Endings, it is said, are only new beginnings. And so it is with the year whose end is only hours away. I thought it instructive on the cusp of a new year to consider how the transitions that we have experienced in the course of 2011 are actually opportunities to recommit to creating the best public educational systems we can imagine. At the risk of omitting some important transitions and sounding a bit like a family newsletter, permit me to mention just a few items relevant to NC Triangle leaders and leadership.
I begin with kudos to Del Burns, former Wake County Schools superintendent and now co-author of a new book, for inviting us to consider how to put the public back in public schools. I have not yet read his book, so beyond congratulating him on the courage to write on what I understand to be a fictional narrative based on the two years of upheaval sowed by the board of education election of October 2009, I cannot comment. In my opinion, Wake County Schools and the community it serves begins 2012 with far more social cohesion than it did last year, and for that we can all be grateful.
I offer for your consideration the many leadership changes across the region resulting from retirement, resignation, and reassignment. Closest to home is my own retirement from the North Carolina Public School System, an act in which I was joined by Neil Pedersen, former superintendent of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School System. Neil was the last remaining founder of Triangle Leadership Academy, and so it evokes a kind of poetic symmetry that he and I go out together. We continue our collaboration, however, which leads me to the next new beginning.
The professional development programs of the North Carolina Principals and Assistant Principals Association in which I have been involved are taking root all over the state. More than 300 principals have matriculated or are in process of matriculating Distinguished Leadership in Practice. In 2012, we are rolling out Future-Ready Leadership for assistant principals. Neil Pedersen, Tom Williams, Kermit Buckner and I are co-creating six days of professional learning for two groups of 60-80 assistant principals to convene throughout the year in Charlotte and Raleigh. Given shrunken district budgets for in-service leadership development, this is great news.
Another outstanding supporter of mine personally and of leaders both public and private, Howard Schultz, is switching gears from his role as purveyor of VitalSmarts products to taking a broader role in foundation and public service. Howard's recent conversation with certain organization executives give me hope that we may continue to deploy Crucial Conversations©, Crucial Confrontations©, and Influencer© with senior education leaders. I hope to write more transparently in future entries.
Joining East Carolina University and North Carolina State University, Triangle educators welcomed Gardner-Webb University's Master of Executive Leadership Studies program last August. Approximately 55 aspiring principals will continue in their second semester of study next month, with classroom instruction by Jim Palermo and me, and internship supervision by Dave Coley, Tom Benton, Tom Dixon, and Rod Ramsey. These cohort programs promise to fill the leadership pipeline for school all across the region. I have written. and will continue to write, about program improvements, but rest assured, we are finally on the right track in this state in developing the public school leaders we need.
On a more personal note, the work with High Point University that MJ Hall, former TLA consultant, invited me to be part of is continuing with great energy. Dean of School of Education, Marianne Tillery, Professor of Education, Vernon Farrington, and other HPU educators are planning with education and business VIPs across the state to explore how to improve K12 educational outcomes by leveraging boundary-spanning leadership. I count this work among the potentially most important developments in figuring out what's next in identifying and supporting senior leaders in building better schools and a better society. It's a big job and I am grateful to MJ for making me part of it.
This blog would not be complete without mentioning the election of Joe Peel as mayor of Elizabeth City. Education practitioners and policymakers across the state owe Joe a debt of gratitude if for no other reason than, when in his role as TLA executive director, he managed to persuade the state board of education to adopt TLA's seven critical functions of leadership as a basis for the new North Carolina Standards for School Executives. I will take credit for distilling the extant research and literature that produced them, but except for Joe's political influence, they would have remained only a framework for TLA learning assets.
In conclusion, I am inviting you to consider what transitions you are making in your life. What has fed and will continue to feed you, what you need to cast off and yet don, who you need to accompany you on your leadership journey, and who has come with you as far as was given to them to come. In his book, Transitions, William Bridges made an important contribution to the literature on change. Among other things, he reminds us that it is not so much change that we fear but the uncertain steps we must take that leads to the change. I invite you to fix your eyes upon the horizon and take counsel not of your fears but of your heart. You will not regret it.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Schroedinger's Cat and Fashioning School Leaders
Continuing a topic I began last month, I ask in advance for your patience as I spin out a little metaphor. If you are reading this blog, we have already established a trust relationship. Today, I am banking on it.
