Becoming a Learning Organization: Leading for Sustained Improvement

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and this week we are doing something a little bit special. I don't have a guest today, but I am going to bring you my full webinar on becoming a learning organization in audio format. So the last couple of weeks, we've been doing a new training called Becoming a Learning Organization, Leading for Sustained Improvement. And it's been a tremendous hit. We've offered it a number of different times and have had hundreds of people attend. And I wanted to make it available to you in podcast format because I know it's hard to make time to sit at your computer and participate in a webinar.

[00:51]

I know your schedule is tight. I know you are busy. And I did not want you to miss out on this training. So let's get started.

[01:00] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:02] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome, everyone, to Becoming a Learning Organization, Leading for Sustained Improvement.

[01:08] Announcer:

I'm Justin Bader, director of the Principal Center, where it's our mission to help you build capacity for instructional leadership in your school.

[01:16] SPEAKER_01:

And in this session today, we're focused on the question of how we can turn our school strategic plan and all the goals that we have on paper and all the improvement efforts and initiatives that are underway into a focused agenda for the coming school year. So we're going to take everything that's been documented, that's in your head, that's been discussed as a potential activity or a planned activity and talk about how we can narrow that down to what's going to make the greatest difference and then thrive with that focus that we can be so laser focused on those key priorities that we're able to succeed with them and then move on to the other priorities. in a kind of iterative process. And I believe that that focus is so critical because I like to say deciding what matters is the first act of leadership.

[02:12]

And if you look at a strategic plan, you might think, well, that's exactly why we have a strategic plan, so that we can decide what matters, get clear on that, document that, plan the implementation, and then go for it, right? Kind of the whole purpose of strategic planning is to decide as an organization what to do. And I'm sure you have some document that serves as a strategic plan. You might call it an improvement plan or a continuous improvement plan or a organizational development plan. You know, every organization has something like this. It might be your accreditation plan or application with your accrediting body.

[02:45]

You know, we've all got these documents that summarize what we collectively believe we're doing as a school. And yet within that, we still have to make choices about what to focus on because we can't do it all. so my question to you is without even looking at your strategic plan without even opening a document and reading it and trying to pick out your favorite i want you to think about what is your biggest priority for your school in the coming year what do you most want to happen and i want to ask you for just one thing i've heard i'm not sure if this is grammatically you know and historically accurate but i've heard that the word priority once did not have a plural, like the word priority originally was a singular word. So my priority is to do X in the coming year as a school, not my priorities are all 17 things in my strategic plan, but one thing.

[03:44]

But then my second question is kind of the reality check question. In addition to whatever your real one thing is your key priority, how many other initiatives are going on right now? And by school initiatives, I mean anything that your school is doing as a new project, a new implementation, a new curriculum adoption, or some district priority that requires you to do something. And then if you also wanna estimate how many hours of PD time, professional development time, or staff meetings where you get everybody together and you can work on those initiatives, how many hours per year do you have? Well, let's talk about organizational learning. Let's get right in to that concept and that task that's before us as leaders.

[04:28]

And I think the heart of organizational learning is learning not from just our successes, but learning from our failures, from looking at what we've tried to do in the past that we thought was a great idea, that really has not panned out as well as we thought, learning from failure. So let's jump in with a definition of organizational learning. I believe that organizational learning is the process of developing policies, procedures, and practices that lead to continuous improvement. In other words, we're taking what works, what we have found to make things better for our students, and we're institutionalizing them. Our organization gets smarter when we develop policies, procedures, and practices that are better for students. And the great thing about that is that it doesn't depend on zero turnover.

[05:22]

I think it's great to have a great school, but if your great school depends on one or two great people being there to hold it all together, I'm not convinced that it's truly a sustainably great school. A leader who leaves a legacy, leaves a school that's working well and continues to work well even after that leader moves on. So I think that the process of turning what we learn as a staff into what we do as a system is really critical for continuous improvement. So we'll talk a little bit more about organizational learning as we go along. But I think in addition to a definition, it's helpful to have a metaphor. And I think the best metaphor for an organization that I can think of is a garden, right?

[06:05]

A garden is complex. There's a lot going on there. It can be kind of a beautiful thing, but it also takes a lot of work to maintain it and to get it looking the way you want it. So imagine that as a leader, as a leadership team, you are tasked with deciding what matters in your school, in your organization. Remember, we said a moment ago that deciding what matters is the first act of leadership. if you were to plan out a garden you would have to make choices about what was going to go in that garden and if you don't make choices you don't have a beautiful garden you have like a normal yard you know which is full of dandelions and weeds and you know who knows what grows there and i think that's what happens normally that's what happens typically in schools where change just kind of happens to us change just pops up

[06:57]

unbidden unwelcomed it just grows freely if we don't make the decision as leaders to select that change and to pull out and to reject anything that doesn't fit our agenda that doesn't fit our priorities so what it comes down to is that we have got to make some strategic choices and i just shared a definition of organizational learning And that takes us to my definition of a learning organization. A learning organization is one that continuously improves by making strategic choices and learning from the consequences of those choices. So everything you have in your strategic plan is the menu right it's the menu it's the the playbook that the coach can pull from right if you go to a restaurant you don't say hey what do you what are you guys cooking tonight and then order all of it right now there might be some restaurants where that's that's how it goes and there are fewer choices and you just you know eat whatever the chef brings you if you're at a you know a prefix menu restaurant but for the most part

[08:02]

We have a huge and overwhelming menu in front of us. We can't eat it all. We can't order it all. We've got to make strategic choices. And we kind of do that. But what I'm convinced happens because we do so much at once is we fail to learn from the consequences of those choices.

