[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Chad Dumas. Dr. Dumas is an educational consultant, international presenter, and award-winning researcher whose primary focus is collaborating to develop capacity for continuous improvement. Having been a successful teacher, principal, central office administrator, and consultant, he brings his passion, expertise, and skills to his writing and speaking as he engages participants in meaningful and practical learning. And Dr. Dumas is the author of the new book, Let's Put the C in PLC, A Practical Guide for School Leaders.
[00:48] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:50] SPEAKER_01:
Chad, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:52] SPEAKER_00:
Well, thanks so much for having me, Justin.
[00:54] SPEAKER_01:
Really appreciate this opportunity. So you've written a book for school leaders that draws our attention to a concise list of 10 key priorities. As you've worked with a variety of school districts and educational leaders, how did you settle on that list of 10 priorities?
[01:13] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So it actually started on a road trip from our home in Hastings or Gibbon, Nebraska, out to my parents in Colorado. And if anybody's driven across Nebraska, you know how long of a drive that is. And I was sharing with my wife, preparing for dissertation and writing that dissertation, and I was sharing with her how important creating a collaborative environment is for teachers and that If there was ever a silver bullet to improve learning for kids, it's getting teachers to work together in meaningful, collaborative communities of professional learning. We've got 50 years of evidence supporting this. And I was sharing with my wife how we can make this happen.
[01:56]
And she kept asking me, she's not an educator, and she kept asking me in a very loving and kind way, she probably asked five or six times, well, Chad, how do you know that they know what they need to do? And my response kept being, well, of course they know. They're principals. You know, they've been in education. They have a master's degree. And she just kept persistently asking in different ways this same question.
[02:16]
Well, how do you know that they know? And so at one point, I just kind of finally caught on and got this aha. Well, what does a principal need to know to create this collaborative environment for teachers? So that's when I then started combing through the literature. And, you know, the greats, you know, Michael Fullen, Rick DeFore, Dennis Sparks, Mike Matos, Todd Whitaker, you know, some of these really amazing, great leaders and thinkers in the professional learning community work. Shirley Hoard, one of the very first folks in the work in the 60s and 70s, and found that there really wasn't a list that says, here, principals, you need to know this to be able to create a collaborative environment.
[03:01]
Because we can't do differently unless we know differently, right? And so that's what I did and started combing through that. And through that work, I identified these 10 elements of principal knowledge. They're not in a particular order, although I do have a personal affinity to certain ones. But yeah, that's kind of the story of how that went about and combing the research and finding what does a principal need to know. to create this collaborative community of professional learning.
[03:26] SPEAKER_01:
Well, you say in the book that we often think of it as a knowing-doing gap, as if there are these things that everybody knows and we're just not doing. But you're saying that's really not the case, that not all of these well-researched, well-established elements are not as widely known in our profession as they should be.
[03:45] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, I think there's an assumption that we know, just like I had, and my wife kept asking me, well, how do you know? And so what this book is saying is, you know, maybe principals do know this. We should be clear about it, though, up front, that these are the 10 things that you need to know. And maybe there's more. Maybe some of these could have been combined. I don't know.
[04:04]
But in my analysis, this is what I came to as these 10 elements. And like you said, you know, a knowing doing gap assumes knowledge. And if we don't know, then we need to fill the knowing gap first.
[04:17] SPEAKER_01:
There's a fabulous book by Natalie Wexler called The Knowledge Gap, and she argues that that's true not only for us as professionals, but for student learning, that often what we think of as some sort of kind of higher level problem often really is just a knowledge problem. So longtime listeners of Principal Center Radio will recognize that that title from our archives the knowledge gap so chad as we as we start to unpack some of those 10 elements you know if we want teachers to work successfully in teams if we want collaboration to to truly be the way that teachers work together and to characterize the the culture of our school what are some of the the key starting points
[05:02] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, so like I mentioned, they're not prioritized necessarily, but I have a personal affinity to certain ones. So the first element that is listed is the importance of building relationships. And that for many folks is like a no duh, a no brainer. My experience is that there's certain things that we can do as principals, as school leaders, that if we know, then we can do differently and that that will help us build relationships. So the first thing in this idea of building relationships is that many times people think that I need to be charismatic in order to be a successful school leader. And the research on Long-term effectiveness, long-term change in results is actually the opposite.
[05:50]
And some of this comes from the business world. Jim Collins did some research that came out 10 years ago or so that looked at businesses over the last 40 years before that, which businesses had the greatest return in performance over the long haul compared to the stock market. And he identified what was commonality between all of them. And what he found is what he called level five leaders. And those level five leaders had a unique combination of intense professional will and incredible humble service spirit. And that when you take those two ideas, that that's how you get success is humility and intense professional will, not charisma.
