Close and Critical Reading Professional Development

[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 back to the program my colleague, Dr. Douglas Reeves. Dr. Reeves is the founder of Creative Leadership Solutions, the author of more than 30 books and 100 articles on leadership and organizational effectiveness. He's worked in all 50 U.S. states and more than 20 countries around the world.

[00:30]

He's been recognized by NASSP, NSDC, the Australian Council of Educational Leaders and other organizations for his work. And he's written widely on school leadership, equity, accountability, grading, creativity, coaching, and psychological safety. And he's the author of the new book, Fearless Coaching, Resilience and Results from the Classroom to the Boardroom.

[00:52] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:54] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Reeves, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Well, thanks so much.

[00:57] SPEAKER_00:

I'm delighted to be with you and with your audience.

[00:59] SPEAKER_01:

Let's start by setting things up a little bit. Why is coaching so important right now for our profession? What did you see happening in the world and in the education profession in particular that prompted you to write Fearless Coaching?

[01:10] SPEAKER_00:

I want to make two general observations. Number one, what dominates the field of feedback to administrators and teachers is toxic evaluation systems. I've never seen anybody evaluated into better performance. I've seen lots of people get coached into better performance. So I think the big gap in improving both instruction and leadership is coaching, not evaluation.

[01:31] SPEAKER_01:

And it seems like evaluations often almost seem in poor taste these days when everyone is working under suboptimal conditions, everyone is under so much stress, and we're not so much worried about giving people rigorous evaluations as we are about hanging on to people. What do you see as some of the connections between retention and coaching?

[01:49] SPEAKER_00:

i think it's a really thoughtful and insightful point what we are doing is alienating teachers who we desperately need you know the data i'm sure our audience does too 53 according to the latest survey of teachers would leave if they could in rural areas it's even higher so we have to keep them and yet we retain these evaluation policies oftentimes associated with completely discredited test score results like value-added assessments that only serve to drive people out of our profession. So number one, we have to get rid of the policies that undermine effective teaching and undermine teacher retention. And then we need to embrace the policies that will keep people here. So I promise not to make a big lecture here, but I just want to say when I interview teachers who are on the fence, are you going to stay or are you going to leave? They're not talking about money. Now, don't misinterpret this.

[02:39]

Money is really important. What we're asking young people to do today is to have a six-figure debt and a five-figure income, and that doesn't work. So you've got to have money. Identify it. factors that were really important in retention, money was number seven. Teachers want respect.

[02:54]

They want professional opportunities. They want collaboration. They want learning. They want all these things that are equally important, if not more important than money, to keep them in our profession. So that's what I want our leaders who are listening to this to think about. You're not going to get people here with evaluations that threaten them and make them feel demeaned.

[03:12]

You'll get them to stay in our profession because you coached them and said, you can make a difference.

[03:17] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk a little bit, if we could, about psychological safety, because it strikes me as one of the key differences between evaluation where people are under at least an implicit threat. This doesn't go well. You know, you might not work here anymore. If we're trying to turn things around and say, you know, how can we keep people? How can we support people? What role does psychological safety play in coaching and in the other activities that we might do in order to support people?

[03:41] SPEAKER_00:

I'll tell you, it's not just psychological safety for adults, it's psychological safety for kids as well. But before I address this, I need to give credit to the premier scholar on this point, and that's Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School. Professor Edmondson has really contributed 30 years of research on psychological safety in hospitals, in airplane cockpits, in all manner of different scenarios in which the ability to have psychological safety, which is, can I admit I'm wrong and not have the legs cut out from under me? If you can admit failure and learn from failure, that is the essence of psychological safety. So first of all, props to Amy Edmondson, who I think is the leading scholar on this. What I attempted to do is to adopt Professor Edmondson's research in hospitals to schools.

[04:24]

And at the classroom level, that means if you only honor kids who have their hands raised in the air, I'm the smart kid, I'm right, and diminish and shame the kids who don't know the answer, you will never have learning. The evidence that Dr. Edmondson has assembled basically says the following. Oxytocin, which is one of the most important chemicals in our bodies, increases when we are fearless, when we have the opportunity to learn. Oxytocin decreases when we are afraid. And the bottom line is, when kids are afraid, when adults are afraid, they cannot learn.