[08:22]

And here is exactly how we do that. How we fail to learn from the consequences of the strategic choices that we make. John Hattie is the author of Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers. And he is a researcher based in Australia who has studied effect sizes and done meta analysis studies covering hundreds of thousands of students and dozens and dozens of different instructional strategies and school level strategies to try to figure out what works in education. Hattie says that everything works. Specifically, he says almost everything works.

[08:58]

90% of all effect sizes in education are positive. Of the 10% that are negative, about half of those are expected, such as effects of disruptive students. Thus, about 95% of all the things we do have a positive influence on achievement. When teachers claim that they are having a positive effect on achievement or when a policy improves achievement, this is almost a trivial claim. Virtually everything works. One only needs a pulse and we can improve achievement.

[09:28]

And of course, in his book, Hattie goes on to talk about effect sizes and how effect size measures can help you know which strategies are more effective and which strategies are less effective. Even though they all work, there are differences. Now, I think one thing that we have to keep in mind, even within that framework, within that paradigm, is that what Hattie is reporting on in Visible Learning is the result of meta analysis, right? He's not saying that this one strategy is going to have an effect size of exactly 0.79 in your school. That's a statistical finding across many, many schools.

[10:07]

What is going to work in your school depends on how you implement it, whether you implement it with fidelity, whether you focus on it, whether you devote the professional development time and the coaching resources and the leadership attention, or whether it's just another thing you do. And we've got to understand that, that all implementation is local. All right. Doing something that has the same name as what Hattie writes about invisible learning does not mean that you are going to get great results in your school. So we have got to make strategic choices about what to do and leadership choices about how we implement what we choose to do. But I think there's a danger in looking at lists like you find in Hattie's work.

[10:50]

And the danger is that we get the idea that there's a thing called best practice and that the path to improvement as a school is to simply do as many of the best practices as we possibly can. Like if you love a burger and you go out to your favorite burger place and you say, I want your best burger and I want it as big as you can make it, right? You can't eat a burger that's taller than your head, right? Like you physically cannot fit that in your head, right? And I think that's exactly what we do as schools. We say, well, this is a best practice.

[11:25]

PBIS is a best practice. And safe and civil schools is a best practice. And also restorative justice is a best practice. And also playground supervisors are a best practice. And also trauma-informed multi-tiered systems of support are a best practice. So we're going to do all of those best practices.

[11:43]

And instead of making strategic choices about where we focus and how we can implement with fidelity and how we can achieve success and learn along the way so that next time it's even better, instead of doing that, we try to do it all. And we don't make those strategic choices and we don't learn from them. And then it gets worse. After we decide that we're going to try to do too many best practices, we try to make sure that none of them fail, right? We want our PBIS implementation to succeed. We want our new homeroom or house system or middle school family system, whatever system we're doing, whatever strategy we're pursuing, we want it to succeed.

[12:27]

And like an overprotective parent, we bubble wrap it. And anyone who's a parent knows that impulse to protect your kids, right? You don't want your babies to get hurt. And as leaders in organizations, we don't want our baby initiatives to get hurt. We wanna protect them, and we wanna make sure that they survive. But rather than approach organizational leadership as scientists, we approach it as overprotective parents, and here's what happens.

[12:55]

When an initiative or an improvement effort is not allowed to fail, we're not allowed to learn from it. All right. And if we're talking about, you know, your kids, that's a good thing, right? You don't want to learn from your mistakes as a parent, you know, when you accidentally drop your baby or something like that, we want to have, you know, prudence in mind. We want to have safety in mind and, in leading our initiatives. Of course, we don't want our initiatives to fail, but I wanna suggest that we actually need to be open to failure because failure is a valuable source of information.

[13:29]

But here's how we wall ourselves off from that information. We fail to learn what's not working. We do things like mass implementation. We don't pilot things. We just say, all right, we're being decisive. We are being committed.

[13:41]

We're going all in. We're making the call. We're doing this. We're going forward with this initiative. We're not looking back. And we're also not going to include a sunset provision.

[13:52]

You know, we're not going to say this is going to happen for a certain period of time and then we're done and we're going to reevaluate. We don't do that. We just say it's ongoing. We're always going to do this from now on. It's just the way we're doing things. And when there's no deadline, when there's no kind of end point to evaluate our progress, we end up unable to analyze our success and we end up unable to do a cost benefit analysis.

