Hacking Instructional Design: 33 Extraordinary Ways to Create a Contemporary Curriculum

[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_02:

I am your host, Justin Bader. And I'm thrilled that my guest today is my friend Mike St. Pierre. Mike is president of Morris Catholic High School in Denville, New Jersey. And he speaks and writes about productivity for a variety of publications and on his website at MikeStPierre.com.

[00:35]

Mike, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Hey, Justin. Thanks so much for having me. Great to have you here. We share an interest in productivity and a common profession in school leadership. What was it about productivity that particularly spoke to you as a kind of a professional interest?

[00:54]

Because I think there are a lot of people who are into productivity. And there are a lot of people who kind of see it as a practical thing. You know, if I have the opportunity to be more, you know, be more efficient in my work, that's great. But it's not, you know, a particular interest for a lot of people. But I think for you and me, it's a little bit different. It is kind of a personal interest and almost a passion that goes beyond the practical aspects.

[01:17]

But what do you see as some of the big draws for you to being interested in productivity?

[01:23] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's a great question. I mean, you're right. For people like you and me, I mean, we're not the normal kind of people. I mean, if there's a new app that comes out that will help us be more productive, I think you and I are probably two of the first people who are going to download it and try it out. And it's just kind of who we are, I guess, right? And I know for me, I mean, I started getting into productivity literally when I was in middle school.

[01:46]

I mean, I can remember a daily piece of paper with my to-do list and my homework assignment, and I used to take great pride in that piece of paper and how I would fold it and You know, only when I was an adult later did I realize that that's called being a dork.

[02:04] SPEAKER_02:

Hey, I had a Franklin Covey planner with a binder. Coach Glenn, who will probably listen to this, got me set up with all of that. The athletic director at my high school, who I TA'd for, got me set up with the Franklin planner. So, hey, I am right there with you back from the...

[02:20]

The K-12 days.

[02:21] SPEAKER_01:

There you go. But you know what? It works. And all of those things allow you to do things that really matter. So for me, I do see my role as a leader of a high school. And if I'm not productive...

[02:35]

then I'm not able to do my job. And if I'm not able to do my job, then that impacts the whole community. So I do see it as a stewardship. I think I have a set of skills that I'm good at. I have things that maybe I'm not so good at, so I'm working on those. But whatever I have, whatever's in my toolbox, I do see it as from the moment I wake up in the day to when I go to sleep at night, I want to make the best use of those things.

[03:01]

And you don't have to have a high IQ. You don't have to be the best looking person to be a good time manager. So I've always looked at it as, gee, I can get better at this. And this alone might be my best gift to the people who I serve.

[03:17] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Mike, I really appreciate the way you framed productivity as really a stewardship issue and something that allows us to do better and more important work. And I really appreciate that connection you made between productivity and doing significant, meaningful work. Because I think often people frame productivity or people frame efficiency as the opposite of effectiveness. And people say, well, I don't want to be efficient. I want to be effective. What's your perspective on that kind of dichotomous thinking?

[03:47] SPEAKER_01:

I think there's something profound there, Justin. And there's sort of two words that get a really bad rap in education. I think it's the first one you mentioned, efficiency. And I think the other one is manager. And maybe we'll talk more about that whole leader-manager kind of dichotomy. I think you can be effective and efficient.

[04:08]

And I think sometimes in schools we get into kind of this nice guy syndrome where we, and this is a good thing perhaps, where we want to look at the body of a teacher's work. or an administrator's work and if a teacher has a bad day or their assessment isn't spot on or something, but you know what, we've worked with this person and we know that by and large they do a tremendous job, most of the time we give them the benefit of the doubt. And I think there's a value to that. The only flip side is that sometimes we use that as a way of saying, well, this person's good for it. It's okay that they missed their deadline because we're looking at the body of work. Meanwhile, that might not be efficient.

[04:50]

So I think that efficiency, you can have a heart and be efficient at the same time. And I mean, let's use an example. If a principal's doing a walkthrough, and they take two weeks to get the teacher the feedback on that walkthrough, we would say not very efficient, right? Meanwhile, if the person's able to give the teacher feedback within a day or two, we would say that's really efficient, and oh, by the way, you've just built a stronger plank between you and that teacher. That's a great thing. So I think sometimes we just, you're right, we get into this thing of we only want to be effective and efficiency is like something for corporate America.

