Guillaume Gendre—School By Design

[00:01] Justin Baeder:

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 Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] Guillaume Gendre:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to be joined today by Guillaume Gendre. who is a senior school design expert for School by Design, where he helps districts design the schools that students and teachers need with the resources they have. He has 20 years of experience in the field of education and has previously been a principal in Washington, DC and Hartford, Connecticut, as well as an assessment specialist for the Oregon Department of Education. And we're here today to talk about how we use time in schools and how we can maximize that time for teaching and learning.

[00:49] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:52] Guillaume Gendre:

Guillaume, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you for having me. Well, one of the things that I think we should start with, Guillaume, is how peculiar it is how we use time in American schools. And I understand that you grew up in France where time is used very differently, and teachers have a very different amount of time to work with as they prepare and as they teach classes. Is that right? That is correct.

[01:16] Guillaume Gendre:

And so the time in France is really just... Really open for teachers to – they have teaching hours and it's very open for them to just use the time that is within their contract however they want. In the United States, what I observe is this is very chunked and it's very organized and predictable in a way. I'd equate it to almost being really busy all day long.

[01:40]

from the inception of students, where you receive the student, welcome them into the school, until the minute they leave.

[01:46] Guillaume Gendre:

And I think that's what we assume is the case everywhere, that you get a prep period if you're a teacher. Hopefully you get a prep period, but that's about it, maybe 30 to 60 minutes where you're not supervising students and actually teaching class. But before we got started recording today, you were telling me that in France, even for K-12 teachers, it's more like what we would think of as a college professor schedule, where the teaching time is more along the lines of about three hours a day. Is that right? That is correct.

[02:13] Guillaume Gendre:

And it's not organized per day. It's per week. And it's about a 15-hour load of teaching per week with a prep time that's just not regulated and not controlled. So that's the contract. For students, it's equally different, meaning the students have a more college-level schedule. And so students would have, for example, three hours of literacy on a Monday in high school, but none on Tuesday, maybe nothing on Wednesday.

[02:43]

Then they just, you know, regroup on Thursday and then maybe have a class on Saturday morning. So it's very different. It's a weekly schedule, very different than the linear schedule you have. Encounter in most schools in America.

[02:55] Guillaume Gendre:

Yeah, so different and really kind of blows my mind that I didn't know that That we have this system that just seems so normal to us in the United States and you know lo and behold other countries who are doing quite quite well and are using completely different approaches to managing time. So we're looking for a few minutes here and there, maybe once a week where PLCs can meet. We're looking for maybe time for interventions if we have students who need extra help in a particular subject. And we really scramble to find that time. So we wanted to have a conversation today about how schools are going about that process and how you work with schools to help them find time, to help them restructure things, maybe if they want to offer college credit, a more college-like experience, or more personalized learning experiences for students. So let's get into the work that you do currently and maybe reach back into some of the work that you did as a principal, as a turnaround principal in DC and in Hartford.

[03:54]

Knowing that we have such a vast difference between our current ways of using time and that kind of 15 hour a week weekly view rather than, you know, periods and every day being the same and not having much prep time. Obviously, we're not going to get there. We would have to have some pretty systemic changes to get to that 15 hour teaching load, which sounds fabulous. But what are some directions that you take when you're working with schools in the United States to help us get closer to our vision for what we want to be able to make happen in the day?

[04:25] Guillaume Gendre:

So the process I've used as a leader in my school is very similar. Actually, it was really inspired by the school by design process. And so the process starts with an audit. Just know your resources and let's go by design. We'll do it with four different buckets of students, time, staff, and courses. And then you analyze that data.

[04:44]

So when I go into a school, usually there's first part is an audit of all the data points. And I'll give you examples. First of all, let's let me distinguish. There's a district level. and then the school level because school-wide design will go into district to help a district-wide effort, but there are, on some occasion, single school support. So this type of data we collect with timetable, for example, staff ratio, staff profile, the class sizes, the sections.

[05:12]

We'll do work with principals on course-taking sequence and alignment. We'll look at enrollment patterns. And so forth and so on. So that's the first step, right? It's just to know the district, know the schools, get some information about the culture, about the processes, the policies before you go in. And then we lay out a work stream, if you will, that starts with, okay, so this is what you did.

