Superintendents Network Statewide Meeting Richard Elmore and Liz

Superintendents’ Network Statewide Meeting Richard Elmore and Liz City April 18, 2012

Being strategic 3 questions: What, Why, How From Strategy in Action, R. E. Curtis and E. A. City, Harvard Education Press, 2009.

Learning Goals for Today • Understand rounds as a LEARNING practice • Understand how rounds connects strategy and practice on the ground • Understand the diagnostic power of variability • Be able to dig beneath rounds data and use that data to provide developmental feedback on your strategy

Agenda • • • Framing: Strategy, Rounds, Learning Artifacts: Symptoms and hypotheses Break Digging below the surface: Root cause analysis Lunch A developmental framework for schools Break Network time: Applying learning from the day Wrap up: Commit to a question

Strategy Warm-Up • 1 min. : Prepare to describe your system’s strategy for ensuring that every learner fulfills her/his potential • Find someone from another district whom you don’t know well; introduce yourself • 1 min. : Each of you describes your system’s strategy. Your partner’s responsibility is to ask one clarifying question. (~30 seconds each) • Find another person you don’t know well and repeat • Rejoin your team. Repeat in triads.

Strategy—What? • Stacey Childress’s definition: “The set of actions an organization chooses to pursue in order to achieve its objectives. These deliberate actions are puzzle pieces that fit together to create a clear picture of how the people, activities, and resources of an organization can work effectively to accomplish a collective purpose. ” --quoted in Strategy in Action, p. 3

Strategy—What? In your own words • How would you define strategy in your own words? • Write a definition • Placing bets

Strategy--Why? • Forces us to prioritize and make choices about what to do and not do • Allows us to marshal resources • Focuses the system’s work and reduces “noise” • Helps the system move from where it is today to the audacious vision you have for children

What good strategy is: • A few, key carefully considered things to focus the system’s work on that, when put together, create a powerful engine for systemic improvement • A series of well-informed, well-educated bets • It addresses the instructional core • It balances problem solving with pursuing a vision • It is developed in partnership; many people feel a sense of ownership of it—you can ask anyone in the system, and they’ll tell you what it is • It evolves based on progress made, results, and learning • If you can’t see it in the classroom, it’s not there

What good strategy is not: • Everything the system does • Everything everyone wants the system to do • A sure thing • Something static • A piece of paper, brochure, wall chart

How does rounds connect to strategy? • Learning – Students learn best when. . . – Teachers learn best when. . . – Leaders learn best when. . . • Every strategy has an implicit learning theory • Rounds exposes that theory to inquiry and learning • The best strategies improve over time

Geoff Norman http: //gk. oeghd. at/grako 14/resour ces/Norman_l 1. pdf https: //videos. med. wisc. edu/video s/8100

Artifacts • Take out your rounds artifacts • What do you see? • What’s the emerging evidence of what’s happening in your system? • What are your hypotheses about what’s causing what you see in classrooms?

Symptoms and Hypotheses • Symptom: Low-level tasks • Hypotheses: – Easy to grade – How people were trained – What’s in the book – Helps kids feel good • Success on stand tests – Quieter is better • Teachers have answers to tasks • No time for conversation about tasks • Loss of control when tasks change • Control of class • Learning is predictable • No reason to change • Prior training

No time for conversation about tasks five whys • Not a priority – Too much content to cover • We haven’t said what is important – Lack of agreement » Action: What will we do to reach agreement? » Issues of control?

Lack of Agreement? • Different philosophies about teaching and learning • Different expectations for student learning • Haven’t taken the time to establish agreement – Avoidance behavior? • This too shall pass; learned helplessness

Low-Level Tasks—Why? • Teachers have answers to tasks • No time for conversation about tasks • Loss of control when tasks change

Root cause analysis: 5 Whys Hypothesis: WHY? Why? Why?

Lunch

So what? • Symptom: • Hypothesis: • . . . Why? • So what for rounds? . . . • So what for strategy? . . .

A Developmental Perspective on Rounds and School Improvement • How do you choose to focus your use of rounds for maximum impact on improvement of learning? • How do you accommodate to important differences among schools– in rounds? in support? • How do you use rounds to make binding commitments to the next level of work?

Key Assumptions • Every school is different, but the overall strategy applies to all schools • Improvement is growth– growth is a process, not an event • Development occurs on multiple dimensions over time • Tailored solutions to specific problems

Break www. serpinstitute. org Victoria: “performance and development culture” in Victoria Department of Education

Network Time Given your artifacts and your data from rounds, consider: • What are the connections between rounds and strategy? • What are the missing pieces and big holes? • What’s the next level of work for our network? Hint: Your theory of action and data from rounds should be helpful here. You may want to revise your theory of action based on your conversation.

Wrap-up • Based on your learning today, what’s one question your network will commit to investigating?