In Praise of Doing Things Right

A colleague of mine has said that management is doing things right but leadership is doing the right things.  I struggle with that notion.  In a later post, I will chime in on the "management vs. leadership" issue.  For the purposes of this post, I want to talk about doing things right.

Doing things right versus doing the right thing is the main point of a popular quip about Stalin.  I think it goes something like, "at least the trains run on time."  The point of this saying is, I think, that despite the fact that he would summarily arrest, imprison, and execute those who disagreed with him, and stripped back virtually every human freedom, he did make sure that that trains ran on time.  In essence, loss of freedom is a small price to pay for punctual transportation.

I think that the problem with that example is that trains running on time is not trivial.  How else would you assess the quality of rail transportation?  The principalship is somewhat like this example.  We may consider much of what principals do to be "trivial" management tasks.  Student discipline,resolving disputes between students, making sure that the milk delivery arrives on time, and maintaining orderly hallway traffic all seem trivial until one of those tasks goes undone.

Despite the fact that management is not totally trivial, the tension between doing things right and doing the right things also seems to assume that the scale of "rightness" is either/or.  If leadership isn't doing things right, does leadership, then, mean doing things wrong?  I reject the notion completely.  I think that just as a society can have basic human freedom AND trains that run on time, public schools can have strong instructional leadership AND well-managed buildings.

Leadership and management, together, are necessary for school success.  In order for the important conversations about instruction, assessment, and achievement to take place, teachers have to feel confident about the learning climate of the building.

School Improvement, the Ultimate Test of Leadership

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins tells about the Stockdale Paradox.  The point Collins is trying to make is that a paradox exists between holding out hope and confidence while at the same time being able to confront the brutal facts as they currently stand.

Here's the story, Jim Stockdale (you might remember him as Ross Perot's running mate) was a prisoner of war in Vietnam's Hanoi Hilton.  While he had no doubt that he would eventually be set free, he knew that it wouldn't happen any time soon.  Jim Collins had an opportunity to meet Jim Stockdale and asked him the question "Who didn't make it out?"  Stockdale did not hesitate with his answer.  He replied "The optimists."  You see, the optimists would say "We'll be home for Christmas." When they weren't they said, "We'll be home by Easter."  When they missed enough milestones, they died of broken hearts.

It is easy to see the story as a metaphor for leading school improvement efforts. You have to maintain faith that improvements will come; but you also have to realistic in understanding that the improvements will take time.

I have a different moral for this story.  While in the prison, known as the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale would intentionally disfigure himself by cutting himself with a razor or beating himself in the face with a broken leg of a stool.  He did this so that he could never be put on television as an example of how well the prisoners were being treated.  Even this is not my moral.  My moral is the fact that he was able to get other prisoners to disfigure themselves.  In my view, true leadership only happens when people follow even though they have a choice not to.

I really liken this kind of leadership to attempting to lead a school improvement effort.  Teachers can attend planning sessions, but then go a back to their rooms and do pretty much whatever they want.  The job of the leader is to get people to do that which they have the realistic option of not doing.

Think that this is overstating the obvious? Me too.  Wish that rather than just pointing out the obvious I would offer some guidance? Stay tuned.  Next week, although I won't tell you what always works, I'll tell you what never works, and why not.

Look before you leap

I guess that if there is anything to be learned from the recent financial news, it is that committing resources unwisely has serious consequences.  I am quoting somebody (actually somebody's father, probably) is stating "If you don't have time to do it right, you better have time to do it over."  I think there is a lesson here for principals who are attempting to forge professional learning communities in their buildings.  My guess is that there are few buildings that are tying to create these communities for the first time.

Many principals I know would rather have a root canal than spend time developing strong professional relationships with their staffs. The list of reasons for this condition contains many of our greatest hits:

• A lack of belief that any tangible results can come from getting to know your colleagues more deeply.
  

• A feeling that time is so valuable that "wasting" it on team-building, trust-building, or communications activities detracts from getting something "real" accomplished.
  

• School culture causes teachers to find security in their ability to keep their practice private.
  

• Relationship building is difficult and fragile work.  Principals must take enormous personal risk and weather a great deal of criticism in order to harness the true power of collective wisdom.  There is little wonder, then,that many principals would rather just "get through" the staff meeting in a "Town Crier" format rather than invest in true community activities.
  

These are just a few of the reasons why so many schools "jump" into the work at hand rather than taking the time (and expending the energy) necessary for creating a true collaborative environment. Among the many paradoxes involved with creating PLCs is the notion that real, measurable results are necessary for the group to truly believe that collaboration is worth the effort, while at the same time real, measurable results cannot be achieved without true collaboration.

If you have not had a great deal of experience in leading Professional Learning Communities, or if you are always on the lookout for collaborative activities, check out this site hosted by the National School Reform Faculty.  It contains a wealth of information about Critical Friends Groups and offers downloadable activities for staff meetings.

