I’m always preaching the importance of vision.  It’s the backbone of leadership.  You are continually connecting people to the purpose of our shared endeavor.

To practice what I preach, I held a series of leadership development sessions with members of the departments that I supervise.  Together, we discussed both the work we do and the aspirations that drive us in that work.  Together, we developed a vision statement for our department.   Here it is.

“Our purpose is to create and support programs, experiences, and mindsets that dramatically deepen student engagement, and can be proven to accelerate student learning and post-secondary success.”

With that vision in mind, we set out to redesign our efforts to collect student feedback at the high school level as part of our Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP).  Last year, we designed student forums that brought together 300 students at each high school to vote on and then discuss issues that students felt were most essential to improving their learning experiences at our schools.  We held seven of these sessions over the course of 3 months.  Our design process was iterative and intensive, meeting on multiple occasions to discuss how we could quickly create a learning environment where students felt safe and respected – enough to speak their truths and challenge the status quo.

This year, we wanted to up the ante.  We were no longer satisfied with going out and listening ourselves to the perspectives and stories of our students.  We wanted to connect our students to the “shapers” – the policymakers, artists, and other public figures whose ideas, decisions, and actions influence the movement of our communities and institutions.

Our planning team met on numerous occasions.  Yes, there were tremendous logistical matters we had to attend to.  Arranging bus transportation.  The technical elements of live streaming the broadcast.  Communicating with participants and other stakeholders.  Securing participation of guest panelists.

That logistical work was hard, and essential.  But it wasn’t what we spent the most time discussing and, quite frankly, arguing about and deliberating over.  We wanted to design a deeply engaging, transformative experience.  We wanted to create a space where people could and would share their honest thoughts and feelings.  We wanted authenticity.  Our decisions focused on how to prime participants for a powerful learning moment.  We had to explain our purpose to our guest panelists multiple times.

“This isn’t going to be a typical panel discussion.”

“You’re here, primarily, to listen.”

Not only is this not the usual practice, but it’s so engrained that we were afraid we might not be able to hold the space in the way we wanted.

This isn’t to say that our guest panelists didn’t have important things to say to our kids.  They do.  But we wanted their contributions to take the shape of encouragement and affirmation of student thoughts and stories.

So, last Friday, we held our event.  Truth 2 Power.  As we got closer to the start time, my mind was exploding.  So many disparate systems would have to come together.  Busses of students rolled in as guest panelists donned their mics.  I would be facilitating the session and discussion with our Deputy Superintendent, Dr. David Haglund.  Ironically, all of my preparation, my review of participants’ bios, students issue topics, and the discussion protocols, was to allow me, in the moment, to clear my mind of the small details.  I needed to focus on creating the space.  Putting students at ease.  Encouraging authentic conversation.

I won’t speak on behalf of participants.  We too often fill the space with our own words rather than student voices.  What I can say is that I was moved by the stories of determination, perseverance, tragedy, and triumph.  We heard from Adrian, and Violet, and Stephanie.  Students whose voices have long been dormant spoke up and expressed their newfound determination.  Many participants were brought to tears.

There are lots of takeaways to reflect on.  The blessing of working with a passionate, talented team.  The challenges of clear communication to stakeholders.  But the thing on my mind this morning is just how much planning and work has to happen if you want to foster a learning environment where robust, rigorous, and provocative discussions can happen in a safe and genuine way.

And even though it’s hard to do – it’s the purpose of our work.

“Our purpose is to create and support programs, experiences, and mindsets that dramatically deepen student engagement, and can be proven to accelerate student learning and post-secondary success.”

It’s a vision worth pursuing.

Check out the archive of the live stream at http://sausdteam21c.org/truth2power/

The Learning Organization.  It’s a concept that best captures my vision for the work of a school district.  The district doesn’t exist primarily to balance budgets, or to maintain the physical plant, or even to develop and deliver a rigorous curriculum.  Those are important tasks.  If you mess up the budget, you end up in the newspaper and lose your job.  If the physical plant fails then lawsuits start showing up on your door.  If you fail to develop a high quality curriculum, then the potential for powerful learning is greatly diminished.  Fail to meaningfully address these critical managerial tasks at your peril.

But they don’t represent the most important leadership task at hand.

The role of leadership is to elevate learning to its highest priority.  And I’m not just talking about student learning.  A learning organization recognizes that deepening the skill and capacity of its employees is a fundamental strategy for any enterprise trying to dramatically improve outcomes.

