Elements of Grading: A Guide to Effective Practice

[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, Dustin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Douglas Reeves. Dr. Reeves is the founder of Creative Leadership Solutions, the author of more than 30 books and 80 articles on leadership and organizational effectiveness. He's worked in all 50 US states and more than 20 countries around the world as an educational leadership consultant and expert. And we're here today to talk about his new book with Bob Aker, 100 Day Leaders, Turning Short-Term Wins into Long-Term Success in Schools.

[00:44] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Reeves, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:48] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks so much. Delighted to be with you.

[00:50] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I know we've spoken previously about one of your books, Elements of Grading, A Guide to Effective Practice. And I'm very excited to speak with you about the new book, 100 Day Leaders. And as I look back, you know, we do a school administrators, for prospective school administrators, for people who maybe are making a transition. And one of our most popular topics ever has been developing an entry plan or kind of how to start in a new role. And I saw some research recently that stated that I believe 20% of principals will basically turn over in any given year. So in any given year, 20% of principals are first year principals in their school, even if they're experienced and not new to the profession.

[01:34]

So, Dr. Reeves, I wonder if you could just take us into a little bit of the origin story of 100 Day Leaders. What did you see happening in the field that prompted you and Bob Aker to write this book?

[01:43] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you for mentioning Bob. He was certainly kind of the intellectual and moral guidepost for this, and I acknowledge his work tremendously. What an influence he's been on our field. With respect to the origin story, Bob and I were concerned that there's way too much time and money in emotional energy invested in five-year plans that are just a farce. Because nobody can see five years out. The world is moving too fast.

[02:07]

But there's still this kind of mythology of strategic planning out there that people use. Even John Cotter, who… you know, has written a lot about change, has acknowledged that most of the traditional planning mechanisms have failed and he's changed his views. The other person I want to acknowledge is Michael Follin, who wrote the foreword to this book. And I would joke with Michael that, you know, whenever anybody didn't want to make a change, they'd say, well, you know, Follin says change takes five to seven years. And so I said, you know, that's on you. And he said, well, that's exactly what I said 35 years ago.

[02:38]

And Fallon said, I've learned a few things about change in the intervening 35 years, and one of them is that we need to accelerate the pace of change. So it was incredibly gracious of him to write the foreword to this, because I think we have a sense of urgency to get things done to meet the needs of students. And we know that we have to be much more fleet of foot. Also, teachers and parents and community leaders, they don't have five years. They don't have three years. They want to see that their efforts are providing results immediately.

[03:06]

I even think the reason we said 100 days is that too often schools are stuck in these one-year cycles of spring test scores. And Bob and I are saying, wait a minute. We can look at success rates on a number of different academic and behavioral indicators in much shorter periods of time and kind of create this flywheel that keeps motivation going.

[03:25] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. So we know we're not realistic. If we say our change is going to take five years, that means it probably is never going to happen. And, you know, principal turnover is such that we can't count on having five years to really pull something off. So I appreciate that 100-day focus.

[03:41] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you for mentioning this issue of turnover because that is particularly important. bad in high poverty systems. Uh, it may be 20% overall, but I, their high poverty system where it's regularly 30, 40, 50% turnover. And it's really hard to get focused and momentum if you're not intentional about it. Or, or if you, if you lapse into these, well, first of all, I'll spend a year getting to know everybody and then I'll spend a year kind of planning. And then We'll spend some years kind of doing, you know, we got to get this stuff done right now.

[04:09]

It is, as we attempted to say in the book, a moral imperative.

[04:11] SPEAKER_01:

I was intrigued that you started with the idea of a moral imperative. What does that mean exactly? And why did you start with that moral imperative to get the first 100 days right?

[04:20] SPEAKER_02:

Because the plain fact is that kids depend upon us. For many of the students we serve, these, you know, whatever we've got them for six, seven hours, of the day, maybe they're most secure, maybe they're most safe, maybe where they get fed, maybe where they receive unconditional love. It'd be great to say, you know, if the world were full of two-parent families and intact homes and no poverty, that'd be fine. But the world that we occupy is full of enormous challenges for children and growing challenges. And that's why Bob and I said every day we delay is a day that a student has lost an opportunity.

