One of the key leadership practices that forms part of the Instructional Leadership Cycle is the principal summit.   This annual practice encourages principals and department directors alike to capture and share the vision for the school or department, and lays out the strategic objectives that they anticipate will lead to improvement.  While most leaders carry an implicit vision in their minds, the summit is designed to make that vision explicit to the school community.  It represents an opportunity to practice and refine how you talk about your school and your focused efforts to improve.  It provides a general overview – what you are working on, why you are working on it, and what you are planning to do.  

The principal summit is also one of my favorite moments with members of my leadership team.  In the context of the Lincoln School where I currently am the General Director, we gather offsite and run through a protocol that allows each school principal and department director the opportunity to share their vision for the team and department that they lead.  We leave time for questions and feedback.  This process creates a collective sense of purpose and helps us better understand the priorities and improvement strategies of our colleagues.  

The day to day operational demands of a school can be so intense, that having the protected time and space to share such big picture thinking can easily get crowded out of the agenda.  Developing institutional clarity about plans for improvement and growth requires not only good ideas and clear thinking, but written overviews and opportunities to then share plans with stakeholders, get critical feedback, then revise and strengthen plans.  All of those steps require time and space.  

I look forward to the opportunity each year to hear and see the vision each of our directors has developed in collaboration with their teams.  Armed with our strategic plan for the entire organization, we can ensure that our areas of focus align with our strategic anchors, all in an effort to build coherency throughout the organization.  

One of the pillars of our strategic plan calls for a holistic, student-centered educational program and experience for our students.  More specifically, we explicitly outline our desire for a more inclusive school community, where all of our students have a genuine sense of belonging and can thrive as they grow and develop.  Our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as a school include increasing the diversity of our student population and developing policy that ensures we are an inclusive school in practice.  

Those aspirations were in part responsible for our decision to invest in the International Baccalaureate’s comprehensive “Diversity and Inclusion in the IB” session, for our entire secondary team.  The session took us through a full review of what inclusion means, how it is applied in different contexts, how the IB program supports inclusion, and how schools can foster an inclusive learning environment.  On day one, our session leader asked a critical question, “what are the elements of a strong system of inclusion.”  A fascinating discussion followed, as our staff discussed their perspectives on what it takes to foster an inclusive school.  

Of course to my mind came a few technical aspects of being a strong inclusive school.  Specifically, the presence of high quality inclusive instructional practices that form the foundation of what happens in every classroom across the school.  Perhaps more commonly referred to by educators as Tier 1 instruction, the idea is that the every student in every classroom has access to a skilled professional who integrates inclusive practice into his or her daily instruction.  Yet, for as good as that foundational practice might be, there will inevitably be students whose unique challenges and strengths push for additional support.  To that end, a strong inclusive school has developed a comprehensive system of services and supports, informed by expert experience and knowledge, that can provide the right services to complement what is happening in the classroom.  

While we certainly discussed these matters, an even more urgent suggestion came forward, pointing out that it is the collective sense of purpose amongst the school community.  A shared “why” so to speak, that drives any commitment to a set of inclusive practices.  It is a commitment to a shared universal high regard for all students.  In other words, we pursue inclusion out of a genuine love and desire to serve every student we have the privilege to have on our campus.

I talk a lot about magic.  That’s what happens when your dad was a magician, and one of his favorite sayings was to remind me that “everyone has a magic show.”  Dad was a strictly strengths-based kind of person.  He usually looked past any potential weaknesses or flaws, choosing to see the best version of the people he worked with.  I talk about him a lot, including at work.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when our Human Resources department took up the magic theme to inspire our staff back to school launch.

Traditionally at Lincoln, we welcome our entire staff back with a breakfast and a morning of team building.  In 2020, in the midst of a job transition and completely virtual school, our welcome back was a series of introductions via a call on Microsoft Teams.  In 2021, my first year to welcome staff in-person, we added back the breakfast and my vision presentation, which I always refer to as the leadership summit.  It is designed to remind staff about our strategic priorities and build a shared vision around improvement for the coming year.  The whole experience lasted less than a full morning, but it was a fun way to kick off the year and remind everyone about the importance of our shared work.  

This year, we were able to put the entire experience back together for our team.  Our team building took the form of a full out magic show, integrated with insights into the power of team work.  At one point, I even had to put on the magicians cape and go on stage to help with one of the acts.  For a magician’s son, I’m quite pathetic at magic.  I have always loved watching magicians, including my dad, but I simply never had much interest in pursuing it myself.  Our magician to launch the school year, who was quite good, was in complete agreement that I had little to offer in the way of stage magic.  But it was still a lot of fun.  My dad always closed his show with the Chinese Linking Rings, so perhaps it was apropos that I was invited onstage to demonstrate my magic abilities with a rif on a metal ring trick.  

