Simplifying The Complexity of Question 3

In my earlier post, Vertically Align Your Interventions Simulataneously, I outlined how principals can carve out time to replace faculty meetings with collaborative discussions on interventions.  In these meetings, grade level teams come to the meetings with intervention strategies for the high leverage skills that they plan to teach in the upcoming grading period.  Teachers meet with teachers from the grade level above and below  about the interventions and offer suggestions to make interventions even more targeted and specific.  At the end of the meeting, every grade level walks away with a deeper understanding of why kids fail to learn and more importantly a more detailed plan of action to address kids when they fail to learn.  Attached are an agenda and graphic organizer to guide teams through the process of designing interventions that align with the grade level below's instruction and lead to the grade level above's standard.

Below are dropbox links to an agenda and worksheet to help teams prescribe Tier 1 interventions collaborative and vertically.
Vertical Alignment Meeting Agenda
Vertical Alignment Intervention Worksheet

So now that we've met and created our specific intervention, what do we do with all this information?

Question 1 & 2 Must be Answered

Once teams have agreed what the standard looks and sounds like at the expected level of proficiency, they must agree on what instructional activities and strategies they will use to guide learners to the standard. Teams must also design common formative assessments that are aligned to the standard and the rigor of instruction that was provided.  Without a common formative assessment developed collaboratively by the team, teachers will have no baseline to identify who really learned the content and who is still not proficient.  Thus, there is no reason to begin answering our next question, #3. 

Special Note - This topic is extremely complex and my basic explanation hardly does any justice to the importance of developing common instructional and assessment practices.

Before Question 3 - Use your Student Work

Assuming that your PLTs have developed a common understanding and agreements for instruction and assessment, teachers are ready to evaluate formative assessment data.  Teachers must come to the table with student work in 3 forms.

1. Struggling Student Work - Bring student work of a student or students that you cannot find an intervention that help them learn the concept.
2. Average Student Work - Bring student work of an average student to gauge if your instruction is pushing all students at the same level of rigor as your teammates' instruction.  This is a great way to evaluate if Question 1 is challenging all students at the appropriate level.  This conversation should also allow teachers to gather new instructional ideas.
3. Exceptional Student Work - Bring work of a high student that you need ideas to push them to deeper level of complexity.  This is a great way to collectively answer question 4.

Question 3 - Struggling Student Work

Why bring the lowest student to the table?  If you can design interventions that will help the student that struggles the most, you are designing interventions for most of the students that fail to learn.  It is easy to discuss a student that is mildly behind, but your collaborative time is precious.  You must spend it with your team discussing the hardest to accelerate and hardest to reach.  Use student work to show what specifically is the problem with the child's learning. Analyzing the student's work will help team members see problems and habits that the teacher may not be able to see yet. It is also very important to have intervention personnel in the meeting to share their strategies and to make them aware of the child's struggles. This conversation must turn into a plan of action that is specific to the largest skill that is preventing the child from learning. The plan must also specify the detailed actions that will be taken and identify the personnel, time and frequency of the intervention.

If your team is able to spend 10 minutes per child designing targeted, specific and prescriptive interventions for the lowest child, they will have just designed intervention strategies that every teacher can employ with other students who are failing but not at the severity of the lowest student in the class.

So What about the Vertical Alignment Document?

Teams must be purposeful in using the document from the vertical alignment meeting.  If they put a lot of effort into making the document and then getting input from the grade level above and the grade level below, they have just answered question 3 for all of their upcoming planning meetings.  Teams will be able reference the input and suggestions from the grade levels above and below each week.  From there, they ensure that the child receives interventions that begin from their prior year's learning and lead to a solid foundation for the next year's instruction.

Now there is a caveat to the perceived simplicity in the above paragraph.  Just because your team wrote interventions and got vertical input does not necessarily make the intervention good.  Teams must review the interventions and be thoughtful and committed to determining if the interventions are prescriptive enough to meet the  unique and specific issues that are preventing students from learning.  In essence, the preplanned interventions need to be reviewed and discussed to ensure that they will meet the needs of kids where they are currently failing to learn. 

