A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Stories of Knowledge and Daring

Building a knowledge base for planning. Developing a promising new plan to implement a good idea usually means learning everything you can about why the old system is ineffective and what might be done to establish a system that works better. Some participants found that slipping into the role of "lead learner" was easiest when they were genuine novices. This was the case for Connie Rickman in the early days of her assignment as vice principal of Lincoln High School in Tacoma, Washington. She wrote:

After a few years as my district's student suspensions hearing officer, I worked as vice principal and principal of a junior high school, then transferred to a high school. There, within a couple of months, I was given the opportunity to develop the Master Building Program.

Being new to the building, I was able to see the cracks in the program offerings already in place. My proposition to the principal was this: "If I accept this challenge, I want reasonable freedom to work with the staff to develop a challenging program for our students." Response was in the affirmative.

Since I had the excuse of being a novice, I was allowed to plead ignorance of our clientele, their needs, and how we were meeting their needs. Thus, I was given the latitude to study these issues. My plan was to review what is, what could be, and what the long- and short-term possibilities were.

First, I asked Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NREL) in Portland, Oregon, to oversee and guide our project. A group that included the administrators, a couple of department chairs, and "coaches" from the NREL selected a steering committee, co-chaired by a highly respected teacher and me.

To get an idea of what a high school program could contribute, we worked with our Partners in Business (PALs) and Washington Natural Gas (WNG) to develop a survey for two adult groups: WNG employees and U. S. Army soldiers, their dependents, and civilians working for the U. S. Army throughout the world. The focus was simple: "Knowing what you now know, and if you got the chance to do it over, what courses would you take? "; and "Of those you did study, which ones helped you the most in a) your personal life and b) your occupation or profession? "The answers were so good we made copies of the results and walked our students through them every semester as they prepared their course schedules.

It was a rewarding--and, yes, challenging--experience. That first year we had two all-day Saturday sessions for overall school reports on progress, the status of implementation, and other work. Otherwise, our Blue Ribbon Curriculum Committee (BRCC) met twice a month. Each department developed its own mission statement, goals, and objectives. Each department chose its own format, using district and other outside resources, as their plans evolved. At the same time, every department reported its plans to the BRCC, so everybody knew what was going on, including parents and students, who were represented on the committee. Looking back, I see that my studies of what the school programs could be led us all to learn exciting new things.

Coming in as a beginner with a lot to learn made it possible for that administrator to stake out room to maneuver and to bring into that "room" others whose learning could inform planning. Sometimes forum participants brought expertise with them to new situations but wisely waited for the teachable moment to share it with their faculties. Lyndal Webb was principal of Hahira Elementary in Hahira, Georgia, where reform strategies were well underway--parent involvement, staff development, and site-based management. She told how her declaration of disappointment with the early results led the staff to embrace new approaches with great enthusiasm:

After voicing my concern that the school was failing its children, I was summoned by the staff to a meeting. They told me that they wished to create a non-graded program and expressed views about reform they had never before expressed. I listened to them carefully and, although I had some reservations, I shared with them the information I had gleaned from traveling to England and reading research and current thinking on the issue. Then the staff devised a plan. My role was primarily supportive. I helped them, but they collectively developed the vision. They involved parents, and I arranged release time to work on it. I eased some of their teaching loads by taking over their classes. Their plan was presented to the superintendent, who approved it. The final product was to become the foundation for Georgia's first school for the future.

After their success, I told staff, "If this had been my idea, you would have kicked me out the door." Because they all had a stake in the work and had collaborated closely, the teachers discovered their strength as a group. When the first challenge to reform at the school recently was brought by [a religiously conservative group], they were able to surmount it together. I have found personally rewarding the phenomenal progress made by our students as a result of this staff initiative.

Participants' stories indicated that, given the intensive and continuous demands of daily teaching, motivating staff to invest energy in making a major change required two kinds of activities. First, leaders helped faculty see how present arrangements limit their effectiveness in promoting student success. Second, leaders gave staff the opportunity to contribute to the design of new arrangements, to ensure that they accommodated real-world conditions as well as moved closer to their educational ideal.

