37 Tuesdays

Making Change

2009-12-20T16:35:00.000-08:00

I have worked in and around public education for over twenty years. Over the past seven years, I have attended numerous meetings, panel discussions, and conferences that include participants from outside the public schools. Few of these meetings go by without someone coming up to tell me about a disappointing encounter with a public school graduate. Remarkably, these people have all taken part in a common interaction-dealing with someone who could not give them the proper change in a retail establishment.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Is it possible that the inability to calculate correct change has reached epidemic proportions? Since most of the people from my meetings are Ohioans, maybe we have a rogue serial improper-change-giver on our hands. Given that fact that retail businesses often struggle with high employee turnover, perhaps all of my meeting comrades have had the misfortune to come across the one public school graduate in the region that cannot make correct change. In the future, I'm going to ask them to describe the offender.

In all honesty, I cannot recall a single incident where the person at a store, restaurant, car wash, or toll booth has failed to give me correct change. In the same way that aliens always seem only to abduct crazy people, maybe those with a poor opinion of public schools are destined to always be in the checkout line of the cashier with the least skill at dispensing change.

Taking Care of the People Who Take Care of Kids

2009-12-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

I just finished re-reading an article by Parker Palmer entitled Good Talk about Good Teaching. I never tire of reading his work. I find it refreshing and hopeful. I have often thought that schools do a terrible job of taking care of their teachers. Additionally, teachers make it very difficult for schools to take care of them. Some teachers reading this might be of the opinion that to really take care of teachers, throw a little something extra in their pay envelopes. While I am always open to discussions about how much teachers ought to be paid, I don't necessarily equate taking care of teachers with increased compensation.

Palmer highlights three conditions of teaching in this article. I would like to focus on the privatization of teaching, the fact that teaching is more than technique, and the human conditions of our students. As most of my opinions have a tendency to be inflamatory, I will pose them as questions and hope for your comments.

The Privatization of Teaching: Palmer acknowledges that increased privatization may well be attributable to the notion of academic freedom, but contends that it is most likely perpetuated out of choice. Teachers choose isolation as an attempt to escape the scrutiny of others and evaluation by supervisors. I tend to agree. The worst part about teacher isolation if the fact that it breeds what Palmer refers to as "institutional incompetence."

Are teachers really isolated from one another, or is this just an overblown notion?

Is it true that teaching in a public school is the most private job you can have?

Teaching is More Than Technique: Most school improvement efforts have a "technical" component. The logic behind this fact is alluring; if teachers do this, student achievement will be increased. Palmer cites an American tendency to believe that all problems have technical solutions. He is quick to follow-up, however, with a piece of scathing insight into most school improvement efforts. Palmer points out that focusing on technique, we can make the conversations much more "safe" for those involved. The price for this safety is continued neglect of the more important issues that are likely to uncover the real barriers to improvement.

Can we have deep conversations about important topics, or will the school's immune system kick in and squash the dialog like a virus?

How do we get started?

The Human Condition: One sentence from Palmer's article that haunts me is his description of the current condition of our students. He describes the fact that many teachers have mis-diagnosed students as "brain dead." This diagnosis has led to the prescription that these students require "pedagogies that function like life-support systems, dripping information into the veins of comatose patients." Palmer continues by pointing out that "nothing is easier than to slip into a low opinion of students, and that opinion creates teaching practices guaranteed to create vegetative states even if students who arrive at class alive and well."

How have your opinions of students (good or bad) shaped your instructional practice?

Teaching. A miserable job?

2009-06-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

On the surface, thinking about teaching as a miserable job seems ludicrous. You have all heard it from your non-teaching friends and relatives:

Teachers get full-time pay for part-time work (180 days)
Summers off
In many cases, tenure, guaranteeing continued employment
Assurance of annual incremental pay increases

Although the teachers among us might point out flaws in the statements above, when compared to other ways to make a living, teaching is a pretty good gig.

Upon closer examination, I am prepared to argue that teaching in public schools might fit at least one definition of a miserable job. Michael Lencioni, author of the well-known tome Five Dysfunctions of a Team, has written a book called The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. In this book, Lencioni identifies the conditions that lead to a job being characterized as miserable. The three conditions are anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurability.

Anonymity: As a characteristic of teaching, anonymity is overlooked. After all, we conduct our work in the presence of others, the students. We work in a public institution and meet with parents and other staff members. Think about anonymity differently. Our certification and licensure is predicated on the notion that we are interchangeable. Our district’s can move us around (under negotiated conditions) as is we are replacement parts in a repair shop. Further, I have heard it said that teaching in the public schools is the most private job a person can have. Once the students arrive, the door closes and teachers are alone. Teachers are left alone to resolve classroom issues, figure out how to manage new accountability requirements, and implement new initiatives. One educational observer got it right when he stated that teachers are a group of independent contractors that share a parking lot.

