What If I'm Wrong? and Other Key Questions for Decisive School Leadership

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Simon Rodberg. Simon is a strategy consultant and coach who teaches educational leadership at American University. He was the founding principal of DC International School, an award-winning public charter, and And his writing has appeared in Educational Leadership, Harvard Business Review, Principal Leadership, Principal Magazine, and The New York Times. And he's the author of the new book, What If I'm Wrong? And Other Key Questions for Decisive School Leadership.

[00:43] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_01:

Simon, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks so much. Really glad to be here. So what prompted, other than the personal experience of perhaps asking that question every single day as a school leader, what prompted you to write this particular book on decisive school leadership? What if I'm wrong? Talk to us about what you saw in the profession and in your own professional experience that brought you to this point.

[01:07] SPEAKER_00:

I think there's a couple of key things. One is realizing that schools aren't actually that intellectual places. It's kind of a paradox because they're supposed to be centers of learning and thinking. But in the ways that they actually operate, it's much more about habit. It's much more about following the way things have been done in the past. looking to what other schools are doing and trying to fit in with the crowd.

[01:31]

And then, of course, schools are just full of human beings who are logical and rational in some ways, but often operate by availability bias, groupthink, rushing to judgment. And so I realized that my best moments as principal came when I really figured out how to think through a problem rather than just go by my instincts, because honestly, my instinct was often not very good. The other thing was that there's a whole field of cognitive research around decision making that has really exploded in the last couple of decades. Folks have won Nobel Prizes in it. There's lots of great books about it. But nobody had yet figured out how to apply this systematically to schools and to leadership decision making in schools.

[02:12]

And so I realized it could be really useful to help folks think through decisions, both in more strategic and systematic ways, but also helping them see why their initial thoughts might not actually be the right ways using those insights from cognitive science.

[02:28] SPEAKER_01:

I love that research from people like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the leading thinkers in organizational decision-making. And yeah, there's a lot there that we often overlook in education. And often leaders find themselves having to make decisions alone, even in the context of collaborative leadership teams and school site councils and things like that. How does some of this show up for leaders who do have to work with other people, because obviously we can use some of these strategies to improve our own decision-making process and think through some of the key issues for ourselves. What do you see the dynamics being when there's also a group context to think of?

[03:11] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, Tony, you're starting there. That's actually where I close the book. Afterward, the conclusion is about how to work with your leadership teams to train them to become better decision makers. So I certainly think that by asking the kinds of questions that I suggest in the book of other people, you can help them become better thinkers when it comes to big decisions and decision making. I also think that collaborative decision making is one of the key ways to avoid your own biases, your own short-sightedness. We all have biases.

[03:43]

We're all short-sighted in various ways. But when you put multiple perspectives together and you do so thoughtfully, when you ask folks to specifically disagree with you, when you cede dissent, when you find perspectives that are different from your own, you're going to be a better decision maker.

[03:59] SPEAKER_01:

So other people are partially the solution to some of these challenges around decision-making, but we also need to start by asking ourselves the right questions and then enlisting other people in asking those questions as we make decisions collaboratively.

[04:14] SPEAKER_00:

Right. I think collaboration is key, but honestly, one of the points of a principle, in some ways, I think the biggest single job that a principle has is to make wise decisions. Even the decision to make some decisions collaboratively or even democratically is a decision. And so when principles don't decide, and honestly, I've seen that in a bunch of principles that I've worked with, when they are afraid of actually making a decision one way or the other, their schools and their leadership really suffer. So I think as collaborative as you want to be, that is not a substitute for the responsibility of decision making, which is, in other words, the responsibility of leadership.

[04:52] SPEAKER_01:

Right. We can't punt everything to the committee and say, well, the committee decided this or the committee didn't want to do that. We are accountable for being decisive. Why do you think that's so hard for people to, especially maybe coming into a new role, over time we might get more comfortable being more decisive. Why is it so hard to be decisive?

[05:12] SPEAKER_00:

I think there's a couple of reasons. One is that I think people are scared of making a mistake. They think that if they make a mistake, it will undermine their leadership. People will think less of them. People won't trust them. And they don't really have an approach.

[05:27]

That's part of why the book is called What If I'm Wrong. They don't really have an approach to what will happen if they're wrong and how to make that not undermine their leadership or feel weak, insecure, you know. needing to hide their head under a table. A second reason is that these decisions honestly matter so much. I mean, in the pandemic, we literally have kids' lives in our hands. And even, you know, before the pandemic and, God willing, after the pandemic, we have the future of...

