Fulfilling on vision for PDC effectiveness

The Eagle Rock Professional Development Center is working on behalf of Big Picture to support improvement, reflecting and ongoing learning. We will also be supporting the professional development and support of principals in the network. One of our first events was preceded by visits to the Bronx Guild, Mapleton Early College and Highline. Folks at the three sites agreed that it would be worthwhile to do some focused work on the academic quality of LTI projects. Collectively we designed an event that eventually attracted participants from Liberty and East Bay. Staff from the five schools met at Eagle Rock from Sun, May 31 to Tue, Jun 2 to conduct an assets-based study of various LTI projects that had yielded positive academic results. We used protocols throughout the 2 days to study our most successful work, develop action plans to implement at our home sites and envision a future where these plans were successfully implemented. The sequence of work will culminate with on-site follow up from the Professional Development Center.

This experience has also inspired some possible plans to conduct similar events on a regional basis. Participants left with the following to say...

"As a first year advisor, it was great to talk to other people who were doing the same work especially in a context that was so focused and well thought out." Ed Kessler, advisor, Highline

"This has been the most productive professional development day I have experienced in my time at the Met" David Cass, 11th gr. advisor, Liberty

"The conference energized me, taught me about best practices at other schools, and gave me time to develop a plan to implrement change at my school." Ben Schneider, advisor, Mapleton Early College

"I have a renewed focus on project depth, creative new ideas about how to bring it about, and an awakened memory of what I know works. The asset-based approach was a great paradigm shift for me." Arthur Baraf, Principal, Liberty

League of Democratic Schools

For the next two days, I will be hosting about 15 folks for the annual regional meeting of the League of Democratic Schools. I'll describe this group in a later post. For now, I want to outline my ideas for creating a work oriented meeting for various schools. Later, I will reflect on how well these plans worked.

Here's the agenda
Theme: Making the Invisible, Visible
"...there is only one thing I would want schools to guarantee, it would be to help all young people acquire the skills and self-confidence they need to feel visible in the world." ~ Sam Chaltain from Degrees of Freedom

Thursday
8:30 am - Eagle Rock gathering: witness an Eagle Rock ritual for supporting youth voice
9:00 am - Framing of meeting: intro to Eagle Rock, emphasis on theme (we're all hear to get better at incorporating youth voice), and emphasis on process of work, sharing and producing content.
10:00 am - Restorative Justice training: folks from Boulder Valley & New Vista High School sharing their practices
1:00 pm - Dilemmas in Democratic Governance: Eagle Rock students will present dilemmas and challenges regarding youth voice and governance. Participants will provide feedback using a consultancy protocol.
2:45 pm - Sharing resources from member schools: Run as a World or Knowledge Cafe. Each school has a home base and participants rotate to different tables. Throughout, we are looking into the question of what makes us a network? Who are we as a region? Who are we to each other?
4:45 pm - Closure

Friday
8:30 am Eagle Rock gathering: witness an Eagle Rock ritual for supporting youth voice
9:00 am Featured Speaker: Sam Chaltain: Sam will highlight some principles of democratic principles in schools. Schools will then work on their own projects with Sam providing coaching based on his presentation.
1:00 pm Creating content on online community: Somehow (not sure how yet) help participants think in terms of creating a product based on our work together and posting that online.

We'll see how it goes.

Using Twitter for PD Conversations

I was minding my own business last night, surfing the web and checking my twitter feeds when I saw a tweet that read:

hrmason: Heather Mason, 8th Language Arts, Merritt Island, FL, USA #educhat

I wondered why this person I was following just randomly identified herself in this way. I noticed the tag #educhat at the end and did a Twitter search for that term to find....

thorprichard: Yeah, #educhat is an informal live intl. discussion about education using Twitter.

At the search window, hundreds of education related tweets began scrolling. Some folks enjoyed finding new people...

@ScottElias: Best thing about #educhat - finding new ppl to follow!!

