Jay Westover, author of Districts on the Move and C.L.O. of InnovateEd, having been mentored by Rick DuFour and Michael Fullan, makes the case for systems thinking and coherence to create sustainable school improvement. He identifies four key drivers: clarity of focus, shared leadership, collaborative inquiry and a feedback loop. “If you want to build coherence and be a systems thinker, you have to be very intentional in how you transform climate, shape culture and build capacity to create coherence, and the end game has to be equity.” website: https://innovateed.com/
Dr. Bob Maxfield and Dr. Suzanne Klein welcome Jay Westover, Chief Learning Officer at Innovate Ed and author of Districts on the Move, the subject of a multi-session book study conducted with educational leaders in southeast Michigan, sponsored by the Galileo Institute at Oakland University.
Jay Westover’s educational background followed a similar pattern to most administrators: classroom teacher, assistant principal, and principal. “I was lucky enough in my first principalship to meet Rick DuFour with whom I became good friends. My career continued at the district office and then in California, the County Office focusing on leadership development; keeping that idea of how we improve schools from Rick's DuFour’s vantage point. In about 2000, I noticed that most of the school improvement work wasn't sustainable, so I left my job and started InnovateEd, and was lucky enough to find another mentor, Michael Fullan, about 2013. The book, Districts on the Move, was something that emanated from working in partnership with Michael, and what we found was how to make coherence happen in action.”
“The idea of coherence or systems thinking is really using collaborative inquiry, which is how you seek out solutions in a way in which you really don't know an answer, to shape that coherent path of improvement. The key has to be district leaders with principals and teachers working together to find solutions, not only for their schools but for their district.”
“We found there are four key drivers that connect Fullan's work on coherence. The first key driver is clarity of focus. Using the analogy of a pendulum scale to determine the weight of a rock using pebbles, you need to work together to calculate it, work together to figure out how to move it, and keep working at it. So how do we work collaboratively to create movement or have an impact? The second driver, shared leadership, requires a very strong communication and collaboration model in order to share the vision and priorities to take action. The third driver is the idea of collective expertise or collaborative inquiry, but I think of it as more like improvement cycles. You know you can go all the way back to Bryk’s work, thinking about a short cycle of four to six weeks of inquiry; what's the problem, what's the solution, let's figure it out, what have we learned, and how do we keep moving in an agile manner? And that last driver which I think is most important, you have to have a feedback loop. If you want continuous improvement maybe every six to nine weeks, you have to come back together and as a system figure out: what's working, what's not working, and how you overcome problems of practice? I would say if you want to build coherence and be a systems thinker, you have to be very intentional in how you transform climate, shape culture, and build capacity to create coherence, and the end game has to be equity. That's got to be in the forefront and it's got to be your long-term focus.”
Jay Westover observed, “a lot of times in school districts, schools are doing good work in isolation and not necessarily in partnership with each other or with district leaders. We have to move away from an isolated model of schools improving by themselves into more of a network structure. I think that concept probably goes back to the idea of a community of practice. So if a district has nine schools they may be grouped into three groups of three, to work together on a problem of practice with a district liaison supporting them. Then they come back together throughout the year to learn across functionally.”
To establish communities of practice within and across districts, “we have to be open to partner and establish broader networks among school districts, especially if there’re areas which we all feel are important. We call that big idea collective impact; how you collectively try to find impact versus individually? If we can create that internal network of the districts, we can really accelerate change and improvements. I've talked to superintendents that said that they feel they've accelerated for example, math improvement by three to four years just by co-learning with others that might be already ahead of them.” When responding to overcoming individual school identity,the difference in talent distribution, and competition between schools and districts, Jay Westover clarified “part of that comes down to what's the purpose? Simon Sinek, we know The Golden Circle, talks about ‘the Why, the How and the What’. I think what you may have described is ‘the What’, where we feel good about our outcomes, about certain practices, but that moral imperative happens to be student equity or equitable growth. So some of those successful districts aren't seeing equal gains for all kids and John Hattie really pushes that idea. If we can find common ground which is how do we achieve equitable growth in student learning, then it becomes an issue bigger than ourselves individually, and we're moving towards something that is collectively important.”