Irrelevance: Employees have to know how their efforts impact the larger organization. Bumper sticker slogans like “If you can read this, thank a teacher” do not begin to strike at the heart at irrelevance. An assembly line worker might get to know the transmission assembly very well, but still have little understanding of how cars are assembled. Similarly, teachers get to know the curriculum of their grade level or subject very well, yet do not get insight into the part it plays in the overall education of a student. Perhaps the biggest blow to relevance comes from the increased deployment of “managed curriculum.” These pre-packaged instructional programs rely upon scripted instructions followed by activities and assessments created far away from the classrooms where they are to be used. More and more, we have created situations where the classroom teacher’s creativity, innovation, and skill are irrelevant.

Immeasurability: Perhaps the most paradoxical of all of signs of miserable jobs, increased accountability demands have not led to increased measurability of our craft. The link between quality instruction and student achievement is complex, to try to measure it with a single metric (student performance on high stakes tests) is extremely unwise. Being left to your own devices to determine how well you are doing your job is a recipe for disaster. Current evaluation and assessment structures do little to provide effective feedback about teaching performance. Similarly, the supervision structure in public schools is ill-suited to promote teacher growth. Finally, the profession of teaching provides little incentive for members to continually increase their skills.

I think that I have laid out a decent case for how the profession of teaching meets the three signs identified by Lencioni. Even though they meet the criterion, I still do not believe teaching to be a miserable job. I offer this post in hopes that we can raise awareness of the dangers of disengaging, and perhaps losing, the very people that can cause schools to improve--the teachers.

The Tyranny of the Practical: Why We Need Third-Third Thinking

2009-04-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

People read my blog. Even though I have few followers and even fewer comments posted, I know that people read it because they come up and tell me that they read my latest post. The conversation usually starts like this: "Wow, it must be nice to have time 'think out of the box' and post the results on-line." I am going to continue to consider this a compliment, even though I think that it might be some kind of comment about the work that I do. I seldom respond to the comments, but if I did I might point out my doubts that it is a lack of time that prevents them from "thinking outside the box."

The practical strategies that emerge from school improvement meetings hold an insidious tyranny over us. I have nothing against things that are practical, in fact I have an incredible bias towards the practical. My problem really comes from the belief that we have incorrectly defined practicality. The things that we continue to regard as very practical have proven to do very little in terms of student achievement or school improvement.

Benjamin Franklin, John and Samuel Adams, and Richard Henry Lee probably had better things to do than hang out in taverns, but we can't discount the fact that those conversations led to American independence.

School improvement teams typically come up with their activities by brainstorming. Many consider brainstorming to be a trite practice that has value only in making team members feel included. The fact is that, done right, brainstorming is one of our most powerful tools. In his book Think Better, Tim Hurson describes the typical items that appear as a result of brainstorming.

Hurson divides the lists generated through brainstorming into thirds. The first third of the items will usually be "mundane, tired thoughts, that reside close to the surface of our consciousness." These are not new ideas, but things that we recall having heard (or thought of) before.

Second third thinking is represented by ideas that are more than regurgitation of things we already know, but are still constrained by the things that we already know and have thought of before.

Finally, third third thinking is, according to Hurson, "where the diamonds lie." Here is where you will find true "productive thinking." You will notice unexpected connections, breakthrough ideas, and innovative solutions.

The value of third third thinking lies not only in the product, but the process. Once again, according to Hurson, "the challenge is not to get new ideas, but to get rid of the old ones." By generating long lists, we "flush" ideas from our heads, making room for new ones. The Greeks use the word kenosis, or self-emptying, to describe the process.

The tyranny of the practical prevents us from ever getting to the third third. Time that we have with teachers is so limited, that we tend to only do things that we deem essential. Brainstorming, dialogue, and debate are "luxuries" that we do not have time for. The result is disheartening. In an attempt to do something practical we eliminate the practices that are most likely to result in the improvement we seek.

Dementors!

2009-04-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

Fans of the Harry Potter series will get the reference immediately. For those others, dementors are cloaked creatures that guard the wizard prison. Among the many ways in which a dementor can hurt you is the fact that getting close to one will cause a person to have overwhelming feelings of despair, like all of the joy is gone from the world. Even if you have never read a word of a Harry Potter book, if you work in a public school setting you have probably met a dementor.

