I often tell new teachers and new principals that they should write down as much as they can about their experiences during the first year on the job.  You never get back to that same sense of awe and wonder about the magnitude of the task at hand.

I should take some of my own advice.

It’s been three months since I started my new role as an Assistant Superintendent of Teaching & Learning for the Santa Ana Unified School District.  I haven’t written much.  Yet to say that I’ve been learning a lot would be a gross understatement.  The learning curve has been steep.  Of course I’m generally confident in my professional endeavors, and typically feel like I thrive in a face-paced working environment, yet even by my own standards the intensity and demand of my new role has been humbling.

We like to throw around the term “lifelong learning” a lot as educators, as if it is a typically quaint experience.  But real learning is hard fought.  It’s not really learning if it’s something we already know or are able to do.  It has to take us across a gap between our current understanding and capacity towards something greater and deeper.  As adults, I find we often don’t embrace that journey quite as enthusiastically as children.  Being a lifelong learner is an easy thing to say but is predictably challenging in practice.  I have been trying to genuinely appreciate the new challenges and learnings that have been coming my way, and thought I would share just a few of them.

Pacesetting as new learning

Sometimes, it’s not learning new things that is required of us, but simply a compressed timeline for production.  Adjusting to work in a faster-paced environment can certainly qualify as new learning.  Prior to joining cabinet in SAUSD, I felt like I was sustaining an urgent pace in moving the work forward.  My own honest self-assessment was to feel that my workload and level of production were both adequate, if not going a little extra.  I’m having to re-consider that assessment given what I am asked to do now.  Simply put, the pace has been overwhelming.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  I remember clearly my experience as a new high school principal.  I would go home every day with an acute sense of all the things I had left undone.  I was particularly vexed on those days when I knew I had spent my time fighting fires as opposed to doing the longer-term work of building and refining systems.  A student fight or a complicated parent complaint might take me off my game for hours, if not the better part of a day.  Over time, as I was able to get more systems in place, the workload slowly became more manageable as incidents that required my immediate attention were decreased and our organizational capacity to do good work was strengthened.

What is most interesting to me is that the compressed timeline has little to do with deadlines or expectations placed on me by others.  The work itself – the urgency to establish a clear vision, align key initiatives and guiding documents, and have those plans in place as we budget and allocate resources, is driving the pace.  My concern is not that I’ll get in trouble if I don’t follow through.  My concern is that if I don’t produce and build consensus quickly enough, the window of opportunity will close.  The work moves on, steadily and without mercy.  The natural rhythm of the school year, the planning and budgeting cycle, or even a single board meeting cycle, requires tremendous professional stamina and fitness.  The moment one deadline comes and goes, the clock starts ticking for the next one.

Prioritization & Delegation

This may sound a lot about my previous thoughts on pacesetting, but I think there are some additional lessons I have been learning with regards to setting my priorities.  Leadership is a lot about time management and where we focus our attention.  How we choose to use our time is a direct reflection of our priorities and vision for the work.  Perhaps more than ever before, I literally cannot accomplish everything that I would like to.  I’m a people person and a problem solver, and when people come to me with challenges or concerns, by nature I want to help them.  I think that is a good instinct and a positive leadership quality.  But what happens when those requests become so numerous that to follow through personally places other priorities in danger, like personal health, time with family, or even more important work for moving the organization forward.  Worse, what happens when that instinct to jump into action undermines the development of independence and capacity in others who are capable of solving their own problems and challenges if you would let them.

I have never felt so acutely the need to effectively prioritize my attention and delegate appropriately.  Yet, it has also been causing me genuine anxiety.  Part of my leadership identity, I believe, has always been about providing personalized attention and feedback to those I lead and serve.  Responding to phone calls and emails, reaching out when I know someone is dealing with a challenge, those are the traits that I think got me this job in the first place.  No matter how much I may want to provide personalized attention, the simple calculus makes it impossible.  I’ve been fighting that for several months now.

With that said, I still find that taking time, even a few minutes each day, to make a personal connection with those doing the hard work, is still essential.  A phone call, a quick visit, or even a handwritten note.  As long as I am consistent with this every day, then it feels like I am a little ahead of the curve.  One of our major areas of instructional focus is providing “personalization” for our students, and so I have to try to model that – imperfect though it may be.

I also recognize that the real solution to my time limitations is found in building a more responsive team, who over time, collectively builds a more responsive system.  This is where the art of delegation comes in to play.  Admittedly, I’m not a great delegator.  There is a tricky balance between building your team and dumping on them.  Often in a fast-paced environment, delegation is relegated to email requests.  It certainly feels good to clear the decks with the touch of a button.  But I know better.  I know that every task has a context that almost always needs a conversation.  It’s dangerous when we don’t take the time to build the shared understanding about why the task is necessary and how it will move the work forward.  Of course, sometimes there are simple compliance tasks that don’t require tremendous clarification or shared purpose, but I find that most work is improved when we take the time to build some sense of meaning for it.  If I don’t have the time to have a conversation with someone about a task or situation, then what does that say about my priorities?

New appreciation for law and policy

I’m not really talking about law degrees and bar exams.  It’s the skill set of precise analysis and attention to detail and nuance that seems so essential.  One of the common ways I describe my new job is to say that I spend my day doing leadership work – coaching, encouraging, and often engaging in difficult conversation and giving hard feedback.  At night, after I put the kids to bed, I become a lawyer, as I review contracts and Memorandums of Understanding, board policies, ed code, board resolutions, and legal and legislative updates.  I’m getting an intense tutoring in the laws, policies, and regulations that frame public education, in a way I simply have not experienced in the past.

To some, that might sound a little depressing.  How could you sell out so quickly?  Certainly a primary critique of school districts is that they have lost sight of the needs of our children because they are so focused on compliance.  The assertion is that creativity, personalization, and student-centeredness have been replaced by institutional bureaucracy.  There is certainly some truth to that.  But my new job has opened my eyes to the world around me.  More than ever before, I find myself reflecting on the foundations of our social compact – the written agreements of law and policy – and find it concerning that I was so disconnected from how those foundational documents play themselves out in schools and classrooms.

It’s not always glamorous or pretty work.  At the cabinet level, we have plenty of discussions about accountability and compliance.  On more than one occasion, I have made a plea for an exception or special consideration given the unique circumstances of a student or school.  The retort is often “Daniel, our job is to understand and enforce the board policy – and so if you don’t like it, then you need to do the work to revise the policy.”  It has been sobering, and eye-opening for me personally.  This has forced me, in a short period of time, to become a serious student of law and policy, with the understanding that to move the work forward, I have to engage with the tools of governance – namely law and policy.  It doesn’t mean I’ve lost my innovative spirit or my willingness to find creative solutions to complex problems that a policy may never have anticipated.  It does mean that I’ve been learning a new set of leadership skills that are essential to do the work of transforming school districts at a deeper, more fundamental level.