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ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON RESULTS-ORIENTED LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
NETWORKS
Earlier this month, leaders of the Partners in
School Innovation Results-Oriented Leadership Development Networks
were asked to discuss the Networks' importance to improving our
impact on student achievement in the Bay Area. Participants were
Becky Crowe Hill, Executive Director, Daphannie Stephens, Associate
Director of School and District Services, Joel Zarrow, Associate
Director of Program Innovation, and Belinda Liu, School Partnership
and Leadership Network Manager in San Jose Unified.
Quick Facts on the Networks:
Supporting Partners:
Applied Materials, Inc., The W. Clement & Jessie V. Stone
Foundation, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, E. Richard Jones Family
Foundation, and San Francisco School Alliance.
Districts Served:
San Jose Unified, San Francisco Unified, and Campbell
Unified School Districts
Schools Impacted:
40 low-performing elementary schools and 12 low-performing
middle schools
Leaders Involved:
10 district leaders, 22 principals, 100+ teacher leaders
and school improvement staff
Frequency of Network Meetings:
1 – 2 times every month
What are we trying to accomplish
with the Networks?
Becky: We have four goals for the
Networks:
1. To accelerate the learning of underserved students
of color. We expect our Leadership Development Networks to
measurably impact student achievement. Traditionally, professional
development for leaders is evaluated on feedback from the participants…did
they learn new skills? Will the skills help them do their jobs
better? Attaching explicit student achievement goals to adult
learning is a significant shift from the traditional objectives
of professional development in education. The quality of our Networks
is ultimately measured by how participants translate what they
learned into student achievement results.
2. To develop highly effective teams of educational leaders
with the skills, will and knowledge to transform low-performing
schools. You can't fundamentally transform schools without
outstanding leadership. Yet districts are still figuring out how
to purposefully develop high-impact leaders. This includes current
principals, teacher leaders, and district leaders. Our Networks
address this need and provide leaders of low-performing schools
with the specific skills and practical knowledge necessary to
transform their schools. Over the past four years, the Networks,
drawing on the participation of teacher leaders in San Francisco,
have been one of the district's best pipelines for new principals.
3. To share what's working across schools. Working in education
has long been an isolating profession. Like those in any management
position, school leaders need opportunities to learn and get feedback
from their peers in order to improve. The Networks are a vehicle
for leaders to come together and share effective practices that
are most relevant to improving their students' education.
4. To make a systems-level impact. The Networks are a critical
element in our multi-pronged approach to district transformation
that consists of intensive work at a set of schools, leadership
development across a broader group of schools through the Networks
and side-by-side work with district leaders to refine the systems
to support this work coherently and effectively. By co-designing
our Networks with our district partners, we are able to integrate
our best thinking into an aligned approach to school improvement.
What characteristics make
the Networks distinct from other types of professional development
for educational leaders?
Becky: So often professional development
is focused on isolated strategies or discrete components of leadership
- for example, how to adhere to requirements for special education
funding or how to put in place a new textbook series. Leaders
need ideas and strategies that develop their ability to impact
the quality of teaching at their sites. They also need colleagues
to provide a sounding board and opportunities to apply new concepts
in their own context, so that great ideas don't just stay at the
conceptual level. Our Networks make these connections between
research, proven practice, and practical application.
Belinda: I agree. Often times professional development
is a one-shot deal. It's focused on one specific content area
and more input-oriented. Our Networks are an iterative, ongoing
system for developing the capacity of our leaders. I don't think
there's that notion that the person in front of the room is the
one who holds all the knowledge and is going to impart that knowledge.
It's really: let's pull out what's going on that's successful
at our schools and share our action plans with each other. It's
also very data-oriented. It's not about learning reading comprehension
strategies just to learn them but we're connecting the strategies
back to student learning and making sure that what we're doing
is achieving results.
How does this work connect
with and reinforce PartnersSI's on-site school services? Can you
provide some examples?
Joel: The question you ask hits on
one of the key distinctive features of the Networks. They not
only build capability but are also embedded in the work the leaders
need to do on-site. Each Network session always begins with: 'let's
review the actions you had planned to take from a prior session
and talk about what went well, what didn't go well and why.' The
session always ends with: 'what are your goals for the next four
weeks, what are you going to be able to accomplish based on the
work of this session, and what's important for your school site?
