Read by Example

Below are five insights after I read ten thoughtful posts from contributors around my book, Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.

1. Leaders need to know literacy.

“Through a lifetime of working in schools, one of my most powerful insights and core beliefs is that teachers must be leaders, and principals must know literacy.” (pg. 1)

- Regie Routman, Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success (ASCD, 2014)

School leaders knowing literacy should go without saying. But a question I have here is, why don’t more leaders - especially principals - know literacy?

My initial thinking was, literacy continues to lack consensus on what makes instruction effective. You can see it in confrontational conversations online around the science of reading. I can understand why few leaders want to join these discussions when the apparent goal of too many is to be right vs. to listen and learn.

But I think there’s more to it, a deeper reason for this challenge of consensus.

Taking a more holistic perspective, a) literacy is a complex discipline and b) we are not embracing it for its complexity. Instead, we resort to simple stories about best practices for teaching readers and writers because they are easier to understand and share, especially when writing hot takes on Twitter. How do we hold these tensions in our minds and help our faculty and colleagues do the same?

I don’t have immediate answers to this issue, but it is something I am working on professionally (see the end of this post for an opportunity to join me).

In the meantime, I continue to appreciate the questions that surface from not knowing, such as Jamie Cicconetti’s wondering, “What point am I even trying to make in exposing my messy process of a professional writing post?”, as she reflects on trying to create clarity from her learning in the post below.

2. Leaders will always need to attend to trust.

The sheer number of book study posts around trust says so much about its importance.

Rhonda Precourt, Paige Bergin, Carrie Thomas, Genevieve Arcovio, and Ryanne Deschane each wrote eloquent and personal accounts of the importance of this element for a successful school literacy culture. Without trust, the school system stops operating like it should. It is the “lubricant of organizational functioning” (Tschannen-Moran, 2014)

As a leader I have learned that to keep trust high, I have to attend to things beyond just a strong literacy initiative, such as:

* How well are teams working together?

* Do staff and faculty feel appreciated?

* Am I following through on my commitments?

This takes effort, intention, and an awareness of the level of trust in the school.

That said, literacy can also be a vehicle for building and sustaining trust, such as by committing funds to purchasing books for classroom libraries.

3. Leaders who are clear on the school’s priorities make better decisions.

When the collective attention is on a clear priority, it becomes easier to lead.

A big part of prioritization is not just in having a focus, but in being able to ignore other options.

And in education, there are always options. I would lose track of word count in this post if I waded into the alphabet soup of acronyms and initiatives.

By committing to one thing, we naturally decline many other things, at least as a primary focus. I have found it reduces stress in the school culture while helping faculty commit to the priority.

I thought Heather McKay summed this idea up well in her post.

4. Any type of feedback is better than no feedback.

In my research for the book, I discovered surprising findings about feedback.

For example, one study found that the most effective feedback was noticing and naming teachers' practices they were already doing well. This was followed in effectiveness by more traditional feedback that focused on areas of improvement. As expected, no feedback had the least amount of influence.

What this led me to believe, affirmed by Tyler Keener's and Jen McDonough’s posts below, is teachers benefit from any type of feedback, even if we are wrong.

In other words, leaders need to prioritize time in classrooms.

5. Leaders need a systems approach to focus on what matters.

As Annie Palmer points out in the above post, teachers need to see the “why” for the work.

A challenge here is how to connect these chess pieces - trust, prioritization, support, feedback, etc. - so that the vision is clear and feels doable.

What I have learned is that so much that goes into effective leadership, especially decision-making, is largely based on how well we manage our days. For example, what is our process when a teacher makes a request to purchase a literacy curriculum resource? How is the process aligned with our school’s shared beliefs? Who should be involved in the decision-making? What is the best way to communicate a response?

This is just one example. There are many more leadership tasks that would benefit from a systems approach, such as:

* How can I carve out time to get into classrooms on a daily basis?

* How do I develop my identity as a coach and expand beyond the traditional leadership role?

* What steps can I fall back on when looking to engage teachers in coaching conversations?

* How might I rethink my environment to better support this work?

* What routines can I use to affirm what teachers are doing well, plus communicate feedback on potential areas for growth?

These are questions I may be exploring more here and in a new community space.

Sign up below and stayed tuned for a follow up post about how this space can support your efforts to lead literacy in your school, from wherever you are.

Matt Renwick has served in public education for over 20 years. He started as a 5th and 6th-grade teacher in a country school outside of Wisconsin Rapids, WI. Matt now serves as an elementary principal for the Mineral Point Unified School District. 

Matt is the author of three books: 5 Myths About Classroom Technology: How Do I Integrate Technology to Truly Enhance Learning? (ASCD, 2016), Digital Portfolios in the Classroom: Showcasing and Assessing Student Work (ASCD, 2017), and Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.: Five Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning (Corwin, 2022). 

He also writes publicly on Twitter (@ReadByExample) and on this newsletter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

The following is an adapted excerpt from my new book, Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.: Five Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning (Corwin, 2022). Colleagues and I will be writing original posts to the book next month. Subscribe and join us!

Think about the last business you went to for groceries, home supplies, or to purchase a gift for someone.

Why did you shop there?

We rarely think about these choices. But the likely reason is you trust the business to provide a quality product or service at a fair price. Your trust is supported by your confidence in their capacity to meet your needs.

This is competence.

Competence is being perceived as able to produce regular results. Competence can be augmented with compassion, such as offering to take your groceries to the car. Communication through advertising and messaging can remind us about a business’s ability to deliver on the goods or services promised. But these elements of trust ring hollow if promises and responsibilities are not fulfilled.

In the context of supporting teaching and learning, competence becomes more complex in both how leaders achieve results and in how they are perceived by others through this lens. For example:

* In any school, you may find a teacher or two wanting to be directed on what to teach readers and writers, how to teach them, and when.

* A few others prefer complete autonomy, to be able to shut their door and do their work.

* The majority want both direction for a schoolwide goal and some authority to make decisions on behalf of their students.

These varied agendas can complicate our capacity to lead and decrease our own sense of competence and confidence. 

Idea: Using routines to support and learn about the school culture

As leaders, we want to create a safe space to surface people’s concerns, questions, and suggestions.

One way is through routines, such as the protocols found at the School Reform Initiative (www.schoolreforminitiative.org). They provide structure to glean insights into how the faculty feel about and view the current school climate. The leader, in response, can use this information to systematically address issues either on their own or with teams.

We build trust by doing what we will say we will do, as well as working together to accomplish these tasks. As Megan Tschannen-Moran, author of Trust Matters, notes:

“Pursuing small, early wins on some key tasks can help build trust in both the principal’s and the school’s competence” (2014, pg. 257).

One example is when I first came to my current school, in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.

My superintendent at the time, Luke Francois, recommended that I start my tenure by listening to the staff and offering support for addressing issues. He suggested the idea of an open suitcase at a staff meeting.

* Staff could write down their anonymous concerns on slips of paper, fold them up, and put them in the suitcase.

* Once ready, I closed the suitcase in front of them.

* Then I announced, “Thank you for sharing these with me. I plan to read each one, as well as to organize these concerns and suggestions around central issues I can address now and in the future. Also, please note that now that you have shared these with me, you no longer need to worry about them so much.” 

The concerns were specific and helpful in understanding the current school situation. Next are a few of their comments under different themes I discovered from my review.

For the rest of that first school year and beyond, I created a list around these concerns. I would work toward addressing one issue, find a way to make the results visible, and then share these results publicly as a schoolwide celebration such as in my newsletter. 

Instructional walks also develop a perception of competence. Teachers participate in dialogue around their practice and feel like the professionals they are. We learn from each other, see past our singular roles of teacher or leader, and engage in continuous learning which leads to an increase in trust in others and confidence in ourselves.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

Hello colleague,

I wrote this post at my city’s local laundry mat. Our dryer decided to stop working on Memorial Day weekend. Perfect timing with our two teenagers navigating between friends’ houses, end-of-year school events, soccer games, and trail biking. The dirty clothes pile up quickly.

Anyway, this is a good time to a) review what this space is about for new subscribers, and b) talk about the upcoming summer book study.

This Space

In 2012, I started a blog on Wordpress titled “Reading by Example”. It can still be found at readingbyexample.com. The goal was to chronicle my journey as a new elementary principal and emerging literacy leader. Previously I taught in the classroom for seven years and served as an assistant principal/athletic director for four years at a secondary school. I quickly learned as an administrator how complex this work was, and that writing about it helped me make sense of the complexity.

In 2018, I started using Substack as a newsletter tool in addition to the blog. I found it to be a better writing platform, so I started writing posts here and retired the original blog. For a while, I offered a paid version of this space but ended up pausing it. I didn’t feel like I could offer enough value for what was being charged. Maybe someday I will restart it, but the circumstances would need to be just right.

In 2020, I migrated all of the content from the original blog to this space. The former still serves as an archive for all of the past articles, including curated lists of posts written by contributors for previous book studies. Other teachers’ and leaders’ writings around a common professional resource have always been the most popular posts. It’s an honor to host their reflections; they provide a sorely needed perspective within today’s dialogue around teaching readers and writers in ways that affirm students for who they are and who they might become.

This Year’s Book Study

With that, I am happy to announce that this year’s book study selection is…Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.: Five Strategies for Supporting Teaching and Learning.

Yes…my book. It came out this past March through Corwin. I admit that it felt a bit odd to position it as the subject for our study this summer. Yet after talking with a few colleagues and contributors, they were very supportive of putting it front and center for people to read and respond to in July.

The core of the book is: formal leaders do not need to accept their current roles as they are presently constructed. More specifically, principals, district administrators, department heads, and educators in any leadership role can expand their positions to include a coaching stance within it when working with teachers.

I am not the first person to recommend a more mindful approach to school leadership. Regie Routman wrote about it in 2014 within the context of literacy in her book Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success. (By the way, Regie’s book is a key influence in Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H., and it’s not a coincidence that she wrote the foreword for my book.) What I offer is a theory of practice for integrating coaching skills within our more formal positions. If I have learned anything in my fifteen years as an educational administrator, it is that there is a direct correlation between student success and teacher empowerment. They need supportive and present leadership that goes beyond traditional supervision and evaluation, including the development of their capacity to lead in the school.

To help clarify these ideas, I created a framework with the word “coach” to help leaders remember the key strategies for success and to provide a clear pathway for engaging in this work:

* Create Confidence through Trust

* Organize Around a Priority

* Affirm Promising Practices

* Communicate Feedback

* Help Teachers Become Leaders and Learners

It is these ideas in which practicing educators – teachers, leaders, coaches, and consultants – will write about this summer here. I’ve asked them to center their reflections around their own work first, and then use the ideas from the book to help validate their thinking they so generously offer to us.

As readers of this site, you can also participate in a variety of ways:

* Read contributors’ posts and support their efforts with a like.

* Write a comment around their articles to validate their thinking and extend the conversation.

* Share these reflections on social media so more people can participate in this discussion.

