Part 3 in the series on school transformation by Erich Bolz, VP of Research and District Development at The CCE.
You may recall in our earlier pieces: The Tired School Improvement Initiatives Won’t Transform your School But This Will, and Consider Measuring and Minding the I vs. They Gap, we discussed how a policy-driven overreliance on student achievement data and structural implementation (think MTSS, PBIS, and any other flavor-of-the-month alphabet soup initiatives) has not led to national student achievement results we had hoped for.
Moreover, we offered a laser-like focus on organizational development as the potential fix or anecdote to the misguided work we do as school leaders as a result of poor federal policy. We left you all hanging at what to do next given most school and system leaders buy into the issues raised in the first two blogs.
So, if the policy error of our ways is clear, and we buy into the notion that the key task of a skilled leader is to measure, monitor, and improve culture, how do we do it? Well, we are glad you asked because the power rests in well-crafted 1:1 questions.
The concept of management through surfacing authentic themes at the workplace has been around since the 1940’s when David Packard coined the phrase, “management by walking around.” So how does this operationalize in education? We think the authorities on the subject are Chuck Salina, and Suzann Girtz, Professors at Gonzaga University who share this field-tested approach in their book, Powerless to Powerful, Leadership for School Change.
At CEE, we believe our Staff, Student, and Family surveys provide the key data points a leader can convert to a 1:1 question. A leader may counter, “Isn’t the 1:1 question inside of what wakes me up at 3:00 AM?” We think some combination of these approaches will help leaders land on the right question to ask their team members, and the themes surfaced, if acted upon, will lead to improved culture.
Consider how Walla Walla Public Schools principal, and long-time CEE client Maria Garcia articulates approaching the process as outlined in her fine blog. Maria identified a focus of concern in her Staff survey data and formulated the following 1:1 question: “Our CEE Staff Survey showed that lots of staff members do not think students get what they need in a timely manner. I’m curious what you think that might be about?” There is so much good in this approach. Note the question is not about me, the leader; instead, it puts a piece of data at the center of the discussion, and she models the spirit of inquiry and curiosity she expects of her staff.
So, what happened next? In a word magic! Maria’s working hypothesis around the question was an assumption the staff perception was rooted in pandemic learning loss. However, the central theme raised as a result of asking the 1:1 was ambiguity around her district’s transition to inclusionary practice. Her staff was not averse to the initiative, they simply wanted more tools to implement the mandate. Absent this process, Maria may have applied a “fix” to a problem that did not exist based upon a perceptual gap between leader and staff.
In addition to being able to meet needs, because she understood needs, consider the collateral benefits of this approach. Dr. CK Bray in his brilliant appearance on CEE’s Outliers in Education podcast (check out the episode here) shared when leaders take the time to ask authentic 1:1 questions, staff members feel heard. Feeling heard creates a sense of personal empowerment, translated into, you guessed it, staff motivated to go the extra mile.
As we stated in our last piece, changing the culture means changing mindsets. Mindsets are not changed through mandates, rather they are changed when a leader betrays a sense of vulnerability and seeks to understand their organization’s point of pain through inquiry.
Again, as stated in the prior piece, we believe it is well within reach of any school leader to shift the culture of an entire school or district. It takes daily discipline and perseverance to transform a school’s culture, but it doesn’t have to take a long time.
If you are thinking, there must be more to this approach than simply crafting a good 1:1 question and managing by walking around, you are correct. In our next and final piece, we capture the process start to finish which manifests in an iterative plan, do, study, act (PDSA) cycle of inquiry. We know when the bright lines of failed policy, the call to lead using the discipline of organizational development, converge with the how to iterative PDSA cycle, you too, can put it all together and begin to change your system’s culture for the better.
Follow this blog series to learn more about the following key notions:
Culture is king and the school leader is the curator
Maintaining and improving culture is a daily practice, and coaching helps
Overinvestment in structure will not overcome a challenging culture
Culture eats strategy and structure for breakfast
Burnout in education has never been higher. Culture can be both an indicator and antidote for burnout
Measuring culture, focusing on empathy, not hiding from vulnerability, and being a people-focused leader are all key
Asking for help from an executive coach, fostering high functioning Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and using the power of 1:1 inquiry to start short cycle improvement initiatives are steps for anyone wanting to grow themselves and their schools
Naming and measuring toxic school culture will help to address it
Turning culture data into short-cycle improvement initiatives will help to implement changes
To learn more about how The Center for Educational Effectiveness can assist you in measuring culture, and more importantly become your guide on the side in making cultural changes, please visit: https://www.effectiveness.org/products-services.
Comments