The event itself was an example of the very thing we were encouraging – “the magic of team work.”  My management practice is one that seeks to give authority and autonomy to my department leaders so that they can carry the vision and the work forward within their sphere of responsibility and influence.  That’s precisely what our human resources team was demonstrating, designing a morning full of good food, smiles, laughs, introspection, and reflection on the importance of the work we do as a team every day.   

Last month I had the privilege of watching two of our Lincoln staff members present their work at the annual Tri-Association conference in Panama City.  The session was focused on how to develop independent writing in our youngest learners.  Specifically, participants were given an inside look at how one of our first grade teachers, with the support of an early learning coach, was able to support students in elevating their writing and literacy skills.  It was an incredible learning session, and I wanted to share some of my reflections and takeaways.  

The pair explained how many of our favorite fairy tales and childhood stories have countless creative versions all riffing on the same foundational story.  Whether it is The Three Little Pigs, or the Gingerbread Man, it seems that children’s literature authors love to think of new and creative ways to present old favorites.  Why not have students similarly get creative about these familiar stories?  Basically, students built up to publishing their own children’s stories, moving from the short 3-4 sentence writing tasks that are common in many classrooms to writing an entire book with a full story arc.  I had three big takeaways from the session.  

High Expectations 

Our classroom teacher mentioned on several occasions that she just wasn’t sure if students could produce the quality and volume of writing that would be required to produce a full book.  With faith in her students’ capacity and with the encouragement of our early learning coach, she jumped in anyway, and was repeatedly impressed but how much her students were both able and eager to produce.  She realized that sometimes as teachers we might artificially lower our expectations, out of a genuine concern that we will push students too hard.  The flip side of that concern is a committment to ensuring that students are supported to their full potential, even when that sometimes requires that they move through uncertainty and even some productive discomfort.   

Endless Variety

On several occasions, our teacher said, “if students can say it, they can write it.”  Funny enough, students can say a lot, and thus they can produce a lot of writing.  The creative part of the process is in designing lots of different, engaging learning activities to help students with that literacy production.  This was really the heart of the session, and the fun part two.  There were pages of different ideas, and we had the chance to practice several of them.  My favorite was the “retelling bracelet.”  Basically, we used beads of different colors and shapes to represent the key elements of the Three Little Pigs, with the end product being a bracelet that we could use to help us retell our story.  It was brilliant!    

The Power of Coaching

My final takeaway was really just a reminder that when the coach/teacher relationship is really working, magical things can happen.  Of course perhaps the most challenging part of coaching is navigating those relationships with teachers; there is never a guarantee that a genuine professional working relationship will develop.  But when it does it makes a huge difference.  It was really powerful to see our teacher and coach working as a team in their presentation, sharing both of their perspectives about what it takes to create a learning environment that promotes both joy and rigor for all students.  It also reminded me of the importance of mindset – here we had a teacher whose willingness to consider alternate methods and try new things led to some really powerful learning.  And this, mind you, from a very experienced and talented teacher.  

There’s sometimes a lot of hand-wringing amongst ed reformers about the connection between the traditional school year and the agrarian cycle.  The idea is that our Labor Day to Memorial Day school calendar is the remnant of food production cycles, when children and young people were needed during the later summer months to contribute on the family farm.  While that may be the genesis of the school calendar, it hardly seems like its much of a driving force these days.  Just because it started that way, doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve kept it simply out of custom or convenience.

There is, of course, some legitimate concern with what is known as the “summer slide.”  Under conditions of limited resources, it makes sense to look at low cost interventions that might have an outsize positive impact on learning outcomes.  The logic goes that you could simply do some shifting of the calendar with the same number of work days and carve away at the long summer break that is responsible for learning loss.  Many schools and districts have done precisely that, building in a fall break and a longer winter recess to cut back the number of weeks of summer.  Personally, I love our 5 week winter recess at my current school, and that leaves just a 7 week summer break.  

