The Lead Learner: Improving Clarity, Coherence, and Capacity for All

[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 I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Michael McDowell. Dr. McDowell is superintendent of the Ross School District outside of San Francisco, and he's an expert in project-based learning and professional development who speaks all over the world. He's the author of three books, including The Lead Learner, Improving Clarity, Coherence, and Capacity for All, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:39] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:41] SPEAKER_01:

Michael, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you've been involved in curriculum and instruction, professional development, instructional leadership for a long time and currently serve as a K-8 superintendent. What did you see in your work both as a practitioner and as an educator of educators that prompted you to write The Lead Learner?

[01:02] SPEAKER_02:

I think through my experience, I've constantly been in conversations at county meetings, at conferences where I'm engaging with leaders. And I continually hear all of this focus around teaching, around structures, around how do we create better scheduling, how do we get better books. And I just find that when I get to those particular conversations and I look at the research, I find that those types of conversations really don't make a substantial impact on student learning. I go back to Vivian Robinson's work on student-centered leadership, where she did a meta-analysis on school leaders and what effect they have on student learning. And interestingly enough, they have a substantial effect, but only if they're using certain types of behaviors in their particular work. And most of those behaviors are when they're focusing on student learning.

[01:48]

What are students talking about? Are students clear on their learning? Are leaders involved in teacher professional learning? And what I found is that the literature was saying the right types of things, but what the literature was saying is not what I was finding in the various types of conversations that I was having with leaders. The way leaders are incentivized, the way that leaders are praised, the way that leaders are recruited and attracted to organizational systems are often not centered around student learning. And so I was trying to design a book that was really helping creating a blueprint, if you will, on if I was a new leader or if I was a leader in a system and I really wanted to focus on student learning and get to the types of conversations that make a substantial impact on student learning, what do I do?

[02:36]

And so this book was really a way of attempting to go from the literature to actual steps that a leader can take to really make a substantial impact on student learning.

[02:47] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I love how throughout the book you're framing those steps first as questions and conversations. I've seen that come up over and over again, this idea that if we are going to do something as an organization, one of the very first steps is to ask the right question and to have a conversation and not just, you know, I think our impulse in the profession is generally to kind of fire up a Word document and start making a plan, right? But I appreciate that focus on really the thinking and the discussion and the conversation that goes into that action and that kind of generates those decisions. And when it comes to the sense of clarity and figuring out, OK, what are we going to focus on? You know, say a new superintendent is coming into a district. That district has had things going on and has hired the superintendent in order to make those things continue and maybe make some other things happen.

[03:38]

What does that process for you look like of figuring out where we are and where to go? So let's talk about that strategic planning question a bit. What are some of the big elements of that strategic planning conversation right off the bat?

[03:52] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think you just nailed some of those. First, you need to start with where are we going as an organization? I think you start talking with stakeholders. I was just talking with some teachers that are aspiring to be principals. And I said, you know, don't think about going into this job with the hundred day plan, but the hundred days of conversations. So go into this organization and talk to learners.

[04:15]

Where are they going? What's their experience? What are parents' experience? What are teachers' experiences? And try to get a sense of, are they really focusing on serving each learner and ensuring that all learners are getting more than one year's growth in one year's time? Is that seem to be the focus of the organization?

[04:31]

Because educational organizations, that is their primary purpose, is to ensure that we're serving each learner and we're causing learning for each kid. One of the things we found from the visible learning research that came out in 2009 is everything works in education or almost everything works. So a key part of our work as educational leaders is to be able to see number one, are we focused on getting the type of growth that we want? And then number two, are we discerning the types of strategies that people are using or the strategies people think will actually move learning forward? We need to have those types of conversations to get a good sense of of the focus that people have and what they think will cause the type of learning that they want to see for kids. So I center any of my work if I'm going into a new educational organization, whether that's as an advisor or as a superintendent or a leader of an organization, it's really around three fundamental questions.

[05:23]

Do we know where we're going in our learning? Do we know what our focus is? Number two, where are we now? In light of the evidence that we collect, where are we? Are we progressing towards that particular focus? And then I think the third question is always, what's that next step?

