When I first interviewed for my current job, one of the things that immediately struck me were the uniform, white walls in the district office.  Now, to be fair, I was working at the time as the principal of a visual and digital media art school in San Francisco.  We hung art from the rafters, painted murals on every hallway.  We replaced our bathroom mirrors with designer mirrors and hung student portraits around the school.  We wanted a space that reflected and projected our values.  We wanted our students and community to know that our building belonged to them.

Suffice it to say, I decided pretty early on that my new office needed some color.  I wanted to make a statement that I was willing to push boundaries and insist that our organization be more thoughtful about design and aesthetics. When I shared my plan with one of my mentors, Gia Truong, she laughed nervously.

“That’s not going to go over well, Daniel.”

She pointed out that in a large school district, paint and protocol are a big deal.  She shared how she had come under fire for doing some painting when she was a middle school principal.  Of course after giving me a friendly heads-up, she encouraged me to move forward with my plans anyway.

On day one of my new job, I realized how tricky my situation had become.  Instead of inheriting the discrete office space I had been shown when visiting a few weeks earlier, I was directed to one of the few offices that had floor to ceiling interior windows.  My office was exceptionally public and visible.  To welcome me, special arrangements had been made to give my office a fresh coat of Navajo White paint and furnish the space with a new set of large executive furniture.  The organization had given me the royal treatment and highest welcome.

I tried not to panic.  When I told my administrative secretary that I was planning to repaint and refurnish, she was visibly perplexed.  “Mr. Allen, they just painted your office.”  “Why don’t you want your furniture?”  I think she thought I was crazy.  Her reaction was so concerning, in fact, I decided maybe I needed to do a little investigating, or at least priming, before redesigning the space.  I learned quickly that I wasn’t going to get explicit permission.  I also started to sense that there might be some people very upset, both that I was “wasting” resources that had just been invested in preparing my office and that I wasn’t following work order protocol.

So I started to ask questions to map the organizational structure related to building services and maintenance.  Who actually painted my office and how could I express gratitude for their work while simultaneously explaining my rationale for such a quick change?  Who supervised the painters and might complain about my actions at the director or assistant superintendent level?  I made a trip to the building services plant, introducing myself to as many front-line employees and managers as I could.  When I finally tracked down the painting manager, he was genuinely surprised I had taken the time to come out to see him.  I explained my rationale for redesigning my space, and he was supportive.  He even took me into the warehouse to supply me with some rollers and basic supplies to paint my office myself.

A weekend of painting and a few trips to IKEA later, my office was ready.  I funded everything myself, figuring it was a wise investment to make a strong and strategic first impression. Word spread quickly, and I had visitors from around the district office come to see my space.  They started taking pictures.  In a large district, people didn’t necessarily remember my name.  They just identified me as the new guy with the cool office (now I’m the guy who rides a bike, but that’s a different story).

Now, a year later, and things have been moving. Of course I had a lot of learning to do myself – about the complexity of stocking and maintaining paint, of the legal requirements of contractor bids and furniture purchasing.  I also realized that a lot of other people were already pushing for more thoughtful and engaging space design.  I was just one agitating source in a big system that requires agitation from lots of sources in order to change and adapt.  We’re hosting a “curation by design” workshop this summer.  Principals are pushing for maker-spaces, welcome centers, and more student-centered and technology-integrated media centers.  We’re approving six new paint colors to stock and use districtwide.

Some might call this work gimmicky or unnecessary given the financial constraints placed on public schools.  Perhaps.

But perhaps by building our capacity as designers, we can develop greater empathy for our students and families and how they experience our schools and classrooms.  Perhaps we can increase the visual cues that reflect our values and create spaces that better engage and enliven our learners.

At the first leadership summit I attended here in Santa Ana Unified, I was introduced to the concept of the “back channel.” The deputy superintendent gave out a phone number to administrators in the meeting that would publicly display comments and questions. Comments were entirely anonymous. It was fascinating to watch the commentary scroll along while the presenter spoke in real time. It wasn’t always pretty, and there was more than one audible gasp at a comment that made it to the big screen up front.

Of course there is a difference between anonymous trolling, and constructive critique. Sometimes the dueling narratives were just too noisy. Cognitive multi-tasking can be mentally taxing. But the presence of the “back channel” also lent a strange sense of authenticity to the conversation. And it kept the conversation more honest. It was kind of fun.

