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The First 100 Days in the Main Office

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The First 100 Days in the Main Office

Transforming a School Culture

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Alan C. Jones

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

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ISBN: 978-1-64113-146-9 (Paperback)

           978-1-64113-147-6 (Hardcover)

           978-1-64113-148-3 (ebook)

Copyright © 2018 Information Age Publishing Inc.

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Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface: What Would You Do on the First Day in Your New Office?

Acknowledgments

1     Strong Instructional Cultures

2     The Perfect Fit

3     The Central High Way

4     Bad Habits

5     We Are All Superior Teachers

6     “Blindsided”

7     The “I” in Team

8     Thinking Outside the Box

9     Valued Ends of Schooling

10    Cultural Levers

11    Enacting a Strong Instructional Culture

References

About the Author

Preface

What Would You Do on the First Day in Your New Office?

The idea for this book originated from a question I asked a former student of mine who had just signed a contract to become the principal of a high school. We were discussing the complexities of changing a school culture when I asked him the following question: “What would you do on the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” Without any hesitation, he answered: “I would ask data processing to send me the state test scores for the last 3 years.” The conversation continued as follows:

“Steve, after you looked at the student scores, what would you do then?”

“Well, Al, you know, I would share the data with stakeholders and develop a plan of action to raise the test scores.”

“What would that plan of action look like?”

“Well, there are a lot of programs on the market I could use. A lot of schools are using Marzano’s What Works in Schools.”

“How would that change the culture of a school building?”

“It would send the clear message that data would guide decision-making in this school.”

Nothing in this conversation provided a compelling answer to the essential question of schooling: “Why are we here?” Do teachers enter the profession to study data and implement canned instructional programs? Do children enter schools with the goals of doing well on multiple-choice tests and mastering learning objectives in prescribed time periods? Do schools exist to raise test scores and purchase data management systems? With this conversation in mind, I made it a point in my formal and informal contacts with school administrators to always ask the question: “What would you do on the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” The most common responses involved reviewing district documents, touring facilities, meeting staff, listening to stakeholders, and managing systems. In each conversation, school leaders populated their responses with the current jargon of school reform: learning communities, data mining, standards-based curriculum, differentiated learning, common core standards, formative assessment, race to the top, continuous improvement, etc.

While these responses encompass reasonable behaviors on the first day in the main office, not one of these actions possesses the capacity to connect educational values expressed in school mission statements—why we are here—to daily organizational and instructional routines. Each activity gives the appearance of leading, but produces no connections between beliefs, values, and practices. Although none of these responses would make or break a school culture, they do represent a pattern of thinking and behaving that holds out little possibility of fundamentally changing a school’s culture.

A school culture is determined by the bond formed between the answers to the essential question of schooling—Why are we here?—and how that question shows up in daily organizational and instructional routines. Listening to stakeholders, reviewing strategic plans, touring a facility, or looking at 3 years of test data, all affirm what a culture is. The primary objective of instructional leadership is not to affirm what a culture is, but to make it what it ought to be. Changing a school culture is a process of enacting substantive changes to the goals, beliefs, values, and practices already established in organizational and instructional routines. Each chapter in this book presents a series of managerial situations that all administrators will confront when they first move into the main office. Each situation presents an opportunity to replace comfortable organizational and instructional routines with fundamentally different ways of connecting the cultural dots.

Chapter 1 presents a framework for transforming the clamor of a noisy school culture into the determined voice of a strong instructional culture. In noisy school cultures, teachers spend the first days of school unpacking new program boxes, paging through new teacher evaluation binders, attending in-service sessions on the program of the day, or practicing the operating procedures for the new data management system. School leaders remove the noise in a school culture when they connect the cultural dots: Why are we here? What do we value? How do we enact our beliefs and values? A noisy culture finds its strong and determined cultural voice when school leaders take an active role in making certain that announced values become realities in daily organizational and instructional routines.

Chapter 2 describes a new school leader’s search for a school home that shares his goal of developing a strong instructional culture. What he discovers in central office conference rooms are administrators more interested in his ability to manage a building than lead an instructional program. After turning down job offers based on his ability to tell, allocate, and inspect, he sits across from a superintendent who begins the interview with the question: “What do you think of tracking?” After an hour-long discussion of topics related to curriculum and instruction, the new school leader realizes that strong instructional cultures are top-down creations. New school leaders committed to the role of instructional leadership listen carefully for the right fit between the instructional leadership role they desire to play and the role that district level administrators expect them to play. School cultures remain noisy when central and main offices are on different cultural pages.