[05:36]

Are we really clear on what that next step needs to be? One of the most interesting articles I've ever read is an article from Christensen, who wrote an article, What is an Organizational Culture? And one of the interesting things he said is that organizational cultures are fundamentally built around a task, a recurring task, which is, what is that thing that we're trying to solve that we're always trying to work on? And most organizations are really working on student proficiency or student politeness or comportment. You know, are students well behaved and are we getting a higher percentage of students that are proficient? And my real focus on what I try to move organizations towards is progress.

[06:11]

Are we getting more than one year's growth in one year's time for every single learner, regardless if they're high achieving, or if they're low achieving, are we getting one year's growth in one year's time? And so a lot of my organizational planning and a lot of what I'm trying to stress to principals is find out what people's focus is on and is it on the right type of task? Can people identify where they are in terms of their current performance? And can you start to shift that towards progress and then identify next steps using evidence? And I think that when you can get organizations to focus on progress, you can actually start to open up a lot more conversations with people on how do we actually move learning forward.

[06:48] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think that question of where are we on track, where are we getting students to make the progress that we want them to make and where are we not is so critical because in every organization, there are things that are working just fine that we should not mess with, you know? And I see so many new leaders come in and think, okay, well, it's my mandate to change things up. And then because they haven't had those conversations that you and I just talked about, they start to change things that are working fine and don't need to be changed. instead of, as you said, looking for those areas where there is an opportunity and something does need to be different in order for students to make the progress that they want to. And I think that kind of leads us into the idea of both proficiency targets, which you talk about in Chapter 3, proficiency expectations, and that targeted support. So figuring out where do we have those gaps.

[07:37]

Talk to us about that a little bit from Chapter 3 of the book.

[07:40] SPEAKER_02:

You got it. One thing I would just like to say a little bit about your comments there is that I think often principals or leaders are hired for a set of solutions that they're supposed to go in and they're supposed to solve a particular problem. And I think that principals and leaders need to come in with a series of questions. and then actually work with the people that are in their organizations to be able to solve these problems, to be able to build capacity of how can we solve this collectively. I say to my principals all the time when we're sitting in a meeting, I'm like, are you solving these problems for teachers? Because if you are, what's happening is that then they're the hands on deck and they're not minds on deck.

[08:14]

We need to bring these problems that we're framing around learners and bring that actually back to staff to help us solve those particular problems. It is not incumbent upon us to solve the problem. It is incumbent upon us to bring that problem forward, to frame it within the organizational vision of how do we get one year's growth in one year's time. We need to bring teachers into that particular type of conversation and use that evidence because that builds their capacity. And I think sometimes there's this fear that as a leader, I'm supposed to answer this problem. And in fact, what we are supposed to be doing is learning and saying, okay, this seems to be a big problem.

[08:46]

Let's bring that back to staff and say, looking at this proficiency data or this performance data, how can we actually move the needle? And what we can actually find from those conversations is really, really fascinating because sometimes teachers don't know. That's such a different mindset, a shift in how principals and superintendents have thought about this in the past and actually how they're praised is that they've often thought, I need to have the solution. And in fact, you don't need to have the solution. We need to have the right criteria to to then present to staff and say, in light of what we know makes a substantial impact on the evidence we have, how do we actually solve this together? And that's why, like in the back, there's just a series of protocols to help leaders actually facilitate those conversations, which goes into that chapter three.

[09:29]

And that is, we want to bring to, if you think of a professional learning community, the structure of a PLC as a computer, the intel inside is actually the process in which teachers come together to look at progress and proficiency data. We have learners, no matter what classroom we're in, we have some learners that are proficient and we have some learners that are not proficient. But what's interesting about that is that we also have some students that are proficient, but are not growing. They're actually not yielding more than one year's growth in one year's time. We call those cruisers. They're kind of just cruising.

[10:00]

They're watching the paint dry. We have some learners that are low proficiency and are showing substantial gains. They're getting more than one year's growth in one year's time, but they're not proficient. And the interesting thing about that is that if you look at these kind of four areas of I'm low proficient, I'm not growing. I'm low proficient, I'm showing growth. I'm high proficient, but I'm low growth or I'm high proficient and I'm showing growth, you're going to have those kids in every single classroom all of the time.