Today I’ve had the pleasure of engaging in a conversation about building capacity for systems transformation.  In other words, fostering a learning organization.  The lesson was led by Peter Senge, who is a bit of an organizational theory guru who teaches at MIT.  I’ve led plenty of leadership learning sessions that draw heavily on Senge’s work, and it was a lot of fun to finally learn from him in person.

Of course, while it’s easy to say that developing the capacity of staff should be the highest priority of the system if it is serious about dramatic improvement, it can be very hard to accomplish in practice.  Especially in schools.  Our discussions today got me thinking about those professional responsibilities that strengthened my own capacity to lead systems-level change.

Punching Above My Pay Grade

I owe a lot of my professional growth to a small group of mentors who have taken an outsize interest in my leadership development.  For people like Dr. Gregg Good, Dr. Alex Molnar, and Gia Truong, I wasn’t just another employee doing a job.  They all saw in me the potential to learn and contribute in powerful ways that went far beyond my job description. While I was still a classroom teacher, Dr. Good asked me to lead a team of administrators to visit an out-of-state district to learn more about implementation of the International Baccalaureate program and how we might develop a strong language policy at a school with various language communities.  Dr. Molnar put me in charge of a major research project and publication.  As my direct supervisor, superintendent Truong encouraged me over and over again to come to my own conclusions, and act out of a sincere sense of what was right and effective versus simply doing what I was told to do.

In all cases, these mentors offered me one of the most valuable assets a leader can extend.  Trust.  They trusted me to take on projects and initiatives that, on paper, I probably wasn’t entirely qualified to take on.  I made mistakes, sure, but on the whole I delivered when given the opportunity.  Perhaps even more importantly, I deepened my capacity to lead meaningful change on a broader scale.

Reflection Time 

The central importance of taking time to reflect on our leadership work was reinforced yet again today in my learning session at the Carnegie Summit.  You have to take time to stop and reflect.  Take stock of where you are, what you’ve accomplished, and where you need to go next.  For Senge, who has conducted research into organizational improvement for decades, this need for reflection time has emerged as one of the three most vital leadership capacities.

In practice, reflection time takes many shapes.  It takes shape as a blog site, where I occasionally stop to try to make sense of what I am experiencing.  By committing my thoughts and challenges to paper, I’m forced to work out the jumble of thoughts happening in my head.  Sometimes it takes the shape of a retreat.  I openly encourage principals and teachers alike to find time to get away from their schools and classrooms.  Yes, this can be controversial because the structure of schools demands our physical presence every day.  But it is nonetheless essential.  We have to get away to have space and time to reflect on the organizational architecture of the institutions we lead.  We have to regularly flex our strategic muscles by taking a step back and considering the systems in which we are embedded.

Get Personal

This is closely related to the time we set aside for reflection.  Leading change is not technical work.  It is adaptive in nature.  When done in any meaningful way, leadership moves people.  It moves them off of entrenched positions and perspectives.  It forces people to confront uncomfortable scenarios and corrosive relationships.  It is emotional work.  It is sometimes lonely and uncertain work.  As Hefeitz and Linsky suggest, it is dangerous work.

It is dangerous precisely because it is so personal.  We don’t like to acknowledge how we contribute to the mess.  As Senge called it today, we are uncomfortable seeing our own handprint on the dysfunction of the system.  Much of our work today was spent doing a “left column analysis,” designed to highlight the gap between what we really observe, think, and believe and what we are willing to say.

As my wife will attest, my work stories typically have me at the center – the protagonist.  It would be better to more regularly cast myself as the villain.  How am I undermining the highest purposes of the organization and what steps can I take to mitigate my own weaknesses?  Asking those type of questions of ourselves can be deeply unnerving, yet is an essential exercise for one aspiring to develop a genuine learning organization.

When you’re teaching in a classroom, you never have to ask yourself whether your work is essential to the purpose of a school.  Yes, you wonder whether your instructional practice is effective.  Yes, you have days when you know, deep down, that students really didn’t learn much.  And while being in a classroom does not guarantee you’re having positive impact on student learning outcomes, it’s not very hard to draw a direct line between your daily work and the raison d’etre of the school.   

I felt much the same way as a high school principal.  I could see a clear relationship between my actions and the learning environment of the entire school. I had power to set the professional learning agenda, plus the benefit of engaging in daily interactions and cultivating supportive relationships with my students and their families.  What I missed from the daily interaction with students in the classroom, I made up for with a broader set of relationships and interactions across the entire school.  I cultivated a community of students, parents, and teachers – all with the goal of accelerating learning opportunities and outcomes for my kids.  Being a principal, while intensely demanding, was deeply satisfying.