In the splinter between management versus leadership for time, energy and commitment, “if you're doing management you're really attending to urgent demands, if you're doing leadership you’re attending to important things. If you go back to the book Districts on the Move, the reason why we put the rubrics in the back is because when you actually look at those four key drivers you start to see if you really have clarity of focus. Chris McChesney in his book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, said that internationally only 15% of individuals in any organization know the priorities. Well, the problem is when you start to attend to the urgent demands and you don't know your key priorities, everyone's going in a different direction. I think the idea of calibrating against something common like a rubric, being reflective about what's in place, what's not in place, really, really is important or else everyone else's opinion's right.”
Jay Westover’s advice to new leaders, “I think I would come into the job with a very strong collaborative inquiry mindset and I would shape some very key questions to get my organization to focus in on and identify some of those priorities. Therefore, we can shift away from the urgency of current demands into the importance that really's connected to sustainable improvement.”
Jay Westover commented on what he saw as some of the unique challenges that have surfaced in the last year and a half. “If you strip away the logistics that are connected to COVID, and whether it's the social-emotional or safety issues, I think what we have unveiled as the most significant problem in education in the United States is its variability. I mean we now really see that there is variability in student learning. I think the real dilemma is how to overcome variability. My new book coming out in March, Schools on the Move, is a little bit more of a school-level look at the question, how do you overcome variability? In this work we're looking at it just a little differently; it's about climate, culture, capacity, and coherence. How do we develop leaders who are able to navigate change and reduce variability? I'm not saying it's easy, but we have to begin to really pay attention to some of these causations of variability in learning and begin to recognize that some of our systems, practices, processes, culture are at the root of it and support our schools to figure out how to overcome it, not individually but with district leaders leading the charge of what's at the root cause of the variability and how do we reduce it in a way in which it's going to lead to better growth in student learning.”
“I would suggest to reduce variability you have to have an inquiry cycle in your school or district. And the first step is to analyze the evidence; figure out what's the problem of practice; what's getting in the way of student learning. Then design some improvement strategies that are going to overcome it and how do you know if they're working. Implement, be agile, make adjustments, and then come back and figure out what works best, why, and move forward more intelligently. What I’m noticing is the urgent demands are preventing school districts from leading from an inquiry stance to figure out how to navigate change and improvements. We have to figure out how to get space and create opportunity for that because the management is taking over the leadership, unfortunately.”
For Schools on the Move, Jay worked with the Long Beach United School District, “recognized as I think number four in the world, and Chris Steinhauser, Superintendent, with an unprecedented eighteen years as the longest-serving urban superintendent in America. In writing the book with Chris, we “merged the pragmatic voice of the superintendent and district leaders and principals, ‘as boots on the ground’, with not necessarily theory but more research from studying. I just want to reinforce that we've tried to figure out what's the solution for the current challenge. If you visualize a simple square divided into four boxes. In the center is the idea of collaborative inquiry, so we're collaboratively inquiring about what should our focus be; we're collaboratively inquiring to develop that really strong shared leadership of how we're going to overcome that challenge. We’re inquiring about how to build expertise, you know to figure out how to be successful and then inquiry implies we have an improvement process. If you could take the big tenets of Districts on the Move and try to get it down to the simplest nuggets, the starting point’s going to be collaborative inquiry.”
website: https://innovateed.com/
Westover, Jay, Districts on the Move: Leading a Coherent System of Continuous Improvement, Thousand Oaks, CA., Corwin; 1st edition, September 17, 2019.
Westover, Jay, and Christopher Steinhauser, Schools on the Move: Leading Coherence for Equitable Growth, Thousands Oaks, CA., Corwin, Release date March 2022
Fullan, Michael & Quinn, J., Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts and systems, Thousand Oaks, CA., Corwin, 2016.