Now fast forward to a meeting I was in just a few weeks ago. Many of the same administrators were in the room, but this time there was no official back channel. I was sitting amongst the crowd, participating in much the same way as others in the room. I listened when something seemed interesting or pertinent, and I responded to email or text messages when it didn’t. We can discuss my meeting etiquette in a different post. What was interesting were the many occasions when soft murmurs or side conversations rippled around me.

“Does it really take 30 minutes to explain this?”

“Why are we talking about this again?”

Those are quotes – not general sentiments. What is fascinating about all of this to me is how much of the authentic feedback never makes it back to the ears of the person who needs to hear it. If that person is in a position of authority, it is even less likely that they’ll hear what people are really saying. I call this the feedback filter. When we debriefed the meeting as a leadership team a few days later, I found myself reluctant to share some of the informal feedback I had been hearing. It’s not fun bearing bad tidings.

We all say we like to learn and that we’re open to feedback. Truth be told, we don’t and we aren’t.

Here’s how the filter works. When we receive information and feedback, we react. That reaction plays out as gestures, eye movements, language, tone, and often, rebuttals. It’s hard to hide how we really feel about what we are hearing. When a person in a position of authority consistently reacts to bad news or hard feedback with a defensive posture or an immediate pivot to rationalization and explanation, then it becomes riskier for others to provide authentic feedback.

Here’s the catch. Leaders need good data to make good decisions. If we’re not careful, our feedback filter can restrict the pipeline of authentic feedback. Over time, the leader is left to make decisions in an isolation chamber, disconnected from what is actually happening in the organization.

That’s why emotional intelligence is so critical for transformative leadership. You have to be willing to hear all the ways your leadership is contributing to the mess. You have to be vulnerable as a leader in order to make it safe for others to take chances and be vulnerable themselves.

So, next time someone disagrees with you, thank them for it.

I just read a fascinating book titled “the life-changing magic of tidying up.”  It’s written by Marie Kondo, a Japanese woman whose central thesis about clutter and tidying is that if you do a little a day you’ll never make it.  Rather, you have to shock the system and experience the benefits of a new reality in order to maintain a long-term transformation.  It sounds a lot like Alan Bersin, former superintendent of San Diego, who famously claimed that if you don’t shake up the system within the first 6 months, you’ll simply be digested by it.

I often hear things like “change takes time,” and “iterate your way towards improvement.”  Sometimes I’m the one saying these things.  I’m a devotee of improvement science, and there is plenty of research suggesting that a rigorous diet of cycles of improvement will eventually get you where you need to be.  But my goodness, change comes slow that way.  Even when we recognize the need to make substantial changes, we’re simply not wired for it.  We keep buying when we know we can’t afford it.  We keep accumulating stuff when we know we won’t need it.  We keep eating when we know we should stop.  The psychology of this stuff is fascinating.

Now, I’m not suggesting miracle solutions.  This isn’t about silver bullets and snake oil.  When Kondo talks about completely tidying your house in one deliberate swoop, she suggests a 6 month process, not something that happens in a weekend.  Yet she also isn’t suggesting that you iterate your way there slowly.  She leaves little room for “let’s try a few things and see what works out.”  Rather, she advocates a deliberate, committed move from old to new practice.

And Kondo suggests an interesting corollary, which is that you can’t tidy things that don’t belong to you.  She even applies this rule to family members.  In short, trying to tidy on behalf of others will only undermine your ability to convince people who are not you of their dire need to tidy and simplify.  So, while transformation only comes when you shock the system, you can only shock your own system.

This part is hard.  In the realm of schools, I go into a lot of classrooms that are functioning smoothly.  Teachers are working hard.  But admittedly I am thinking to myself, “students could be so much more engaged.”  When I see this, I’m immediately filled with judgement, just like I might be when I walk into a messy house, or my own garage.   I want to help them tidy up, so to speak.

Perhaps this is all just paternalistic – believing that somehow there is a right way to keep a house, or an ideal bodyweight.  I’m certainly open to that critique.  Yet as an administrator dedicated to accelerating student learning, I feel compelled to take  action, especially when I know what truly powerful learning can look like in action.  When I read a book like Kondo’s, it breathes more urgency and hope into bolder plans and more aggressive reforms.  I certainly take to heart the idea that meaningful change has to start with me.   I just want to make sure it doesn’t end there.