[06:42]
And he actually found that charismatic leaders actually had an inverse relationship to success. So it was negative. Even though we think of sometimes like the Lee Iacocas of the world, they had great success for short periods of time. But over the long haul, those organizations did not perform well. So that's the first thing is as a leader, I need to understand it's not about charisma. It's about intense humility and a strong professional will and those two things combined.
[07:10]
And then through that, building relationships. And so there's certain characteristics of what does it take to build a relationship. And dialogue is really key in that role. And that's where some of the work of Dennis Sparks and Garmston and Wellman and Costa in the cognitive coaching adaptive schools work and specific knowledge around, for instance, pausing, paraphrasing, and posing questions that these three skills, which we have to know first, but the application of those skills is a tremendous boon to building relationships. And so spend a considerable amount of time in the book talking about those three skills particularly, and now how they can be leveraged for building relationships.
[07:54] SPEAKER_01:
Wow. I want to highlight that because I think that's something that's easy to overlook in our eagerness to nod along with the claim that relationships matter and that school leaders need to build relationships. You're saying it's actually some of those conversational skills and cognitive coaching skills that actually can build those relationships for school leaders?
[08:12] SPEAKER_00:
Yes, absolutely. And that they're not only can build, but they're foundational to building effective relationships in a professional learning community. That if we have relationships that are simply based on, you know, feel good, which are important, you know, we need to feel good about each other. We need to feel good about our work. We need to absolutely know each other. I make the assertion in the book that I have seen more than one leader who doesn't even know the name of their staff.
[08:41]
this is unacceptable. Like this is, this is foundational. You've got to know the name of your staff, each of them. You need to know things about them. You need to care about them. And the way that you do that is through pausing, listening, paraphrasing for them so that they can clarify their thinking, that you can understand where they're coming from, posing questions, listening more than you talk.
[09:05]
These are just foundational. And I like the way you said, you know, we can't just nod and say, yep, relationships are important, check, move on. there's really important knowledge and skills that we have to hone in on and work to refine our craft to be better at building those relationships.
[09:23] SPEAKER_01:
And so much of that seems to me, from what you're saying, to be based on the idea of listening. right? That it's not about being a charismatic leader who is known to staff and has built that relationship by being a big presence, but someone who has actually been present to listen, to hear from people, to learn the nuances of their thinking and their practice and who they are as people. And I think that's such a gift to the profession to articulate that, Chad, that this is not about chit-chat in the staff lounge or you know, giving out candy bars to, you know, to make people feel good, but really about just showing that respect for your colleagues as people and as professionals.
[10:05] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. As important as those other things are, you know, showing up in the lounge and having those conversations and giving out the candies and things like that. Those are I wouldn't belittle those. I think they're important, but I think you're really right. There's a quote from Stone and others that I cite in the book that's really powerful that I'll just share here with your listeners. Listening is only powerful and effective if it is authentic.
[10:32]
Authenticity. means that are you listening because you are curious and because you care, not just because you are supposed to. The issue then is this. Are you curious?
[10:45] SPEAKER_01:
Do you care? Well, let's talk about how that same idea carries over into teacher teamwork, because there have been numerous books written about PLCs and how to organize PLCs and how to train people on PLCs. What do you see as some of the key elements for principals to be aware of when it comes to creating the conditions for teachers to work effectively in teams?
[11:10] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So this is like, like you said, there's so many books on this. And I think people pretty much understand that, that just because you put a group of people together doesn't mean that they're going to be effective. I love Michael Follin. He says, you know, groups can be powerful. they can also be powerfully wrong.
[11:32]
And so we as leaders need to understand that. And so one of the elements that I've identified is teaming teachers. And so some of the ideas behind teaming teachers is, first of all, ideal group size is three to five. And so that's a pretty key piece of knowledge, right? You get six or more folks in a group and the effectiveness and efficiency starts to dwindle. The need for highly skilled facilitators increases dramatically when you get above six people.
[12:04]
And so we need to know this as leaders. Three to five people, that's the optimum size of groups. The second thing I think we need to think about as leaders is how do we then group people? I've talked to so many teachers over the years that have found that PLC time is a waste of time because teachers were grouped for the convenience of the adults or the convenience of the principal. What we've got to do is group teachers based on what do they need, what do the kids need, and what do the adults need to be able to learn to impact student learning. So in many cases, that might be at an elementary level, like the third grade teachers meeting together.
[12:43]
And maybe there's a special ed teacher that engages with them or an English learning teacher Or maybe the music teacher. But it has to be done collaboratively. It can't be the principal coming in and saying, hey, you four people are going to work together. Instead, it's which groupings in this school make the most sense to impact student learning so that we as adults are learning and maximizing our time. And so that's just a really key thing. And I think it's really important when it comes to your, you know, so-called specialists, your ELL, special ed, title, music, PE, art, counselors, school psychs, SLPs, you know, the whole list of folks that really comprise, in many cases, half of the staff population.
