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.

 

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.

Successful leadership requires effective management

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and do what really matters. –Stephen Covey

My simple definition of school leadership is creating with the school community that which does not now exist for the benefit of students.

But it’s also essential that principals and teacher leaders be able to manage, which I define as getting things done for both what now exists and for what is being created. It involves both management of self and of the complex system that is the schoolhouse.

From my experience, here are a few essential things that effective managers do:

• Effective managers are intentional. They think about what they want to accomplish today and in the future and have a fool-proof system in place for ensuring that those things get done.

• Effective managers are diligent about keeping promises both to themselves and to others. Promise keeping is a hallmark of leaders’ integrity, which, in turn, is the touchstone for trust within the school community.

• Effective managers consistently practice “next action thinking.” Meetings and learning events never conclude without clarity about what will be done next, by whom, and to what standard.

• Effective managers reserve time for quiet reflection regarding their practice and the well-being of the school community. They use this time to recall their values and goals, to consider the effectiveness of their actions, and to establish short and long-term priorities.

• Effective managers know when and how to say “no.” They consciously minimize obligations on themselves and on the school community that would distract from the achievement of important goals.

What have I missed?

Your answer to these two questions could change your school forever

To what goals would you aspire for your school if you knew you could not fail?

What type of school would you create if you didn’t know what role you would play in that school and you would be in that role forever?

I don’t know where or when I acquired these questions, but I have found over the years that they evoke incredibly important conversations in the school community about purposes and barriers to creating wonderful schools.

The phrase “if you knew you could not fail” in the first question acknowledges that our fear of failure often prevents us from aspiring to do all that is possible.

The second question requires that we put aside self interest to consider the perspectives of others in creating schools that would be wonderful places for everyone who learns and is employed in them. For instance, it asks teachers to consider the characteristics of a school in which they would want to be a principal or a student—forever.

Fear of failure: Leaders address their fear of failure by recognizing that worthy goals and important learning demand that we risk failure. The only alternative is the safety of our comfort zone, which ensures the status quo.

Leaders ask the school community to do the same by inviting it to participate in a deep, honest, and sustained conversation about its aspirations and fears.

Multiple perspectives: It is essential that school communities examine problems and their solutions from multiple perspectives. Such a process requires that the views and experiences of each role group be elicited and fully explored.

Addressing fears and incorporating multiple perspectives enable the creation of schools in which all young people and adults are successful and surrounded by supportive relationships.

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“I don’t know” is sometimes the right answer

My criteria for a radio or TV talk show worthy of my time and attention include well-informed guests, diverse points of view, and a moderator who is able to bring out the best in those guests.

In addition, I appreciate talk show guests who are able to say “I don’t have information about that” or simply “I don’t know” when that is the case.

Saying “I don’t know” is also an essential skill for principals and teacher leaders.

Sometimes I joke with school leaders that they seem to believe that their job descriptions include a responsibility to know the answer to all questions and to be able to solve all problems.

Schools that have ambitious, stretching goals give their leaders lots of opportunities to say “I don’t know” because by their very nature such goals require school communities to invent their way forward. There are no right answers.

When school leaders don’t pretend to know everything, others in the school community have opportunities to develop their problem-solving muscles.

Plus, when teachers see principals responding honestly they are more likely to be vulnerable with their students and colleagues.

Fortunately, once you get the hang of it, it is easier and less stressful to be imperfect.

And, in the long run, our candor will be respected and appreciated by others.

Question: How have you and others benefited when you were able to simply acknowledge, “I don’t know?”

The importance of thinking very big and very small

“Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. Ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.” – Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–But Some Don’t

A week or two back I noted that I was reading Nate Silver’s new book, The Signal and the Noise, in search of potential breakthrough ideas. I’m not sure if this idea is a breakthrough, but it certainly resonated with me.

The “granular details” Silver mentions often prove to be a source of good ideas or key to the implementation of new practices.

Innovation that leads to continuous improvements in teaching and learning involves both a richly-detailed vision of what the school community seeks to create and an understanding of the specific actions necessary to get there, particularly the very next action so that momentum is not lost in the press of too many things to do.

In my experience, maintaining the focus and energy necessary to implement new practices requires that everyone in the school community hold in mind both the big picture and the “granular details.” That includes:

1. A compelling, richly detailed vision of what the school seeks to create in terms of student learning and classrooms practices. Such a vision guides, energizes, and sustains the work.

2. Clarity about fine-grained, often mundane specifics – for instance, the forms teams/PLCs will use to communicate with principals and teacher leaders the nature of a group’s conversation, the ideas and practices generated there, and the team’s accomplishments.

3. “Next action thinking” in the last few minutes of every meeting, including those devoted to professional learning, so that participants have clarity and a sense of accountability about individual and group responsibilities.

Question: What seemingly mundane details have you addressed that either became a source of good ideas or helped lead to the implementation of new practices?

When school leaders adopt a problem-creation stance

See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to [participate in] ‘problem creation’ … You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome — which I think is a more interesting place to be. – Chuck Close

Because most of the problems associated with the sustained improvement of teaching and learning do not lend themselves to one-right-way, prescriptive solutions, schools benefit when principals and teacher leaders adopt a “problem creation” stance like the one described by artist Chuck Close.

The creativity and energy that are activated by a problem-creation approach sustain the focus and momentum of improvement efforts as schools continuously adapt to changing circumstances.

Sustained improvement resembles the improvisation of jazz

For some reason I associate this time of year with creativity and energy. Perhaps it has to do with the holidays or religious celebrations. Or maybe it’s the fresh start provided by a new year.

That may be why I was drawn to this inspiring story about the human compulsion to create, a drive which seems to have defined the life of the story’s subject, artist and author Betty Abbott Sheinis.

Like Sheinis, children make up stories and games and images of the world that are uniquely their own in the same natural way they learn to walk and talk.

Unfortunately, it’s a desire that diminishes for most children as they grow older—often because their creativity is neglected or even suppressed in schools—so that by the time they are adults their creative impulses may be extinguished and they believe that they no longer have creative abilities.

Likewise, the creative impulses of educators are suppressed as current reform models view improvement as a technical process in which experts tell teachers and principals what to do and policymakers hold them accountable for the results.

Sustained improvement, however, is far more complex and nuanced. At its best it is a creative act in which educators apply available research in continuously evolving ways to invent solutions to the most pressing problems they face and then use various forms of evidence to determine the effectiveness of those solutions.

Seen this way, the continuous improvement of teaching and learning and leadership is more like the improvisation of jazz than adherence to a symphonic score under the direction of a conductor.

And like all creative acts, inventing solutions and determining the effectiveness of those inventions releases an energy in the school community which is essential to maintaining the momentum of improvement across time.