McChesney, Chris, et.al. The 4 Disciples of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, Free Press; 1st edition April 1, 2012
Bob Maxfield:
Hello, this is Podcast for Leaderful Schools coming to you, almost live from Oakland University from the Galileo Institute the School of Education and Human Services at Oakland University. This is Bob Maxfield, and my co-host as always is Dr. Sue Klein. Suzanne, welcome and how are you today?
00:16.10 --> 00:24.69
Suzanne Klein:
I'm doing great Bob, and very excited about the conversation we're about to have with Jay Westover and Districts on the Move ideas.
00:25.02 -->01:15
Bob Maxfield:
The interview with Jay today is really important because while we're wrestling with this whole broad issue of school improvement which was something that has always been important, but during and hopefully as we begin to come out of the pandemic it's more important than ever before because the challenges before us are greater than ever before.
So our guest today is Jay Westover, who is the Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer at Innovate Ed in Riverside, California. His recent book, Districts on the Move, was the subject of a multi-session book study conducted by almost 100 people in southeast Michigan, under the auspices of the Galileo Institute at Oakland University and so Jay, we're really glad you could join us, but I want to begin just by giving you a chance to tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get to this gig at this point in your life?
01:16 -->02:52
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
Well, first of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity, it's always good to speak to educators at large. Yes my background, I probably had a similar story to most I started as a classroom teacher, you might say got little disenfranchised with the system and then moved up into assistant principal, principal, and was lucky enough in about 2000 when I was in my first principalship met Rick DuFour. So I really didn't know how to lead school improvement. Rick and I became good friends. I got to do work with him in my own school, was successful, and from there went to the district office and then in California the county office, and really focused on you know, leadership development and kept that idea of how we improve schools, you know, from Rick's vantage point close to my vest.
And then in 2000, I want to say about 15 years ago, I noticed that most of the school improvement work wasn't sustainable. You know, it may have started the work but it did not sustain the work, and so what I ended up doing was leaving my job and started InnovateEd, and then was lucky enough to find another mentor, Michael Fullan, about 2013. So you could say that Districts on the Move was something that emanated from working in partnership with Michael, and you know what we found was how to make coherence happen in action, and glad to hear that people are enjoying reading the book.
02:53 -->03:02
Bob Maxfield:
Well, thank you for that. That's a rich background. We weren't aware of the Rick DuFour connection, but that's even more tied into the kind of thing we've been doing.
03:04 --> 04:01
Suzanne Klein:
Moving from that wonderful introduction and you alluded to this already, the notion that educators had been working on school improvement and trying to again, enhance and make really robust learning systems and opportunities for all kids in classrooms in a school and across the district, and yet feel a sense of frustration about it. And you noted just a moment ago Jay, that whole notion of sustainability sometimes comes to the fore.
With that in mind, when you think about the whole notion of developing a coherent approach and how you learn from colleagues and how you sustain it, in the book, which again I've had the opportunity and good fortune to have discovered and read it several times now actually. Talk a little bit about the background that emanates from that concern about sustainability, because you make the case for systems thinking, coherence, and learning from colleagues. What can you share with our listeners about what you've learned along the way?
04:02 --> 07:27
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
Yeah, I think it’s important for me to set the context, so I would say the precursor to the book was the systemic work that we started in about 2014. We brought together about 14 school districts, about 300 schools in total, and pretty much I would say, in a joint partnership with Michael Fullan. He had just begun to write the book, it hadn't come out yet, Coherence, but he shared with me that he hadn't seen coherence come about, he studies districts who are “coherent”, but you know the question was what's the path of progress and then, are there any critical success factors? And so I think to answer your question what we learned was that the idea of coherence or systems thinking, it's really using collaborative inquiry, which is how you seek out solutions in a way in which you really don't know an answer to shape that coherent path of improvement, but the key has to be district leaders with principals and teachers working together to find solutions, not only for their schools but for their district.