[13:30]
if as a principal, you're just throwing those folks into groups because it's convenient for you or because it makes sense to you, but you're not consulting with those teachers, pretty good chance that those groups are not gonna be effective. So that's the teaming part. And then the other thing is, okay, so what are they gonna do when they're together? And so, as you know, the DeForest has succinctly put together these four questions of PLCs. What do we want kids to know and be able to do? How are we going to know when they know it?
[14:00]
And then what are we going to do about it when they know it or don't know it? And so as a leader, we need to be pretty well adept at what I then call the CIA, the Curriculum Instruction and Assessment. And so being able to identify as a leader, what are quality curriculum practices, quality instructional practices and assessment practices? What kinds of questions do I need to ask? I don't think a principal can or should be the expert in every content area, right? They can't be, nor should they be.
[14:34]
What the principle has to be, though, is clear about what are quality processes and products in these areas, number one. So what is good? What constitutes good quality? And number two, have the ability to ask good questions to push folks further to increase their quality in those areas. And so in terms of making those effective teams work, teaming teams appropriately, first of all, and then making sure they're working on the right stuff is critical.
[15:03] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Chad, you make the point in the book that it's not enough to simply put teachers in teams, as you mentioned earlier, we also need to think about what people are going to be doing and make sure that not only that they have a worthy task to collaborate on, but that they actually have the skills, that they've been trained to collaborate effectively. What do you see happening in teams that have not had that training and what can good training look like so that people are able to make good use of that time when they're collaborating?
[15:35] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So there's a fascinating study from Google from a few years ago. I think it was a 2016 study where they studied, I think, 200 teams. So they don't say how many people, but I'm guessing those teams are five to 20, 30 people on those teams. So we're talking a thousand or more people in these 200 teams. And what they found is that effective teams had two characteristics to them.
[16:06]
And those characteristics were at odds with what most of us think. Like if I asked you, Justin, or anybody, what makes an effective team? Most people would say, well, they get along with each other. They like each other. They have a high level of expertise in their areas, right? And there's probably some other characteristics.
[16:26]
Well, what this study found is that actually none of those things, they mattered, but they didn't matter to the extent as two other things did. Number one was the social, I don't know, the social mores of the group, the ability of the individuals in the group to read body language of each other, to tell when I look at somebody and I see their facial expression and I hear the tone of their voice, can I tell what their emotions are and are we able to build off of each other based on that and respond based on those emotional cues? That was the first thing. The second characteristic that's really important is the equity of turn-taking. That highly effective teams access the expertise of everybody in the group and they balance participation.
[17:19]
And I know most of us have experiences of working in effective groups and ineffective groups. And my experience would mirror that as well. In ineffective groups, one person dominates or two people dominate and everybody else sits quietly. And folks don't read each other's emotional cues. And so if we can help staff understand these two things. The emotional cues is harder to teach, right?
[17:46]
But in terms of the balancing participation, that's very easy for us as leaders to do. There's amazing, fantastic, wonderful protocols. I mean, entire websites and organizations focus solely on protocols. And so those protocols are designed to balance participation. to make sure we get everybody's voices in the room. And so that one simple tool of accessing, using, training in those protocols can be a powerful way to increase the effectiveness of our teams.
[18:19]
It's very simple. Use protocols so we can balance participation.
[18:22] SPEAKER_01:
I'm so glad you mentioned protocols because I think they remain one of the best established and least popular strategies in the whole world of professional learning. I remember attending extensive training on protocols and having many, many PLC meetings facilitated. with protocols. And of course, every team has different reactions to protocols. In my experience at the elementary level, there's often kind of a de facto team leader who runs the meeting. And if they share an opinion, then everybody agrees and they move on.
[18:57]
And if they don't like an idea, they don't move forward with it. And really, there is not that balance of participation and turn-taking that you just mentioned are so important. Beyond maybe those de facto leaders, why do you think protocols are such an awkward and kind of seldom implemented idea for teachers?
[19:16] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So I was able to go to a session and have since gotten to know a consultant by the name of Thomas Van Zulen. And I thought he summarized it really succinctly. He said that so many times protocols don't sing, as he referred to them, because the person who is using the protocol doesn't understand it well enough. And so if the person who is facilitating the use of the protocol doesn't understand it themselves, the people who are engaging in that protocol aren't going to get a lot out of it. And so one of the things I've found has been really successful with leaders I've worked with is us using protocols ourselves as practice in like low risk environments.
