The Joy of Leadership

You read that correctly.

I don't hear many people talking about the joy of leadership. The challenges, certainly. The frustrations, yes. The demands, most definitely. The work load, for sure. But, not the joy.

I believe that there is joy in leadership and that choosing joy actually improves achievement. I am not denying that challenges, frustrations, demands, and an overwhelming work load exist - just that seeing the joy in every day allows for us to see the wins amidst the challenge.

It's really a matter of mindset. Carol Dweck, in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, explains how having a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset, can actually improve success and achievement. This applies to education, to learning, to a new skill, or to how you approach your role as a leader. Choosing a positive, optimistic attitude in your daily work and in your daily life can have a significant impact on the outcomes (find more info here).

Do you want to test your mindset? Check out this quick online quiz to see if you have more of a growth mindset or more of a fixed mindset.

And so, I choose to see the joy in the challenge, in the faces of the children, in the classrooms that are in love with learning, and in the promise of making a difference in a community. What is your joy?

Do we really value achievement?

We, as Americans, say that we value achievement. We profess to be the best - at virtually everything - and that plays throughout our culture as important. We revere professional athletes who excel at their sport and pay them exorbitant salaries. We need to have the best military, the best economy, and the best political structures. But what happens when we apply that same thinking to education?

It has been reported for many years that the United States lags behind other countries in education (read more here). We are well aware that even with higher standards, on 38% of American children are ready for college according to the NAEP National Report Card. While we could propose reasons for this that range from the numbers of mothers who have to work to the number of single parent families to the degree of poverty many families live in to the increase in refugee populations, I propose that many people are intimidated by achievement.

When my oldest son started Kindergarten, he was already reading fluently. I had a friend of mine assess him and he was reading on a 2nd grade level. When I told his Kindergarten teacher, she nodded disapprovingly at me and said "We'll see." When I went for parent teacher conferences in October, she exclaimed to me "Your son can read!" I asked for enrichment to keep him moving forward and he was assigned to a teacher for two hours a week who worked on his pencil grip. Teachers make decisions like this all of the time - we pair the "high student" with the "lower student" to help the lower student stay on track. We let our higher students be "self-directed," which too often means that we let them teach themselves. We often hear high performers being called "teacher's pet" or "brown nose" by other students. Our classrooms often teach to the middle - which leaves high performing students on the fringes, bored, or even acting out to find some level of engagement.

We, unfortunately, do this with our teachers as well. We ostracize high performing teachers and call them "Principal's Favorite" or make comments like "well, you wouldn't know what we are dealing with since everything is perfect in your classroom." We might include the high performer in our group, but assume that he or she will carry the majority of the load because it is "easy for them." We tell our high performing teachers that they should be careful about sounding "too smart" so that they don't intimidate those around them or we caution them to "slow down" or "lower their expectations" because not everyone wants to work with people who expect so much from those around them.


What is the impact of this duality on our schools? As we well know with our own families, "do as I say not as I do" is a very ineffective technique for raising children. Likewise, for creating vibrant school cultures. If you are creating a culture of achievement, high performance and achievement must be valued, honored, pushed, and grown throughout the system. For high performance to become the norm, all stakeholders must be able to find ways to nurture, appreciate, and challenge high performance.

We live in a system of standardization - a "one size fits all" approach to testing and achieving. Daniel Pink, in his new publication To Sell is Human, talks about how teachers have amazing opportunities to sell learning to children each and every day. In order to do that, we, as educators, must let go of our fear of achievement and performance and embrace the ways that our students and our teachers are changing the way we teach and learn each and every day. We have to train our brains to accept challenge as a way to grow our brains, accept that ongoing reading and learning is the way that we can and should be engaging in dialogue and discourse with our peers, and accept that we are all stronger when we push one another to higher levels.

Supporting Social Emotional Learning

This week, I have been thinking a lot about mental health supports. Schools can provide supports and instruction in social emotional learning - and that is a big component of what we need to be doing - but I need to call attention to the serious lack of mental health supports available to our students and our families in our communities. This is really quite a travesty and it really needs to be a call to arms for political leaders, community leaders, and school leaders everywhere. 

At my school, we have daily morning meeting and closing circles in all of our classrooms. Our staff is being trained over time in restorative circles. We have a "Peace Place" in every classroom where students can practice cool down strategies if they are upset. But there are deeper, more significant issues in every one of my classrooms that cannot be supported by this type of tier one instruction. We are fortunate to have a number of supports for our school of 800 students - two social workers, two on-site school-based counselors, three agency based supports, and two Teaching Assistants to support student behavior - and we have a top notch team, however, the need far outweighs the amount and type of supports available. Our school based supports are largely for tier 2 kinds of issues. And if parents are not on board, then the services are discontinued. If families or children are in crisis, the support becomes more difficult to access and there are far fewer options. 