[05:57]

human beings in our in our control. And we in the you know, in any given moment, there's usually hundreds of human beings, you know, kids and teachers and other staff who we feel responsible for. So these things can feel really overwhelming. I think the final thing is that folks, and I include myself in this, folks need some time to build up a thick enough skin that they can be okay with other people being mad at them. I remember when I was a department chair and there was a teacher who was mad at me, I would literally lie awake at night thinking about her and feeling bad and having conversations with her in my head. And over time, I got better at not lying awake, having those conversations in my head and being able to say, you know what, I've used a process that I think is appropriate.

[06:40]

I've led from a place of values that I think are clear and appropriate. Sometimes people are going to be mad. But if you don't make decisions because you're scared that people will be mad, you're certainly setting yourself and them up to fail.

[06:54] SPEAKER_01:

Such an important point. And I think as any leader in a new role exits kind of the honeymoon period, you know, if nobody has ever been mad at, you know, at one of your decisions or mad about a decision that you've made, you're probably still in that honeymoon period, right? Like it's going to happen to all of us that we cannot please people all of the time.

[07:13] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and I've seen some folks last a little bit longer than that, but it does also inevitably lead to frustration where you sort of help everybody think that you're on their side. So I knew a principal who, you know, he would have a meeting with one teacher, say, yes, yes, I agree with you. Day or two later, have a meeting with a different teacher about the same topic, different opinions. Yes, yes, I agree with you. Both teachers walked away from those meetings happy. only to later find out that there was no real decision and just lots of confusion.

[07:40]

And so you can keep that honeymoon period going if what you try to do is just assuage people all the time. But they will find that out and it won't lead to good things for your school.

[07:52] SPEAKER_01:

And in the book, you take people through five questions. And I wonder if this is a good time to go through each of those questions that you say we can ask ourselves to figure out if we're making the right decision. What's the starting point for that series of questions?

[08:10] SPEAKER_00:

The starting point comes back to the fact that we all have limitations and the best people and certainly the best leaders are aware of their own limitations. So the starting question is, what am I missing? How can I get out of my own head? How can I recognize that? no matter how present a principal I am, no matter how many classroom observations drop by as I do, there are going to be things that I'm just not seeing. And what are some strategies that we can use to get out of our heads?

[08:39]

So I go through a couple, doing a lot of surveys, doing focus groups, doing something I really love called stack audits, where you put every example of something in a stack and just look through it so you're not tempted by the one example that sticks out, whether it's every piece of homework that a specific child received that day, or every email that's been sent to the all school email address over the past week. And you can really say, okay, it's not just the things that I remember, the things that stick in my mind because of availability bias or confirmation bias, rather I'm looking at everything. A second aspect of what am I missing is to recognize that your own identity limits what you see. That's particularly true of racial identity and particularly true for white folks. So if other people say, hey, this seems racist or, hey, it seems like there's some racial bias going on or racial disparity going on, to be willing and able to listen to that and hear that and recognize that if you're white, you might be missing that.

[09:35]

But also beyond race, other aspects of identity. Most principals were teachers. And so it's hard to see the perspectives of folks who aren't teachers and to remember to listen to them. So have you talked to your custodians recently? When we think about reopening, what ideas did the office staff have? When you talk to counselors, how can you try to get inside their heads and really listen to the way that they see the school?

[09:57]

These are all ways of trying to get past the fact that we all have blind spots and and really good leaders before they make a decision, figure out how to get past those blind spots.

[10:10] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So important to hear from people who may just have a different perspective or different information or maybe affected differently by a particular decision. So hugely important point there. So Simon, what is availability bias and how does that affect us as leaders?

[10:27] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, my favorite example of this is actually not from school, it's from home. So if you live with a spouse or roommate or partner, and we ask each of you, what percentage of the chores at home do you do? You might say, yeah, I don't do as much as my partner. I only do about 40% of the chores. Your partner is going to say they do 80% of the chores. The answers are always going to add up to more than 100%.

