"It will be different this time"

Heath and Heath’s 2010 work titled Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard is without question a timely read for any of us tasked with the responsibility of leading change as well as anyone involved in change. Come to think of it, it’s just a must read for everyone.

This week I gravitated to a particular statement in the book as the implications of the Race to the Top plan for North Carolina rolled out. Heath and Heath write, “But sometimes in times of change, nobody knows how to behave, and that can lead to problems” (p 226).

This is particular true give the Anson County Schools have been subjected previously to both the “list and look” of policy makers at the state capital for schools that persistently perform low on End of Grade or End of Course assessments. As such, a few of our schools have experienced a plan to fix them. Those efforts despite good intentions did not meet or exceed the expectations, requirements or promises of school reform. How will we behave this time?

Differently!

We have learned much from what has not worked. Moreover, we know much more about why reform has not yielded the results as promised.

We have heard and used all the pithy and trite statements about change. Bummer! They tend to be true more often than not. Right?

There are no easy change formulas, strategies, or methodologies. If there were, we would have used them – wrote the book, made the DVD and not be worried about funding public education.

Our learning from past efforts include first and foremost the importance of communication. Creating awareness, understanding and support consumes time, creates division, conflict, and often provokes reaction often negatively expressed. Nonetheless, we are making it a priority to create awareness of our current reality – how we got here, what worked and what didn’t, what has been accomplished and achieved, factors that must be considered, and the need for a comprehensive “call to arms” to meet or exceed what is expected from us, by us, and for each learner in our system now and in the future.

To that end, I made the decision that staff, leadership, the Board of Education, and soon public know where we are, where we are going, and the need to work together to get there. Simply, this time, everyone must be aware, understand, and assist sincerely, authentically, and transparently to address root cause of failed learning.

It was not comfortable standing before the high school faculty to unpack the Race to the Top plan on Monday. Equally humbling was reporting that evening publicly before the Board of Education that, despite the accomplishments and achievements of the past three years, the hard work of dedicated and caring staff, and the efforts to transform our school system we now faced unprecedented intervention, oversight, and accountability from the state.

However, as the RttT transformational team from the Department of Instruction acknowledged, the Anson County Schools has everything in place for breakthrough results. In fact, there isn’t a school or school system on the new “list” that has all the components of transformation in place as we do.

As I shared publicly, everything we have put in place over the past three years remain the “right” work. The challenge for us goes deeper than programs, initiatives, alignment, and focus.

We’ve learned the absence of an authentic and relevant value proposition for learning will not motivate, inspire, or compel students to learn. In a like manner we’ve learned the value proposition for education must be present in the behaviors we, the adults, exhibit daily – not just in our schools – throughout the county.

The work of transformation is the “right” work. It will not be easy – transformation never is. It starts with the acknowledgement and ownership of dissatisfaction of our performance to date – a clear vision of what could, would, should be for each learner, and taking the steps, together, to get there – we will behave differently this time! We must!

"Staying the Course"

For the past several months I have heard consistently from across our organization just how busy we are – the “new normal” some suggest. Without question we are!

Over the past years we have been careful to introduce programs, training, practices and tools to assist each staff with the intent of greater focus, alignment, and results. From every indication, we have been successful and effective in doing just that – building capacity. With steady growth in most, if not all, our schools at each grade level and in each subject we can conclude that capacity building is heading us in the right direction. Well, not so fast.

We just completed the first common formative assessments across our system. For those not familiar with the term or practice I will digress just a minute to catch you up. From our work in Total Instructional Alignment – the deconstruction and reconstruction of the North Carolina Common Course of Study (NCCCOS), identification of essential vocabulary, development of pacing guides to name just a few of the activities and artifacts generated from this alignment work, we transitioned to the means to assess authentically teaching and learning.

To that end, we created Benchmark Assessments that were administered three times last year leading up to End of Grade and End of Course assessments.

The common formative assessments are an even closer and frequent examination of teaching and learning designed to inform both the teacher of effective practice as well as the learner in their progress toward meeting or exceeding standard.

This is a lot – but the power of alignment and focus through constant and consistent feedback that informs all in the process of learning is necessary. Logical next steps, right?

Consider that prior to last year our system for the most part relied exclusively on the End of Grade or End of Course assessments to determine if a student had, in fact, learned what they were suppose to over the course of the year. We literally had little or no evidence along the way to suggest, inform, guide, or lead us to conclude how a student would or could perform on these assessments – let alone intervene or re-teach a concept or skill. Now at last, our educators have the tools to measure along the journey of learning not just whether they reached the destination.

The implementation of both common formative assessments and Benchmark Assessments are different constructs than most of our educators have experienced. In fact, as I interview staff informally I frequently hear how the common formative assessment take time away from teaching and classroom activities. Huh?

Feedback, authentic feedback in real time that informs both the teacher and learner as an indicator of learning is teaching.