And then I came to the district office.

I have to clarify.  I love my job, truly.  And I believe that my work is essential, and that I am having an impact on student learning.  But it is not the same work as being at a school.

There are no bells ringing once an hour.  You aren’t surrounded by hundreds of students engaged in endless exchanges of “good morning” and “great game last night.”  You don’t feel the crisis unfold in real time.  Typically, you’re not in the room when the tears come – whether it be from students, parents, or your staff members.  And just like you miss the minute by minute and hour by hour challenges, you only get glimpses of the triumphs.  You’re a step removed from the dailyness of school.

Often, teachers, and even site administrators, can come to the conclusion that anything outside of direct support to meet the daily exigencies of the school qualifies as non-essential dressing.  Indeed, when I’m rhetorically over here drowning in my classroom, I might not see how a district employee is essential to the success of my students.

I’m the first to admit that the work of a district office can be problematic.  I’m surprised every day at just how much compliance work goes on.  Most of it is tedious.  Some of it strikes me as necessary.  And even less of it feels essential to transforming learning outcomes for kids.  And while I agree completely with Michael Fullan, who suggests we move as much of the compliance to the side of the plate as possible, I guess we still have to eat our veggies.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in how many district administrators think about their work.  The rise of the district effectiveness movement introduced the belief that the district could be the source of support for school level transformation.  In other words, teachers and site administrators mired in the dailyness of running school could benefit greatly from the focused support of district staff.  This movement flipped the compliance mandate, suggesting that the district’s primary role was to encourage instructional innovation and develop leadership capacity within the system.  In other words, the district exists to serve the needs of the schools, and not the other way around.

Which brings us to our current context in a district where a budget downturn is imminent, and hundreds of employees have already received notices that they might not have a job next year.  Embedded in the conversation of who will be laid off or downsized is a conversation about where the cuts should be aimed.  How deep do you go at the district office?  How much trimming can a school withstand before the reduction in services bleeds into a corresponding deterioration of learning environments and outcomes?

These are not easy decisions.

Sometimes we hear platitudes like “keep cuts away from the kids” or “focus on saving jobs” without really defining what is essential.  Basic services at the site level are critical, but so are the enrichment programs that give life and meaning to the student experience.  Safety is another paramount priority, but so is developing a welcoming and inviting learning environment where we can be attentive to the personalized needs of students and families.

As for what is essential at a district office, it seems clear that in the context of reduced budgets and staffing the only chance of navigating to a better place is through the development of a smarter and more skilled workforce.  Difficult financial times are precisely the times for focusing on building transformative leadership capacity and improved instructional practice across the system.

I don’t know exactly what the future holds.  There are a lot of dedicated teachers and staff who have similar uncertainties.  Regardless, it’s an opportunity for all of us to ask the hard questions about what is essential to ensure the best possible experiences and outcomes for our students.

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.

 

The district where I work is big.  50,000 students big.  In fact, my motivation for coming to Santa Ana is tied to both a desire to have a broader impact on students and to learn how school improvement happens at scale.  The size of the organization defies linear cause and effect.  Yes, sometimes A does cause B, but often it splinters out and causes C, D, and E.

One of the most challenging adjustments has been getting my leadership optics right when it comes to accountability.  Let me explain.

In my previous role as a charter high school principal in a small 3-school system, accountability felt natural and organic – and it was typically tied to clarity about job roles and responsibilities.  For example, as the principal of the school, one of my primary job responsibilities was recruitment and enrollment.  Yes, I had support from our central office in the form of an enrollment coordinator, but it was always crystal clear that if enrollment dropped, I would be held accountable.  That accountability was rarely, if ever, my supervisor coming down hard on me.  It wasn’t a stern talking to.  It was much simpler than that.  If we lost enrollment, I had to let someone go.  If numbers sagged, we lost programs for kids.  If I failed or underperformed, I was the one having the hard conversations.

I worked my tail off to sustain a strong enrollment system.  Of course my primary strategy was to build a strong academic program that got results for kids.  But there was a lot more that had to happen.  I taught myself graphic design, I mapped out all of the recruitment events, I personally visited every middle school in San Francisco – with school logo emblazoned mugs filled with candy in hand.  We walked streets.  We filled phone banks. We strategized and agonized.

