Culture Champions: Teachers Supporting a Healthy Classroom Culture

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined again on the show by Dr. Anthony Mohamed. who is an internationally known education consultant, former middle and high school principal, and the author of numerous books. You've probably seen him speaking at conferences around the country. His books include Transforming School Culture, How to Overcome Staff Division, and The Will to Lead, The Skill to Teach, Transforming Schools at Every Level, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:42] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:44] SPEAKER_02:

Dr. Muhammad, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:46] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin. I appreciate the invitation and Congratulations on the success of your podcast.

[00:51] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks very much. It's a credit fully to our fantastic guests, and I do want to thank you for coming back on the show. Thinking about the work that you do with schools and the challenges that you saw schools and school leaders facing, what was it specifically that prompted you to write this particular book, The Will to Lead, The Skill to Teach?

[01:11] SPEAKER_00:

I started off my consulting career working strictly with the development of professional learning communities, helping schools reform and really systemically implement those four PLC questions around curriculum, assessment, intervention, and enrichment. And I noticed that there was a real void in some of the schools that I work with with their school culture. So that's what prompted my first book, Transforming School Culture. It was a way to really help schools understand the political insights and the interactions in their schools and ways for them to overcome that division and create a united front really develop a productive, healthy culture and implement the right strategies. Well, that book was very successful. And I did a lot of work with schools on school culture.

[01:59]

Then I recognized that in some cases, the problem wasn't that they didn't know what to do to evolve their culture. And it wasn't that they didn't understand the PLC concept. There were some real gaps in skill, how to teach, how to construct a lesson, understanding the culture of the students that they served and understanding culturally responsive teaching. So around that time, I met Dr. Shiraki Holly, who was my coauthor, and our work just complemented each other. And after transforming school culture, I was very interested in providing a strategy or sets of strategies for schools, any school that wanted to develop a healthy culture to be able to do it.

[02:41]

But I found that just having a healthy culture wasn't enough. They had to also have responsive pedagogy and the right instructional strategies to fit within the right system to go along with the right culture. So the pedagogy, the skill was the missing piece. So this book was really the marriage of Dr. Shiraki Halle's concepts and my concepts to really how do we develop the will or the culture of the organization, but simultaneously really address the skill level because being focused, having high aspirations, being very collaborative with very poor instructional practices wouldn't get us the results that we wanted. So it was the perfect way for our two messages to merge so that any school that was desperate to improve in those two areas really would have a roadmap for it.

[03:29] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let's talk about will first, this idea of the will to lead, the will to improve. What do you see as the big challenge for schools, especially schools where perhaps there's a history of underperformance or there's been a history of leadership turnover or just some pretty substantial challenges? How do you define the issue of will? What's going on in schools that we need to figure out and get right in terms of will?

[03:55] SPEAKER_00:

It's not much different than what we face with personal will. I mean there are people who look in the mirror every day and there are problems with their health or problems with their finances or problems in their marriage that they know. I mean those problems aren't hiding. They're not elusive. They're right in front of you. But developing the will to actually confront those and do something about it means that people are going to have to be made uncomfortable.

[04:22]

It means it's going to take a tremendous level of commitment, follow through. It's going to take a plan. What I found was schools didn't lack an understanding of what having a good culture was like. They just didn't really have the will to go through the process to actually make that happen. And for a lot of people, the process was elusive. So I wanted to make the process as concrete as possible, to make it as logical as possible, to really push people into the process.

[04:50]

Just like every day when you wake up and you say, man, I'm not happy with this. If there was a process that made sense, it was doable, it didn't cause too much discomfort, I think most people would do it. And that's what I was betting on with the will part. Help people recognize the need to improve, but also provide them with a strategy that wouldn't kill their desire to actually do it because it was overwhelming or too challenging.

[05:14] SPEAKER_02:

So what do you see as the various groups or kind of camps or constituencies that leaders have to deal with when trying to bring about that kind of change? And what do you see as our agenda, our task as leaders in dealing with those different groups?