Digital transformation is being heavily evangelized amongst school reformers.  Heck, I’m one of them.  As I write this I’m attending a summit hosted by Digital Promise, focused on school level digital transformation stories.  I’m a believer in the tremendous potential of personalized learning, student adaptive content, and competency based assessment systems.  I know it can accelerate student learning because I’ve seen it in practice.  But there is a three-headed monster in the closet.

In our district, we call it a unicorn, actually.  And we’re all on the hunt.

High Quality Digital Content

First is our search for high quality digital content.  A few districts develop their own online content.  As a large school district, we have some capacity to do that in-house.  Of course it takes time and resources to either train current curriculum writers or hire new curriculum specialists to develop high quality digital content.  Regardless, developing talented educators with both the content expertise and digital literacy acumen is a daunting undertaking.

Many schools come to the conclusion that they don’t have the capacity to develop their own team of digital content creators, so they buy content from external vendors.  ST Math, Lexia, Achieve 3000, and hundreds of other programs offer content across the market.  New content-driven companies come online every day.  They’re constantly looking for willing districts and schools to help them test and vet their developing content platforms.  To survive, textbook publishers have moved into digital spaces, and quality and pricing of content is as variable as it was when everything was paper-based.

In other words, the content question is not easy, and let’s not even get into the professional development required to build the capacity of staff to utilize the content once you acquire it.  Transformation to the digital environment has not made the challenge of providing high quality, rigorous content any simpler.  Perhaps it’s even more complicated.

Standards & Assessment

You might normally think that the conversation about standards should be addressed in the conversation about content.  Fair enough.  Certainly content and assessment are closely intertwined – or at least should be.  Yet content standards often come to life (or go to die) in the assessment system.  We have to ask ourselves the basic question about how we come to understand what students currently understand and what they’re ready for next.

Competency-based learning, personalized learning, and student adaptive learning systems all rely on an ability to adequately assess student performance and then marry content to the unique learning needs of each student.  To be frank, even our most talented classroom teachers struggle mightily to do this.  How do you develop a learning experience tailored to each individual student?  Many teachers skip it altogether, and instead move their entire class through a standardized scope and sequence at the same time.  Assessment for grading trumps assessment for learning, as there is little real intention of adjusting content and pedagogy based on what individual students are actually learning.  You cover the curriculum using the best teaching strategies you’ve got, and move on.  Or, you use the scale of the school to create tracks based on grouping “similar” students.  That’s not really personalizing learning either, and the structures of tracking often create inequitable barriers that make it difficult to move from one track to another.  Once a student get’s “locked in,” it becomes an identity that is hard to shake.

The hero of the story is supposed to be digital content providers, who have adopted the language of personalized learning, and proclaim to offer a student adaptive system to match.  That automatically implies a robust assessment system – a system that can accurately assess student work, provide quality formative feedback, and then provide the next level of content. This can work when the content and skills being assessed are relatively simple.  Most current digital content delivery platforms live in this space, if they address assessment at all.

But more complex thinking and understanding requires more complex assessment.  The Common Core State Standards aspire to move learning to a deeper, more rigorous place. Districts and content vendors alike must face the challenge of developing reliable and valid items that give us the learning data that we need.  We don’t typically hold vendors accountable for their assessment systems because frankly most educators aren’t comfortable with the technicalities of assessment, nor do we usually have the resources to adequately field test items or calibrate our scoring. Complex understanding is hard to measure.

It’s one thing to know what we want to teach. It’s quite another to understand what students have learned.  Good assessment is expensive and hard to find.

The Dashboard

Okay, so we know nothing is perfect.  But let’s say that over time you curate a portfolio of internally developed systems and external providers that gets you a package of high quality, rigorous content, with assessment instruments that do an arguably good job letting you know what students know and can do.

That’s really the starting point for any blended learning model, at least in terms of the digital learning component of your system.  If you’re running a rotation model in your classroom, for example, you need to have a basic degree of trust that the computer-based learning that happens when you are pulling small groups or guiding collaborative learning is providing a meaningful, standards-based learning experience for your kids.

Assuming you’ve come this far, now you want to pull all of your systems together in one place where students, parents, and teachers can easily monitor and reflect on progress and areas for growth.  A data dashboard that brings all the assessment data across content providers and assessment systems together into one gloriously accessible place.  The unicorn.

Some vendors say they already have it.  They’re lying.

