Time for Change: Four Essential Skills for Transformational School and District Leaders

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

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_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by... Anthony Kim. Anthony is a nationally recognized leader in education technology, school design, and personalized learning. He is the CEO and founder of Education Elements and the author of The New School Rules, Six Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools.

[00:37] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:39] SPEAKER_01:

Anthony, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me.

[00:42] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I'm excited to talk with you about schools as organizations and thinking about some of the organizational issues that school leaders can keep in mind as we're striving to bring about change, as we're striving to deliver better results for students. You have a particular background and a particular body of experience that has given you a focus on schools as organizations that I have to say to me as a researcher, as a scholar, is very exciting because I get excited about thinking about organizations and how we can make our organizations more effective and how we can make them more agile and responsive in order to meet the changing needs of our students. So let's start by talking a little bit about where this book comes from. let's catch our audience up on the work that you've done throughout your career with schools to help them become, as you say in the title of the book, thriving and responsive.

[01:32] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks, Justin. I think this came from our work in helping schools rethink teaching and learning and new school models. And I think the response we often get to make changes about all the barriers that exist. Kind of the other response we get are you know, what are the programs that work? And what we found is that, you know, at the most abstract level, if you think about education and schools and educators across the country, we have 5 million educators in the country across 100,000 schools and 13,000 districts, all trying to do the same thing, which is improve student outcomes in meaningful ways. And in fact, trying to get more than a year's worth of gain in many places because we're so far behind.

[02:16]

And with all of this energy and effort that gets put into the work and the dollar spent, the programs purchased, the teams kind of reorganized and rebuilt, we're not getting the results we're expecting. And I've been thinking about why that's the case. And although like we work incredibly hard weekends, long hours, and it gets quite exhaustive, we're still not getting the results. And so I look, towards other industries and worked with my co-author Alexis Gonzalez-Black who currently is an org designer at IDEO and previously worked at Zappos as an organizational designer. I started thinking through what are the attributes that make corporations and company teams much more effective than the ones that we see in education and part of it is just how they work and how they interact with each other.

[03:09]

So that is kind of the

[03:11] SPEAKER_01:

six principles that we put together the six practices that we put together for this book we felt like if you could get these six things right any team could be more effective more agile and more successful in getting the job done well i love that focus on the organization on the idea of organizational design because i think the the nature of schooling for the most part in our profession is that we inherit an organizational design and we inherit a role that we step into And within that role, we try to do what we can, but often we don't ask ourselves the question of, is this role, is this organization really designed the way it should be to meet our students' needs today? So I'm excited about that opportunity to talk about changing organizations, to talk about redefining roles. And I wonder if we could start with some specifics. Does anything come to mind as a great example of a school that decided to

[04:04]

change things up, to change their roles, to change the way they work together, or even to change the design of their organization in order to be more responsive.

[04:13] SPEAKER_02:

A few years ago, four years ago, I learned how to swim for the first time. And, you know, I would flail my arms and legs and try to get to the end of the pool and never really make it because I exhausted myself before I got to the end. Then I finally found a really good coach and the first thing they focused on is just what they call the shape of the vessel, like my body shape to make it more streamlined. And so I expended 10% of the energy I was expending before and I was able to get to the other end of the pool and now I'm able to swim miles. It's the same thing with organizations, we feel. You have to work on the shape of the vessel, like you mentioned, right?

[04:47]

Like how we work together and just because you become a new principal or an assistant principal at a new school because they have an existing vessel doesn't mean you don't need to work on shaping that vessel because otherwise all this energy gets expended in order to achieve the work. And you might not get to the other end of the pool. Along those lines, I think what we see, and you wonder why certain schools are more effective than others. We have very similar talent pools in various schools. We have similar technologies in many ways, and we have similar tactics and practices, but some schools get better results than others, and a lot of it has to do with how these teams operate. I've been to schools all over the country, maybe 100 schools a year I visit, and there are ones that I see kind of over and over again.

[05:37]

You know, one that comes to mind is Whitmore Park in Horry County. I've worked with them for several years in the past, and one of the unique things about them were the teachers became designers of classrooms. Teachers became designers of instructional strategies. So one day they may start with station rotation. Nine weeks later, They're doing co-teaching. Nine weeks after that, they've merged two classrooms to do a science and math project.

[06:06]

That's the kind of decision making we want out on the field with guidelines and structures that allow for the necessary checks and balances, but you want the decision making based on all of the information that they're getting, the needs of the students to happen in the classroom, and you want to develop the skills of the education leaders to be able to be responsive and dynamic for those types of environments.