One quick story about a staff member on performance on the first common formative assessments of the year – she was stunned, her students as a group only demonstrated proficiency in two of five standards. Distraught until she was informed that the two standards mastered were for the end of the grade not the first three weeks of school. What? Yes, this teacher learned after three weeks into this school year that her students demonstrated mastery of two standards. What great news – not bad news. By the way, she also had two students that mastered four out of five – inconvenient? I don’t think so

Because something is different doesn’t make it bad or of little value. Common formative assessments are different. They require different thinking, thoughtfulness, planning, and analysis. Come to think about it, isn’t that what teaching is suppose to create in learners.

Based on the initial common formative assessments results, we can expect greater growth and achievement. In fact, if we accept the shift in how we are using assessment data to inform our work as well as to notify each learner of their progress we will indeed be further along than we were a year ago – we can, we will, and we must stay the course.

"He who fails to plan is planning to fail” - Winston Churchill

The etymology of the word, concept, and construct of “strategic” comes from several different Greek words. Though closely associated and identified with the military with respect to leading, planning, direction, and command over time the concept and construct cross walked into the private and public sectors of business, industry, and of course, education. In concert, the discipline of strategic planning evolved and has for sometime been associated with focus, prioritizing, and clarity to name just a few of the applications for organizations.

We’ve learned from the writer of Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (29:18). A way to bring the vision into full focus is determining where an organization is going – what are the aspirations, the strategic actions – the plan?

Presently, these aspirations are expressed as commitments – strategic commitments.

Why commitments?

I learned through reading Dr. Carl Glickman in his seminal work Renewing America’s Schools (1993) that we needed to elevate the importance of our purpose, vision, direction, and strategies to a level that conveyed a deeper, almost sacred relationship between all those participating in the process. Taking a slight liberty in the construct that Dr. Glickman proposed I applied it to the concept and construct of strategic planning. Here’s why -

For too long the power, utility, and outcome of strategic planning has resulted in mixed, oft unfulfilling experiences for participants. The process is powerful but the outcome or results is lacking. Many explanations are available as to why this powerful process doesn’t meet expected outcomes – chief among these is the lack of follow through or implementation. Hence, strategic planning is akin to a four-letter word to many and especially to those who most need to be a part of a process to create awareness, understanding, ownership – commitment, if you will, to the direction of the community’s schools.

The birth of the Strategic Commitments came after the first months of my tenure as superintendent in Anson County. Taking from Dr. Glickman, we very much needed to have a document that conveyed a deeper sense of purpose or plan to achieve the expectations and goals of the Board of Education let alone the state and federal government.

Knowing the dissonance created by the term strategic plan we simply, but very intentionally used the word commitments rather than plan. I wanted our organization to sense a big difference especially with expectation that a commitment is something you make and keep. I wanted our organization to sense that we were committed to critical, key, strategic actions to ensure our mission could and would be achieved – something different than a plan that more often or not was created and loosely acted upon.

Now, however, is time that we begin to formulate the 2012-2016 commitments. This time, we need broader engagement, involvement, and ownership of the commitments especially the third commitment – The Anson County Schools will engage, promote, and partner with parents and community to ensure all students meet or exceed state and community academic learning standards.

I cannot think of any better way to engage, promote, and partner with parents and our community than to participate in deliberate conversations about our current performance as well as our aspirations for the next five years and beyond.

As I have penned previously, two centerpiece questions germane to students, teachers, parents, principals, support staff, and community serve as the starting point. They are: “What do you expect and require from your school system? And “What must every student know and be able to do as a result of teaching and learning in the Anson County Schools?”

It is now clearer than ever before that it will take a concerted, collective, and committed community working in support of one another, with one another to achieve the mission. If “all means all” then it will take all of us engaged in discussing these two critical questions that will result in the awareness, understanding, and commitment necessary to succeed.

"Pulling weeds - Root Cause"

In Teaching Smart People How to Learn, author Chris Agyris states, “… success increasingly depends on learning, but most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization whom many assume to be the best at learning – professionals who occupy key leadership positions – are, in fact, not very good at it.”

What I find fascinating is Agyris’ belief that “most people too narrowly define learning as problem solving”. As such, problem solving focuses on correcting errors that more often of not are external. Thus, Agyris concludes that learning requires an inward, reflection of behavior – individually and collectively. This reflection cannot be superficial or cursory. Rather, it must be a critical examination of behavior – attitudes, beliefs, and practices. Further still, Agyris argues that behaviors often inadvertently contribute to an organization’s problems. “In particular, ‘organizations’ must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right.”

Yes, you read that right – the way we go about defining and solving problems are often the problem. The solutions we identify are in many respects doomed from the onset given we haven’t deeply sought to understand, examine the root causes of the problem we seek to solve.

One way to ensure success is getting to the root cause.

Root cause analysis sounds sophisticated, complex, and time consuming. It really isn’t. In fact, the only aspect of root cause analysis that is challenging is thinking differently about a problem, challenge, issue, etc. Therein lies the challenge – thinking differently.

I recall a gardening lesson from my mother about pulling weeds – speaking about root cause. My brother and I were weeding the garden with specific instructions to pull the roots not just the visible part of the weed (above ground). We thought we could expedite the work by pulling the visible and covering whatever we didn’t get with soil (mom will never know). Well, imagine our surprise days later when the weeds reappeared.