Okay, maybe lying is too strong a word here.  Certainly there are dashboards available that have the ability to take data from multiple sources and put them together into one place.  You can even automate the inputs.  But some content and assessment vendors don’t want to play.  Their programs offer a closed system that doesn’t want to talk to an external dashboard.  In fact, I think the higher the quality of the content, the more likely the vendor won’t want to share their data.  You might think that a district owns the data that is generated by their own students, and could ask for access to that data however they want it.  Not the case.  There is little financial incentive for established vendors with internal progress data dashboards to make their systems compatible.  And yes, I’ve sat in dozens of meetings and conference sessions where the proposed solution is to band together as districts to force vendors to meet our request for data output or refuse patronage.  I call that the Walmart strategy – to force our suppliers to comply or walk away from the table.  The problem is districts are desperate for the content and vendors know it.

The most promising systems have found ways to patch their systems together.  But it’s usually an analog solution.  At our personalized learning school Advanced Learning Academy, for example, students do the heavy lifting and use the transfer of data from disparate locations into a common digital dashboard as an opportunity for reflection and dialogue.  But the dashboard can’t talk back to the systems.  It’s just a container for data.  And it’s tremendous work for the teachers to manage all of the data transfer.

Bringing It All Together

We know what the unicorn would look like if we found it.  High quality, engaging content across subjects with a trustworthy assessment system that all feeds into a dynamic data dashboard. Opportunities for peer feedback and collaboration would permeate the system.  Access to expert insight would be no further than the touch of a button.

I guess that true disruptive innovations don’t come neatly packaged in a box.  It’s the organizational pursuit that builds our capacity and refines our abilities.  Perhaps we should just embrace the hunt.

I have about as complicated a relationship with charter schools as you can imagine.  Of course the most obvious connection is my experience as a principal of a charter high school in San Francisco (and a fine school at that, I might add).  Many of the educators and friends I admire are heavily involved and invested in the success and spread of charter schools.  Certainly there are students and communities who have benefited from access to high quality charter options.

Yet I remain skeptical.

And the purpose of this post isn’t to engage in a breakdown of my skepticism.  I’ve largely avoided the topic of charter schools in my blog posts since I run the risk of upsetting people I care about regardless of what I have to say.  Charters are not without political implications.  “Don’t go there, Daniel” is a phrase that’s reverberating in my mind.  Even my wife and I can get into a good old-fashioned debate (dare I say argument) about where it’s best to send our kids to school.

So, it’s with a bit of caution that I dig in to a conversation about some of the reasons why families would leave their neighborhood, district-run public school for a charter option.  This is particularly salient in my current role as a district administrator in Santa Ana, where we are seeing an influx of charter school options and petitions for new schools.  Like I said, it’s a tricky topic for me and I’m not without my biases.

Regardless, here are three aspects of charter school enrollment that have been bouncing around my head lately.  It’s hardly an exhaustive list, but hopefully opens a door into understanding the current and future role charters might play in the educational landscape.

Elitism

Whether or not we care to admit it, as parents we often seek out exclusivity for our kids.  Top ballet instructor in the city?  Yes, please.  Access to a program for gifted students?  Where do I sign up?  When it comes to our children, we want the best.  The needs of other people’s children fall into the periphery.  That desire to secure excellence for our children drives what is being reported as an ever-growing effort on the part of middle and upper-class families to acquire whatever training and education we can get for our children to have a competitive edge.  The opportunity gap is widening, thanks in large part to well-intentioned parenting.

Charters play to that sense of elitism.  Big time.  From official marketing to subtle ways schools talk about themselves and their programming, the idea is to give parents and families a sense that space is limited, and that the increased demand is proof of a better program.

Now, a true charter advocate would call this critique nonsense – of course parents choose what they perceive as the better choice.  That’s the entire policy intent behind charter legislation.

Yet scarcity is a powerful asset and it is actively used by many charters to manipulate demand.  If my school with a capacity of 2000 students only enrolls 1800, and your 400-seat charter down the road has 500 kids trying to attend, which school is actually the one in higher demand?  We might describe my large high school as “under enrolled” or suffering “flagging demand,” while our charter neighbor touts lottery admissions and waiting lists.  Scarcity drives enrollment energy and shapes the vocabulary we use to talk about different school choices.

I’m not sure how a large comprehensive public school can flip the elitist script.  These institutions are sitting ducks, as they can’t help but be large and inclusive.  “Everybody gets in” is not a particularly strong marketing campaign with parents who don’t see “everybody” as a comparable advantage.