[06:30] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's talk about some examples of what that kind of responsiveness could be, because I think often in public education in particular, we think about change in terms of implementing a model that's been designed elsewhere. For example, a school might be implementing PLCs, and we know generally it's better not to start from scratch, not to reinvent the wheel. But often because we're addicted to that kind of thing, we're implementing this change and that change and just external model after external model. without really any thought to the design of the organization itself or how we can work together effectively to bring about whatever kind of change we're pursuing at the moment. So what are some touchstones in your work that you found really get people thinking about their school as an organization in a helpful way that allows them to actually gain some traction with the changes that they're making?

[07:21] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so this is a common problem we hear, especially when you start mentioning things like pacing guides. I'm going to take us back a couple stories. The first is a book that I read called Team of Teams by General McChrystal. And he was the general for the Joint Command, Special Command. And they put together 200-page standard operating procedures. And what they found is that when kind of the...

[07:45]

patrol units that were deployed for missions followed the SOPs exactly. They were actually ill-prepared and they didn't have the right things packed in their rucksack, for example. So they made a lot of changes to kind of provide these SOPs as frameworks. Kind of the bases would actually get a lot of data around what was going on. And then it was up to the individual soldier to be able to pack the rucksack based on the specific needs, but within the constraints of the SOP. And that became super effective.

[08:15]

And while we were writing this book, I had the opportunity to interview several soldiers and learned that this was really valuable for them because they could make decisions around how best to pack their rucksacks, depending on the type of mission. This is no different in our mind to an experience that all of us have every day at a Starbucks. If you look at kind of the SOP of a latte, for example, there are very specific rules as to how many shots of espresso there are, how full it is to the rim of the cup, the temperature, but when you go into any Starbucks, you can custom order 15 different varieties of a latte, extra hot, skinny, almond milk, whatever it is. We find that classrooms have a similar behavior as well, like districts could produce a pacing guide. It's never meant to limit teachers capabilities to make decisions in the classroom based on needs and information about the student.

[09:08]

In fact, we actually encourage teachers to make these types of decisions within the structures that are provided, but they're not. And so we're trying to figure out why that's the case in a lot of our school design work and the way we go about doing it with schools and school leaders and teams are Really deconstructing those little instructional practices that allow them to feel comfortable in making those decisions. Kind of the first step of doing that is just being comfortable with small group instruction. We can't do that. You can't really customize the latte for each student.

[09:39] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Do you want to talk more about decision making? Because I think that's something that our audience really would benefit from some food for thought on.

[09:45] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. You know, I think decision making is actually a really hard one. Right. And it connects with roles and decisions. titles and sharing information quite a bit. We've been in a lot of situations in schools where we would ask, for example, a team of 25 people, how many of you are responsible for school leader development?

[10:09]

Almost everybody raises their hand. Right after that, we ask, who gets fired if those school leaders don't get it developed? No one raises their hand, right? And that's the problem. No one knows who's accountable for that work. And as a result, we go into consensus mode.

[10:28]

We get into talking about all the things we can't do because everyone is weighing in on their contextual reason why there are barriers. So probably one of the biggest shifts that we ask districts and teams to make is changing their notion to what we call safe enough to try. And what that means is usually, let's say, you go to a cabinet meeting and You want to propose a change, whether it's purchasing a new LMS or adopting project-based learning in the school. It could be anything. And usually the response we get is you having to defend all the reasons why it's a good idea and people throwing at you kind of like, dropping bombs on you, really, about why all the reasons why that's a stupid idea and why we can't do it.

[11:19]

It doesn't work that way in many companies, actually. In companies, they actually talk about safe enough to try as a way to innovate. And so if someone's willing to own the work, if someone's willing to take some small risks, And it doesn't jeopardize the rest of the organization. It's not harmful for the rest of the organization. And no one can really object to it because they're not actually doing the work themselves. It's considered to be safe enough to try.

[11:46]

And I think if schools can move towards a mindset of safe enough to try, that will change a lot of the behaviors that prevent us from creating the culture of innovation we're all looking for.

[11:57] SPEAKER_01:

And I think we've all had experiences of change in schools where we felt like we were biting off more than we could chew, or we just didn't have the bandwidth, or maybe not everybody was on board with the change. But it sounds like you're saying rather than really try to solidify support for something big, it almost sounds like you're talking about shrinking the perceived or the real size of the change so that, as you said, it's safe enough to try, that people don't feel like it's such a big risk to take that step.

[12:27] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, and it also that ties well into our first chapter, which is planning, right? We often spend so much time trying to plan, get everything right, because we're in a defensive mode. And kind of the first exercise that we have teams do is let's start to estimate how predictable things are three months from now, six months from now, one year from now, over one year, like is your cabinet still there? Is your superintendent still there? Are the board members still there?

[12:58]

What budget changes? Like there's a lot more variables once you get to a year. So how are we planning three years out in that kind of rigid structure? And then we get to executing on the plan and we really want to follow the plan to the T because that's what the board approved. But really like by following the plan in year two, you're really making a lot of known bad decisions.