Guess what? We were back out there weeding again.

What’s so important about roots? We know from our botany days that plants (weeds too) need sunlight, water, and nutrients to grow. Roots have three functions they: 1) absorb water, 2) anchor the plant body to the ground and 3) store food and nutrients.

Anyone that has pulled weeds knows that the second function of roots is often the most challenging – anchoring the plant or weed to the soil. Yet, the strength of the root does not determine what we see above ground – we may pull easily the stem or leaves but have a difficult time getting the root.

So it is with the root cause of problems – they’re generally deeply anchored. Our problem is that we embrace the axiom of “out of sight means out of mind”. Gardeners know this couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, the out of sight out of mind thinking will often lead to deeper more profound problems.

Our work is similar – the work of continuous improvement. We cannot accept or attempt to merely pull or remove what is visible. Rather, we must go after the roots. To do so, of course, requires discipline and humility. The discipline is self-evident. We must engage in continuous reflection – easier said than done. We don’t like to ask critical, penetrating questions about our behaviors or their underpinning beliefs or values.

The obstacle to asking, discussing, and addressing these behaviors is the lack of humility. Our profession is oft impaired by sentimentality. We are quick to defend, explain, or excuse the results or evidence of our work (student learning) as something outside our control except when student learning and achievement exceeds expectation. We tend to take credit for outstanding student results but quickly run away from responsibility for poor student learning results (a discussion for a different day).

My brother and I were humbled in our efforts to cover up incomplete work. From this humility came a valuable lesson that serves us well today. We cannot prepare the garden properly without removing the roots of the weeds that so desperately want to dominate. Now, whenever in the garden I exercise the discipline (and time) to pull the roots.

Our organization must commit to learning – learning to ask different questions, learning to think differently, and learning to identify the root cause of a problem, issue, concern, or a result that did not meet or exceed expectations.

Connecting the Dots

A cardinal responsibility of leadership is to constantly and consistently make “sense” of the work. Making “sense” is akin to connecting dots. I remember as a child coloring in coloring books that challenged you to connect the dots to frame a picture to color. If one or more dots weren’t connected the picture couldn’t be completed properly.

After completing several pictures, I recall attempting to guess the picture without connecting the dots. More often or not I would guess correctly. However, with the connection of each dot the outline of the picture didn’t quite match my previous efforts. Lesson learned – connect the dots, all the dots.

The work of leading continuous improvement requires the dots to connect to provide a framework and thus a picture of the work. The consistent and constant reminder of these connections as well as the dots themselves is critical. My fear as realized this past Monday is that leadership (chiefly myself) assumed the connection and the dots were clear – they are not.

Let me try to connect them –

The Anson County Schools has three commitments that frame a picture of our work completed. They are:

1. All Anson County School students meet or exceed state and community academic learning standards;

2. The Anson County Schools are organized efficiently and effectively to ensure that all students meet or exceed state and community academic learning standards; and

3. The Anson County Schools will engage, promote, and partner with parents and community to ensure all students meet or exceed state and community academic learning standards.

Within each of these commitments are critical or key success factors that when met complete the commitments.

In commitment one you find our core work. The critical success factors or dots include, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional learning and growth alignment. The details are posted on the http://www.ansonschools.org/ website under the BOE/Superintendent tab.

We have several initiatives underway to connect these important dots. Chief among these is Total Instructional Alignment. Within this initiative are several ongoing strategies including a heavy emphasis on training staff in effective practices. This year, we add Atlantic Research Partners to build capacity in our building leadership (principals and teachers alike) in instructional leadership.

In commitment two you find the emphasis on effective and efficient organization of our schools and departments. Several dots connect this work. Chief among these is our work on planning, monitoring, and assessing individual as well as department, school, and school system performance.

The Organizational Assessment is central to our accountability model. This year we add SeeChange (Mariner) the public reporting mechanism to allow our entire community to monitor our progress. Though it could be argued that SeeChange is a communication, engagement tool, it is really a powerful monitoring and reporting tool connecting the Strategic Commitments and the Organizational Assessment.

An additional dot in commitment two is process management. This work is to ensure we have a system in place to monitor and measure processes to determine if and to what extent they are efficient and effective and is being facilitated by Results Based Solutions and is planned to be completed no later than 31 January 2011.

The third commitment is the one that has the most work still to be completed. To that end, SUCCEED created and facilitated by Mary Jo McGrath will commence this fall as a process for building (or rebuilding) relationships within our schools, with our community, and throughout our county by learning to listen and engage in authentic conversations with one another. In addition, K-12 Insight will assist us with soliciting, gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and taking appropriate actions from opinions, perceptions and etc. of our citizens. Lastly, the Parent Guides are an important dot connecting our schools to parents about the standards and expectations for learning.

Next week I will continue with the role that planning plays in connecting dots in the Anson County Schools. Until then, remember our Give Us Feedback tab on the Anson County Schools website as a great way to provide input, feedback, suggestions for improvement, and recognition for outstanding service by our staff.