And what we found was from that work over about four years before the book was written, well there's four key drivers that connect Fullan's work on coherence, just to describe them briefly just maybe bring that idea to life. We think about clarity of focus as a key driver, but if you can imagine you have a scale and it's the old scale, it’s the pendulum scale. And you had to figure out what's the rock, I mean what's the big rock you're trying to weigh, and then you have to figure out how many pebbles you have to put the other side to balance it. But you have to not guess, you have to work together to calculate it. And you have to work together with everyone to figure out how to move it and keep working at it. So that the clarity of focus is how do we create movement or have an impact?
And that shared leadership kind of goes back to the old telephone game. I mean I work with lots of superintendents that are very well intended, but if you ask them to speak to their teachers about the vision and priorities, that idea of telephone kind of gets fragmented. And so you have to have a very strong communication and collaboration model, or else you don't have the shared leadership you need to communicate and take action.
And then I think a lot of work has been done on that idea of collective expertise or collaborative inquiry but I think of it as more like improvement cycles. You know you can go all the way back to Bryk’s work, thinking about a short cycle of four to six weeks of inquiry; what's the problem, what's the solution, let's figure it out, what have we learned and how do we keep moving in an agile manner?
And that last driver which I think is most important, you have to have a feedback loop. So if you want continuous improvement, every maybe six weeks nine weeks you have to come back together and as a system figure out what's working, what's not working, how you overcome problems of practice? So you know, in a nutshell, I would say if you want to build coherence and be a systems thinker, you have to be very intentional in how you transform climate, shape culture, and build capacity to create coherence, and the end game has to be equity. That's got to be in the forefront and it's got to be your long-term focus.
07:30-->08:17
Suzanne Klein:
Those are, those drivers are a wonderful way to better understand and start to analyze one's own organization and then think carefully about how to step into making them real. That's where I'd like to go with this next question. Knowing the heavy research that went into that as well as the careful thinking, when you think about some of the districts that you've watched and or helped support,
What were those networks, what were those ways that they establish those systems as how we do business around here, part of the culture, those tenants, those drivers became very real and just unfolded with careful forethought but also were nourished and tended to, how did they make that real?
08:18 --> 10:04
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
I think that concept probably goes back to the idea of a community of practice. So a lot of times in school district, schools are doing good work in isolation and not necessarily in partnership with each other or with district leaders. We've always tried to establish communities of practice within and across districts. So for example, you might have a district of like maybe nine schools. Let's say maybe those schools are grouped into three groups of three. They're working together on a problem of practice. There's some district liaison that's supporting them. So they're working on the work together, and then they come together at times throughout the year to learn across functionally.
So if we can create that like internal network of the districts, we can really accelerate change and improvements. But more importantly, we also want to bring districts together laterally and so whether its district leaders or district leaders or the principal, if they come together at times and convene and say, “You know we're trying to overcome these problems of practice. We're finding this challenge to success, what are you working on? I've talked to superintendents that said that they feel they've accelerated like say math improvement by three to four years just by co-learning with others that might be already ahead of them.
So I would say we have to move away from an isolated model of schools improving by themselves into more of a network structure inside of the school. And then we have to be open to partner and establish broader networks among school districts especially if there's areas which we all feel are important. We kind of call that big idea collective impact, like how do you collectively try to find impact versus individually.
10:05 --> 10:59
Bob Maxfield:
Picking up on Sue's question Jay, I think there's a couple of issues that I hear at least are problems in getting to what you just described. One is that sometimes there's even within a district, a relatively large district there's a competition between schools and kind of an unwillingness to share something because it's their claim to fame. And in a state like ours where school of choice is a reality and people can shop, sometimes hanging on to those things is a way to do it. And secondly, talent varies from site to site and so a given school, and I think you talked about this in the book as I recall, where a given school might be really strong in project-based learning for example or really strong in math concepts, but another school is really good at something else. So how do you overcome both of the competitive urge and then the difference in talent distribution?
