Sometimes, in the process of moving forward, there are setbacks. Disappointment is not really all that motivating, despite what people might say. It can feel more like a weight pulling you down. So, how do you re-group and get back on track?
As a leader, we have to set the tone, so we can't focus on the disappointment. We have to stay focused on what is working and the results that we are getting. When there is so much riding on the results of state assessments, it can be difficult to see the many things that contribute to overall growth, but purposefully calling out the things that are going well can help to redirect your focus away from feeling down and energize that positive thinking again.
Don't let a set back stop you from moving forward. Find a way to refine your focus and clarify your vision. Take inspiration from others who have been knocked down and gotten back up to experience great success.
A major aspect of being a turnaround leader is looking for the early wins. Sometimes those early wins are not the things that you can see in state assessment scores - but they will make the space for that powerful academic achievement to happen. Without the significant changes that we experienced in culture and climate, we would not be able to make any academic gains. Without the shifts in belief that we have worked so hard to establish, we would not be able to build a culture of goal-setting and data analysis. Without the relentless commitment of our staff to the vision of our turnaround plan, we would not be able to see the kind of effective collaboration, data analysis, and instructional planning that we are seeing with our teams. And so, we won't focus on the disappointments of the day, but on the day when our students will achieve on level with others across the state and the country and we will know that the hard work, tears, sleepless nights, and deep commitment have all been worth it.
As a turnaround leader, your day is full of immediate priorities - most of which are not the priorities that you started off with on your to-do list. A colleague of mine referred to her need to have time in her day for the "deep work" - time that she could prioritize toward the work that needs to be done or the tasks that need to be completed. So, the question is not only about how we prioritize our time so that we can accomplish the work that needs to be done, but also, what is the work that should be prioritized?
In many principal interviews, they will give you a scenario of three (or more) situations happening simultaneously and ask you how you would react. In most of these scenarios, there is an immediate crisis in the building (think safety), a parent demanding to meet with the principal, and a call from the Superintendent that must be attended to - all happening simultaneously. That is pretty typical - but you can usually add in a pressing deadline, classroom observations, meetings, and emails requiring immediate responses.
What are the priorities of a turnaround leader?
Inspect what you expect. You cannot turnaround a school without knowing exactly what is happening in classrooms on a daily basis. This is the priority. Observation. Feedback. Change. Seeing results in classrooms and in student learning. If you are not available because you are in classrooms supporting instruction, that will be understood.
Empower your team. The work of a turnaround leader requires a strong team - that includes your leadership team, your instructional team, your support staff, your teacher leaders, and your classroom leaders. Meet regularly with these key people to make sure that the work is being pushed out and that they own the vision enough to fill in when you are unavailable. Include opportunities for practice and rehearsal in your regular meetings so that you are confident that your team has the skills necessary to handle challenges when they arise. You are the leader, but a good leader has an even better team.
Make time to manage. Trusting that others will follow through on tasks and assignments is important, but so is checking in to see that these tasks and assignments are meeting deadlines and expectations. Building in the time at the beginning to ensure that everyone has the same vision of the work is also important to preventing frustration and feeling like you have to take over when things don't go as planned.
Build a strong community. When your community is with you, then it makes it much easier to solve problems and keep things moving forward. Take the time to learn who the parents are who can help to move your vision forward and who can have a positive influence on the greater community.
Base everything in results. If you are not regularly reviewing your data - individual student data, classroom data, grade level data, interim assessment data, and student work, then you cannot make mid-course corrections or celebrate your successes.
Keep an open door, but know when you need to close it. There are times when you need to close your door, do the work, and make the deadline. I don't do this often, but when I need to, I know that my team has what it takes to keep everything moving.
Take the time to go back to 10,000 feet. You cannot move a vision forward if you are stuck in the minutia. Emails have to be answered, phone calls must be returned, and meetings must be attended, but you have got to back up and return to your vision on a regular basis - for yourself and for your team.