[05:31] SPEAKER_00:

The Transforming School Culture book provided a framework for helping people to understand school culture. What I found was there were political divisions in every school that I studied. There were 34 that I documented in the Transforming School Culture book. and that people tended to gravitate into one of four subcultures. We call them the believers, the tweeners, the survivors, and the fundamentalists. The believers and fundamentalists are at two polar opposite ends of the political and social spectrum in a school.

[05:57]

A believer is a group of individuals whose professional objective is to maximize student growth and productivity, which opens them up to the willingness to change, the willingness to learn, the willingness to grow, So their behavior is driven by their objective of seeing students successful. The fundamentalist, on the other hand, is an individual who's grown comfortable in status quo. So outcomes, objectives, organizational growth really have now, it's left their circle. Their own personal goal is to maintain whatever level of comfort or level of stability that they've gravitated towards. So whether it's a particular instructional method or particular master schedule, keeping things the same for their own personal gratification and comfort becomes more important in organizational growth.

[06:49]

So when it comes to change, fundamentalists are typically the most vocal, they're the most active, they're the most political. And my biggest critique in the Transforming School Culture book was that believers tended to not match fundamentalists in their political influence and activity. They typically would give them carte blanche. And there are places where Two, three, four very vocal people who are frustrated, they don't want to change, monopolize the entire political conversation and entire change agenda. In the will to lead, a skill to teach, the premium is placed on the role of leadership because organizations don't typically change themselves organically. There's usually some catalyst and that catalyst usually comes from leadership.

[07:34]

Somebody who's visionary, somebody who helps people see things in a different way. a person who models the behavior or people that model the behavior. Organizations typically don't fix themselves. It usually takes somebody who is the catalyst to that. So that's why it's called the will to lead. We developed that will because of the influence of effective leadership.

[07:56]

And Larry Lizotte and Ron Edmonds are correlates of effective schools. Strong, effective leadership was one of the seven correlates. They've never found a school that was effective that did not have strong, impactful leadership. There are schools that get good results without it, but it's not an effective school. These are schools that benefit from things that are developed or cultivated in students before they actually enroll. So we're going to take credit for kids who were born on third base and who thought they hit a triple.

[08:26]

And we're going to take credit for that, but we're not willing to take responsibility for students who need assistance. Lizard and Edmonds hit it right on it. We've never found an effective school that did not have an effective leader.

[08:38] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and it seems like, as you described the fundamentalists in a school that perhaps is struggling, it seems like there's so much inertia residing in that group of people. And if it's a large group of people, as you said, it's always the most vocal too. And thinking back to some of my experience as a classroom teacher, I definitely can identify people who I would say fall into each of those categories. And as someone who comes into that either as a teacher or a leader and thinks, hey, things are very different here. Things should be very different from the way they are. The status quo is not okay.

[09:14]

What you're saying is that inertia that's held by that group of people who wants things to stay the same is so powerful that it takes very intentional leadership to make things different and to start to turn things around. So what does that leadership look like at different levels? If we're looking for transformational leaders at the administrative level, at the classroom level, you know, and I can think of so many examples of colleagues of mine in that school who worked at each of those different levels. What does that look like at different levels, the leadership that we need to overcome that inertia?

[09:46] SPEAKER_00:

There are four very critical behaviors of a transformative or transformational leader. I like to call it the balance between support and accountability. And my theory is, is that in order to effectively motivate and move people out of their comfort zones, it takes a balance of support and accountability, but there's an order to it. Support has to precede accountability. That accountability is unethical if it's not first preceded by support. I read a quote once that said, when the hammer is the only tool you have in the toolbox, you look at every problem like a nail.

[10:20]

And so a leader can be too supportive or they can be too coercive. It takes a balance between the two. And being coercive or using the hammer or accountability is only ethical after you first provided people with all of the support they need to actually be successful at what you're expecting them to do. But there are three very important supports. And the first characteristic or support or characteristic of an effective leader is communication. In my Transforming School Culture study, I found that about 70 percent of the factors that led to staff resistance could be directly traced back to communication.