* Post your own writings on your blog or newsletter related to the book.

* Let me know what you’re sharing and writing through #leadinglikeacoach and tagging me @ReadByExample.

However you decide to engage in this space, please know that your readership is appreciated. We look forward to learning with you!

Take care,

Matt

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

I spoke with Steve Barkley, educational consultant and coach, for his podcast Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud (found here).

We discussed:

* The importance of instructional leadership,

* Balancing evaluation with professional learning, and

* The five strategies from my book Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. (Corwin, 2022).

Thank you for listening!

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Steve [Intro]: 00:00 Hello, and welcome to the teacher edition of the Steve Barkley Ponders Out loud podcast. The complexity of teaching is both challenging and rewarding. And my curiosity is peaked whenever I explore with teachers the multiple pathways for facilitating student engagement in the exciting world of learning. This podcast looks to serve teachers as they motivate coaches and support their learners.

Steve: 00:28 Leading like a coach. Joining our podcast today is Matt Renwick, an elementary school principal from Wisconsin and the author of a new book titled, “Leading Like a Coach.” A description of Matt’s book has this statement in it: “Matt reframes the approach to school-wide change from a leader acting alone, to a leader working with a community, a community in which each member contributes their strengths and ideas to improving instruction.” When I read that statement, it sure aligns with the mantra that I’ve been on for years that teaching is a team sport. So Idropped Matt a note and he agreed and was happy to say he is with us here today. So welcome Matt.

Matt: 01:17 Thank you, Steve. I’m glad to be here.

Steve: 01:20 So Matt, would you start off by giving us a little introduction to your background and the role that you’re in at the school today and I’m kind of wondering how that led to you taking on the task of writing this book?

Matt: 01:34 Yeah. I found it interesting you shared your experience as a fifth and sixth-grade teacher in an open concept experience. That was actually a similar experience I had in a multi-age classroom. We did natural looping, and we designed thematic units integrated units together and it was very project-oriented and it was just a lot of fun.

Steve: 01:57 Was that in Wisconsin?

Matt: 01:58 It was in Wisconsin. Yep. Rudolph, Wisconsin – central Wisconsin. And I noticed, as I progressed through my teaching career, standards became more prominent, testing evaluations all became much more a part of the school and experience and I felt kind of, maybe some of the joy leaving it too. And that kind of prompted me to think, how could I maybe influence at a school-wide level, have more impact in protecting that joy and that learning experience in a way that teachers and kids can be a part of. And so that’s why it got me into the principalship. And once I was there, I don’t know if it was a rude awakening, but it was definitely a realization that you can’t just put out some kind of a goal and offer some professional development and monitor progress and then expect outcomes. It’s just school change and improvement is not linear in that sense as we might put it on paper. And so that led me to learn more about coaching, instructional coaching in particular, and really trying to embed it into my practice, working with teachers, working with staff, even working with colleagues. How do I talk, how do I present myself? And really, as you said in the description of working together to get collective goals.

Steve: 03:18 Yeah. I’m real big on the concept of team and I describe that very frequently, what a lot of schools call teams are really what I would call franchises. So I got a group of teachers that come to a franchise meeting, they exchange tips and strategies, but they still go back and run their own classroom versus people coming together as a team, which is that they really got a combined responsibility for student success.

Matt: 03:54 Yeah. Seeing, I can’t do this job without you.

Steve: 03:59 Yeah.

Matt: 03:59 And that’s what I realized as a principal. I couldn’t do this job without the teacher’s input and understanding their decision making and trying to stop coming in and judging. And not that there’s not a place for that as a part of a supervisor, but it really has become a fraction of how I spend my days now. I’m now coming in daily, just learning, just coming in with kind of getting rid of my biases as much as I can and trying not to make assumptions and just coming in and noticing what’s going on, trying to notice what’s going well, communicating that with the teachers and eventually leading into conversations around their instruction, which is where, as I’m sure you see as well in your work, is that’s where the impact happens, is learning together. And it’s so much more effective than like I said, that very technical way of trying to get people to improve. And that just doesn’t get you very far.

Steve: 05:03 At best minimum competencies.

Matt: 05:06 Yeah.

Steve: 05:07 We can evaluate whether minimum competencies are in place or not, but we can’t grow out of that evaluation process.

Matt: 05:13 That’s 100% correct. And that’s where evaluations can be effective. You get people to a minimum area, minimum level, like you said, but where go from there? And that’s kind of what I felt a decade ago, which is where kind of the idea for this book came about is, what is my role beyond getting teachers to a standard level of instruction? And I even wrote a blog post about it a decade ago, “can a principal also be a coach?” So the seed was planted there. 10 years later, we’ve got the book and I’m hoping to get it into the hands of leaders, not just principals, but coaches and superintendents and anyone who’s a leader, teacher leaders, I think can find this book helpful.

Steve: 05:55 I can tell you that a whole lot of years ago – so it was in the 80’s that I began to work in the area of coaching and way back then people would raise the question, can the administrator be an evaluator and a coach? And we responded to the fact that not only can they, but they really need to. Because at a minimum, they needed to model the behavior you wanted teachers to take on in the classroom. So most of the time the teacher’s a coach. There comes that day that the teacher puts on the evaluator hat and does the assessment. And then the next day, the teacher’s back in the coaching role using the outcome of the evaluation or the assessment to assist in jumping back in and working with growth. So I’ve always had the thought that it’s critical that an administrator, in effect, takes on both roles. And then a whole lot of years ago, they introduced that term of instructional leadership and I responded that if you really thought that the principal was an instructional leader, then part of the administrator’s evaluation would be looking at the growth that the teachers made as they worked with that principal.

Matt: 07:19 Yeah, I wish I would’ve gone back even farther and explored your work, just learning more about it here. And I’ve even had teachers when you mentioned, how can a principal also be a coach? I’ve even had a teacher say, I don’t think you can because you’re an evaluator. How can you also coach? There seems to be some rigidity where they just need these things to be siloed. What I try to do with this work is really kind of embrace that complexity and really be kind of fluid and shift from one of the other, just kinda like you said, with the teachers of one day, it’s evaluating other days, it’s really coaching. And I appreciate you noting too that this has a kind of bootstrapping effect too when you’re talking with teachers and you’re using coaching strategies like paraphrasing and posing questions and pausing.

Matt: 08:08 I remember a teacher last year coaching one of her first graders. He was writing all of these topics on camping, but he didn’t have a title. And she just said, “take a look at all of what you’ve written, all your topics, your table of contents, and what do you think would be a good title?” And he’s like, “fun and camping.” And she’s like, “yes,” and he totally owned it and there was a lot of pride with that process. And later on, I just said, I couldn’t help but notice you using paraphrasing and some of the things we’ve talked about in our staff meetings and coaching. I hear you doing it. And likewise, I’ve tried it myself, so it absolutely can work.

Steve: 08:52 Critical modeling.

Matt: 08:53 Yeah. And there’s even research too. My background is in cognitive coaching. I’m not a cognitive coach, but I’ve had coursework on it. And there was one research study where they looked at three different people working with teachers – an administrator, a coach, and a peer, and they were all trained in coaching and the result was, it didn’t matter who coached you, improvement occurred. And so that’s one of the studies I listed in the book to just really kind of break that myth that as an evaluator, I can’t also support learning.

Steve: 09:32 Would you say that the support comes from – the two words that come out to my mind are conversation and reflection and they kind of go back together. So in effect, what that teacher did, was she used a question to cause the first-grade student to do some reflection and that led to the student’s thinking. And so it doesn’t matter which of those hats I have on, as long as I can cause reflection and conversation to occur. And historically, what was wrong with the evaluation is that those two things didn’t occur. The administrator came in, did all the thinking, and issued a report. And so the teacher didn’t grow because the teacher wasn’t engaged in conversation or reflection.

Matt: 10:16 Yeah, I was there. I was coming in and checking all the boxes in my initial part of my principalship. And I was thinking back, I’m astonished at how often I was wrong because I didn’t ask and I wasn’t curious. I was trying to get certainty. I wanted to get it right. I can’t tell you how many calibration activities I’ve gone through with rubrics.

Matt: 10:44 And they really train you to not deviate from, are you curious because you want it to be accurate and I agree with that, but without having conversations and reflections with the teacher, you’re only getting a limited perspective.

Steve: 10:56 And that’s where the growth comes. So even if you get a perfect, accurate evaluation, you didn’t cause any growth to happen.

Matt: 11:04 Right.

Steve: 11:04 If you weren’t able to move it into a coaching environment.

Matt: 11:09 Yeah. What’s driving this process.

Steve: 11:13 Well Matt, I see that you laid your book out in five key practices and I thought it would be valuable if we just kind of bounced through each of those as an outline for folks. So the first one that you laid out was to create confidence through trust. Could you take a moment or two and talk about that?

Matt: 11:37 We’ve heard a lot about trust and how it’s important, and even writing this book, I was writing this chapter and being able to count on someone and be able to know they’re not going to immediately jump to conclusions or only looked at the negative pieces, felt like that was kind of already said. And so what’s different about this? And that’s where the confidence piece comes in. When I trust that teacher I was just mentioning and instead of quickly naming it, or, I asked a question, right? And so I trusted them that they could articulate the practices they were doing. And I wasn’t, like you said, I wasn’t giving advice. I wasn’t telling them what I necessarily thought or didn’t think. And I think through those repeated experiences, then we’re creating confidence. They’re confident in themselves, I’m confident coming in the classroom and we can really start to have pretty authentic conversations. I don’t want to say honest because sometimes people right away conflate that with –

Steve: 12:41 Good word.

Matt: 12:42 Overly critical, right? But really naming and noticing those practices that they’re doing. So yeah, I wanted to start with trust though, and to make sure that that was in place before we start getting into the coaching side of things.

Steve: 12:57 So when I talk about trust, I usually connect it to the word vulnerability. Do you see a way that plays into that – in effect, you as the coaching administrator are vulnerable as well as the teachers are vulnerable?

Matt: 13:14 That’s huge. And in my initial work as a principal, I was reluctant to be open and honest about my own challenges and mistakes. And the pandemic certainly forced me even more so to be vulnerable. I remember we were preparing for the last school year and I had a few teachers just saying, I’m not feeling supported. And I could have come back and said, oh, remember all these trainings we did and all the technology we bought. And instead, I just said, I’m sorry you were feeling unsupported. My apologies for that. Please let me know what I can do to better support you. Here’s my phone number at home, give me a call over the weekend. And this was before the first day of the 2021 school year. No one called me, but I think just having that out there, I mean, they appreciated that. And it didn’t decrease my – I don’t think, their perception of my credibility or capacity. And I think they felt like we were in it together.

Steve: 14:24 That’s the key. Great. The second element that you laid out is organize around a priority.

