[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the show Eric Kalenz. Eric's career in education has included posts in teaching, coaching, administration, and consulting. And he's the author of the book, Education is Upside Down, Reframing Reform to Focus on the Right Problems, and a regular contributor to Ed Week, The Education Post, and his blog, A Total Ed Case. And he's the author of the new book, What the Academy Taught Us, Improving Schools from the Bottom Up in a Top-Down Transformation Era.
[00:45] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:48] SPEAKER_00:
Eric, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:49] SPEAKER_01:
Hi, thanks for having me, Justin.
[00:51] SPEAKER_00:
So Eric, this book is interesting in so many different ways, but I think one of the first things we should let our listeners know is that this book is written about a school that you worked in for many years, correct? Yep. Tell us a little bit, so when we see what the Academy taught us, we're talking about your school that you taught in. Tell us a little bit about the context that this book came out of.
[01:12] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think building on the first book that I wrote, so Education is Upside Down, I didn't do much anecdotal. In fact, none. It was very, very academic. When I started to think about how we might actually reach more people and certainly get more teachers listening and kind of what I was observing from the field and what folks tend to read, I just wanted to do something that was a little bit more based in teachers' day-to-day experience, administrators' day-to-day experience. And I felt like Though I wanted to talk about continuous school improvement, and that could be told in a very academic way as well, I thought I was sitting on a great story in that I lived one as a teacher, like a really positive continuous school improvement experience that really grew up from the classrooms at a school that I worked in. Once I started going back to that experience and thinking about how positive it was, I thought I could really go back and talk to former teachers and I could talk to former students who are now 10 years out from that experience to gather data on did it work
[02:12]
And all those things. And really, it just kind of kept spinning away in terms of giving me great material. And so I thought, instead of talking in this very academic and purely objective way about continuous school improvement, which I think the book ultimately gets around to, I can show this study that is not just of that school, but that also resembles a lot of what I'm seeing out in the field. And that I thought would be a very relatable study. and identifiable kind of story to couch the entire argument.
[02:42] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, Eric, it's interesting. When I first picked up the book, I assumed, okay, well, Eric was an outside researcher studying this school. And certainly it has that heft to it and that degree of seriousness to it. But you are actually an insider, a teacher in this school during this entire period, correct?
[02:58] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And it spans really 2004 to 2008. So it's a ways back now. At no point while I was living it between 2004, 2008, did I think I should write about this someday because I had no designs on someday being a writer. But as I've gotten further out into the field and doing more, you know, leadership type things, I would just kind of keep coming back to a lot of what I base my leadership work on is based on lessons I really learned as a teacher there and as experiences I got as a teacher leader there from my principal. So yes, I wasn't I wasn't descending on the school to go learn about it.
[03:36]
It was kind of going back in time and having to do a lot of research with my former colleagues and kids to kind of recapture some of that. And we also got the great fortune of, I think I'd said things to my colleagues once upon a time, like, let's save as much of this as we can. You never know when we might need it. And Kelly Klecker, who was the math teacher in the academy, for example, had a whole binder full of documents that we'd collected from the kids. And it was, that was a goldmine. So, yep, I was able to do the research with, you know, even if I had to get in the time machine to do it, but.
[04:08] SPEAKER_00:
Well, it's so interesting to think about all of the reforms that are, you know, currently underway in a school. And, you know, we have to tell ourselves on an ongoing basis, you know, like someday we will see the, you know, the fruits of our labor. We'll know how this all turned out. But in the, you know, in the meantime, while we're doing that work, while we're implementing reforms that are still in progress, we don't really know how it's all going to turn out, right? We need that time to pass. So it's so interesting that you're able to reconnect with students and former colleagues to get that perspective.
[04:38] SPEAKER_01:
I appreciate you saying that, especially because I think also at that time, this book is it straddles the period between when I think site level leaders had a lot more autonomy in larger districts and shoot even smaller districts. And with kind of like the accountability era kind of moving in behind the passage of No Child Left Behind and when tests hit and when evaluation hit and a lot of really centrally for lack of a better word, centrally imposed improvements started coming from central offices. This is when you started to notice the eclipse happening. And that's kind of like what happens in this book is a lot of really promising things started going on that that school found wholly run off the road. And so where on the one hand, we have to let things mature to see how they actually turn out.
[05:32]
This is also a case of we probably didn't even get a chance to let them mature as they might because of kind of the way the game changed for a lot of building leaders in that late in the first decade of 2000s.
[05:45] SPEAKER_00:
So you saw a big drop in autonomy or in the principal's kind of sole authority to, without interference from district administrators, make those kinds of decisions and protect those initiatives that had been underway in the school.
[05:58] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And as Dr. Bob, who is the de facto kind of like hero of the story, he's the principal at the time. Again, I was a teacher under him. I didn't design the stuff. And he just was a man of great vision, had a great way of getting people to trust him, things like that.
[06:14]
At one point I said, so what became of those things we started? Because I actually left the school in 2009. And I said, so what became of them? And he just said flat out, we became obsolete. We were not given room to move. And then, so someone who kind of had those leadership gifts I wasn't necessarily able to see him to fruition.
