Staying Coachable: A Story with 4 Questions to Help You Thrive in Change, Keep Climbing, and Enjoy Relentless Improvement

[00:01] SPEAKER_02:

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 thrilled to have as my guest today, Sean Cain, author of The Fundamental Five, The Formula for Quality Instruction.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:29] SPEAKER_01:

Sean, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Oh, thank you. Glad to be here. I wonder if we want to start by having you tell us a little bit more about you and what brought you to the point in your career where this book just had to happen. So tell us a little bit about your professional background and what got you to this point.

[00:46] SPEAKER_00:

Okay. I'm a Texas educator. I was a secondary teacher, a secondary principal, central office administrator. And then I was lucky enough for almost three years to be the state director of innovative redesign for the state of Texas. And what happened was I had a reputation of being able to modify and create systems that made both teachers and students more successful. We got a new commissioner in the early 2000s, a Dr. Shirley Neely, who was familiar with my work.

[01:19]

And at the time, she had some schools that were in... in some trouble for low performance, and she wanted me to create a team to help those schools essentially get out of the ditch and be more successful. And so that's sort of how this all started, just sort of a reputation for understanding systems. She hired me, and I had a couple of great people working with me, Dr. Mike Laird, who was my co-author of the book, Edon Brown, who was the architect of Breaking Ranks, which is still recognized as a national model of school redesign,

[01:54]

and a number of other people. And basically we had unlimited access to any school in the state of Texas. We had data resources. We had scope and sequence resources. And for the first time really in the era of education, we had access to cheap computing power. So we were able to spend a lot of time on campuses of all different performance abilities in classrooms at all different grade levels, all different performance levels, and basically record what we see and then start crunching numbers to figure out what the patterns were telling us.

[02:27]

From that came the book The Fundamental Five.

[02:30] SPEAKER_01:

Wow, so you're in this position where you basically got to be the Jim Collins of Texas education.

[02:36] SPEAKER_00:

That's high praise, but yes, at a much more pedestrian level, yes, we had the opportunity to do that. And I'm glad you mentioned his book because as both the principal and central office administrator, we really were trying to implement a number of his principles his practices and the things that he'd talk about in the book, Good to Great. The interesting thing was that we were early adopters of a lot of those things, and so when he wrote Good to Great in the social sector, a lot of the things he talked about we had already figured out. So yes, we were, and I was at the time a young administrator, so I wasn't afraid of technology, I wasn't afraid of data, and I really did have a passion for making sure that, really to maximize the opportunity for every student that walked into a building. I was an urban educator and so recognized that we were sort of the nexus to the middle class, and so we were always looking for ways to make sure that our kids had every opportunity to not only be successful adults, but to extend their education beyond when they were at our school.

[03:37]

What essentially happened when we were out, we had about 40,000 classroom observations across the state of Texas at all different grade levels, all different performance levels of academic performance for accountability purposes. So while we were out in the field looking for the big picture system-driven practices that maximize student performance, we noticed it was not an uncommon occurrence, not on every campus, but on many campuses, there would be these teachers who were much more successful than the teachers around them. And it wasn't based on who they were teaching or what they were teaching. We were real big on looking at peer-to-peer performance. We realized very early on that to compare an affluent campus to a poor campus wasn't a fair comparison. We were looking at poor campus to poor campus, middle class to middle class campus, affluent to affluent.

[04:27]

And so when we were looking at teachers, we were looking at teachers who were teaching similar kids in the same subject. And so we found about this unrare occurrence that these teachers were much more successful than their peers. So we started basically studying them very closely while also looking at their peers who weren't successful. And this was the aha moment.

[04:47] SPEAKER_01:

That makes me recall something that I think Richard Elmore says in his books, that the variation between classrooms within a school is greater than the variation between schools. So if you look at a quote-unquote good school and a quote-unquote bad school, there's going to be more variation between the teachers within each school than... if you just kind of compare overall those two schools. Is that kind of what you found as well?

[05:11] SPEAKER_00:

Actually, I would add a caveat to that.

[05:16]

What we found over and over again, that the better instruction overall was occurring at the campuses facing more adversity. That the less adversity you faced, the less current you were in what would be considered best practice, because there was really no compelling need. So I would agree with his statement, agree with it, and just add that caveat that, yes, in that the more adversity you face, the better chance there was to see actually better practice.

