties and failure.”

Gawande’s suggestions lead me to think more deeply about the behaviors of school leaders whom I have viewed as Positive Deviants.

I concluded that they possessed one or more of the following habits:

1. Writing to gain clarity and to communicate;

2. “Counting” things to improve their performance (most things that count can be measured, even if only in rudimentary ways);

3. Reading widely in search of new ideas, perspectives, and inspiration;

4. Continuously seeking more effective and efficient ways to do things;

5. Engaging the support of others when challenged by stretching goals or demanding circumstances;

6. Persisting over many months and even years to achieve important goals because the values represented by those goals were so important;

7. Seeing things in unique ways that were in opposition to accepted wisdom or common practice; and

8. Assuming that important problems can be solved, and that working alone or in collaboration with others they would contribute to their solutions.

What behaviors would you add to this list?

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How to spread “demonstrably successful but uncommonly applied practices”

“We need to look at how individuals and organizations within our own systems achieved stellar results using the resources available to the system (and then duplicate then learn from that individual or organization),” reader Frances Miller said in a recent comment on  one of my blog posts. “Many times we spend our energy looking for outside experts when they are right there within our organization; we just have to learn how to develop a culture where others support their use.”

Miller’s comment brought to mind a 2004 JSD interview I did with Jerry Sternin. Sternin and his wife, Monique, had applied the concept of “positive deviance” to life-saving work they did for Save the Children in the villages of Vietnam and to solving other seemingly intractable problems, and I was curious about the implications of the practice in educational settings.

“Positive deviants are people whose behavior and practices produce solutions to problems than others in the group who have access to exactly the same resources have not been able to solve,” Sternin told me. “We want to identify these people because they provide demonstrable evidence that solutions to the problem already exist within the community.”

In the same way that villages in Vietnam had positive deviant parents who had found ways to support the health of their children with the same resources available to other parents, so, too, do schools have positive deviant teachers who are successfully and often quietly solving problems that others in the school community declare to be unsolvable.

Likewise, some schools within a school system have been more successful in solving problems that other schools had declared unsolvable.

Here are some important things to keep in mind about the positive deviance approach.

• Positive Deviance inquiry begins with an assumption that solutions to most problems of teaching and learning can be found in the school community rather than imported through consultants and other experts. If principals and teacher leaders do not share this assumption, the approach will predictably fail.

“Positive Deviance inquires into what’s working and how it can be built upon to solve very difficult problems,” Sternin told me. “It requires that experts relinquish their power and believe that solutions already reside within the system. Our role is to help people discover their answers.”

Later in the interview Sternin noted, “My experience in over 12 years of working with this particular approach and more than 30 years of experience in the development field is that improvement may occur when an external agent brings new resources and ideas to a community.  But as soon as that external agent leaves, the problem returns because the recipients were essentially passive. This is why best-practices approaches usually fail.”

• Positive Deviance inquiry is far more complex than principals identifying teachers who produce above average test scores and asking them to explain to their colleagues how they did it.

As Sternin explained it to me, the process has four steps: “define, determine, discover, and design.  The group begins its work by defining the problem and describing what success would look like—which is the inverse of the problem statement.

“Next, the group determines if there are individuals who have already achieved success.  If there such people, they are the positive deviants.

“Next, the group discovers the uncommon but demonstrably successful behaviors and practices used by the positive deviants to solve the problem.

“And finally, the group designs an intervention which enables its members to practice those demonstrably successful but uncommonly applied practices.

“The process is beautifully simple because it’s strength lies in the solutions that are discovered and owned by people in the community,” Sternin concluded.

• A school’s culture will determine it’s success in implementing Positive Deviance inquiry. I have said more about the qualities of such cultures in other posts.

• A Positive Deviance approach requires that principals and teacher leaders think about professional learning in new ways. It taps the strengths of the school community

In a deeply respectful and honoring way it taps the strengths of the school community and emphasizes behavior change above “learning about.”

“Knowledge doesn’t change behavior…. Practice changes behavior,” Monique Sternin said in a recent New York Times article. (Readers interested in a deeper understanding of this approach will benefit form reading this article.)

Tomorrow’s post will explore the practices of Positive Deviant school leaders.

Don’t fall into the knowing-doing gap!

Most of us know more than we do on a regular basis.

In our personal lives, we know more about a healthy diet than may be evident in what we choose to eat each day. We often know more about the value and techniques (and perhaps clothing) of exercise than we actually do exercise.

In our professional lives we are also likely to know more about leadership or about teaching than we regularly practice.

In addition, even when our intention is to learn and use new strategies, there is often a wide gap between our learning about that method and our implementation of it.

Some have called this phenomena the knowing-doing gap.

Here are several ways we can bridge that gap:

• Access prior knowledge. Before beginning a lesson good teachers usually determine what students already know about an area of study for both diagnostic and instructional purposes. Likewise, the knowing-doing gap can often be bridged by simply asking ourselves: “What do I know about this subject?” and then setting goals to do one or more of those things more consistently.

• Examine our assumptions. Sometimes we resist doing new things because they are based on assumptions that consciously or unconsciously contradict our current assumptions. For instance, we may resist new instructional practices that promise greater success for more students because of a previously unexamined belief that poverty and family background are more powerful forces than teaching methods.

• Embed learning in doing. Whenever possible, integrate the learning of new practices in situations that allow us to experience the practice firsthand, to identify implementation issues, and to consult with and receive feedback from leadership or instructional coaches.

Like most things that are important, closing the knowing-doing gap requires intention and persistence. It also requires that we recognize and celebrate the “genius” within us, a rich and readily-available resource that we can tap in a wide variety of circumstances.

The result of closing this gap will be the continuous improvement of leadership, teaching, learning, and relationships for the benefit of everyone in the school community.

 

A special note: I value my readers. And because I want to extend the reach of these ideas, I encourage you to become a subscriber to this blog if you are not already one. 

Subscribing ensures timely, automatic receipt of every post. It only takes a moment to subscribe using your email address, and it’s just as easy to unsubscribe. (WordPress does not use email addresses for other purposes.) 

Thank you for considering subscribing!

Improved teacher evaluation may be necessary, but it’s far from sufficient

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. – H. L. Mencken

The problems of teaching, learning, and school leadership are complex. Perhaps that is why policymakers often respond with solutions that are “clear, simple, and wrong.” Or at least wrong in part.

Recent efforts to strengthen teacher evaluation provide an example.

There’s no question that improved teacher (and principal) evaluation is desirable. Evaluation methods used in most places in recent years have done little to improve teaching, support struggling teachers, and identify and remove educators who are incompetent.

But the effects of improved processes of teacher evaluation will be minimal unless they are well integrated with:

• Well-trained classroom observers, evaluators, and peer assistance teams.

• Peer evaluation and mentoring of teachers in their first few years of employment to ensure that only competent teachers are admitted into the profession and that they begin their teaching careers on a solid footing.

• Sustained, high-quality professional learning with coaching targeted at high-priority school and school system student learning goals.

• Participation by all teachers on instructional teams that have as their primary purpose the continuous improvement of teaching and learning for all students.

• School cultures that promote innovation and experimentation and that surround all members of the school community with encouraging and helpful relationships.

• Skillful principals and teachers leaders supported by skillful system administrators.

Effective leadership at both the school and district levels will determine to what extent these elements are integrated into a coherent, high-quality program of career-long development that serves students, the school community, and the teaching profession.