“why we do, what we do every day…”

Click here to see Eddie share his thoughts on leadership

Managing other human beings is a tremendous privilege.  In schools, those who manage others are typically referred to as administrators – which I happen to think is an awful word.  It’s a word that does little to capture the deeply human and emotional challenge of leading any human endeavor.  Rather, use of the term administrator focuses us on the technical aspects of the work we do in schools – program administration and implementation, roll-out and accountability.  Of course technical and managerial know-how are key ingredients to successful leadership.  As we say in schools, you have to be able to get the buses running on time.  Similarly, financial mismanagement is what gets school leaders written up in the newspaper.  Not good.  Yet we know that leadership goes far beyond technical expertise.

Thoughts on leadership is a series of short videos designed to explore precisely what it means to exercise leadership in a way that motivates those around us, builds momentum towards common vision and goals, and ultimately gets the results that bring positivity into our work places.  It’s an opportunity to celebrate when we get leadership right.  Each month, I’ll interview a Santa Ana Unified employee who will share insights into the attributes and experiences of quality leadership that have built shared commitment and improved learning for our students.  I’m hoping to surface the stories of those who often work behind the scenes, whose contributions are critical to our success, and whose perspective on leadership can help us understand what it means to generate momentum and commitment throughout an organization.

I start this month with an interview with Eddie Leon, plant custodian at the district office on Chestnut St.  From my first day on the job, Eddie emerged as a talented and friendly team member.  His consistent enthusiasm for both his work and our shared mission of educating students rubs off on all of those who work with him.  I like to joke with him that aside from the superintendent, he is probably the most well known team member in the building.  I knew immediately when thinking about this project that I wanted to interview Eddie first.  I’m not sure Eddie knew what to expect with my request, and he kept reminding me that he was used to working in the background.  He didn’t disappoint.

Back in summer 2010, I had the chance to interview Lattie Coor, former president of Arizona State University, and Michael Cowan, superintendent of Mesa Public Schoosl, the largest school district in Arizona.  Both were unflinching in their belief that vision was the most crucial aspect of leadership.  A quick read of any leadership manual, or a quick listen to any leadership seminar will confirm vision as a preeminent practice.  Vision is the ability to articulate a future state in which we work better and do better work, and convince others that it can and will be the new reality.  Vision provides the energy, vitality, and enthusiasm to engage in the complex work of organizational improvement transformation.

Interestingly, many leadership programs are not in the business of developing the communication skills to clearly articulate a vision.  We might read about it in a book if we are lucky.  More likely we see leadership reduced to a combination of technical expertise, analytical thinking, and long work hours.  Perhaps that’s why I was surprised when the first assignment in graduate school was to develop vision speeches, practice them in front of our peers, and develop a rubric together for assessing the effectiveness and impact of our discourse.  It wasn’t always comfortable practicing in public, especially at first when we hardly knew one another.  It felt awkward giving honest feedback to other students – we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Ironically, it’s that honest feedback that can help reduce heartache in the long run.  Leaders in the real world are held to a high standard for their communication skills.  Better to hear the truth about our performance in the relative safety of a classroom than in the coldness of a job interview or in the silence of a meeting room.  It only makes sense that we would actually take the time to practice and adjust our technique as a part of our formal leadership training.

This was the moment I was afraid of.  The entire room was full of administrators around the district, and we had just finished taking a survey designed to reveal our greatest strengths as leaders.  We each received a report of our top 5  leadership attributes.  My #5 was an attribute I was well acquainted with, even though I’d hoped it wouldn’t show up.  Competitive.

I’m seriously competitive.  It’s in my bones.  My wife and close friends know this about me.  I cannot sit down to play a board game just for the fun of playing.  I want to win.  Even allowing my 5 year old to beat me in a game takes focus and concentration.  I can’t imagine how losing on purpose sends the right message.  We’re winners here.  I’m not proud of it, but this competitive drive is as natural a part of how I function as it is for me to walk on two feet.