Moving to a shorter summer also allows for the extension of the school year.  This is a more robust intervention, albeit an incredibly pricey one.  Adding 20 days to the school calendar would logically add at least 10% of the entire annual budget.  In one of my former districts where we negotiated an additional two days to the annual calendar, teachers received a 6% salary increase and hourly employees had their daily rate extended.  It was a very pricey intervention. From the moment the agreement was signed, moving from a 180 to a 182 school day calendar, everybody seemed to talk about going back to 180 days.  Unsurprisinginly, teachers weren’t terribly excited about it.  The community seemed a bit indifferent about the whole thing, as families still had to scramble for summer school programs, if they wanted to participate at all, which many of them opted not to.  Eventually, when state budgets got tight (which they always do in the somewhat predictable cycle of school funding), those two days were first turned back into teacher professional development days and then cut out of the calendar altogether.   It was a relatively short-lived experiment.  

It seems that the idea of a summer break away from school has embedded itself into how we think about schooling and childhood.  While it is certainly true that for many families living in poverty, summer might not be a mythical place of family vacations and long lazy afternoons by a pool, it may also be true that families across the socioeconomic spectrum see some value in having a longer break from formal schooling.  Most working adults can tell you that the constancy of the work calendar year after year leaves little space for ideas of transformation and new beginnings.  Life can seem at times to just melt together when you remove the milestones and benchmarks of more periodic cycles.  

I can’t help but wonder if there is some wisdom in the broader cycles of nature that led to the agrarian school calendar in the first place.  The school year gives a clear sense of beginnings and endings that punctuate our childhoods.  There is a real sense of anticipation for the school year, with a chance for reinventing ourselves, starting with a fresh slate, and taking on new independence and responsibility as we move from grade to grade.  Sometimes the cynics in us point to purely mechanistic reasons for the way we structure schools into grades and semesters.  “We’re training you for the industrial complex,” goes the saying.  I tend to see it more as a progressive, upward developmental cycle as our skills build.  In a world that is increasingly individualistic, the common rites of passage of school are some of the few collective experiences we have left.  In our rush to maximize and optimize learning, we might be breaking down the very things that hold us together.  

Yes, perhaps I too get a little too enthusiastic about matters of school calendars.  I can’t help but get excited at the launch of the school year.  It is a time of new possibilities to be sure.  I remember the transition from elementary to junior high, when it seems most of the young women got the message simultaneously to cut their hair short and go for a new look along with starting at a new school.  I took advantage of the transition to high school to shed my thick pair of eyeglasses and go for contact lenses, hoping that I would come back a somewhat reinvented version of myself.  In some ways, it felt like it worked.  I hope we don’t try to amalgamate schools into individualized pathways with no space for collective rites of passage.  Nostalgia aside, I still love that feeling of anticipation and possibility on the eve of a new school year.  

Yesterday morning I spent some time observing two of our classrooms in the high school.  In the first room, a design class, students were finalizing a design project that required them to transform a sketch into a design prototype.  Students had been granted the autonomy to pursue their own design as well as use prototyping materials of their choosing.  Once the prototype was complete – as most of them were during my visit – students were required to prepare a formal reflection on their process of taking a sketch to a physical prototype.  

I started asking students about their projects.  One of the students had a prototype of a cereal box sitting on the desk.  Perhaps it caught my attention because in some ways it was a very simple design.  When I asked the student about it, she quickly pointed my attention to a QR code on the box that brought up an audio recording, with the hope that blind people could have access to the information.  She was working out some of the details, and was cognizant of the fact that QR codes are a visual cue that are not always accessible to the blind.  Regardless, she was passionate in her pursuit of a design whose primary purpose was to enhance access for the visually impaired.

After spending some time interacting with students, I went into the classroom next door.  This was a new media class, and again students were working independently on a project.  In this case, they were working on scripts for an awareness campaign.  Apparently, after some discussion, the class had settled on the topic of inclusion as the focus of the campaign.  As I talked with some of the students, they showed me their script storyboarding brainstorms, full of ideas about how to encourage fellow students to be more aware of both the challenges and resources available associated with student special needs.  

On a random day, in a pair of random classrooms, I stumbled upon students actively engaged in thinking about how we can make our classrooms, our school, and our world, a more inclusive place.  It definitely put a smile on my face to see that the work is moving forward at the classroom level with students.  Of course we still have lots of work to do, but it was a welcome manifestation of our collective intentions as a school community.  