Matt: 14:33 Yeah. And not to date this podcast, I’m gonna tell another pandemic experience. The past couple of years it’s been tough to operate like more like a coach, primarily because we’ve been in survival mode. And how do you support that other than getting rid of obstacles and increasing resources, but with the priority it’s, what are you aiming for as a school and where do you need to grow? And I always start with what we’re doing well. I think that’s important, but then what’s that next step? So in my school, for example, it’s literacy, it’s particularly reading. And so that gives me a lens in which I can come into classrooms now, and hopefully we’ve got professional learning happening so that they’ve seen good practice, and now they’re trying to apply it.

Matt: 15:26 And then I can come in and really have a, not a laserlike focus, but have a framework in which to operate around common language. For example, what level of discussion are kids at with their book clubs, and what kind of questions are being posed? Is it open-ended or closed-ended? And within that framework for literacy instruction, whatever that may be, whatever the school chooses, it really helps me as a principal or whatever kind of leader you are, to then engage in that conversation. So, yeah, frameworks can be – I mean I don’t know what a favorite one of yours is, but we use the gradual release of responsibility or optimal learning model, it’s kind of an adaptation of that.

Steve: 16:12 The whole concept of identifying a priority is critical in coaching for the one-on-one relationship. And I would say equal – I do a lot of work with professional learning communities and I’ve actually been voicing a phrase for the last couple of years of goals before norms. That there’s a tendency when you bring this group together, you’re gonna put together a set of norms for everyone to operate with. Norms are important but it’s a whole lot easier to agree on norms if we got some common reason for being there.

Steve: 17:04 And I was doing a coaching call with a new instructional coach earlier today and she’s talking about an experienced teacher who’s just kind of like stuck where he is at. He’s at an okay spot and not moving on. And my conversation with her is, you’ve gotta be able to move the conversation to where there’s something important for him to make happen for kids that isn’t happening. And if you can get him to voice what that is, then now you and he can work together because you got something to make happen. So that spot that we’re moving towards is critical in coaching.

Matt: 17:35 And that’s what’s nice about a framework too, is there can be opportunities within that for a teacher to, I wanna work on this, and everyone’s working on something and I think that’s really important. And I wrote down the goals before the norms. I think that that’s a good point of making sure form follows function.

Steve: 17:56 Yep. The third one you mentioned was affirm promising practices.

Matt: 18:02 Yeah. There was just an article I read on Twitter – it’s more of a business journal I think and they just basically said, when you give critical feedback, people either do one of two things. They forget it, or they remember it and they don’t do anything about it. And I just think of some of the critical feedback I’ve received and like, I remember being resistant and because I have this belief and I am very good at what I do and that’s what we want in teachers. We want them to be confident but how do you get there? And so that’s where affirming promising practices is to start with what are they doing well, and it’s validated. It’s not – if you remember the Saturday Night Live clip, Stuart Smalley, you know, good enough, I’m smart enough…

Matt: 18:51 Where’s the evidence on that? It’s not just a pat on the back it’s, here’s what you did, and here’s the impact that it had on kids. And that’s objective reality, right? That’s not something I’m just sugar coating. And so, again, with that teacher, when you allow that student to identify the title for their book, you empower them as a writer and that’s gonna carry forward the rest of the way. When I visit classrooms, 95% of the time, I’m writing notes. You can see on the cover of my book, in the book, you have some examples of instructional walks. They’re not walkthroughs, I’m not checking boxes. I’m not looking for certain things. I’m just documenting what happened. And then near the end, I’m affirming what they did well, and the impact that it had on kids. And that for me is the entry point to those coaching conversations and which we can talk about practices, that may be worth pursuing for improvement.

Steve: 19:59 So I’m guessing that ties closely then to the fourth element, which was communicate feedback. So those two kind of get paired together?

Matt: 20:09 Yeah. Communicate is a key word. And that’ll certainly help create that coach acronym, but it’s not giving feedback. It’s not delivering feedback. Like you said before, principals might come in and just say, here’s, what’s going well, here’s what you need to improve on. It really is communicating it in a sense that I want teachers to hear it. And often that feedback isn’t coming from me, it’s coming from their own sources of knowledge, it’s their own experiences and things that they have forgotten about, maybe they got in a rut and then we start talking and they’re like, “oh yeah, I did that unit five years ago and I did that practice and I wonder why I stopped doing that.” And so when we say communicate feedback, it’s through that conversation that we have, and it’s often through questions, right?

Matt: 21:02 I have a new teacher whose classroom library was very – it looked like a public library. All the spines were out, and none of the books were facing out. So I withheld my assumption and just said, “Hey, how’s your classroom library going? What are you liking about it? What what’s challenging you?” And she’s like, “oh, it’s been great because the kids wanted it this way. They are the ones that said, well, I want all the series books together and we didn’t have enough room to face them all out, but the kids are reading more and taking care of the classroom library.” I’m like, “that’s great.” And then I realized she needs, maybe she needs more shelving. So that led into that conversation of what do you need from me then? But through that conversation, she was able to reflect on her process and her decision-making. And I think the point there too is it’s not just communicating feedback to the teacher, it’s the teacher communicating feedback to me.

Steve: 22:03 I was just gonna say, as I was listening to you, you’re describing she was reflecting, but I think I’m hearing you were reflecting too.

Matt: 22:10 Oh yeah. I’m learning as much, if not more than the teachers because I’m not in their classroom. I’m in there 1%, 2% of the actual time. It would be very pompous of me to say I can come in and a matter of couple hours, here’s all the things you need to work on. It’s just not possible. So I’m coming in there trying to do these conversations around once every two to three weeks. It’s been a little bit slower with the pandemic, but these conversations accelerate my learning. So when it comes time for evaluation cycles, observations that are more formal, nothing’s really a surprise. And for the teacher too, and it’s really a lot less stressful when we have to engage in that work and a lot more accurate when I’m actually adding evidence into those systems.

Steve: 23:06 It’s interesting that when I flagged you to can communicate feedback, one of the first words you went to was questions. And it’s probably not what would jump out at people when they first consider the word communicate.

Matt: 23:22 Yeah.

Steve: 23:22 But it really is what makes it communication. Because it creates the conversation.

Matt: 23:27 Yeah. And the cognitive coaching work training I’ve done, I remember an activity, “What are the five forms of feedback and which do you think are most effective?”, and the number one is mediative questions. Not to say that there isn’t a time where I just need to say something, you know, because there is something that’s going on that’s just either really great or I do have concerns about. But even then, I can approach it with a thoughtful question.

Steve: 23:55 It comes out of the conversation.

Matt: 23:59 Yes.

Steve: 23:59 It in effect emerges out of the conversation so it feels normal.

Steve: 24:05 Whereas when you’re in that evaluation process, it was kind of like, where did that come from?

Matt: 24:09 Yeah. It feels like you’re talking about the weather and it’s a lot less stress-inducing. And I remember one activity in a classroom, it was probably culturally insensitive, it wasn’t terrible, but I remember talking to them about it. I recognize that they’re bringing in diverse texts and they are facilitating conversations and the kids are doing research and this and this and all these affirming things. And then I finally said, and this was actually a question that my coach, my executive coach, my leadership coach helped me craft because I knew I was gonna ask this coming in, “how might a person of color come in and view this activity you’re doing today?” And it wasn’t accusatory, it wasn’t affirming, it was truly curious because I wanted to know what they were thinking when they went into this activity. And then they explained it and then I did finally leave with, here’s kind of a next step is just continue to ask yourself that question whenever you’re designing any of these activities. And I appreciate your efforts here to diversify our curriculum and I think that’s important. And it did improve. So it’s a much more respectful, I think, way to engage in these types of things.

Steve: 25:29 Alright. And the last one that you had was to help teachers become leaders and learners.

Matt: 25:34 And this is kind of a meta-strategy, I guess. It’s incorporating all of these things. The note-taking, the paraphrasing, the pausing, questions. And I think this really comes to some advice I was given, which I think is for principals in particular to hear, is to stick around in your schools, to not hop around. To really commit to five to seven years at a minimum of being in that school. Because that seems to me, and I don’t know your experience, Steve, but that seems to be how long it takes to really kind of right the ship or get it going into the direction we all wanted to go.

Steve: 26:13 Build a team.

Matt: 26:14 Yeah, as a team.

Steve: 26:16 How do you build a team in a year and move on?

Matt: 26:19 Absolutely. Yeah. There’s it really isn’t any way. But that’s what I’ve noticed. In my previous school where I was there for five years, in my current school where I’m at for six years now, really starting to see teachers stepping up and becoming the leaders. And right now we’re looking to go through a curriculum renewal process for literacy and my coach is setting up site visits and I probably had a dozen teachers giving their opinions on one of the resources we looked at and everyone felt fairly safe speaking out, but I don’t think that would’ve happened five years ago. So in that chapter, it’s a shorter chapter, but it highlights one school and one district that through their commitment over the long term, really saw some profound change. And so it can happen, but there are no overnight successes in education.

Steve: 27:15 Well, Matt, I appreciate you taking the time to lay this out here for us. I’m wondering if you could tell the listeners the best way that they might communicate and follow up with you.

Matt: 27:26 I am on Twitter. I enjoy puns and wordplay. So it’s @ReadByExample. I have a particular focus on literacy and leadership. I can also be found at my newsletter blog, readbyexample.substack.com, and the book can be found at Corwin or Amazon or wherever else they sell these books. But I’ve appreciated meeting you. I’ve heard your name before and just getting to know a little bit more about your work, it’s something I might pursue more as well. So thank you.

Steve: 28:04 You’re very welcome. We’ll be sure to put the sites that you just mentioned into the lead into this podcast so folks will be able to find you good luck to you.

Matt: 28:13 Thank you, Steve.

Steve: 28:14 Take care.

Steve [Outro]: 28:16 Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud on iTunes and Podbean. And please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter @stevebarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

This adapted excerpt from my new book, Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H., questions the tendency for educators to seek fail-safe instructional practices in a search for certainty.

During a conversation I once had with a district administrator about adopting a scripted curriculum program, one of their arguments for the resource was that it was based on “best practice”.

This stance invites resistance. Educational researcher Dr. Viviane Robinson notes that “appeals to adopt ‘best practice’ imply that current practice is less than best, and such implicit evaluations are more likely to generate mistrust and suspicion than enthusiasm for change” (2018, pg. 39). 

Related, who gets to determine what a “best practice” is in education? Education is evolving, considering new research, changing environments, and technology. As a colleague of mine noted, “If someone has figured out the best way to teach, everyone would be doing it and education would be fixed.” This stance leads to a raft of problems, including retroactive guilt teachers might feel from previous teaching decisions and the difficult argument one tries to make in defending their practice.

Both issues surface the reality that teaching is dynamic and holds too many variables to ever deem one teaching practice, resource, or strategy as the epitome of our profession. There will be scenarios in which almost any teaching practice situated in a specific classroom fails to help students learn. For example, feedback may have less of an impact if a relationship has not first been established between teacher and student, or the goal for a lesson has not been clearly articulated. 