[05:30]

But actually, I think that the more efficient we are, the better we are as time managers and probably the more rapport and respect we build with our team. with our parents, with the people in the community. You know, people who are inefficient, at a certain point, we start to think bad things about them. Like, gee, maybe they're not competent or maybe they're lazy or something like that. So I actually think efficiency doesn't get enough attention. So I think you're onto something there.

[05:57] SPEAKER_02:

Well, yeah, and I appreciate the example of walkthrough feedback because the efficiency is directly linked to the effectiveness of the feedback. You can give somebody great feedback, but if it's two weeks later and they've completely forgotten what they were doing in that lesson, the effectiveness is really undermined by the lack of efficiency. But yeah, I really feel like the perspective that's so typical on efficiency and productivity is almost kind of like an Ebenezer Scrooge approach to time. If I'm going to be efficient with my time, I'm going to be mean. I'm going to be stingy with my time. I'm not going to give it generously where it's needed and deserved.

[06:39]

I'm not going to stop and talk with children in the hallway because I'm too efficient to do that. And that's not my perspective on it at all, simply that it's a matter of, I guess I would say self-discipline really is at the core of it.

[06:56] SPEAKER_01:

Well, you know what else? I think it's self-discipline. I think it's also setting the example for your team that efficiency matters. Here's a big topic that I've been looking at lately, and that's meeting management. You know, the next meeting, for whoever's listening to this episode of Principal Center Radio, probably millions, right? But if you're listening to this episode, you know, you're going to be attending meetings at some point, whether it's with parents or with teachers or with people from the district, whomever it is, right?

[07:25]

And if you look at that meeting, let's say it's an hour. Well, take a look at everyone around the room. Take a guess at what they're making for a salary and start adding it up. Those are dollars there. I mean, that's serious. So it's not right to waste people's money or to waste people's time.

[07:43]

And so I think like meetings, that's a huge opportunity to get better in terms of our efficiency. One of the genius things that I learned years ago was when you're done with the meeting, stand up. And it seems like such an obvious thing, but most people add five or 10 minutes to the end of every single meeting just to be nice or say a few things. Whereas I think it would be much more efficient to look at it as a football huddle, less of a meeting, more of a football huddle. I mean, none of us watch a game on Sunday, whether it's the Razorbacks or Rutgers or, you know, and people just hang out in the huddle. No, they're in the huddle for as short a time as possible.

[08:22]

They get the play and then they go execute the play. And again, we don't think of schools this way. We don't think of our professional lives this way. But that's what meetings are. And that's very efficient. So I think that's a big opportunity as well.

[08:34] SPEAKER_02:

That's tremendous. And it reminds me of kind of the business world practice of having stand-up meetings. You're not allowed to bring your chair to the meeting. So if you're going to say something, you need to be willing to stand up the entire time you're saying it and make everyone else stand up. And I think that does a couple of things. On the one hand, it keeps people brief, but it also helps people understand.

[08:56]

think about whether that meeting is the right forum. And one of the things that I struggled with with my staff regarding meetings on was a lot of people tend to see meetings as their opportunity to do a laundry list of things that they need as human beings and as adults and as professionals that really make it hard to have a meeting that's for mutual benefit. So I'm thinking about things like, if you feel isolated as a professional and you don't have the opportunity to talk about teaching with other people, and anytime an issue comes up, you really need the opportunity to talk that out, You know, if we're not really aware of that dynamic, we're going to have people frustrated that they don't get to talk as much as they want to, that they don't get to have the floor for 15 minutes of every staff meeting.

[09:46]

So I think just that purposefulness and saying, okay, here's what this meeting is about. Let's talk offline if you want to. you know, to have some additional processing on this, or maybe this is a team topic. But yeah, I totally agree with you. Meetings are an incredible place to focus in terms of organizational productivity.

[10:06] SPEAKER_01:

It's almost like we need a new set of rules for meetings. You know, maybe we should do this, you know, and this might be a blog post, right? Where it's, you know, rule number one, it's okay to stand up. Rule number two, it's okay to end early. You know, Rule number three, it's okay to keep to the agenda. I mean, these are all opportunities, and I think that probably in schools we need to do a better job.

[10:30]

Starting on time, I mean, oh, man, I could keep going and going.