11:01 --> 12:21
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
Well, I think part of that comes down to what's the purpose, right? Simon Sinek, we know The Golden Circle that talks about ‘the Why, the How and the What’. I think what you may have described is ‘the What’, like where we feel good about our outcomes, we feel good about certain practices, but that moral imperative happens to be student equity or equitable growth. So even when you peel apart some of those successful districts that kind of want to hold themselves high, they aren't seeing equal gains for all kids and John Hattie, you know really pushes that idea. So if we can like find common ground, which is how do we achieve equitable growth in student learning, then it becomes an issue bigger than ourselves individually, and we're moving towards something that is collectively important. And then I'm a big one to say that I don't want to hear your test scores, I want to understand your ability to be sustainable and so when you move into more of a sustainability conversation, and then you look at systems, practices, culture, it moves away from the ivory tower or the reason why you are perceived as a good district. Most are not sustainable.
12:22 --> 13:24
Suzanne Klein:
I want to jump in with a quick follow up to that Jay for just a moment, because in talking with some of the folks that are in our central office leadership preparation program and our superintendents’ network, colleagues, former colleagues that are in classes and seminars that I've joined, one of the things I hear from them is this tension between the urgent and the important. And here we are in the middle of January in 2022, and we all know what the last couple of years have brought in terms of the pandemic, and people are very eager to dive into that important work, that sustainable work, but there's a wrestling match going on for their energy and their time and their commitment.
I'm curious how with that community of practice idea there might be a way to help float the balance more towards the important side of things, which is why people got into this work in the first place. What can you advise about that?
13:25-->14:14
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
I think you'd mentioned to me before we had the podcast was a question about the like-mindedness of educators, and so I’d like to answer that question in that vein, when you kind of pull apart the urgent versus important you begin to splinter the idea of management versus leadership. And if you're doing management you're really attending to urgent demands, if you're doing leadership you’re attending to important things. The unfortunateness is most of the important things have very long-term outcomes and the urgent things have short term, you know I wouldn't even call it outcomes, but it's a short-term feeling of success which fades very quickly.
14:14 -->14:15
Suzanne Klein:
And all the deadlines...
14:15--> 14:20
Bob Maxfield:
That's the reacting; it’s the reacting to the day's issue.
14:21 --> 15:55
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
It is. So what we do I guess if you go back to the book Districts on the Move, the reason why we put the rubric in the back is because when you actually look at those four key drivers and you start to see do we really have clarity of focus? You know a really good book written by Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, said that internationally only 15% of individuals in any organization know the priorities. Well, but the problem is when you start to attend to the urgent demands and you don't know your key priorities, everyone's going in a different direction.
So those rubrics really help school districts begin to say, what do we have in place that's going to help us sustain improvement and growth in student learning and long term success? And I've seen some spectacularly successful districts rank themselves very low and they realize things such as you know, we're just lucky that certain students are our demographic, or if we were to compare individual schools, not all schools are equally successful and they began to identify some of those important areas, and so I think the idea of calibrating against something common like a rubric, being reflective about what's in place, what's not in place, really, really is important or else you know everyone else's opinion's right.
15:58 -->16:47
Bob Maxfield:
One of the challenges that we've been wrestling with during this podcast series has to do with the remarkable turnover in school leadership well, including teacher leaders, but certainly principals, and superintendents. In our network locally we're dealing with close to forty new superintendents, so I guess what I really want to give you a chance to talk about, is how can we most effectively, efficiently bring these newbies up to speed in the kind of thing you're talking about? Because they too, they're going to come into these jobs, they're going to see their immediate job as being you know, reacting to the day’s immediate crisis, and yet you're talking about a kind of leadership that goes way, way beyond that. So what advice would you have for us in preparing the next generation of school leaders and for these folks who are assuming these roles now?
16:47 --> 16:58
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
I want to go back to the idea of collaborative inquiry. You know we've always heard whether you're new principal, new superintendent, you know sit on your hands for a year and just pay attention.
16:58 --> 16:59
Bob Maxfield:
Stay out of trouble.
17:00 -->18:14
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
I actually would’ve… I've always failed with that advice and so my advice would be, really deeply understand the idea of collaborative inquiry as both a mindset and a structured process, and so if you're able to, use that inquiry process to say, to what extent is there clarity of focus in our organization? What are people working on? What do they think's important and how do we gain consensus about what really is important? You know, do we have shared leadership? I mean a lot of times culture is the root of a lot of the problems, so to what extent do we work well together collaboratively, systemically? Do we have the expertise we need to take on these challenges? And so you know the last one is, are we being agile in the improvement process?