[04:56]

If I could summarize in that one sentence what psychological safety is all about, it's that when we're afraid, we can't learn.

[05:03] SPEAKER_01:

So reducing fear, reducing the consequences of being wrong and increasing the willingness to take risks certainly matters for student learning. Let's talk about adult development a little bit and how this plays into your model for fearless coaching. What does fearless coaching mean?

[05:19] SPEAKER_00:

Fearless coaching means that we identify not only what our strengths are, because building on strengths is far better and more effective than perseverating about weaknesses, but it's also goal focused. I've been through this myself because I think, you know, I need to take a student's perspective on anything I'm asking other people to do. And when my coach would say, well, Doug, You've brought up the same issue for three months in a row. What's going to be different this month? That was a real tight indicator to me of goal-focused coaching is different from being a buddy, being a friend, being a mentor. Goal-focused coaching, what we call fearless coaching, is all about saying, how's this month going to be better?

[05:56]

And it's all based on the goals that the client has that's most important for them personally and for them professionally. And I think you have to combine both. What I've seen certainly around the world in the last couple of years is that if you want leaders to be healthy as coaching clients, that's not just about what they do in the job. That's about their physical health. That's about their emotional health. That's about their psychological health.

[06:20]

So we address those specific goals that they have. And every time we meet, it's all about what's different this month. I've really had to hold myself accountable to that as well.

[06:30] SPEAKER_01:

That's interesting to explicitly bring in the personal and the factors outside of school, because often we intentionally ignore those factors when we're talking about workplace performance, when we're talking about someone's success on the job, whether that's in the classroom or in a school leadership position. We often don't want to talk about personal life. Why does that matter? Why is that relevant? And what do we miss if we are not willing to talk about those areas?

[06:54] SPEAKER_00:

so this interview is being broadcast in march of 2023 so it was exactly three years ago that we saw teachers and administrators doing heroic work in march of 2020 and god bless them they were working 22-hour days they were answering calls and texts at all hours of the day and i respect and appreciate that but i also have to say to any senior leader or governing body member who's watching this heroism is not a sustainable strategy You can burn people out on that. And we did that a bunch. We burned a ton of people out. If you want to have a sustainable strategy, then you have to have something that is not going to require people to make the sacrifice of their family or the sacrifice of their health. And so in my view, fearless coaching, It's about considering what's best for the organization. That's really important.

[07:40]

But also how do you sustain that in a way that is sustainable for you as the client and for your family? I fear particularly that we have made senior leadership positions antithetical to family values where they always have their telephone, you know, right at the ready. They don't have family dinners because all their kids are focusing on their phones. When I think there's really persuasive arguments to be made for if you want to be an effective leader for your organization, the first thing you have to do is take care of yourself psychologically and physically.

[08:11] SPEAKER_01:

I'm really seeing the importance of boundaries, you know, the willingness to put down the phone, turn off the ringer and, you know, maybe even set the out of office auto reply. We've had this pressure in our profession to be on 24 seven and to, you know, quote unquote, do whatever it takes. And now we're realizing that demanding year after year that people do whatever it takes, even as whatever it takes rises to infinity is a recipe for burnout. How do we get our minds around the moral obligation that we have to students and stop doing quote unquote whatever it takes in order to stay in this for the long haul? I think the unintended consequence is the people who are doing whatever it takes are getting fewer and fewer. You can't do whatever it takes if you actually burn out and leave the profession entirely.

[08:57]

I've spoken with a number of people lately who really were committed, really were all in until they couldn't be anymore. So how do we change that norm in our profession from that heroism, that sacrifice, to one that is more sustainable?

[09:11] SPEAKER_00:

I think there's a couple of issues that we have to think about. Number one is that we get rid of the notion of the unitary single leader, the man, and I'm using my pronouns carefully here, riding on a white horse, he's going to save the day. Because he doesn't have to care about his kids. He doesn't have to care about his families. So that's the man riding on the white horse. If we really want to have the...