Hope this helps.  I would enjoy your thoughts, feedback and questions to this post.  Good luck.

Silencing the Silence

How often have we heard that the silence is deafening? Can you really hear a pin drop? Do the crickets actually commence to chirping as soon as the elephant enters the room?

Dictionary.com describes the noun of silence as:
1. absence of any sound or noise; stillness.
2. the state or fact of being silent; muteness.
3. absence or omission of mention, comment, or expressed concern: the conspicuous silence of our newspapers on local graft.
4. the state of being forgotten; oblivion: in the news again after years of silence.

As a leader I find it interesting that silence is defined as the omission of mention, comment or expressed concern. As I reflect on the noun of silence, I wonder what conditions are created that force teammates or employees to purposely fail to bring about issues of concern. Is the culture so toxic and threatening that members hold their tongue when they need to address really important issues?  In order to answer the questions about how silence is created, we must dig deeper to learn more about silence.

Dictionary.com goes further to describe the verb of silence:
1. to put or bring to silence; still.
2. to put (doubts, fears, etc.) to rest; quiet.
3. Mil. to still (enemy guns), as by more effective fire.

Here we find that the action of silence has 2 opposing responsibilities for leaders to consider.  Each action will take the culture of an organization to 2 completely different places.

1. Leaders can squelch the conversation and subdue voices that differ from theirs, or 
2. Leaders can put fears, doubts or uncertainty to rest.

To synthesize this even further, suppressing the conversation does not put fears to rest, and putting fears to rest requires anything but cutting off the conversation.

So what steps do leaders take to silence the silence?

1. Welcome the Elephant into the Room

The leader must model a positive approach to solving difficult problems. Keeping the team focused on what's best for the organization is key to effectively dealing with difficult situations.  Conversation must be open, authentic and focused on a resolution. People appreciate a leader when he has the courage to address the elephant.  They see that moving forward is not only attainable but essential.

2.  Listen to the Crickets

When the crickets are chirping, trust is uncertain.  Fear and uncertainty abound.  This is your cue to put fears and uncertainty to rest.  Frequent individual conversations with multiple people and continued dialogue with the group are essential to remove the perceived gag-order.  As long as the crickets are chirping, your progress is stalled.  If you want to quell the crickets, you have to make some noise.

3. Question Why the Pins are Dropping

If you want to help your team members, you have to allow them to address their own doubts.  Leaders are most successful at helping others when they use reflective questioning, rather than endless suggestions and directives, to guide others to untangle their own web of confusion.  To help teams discover the answer to why silence is present, the leader can't answer his own questions.  The answer is in the room and the team has to find it with your support and guidance.

Silencing the silence takes courage.  It takes vision, and it requires an unwavering commitment not to people, but to something bigger, the team.  It requires situational awareness which is only possible when the leader knows their staff deeply, knows the daily undercurrents of the organization and uses both pieces of information to guide the organization to resolve its problems and ultimately to become better for kids and each other. If the leader fails to confront the elephant, the crickets and the pin-dropping, they will lull their staff to a state of silent lucidity.

The Intersection of Memory Ln. & Busy St.

Life's what you make it.

You get out of life what you put in it.

We've heard this mantra from every kind of motivational quote that focuses our minds on constant improvement. This is the path we call Busy Street. It is the path of progress and growth.  Much like a freeway, you must move fast, narrow your focus and keep your eye on the road and your hands on the wheel. 

Life's not the breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away.

Live, Laugh, Love.

When we hear these quotes, our minds quickly gravitate to our family, and we instantly cherish the time and special memories that we have had with the people that mean the most to us. We call this place Memory Lane.  This path is one of emotion and feelings.  Much like a less frequently traveled country road, you can drive slow, enjoy the view, roll down the windows, soak up the sun and feel the wind in your hair.