Analyzing and adjusting. Reforming education is often compared to rebuilding a plane while it's in flight; life in schools seldom stops for long enough to permit us to start from scratch. Borrowing a page from the texts on Total Quality Management, many reforming schools are engaged in continuous improvement: gathering data about some aspect of their operations, analyzing them, and making appropriate programmatic changes. Carol Boyd describes how the staff at Corvallis Elementary School in San Leandro, California, made "in-flight" adjustments to its program for students in the upper elementary grades:

This story is about the nature of change, how it can emerge in a moment, a moment we need to seize. Because our school houses K-7 students and our high schools serve grades 8-12, meeting the needs of our middle school students is problematic. The sixth- and seventh-grade teachers at our school work as a core team and have developed a program modeled after elements in Caught in the Middle. One of the key dilemmas of this kind of configuration is sharing resources and scheduling at the school site.

Last year we had an uneven number of core classes. Up to this point, the core program had consisted of an English-language arts/social studies block from 8:25 to 9:55, followed by an hour of either science or math and then vice versa. This enabled teachers to specialize in an area. With an uneven number of classes, however, scheduling became problematic. I had already been thinking about how this scheduling challenge offered a golden opportunity to innovate. Among the areas I felt we needed to develop were technology and applications of curriculum content to the real world.

One of the lead core teachers invited the group over for dinner in August to develop a plan and a schedule and welcome a new colleague. This party was a tradition, and members of the teachers' families were included as well. As we met and chatted before dinner, two teachers shared their thoughts on scheduling. One suggested dividing the students into four groups, leaving the fifth teacher to float and help in the science classes on lab days, for example. The other wanted to see the extra teacher teach art. I mentioned that it would be a great opportunity to create something really new and exciting and talked a little about curriculum integration, especially in the area of science and technology. One of the teachers, the core leader who was anticipating being the floater, began to brighten as I talked. Excitedly, she talked about having a "block of time" (and I did not expand greatly at this point), thinking about the use of computers (she had just bought one and was learning word processing) and began to describe ideas for a math/science course. After further discussion, the group agreed to try her idea.

Here was an individual who had been teaching for 20+ years, who barely knew how to use a computer, agreeing in August to teach a curriculum still totally undeveloped to a group of 24 students (six pulled from each of the four classes) for a four-week period. This was risk taking!I pulled in every debt owed by people across the district and in the county office to support her as she began. She stayed, literally, one day ahead of the students. I ordered materials advertised to support math/science integration. The class was so successful that this year it has expanded into two classes, one for the sixth grade and one for the seventh.

The curriculum last year focused on school-level environmental and resource-use issues. Students working in cooperative teams surveyed other students and staff, called local agencies, videotaped toilets flushing, and developed presentations, using laser disc, video, and computers to present their findings and recommendations on how to conserve resources such as water, electricity, and paper. This year the students took the math/science/tech course twice. During the first session, the student groups identified a problem that they wished to research. Some of the problems included pollution, graffiti, and endangered animals. During the second session, the two classes met together with the two teachers to learn about earthquakes, how they are measured, how they occur (a topic of great interest in the Bay Area). Student groups then determined how the city would cope with the aftermath of an earthquake in areas such as transportation, sanitation, food and water supplies, and health. As a culminating activity, the San Leandro Earthquake Preparedness Department made a slide show presentation to the students on the city's actual emergency plan.

Occasionally, after rushing in where angels seldom tread, a faculty discovers why even angels might have cause to worry. Alan Burke, principal of Mill Pond Intermediate School in Yelm, Washington, describes how his staff evaluated the success of a new program and decided to make an adjustment when they found that some students were not faring well under the new regime:

When planning a new intermediate school, one of my major "vision-related" tasks was to sell the fifth-grade teachers on the merits of team teaching. They were coming to the new team-based intermediate (fifth and sixth grade) program from self-contained class experiences. To do that, I had them visit current sixth-grade classrooms that were successfully teamed, travel to schools that had implemented teaming, and set up one two-person fifth-grade team as a model for study. The initial process went well; teachers from fifth grade agreed unanimously to team, and plans were made to open a fully teamed school in the fall of 1993.