Others launched polls...

wgraziadei: What criteria do you use to follow (for that matter unfollow) a user? Poll http://twtpoll.com/?twt=twa123 #educhat

And many shared resources....

clinds: Just heard about LearnCentral in Live Classroom 2.0 Ning archive - looks like an amazing tool to collaborate w teachers-anyone try? #educhat

To review the content of this evening's chat or to share it with colleagues, use the hashtag at http://search.twitter.com/ #educhat

And, about 1000 tweets later, we signed off with...

Educhat: Thank you for joining us. Please take the time to join us at our next meeting on April 6, 2009. Goodnight! #educhat

In addition to using Twitter to engage in backchannel conversations at conferences, this was my favorite use of Twitter.

PDC Work - part 2

A few ideas I want to weave into the strategic stance I drafted in the last post.

1 - Sustained contact time on a single focus spread over time Consistent with a recent report titled "Professional Learning in the Learning Profession," our professional development center would emphasize choosing a focus, working together with a school for at least 50 hours and spread out over 6-12 months.

2 - People on the ground have the capacity to invent their own solutions This falls under our assets based approach. However, I think there are so many specific elements to the assets based approach that it warrants listing them out. The last post listed the concept of "positive deviance" and now we have the belief in the capacity of people to invent their own solutions. More can also be written on the "strengths based" movement, positive psychology, growth mindset, appreciative inquiry and learned optimism.

3 - Building teams in this work is a high leverage point More brains are better than one and only different perspectives can really produce new knowledge.

4 - Whatever theory or concept we are working on, it must be grounded in the work produced at the site Studying student work together or videotaping teacher practice provides the reality test when we are discussing more abstract concepts of differentiation, scaffolding, or project based learning. It takes far more disciplined energy to keep returning to our work than it does to have abstract debates on what works best for students. Our approach is more empirical.

Professional Development Center work

I'm drafting some ideas for how to best describe the strategy for The Professional Development Center at Eagle Rock School. Here's what I've got so far.

Guiding principles: Assets based and actionable. We begin from a place of working with schools and organizations from the stance that they already have all they need to move closer to their vision. They may need someone like us to unearth their assets and identify signs of positive deviance. Further, we are strict about turning any insights into actions. We provide clear descriptions of what the folks in an organization must do rather than just describe outcomes.

Given these principles, we engage in the following strategies.

1 – We choose to work with strategic partners. These are organizations that have a highly developed infrastructure for working (a) with small public schools and (b) directly addressing issues of high school drop out rate and secondary school experience for the kinds of students we work with at Eagle Rock School. Amongst our current partners are The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), Alternative High School Initiative (AHSI) and the League of Democratic Schools (LoDS).

3- We partner strategically with technical assistance providers like PEBC and Buck Institute. They offer to either train us in their professional development or have us cofacilitate their work. That enables us to deliver our work having had the benefit of their high quality approach -- builds our capacity as trainers, adds value to ERS and adds values to the schools we work with. We are low to no-cost help to them as needed facilitators and we, in turn, learn from their work which is in high demand due to their quality and reputation.

3 – We are using our capacity to host visitors at our school site more effectively by working with fewer schools with whom we can conduct follow up visits. We combine the retreat nature created here while remaining embedded in a school environment. Our follow up visits to their school sites supports the needed contextualizing.

I will continue to flesh out these thoughts and develop a fuller strategy document.

Oprah Winfrey Final Remarks at NAIS 09

"I believe in what you do" ~Oprah

She has sponsored young women to attend independent schools all over the country. Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa inspired by independent schools. Sharing her experiences - ups and downs - of having a school.

Benefited from nuns bringing Christmas gifts to her when she was a child on welfare. Wanted to do the same - spread the love, bring unexpected joy to children - in South Africa. During the 3 week effort, Nelson Mandela invited her to stay over his house for ten days. What to say? What to do? Stedman told Oprah, "Why don't you just listen for a change?"