[10:33] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and it gets back to that idea of purposefulness. And I think often the only clear purpose that we have historically had with a lot of our meetings in schools is that they need to be at a certain time and they need to be an hour. And I mean, honestly, those are the big priorities for a lot of people. If you say, you know, what do you expect to happen in a staff meeting? You know, you're going to get a lot of different things in a lot of different schools. But I think one commonality is you're going to get that it's supposed to take a certain amount of time and that's pretty much it.

[11:01]

And you're not going to hear things like it. You know, everybody should be standing up. We should be really focused on our agenda. Everybody should leave with action items. Someone should send notes afterward and people should clarify their commitments and follow up and prepare for the next meeting and send out an agenda. You know, and that purposefulness, I think, would just add an incredible degree of effectiveness to meetings.

[11:22]

the whole process and would help us get so much more out of those meetings. And I think it would deal with a lot of the kind of dissatisfaction that we tend to have with meetings where they get into kind of complaining or people just feeling like their time's not being used well. Well, Mike, one other thing that I think we share an interest in is digital tools for productivity and the iPad in particular. And I know in your school, you have an iPad initiative with students, and you also have a podcast called Techspiration with Nancy Karamaniko. And I've had the pleasure to be on that podcast. Thanks for having me there.

[12:00]

So this issue of digital tools and productivity and the kind of analog world. that will always live in to some extent. I wonder what your thoughts are on the kind of margins between the analog and the digital world in your work and in the iPad initiative that you're pursuing with students.

[12:21] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, for us, iPads have been really important from a branding, marketing perspective, but they've also helped our school move from kind of some traditional systems of you know, writing things on the board every day, to giving tons and tons of handouts every day, to shifting assignments to the cloud, and helping students keep that digital locker where they can keep things organized. So they've been good for us on that front digitally, but we're seeing some other skills that we're having to help students with, such as this year was the first year that we actually talked with our incoming freshmen and their parents about password management. We talked about it as if it were a priority and a skill because we really believe it is for students who are in a very digital kind of culture. So that's been great.

[13:11]

On the flip side, I think we're noticing some surprising and kind of nice ways that analog still makes sense. Here's an example. Classroom begins, teacher and students know that the assignment's online and but the teacher takes that 30 seconds to put it on the whiteboard in front of everyone. Now, some people might say, well, why bother doing that? Everything's online. Yeah, that is true.

[13:38]

Everything is online. But there is a learnable moment right there when the 35% of the class who are visual learners see the teacher reference that, and maybe the teacher says, does anybody have any questions on that? That's a powerful moment there. And that's not one that I can use email for. So that's an interesting piece there. On the book front, you know, as a school, we are trying to go more towards digital textbooks.

[14:04]

It's really just in its for their backs. That is the biggest reason why we're going in that direction. And we want to save their backs and we want them to have as much as possible in one place. However, I still think, and we're learning as a community that, that the written word, the book that you hold in your hand, it's very powerful for learning, and you don't have to be exclusively digital or exclusively analog. We're a faith-based Catholic school, so for us, holding the written word, holding a Bible as an example or a book that's very motivational or inspiring, there's something very powerful about that. And I would imagine it's very similar in other faith-based schools.

[14:50]

So we don't want to lose that. And I think the other piece, and I wrote about this recently online, is when I read Two Things Happen, meaning like a full-length book, I am slowed down, which is really valuable. And everything about the experience slows down. My heart gets...

[15:08]

less frequent, my heartbeat, my breathing is more calm, my body is relaxed. Those are good things in an increasingly busy world. But the other piece is, reading a full-length book in particular, it's really an act of humility. And it's saying, I'm going to suspend judgment on the author and his or her background, and I'm just going to try to learn and absorb like a sponge everything that they're trying to tell me. That is a powerfully good thing that I think we want young people to learn and adhere to. We want them to learn to love reading.

[15:41]

And I think it's very hard to learn to love reading just through blogs and Twitter posts and Facebook updates. I still think we need books. I really do. And I think it's a powerful truth that...

[15:56]

I don't think libraries are going to go back to books. I don't think that most students are going to go back to the traditional books. But I think reading full-length books is something that's never going to go out of style.