Every Student Counts

Charters don’t take kids for granted.  I don’t mean that in it’s traditional, euphemistic sense.  Rather, the charter school is never the default option for enrollment, and therefore, the school understands that you have to convince every student who enrolls to come to the school.  It should come as no surprise then that charters expend a tremendous amount of resources and energy in their marketing.  When I became a charter principal myself, one of the aspects of my job that I simply hadn’t anticipated was the amount of time I would spend with potential students.  I spent at least a night or two each week in the fall at enrollment fairs and parent meetings.  We made individualized follow up phone calls.  I walked neighborhoods and even knocked on doors.

This focus on enrollment is further incentivized by the economics of public education, which again, most teachers and administrators in district schools don’t appreciate as fully as do charter operators.  If I’m an elementary school that receives $8,000 a year for a student, I should recognize that losing just one kid results in a loss of nearly $50,000 for my school over the course of that student’s elementary school experience.  That’s a HUGE amount of money.

Of course this type of personal attention is not lost on students and families who are considering a switch to a charter school. For some, it may be a refreshing change from what they’ve experienced at their neighborhood school.  It feels like the charter school just cares a lot more.  If a potential parent called my charter school for information, I always called back the same day. It was that important.  This is certainly not because I somehow liked my charter kids more than I do my district students – the system just doesn’t incentivize my time interacting with potential students.  The same could be said at all levels of the organization.  In a charter school, if an office manager can’t figure out how to be inviting and helpful to every potential student who walks through the door, he or she doesn’t last long.

To illustrate the point, just last week I was in a conversation with some of my district colleagues about our marketing efforts and found myself critiquing our district website.  It’s not that our website doesn’t have an inviting presentation or lacks important information.  It just values sharing information and directing traffic over driving enrollment.  In my charter school, you could navigate to the application from every single page of the website.  It was a constant option, and it was carefully curated.  As the leader of a charter school, I knew every parent comment posted on Great Schools, and when a not-so-positive comment appeared you can bet I was reaching out to my PTA to get some new positive comments generated.  I was constantly attending to our public perception and encouraging enrollment.  You couldn’t turn that off.

But believe me, charters struggle just like any district-run school to provide personalized attention once the student is enrolled.  In fact, I believe it is a serious miscalculation to equate a personalized recruitment experience with a more personalized classroom experience.

Mission-driven

Every school has a mission statement.  It likely is hanging somewhere in the front office and is peppered with flowery language about lifelong learners and preparation for success.  It’s mostly garbage.

It isn’t garbage because its authors aren’t well intentioned.  It isn’t garbage because what it says wouldn’t be nice if it were true.  It’s garbage because the organization is not entirely committed to aligning itself to the mission in any concrete or measurable way.

In this regard, charters are often different, especially the good ones.

Strong schools in general, regardless of their governance structure, understand the importance of deliberately infusing the mission into the daily work of the school.  And they understand the importance of walking potential students and families from the aspirations of the mission statement to measurable data.  The organization aspires to hold itself accountable for what it says it values most.  Charter schools as a movement seem to understand this better than the rest of us.

This is why charters can be so effective as brand-managers and recruiters.  They aren’t branding an educational program, they are offering their perspective on the purpose of education, with a program to match.  That is a powerful recipe for connecting with families – as you feel like you have something substantial to offer.  There’s some evangelism to it.

Of course that means the opposite statement can be true – charter schools tend to undervalue the things they don’t aspire to in their mission statement.  Vocational education?  Not typically interested.  Remedial support?  Only to a certain extent.  Special education?  Well, yes, we offer that, but it’s not our forte, and especially not if you happen to have a severe disability.  At some point, the welcome mat is replaced by a conversation about finding a school that’s a good fit.  Yes, 100% of your graduates go on to college, but let’s not forget that the ones who weren’t “college-bound” left a long time ago (or never came in the first place).  This is a common critique of charters, and some charter operators are quite open about it.  It’s coded in the language, but it’s there.  “We want families to have options,” or even more simply, “go somewhere else if you don’t like it.”

Like I said, my relationship with charter schools is complicated.

I just received my latest issue of Entrsekt, a quarterly magazine published by the International Society for Technology in Education – or ISTE as most educators know it.  The lead article carries the same title as this blog post, and provides a refreshing classroom-based perspective about how technology can open up new opportunities for students to share their thinking and make choices about their own learning.  It seems that student-centeredness is on the rise – and thank goodness for that.