Dementors are our colleagues who have the ability to find the dark lining within any silver cloud. According to these people the kids are never smart enough, the parents are never supportive enough, and the administration is never competent enough. What makes them all the more irritating, is that like the dementors of Harry Potter, these teachers are never as happy as when they are making others as miserable as they are.

If you have spent any time in public education, you have probably tried including them in professional discussions or sharing interesting resources. You may have even tried baking something for them. The fact is, the more you try, the more negative they become.

What can you do?

I think that you already know the answer to that; there is really nothing you can do. If you are a colleague you find ways to minimize the influence that they have upon you. Dementors are blessed (cursed?) with uncanny skills of persuasion. Just being near them for minutes at the office mailboxes is enough for them to convince you that there really is no hope for public education. If all else fails, I like the honest approach, just tell it like it is: "Mary, you upset me when you tell me stories like that. I would actually prefer not to hear them."

If you are the principal, the situation becomes a bit more complicated. To some extent you are charged with maintaining building morale, and this person is really lowering it. I hate to mention it because you have heard it before, but restating is really the best strategy. I know that any sentence that begins "What I hear you saying is..." sounds corny and staged. Instead, try just saying the last part of the sentence: "You think our kids don't have a sound work ethic."

Don't be afraid to really restate what you hear: "You don't like working here." Statements like this will definitely cause the person to reflect on the messages they are sending.

What if YOU are the dementor?

Don't laugh. Some of my best friends are dementors. If you are not sure whether you are a dementor, try this exercise. For one day, hold your tongue long enough to answer this question. Why am I making this comment? I think that you might be surprised at how many times you will find that you make comments to get a certain reaction, let people know that you are feeling a certain way, or to communicate that you disagree. When people have to guess what you are really trying to say, you might get "lumped in" with the dementors.

If you are honest and come to the conclusion that you really are a dementor, don't give up hope. The same exercise mentioned above works well in this situation. If you can stop to listen to your own feelings, you can communicate them in an overt manner. If you clearly label your frustration and let people know how they can help you, my guess is that most of them will.

In Defense of Jargon

2009-03-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

Vertical articulation, cognitive dissonance, metacognition. These are the words of people involved in the education profession. Recently there has been a movement to rid public education from what critics call "jargon." I believe that such a movement is a grave mistake.

Those who follow public education, in my opinion, would be hard-pressed to claim that the problem with public education is too many big words. As a matter of fact, I think that I could build an argument in support of the opposite--we don't have enough big words.

Ours is an academic profession. I refer to "academic" in its purest sense. Increasingly the word academic (as in, "this is a purely academic exercise") has come to mean irrelevant. This is a sad state of affairs. It should be noted that space travel, initially, was an academic pursuit.

I was recently working with a district that was considering revising the way that it keeps parents informed about the progress of their children. One segment of the administrative team felt strongly that the current report card format should be kept. Their argument was that parents understand letter grades (A,B,C,D,F), they would struggle to make sense of a standards based report card. I contended then, as I do now, that it is not the job of the public schools to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but to raise it.

To those who continue to argue for the removal of jargon from pubic education, would you be satisfied with a physician that, after a battery of tests came back to you and said, "Yep, you've got a tummy ache."

Big words have a place. They have specific meaning. They should be used by people within our profession to communicate specifically and correctly.

Professional Learning Communities and the Holy Roman Empire

2009-03-24T18:15:00.001-07:00

I had a history teacher who loved to say that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire. Catchy. As I learned majoring in history in undergraduate school, it's also wrong. In education we never let a catchy phrase be diminished by the fact that it's inaccurate.

I wonder if it is accurate to say that professional learning communities are neither professional, places where people learn, nor communities?

I am not sure how professional it is to have to mandate that a group of people meet formally to improve their practice. Also, I am not sure how professional it is to have the purposes for those meetings determined by people outside of the group. Without entering into a debate about whether public school teaching is a profession, I am wondering if there are other professional groups that have to record the proceedings of their meetings and that are told when to meet and for how long. Finally, I am not certain about how much time is spent in professional conversation. If the profession of those involved is teaching, that should be the main topic of the meeting. Instead it feels like the meetings I attend, or am told about by clients, are about achievement data and what band-aids can be applied to get the struggling student through the statewide test. In short, it feels like the PLC meetings I am aware of produce fabulous answers--to the wrong question.

In terms of learning, I am not sure it is possible to learn something you already know. If the meetings are intended to achieve consensus around a strategy that has already been selected, I am not sure if learning can be the outcome. Talking about what I have learned since my last meeting somehow seems esoteric and inappropriate for many of the meetings of the PLCs I have attended.