This example confirms the theory of practice described in this very book: that every school already has the professional capacity to address their unique challenges. And yet the last thing I would proclaim to one reader is to follow this theory to a “T”. No one can possibly know with certainty how teachers will respond to these strategies in a school. While there is “nothing more practical than a good theory”, it is only as effective as its flexibility and adaptability to unique situations. Yes, trust is a foundation for this work. Yes, it is hard to move forward together without some type of priority. Yet trust can be fostered in a myriad of ways. Every school has its own specific needs to prioritize around.

So instead of developing the typical plan, breaking it down into objectives, and following a linear process to success, we can instead remain somewhere between curiosity and certainty by focusing on promising practices in the classroom and how we as leaders can affirm them when we see them during instructional walks.

Three Tenets of Promising Practices

“Promising practices” strikes me as the right balance between confidence in our classroom practice and remaining open to new ways of instruction. It is a paradox of belief: that we have both trust in ourselves and curiosity toward other possibilities.

With that, what makes a practice promising? I see three criteria.

1. The practice is aligned with the district’s vision and a school’s shared beliefs. It is important that whatever teaching strategy, method or approach is employed schoolwide, that it is coherent with what the faculty believe to be true. For example, in our school we believe that phonemic awareness can be taught with students’ own writing. That does not preclude a teacher from using direct instruction of phonics. But if isolated skill development is the only way in which phonemic awareness is developed with students, then that is not a promising practice. Word study removed from an authentic context is not aligned with our beliefs.

2. The practice has evidence to support its effectiveness. As a professional, we must look to current research to make an informed decision about what practices enter our curriculum and classrooms. Dr. John Hattie (2021) offers a list of the most effective practices (visiblelearning.com) based on a summary of many studies on each approach at his Visible Learning website. Any practice that is considered promising should also have evidence that is peer reviewed and independently evaluated; the publisher or company was not involved in the study of its effectiveness. 

3. There are situations in which the practice may be ineffective. This rule would seem to apply to almost any practice in education. For example, summarization has a high impact on student learning. But what text or content are the students being asked to summarize? Is it relevant to their lives, or simply a generic passage assigned by the teacher to address a standard? Further, were students able to select the information to summarize, as motivation also has an impact? In addition, did the teacher engage in some type of shared demonstration of summarization prior to releasing the responsibility? Implementing a promising practice is not like taking a pill prescribed to you by your doctor; the nuances and variables of teaching and learning are too great to accept any practice as infallible.

So how can we find agreement on anything? By leading like a coach and affirming the process of teaching and learning: noticing and naming what is going well and getting curious about where we might seek improvement.

What others are saying about the book:

“This is a book all leaders should read. It could be transformational.”

- Kelly Jones, instructional coach, Madison Metropolitan School District

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

If you prefer to listen to my conversation with Regie Routman instead of watching it, here it is. We explored this question related to my new book, Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H., available through Corwin now (30% off through March).

What people are saying about Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.

Matt Renwick is the principal we all wish we had and the one we all want to be. His ideas about walking alongside teachers to grow them in the same ways we want them to grow students are just-right advice. He brings the research on trust and collective efficacy to life through concrete ways to operationalize rituals and routines of observation, goal setting, and planning with teachers.

Samantha Bennett

Learning Design Specialist, Instructional Coach and Education Consultant

Matt Renwick makes a compelling case for deeper inquiry and more thoughtful engagement around teacher practice. Full of rich, compelling examples from Matt’s real-world experience, this book will help readers reconnect with their purpose as instructional leaders. Highly recommended.

Justin Baeder

Director of The Principal Center, Author of Now We’re Talking!

Matt Renwick offers readers a rich, practical how-to book supported by current research. This book should be within easy arm’s reach of school administrators wishing to increase their skills of performing their major responsibility: increasing student learning.”

Arthur L. Costa and Robert J. Garmston

Professors Emeriti, California State University, Sacramento, Co-Authors of Cognitive Coaching

Matt Renwick reminds us of a key element of our shared professional leadership work: we can’t do it alone. He keeps us focused on the value of coaching tools and the pillars he references to keep instruction at the center of the work of educational leaders. This book draws on an extensive research base as well as Matt Renwick’s own professional experience to provide an accessible entry point for school leaders as they consider what it means to lead like a coach.

Jason Drysdale

Assistant Superintendent, River East Transcona Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Research is clear: Principals can have a tremendous impact on student success by focusing on job #1: ensuring every student benefits from great teaching in every classroom. Drawing upon his vast experience as a successful leader, Matt Renwick provides compelling insights, practical tools, and real-life examples for how to effect real change in schools. Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. is a must-read playbook for any principal seeking to improve student outcomes—not by forcing change from outside in, but rather by unleashing it from the inside out through trust, compassion, optimism, and an unrelenting focus on excellence.

Bryan Goodwin

President & CEO, McREL International, Author of Building a Curious School

Renwick unpacks conversations by describing what he said in a coaching situation and then sharing his reasoning for why he chose the actions he took. This book is not just for people who are in the positional role of leader; it is for anyone who wants to develop their leadership capabilities.

Bena Kallick

Co-Director, Institute for Habits of Mind, Co-author of Students at the Center

This is exactly the book educators need to build trust while navigating the tensions in today’s school systems. Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. will provide you with strategies that humanize leadership and bring joy to the work. This is an excellent book to read with your school teams to build the leadership pipeline essential to sustaining organizational excellence and a positive culture.

Anthony Kim

Founder and CEO, Education Elements, Co-author of The NEW School Rules

An inspirational guide for school leaders, this text provokes discussion and reflection among leaders who see themselves as as co-leaders in school communities. School vision becomes a reality when school leaders coach school faculties in a collaborative and collegial way in order to create a comprehensive and cohesive learning environment for students. An excellent book that is accessible to all principals.

Allyson Matczuk

Early Literacy Consultant and Reading Recovery Trainer at Manitoba, Education and Training

Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H. provides a framework that engenders trust and fortifies commitment to instructional excellence. Matt Renwick helps readers envision and rethink roles and routines. Most of all, his strategies, stories, and practical approach take the burden of trying to be an 'exert of everything' off of principals' shoulders. If you want your school to be a place where teachers and students want to be, this book is for you!

Cris Tovani

English teacher, literacy consultant, Author of Why Do I Have to Read This?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

In this excerpt from my book Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H., I described my experience observing a book club-style discussion via Zoom. I learn as much as anyone when I visit classrooms with a stance toward curiosity.

Instructional walks offer a responsive and authentic approach to continuous professional development for all educators.

This development includes principals. I have learned as much as my teachers have from my regular classroom visits. Until instructional walks became a priority, my background in literacy was limited to the resources I read while teaching full time.

For example, during an instructional walk in an online middle level classroom, I observed students discussing the books they were reading for their clubs. Within the video conferencing tool, they would take turns sharing their thinking about what they had previously read, prompted by their teachers (Dalton Miles, Kris McCoy).

As the group transitioned to a whole group reading strategy lesson, I thought to myself, “The teachers devoted significant time for students to share their understanding. Would it have been more efficient to give a quick quiz?” This thinking was partially based on this new platform (Zoom); instruction seems to require more time when online. Yet I knew my role was not to judge but to notice what was occurring through an appreciative lens. So, I continued to observe as the teachers demonstrated their thinking processes for one of the books they were reading.

Later, I emailed my notes to the teachers, acknowledging the opportunity they gave their students to share their understanding of what they had read so far. I also wondered why they devoted that amount of time to check for understanding. 

Through our conversation, I learned that public check-ins help everyone construct meaning about the text. In addition, the teachers would use their responses as teaching opportunities. For example, a student shared their observation from Legend by Marie Lu that mortality rates were high in their science fiction story. Dalton responded: "Things aren't great in this dystopian American society." This follow-up affirmed the student’s thinking and included genre-specific terms in the discussion for the group to hear.

My initial belief was to maximize instructional time in the form of direct teaching and brief assessments. What I learned is that giving students the opportunity to share their thinking about their books is instructional time. The teachers’ responsive approach to facilitating conversations around books also encouraged them to identify as readers.

With an open mind during the walk, my understanding improved. I remembered the importance of assuming a teacher believes they are doing the best they can for their students, and then recognized the authentic environment they created for readers. 

Had I come into the classroom with only my pre-existing thinking about reading instruction (which does not include any experience teaching these grades), our conversation may not have led to a better understanding on my end, nor the teachers affirmed in their practice. Our conversation around their decision making was supported by my curiosity.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

If we teach a skill or an idea, and students didn’t learn it, how do we respond?

Often we lean on more time or individual/small group support. Yet if the problem is the instructional strategy itself, more of the same will not be helpful. A student may need something different that is more effective at meeting students’ current needs.

This is where cognitive science can help. Bryan Goodwin, co-author of Learning That Sticks: A Brain-Based Model for K-12 Instructional Design and Delivery (ASCD/McREL, 2020), provides a model for teachers to prepare instruction with intention.

During our conversation, we discussed:

* What “brain-based” actually means,

* Why it’s wise to identify what’s in it for kids when preparing instruction, and

* How to revitalize units of study to make them more effective and engaging.

Effective teaching is not only knowing what to do; when and why are just as important.

Related Resources

* Audio + Transcript

* Also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts (and give a rating!)

* Purchase Bryan’s book

* Check out more resources on the McREL website

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick (00:06):

Welcome Bryan.

Bryan Goodwin (00:09):

Good to be here. I'm glad to have this conversation with you.

Matt Renwick (00:12):

You're the president and CEO of McREL International, a Denver-based nonprofit education, research and development organization. You're a former English teacher, correct?

Bryan Goodwin (00:21):

That's right.

Matt Renwick (00:23):

And former journalist. And you've been at McREL for over 20 years and you previously served as a chief operating officer and director of communications and marketing. You've had several books out; you write regularly for Educational Leadership. I know I've used a couple of your articles when I taught curriculum leadership at a university, I've used some of your content and that's great. I appreciate how well you distill down these complex ideas into things that are manageable.

Bryan Goodwin (00:53):

Appreciate that. That's great to hear.

Matt Renwick (00:55):

And this book really helps people manage brain-based instruction: Learning that Sticks: A Brain-Based Model for K-12 Instructional Design and Delivery. And you wrote it with Tonia Gibson and Kristin Rouleau.

Bryan Goodwin (01:09):

Kris Rouleau, yep.

Matt Renwick (01:12):

I guess that would just be the first question is, how do you define brain based?

Bryan Goodwin (01:19):

That's a good question. Really, what we were looking at is a combination of cognitive psychology, the science of learning, and some neuroscience, but cognitive science has been around like for decades now. What cognitive science tries to just figure out is, how do our brains actually process information? So there's something in cognitive psychology called the information processing model and the six phases are based on that. I'll give you an example: One of those early studies where they figured out one of the keys to memory is actually repetition. They figured that out entirely by accident. They were quizzing people to see, when do they forget things?