Yet all this talk about student empowerment and student voice gets me worried.  Specifically, I worry that in our discussions about empowering students, we don’t take the time to talk to them – much less listen to them.  In our rush to develop systems and adopt programs of choice on behalf of our kids, we don’t exactly practice what we preach.  It’s not intended to be ironic.  When education digests a new concept and brings it out to scale, it is often stripped of the essence that made it exciting and effective in the first place.  Our good intentions can become monsters.

Take high school for instance.  When students walk into high school, they are virtually stripped of their agency.   Students are generally told the classes they need.  Students have little say in selecting their teachers, or how classes will be taught.  Phones are on lockdown.  Students are told when to eat and when to use the bathroom.  The walls belong to the adults.  So let’s be frank about the inherent conflict that comes from restructuring and reculturing schools and classrooms that seek to authentically empower students.  Let’s not underestimate the huge change implications of transforming a system to orient itself to the student experience.

If we believe that students bring meaningful perspectives and insights into their own educational experiences, then we might ask ourselves how we are systematically attending to students’ thoughts, hopes, and dreams.  The best teachers, of course, already understand this – they don’t need new initiatives to practice true student-centeredness in the classroom.  At a school or district level, things can get more complicated.  As a district administrator myself, I can attest to how easy it can be to allow the day to day workflow to disconnect us from the very students we are committed to serve.

So, we’ve been experimenting.  We began with a question – how can we authentically connect district administrators with students in a setting that facilitates honesty and open dialogue?

We started with seven of our high schools.  We brought together district leadership and groups of 300 students, chosen in a manner to approach a random sample across the school, to respond to essential questions related to a range of school-related topics.  Individual students recorded their personal responses, and then discussed them with student colleagues and school and district staff.  We then collected this data, transcribed or photo-captured student responses, and shared back with site leadership teams.  While we offered nearly a dozen discussion topics, students across schools overwhelmingly chose to discuss issues related to school discipline and the school to prison pipeline, expansion of opportunities to pursue personal interests, and experimentation with alternative and personalized school schedules.  The request for better food was a constant.

When we went to talk to younger students, we realized we would need a protocol that would be more appropriate for younger learners.  Each school selected 90 students who were divided into three rotations.  One rotation focused on capturing student narratives about powerful learning experiences, another rotation engaged students in a discussion about their perceptions of their current school learning environment, and the final rotation brought in high school students to facilitate a dialogue around the high school experience and how it could be improved.  We again collected student responses – scanning student written responses in both the high school and school learning environment discussions, and collecting the student video narratives.  While our intermediate students were more reserved in their critiques of their experiences, they did offer lots of helpful feedback in terms of their perceptions of academic rigor and challenge, their desire for more universally available support and guidance, and at some schools, a call for improved safety and supervision.  As is the case with the high school sessions, we return the input data to school leadership teams for their discussion and review.

When taken together, we saw a number of interesting patterns amongst our students’ responses.  In terms of the academic experience, students voiced a clear desire to have more ownership of the path through intermediate and high school: access to more course choices, fewer required courses, and more flexibility in daily schedules.  They also expressed some impatience with elements of their experience that lacked meaning or authenticity, including disdain for busy work, unnecessary homework, and having to endure some classes where teachers didn’t seem terribly interested in their personal goals or challenges.  “Believe in us more.”  “Trust us more.” These were common statements we heard from students.  Some comments were hard to hear.

We also heard a lot of students talk about what is working for them at school.  Many students shared anecdotal evidence of teachers who had gone out of their way to support, encourage, and mentor them.  Similarly, many students talked about enrichment experiences and field trips that stood out as significant to their learning.  There was a strong call to make these types of experiences both more widely available and in greater quantity.

Student voice and empowerment are not boxes to be checked off a list.  It’s an ongoing commitment and it’s never finished.  As our intensive, albeit imperfect efforts can attest, students have plenty to say about the educational experiences we are offering them.  We just have to take the time to listen.

A lot of the organizational and school leadership literature I read starts out with the premise that we live in an increasingly complex world, and that the degree of complexity is increasing exponentially.  In other words, the future is a bully who is coming to steal your lunch.