[05:44] SPEAKER_01:

Right, because there's that natural pressure. There's the sense of urgency, kind of to quote another business author. I think John Cotter has a book called A Sense of Urgency, and we know how powerful that is. just in terms of driving change, of kind of creating a mandate. So what are some of the fundamental five?

[06:03] SPEAKER_00:

So the interesting thing was when we found these teachers, what we found was, surprisingly to us, because we thought we were looking for this really high-level, almost mythical, magical practice they were doing. What we found was these teachers we were studying weren't doing anything extraordinary. What they were doing was the ordinary extraordinarily well. They were doing the most solid of fundamental instructional practices that all of us knew about, but really just pay lip service to. So when we say the fundamental five, we tell people it's the most underwhelming list you've ever seen on paper. These were teachers who framed the lesson better, which basically was telling the kids what they were going to learn and how they were going to demonstrate the learning.

[06:40]

These teachers worked in close proximity to their students much more often than the typical teachers. These students had much more student-to-student conversation, purposeful talk going on. These teachers recognized and reinforced much more frequently than the rest of us And these teachers had a lot more critical writing than all the rest of us. So what these teachers did were these five practices that we all know that we should do more frequently. They just didn't talk about it. They did it every single day.

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And because they did it every single day, they actually did it better than all the rest of us because they had more practice. And once we found that pattern of five practices, we really spent as much time trying to prove it wasn't that because... That almost embarrassed us because, you know, me and the team, we were looking back. As teachers, we knew about it.

[07:27]

We just didn't do it near frequently enough. So that's what happened was that what we found out was and discovered, didn't invent, just discovered that the ability to be an exceptional teacher really was in the grasp of every teacher. It was how well you did the practices that leveraged all your other practices, hence the fundamental five.

[07:49] SPEAKER_01:

In education, that seems like such a strange thing to come up with this powerful list of five strategies and realize that they're all things that everyone has heard of. Nothing on that list is incredibly exciting or really even innovative. And when David Kirp, who was another guest who's been on Principal Center Radio, studied the schools in Union City, New Jersey, which vastly outperform their kind of peer districts, a very low income urban school district in New Jersey. And they're outperforming any other comparable district in the state by a huge margin. And if you look at what's contributing to their success, it's very boring things. It's very mundane things.

[08:31]

And if we were to look at a basketball coach and say, okay, what really is working for this team? What's making this coach successful with these players? We would never say things like the coach is using technology and implementing standards in a consistent way. We would look at what we would call the fundamentals. So I really appreciate the fact that you've referenced those fundamentals and identified critical writing and working in close proximity to students. So Sean, as you conducted your research and kind of unpacked each of these fundamental characteristics of high quality instruction.

[09:11]

You've started to share those and in your role, you're in a position where you could help spread those practices to other schools. Where do we tend to get it wrong? Where are some of the misconceptions or where do we kind of fall off the rails in trying to apply these lessons elsewhere?

[09:28] SPEAKER_00:

The first misconception is the mistaken belief that we all do these a lot already. These aren't practices that anybody is surprised by, but we naturally assume we do them much more frequently than we ever do. And the best example is we talk about working in the power zone, which is proximity instruction. The typical secondary teacher spends about 40% of their instructional time in the power zone, close proximity instruction. These exemplar teachers were spending 75% to 80% of time in the power zone. So we end up attributing...

[10:07]

our frequencies at a much higher level than we actually did. And here's the reason why. We've done some work on perception, some reading and some research and study on this. And basically, when you do, what your mind really remembers well is what's unique. And so I do typical whole group lecture worksheet instruction for four days in a row. And then on the fifth day, I have some discussion groups and I have some writing going on.

[10:37]

And in my mind, because I did that so infrequently, it really stands out as this really bright light. So that's been the first thing, is trying to get people to understand, we're not talking about do you ever do these, it's do you do them at high frequency, high quality. And so our campuses and teachers that have been most successful really have sort of broken down what their typical practice is, and they've worked very purposely to do these practices much more frequently than the typical teacher. For example, critical writing. There's a lot of researchers out there. Mike Schmoker wrote in his book Results Now that he observed critical writing less than 4% of the time when he visited classrooms.

[11:22]

We did the same thing in Texas with our team. We were seeing critical writing less than 5% of the time. So it's this practice that we see so infrequently. Well, our best teachers now who do critical writing, we're observing critical writing about 15% of the time. So it's still not over the top in terms of frequency, but it's 300% more often than the typical teacher. Well, that's really powerful when you consider that critical writing represents the highest yield of high-yield instructional practices.