Bryan Goodwin (02:02):

They found that the more they quiz people, the more they actually remembered something. So that becomes one of those key principles that comes out of cognitive science: that quizzing to remember, or repetition, is the key neuroscience. Meanwhile, in a newer endeavor, maybe only the last 20 years or so, but in neuroscience, we figure out why that works. So the cognitive science tells us how the brain works. Neuroscience often gets down to the chemical level of why that works. For example, with repetition, we know from neuroscience that there's a substance called myelin that's basically a fatty substance that wraps itself around our neurons, kind of insulating them like electrical wire. Well, that means those neurons can start to fire together better. So we now know from neuroscience what we found out in cognitive science actually works. So we've combined both of those things in this book to hopefully provide teachers with the clear sense of how this process of learning actually happen in my own brain, but more importantly in my student's brain. So we can design learning accordingly.

Matt Renwick (03:01):

Yeah. I remember that in your book too, you've mentioned that often instructional plans are designed more from a teacher perspective, like what kind of strategies do I want to use to teach this content? And you're suggesting, recommending that we think from the student's perspective, what's going to benefit them the most, the content and the skills.

Bryan Goodwin (03:20):

Yeah. I think that's a key paradigm shift, that you start to think about students' brains and what's happening there. One example is learning objectives. What we all know is we have to have learning objectives. We put them on the board, but that's like a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear, if the students don't actually take that learning objective and make it their own learning goal. And so as we think about what has to happen in students' brains, we go, "Oh, that's students need to set a goal." So that we also know from brain science, when they achieve a goal, they get a dopamine hit. Right? So there's a reward that makes learning fun, enjoyable, even addictive in all the right ways.

Matt Renwick (03:56):

So, instructional design and delivery...how does that look different when you overlay it with a brain-based model?

Bryan Goodwin (04:07):

In addition to thinking about, "What's happening in students' brains?", we also want to make sure that we don't skip a step or that we don't move on. If we realize our kids aren't making sense of this, we need to give them more time to make sense of arguments. That's the fourth phase of learning, but the six phases basically are this: the first phase is saying, let's get kids interested in learning. That's the first thing that has to happen because there's a million distractions. Our brains are really good at ignoring stuff. And there's a pecking order that they follow and, believe it or not, 'Turn in your books to page 42" is nowhere on that pecking order of interest for kids. So we have to make learning interesting. We have to make the environment feel emotionally safe, too.

Bryan Goodwin (04:44):

Emotions are the first trigger. Once we feel safe to learn, then we want to be interested in learning. So that's the first phase. The second phase is we know that our brains are kind of inherently lazy. Daniel Kahneman, one of the giants in the field of cognitive science, writes about this, that learning is a lot of effort, that we have to power on our brains. People are listening to this podcast right now. You're having to keep your brain powered up. This is probably more difficult than say, listening to music, right? So your brain has to stay powered up. That means we need to convince our brains all the time. "Hey, keep paying attention." So that's where goal setting becomes so important, right? That we have to tell our brains, "Hey, this is important enough that I need to stay focused on this." The next phase is really focusing on new learning.

Bryan Goodwin (05:23):

We've learned a lot of things from cognitive science, about what's called dual coding. We process information better when it's visual and it's verbal. So we think about what that focus on new learning phase looks like. Then we know that our brains always work by connecting new learning with prior learning. So we need to give kids the opportunity to process their learning in small groups, oftentimes through their own reflection in writing, but give kids a chance of process learning. Then we know that repetition is the key. Like I mentioned, myelin, right? We've got to give kids opportunities to repeat over time, not cramming. Cramming leads to fast learning and fast forgetting. And then ultimately, I think what's missing in a lot of classes, and maybe this is the biggest difference with really designing learning with the brain in mind, is that extension/application activity.

Bryan Goodwin (06:07):

Right? So, we have to actually not just repeat information, but come at it from different angles and like, "Oh, now I'm going to take this new learning, I'm going to apply it to solve a problem, or I'm going to do some creative synthesis of this, or I'm going to do a writing project or a research project," and to extend and apply is really key. And that's what overcomes what John Medina writes about this, that students typically forget about 90% of what they've learned in the classroom within 30 days. Well it's because we don't provide that final phase of learning. So I think that's how learning looks different. We were thinking about the brain and saying, "Well, it's not just about teaching something kids study. We give them a test that's going to lead to fast forgetting. How do we really design learning that that keeps kids brains actively engaged throughout the entire process?"

Matt Renwick (06:52):

A lot of the shifts you suggest are not huge shifts. Like you said, it's maybe adding a visual with the text and that helps cement some of that knowledge into your long term memory.

Bryan Goodwin (07:03):

Exactly. Yeah.

New Speaker (07:04):

What about content? Like, no matter how hard you might work, there's just maybe certain content or skills that just kids aren't going to find relevant. I mean, do you ditch it? Do you reformat it? I mean, how do you deal with that situation?

Bryan Goodwin (07:21):

yeah,

Bryan Goodwin (07:22):

I think about myself as an English teacher. I remember teaching The Scarlet Letter to kids. I was in the Virgin Islands and like trying to get them to relate to this and honestly I didn't have it figured out. I didn't have what we talk about as a marketing term called "What's In It for Me?", WIIFM is the acronym, what's in it for me. And if you don't have that figured out, it's really difficult to teach something. And honestly, I think back about the travesty that I perpetrated on my kids, trying to teach The Scarlet Letter when I didn't actually know what's in it for them. Why should they read The Scarlet Letter? I was like, "You know, the Puritans are interesting. I don't know, but had I thought about it and sometimes where you get through that with them is, were what's the enduring understanding?

Bryan Goodwin (08:00):

What is it that I want them to learn when they're 18 that they'll remember when they're 80? Thinking about how do adults apply this in the real world and, honestly, if you come to the answer, you're not bereft if you don't read The Scarlet Letter. Maybe you cut it out and say, it's not really important anymore to teach. Or if you do, it's like you're thinking about those key themes, those key ideas that I really want kids to be thinking about. And so I think, you know, with mathematics or science, there's some practical application, but you really do have to get to why, why do adults learn this stuff? And why is it important for you to know? And if you can't answer that question, I think it is really difficult to do that. So then maybe from moments of reflection...I've teachers and workshops where we do this, having maybe an existential crisis, like "Why do I teach asset theory?" Right? I need to figure this out. And if I don't have it clear, I know my kids won't figure it out. So I think short answer, you have to dig deep into what is, why is this important to teach? And if you honestly can't answer the question, then you probably should talk to colleagues and others and say, why are we teaching whatever.

Matt Renwick (09:02):

It might be. That's a good point too: if you don't just assume there's not some kind of an enduring understanding, theme, to take the time to look into it. Kind of walk us through the phases of a brain-based model. How do we know that these phases support student growth and achievement?

Bryan Goodwin (09:24):

Yeah, that's a really good question. In fact, something that we've done a bit in the book Learning That Sticks, but also we're actually doing right now - I'll forecast something - we are reexamining research that supports a title we've had out there for quite a while called Classroom Instruction That Works. So we're looking now at empirical studies and here's what we can find from empirical research in classrooms, that something like goal setting has tremendous effect sizes for learners. And so it is getting kids to set their own personal goals, to track their own progress. And so we know that works as a classroom instructional strategy. If you understand how the brain works, then you see why that would work, right? Now. I understand, "Oh, I'm helping kids get those dopamine hits," right? When they achieve a goal or I'm helping them and sometimes set small goals...

Bryan Goodwin (10:09):

...so that every day they're moving, they're making progress towards where they wanna get to. And I'm helping their brains to: "Hey, this is important. Stay focused, persevere, you know, productive struggles. So we do actually know kind of each step along the way. And that's where in the book we have provided those evidence-based strategies. We also know, for example, like queuing cognitive interest or getting kids interested in their learning has tremendous effect sizes. Also we actually know from neuroscience why that is true because there's a dopamine reward when you're curious about something and you solve your curiosity, resolve your curiosity: You get a dopamine hit. We also know neuroscience studies have found that we tend to learn things that are even unintentional, that there's accidental learning that happens. It seems that somehow how curiosity primes our brains for learning. So we learn more. So we can see both from like laboratory studies that are cognitive science studies, but also classroom studies, why each of these spaces are really important.

Matt Renwick (11:08):

You've spoken about this already, just why we need to get kids first interested and committed to learning. Maybe to that question then, just what we've noticed in our schools, and I think other educators are noticing this too, is kids have had a harder time getting back into independent reading, writing, even holding a pencil for younger kids because they just haven't had that practice. Any ideas of what as we, as educators can do to get them reinterested and recommitted to some of these more independent and kind of solitude-centered, I guess, activities, like you said, in a world of connections. That's been a challenge for us. Any thoughts on that?

Bryan Goodwin (11:53):

Yeah, I think that's where also goal setting is really important. We work with schools a lot on making the shift from learning objectives to success criteria. And that's not a new idea, but for a lot of teachers, it's not until I define how will I know when kids know it, how will they know when they know it? That usually then also kind of forces that question about, so why are we asking kids to learn this? And I think we do need to spend time helping them become interested in learning. There are also things we know from studies, like "What does peak curiosity?" Well, things like mysteries, right? Trying to solve a mystery. So sometimes we might wanna flip history around, like, "Why did the Roman Empire fall? Let's figure that out," right? When actually there's a debate.

Bryan Goodwin (12:35):

That's the other strategy that creates curiosity, is controversy. When kids realize that historians still don't agree two thousand years later why the Roman Empire fell, or just 1700 years later. So we can use controversy. We can use things like cognitive conflict when something doesn't quite square with our expectations. I live here in Denver, Colorado. And interesting that what happens in the wintertime is when the wind is blowing out of the mountains, it actually makes Denver warmer. It's Chinook winds, but that seems contrary to what we would think, because it's cold in the mountains. Why does that work, right? So posing those kind of conflicts, I think also we can use like just even suspense, right? Literature is full of suspense, or a science experiment. What do you think is gonna happen? I actually write about this...

Bryan Goodwin (13:19):

...in some of my books. My daughter, Molly, who's now a freshman in high school, years ago - I think she was in second grade - snowy morning here in Denver. She's coming down the stairs as I'm going up the stairs. And she asked, "Dad, is it a school day?" You know, I'm thinking she wants it to be a snow day and I have to inform we're in Denver. So it's gonna have to snow sideways before it's a snow day. Right? So like Wisconsin, I'm sure. So, no, it's still a school day and I thought she'd be dejected and bummed out. But she pumps her fish, like she's excited, right? She can't went to go to school and it wasn't because of the cafeteria or seeing friends. It was like they were doing an overnight science experiment. It was that that made her want to come back to school.