So it was with just about every task.  We were so small as an organization that I always felt vulnerable.  One misstep, one lawsuit, or one negative PR blowup could have tremendous consequences. Nobody had to remind me of this or reassert their authority.  Accountability was the context of the work.

In Santa Ana, there is still tremendous accountability.  In some very concrete ways, there are layers of public transparency that charter schools simply don’t have to meet.  There is clearly a different standard.

Yet while accountability still plays a substantial role in the governance of a large school district, it doesn’t always operate in natural or predictable ways.  For example, we’ve been experiencing year over year enrollment declines for virtually a decade in Santa Ana.  Yet even if we lose 1000 students in a year, that might only pan out to 10-20 fewer students per school.  As a teacher, I might only see one fewer student in my classroom.  I probably wouldn’t notice at all.

So for the teacher, and even the school site administrator, accountability isn’t experienced naturally.  The district office has to simulate the accountability.  We have to explain a phenomenon that site employees don’t necessary feel in their day to day work.  Even when a school loses enough enrollment to justify a reduction in staff, it sets in motion a complex set of negotiated terms that often means the person who ultimately loses their job probably doesn’t even work at the school in question.  When the reduction in force notice comes, it doesn’t come from the person responsible for enrollment, it comes from the Human Resources department.

That’s all to say, a big part of my learning curve has been making sense of the way districts operationalize accountability – compliance.  We work within a complex web of accountability regimes – board policies, ed code, administrative regulations, and negotiated contracts.  It creates a context that is ripe for tension and conflict – perhaps as any public institution is inevitably prone to experience.  A union invokes a grievance when action is out of line with the contract.  The legal system reinforces Ed Code.

For the rest of it, accountability shifts to the relationship between a supervisor and his or her direct reports.  But that’s a balancing act too. There is a real leadership puzzle in building motivation and morale and momentum  when I’m also responsible for invoking the controls of the system to ensure we are accountable to the public.

This has been a rocky shift for me.  We’re a public institution governed by an elected body that sets policy.  We need financial controls.  And yes, we need compliance.  But we also need energy and momentum and something inspiring to draw out the best in each of us.  I’m actively trying to find the sweet spot of leadership that successfully navigates the two.

Some people love New Year as a holiday – the party, the food, the games.  I have five children 8 years old and under, so my house is always a party with food and games everywhere – a party I get to clean up every night.  Add an extra late bedtime and you have a recipe for emotional breakdown – and I’m not talking about the kids.

I’m a much bigger fan of starting a new year.  That sense of renewal, of new possibilities, of new adventures.  This year, I’ve noticed a lot more online chatter about the uselessness of resolutions or goal-setting.  There’s even some compelling research that suggests that New Year’s resolutions typically fizzle out.  The trend is away from self-discipline to self-acceptance.

I’m all for learning to love who we are – and we all know we’re often our own biggest critics.  But I also think it would be a shame to allow the New Year to roll forward without taking the time to reflect on where we’ve been and intentionally think and plan how the coming year might bring new possibilities.  This launch into the New Year is much more than just writing better goals or mustering more personal mastery.  It’s about taking the time to get some closure and intentionally set our future trajectory.

Set Aside Time for Reflection

My wife’s family started an interesting tradition just a year after we were married 15 years ago.  One of the gifts that we all give one another is a “year history.”  Each of us takes the time to write an overview of the past year.  Highs and lows.  Triumphs and failures.  There is always a healthy dose of laughter and tears.

Anyone in the family will tell you that writing the one-page history can be on the agonizing side.  We write, and revise, and then write some more and keep making the font smaller. Some histories tell stories, some list activities, and some find broad themes to summarize the year.

It’s a tremendously cathartic experience.  Possibly my favorite tradition.  In the end, the process lends incredible clarity to my intentions for the new year.  Having a deadline and an audience has been surprisingly helpful in pushing me to really invest in my reflective process.  But even if you are writing for an audience of one, taking time to reflect and write about the past year is an investment worth making.

Shifting Identities

We tend to use labels and absolutes when talking about ourselves – I’m a writer, I’m not a math person, I don’t cook.  There is a certain sense of finality about how we talk about ourselves.  In some cases, this approach to language reinforces what we like about ourselves.  It communicates our values and the communities we aspire to be a part of.  Often, however, our language closes doors and possibilities for ourselves.

The new year is a great time to play with our sense of identity.

Most people in my job with Santa Ana Unified think I’m a Facebook junkie and a cyclist.  A surprising percentage of my conversations at work start with someone asking me, “Did you ride your bike today?”