This past week was semana cívica or “Civics Week” in Costa Rica.  The week is punctuated by a number of patriotic and independence related traditions.  Most of those traditions center around schools.  Independence Day itself is celebrated on September 15^th, and schools engage universally in actos cívicos or a civic assembly where students perform traditional music and dance and share thoughts about the values of democracy and national pride.  The day prior children all over the country carry their faroles or lanterns in remembrance of those who now over 200 years ago walked to share the news of independence.  An annual torch run and lighting is also part of the festivities on the night before, again often centered around school communities.  The week is filled with a focus on traditional foods, music, and clothing.  

What has struck me now that I have been here for 3 years of civics week, is how in many ways independence in Costa Rica is a celebration of children.  The majority of events and traditions center around schools.  In fact, historically the day was a national holiday for everyone but teachers – who had to work on the 15^th to allow for all of the festivities to happen.  Teachers then had the 16^th as a work holiday.  The idea of democracy and freedom is very much tied to the idea of universal education and the need to secure for our children the rights and freedoms that we have enjoyed.  There is an innocence and earnestness to the idea of independence, one that seems to focus on the responsibility to teach successive generations that freedom cannot be taken for granted.  

At Lincoln, semana cívica was also the week for student government debates and elections in the secondary school.  It has always struck me as interesting that in these elections, it is not individual students running for office, but for a team of students who collectively develop and debate a platform.  The idea is that governance is not the work of individuals, but of a group that works as a team to implement changes and improvement.  It’s a subtle but significant difference in how Costa Ricans orient themselves to public offices and the responsibilities of political leadership.  I remember well student council elections of my youth, where campaign and poster signs focused on individual students.  You voted for a single candidate.  Here, campaign slogans, debates, and even the election itself is focused on the group.  Nobody gets into student office by themselves.  It’s a team.  

It’s a powerful lesson in how culture and tradition can shape democracy and politics in different ways.  I remember in the run up to the presidential election earlier this year, that someone sat down to explain to me how political parties worked here in the country.  Instead of a spectrum, from left to right like you might find in the United States, they showed me a quadrant.  It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but essentially they map both a political spectrum and a social conservativism spectrum.  Costa Ricans are generally much more open to political solutions that would be considered left of center in the United States.  Universal health care is not debated here, it is embedded in the psyche of what it means to have good government.  It would be a mistake, however, to associate a left-leaning party with social liberalism.  For example, presidential elections typically include an evangelical party openly campaigning for conservative social values associated with a particular religion.  In the United States, it might be strange to have an evangelical political party, and even stranger to have one that supports universal health care.  Not so in Costa Rica.

Semana Cívica is definitely a highlight for me here in Costa Rica.  While the politics are certainly different, Costa Ricans hold a strong collective commitment to the principles of democracy – principles that they are eager to pass on to the next generation.  

We welcomed back our teacher leaders nearly six weeks ago as we prepared for the launch of the school year, and I can’t express just how incredible it was to jump right into matters of instructional practice.  We had entire sessions looking at the framework for student-centered instruction that we are developing at Lincoln.  I don’t think I heard the word COVID during the entire session.  The past two years, our school launch was dominated by the specter of COVID.  Schools around the world were mired in matters of logistics – social distancing and mask-wearing alone occupied countless planning meetings to determine how to structure everything, from student dropoff and pickup, to managing passing periods and lunch, to protocols for classroom management.  One year ago at this time we were building makeshift classrooms and walking around campus with a 2 meter stick to verify distances between tables and chairs.  

Instead of endless question and answer sessions on how we were going to enforce COVID protocols, we spent our preparation days talking about rigor and inclusion in the classroom.  Teachers talked about their “go to” instructional strategies, and began work on classifying where their favorite practices matched up with our schoolwide framework for student-centered instruction.  Our principal team modeled a number of practices themselves, from a quality group Word Sort, to the classic Think Write Pair Share (one of my favorites – I want to name a school “Think Write Pair Share high school,” although I’m not sure what our mascot would be), to a Gallery Walk to share and consider group work, to an exit ticket to close out the session.  It felt like we were doing the essential work that schools are meant to do – plan for outstanding instruction and student learning.  

A few weeks ago we closed out our summer entrepreneurship camp experience.  We had students from 10 different schools across San Jose join us for the 2-week intensive camp.  Students participate in a series of curriculum modules designed in partnership with Babson College, the #1 university in the world for entrepreneurial education.  Over the course of 3 years, roughly 3 dozen of our teachers have been certified in the Babson methodology for teaching entrepreneurship, and our summer camp is just one of the ways that we make the experience accessible for our own Lincoln students and others across the country and the region.  