[20:07]
So at a principal meeting, we bring together some student work and we use a protocol for looking at student work together. So we experience it together before going out and facilitating it with our staff. Because once you know the protocol and use it, then you're better able to facilitate. The other thing that I like to talk about with protocols is that it provides us a constraint so that we can exercise restraint. Because the idea is we do wanna access everybody's expertise. And so the best way to do that is to provide some constraints so that we can exercise restraint in accessing everybody's expertise.
[20:54] SPEAKER_01:
I love it. It's like the idea that creativity actually thrives when we have constraints. If you need to write an article, if you have unlimited space, that article is probably not going to be quite as good as if you have one page in a magazine that you have to fit your best ideas into that one page. And I think that translates so well into that teacher team setting where those constraints really do force people to, you know, to be selective about what they share and how they contribute and really allow teams to balance that participation.
[21:29] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. And then it also does the other thing about engaging in protocols as leaders is that it models learning for our staff, which is another one of the elements of principal knowledge is that we need to model learning for our staff. So if I'm engaging in a protocol and then I come to the staff meeting, which needs to be a learning meeting, And at a staff meeting, I am honest and open with the staff and say, you know, I engaged with this protocol with principals. And these are the things I struggled with myself personally. These are the things I really liked. And let's use this together.
[22:00]
And then, you know, afterwards, let's reflect on it and see how it worked. And so that modeling of learning, we as leaders are also engaged in professional learning with colleagues, with our both teacher colleagues and principal and central office colleagues.
[22:17] SPEAKER_01:
I love that modeling and I love the emphasis on not just doing the right things, but actually continuously learning and building our own capacity. Let's talk a little bit more about adult professional learning, which sometimes takes a backseat to data analysis or focusing on logistics. And I know this is a year when we've had probably more logistics to worry about than any other year. How can school leaders keep the focus on professional learning and make time for that adult professional learning?
[22:48] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, one of the things that has been, you know, I think it was Winston Churchill who said, never waste a good crisis. And this time of COVID has been in many ways a crisis for us in schools on many, many levels, not just society, but just in schools. And so one of the elements of this crisis is, like you mentioned, this professional learning. How do I, quote unquote, fit professional learning into the day? And I think one of the opportunities for us is to reimagine, to rethink professional learning beyond a sit and get workshop or training. It is really humbling and cheers my heart when I see the amount of professional learning happening now that's actually job embedded, right?
[23:44]
Because now I have kids who are both in front of me and on a screen Or maybe they're just on a screen and I got to learn new tools to be able to do that. And I don't have those tools. I don't know the technology of these different apps and programs. So I need to access the expertise of colleagues. I need to go on Twitter. I need to go on other social media platforms and access the expertise of others and improve my own practice.
[24:09]
So this shift away. from sit-and-get workshops, or some people might call them a spray-and-pray workshops, to job-embedded learning. There's a great resource from Learning Forward from a few years ago that you can just Google. I think it's called If Not a Workshop, Then What? And so I think this time is helping us see that a workshop is not the only design for professional learning. There are zillions of designs, things like, as you mentioned, writing an article, reading an article, designing an assessment with someone, creating curriculum objectives with others, designing lessons together, observing another...
[24:52]
teacher teach. All these ways that we think about and talk about instructional practices, this is professional learning. And so I think this time of COVID has hopefully provided an opportunity for us to say, you know what? Professional learning is something that we do each and every day throughout the course of the day as we are working to meet kids' needs. And by meeting kids' needs, we're improving our practice.
[25:20] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Chad, I think your book is a tremendous roadmap of the territory for school leaders to be aware of, to become informed about, and to serve as kind of a check in terms of our own emphasis. We would all, again, kind of nod along as someone says relationships are important, but it's so easy to allow some of these elements to kind of slip to the back burner and fall out of our field of view as leaders when we have so much coming at us. So I wanted to ask, thinking specifically, not just for experienced leaders, but especially for new leaders or leaders coming into a new role, if you could wave a magic wand and get everyone to focus on one key element that might otherwise not be in their immediate awareness, what would that be?
[26:12] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, because as you know, there's so many things a principal has to know and do. I guess... An overarching thing would be a posture of learning, because if we have a posture of learning as adults, then we're going to learn what we need to learn and help kids get where they need to go. And so while that's not really an element in the book, I think this idea of How do I make sure that every day I'm thinking about what do I need to do to get better in my practice?
[26:44]
And what do I need to learn to be able to do that? I think that's probably the biggest thing I would say to someone coming in.
[26:53] SPEAKER_01:
So the book is Let's Put the C in PLC, A Practical Guide for School Leaders. And Dr. Chad Dumas, if people would like to learn more about your book or talk about the possibility of working together, where's the best place for them to find you online?
[27:07] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, it's nextlearningsolutions.com, nextlearningsolutions.com.
[27:12] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Chad, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.
[27:16] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you so very much. Appreciate this, Chad.
[27:19] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