The wait for a child psychiatrist is anywhere from 3-6 months. The waiting list for skill streaming can be up to 6 months. Insurance, or lack of insurance, prevents many families from accessing the kind of care that they need. Often, families have to choose between their own care or care for their child which means that the family unit still may be in crisis. There are very limited options for whole family supports. The systems that are in place to support our children and our families are difficult to navigate and require a level of persistence and determination that is really unlikely. 

Emergency services for children having mental health crises regularly recommend that a child needs an IEP from the school in order to get the supports that they need. Special Education services do not address mental health concerns. So, families are often stuck in a ridiculous cycle and then feel like there is no support for them, for their children, or for their needs. 

We have to do better. Mental health issues are significant in urban education, but they exist in every community. Rural and suburban schools are dealing with a lack of support for mental health, as well. Mental health needs may look very different in rural and suburban children. There may be more anxiety or depression, but the signs may be much less extroverted. This is an issue that must be taken up at the highest levels in order to provide adequate supports and to allow our students to access the goal of "college and career ready." Without significant improvements to the mental health systems for children and families, we run the risk of continued generational struggles with mental health and under-performance in education. More services is a starting point, but the service providers themselves must do better to rid themselves of apathy and work diligently to make change for children and families. 

There are advocacy groups who are hard at work every day trying to provide adequate mental health care and supports for our children and families. The Citizens' Committee for Children in New York City recently published a report advocating for mental health services in all New York City Schools (download report here). Mental Health America is an advocacy group who is trying to impact change through legislation and awareness (see what they are working on here). Get involved. Speak out. It's time for all of us to become a part of the solution for providing adequate mental health care for our students and their families. 

Letting Go

We often say that if something isn't working, we should stop doing it. This is easier said than done in education. The ways we learned and the ways we learned to teach are deeply embedded in who we are as educators. Despite belief systems that have grown and changed, we often revert back to our comfort zone in our classrooms - and particularly if we are under stress - it can be difficult to implement lasting change.

Enter blended learning. As individuals, we have embraced technology for the multiple ways that it can help make our lives faster and more efficient. We text instead of calling. We post on social media to stay connected with family and friends. We use computers where we used to hand write. We have smart phones, smart TVs, smart watches, and even smart homes. But our classrooms still look like traditional, dare I say "old school," classrooms. We have smart boards that have replaced black boards, but we are using them in much the same way we used black boards (or white boards depending on your age and teaching experience). We make just as many worksheets (if not more) as teachers cranked out of mimeograph machines when I was in school (truth be told, in my first teaching job there was a mimeograph machine in the teacher's room!).

Going blended is a little scary. It's kind of like jumping in to an abyss and you are not sure where you will end up. We don't know how the use of digital content will improve state assessment scores or if it will help us get off the dreaded "list" of failing schools. But, we do know this: the world has changed. We must change our classrooms in order to provide relevance to student learning.

CLICK HERE for some great resources to support your journey into blended learning.

CLICK HERE to learn more about blended learning.

For even more information and support, visit:
www.highlanderinstitute.org
www.edelements.com
www.christenseninstitute.org

Building Effective Teams

Let's talk about collaboration. The work involved in turning around a school cannot be done alone. It cannot be done in silos. It requires significant collaboration. What is collaboration exactly? By definition, collaboration is "a working practice whereby individuals work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefit." (http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Collaboration). Teams have to be able to build trust in order to be able to accomplish the significant work that faces them. But at the beginning of the school year, a group of people is thrown together and told that they are a team. They are told they have to make significant gains in student achievement and that they have to work together in order to do that. But, we don't do a lot to help the teams develop the skills necessary to collaborate effectively. In Patrick Lencioni's essential text, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the author outlines the components of true collaboration.

The foundation of the pyramid is about an absence of trust. It requires that teams share a level of invulnerability. We have to be able to share our insecurities, our imperfections, and even our failures with the people on our team. Without this ability to trust, we cannot become an effective team.

As a leader, we must be aware of the dynamics of building collaborative teams and provide support and guidance for teams who do not develop trust or who struggle with conflict. When teams lack trust, they are unable to move forward. When teams are only friendly and collegial, they may have trust, but they cannot sustain healthy conflict. We need to have vulnerability in order to build trust. We need to have honest discussions in order to build true harmony. As effective teams, we must all commit to common goals and find the ways to see the strengths in each of us. We should be able to set higher standards for one another and hold one another accountable when we let the team down. It is only through our collaboration that we will achieve. Silos of achievement will not turn around our schools. True collaboration and honest dialogue is the only thing that can truly move our teams and our schools. 