[05:38]

And then the second step is let's dream very big. What could we do? based on the problem that were identified through the data and the interview of leaders, teachers, sometimes students, depending on the district, right? Depending on the access. And so then what would you do? If you removed all the barrier, what could you do?

[05:59]

And then the third step is, okay, let's be real because there's the reality just hits really hard. And so, okay, what's feasible maybe for first year, second year and third year. That's really just the big, process that we utilize and I utilize when I work with districts and schools. And so it's really just starting with the problem of practice and resolving it. That's really what it is.

[06:24] Guillaume Gendre:

Yeah, I'm thinking back to some of the changes that I made as a principal looking for ways to give teachers more collaborative time and find time that teachers could meet consistently. But I love that you're starting with a problem of practice because it's easy to look at another school and say, oh, you know, I want what they have or wouldn't it be nice if we had what they have? But really it is, you know, I think leadership is largely about problem solving and figuring out where are the opportunities for this school? What do we need to do in this particular context? Not because it's done somewhere else, but because it solves a problem for our students and our teachers and So I wonder, as you think back on your experience as a principal, what were some of the problems that you identified and worked to address in terms of how time and other resources are used?

[07:09] Guillaume Gendre:

So the biggest thing I've encountered over and over and over is the quality of lessons. I'm putting myself in the shoes of a student. And as a leader, you probably did this, too. We have a lot of colleagues who do this. You are in the classroom all the time, right? You know, 75% of your time is spent in the classroom just really just feeling the experience, looking at the instruction, analyzing the products, looking at students, what tasks they're engaged into.

[07:34]

And my experience over time and time again is that it's usually not great quality. And so sometimes you'll find the worksheet out of the drawer. That's kind of an endemic problem. Two lessons are not really well thought out or are just meeting the standards but not really analyzing the skills that sit underneath the standards and so forth and so on. And so that's been the problem. And the only way I could think of remedy that is not to collect lessons plans and try to cover, you know, 100 staff's lesson plan daily.

[08:04]

I can't do that. I don't have the capacity to do that. But what I can do is I can empower teachers to design better lessons by supporting them while the designing of the lesson happens. And so how do you create that time for them to collaborate? And it's just one strategy, right? When we're thinking about time, getting adults together to work and design better lessons is one strategy.

[08:24]

We could increase the amount of instructional time. That's another strategy around time, but that doesn't necessarily result in better lessons. And so for me, it's really, is the experience really engaging? Is it relevant? Is it connected? Is it connected from different content areas?

[08:40]

Is there some sort of pass through that just really makes sense for a student? Are the skills aligned? Are they shared? Is it the shared responsibility if we share the literacy skills or not? And so that's the only really way I've found to really address it in a systemic way is just to read to get the people together and to work together, but not at the expense of students.

[09:04] Guillaume Gendre:

And I love that you started with getting into classrooms, right? Because I think it's easy to have meetings and to go to conferences and to read books and to get all these ideas about what we need to do for our students based on outside ideas. But what it really comes down to, I think as a starting point, as you said, is getting into classrooms, spending that time there, figuring out what students are experiencing, figuring out what kind of teaching they're experiencing, and then what we can do about that. So if we are seeing a lot of worksheets thinking about, okay, What systemically is in place that's causing this kind of instruction to take place? And what do I need to do as a leader to create a different experience for students? And I think that drives a lot of administrators in the United States in particular to look at professional learning communities, to look at collaborative time so that people really can work on the quality of their lessons and making their instruction engaging.

[09:55]

And I'm thinking back to the schedule that I inherited as an elementary principal where We had, you know, homeroom classes and then special classes like PE, art, that basically provided the prep period for teachers. And one of the big challenges that we faced is that on every grade level team, there was somebody who did not have a common prep time. with everyone else, you know, we had kind of two and a half special classes for students to go to. So that third group had to kind of rotate around in a very awkward way and people would have their prep period at different times on different days of the week and they could never really meet all as a team. So one of the very first things I did and was able to implement this in my second year as a principal was to give everyone a common planning time and a consistent schedule from day to day.