[04:56] SPEAKER_01:

So Dr. Reeves, I wonder if you've ever seen a little bit of a tension around this. Thinking about the urgency, thinking about the moral imperative, one of the challenges that I've seen a lot of new leaders run into is the tension between building that trust, building those relationships, learning the lay of the land, and figuring out what precisely it is that needs to be done, and that urgency. And I've seen some people really crash and burn or just get off on the wrong foot with their staff when they came in too hard, too fast, really wanted to change things up quickly and then just kind of hit a wall. What are some of the steps that you recommend in 100 Day Leaders to prevent that from happening, to allow people to hit the ground running, but not then smack into a wall of resistance or relationships that have not been built yet?

[05:45] SPEAKER_02:

Sure. Well, there's two things that we talk about. And you have reminded me of rule number one of change is thinking about what's not going to change. So part of going back to moral imperatives, I think it's really important that new leaders don't come in and say, there's a new sheriff in town, it's fruit basket upset. But rather, we should be saying, hey, This school or this district, whatever it is that I'm leading, has a strong culture or set of values or traditions that we hold dear. And whether it's kind of big picture things like that or in our previous conversation about grading, I think people go completely crazy on that stuff, talking about changing everything.

[06:20]

Let's reassure people, hey, we'll still have transcripts, we'll still have IEPs, we'll still have letter grades. And to be able to talk about what doesn't change then gives you leave to say, now that we've established what's not going to change, Let's be clear about what is. So that's big idea number one. Big idea number two is focus. The mistake that most leaders make is they come in with a list of 50 things. And the evidence that I've reported in this and other research is pretty strong that you can't do more than about six.

[06:48]

And that's not just my research. I see this recurring rule of six. It's about the most number of things that we can hold in our heads and really monitor and lead thoughtfully. So those would be the two things that I think resolve that tension.

[06:59] SPEAKER_01:

So being clear with people, you know, this is not going to change. That is not going to change. You're going to have these anchors, these foundations that are going to be solid for people. And you in the book say that we need to make a not to do list. Tell us about the not to do list.

[07:13] SPEAKER_02:

It's so funny. It is one of the hardest things that people do. And I do this in presentations all the time, whether it's a thousand person keynote or a 30 person workshop. And here's how I set it up. Everybody has a not to do list. They just don't admit it because the end of the year is going to happen.

[07:27]

It always does. Almost always. And and there's stuff that we don't get done. So everybody has an unconscious not to do list stuff that they just didn't get around to. What we're trying to say in the book is they need a conscious not to do list. And let me be really specific, because I think people Struggle with that saying, well, there's, you know, unless my boss changes, there's nothing that I can ever take off my plate.

[07:49]

And frankly, that's just not true. For example, I find a huge amount of leadership time wasted in replying to emails that weren't even sent to the leader. It was just a CC. A huge amount of time spent switch tasking when people thought that they were giving good service by replying in 30 seconds to an email that could have easily waited four or five hours. I think 24-hour response time is a responsibility that we have. But when I see people all day long stuck in their office, never observing teachers, never having lunch with students because they're just playing the eternal ping pong match.

[08:24]

of responding to emails, it's really unproductive. I think the same is true with other elements of technology like text and calls that we could screen more effectively. But there's other things. I've seen some principals do some really clever things. One woman, for example, I asked her, I said, you know, you've got the same contract, the same budget everybody else does. How are you getting so much more done?

[08:45]

And she looked at me with cold eyes and said, because I haven't had a staff meeting for three years. You know, they still have the meetings, obviously, but the idea of the traditional staff meeting, which is a colossal waste of time, nobody's ever said, I wish I had another meeting like that. She has completely repurposed for collaborative scoring, for effective assessment, for some of the things we talk about in the book, and she just stopped having traditional meetings. I know a superintendent who made a quantitative goal to inventory all the meetings that were out there and start reducing both quantity, the participation, and the time involved. So it can be done, but it takes intentional effort.

[09:20] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I hear that issue of email and communication and just all the meetings that they have to go to being one of the key things that overwhelms people when they start in a role. Perhaps someone's been an assistant principal for years and then steps into a principalship. or just moves to a different setting where the the culture of communication is different and suddenly they're getting 400 emails a day and just slammed and feeling how can i ever get out of this i saw a strategy uh from my friend uh the author kevin cruz uh says he does email 3210 he checks it three times a day uh for 21 minutes at a time and whatever he gets done he gets done with those 21 emails but he's done with them after 21 minutes and i compare that i love that i don't I can't say I follow that exactly at this moment, but I love the simplicity and the focus and the practicality of it. Because what I see so many people doing instead is, as you said, sitting at their computer for far too long, typing out all these replies that probably could be handled in a different way.