Chapter 3 describes a new school leader’s response to the vocabularies and behaviors of an entrenched school culture: “The Central High Way.” A new tone is set at Central High when the new school leader redefines Central High’s understandings of the values that will drive a new vision for Central High: teaching, learning, performance, professionalism, collaboration, and execution. The school situations presented in this chapter provide the vocabularies, the managerial strategies, and documents that move a school culture from talk of implementation to talk of self-examination.

Chapter 4 describes a new school leader’s response to a pattern of professional and instructional bad habits that have become the goals, beliefs and practices of the Central High way. The hometown culture of Central High sees no problem with drinking coffee in classrooms, locking tardy students out of classrooms, reading a newspaper during class, making frequent public address announcements, or leaving students unsupervised in lunchrooms. Looking back on his pointed responses to the bad habits of Central High, the new school leader concludes that there is no cultural middle ground between comfortable organizational and instructional routines and the goals and practices of a strong instructional culture.

Chapter 5 describes a process for assessing the overall quality of a school’s instructional program. If teaching matters most in a strong instructional culture, then new school leaders observe first-hand the teaching scripts that students follow each school day. The dominant teaching script at Central High consisted of teachers spending most of their time standing in front of the classroom transmitting facts and procedures, students spending most of their time taking notes or completing worksheets, and most of the time on Fridays was devoted to test-taking, game-playing, or video-watching. The daily grind of Central High’s bureaucratic teaching model was interrupted by pockets of excellence that exhibited the type of transformative teaching designed to develop the thinking and communication skills listed in state and national standards. All thoughts of expanding the pockets of excellence at Central High, however, were crowded out by a small number of teachers who were unaware that their classes were poorly informed, poorly organized, and poorly managed. Central High’s uninspiring instructional program was a product of a school culture that paid a lot of attention to the managerial documents that filled inboxes on top of main office desks and little attention to the instructional documents that were stored in boxes underneath those desks. What a new school leader finds in the box underneath his desk are the documents and forms that offer the opportunity to transform the Central High teaching script: teacher evaluation plans, unread teacher observation reports, teacher evaluation schedules, a five-year curriculum review cycle, and last year’s subscription to American Research Journal (unread). For the remaining 100 days, a new school leader proceeds to implement the contents of the box underneath his desk.

Chapter 6 describes a process for leveraging a perceived policy “blindside” into an administrative tool for advancing the beliefs, values, and practices of a new instructional regime. Most schools view unexpected policy mandates through an organizational lens: comply, but don’t disrupt. Schools with strong instructional cultures view unexpected mandates through an instructional lens: disrupt and redesign. A new school leader employs a managerial script composed of three leadership moves—framing, educating, and implementing—to navigate a course between the district goal of minimizing disruptive practices and his or her goal of redefining Central High’s teaching script.

Chapter 7 describes the central role the “I” in team plays in enacting the beliefs, values, and practices of a strong instructional culture. New school leaders enter main offices with the belief that collaborative processes and team structures are key managerial tools for achieving organization goals. This long-taught managerial principle holds true in organizations with agreed-upon beliefs, values, and practices. School leaders who disrupt the beliefs, values, and practices of the schools they enter call into question the collaborative processes and team structures that have dictated the direction of a school’s instructional culture. A new school leader restores the I in team by chairing meetings designed to educate, coach, and monitor teams that possess the proper knowledge and skills to enact a new vision of schooling.

Chapter 8 describes the process a new leader follows to implement a truancy program that conflicts with state mandates and the institutional goals and values of the Central High way. Although the program proves to be a success, a new school leader questions the professional, institutional, and community hoops he and a resource teacher were asked to jump through to bring eighteen alienated teenagers back to school. Thinking outside the box in schools dominated by inside-the-box goals, values, and practices calls upon new school leaders to find the right balance between leading change and managing routines: management without leadership is a strategy for stagnation; innovation without management is a strategy for confusion.