[14:17]

Remember, John Hattie says everything works. And if we're going to make strategic choices, we need to be able to compare those choices as options, figure out what's working and decide when we might need to redirect our time, our attention, our resources to something that's going to have a bigger payoff for our students. And because we do this over and over and over again, we end up with a scenario where we're constantly starting new initiatives and we're never ending the ones that don't work. We're simply allowing them to kind of fade away and yet they live on in people's minds and they live on in the kind of cognitive overload that people feel. So if you have people saying, I feel like we're always changing, we're always starting new things, but we're not really getting better. You know, we've just got all this stuff going on and it doesn't feel like it's making a difference.

[15:06]

It's just overwhelming. When we don't do that, when we protect our initiatives too much and insulate ourselves from failure, we fail to learn. And we repeat the cycle of doing more, of best practice stacking. If only we do X and Y and Z, then our students will learn better. And I think that does not work. So how can we make failure obvious?

[15:32]

How can we try something and then figure out with crystal clarity if it's working? I believe there are a couple of things we need to do. Number one is my current focus with a lot of the work that I'm doing these days is articulating clear theories of action. Often, we don't have a clear sense of how what we're doing is supposed to work. We just have an acronym. We say, well, we're doing PBIS or we're doing RTI.

[15:58]

And RTI is supposed to work. It's supposed to help our students be more successful. It's supposed to reduce our number of special ed referrals. It's supposed to, you know, we have all these things that are supposed to happen. But if we don't have a clear theory of action for why and how that's supposed to work, we stop at the acronym and we say we're doing it. and then we don't really know if it's working because we can't analyze it.

[16:18]

We don't have a clear map of how it's supposed to work. So we're going to talk about that in just a moment. We'll talk about the four specific types of goals that can help you tell if something is working, and if it's not, figure out where the breakdown is so that you can fix that and then continue to learn and press on with your experiment. And then third, we need to use short timeframes for those experiments. Rather than just say, well, we're all doing this, we're all in, And in two years, our scores should go up. Well, that is a recipe for overwhelm because we do that with multiple initiatives at once.

[16:51]

And it's a recipe for failing to learn from our experience. So we need to have clear theories of action for specific types of goals and short timeframes. And we'll talk about how to differentiate those timeframes for different groups of your staff. All right, let's talk about improvement mapping. I think too often we have these strategic plans that are not very specific about what we're going to do and how that is going to work. And as a result, we have a lot of activity going on, but we're not super clear on whether it's working on how it's supposed to work.

[17:27]

And if it's not working, where the breakdown is. So we have quite a bit more, we have a whole course on this actually, and it's more than we can really get into today with examples and everything. But if you're a pro member, you've probably seen our course high performance goal setting. And in high performance goal setting, we talk about four types of goals that you can use as an individual, that you can have your students set, that you can have your teachers set, and that you can set as a school or a district. And the highest level down here at the bottom is a purpose goal. or a vision or a mission statement.

[17:57]

A purpose goal is what you ultimately want. I usually list them in the opposite order, but I like actually that this one is at the bottom because your purpose goal is the bottom line. It's what you ultimately want. And if you've ever felt like a SMART goal was kind of uninspiring, if you set a SMART goal that all students will achieve a 72% or higher on the mid-year assessment, and you're like, I don't really care about 72%. What I really care about is my kids love my subject and know all the stuff they're supposed to know. Purpose goals are that what I ultimately want type of goal.

[18:27]

And the measures that we use are what I call practice goals, kind of in the middle here. A progress goal, excuse me, progress goals. A progress goal is like a smart goal where you have a timeframe and you have a data source, you have a measure that allows you to see if you're making progress. In between progress and purpose goals, we have what I call phase goals or milestones. And these are things that you have done, that you have implemented in your school. So, for example, a phase goal might be training all staff on your new curriculum.

[19:01]

That was something that was done, I believe, one year before I took over in my elementary school. There had been a new math curriculum and all the teachers had been trained and that milestone had been achieved. And it was moving toward the purpose of having math instruction that met the needs of all students. Now, when I came on the scene, we were focused on some progress goals and some practice goals. We were making sure we were getting the results we wanted. by focusing on specific practices.

[19:28]

And if we're not getting the results that we want, we have to look at the practices. So there's kind of a cascade here from what we do to the data that we get as a result. And that tells us if we're on track to achieve our big milestones. Have we fully implemented our curriculum? And sometimes that ties back to our practice goals. Again, are teachers actually teaching the lessons?

[19:48]

Are they using the math games that are in our curriculum? And all of that works together. Those four types of goals work together to help us implement our plan. So what is a theory of action? And how does it help us get clear on that plan and get focused on making it better? A theory of action is basically a hypothesis.

[20:11]

It's an if-then set of cause and effect relationships that articulates how something's supposed to work. So if we adopt a new math curriculum that is spiral in design and that includes math games, then what do we expect to happen? Well, students will be more engaged in instruction. They will learn the concepts at a deeper level. Their scores will go up. They will be successful in life and they'll be able to be engineers if they want to and so on.

[20:38]

So the goals link together and the theory of action specifies what causes what. It's the cause and effect chain that we believe is working. But we never really know if it's working until we do some testing, until we do some experiments. And that's why we have to think like scientists. We have to think like organizational scientists running experiments. And typically, if we were to look at a strategic initiative in a typical school, and we were to rate that the same way I used to grade my students' experiments in sixth grade science, most schools would fail that assignment.

