The 3 Problems for Change

These three problems are not insurmountable. They are challenging.

1. Problem of Baskin & Robbins
2. Problem of Ideals
3. Problem of Memory

The Solutions for Change in Classrooms

When applied in a healthy school – one that is built on trust and clarity of purpose – these solutions can destroy the 3 problems.

1. Scripting Change
2. Cueing
3. Buy-In (A failed solution)
4. Commitment

Embedded in the commitment solution are five other solutions: 1) involvement in shaping processes, 2) shared experience, 3) no selling, 4) creativity, and 5) intrinsic persistence.

Daniel Simons takes a quick tour of why the mind doesn’t, and really can’t accurately perceive reality. It’s this exact bias that makes supervision an uneasy and ineffective approach to leading schools.

It’s also the same bias that tempts school leaders to shortcut leadership for forms of manipulation and mandating change. These, of course, are not effective leadership strategies for change.

Clarity of Purpose. Educator Burnout and Demoralization. Where do these magnified side effects come from? Who are the Millers? Do you want to take a cruise? And…it is missing, are you missing out, or is it a mission for your school?

Topics in this episode include:

• Stats on Burnout and Attrition
• Understanding the Problem
• Clarity of Purpose
• Mission Statements in Schools
• The Millers
• Bearings & Long Distance Cruising
• Behavioral Cohesion for School Leaders
• Magnified Side Effects

Leave your comments, questions, or ideas at mafost.com/pod 

The season 3 premiere focuses on busting through the one thing that limits your people in your schools. Topics include:

• Organizational Health vs. School Culture
• The Key Ingredient to High Performing Teams
• Minimizing Politics
• Difference Between Trust and Confidence
• How to Lead With Vulnerability
• If you enjoy this episode, consider sharing it with one friend.

Join the podcast by leaving your ideas, comments, or questions at mafost.com/pod.

“Just Trust Me”

Research and Background

Browse these articles to get more information about the research and background on The One Thing That Limits Your People.

• Lead With Vulnerability, What and How-To
• What A Leader Feels
• The Fringe of Conflict
• Fester Then Transfer, How Conflict Can Erode Teamwork
• Attribution Error, What and How-To

There are two definitions of unleash. It’s the second definition I wish to highlight: “Removing the restraints that limit.”

Organizations, particularly larger ones, are notorious for restraints. Boxes. Limitations. Whereas smaller ones are notorious for a sense of chaos and disorder. Both extremes create unhealthy environments for people to flourish.

This season is about your people. Over a decade ago in the Harvard Business Review, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras wrote, “Executives spend too much time drafting, wordsmithing, and redrafting vision statements, mission statements, values statements, purpose statements, aspiration statements, and so on. They spend nowhere near enough time trying to align their organizations with the values and visions already in place.”

Topics in this introduction include:

• Removing Restraints that Limit
• Propensity to Complexity
• Brains Need Simplicity
• Overview of Research on 40 School Districts
• An Actionable Definition of Integrity
• Coming Topics such as the Amygdala, Environments that Matter, Builders of Learning Systems, and Crafters of Learning Cultures

Is buy-in a necessary component for school improvement? Or is it a detriment? What is your school’s attention span? How do you garner commitment to long-term improvement efforts? What is the long game?

Episode 1 tackles these questions and more.

The Mafost Mashup is for principals and school leaders who value people, build school culture and make a measurable impact. This is insanely innovative – not for everyone!

Two Specific Reading Systems

In the episode, I named two systems specifically: 

1. Multi-Gate Screeners
2. A/B Testing.

Additional discussion on these systems (and more) are in the two weeks of blog posts beginning with this one: Why Systems Matter for Reading.

John Hattie’s Research

The visible learning/John Hattie rankings from his meta-analysis of over 800 studies are in a variety of graphs and infographics here. Response to Intervention (RTI) has always been in the top 3-6 since the first publication in 2009.

Get an overview that I wrote on Visible Learning here.

Episode 3 of the Mafost Mashup includes four factors from John Hattie’s research. I’ve also added a few more here for reference and context:

1. Response to Intervention (d = 1.29)
2. Video Review of Lessons (d = 0.88)
3. Direct Instruction (d = 0.60)
4. Collaborative Learning (d = 0.34)
5. Web-based Learning (d = 0.18)
6. Teacher Subject Knowledge (d = 0.11)
7. Whole Language (d = 0.06)
8. Student Control Over Learning (d = 0.02)
9. Suspensions (d = -0.20)

John Hattie on RTI

Topics in This Episode

• Changes in Reading Technology
• The disappearance of Learning Disabilities
• The Documentation Problem
• Why RTI (Response to Intervention) Fails
• Multi-Gate Screener Systems
• A/B Testing as a System for Improvement
• The Coming Change in Reading Skills
• Why Systems Win

Is buy-in a necessary component for school improvement? Or is it a detriment? What is your school’s attention span? How do you garner commitment to long-term improvement efforts? What is the long game?

Episode 1 tackles these questions and more.