That’s why when I saw the workshop title “Unleashing Large-Scale Social Change” at this week’s Carnegie Summit, I immediately registered.  The session was led by Becky Margiotta and Joe McCannon from the Billions Institute.  I was drawn to the audacious belief that as individuals and organizations, we can influence and shape aspects of the increasingly complex world we all live in.  Perhaps we can even be strategic about how we shape our broader environment.

So, here are 3 major takeaways from my learning today about how to unleash large-scale social change.

Get out of your sector 

Most of us like to talk to people who think like we do.  When we are talking with likeminded professionals whose expertise is similar to ours, we often default to communication shorthand that draws on shared heuristics and  jargon.  It feels good to speak the language.  It feels efficient and reinforces our own sense of expertise and belonging.

That all comes to a screeching halt when you add people to the conversation who don’t necessarily speak your language.  It slows down communication and forces you to explain yourself.  It lends itself to a fresh reflection on your work.

One of the welcome surprises in my session today was the opportunity to interact and learn from non K-12 educators and administrators.  At one point we engaged in a problem solving activity where we formed small groups to give us feedback on challenges we’re facing in moving our work forward.  My small group had a researcher from a for-profit organization, a higher education administrator, and an HR director from a philanthropic foundation.  The group’s collective feedback was insightful and sometimes surprising.

Large scale social change, by definition, engages broader groups and coalitions of people.  We are hoping to connect and impact people whose worldview and expertise don’t match our own.  That suggests we assemble diverse, multidisciplinary teams and embrace the opportunity for our ideas to be analyzed, contested, and refined.

Change happens in the field

 Stop perseverating on planning.  Stop strategizing all day.  Get in the field and test your ideas.  Creating a culture of change and improvement happens when leadership adopts an obsession with what is happening in the field.  Then lead from the field.  It’s Seth Godin’s invitation to “ship it.”  It’s Nike’s invocation to “just do it.”

One of the most powerful ideas that struck me hard was something I already knew. Improvement happens when you are out there doing the work, collecting data about the work you are doing, reflecting on that data, and iterating towards the final goal.  It’s the cycle of inquiry.  It’s improvement science 101.

Being in the field can speed up our iteration cycle.  We’re there when the work is happening.  We’re there with the practitioners.  When the cycle has to filter back through a dense bureaucracy – organizational hierarchies, governing boards, standing committees – it slows down.

Instead of sitting back, receiving reports and making judgements about the work, we should be where the work is happening – identifying, documenting, and celebrating success stories.  Large scale change is unleashed when the potential for success becomes tangible.

Losing Control

So much of the conversation today can be distilled down to one word.  Fear.  Fear of public failure.  Fear of disappointing people we care about.  Perhaps the most pernicious fear we discussed was the fear of losing control.  Bureaucracies are designed to exercise control – we want to maintain our aura of expertise, minimize liability, and guarantee outcomes.

There’s a problem, however.  To keep up with the broader demands of our shifting world, we have to do things we don’t yet know how to do.  That means we would have to acknowledge that our expertise is limited.  We would have to risk trying new things, and we wouldn’t know for certain if we’d get it right.  We have to learn.

The challenge gets even more acute when we are trying to move from organizational responses to external stimuli, to an organization trying to shape the external context.   Our risk of losing control goes up as more stakeholders engage the issue.  Public failure is now a strong possibility.  So we back off.  We decide it’s better to play it safe.

“Write down up to three words that best describe your experience with math in school.”  That was the opening prompt for my day of professional development last Friday.  Somehow, I found myself at a table of math lovers, but around the room the immediate reaction was much more visceral.  “I try to block that part of school out of my mind,” was one impromptu response.  Then we stood and grouped ourselves into one of three affinity groups – whether our math experiences had generally been negative, mixed, or positive.  The groups were pretty evenly divided.  Insulted.  Confused.  Frustrating.  Those were just a few words people in the negative group used to describe their math experience in school.  That didn’t reflect my experience at all, and I wasn’t the only member of my group to use words like fun and satisfying.

What in the world happened here?  We went around the circle, and participants did a little self-analysis to determine how we could come to such disparate conclusions.

A few interesting patterns started to surface.  One was that many of the members of our class described having had a generally positive experience “until that one class…”  That’s the class when they started to struggle, and then, to seal the deal, they were basically told directly by a teacher that they weren’t cut out for math.  One participant reported that he was told in no uncertain terms that he was dumb.  The lingering pain associated with these stories was tangible.