[10:59]

People don't have the power to read leadership's mind. If the leader is not up front, it's not transparent, doesn't have an exchange of ideas with those who they expect to lead, then it leads to misunderstanding. Misunderstanding leads to resentment, which leads to people resisting. So communication is very, very important. The second characteristic is the ability to develop trust through professional relationships. Some people become motivated because they understand you've made it rational, you've communicated your purpose, but others feel comfortable changing because they trust you.

[11:35]

It's more of an emotional bond, not a personal trust or personal relationships, but professional. And trust and likability are very, very different. Being trustworthy means that your behavior is consistent. and is aligned with your stated core value system. Whenever your behavior isn't aligned with your core value systems, people don't trust you. You come up as a hypocrite.

[12:00]

So one of the things I want leaders to recognize that being trusted and being liked are not the same thing. Invest in being trusted. Develop in relationships that are professional. The third important support is training also professional development and training resources. Some people don't change their behavior because they don't know how to do what you're asking them to do. So I might understand, I might trust you, but my apprehension is based upon the fact that I just don't know what the heck you're asking me to do.

[12:31]

And that's why Dr. Holly's part of the book is so important. I work with people, especially in inner cities, who get the urgency. They trust their leadership, but they don't understand the culture of their students. They don't understand culturally responsive teachings. They don't know how to create good assessments.

[12:47]

They don't know how to analyze data. So it's kind of ineffective to expect somebody to do something that you never prepared them to do. So communication, building trust, and providing training and resources. If those three things are done, the fourth characteristic would be holding people accountable. It's setting a standard and basically declaring that I'm not asking you now telling you you know why it's necessary you know how to do it we're in an environment where we broke down the walls of distrust the only thing that's left is is that you're just you just want to be resistant and we have a remedy for that too it's called courage and it's fair accountability if I prepared you to do something I'm going to hold you accountable for doing what we've agreed that you should do you're prepared to do and you know how to do so that accountability piece is

[13:43]

It's only really effective after due diligence has been done on the support part. And I've seen a lot of leaders try to use the hammer to compensate for a lack of emotional intelligence. They don't know how to build people up. All they know how to do is give orders. And then I've also seen the opposite where people are so relationship oriented and there's such servants that they never demand anything of anybody. When there's an imbalance, we don't create the right environment for people to have that will to change and to grow and get better.

[14:16] SPEAKER_02:

Right. And if we think back to what you said earlier about that vocal group that wants to maintain the status quo, you know, they always have something to say whenever there's some new training, some new professional development. And it's kind of a kind of a this too shall pass or this won't work or I'm not even going to show up for it kind of attitude. You know, and we talk about that a lot in working over the summer with schools where there's a there's a training scheduled and everybody's on board. And then you get there and half the department's not you know, didn't show up for the training. You think, well, what was this optional?

[14:45]

Where is everybody? And, you know, I think that's so critical to take it in that order. Communication, trust, training that produces the skills that people need, and then accountability. And I think at the secondary level, we face a particular challenge because as administrators, we can't have expertise in every one of those areas that Dr. Hawley goes into in the the second half of the book. We can't personally be the expert the way that I think a lot of our colleagues at the elementary level become principals because they have this instructional expertise.

[15:17]

They're an instructional coach, especially in literacy, and then that leads into kind of a principal role, and that kind of encompasses the majority of what's focused on at the elementary level. But at the secondary level, a lot of us get into this work through athletic coaching, through student discipline, through the relationships that we have with students, and it's a very different path. So thinking about that transition into... Providing that training, providing that skill that's a prerequisite to holding teachers accountable.

[15:48]

How do we approach the varied skills and topics that you and Dr. Hawley cover in part three of the book on those skills around responsive pedagogy and classroom management? And I would say classroom management is probably one where we tend to have the strongest personal skill set. But when we need to help our teachers get better at things that we ourselves were never really helped to, you know, honestly, I can't say that I ever had great training as a teacher in say formative assessment, but I know as a leader, I've got to focus on that with my staff.

[16:18] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Three different ways. The first way is to expose people to experts. If I'm a principal and I have resources, I have title one money. I have, Title II or some other fund to invest in training for teachers, use it wisely. Assess the needs of your faculty.