The Mafost Mashup is for principals and school leaders who value people, build school culture and make a measurable impact. This is insanely innovative – not for everyone!

You are doing meaningful work. And you will continue deep into the summer days because you understand your finish determines your starting line next year. And your start will determine your wins. You are a champion for your school, and champions finish strong.

Episode 3 tackles the big questions of how to seriously advance your school during summer break. Don’t listen to this episode, unless you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and make some amazing culture shifts!

Topics Include:
-Situational Awareness vs. Curriculum/Instruction
-Leading with Questions
-Who to Question
-Intentional Questioning
-Acting on the Data
-Build a Baseline
-Summer Leadership Steps
-The Instructional Plan
-Leadership Dinner
-Pizza Panels
-September Execution
-Surveying Campus Culture

What is success for your school? Is it a rating? Is it a passing rate? Is it your own promotion? Or do you measure success by impact?

James Griffith is the name of a relatively unknown researcher at the US Department of Education. James published a very interesting study, but the findings are almost obvious. He examined the relationship between “transformative” leadership practices and turnover and student achievement. Transformative leadership for principals is defined as:

1. inspiration,
2. showing consideration to individual staff members, and
3. acts that are intellectually stimulating.

He studied how leadership practices impact job satisfaction. Is teacher happiness one of your primary leadership aims? It should be. And it’s not a target that is at odds with student-centeredness. They go hand in hand.

Imagine having a real impact with your staff and students and doing work that matters on something more than a test score. Imagine students and teachers

• Creating fundraisers for local community needs.
• Successfully completing internships for political campaigns.
• Offering designs for the community park.
• Creating partnerships with the school and local farmers’ market.

There are so many meaningful ways to have an impact. This episode explores the what and how for principals and school leadership.

What if your school were characterized by complete absorption in what one does? Students completely absorbed into their work? Teachers completely absorbed into their work? Extreme engagement in teams? Principals who play? Communities that commit? That is meaningful work.

This episode of the Mafost Mashup focuses on several critical topics related to meaningful work in schools:

• Workplace Envy
• Absoprtion
• Jeffrey Springer’s Unpublished Research on Play
• Flow
• Ways to Increase Meaningful Work in Your School

Click to Download the Research Article, Meaningful Work, Work Engagement, and Organizational Commitment.

Episode 6 of the Mafost Mashup is loaded with practical applications for principals and school leaders who wish to build a leadership strategy using Empathy. Five characteristics of empathy are discussed in detail:

1. Situational Awareness

This is the ability to predict issues and pitfalls before they occur. How will you prep your teams for the implementation dip? How do you expand the circles of safety? What are the tribes within your culture? How do you build connections between those tribes?

Here’s an example from Marzano, Waters, McNulty (2005):

…the principal might become aware that a certain teacher or a certain group teachers feel disenfranchised. Rather than wait for these feelings to show themselves in a negative manner, the principal would meet with the teacher or teachers, inviting them to discuss their issues openly.” p.103

2. Seek to Understand

 This is the humility factor – how much do you seek to know vs think you already know? In this episode, I offer five quick tips on when and where to hold the conversations that unlock the key to understanding your teacher teams and the undercurrents of the campus.

3. Authenticity 

 What is not authenticity? Transparency? Openness? Maybe…but after you hear this cautionary tale from the Harvard Business Review, you might rethink what authenticity is.

Here’s the authentic leadership research cited in the episode: Leadership Quarterly Authentic Leadership 

4. Fearlessness 

That’s right, fear of failure is a natural, but opposing force to empathy. Episode offers 6 mindsets that eradicate fear from your campus culture build a culture of innovative teachers, creative principals, and meaningful work.

5. What Empathy is Not 

Empathy is not low expectations from school leaders or principals. It is not softness, nor is it without standards or substance. Empathy is not afraid of data, of measurable impact – rather, it creates impact on people, on culture, on learning.

The effective schools research has a cumulative 50+ years of data to find what works in schools. By “what works”, I mean high levels of student learning regardless of economic background. Episode 7 of the Mafost Mashup offers communication techniques to make the correlates and effective part of your school engine.

Correlates of Effective Schools

In the newest updates of the correlates of effective schools, Lawrence Lezotte and Kathleen Snyder describe how to use the 7 correlates of effective schools:

1. High Expectations for Success
2. Strong Instructional Leadership
3. Clear and Focused Mission
4. Opportunity to Learn/Time on Task
5. Frequent Monitoring of Student Progress
6. Safe and Orderly Environment
7. Positive Home/School Relations

This episode of the Mafost Mashup tackles the missing link in the correlates and offers five strategies for principals to enhance communication. In addition to the 5 strategies in the episode, I’d like to provide you with these communication techniques.