[10:50]

Why? Well, because it's a lot easier to think about the chores you do than the chores your partner does. Cleaning toilets is pretty memorable. So it is much easier to call things to our mind that really stick out to us, that we were somehow emotionally involved in or that really made an impression on us, rather than to look at the big picture. So if I observed a teacher's classroom and they were doing something really unique that day, or a kid acted out in some really egregious way, at the end of the year, if it's time for a teacher evaluation, that day is going to stick in my mind, rather than all of the other 179 days that that teacher had in their classroom. Availability bias also plays in with the last example of something.

[11:32]

So if I do classroom walkthroughs on a given day, the eighth classroom I see if I visit eight classrooms is going to be a lot more available to my mind than the first or the second or third. So we need to make really sure that we are systematically looking at all of the examples of something and keeping them all in mind, whether that's a sample, right? We're not going to see every single 180 days of the teacher's class. or we're not going to go to every classroom in the school on a given day. But if we're taking notes along the way, if we're reflecting after each one, if we're using some practices to make sure that we're getting past our own availability bias, we're going to much better understand the big picture.

[12:09] SPEAKER_01:

Such great examples. And I can think of so many times when that comes up. One for me is hiring, right? That it's often easier to remember the first candidate you interview and the last candidate you interview. And then everybody else in the middle, especially if it was kind of a long day, kind of runs together, right? And if we had our best candidate right in the middle chronologically...

[12:32]

We really have to have the self-discipline to look through our notes and to look through our evidence that's in front of us and make a decision based on that and not the, well, that last person made the strongest impression on me kind of feeling.

[12:47] SPEAKER_00:

With that example, it can feel like drudgery, but it's one reason that it's really good to have some sort of rubric that you score every candidate on and not wait till the end of the day to score those rubrics, but rather to make sure to leave yourself a five or 10 minute chunk between interviews so that you can score the rubric right after you see each candidate.

[13:04] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think that that's a great point that, you know, so many of these cognitive biases operate because our brains are intrinsically lazy, right? Like we need shortcuts in order to get through the day. We need these cognitive shortcuts and kind of decision-making heuristics in order to not be overwhelmed by all the decisions we have to make, but that sometimes those don't serve the quality of the decision. And we have to kind of route around those natural shortcuts our brains take.

[13:32] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, Kahneman, who we've talked about, the psychologist who actually won a Nobel Prize in economics, his influence is so great, talks about this as what you see is all there is. An example that I like to think that I like to use is imagine seeing two second grade classrooms and one's really the quintessential tight ship. Everything's in order. The kids are incredibly obedient. There's the bulletin boards are together. Everything's just right in the same place.

[13:58]

And another example, second grade classroom, the kids just love their teacher. They run up to him, they give him hugs in the hallway. Kids from later years come back and drop by and always want to be around him. He's kind of that Pied Piper of teachers. Now, if I ask you which teacher is better at improving reading achievement, you probably already have an idea. Your mind jumps to one of those things.

[14:22]

I haven't given you any information about reading in either of these teachers' classes, but because of this, what you see is all there is because our brains are lazy and just like to look at the evidence in front of us, it's easy to imagine that one of these teachers is going to have an impact on reading rather than say, hold on, wait, I need to slow my brain down and actually find some real evidence.

[14:41] SPEAKER_01:

And I will, rather than continue our meeting of the Daniel Kahneman fan club, which I definitely would love to do, we can refer readers to the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which is just an excellent book, such a mirror into our own minds and into our own thinking.

[14:59] SPEAKER_00:

If I can, I do want to warn folks that I started reading that book as a principal and it's about 600 pages and I got about 100 pages in because life is really busy. That's one reason my book is only 115 pages because school leaders are just so pressed for time.

[15:14] SPEAKER_01:

Simon, one other example of this kind of availability bias that I think is so relevant for school administrators is that we just don't see very much of instruction, right? In my friend Kim Marshall's book, Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, he actually has a chart where he shades in, he has a little square in the chart for every day and every lesson, 180 days in the school year, maybe five lessons or five hours a day. of instruction. And as administrators, if you shade in how many of those blocks of instruction we actually see, we see maybe one or two complete hours of teaching and maybe a few partial blocks of teaching on top of that. And we make very high stakes decisions based on what really is a very limited picture, very small percentage of the overall bulk of teacher's practice.

[16:08] SPEAKER_00:

That's right. I think that, you know, principles time is the thing that is in the shortest supply. One of the chapters in my book, where's the trade off, I talk a lot about time, because I think that we need to be honest with ourselves that both in terms of our time and our teachers time. The trade-offs are real. We'd like to get into teachers' classrooms more. Something else is going to suffer if we do.