Can you think of the one person who was pivotal in supporting you, believing in you, or influencing you in the trajectory of your life? Mine was Gloria Carroll. She was my 7th grade Social Studies teacher and she was the first person to really see me and believe in me. What I mean is that she really saw my potential and encouraged me to see it as well. I have had many teachers - and many were good teachers - but, Mrs. Carroll ranks at the top all of these years later because she took an active role in believing in me. She talked with me, she listened to me, she encouraged me to dream, she encouraged me to challenge myself academically, and she set the bar for my success high and expected that I would reach it.
When I reflect on the most meaningful teachers in my life, they all have similar characteristics: they pushed me, they encouraged me, they supported me, and they believed in me. The teachers who I remember the clearest had high standards, they could articulate what excellence looked like/sounded like, they gave explicit feedback, and they challenged my thinking about myself, the content, and/or the world around me.
As a principal, this is what I want for my students. Teachers who see them for their possibilities and not defined by their neighborhood or their [perceived]family background. Teachers who have the same high expectations for their students that they have for their own children. Teachers who know that high standards and academic success rarely exist in a worksheet that reduces thinking down to a few sentences or sound bites. Teachers who encourage creative and divergent thinking and who actually listen to student thinking - always challenging them to go further, do more, expand their thinking.Teachers who believe that the next President, the next Steve Jobs, the next Olympic athlete, or the next award-winning author is sitting right in front of them - waiting to hear those words that will change the trajectory of their life forever. "To me, you are not a challenge, you are an opportunity."
Watch this video. Don't say to yourself, "I will watch it later." Watch it now. And ask yourself if you are the one for someone in your classroom. Are you the one person who makes a difference in the lives of the children you serve? Are you the teacher that will still be the one in thirty years (or more)? Are you helping your students see themselves as the next President, award-winning author, or creative genius?
Teachers are powerful. They directly influence the future. Be that teacher who dares to believe, who dares to have high expectations, and who sees the future sitting in front of them each day in their classroom. And be that teacher who is brave enough to tell your students all that they can be. No matter what.
When I was in school, math was about right or wrong: correct or incorrect. If you struggled with figuring it out or had to think about the problem differently, it was discouraged. I have a vastly different understanding and appreciation for mathematics now that I am on the other side of the whiteboard. But, our instructional practices haven't caught up to the purpose of higher standards. The rationale behind higher standards is to move mathematics away from a purely procedural study into a study of questioning, problem-solving, testing hypotheses, and failing forward.
The majority of our metrics in our receivership status focus on mathematics - so math has been on my mind a considerable amount lately.
The purpose of higher standards in mathematics is to bring back the joy and curiosity that should live in problem solving - to inspire the next generation of thinkers, to build confidence in reasoning skills, and to develop young people who can use logic and have a deep understanding of the world around them. Too often, instruction focuses on teaching children to excel at ritual compliance - rather than to excel at thinking, questioning, and problem solving.
So, what would it take to have more of our mathematics classrooms look like what Dan Meyer describes? As we have tried to increase the level of rigor in our classrooms and promote more thinking and problem solving, we may have actually gotten farther away from the actual intent of the standards. Even as we have tried to increase the conceptual understanding of mathematics, we continue to apply procedural approaches and often miss the opportunities for deeper learning. We have to structure our instruction and our questioning to encourage our students to take risks, to think deeply, and to productively struggle. That means that we, as educators, have to do the math to think about how our students might see the challenges that they are facing.
If we are still approaching the teaching of mathematics as a procedural study, we will only produce students who see the procedure of the problems. Even the explanation of thinking can become a procedure if that is the way it is presented. In order for our students to achieve the higher standards, we have to provide them with strong foundational skills and plenty of modeling and practice with thinking about thinking. It is critical for students to understand that it's okay to struggle and to revise their thinking as part of how they make meaning of the problem or task. That struggle is part of what will make our future engineers, computer programmers, or video game designers successful. Building excitement and conceptual understanding about math begins in our elementary classrooms where we can make math fun and show our students that they have the support they need to learn and grow. Giving our children the chance to experience math, rather than just doing practice problems and worksheets, will give them the best chance to gain the skills that they need to not only meet the higher standards, but also to make connections to anything that they wish to pursue in their future.