[09:30]

other 50% of the population as part of senior leadership. We have to stop telling our future women leaders, gee, we'd love to have you as a superintendent. We'd love to have you as a high school principal or a board member. But by the way, you're going to have to give up your family along the ways. And women, we've learned well before COVID, but particularly during COVID, bear the disproportionate responsibility for child care and for elder care. So number one, we have to stop the idea of the unitary leader.

[09:57]

One thing that I've tried to contribute to this conversation is the idea that, hey, if there's 10 dimensions of leadership and research that I wrote about 37 states, if there's 10 dimensions, stop saying that the perfect leader has got to be all 10. A good conversation between a prospective superintendent and the board is, you know what? I'm really good at faculty development, at leadership development, at community. But you want to know what? I'm not great at data analysis. But thank goodness I've got three deputies here that are fabulous at deputy analysis.

[10:27]

Stop looking for the perfect person and start looking for the holistic team that can be that. And it should not be a sign of weakness. for the leader to say, I'm not perfect in every area, but I will build a complimentary team. And I'm not going to go hire people who are clones of me. I'm going to hire people who have different strengths than I do. That's what boards ought to be looking to.

[10:48]

So that's kind of big idea number one. And big idea number two is that when we burn people out because we sacrifice their families and their moral code, to the service of the job, that's a short-term fix for a very long-term solution. This is particularly true in high poverty systems where the turnover of principals and the turnover of superintendents is dramatically higher in suburban situations. If we really want to hire and keep the best leaders, stop looking for perfection, start looking for complementary strengths.

[11:22] SPEAKER_01:

I love that about hiring people not who are clones of yourself, but who can kind of fill in around you. My co author on my current book project is currently hiring his admin team for a new school that's opening. And that's exactly what he said that he is not looking to just replicate his own skills, but to fill in other areas so that collectively, they have what it takes to cover everything. And he kind of positions himself as kind of taking that 10,000 foot view and able to step into any of those areas, but really wanting that team to be able to share that load and to have complimentary strengths. I think that's so important. Thinking about a team, what are some norms that we can put in place in our admin teams?

[12:00]

We haven't used the term balance, but at least the kind of boundaries that reduce the chances of anyone burning out. How can we work together as a team to kind of cover for each other and make that happen?

[12:09] SPEAKER_00:

Let me offer a free resource that your audience may have opportunities to consider, and that's the Leadership Performance Matrix. The Leadership Performance Matrix identifies 10 different dimensions of leadership. It's all rubric-based. Nobody ever, ever scores perfection. You know, the message I have for governing boards is stop looking for perfection. look for people with complementary strengths.

[12:29]

And so what we've tried to do is to offer this. It's open source. You can change it in whatever way you want, but it's the leadership performance matrix. And if you find that, you'll find that you will build a team of complementary strengths. And what I've tried to encourage leadership teams to do is do a self-assessment on each one of those and find out where you've got some gaps. And if I've got a gap in data analysis or community relations or professional learning, whatever it is, then your next hire needs to be to fill in those gaps.

[13:00]

That's just a practical tool that's free and available. And I would just say, I've seen a bunch of these things that are very expensive and proprietary. This is not that way. It's open source and free. So please don't think that you've got to pay a lot of money for something to be worth the price. It's a pretty strong research-based tool.

[13:16] SPEAKER_01:

If I'm looking at the right thing, this has components like willingness to admit error and resilience and dissent, things like that. Is that the right one?

[13:24] SPEAKER_00:

Yes, sir. It's so funny that you would note that because after the last three years, if you could identify one leadership trait that is so important, it's resilience, bouncing back from defeat and disappointment and error. That's what every leader needs. But I've looked at a ton of leadership assessments and they all talk about the highfalutin stuff. They don't talk about, hey, I made a mistake. How can I communicate that mistake and actually admit that mistake in a way that helps everybody in my entire system learn?

[13:52]

One of my favorite superintendents is Dr. Mike Wasta, who used to send out what he called oops scrams. And he would send out, hey, here's the three biggest boneheaded mistakes that I made in the last month. Here's how we can all learn from them. You know, when the superintendent is willing to say, here's my mistake, here's how we all learn from it. Think about that, how that could filter to the classroom where a kid with the wrong answer, instead of being shamed and humiliated, knows that, hey, I made a mistake, but here's how I learned from it.