[10:46]

And that worked in my particular school. There were some pretty simple changes that we could make. They cost a little bit of money, but not a lot. And we were very, very happy with the return on that investment that we got. But I feel like there's this tendency to just assume that the schedule is a given or that the way we arrange courses and prep periods and things like that is a given. And there's an opportunity to use our imagination and kind of create that vision.

[11:15]

So let's get into that a little bit. What are some of the ways that we should expect to be creative and to find opportunities there that might be right under our noses?

[11:24] Guillaume Gendre:

Right. So oftentimes, It's almost contradictory. But when we think about schedule in the school and basically the example you're giving about what you inherited as a leader is that we are really at the micro level. We're trying to match people to be together. We're really just, you know, for example, in the elementary school, the special schedule will drive your master schedule, right? So one strategy is to go to the macro and say, hey, there are big chunks of time that are organized in a certain fashion and we can just play with that.

[11:51]

We can reorganize this. Nobody said that the special had to be always at the same time. Nobody said that the special had to be always in one big chunk of time. Sometimes this could be in a different configuration. For example, there's a school, for example, I work with where specials are now just stacked into one day. So it takes place of the teachers, the classroom teachers once a week and they're all stacked.

[12:12]

So the students do have those long experiences. Think about a student doing an art project, for example, when you have 45 minutes to do an art project and you do it. You know, some some schools were rigid weekly. So you have a rotation of specials five a week or some something of that nature. And then opposite is, well, you might just have it only once a week, but then it's all stacked and it's very different. Right.

[12:36]

So there are different ways to look at it from not for just engaging from the micro and the detail, which is oftentimes adult oriented. It's really about adult issues. Let's try to make it as pleasant as possible for the adults. And I don't mean to to just be disrespectful to the adult. Obviously not. But let's look at it at the macro level.

[12:55]

Let's look at the student experience. Would it be better to have two hours of art back to back so that we could actually do a A to Z project? So those are different ways to think. So it's just one example. The other example is that why do we always go by that organization of you are in a grade specific and you can never blend with another grade? Who decided that?

[13:19]

Now, I understand the Carnegie unit. I know the history of how we came about in secondary of all this little chunk of time and that seat time, which is thankfully changing. But at lower level, elementary level, for example, Nobody said that you had to be in a grade specific. It's about standard. It's about the growth of the student on the continuum of a standard that is actually now, thanks to the Common Core, organized in a spiral way, right? So they're connected.

[13:50]

They're not different. You go deeper, but you don't necessarily go, you don't add more, right? You refine your skills as you go. And so who said that all first grade had to be with first grade? Could they be with second grade? Could they be starting to blend?

[14:08]

And how can we ungrade this? And I've done this experience actually in my school where I experiment. We did not do a full on, but we did an experiment. We found out that the student worked really well. A little older student worked really well with younger students and help each other. And some were just very comfortable because they weren't quite where they needed to be in the fourth grade.

[14:28]

And then some of the third graders were a little more advanced. And so Ljubljana, at the end of the day, without tracking necessarily, but differentiating and blurring those lines of artificial grades really helped students, really helped teachers, and overall was a success.

[14:44] Guillaume Gendre:

So if we've done the audit, we've taken stock of what problems we want to solve and what resources we have. We've spent that time in classrooms, kind of done that audit. What's the next step in the process? Because as we're thinking about how to make some of these changes, obviously we don't want to just think of one change that we could make and then go full steam ahead with it. We want to think about some different scenarios. So talk to me for a second about what that scenario building process looks like with staff.

[15:13] Guillaume Gendre:

Well, yes, there are many stories, but I think the important thing, too, and tying it back to what we do at School by Design. So once you've done the audit, you really sit down with the team. You propose some scenarios. You always propose some possibility. You provide. We get a chance to, you know, work in many places across the country.

[15:31]

And then some of us have international experience. So we get to bring that kind of view into the school districts and share that with the leaders. So we propose what we call a scenario, right? You might have heard about this on our website. We do scenario, which is beyond the audit. So now we know about the school.