So if I was a new leader I think I would come into the job with a very strong collaborative inquiry mindset and I would shape some very key questions to get my organization to focus in on and identify some of those priorities. Therefore, we can shift away from the urgency of current demands into the importance that really's connected to sustainable improvement.
18:15 --> 18:38
Bob Maxfield:
You know in your response you suggested to me something else that you didn't say, but that isn't it in some ways there's an advantage to being new? You have a chance to build a culture, you have a chance to, you know you're not burdened by previous misconceptions about what you can or cannot do, and so you are starting a fresh slate and take advantage of it, all the more reason not to lay low for the first year.
18:39 --> 19:20
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
Yeah, and I would just add to that, that even if you're not new, with the marked number of retirements we're seeing, with you know the changes that are happening I'm actually thinking that COVID has brought forth what we might call ‘The Great Reset in Education’, so we might talk about re-imagining education for the betterment of student learning. But I don't think it matters where you are and which school district, it's almost like it's a fresh start, and we probably should take the work on from the standpoint of how do we re-imagine our schools could be better.Whether I'm new or not, it's an amazing opportunity if we see it that way.
19:21 --> 20:29
Suzanne Klein:
Those are precisely the words we've been using as we've been talking with folks through this podcast series, through our superintendent leadership workshops, through the book study and the workshop sessions. It's an opportunity that was presented, it was not asked for in terms of COVID, but to the point and I couldn't agree more Jay, it's an opportunity to step back and look down from the balcony and say, are we happy with what we have, because we've discovered some things that we already knew but are much more visible now. But we've also rediscovered some things that maybe we hadn't spent enough time thinking about: in terms of some of the differences in achievement, and learning things about our students and their families, and how easy access is for them with an online form of instruction, teachers who have the opportunity to learn more about how their kids learn as they get more of those demographic and background clues from families, so I couldn't agree with you more. Re-imagining, reinventing are words that we're hearing a lot and trying to use a lot, so we don't miss the opportunity that we now have in front of us.
20:30 --> 20:58
Bob Maxfield:
Let's dig a little deeper on that one though, because I think out there in your base of operations in Riverside, California, and with all these districts that you've been working with, I'm sure that you have a rich knowledge of problems that have emerged during the pandemic, issues that heretofore might have been ignored, although it sounds like with your commitment to equity that they weren't necessarily being ignored in those districts, but what do you see as some of the unique challenges that have surfaced in the last year and a half?
21:00 --> 23:36
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
Well, you know I hate to try to pin this down into one challenge, because you know if you strip away the logistics that's connected to COVID and whether it's the social-emotional or safety issues, I think what we have unveiled as the most significant problem in education in the United States is its variability. I mean we now really see that there is variability in student learning. We've had opportunities for parents at home with their own children to see variability through a Zoom-enabled face-to-face interaction. You know we've seen variability in other ways and we've seen variability in how schools are tending to work at hand.
I think the real dilemma is, we have to see how to overcome variability and not to make this into a pitch, but I've got a new book coming out in March, it's called Schools on the Move. And the reason why we wrote Schools on the Move is because we appreciated the work that came out of Districts on the Move, but Schools on the Move is a little bit more of a school-level look at what you just asked me, how do you overcome variability? I think in this work, we're looking at it just a little differently: it's about climate, culture, capacity, and coherence. So if I were to look at any individual school or district at this point in time, you talk about problems, I might look at the climate of the school, what's the attitudes and beliefs in the school? Do we think we can be successful? Do we think all kids can learn now? What about culture; like how we work together, our behaviors or actions, or capacity to do work differently, and be agile, or coherent, you know do we all have a common understanding?