What steps are you going to take?' And in the following session
we check in on what they said they would do. It really contributes
to leaders' planning, implementation and follow-up. As a long-time
principal commented at the last meeting: "this is important for
me to attend because it always helps me to refocus on what's important
for me to do. There's no shortage of things for me to do,"
she said, "but this helps me to dial in on the important
things."
Daphannie: Rosa [Molina] (Assistant Superintendent
in SJUSD) told me: "What I see as evidence of PartnersSI
being here for many years is showing up in the levels of conversations
in the Networks. I never would have thought that people could
be so reflective and so honest about their challenges and really
believe that someone else in the group could really help them.
This is the kind of culture shift that has happened."
Belinda: We have a structured Network curriculum
but we are also flexible to what's going on in the schools and
what the needs are. We decided to focus one of the meetings on
objective-driven lesson planning because we saw that as a need
across our schools and we saw that a lot of our own staff members
were trying to make that a focus at their school sites. Now we
see stronger cases of objective-driven lesson-planning out in
our schools.
What changes have you seen
take place in your relationship with the districts given that
you are co-designing the Networks with them in both San Francisco
and San Jose?
Joel: In San Francisco our move to
Network support began four years ago. It increased our visibility
in supporting their struggling schools dramatically. Rather than
serving a handful of schools we started to work across all the
underperforming elementary schools and started to work more closely
with the district people responsible for them. So it's transformed
us from an external support provider dealing with a couple of
schools to an important partner in helping them think how they're
going to support the under-performing schools across the district.
Becky: The typical model is that the districts either
design something in-house without the necessary capacity to do
it as well as they'd like or outsource it and contract for professional
development. In the latter model, someone comes in with a pre-packaged
set of materials, and does not necessarily connect with the district's
initiatives or the real needs of the people at school sites. Our
approach is more aligned, and more effective, but also more time-consuming
for the district because we're jointly developing the work. There's
a tension around that because we've shifted the districts from
the outsourcing paradigm to one that involves co-designing an
integrated approach with the best thinking from PartnersSI and
best thinking from them. The partnership ultimately builds the
districts' capacity to do that level of work without us.
How are the Networks scaling
PartnersSI's impact beyond our intensive school sites?
Joel: The Networks enable us a broader
reach. It's like a group clinic. In San Jose we're on-site in
8 schools but reach 12 schools through the Network. Likewise,
in San Francisco we're in deeply in 6 schools but we have 28 elementary
schools in the Network. In my planning with district leaders,
they take the thinking back to how they develop middle school
and high school teacher leaders. We are contributing to an overall
district approach for improvement.
Daphannie: I would agree. I think that the work
we've been doing in San Jose has actually informed the types of
documents the district provides the schools and they've made adjustments
based on what they've learned to impact all other schools. We
revised a planning tool, for example, that became the English
Language Development (ELD) planning guide for the entire district,
not just for a few schools. It's important to know that we are
actually pushing the parameters about what good instruction looks
like. We worked closely with the district to really state what
their objectives were and to draft a lesson plan guide that was
much more aligned to the objectives. It actually changed the conversation
in all the schools in the Network.
If there were no resource
constraints, what would you change or improve?
Joel: We've learned from last year
that starting off strong at the beginning of the year is essential.
And we know it takes more than two days of an intensive Summer
Leadership Institute to develop sufficient leadership capability
so leaders show up on site knowing what actions they need to take.
They need more time working together over the summer to develop
a strong start.
Becky: Especially given the budget cuts this year
it's an opportune moment for a private funder to support schools
to take that planning time over the summer. This is really a critical
point of leverage and with the budget cuts, summer planning time
will be one of the first things to go.
Joel: We could also do a much better job with our
district partners in integrating the Networks into a performance
management system. This is a quick hit opportunity for our district
leaders to get a much deeper sense of where our schools are at,
what they're struggling with, what they're doing well, than the
districts have ever had before. We could follow up with district
leaders about: given the evidence that has surfaced in these meetings,
what are the district implications? Let's not have disparate initiatives
going on in the district and align them to be all moving forward.
In addition, we believe we can get more leverage from the Networks
by providing a mobile support team that can follow the work back
to the Network schools that don't have PartnersSI teams on-site.
The mobile team could do targeted follow-up from the Networks
to bring the work to life. If we discussed how principals can
develop more effective, data-driven grade level team meetings,
we could be at the site the next week to provide an example and
coach teachers through the process.
Articles in this issue (Mar 2008):
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