[16:31]

So how do we think about that trade-off? What are some strategies that we can use? The strategy that I talk about in terms of principal's time is called satisficing. It's a funny word, but it basically means being okay with something at an acceptable level rather than needing it to be good. That's really hard for school leaders who tend to be highly effective people, right? We wouldn't be in these positions if we weren't really good at getting things done at a high level.

[16:57]

But we just can't get our whole jobs done at a high level. We need to be okay with some things being just acceptable rather than being really good. And so principals can think about if it's really a priority for me to get into classrooms more, what can I actually lower my standards out that's not about being in classrooms? Not so much that it becomes a disaster for your school, but being honest with yourself that there's a trade-off in terms of your time if what you want and need to do is get into classrooms more. Couldn't agree more.

[17:30] SPEAKER_01:

And I think the reason I, you know, thinking back on my own attempts to get into classrooms and provide feedback to teachers, you know, one of the biggest sticking points for me was that I would overcommit, you know, I would give myself too long a form to fill out or too elaborate a narrative to write for the teacher. And I thought, you know, if I can simplify this, if I can give myself less homework after each visit, if I can make this just an easier process, I'll actually show up more, I'll actually be more consistent. And that is is going to allow me to have most of the benefit without all of that extra work. So satisfying, love it.

[18:05] SPEAKER_00:

I think that what you're suggesting also gets at one of the other areas that folks make in thinking about decisions. So I'm going to decide to get into classrooms more. And so I'm going to rework my whole schedule. I'm going to create an annual calendar for the year. I'm going to create a long rubric that I'm going to use when I get in. I'm going to tell everybody there's this big thing happening.

[18:27]

And that actually can waste a lot of time that you could be using other things. And it might not work, right? You might fail ahead of time. And so if we can take one small step, if you can get into one more teacher's classroom for five more minutes, what did you learn from that experience? And then what does it tell you for the next teacher's class you're going to do or for your calendar for tomorrow? We're going to do a lot better when we take small steps for decisions and try them out.

[18:55]

when we experiment and learn from those small experiments than if we try to make these huge sweeping shifts that themselves might not actually work out.

[19:07] SPEAKER_01:

I love it. So question one, what am I missing? Question two, what is one small step? And that reminds me of, I think the Heath brothers call this ooching, right? The idea that if we just take a little bit of a step in one direction to kind of investigate whether that's a productive direction, we can then learn a and then kind of see where we are from there. How do we keep that small step from becoming really just a form of indecision?

[19:38]

You know, like kind of a kick the can down the road. We'll have a meeting to decide if we're going to have a meeting about the committee to have a meeting. How do we avoid small stepping our way to indecisiveness?

[19:50] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think there's a couple of key elements there. First of all, having a meeting about the small step is not the same thing as the small step. If you want to get into teachers' classrooms more, the small step is to get into a teacher's classroom. It's not to schedule getting into a teacher's classroom. It's not to plan to get into a teacher's classroom. It's actually to get into the teacher's classroom.

[20:12]

The small step is the small version of the big thing that you want to try. The second point is to make sure that you have a plan for assessing that small step, that you know what you're going to do to be able to move forward. The small step is a learning opportunity. It gives you more information when you're facing that big decision. And so the meeting about the meeting isn't actually going to give you the information about how the small step went, right? You need to actually try a mini version of the big thing that you're thinking about.

[20:43]

And then you need to be able to reflect on it, to say, okay, how did that go? What did I learn? What's my next small step? You can't satisfy yourself with thinking about it. You need to actually do it. And then once you've done it, you need to use that information to take the next small step.

[21:06]

Let me actually give you, I think that might actually be a little theoretical. Let me give you an example. I know a school that was considering going to block schedules and they did all the things that people did of looking at the research and thinking about, you know, taking information from stakeholders. But in the spring, they actually had a day of block schedules. They changed their schedule. They said, everybody's going to try one day of block scheduling, and then we're going to gather input and feedback from folks who did it.

[21:35]

We're going to be in the hallways and see when hallway changes happen, how is this different? We're going to hear from kids about what they thought of the longer classes. We're going to ask teachers. They neither just kept meeting about it endlessly, But they also didn't wait till September, change the whole schedule, and then have to learn the lessons all at once. They could just do one day, one small step, a pilot experiment and learn from that.