[14:18]

And the teacher who stays with that kid, not dismissing him, but stays with that kid, here's how we can all learn from this mistake and get better. That's a learning system.

[14:27] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. And so much that applies to the classroom, we need as leaders to be ready to apply that to our own practice as well. Very well said. Thinking about resilience a little bit, we've heard the term resilience quite a bit. How is it different from just hardness and toughness? You know, the idea that as leaders, we need to be a rock, we need to be solid.

[14:49]

How is resilience different from that?

[14:52] SPEAKER_00:

So one of the things I wrote about in the book is what lessons have we learned from physical resilience? That is like, I used to be a marathon runner. How do you recover from an injury, a psychological resilience? How do you recover from emotional rejection and emotional energy? And how does that apply to us as leaders? And I think there are indeed a number of parallels there.

[15:13]

A colleague of mine, Dr. Harold Volkheimer, former superintendent in Southern California, an ultra marathoner, This guy does like ultra marathoners as if that were not hard enough, connected by rope to his son where they swim and they run marathons. They do all the other things that these guys do. But here's what Dr. Volkmar said. He said, elite athletes spend as much time in recovery and as much energy in recovery as they do in training.

[15:39]

And I think the relevance to your question is, if we really want resilience, you don't just think that the response to disappointment is taking a break, resting. The response to a challenge that requires resilience is working just as hard to recover emotionally, psychologically, physically, as you did when you were training. I worry that school leaders that I've seen tend to one of two extremes. They're either all in 22 hours a day, Or they're all out trying to rest and get better. We have to have a more moderate. And I think Harold's guidance there is really thoughtful and appropriate.

[16:12] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's interesting to think about athletes because I think often we idolize misconceptions about how other fields or other domains of human practice work. So you're saying athletes maybe occasionally work through the pain or, you know, power through even when they're hurt or hurting. But you're saying recovery is actually part of the work of training and readiness for the next race, so to speak.

[16:34] SPEAKER_00:

It's so interesting. And almost every faculty, even in small schools, you'll find somebody who had either a physical, emotional, psychological injury. Women recovering from breast cancer, we'll talk about this. And they'll talk about how debilitating it was. And yet they didn't just lie in bed. They really focused in recovery.

[16:51]

I think there's definitely lessons for all of us in people recovering from physical injury, from disease, and from psychological injury that can be applied to the classroom. I'm not trying to encourage over-projection onto our students. But you and I have both been in classrooms where kids, once they've been shamed, once they feel that I'm just no good at math, I'm just no good at a writer, that stays with them. And it's our job as teachers to do everything we can to recover that psychological injury and help them be as resilient as our cancer survivors, as our physical recovery advisors are.

[17:26] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk about the role of coaching specifically in that. I think we're starting to realize as a profession that coaching is going from one of those things that maybe we reluctantly provide if it seems like someone is having trouble to something that we're increasingly recognizing just needs to be the norm. It's not just, oh, you get a coach and then you're probably about to get fired if you needed a coach or you get a coach if you're new, but then hopefully you won't need it anymore after a couple of sessions because it's kind of expensive and we don't want to pay for it. What are you seeing as far as the mindset around coaching on an ongoing basis within our profession? And then take us into some of what the book advises about coaching.

[18:02] SPEAKER_00:

First of all, your insight is precisely right on. We tend to overcoach low performers and undercoach high performers. The best return on investment is to take the very best teacher who does great classroom engagement, great formative assessment, you know, total great personal relationships with students. Give that person, invest in them. There's a great Bain study that says one of the best employee benefits for A-plus players is to work with other A-plus players. So we have to stop the notion that coaching means, oh, you're in trouble.

[18:31]

But then the district will say, well, gee, we gave you coaching, you know, now it's your fault. we ought to give our coaching to our higher performers as well. Secondly, I think it is really important that we acknowledge that coaching is not just advice. There's a great Harvard Business Review study called The Wild West of Executive Coaching. Who knows what coaching means these days? There's relationship coaching, there's teacher coaching, leadership coaching, all these other things.