So I think it's really now how do we develop leaders who are able to navigate change and reduce variability? And I'm not saying it's easy, but we have to begin to really pay attention to some of these causations of variability in learning and begin to recognize that some of our systems, practices, processes, culture, are at the root of it and support our schools to figure out how to overcome it, not individually but with district leaders kind of leading the charge of what's at the root cause of the variability and how do we reduce it in a way in which it's going to lead to better growth in student learning. So I guess the simple answer is we have too much variability.
23:37 --> 24:20
Bob Maxfield:
Absolutely and we've always had it, but it's so obvious. Right here in the area surrounding our university; within 10 miles are a couple of districts that are routinely cited as among the best in America, and there are a couple of others that have been under state oversight. And it's no surprise that those best in America schools have been back in-person most of the time, and those struggling schools are still remote. And there's a whole bunch of factors that lead to that decision on the part of the folks in those communities, but that's... you know, that variability thing is such a powerful concept. And then, even within a given school district that plays out in a certain way.
24:21 -->25:23
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
I just want to connect one piece to that is if we were to say the solution to variability was that concept of collaborative inquiry. Just to make it really simple I would suggest to reduce variability you have to have an inquiry cycle in your school or district. And you know the first step is analyze the evidence; figure out what's the problem of practice; what's getting in the way of student learning; and then design some improvement strategies that are going to overcome it and how do you know if they're working; implement, be agile, make adjustments; then come back and figure out what works best, why, and move forward more intelligently.
What I’m noticing is the urgent demands are preventing school districts from leading from an inquiry stance to figure out how to navigate change and improvements. We have to figure out how to get space and create opportunity for that because the management is taking over the leadership, unfortunately.
25:24-->25:35
Bob Maxfield:
But you have …Unfortunately if you have a board meeting jam-packed with community members who are fighting about masks, there isn't a lot of time to talk about what you just described.
25:36-->25:53
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
No, hopefully, the Cabinet and superintendent can create a mode of protection, and then they can allow schools to attend to the work, so they need to somehow protect and support their schools to engage in the work, while some of the political issues are happening. Absolutely.
25:54 --> 26:21
Suzanne Klein:
Well to capsulize what you just said it's not either-or, it's both and. You have to attend to the urgent pieces because they are presented to you and you don't have a choice, often with deadlines. But the whole notion of what's the important piece, and then how to make sure that that is sustainable and coherent and there's communication around it, is the key that is absorbing people's brain cells at various hours of the day and the night.
26:24 -->27:10
Bob Maxfield:
One of the things before we run out of time and I took from the book and you've hinted at it today, is that this systemic approach to collaborative inquiry and equity involves everybody, but the thing you did that I found particularly helpful is you distinguish the role between the district level administrators, the principals, and the teachers. Yes, we're all on the same team, we're all moving in the same direction, but they're not all doing the same thing. I mean the teacher at the point of deliveries job is different than the principal working with 30 or 40 teachers and certainly different than the superintendent working with multiple schools, so how do you... I think you asked and answered the question of how do you distinguish those roles and yet make sure that they’re systematically linked. I appreciate that.
27:11 --> 27:27
Suzanne Klein:
Which is why the next book in your series, Schools on the Move, is going to be something I'm going to inquire about right away, because I'm guessing that that might be part of the key areas for discussion and thinking that you present there Jay.
27:28 --> 29:34
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
Yeah, you know the reason why I'm also excited about that is, you talked about successful school districts, so Long Beach Unified School District has been recognized as I think number four in the world. And so, Chris Steinhauser, Superintendent for an unprecedented 18 years, the longest- serving urban superintendent in America, and you know, Chris and I wrote that book together, so I would say that it was helpful for me because I was able to merge the things that we're talking about now. And then Chris being Superintendent for 18 years and recognized as one of the best in the world, he actually was doing this work for 18 years systemically. And so, like when you merge the pragmatic voice of the superintendent and district leaders and principals as ‘boots on the ground, here's how we did it’, with I wouldn't say that I talk about theory but I probably talk about more research from studying. Hopefully, it's going to have the same vein, but I just want to reinforce that we've tried to figure out what's the solution for the current challenge. And I just want to go back to maybe a visual, if you can put in everyone's mind it's a simple square and the square’s divided into four boxes. In the center is the idea of collaborative inquiry, so we're collaboratively inquiring about what should our focus be; we're collaboratively inquiring to develop that really strong shared leadership of how we're going to overcome that challenge. We’re inquiring about how to build expertise, you know to figure out how to be successful and then inquiry implies, we have an improvement process, so you know if you could take the big tenants of Districts on the Move and try to get it down to the simplest nuggets, starting point’s going to be collaborative inquiry.