A Place to Start

Just as the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, building community in your school begins with a single conversation. Roland Barth, in Learning by Heart, writes that every school has non-discussables.  These are issues that are so emotionally charged that they cannot be spoken about in any formal way.  They are discussed in parking lots, teacher lounges, and in teacher's rooms.  Barth maintains that a school's quality is inversely proportional to the number of non-discussables it has.  Examples of non-discussables include the leadership of a new principal, the move to block scheduling, the adoption of a managed curriculum, and the enactment of a new board policy.

In our attempt to get results rapidly, some schools jump right in to the "work at hand."  It is not possible to understate how big of a mistake this is.  I am tempted to argue that "jumping right in" is less an attempt to get things done in a hurry than it is an attempt to not have to discuss things or real importance.  Blend this with the fact that there are people on every staff who would rather have a root canal than share their practice with colleagues and it becomes easy to see why so many attempt to create learning communities are doomed from the start.

That we must begin slowly and in a non-threatening manner is pretty intuitive. How to do it is less so.  Beginning slowly does not have to mean small talk of the "how's the weather" variety.  In an article entitled Good Talk About Good Teaching, Parker Palmer demonstrates just how easily these initial conversations can be.

Read the article.  The way forward should become more clear.

Efficacy as a Metric

As mentioned in the initial post, I consider Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to be a strategy and not a goal. Without a doubt, there are some principals who have written PLCs into their school's strategic plans in goal oriented language, if not into the actual goal section of the plan. This encourages a dangerous mindset. Developing a PLC at your school is not a goal. (Despite what your Superintendent tells you) Improving your school in terms of student achievement and other measures is the goal. PLCs are one of many strategies that are employed to reach that goal. Semantics? Not really. If your goal is to have a Professional Learning Community at your school, that is what you'll get. Clear understanding of the differences between goals and strategies help to ensure that the goal remains "the main thing."

A difficult aspect of the time spent in teacher collaboration is answering the question, "what difference does it make?" Those hoping to see immediate results in the form of improved student performance on standardized tests might become quickly frustrated. Although PLCs do make a difference, and that difference is immediately realized, it can be difficult to measure.

One method for measuring progress is by examining your staff's sense of efficacy. I use efficacy here in its raw form, the capacity to produce a desired result. How a staff feels about its collective ability to cause the improvements called for in the strategic plan can be an important metric.

The link below will take you to the Collective Efficacy Scale. This brief survey, and accompanying scoring instructions can provide for an interesting staff meeting discussion, as well as a decent pre-post measure of PLC effectiveness.

http://www.waynehoy.com/waynekhoy/collective_efficacy.html

Give it a try, the results may surprise you.

About this Site

Thirty-seven Tuesdays draws its name from the number of Tuesdays in a school year. I came upon the name from a local school district that, in an effort to build professional learning communities, designated every Tuesday as an "early release" day for students. This gives the staff an opportunity to meet in order to plan, discuss, and collaborate.

I live about an hour away from The Center for Leadership in Education. On the drive home, my mind began to wander back to my days as a building principal and what I would have done with the ability to meet with my staff for a generous period of time, every week, for an entire school year.

The resulting thoughts are ways that I would use Thirty-seven Tuesdays to put into place a sustainable, accountable, collaborative program in my school.

I make no effort to distinguish fact from opinion. That is the beauty of weblogs. I simply post ideas and resources that are of interest to me in the hopes of sparking dialog, gaining more insight into my own thoughts and the thoughts of others, and hopefully encouraging those who are charged with the task of fostering professional learning communities to try some of the ideas.

Without question, schools functioning as professional learning communities are the silver bullet of school reform. We are in the tall grass without them. Few will argue with the benefits that come from a professional learning community. If you read this blog regularly, you will come to know that recognizing the benefits of professional learning communities and reaping any academic benefit from them are not one and the same.

This site builds upon the following themes:

• Professional learning communities are not a goal, but a strategy. The goal remains improved academic achievement. When we set a goal of creating professional learning communities, it is possible to lose sight of the real goal. This blog, then, sets out to make sure that schools "keep the main thing the main thing."

• Less is more. Many scholars, authors, and consultants have created an industry out of professional learning communities. To be sure, there are many studies that demonstrate the value and academic impact of PLCs. I believe that the value of professional learning communities lies in the practice, not the structure.

• Professional learning communities are all about leadership. While many principals are eager to take an active role in developing meeting agendas, facilitating the actual meetings, and guiding the conversation, that is not hte kind of leadership I am talking about. I have a working theory, it is that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of time spent with the principal talking to the larger staff and the gains in student achievement sought by the school.

My hope is to blend a large helping of rationale with a healthy does of practical resources. While it is important for school leaders to consider practical resources to ensure optimal use of available time, it is even more important to ensure that the school addresses achievement issues in a meaningful way.

While it is not my goal to tell anyone how they ought to construct professional Learning communities in their building, I do hope that I can build a logical case for using these strategies, activities, and agendas in your school's quest for improvement.