When you educate a girl, you educate a community. Teen pregnancy, AIDS and other social ills go down. Battled the government and architects in an effort to make the Leadership Academy beautiful. Art can inspire. "Why do the girls need closets? They don't have anything to put in them." Why? Oprah: "Because I want to send the girls a message that they are valued."

Oprah was looking for an "IT factor" amongst the girls. Wanted young women who had something to fit in Leadership Academy. Do we, should we do that for Eagle Rock? These young ladies have lost their parents to AIDS, suffer sexual assault, live in poverty. Is it so wrong to be selective within that group of youth in need? I think we dance around that question in student admissions.

First biggest challenge: finding the right staff. Selected students first because she thought it would be harder to find the right kids. Then surprised by how difficult it was to find the right teachers. "I thought because the vision was so clear to me, it was clear to everyone." Not so. Looking for a head of school, dean of academics, counselor.... Issues with staff exist everywhere.

Second learning: "Projected budgets are made by people with a great sense of humor." Spent 2 1/2 times more than planned on everything. Oprah's school pays for everything: appendectomies, coats, braces, transportation. I thought Eagle Rock provided a lot (we do, but this is more).

Now, she's talking about the alleged sex abuse scandal at the Leadership Academy. The case has still not been resolved. The only way to deal with a crisis is to "stay in the moment." Don't get consumed by worst case scenarios. Stay in the moment, tell the truth. "If you tell the truth, you can be criticized but you can never be hurt."

Sidney Poitier's expectations of these girls: To be seated at every table where the decisions of the world are made for the future.

Final scene from Goodbye Mr. Chips. "I think I heard you say it was a pity that I never had any children. But, you're wrong. I had thousands of them. All boys." Oprah feels the same.

Great ending! So acknowledging of educators and saying, "I'm trying to do it too."

Letting my frame of reference get in the way

Second experiment in live blogging. Waiting for Oprah to take the stage and hear her words of wisdom for the independent educators of the world. Meanwhile, a word on Guy Kawasaki's presentation. After discussing the presentation with a colleague, I realized I assessed Guy's presentation using a pretty limited rubric. I heard him say he was presenting on steps to change. Given that's an area of interest for me, I listened for "steps" and did not hear any. First of all, I may have misheard. He may have said principles or qualities of change. In that case, he would have fared much better in my evaluation. Second, after reflecting with a colleague, I see that there was a lot of useful and practical stuff in the presentation. For example, the whole idea of jumping the curve is a way we can frame what we do at Eagle Rock School. Lot of opportunity there. My limited framework for evaluation limited what value I drew from the talk. How often do I do that? How often do any of us do that?

Guy Kawasaki Keynote NAIS 09 Entry #2

Guy Kawasaki
10 Steps to Change continued

6 - Polarize People

Okay - love that he's bragging about loving low brow TV. Makes me feel good. Loves 24 and The Unit. I love TV. He has three Tivos....that's what I want!

The point is some people love Tivo and some hate it. Any good idea polarizes people. That's good. Anything good generates strong emotions: Tivo, Harley Davidsons, Montessori schools

7 - Let 100 Flowers Blossom

Quote from Chairman Mao. I like this quote for the right situation but I've heard it applied at Eagle Rock for not working deliberately on any process or system. I've also heard it to justify taking in hundreds of students and watching hundreds fall away. I think 100 Flowers is a good approach to things and prototype thinking. Not so great when we're working with human beings and we want to serve them as best we can.

8 - Churn, Baby, Churn
Move through versions 1.0, 1.2, 1.3.... Ignore the bozos who say this revolutionary idea is not possible. Ignore them. But once the product is released, now switch to listening because the users will tell you how to fix the bugs. I can relate this to our current curriculum revision project.

9 - Niche thyself
2x2 matrix Uniqueness and Value

• High uniqueness, low value: Bozo

• Low uniqueness, low value: Pet Store food being shipped. Shipping costs too high and inconvenience. Most dot.coms are this way.

