Ideas and Hope and Energy...Oh my!

In her book Resourceful Leadership, Elizabeth City mentions several "ingredients" for school improvement. Three of these, ideas, hope, and energy, are rather intriguing. I think that these three are particularly interesting because, like most valuable things, they are very rare. Let's consider them one at a time.

Ideas: It makes sense that if the old truism "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten" holds true, absent new ideas, school improvement efforts will likely fall short. Six years ago I came to this job with the notion that schools and their leaders had the necessary ideas, they just faced numerous barriers to implementation. Through my experiences at The Center, I have come realize that we have a tragic dearth of ideas. In fact, many creative souls within the school framework pay a heavy price for even venturing to offer a new idea.

Hope: City describes hope in Resourceful Leadership as the desire to see a situation improve combined with the understanding that you have a role to play in that improvement. Unlike other uses of the word hope (City uses the example of a person telling another 'I hope you feel better') this connotation incorporates both the desire to see improvement AND the recognition that you have a role to play in that improvement. While I am tempted to refer to hope as "efficacy," I can see the importance of desire in the equation. I think that you would have a hard time finding school personnel that did not have a desire for improvement. As to the recognition that every person has a role to play in bringing that improvement to fruition; the jury is still out.

Energy: This ingredient is frequently overlooked. The work of school improvement is exhausting, a full tank of energy is required. I think that Dr. City is referring to collective energy. While some might be tempted to lump energy into another attribute, capacity, I think there is value in the difference. While capacity seems to imply capability, energy refers to the stamina (emotional and physical) required to carry out the work.

I have been doing quite a bit of reading lately about what Ohio is calling the Decision Making Framework. Since we love acronyms in Ohio, sometimes we just say that your CIP must be informed by OIP, but not until your SST has presented the DMF. In my reading, I have not seen a reference to ideas, hope, and energy.  Maybe Dr. City ought to create more acronyms.

What are leadership proxies and why are they killing us?

A proxy is one thing that stands for another. A best friend can be the proxy for a groom that is in the military in another country. Most proxies are pale comparisons for the real thing. I think we have established a number of leadership proxies that are collectively harming schools and school leaders.

Efficient, orderly meetings=good meetings: Meetings in schools are haphazard. Rarely can an entire staff come together and complete meaningful business in the time provided. The proxy here is that if a principal can ruthlessly follow the meeting agenda and get through the items, the meeting was worthwhile. The meeting was worthwhile even if the items contained on the agenda were barely worth talking about in the first place. Consider the alternative. Staffs could undertake meaningful, complex, and important issues and not make a dent in resolving them. I think that those were some of the best meetings I have ever attended. Conversations always lasted well beyond the meeting. In some cases, we discussed the issue for weeks in the library, the teacher's lounge, and through e-mail.

Examining achievement data=solid instructional decisions: Data can be tricky. Making decisions based upon "the numbers" has become all the rage. Decisions linked to available achievement data are widely considered to be better than decisions made by other means. The proxy here is that the examination of data usually does not go far enough. On the basis of a single metric, we (usually some sort of standardized achievement test) assign students to intervention, or determine that the student has mastered the standard sufficiently. While I'm very much in favor of using data to make decisions, I think we have totally missed the boat on what qualifies as potent data. For example, based upon the available data, we will assign students to intervention. What data was used to craft the intervention program? Does the intervention work? What is percentage of students receiving this intervention that make progress on the test? If we are going to use, data, lets be thoughtful about it.

While these represent only two of the many leadership proxies that exist in our schools, they serve as examples of ways that we collectively conspire to define success through labeling effective practice, without regard to the products of those practices.