[10:26]

And the idea is when we come into a PLC, how do we look at that data and then how do teachers effectively solve those problems to say, what do I do to move these learners? What do I do to move that cruiser? Because that cruiser, even if they're high proficiency, they deserve, just like every single other child, they deserve one year's growth and one year's time. And the question is, does our staff know how to solve those particular problems? Because if you go on Amazon and you look at all of the books for teaching and learning, most of those books are designed for low achievements. How do you support a struggling learner?

[10:55]

How do you support a struggling learner that's high achieving? And so I think that it's these types of questions when we start talking about progress and proficiency and bringing that into a team approach I think that is the critical kind of work that a professional learning community needs to do. Number one, talk about progress, not just proficiency. And then number two, I would say, and bring those types of conversations back to learners. Learners need to be able to have these types of conversations too, where they can say, hey, this is where I'm progressing. This is my level of proficiency.

[11:23]

These are the next steps that I need to take. And leaders can facilitate that. not just creating the right types of structures, but actually being in those meetings and asking the right questions. Like, is this a place where we need support? What types of instructional strategies would we be putting into place? What are kids saying when you have these conversations with them?

[11:39]

And when a leader shifts their focus from how do I manage PLCs to how do I actually get in and have those conversations, you start to see a huge shift in the level of conversation and the level of impact. And when I present the lead learner work, I also talk about the staff meetings. The staff meeting is one of the most underutilized, most expensive, yet could yield one of the highest impacts that we have in any organization and that leaders need to run that as an uber PLC. bringing together these professional learning communities and saying, what have we learned from evidence? What are the steps that we're taking? And the leader facilitating those conversations and saying, so what have we learned from this and what are some next steps we can go and take back out?

[12:19]

As opposed to often staff meetings being, you know, why did the juniors leave early? And what are we getting ready for next Friday? And Let's talk about better ability grouping. All of those conversations that usually take up so much oxygen of staff meetings or in PLCs need to be fundamentally shifted. You can do all of that other stuff in a memo. It needs to be fundamentally shifted to let's really talk about learning and the impact our teaching is having on learning and what next steps we need to take.

[12:45] SPEAKER_01:

Well, speaking of building capacity and getting your team to have those conversations, I think one of our biggest opportunities for taking those conversations to a higher level comes to us when we have a vacancy and we have the opportunity to bring someone new into the organization who is going to probably fill an existing role, but maybe be able to take us further and take us in a new direction. So you talk in the book about hiring and how critical the hiring process is. What are some of your recommendations for anyone who's hiring teachers for the upcoming school year?

[13:17] SPEAKER_02:

I think my number one recommendation would be to use a structured interview process prior to anyone coming on your site that requires candidates to expose their beliefs in specific situations. So anytime you're going to interview a candidate, they're always going to tell you the right things. They love kids. They'll love kids when they're in the classroom. They're going to use the right strategies with kids. You need to actually put them in situations that we commonly face within classrooms.

[13:46]

Two students have a disagreement. Someone doesn't turn in their work. Someone cheats. How do you actually handle that situation in which you are fundamentally there to support the learner and their learning? And so what we do within our own organization and what's written in the book is we use a structured interview process where we get on the phone with candidates and we put them through a series of these situations to really see if the beliefs that they're espousing to us actually align to the types of behaviors in classrooms. From there, we'll then bring them to the school site to be able to do a demo and to go through the interview process.

[14:20]

But we're really trying to cut out a lot of the biases. that we often have once we bring someone into a room, the way they look, some of the terminology that they might use. Some of those things can really draw toward certain decision making that we think is ineffective in terms of hiring a really strong teacher or administrator. The other part for us is we also want teachers or candidates to utilize data with others. So one of the key strategies that I recommend is if you're going to have teachers do a demo lesson, It's really after the demo lesson that matters. So you have a teacher that does a demo and then afterwards you actually have them go into a room, you give them some data and say, okay, you just did that demo lesson.