Chapter 9 presents the five aims of schooling that serve as the foundation for connecting the cultural dots of schooling: Why are we here? What do we believe? How should we enact our beliefs and values? Throughout the situations described in the first 100 days of school, a new school leader translates his aims of schooling into the goals and practices of Central High. Most administrators see little value in philosophy talk in main offices consumed with managing the crisis of the day or implementing this year’s strategic plan. However, without a coherent response to the what, why, and how of schooling, school administrators lack the intellectual tools to properly critique the instructional programs they lead or to gather together all the essentials of schooling (methods, routines, programs, and policies) into a coherent instructional worldview.

Chapter 10 describes the three cultural levers that either pull a school’s culture toward the achievement of managerial goals or pushes a school’s culture towards the goals and practices of a strong instructional culture. Each cultural lever prompts school leaders to decide upon the goals and practices of doing things right or the goals and practices of doing the right things. Whatever direction in which new school leaders decide to push or pull cultural levers in their schools, they must be mindful of the cultural orientation of the schools they lead. The failure to pay attention to how school communities define schooling will jam the cultural levers a new school leader attempts to push or pull.

The final chapter in this book lists twelve managerial lessons that serve as vehicles for enacting the beliefs, values, and practices of a strong instructional culture. Each lesson is based on a cultural model that emphasizes the role organizational structures play in advancing or impeding particular beliefs about teaching and learning. Decades of failed school reform initiatives record the consequences of forcing good theories into incompatible organizational structures. School cultures change only when the theories and practices they endorse are fully integrated into the goals, vocabularies, and practices of the organizational structures they occupy. Each chapter in this book ends with a resource guide that presents examples of managerial artifacts that offer new school leaders documents and conceptual frameworks to translate organizational theory into real school world practices.

This book presents a series of cultural situations that could occur early in a school year—the first 100 days. Each cultural situation offers a new school leader the opportunity to redefine the goals, values, and practices of an entrenched school culture—the Central High way. Administrators who pick up this book may view 100 days as an arbitrary number picked out of administrative thin air. I argue that disrupting and replacing organizational and instructional routines is a race against time. Every school day that goes by without some sign of creative destruction is one more day that comfortable organizational and instructional routines live on in main offices and classrooms. If the intent of a new school leader is to transform weak instructional cultures into strong instructional cultures, then the instructional and organizational manifestations of that strong instructional culture must be in place by December. This does not mean that when the school closes down for holiday break, faculty and staff will have a full understanding of the relationship between a new vision of schooling and what they practice in classrooms and offices. What should be clear to all faculty and staff, however, are the beliefs and values they carried into classrooms in September are now very different than the beliefs and values they are expected to enact in January.

Before the 100 Days Begin

Administrators who are drawn to managerial books with recipe-like titles—100 days—should be forewarned that the principles and strategies described in this book will only succeed in main offices that are educationally prepared to offer and implement a new educational perspective. Advancing the goals and processes of a new school culture assumes that school administrators possess a clear educational direction in their minds. The process for developing a personal instructional worldview requires private readings of educational minds that challenge dominant instructional worldviews (Jones, 2013) and public dialogues with school communities that articulate a clear and coherent response to the fundamental questions of schooling: How do children learn? What knowledge is of greatest worth? How should knowledge be organized? How should we assess what students understand? How should we teach?

Changing a school culture is hard work. Each day in the main office will be a contest between organizational and instructional routines that value seat time over performance, credits over mastery, conformity over critical thinking, speed over thoughtfulness, coverage over understanding, and telling over dialogue. No matter how thoughtful an instructional worldview may be, changing comfortable organizational and instructional routines will invite formidable opposition from parents, teachers, and students who are heavily invested in a way of schooling that they believe is working for them. This book was written for administrators who are willing to step into the middle of the daily disagreements that will inevitability occur between comfortable ways of doing school and uncomfortable ways of educating students. Administrators who win the culture war enter main offices with the educational preparation to articulate a clear vision of how children learn and the managerial skills to implement that vision in the organizational and instructional routines of the schools they lead.