This post is dedicated to my son, who is a senior this year.  As a senior parent, I find myself reflecting daily on the time that has passed so quickly.  With every last event in his high school career, I feel him naturally growing out of our house.  His last football game, his last pep rally, his last band performance at the football game, his last 'this' and his last 'that'.  Being at these "last" events, I take mental snapshots of everything I can on my path down Memory Lane.  Emotions and feelings of sadness, elation and guilt abound.

Yes, I said guilt.  Did I spend too much time on Busy Street trying to provide the best for him and my family?  Did I sacrifice too much time being busy instead of making memories?  Did I fail to sit quietly and observe when I was preoccupied with tasks?

So which way do I go now?

Here are some tips for myself that I think would benefit all leaders that are stuck on Busy Street!

• Go down Busy Street, but make sure you exit the freeway often to take a slower scenic route.
• When you get on Memory Lane, don't take Busy Street behaviors with you.  They take you away from the reason you're on Memory Lane in the first place.
• While on Memory Lane, pull over on the side of the road.  Stop and just soak up the scenery.
• Put your phone down and don't worry about what's happening on Busy Street.
• Make your time on Memory Lane special by showing your love for your family with your words, actions and most importantly time.

As we get older, there is a consuming fire within leaders that drives them to do everything we can to solidify our career.  We must reach the goal, achieve excellence and make our organizations highly effective and efficient.  Everyday, this fire forces us to narrow our focus even more to the point that we forget that there is actually life beyond the superhighway of success.

So for Thanksgiving, I challenge you and me both to exit the freeway wherever we may be.  Take a path that is slow where we can create memories that will last forever in our lives and in our families' lives.  Disconnect and unplug from all the tools and structures of progress, and enjoy life.  That is hard for driven people because true life is not task driven, and in the end, it doesn't really matter how far you got down Busy Street.  Life is relationship driven and that is what Thanksgiving is all about.  Give thanks for the life that God gave you, the people that he put in your life and the ability to create and remember special times with them.

Happy Thanksgiving

Never Neglect Insignificance

I read a blog the other day about the leadership of the winningest coach in NCAA basketball history, John Wooden. I wondered what epic leaders do differently, and I was shocked to find that the first lesson that Wooden taught his players was how to correctly put on their socks. Really?? Socks??? His rationale was rather simple. If the players can't put on their socks correctly, they will get blisters on their feet. Once that happens, no amount of leadership, motivation or coaching will make the player effective or successful.

So What are the Socks in Education?

To me, it seems that the socks of education are support and how to access it. Teachers stay covered up in the ever changing mandates and accountability pressure. If educators don't have the necessary supports in place, they will surely get blisters or burnout; thus, knocking them out of the game. Sadly, many leave the teaching field because their lack of support gave them a poor impression of the profession all together.

How Do We Correctly Put on our Socks?

From day one teachers must hear and feel from their coach or leader  that the leader's job is to support and serve the teachers. The leader and fellow teachers are the socks that prevent initial injury.  Teachers must also know the detailed expectations for how to be prepared with the curricular, instructional and assessment practices of the district. This takes lots of organization on the leader's part to ensure that teachers are adequately prepared for success in the classroom. If teachers do not receive support through mentors, teams and pacing guides with important details, the path of student performance will be left to chance, and leaders will be left with unreliable results on whether students are learning or not.

Once We have our Socks on Correctly...

Players are ready to grow and perform by receiving feedback that is concise and precise, positive and constructive, direct and affirming.  Leaders can help players capitalize on mistakes by turning them into coaching points. Coaches must avoid being critical and punitive in their tone and actions because the player will never be receptive to future ideas of how they can improve. Players are conditioned  by the coach's daily interactions, and it is important to make sure the coach doesn't condition players to never reveal mistakes and even worse present a false facade that all is well.  Failure on the leader's part to establish this critical line of trusting communication could result in many kids failing, and this would be due to the leader creating conditions for the player  to fear having their mistakes used against them.  In short the relationship between the coach and the player keeps the socks on correctly.