[11:51]

So I do anything 300% more often than my peer, you're going to see a difference in student performance. So that's what we're talking about in terms of significantly higher frequency. I had one principal explain, you know, it wasn't that we didn't know these fundamental practices, we were just applying them randomly instead of purposefully.

[12:13] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that is such a huge difference between saying, you know, oh yeah, I do that, and we've all heard people say, and we've all, I'm sure, been guilty of saying, oh yeah, I do that in my school. But yeah, the consistency, the habit, the amount of time that it takes up, and how much it characterizes your practice is versus just being something that you can check off. I think that's huge. I was thinking about my high school experience. And hands down, I think the best teacher I had in high school that I still remember to this day, Mr. Frazier, if you're ever listening to this, Mr. Jerry Frazier, I know you're out there somewhere.

[12:46]

See you on Facebook. you know, one of the things that I remember about his class was that critical writing. And we did a ton of it. And we would have to outline, we would have to make our own outlines from some of the readings. And, man, you talk about close analysis of a text and you talk about critical writing. When you have to outline a text to really, you know, you understand its argument.

[13:08]

And that's something that really sticks with you. So I appreciate that specific strategy and the power that that has, you know, just remembering that decades later.

[13:18] SPEAKER_00:

The only other misconception we face, the major misconception, is that teachers assume that these five fundamental practices are only for your best kids. We make the point over and over and over again and have proof points over and over and over again that these five practices improve student performance no matter where the student starts. It works with special ed kids. It works with kids in regular classrooms. It works with your honors kids. Best practice is best practice is best practice.

[13:46]

And I can use these five practices no matter what content I'm delivering. So the practices aren't content-specific. They really are. It's about improving the quality of delivered pedagogy.

[13:57] SPEAKER_01:

So I have to ask about Teach Like a Champion. If there are only five practices in your book, you've got the fundamental five. Doug Limov has 49 techniques, so I don't know. It seems like maybe this is only a tenth of the information. Could you tell us a little bit about the grain size of these strategies? We've talked about a couple of examples.

[14:19]

but I think we've all, you know, kind of, we've, we've experienced both extremes where there are things that are extremely specific techniques that you use in a very literal way, uh, you know, at very specific times. And then there are very broad things that maybe are a little harder to, to kind of pin down. Uh, would you say the, uh, the fundamental five are somewhere in the middle or how would you characterize that?

[14:40] SPEAKER_00:

Um, what, what we have, what we, what, you know, you know, you talk about, uh, teach like a champion and his practices, you have, um, Ron Clark in his Essential 55. Of course, you have Marzano in his 9 or 18, depending on how you want to count them. What we say about the Fundamental 5, it's not the pinnacle of teacher crack. This is the blocking and tackling, that when you do this well, you can do all those other practices. And if you don't do these well, those other practices aren't going to happen anyway. So we really do, you know, it's a coaching background.

[15:12]

You can block and tackle. You can run any scheme. You can run any playbook. you know, um, so these, uh, these leverage all the other practices. Um, the other thing, essentially with the teach like a champion, there's some behavioral issues that go on there. And my early background was as a behaviorist.

[15:28]

Um, you know, and so, uh, part of this, you know, when you, when you, when you use the fundamental five and you actually have kids more engaged in instruction, um, have their brains working more in depth about instruction, a lot of the behavioral issues start to solve themselves. So, um, I'm familiar with the other books. I like the other books. Um, Our big thing is that these sort of set up all those other practices, that if you can't do these things, moving on to something else isn't going to help you. There's a construct that people see complex problems and they want complex solutions. That's what the brain is comfortable with.

[16:04]

We argue the other way. If you have a complex problem, you solve that by executing at high speed a series of simple solutions. And so the Fundamental Five is a series of simple solutions executed with increasing frequency and quality that solve complex problems. So it's sort of like the differentiation argument. There's a large prestigious university that now uses the Fundamental Five in their initial master's program for differentiation. And it's the text they're using first.

[16:36]

And what the professor is saying is if you can't do these five things, we're not even going to worry about everything beyond that. And once you can do these five things, then we can jump off and do some other fantastic things. And that's pretty much our argument. We have – I don't know if you're familiar with the Reader-Writer Workshop at a teacher's college with Lucy Calkins. But we have a lot of teachers who point out that the workshop model became a whole lot easier when they were able to do the fundamental five at higher frequency. That until they understood the fundamental five, the workshop model was just constantly a battle with them and their kids.