[21:58] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Simon, earlier we talked a little bit about the idea of satisficing and not being a perfectionist and the idea that there's kind of an opportunity cost to continuing to spend more time on something. So question three that you ask in the book is, where's the trade-off? What do we need to be looking at in terms of trade-offs and opportunity costs?

[22:20] SPEAKER_00:

We need to be aware of the fact that we live in an imperfect world, that we can't do everything we want as well as we want. And there's a couple, in addition to the time trade-off that I raised, There's a couple of other things that I think we need to be thinking about. The first is that we need to recognize that teachers just aren't going to see trade-offs. It's not their job. They're not doing anything wrong by not thinking about the big picture of the school. That's the principal's job.

[22:43]

That's the school leadership's job. It's not teacher's job. Teachers are good at seeing trade-offs in their own classrooms. This kid needs to learn phonics. This kid needs to learn poetic devices. Another kid needs to throw out their chewing gum.

[22:53]

They can deal with that and figuring out how to divide their attention and strategy among those But they're not going to see trade-offs, for instance, in whether an aide is assigned to their classroom or somebody else's classroom and whether they get the paid version of the math software or not. That's the leadership job. That's where some of that leadership decision-making comes in. And so where are these trade-offs often found? Well, they're often found in the individual versus the big picture. So if you let a particular teacher take some extra leave, how's that going to affect overall school morale?

[23:22]

What kind of precedent is that setting? I'm not saying the answer is one way or the other, but you need to be thinking about the trade-off between individual needs and big picture needs. If a teacher wants to devote some extra time to an individual student, have them come in for tutoring before school. If you want to devote some extra time to individual tutoring or mentoring a kid before or after school, what might suffer because of that? It's a really hard-nosed approach to saying any given need is going to be a good need, but we always have to balance it out against another.

[23:56]

So with trade-offs, that sounds a little pessimistic. I don't think it's pessimistic, but it's certainly realistic. But does it have to be this way allows us to think much more innovatively and creatively. We all know the structure of schools. We all know how schools are supposed to operate. Here in the pandemic, we are seeing that actually schools can be other things.

[24:15]

They can do other things. And if you think about, for instance, what might school be like 50 years from now? What structures that we see? Are grades going to be the same? Are we going to have one teacher for every group of kids and all those groups be the same size? We can see that the structures that we currently live in are artificial.

[24:34]

And then we can try to imagine right now what are some changes that I could make that are based on my core values rather than the structures that I already know and that I've grown up with. And that question of core values gets to the last question of what if I'm wrong? Because you're going to be wrong. People are wrong. Leaders are wrong. You're going to make the wrong decision.

[24:53]

I've given you these questions. You can use them. You can read all the research. You're still going to be wrong sometimes. And if that's going to be okay, it's going to be for a couple of reasons. One is that you led from your values and those values are clear.

[25:09]

And so even if people see you be wrong, even if they disagree, they can recognize that you're doing it for reasons that you believe in. The second, they can see the process that you used, that you had a collaborative, inclusive process, that you thought things through, that you wanted dissent and encouraged dissent and listened to the dissenters. They will trust you, even if you get things wrong, if they know that you're leading from values and that you've got a decent process. I think that we all want good things for our schools. The question is, how do we balance among those things? And how do we get there?

[25:43]

And that's where the decision part comes in. You should certainly be leading from your values as a leader. And I think most leaders want their schools to be places of equity, of hope, of kindness, of learning. The thing that's going to set great leaders apart is how they get there.

[25:58] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Simon, thank you so much for drawing attention to these dilemmas that we face every day as school leaders and to a process that people can follow. Thank you for outlining so clearly the five questions that people can ask themselves in making a decision in terms of what they're missing, what's a small step, what's a trade-off, does it have to be this way, and what if I'm wrong? I think attention to this issue is long overdue, and I've had a great deal of fun talking about some of the issues cognitive biases that we explored earlier on in the podcast. And I thank you for joining me on Principal Center Radio to share your research and to share your recommendations. If people want to learn more about your work, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[26:42] SPEAKER_00:

My website is simonrodberg.com. My Twitter is at Simon Rodberg. And there's a contact me form on the website. I love hearing from folks and having conversations over email or otherwise.

[26:53] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is What If I'm Wrong? And Other Key Questions for Decisive School Leadership, published by ASCD. Simon, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been fun. Thanks so much.

[27:05] Announcer:

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