[13:19] SPEAKER_01:

I have to laugh at that one a little bit because, yeah, I feel like once, you know, three or four months have passed, you know, everyone knows that that plan is often quite out of date. Right. And it really, you know, the situation has changed. Circumstances have changed. We've moved on mentally. And often that plan is obsolete as soon as the ink dries.

[13:40]

So. One of the things that I like to direct people to is the idea of inquiry and the idea of organizational learning and this idea that, you know, we're never going to get the perfect plan that's going to last us five years and then we can do another one that'll last us another five years. And I think that idea is pretty dead and buried, although very much alive in our actual practices. We know it doesn't work, but we're still doing it. We're still typing up these giant strategic plans where the goal really is, as you said, defensiveness. You know, we're trying to demonstrate that we've got a good defensible plan.

[14:13]

Now, please leave us alone and we'll just keep doing what we're doing. But if we want to actually change things, if we want to actually make things better for our students and say, become more of a project-based learning school, or become more of a standards-based school. Whatever change we're thinking about, often it's not the plan that's going to get us there. It's the process of learning. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about organizational learning and what that means to you. I have, again, my definition and my understanding of what that can look like, but I'd love to hear your perspective on organizational learning.

[14:48] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's a great question. And it just happens to be chapter six in our book, too. You know, we think the last practice is how to make kind of organizations a learning organization. And even though we're in schools and school districts, I don't feel like as an organization, we're the most conducive of learning based on the way we're structured, the way teams interact and such. Some of the problems that we see is, you idea that everything has to be based off of best practices, like you mentioned before, right? And I get it.

[15:21]

The problem is, you know, often those best practices, because it worked at another school or at another district, doesn't mean it's going to work at yours. But we take it as if it is, right? Because the teams are different over there. The conditions were different. The culture was different. But just because it was a best practice over there doesn't mean it's over here.

[15:40]

It is information, however. you know to know that certain practices work there are a lot of startup companies that kind of take best practices of other companies and it just doesn't work the same because they don't introduce a particular concept at the right time the other part is this notion of efficiency right like the way we think about how to improve our organization is by increasing efficiency that is important still but another kind of component of that that makes it more complicated is also agility now Because information travels so much faster today, being agile is also as important as being efficient in the work. And with changing conditions and needs of students, changing community dynamics, information spreading really fast, the efficient is no longer efficient if you're not agile. So how do we get a team or an organization to really understand how to become a learning organization?

[16:36]

And there are several things that come into mind. One is I believe we have to change the physical look and feel of how we experience a school building or an administrative building. They're still pretty sterile or very industrial experiences. Like we get buzzed in through multiple doors, secretaries standing behind glass walls. It's not a welcoming experience. And similarly, when I walk into schools that I know are performing well, I immediately get embraced by the environment.

[17:07]

And I know that some schools where I already get a gut feeling that they're not performing well, just by the environment that I walk into and how I get introduced the first five minutes to the school principal. The other piece beyond just the physical attributes is based around like, how do we think about information and feedback? Often, we're trying so hard to integrate feedback from everybody, and this aligns with consensus building, but we have a proposal, we want to roll something out, and we're getting feedback, and we integrate everybody, and there's conflicting messages, and so we go for the lowest common denominator, which becomes this brown thing. And we have to get the organization to believe that everyone's feedback isn't really meant to be integrated. It needs to be a piece of data that the person accountable for executing on this is going to use to make the best possible decision they can.

[18:02]

And just those kinds of changes within an organization could make your team a better learning organization.

[18:08] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the idea of physically redesigning space because I think back to when my wife's high school was redesigned and they built in some commons areas and kind of widened some hallways and put in some extra chairs that were to be left in that common space and built in that flexibility. And I've heard from a lot of schools that maybe are adding a maker space or are redefining how they use their library. And it seems like there's a correlation between changes in the way people think about their work and changes in the physical environment. For example, opening a new campus or remodeling a campus often seems to be accompanied by an analogous kind of remodeling of thinking. And I wonder if you've seen the same connection between the physical environment and the way we think about our work with students.

[18:58] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think especially where school districts are building new school buildings, they're thinking about it. I actually don't think that they bring in kind of school model designers early enough into the process. They get into kind of the building blueprint before they get into the school models because they are still creating rooms like maker spaces and this is what you do there, right? Whereas Kind of in the work environment, the most progressive companies and probably some of the other types of organizations, community workplaces like WeWork, which is, you know, picking the workforce by storm right now. Those types of places have every spot is kind of a multi-purpose spot, almost like 75% of the building is kind of multi-purpose.

[19:44]

And then the rest are like a very... small but specifically functional like phone booths where you could take a call or something where you need complete privacy but places like WeWork are really interesting because what we're seeing is kind of a shift in how people think about work and due to like what's called solo entrepreneurship and on-demand jobs and you know companies that can exist with just three people. Those places are being inhabited by communal work areas called WeWorks or other types of places like that where they provide all of the services, they provide cafeteria, they provide workspace, but you're also not alone in the basement or a garage. You're actually with a bunch of like-minded people that surround you.

