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.  

I took nearly a year break from my weekly blog, and I’m increasingly feeling the pull to get back after it.  My break wasn’t really about taking a pause in my daily writing practice.  I still try to put in 30 minutes of writing early each morning.  I finished a book manuscript (more on that in the next post) and started on my next book project, which in those 12 months is already nearly halfway to completion.  

I think my pause was more about the self-imposed deadline of getting something up each week.    I wanted to step back for at least a few months to see if things in my daily and weekly routines would change significantly if I wasn’t putting pressure on myself to share something each week.  I think it’s a good thing to know that the desire to write and share regularly is something authentic, and I’m definitely feeling that.  I am more convinced than ever that for me, an important part of my professional practice as a school leader is writing regularly about the work and what I am learning.  It is no coincidence that one of the major components of the National Board Certification process is promoting the “reflective practicioner.”  My blog has become one of my primary venues for processing and reflecting on my work as a school and systems leader.

I also felt that my blog posts were becoming increasingly formulaic, as if my writing was a performance.  I certainly understand why that might be the case, as there are very real pressures and forces at work when you are in a position of leadership and are trying to strengthen an organizational culture that is increasingly focused on consistent quality and realizing an ambitious vision of transformational learning and personal development for kids.  From my very first posts as an Executive Director with Santa Ana Unified, I knew that a public venue for my thinking would have implications for my leadership internally with the organization.  Almost always, those implications were positive ones as I felt I was sharing my genuine efforts to create game-changing schools and programs, but you can’t help but feel limited at times in what you can say.  

So, I’m hoping to keep things a bit more informal and open up to share a little bit more about what happens behind the scenes in my daily and weekly leadership practices that I perhaps didn’t write about as often as I would like.  I have to remember that my blog is primarily a tool for my reflective processing, and so I want to share more about my mistakes, failures, and consequent adjustments and adaptations to try to strengthen my contribution to the work.  I think writing more authentically could actually simplify and speed up my writing process and allow me to post with a bit more frequency.  

In any case, I’m excited to be back on the blog.  I’ve had more people than I would have expected comment about how they enjoyed my posts, and quite frankly I’ve missed it as well, so it is definitely time to relaunch.  I also have some very big news related to the writing projects that I have been working on, but again will save that for my next post.  Thanks for reading!