[15:50]

What if we were to dream big? And then we engage our partner in doing the same thing. So we guide him through the process of scenario design, right? And they design the school of their dream. What would be the school if we remove all the barriers? And then we go into a more practical approach and we just bring it down to earth and we implement it.

[16:09]

So there are schools where, for example, on the second day, we've designed schools where teachers have, for example, a cohort of students. I'm thinking about a high school in this case where there's a humanities block of time and a STEM block of time. And within that block of time, which really represents three periods, if you were to break it down in terms of periods, but it's two teachers and two sections over three periods. And within that, the teacher control their cohort of students. So you've got two sections of students, two teachers, three periods. It's very difficult to even visualize it by me just saying it.

[16:47]

But what happened is that we delegate the responsibility and the ownership of the student to that team of two teachers with a group of, say, 50 students. And then that whole amount of time. And if I'm an English teacher and you're a social studies teacher, how do we organize our time? And we don't have to be linear. We don't have to do English, social studies, and then a period we...

[17:05]

do this more of the same. We could do an intervention in the third period, or I could take the whole three period amount of time to deliver some instruction, maybe do a project in social studies. And then tomorrow we'll swap the students. I'll get the other group of students. So we do that type of exercise. And that comes into the scenario part of our work with the schools.

[17:28]

And then once we have that, we bring it down to the ground. And then we have a level of service where we do technical assistance, which is really broken down in many different aspects. So there's the technical assistance of scheduling, right? Helping district transfer the idea into, okay, now we have a student information system. We have to develop a master schedule, right? What does it really look like?

[17:51]

And so we support schools in that. And then we also have modules of leadership. So transformational leadership, change leadership. How do you bring a team, a school culture to be able to work together, say, once a week? And what does it look like to work together? And what are the different activities that happen?

[18:11]

And how do we empower teachers to have the leadership skills necessary to work together? Because it's not a given. We bring people together to work together. It's a very artificial construct.

[18:20] Guillaume Gendre:

So we've done an audit. We've looked at some scenarios. We've kind of modeled what those would look like with our course configuration, with our schedule and staffing patterns and things like that. How do we move forward into implementation? So as School by Design works with schools, what does the implementation process look like?

[18:38] Guillaume Gendre:

So the implementation process, once you have dreamed big, is to bring it down to at the master schedule level. And so it's how do we provide technical assistance for schools or district to take the big ideas that were agreed upon that meet some criteria? Because when we do scenario, we are really working within allocation we're working within contract requirements and so forth and so on it's really specific and it's specific to the school or the district and then we bring it back to to developing the master schedule the actual master schedule and we we do not actually do the master schedule we support the school district it's always about empowering people to be able to transfer ideas into practice And we just make it part of a cycle, if you will.

[19:29]

So there's a cyclic aspect of our work from the audit, dreaming big, implementing, and then monitoring, right? And before we get to the monitoring, we can talk, if you will, about the other pieces that can come into play in terms of translating the work. Basically, how do we work together? What does it look like? What are the activities are we doing? For example, we train teams in lesson studies.

[19:59]

We train teams in LDC, Literacy Design Collaborative. So we don't actually do the training. We connect the schools with LDC. They have their trainers so that we provide that technical assistance. But it's a cycle. And so in terms of the cycle, think about the school improvement plan, if you will, or think about a district improvement plan, strategic operating plan.

[20:23]

And so all the pieces of what we offer fits into our cycle, meaning that we did it and then we go into monitoring. And one of the work we do is that once you've analyze the data, decide on the strategy, design the strategy, implement the strategy is monitoring, right? And that is decided with the school and the district of how, what will be the measure of success. And then we go back to the next year and then we analyze the data again. So it's really a cycle. It's not in isolation because developing a scenario and implementing a scenario is the answer to as we said at the beginning of our conversation, a problem of practice.

[21:02]

The end goal is to solve that problem or resolve what's not working. But unfortunately, if it was just only one problem, there are many other problems, right? So it's always a cycle. We always keep reinventing ourselves in terms of, the district. And so I did that as a school. I had, you know, kind of goals and then I developed structure and then I worked on culture and I never gave up any of those.

[21:29]

Right. And then I went into instructional leadership and then I added components to it. How do I better serve students with an IEP? How do I better serve students who are English learners? And so it always evolves. It never stops.