[21:17]

Because, you know, to run an experiment, we have to have certain conditions in place. We have to have a hypothesis. We have to have an experimental design. We have to have data collection. We have to have some analysis that goes on. We'll talk about that whole cycle in just a moment.

[21:30]

But we almost never go through that entire cycle in schools when it comes to our school-wide initiatives. And as a result, we fail to learn. So I'll share that cycle with you in just a moment. But first, let's get into some examples of theories of action. I've talked about PBIS a couple of times already today, but let's say your staff or maybe a small group of your staff says, hey, Justin, we really need to do PBIS and get some school-wide expectations in place because we need to have safer, quieter hallways. And we went to this conference last week, Justin, and we learned about PBIS and how great it is to have school-wide expectations.

[22:07]

And what happens when you set school-wide expectations is that all students hear the same thing. They hear the same expectations. They learn those expectations. They practice them as a class with their teacher. They walk through the hallways without hitting each other and shoving and touching the walls and knocking stuff off the walls. And as a result, we have safer and quieter hallways.

[22:24]

That's how PBIS is supposed to work. Well, that happened in my school a couple of years ago. Some teachers went to a conference and they heard about PBIS and they said, Justin, this is exactly what we need to do. And I said, that sounds good to me. Let's learn more about it. So we all went to another conference and learned a lot more about PBIS and kind of filled in some of these if then chains and figured out specifically what needed to happen in order to make that work.

[22:49]

And you know what? That pretty much worked. That was a good theory of action. It wasn't too complicated. We were able to figure out where the breakdowns were. We had a few people who had not actually reinforced those expectations with their classes and practiced them enough.

[23:05]

So we had to say, okay, now it's time for your class to go practice walking through the hallway and set a good example for the kindergartners. And we got there, safer, quieter hallways. So to develop a theory of action is really to just lay this out, to specify what do we plan to do? What do we expect to happen? What ultimate outcome do we want? Sometimes though, they're not this simple.

[23:28]

Sometimes they're a little bit longer. For example, let's say as a school, your goal is to get higher math scores. Now, maybe that's not your ultimate purpose goal. Maybe that's not your bottom line, but you know, as a progress goal in the intermediate term, you want to get higher math scores. You want your students to do better on the state assessment. And somebody in your school says, you know, Justin, what we should really do is we should offer a parent math night because if we offer a parent math night and the parents will come in to learn about our new math curriculum and they'll be able to help their kids with their homework.

[23:57]

and then the kids will get more out of that homework and then when we teach the next lesson the next day the kids will be less confused and we won't have to reteach as much and we'll be able to move on faster and we'll get all the way through the curriculum and kids will learn more and we'll have higher math scores so let's do a parent math night it's laid out is it logical Do all these steps seem to connect? Did we miss any? I think this is a pretty complete theory of action for a parent math night. But when we spell it out like this, sometimes we can find where the breakdown is before we even get started. Because it's easy to say, oh yeah, parent math night, we should do that. That sounds like the right thing to do.

[24:37]

And it will probably work. and john hattie says almost everything works i guarantee you if you do a parent math night people are gonna love it now maybe not the teachers when they don't get to go home for dinner but you know you're gonna have parents who say wow this is so fabulous thank you so much for doing this it's been tremendous to see how my kid is doing and have them show me what they're learning thank you so much it worked great but you might also realize that not all of your parents were able to attend and in fact the very parents you were hoping attended weren't there. And you might realize that as a strategy for getting your kids to get more out of their homework, a parent math night actually missed the mark because we couldn't get the kids that we needed to come with their parents. So if you want higher math scores and you come up with this idea of doing a parent math night and you map out your theory of action, you might realize, hey, this is not our best option.

[25:32]

We should pursue a different approach. And typically we have enough approaches specified in our strategic plan. You've got this detailed document. I've reviewed a number of strategic plans this year for districts and for schools. I've seen some that were 50 or 60 pages long, just beautiful documents of what we believe and what our ultimate vision and mission is for student learning and what our different improvement initiatives are. And I think of a strategic plan as kind of a playbook like a coach would have on a basketball team or a sport, excuse me, a football team, any kind of, sports team, you're going to have a playbook that the coach can refer to and say, hey, let's run this play, let's run that play.

[26:11]

You can't run all the plays at once, but it's good to have that playbook that you can refer to. And if we think about the document that you have in your school, whether it's an accreditation plan or an improvement plan or a strategic plan, whatever, it serves a lot of good purposes, right? It serves compliance purposes. It keeps various people who oversee your school happy. It keeps different stakeholders happy. It represents kind of a consensus of what matters in your school and what general approaches you're taking.

[26:39]

And it's pretty comprehensive. And if it's an especially good strategic plan, it articulates your instructional theory of action. It tells your staff, it tells your community what you're doing instructionally to make a difference in student learning. But those are not always illustrated very clearly. They're not always articulated the way they need to be. So my challenge to you in the coming year is not to have an even bigger and more comprehensive and more detailed strategic plan.