• High uniqueness, high value: Fandango, Clear Card, Smart Car, Trek Line bike

10 - Follow 10-20-30 Rule
This is about pitching using power point. (Claims someone try to sell him on the idea that Israel be purchased and turned into an amusement park.)

10 slides - no more...
20 minutes - present in no more than...
30 points - use font no smaller than...

11 - Don't Let the Bozos Grind You Down (Guess he added an extra step)

That's it. What Guy calls the 10 steps of change. I have to disagree. It was an entertaining presentation with some clever tips. I'm glad I saw him. But, these are not steps. It's a collection of anecdotes.

Guy Kawasaki Keynote NAIS 09

Guy Kawasaki
10 Steps to Change
This is my first attempt at live blogging. I'm taking notes on this talk as it's happening. I'm putting first five steps here and will continue with second entry.

1- Make Meaning (i.e., make a difference, change the world)

With 2 pieces of cotton, leather, rubber construct a shoe under controversial sweatshop conditions - not compelling. But that's what Nike does and they market it with meaning.

2 - Make Mantra

Put's up Wendy's [bad] mission statement about leadership and innovation. "When I order a cheeseburger it doesn't occur to me that I'm involved in leadership and innovation."

FedEx: Peace of Mind or EBay: Democratize Commerce. All better than a mission statement.

3 - Jump to the Next Curve

Don't be satisfied working it out on the same curve. "The telephone was not a slightly better telegraph. It was a whole new curve."

4 - Roll the DICEE
D: Depth: Reef sandal has beer bottle opener in its sole.
I: Intelligence: BF-104 Flashlight...someone was really thinking here. Flashlight takes three different battery sizes.
C: Complete: Totality of experience. i.e., Lexus
E: Elegance: How beautiful is your laptop, your school?
E: Emotive. You love it or hate it, you are not indifferent.

5 - Don't Worry, Be Crappy
When you have some revolutionary idea and you wait for that perfect bug-free world, you will NEVER ship your product.

So, far....my favorite principle. It supports "Don't let the perfect, be the enemy of the good." Also, promotes the prototype mindset we all need to get things done.

Making Change Stick: Steps

My newest version of presenting steps to change. I'll annotate each step at another time. This is what I've come up with after combining my experience with work by John Kotter, David Allen and the Vital Smarts folks who wrote Influencer. Wisdom of Teams also has a minor influence.

Making Change Stick Steps
Precondition: Establish champion, leadership
1 – Identify the dilemma
2- Focus on the desired behavior
3 – Create a project built around bringing that desired behavior into practice.
4 – Involve others (establish a team and invite community feedback)
5 – Establish boundaries

Roles in life - The Value of Inputs

At Eagle Rock, we have houseparents who live in a house connected to residences for up to 16 students. Over time, I have heard houseparents struggle with how well they are doing. It caused me to wonder, how does a houseparent assess how well they are doing? It got me thinking about "roles" in life like being a father or husband. How do I assess myself in those areas. These are notes from a one-hour meeting I facilitated presenting my ideas on some answers to these questions.

Definitions
• A role is a relationship to others or something (like your finances) that you choose to maintain to a particular standard and according to a set of values. It’s never complete.

• A project is an outcome that can eventually be checked off as “done.” It takes more than one action to complete.

When confronted with work, you have to ask yourself, “Is this something I can check off as done” or “Is this something I have to manage?” If the latter (i.e., relationships, fitness, houseparenting) then that role comes with certain qualities. Misinterpreting those qualities or characteristics causes problems.


Qualities of a role:
1) You will always think there is more to do than you can possibly do – use this thought as a signal that you are in a role rather than as a signal that “something’s wrong.”

2) You will either never feel you are good enough or if you do sustain some sense of accomplishment, it will be punctuated by self-doubt from time to time – another signal that you are in a role.