[10:18]

And increasingly, I'm seeing people look down at their phones, like we'll just stop in the middle of the hallway, look down at their phone for two minutes and type out a reply with their thumbs. And it's something that, you know, if it was an email, A, it could have been 15 seconds on a proper keyboard or a 30 second face to face conversation with the person whose room is right over there. So we've got to really be, as you said, intentional about how we communicate, because if we don't, it will consume us. It will consume all of our time and more.

[10:46] SPEAKER_02:

And there's a particular leadership issue about everybody, you know, over communicating. My my brother is a retired two star general. And and when he took over the command, for worldwide command for chemical biological defense, which is a pretty big deal with 85 posts around the world. And everybody wants to keep the general informed. He said it was crazy. He was getting all these CC.

[11:06]

And all he did was use the function on the email filter, said, I'm only going to reply to things that are really addressed to me. I'm not going to reply to things that are CC'd, just keeping the general informed. He said 90 days went by before anybody said, gee, general, did you see this? I think principals and superintendents are in the same boat. They get a lot of CC emails that they could frankly dispense with.

[11:29] SPEAKER_01:

So in addition to dealing with the moral imperative and some communication things, you say a big, actually step one, you say in the book is to identify your values. And I know we're often kind of in flux and we have a lot going on in our heads as far as values when we enter a new organization, because probably that organization has some different values than the previous organization we worked with. Why is it so important for leaders to start by identifying their values?

[11:55] SPEAKER_02:

Because everything else stems from that. And values are not just about what we're going to do, but values articulately stated help us decide what we're not going to do as well. And so some of the fundamental values of respect and fairness talk about how we're going to deal with people and how we're not going to deal with people. I would also say that I think leaders, frankly, sometimes get way too deep in the weeds. Another part of my objection to the general strategic planning industry is they'll spend a year trying to figure out values as some community process. Values are something the leader has got to set and be very clear about this.

[12:29]

We don't vote on equity. We don't vote on a commitment to excellence. We don't vote on safety. I mean, there are fundamental things that I think every leader has to articulate. I'm not saying everybody's. has to have the same ones as I do.

[12:42]

But I think we've got to be very clear about what is a consensus building process that is inclusive and what is a fundamental framework. And that's what values are that guide the decisions that we make.

[12:52] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that's a great way to frame the role of values around guiding the decisions we make. Because of course, we're all going to, you know, if we talk about our values in great depth, we're going to realize that different people have different values. And yet, as an organization, we have to act on a shared set of values that, you know, maybe we don't share equally. But as leaders, we do have to take a stand for Yeah, absolutely. Things like equity.

[13:15] SPEAKER_02:

then we have to translate those into behavior. Let's face it, there's still a lot of pervasive inequities in our system. And I'm not going to wait 10 years for somebody to go through a lot of workshops and change their values toward equity. What I'm going to look at is that is the value. And then there are certain behaviors with respect to everything from how we give students feedback, to how we call on them in class, to how we arrange the class that are then reflective of that value. And so this is not a dumb poster on the wall.

[13:43]

What leaders have to do is to translate values into action in specific leadership and teaching decisions.

[13:48] SPEAKER_01:

And I think people tend to dismiss that as putting behavior first and saying, OK, these are the actions I want you to take, whether your values are there yet or not. People write that off as fake it till you make it. But I think it's much more the case that it's much easier to change people's behavior and then change the values as a result than it is to get agreement on values and then hope to get people to live up to those.

[14:11] SPEAKER_02:

The next book that I'm working on is called The New Model of Educational Change. And one of the fundamental changes – and I've had tons of arguments about this, and your listeners may have a different point of view, and of course I respect that. But the biggest myth out there about change is that you've got to get buy-in first. And no, you don't. You behave first, and then people have buy-in. I can tell you, Justin, I have seen this again and again and again where people didn't have buy-in about the value of writing.

[14:35]

But they did it. Then they saw the impact that writing had, and then they had buy-in. And I've seen the same thing in grading. I've seen the same thing in equity sticks and student discipline. If I wait for buy-in, you know, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long term, we're all dead. So I'm not going to wait for that.

[14:50] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's a great segue into the idea of 100-day challenges. What is a 100-day challenge?