[16:07] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so I think that relationship between the analog and the digital, whether we're talking about productivity tools. or books, I think is a really interesting one. And I recently read a book called The Myth of the Paperless Office, which is a few years old now, and actually wrote to the authors by email, not in paper, and thanked them for the book. Researchers at Microsoft Research wrote, One of the things that they shared from their research is that paper is increasingly being used for ephemeral purposes. And as I thought about what I do on paper versus electronically, you know, often the book that I want to keep for reference, you know, I would love to have that digitally. So if I need to look something up later, I can.

[16:49]

But while I'm reading it, while I'm writing an article based on something that I'm reading, while I'm doing research, it's really nice to have the hard copy there just because of all the physical, what Sellen and Harper call affordances of it. You can stick a sticky note on a page. You can highlight a page. You can open to a certain page and keep it in front of you and put another book on top of it and compare things side by side. And if I'm editing an article, you know, we have a newsletter for the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network that I create digitally, but we send out in hard copy. I never actually touch the hard copy before it reaches people, but I do print it out while I'm creating it digitally for editing.

[17:32]

And I just think those tools, we're having to figure in new ways how to use those tools together. And are you an Evernote fan? Oh, I love Evernote. One of the things that I thought was pretty cool that Evernote decided to do a couple of years ago was the Moleskine notebook. So they provide stickers and you can write on paper in your Moleskine notebook and take a photo into Evernote and make that tagged and searchable. So I think it's really terrific the way we're seeing these tools kind of evolve together and giving ourselves and our students the opportunities to work with them together in new ways.

[18:06] SPEAKER_01:

You know, if you're an art student, You need to use your hands. You need to get dirty. You need to play with ink on a canvas. I don't know that it's much different for a lot of professionals that I'm working with. I really live in that both-and world where my day is deeply into Google Calendar and Gmail. On the flip side, I don't go anywhere without a notebook.

[18:35]

I just find I can think better when I'm writing, creating, using my hands, and I need those reminders, and I find that writing those things really helps with that. So you can have it both ways. I had a parent say to me a couple years ago, when is the school going paperless? And I said, well, never. And she said, well, why not? And I said, because I don't know that people learn that way.

[18:56]

I mean, there's probably half of our people who would love that, but how about the other half?

[19:00] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I think the same question could be asked the other way. You know, do you want to have a tech-free school or a paperless school? No. Yeah, those tools work together. And it's all about solving the problem and meeting the needs of the people that we're here to serve. Well, Mike, if people want to connect with you, where is the best place for them to find you online?

[19:19] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Two places. One is my website, www.mikesaintpierre.com or on Twitter at at Mike K. St. Pierre.

[19:28] SPEAKER_02:

Great. Well, we'll link those up in the show notes on our website. If you go to principalcenter.com and search for Mike St. Pierre, you will certainly find that under Principal Center Radio. Mike, it has been a tremendous privilege to speak with you today.

[19:42]

Justin, thank you so much.

[19:44] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[19:48] SPEAKER_02:

So high performance instructional leaders. I hope you enjoyed hearing from my friend, Mike St. Pierre, who is a terrific thinker on those issues of kind of purposeful work and productivity in that work. And I hope you're inspired a little bit to pursue productivity, not only in your own practice, but in your school. And I think it all comes down to that mission that we have of serving students well and being good stewards of the resources that we've been given to carry out that mission. And I want to challenge you in your school to help people see efficiency and productivity not as bad words.

[20:26]

I think too often, as Mike and I talked about, Those are seen as kind of opposites of the humane and human and sensitive and compassionate kind of perspective that we need to have with students. And I think Mike and I would agree that productivity is not at all in conflict with those goals, but is actually really helpful to them because the more productive you are, the better you manage your time, the more you're able to be there for people, the more you're able to be a good listener and to slow down when you need to. So I hope you've taken away from this interview the message that efficiency and productivity are good things. They're not things we pursue as ends in themselves. They're not things we push so far that they drive out the human side of our work. And I want to, again, challenge you to look for ways to promote productivity and efficiency in your school.

[21:19]

And that's why in the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network, a lot of what we talk about is not simply about how to use apps and how to manage your time, but it's about culture. It's about communication. It's about trust. All of those things relate to the overall efficiency of your school because when people work well together, they get more done. If you're interested in learning more about the High Performance Instructional Leadership Network, you can find that on our website at principalcenter.com slash leadership.

[21:49] Announcer:

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