January 2019 Tackling the Implementation Challenge: How Matters
Sarah Beck and Shawn DeRose
Glasgow Middle School, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA
“We don’t have a knowledge problem, we have an implementation challenge.” That is what our newly-hired superintendent said at his first school leadership conference. He was speaking to a reality that we had been living as school-based leaders at Glasgow Middle School, a large, diverse public school outside the nation’s capital.
For several years, we had been working to improve student achievement outcomes, and while we knew what best practices we hoped to see in our classrooms, but it seemed much easier said than done. Despite planning engaging and relevant whole-staff professional development sessions, we had yet to see the type of instruction we were able to describe with such confidence as a staff. And we were not alone: In education to date, there has been much more focus on what schools do to impact student achievement and relative little focus on how it is implemented, either well or poorly.
So our goal over the last several years at Glasgow has been to approach the work of school improvement systematically. We believed that applying effective organizational leadership would make the biggest difference in raising student achievement. We applied this belief to several school-wide initiatives over the last five years. In each case, what we did was not revolutionary, but how we did it was markedly different from other schools.
Through our focus on implementation, we identified four key strategies that were essential to our success. We invite you to think of them as essential elements in any recipe for sustainable school improvement:
Establish clear priorities
Develop common language
Address systems and structures
“Humanize” the work
Whether we were tackling a schoolwide positive behavior program or implementing a specific classroom strategy like learning targets, we relied on these essential elements of organizational leadership to guide our implementation. We found greater success and higher levels of engagement (both staff and students) than we had on previous school initiatives, and as compared to other schools pursuing similar changes in different ways.
Essential Element - 1) Establish Clear Priorities
In our experience, nothing is more foundational to effective implementation of school reform than establishing clear priorities. Year after year, we’ve seen evidence that focused energy leads to quality implementation. One of the most important realizations we’ve come to is that every ask we make of our staff distracts from another. Ensuring everyone in the building knows how to prioritize their work allows teachers and teams to make progress on what matters most.
We think of establishing clear priorities as “pruning”. Much like a cutting branches off a tree to direct the energy and therefore growth in the desired direction, limiting the priorities of your staff allows them to invest enough focus to see results. Furthermore, having limited priorities creates a sense of alignment and purpose across teams and departments, building a positive and efficacious school culture.
From the Trenches - What it Takes to Establish Clear Priorities
It is easy to understand the theory behind establishing clear priorities. In practice, however, it can easily become one of the most fraught and unpleasant tasks of school leadership. Establishing clear priorities means saying “no” early, often, and to multiple stakeholders. Finding ways to explain your school’s priorities while validating the initiatives you’re choosing to de-prioritize becomes an essential skill for school leaders.
For example, in the 2016 school year, we began a schoolwide focus on learning targets. Our goal was to use them as an internal check on our lesson plans to ensure they were purposeful and transparent to students. Every staff meeting, every team conversation, and every professional learning opportunity had an explicit connection back to learning targets. When division leadership announced a focus on equity and literacy, we made the decision to address these initiatives implicitly through learning targets, rather than explicitly as separate initiatives.
At times, this meant difficult conversations about whether or not we truly valued equity and literacy. However, by the end of the first month of school, nearly every teacher on our staff of 150+ was using learning targets to support quality classroom instruction. We saw a dramatic increase in the amount of time students spent reading, writing, thinking and discussing, across all class settings. In other words, we used a focus on learning targets to ensure more students are reading and writing in more classes: what is more equitable than that? While we were criticized in the short run for not sending a team of teachers to a four-day training on equity, by the end of the school year, equitable practices were implemented in our classrooms to a far greater extent than most schools who did. Establishing clear priorities means making difficult decisions to ensure your leadership team and entire staff is able to stay focused.
Essential Element - 2) Develop Common Language
To be able to collaborate effectively around clear priorities, schools need common language. We have found that common language is one of the most important tools we have as school leaders, and yet it is also one of the most overlooked. There are many terms in education that mean different things to each person who uses them: “engagement”, “discipline”, “differentiation”, “student-centered”, to name just a few. We assume we are on the same page when often we are not, leading to unproductive conflict and hindered cooperation. Think of when a spouse says “I’ll be home early” and means 6pm, when her partner thinks “early” means 4pm. Purposefully and explicitly developing an understanding of what something looks like and sounds like is essential to effective organizational leadership. Common language reinforces prioritization and focus, addresses misconceptions, and empowers all staff in building to work toward the same clear outcomes.
From the Trenches - What it Takes to Develop Common Language
When we re-launched our PBIS program in 2014, one of the first steps we took was to create common language. One of the most conflict-ridden terms in the building at the time was “consequence”. In feedback surveys, we often heard complaints that consequences were inconsistent or insufficient in addressing student misbehavior. Teachers would tell administrators that students who were removed from class received “no consequences”, while administrators were spending a disproportionate amount of time conferencing, documenting and managing the number of students being sent to the office.