[14:56] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's got to be something that we can celebrate. I mean, it's the rhythm of schools typically are in semesters that are typically about 90 days each, 10 days each. maybe five days before, five days after. So the rhythm of always having something to celebrate. I don't think any semester ought to end. Don't wait until the springtime.

[15:12]

Don't wait until graduation day. We ought to be having things every October, every November, every December that we can have some short-term wins. And they don't have to be giant test score goals, though I do think we ought to be able to say what percentage of our students were better off in the fourth month of school than in the third month. That's a reasonable 100-day objective. How did we have better communication with parents in the fourth month versus the third month? How did we have better attendance and tardiness and behavior and all manner of things?

[15:41]

Those are the kind of things that we can do in the short term. You can see the step and that pride that people take when they're walking down the hallway saying, dang, we nailed this thing, which you never see year to year, but you can absolutely see month to month and certainly semester to semester.

[15:57] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so this idea of more leading indicators, or at least even if we're measuring some sort of lagging outcome, things that we can measure more frequently than annual test scores, graduation rate, that we can get some kind of quick wins on. I've seen a lot of principals lately posting their daily attendance, like they'll have a sandwich board out front that says daily attendance yesterday was 96.7%, and really trying to keep that up, you know.

[16:21] SPEAKER_02:

My friend Roger Leon in Newark, that's the first thing that he did after taking over as superintendent, said attendance is job one. If we don't get that right, nothing else happens. And every day it's out there. And then they come together and share their data every month and say, hey, you're at 97 percent. I'm at 92 percent. What are you doing that I can.

[16:39]

I can learn from you on. And it really is a way to, in a short cycle of celebrations, create a real professional learning opportunity.

[16:46] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's talk more about opportunity because every school is going to have kind of a different set of opportunities. And there may be one school that has a big opportunity to improve attendance, whereas another school attendance might not be a problem. And to increase the attendance further might just be to make kids come to school when they're sick. So what are some guidelines that you have for us in the book around identifying those big opportunities where we can get some quick wins that will make a meaningful difference for students?

[17:09] SPEAKER_02:

So there's definitely a principle of leverage that Bob and I talked about. And later on today, I'm going to be talking to Tom Guskey, who's another researcher I should acknowledge. He's such a thoughtful and wonderful author. And part of the issue that Tom and I are addressing is if all you do is ask what works, there's a thousand things that work. John Hattie says anything with a pulse works. So the principle of leverage says don't ask what works.

[17:32]

Ask what works best. Ask what works most effectively. So what we tried to say in this idea of leverage and focus is it's a short list. There are things like professional learning communities, things like nonfiction writing, things like effective feedback for both adults and for students. That's the kind of thing that you can really see results in a short period of time and have leverage.

[17:54] SPEAKER_01:

So Dr. Reeves, I'm thinking about kind of a complex situation that a school might be in, where a leader comes in and thinks, you know, we really need to do PLCs, we need to be looking at common formative assessments, but we're a long way from that in this school. Maybe trust is poor, maybe teamwork is poor, maybe there's just a lot of work to do. And I'm keeping in mind what you said earlier in our interview today about, you know, not doing one thing in year one and another thing in year two, and really having that sense of urgency, that moral urgency, When it seems like there's just a big ball of wax and so many things that need to change in order for something complex to be successful, where do we start?

[18:33] SPEAKER_02:

We are famous in education for taking simple ideas and making them complicated and writing 300-page books about them. So let's just stay with your example of professional learning communities. It really all comes down to the four questions of learning, assessment, intervention, enrichment. And I see a lot of people wasting huge amounts of time on minutes and document drills and multi-page forms oh my goodness i was in a state where they had after every meeting had a three-page form that they were filling out that was taking more time than the meeting did and what i want to have is like a four line fragment of of an email that says okay learning assessment intervention enrichment those are the four things that we're focusing on it's blocking and tackling and i'm not saying you know Those are the only four things. But you've got to have a very few things that are going to be visible, that are going to be easily measured, easily understood, easily communicated.

[19:25]

So that's how I would reduce, with great respect, of course, you know, Rick and Becky DeFore and Bob Aker and people like Mattis who have been leaders on that. But I want to make sure that we communicate exactly what our expectations are in more crisp and clear terms.

[19:39] SPEAKER_01:

In the book, you talk about doing an initiative inventory. And we talked earlier about a list of things that will not change. How does the initiative inventory fit into all of this?