[16:37]

Allow them to go to a conference or bring somebody in. I mean, it's nothing like having somebody who's dedicated their entire life to a particular skill or particular methodology. Help people or demonstrate people because, I mean, their work is well known and it's gone under the scrutiny. of analysis from others. That's one way, being efficient, not just spending your PD money on things that are frivolous, that don't really meet your goals as a principal. The other way is through a process in the PLC at work model called collective inquiry.

[17:14]

Study together, journal articles, using a staff meeting to study a common piece of literature, having people report on that literature and then develop an experiment based upon the literature that they've read. So people don't have those type of financial resources. We always have access to scholarship through sources like ERIC, Google Scholar, professional organizations. There's literature that we can go to. And a third way would be through the PLC process. As we've aligned standards, as we've assessed, and now we go through a data analysis protocol, to take a look at data to see who's taught that standard best or who got the best results.

[18:00]

We'd share strategies, allow teachers to go visit other teachers who've done it. Even if there's a school in the district who's gotten really good results in a particular area, to allow time for those teachers to go observe the teachers at that other school teach or videotape it. So in 2016, with all the technology and resources we have at our disposal, Saying that, well, I wasn't well-trained and I don't know what to do. Really, people aren't looking. You have podcasts like yours. You have Twitter.

[18:31]

You have other professional resources. If people want to know how to do something, there are more resources at their disposal now than there's ever been. But again, it typically doesn't happen unless leadership models that behavior and makes it a priority for the entire system.

[18:48] SPEAKER_02:

And it's funny, at a lot of conferences, if you attend a professional conference, I know you speak at a lot of conferences, a lot of the people that I see there, especially attending content area sessions, say on literacy or vocabulary or PBIS, some kind of behavioral support, a lot of what I see happening is that people are shopping for those ideas. They're shopping for those strategies and those approaches that they can bring back to their school and then have a team that kind of runs with it. And I saw that happen in my own school when I was a principal. We had a great team go to a PBIS conference, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. And as principal, I was involved in that. I was aware of it.

[19:30]

I went to the conference. But that team went so deep with that work that it was far more than I could ever have said. You know, if I had read a book and said, OK, we're going to do PBIS and here's what it's going to look like, it would have paled in comparison to what that team was able to do. So I appreciate that approach to going and learning from experts, learning from research. And I have to say, Dr. Muhammad, that is the first time I've ever heard someone recommend that we as school-based educators go into the ERIC database and actually download the original research or go to Google Scholar.

[20:00]

And you can find a PDF of just about anything on Google Scholar. You don't have to have a university login to get journal articles. Often they're out there. But I think that's such good advice because if I think about the best teams that I've seen, especially at secondary school levels, I think about the math department at the high school where my wife taught. That math department, I mean, they're all coaches now. They're all...

[20:24]

you know, they've moved on into professional development roles because they got so good at figuring out what their students needed, figuring out which experts they were drawing on to develop their models. They got so good at that PLC process and learning what they needed to do to improve that they just shot through the roof and it was just incredible. And I think we've got to set our teams up to have that kind of success. So I...

[20:46]

Really appreciate your comments there about those resources, whether we have a lot of financial resources to sink into it or not, just getting people working together to really figure out what does the skill look like. I think that's so powerful.

[21:02] SPEAKER_00:

One of my colleagues, Mike Mattos, said if you take the work away from the teachers, you take the learning away. So actively engaging in professional activities is really how you grow your skill level. And when we take that away from teachers and we give it to Pearson or we give it to somebody else or McGraw-Hill and we take that away from the teacher, they lose that. So there was a big movement about five, six years ago to really centralize everything and just give these so-called research based processes to teachers. Well, allow teachers access to the research, then allow them to collaborate to develop a hybrid or the version that works for them. Anytime you take the learning away from a professional or take the work away, you take the learning away.

[21:48]

So that's just something for principals to remember. You're a facilitator. You don't teach anything. You teach teachers, but you don't teach math. You don't teach reading. You don't teach science.

[21:57]

You don't teach PE. You have to engage them. You have to be the lead learner to engage them in the process of becoming scholars and becoming professional in their field, in their particular area of professional practice.