3) Because of first two you will alternate between beating yourself up and blaming some 3rd party {both are versions of “blame” and escaping personal responsibility – even “beating yourself up” is a form of taking evasive action and not putting yourself in the driver’s seat}

4) With a role, boundary issues will emerge –
(a) boundary you need to put up between yourself & others AND
(b) boundary between our imagination of what we think we can do and what we realistically do (not thinking that we can actually meet ALL of our students needs, we would hope that we behave in such a way that our actions correlate to students getting what they need).

What follows are three ways to “measure” yourself. Some are more useful than others. Some cause harm when used inappropriately.

Attitudinal –(self-talk and "I’m being" statements) I’m open, I’m available, I could probably be doing more.

If a positive attitudinal desire helps to suggest some things you can do (see inputs), then attitudinal thoughts can be useful. However, if you are referencing these attitudinal statements to judge yourself (i.e., I want to be available but I’m not) then you are using an inappropriate measure. You will never be “good enough.”


Outputs – It’s totally appropriate to assess an organization or system on outputs: educating, serving or graduating students. It is even appropriate to assess yourself over the long haul and see that more or less, you have made a positive difference. However, in the short term and with individual events, this is also an inappropriate measure of your effectiveness. This is a boundary issue. You have only so much control over what a student does in the next day or so. You are not responsible for a choice some student made to leave the school.


Inputs- (things you are doing, actions you are taking) Inputs are what you do based on some theory of action you hold. For example, I will check in with my advisees once a week outside of advisory because I think that this establishes relationships better than only talking during advisory. That in turn will make it more likely that the student will stay in school.

So, the input becomes “one check-in per week outside of advisory.” Or in our houses, “I will open the door three times a week so students can come use the kitchen.”

It is these inputs that one should look at and ask, am I staying true to my commitments? Have I kept my word? If yes, then you are doing well in your role. If it turns out that students are not learning or they don’t stay in school, this is a failure of your theory of action, not you. Once you review the outputs, reflect and adjust. Commit to new and different actions based on your learning.

The world of inputs and what we can do with it

1. Sharing common practices provides new ideas for inputs. If you like what someone else is doing, adopt it as a practice. Use your colleagues as assets who have already been successful with some practice (i.e. putting out a newsletter).

2. Sharing your input commitments with fellow houseparents and with house team can create support and accountability groups around inputs.

3. Sharing input commitments with others (ie., supervisors) provides information for targeted training and professional development. It is much easier to figure out what houseparents need if their practices are shared rather than make some vague request for training and support.

All the above reflects real early thinking on the subject. As I apply these ideas more explicitly, I imagine some of my thinking on this will evolve.

If you say three things, you don't say anything

Post inspired by Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
Chapter 2: Simple

“No plan survives contact with the enemy” Colonel Tom Kolditz.

I spent hours planning last week's licensure meeting. I wanted the group to generate performance-based assessments (PBAs) that might measure achievement of our power standard. Prior to the meeting, I collected a list of learning targets off course proposals and previous exercises. I scoured texts on PBAs to find examples. I created a 12-page handout with examples from New York State Performance Consortium, Eagle Rock course proposals and a couple of books. I designed a mini-lesson intended to get people focused on developing PBAs and using the learning target list to inform their judgment. I then put the class into three groups of three to brainstorm.

Two interesting things happened. First, two groups each came back with only one PBA suggestion despite it being a brainstorming session. Second, the feedback about the process consistently urged me to simplify: don't provide learning targets, reduce the 12 page handout to a single page, say less during the mini lesson.

I believe critiques are correct given the consensus of a group of intelligent people. However, at my core, I don't get it. Why is it better to scale everything back so that folks are working with the least amount of information. I hear that folks don't want to engage in the material at some deeper level. Throughout my career I hungered for understanding the fundamentals. What was the literature or research on this topic? Why do some suggest we do things this way? What is the larger process or bigger picture here? If a staff development meeting only had me run through an activity I felt like a technician rather than a thinker. My presence was not that important. I need my mind to be engaged.