So now the facilitator of our leadership attributes conversation asks those in the room who have competitive as a core characteristic to stand up.  There are nearly 50 people in the room, but only 3 of us stand up.  This is going to end poorly, I think to myself.  Then the facilitator points out there are two types of competitive people.  Type one are those primarily concerned with their own performance and not one-upping anyone else.  I’ll call them the benevolent competitors.  Type two competitors are those who feed off of the glory of victory.  It’s hard for them to watch others win.  After the difference was clarified, the facilitator asked all but the type two competitors to sit down.

I was the only person standing in the room.

Standing there, by myself, I was asked a few more questions. Frankly, I wasn’t ready for this group of people who didn’t know me very well to see the depths of my competitive nature.  I even tried to use some humor and an awkward no comment to deflect attention.  Great, now everyone knows I’m a jerk.

In the end, that very public confrontation with a part of me that I have tried to minimize in my leadership practice left me in a very reflective mood.  As I pondered the significance of my competitive spirit, I had something of an epiphany.  Yes, I’m naturally competitive.  I realized, however, that my natural inclination to victory has forced me over time to develop a very aware sense of the need to be humble.  Unchecked, ambition easily distills into arrogance, and I’m constantly striving to stay grounded and live with a grateful spirit for the people around me. I also realized that my competitive furnace produces the fire necessary to teach and lead through the long cycle of the school year.  I have an insatiable need to do good work, and that is a hunger that feeds those around me.

We often close ourselves from the hard feedback – the critique that lands hard because we know it is, at least partially, true.  We convince ourselves that as leaders, we need to always appear polished and free of flaws.  Perhaps ironically, it is our acknowledgment of our fallibility that makes us trustworthy.  In the end, those we work with know well our weak spots, and the real danger is in refusing to see those spots for ourselves.

Growth mindset is dead.  Really.

If you are an educator and haven’t heard about Carol Dweck and the concept of growth mindset, then you have been sleeping through the past five years of professional development.  These days, I rarely go to a meeting involving teachers where someone doesn’t extol the virtue of having a growth mindset.  I heard about growth mindset’s redemptive power no less than daily last week.

Let’s start with a quick review lesson.  Dweck’s research asserts that human beings can generally be divided into two categories.  Those with a “fixed” mindset are those who see their intelligence as a static, non-changing commodity that is continually tested or proved.  In other words, tests or challenges don’t develop intelligence, they reveal it.  It should come as no surprise then, that those with a fixed mindset really only want problems they already have the skills and knowledge to solve.  Anything more challenging is just a trap to make them look bad.  Then there are those with the “growth” mindset.   These people see a puzzle or test as an opportunity to learn and develop.  They see their brain as a muscle that gets stronger with each use.  Their sense of success is not in proving they are smart over and over again, but in the act of engaging challenging tasks.

Here’s the problem.  It’s dangerous for educators to have a growth mindset.  Teachers are rarely rewarded for taking risks and pushing themselves to learn new strategies and techniques.  We expect teachers to perform.  The “dog and pony show” is a ubiquitous term describing classroom observations and principal walkthroughs.  Time to look good.  Unless an administrator has earned a tremendous amount of trust, it is rare for a teacher to invite visitors to the classroom to provide feedback on what needs improvement.  Close the door.  Let me do my thing.

The problem is even more pronounced in how it applies to students.  Few educators would admit publicly that they don’t believe all children can learn.  Yet there is a difference between assuming all kids can learn and applying a growth mindset to the potential of our students.  We attribute static characteristics to kids and then layer on labels to make grouping as easy as possible.  “Smart” is a dangerous word both for those who are deemed worthy of its bestowal, and even more so for those who experience childhood without it.