About halfway through the first quarter of the school year, as the euphoria of opening a brand new school wore off, fifth-grade teachers began to complain about the lack of "bonding" among students and teachers, compared to previous years, when they worked in a self-contained environment. I listened to each team carefully, asked them for suggestions, and then realized my mistake. Basically, I had assumed that fifth-graders (with whom I had never before associated during my professional career) were the same as sixth-graders; therefore, they would fit easily into a three-person team model that rotated homeroom groups for math, social studies, and science. Unfortunately, they were not the same. Simply put, the younger students needed more contact with their homeroom teachers and fewer disruptions in the block of time scheduled for exploratory classes and rotations.

To solve this, I reduced one exploratory offering for fifth-grade kids (giving teams more block time) and planned to experiment with two-person teams for the 1994-95 school year. The staff appreciated the additional block time, and watched as our experimental two-person team flourished during this current school year. In 1995-96, all but one of the fifth-grade teams will convert to two-person arrangements.

What I learned through all of this was to pay more attention to kids and current programs when planning a new school--especially when I lack experience at a grade level or with an alternative type of school schedule--and continually ask staff engaged in a change initiative about the results of the new programs that have been planned. Accommodating their legitimate concerns is one important way to build trust.

Many educators view shared decision making at the school level to be a key ingredient of site-based management. Involving stakeholders in planning programs and allocating resources can ensure that issues are comprehensively examined and thoughtfully resolved. Ann McDuffie, principal of Edgewood Elementary in Columbus, Georgia, found that her preparations for discussions about staffing arrangements made a substantial contribution to deliberations:

When given the opportunity by the superintendent to make school-based decisions about staff reorganization, I faced a difficult choice. The mandate was to allow the faculty to decide what would best support instruction, in terms of personnel. The reality was that any change would likely result in someone being moved to another school.

I knew what I believed to be our best move, but not how to get feedback from the faculty in a manner that no one would find threatening, whatever their opinion. I spent half the night drawing up a matrix that outlined every reorganization scheme I could think of. The matrix showed every possibility with each successive step. Grade-level teams met, and I discussed the matrix with them.

Next the leadership team met, and we shared opinions. There were strong convictions about who would lose and who would gain under each scheme--some tears--some soul searching. In the end, we could all agree that if we were really going to act out our mission and become risk takers in the learning environment, we had to give up territory and think of all the students in our school rather than just those in a single class.

This problem-solving effort brought me quickly to the conclusion that empowering teachers and getting their buy-in was essential. It wouldn't be the last time we faced a difficult situation as a team. This experience led me to be a believer in team decision making and in doing my homework before I put any cards on the table.

Doing "homework" arose as a theme in many stories. The leader's homework often served a role like that of lesson planning--as the prerequisite for a productive staff learning experience. Often, however, the homework was a group activity, in which all members of the staff took part. Bill Duncan, principal of Knollwood Elementary in Decator, Georgia, tells about an "assignment" his faculty gave itself when one of the school programs faltered:

After four years of frustration with their assertive discipline system, teachers felt a need for change. They began with a two-day workshop, where staff members, parents, and community leaders came together to discuss a variety of issues. From this workshop came ideas on new discipline systems and a request to look at other schools trying innovative approaches to discipline. After staff members visited several schools and collected new ideas, twenty-four came together in the summer of 1994 for a two-day meeting in which they shared concerns and ideas. From this meeting came a new discipline system for the 1994-1995 school year. Before school started, a team of faculty members taught their colleagues how to implement the new system effectively. On the basis of this year's experience, the staff is planning a workshop for the summer of 1995 to refine the present system.