Community? I am not actually certain about that one. Mostly because I am not sure what community is supposed to mean. If by community we mean a group that owes responsibility to one another, maybe I have seen that. If we mean teachers that come together and share meaningful conversation around the practice of teaching, I've seen that. Funny thing is, though, I have never seen these things in the context of a formal PLC meeting.

Lately I have been posting a bunch of things that read like a laundry list of complaints. This is not one of them. Borrowing from the "rules" of Harrison Owen's Open Space Technology, whoever comes is the right people, what ever happens is the only thing that could have happened, and when its over its over.

Bottom line, I think professional learning communities are the silver bullet of educational transformation, I hope that teachers take whatever opportunity is available to meet with colleagues and build solid relationships, with teaching at the core.

Professional? Learning? Community? Who cares, just talk to one another.

The Most Common Mistake

2009-03-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

My list of school improvement efforts (and eventual failures) is long, but distinguished. As a teacher I have served on every possible committee, including a committee established to determine whether we needed a committee. As an administrator I have led school improvement initiatives ranging from complete facilities renovation to implementation of block scheduling.

Like many of you, I have had successes and failures. When I consider all of the attempts, one thing that stood out among all of them was the search for success--we never went on one.

We anticipated success, we had a clearly defined vision of success (complete with benchmarks), and we waited for the successes to happen. But we never searched for success.

In school reform and improvement, success often happens when you are not expecting it and in ways that you have not identified. If you are not constantly looking for successes, you probably will miss them.

We were too busy to talk about what was going well--we needed to spend our time putting out the fires. It felt awkward to talk about things that were working--many of us felt as though we would lose our teacher's lounge privileges if colleagues heard us talking about how well things were going. Finally, I don't think we had the skills to identify success. We had tons of professional development about how to diagnose problems and craft responses to them. Never did any of us receive instruction about how to identify success.

I am in the professional development business (kind of) and I cannot think of a more difficult task than getting participants to attend a Success Locating Seminar.

The logic is pretty clear, we have time and energy to try to fix what is wrong, but talking about how to sustain what is really working is given a low priority.

The Five Most Important Questions to Ask a Teacher

2009-03-06T17:55:00.000-08:00

Famous management author Peter Drucker wrote a book called The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization. In this book Drucker edits chapters by some of the most important management thinkers, including Jim Collins, Frances Hesselbein, and John Kotter. The result is a simple, yet extremely difficult set of questions that people can ask about their organizations. The questions are simply stated and direct. They are also very difficult to answer. Based upon the the book mentioned above, I have developed five questions that should be asked of any classroom teacher.

Question 1: What is your core business?

Of course, the obvious response would most likely be, TEACHING. Think about it for a minute. If you are reading this blog chances are that you have a close connection to the education profession. That said, really think about it. Can you define teaching? How a teacher defines their practice depends quite a bit on how they define teaching. Rick and Becky DuFour have written Whatever it Takes, a book about professional learning communities. In this book they have a section that they call "What Kind of School is This." They describe four different schools within a two-by-two matrix that places expectations and support on opposite axes. The result is four distinct views of school:

The Pontius Pilate School, where teachers present the subject and wash their hands of the outcome. If students want to learn, they will progress, if they don't it won't because the teacher didn't do their job.

The Charles Darwin School, where achievement is governed by innate ability. Those students who achieve are those that have the raw ability. Those who achieve at a lesser rate probably have reached the limits of their ability.

The Chicago Cubs Fan School, where teachers believe that everyone can learn, at least a little. This school operates on the notion that nurturing the students' self esteem is the most important work of the school.

The Henry Higgins School, where the staff believe that all students can achieve at high levels and the teachers are expected to cajole, push, support, and work side-by-side with the students.

While I don't contend that this is the only way to think about the core business of the classroom, it is a workable model from which to proceed. I maintain that teachers ought to be asked this question and that we ought to wait for an answer.

Question 2: What is it that you want your students to know and be able to do?

Once again, this is not a dumb question. Hopefully a teacher can go deeper than passage rates on standardized tests. Ideally teachers have a clear picture of what a successful student looks like. They would be able to describe work that is exemplary and would know exactly where any student's work falls on a continuum leading to exemplary quality.

When a teacher can clearly define what success means, they can also determine what students need to do in order to attain it.

Question 3: Who are your students?

Time and again, when I hear a teacher say, "That won't work with these kids." I am tempted to reply, "When you say these kids, what do you mean?" How well do teachers really know their students? Is it even possible to know your students? Think about it, not an easy question to answer.

