Organic Initiatives Start with Relationships

Lately, school leadership has been tasked with organizing systemic approaches to local problems.  When literacy is low, we take on literacy initiatives.  When teacher resourcefulness is stretched, we implement coaching initiatives, ad nauseam. The initiatives, while well-meaning, are often instituted school-wide as a blanket solution. And they tend to show initial success.  While blanket approaches may begin to solve the problem, the pieces of fabric used in each department, even each classroom, resemble the other swatches to such a degree, the a deeper, systemic solution is never reached.  What we see working, that x-factor, is the relationship resonance between those tasked with carrying out the initiatives.

The cookie cutter research-in-practice approach to school initiatives will always fall flat.  This is because the culture that produces a model initiative necessarily differs from the culture that will apply it later. The general framework and truths of a good practice will hold in spirit at any school site, but the course of the initiative must grow anew at every new application of theory.  That growth only happens when the school and district provide the cultural space to have real conversations that devise real solutions.

Viviane Robinson ("Student-Centered Leadership") asserts that the task of school leadership is to assure a proper place for learning. The problem, she points out, is achieving student gains "to scale" among all schools.

The answer lies in situational, relationship based solutions. Just as I have discovered that the true laboratory of teaching is in the classroom, and the true observer is the teacher, I can extend this to say the true laboratory for school programs is in the school itself, and the instructional leaders are its true observers. An analogy for this falls in the physical sciences. The heart of oceanography happens in the ocean, while the conditions for these studies are set in the think tanks and research facilities where the conditions for the science to happen are formulated and assessed.   However, the quality of these initiatives depends on the resonance between those involved in the experiment.  The scientists in the research facility, and those in the depths of the sea need have a dialogue that resonates as it develops.  They don't have to agree, but they have to synergize.

I would say, on a practical level, that all schools that wish to cause change, should ask local school leadership to devise an initiative. The leaders should pull from research to inform the conditions of the initiative, but the heart of the initiative must come through a transformational process via conversation, data analysis, and culture building.

Systemic work must be done through relationships.  This is the consensus of my peers at leadership conferences and courses.  It's not that any old initiative will work. But an initiative, addressing the problem of practice, can be grown organically and effectively at each school site. It must be specific to the school and the culture of the school.  And it must happen through developing the resonance among those involved in the groundwork.  The classroom shows the prima materia for observation, and the leadership team's primary task is to grow those observations into information that guides the course of the initiative. 

How Do I Influence My Own Initiatives?

How much 

"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." - W. Edwards Deming 
"Every interaction is perfectly designed to produced the relationship it gets." - Me

In schools, and I suppose other organizational systems, our relationships with others play a distinct role in supporting the system that is organized around us.  And impressions being what they are, our interactions produce the quality of relationships we have with others. It appears to me that interaction begets relationships.  However, relationships do not beget interaction; they set foundations and contexts for more interaction.

How are we interacting with others via talk, email, and gestures?  Are people's reactions to our ideas a direct result of the quality of our interactions with them?  How much do we as innovators, thinkers, leaders control about our interactions?

Keep it Core - Just Read the Standards

Any educator interested in literacy owes it to the kids to read the standards with the grain, and go to them over and over again to flesh out the actual approach that will be taken.  After all, the research and thinking about college and career readiness has been done already by the dreamers of the new standards.  We just have to put it into practice. 

Often when I come into a conversation about curriculum, I jump into a cycle of talking about "standards". Much of what I and my colleague say about standards comes from a combination of rumors, op-ed pieces, unplanned conversations with others and even some ideas from disappointingly incomplete staff trainings. Lately, however, I have gotten the nerve to say,  "Hmm. We should look into what the standards say."  It's a simple solution, and seems obvious.  But I am constantly surprised by how few people (myself included) relate the standards with fidelity when talking curriculum and instruction.

It is too easy to say, "It's common core!" when we talk about tasks and texts and strategies.  It's almost like we depend on the phrase "common core" to refer to a generalized foundation for anything we want to promote.  The common core can promote literacy.  It can promote literature.  It can promote English in math, and math in English.  It can suggest creativity and analytics all at once.  And while superficial use of the ideas in the common core may support any innovation that anyone has, we must always look at the details and the spirit of the frameworks.  There is no substitute for good reading and analysis of what exactly that enormous and credible consortium tried to do when they produced these new standards for American education.