[22:10] SPEAKER_02:

I love that view of professionalism because I think you're absolutely right. The old saying goes, whoever's doing the most work, I think I got this from a Harry Wong book in my first year of teaching, whoever's doing the most work is doing the most learning. So in the classroom, you want your students to be doing the most work. You want to be the facilitator. And at the school level, when we're talking about instructional leadership, if the principal is doing all of the instructional leadership work and learning the most, that's not going to impact the classroom the way it can. if the, you know, if teachers are doing the most work and the most learning in terms of their professional growth.

[22:44]

So I wanted to circle back to a situation that probably a lot of principals find themselves in where they feel like, you know, you have a group of teachers that's substantial enough that it's a problem who are just are not willing to see themselves that way, who are maybe just seeing themselves as people who have a job that goes from 7.30 to 3 and from September to June, but that's it. And that level of professional learning and professional responsibility is just not part of their identity. what's some of your advice as far as getting a critical mass? And I know the more we expect, the more we'll kind of repel the people who don't have that vision for themselves and we'll attract the people who do. But to start the wheel turning, if we feel like maybe I have one teacher who feels that way, but they're kind of outnumbered on my staff, what do I do?

[23:35] SPEAKER_00:

Well, the first stage in the book of transforming culture, developing the wheel, called aligning the philosophy. We have some challenges as educators is that Our field was organized to be individualized. They're called classrooms. We were all trained to work in individual spaces. So developing a collective movement requires breaking down the walls of those one-room schoolhouses. And that's why when people say, well, there's some good teachers at my school, some are on board.

[24:03]

That doesn't mean you have a productive organization. Some of the worst schools I've ever worked would have pockets of greatness. But pockets of greatness don't change organizations. It's just like a cool spot in the middle of hell. I mean, it's not what we're shooting for. We're looking for a productive organization.

[24:23]

Proficiency in practice shouldn't be restricted to a few classrooms. It should be universal. It's one of the primary responsibilities of a leader. So the first stage of developing culture is developing a universal philosophy, being able to answer the questions, who are we? What are we committed to? what are our core and fundamental purposes, what direction do we need to take.

[24:48]

And I know you've had, I believe you've had Ken Williams on one of your podcasts. The Starting a Movement book was really designed as a way to address that first step of the process I'm talking about, taking the me and creating the we. So that book is a really good guide on how to look at our current reality, how to project a reality that we want, the right conversations that we need to have, and how do we take a group of very, very divided individuals and engage them in a conversation and a level of interaction that allows us to be able to speak as a unit. So that means there's going to have to be some arguments. There's going to be some disagreements. We need to lay out some facts.

[25:32]

But a leader who's not willing to tear down those walls of the one-room schoolhouse and start speaking as a we as opposed to a bunch of me's will never be able to transform culture. They'll have pockets of greatness. They have pockets of people who aren't very good at what they do. And kids will be subjected to the lottery. If I'm lucky enough to get this good teacher, then I'm great. If not, I'm kind of out of luck.

[25:58]

I wouldn't want my leadership to be reflected that way.

[26:01] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and in my experience, when a leader, you know, someone with a formal leadership title does step up and say that, say, this is, you know, let's talk about this, but this is the kind of school we're going to be. A lot of teachers will say, that's what I've been saying for years. You know, finally, someone is, you know, is putting that out there, you know, and you do have the believers in every school and, you know, the people who are probably asked pretty frequently, why do you still work at this school? And, you know, and the answer is because, you know, the kids matter here and we want to see things turn around and people will hold out for, you know, for years waiting for those leaders to emerge and make that vision a reality. And I think the key thing there is that that vision is already there. It's just optional.

[26:44]

And for too many people, they've opted out.

[26:46] SPEAKER_00:

And good leaders know how to tap into the moral imperative. People didn't choose our profession to be wealthy. They didn't choose our profession to be selfish or to isolate themselves. there are conditions that cause that kind of spiral into that unprofessional behavior. A good leader knows how to tap into that and kind of rejuvenate that moral and intrinsic imperative.