[21:42] Guillaume Gendre:

Well, and I think what's so exciting about getting some of those foundational pieces in place, for example, collaborative structures, is that those same structures can be set up to solve multiple problems. So if we want to look at student work and look at our lessons to make them more engaging, and we implement PLCs in order to make that possible, well, those same PLCs can then turn their attention to other problems, like how are we engaging our English language learners? And it really, to me, sounds like capacity building. You know, I think what we're really talking about here is building capacity for improvement so that it is an ongoing process, as you said, and we can continue to go back to our data, go back to our goals and figure out, okay, we solved that problem. Now, what do we do next? And how do we keep getting better?

[22:29] Guillaume Gendre:

That is correct. And then the organization could be at the school level, but it also could be a district level. So we have district who actually do the collaboration as a district. They'll bring, for example, in a middle school or in elementary school or high school, they'll bring teachers, say third grade teachers together in a location offsite for a half a day, for example, or they'll bring science teachers together from secondary. So they're different configuration where we do content specific support where, you know, we organize teachers in content or also some interdisciplinary so that it'll allow or horizontal and vertical alignment. And that work, it needs to be really just flexible.

[23:09]

That's the big key is to what extent a district is willing to be flexible. And so we try to answer that and support that as well.

[23:23] Guillaume Gendre:

more innovative approaches, you know, as you said, making, say, two teachers responsible for a group of students for an extended block of time so that they can maybe do project-based learning or work on some sort of interdisciplinary unit. And as a principal, I think about specific teachers who might have come to me and said, hey, this is what we want to do, and I would have a tendency to say, go for it, let's make it happen. But thinking more systemically at the school level or the district level, when we go from, okay, I'm thinking about two exceptional people who have a plan to an entire district or an entire set of teachers that's a larger group where maybe not everybody has that clarity of vision. What are some of the moves that you've seen districts make at scale that allow that kind of flexibility, that allow that kind of innovation without just confusing people.

[24:17]

Does that make sense? Like, you know, how do we, how do we create that?

[24:21] Guillaume Gendre:

Right. I think it makes total sense. And oftentimes what we've seen is when somebody is successful, we pull them out of the classroom to put them in a different role and they say, okay, now scale that. And unfortunately, they're not necessarily equipped for that particular function. And so it doesn't always result in a success. It's oftentimes a failure, actually.

[24:42]

And so what do we do with this? Well, the flexibility comes into the autonomy. We have to, if you empower somebody to be a professional, you have to give them some autonomy. And so while there are, it's a fine balance between mandates and releasing responsibility and empower the teacher. And so, you know, it's building a culture. And it's building a culture around education in America where it is no longer linear.

[25:07]

It is almost forced upon, if you will, by the emergence of a lot of virtual schools. So you'll see that in many states. And I'm thinking about Florida where they have the Florida virtual schools where time is used very differently. And the brick and mortar school is no longer necessarily the only structure to host the learning. And there are just many, many different variation on schooling. And so.

[25:36]

know the disappearance of the carnegie unit and then the proficiency base assessment and mastery so this does play an impact but to your question specifically um about if you have somebody successful and how do you scale that and it's really just releasing that responsibility and then and cross-pollinating and then supporting and learning from that experience in that context and then allowing people to just work with their colleagues and learn from their colleagues as organic as possible. Because forced learning does not always bode well. And so... It's really just about if a teacher is successful, then what are the structure to support that team that's successful too?

[26:19]

Are we able to modulate evaluation? I did this. So for example, I actually had a team that was highly functional, really good result, very functional. The next step as a leader for me was I want you to be successful. And so, and I could speak about this now because I'm no longer in those districts, but it was really about, OK, I want you to try even higher level and I want you to take risk and I want you to try different strategies to enhance your practice, which was already good. I mean, it was really good already.

[26:54]

But what is the next step to allow them to problem solve? And for me as a leader to remove the constraint of evaluation, meaning on a scale one to four evaluation, you have a three. You are satisfactory regardless because I want you to take risk and it might not work. But it will not come with a consequence, a negative consequence. The only consequence will engage in the next PLC, a conversation and a reflection on that practice and what went wrong or what went well. And that's so, as a leader, that's really just now we're flexible with systems that are compliant systems that are necessary.