29:35 --> 29:55
Bob Maxfield:
Thank you, thank you for that, because that really is probably a place where we can end this conversation, but really in your case Jay, I think we're just beginning the conversation; so we really appreciate you being with us today. Is there anything you haven't mentioned that you wish you had before we sign off?
29:56--> 31:12
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
I guess the only thing I didn't mention is that for those listening, I just want to share that you know we've done this work that I've described with Los Angeles Unified School District, second largest in the nation and so they’d broken themselves into different types of smaller units, and so this work is more about how a geographical region of maybe 120 schools in a very large school district does the work. We partner with other states like Kansas and geographical regions across the state but here's what my big takeaway is, educators are thirsty for this work. But we may not be creating opportunities for them to engage in the work, and so I think there's a little bit of trepidation of empathy for the current state.
But we have to figure out how to create space and opportunity to engage in this work because it's appreciated to go back to the work, and it makes people forget about some of the current challenges and they imagine future possibilities. So I just would like to say, regardless of the size of your district or your geographical location, how do you create space and time, and opportunity for this work?
31:13 --> 32:16
Bob Maxfield:
I think that's a, that's really a power I’m glad you added that, because it also answers another question we didn't explore with you and we don't have time for, which is what on earth are we going to do to attract more young people to become teachers? But when you describe it the way you did, that it is an opportunity to do something that is really important, to have autonomy, to really make a difference in the institution in which you work and the children with whom you work, that is a selling point, so thank you for that. So if people want to know more about Jay Westover, obviously his book Districts on the Move is available, stay tuned for the release in March of the new book, Schools on the Move. InnovateEd has a website that you can go to that and Jay; if you don't mind we’ll also make sure we publicize that, your website so that people can follow up with that.
So Suzanne this was a great follow-up to the session that you and Larry Thomas led on Jay’s book, I think that was. I’m so glad we were able to do it, and again Jay, thank you for being with us.
32:18 --> 32:21
Jay Westover, InnovateEd:
My pleasure and thank you both, appreciate it.
Bob Maxfield:
Go ahead Sue, I’m sorry.
32:22 --> 33:10
Suzanne Klein:
And it bodes well when you think about the future of education, going back to your last comments and Bob, your summary, in order to invite people into this work they're caring deeply about what happens for children and learning. And how to keep that fresh and how to keep that compelling for them, to me has a lot of legs, with the process that you're just describing and the focus on collaboration, not only within your school but within your district and across districts, that's how that brain food keeps getting delivered and the courage to keep exploring further things that are important, knowing you have to take care of the urgent but the things that are the most important for kids’ learning. So thank you so much for the conversation today Jay and I look forward to your new book and learning more.
33:11 --> 33:21
Bob Maxfield:
And by golly, this stuff really matters. (Laughter) That's pretty good. So to our listeners, thank you for being part of this installment of Podcast for Leaderful Schools
Resources:
Westover, Jay, Districts on the Move: Leading a Coherent System of Continuous Improvement, Thousand Oaks, CA., Corwin; 1st edition, September 17, 2019.
Westover, Jay, and Christopher Steinhauser, Schools on the Move: Leading Coherence for Equitable Growth, Thousands Oaks, CA., Corwin, Release date March 2022.
Fullan, Michael & Quinn, J., Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts and systems, Thousand Oaks, CA., Corwin, 2016.
McChesney, Chris, et.al. The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, Revised and Updated, Simon & Schuster, (April 20, 2021).
Sinek, Simon, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action, Published by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), 2009.
https://simonsinek.com/commit/the-golden-circle