Bryan Goodwin (13:56):

So I think what we have to recognize is that our kids' brains, these days have more distractions than ever, right. There's so much media that's out there. We have to figure out how do we cut through all the noise with the signal that makes them say this is interesting, right? The good news is that we don't have to teach curiosity to kids. We're all born curious. And so if we can tap into that, that's a good way to start the whole process. And then you build in the rest of the six phases of learning. But I think to your point, I mean, if you skip that first (phase) - get kids interested- the train leaves the station without them, right? So we want to figure that out. It's worth spending some time doing that. And honestly that tends to be more of a collaborative activity. Teachers should come together to say, "How do we hook kids' interest in, you know, American literature or American history, whatever it is - that's what I used to teach, right- so how do you get kids interest in that?

New Speaker (14:46):

So I hear the three Cs: curiosity, controversy, and conflict.

Bryan Goodwin (14:53):

Yeah, exactly. And it's productive conflict, right? So another great example is, "Should we list the wolf as an endangered species?" You can hear what environmentalists have to say about that. You can hear what ranchers have to say about that. That's actually a study that was done and found kids were so interested in learning about the wolf in that frame, they would stay in from recess to watch a film and to learn more about it, because we all want to sort out ideas in our minds of where do we stand on this. So instead of shying away from controversy, there are certainly some very productive conversations kids can have around controversy.

Matt Renwick (15:32):

You can weave in reading, writing, speaking, and listening...

Bryan Goodwin (15:34):

Absolutely.

Matt Renwick (15:38):

That would be a relevant topic here in Wisconsin too. The final question is, what does this look like? You work with schools and teachers...what do you see when you see teachers engaging in this brain-based model for instructional design?

Bryan Goodwin (15:57):

I think one of the key things that happens, Matt is, it's intentionality. Teachers become metacognitive in their practices. I think about my first year as a teacher. You would've seen me doing some of the right things, right? Cooperative learning, but if you'd ask me, "Brian, why are you doing cooperative?" I'd say, "I've been lecturing all week. You know, I need to do something different." That's not why we do cooperative learning. It's not Cooperative Wednesdays, right? It's, "I'm at a point in the learning process where I want my kids to pause and process together and make sense of their learning." So I think that's the first key shift is teachers become more intentional. I think something else that we see oftentimes though is while there are six phases and several teaching strategies that hang under each, sometimes schools will say, "We just need to focus on one thing right now."

Bryan Goodwin (16:43):

And sometimes it is. So those success criteria, let's be really clear about why we're asking kids to learn this and why we'll know that they've got it, how they will know they've got it. And it's those "I can" statements, but embedded with this idea of "what's in it for me?". So we find that sometimes it's great for schools or teachers to have the overall model in their minds, but then say we're going to work on one phase right now. That seems to be where learning is breaking down. That's another way to think about this, is like when learning is breaking down or doesn't seem to be happening, is it because kids aren't interested. So maybe we start there. Is it because no, we, we got their attention, but they don't seem to stay focused. We're going to think about that commit to learning phase for wherever it may be breaking down. So sometimes it becomes a really great diagnostic tool as well. If learning isn't happening the way we think it should. what phase did we miss? You know, when did the train leave the station without the kids, and let's go back and be sure we got that figured out.

Matt Renwick (17:36):

I remember using the Classroom Instruction That Works book for professional learning in my first stint as an administrator, as an assistant principal. And we followed what you mentioned now that you mentioned it: I think there were like nine, correct?

Bryan Goodwin (17:50):

That's right.

Matt Renwick (17:50):

So we focused on three per year, over a three year period. And then within that, a teacher could pick one. And really made it personalized, but also schoolwide and we're kind of moving together.

Bryan Goodwin (18:02):

I think it's a great strategy, to have PLCs come together, a grade level team come together to say, "Yeah, let's get really good at this one particular phase of learning." Becaise we think now it's the biggest inflection point for us, if we can do this well consistently and intentionally.

Matt Renwick (18:17):

Well, your book lays it out very nicely in Learning that Sticks: A Brain-Based model for K-12 instructional design and delivery. Where can we learn more about your work, Brian?

Bryan Goodwin (18:27):

Just come to our website, www.mcrel.org. There are a lot of free resources. There's in fact a free download that relates to this book. You can find lots of materials there. You'll find me there as well. So you can reach out to me. I'm always happy to answer questions and to chat with folks about this work.

Matt Renwick (18:47):

And you also have an eCourse that can goes with this too.

Bryan Goodwin (18:50):

That's correct. Yes. We have an online course that provides an overview of this and we've designed it also really to be effective professional learning. So ideally, you know, teams would come together, do the eCourse, but then have a chance to meet together. So that one of the things we talk about is the importance of processing learning in a group. So we've designed the eCourse that way too.

Matt Renwick (19:11):

I saw you had some discussion boards in there and so you’re trying to practice what you preach, right?

Bryan Goodwin (19:17):

Exactly. That's right. Modeling the practice too.

Matt Renwick (19:21):

So thanks Brian. It was good to talk to you and I encourage everyone to check out this book.

Matt Renwick (19:26):

Thank you so much, Matt, for the opportunity. And I look forward to hearing from listeners too.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

What can we learn about literacy from our nation’s past?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, author of Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, shares her findings from her dissertation work on black literary societies and their relevance for today’s educators.

In my conversation with Gholdy, we discussed:

* her professional learning journey researching this important topic,

* the four pursuits of this pedagogical framework teachers can follow, and

* how to be a culturally responsive teacher in these challenging times.

This is an episode you won’t want to miss!

Relevant Resources

* Buy Gholdy’s book

* Read our book club contributions around Cultivating Genius from this summer

* Learn more about Gholdy’s work on her website

* Follow Gholdy on Twitter (@GholdyM)

* Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts (and give a rating!)

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick (00:07):

It's nice to meet you Gholdy. Dr. Gholdy Muhammad is the author of Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy through Scholastic. She has her PhD in Literacy, Language and Culture at the University of Illinois, Chicago where she's also an associate professor. I came across your book actually through Lois Bridges. She was your editor, I believe on your book.

Gholdy Muhammad (00:41):

Yes, she was my extraordinary editor. I really enjoyed working with Lois.

Matt Renwick (00:46):

And I worked with Lois on a project, Bring Me a Book. I said, I'm looking for some titles for the summer book club and I mentioned yours as one. And she's like, "Oh, it's phenomenal. It's transformational. You have to do that one." And that was it. If Lois says read it. I read it. But yeah, it's such a unique book. What drew you into that study?

Gholdy Muhammad (01:11):

Yeah, I was at the time I was in graduate school and studying for my PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture at UI-C. And, you know, like a lot of people I'm always searching for solutions, answers, better ways in education. And I was really interested in the collaborative literacy spaces that are created, like book clubs and writing groups. And that's what my research was on: these literacy collaboratives and a professor pointed me in the direction of this rich history of literary societies. And I came upon the work of Elizabeth McHenry who wrote the book Forgotten Readers, and she captures these literary societiies throughout this history of the 19th street. Dorothy Porter, who was a librarian for Howard University, was also one of the first people to write about these literary organizations. But when I was reading them, I was reading them like a K-12 teacher. Elizabeth McHenry, her scholarship has less of carry over into education and library studies and things like that.

Gholdy Muhammad (02:35):

And English studies and humanities and things. But I was reading it like a teacher and I would read and come upon artifacts after artifacts. I would read something, then it would direct me toward another archive and then another one and another one. And it was like this beautiful sort of scavenger hunt of knowledge and information. And as I was reading about our ancestors, it was helping me to become a better teacher, a better scholar, a better thinker. I'm a better doer of my research, you know, instead of just writing about it, helping to show action, right. To improve communities. And so that's kind of how it came about. When I started reading, I just couldn't stop. I couldn't stop reading about it, writing around it and studying these spaces.

Matt Renwick (03:27):

The framework that you create for this, around culturally and historically responsive literacy, it's a curriculum framework, right? How do you take some of these ideas and put them into action in the classroom?

Gholdy Muhammad (03:40):

Yeah, it's a pedagogical framework, and it's focused on creating curricular pursuits, teaching and learning pursuits. And I think even if we think about pedagogical and teaching and learning, it can be used across different grade levels in spaces, right? It depends on where one is teaching and where one is learning. So, you know, even though this is initially designed for K-12 education, I've seen it with three-year-olds and pre-K, I've seen it with higher education, adult education have adopted using it, companies using it to think about their internal work around diversity, equity and inclusion. So I also think it has some wider manifestations, in addition to how we use it as teachers and leaders in schools.

Matt Renwick (04:34):

I shared with you before: I saw that it's sold over a hundred thousand copies, which in the educational publishing world is huge. So you've definitely offered something that people are looking for, and just reading some of the examples too, it feels like it just couldn't have come at a better time. People are overwhelmed and stressed, as well as societal, civil unrest too. Just the, kind of the simplicity of it, it doesn't feel overwhelming when I read some of your examples. Some of the lessons and units you've designed, are you finding that when you work with teachers that they're finding this refreshing?

Gholdy Muhammad (05:16):

And leaders, because I want principals to write a sample read-aloud lesson plan or unit plan with the model and try it out too, because they are teacher leaders. And I feel like that's a big part of it. But what I find is, I think anytime we introduced a new model or a framework, as you know Matt, teachers may feel like, "Oh, wait, something else, how am I supposed to do something else in addition to everything else I'm doing?" And they're absolutely right. You know, we have introduced a lot of models, frameworks, strategies, theories to them. But a lot of these models have never sort of captured cognition with social cultural news, with critical theory, with equity, with justice. But also with reading skills and math skills and STEM and all of these things that my model does.

Gholdy Muhammad (06:17):

And so I think at first, it may feel overwhelming, but then when I'm with teachers and I have them practice with it, what they create is such genius because our teachers are geniuses too. And they create these learning experiences, not activities, but experiences with children that are so enriching and meaningful. I mean, things that I think children will remember for the rest of their lives. And they're like, "Oh yeah, this is doable." Like you were saying, I could do this. And in many ways I've been already doing this part of it. There are lots of teachers who have centered identity in the learning, but they have not gone as far as assess it oftentimes. So I think this has been elevating the pedagogical practices of teachers across the nation and in other parts of the world that I've been able to work with.

Matt Renwick (07:16):

So you're blending different philosophies of education that have come through historically and to allow teachers to be empowered, and our kids. There was one term in there that was pretty new to me. It was criticality. Can you describe that term? You do a nice job in the book, but I think so everyone's aware of the importance of criticality when you're creating curriculum and instruction.

Gholdy Muhammad (07:49):

Yeah, criticality...Like the root word critical. And I talk about critical, like as upper case C critical, not just deep and thoughtful, analytical thinking, but deep, thoughtful, analytical thinking as it relates to justice, equities, inequities, representations, conscious power. That's what criticality is; to have criticality means that you have an understanding of oppression, anti-oppression. Sometimes people send messages out and they said, "How can I be a disruptor of oppression? That's just horrible. And we're going to let everybody know." And I said, "Oh, oppression is hurt, pain and harm. If you're not a disruptor of oppression, what would you like me to be? You either want me to be silent on someone else's or my own hurt, or you want me to contribute to it." And so I talk about oppression in that way, because I think you can oppress or hurt the land and the air by polluting and littering.

