One of my good friends from high school, an education visionary in his own regard, sent me an excited e-mail (if e-mails can have emotions) a few weeks back announcing his intention to put together a school design team to compete for the XQ super school competition.  I hadn’t yet heard of the XQ, but in opening my Facebook page I noticed several of my connections sharing the announcement that Laurene Powell Jobs was sponsoring a 50 million high school redesign competition.  I shared the idea with the deputy superintendent of Santa Ana Unified where I work, David Haglund, who enthusiastically invited me to put together a team and start the process of engaging students, community partners, and our own staff in putting together a proposal.

The XQ is an open invitation to design the next great American high school.  Of course it’s a call to innovate.  Yet it is an invitation that goes beyond setting aside convention. It is a call to draw on what we know about how students are motivated and learn, and then distill that knowledge into a viable educational program.  The design of the school is only half of the design challenge – building the organizational capacity to translate a plan into a sustainable, replicable school requires tremendous creativity and leadership.  To be frank, this sobering reality makes me think school districts were probably not the target audience of the XQ competition. Fairly or not, school districts are not always associated with nimbleness, flexibility, and risk-taking.

With that said, we’re in it to win it.  The XQ builds on our efforts to prioritize creative problem solving and engage our own students and community in conversations about their conceptions of the ideal high school learning environment.  Even more importantly, the design and development exercise will strengthen our organizational capacity to more tightly align our programs and systems with what we know about how students learn.  It’s a chance to approach our work with fresh eyes.  In this sense, the XQ is adding a fun twist to work that we already know we have to be doing.

So this is the first of multiple posts focusing on our journey to the XQ – how we turn both internally and externally to gather ideas, feedback, and insights to inform our design.  In reviewing application and promotional materials, we got a very clear sense that like us, the XQ values innovation not only in product but process as well.  We wanted to engage stakeholders in a process that would build excitement while simultaneously producing the data we need to make community-informed decisions.  We’re now engaging in a series of “design engagements” which represent our initial efforts to utilize a process that is both data rich and collaborative minded.  I’ve posted a video of our first design engagement.  Check it out.

“why we do, what we do every day…”

Click here to see Eddie share his thoughts on leadership

Managing other human beings is a tremendous privilege.  In schools, those who manage others are typically referred to as administrators – which I happen to think is an awful word.  It’s a word that does little to capture the deeply human and emotional challenge of leading any human endeavor.  Rather, use of the term administrator focuses us on the technical aspects of the work we do in schools – program administration and implementation, roll-out and accountability.  Of course technical and managerial know-how are key ingredients to successful leadership.  As we say in schools, you have to be able to get the buses running on time.  Similarly, financial mismanagement is what gets school leaders written up in the newspaper.  Not good.  Yet we know that leadership goes far beyond technical expertise.

Thoughts on leadership is a series of short videos designed to explore precisely what it means to exercise leadership in a way that motivates those around us, builds momentum towards common vision and goals, and ultimately gets the results that bring positivity into our work places.  It’s an opportunity to celebrate when we get leadership right.  Each month, I’ll interview a Santa Ana Unified employee who will share insights into the attributes and experiences of quality leadership that have built shared commitment and improved learning for our students.  I’m hoping to surface the stories of those who often work behind the scenes, whose contributions are critical to our success, and whose perspective on leadership can help us understand what it means to generate momentum and commitment throughout an organization.

I start this month with an interview with Eddie Leon, plant custodian at the district office on Chestnut St.  From my first day on the job, Eddie emerged as a talented and friendly team member.  His consistent enthusiasm for both his work and our shared mission of educating students rubs off on all of those who work with him.  I like to joke with him that aside from the superintendent, he is probably the most well known team member in the building.  I knew immediately when thinking about this project that I wanted to interview Eddie first.  I’m not sure Eddie knew what to expect with my request, and he kept reminding me that he was used to working in the background.  He didn’t disappoint.

Back in summer 2010, I had the chance to interview Lattie Coor, former president of Arizona State University, and Michael Cowan, superintendent of Mesa Public Schoosl, the largest school district in Arizona.  Both were unflinching in their belief that vision was the most crucial aspect of leadership.  A quick read of any leadership manual, or a quick listen to any leadership seminar will confirm vision as a preeminent practice.  Vision is the ability to articulate a future state in which we work better and do better work, and convince others that it can and will be the new reality.  Vision provides the energy, vitality, and enthusiasm to engage in the complex work of organizational improvement transformation.

Interestingly, many leadership programs are not in the business of developing the communication skills to clearly articulate a vision.  We might read about it in a book if we are lucky.  More likely we see leadership reduced to a combination of technical expertise, analytical thinking, and long work hours.  Perhaps that’s why I was surprised when the first assignment in graduate school was to develop vision speeches, practice them in front of our peers, and develop a rubric together for assessing the effectiveness and impact of our discourse.  It wasn’t always comfortable practicing in public, especially at first when we hardly knew one another.  It felt awkward giving honest feedback to other students – we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Ironically, it’s that honest feedback that can help reduce heartache in the long run.  Leaders in the real world are held to a high standard for their communication skills.  Better to hear the truth about our performance in the relative safety of a classroom than in the coldness of a job interview or in the silence of a meeting room.  It only makes sense that we would actually take the time to practice and adjust our technique as a part of our formal leadership training.