[18:56]

I'm a member of the Harvard Institute of Coaching, and we're very, very specific on coaching. Coaching is performance-based. It's here's an objective. Here's what your organization needs. Here's what you need. How do we get better?

[19:07]

And I fear that way too much coaching out there is kind of this buddy-based coaching with no parameters, no expectations. It's actually worse than the absence of coaching because it tends to validate bad performance. A good coach is willing to challenge the client, just as my coaches challenge me. I think it's really important that we dismiss this notion that your coach is your buddy, is your therapist, is your friend. Hey, no problem with getting a therapist, but you might want to get actually a licensed therapist and not somebody who calls themselves a coach. I do worry that the term coach has been used without the specificity.

[19:44] SPEAKER_01:

I think you made a really important point in passing there that as school leaders, we need friends. We probably all need a therapist these days. I mean, to be honest, I think probably everybody needs to access some form of counseling at some point, and we probably all need a coach. And I think sometimes when we get the wrong person to play each of those roles, when our friend becomes our therapist or we lean on our coach as our therapist or our friend or recognizing just that different people need to play different roles in our lives and maybe some Sometimes we can lean on people to flex their role a little bit, but we have to be careful about that. But take us more into that coaching role. You said coaches need to be willing to challenge their clients and focus on performance.

[20:20]

Say more about that.

[20:22] SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. And by the way, thank you so much for validating a therapy. One of my favorite principals, Ms. Persky, has literally on her desk the 800 number of the medical plan that they've been paying premiums to for years. And what happens, unfortunately, in schools is that people, staff members will come into the principal's office asking them to provide psychotherapy. And Ms. Persky is able to say, you know, we've been paying these premiums for all these years.

[20:48]

No shame, no blame. If you haven't had depression and stress and anxiety in the last three years, you're lying. We've all had those things. So she clearly distinguishes the need for therapy, as you so thoughtfully said, from my role as a leadership coach. Now, I think the other thing that we need to do is to have a mutual understanding about what the expectations are, because the therapeutic conversation is totally different. The coaching conversation is, you know, here's where we are in third grade reading.

[21:16]

Here's where we are in ninth grade biology failures. What do we need to do between now and four weeks from now? Not the Stalinist five-year plan. What do we need to do right now that we can do? And I think what effective coaches do is to provide short-term goals and short-term reinforcement, because that's what our teachers and our staff, and frankly, our kids and our parents really need right now. After three years of disappointment, we need to bounce back.

[21:40]

It's back to what you said earlier about resilience. And so I think we need to The coaching conversation is all about performance, measurement, and response.

[21:48] SPEAKER_01:

Talk to us a little bit more about measurement. I feel like that's maybe a frustration of the people who are arranging and paying for coaching is that sometimes we're throwing money at something and then maybe the person leaves anyway, or they work through the coaching cycle, then the coaching is over and who knows if things are different. How do we gauge the success of coaching, especially when we're talking about high performers who are going to be doing well anyway, or we're talking about people who are struggling and maybe still struggle after coaching? How do we get a sense of whether this is making a difference or not?

[22:18] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'll tell you, for whatever it's worth, my colleagues and I have struggled with this very issue. And we have gotten so tight on this point that we will not accept an engagement that does not have what we call local evidence of improvement. For example, if the goal I mentioned a minute ago, ninth grade math and science, that's a huge issue around the United States. And if our goal is to reduce the DF rate, then I want to have a baseline. What was it like in 2022? What was it like in 2023?

[22:44]

And I want to measure that very carefully. Maybe it's attendance. Maybe it's parent engagement. You know, I let the client choose what the goal is, but there has to be a clear before and after measurement. The least effective thing that you can do is to focus on state test scores because the result is way too long. You know, if you're going to be a coach, think of yourself as an athlete, as a performer.

[23:05]

is a musician. You need coaching that's going to say, how is next week going to be better than now? In John Hattie's wonderful research, he talks about six week terms. Nobody talks about these 12 to 18 month lags between the performance and when you get state test scores back. It's really got to be something that you can observe upfront. And I think the more specific and clear they are, the better.