The entire time I was listening to these accounts, I was thinking hard about why my experiences had been so different.  Now, by 2nd grade I had been told I wasn’t gifted (I don’t believe gifted programs are typically designed to serve truly gifted students, but that’s a conversation for a different post).  I had received my share of “Needs improvement” on my elementary report cards.  Average is probably the best word to describe my performance.

Despite my ordinariness as a student, I developed a love of math.  But why?  Well, this is hardly a scientific study that can isolate the significant variables in my life that led me to love math.  Yet as I stood in the circle, something jumped out at me that I hadn’t really ever considered.

Some of my earliest memories as a child are of our annual visits to my great grandparents’ house.  We lived in Arizona, and their double-wide trailer in Laguna Beach, CA was a magical place.  Amongst the many wonders of their little home, was my great grandpa’s puzzle closet.  My great grandpa Hind loved puzzles, and he had a wonderful collection of math games and mind teasers.  I spent countless hours trying to match numbers, arrange colors, untie knots, and unlock boxes.  Sometimes great grandpa helped me pick out a puzzle that matched my very basic skill level.  Sometimes I was informed a puzzle was off limits – I was simply not prepared and needed more practice before attempting to solve.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve always approached math as a game.  A puzzle that has a solution. When I couldn’t solve a problem, it just meant I wasn’t ready yet, or needed more guidance.  I didn’t have any problem when a problem required additional time – it just meant the puzzle was harder to solve.  I never took it personally.

My absolute favorite math activities were often complicated word problems, or even better, logic puzzles.  My 5th grade math teacher, Mr. Christensen, took notice of this interest, and started feeding me lots of logic puzzles.  I gobbled them up.  Then he chose me to represent the school at Math Challenge Day – a district-wide math competition.  I still remember how proud and excited I felt to participate.

Math instruction is a tough nut to crack, and certainly my over-simplified explanation here does not adequately capture the complexity of our math challenges in schools.  Yet I can’t help but think that my great grandpa’s collection of mind teasers, together with the encouragement of a few observant teachers, had an outsize influence on my relationship with math.

When I flew in to interview for my job with Santa Ana Unified, I stopped to pick up a rental car.  The attendant at the desk asked me why I was in town.  I responded that I was an educator interviewing with Santa Ana Unified.  She responded flatly.  “That must be tough.”  Of course I was still an outsider to Orange County, and I was taken back that a complete stranger would offer up such a dismissive statement about an entire community.  Indeed, it comes to many as a shock that in the midst of the wealth of Orange County, California, there exists a school district and community of over 50,000 students where over 90% of students live in poverty.  From an outside lens, Santa Ana is hardly mentioned.  Invisible.  To the OC resident, it’s dismissed.  Rejected.

Public perceptions and expectations matter, and changing the narrative about Santa Ana students and schools defines my work.  It is a struggle I take up every day.  Every day I attempt to provoke people enough to consider, if even for a moment, that what they assume about Santa Ana and our youth is far from adequate in describing the collective talent, passion, and potential of our community.

Back in September, when I first heard about the XQ super school competition, it seemed like a natural fit for our district priorities to move towards personalized, competency-based learning.  Certainly our efforts to transform to a portfolio of schools model wouldn’t be hurt by the addition of an XQ Super School.  It also spoke to my belief that “traditional” school districts have the capacity and vision to do radically transformational work that significantly accelerates student learning.  Ten million dollars certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Then we started to meet with students.

When we handed the mic over to students and stopped talking long enough to listen, a different school design narrative started to take shape.  It wasn’t that our adult motivations for building a Super School weren’t accurate or even admirable.  Our purpose simply didn’t capture enough of the passion, urgency, anger, and hope that we heard from our students.

“Don’t underestimate us”

“Don’t give up on me.  Give me confidence”

“Trust us more”

“I AM AS EQUAL AS YOU ARE.”

You see, I think our kids in Santa Ana have internalized the marginalization and invisibility that is projected upon them.  Yet just underneath the surface our kids are screaming for opportunity.  The amount of untapped potential, underutilized ability, and unrealized ambition is as deeply impressive as it is deeply tragic.  When you figure out how to unlock what a community like Santa Ana has to offer, you begin to unravel the puzzle of what the next generation of education must look like in America.

Over the past six months our design team has been increasingly fueled by a sense that what we have to offer as a community can and will spark a larger movement and conversation about what high school means in an increasingly complex, diverse world. Our kids want this.  Our community wants this.  We’re ready for this.