This was the moment I was afraid of.  The entire room was full of administrators around the district, and we had just finished taking a survey designed to reveal our greatest strengths as leaders.  We each received a report of our top 5  leadership attributes.  My #5 was an attribute I was well acquainted with, even though I’d hoped it wouldn’t show up.  Competitive.

I’m seriously competitive.  It’s in my bones.  My wife and close friends know this about me.  I cannot sit down to play a board game just for the fun of playing.  I want to win.  Even allowing my 5 year old to beat me in a game takes focus and concentration.  I can’t imagine how losing on purpose sends the right message.  We’re winners here.  I’m not proud of it, but this competitive drive is as natural a part of how I function as it is for me to walk on two feet.

So now the facilitator of our leadership attributes conversation asks those in the room who have competitive as a core characteristic to stand up.  There are nearly 50 people in the room, but only 3 of us stand up.  This is going to end poorly, I think to myself.  Then the facilitator points out there are two types of competitive people.  Type one are those primarily concerned with their own performance and not one-upping anyone else.  I’ll call them the benevolent competitors.  Type two competitors are those who feed off of the glory of victory.  It’s hard for them to watch others win.  After the difference was clarified, the facilitator asked all but the type two competitors to sit down.

I was the only person standing in the room.

Standing there, by myself, I was asked a few more questions. Frankly, I wasn’t ready for this group of people who didn’t know me very well to see the depths of my competitive nature.  I even tried to use some humor and an awkward no comment to deflect attention.  Great, now everyone knows I’m a jerk.

In the end, that very public confrontation with a part of me that I have tried to minimize in my leadership practice left me in a very reflective mood.  As I pondered the significance of my competitive spirit, I had something of an epiphany.  Yes, I’m naturally competitive.  I realized, however, that my natural inclination to victory has forced me over time to develop a very aware sense of the need to be humble.  Unchecked, ambition easily distills into arrogance, and I’m constantly striving to stay grounded and live with a grateful spirit for the people around me. I also realized that my competitive furnace produces the fire necessary to teach and lead through the long cycle of the school year.  I have an insatiable need to do good work, and that is a hunger that feeds those around me.

We often close ourselves from the hard feedback – the critique that lands hard because we know it is, at least partially, true.  We convince ourselves that as leaders, we need to always appear polished and free of flaws.  Perhaps ironically, it is our acknowledgment of our fallibility that makes us trustworthy.  In the end, those we work with know well our weak spots, and the real danger is in refusing to see those spots for ourselves.

Growth mindset is dead.  Really.

If you are an educator and haven’t heard about Carol Dweck and the concept of growth mindset, then you have been sleeping through the past five years of professional development.  These days, I rarely go to a meeting involving teachers where someone doesn’t extol the virtue of having a growth mindset.  I heard about growth mindset’s redemptive power no less than daily last week.

Let’s start with a quick review lesson.  Dweck’s research asserts that human beings can generally be divided into two categories.  Those with a “fixed” mindset are those who see their intelligence as a static, non-changing commodity that is continually tested or proved.  In other words, tests or challenges don’t develop intelligence, they reveal it.  It should come as no surprise then, that those with a fixed mindset really only want problems they already have the skills and knowledge to solve.  Anything more challenging is just a trap to make them look bad.  Then there are those with the “growth” mindset.   These people see a puzzle or test as an opportunity to learn and develop.  They see their brain as a muscle that gets stronger with each use.  Their sense of success is not in proving they are smart over and over again, but in the act of engaging challenging tasks.

Here’s the problem.  It’s dangerous for educators to have a growth mindset.  Teachers are rarely rewarded for taking risks and pushing themselves to learn new strategies and techniques.  We expect teachers to perform.  The “dog and pony show” is a ubiquitous term describing classroom observations and principal walkthroughs.  Time to look good.  Unless an administrator has earned a tremendous amount of trust, it is rare for a teacher to invite visitors to the classroom to provide feedback on what needs improvement.  Close the door.  Let me do my thing.

The problem is even more pronounced in how it applies to students.  Few educators would admit publicly that they don’t believe all children can learn.  Yet there is a difference between assuming all kids can learn and applying a growth mindset to the potential of our students.  We attribute static characteristics to kids and then layer on labels to make grouping as easy as possible.  “Smart” is a dangerous word both for those who are deemed worthy of its bestowal, and even more so for those who experience childhood without it.

Frankly, I think we’ve inoculated ourselves against considering the implications of truly having a growth mindset, both for ourselves and our students.  We don’t necessarily want to change – our practices, our beliefs, our security, our prejudices.  We don’t want your critical feedback. In fairness, few of us would stay in a relationship where we only received mean-spirited observations from our partner.  We can only take so many invitations for improvement before we need to hear that we are appreciated and valued.  I’ve often said that the most difficult aspect of being an administrator is balancing genuine and authentic appreciation with meaningful and honest critical feedback.  Yet I still can’t help but cringe a bit when I’m in a meeting where we make a passing reference to the importance of a growth mindset.  The more we use the term, the further we seem to get from what it really means.