Nearly 5 years ago, I sat in a lecture hall at the Department of Government at Harvard University to listen to Margaret Spellings, who served as the Secretary of Education towards the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.  I expected her to come in the spirit of reflection, engaging us in a discussion about what went right and what went wrong with No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  From my educator perspective, I thought there was certainly a lot of room for improvement and plenty of critique to go around.

What I got was a campaign ad.  Ms. Spellings was unflinching in her defense of NCLB.  Of course I came in the role of a practitioner, someone familiar with the nuts and bolts of the law and its implications on the ground for educators and students.  Ms. Spellings was much more interested in NCLB as a case-study in effective policymaking.  “Love it or hate it, NCLB has been a game-changer.”  Her assertion was that very few pieces of policy had resonated and traveled as broadly and deeply as NCLB.  She even jokingly offered us NCLB paraphanelia, reminding us that NCLB was more than a policy.  It was a brand.  “We need more NCLB, not less.”

I thought of that encounter this morning as I was engaged with colleagues from six of the largest school districts in California in a discussion about teacher and principal evaluation systems.  We are all in the process of developing meaningful systems for assessing performance, providing feedback, and encouraging professional growth with the aim of dramatically increasing student performance. We’re making progress, but we do so while walking the narrow ledge that drops off into quantitative oblivion.  Multiple measures of student achievement quickly melt back into a single composite index that’s easy to understand and quantify but relatively useless in practice.  Questions of teacher and principal efficacy can quickly deteriorate into arbitrary conversations about cut scores and variable weighting.

We need systems that paint as complete a picture as possible, capturing the complexity and nuances of the classroom.  We need systems that bolster the professionalism and prestige of educators – not reduce them to a number.  We all wait, a bit nervously, to see what the newest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will bring.  Let’s hope it’s not just a brand.

On the first morning of school as a high school principal, I stood outside the front entrance, enthusiastically greeting my students as they came for the first day of instruction.  While I had worked as an intern on a middle school admin team during the prior year, I had never been a full-time vice principal.  You can imagine the combination of emotions I was feeling as students streamed past.  I had high aspirations for my own performance and for the learning of my students, combined with genuine nervousness.  I was now responsible for the success of an entire high school.

My morning contemplation was interrupted by a high pitched scream.  As I quickly scanned for the source of the commotion, a young man walked past, blood across his face.  I was quickly forced from a disposition of friendly meet and greet to one of gravity and concern.  I spent the next 90 minutes investigating, interviewing (or perhaps more accurately, interrogating), and processing those involved with what turned out to be the first fight of the year.   The day pressed on, filled with hundreds of interactions with students, parents, and staff.  Some conversations required a spirit of understanding and empathy, others necessitated I be more decisive and directive.  This affective roller coaster was a daily experience.

After six weeks, I was exhausted.  Every statement I made was open to public scrutiny, and every decision carried with it implications for my leadership practice.  On many evenings, and occasionally accompanied by tears, I would come home and slump on the couch feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of the leadership task before me.  My typical spirit of confidence and enthusiasm was under serious bombardment.  I lived with the relentless sense that my students needed more from me and I was struggling to deliver.

One afternoon, as I supervised after-school dismissal, the principal of the school that shared our campus came to talk to me.  Perhaps sensing my struggles, he asked me how I was doing.  My short response of “I’m hanging in there” belied a deeper feeling of inefficacy.  Thankfully, this veteran principal ignored my superficial response.  “You know Daniel, it wasn’t until my third year that I realized that being a principal is an impossible job.  Once I reconciled myself to the fact that I couldn’t meet everyone’s expectations of me all of the time, I was able to focus on the most important things to move the school forward.”

Principals, like teachers, always live with a nagging sense that their best is not enough.  In our most under-resourced schools and in the lives of our most challenged students, our fledgling efforts may indeed fall short of what is truly needed. Yet we persist in the face of that difficulty.  Our students have no choice but to persist, and we must match their resilience with a professional commitment to push through our challenges and feelings of self-doubt until we possess the skill and perspective to doggedly focus on what matters most.