Frankly, I think we’ve inoculated ourselves against considering the implications of truly having a growth mindset, both for ourselves and our students.  We don’t necessarily want to change – our practices, our beliefs, our security, our prejudices.  We don’t want your critical feedback. In fairness, few of us would stay in a relationship where we only received mean-spirited observations from our partner.  We can only take so many invitations for improvement before we need to hear that we are appreciated and valued.  I’ve often said that the most difficult aspect of being an administrator is balancing genuine and authentic appreciation with meaningful and honest critical feedback.  Yet I still can’t help but cringe a bit when I’m in a meeting where we make a passing reference to the importance of a growth mindset.  The more we use the term, the further we seem to get from what it really means.

Nearly 5 years ago, I sat in a lecture hall at the Department of Government at Harvard University to listen to Margaret Spellings, who served as the Secretary of Education towards the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.  I expected her to come in the spirit of reflection, engaging us in a discussion about what went right and what went wrong with No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  From my educator perspective, I thought there was certainly a lot of room for improvement and plenty of critique to go around.

What I got was a campaign ad.  Ms. Spellings was unflinching in her defense of NCLB.  Of course I came in the role of a practitioner, someone familiar with the nuts and bolts of the law and its implications on the ground for educators and students.  Ms. Spellings was much more interested in NCLB as a case-study in effective policymaking.  “Love it or hate it, NCLB has been a game-changer.”  Her assertion was that very few pieces of policy had resonated and traveled as broadly and deeply as NCLB.  She even jokingly offered us NCLB paraphanelia, reminding us that NCLB was more than a policy.  It was a brand.  “We need more NCLB, not less.”

I thought of that encounter this morning as I was engaged with colleagues from six of the largest school districts in California in a discussion about teacher and principal evaluation systems.  We are all in the process of developing meaningful systems for assessing performance, providing feedback, and encouraging professional growth with the aim of dramatically increasing student performance. We’re making progress, but we do so while walking the narrow ledge that drops off into quantitative oblivion.  Multiple measures of student achievement quickly melt back into a single composite index that’s easy to understand and quantify but relatively useless in practice.  Questions of teacher and principal efficacy can quickly deteriorate into arbitrary conversations about cut scores and variable weighting.

We need systems that paint as complete a picture as possible, capturing the complexity and nuances of the classroom.  We need systems that bolster the professionalism and prestige of educators – not reduce them to a number.  We all wait, a bit nervously, to see what the newest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will bring.  Let’s hope it’s not just a brand.

On the first morning of school as a high school principal, I stood outside the front entrance, enthusiastically greeting my students as they came for the first day of instruction.  While I had worked as an intern on a middle school admin team during the prior year, I had never been a full-time vice principal.  You can imagine the combination of emotions I was feeling as students streamed past.  I had high aspirations for my own performance and for the learning of my students, combined with genuine nervousness.  I was now responsible for the success of an entire high school.

My morning contemplation was interrupted by a high pitched scream.  As I quickly scanned for the source of the commotion, a young man walked past, blood across his face.  I was quickly forced from a disposition of friendly meet and greet to one of gravity and concern.  I spent the next 90 minutes investigating, interviewing (or perhaps more accurately, interrogating), and processing those involved with what turned out to be the first fight of the year.   The day pressed on, filled with hundreds of interactions with students, parents, and staff.  Some conversations required a spirit of understanding and empathy, others necessitated I be more decisive and directive.  This affective roller coaster was a daily experience.

After six weeks, I was exhausted.  Every statement I made was open to public scrutiny, and every decision carried with it implications for my leadership practice.  On many evenings, and occasionally accompanied by tears, I would come home and slump on the couch feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of the leadership task before me.  My typical spirit of confidence and enthusiasm was under serious bombardment.  I lived with the relentless sense that my students needed more from me and I was struggling to deliver.

One afternoon, as I supervised after-school dismissal, the principal of the school that shared our campus came to talk to me.  Perhaps sensing my struggles, he asked me how I was doing.  My short response of “I’m hanging in there” belied a deeper feeling of inefficacy.  Thankfully, this veteran principal ignored my superficial response.  “You know Daniel, it wasn’t until my third year that I realized that being a principal is an impossible job.  Once I reconciled myself to the fact that I couldn’t meet everyone’s expectations of me all of the time, I was able to focus on the most important things to move the school forward.”