Why Year 2 is Harder

I am a school leader who is turning around a failing school. Year one was challenging. We had to start from scratch with new staff, a new vision, an extended school day, and building a culture of academic achievement and consistent expectations where one did not exist. Year one was definitely challenging. Year two is just plain hard.

In the first year of school turnaround, everything felt like growth and improvement. We were coming from pretty much the absolute bottom in terms of student behavior and academic achievement. Providing consistent structures, routines, and expectations was difficult to implement, but not difficult to conceptualize. Establishing targets for grade level achievement required stretching, but we were also honest about where we were starting from, so our targets were ambitious but realistic. We were focused on progress. 

We are now in receivership and year two feels like the stakes are higher. We are no longer able to focus on progress alone - we have to focus on proficiency. We do not have time to waste on figuring it out. We need to have immediate responses that will ensure student progress. Feedback must result in immediate course corrections. New professional learning must be implemented into new practice. Teams must be able to collaborate, share ideas, support one another, and problem solve. As a leader, I must make difficult choices that sometimes make people aggravated because I must prioritize what is needed in my building above other things that may be happening throughout the district. This is lonely work. There is often no one else who can understand the pressures of being a turnaround leader. 

Here are some of my thoughts about keeping your head above water in year two:

• Know your focus areas and be strong about saying no to things that do not support your focus. Our three focus areas for year two are Writing, Culture and Climate, and English as a New Language supports. Even our Receivership Recommendations align with these three focus areas so that all of the work we are engaged in moves our focus areas forward.
• Use data wisely. Sometimes it feels like we are drowning in data. A wise leader will only ask for data collection when it is going to be used to inform instruction. What is the point of collecting data that does not inform your instruction? 
• The other part of using data wisely is expecting that your teachers know their data and their students. That means that you as the leader need to know the data of students in your teachers' classrooms. You should be able to walk the walk and talk the talk. You cannot expect your teachers to know how to use the data if you do not know the data and how it should be informing their instruction.
• Ask for help and be clear about what it is you need help with. Plenty of people will offer to help, but you must stay focused on what you really need. An example of this is how I have shifted my consultant support. In year one, we focused a good amount on leadership and coaching support - and that made sense because I was building a team and an infrastructure. In year two, I have asked for some of that support to shift and I am looking at building and empowering some of the promising practice in my building with video coaching and building a repository of effective practice as well as coaching for my enrichment program in the areas of curriculum development and alignment. 
• Message what you mean. As a turnaround leader, there is no time for inconsistent messaging. That includes every single person in the system - from the front desk to the custodian to the teaching assistant to the parents. This can be particularly frustrating and requires that you "inspect what you expect" in terms of newsletters, conversations, and interactions. 
• Appreciate your team. There is no way that this work is accomplished by a single leader - although the role of the leader cannot be underscored in turning around a school. Your team - your leadership team, your support staff, your teaching staff, and everyone in the system is working tirelessly to move student achievement. It can be very frustrating to feel like you are working so hard and someone (namely you) keeps telling you that it isn't good enough (or that is the message that is heard). Acknowledge how hard your teams are working and find ways to keep their heart and soul in it. I am always working to push myself in this area, but I try to acknowledge personally several people a week for the work that they are doing, I try to write several thank you notes each week to acknowledge contributions, we have random "Our Teachers ROCK" experiences where we do something fun for teachers, we end every meeting with "Appreciations" so that there is public appreciation for others, and I try to let me staff know in multiple ways that I completely have their back (even when I am asking them to grow). 
• Know when to let go. You have to recharge. There is no one who can sustain this pace forever. In year one, I gained a significant amount of weight, I got mono, and I had no balance. In year two, I am just as driven, however, I am having to be much more realistic about what I can humanly sustain. I am eating healthier, walking and running, going to bed earlier, and even going on dates with my husband because I am not a superhero. I couldn't do any of this work without my husband, my sister, and my amazing leadership team supporting me. 

Year two is definitely harder. In year one, I didn't even know what I didn't know. Now, I am painfully aware of how far we are from where we need to be. But, I believe in backwards planning and I see clearly where we need to be at the end of this school year. I am diligent in ensuring that we will get there and I have a dedicated team who shares the vision. Wishing for a magic wand will not make it happen, so we must focus on where we can make the most progress and eliminate things that are not helping in order to arrive where we need to be. Destination: Achievement!