It was a Friday morning, and I had simply been too busy during the week to arrange a time to test out the technology.  I was scheduled to give a presentation to the 140 elementary students in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades at our Advanced Learning Academy (ALA).  The trick was that students would be located in 6 different classrooms, and I would need to broadcast my presentation to all classrooms simultaneously.  The goal was to have an engaging, thought-provoking interaction with the kids, and I had 60 minutes to work with.

I was nervous.  Of course there was the content of my lesson about what it means to be a “pioneer.”  Certainly the students and teachers at our Project Based and Blended Learning focused ALA qualify as pioneers, and I wanted to explore some of the history of pioneers and the emotional challenges associated with doing something first.  Yet here was a situation where I wasn’t just using technology as an add-on.  I needed it to communicate, and the kids would need it to wade into the internet search waters to learn about pioneers in ways that interest them individually.

The trick in these types of situations is not expertise – it’s having a team that is willing to experiment and learn together.  Luckily, the team of teachers at ALA are some of the most flexible, willing-to-experiment-and-learn professionals I’ve had the opportunity to work with.  So I arrived a little early, hoping I could make Google Hangouts work for my simultaneous broadcast.  We spent 15 minutes running around from classroom to classroom, double-checking invitations and coordinating start times.  Somehow, by 8:15, we had all 6 classrooms broadcasting.

I was in one of the classrooms with an in-person audience of 5th graders.  The other teachers were texting the teacher in the classroom in which I was stationed.  “We can barely hear him!”  Within a minute, the school program coordinator came into the room with a mic from her purse.  “Try this,” was her invitation as she passed it to me.  Later into the presentation, another message came that they wanted to try having me ask and answer live questions with students in other classrooms.  So we tried.  The teacher quickly figured out that the interaction was easier if she had the student walk up next to the large screen from which I was being broadcasted.  The student waved into the screen as the image rotated amongst the 5 other classrooms.

60 minutes later, and feeling relieved, we had been successful.  Students had watched video shared from my computer about Jackie Robinson and Marie Curie, they had refined internet search terms using their Chromebooks to define what it means to be a pioneer, and they had written and reflected on how they themselves were pioneers as the first cohort of students at the school.  Not only did we learn together, but we had some fun doing it.

It’s easy to simply keep doing what we’re comfortable with.  It can be a bit frightening when others look to us as the experts, while we ourselves are trying something new.   Quite frankly, sometimes we’ll fail.  Regardless of the risks, there is a thrill that comes with pushing ourselves to learn something new in ways that enhance student learning.  Hopefully we are surrounded, as I was, by a similarly flexible-minded team who can give us formative feedback and support as we move forward together.

As we learn and deepen our expertise, what was once fresh learning becomes implicit.  For example, it’s hard for me to remember what it felt like to be a novice behind the wheel.  Over the course of years and countless trips in the car, my brain and corresponding muscle movements have deeply ingrained in my memory what was once completely new and foreign to me.  While my wife might disagree, I have become an expert driver.

Of course constant repetition is one way to commit new learning to long term memory.  While there are other strategies that can enhance memory, most of them require some type of mental reworking of the material.  Summarizing in writing, visual cues, and revisiting notes before bed, are all in essence a deliberate review of new material.

Some of the most dynamic and influential mentors in my life made a habit of using a journal to reflect and help move new learning into long term memory. Journaling certainly qualifies as a powerful strategy for consolidating learning. While I have long had a habit in my personal life of journaling, my professional record of journaling is more hit and miss.  I was especially vigilant as a graduate student working on my master’s degree in School Leadership, and thought it might be fun to revisit and share some of my most influential reflections during that year of study.  I called it my School Leadership Processing Journal, and combined visual and written cues to keep it interesting.

So here’s my post from Day 1 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  We started with big questions about our purpose – not just why we were studying school leadership, but to really ask ourselves about our driving purpose.  What do we hope to accomplish with our lives, and how is that related to our professional work and identity?  The question of leadership becomes how we shift our core values into the shared goals of an organization.