I’m not sure when I first heard about Lindsay Unified School District.  Their work to shift towards personalized learning is often cited in broad reform conversations.  Sometimes, the work in Lindsay gets reduced by media to the “system that got rid of grades.”  Not exactly.

Today I finally got to visit Lindsay for myself.

There are a lot of things you could focus on when you come to Lindsay.  Some are of the shiny and exciting variety.  Open classrooms, proprietary learning software accessible across devices, and a just-published book by the Marzano Research Institute.  As impressive as those features may be, what catches my attention are those foundational shifts that are harder to see.  Here are three that struck me as essential.

Strategic Vision & Leadership Tenure

No big surprises here – Lindsay has had stable leadership at the superintendent level for a decade.  That’s a characteristic of high performing districts that has been well documented, and it’s certainly the case in Lindsay.  Furthermore, most of the leaders I spoke with, from district personnel to site leadership, were developed within the Lindsay system.

It was very clear that the starting point for Lindsay a decade ago was developing shared core values, guiding principals for learning, and clarity around the graduate profile.  Those founding documents are often the first things that go out the window when there are disruptions in leadership.  The stability of top leadership has allowed the vocabulary of the vision and corresponding strategic documents to seep deep into the professional culture.  Nobody in Lindsay talks about students or teachers.  They refer to learners and learning facilitators.  The six word mission statement – “empowering and motivating for today and tomorrow” – has been a guiding statement for over a decade.

As one teacher we talked to more bluntly put it.  “Lindsay is stubborn.  Our board and superintendent are stubborn.  Unlike every other system I’ve worked in, they developed a vision and keep at it.  You can’t escape it.  If you don’t like it, you leave, because it isn’t going away.  And I believe in it.”

Aligned Curriculum System

In terms of teaching and learning, Lindsay has shifted to a truly transparent, standards-based curriculum.  That’s easily the feature of the Lindsay story that was most impressive to me – because as a teacher and administrator myself, I know how hard that work is.  Really hard.

Each class is defined by a set of learning targets, pegged directly to the standards, that outlines the learning that is expected.  It has taken Lindsay Unified several years to outline the evidence that they want to see in order to certify that students have demonstrated mastery or proficiency of those targets.  I’ve rarely walked into a high school where every course has a clear standards-aligned syllabus that was accessible to students.  At best, these types of planning documents exist behind the scenes as teacher artifacts that don’t carry real meaning to students.  At worst, there is no deliberate connection between the standards and what happens in the classroom.  If Lindsay Unified had done nothing beyond ensuring a high-quality, standards-aligned curriculum across their 4,000 student system, it would be considered a success.

You really can’t talk about shifting ownership of learning to students when it isn’t clear where the path goes and what success looks like.  And the details matter.  I refer to those details as the three pillars of competency-based learning: standards-aligned targets, high quality assessments, and accessible content.  I think Lindsay has the targets and assessments to a high degree, and they are constantly trying to build their capacity to discover and design the content.

Systemic Willingness to Learn

There is a fine balance to walk between stubborn adherence to core values and guiding principals, and stubborn unwillingness to change course when the data and lived experience suggest something isn’t working.

I heard some interesting quotes over the course of our visit.

“Those were some painful years.”

“We found that out the hard way.”

“It’s tough because a lot gets asked of us.”

Those are statements that reflect the reality of a learning organization.  You are constantly leaning into the unknown.

Richard Elmore uses the sentence frame – “I used to think, but now I think…” to give space to the hard fought learning and insight that comes despite our original assumptions.  I heard several examples of this during my visit to Lindsay.  Both teachers and administrators referred to the original mantra “every student learns at their own pace.”  The vision was oriented towards individual students progressing independently.   You might have students all over the map in terms of their progress.  That’s certainly the image that pops in my mind when I think of true competency-based learning.

Interestingly, Lindsay has adjusted their mantra.  Now they say, “teacher pace or faster.”  An acknowledgement that teachers can offer needed structure and accountability to move students forward, especially for those students who haven’t yet developed the motivation or executive functioning to actively monitor their progress.  “Teacher pace or faster” may not be as attractive a slogan as “every student at their own pace,” but it’s a design principle that has emerged from real system learning.

I stole that title from a truly phenomenal high school social studies teacher.  On the books, Ben taught AP Government.  But we all know that wasn’t exactly what was going on in his classroom. Dissent & Control was the title of the senior research project in Ben’s class.  The essential question was how we balance, as a country, the need to control opinions & behaviors with the right to dissent, protest, and disagree.

Managing Ben, quite frankly, could be tough.  He has the heart of an activist.  During the Occupy Movement, he sometimes spent his afternoons and evenings across the Bay at the encampment in downtown Oakland.  I didn’t ask too many questions, just encouraged him to make sure he was available and present for his students – which he always was.  But often when we proposed changes, Ben voiced concerns.  On our Instructional Leadership Team, sometimes Ben was the lone vote for dissent.