But, I admit I find more evidence that I overcomplicate things and others prefer to hear things in a simpler version. I also understand there's a flaw in imposing my view of myself as a learner on others.

I must become more disciplined about simplifying my message.

From the Heath book:
“...plans are useful, in [that] they are proof that planning has taken place...[which] forces people to think through the right issues. But the plans themselves don't work on the battlefield.”

Commanders Intent: crisp, plain-talk statement specifying the plan's goal, the desired end-state of an operation.

“If you say three things, you don't say anything.”

When to take action

I laugh when folks say, "We should have done this a long time ago," and then that insight somehow justifies not taking action now.

"The best time to plant a tree...was twenty years ago. The second best time, is today."

Chinese saying

Creating a Sense of Urgency

As I work on pushing forward on our curriculum revision project, I ran across these words by John Kotter in Leading Change:
"...transformations usually go nowhere because few people are even interested in working on the change problem. No matter how hard we push...if others don't feel the same sense of urgency, the momentum for change will probably die short of the finish line. People will find a thousand ingenious ways to withhold cooperation from a process that they sincerely think is unnecessary..."

We have a great staff, great culture, but I still worry that we haven't laid the groundwork for establishing a sense of urgency. I need to draft some of my own thoughts about why this could be so useful to the staff, the school and the students.

Launching new initiatives

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."
~ Peter Drucker

Some staff want to experiment with instituting a study hall. We've been meeting about how to support the success of such a new initiative. I'm interested in seeing whether or not some "change strategies" (mostly from John Kotter and The Influencer) will help make this happen.

another action oriented quote

"You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind"

I think it's an old Irish saying.

Technical decisions provoke adaptive work

From Heifetz: “…with adaptive problems [complex, not solved via some technical fix], authority must look beyond authoritative solutions. [However] authoritative action may usefully provoke debate, rethinking, and other processes of social learning, …then it becomes a tool in a strategy to mobilize adaptive work toward a solution , rather than a direct means to institute one.”

There is an earlier blog post (Feb, 2005) where I describe instituting 4 authoritative fixes at the Bronx Guild: use of learning plans, grids, conferring with students and mentor meetings. The idea at the time was not necessarily that I had the correct solution and that faithful implementation of these measures would bring success. Rather, they were provocations. There was complacency around certain practices like tracking student progress or engaging with mentors. Perhaps these measures would help. However, certainly they would spur reactions. Folks who had a difference of opinion on the matter were now motivated to push back and come up with alternates solutions. New conversations were held that were not being held before. Dialogue, problem solving, creating new knowledge, and action were provoked.

Here at ERS, the authoritative "fix" of instituting a process for curriculum guide revision is of the same nature. Simply presenting the process has surfaced all kinds of feelings amongst staff: some love it, some feel discounted, others have alternative ideas. Could not have asked for better than this. It forces us to have these conversations: how can we include you more, what role will you play in the future of the school, what other ideas do you have? These are the conversations that need to happen.

Individual's concerns represented as group concerns

Occasionally within a group, a few individuals may have a concern. Rather than say "this is my concern," the person will represent it as a group concern: "Our group feels slighted by what you did" or "The group doesn't think so." By the way, I'm talking about concerns that are shared by a few. I'm not referring to concerns that statistically do represent the group.

The problem here is that the group is referred to in monolithic terms. That is, generalizations are asserted in a way to create the impression that this statement is true for most if not all members of the group. What is really happening is that the speaker holds a minority view but holds it intensely. I believe that there is not an easy way to present one's valid and intense feelings about something and the way to get things heard is to assert incorrectly that the entire group feels this way.

The trap for the leader or the change agent is to accept this as a group issue and continue to address the group. The feelings and reactions are valid and should not be ignored just because they belong to one or two people. But, the right approach is to talk to the individuals one on one.