Truth be told, prior to moving from San Francisco, I was a reluctant social media user, and I had only recently experimented with occasional bike rides for exercise.  When I moved here, I decided that I wanted to try out some new “characteristics” that I associated with people I considered to be creative and innovative.  I bike to work almost daily.  I’m one of the heaviest users and posters to our district Facebook account.  Of course I had to move through all of the discomfort of being a novice, but over time I’ve learned a tremendous amount about social media and how to ride a bike to work in Santa Ana without dying.

Perhaps that seems shallow or inauthentic.  But for me, my desire to play with new characteristics or identities comes from a genuine curiosity about life and a insatiable desire to learn.  Sometimes I joke with my wife that I’d like to move to a horse ranch and become a cowboy.  Why not?

Find Your Mantra

There’s a reason Michael Pollan’s book “Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not too Much” got so much traction in the wellness and diet world.  Simple Green Smoothies?  Same thing.  These concepts are simple.  We can digest them quickly.

I’ve spent a lot of time in university classrooms, and some of the most profound concepts that have stuck with me have been the most simple.  I still remember a long conversation about assessment and feedback and how difficult it can be to deliver critical feedback to others.  One of my classmates wrote in big letters on the board: “One Big Thing.”  The message was that people aren’t able to process that much feedback at once, especially if they perceive the feedback as negative.  In essence, you get to address one thing – the most important thing – so make it count.  That simple advice has served me incredibly well over the years in my work as an administrator.

Sometimes we need to switch our long lists and comprehensive plans for simple statements of intention.  We need a mantra.

At the beginning of each school year, my wife and I sit down to come up with a theme for the school year to continually reinforce with our kids.  Instead of outlining a bunch of things we want our kids to do and become, we just choose one.  This year is “Allen’s are Courageous.” That statement hangs near our dining table, and it informs lots of conversations throughout the year.  It’s a deliberate attempt to create a shared value that we hope then translates into desired changes.

With that said, I have to admit that my mantra for 2017 isn’t nearly as aspirational, although it is remarkably simple. I’m only communicating one goal to people around me – “finish my dissertation.”  If I can do that I’ll consider 2017 a success.  Wish me luck.

About a week after I began my first year as a high school principal, I received an invitation to join a network of principals who met once a month at Stanford University to discuss leadership and delve into problems of practice we were facing at our schools.  Frankly, I was hesitant to join.  It was my first year as a principal and even with just a few days on the job, I could tell that being off campus could be a major leadership liability.  Everything I had heard from colleagues and other principals indicated that year one was not ideal for embarking on a major professional learning initiative.  Don’t go back to grad school.  Don’t make big life commitments.  Just spend as much time at school as possible – build relationships, be visible, familiarize yourself with the system, and try not to make any big hairy mistakes.

I joined anyway.

One of the big ideas that we wrestled with as a cohort of principals was the balance between doing the work and strategically planning the work.  There is a natural forward propulsion in school buildings – constantly pushing you ahead to address the latest crisis or incident.  It’s hard to escape the constant ringing of bells.  Sometimes you just can’t think – you are constantly reacting and hoping your leadership intuition and training serves you well.  The metaphorical need to “put out fires” sometimes, at least in my experience, included actually putting out fires.

Which is all to say – you need time to think, and plan, and strategize.  You probably can’t do it on site.  There are simply too many distractions.

I get it.  It’s a hard balance and being off campus always feels uncomfortable, but there is intellectual and conceptual work that needs to be done that in many ways only you can do.  I would make similar arguments for teachers who need to attend to the instructional architecture of their classrooms.

Lots of organizations pay big bucks to hire professional consultants to facilitate this type of strategic thinking.  For the most part, we don’t have the resources for that type of support.  And frankly, I think building your strategic muscles internally is a key leadership practice.  So here are a few practical ideas to help you attend to your unique role as a strategic leader.

Go on a retreat

A retreat sounds relaxing, but in reality there isn’t a lot more cognitively demanding work than mapping out a strategic plan. It’s not the type of work you can hammer out in a series of one hour meetings.  You need extended time to entertain different possibilities, lay out priorities, and design systems for communication and ongoing progress monitoring.  You need different types of interactions – sometimes the more informal conversations that happen during lunch or over dinner are where the pieces really start to come together.  You need moments to deeply engage an idea, and more open-ended time to allow an idea to percolate.

And a retreat has a dual benefit.  Not only do you have the possibility of developing a strong strategic plan, but you are helping to build the sense of trust and purpose that will serve your team well in those moments when the work inevitably gets difficult.