We spend so much time as educators trying to fill in gaps when students are not performing at mastery levels. It really makes me question why we aren't thinking about this in a different way - why aren't we investing our time into pre-teaching instead of re-teaching?
Let me clarify - I do not mean "teach to the test." I definitely mean teach to the standards.
When we re-teach something, we think about our students differently. We think about different ways that individual learners could reach mastery more efficiently and more effectively. Why don't we do that in the first place? Why aren't we spending our considerable time that is spent planning instruction thinking about the learners that we have, the standards that they must master, what the data tells us about our students' learning, and ways that would be the most effective and efficient for our students? If we are willing to invest hours on Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers, then why don't we invest those same hours into developing effective questions that will engage our students as deep thinkers or hands-on experiences that involve our students in solving real problems?
Robert Marzano explains in his article on Teaching for Rigor (read more here), "If the majority of instruction is spent at lower levels of complexity, it is unlikely students will perform to standard on state assessments written to test cognitive complexity." Marzano goes on to explain that "strategies that are more student-centered and demand sophisticated levels of analysis, hypothesis testing, synthesis, and collaboration in the service of applying knowledge to authentic, real-world problems" is seen fewer than 3.2% of the time in classrooms that he observed. Marzano concludes that "instruction focused on achieving rigor is rare." He states that "the lack of such instruction amounts to a crisis" because our students are unable to experience the kind of instruction that will prepare them for achieving higher standards. Marzano identifies 13 Essential Strategies for Achieving Rigor in classrooms.
There is no doubt that instructional planning to increase rigor and increase student achievement is time consuming. However, it is essential in order to ensure that our students experience the kind of foundation for learning that will prepare them for college and career readiness. The next generation of innovators, creators, problem-solvers, and leaders require that we prepare them to embrace the endless possibilities that their futures include. To do that, we need to give them rigorous experiences and opportunities to connect with the real world and empower them to become curious and question everything. You won't find that on a worksheet.
This weekend, I went back to my hometown for the funeral of a family friend. I saw my elementary PE teacher, my middle school art teacher, former students, former students' parents, and colleagues from my first teaching position. As I talked with people who had meant so much to me throughout my growing up and early years of teaching, I thought about the power of teachers to impact, influence, and encourage the trajectory of individual lives, families, and the community.
I grew up in a small town. The school is the center of the community - providing support, social interaction, encouragement, and a sense of safety for students and their families. My first teaching job was in the small town where I grew up. Many of the teachers who had been my teachers in school became my colleagues. I realized that teaching was a calling for these amazing teachers. They were unbelievably dedicated - not because they were paid to be, but because of their belief in the students and the future of their community. They saw limitless possibilities in their students and went above and beyond to make a difference in the lives of their students and their families. They gave countless hours before and after school without compensation to run clubs, have play rehearsal, volunteer at sporting events, or tutor students with homework.
Main Street in the small town where I grew up and began my teaching career.
When I began teaching in urban schools, I realized that there were many connections between rural and urban teaching. The most important similarity is that students, families, and the community need dedicated teachers who are willing to go above and beyond. Even if the schools that we teach in are dramatically different from those we grew up in, we must bring the same level of commitment and dedication to our students as we want from the teachers of our own children - like what I experienced in that small town.