[17:08]

So yeah, we see it really as that this supports. A lot of the other, I don't want to say more complicated initiatives, but in terms of number of steps, more complicated initiatives.

[17:19] SPEAKER_01:

So, Sean, what's one thing that you'd like every school leader to do to kind of apply the lessons that you've learned over the years and have put into the Fundamental Five? What action would you like school leaders to take?

[17:32] SPEAKER_00:

Ah, that's a fantastic question because we work with implementation on, we consider ourselves implementation experts or implementation geeks. From a school leadership standpoint, school leaders need to be very specific in what practices they want to change in a specific period of time. And keep that number of changed practices to a minimum. You know, you focus on one or two changes in the course of a two- to four-week period, and that's all you focus on. And then you spiral in the next one or two changes of practice the following cycle. So one thing we tell leaders, line out all the things you want to do, but then break that down into smaller pieces.

[18:15]

Because teachers work in a very complex, chaotic environment. They're naturally under stress. And if you throw too much at them at one time, you're going to increase that stress and the brain will just default to habitual routines. So what you have to do is you have to reduce stress. And so you say, teachers, as you're doing the things you're currently doing to manage your classroom, let's add this one new piece. And that's going to be our main focus for the next two or three weeks.

[18:41]

And then, so I'm purposeful on what we want to work on, then leadership has to be out in high volume to cue those new practices. Not to get angry when they walk in and it's not being done, but when they walk in to say, I'm the cue, now let's try to do that. Sort of force implementation that way. And then when the teacher engages, you know, just like we do with kids, a smile, a pat on the back, you know, a little reinforcement of, hey, we're trying to do that. So when we work with implementation with leadership, you have to be very purposeful. You have to cue in high volumes, and you actually have to give some positive reinforcement.

[19:14]

Otherwise, you're not going to have any implementation at all. What you're shooting for is implementation at scale, which next to no campus is able to accomplish because leadership throws too much at their teachers. They don't provide enough cues. And there's no positive reinforcement for engaging.

[19:31] SPEAKER_01:

Right. We just roll out kind of initiative or mandate after mandate and that reinforcement and that follow through. Not to mention, as you said, the focus issue just becomes unmanageable. That's great. Great advice. Well, Sean, the book is The Fundamental Five, The Formula for Quality Instruction, and I'm sure people can find a variety of places where they can pick up that book.

[19:54]

If they want to connect with you and your work, where's the best place to find you online?

[20:00] SPEAKER_00:

Find me online. You can find us at leadyourschool.com. That's the word, leadyourschool.com. And you can find me at Twitter at atlysnation.

[20:14]

And, of course, the book is available on Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Google Books. It's now sold over 70,000 copies, made the Washington Post bestseller list for nonfiction last summer. So it really has surprised us by how popular it's been and how teachers really have found it useful. We tell everybody we're not authors, Dr. Laird and I. We're just a couple of principals who happen to write a book.

[20:41]

So evidently schools and teachers have had it useful and we're happy for it.

[20:47] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and it's nice to be in that position where the work that you're doing on a day-to-day basis accidentally turns you into researchers and authors. So I want to thank you for sharing that research and for sharing your insights with us today on Principal Center Radio.

[21:01] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you very much.

[21:02] SPEAKER_01:

It was a joy to do this.

[21:04] SPEAKER_02:

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

[21:09] SPEAKER_01:

So, high-performance instructional leaders. What can you do to keep people focused on the fundamentals? I think there's so much temptation in education, especially as we attempt to make major overhauls to the systems that are in place and the types of instruction that we're providing. What can you do to keep people focused? I really appreciate a couple things that Sean said today. about having a very focused list of fundamentals and moving from one at a time, moving through that list so that people are getting very specific feedback on that fundamental element before moving on to something else.

[21:49]

Now all of this gets much clearer and much easier if you have a focused leadership agenda. And you'll hear me talk about your leadership agenda fairly regularly. This needs to be a document that you keep for yourself that has all of your public priorities and all of the things that are kind of rolling around at the back of your mind as hunches or things that need to be investigated and pursued more and possibly pushed into that public agenda. Whatever goes on that public agenda needs to be high priority and it needs to remain a short list so that you can actually devote the focus and the energy you need to it. I'm Justin Bader. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Principal Center Radio.

[22:32] Announcer:

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