[19:49] SPEAKER_02:

It's fascinating. I'm in the middle of several of those right now. And first of all, everybody talks about initiative fatigue, but people rarely do anything about it because they go to a conference and hear a great idea and they read a book and get a great idea. And by the time you're done, it's one thing after another after the other. So initiative fatigue is never the result of malice. It's everybody trying to help you out.

[20:09]

But the problem is, and this is also kind of a side research insight, all these great ideas work well in isolation. They don't work well when they're one of 50 things going on. And I'm working in a district right now where we are already at 130 initiatives that we have identified and counting. And I still don't think we've got them all. The way that we make this initiative inventory work is, first of all, you just got to be honest about what are the initiatives out there. And there's always more than you think.

[20:34]

Even when leadership thinks that I'm very focused, teachers have got their own. And to be totally fair, even though everybody loves to dump on administrators, I've been in classrooms where there's some 20-year-old word searches going on out there that some of these initiative overload is self-imposed by their own tradition. So we all own this together and we all assume goodwill. But first thing you do is you take the inventory. And if you've got, here's another example, seven different literacy programs going on in the same school, none of them have a chance to be implemented well. So take inventory.

[21:07]

Second thing is we identify a implementation rubric, and that may be something like level one, the materials were delivered, but nobody used it. Or number two, we got materials, we got training, but there's no evidence in the classroom. Level three might be, well, we've got the training, the material, and there's evidence that's being used in the classroom. And level four, we got all that stuff, and there's evidence that it has an impact on student results. And what I noticed in this research is that it is a nonlinear relationship. In other words, my hypothesis, as so many of mine I was wrong about, was level one, level two, level three, level four, each one gets a little bit better.

[21:47]

And it's not true. Turns out that level one, level two, level three are indistinguishable. If you're not going to implement DSO student results, don't bother because there's a heck of a lot of work going on in workshops and trainings and stuff like that that has zero impact in the classroom if we're not going to follow through and monitor implementation. So you take inventory, you do a rubric for every one of those, and then the low-hanging fruit is finding stuff that's not used. You probably saw a study just released a few weeks ago, 67% of instructional technology initiatives not implemented. Millions of dollars on the table.

[22:19]

And I've gone into districts and found that very thing where Literally 1% of teachers are using something that they were paying for the entire district to have access to. That's the sort of tough leadership call that we've got to have to pull the plug.

[22:33] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, just to see what we're actually doing. Maybe we've purchased something and the shrink wrap is still on it. I've got a funny story on those lines. We did a math curriculum adoption when I was an elementary principal, or just prior to when I was an elementary principal. and getting people to fully transition to the new curriculum, which was an excellent curriculum. Teachers loved it.

[22:52]

But the thing that was lacking, the one action that senior leadership took that really, I think, kind of got us across the finish line was actually confiscating and selling off the old materials.

[23:07] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[23:07] SPEAKER_01:

That it wasn't until we rounded up all of the old textbooks, you know, teachers would have two textbooks on their desk. They'd have a teacher's guide from the old curriculum and a teacher's guide from the new curriculum. And it just didn't work. The philosophies were different. The scope and sequence were completely different. And people were overwhelmed.

[23:22]

And once the district said, hey, actually, we need those back. We're going to sell them and, you know, recoup some of our investment.

[23:29] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[23:29] SPEAKER_01:

I don't know if that was actually true or not. I don't know if the old curriculum was ever sold or if it was just recycled, but it worked and it got people going.

[23:38] SPEAKER_02:

I have a principal friend in Wisconsin and every year she has what she calls a dumpster day and literally brings in one of those dumpsters and finds all this stuff in file cabinets that needs to be recycled.

[23:51] SPEAKER_01:

I'm so glad you and Bob Aker have taken on this challenge of the first 100 days. And to any of our listeners who maybe have been in the same role for a while, if you have a transition coming up, I would not say this is a book for... Four New Principles. This is a book for principals who want to be successful in their next first 100 days.

[24:14]

So thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Reeves, in talking about 100-day leaders. If people would like to get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to do that online?

[24:25] SPEAKER_02:

The website creativeleadership.net has lots of free resources. There's free videos, there's free research, a number of articles And in rubrics, we try to make that as user-friendly as we can. So I would really encourage your readers to think about creativeleadership.net as a source of free resources.

[24:43] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Douglas Reeves, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[24:45] SPEAKER_02:

My pleasure. Thanks so much.

[24:47] Announcer:

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