Teachers have incredible power to impact lives and to change the outcome for so many students. I often write about the power of belief because it has been so important to me personally and I have seen it make a difference in the lives of the students I teach. If the message that we give our students is "I believe in you and I will be there for you no matter what," then they start to believe in themselves - they start to see themselves through our eyes. But that takes time and commitment. In urban schools, the trust is so thin. You must build trust with students through consistency - in terms of belief, follow through, and expectations. Too many people have already let our urban youth down - we must recognize that the power that we have to change lives can go both ways. Our words, our actions, and our messaging must always underscore that we have unconditional belief in our students' future - that is what will truly change our communities.
I love the message in this poem by Taylor Mali. He shares why he teaches - what makes him restart every day. All of the political undertones of education - APPR, Receivership, Turnaround, accountability, funding shortages, curriculum shifts, common core, or the cornucopia of letters that identify new programs and new guidelines - none of that is as important as knowing that we have the power to change lives each and every day in our classrooms. I didn't become an athlete or an artist, but I know that my elementary PE teacher and my middle school art teacher believed in me. And when I shared with them this weekend that I am now a principal of an elementary school in an urban district, I could tell that they still believed in me. That power of a teacher - powerful, powerful stuff.
Let's face it - in the world of school turnaround, the bottom line is results in student achievement. I can tell you that I have led my school to a complete turnaround in the areas of culture and climate and that we are a radically different learning environment than we were when I first started and I can even show you data that supports all of that. But - and it is a big but - according to state assessment scores, we are still performing with single digits. We collect a great deal of data that indicates student growth and student progress, but even our common core aligned interim assessments (we use Achievement Network) make a disclaimer that they are not predictive. And the short version of this story is that we need a win.
Unraveling the story of what your data is telling you is akin to Alice going down the rabbit hole. As a leader, you have to ultimately make a decision about what needs to happen first in order to get results. Here is a real life scenario. According to our receivership metrics, our baseline for students scoring a level 2 or above on the NYS ELA assessment is 21%. Our target set by the state is 43% and the very least that we can do in order to receive any credit for that indicator is to improve by 1% - so 22%. As we analyze the closest thing that we have to an aligned state assessment (our Achievement Network Interim Assessments), one of my grade levels has only 17% of students scoring a level 2 or above and the proficiency rate is single digits. Unraveling what is the root cause of under-performance is what getting results is all about.
Everyone seems to have a proposed solution for getting results; replace the principal, replace the teachers, change the curriculum, become a charter school, bring in outside consultants, provide more interventions, increase community involvement. If you google "getting results in failing schools," you will end up with link after link of schools, districts, outside consultants, and independent receivers that propose the answer for getting results. As I think about the situation with my under performing grade level (to be honest, I am perseverating on it), I am reminded of the underpinnings of Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I know that we have a clear vision, I have the best teachers, and we have students who are willing and eager to learn - so what is preventing us from getting results? As I think this through, I can see how gaps in both our curriculum and instructional delivery are impacting our ability to achieve the results we want and need. When 83% of your grade level is not proficient, it is an issue of core instruction and cannot be addressed through intervention. So, as the school leader, I have to make decisions that will lead to us getting results because we cannot continue this level of under-performance.
As we peel back the layers of this issue, I have to go back to my fundamental beliefs about high quality reading instruction - whether we are talking about common core or not - and I need to dig deep with my team to see what their fundamental beliefs are as well. Students become better readers by reading. Our classrooms must be spaces that inspire and encourage children to love reading. This is the underpinning of high quality reading instruction. When I think about what our instruction actually looks like in comparison to this, I know that I am seeing more teaching of discreet skills than I am seeing students deep in text that they love and responding to that text in a meaningful and purposeful way. This is likely the result of the very thing that we think is helping - reteaching plans that are based on improving specific skills, disaggregated data that identifies student gaps, and an unending pressure to make gains. It is more difficult to see how students are growing on specific skills when they are deep in a great book. It requires a different approach to teaching that is based on the passionate belief that our kids can achieve at high levels if they are given the right environment and encouragement.
Good teaching should result in results. Curriculum may change. Initiatives may change. Leadership may change. Good teaching should be the stuff that results are made of.
