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!

Creating a Culture of Achievement

I haven't written in a couple of weeks. I have been really engaged in the delicate balance of managing the immediate needs of where we currently are (which, by the way, is light years ahead of where we were this time last year!!) and planning for our future. We are part of a new legislation in New York that places struggling or persistently struggling schools in a status called "Receivership." To summarize receivership, it is the last chance that the lowest 5% of achieving schools in New York have to improve before someone else (an "independent receiver") steps in to take over. Although we have not made the kind of growth that we wanted or expected in terms of state assessments, we have plenty of evidence to support that we are really on the right track (for example, we are light years ahead of where we were at this time last year!!), so we have embraced receivership as a great opportunity to add more details to our plan and really think through what we envision from our school in 2-3 years. This kind of backwards planning is critical to the process of turnaround. If you can clearly see where you want to be at the end, and then you can articulate exactly what you need to do in order to get there, and you can allow for assessment and adjustments along the way, then how can you fail? Vision + planning + follow through = success.

But I digress. The real topic today is about achievement. The kind of achievement that permeates the entire of a school and of a community. The kind of achievement that hast parents invested and asking questions; the kind of achievement that makes it more cool for kids to be spending their time talking about reading or writing than it is for them to goof off; the kind of achievement that has teachers talking about best practices and ways to reach and teach kids - even over lunch or in the copy room. How does that shift happen? We worked so hard in year one to develop data protocols, make goal setting and achievement a living part of our culture, and shared data with our parents and families. Our students made progress - the growth was evident - but we really didn't achieve mastery. As we got deep into our data over the summer we knew exactly what we were missing. Our students were progressing and we were so proud of that growth, but they were not achieving the standards because we did not invest in sharing the standards with our students - we did not show them enough exemplar work, have them assess their own work against the standards using student friendly rubrics, and we did not inform parents and families about what grade level work is supposed to look like. In other words, we created a strong culture of learning, but we did not go far enough to fully develop as a culture of achievement.

 So, we are getting smarter. Our data meetings include more exemplars of grade level writing. Our discussions surround how we can align our expectations to standards, rather than letting our students define our expectations. That brings a real issue to the table - our students have been performing below level, and that has been a part of the culture at my school for many years (hence, the receivership status). So, making sure that we have the right strategies in place to move our students toward the standards becomes the work. In this video, a teacher prepares her students to dig deep into the work around theme in a novel and shares with her students the different levels of proficiency that they may be at in terms of this concept. There is real power in helping students to understand their own level of proficiency and be able to identify levels of proficiency in their peers. This is how we become more of a culture of achievement.

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With all of this talk about standards, achievement, and classroom culture, it is so important to remember that creating a culture of achievement in classrooms is purposefully built. Teachers who are able to move their students toward this do not have a magic wand and they are not simply "better teachers." The same kind of backwards planning that I am using to move our school forward as a school in turnaround is the same kind of purposeful and backwards planning that teachers must utilize in creating a culture of achievement in their classrooms. Debbie Miller (in her book Teaching with Intention) talks about the importance of purposeful planning to achieve what you believe that students can achieve. If you believe that students can, and should, be engaged in discourse around standards, exemplars, and levels of quality work (and I certainly believe this!), then you must implement structures that build the capacity of students to do this. It will not happen overnight. And it is so important to persevere and make sure that you don't give up and let the student's performance define your expectations. If it isn't working, reflect on what skill students are missing and back track to teach that skill. Involve students in assessing their own progress. Allow them to reflect on how they can do it better. But do not give up and lower your expectations. Our students must have the same high expectations in their classrooms that we expect from our own children. This is the work - and it is so important.