Gholdy Muhammad (09:01):

I think we should be teaching students about that. I think you can oppress living organisms like animals and plants. I think we should be teaching students about that because if we don't teach them how to disrupt it, we may not have a planet for them to live on, right? I teach them about the hurt, pain, and harm, where we can often inflict to ourselves, like saying negative things to ourselves. Like "I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough." And then I think people can hurt and harm other people like through racism, sexism, ableism, religious discrimination, classism, and things like that. So criticality the way that I use it and take it up in my work, it is the naming, the understanding, the questioning, the disruption of hurt and harm in the world and humanity to understand it and name it enough and disrupted enough that you're working everyday to make the world better, to make our lives better and the lives of others better. And that's what criticality is. It pushes for a better humanity for all, not just for black children or white children or brown children, but for all of us, because we have to be in this together in harmony. And so that is my short, maybe longer, but shorter description of criticality.

Matt Renwick (10:29):

That's perfect. It's broad enough that you can apply it to just about any unit of study, whether it's history or whether it's the current reality, like you said. So it seemed like an entry point I think that teachers are looking for. I want to talk about some of these issues, but I feel like I can't, because I'm going to get, you know, blasted by someone in the community or I'm even at risk of losing my job. And so they've been there, maybe they're feeling like they're stuck and they don't know where to start. I feel like, I feel like your work would allow them to do that.

Gholdy Muhammad (11:05):

And you know, sometimes I have to, we have to think about ourselves, but we should not have systems and structures that make teachers think about losing their jobs. If they are trying to teach in equitable ways that should make you keep your job. But our system has been a little bit reversed in that sense.

Matt Renwick (11:28):

And if in some ways it can avoid some issues where we end up being insensitive to a group or around a topic, because we're just not, maybe we're not versed in it or just don't feel confident in it. So it just feels like the framework really does help. Can you quickly walk through your four steps to develop the unit?

Gholdy Muhammad (11:53):

So I call these steps more so like pursuits, right, and criticality is one of them. So I like to start with an intellectual prism. What are students becoming smarter about, and pushing back against practices that have only taught skills in isolated ways? Like we teach children how to read that are devoid of texts, sometimes of texts connected to their lives, to the world. Sometimes we teach mathematics decontextualized to students' identities and to the world. So it's kind of pushing back on that notion where I think, what do I want my students to be smarter about? I'll give you an example. Maybe last week I wanted my students to learn about sugar and the history of sugar: where it's grown, the history of sugar and freedom. There's like a rich history in Louisiana of sugar, among communities in color.

Gholdy Muhammad (12:52):

And that was the starting point. And then I go to identity: what does sugar have to do with the identity of my students? Well, a lot of children consume sugar, but do they sort of monitor their conception and know what they're putting in their bodies? And so to me, I made a goal of that students will consider their daily and weekly intake of sugar and compare it to what doctors say are norms of what children that age need. And then I go to identity matters because we should for the reason of authentic purpose, children want to know what does this have to do with my life? And we should be creating spaces where students get to understand who they are and who they are destined to be. They might grow up and say, "You know what, I need to cut back on my sugar intake."

Gholdy Muhammad (13:47):

The third pursuit that our ancestors gave us are skills. So I went to the skills goal and I said, "Well, what does sugar have to do with skills?" So I used two different skills. One was a science skill of studying the molecule and being able to learn how to dissolve sugar through experimentation. That was the science goal. And then I'm at literacy. I mean, I'm always bringing more literacy in. So I also would want students to learn how to read and write a lab report that one would do as a scientific expert. The fourth pursuit, which we already mentioned, is criticality. And what does sugar have to do with harm and hurt? I won't say oppression, but sometimes I feel like sugar oppresses our body because it does: it can harm the body, certain sugars, right? So I would have students look at unhealthy forms of sugar.

Gholdy Muhammad (14:52):

Sometimes doctors call them bad sugars versus good sugars. Those that are, you know, in processed foods and things like that. And they will look at the harms of what it does to the body. You know, I'm thinking about, sometimes they show these images of pouring sugar in these containers and how much sugar is in this and this and this. I think it was like a Parks and Rec episode where they had this sugar, this fast food place. I was like, oh, there's sugar in it. But you know, we would think about the harms of the sugar, of the body, of certain sugars. And then for a joy, I added a fifth element to the model. I know it would be written about in my next book. It's joy: what's the beauty, the aesthetics and the topics we're teaching children need? Joy. Teachers need joy, parents need joy.

Gholdy Muhammad (15:47):

We all do. And so I would maybe then focus on the healthy sugars like fruits and vegetables. A lot of children don't know that there's sugar in certain vegetables. And so collectively, it just started with sugar, but we're able to teach intellectualism, skills, identity, criticality and joy. So now I'm teaching the whole child and I'm taking sugar. I could have easily just taught them, "Hey, this is sugar. We're going to dissolve it." But look, now I'm giving them a richness of history of sugar, where it comes from. I'm intellectualizing it because they are scholars, the children.

Matt Renwick (16:30):

It's a relevant topic. And it's like you said, it's so much more than "This is what sugar is. Don't eat too much." And of course they're going to go home and do it, a lot of kids do it, and I have myself. There are so many other...I'm just, as you were talking, I'm thinking other, so many other pathways you could take. You can look at the history of where sugar came from, is currently coming from. And as the kids get older, right, taking a critical look at the working conditions, of how it gets to your store. So yeah, just very interesting. It was great to hear that joy is an added piece to it. When is the book coming out?

Gholdy Muhammad (17:23):

I don't know. You know, I didn't know when Cultivating Genius was going to come out. You know, I have learned to move in the world to just feel like when it's time, it will happen. And that's what happened. You know, I've been training and doing work with cultivating genius for 12 years, even though the book is almost two years old. And so, you know, the way I write, the way my art is, when it comes, whatever my mind tells me, it's time to write, then it'll probably just pour out. But I'm hoping sometime next year, in 2022, that would be lovely, if not sometime after. But focus on unearthing genius, enjoy more connection on joy and how to take now the model that teachers are learning and go deeper into it, but also give leaders the tools to support teachers in doing this work as well.

Matt Renwick (18:28):

That's key. I know for me to know we're going in the right direction, because just like you said, there are so many initiatives that we have to be careful. Gholdy, where can they find more about your work and to learn more about you?

Gholdy Muhammad (18:47):

Social media is a good place like on Twitter and Instagram, it's @GHOLDYM. And like my sugar unit draft, I just posted teachers too. They're just doing amazing things with the model. So I like to share their lessons and units and ideas. I'm at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I'm always inviting people to come study with us, I have amazing colleagues doing such great work there, so they can also reach out to me that way.

Matt Renwick (19:28):

Awesome. Well, this was a treat for you to join me today and thank you for doing the work that you do.

Gholdy Muhammad (19:36):

No problem. Thank you for the invitation and thank you for your work. We need this kind of work to come together, to give our educators more tools and more understanding and do it in collaboration. And that's what I feel, when I see the work that's happening. So I just want to say, thank you.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

Leading schools in the 21st century can be overwhelming. More is being added to our plates while our resources and time feel depleted.

In a highly complex world, a framework for leading schools is needed. Devin Vodicka, author of Learner-Centered Leadership, offers “A Blueprint for Transformational Change in Learning Communities.”

We talk about this topic, including:

* why trust is foundational,

* how schools can see the whole child, and

* why both teachers and students need to be empowered for this work.

A 20th century education model still exists in too many schools. This episode introduces a pathway leaders can follow toward true success for all learners.

Relevant Resources

* Audio + Transcript

* Purchase Devin’s book

* Check out Devin’s article on trust (Principal Leadership)

* Learn more about Devin’s work here and here.

* Also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts (and give us a rating!)

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick:

Welcome Devin Vodicka. I came across your work through your article through, I think it was the Principal Magazine. Is that right?

Devin Vodicka:

Yes.

Matt Renwick:

A summary of your dissertation on trust. I'm interested in learning a little bit more about that as it relates to the book that I have coming out. But you also have a book out Learner-Centered Leadership: A Blueprint for Transformational Change in Learning Communities through IMPress. Welcome Devin. If you just say little bit about yourself, your work, what you do for schools.

Devin Vodicka:

Well, it's great to connect. I'm Devin Vodicka. I'm the CEO of Learner-Centered Collaborative. We partner with schools and districts to help them make the shift to learner-centered education. For us that's all about beginning with whole learner outcomes and designing meaningful learning experiences and creating the enabling conditions to bring all of that to life.

Devin Vodicka:

We're working with 130 something school districts across the country. Seeing lots of great innovations during this interesting time. Before my current role, I used to be superintendent of Vista Unified School District which is where I live, San Diego County. School district of about 25,000 students. Then prior to that, I had a whole bunch of admin roles and I was a teacher in LA Unified at the beginning of my educational career.

Matt Renwick:

What a time to be in this business. Supporting that shift. I mean, not surprised you're that busy. Why did you pick trust as a topic for your studies and dissertation and the frame that you came up with the 4Cs?

Devin Vodicka:

At the time that I was working on my dissertation, I was a principal. I was fortunate to open a new elementary school and a new middle school. I was really interested in organizational development and how you measure the progress of an organization.

Devin Vodicka:

I looked at a lot of different models, a lot of different frameworks and ended up becoming really interested in the field of social capital. Social capital essentially says that, there's a benefit from connections that we have. Because they enable the exchange of resources and expertise.

Devin Vodicka:

There's a lot of research in many in fields that shows that when you have higher levels of social capital, those resources flow more freely and you end up with higher levels of effectiveness. I had this hypothesis that social capital could be a way to think about organizational development.

Devin Vodicka:

I got pulled into a research study that was through SRI International. It was funded by The National Science Foundation. They were looking at the feasibility of using this social capital lens to look at school reform and technology integration. Sure enough, it turned out where you have a lot of connectedness, you have the space for a diffusion of innovation and reforms and change efforts stick.

Devin Vodicka:

That led me to then wonder, well, how do you create social capital? If that's a way to think about the readiness of an organization. What does it take to build it? When you really start asking the question about how do we build connections? It quickly leads you to trust and relational trust more specifically.

Devin Vodicka:

I became then very interested in, well then as a school leader, how can I create higher trust in this environment? How can we create relational trust? There's a lot of research in this area and that all led me to develop this synthesis which says it really takes four elements that have to be in place.

Devin Vodicka:

Consistency, compassion, competence, and communication. It's the interplay between those four elements that creates relational trust. If you have relational trust, you're then generating social capital. If you're generating social capital, you're creating the conditions for more meaningful change. That's a quick fly through of my intellectual journey.

Matt Renwick:

I remember that article too. I remember you, I think writing you can't have just compassion or just consistency. You have to have all four. It's a layered approach to building that foundation.

Devin Vodicka:

Totally right. Well, I give the example of sometimes when we talk about trust, we generalize it. But it is highly situational.

