On the surface it would appear the task is merely to gather the right people, establish an appropriate atmosphere and pose the right questions at the right time to generate the right keys – the ones that open the doors to production of a plan, subdivided by the details of what has to occur along the way, parsed out on a map showing the way with a chart showing who’s responsible and columns of $$ showing what it will cost and whose generosity will pay for it to generate the desired results.

Changing minds and habits is so simple, in a complex sort of way. There is so much convoluted logic to untwist, uncovering where it stands up or falls apart, and a long litany of ways to knock the strings out of tune – timing, nuances of perceptions, understandings and misunderstandings of concepts large and small, deeply embedded and doggedly difficult to uncover - let alone assess - philosophical foundations formed from the complexity of a lifetime, the logical contortions of countless influences, the scars of misguided supervision and unreliable authority, the barriers thrown up by the habits of those who sat in your chair last and those who still sit around you, and the relationship questions – whose questions and guidance can you rely on, whose advice can be trusted, whose motives are respectful, who is really in charge today and who will be in charge tomorrow… relationship stuff.

And it is the thing that must be done. To do it, we traverse back and forth between the dream and the reality. We have just finished a week of heart rending realities – good students suspended because they were intentionally drawn into a fight, and a set of test scores that have been interpreted to suggest the students could have done better on their tests (i.e. learned more) if they stayed home and watched television than they got out of being in school; yet also a week punctuated by good news – there are changes on the horizon that have been on the request list for six weeks, changes that bring the possibility of establishing stability where there is little, the potential of a solid foundation a team can form around and build on. 

Hope thrives, witheringly at times, blasted by cold winds on these transitional days as the season changes -  the beginning of winter is also the time when many gather with their various families around their common roots to share and renew their bonds of good will, seeding new hopes and nurturing the growth of what ought to, could, should and just maybe can be.

Imagine, if you have experienced this recently – by visiting your own child’s school during the day – or if you are one of the “lucky” ones who spends your day in one – or perhaps you will have to reach back into your own memory to pull out a sense of what I mean. You might need to refer back to one of those lessons in one science class or another about the kinds of energy that exist on the world – not the sources but rather classes of energy. If I have this right, one of those classes is potential energy. So now imagine - watching the nervous fidgeting of 400 6 to 12 year olds at 9:45 am in thousands of elementary schools across the country, the pent up potential energy 15 minutes prior to the ringing of the bells indicating the start of recess and watch the chaotic expenditure of all that potential energy in just 15 minutes. What could you power with that? Should we be installing hamster wheels on our playgrounds? What kinds of devices would we need on those merry-go rounds and swing sets to capture even some of that energy and find a way to recycle it so it can be repurposed to drive learning of the core standards plus maybe power the flashing school crosswalk signal out front and keep the principal’s coffee pot going? 

Or then again maybe that won’t get us close enough to being really green and some might think ill of me for suggesting that we try to resolve adult challenges using the energy of children. So maybe another approach, maybe even a different mindset…   Thinking about making schools greener, I come up with two real options – reducing the need to expend energy and increasing the output from utilization of energy. Then being a fan of technology based solutions, I think we ought to be utilizing data generated by our information systems that are running full time anyway, to help us find ways to expend less energy and get more from the energy we do use. So that’s it – that’s my idea for a green school – conserve energy and use energy more effectively by using data, oh and maybe we can throw in some recycling or something too.

Now, lets get analytical. What are the biggest consumers of energy in the school?   I am not talking about lighting, heat, copiers, computers, televisions, school buses. I am not even thinking about electrical or petroleum driven energy sources at all. I am thinking that green school is one where human energy is utilized wisely, effectively and efficiently. We expend far more budget dollars for people energy than we do for any of those forms of energy provided by the utility companies. 

Maybe this is a side issue but it might make sense to step sideways for a minute and consider the clarity issue as it may be difficult at best to get green with being clear about why exactly we are expending all this energy to begin with and what we expect this expenditure to accomplish. (Sideways view: are inefficient-schools polluting our neighborhoods and communities in ways we will have a hard time recovering from - sort of like lead, mercury and asbestos?)

A Green School Organization

This is a school organized to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of the way people and resources are utilized in reaching the school’s goals. Seems easy enough, everybody does their job and things run smoothly and everybody is somewhat happy  – though our performance is never good enough. Perhaps one way to look at this would be to look at any single legacy position and consider what would happen if that job did not exist… Are there functions, tasks, etc that could be let go with no significant impact?  Are there some that have to be picked up by someone, and what about the maybe’s…. The real question here is how is time used and related to that – what things are not being done because everyone is busy doing other things.

A book arrived in the mail this week and though I have only made it through the first fifty pages or so, it has spurred lots of thinking. It comes at a time when we are wrapping up a nine year partnership with one urban district where we have worn many hats in our technical assistance role. Bringing closure to this is complex for us because we have invested so much time over the years in trying to bring conversations into focus, move boulders out of the way and bring light into some dark, gloomy rooms where id and frustration seem in control, replacing it with intellectual enterprise and a conviction that it can happen here. This is also complicated by my own sense of not having finished what I set out to do in the city where I spent five years, thirty years ago as a twenty-something, that set me on the course that has brought me to and, since we operate as a two person tag team, been a significant element in bringing us to where we are today.