Sometimes faculties embrace new programs with great initial enthusiasm and then get cold feet when the time comes to implement it fully. Unconscious reservations and hidden fears block progress until someone volunteers to surface them so they can be dealt with rather than permit them to shut down reform. Lois Jones, principal of Oceana High School in Pacifica, California, told how her own confession opened the gates of disclosure among staff members and set them going again on the path toward professionalism:

The staff had agreed to implement a peer coaching program, as part of our self-assessment process. We agreed that coaching teams would cross learning areas and that teams would have experienced and new teachers working together to improve classroom practice, thus improving student learning. The work began: teams shared student work and conferenced on practices. However, we bogged down on classroom observations. We did put a process in place--preobservation conference, classroom visitation, and postobservation conference--and grant money was designated for support, but observations did not occur.

As I thought about what was happening and--more importantly--not happening, I decided to find a nonthreatening way to confront the issue. At Oceana, all certificated staff teach in the classroom; all are a part of the process, so I was directly involved.

At a staff meeting on peer coaching, I approached the topic by relating to the staff how I had "forgotten" to meet for a preobservation conference. My question was, "Could I have missed this meeting because the entire issue of coaching one another made me anxious and fearful? " I asked whether anyone else had similar concerns.

A wonderful conversation followed; for the first time we openly addressed the fears inherent in such a process. As a result of this exchange, we built in safety nets to ease the fears of such risk taking. Now classroom visitations have tremendously increased and the process is becoming institutionalized.

When circumstances seem to warrant taking action that is not warmly supported by their superiors, leaders line their ducks up in a row before moving forward. Participants often spoke of the reasons for living to fight another day, but they also made it clear that for some principles it was worth pushing the limits of permission. For example, when Bradford Fellows, principal of Albert H. Hill Middle School in Richmond, Virginia, had what looked to him like a great idea for increasing parent involvement, he had to make a strong case for adopting it in order for the district office to drop its opposition:

I am a principal in an urban middle school (grades 6-8) where parent involvement is, at best, difficult to create and maintain.

We send report cards home at nine-week intervals. Several days after report cards are sent home, a parent/teacher conference is scheduled. The turnout for these conferences has traditionally been very poor.

I decided to try increasing parental involvement, support, and responsibility by requiring parents to come to the parent/teacher conferences to pick up student report cards. The superintendent's office was not enthusiastic about this idea, so I minimized the risk of failure in several ways. First, I met with the school's Faculty Planning Council and quickly learned that I had 100 percent support from the school staff. Secondly, I held several meetings in the community, outlining my plan. It seemed as if I had general support from a large segment of the community.

Our first parent/teacher conference of this year turned out to be a booming success. More than 80 percent of the report cards were picked up by parents at this conference. This concept was not only accepted by central administration, but it is now being promoted throughout the district.

In general, forum participants described school-centered learning activities, arising from or directed toward common work on educational programs. However, formal education played a significant part in the professional development of many. Jim Dougherty, the executive director of the De La Salle Education Center in Kansas City, Missouri, describes how his personal odyssey influenced his support of faculty growth:

Five years ago, I asked a friend how I could improve myself as an educator, and he suggested that I get a doctorate. I enrolled, and about halfway through the process I found myself captivated by educational theory and new practices. It made me really excited again; I got into theory and started applying everything. I encouraged my staff in a general way to become lifelong learners; two have since enrolled in PhD programs, two have completed masters degrees, several are doing graduate work, and others are considering graduate programs. One colleague commented humorously, "If you can do it (get a doctorate), anyone can."

We've since engaged in organizational development that included Total Quality Management training, a complete school restructuring process, and courses in faculty and student governance offered by the University of Missouri at Kansas City. All of these explore education from a theoretical viewpoint. We're also working on a "Just Community" model, based on Lawrence Kohlberg's theory. Our school's mission statement now identifies us as "a learning organization," and whenever possible we help staff pay for the education programs they choose.

For leaders who sustain reform, their daring behavior is informed by learning from colleagues, parents, and students as well as from more formal sources. Knowledge of human nature, instructional practices, and organizational development is the wellspring of the courage of their convictions.
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