And a note of humility: many minds finer than mine have helped create our structures and systems. As always, my intention is not to torch what others have built, but to illuminate the building. In fact, I too am a builder whose work is continuously in need of improvement. In that spirit, I write.
Schroedinger's cat is a 1935 quantum physics thought experiment that illustrates the paradox of reality, at least in the quantum world. The experiment postulates that one cannot know what is happening to a thing if one is not observing it. In fact, theory says that nothing does happen to the thing until one observes it.
A cat inside a box, for example, may be simultaneously alive and dead. It is only the observer's lifting the lid and peering in that seals the cat's fate. I invite the courageous reader to see Margaret Wheatley's (1999) Leadership and the New Science for an exploration of this and similarly fascinating topics.
I am beginning to believe that the classic thought experiment may provide a way for us to think about educating future school leaders. As a study and practice, leadership education seems both to live and die only as we observe it. Attention to it by policymakers waxes and wanes, and at this waxing moment, I think we may be about to unwittingly kill the cat.
Last month, I stated my intent to dive deeper into my concerns about the new North Carolina program for principal preparation, including and especially, documentation of on-job-training performance manifest in artifacts. At the end, I hope to have encouraged you to think critically about where we are now and our means of collecting data that may inform mid-course correction.
At my school, Gardner-Webb University, we collect six artifacts: Analysis and Action Plan for Student Learning, Analysis and Action Plan for Teacher Empowerment and Leadership, Stakeholder Involvement Plan, Organizational Management Analysis, Cultural Advocacy and Action Plan, and School Improvement Action Plan. So far, so good. We may optimistically assume our cat is alive.
Artifact topics are informed by a growing research base that supports why they, and not just any topics, are ones that provide principals with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to develop their schools into high-performance learning organizations. We probably agree that such a goal is laudable.
It is not the goal of creating the ability to lead a high-performance learning organization, however, that is troublesome; rather it is the distortion of instruction that is leading to the student creation of the artifacts that we assume will represent attainment of the goal. I have been accused of being a highly-effective teacher, so let me tell you what is happening in my class.
In the semester that is now ending, I had 20 students with whom I met face-to-face for up to four hours weekly and with whom I facilitated online discussion and occasional web-based instruction in the interim. Despite expected administrative growing pains and downstream communication gaffs, my students have done an excellent job conforming to program expectations. And that is my concern.
Essential to the new program are expectations that aspiring leaders actually lead in their schools, that differences in student learning result from that leadership, and that their leadership is collaborative. On the face of it. that is a good thing. But then reality happens. We look into the box and inside the box, the thoughtful leaders-in-progress we hoped to have been making may actually be . . . well. we don't yet know do we?
My students. God love them, have been totally consumed in their non-class hours by cutting and pasting from their school's NC School Report Card, Teacher Working Conditions Survey, Professional Learning Team minutes, and other extant databases all to meet the requirements in the artifact rubrics. I wonder when they had time to teach students?
So who can blame them for an occasional lapse in doing what is, in my mind, the most important thing they could be doing right now-- consulting their own minds about being a leader, not just doing a leader. Here is some of what we are asking our aspiring principals to do:
We have created rubrics for 30 separate parts of six artifacts to be crafted and reviewed over the course the five-semester program. Of these 30 parts, students are to have responded to 12 during first semester. Students will return to these artifacts over the course of their program, amend them as needed, and finalize them at some undetermined time in the future.
Add to the scramble to submit and resubmit artifacts and the state of ambiguity about when an artifact is actually finished, students' foreknowledge that expert review of the artifacts is the primary means by which a principal license will be conferred, and tell me, where do you think an aspiring North Carolina principal will spend her time?
I think I can say with certainty that, given program expectations, she will not spend it inside her own head thinking deeply about her practice. Yet a huge body of research in training and development suggests that reflection on practice is the first step to improving performance.
To bookmark this conversation, I return to our metaphor, Schroedinger's cat. I know we cannot avoid looking in the box to see if our cat is alive. We should want to know. But I do want us to have at least put in a bowl of food, a cup of water, and have kept the box in a warm, oxygenated place before we open the lid. Arguably, we should get the design and conditions right before we even put the cat inside.