The camp experience culminates on the last day with a Rocket Pitch session.  Similar to what you might see on an episode of Shark Tank, teams of students walk the audience through a pitch deck in front of a panel of entreprenuerial innovators from the field.  After sharing their big ideas, the students receive feedback from members of the panel.  At one point, our director of innovation and entrepreneurship leaned over to me to say “they are getting some pretty hard feedback from this panel.”  Honestly, that puts a smile on my face.

When it came my turn at the end to share a few words, I went back to this idea of hard feedback.  At Lincoln, we’re not just trying to integrate an entrepreneurship curriculum.  Yes, we definitely do that.  We have key conceptual learnings and projects strategically placed throughout the PreK – 12 continiuum.  Students start learning the key concepts from a very young age, with more sophisticated projects and venture competitions as the grow older and advance through the school.  

Yet just as important as a deliberate entrepreneurship curriculum, is the development of an entrepreneurial pedagogy.   This entrepreneurial pedagogy has found its way into our framework for student-centered instruction, and seeks to integrate instructional practices across all subjects that draw on entrepreneurial skillsets and mindsets.  Practices like ideation, rapid prototyping, rocket pitches, and design thinking protocols are just a few of the instructional strategies that we want to see more deeply integrated across the curriculum and grade levels.  

As I stood before our audience of students, parents, staff, and guest panel experts, I commented on the value of such an authentic performance assessment, like the rocket pitches students had just completed.  Like an athletic contest on the field or a music or dance concert on the stage, the rocket pitch provides students with an authentic audience and real-time feedback on their performance.  And that feedback is not just about a grade.  Rather, it is valuable information about how to strengthen ideas and projects for real world testing.  We’ve already seen students take projects that started in these developmental stages all the way to social and business ventures.

We’re still in the early stages of our entrepreneurial journey, but it is exciting to think about and see how we can develop entrepreneurial curriculum, instruction, and assessments to better prepare our students to make real contributions in the local and global communities that they are a part of.  

This is the blog post I have been waiting to make for 7 years.  I am crazy excited to announce that the Harvard Education Press is going to be publishing my first book, The Instructional Leadership Cycle, later this Fall!  This book and the framework for school improvement that I lay out are the culmination of two decades trying to bring about the instructional shifts and leadership practices that transform schools into equitable, student-centered places of joyful learning.  

The Instructional Leadership Cycle is a leadership framework that can guide K12 school and teacher leaders over the course of the school year towards instructional transformation across classrooms.  I walk readers through the major milestones of the annual school calendar, emphasizing the need to break the year down into smaller cycles of implementation, analysis, reflection, and improvement.  From the strategic planning work of the summer, to launching the school year with purpose and vision, to the conclusion of each improvement cycle with corresponding data analysis and adjustments, to finishing the school year strong, The Instructional Leadership Cycle provides the tools necessary to institutionalize ongoing organizational learning and improvement.  The book outlines both the genesis of the framework, as well as how it was taken to scale in one of the largest K12 school districts in California.  

The Instructional Leadership Cycle is rooted in the idea that as our modern society grows increasingly complex, students must develop ever more sophisticated analytical and problem-solving skills in order to succeed.  To meet this challenge, schools must improve and transform the learning experience of students.  To do this, schools must act as learning organizations that constantly analyze their own actions, identify gaps or problems of practice that impede instructional improvement, and outline and implement the theories of action that guide corresponding changes to enhance effectiveness.  Schools must therefore be in the business of learning – to adapt, to innovate, to prioritize, to problem-solve – if they are to survive.  In the context of schools, this improvement is measured by both student learning outcomes and students’ sense of belonging, which are largely dependent on improvements within a relatively specific set of relationships between students, teachers, and the content being learned.  Education researchers City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel conceptualized these relationships as the Instructional Core, and posited that in order to improve, schools must develop the theories of action that will result in improvement within the instructional core.  The Instructional Leadership Cycle provides a systematic structure for continually engaging team members in testing and adjusting their theories of action in pursuit of measurable improvement.  

I wrote the book for aspiring and practicing school and teacher leaders in K12 schools who want to see instructional transformation, accelerated student learning outcomes, and improvements in students’ sense of well being across classrooms.  It does this by equipping readers with the analytical tools and implementation practices that have been shown to improve outcomes for our students.  

Of course I couldn’t share this post without a shameless plug for picking up a copy.  You can preorder a copy of the Instructional Leadership Cycle by clicking on this link.  I hope you will read it and then put into practice the leadership strategies I share as you continue in your journey to create incredible schools that make a positive difference in the lives of young people, their families, and our communities.