Ben didn’t believe the AP curriculum was adequate.  When our charter management organization entered into a grant agreement to boost AP scores using a common curriculum, it created tension.  As a small charter management organization, our principal team was usually at the table when binding decisions on curriculum were made.  Some members of the team expressed concern that I would allow a hold-out.  I myself had moments of doubt – wondering whether it would be in the best interest of the school and students to either force a strict adherence to the AP curriculum or move him from teaching seniors.

Yet, in many ways, Ben was one of the most essential members of our faculty.  If we truly aspire to teach critical thinking as a habit of mind, then Ben represented the best of what is possible.  He taught kids to question, inquire, push for clarification, and then probe even deeper.  He equipped students with a set of analytical skills and tools that would serve them throughout their lives.  That’s not just my interpretation of Ben’s impact – it’s all the things I heard students say about their experiences in his classroom.

As a teacher leader, Ben invited us to see another perspective, consider alternative explanations, and to never forget that social justice is how we live our lives and not just our curriculum. Over time, I would sometimes play out different scenarios in my mind in anticipation of how I might respond when Ben voiced his dissent.  It was an intellectual practice that continually strengthened my own decision-making process.

As administrators, we make decisions on a regular basis that balance individual student needs with the health of a school community or larger organization.  We weigh the financial health of a public institution with the needs of our students – needs that always outpace our ability to address them.  I wonder if I’m not being vocal enough when decisions are made that I perceive as harmful or unfair.  At other times, I wonder if we are ceding too much decision-making to the data – as if numbers bore the whole truth or didn’t play favorites.

I often find myself walking that delicate balance between dissent and control in my own personal political life.  I’m feeling a pull towards dissent that I really have never experienced as acutely as I am experiencing now.  Some mornings I wake up feeling like I will have let my family, community, and country down if I don’t do something or say something.  I know I need to speak out – but I also wonder how much noise to make.

I’m sure Ben wondered too.  I know there were plenty of moments when he felt a surge of genuine concern or anger about a decision that was being made.  He wasn’t afraid to vocalize his perspective.  I’m sure Ben probably felt, at times, that his job might be on the line.  And quite frankly, he would have been right.  But to his credit, and I hope to mine, we persisted together.

In the end, I think it made both of us better.

How do you respond when someone asks how you are doing?

“Things are a little crazy, but I’m doing well.”

“I’m doing fine, just really busy.”

“Good, although I’ve got back to back meetings this morning.”

I’ll speak for myself when I say that there are countless temptations every day to refer to my level of “busy-ness.”  Markers of “busy-ness” show up in our choice of vocabulary and topics of conversation.  Both in our professional and personal lives, “busy” can become shorthand for how we talk to each other.

“Man, life is busy” could be innocuous small talk.  Just a friendly way to build on common experiences with the people we interact with each day.  But sometimes I’m suspicious that the constant talk of more to do then we have time to do it reveals something deeper.  I’m not a psychologist, but I wonder if it has to have something to do with an emotional need to present our contribution as valuable, or perhaps to remind people that we’re pulling our weight.  In a highly regulated labor environment like public schools and classrooms, we associate value with time worked and not necessarily with outcomes achieved.  It’s baked into our contracts and our professional culture.  In Santa Ana, we even share a funny line about how employment is measured in dog years – every year in Santa Ana is the equivalent of 7 years somewhere else.

It could be that we happen to work in an profession and environment as teachers and educators where we feel starved for the public recognition and financial support that our work deserves.  In other words, our individual need to prove our worth is a miniature version of our collective need to prove that education is a real profession on par with other professional fields.  It could be that the expectations for what an educator should be responsible to accomplish – singlehandedly overcoming the impacts of intergenerational poverty, systemic racism, or family disfunction, for example – are not entirely reasonable.

Even if some of that existential need to share how busy we are is the result of legitimate stresses of the work we do – I think expressing our busy-ness actually makes the situation worse.  The way we talk influences the way we think and feel about our work.    Our language seeps into and shapes our classroom, school, and organizational cultures.  And it doesn’t build empathy in the way we think and hope it does.  At best, it reinforces a sense that value is measured in hours worked and not on impact.  We start narratives about teachers who leave early or stay late, without much good data to inform us who, actually, is making a bigger difference in the classroom.  At worst, we’re perceived as whiners, setting us up collectively for the inevitable comparisons between other industries and professions and our relatively short working days or calendar years.

As a former high school principal and currently as a supervisor of principals, I know firsthand that running a school is a time-intensive endeavor.  I have a lot of empathy when a principal shares the extent of their busy-ness – and I don’t have to doubt their frustration that they simply can’t do it all.  At the same time, the ability to manage a resource as precious as your time is a marker of your leadership skill set.  Everyone is busy.  Everyone is overworked – and yet in that context some leaders move organizations much further than others.

So yes, I’m busy.  Life is crazy right now.  But it’s the work I chose and the work I love – and I have just as much time as anybody else.