[27:11]

My challenge to you is to also develop a game plan. When a coach is preparing for the big game, they don't try to run all the plays. They don't open up the playbook and say, okay, in the first quarter, we're going to run plays one through 10. In the second quarter, we're going to run plays 11 through 20 and so on. They don't try to run all the plays in every game. And yet that's exactly what we try to do when we have 20 initiatives going on at once, when we have 15 different changes that we're asking people to internalize all at the same time.

[27:44]

We make strategic choices and we create strategic focus. And when we've created strategic focus, we can actually engage in realistic and effective implementation planning. There are three theories of action that I think are especially helpful to leaders, and especially when we're talking about planning out the coming year. And those are your instructional theory of action, your improvement theory of action, and your leadership theory of action. All right, and the instructional theory of action is kind of what we've been talking about all along. So what are we doing to ensure that students learn?

[28:20]

How's that supposed to work? And then once it's mapped out, we can figure out, okay, are we actually doing that? And is it working? Where is the breakdown if it's not working? And that is how we can generate organizational learning. We map it out, figure out how it's supposed to work, figure out what we're doing and what we're not doing, and then make additional implementation and adjustment decisions as we go along okay so instructional decision is about how we're ensuring that students learn uh but i want to clarify that if you've you know read lots of books on best practices and research about what works in education simply saying that we're doing x because it's research based is not what i'm talking about here that is not a theory of action because for a theory of action to really work Everyone on your team has to understand how it's supposed to work and why that's supposed to work and what the cause and effect relationships are so that we do the right thing, so that we make the right choices and protect that cause and effect set of relationships and don't mess it up by doing something that undermines how it's supposed to work.

[29:24]

And often we do that when we have too much going on at once. So press your staff to articulate clear theories of action. Again, an example of an instructional theory of action would be, let's say you've got new standards in science. Let's say you've got next generation science standards and you need to align your science curriculum to those new standards. You might say, well, let's get a new science curriculum that's already aligned to those standards. And then as a result, we will teach in alignment with those standards.

[29:52]

We'll cover those standards more effectively, and then we'll get higher student test scores in science. All right. There should be an easily articulated theory of action for every instructional improvement initiative that you pursue as a school. The second kind of theory of action is your improvement theory of action. And often this is where we're talking about initiatives that happen behind the scenes. Maybe we're adding PLCs.

[30:16]

And we've got to be clear, if we're going to start doing PLCs in our school, How's that supposed to work? Where are we with that? How is that working out? So you might map out your theory of action for PLCs like this. You might say, if we have PLCs that meet weekly, that do some common planning and set learning targets and develop assessments to assess those learning targets, and then teachers get together every week and compare data from those common assessments. and see well which you know which students did best and which classrooms did best we can talk about what worked in different classrooms and what didn't work and people can share their best practices and as a result student learning will improve once you've mapped out your improvement theory of action you can figure out what parts of this are we doing what parts of this do we need to make changes to and where do we need to do additional work to make sure that this is going to succeed for example

[31:10]

if sharing best practices is going to result in improved student learning, people have to be comfortable in actually sharing their best practices. So if I have a team of people who hate each other and can barely stand to be in the same room together, they're probably not going to adopt each other's best practices very effectively. And when I'm clear on that, I no longer think that PLCs have some magical power to make miserable people who don't like to work together suddenly collaborate magically. We can focus on whatever it is that we need to do as leaders to make this succeed when we've clarified exactly how it's supposed to work with an improvement theory of action. All right, another example. Let's see.

[31:52]

And this is kind of along the same lines. You don't have to do this as a diagram. You can just make a list, like a bulleted list, and kind of go down it. And notice that this is an if-then series of statements. Let's say we want teachers to engage in collaborative planning. This was actually one of the responses on our survey that we did last month on improvement activities.

[32:11]

So I asked people, you know, what are you doing in your school to improve? What are your big efforts currently? And one person said collaborative planning. We really want our teachers to engage in collaborative planning. So I just made up, I didn't ask the person for this much detail, but I just made up a theory of action. You might say something like, if teachers engage in collaborative planning, then their lessons will more effectively address the standards.

[32:32]

And then students will master those standards that get tested on our state test. And then our test scores will improve. Now, if you go to your first staff meeting in August and say, hey, this year we're gonna do collaborative planning. All right, everybody, so get with the program, get with your team, do collaborative planning, go get them. You're going to get very different results compared to a principal who sits down with staff and says, let's talk about collaborative planning and let's develop a theory of action for how that will impact student learning. And let's make sure that we believe as a staff that this is all true.

[33:09]

Because if people don't believe that this is how it works, that these relationships will turn out to be true, then we're not going to get the buy-in that we need. And we're going to be frustrated that people aren't getting with the program. We've got to be clear on how it's supposed to work. We've got to build consensus around those assumptions and build support for them. And only then can we expect to implement them successfully. Now, that can be a lot of work to get people to consensus and on the same page about those theories of action.