[27:08] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Dr. Muhammad, as we think about those will and skill issues and as we think about the challenges that each of our schools face, if there's one kind of first action that you would like to see school leaders take to start to turn things around in their school or just to take it to the next level if things are already moving in the right direction, what's one action that you want to challenge our listeners to take?

[27:30] SPEAKER_00:

Is to challenge yourself to create a mission and a vision, a vision meaning a plan of action, um, create your theory of action and create a plan of action of the school that you'd like to become and get everybody engaged in that process. And, uh, as my colleague, Dr. Louise Cruz says, people are less likely to tear down a fence that they help build. If you don't expect anything, if you don't raise the bar, if you're not the head cheerleader, if you're feeding into those fears and apprehensions, you're feeding people's egos because you want to be liked, or you're afraid to address touchy topics. I would recommend that you probably choose a different part of the profession. Maybe leadership just isn't for you.

[28:14]

People can be mediocre on their own. They can regress on their own. It takes an effective leader to create a vision for people of what they can become.

[28:24] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Dr. Muhammad, it's been a pleasure to speak with you again on Principal Center Radio. If people want to find out more about your work, get in touch with you online, where's the best place for them to do that?

[28:32] SPEAKER_00:

My website is www.newfrontier21.com. I'm on Twitter, at New Frontier 21. And on Facebook, my page is Dr. Anthony Muhammad.

[28:45] SPEAKER_01:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[28:50] SPEAKER_02:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Anthony Muhammad? One thing that really stands out to me is the importance of vision. And I think of vision as a type of goal, and a type of goal that we've got to be aligned around. And if you look at a school that's been struggling for a long time, a school that's been losing good teachers, a school that's been keeping mediocre teachers and keeping teachers past the point when they really retain their commitment to students and are not necessarily doing what they need to do on behalf of students. If you look at a school like that, often it lacks a vision that people really buy into.

[29:29]

And maybe there's a vision on paper, maybe there's an official statement of, us being here for students and having their best interests in mind and being willing to do whatever it takes. But maybe that's not a reality. I want to challenge you to think of your school's vision as your school's ultimate goal. And it needs to be something that you hire and fire for. Now, I think we've got to be careful whenever we talk about firing people, and especially around a very particular vision. But I think it does need to be that important.

[30:00]

We don't want to be policing what people think and what people say. That's not what I'm talking about. But we need to be bought in to a common vision if we're going to get people's commitment, if we're going to get people to work hard in a common direction. And if we break that down from the vision-level goal into the achievement goals that we're accountable for, those SMART goals, those test score goals. There has to be a relationship between what we're doing to hit those targets and what we ultimately believe. And there's nothing more demoralizing in a school than really believing that we're here for students, that we're here to make a difference for students, and then being told that we have to do things to achieve test scores that violate our goals.

[30:42]

And one example that I've heard from educators around the country is this idea of focusing just on the kids who are right at the cusp of passing the test and giving them all this extra support and ignoring the needs of kids who are farther down and not likely to pass and ignoring the kids who are doing well and will easily pass. You know, we have all of these kind of unethical approaches that have been developed over the last 10 or 20 years in education to achieve test scores or achieve some mid-level result that people are accountable for in the short term without being guided and directed by that vision to say yes to some things and to say no to other things. So I want to refer you back to that four-step sequence that Dr. Muhammad talked about, establishing communication first and foremost. We have got to be communicating about that vision.

[31:33]

We've got to be building trust so that people will work together toward that vision and take the actions that they need to take because they trust our leadership. But that's not enough. It's just talk at that point. We've got to turn that into skill through professional development and through training. And only then can we hold people accountable. And often accountability comes in at those lower levels of goals, like our test score goals and our kind of behavioral goals.

[32:00]

Are you teaching the curriculum? Are you following this procedure? That stuff only matters in the service of a bigger vision. So if you're looking for more alignment, if you're looking to overcome the status quo, I want to encourage you to start there, but don't stop there. Start with a vision. get people on the same page, and start taking action.

[32:19]

And I want to refer you again to Dr. Muhammad's book, The Will to Lead, The Skill to Teach, Transforming Schools at Every Level.

[32:26] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.