Devin Vodicka:

My wife and I have been together since high school. We have a very high level of relational trust but she knows what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. Competence being one of those four elements for example. If our car was broken and needed repair, she would not trust me to fix it because she knows I'm not competent in that particular area. But if she needed a bill to be paid or she needed one... there are lots of things that I can do.

Devin Vodicka:

It's important to remember that it's very situational. It's dynamic. It's two parties that go into it. I can do everything that I can to try to build trust but ultimately it's the interaction between two or more people that really generates that social connection.

Matt Renwick:

Communication's going to be a huge part of that as well.

Devin Vodicka:

Communication is huge. It cuts across the three other dimensions. Your consistency, your compassion and your competence are all influenced by how you communicate. The research in this area really reinforces the importance of receptive communication. Are we able to be a good listener?

Devin Vodicka:

That tends to be a higher predictor of trust than your ability to express yourself? As it relates to leadership, school leadership in particular, I think we're always confronted with the myth of the charismatic, eloquent leader who carries a message and inspires people through that.

Devin Vodicka:

But when you really look at the research, you find out people are often more inspired by someone who cares about them as a person, listens to them, understands their perspective, is able to balance consistency with compassion to get things done. Communication is huge.

Matt Renwick:

I saw that throughout your book too, in the learner-centered leadership in your blueprint. Speaking of communication, you talk about a... you introduced the book by telling a short story about Diego and just how you were able to find out about his situation. Can you just describe that just briefly and how it led to this concept?

Devin Vodicka:

Yeah. The story in the book is about Diego which is not his real name. But he didn't want to be identified. We'll call him Diego. He was a student at the school where I was an elementary principal. We knew each other when he was really quite young.

Devin Vodicka:

Then I ended up going to the district office. Moved to a neighboring district to be superintendent. He ended up at a high school in the district where I was superintendent. I made it a priority to be in schools a lot as the superintendent. I would wander through the schools and every time I saw him, it was a sense of reconnection. It was just great to see how he had grown over time. We had, I'd say a friendly but not super close connection.

Devin Vodicka:

Then I got a call from his mom one day who shared with me that his dad had passed away. She was very ill. He was a senior at that time. He was working to support his family and falling behind in school. I went and checked in with him. It turned out that he was carrying a lot.

Devin Vodicka:

As soon as we knew about it, there was a whole team of people, the principal, the counselor, the teachers all sort of sprang into action and set up all kinds of supports and interventions. He ended up graduating, going to college. He's doing quite well now. But it was shocking to me that he had been in school and none of us knew about his situation.

Devin Vodicka:

His story to me is just such an important reminder of how relationships have to be first in everything we do. Because with that relationship, we can understand the whole person and how we can be most helpful for them. That's the story. That's the takeaway. That's part of why I think we need just more humanity in our educational approach.

Matt Renwick:

Relevance seemed to come up for me too as I was reading your book. Your own story is not the same as Diego's but you were also a first generation citizen. You talked a little bit about that too with how you viewed school coming through in the United States. How did that form your philosophy where you are today?

Devin Vodicka:

In the book, Learner-Centered Leadership, I also share the story being from an immigrant family growing up in a small town and just how strange it was. I noticed it at a young age. I was probably seven, maybe eight years old that I had these very distinct cultural differences that were completely unrecognized in the learning experience.

Devin Vodicka:

Not just culture being unrecognized as a form of individual difference but I had friends that picked things up quickly or slowly or had different interests. It just struck me as very strange as a very young person that we would be getting sort of one size fits all treatment. When it was really clear to me that we were unique as individuals. As a learner, what it made me feel like is that I was unseen or invisible.

Devin Vodicka:

When I connect that back to Diego, I think about why didn't he tell somebody about his situation? But when you feel like you're not seen in the educational experience, you don't feel compelled to reach out. You withdraw is the natural tendency.

Devin Vodicka:

That happens to so many kids in our school system. It's one of the reasons we've had almost 20% of our students not graduate from high school for 50 years. It's not that they're not capable. It's students disengage and they withdraw. It's often because we're not seen as people. We don't have those connections that will help us to really flourish.

Matt Renwick:

Your blueprint talks about some of the elements that will help us meet every kid's needs for learner-centered leadership. Could you walk us just through each element? I think there was four, should leaders be looking for to help guide their teachers in their community toward a more responsive experience.

Devin Vodicka:

Well, part of it is the context. That context is really important that it is characterized by high levels of trust, social capital as we go talked about. I encourage leaders to be deep listeners. No matter what your role is, we can all learn from one another in that listening mode.

Devin Vodicka:

If you have a high trust environment that's characterized by really trying to understand one another, leaders need to have a strategy to move forward. I define leadership as an intersection of purpose, participation and feedback.

Devin Vodicka:

The way that you get to that is by aligning what I call a framework for the future. What's your vision? Where are you going? What's your mission? How are you going to contribute to achieving that vision? What are your values? Which is how you'll behave. What are your goals? So that you know if you're making progress towards your aspirations. Then roles and responsibilities. Who's going to do what.

Devin Vodicka:

Then lastly, you need a plan of action. In communities where you have alignment of vision, mission, values, goals, roles, plan and you have high trust, incredible things can happen for learners.

Matt Renwick:

With this framework you encourage leaders to constantly reexamine it and adjust it to your local, like you said, situation instead of context. I just wrote it's personalized learning for ourselves too. It's not just for the kids but we have to be learners along with them.

Matt Renwick:

Sometimes districts or schools will be told, no you need to follow this curriculum or you need to follow this framework. Somewhat, I would say rigidly. But you don't advocate for that. You actually advocate for personalizing it to of your context. What are the benefits to that?

Devin Vodicka:

Yeah. For sure. Well, it's a really hard change because we're conditioned by these industrial era systems that do promote compliance where I think what we need today in the world is much more agency which is part of personalization. That agency is really purposeful action that each of us can take individually.

Devin Vodicka:

If we want to see that for our students, it needs to also be in place for our teachers, for our school leaders. It needs to be we have integrity in the system. Having gone through the experience of moving towards more personal learning for all students, you have to align those outcomes, the experiences and the conditions. The conditions need to reflect the outcomes you want to see. If you talked about empowering learners to drive their own future, you have to promote that for everyone in the system.

Matt Renwick:

You have to give them space to make decisions.

Devin Vodicka:

Correct. Well, the flip of this is some people I think worry that if you take this empowering approach where you're promoting agency and choice and flexibility, that you're going to have chaos and that it will be unstructured. This is where having strategy, vision, mission, values goals, the elements I talked about, are important to put guardrails around the process and establish some expectations about how we're going to coexist together.

Devin Vodicka:

Where you have that balance of structure and flexibility, you get tremendous growth. But that requires ongoing feedback which is why listening continues to be important. Because just when you think you've found that balance... we're dynamic people. We exist in dynamic context. We need to be listening in this kind of inquiry mode to make adjustments. Sometimes adding more structure. Sometimes removing structure. But keeping those boundaries in place to have purposeful action in the direction of what we're trying to achieve.

Matt Renwick:

It takes time. I mean, I'm in my sixth year now. We're still, exactly what you said, just trying to re-examine why we're here? What we're doing? I almost got a sense just reading your book too that, it's not just maybe changing what you currently have but almost not to throw out what we've done but like you said, it's a pretty substantial shift to go here.

Matt Renwick:

Any specific strategies? You mentioned deep listening which I 100% agree with. Any other strategies a leader might take to start accelerating that shift so that we can get there sooner just for our kids right now?

Devin Vodicka:

Yeah. I mean, the way we start with most of our partnerships is talking about what are we really trying to achieve? What do we really want for our learners? If you engage in that conversation, you say, what does success really look like for one of our students?

Devin Vodicka:

Invariably, they talk about we want them to be knowledgeable. They need to be literate. They need to have foundational skills in math and science and social studies. Those things are necessary but they're not sufficient because we also want our students to have a sense of purpose.

Devin Vodicka:

We want them to know how to interact well with others. To be empathetic. To be effective communicators. We want them to be creative. We want them to be problem solvers. We want them to contribute in their communities. Once you start getting into that conversation, you just say, well, how would we know that that's actually happening?

Devin Vodicka:

It leads you into a very important and urgent conversation around what are the metrics of success that are going to tell us if we're making progress? As soon as you start anchoring on the whole learner as what you're trying to achieve, you recognize that all of these other things must shift if you're really serious about achieving those ambitions.

Devin Vodicka:

It starts and ends with the learner always. But outcomes is a great way to get started quickly to do the urgent work that needs to occur.

Matt Renwick:

It can't be just test scores. There has to be other ways to measure this. Correct?

Devin Vodicka:

Yes. Test scores are not bad but if you think of a different setting like healthcare, imagine if the entire industry focused only on your weight. That was the single measure that was the exclusive focus of all of your health efforts. We would end up being less healthy than if we also incorporated other inputs like, what's your blood pressure? How well are you sleeping? What's your emotional state? These are all things that are important.

Devin Vodicka:

It's critical to have multiple measures to guide progress. I will say along those lines, when we started shifting schools to more personal learning, we often saw initially that academic achievement would go down. But we were tracking multiple metrics and measures like attendance and discipline, attitudes about school.

Devin Vodicka:

Those were going off the charts in a positive direction. It gave us the confidence to say, well, if we're seeing higher levels of engagement, ultimately that should translate into more academic achievement. Sure enough, it did. When the academic metrics bounce back, they went to higher levels than we had ever seen before. But we wouldn't have persevered through that if we weren't oriented to more than one input. Very important to have multiple metrics.

Matt Renwick:

The multiple measures not only gave you feedback on how you were doing, but it also helped you sustain that journey so that you stuck with it.

Devin Vodicka:

Completely. Just like in the health field, if you optimize around one metric, you might suboptimize around other things that are also important. We do the same thing in education. There's a lot of great research that says that countries that do really well with improving test scores have students who are disinterested in the subject or not motivated.

Devin Vodicka:

We need to be thinking about the holistic effects and impacts of what we're doing. Just like I was talking about trust and how there's these competing dynamics, it's similar in this respect. We need to be thinking holistically and globally if we really want to better serve one another as humans.

Matt Renwick:

Well, this is complex work but in your book Learner-Centered Leadership, you nicely frame it. I think leaders can read it and they start to do this work and feel confident going forward. Devin, where can we find more about your work online?

Devin Vodicka:

Well, the good thing about having a name like Devin Vodicka is there's not many of us. I'm pretty easy to find on Twitter or LinkedIn, social media. But I also have a website called learnercenteredleadership.org. I try to do pretty regular blog posts. Then the website for our organization is learnercentered.org. Learnercenteredleadership.org gets to my website, learnercentered.org is our company's website.

Devin Vodicka:

We look forward to staying connected and eager to learn from all the great things that others are also doing to better serve kids.

Matt Renwick:

Devin Vodicka, it was great to talk to today. Thank you.

Devin Vodicka:

Appreciate it. Thank you.

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