A Note on the First Person Narrative

The intent of this book is two-fold: first, to bring back into the school reform conversation the vital role beliefs and values play in successfully implementing organizational and instructional changes; and second, to describe how a school leader would perform the complex task of translating a set of beliefs and values into daily organizational and instructional routines. I decided that the best approach for converting the abstractions of beliefs and values into the daily routines of main offices was to tell a story, in the first person, of how a new entrant into a main office carries out the daily tasks of redefining the goals, values, and practices of an entrenched school culture. The situations, the conversations, the decisions, and the characters in this story of cultural change are representative of what goes on in main offices during the first 100 days of a school year. The thinking and decisions of our new school leader, however, are not representative of the normal managerial response that emerges from most main offices. Our new school leader, instead, pushes and pulls a series of cultural levers that both disrupt and redefine established norms of leading, managing, and teaching. Each cultural lever that is pushed or pulled, each decision that is enacted, and each conversation that transpires, brings to life a theory of cultural change. While the characters and situations in this cultural narrative will differ from school to school, the cultural levers described in each chapter in this book are present in all school settings. If I tell this story well, by the end of this book, school leaders will know what levers they need to push or pull to make fundamental changes to the beliefs, values, and practices of an entrenched school culture.

Acknowledgments

The First 100 Days in the Main Office describes a series of situations that a new school leader would encounter in the opening months of a school year. Each situation presents the new school leader with opportunities to redefine the beliefs, vocabularies, and practices of an entrenched school culture. The new leader must be educationally and managerially prepared to pursue the organizational and instructional strategies necessary to enact a new educational vision.

The educational vision described in this book is a product of my learning process involving a personal dialogue about teaching methods that were not working in my classroom and educators who informed me why those methods were not working with the children and adolescents we served. Among these educators are Harry S. Broudy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Larry Cuban, Linda Darling-Hammond, John Dewey, Elliot Eisner, John Goodlad, Howard Gardner, Philip W. Jackson, Dan Lortie, Debra Meier, Dianne Ravitch, Seymour Sarason, and Ted Sizer.

I worked under three supervisors who mentored me with the managerial skills to organize a school to accommodate my educational vision: Maury Gladstone taught me that learning is more about emotion than intellect; George Bieber taught me that behind every great idea is a well-designed system; and Richard Kamm taught me that no matter how good an idea may be, politics will always have the last say. Along with these real-world mentors were organizational theorists who provided principles of management that supported the supervisory and managerial practices described in this book. Among these theorists are Warren Bennis, Clayton M. Christensen, Jim Collins, W. Edwards Deming, Peter F. Drucker, Henry Mintzberg, Donald A. Schön, and Karl E. Weick.

Even with these educational and organizational fundamentals in place, changing an entrenched school culture, whether in 100 days or longer, would not be possible without the support of a board of education, a superintendent, and an administrative team willing to take a leap of faith into a new vision of schooling. Superintendent Richard Kamm, and Board Members Karen Costal, Larry Hapgood, Michael Mueller, Rich Nagel, Richard Sackett, Debra Skidgel, Joe Vavrek, and Norma Wienecke found the right balance between keeping a new principal grounded in the realities of the community they served and supporting the often emotional process of disrupting comfortable organizational and instructional routines.

The glue holding together the valued ends of schooling and the daily organizational and instructional routines was an administrative team who possessed the academic backgrounds to grasp the theories and practices of new pedagogies and the organizational abilities to translate those theories into every day routines of classroom instruction. Gail Aronoff, Maura Bridges, John Highland, Marianne Melvin, and Dick Waterhouse were instrumental in developing systems that ask only one question of staff and faculty: How can we make students successful in this school? Marjorie Appel, Joe Crickard, Paul Junkroski, Tom McCann, George Strecker, and Lee Yunker were department chairpersons who embraced the role of instructional leader and demonstrated the courage to act upon a culture of low expectations.

My motivation to continually write books on instructional leadership is driven by a professional responsibility to provide school communities with strategies to close the gap between school systems designed to implement institutional goals—accreditation and control—and school systems designed to implement educational goals—enlightenment and liberation. The personal motivation to think and write about instructional leadership and school reform is the continual dialogue I end up having with my editor-in-chief, Amy Daly. Not only is Amy an expert editor, but, more importantly, she writes comments in margins that often shift how I think about presenting the themes and strategies I propose in my books.

Finally, I have a wife, son, and daughter, who, over the years, have never been bashful about telling me how the real world of schooling works. Often, in the middle of expounding on strategies for transforming schools, Matthew would describe to me the fine art of how students “do school,” Amanda would describe to me how students “should do school,” and Linda, my wife and school administrator, would describe to me what schools do not do for their students. Over the years, all three perspectives have kept me grounded in what schools are and what they could become.