The trap is especially prevalent in places that put people in groups without clear boundaries. We don't really practice the discipline of teams yet we put groups together that Katzenbach would call a "compromise unit." These are the worst kinds of groups - they are a pseudo-team. They lack the leadership of a single-leader unit and they pretend to be a team when they don't practice the disciplines required of a team. Fundamentally, this is the real source of the problem described above.

Folks wouldn't mask their individual concerns as group concerns if they were clear on the boundaries and processes associated with the work unit they belong to.

My Report Card

Despite how focused I think I am and how much I preach focus in leadership, I find myself scattered as I try to juggle multiple initiatives. All of these initiatives are in addition to my standard work with other schools, presenting at conferences or hosting visitors. I launched these initiatives in order to meet needs of the school as I perceived them. I thought a report card on my self might be a helpful exercise. I need to figure out whether there's a pattern to those initiatives that fizzle out and those that get traction.

Faculty Evaluation – a year ago I attended the National Association of Independent Schools conference and ran across a form of faculty evaluation that focused on teachers setting their own professional goals. I adapted many of the forms and the approaches as I understood them.

• Grade: C Despite having run meetings to focus on these goals, not a single person mentions these goals unless I bring them up. It doesn't seem to be meaningful to the staff.
  

Instructional Meetings – I was tired of making up stuff to deliver some staff development. Like the faculty evaluation, there wasn't much demand from staff for anything in particular so I kept preparing topical sessions that were not part of a coherent plan as I would like. However, I was working to meet with smaller groups all the time. So, I proposed using this time to meet in groups.

• Grade: C I thought more people would want to meet in small groups to work on projects they were already a part of . There's little to no response to joining various groups. So far, the meetings have fallen into two groups each time and they don't seem to be very effective. I give this initiative a B however with respect to how much I have to work on it in contrast to past PD.

Restorative Justice – instituted to stem the expulsion of students for breaking non-negotiables while also providing a community building ritual.

• Grade: B+ Part of the culture, students expect to get restorative justice and we have a stable group of staff and students who can facilitate. Follow through is excellent. More trainings and reflection would move this to an A.

Fairness – in the spirit of restorative justice, I wanted to create a group that would deal with lower level behavior issues.

• Grade: D Exists in concept only. I haven't figured out how to make it work and there's no demand for it.

Night Patrol– I proposed doing random night patrols to look into how well students were sleeping and hopefully act as a deterrent to late night misbehavior.

• Grade: B+ Committed volunteers work on this. No complaints from students and some of them have reported their belief that it has been a deterrent. I feel really good about this initiative. Unfortunately we are short one or two volunteers to successfully fill all the slots.

Leadership Team Meetings – part of my earlier school critique was the lack of agenda and focus during leadership team meetings. I gathered all the items that people suggested we talk about and organized an agenda based approach to holding the meetings.

• Grade: B+ ...maybe an A. Since proposed, we have never failed to have an agenda and minutes for the leadership team meetings. A digest of the minutes is provided to the staff and we have received great feedback on our greater transparency.

Power Standards – Some time ago I proposed we revise our curriculum guide to focus on fewer standards. Little to nothing was done on this work until there was a recent resurgence in interest. It may now be the focus of an all day instructional meeting.

• Grade: C or B The resurgence of interest is welcome. However, staff seem real confused about how to proceed. I feel like there's a lot of work to do to make sense of this initiative for the staff.

How often are any of us guilty of this?

“One issue is denial within the school about what’s going on—or at least a lot of rationalization. Especially in a school where there have been consistent patterns of failure for certain kinds of kids, it’s often the case that people locate the source of that failure in the kids themselves, or in their culture, their community, or their parents. All of this means the school is unwilling to take responsibility for what it can do to address the needs of those kids. Getting people to the point where they’re willing to take some responsibility is an important step.

That’s where the research can play a role in challenging people’s assumptions and getting them to see how they can think differently about why kids succeed or don’t succeed. Some teachers are very willing to accept credit for success—the kids who go to good colleges—but they’re not so willing to take responsibility for the kids who don’t succeed.”

Pedro Noguera