4 Out-of-the-Box Communication Ideas

1. 2-Minute Meetings: Hold weekly meetings with your teacher teams, but 120 seconds max! 30 seconds to affirm and celebrate the good…30 seconds to relay information…60 seconds to listen to questions, which will then be used for email follow-up. <<< This will boost your read-rate on emails!
2. Video Conferencing: Use Skype or Google Hangouts to hold 5 to 10-minute meetings with small groups of teams. This is effective for allowing people to remain in their workspace and save time on tardiness and interruptions.
3. The Online Ongoing: Create a shared document or OneNote for each month of the year. It’s an online collaborative space where questions can be asked, information shared, and all voices can be heard! Delegate your administrative team to monitor it and bring critical issues to your attention (including teams that don’t engage).
4. Twitter: Create your own hashtag (i.e. #OakElemComms or #TigerElemChat2019). Open up communication on campus in this public forum where teachers can share the great stuff in their classrooms and get feedback from each other.

LISTEN: The Pepper Effect

Sean Gaillard does an amazing job in The Pepper Effect (link to Sean’s book on Amazon) showing how to create a culture of collaboration and innovation. He also provides the LISTEN approach to enhancing communication:

L: Look for the strengths in staff at your school.

I: Invite teachers to share their strengths and gifts.

S: Strategize to build something great.

T: Take risks and be bold. (Read more on this, Why Leaders Should NOT Stand Out)

E: Enjoy collaboration and make it enjoyable.

N: Now make it happen.

In essence, Sean’s LISTEN approach to communication is about embedding all discussion in doing meaningful work. Work that matters and is enjoyable (but not easy) to do together.

7 Must-Have Communication Tips for Principals

These are the standard communication techniques for principals. They are simply must-haves, in-place, systems.

1. Follow-Up: (not gotcha emails) But a genuine follow-up to conversations and concerns on campus.
2. Active Listening: seek to understand, use daily conversations, and lead with questions.
3. Easily Accessible Documents: Use OneNote, Google Drive, and other shared locations to make redundancy easy to access.
4. Internal Newsletters: Automate them and delegate them. Do them monthly. Do them weekly. Keep them beautiful, clear, and concise to reiterate dates, info, and messaging.
5. Campus Events: Create social events 2-4 times per year in a variety of settings to engage your people and build a healthy sense of community.
6. Don’t Forgo Face-to-Face: It builds incredible connections unlike email and other non-personal formats.
7. Open-Door Policy: This means more than the physical door. This means inviting feedback and impromptu conversations.

If you’d like to read more on the effective schools research and correlates, this pdf file shows the evolution of each correlate.

Principals, instructional coaches, and educational leaders will receive helpful insights into why toxic cultures form and how to turn them around and actionable steps to start using immediately in their school cultures.

High expectations for student success – this is the mantra of our generation, but what if we’ve got it out of balance? What if we’ve used high student expectations in ways that created blind spots for excuses? 

The Water Analogy

Expectations for Instruction and Leadership

This 2017 article investigates the tension between high expectations for students/teacher vs. the relative lack of discourse on the expectations we hold for school leaders. The literature review in the article is certainly worth perusing (if you’re into research), and here’s an important snippet from the study:

The emerging consensus, among scholars who have reflected on the school leadership requirements of the 21st century, suggests that the kind of principal who will be required is one who understands his or her role in terms of:

• instructional leadership that focuses on strengthening teaching and learning, professional development, data-driven decision-making and accountability
• community leadership manifested in a big-picture awareness of the school’s role in society
• shared leadership among educators, community partners and residents; close relations with parents and others; and advocacy for school capacity building and resources
• visionary leadership that demonstrates energy, commitment, entrepreneurial spirit, values and conviction that all children will learn at high levels, as well as inspiring and influencing others with this vision both inside and outside the school building.
  (Thompson, 2017)

Download the full article here.

No Excuses for Learning Rate and Impact

Without metrics for impact, we create blind spots for excuses. Take a look at the charts below and see who is achieving the greater impact on learning and learning rates.

Classroom A and B are taught by the same teacher. Classroom C and D are taught by a 2nd teacher. Which teacher has fewer excuses for learning? Which teacher has higher expectations for herself?

At first glance, it appears that classroom A and B are performing higher than classroom C and D. And it all we look at our finish lines, that’s true. Remember, the impact is not about finish lines…it’s about learning rate. Two analogies were mentioned in the podcast:

• Coaches and runners racing on a track.
• Athletes working out in a gym.

Now let’s look at two campuses and principals.

Principal B is always outperforming Principal A…at least in his own mind. Unfortunately, he’s created blindspots for excuses. False positives are strong in this data.

Here are a few questions Principal A should ask and be asked to raise expectations for himself and his leadership team:

• At what rate should my campus improve each year?
• What is my starting line? (My peers are not my starting line)
• What key performance indicators will cue me monthly about my learning rates?
• How is my leadership impacting learning rate?

Now, if we take a second look at the data, Principal A is affecting a learning rate of 23% while Principal B is achieving a learning rate of 8%. 

However, if we rank the two campuses, Campus B (Principal B) gets 1st place! This is a false positive and creates a blind spot for excuses. It’s a fallacy all too common in education and underserves many students.

Principal A’s campus in a ranking (read more on the fallacy of ranks) will appear to be lower performing than campus B, but her leadership impact on learning rate is almost three times higher than Principal B! It’s another blind spot for excuses!