[23:26]

That said, I want to admit, because I'm a quantitative guy, I measure things. I've seen some qualitative things that have been fabulous oh my god this great school that i've watched they just had student writing because they know the research from steven graham and others and hopefully myself on the power of non-fiction writing influencing math science pe so what they did was they simply posted without names the same kid to same kid comparison september december may and Now you would see same kid to same kid, same family, same nutrition, same attendance, same behavior, same everything. Those writing things would get so much better. And that allowed the principal to say at the end of the year, so what do you think caused that? What is the same kid, the same nutrition, the same? That's you, teachers.

[24:11]

You're the one who caused that. And if we're going to keep the teachers that we want to keep in our profession, we have to let them leave every single school year knowing they're the ones who caused those amazing improvements. So I know quantitative things are fine, but please don't neglect the qualitative things like that. I guess I would only say the following. A complaint that I hear all around the United States is that we're so busy trying to catch up, but we're basically giving teachers the same time allocation that they had in 2019. So the respectful question I would ask for all of your leadership listeners is, how is your schedule, how is your time allocation different today in 2023 than it was in 2019?

[24:49]

And in the vast majority of cases where I ask that question, the answer is it hasn't changed. And colleagues, I'm just saying as respectfully as I can, if you think that's true, you're pretending that COVID never happened. Learning loss is real, depending on whose research you want to believe. It's between 22 weeks and 36 weeks behind in reading, perhaps more in math. I work most of my life in high poverty systems. I think it's more than 36 weeks.

[25:13]

So we need more time. You give me kids in seventh grade math, which I used to teach, who can't add, subtract, multiply, and divide. I'll teach them algebra, but not in one period a day. I'm asking you as my leader to give me more time. If you're sending me kids in third grade who don't know how to hold a pencil, don't know yet all their numbers and letters, please don't tell me I've got to have the same number of minutes that I had in 2019. I can do it, but I need more time.

[25:40]

So that's the most important thing I could request respectfully of my leaders.

[25:44] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a great point because I think we're starting to realize as a profession that there is no magic trick that makes up for that, right? I mean, learning just takes time. And if time is what we have lost, it may be that time is what we need to gain back some of that learning that would have taken place in the time that was lost.

[25:59] SPEAKER_00:

It's interesting in the book, Equity and Excellence, I contrasted districts that had in schools that had five or six periods per day with those that had eight or nine periods per day. And those that had eight or nine periods per day were sincerely trying to offer everything to all these kids. But what it practically meant was fewer minutes per subject. Those that had five or six periods per day basically said, you know what? We're the grownups. We're running the show.

[26:23]

I know you're big and bad and 14, except we're going to say what's most important. And it's the paradox of choice. We'll have fewer choices now so you have more time to learn so that you have more choices in the future. And I fear that some of these districts that have had eight or nine periods in fragmented curricula are giving many choices now, which then lead to fewer choices for a lifetime. So I'm just asking our listeners to take some heat, as I know you will, but narrow the focus and give both teachers and students the time that they need.

[26:54] SPEAKER_01:

One last thing I wanted to ask about, you have a somewhat unusual number of co-authors on the book, Fearless Coaching. Tell us a little bit about the team that put this together.

[27:03] SPEAKER_00:

I'm so lucky, man. This is in the category of better to be lucky than smart. I had so many great colleagues, Dr. Kate Anderson Foley, for example, former associate commissioner of education for the state of Illinois, a specialist in special education. Lisa Almeida, who's our executive director. a principal in a high-poverty system, and now leads a team of 55 people leading them.

[27:23]

We just have extraordinary colleagues who I've been lucky enough to attract to our organization, and each of them contributed. Bill Sternberg, I should mention, he was the one who was so instrumental in saying, here's the biggest mistakes that coaches make. And I'm sure he was not referring to me, of course, but Bill is the kind of guy who's just such a straight shooter. that he'll tell you exactly here's what doesn't work, here's what does work. So as you said, there's a number of co-authors on there, but I'm really lucky to have had them as colleagues.

[27:51] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Fearless Coaching, Resilience and Results from the Classroom to the Boardroom. Dr. Reeves, thank you so much for joining me once again.

[27:58] SPEAKER_00:

It's my great pleasure. Thank you so much.

[28:00] Announcer:

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