[15:01]

Here's how the students actually performed on that. You actually have some other teachers here with you. Let's have a conversation of what might be some of our next steps. And what we're looking at is their interest in engaging with data, their interest in engaging with data with others, and to make sure that they can walk away understanding that this is what life is like in an organization that's focused on learning. You will not hit a home run every single day. You will have students that will be in these different phases of learning, and that's great.

[15:31]

It's not about whether or not you're getting one year's growth in one year's time right now. It's about your interpretation of the data and saying, how can I improve the learning lives of these particular children? So I think from the front end, it's making sure that the beliefs they espouse really align to their actions. And we do that through a very structured protocol that we do through phone interviews. And then at the end, giving them an actual experience of what it's like to be in a professional learning community where you're looking at evidence.

[15:56] SPEAKER_01:

I love that, especially circling back to the, okay, here are your results from this lesson. What do you do next? I think we tend to view teaching as a little bit of a song and dance, whether it's in the evaluation process or whether it's in the hiring process. In every district that I've ever heard of that has...

[16:14]

teacher candidates do some sort of performance task, some sort of model lesson, they always speak very highly of that exercise and often say, well, it really makes the decision for us to see teachers actually teaching. But I love that you've neither started nor ended there. You mentioned starting with kind of a phone screener that gets at beliefs and trying to screen out people who have beliefs that are going to be incompatible with the kind of work that your organization seeks to do, and then following up that lesson with that collaborative process of looking at data. Wow, that just blows me away to see that as not just, you know, let's look at your application, let's bring you in for an interview, and then, you know, we'll make our decision, but really a thoughtful and structured process, as you said, that gets the kind of people that are ready to do that work.

[17:05]

Love that. Well, let's talk about what this means for us as lead learners. So certainly learning is not something just for our students. Learning is not just something for our teachers, but also for the organization as a whole. And certainly for us as lead learners, what are some things that we need to have in mind on a daily basis and as we go through the various aspects of the work of leadership?

[17:28] SPEAKER_02:

I think one thing about leaders is that they always control the narrative. As soon as a leader has lost the narrative, then they're not leading. So I think the first thing that a leader needs to do and needs to maintain is this narrative that we're about learning and we're about getting one year's growth in one year's time, not only for children, but for our employees and for our staff, for our parents. And so I think that the more leaders are constantly being redundant around that particular idea, the more powerful they can actually build that within their organization. Everyone in my organization, from parents to board of trustees to my certificated and classified staff, my students, they all actually don't refer to themselves as students. They refer to themselves as learners.

[18:09]

We talk about learning. We talk about how are we continuing to grow. Our kindergartners are measuring their own learning. We have coffee chats every month in which I'm meeting with parents and we're talking about what are things you can say at the dinner table, not just how did you do today at school, but asking questions. What feedback did you get today? What did you do with that feedback?

[18:26]

How did you ensure that you gave feedback to somebody else that really impacted their learning? So the more we center our narrative around these ideas that it is about learning, the greater impact we can make and we can actually get kids to see this idea of Learning is what this work is about, that I come here as a learner. That's my focus. And I think that though that might sound cliche to some people that are listening to this, I think that it is profound and it is a fundamental shift. to what often students think. Often students think a great student is when they get work done, it's when they get in rows, it's when they do well when the whistle blows and they can all get back in line.

[19:06]

That's often what is conveyed in the narrative of many children is that that's what good is. But the problem is that rigor will come knocking at some point in their life and crisscross applesauce isn't going to help them get through calculus. What will help them get through calculus is knowing, I know what the teacher is expecting of me. I know where I am. I know that I can collaborate with other people and be able to get some feedback. I know I can go back and I can review some practice tests and identify next steps.

[19:31]

And if I don't do well on a particular assignment or I don't do well on a particular task, I know what I need to do to be able to make that particular shift. So I think what can leaders do beyond just the conveying this particular type of narrative is spending time with children. Don't just be in classrooms and look at teachers. In fact, what we have found from the research from Graham Nuttall's literature, which is very influential in the writing of this book, is that 80% of what's happening in the classroom is hidden. We can't see it. So when I go in to do observations and when I work with my principals to do observations, we're not looking at teachers.