 The focus on replacing optimism about what we could be doing in urban schools with a broad based effort to uncover and do well the things that work best is bringing some fresh air to school change efforts. In the past year we have heard a great deal of discussion about 21^st Century Learning, global culture and disruptive innovations, seasoned with the harsh reality of an economic flutter that has burned us all on a global scale. In this we have opportunity, and it is refreshing to see and hear innovation being used so frequently. At the same time, this is a little bit frightening since innovation is one of those concepts we have hung our hats on and my inbox is filled with announcements of “stimulus qualified” and “innovative” products and services that look a lot like the same thing they were selling last year. Which flags another “keeps me up at night” item – edu-preneurship - which seems often to have too many parallels to the big promises of technology ten years ago. We have seen many companies, conceptual models and products come and go because the success of their business model required districts to buy fully into a system wide product that promised but failed to deliver on system-wide results.

Off the soapbox and onto the book – After reading only the first two chapters, I highly recommend this book– from Harvard Education Press –Instructional Rounds in Education by Richard Elmore and others http://www.hepg.org/hep/book/99/InstructionalRoundsInEducation .  Whether or not one adopts the clinical practice methodology  borrowed from physician training mapped out in this book, the introduction and chapter on Instructional Core set off so much reflective thinking that I haven’t gotten past them yet. My initial response is that this is a very intelligently written book that gets to the heart of the challenges facing schools and teachers.  A favorite line goes something like “teachers and principals and central office folks are doing all that they know how to do, the challenge is in helping them learn more about how to do what  we demand they do” (I would say the same is true for the students).   The authors make some critical points about the need to change the work students are expected to do if we want to see any change in their performance.  It sheds a much brighter light on the concept of teacher and administrative collaboration.

The chapter on mapping out Seven Principles of the Instructional Core is loaded. A few months ago we were assisting in preparation of a professional development plan. Today I think I would suggest tossing out the complex language of embedded PD tuned to the needs of individuals, programs and schools, and replace it with these seven principles and the accompanying discussion which bring the whole concept of professional collaboration to focus on one thing – finding the best ways to get students to engage in the work that will open the door to learning what they need to know.

Critical elements of the discussion are the importance of common definitions,  (Tony Wagner tells a story that illustrates this problem in chapter 4 of The Global Achievement Gap),  working protocols which recognize that evaluation is not the end product (getting out of the blame game), and that students learn what they are taught not what they are expected to learn (someday I’d like to write a book addressing the bad habits we have observed being unintentionally taught/learned in classrooms).

This is a book about professional social networking with a purpose, using protocols modeled after the use of medical rounds in training physicians. (Two books I have read in the past few months, while not specifically about physician training and medical rounds do provide insight into both the parallels between medicine and education and the impact of the rigor of rounds in preparing the two surgeon authors for their profession – Complications  by Atul Gawande and Another Day in the Frontal Lobe by Katrina Firlik). This book has already started us on reworking the protocols, training and support we will provide to school and district teams in the coming year.

In the work we do as the Model Secondary Schools Project we work in the middle and on the ground. We often find ourselves navigating between hope and expectation and the outcomes of daily work. Every project begins with high hopes, but at various points gets caught up in the complexities of competing visions of what this effort will accomplish, multiple agendas for what needs to happen today, organizational entropy and individual ambition. The appearance of these factors is somewhat predictable and it can either be allowed to run its course or it falls to the facilitator to intervene in a timely and fair manner to keep things on track. It is these moments that seem to eat up countless hours in meetings, when the team starts asking “When are we going to make some decisions?” 

This is one of the areas we work – in that meeting room, herding the ideas so they are captured and the concerns raised by their intersection are considered, managing the flow to get enough information to make critical decisions, keeping the purpose from being depleted by side bars, and building the momentum to keep the possibility alive. We do this with a planning process, a set of steps and stages teams go through. We try to model through this process the end concepts we are aiming for – taking into account every student’s (as well as each team member’s) development needs and understanding, personalizing the way we work each day with each class (team) and each student (team member).   This thing we are aiming for is a school that has come to terms with its role as a public institution and its strategies for succeeding with every student who walks in the door.

This notion of a successful public institution is for some an oxymoron, but not for those in the midst of managing the daily and future business of a school or system of schools. This is another area where we work – connecting the organizational development needs at the system level and the local level. This is where we typically get hired – to meet a system level need for significantly improved schools. We work from there to build school level teams, communicate at both levels about processes and expectations, negotiating when needed, and trying to close the communication and expectation gaps. This means we also write reports and proposals, work out budgets, map strategies and raise issues an outsider can bring to the table without repercussions.