Principals, like teachers, always live with a nagging sense that their best is not enough.  In our most under-resourced schools and in the lives of our most challenged students, our fledgling efforts may indeed fall short of what is truly needed. Yet we persist in the face of that difficulty.  Our students have no choice but to persist, and we must match their resilience with a professional commitment to push through our challenges and feelings of self-doubt until we possess the skill and perspective to doggedly focus on what matters most.

It was a Friday morning, and I had simply been too busy during the week to arrange a time to test out the technology.  I was scheduled to give a presentation to the 140 elementary students in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades at our Advanced Learning Academy (ALA).  The trick was that students would be located in 6 different classrooms, and I would need to broadcast my presentation to all classrooms simultaneously.  The goal was to have an engaging, thought-provoking interaction with the kids, and I had 60 minutes to work with.

I was nervous.  Of course there was the content of my lesson about what it means to be a “pioneer.”  Certainly the students and teachers at our Project Based and Blended Learning focused ALA qualify as pioneers, and I wanted to explore some of the history of pioneers and the emotional challenges associated with doing something first.  Yet here was a situation where I wasn’t just using technology as an add-on.  I needed it to communicate, and the kids would need it to wade into the internet search waters to learn about pioneers in ways that interest them individually.

The trick in these types of situations is not expertise – it’s having a team that is willing to experiment and learn together.  Luckily, the team of teachers at ALA are some of the most flexible, willing-to-experiment-and-learn professionals I’ve had the opportunity to work with.  So I arrived a little early, hoping I could make Google Hangouts work for my simultaneous broadcast.  We spent 15 minutes running around from classroom to classroom, double-checking invitations and coordinating start times.  Somehow, by 8:15, we had all 6 classrooms broadcasting.

I was in one of the classrooms with an in-person audience of 5th graders.  The other teachers were texting the teacher in the classroom in which I was stationed.  “We can barely hear him!”  Within a minute, the school program coordinator came into the room with a mic from her purse.  “Try this,” was her invitation as she passed it to me.  Later into the presentation, another message came that they wanted to try having me ask and answer live questions with students in other classrooms.  So we tried.  The teacher quickly figured out that the interaction was easier if she had the student walk up next to the large screen from which I was being broadcasted.  The student waved into the screen as the image rotated amongst the 5 other classrooms.

60 minutes later, and feeling relieved, we had been successful.  Students had watched video shared from my computer about Jackie Robinson and Marie Curie, they had refined internet search terms using their Chromebooks to define what it means to be a pioneer, and they had written and reflected on how they themselves were pioneers as the first cohort of students at the school.  Not only did we learn together, but we had some fun doing it.

It’s easy to simply keep doing what we’re comfortable with.  It can be a bit frightening when others look to us as the experts, while we ourselves are trying something new.   Quite frankly, sometimes we’ll fail.  Regardless of the risks, there is a thrill that comes with pushing ourselves to learn something new in ways that enhance student learning.  Hopefully we are surrounded, as I was, by a similarly flexible-minded team who can give us formative feedback and support as we move forward together.

As we learn and deepen our expertise, what was once fresh learning becomes implicit.  For example, it’s hard for me to remember what it felt like to be a novice behind the wheel.  Over the course of years and countless trips in the car, my brain and corresponding muscle movements have deeply ingrained in my memory what was once completely new and foreign to me.  While my wife might disagree, I have become an expert driver.

Of course constant repetition is one way to commit new learning to long term memory.  While there are other strategies that can enhance memory, most of them require some type of mental reworking of the material.  Summarizing in writing, visual cues, and revisiting notes before bed, are all in essence a deliberate review of new material.