[33:42]

So as leaders, we have to have our own theory of action. We have to ask ourselves, how do I contribute to the improvement work in my school? And since there are seemingly infinite things that I could be working on, what is the highest and best use of my time? How can I make the biggest difference that only I can make? As a leader, if I want our PLCs to succeed, should I be facilitating those PLCs? Should I be meeting with the PLC facilitators?

[34:12]

What should I be doing that's going to make the greatest difference in the improvement work? And in order to focus on that, what do I need to stop doing? So I wanna ask you now, what priorities most need your attention in the coming year? Where do you need, maybe there's something big that's going on, but it's handled. Maybe you have a fabulous literacy coach who is really spearheading your most important improvement initiative. And maybe you are focused on something else.

[34:44]

Maybe you're the assistant principal and RTI is your big priority for the coming year. And let's talk now about how we can make change happen in a way that creates organizational learning.

[34:59]

How can we move the work forward in a way that doesn't just lead people to say this too shall pass and let's just get it done. And then, you know, we'll, we'll get through the school year and hopefully things will be better. How can we lead for organizational learning? I said earlier that too often we lead change in a way that prevents learning because we try to push everybody across a change at once. We try to say, okay, this is what we're doing now. Let's go.

[35:30]

And if I think about the math adoption that happened right before I became principal of the school where I was principal in Seattle, it had happened a year, maybe two years before I came on the scene. And it was an all at once change. The district made a curriculum adoption decision. It was made. very deliberately with a lot of process and a lot of consideration and a lot of input from various people. And it was made with a lot of investment.

[35:55]

An enormous amount of money was spent to buy the curriculum, to buy all of the math manipulatives, because this is an elementary curriculum, a lot of hands-on manipulatives. An enormous amount of effort was put into training teachers over the summer. Additional paid staff development days were built in because we knew we're not just going to squeeze this in. This is going to be a big change. We had to bring in trainers from all over the country who consulted with the curriculum company to train our teachers. And then we hired a math coach to support the implementation throughout the year.

[36:27]

This was a big deal. And it was an all at once change. And I have to say, I think it worked. It worked pretty well. Now, it was not without its detractors. And some people changed kind of kicking and screaming.

[36:41]

And it wasn't until we actually confiscated the old curriculum materials that everyone finally got on board with the new change. That was kind of a harsh wake-up call for some people. But, you know, it worked out. But this is not the only way to bring about change. And the fact that it's our dominant paradigm, that it's the way we normally do change all at once. We're doing this.

[37:04]

We've been decisive. We are burning the ships. We are burning the bridges behind us. We are making this change. The fact that we do things that way keeps us from organizational learning. Because you know what?

[37:17]

If that math curriculum had failed, we would be up a creek because we've spent all of our money. We have gotten rid of our old materials. There's a lot of deliberation that went into that decision on the front end and a lot of investment and it's a good thing it worked. But we're not always so fortunate. We don't always have the resources and we don't always have the luxury of failing on so big a scale. When we make changes that are that big, instead of generating learning, often what they're generating more than anything else is resistance.

[37:51]

Because teachers will say, well, what we were doing actually works really well. Don't you see that? Don't you see how well our traditional curriculum works? Why do we need this new curriculum with its spiral design and its manipulatives and all this stuff that's so different from the way I learned math when I was a kid? People resist when change happens all at once. And there are some good reasons for that.

[38:14]

We'll talk about those now. And a lot of it comes down to the individual. Everett Rogers wrote a book in the 1960s that's still in print today called The Diffusion of Innovations. And in The Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers writes about the adoption of new technology. And he says there are people who adopt new technology right away. There are people who adopt it when it becomes kind of mainstream.

[38:38]

And there are people who really kind of always drag their feet. So think about the iPhone. Like you probably know somebody who got the first iPhone, like the iPhone 1 when it first came out. You probably know someone who just stood in line at the Apple store or wherever they were selling them in those days and got the very first iPhone. And it was kind of weird to have an iPhone at first. So a very small percentage of the population actually went to the effort and the expense that it took to try something new.

[39:05]

But then it started to catch on. And the early adopters, you know, a larger group got that iPhone and pretty soon everybody's got an iPhone. You're, you know, your mom has an iPhone, uh, kids have iPhone, you know, it becomes a very mainstream thing. And over time, Almost everybody adopts the change except this final group. You know, you still have people who don't have cell phones or have a flip phone or whatever and do not get on board with that change. Or if they do, it's very reluctantly.

[39:35]

So Rogers developed this model to talk about the adoption of technology, but really it applies to any type of change. And in your school, you have all five of these groups. And I'd like you to think about these five groups when it comes to an instructional change, when it comes to some sort of improvement effort in your school. Maybe you've done professional development on an instructional strategy that's supposed to help students learn more in class. And you probably had some people who were doing that before you even brought it up. And maybe they were the ones who told you about it, right?

[40:07]

I had teachers come and tell me about PBIS before I had ever heard about PBIS. They were already doing it in their classroom. they would teach their students hallway behavior expectations way before anyone else is even thinking about it and they would be frustrated that everyone else was so far behind just like people who bought the first iPhone would pull up Google Maps and just you know kind of be frustrated that other people didn't know that they could take advantage of that technology but there are different personalities there are different levels of openness to change for different reasons. There's a variation in how ready people are to try something new. And when we adopt an all at once change, a mass change, and we push everybody to make that change at once, All of these people who are not ready yet resist. And the innovators are saying, yeah, let's do this.