[27:32]

but also extremely restrictive. That's an example of how you can empower the greatness.

[27:38] Guillaume Gendre:

And I appreciate your circling back to the idea of professionalism, because I think that that really is at the heart of greatness. If we want to see greatness in our profession, we have to start treating people as professionals. And back toward the beginning of our interview, we talked about how in France, it's common for teachers to really only teach for about 15 hours a week. And I say only because, you know, in the United States, teachers typically teach for, you know, five or six hours a day, you know, so 25 or 30 hours a week, you know, it's just natural for us to think, well, if we didn't pack teachers' schedules with classes, what would they do? How would they use that time? How would they be accountable for it?

[28:18]

What would we make them do with that time? And it's a very different question than we would ask for a doctor or an attorney or any other kind of professional. or a research scientist, we wouldn't say, well, a scientist must be looking through a microscope for at least 25 hours a week or they're not being a scientist. It's just a very funny definition of how professionals need to behave that we've come up with that I think is really worth reconsidering and saying, okay, how can we empower people to do more of what we're ultimately here to do to improve teaching and learning? And how can we really trust teachers as professionals?

[28:55] Guillaume Gendre:

Yes, and I think that the medical field has been really researching from the education standpoint. The instructional round came out of that. It's really when I have a doctor and when you have surgery, that surgeon might just work a half day, do three or four surgeries, and then go play golf. And it's not they play golf just because they can. You understand that those surgeons are doing research. They're keeping up on their medical journal.

[29:21]

They're doing extensive research. They do training. They learn new techniques. There's a whole lot of work we don't see as patient, for example, that just happened. And I think that looking at education the same way is a pretty good idea where professionals get to really specialize in their field and that their time is not restricted, but there's that level of accountability. That if I give you tons of freedom and I don't hold your hand to do every step of the way, which is a really extremely compliant system, but at the same time, it's not a motivating system.

[29:59]

And think about PD. So what we offer at School by Design is a different way to do PD. We say it's not your grandma's PLC. It is not your grandma's PLC. No offense to any grandma, but it's really about working together in a meaningful way and being extremely flexible in what we work on. as long as it results into improved practice and better student experience and obviously measured by student outcomes that grow that's what we do um and so it's not just putting people together in one room that that is not enough right or dictating activities this is what is needed today for tomorrow and i as a leader i want to see the evidence of that thinking translated into practice because as we also talked about is that presence in the classroom You need to be in the classroom.

[30:48]

So if we think about the leadership role, are we managers or are we instructional leaders? And then that's a choice, right? Because as a principal, as you know very well, there's a lot of managerial tasks that need to be done and attended to. And a lot of them around safety and you can't avoid it. It's necessary. But at the same time, what is the core of our business?

[31:11]

So there's just ideas to think about. There are a lot of people who have a very good idea about this. And so how do we capitalize on this and translate those? And we try to just do that research and bring it to the school and the district and offer that support.

[31:23] Guillaume Gendre:

And I think that support is so critical because we've been talking about some fairly big-picture things, some fairly open-ended ways of rethinking how we do major aspects of schooling, how we manage time, how we organize our schedules, and how we think about teacher professionalism. So I think having that support support in the form of a thinking partner in terms of organizational design, I think really is critical that we don't just get an idea and run with it, but that we really have a thoughtful process. And I know that you've taken many schools through that thinking process at School by Design. So if people want to get in touch with you, maybe have a conversation, learn more about the work that you do with schools and with districts, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[32:07] Guillaume Gendre:

At schoolbydesign.com. That's our website. And then the Twitter is Cool by Design. Those are the fastest way to contact us and get in touch with us and, you know, start those conversations about how we can support, you know, and really just it's personalized. So it's really for the problem of the district.

[32:27]

It is not a recipe necessarily. It's a process, but it's not a recipe.

[32:31] Guillaume Gendre:

Well, Guillaume, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a blast.

[32:34] Guillaume Gendre:

Thank you, Justin.

[32:35] Announcer:

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