And a note of humility: many minds finer than mine have helped create our structures and systems. As always, my intention is not to torch what others have built, but to illuminate the building. In fact, I too am a builder whose work is continuously in need of improvement. In that spirit, I write.
Schroedinger's cat is a 1935 quantum physics thought experiment that illustrates the paradox of reality, at least in the quantum world. The experiment postulates that one cannot know what is happening to a thing if one is not observing it. In fact, theory says that nothing does happen to the thing until one observes it.
A cat inside a box, for example, may be simultaneously alive and dead. It is only the observer's lifting the lid and peering in that seals the cat's fate. I invite the courageous reader to see Margaret Wheatley's (1999) Leadership and the New Science for an exploration of this and similarly fascinating topics.
I am beginning to believe that the classic thought experiment may provide a way for us to think about educating future school leaders. As a study and practice, leadership education seems both to live and die only as we observe it. Attention to it by policymakers waxes and wanes, and at this waxing moment, I think we may be about to unwittingly kill the cat.
Last month, I stated my intent to dive deeper into my concerns about the new North Carolina program for principal preparation, including and especially, documentation of on-job-training performance manifest in artifacts. At the end, I hope to have encouraged you to think critically about where we are now and our means of collecting data that may inform mid-course correction.
At my school, Gardner-Webb University, we collect six artifacts: Analysis and Action Plan for Student Learning, Analysis and Action Plan for Teacher Empowerment and Leadership, Stakeholder Involvement Plan, Organizational Management Analysis, Cultural Advocacy and Action Plan, and School Improvement Action Plan. So far, so good. We may optimistically assume our cat is alive.
Artifact topics are informed by a growing research base that supports why they, and not just any topics, are ones that provide principals with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to develop their schools into high-performance learning organizations. We probably agree that such a goal is laudable.
It is not the goal of creating the ability to lead a high-performance learning organization, however, that is troublesome; rather it is the distortion of instruction that is leading to the student creation of the artifacts that we assume will represent attainment of the goal. I have been accused of being a highly-effective teacher, so let me tell you what is happening in my class.
In the semester that is now ending, I had 20 students with whom I met face-to-face for up to four hours weekly and with whom I facilitated online discussion and occasional web-based instruction in the interim. Despite expected administrative growing pains and downstream communication gaffs, my students have done an excellent job conforming to program expectations. And that is my concern.
Essential to the new program are expectations that aspiring leaders actually lead in their schools, that differences in student learning result from that leadership, and that their leadership is collaborative. On the face of it. that is a good thing. But then reality happens. We look into the box and inside the box, the thoughtful leaders-in-progress we hoped to have been making may actually be . . . well. we don't yet know do we?
My students. God love them, have been totally consumed in their non-class hours by cutting and pasting from their school's NC School Report Card, Teacher Working Conditions Survey, Professional Learning Team minutes, and other extant databases all to meet the requirements in the artifact rubrics. I wonder when they had time to teach students?
So who can blame them for an occasional lapse in doing what is, in my mind, the most important thing they could be doing right now-- consulting their own minds about being a leader, not just doing a leader. Here is some of what we are asking our aspiring principals to do:
We have created rubrics for 30 separate parts of six artifacts to be crafted and reviewed over the course the five-semester program. Of these 30 parts, students are to have responded to 12 during first semester. Students will return to these artifacts over the course of their program, amend them as needed, and finalize them at some undetermined time in the future.
Add to the scramble to submit and resubmit artifacts and the state of ambiguity about when an artifact is actually finished, students' foreknowledge that expert review of the artifacts is the primary means by which a principal license will be conferred, and tell me, where do you think an aspiring North Carolina principal will spend her time?
I think I can say with certainty that, given program expectations, she will not spend it inside her own head thinking deeply about her practice. Yet a huge body of research in training and development suggests that reflection on practice is the first step to improving performance.
To bookmark this conversation, I return to our metaphor, Schroedinger's cat. I know we cannot avoid looking in the box to see if our cat is alive. We should want to know. But I do want us to have at least put in a bowl of food, a cup of water, and have kept the box in a warm, oxygenated place before we open the lid. Arguably, we should get the design and conditions right before we even put the cat inside.
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