Buzzer Beater

There is nothing more exciting than watching a buzzer beating shot in a closely contested basketball game.  The reason that John Wooden is the most prolific coach in NCAA basketball history is because his teams were consistently victorious. He was a masterful motivator, but even more important, he became a legend because never neglected details that seemed insignificant.

Minimizing your Moron Factor

Leaders can be morons. Now this is not always the case, but it happens from time to time. Sometimes, when I'm sitting in a meeting, I get really involved in the discussion, and suddenly, something begins to change.  I sense this awkward and uncomfortable feeling and notice that my moron factor is starting to increase.

What just happened?  I heard that there was a problem, so I started talking about what we needed to do to resolve the issue. Within about three seconds, the facial expressions of the people in the room signaled that my moron factor was increasing.  The conversation segued from deep discussion into deafening silence as the focused engagement disintegrated before my very eyes, and that's when I realized. John, you're such a moron.

Leaders are morons when they:

1. Monopolize conversations.
2. Omit others' ideas.
3. Respond before fully understanding.
4. Overlook the expertise of others.
5. Neglect opportunities to build collaborative capacity.

How can we decrease our Moron Factor?

1.  Less Talking, More Listening

When a problem is afoot, I tend to stick my foot in my mouth the more I talk. Great leaders talk only after they really understand the situation. That can't happen without listening. When listening leaders use their words, they are restating and clarifying what the problem is rather than telling people what their problem is. You can't really clarify unless you really listen. 

2.  Less Telling, More Asking

Managers tell people what to do to fix their problem. Leaders ask more questions to help people solve their own problems. The answer is always in the room because everybody has their mind wrapped around the question.  Solutions can be created, but they need questions to help them evolve. Telling takes people backwards, while asking moves them forward. 

3.  Less Solutions, More Choices

Leaders forget that their role is global; therefore, they tend to offer global solutions to specific problems. Specific problems can only be remedied with specific and detailed solutions from the specific person that is directly impacted by the problem. Leaders must avoid the temptation to give solutions and instead guide teams and individuals to devise their own solution by offering multiple choices or even better, solution pathways.

The Bottom Line

If you want to lessen your moron factor, there is one simple solution.  Emphasize your empowerment factor. Tell less and guide more. The more you guide, serve and support, the more your staff will rely on your expertise, and the less they will think you're a moron. If you don't believe me, tell me what you think about your boss when he or she tells you what to do when he doesn't understand your problem.

What do you do that increases your moron factor?

The Art of Self-Contol

Self-control is an extremely valuable skill, especially if you're a leader. If you have it, you can lead ordinary teams to amazing results. If you don't have it, amazing teams will quickly disintegrate. Do you have self-control? Lets take a look at the definition and 3 components of self-control.

Definition - n. the restraint of one's feelings and actions.

Component 1 - Controlled Anger
Anger is not a bad thing. It is a natural human emotion, but if we allow it to take over our bodies, minds and soul, it will ruin us and our career. Uncontrolled anger is the result of being unable to handle the results of a bad situation. Being slow to anger is the most important aspect of controlling anger. You can't change the result of what has happened to this point, so don't let your anger focus you on the past. Last, failure to control your anger will tear down the trust in your organization like a tornado tears down a house that took months to build.

Component 2 - Controlled Ambition
Wanting to succeed professionally is not a bad thing. Like anger, it is a very natural human quality. Where it goes wrong is when leaders focus on making themselves successful rather than making others successful. Lets be honest. No one wants to follow a leader that touts all that he has done. In order to control your ambition, focus on promoting and celebrating the work of others. They deserve it. By helping others to grow in their work, your leadership will also grow. Be patient, your professional aspirations will be realized in due time.