[40:58]

Let's go. The innovators are like, all right, let's move along. Let's get this going. They're excited about it because that's who they are. It's their attitude toward change. They are ready to make a change any time.

[41:10]

but everybody else is not yet. And what everybody else needs to see before they are going to commit to a change is they need to see that it's working for these first two groups. And in fact, each group down the list here needs to see that the group above them is finding success. For example, the early adopters are pretty open to change. And if the innovators have tried something and it's working out, the early adopters are going to say, I want that too. And they'll try it.

[41:37]

And then when they do, the early majority will say, oh, you're using that new curriculum? How's that working out for you? Good? Well, yeah, I got to try that. I'm going to sign up for the next training. And if I think about a different curriculum that we adopted during my time as a principal in Seattle, the Writer's Workshop curriculum, the Lucy Calkins Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

[41:56]

If you've heard of that, let me know. We had great success with this, but we didn't do a mass adoption. I wanted to because everyone seemed to be on board with it. but I didn't realize that we had this distribution. We had multiple kinds of people, some of whom were ready, some of whom had been teaching that curriculum for years and some who would have to be dragged kicking and screaming. And even then some would choose to retire rather than adopt that new curriculum and what I found was that every group as you go down the list had to see the group above them succeed with it and learn from it and push through the challenges before they were ready to say yes and this I'm convinced is the key to pacing organizational learning and pacing new initiatives if you want a new initiative to succeed in your school you've got to find your early adopters who can go first and then you've got to find or your innovators sorry and your early adopters to go first and each group will follow and as your early adopters try the same things that the innovators were trying they're going to find bugs they're going to find problems that they have to solve but that's okay

[43:06]

because early adopters are good at solving problems. Innovators are great at solving problems and they're not going to be discouraged. And they're going to have answers when the people who come after them, that early majority and late majority say, well, I don't know if this is going to work with my kids because blah, blah. They're going to have an answer. And then that next group is going to get on board. They're going to work through the challenges and then they're going to get the next group on board.

[43:30]

This right here is the key to organizational learning. This is how you get an initiative to either fail quickly, so you can go back to the drawing board and fix it, or how you get an initiative to succeed at every stage. So how do we do this? What do we need to be clear on with our staff in the coming year to make a change happen in a way that results in improvement and results in organizational learning? I believe first we need to be clear on our goals. When you have those four types of goals that we touched on briefly, you have a plan that you can analyze.

[44:04]

We need to have a clear theory of action for how those changes are supposed to work. the cause and effect relationships that are hypothesized there so that we can spell that out. We can get everybody clear on how it's supposed to work and then we can do it and adjust as needed. And I believe we need as leaders, a game plan. We need to figure out what is our highest and best use of time. What are our levers for change?

[44:29]

How are we going to influence the work and make sure that it results in improvement and learning? So that I believe is the task before us in the coming year. And I've been thinking about what we do at the Principal Center and how I can provide support for principals in doing that thinking. And it's not strategic planning, right? It's not, we need to make a big document in a big binder and get everybody to agree to it. You've already done that.

[44:56]

What we need to do is we need to create clarity and strategic focus. So I hope this has been a helpful set of ideas. And if you would like to do what we've talked about today, if you'd like to work with me this summer, we've got a program called the Instructional Leadership Intensive. And in the intensive, you will craft your instructional leadership game plan for 2017, 2018. You will get clear on exactly what we've been talking about today. The Instructional Leadership Intensive is an online program we have the the full curriculum mapped out and we're filming it this month so it's all ready to go on june 1st so again it's 100 online and every week we release a video training module and we'll have some some short videos to dive into each of the the concepts for the week that will allow you to do the work to complete the assignments that get you clear

[45:49]

on your theory of action, on your improvement processes, on the inquiry processes that you go through to experiment and figure out what's working and where you need to make adjustments. So in those assignments, you will be doing the work to plan out your year and your staff's learning for the year. So this is designed to be something that you can do as an individual leader. We're perfectly happy to have leadership teams if you would like to have your assistant principal or your supervisor or, you know, whoever needs to be with you in that. But it's, it's designed to be primarily an individual exercise that in a, in a set of tools that you can then take back to your staff and run with throughout the year. After doing your weekly assignments, we'll get together on a zoom video chat.

[46:39]

We'll, you know, not a webinar, but we'll get together face to face on a zoom video chat room and talk about that work. Talk about those assignments and what you took away from the modules so that you walk away with that game plan. You've already got the playbook, right? You've already got a strategic plan. You've already got best practices and goals for your school. What we're talking about in the intensive, is getting that game plan for the year spelled out, specifically your instructional theory of action, your improvement theory of action, your leadership theory of action, and then the game plan itself, your leadership agenda.