[20:32]

And so you feel engaged that way. And, you know, it'd be interesting to see how that could correlate to what high school might look like in the future.

[20:43] SPEAKER_01:

It's interesting to hear you say kind of organizational design expertise needs to be involved early in the process, because I think traditionally we think about the more, you know, physical plant functional aspects. You know, we need an architect, we need a plumber, we need a construction company. And then on the blueprint, we have rectangles and we might argue about what word we write in each rectangle and the dimensions of that rectangle. But it sounds like you're talking about something much more fundamental and thinking much more flexibly and perhaps less permanently about how different spaces are used. And I know that's not an entirely new idea, because we've always had accordion walls and slightly reconfigurable things. I think it's really reaching new heights, reaching new levels of flexibility in some of the newer school designs that we're seeing.

[21:29]

And I'm curious, what are some of the ways that that space is connecting with changes in the ways that people are thinking about their work and thinking about the way that learning is organized for students. When people tap into that potential for agility, what are they doing with it in your experience?

[21:49] SPEAKER_02:

One way we help educators realize what they're trying to do in terms of instructional agility is we'll give them a blank piece of paper and we'll say, draw a classroom design, like a layout of a classroom with different types of spaces and different types of activities for a student, like your ideal. Many of them will design, you know, beanbag chairs and little collaboration stations, maybe a workshop, a lot of different kind of cubby holes and modules and places where you can move around. And then we ask them to draw their classroom today and, you know, they draw a bunch of rows and seats, right? And so, although like we want students to be collaborative and self-directed. The spaces that they have now don't allow for students to be that. And that configuration is a direct correlation, I believe, to how people work and think and learn.

[22:43]

So I think the first step for folks is to really be honest with themselves. about what their current condition is and what are the steps that they could take to get to the condition that they imagine. Because you can't just leap there. You're not one, you can't just leap to having every kid be self-directed. Just like you can't leap towards doing a flipped classroom the next day, it's just not going to be successful. But if you could design the appropriate steps to get there and to build the skills and capabilities, I think that allows you to achieve the goals that you're aiming for.

[23:15]

set a timeline for yourself, like 18 months or 24 months.

[23:19] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The New School Rules, Six Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools. And Anthony, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about your work, where is the best place for them to find you online?

[23:32] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. So we have two websites. We have edelements.com, E-D-E-L-E-M-E-N-T-S. And then we have newschoolrules.com.

[23:44]

And then I'm also available on Twitter at A-N-T-H-O-N-X, as in x-ray.

[23:51] SPEAKER_01:

Perfect. We'll link that up in the show notes, and people can learn more about the book and more about your work at EdElements there. Well, Anthony, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[24:01] SPEAKER_00:

All right. Thanks so much, Justin. Nice talking to you. And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.

[24:09] SPEAKER_01:

So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from a conversation with Anthony Kim? One idea that stands out to me is the idea of organizational learning. And I think I first learned about the idea of organizational learning in my principal preparation program when we read a book called The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. And Peter Senge is an organizational scholar. I believe he spent most of his career at MIT and as a consultant helping organizations kind of rethink the way they worked and the way they encourage people to work together. So this idea of organizational learning and systems thinking is one that I think is overdue.

[24:49]

Attention to this idea is overdue in our profession because whether we like it or not, schools are organizations and there is a science to how organizations work, how organizations change, how organizations learn. And I want to encourage you to check out Anthony Kim's book, The New School Rules, to gain a perspective on that from somebody who has spent time in schools, leading schools, helping schools redesign themselves, designing software for schools, designing physical environments for schools. This idea of design I think is so critical because I'm sure you've heard the concept that your system is perfectly designed to create the results that you're getting. The systems that we have in place now are giving us the results we're getting now. And if we wanna get better results, we need to be prepared to design better systems. And that design doesn't mean a 10-year strategic plan or a five-year strategic plan, as Anthony and I talked about.

[25:42]

It means engaging in learning, engaging in inquiry. And if you're interested in a deep dive on this topic, I want to let you know about our program, the Organizational Learning Intensive. This is an in-depth program for heads of school, for district administrators, superintendents, assistant superintendents. or perhaps school founders, if you are starting a new school or restarting a school, I wanna encourage you to check this out. It is one of our flagship courses, goes into a great deal of depth on organizational learning and inquiry and goal setting, not in the strategic five-year sense, but in the agile, short-term, rapid learning sense, so that over the long term, we can see those big changes adding up from those small changes along the way and from that agility. So I want to encourage you to check that out at principalcenter.com slash intensive.

[26:36] Announcer:

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