We have templates and interactive exercises we like to do.   We teach our teams protocols for moving quickly through too much information and bypassing distracting dialog. We ask a lot of questions and capture the answers.   We encourage, push and occasionally insist that the conversation focus on students and the future rather than adult needs or current potholes. We help teams sort through the ideas and concerns to identify barriers to their plans, bumps they can expect along the road and challenges they will have to overcome.

This is a difficult process for many, though in the end a professionally refreshing one.

 A blog I frequently visit posted a poem the other day. (http://www.varpartners.net/?p=351 ) 

My waking thought a day later – where this writing every day is like crafting with words, poetry is more like sculpture with words - though both hang some naked soul on the screen, the poetry is much richer and far more naked.

Shaken or stirred

Shaking the baby is not a viable means to stop her from crying – more likely to quiet her by bruising the brain to the point of numbness – a course of action that causes damage and solves nothing... can the same be said for high impact strategies to shake up schools?  I’m probably pushing the metaphor here but there is a point. We have seen, and tried ourselves to implement high impact strategies to change schools.  Sometimes we have seen results, sometimes no discernible change and sometimes net damage. To align this with the metaphor, perhaps the best perspective is to consider who benefits. 

While shaking the baby pretty clearly has no net benefit - injuring the baby is clearly the opposite of caring for the baby -schools are a good deal less fragile, nor as social institutions are they anywhere near as precious as life. Yet shaking up schools and districts is a regular practice that often seems to do little more than make a mess, while careers as school change leaders are often built on such strategies. 

This is especially true of mandated change that receives little or no support beyond the obvious tactic of pointing out the problem and insisting on a change in results. With all the attention paid to systemic change strategies, we ought to know better. In well run school organizations this seems to be understood, but in urban schools, it far too often is not. Is the problem corruption, unions, incompetence, low expectations, too much emphasis on testing, poor study habits, bad teachers, lack of leadership? In general, one could say yes, to all of the above, but not exclusively or entirely. There are many examples of extraordinary work, outstanding results, and more examples of acceptable quality, the problem comes when the quality is not there and we try to change the horizon the easy way by shaking things up.

Perhaps this is going too far. What I am referring to often resembles well-intentioned interference, telling the young parents what they have to do to raise their baby right. Still we have seen it, educational authorities using “shaking up a school” as a strategy for change. This shaking takes many forms:

• A new leader bringing a new way of working, new expectations, and new priorities. 
• A mandated plan of action that has all the right stuff (but is too often based on the concept of right without looking at what might already be right).
• A new set of guidelines, rules and expected practices communicated in a policy memo and announced at a meeting where only half are in the habit of listening to what is being said.
• A new partner to provide mentoring, facilitation and guidance, but viewed internally at the school and district level as an outsider and treated with the same respect as a new kid on the block with fancier clothes and an attitude.

If we want to change schools we have to do more than shake them up.    As I said, we have worked at this and watched others take on similar efforts. We have always used a team approach. Working in a way we describe as melding top down with bottom up by working in the field and in the office. This hasn’t always worked. In one school, the staff and principal would sit in meetings waiting for us to tell them what to do. We’d guide them into discussion and planning, then chart out some actions steps. Then, when we come back a month later to talk about how it went, we’d hear they didn’t understand what they were supposed to do, or they had a meeting and tried but nothing happened. (No doubt about where kids learn this stuff.)

There must be a middle ground, some way of approaching this crisis in learning so prevalent in our urban schools that promotes growth and development of the school without hindering it. Schools are social institutions operating in a politically charged atmosphere. We have thousands of them, many are successful and many are failing.  All are unique, but have many common traits -kids, teachers, principals, and superintendents. Perhaps what I am trying to do here is draw a line between meddling and helping (which perhaps makes shaking the baby a bit of an overstatement).

Where we work is in that middle ground, helping teams come to their own conclusions and action plans, adjusting, adapting and facilitating to create some alignment with the district’s broader efforts. Where we most often find frustration is when that middle ground cannot be found because both sides – the schools and the district – have differing views, differing agendas and are aligned against each other rather than with each other.  When this happens it seems that the common goal is the fight, maintaining us against them. We have, in cases where we found the school environment to be nearly intolerable, started the change discussion by going to the heart of the problem by asking “What would it take to call off the war between students and teachers?” In many districts, we see the need to ask a similar question: “What would it take to call off the war between schools and the district?”

To get students to write, one must get them started, not set the bar too high, nor too low, but if they don’t start, they can’t get better at it. With that in mind it is time to stop putting this off and start putting these thoughts and ideas up here, see if I can get better at it with practice and see if exposure to the air will ripen and enrich this stuff that rattles around inside, erupting without warning. 

I’ll try for consistency, and though I hear many find me critical, I will also try for fair. This education business is complex stuff – people come into it because their heart is here, they work in social institutions with complex agendas, that are dependent on politically charged funding and oversight, and are charged with establishing the social, cultural, intellectual, scientific, technical and moral foundation our future will be built upon. Pretty serious stuff that gets scary when we think of ourselves as the leaders of the free world but find ourselves in the low middle of the pack on performance (but then that pretty much describes where I was for most of my years as a student).