Some of the most dynamic and influential mentors in my life made a habit of using a journal to reflect and help move new learning into long term memory. Journaling certainly qualifies as a powerful strategy for consolidating learning. While I have long had a habit in my personal life of journaling, my professional record of journaling is more hit and miss.  I was especially vigilant as a graduate student working on my master’s degree in School Leadership, and thought it might be fun to revisit and share some of my most influential reflections during that year of study.  I called it my School Leadership Processing Journal, and combined visual and written cues to keep it interesting.

So here’s my post from Day 1 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  We started with big questions about our purpose – not just why we were studying school leadership, but to really ask ourselves about our driving purpose.  What do we hope to accomplish with our lives, and how is that related to our professional work and identity?  The question of leadership becomes how we shift our core values into the shared goals of an organization.

I spent the last four years as a high school principal in San Francisco.  Living and working in the City by the Bay gave me a front row seat to how Silicon Valley is redefining modern society.  The boom and bust nature of the digital gold rush is rich with success stories of rapid market capitalization and cautionary tales of lost fortunes and squandered opportunities.  Here are just three of the things I learned from Silicon Valley about leading schools in the 21st Century.

1 – Embrace Design Thinking

Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.  That’s the Stanford d.school cycle for design thinking.  In Silicon Valley, it’s not just a process, it’s a culture.  There is a pervasive faith in the power of data analysis and informed experimentation to iterate our way towards improvement.  The entire process depends on a wide aperture for ideas, and a big appetite for learning from failure.

Design thinking comes as a shock to education.  It flies in the face of standardization.  Reform initiatives typically have their genesis outside the school site.  School leaders talk about roll-out and buy-in and implementation struggles.   Design thinking flips all this on its head.  Design thinking assumes that the most important data lives at the classroom level, and it’s not just quantitative data we want.  Empathy requires leaders to pay attention to the emotions and perceptions derived from the lived experience of students and teachers in their classrooms. This reconceptualization of school leadership requires strong facilitation skills and the emotional intelligence to publicly acknowledge that you as the leader don’t have all the answers at the outset.  It turns the principal into the lead researcher of his or her own organization.    

2 – Physical Space Matters

Gourmet cafeterias, funky couches, open architecture, desks without chairs. Silicon Valley thrives on creativity and innovation, and has the architecture and furnishings to match.  This isn’t just the whim of youth or privileged engineers. Nor is it just about recruitment and retention of top talent.  Silicon start-up style aligns work spaces and physical landmarks to shape organizational culture and emphasize the power of collaboration.  When success depends upon authentic integration of expertise across skill specialties, physical obstacles work against the bottom line.  When survival is directly tied to product aesthetics and end-user ease-of-use, ugly and boring spaces mitigate organizational purpose.

School architecture is often placed on the altar of efficiency.  While efficiency is an important consideration in an environment of scarcity, schools do not exist to save money.  We build schools to educate and inspire our children – and we need the architecture to support our end goals.  School leaders should see themselves as designers, curating powerful learning spaces and showcasing student work that reinforces aspirational learning outcomes.

3 – The Power of Networks

The connection economy has its birthplace in Silicon Valley.  Social media disaggregates mass communication to the individual level, and success is increasingly measured by likes, hits, kicks, and pushes.  This new world of digital networking is actually built on the foundation of very old technology.  We’ve all heard the adage “it isn’t what you know but who you know.”

Too many conversations of school improvement and reform define success solely as a measure of cognitive skill.  At City Arts & Tech high school where I was principal, every student had to complete an internship in the workplace as a graduation requirement.  While the development of workplace skills was an important outcome, the social benefits of an expanded professional network were perhaps even more impactful.  Internships led to offers of paid employment, letters of recommendation, and ongoing mentorship.

Networking no longer just helps us get our jobs.  In the connection economy, networking is our job.  While our students may be digital natives, they do not have equal access to the tools that facilitate meaningful connections, nor are they necessarily strategic in the development of their online presence.   We need to build student skills and social capital.