At a whole-staff meeting that fall, we explained to staff that when we say “consequence” we mean holding students accountable in ways that helps them learn. We do not mean punishment because we know from research that consequences help kids learn behavior expectations and punishment does not. To create even more clarity, we shared a parenting example: when a toddler bites, the consequence is saying “I don’t play with people who hurt me” and the punishment is putting hot sauce on his tongue. Concrete examples of what we mean when we say certain words changed how we interacted as a staff and lessened the conflict around how discipline was being handled. Staff began to see that removal from class, conversations and calls home were all consequences that were being used to teach and hold students accountable for our expectations, instead of seeing them as ineffective punishments.
Essential Element - 3) Address Systems and Structures
There is nothing more frustrating to a staff than actions not matching words. If you’ve gone to the great lengths of articulating clear priorities and have developed the common language needed to pursue them, it is essential to also align the systems and structures in your building to match. For us, this meant paying close attention to areas of our school organization where there was misalignment or where initiatives would get stuck. Then, we would work together as a leadership team to brainstorm systems and structures to address it. We began to envision our school as a Rube Goldberg machine, which are designed to get a simple thing done in an elaborate and multi-step process using pulleys, ramps, hinges and cords. We would ask ourselves where in the machine the momentum would slow, get lost or miss the mark so that we could address it.
From the Trenches - What it Takes to Address Systems and Structures
In 2015 our biggest structural misalignment was in our leadership groups. We had been explicit with our staff that distributed leadership was one of our core beliefs. We had said that a focus on improving classroom instruction was our top priority and that meaningful collaboration between teacher teams was the most effective way to do it. However, the only structure we had in place involving teachers in leadership was a monthly Instructional Council meeting. The group included all admin, instructional coaches, resource teachers, department chairs and team leads, for a total of 35+ members. It was nearly impossible to engage such a large group in meaningful discourse in a way that allowed for true input from all members. Consequently, agendas were mostly informational. It was clear that we would need to change our meeting structure to reflect our priority of distributed leadership.
To do this, we created several smaller leadership groups instead of a single large one. Instructional Council remained but involved only eighteen members, including a rotation of Assistant Principals instead of the full admin team. Our goal was to include an equal balance of teacher leaders, administrators, and instructional support roles. We then created a monthly Team Lead Cohort to give input on key instructional decisions and learn about leadership best practices from and with each other. Finally, we created an Administrators’ Collaborative Team and an Instructional Coaches’ Collaborative Team that met weekly to ensure those roles were able to learn from and push each other through their instructional leadership. With these smaller groups in place and a clear purpose articulated for each, we were able to engage more people in distributed leadership than we ever could have with the previous structure.
Essential Element - 4) Humanize the Work
Last but not least, it is essential that in every leadership decision and communication we reflect an understanding of how humans tend to think, learn and act. Too often, we work against human nature instead of proactively planning with it in mind. We know that humans do best when we normalize struggle (Brene Brown), reduce cognitive load (Mike Schmoker), invest in team dynamics (Daniel Coyle), shape a path of least resistance (Chip Heath and Dan Heath), and clearly articulate purpose (Simon Sinek). Instead of being frustrated that our staff can not focus on more than a few clear priorities at once, we anticipate and plan for it. Instead of simply outlining expectations around new initiatives, we ask for feedback and normalize the learning process. Instead of suggesting changes are easy and obvious, we explicitly tell staff that it is okay to be wherever they are currently, but it is not okay to stay there; we are all getting better, each and every day. Perhaps the most important part of humanizing the work is being empathetic and authentic in our leadership, meaning we connect back to our own experiences with learning and change and stay open to input and feedback from others.
From the Trenches - What it Takes to Humanize the Work
At the end of each school year, we collect anonymous feedback from our staff. In 2016 there were a number of responses expressing concern about comments heard in teacher workrooms. It became clear that as a staff, we did not all have the same mindset about kids and our work with them. Instead of ignoring this problem or being frustrated by the negativity, we decided to address it directly. We presented our Instructional Council and our Team Lead Cohort with a draft list of “Mindset Commitments” that we believed were most important for guiding our interactions with students and each other, including “presume positive” and “conversation is the relationship”. The feedback from these groups was overwhelmingly positive and we presented them to the entire staff at the beginning of the next school year. Our Mindset Commitments have become a guiding force for our staff, and they help us stay internally accountable to the type of interactions we want to have as we collaborate. Since then, staff members have shared that they did not realize the impact their comments were having on others in the building, while others say the commitments have supported difficult but rewarding conversations with their colleagues. We humanized the work when instead of ignoring or fighting human nature, we created something that addressed and supported the needs of our staff.
Conclusion
We have been encouraged to find that our success is measurable in student achievement and staff morale data. In 2018, our pass rates increased in every content area and every subgroup, all while our employee engagement scores increased. We continue to learn, and we have goals that we have yet to reach. However, we continue to use the approach we have developed and believe that it makes all the difference in our ability to improve as a school. As a result of our experiences, we believe that the key to managing the complexity facing public schools today is not in reinventing the wheel, but rather in seeking to implement proven practices in a new, better way that mutually benefits students and educators.