Phone a friend

You need thought partners outside your organization.  People who you can trust.  People who aren’t afraid to disagree with you.  People who will tell you the truth about your contributions to the mess.

When you’re inside your own organization, you always wear your authority on your sleeve.  You may work hard to minimize your positional authority, and your staff may genuinely recognize your efforts not to lead solely from a place of power.  But you are the boss – and that impacts the feedback and input of the people around you.  You need to be self-critical, and an outside friend can help you gain that perspective.

My wife is an incredible thought partner.  She is the first to point out that in my work stories, I always paint myself as the protagonist.  We typically tell stories where we are the super-hero or the victim.  She helps me think through challenges and opportunities without paying any attention to my positional authority.  Yes, sometimes it takes time to share enough context for a thought partner to understand the organizational boundaries and limitations, but having access to fresh perspectives is a critical leadership commodity.

Keep Coming Back to It

In schools, summertime is usually the default time for strategic planning.  The lack of students in the building creates a very real sense of space and possibilities.  It’s a little easier to laugh and the time of the year lends itself to reflection and planning.

The summer, unfortunately, isn’t enough.

We don’t learn best in isolated moments.  It is when we engage in an ongoing cycle of learning, planning, experimenting and doing, and then reflecting on our efforts, that we really start to get traction.  The same can be said for your strategic planning as a leader.  You have to keep coming back to it.  You need to reflect on your implementation and direction as it unfolds.

One of the best organizational structures I experienced as a principal was our quarterly Key Performance Indicator (KPI) meetings.  Of course, a data-centric meeting with your boss can easily default into an evaluation meeting, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  In my case, we would gather data on our strategic initiatives and then engage in data dive and consultancy protocols designed to elicit diagnostic thinking from everyone in the room.  Our time together deepened our understanding of the organizational factors at play while strengthening our capacity to move the organization as a team towards realizing our strategic goals.

Regardless of the strategies you use to make it happen, don’t allow the “dailyness” of education leadership to pull you off your top priorities.  My one-day-a-month sessions at Stanford were the birthplace of many of my most important strategic ideas and intentions.  It’s never convenient to take the time out for deep strategic thinking – but the momentum and improvement of the organization you lead certainly rely on you being an effective strategic thinker.  Give it the time it needs.

I love reading work productivity blogs and articles.  You know the stuff I’m talking about – the “5 things successful people do every morning” or the “top apps for productivity at work and happiness at home.”  They all basically say the same thing: get up really early, use your highest energy time of the day for the highest priority projects, make time for self-care.  That kind of stuff.  I’ve been wanting to respond to some of these productivity hacks and insights for a while – thus my “Find Your Flow” heading.

One of the most common refrains I read in these articles is the idea that work/life balance is no longer attainable, and that we’ve entered a new reality we call “work/life integration.”  With the advent of the internet and smart phones, we can and do take our work with us everywhere we go.  The idea is that you can’t really turn off work, so you might as well stop trying and find ways to integrate the two together.

One response to the integration is to fight back.  Create clear boundaries and rules and push back on the encroachment.  I was listening to a podcast recently with the designer of the Light Phone, and the idea struck me as brilliant.  Basically, it’s a phone that only has old-school phone capabilities (as in, to call and talk to someone) that has calls forwarded from your smart phone.  No texting.  No internet.  Just phone calls.  Then there are the phone lockboxes, where you put your phone in a box with a timer that keeps you from accessing your phone for a specific amount of time.  How far down the rabbit hole must I be to think these are good ideas, to say nothing of actually spending money to buy these things?

Is this madness to anyone else out there?

So basically, my phone is an ongoing guilt trip.  For example, I’ve been somewhat religiously logging calories using an app on my phone for about 5 months.  I’ve lost nearly 20 lbs.  In terms of weight loss, for me, it’s a strategy that works.  Yet just a few days ago my wife mentioned how annoying it is that during or after every meal I take out my phone to log my food.  I’m annoyed by it too.  It’s distracting and cuts me off from the conversation and the people around me.  But it works.

Some research is starting to suggest that just having the phone out – even if you aren’t using it – can have negative effects on interpersonal conversations.  It’s like a constant reminder of “hey, I’m really into this conversation as long as someone or something more important doesn’t come up on this phone that I’ve conveniently placed on the table between us.”

I guess it’s all a part of a big social experiment that we can’t seem to escape, or at least I can’t seem to.