[20:07]

We're talking to kids. We're talking to learners on what is their experience. What are they thinking about? Are they thinking about their learning or are they thinking about what they're doing? Are they thinking about linear equations or are they thinking about, I got 17 more problems that I need to get done and I can turn this thing in? That is fundamental between whether a student is on track to probably getting more than one year's growth or not because of this idea around clarity.

[20:29]

So the way that evaluations shift, the way that we have conversations with teachers, one of the great ironies of this work is that if you want to talk about teaching, you need to start with learning. Because if you talk about teaching, there was a five-minute window between really great teaching and what you saw. Because if you go in there and you say, well, I didn't see this, teachers are often going to be in the defensive and say, well, I did do that earlier. You didn't see it here. You know, you just missed it. But if you actually get to this place of saying, I want to start from learning, and this is what kids said, this is the impact or the evidence that we saw from learning.

[21:04]

What's interesting is that teachers for the most part want to dive into, well, then let's look at that. Or I didn't think that students thought that I thought students thought this, there was an experience where I was in a classroom and, And the students were drawing bubble letters of their name, but the teacher was really focusing on perimeter and area, but using this as an activity. But all of the students thought, hey, I'm drawing my name. I'm drawing it in bubble letters. The students were incredibly busy. They were active.

[21:29]

The classroom looked great. The teacher was moving around. Everything looked good from the outside. If you were a traditional kind of administrator that wasn't leading the learning, but really leading the teaching, you'd be like, great job. The challenge with all of that is that every student I interviewed had no clue what they were actually learning. And so you walk out of that classroom saying they did not learn.

[21:54]

And you now want to have that conversation with the teacher, not as a judgment of you did something wrong, but as a here is the experience from a learner and what's next. And that is a fundamental shift from an administrator going in and looking at is teaching going well here?

[22:10] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. And I love that statement that you made a few minutes ago that as leaders, we're responsible for the narrative. And I think that's so true. And it's so easy for something else to control the narrative, right? For compliance mandates or from the overhead of initiatives that are already underway. So many other things can kind of take the wheel and take learning off of the agenda and put that in kind of the backseat When as leaders, we have the opportunity to, as you said, make learning front and center and make the narrative about that.

[22:44] SPEAKER_02:

I was just going to say really quickly, I think the hardest part of this work and I think you just hit on it is the ability to say no and not to say no, that we don't have the money for it, but to say no, because that's not going to make the greatest impact for kids. The discipline of saying we are going to focus on learning and those things that make a substantial impact on learning. is so incredibly difficult. And the amount of leaders that I work with and including myself, that's an active administrator is the ability to say no, because this isn't what's best for learning is difficult to do. It's difficult to hold onto, but at the end of the day, you see greater impact on student learning. And so it's the courage to say no, even when the critics that are outside the arena are saying, But you could go over here, you could go over here.

[23:30]

And some of the really exciting things that people talk about, like we need to get new Oculus glasses and let's get everybody an iPad and let's go to block scheduling and these things that can just take so much time away from actually talking about our learners giving each other accurate feedback and what do we do with that data. When we talk about that piece around the feedback, it's unpopular. It doesn't seem to really fit within the traditional schema of what makes a big impact. But that's actually the work of being a lead learner. And it's the discipline of fighting against some of the common rhetoric that will make that difference. And then over time, you'll gain much more kind of esteem from others saying, hey, you're moving the needle.

[24:10]

It's like, yeah, that's the job. And I'm not just moving the needle. I'm moving the needle more than one year's growth in one year's time for every kid. And they know it and they're empowered by their own learning. And so is the staff to say, hey, I'm getting more than one year's growth because everyone wants to improve. And that's the whole idea behind this work.

[24:25] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The Lead Learner, Improving Clarity, Coherence, and Capacity for All by Dr. Michael McDowell. And Michael, if people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you online, where's the best place for them to find you?

[24:39] SPEAKER_02:

So a couple of places. You can always go to our school website, which is rossbears.org. You can follow me on Twitter, which is at mmcdowell13. Or you feel free to send me an email at michaelmcdowell at icloud.com.

[24:51]

Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[24:53] SPEAKER_01:

It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

[24:55] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

[24:57] Announcer:

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