[47:12]

And as a result of doing that work this summer online through this program, you will develop a toolkit that you can then take back to your staff And then when somebody says, hey, Tim, I think we should do a parent math night because we really need to get our scores up and we really need to get the parents to help their kids with homework. When somebody says that, you can say, hey, that's a fabulous idea. Let's map it out. Let's figure out how that would work. And once we've done that, we can decide if it's a good fit or if we should look at some other options because our resources aren't infinite and we've got to focus. you can take those skills of facilitating organizational learning back to your staff and run with them in the coming year.

[47:55]

So a little bit more detail about the schedule. Week one, we're going to talk about your current situation. And then in the second week, we'll talk about your staff and where they are in terms of their performance, their readiness for change, what the leadership capacity exists. And then in the third week, we'll talk about your instructional theory of action, fourth week your leadership theory of action fifth week organizational learning and some of the inquiry processes that you can go through as a scientist then we'll talk about your agenda for the coming year your backlogs of everything else and we didn't really talk about backlogs today but know there's always this background issue of well there's all this other stuff that we also have to do and we can't just pretend that that's not there we can say we're strategically focused and we're zoomed in on the the most important levers for change but also the state needs reports from us and we have all these other initiatives that we've somehow got to manage and backlogs are your tool for doing that so we'll talk about that borrowing some strategies from the lean software development world

[48:57]

And then in week eight, we'll talk about creating sustainable systems for implementation and organizational learning. So that is the plan. I am hard at work putting that together now. And when you join the intensive, when you sign up for the intensive, we'll get on the phone. We'll talk about your current situation. And if there's some pre-work that you can do while staff are still around, we'll talk about that and get you going on that.

[49:18]

And then June 1st, we start releasing the modules. And every week when you get the new module that's come out, You watch the videos, you can watch those on your phone. You do not have to be at a computer to do any of this really. But you go through those modules, the assignments. We've got a PDF workbook that we're putting together and you can either print that out at the beginning of the program or just look at it on the screen if you prefer to you know, work in a notebook or something like that, but you do the work and then you discuss that work in those round table sessions with me. We'll have a variety of times each week where we are getting together face to face on zoom video chat and talking about that work and mapping out those theories of action and those game plans and make sense of it together.

[50:00]

And from there you enter the new year with a crystal clear game plan. A couple of questions about the program as far as who it's for. Again, my assumption is that most people who are interested in this type of thing are in the school leadership world, either principals, assistant principals, leadership teams, people who supervise principals, perhaps incoming or aspiring principals. So I'm assuming that that's your situation. This is not the kind of thing that you sign up your whole staff for. It really is designed for you to go through as a leader.

[50:30]

In terms of flexibility, and let me know what questions you have about this. Again, the modules are on-demand video. The roundtable sessions are live. We'll do those on Zoom and we will record them. So if you miss one, you can watch it later. And also Zoom has a great mobile app.

[50:46]

That's one of the reasons we went with Zoom instead of Webinar Jam is in Zoom, you can actually log in from your mobile device and from an app and either choose to be on video or not. You can turn off your video and mute yourself if you're in a, not in a quiet place. And we'll, we'll flex the times of those to, to meet different schedules. And of course you can also work at your own pace. So if you're out of the, out of the country for a couple of weeks or whatever, uh, you can, um, you know, blast through it when you come back or you can work ahead. Uh, just let us know what, you know, what you need to do there.

[51:17]

And we will, uh, accommodate different schedules. Cause I know I've, I personally have a lot of travel in the months of June and July for professional development. I know you have probably some time off and maybe some PD that you're engaging in. So we wanted to make this flexible. But we also wanted to make it an intensive. We did not want to make this just another webinar series.

[51:36]

We do have our pro member webinars that will be continuing throughout the summer. And I encourage you to check those out. But the intensive really is for people who really want to deeply engage in this work. So it's my intent that it's on par with a graduate class. We are not requiring that you submit your work to anybody to be assessed or anything. It's not a for credit thing.

[51:58]

It's really just for you to get a game plan for the coming year. So if you are interested in learning more about that or signing up, you can go to principalcenter.com slash go. And that is the deal. The program is June 1st through July 27th, 2017. And with that, I'm going to sign off.

[52:21]

Thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful day.

[52:28]

so high performance instructional leaders what did you think about theories of action and becoming a learning organization i want you to be crystal clear on your leadership theory of action your school's improvement theory of action and your instructional theory of action and i want to help you develop that game plan for the coming year taking your strategic plan your playbook all of the things that have already been decided that have already been put in place and achieving strategic focus from within those larger resources. And if you are interested in joining me for the intensive this summer, go to principalcenter.com slash go, and you will find all of the information you need about the Instructional Leadership Intensive. It runs in real time from June 1st through July 27th, 2017.

[53:18]

And you can participate at your own pace, work at your own speed and accommodate whatever travel you have. But the program starts June 1st. So I'd love to have you in the Instructional Leadership Intensive. And I want to encourage you to use the coupon code podcast when you register. You'll see a space on the registration form where you can use the code podcast to get a special discount as thanks for being a podcast listener. So once again, go to principalcenter.com slash go and use the coupon code podcast.

[53:51] Announcer:

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