Question 4: What are your results?

Standardized test results represent one important measure of student outcomes, but only one measure. My guess is that when a parent sends their child to school each day, they are thinking more than, "I hope my kid masters all of the grade level indicators today." Included in this question are things like:

Are the students better off today than they were in August?
Are they the kind of people I would like them to be?
Have I served them well?

Again, I am not completely convinced that every teacher must answer these questions. Looking back to my time in the classroom, I know I cannot answer all of them. I would feel a little bit better if I knew that my daughter's teacher asked those questions of herself often.

Question 5: What is your plan?

I am not sure that I have ever met a teacher that could answer all of the questions above. I don't think that a teacher's ability to answer them all even makes that teacher superior. I think that this question is key in that it requires reflection about the previous four questions. Based the answers to those questions, a course of action should present itself.

Skill or Will?

2009-03-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

Being a lifelong possessor of minority opinions in my household, I have entered the fray many times on the topic of socialized medicine. This is not a blog about politics but I think that there are some interesting parallels between the discussion of universal healthcare and public education, specifically the goal of successfully educating ALL students.

I first began considering the possibility of ensuring that all Americans could have access to quality medical care regardless of their ability to pay for it when I was an undergraduate student in the mid-1980's. At that point the question was moot on several fronts. The main factor that made the debate purely academic was that I did not, at that time, believe that we could make the health care guarantee even if we wanted to. That is to say, even if we had the WILL to do it, we lacked the technical ability, or SKILL, to carry it out.

I confess ignorance in the realm of health care, but my sense is that we have progressed rapidly in our ability to share information quickly across great distances, store records and information in ways that are accessible anywhere in the world, and to communicate directly to people who in the past existed "off the grid." The point is, I don't think this question is academic anymore. We now have the SKILL, but lack the WILL.

Despite the claims of public school mission statements, we do not educate ALL children. In the past we seemed to have accepted the fact that there is a "margin of error" or "cost of doing business" that would always be present and would account for the fact that despite our best efforts, some students would fail.

Noted education consultant Carole Helstrom said that "the question is not WHETHER we can successfully educate all children, but rather how we feel about the fact that we haven't thus far."

Like health care, I believe that we have the SKILL to ensure 100% success in education, I think we lack the WILL.

Marching Bands or Soccer Teams?

2009-03-04T05:21:00.000-08:00

In his book Strengthening the Heartbeat, Tom Sergiovanni draws a parallel between schools that function as marching bands and schools that function as soccer teams. He makes his comments in reference to thinking about schools as a community. In this post I am taking his ideas and applying them to something that most schools say they aspire to--professional learning communities.

Marching bands are judged by their ability to make uniform movements. In order to be a successful, a marching band must depend on every member doing what he/she is supposed to do, when they are supposed to do it. There can be no creativity. There is no option for "making decisions on the fly." Success is never measured by outstanding performances of individual members.

Soccer teams, on the other hand, are judged by their ability to achieve a common objective: scoring goals while at the same time preventing the opposing team from scoring goals. Winning soccer teams do this by depending on the fact that players, aware of the objective, will make individual decisions to further the team's chances. Soccer teams depend on individual members' ability to make independent decisions (pass the ball, keep the ball, shoot the ball).

I argue that schools are increasingly aiming toward functioning as marching bands. Common assessments serve as one piece of evidence for my assertion. If teachers are to give students across a grade level or subject one common instrument to measure mastery, it follows that common instruction will be the vehicle most likely to produce the desired results. I honestly have no problem with this, provided the assessments are created collaboratively and there is consensus around the fact that the assessment is a reliable and valid predictor of mastery.

Where I have a problem is that the marching band schools also sing the praises of professional learning communities. The goal of these groups is to consider results in light of practice and make the alterations necessary for continuous improvement. For me, this is where the system breaks down. To stick with the marching band example, the trombone section, is probably going to be discouraged from meeting as a professional learning community and deciding upon how to adjust their piece of the performance. While claiming to operate as professional learning communities, marching band schools work against those very principles by requiring compliance and judging success by uniform action, not individual greatness.

To me, this goes beyond being an issue of semantics. I truly believe that the success of public schools depends upon our ability to function as professional learning communities. Marching band schools do a disservice to that notion by stressing uniformity over individual practice, implementation over experimentation, and delivery of instruction over student outcomes.

Ideas and Hope and Energy...Oh my!

2009-01-22T17:48:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-01-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

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.

In Praise of Doing Things Right

2008-12-03T18:41:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-01T10:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

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.