Component 3 - Controlled Selfishness
Being selfish means to do things for yourself with no regard for others. How can you lead when you have no regard for others? The time that you invest in a behavior is borrowed from something else. Do you invest time in things that satisfy yourself or satisfy others? Do you deny others' needs for your selfish ambition? Are you unwilling to ask difficult questions because the answers may reveal weaknesses in your leadership? If you fail to control you selfishness, you hurt others and yourself by limiting or controlling your own potential.

Synthesis
No leader is perfect at self control, but I have seen some excellent strategies that leaders have used to control themselves. The main trait that I have seen in these leaders is the art of patience and calmness in the storm. In difficult times, they are calm and composed, and as a result, they can move the problem to solutions quickly. They know what they can control and what they cannot control. They can't control people, but they can influence them positively with their calm demeanor. Ultimately, they understand that in order to positively impact an organization, they must control their actions, words and emotions with self-discipline, self-actualization and most importantly self-humility.

The Race to Educate

Running an endurance race for the first time is quite exhilarating. The anticipation mounts with the gathering of the runners.  The anxiety builds and finally the race begins. As the runner takes off, he finds it hard to gauge his initial progress. Is the pace too fast? Is he running too slow? The runner's brain pulses with every runner passing him by. There is little else that can describe the first mile of a race. Everyone is jockeying for position, trying to gain the edge.

As I synthesize the start of a race, I can't help but think how teachers in isolated systems feel. Without a team to collaborate with or a set of values to give them guidance or a vision to serve as a beacon of light, what emotions will run through their mind at the start of the race? In this race to educate every child, some will start off too fast and fall apart before they get halfway through it. Some will take off too slow and the race will end before they do. Some will finish the race, but they will have no one to share the sense of accomplishment with.

So what does every teacher need this Christmas to make it through the most important race in educational history?

Resources

In order to be the best runner, you need the best gear, training and coaching to compete.  In education, it's no different.  Educators need access to all of the resources, but more importantly, the training on how to effectively use the resources.  Many schools provide adequate or even superb resources, but no training about them.  This leads me to the most important resource that teachers need and that is TIME!!!  Without proper time to plan, ineffective lessons and poor use of resources occur.  This will lead to teacher fatigue and in time falling out of the race all together.  Coaches and leaders must be present to help, listen and guide educators so they, themselves, can be a valuable resource to the educator.

Affirmation

Affirmation is confirming that something is true.  To me, we all need to know that the path we are on is true or at least headed in the right direction.  This is where feedback is critical.  The more frequent the feedback we receive, the more we are fed intellectually.  All educators need feedback from their supervisors, from members on their team and from those that they lead.  Not all feedback must be positive to be helpful, but it must be TRUE.  If a runner's pace is too slow, the runner must be affirmed that what they are doing is not enough.  Feedback or affirmation is the nourishment that you need to continue running.

Collaboration

Just like every runner sees more improvement by working with a team, teachers benefit more by working regularly with a team of teachers focused on the same aspects of educating children. Teams that collaborate together, stay together, and they do so, because the focus is not on individual improvement but collective improvement. The purpose of a team is to get everyone across the finish line, and that occurs when all members are committed to making everyone successful.  Collaboration builds the stamina that every runner needs to finish the race successfully.

Encouragement

We all perform better when others cheer for us. Encouragement and celebration along the way help educators stay mentally focused on the importance of finishing the race.  Encouragement is different than affirmation because affirmation requires the runner to acknowledge his current reality.  Encouragement is what every runner needs after they accept their current reality.  Whether you are behind or ahead, every educator must feel appreciation from supervisors, teammates, students and parents.  The leader's job is to make sure that everyone comes out and cheers the teachers on to the finish line throughout the race.  Encouragement is the 2nd wind every runner needs to run even faster.

Half Way Point

It's almost Christmas and teachers across the country have finished their first mile or two in this race to educate every child. As their coach, we must ascertain where they are in the race. At this point they need support from their leader of the good job that they are doing. They have reached the water station and they need to quench their thirst. This month, I challenge you to join me in being the best Resource you can be to Affirm, build Collaboration and Encourage your fellow educators.  They are running their tails off to educate every child.