[06:36] SPEAKER_00:
Every school supposedly has a school improvement plan or a, you know, I was a principal in Seattle and we had continuous school improvement plans. So, you know, for decades now, we've known that this is what we're supposed to be doing. But what did your specific school do? And maybe give us a little bit of an introduction to your context.
[06:56] SPEAKER_01:
It was in a high school. It was definitely before the era of like standardized or centralized school improvement plans. A later work that I did, in fact, after, so I don't know, five, six years hence, I was at actually Minneapolis Public Schools and Central Office and assisting schools with drawing up and executing those kinds of plans, which put a whole new lens on my previous experience at this school. Because there we weren't really following any sort of template. There were no sort of requirements or anything like that. The continuous improvement actions that were dreamt up by Dr. Bob and his team
[07:33]
which I was part of, weren't following any sort of script. It was very much based in very clearly identifying needs. And again, this is also early in the data crunching era as well. So there weren't necessarily protocols for that. And we knew after fumbling around, frankly, for a couple of years with this kind of planning, that we were going to have to get a lot more deliberate We ultimately landed on a way to do it that we felt like really involved staff at a wide level, as opposed to the school improvement plan being created in the office by principal and perhaps two helpers and not many people outside that blast radius knowing what was going on. We figured out ways to really reach the entire staff and say, we're going to need all of us lifting on this to make it a truly comprehensive school improvement plan.
[08:25]
and not just an expression of a list of goals, for instance, that, you know, like, uh, that might be goals, but no real actions tied to them. We learned as a team right away, we were going to have to do some things together. Okay. Uh, in the heart of all of that, there was a thing. And just for the context of the book was the sophomore Academy. Sophomore Academy was a school within a school for at risk sophomores by at risk.
[08:48]
I mean, as based on data, not in a general descriptive way. Um, but we used kind of like an, uh, Before the term early warning system had really kind of come about, Dr. Bob and his administrative team had determined that the kids who were below a certain credit threshold were almost guaranteed to either not finish school with us or need additional time with us to earn a diploma. He found out that threshold happened in the sophomore year, so he said for a bunch of kids that we're going to have to somehow identify before they come in. We want to give them a lot of extra help. Okay.
[09:28]
And he handpicked four people who would become those kids like the center of their world at school. They barely left us. So the four core teachers and a lot of the things that we tried in that setting were things that became school-wide policies that we felt would go a long way toward our improvement. They were sometimes tough cells for the rest of the building. Like when you'd say something as simple as, We have a high incidence of behavior incidents that were taking place in the hallways. Okay.
[09:59]
Plus kids were kind of using going back to their lockers as a crutch. And so weren't showing up prepared. Well, one way we eliminated that in the sophomore Academy was no passes ever. Okay. Simple policy. Some would find it draconian, but we said no passes ever.
[10:17]
And I was one of the folks who was against it within the Academy, but then was able to sing its praises. a year and a half later to the rest of my staff in that you will never believe what happens when you put a premium on in-class time through an action like that. And then nobody's in the halls to get in fights anymore. No kids are roaming the halls aimlessly for 40 minutes, and every kid shows up prepared. I'm like, it's a miracle. But we had to build it across the entire team, which was hard.
[10:48]
But you started to see people actually talking to each other about how to pull it off. Okay, so I think that's kind of how all the links in the chain add up to school improvements is they began as simple actions that then teachers held each other up in order to carry out not just a principal walking around to make sure that's what people were doing or to hold them accountable for staying true to this policy. It was people saying, you know, my kids still aren't showing up on time. What can I do? And coming up with novel solutions together.
[11:19] SPEAKER_00:
So Eric, you were working in a large comprehensive suburban high school, right? So 10th through 12th grade, students came in at 10th grade and the sophomore academy was developed first as kind of an early intervention for students who were at risk of not being on track for graduation. Take us into a little bit of the origin of the improvement work. Did this come out of any kind of crisis or just a vision or what led to that continuous improvement work? that you describe in the book.
[11:50] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. I think, uh, with Dr. Bob, uh, his, he was always planning for a time he wouldn't be there. Okay. So like, that's kind of how he put it is, uh, at some point he had to figure out some way for the people currently in the building to continue having the building, uh, they wanted to have after he was no longer there. Um, and that was kind of how he would say it.
[12:13]
Like, like we're planning for a time where I won't always be here. So I can't You don't get free reign, but at the same time, we're going to have to do this together. And then he could kind of keep a hand on the tiller of the improvements. But it was not the sort of thing that was, like I say, imposed on the building. We were entering the age of using data to make better decisions, but we didn't have a very robust data system, nor did we have any sort of system for looking at it as professionals. But we knew some things were changing.
[12:42]
We knew some accountabilities and some penalties were about to be levied and things like that. I mean, we were entering the age of no child left behind. And all of a sudden we had piles of performance data we never had before. And so I think there was a. an awareness that we were going to have to get better at it, and this is kind of what Dr. Bob installed to make that so, even though there was very little guidance.
[13:08] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I love that forward-thinking vision that, you know, it may sound a little bit depressing to think, okay, I'm not going to be here someday, but really, he's thinking about his legacy, right? And, you know, what's going to become a part of this school that's not dependent on any one leader, but that's really built into the culture and the way the school does things. So how did that culture kind of, kind of manifest and what did you do as a, uh, as a team to, uh, you know, to set a vision and bring it into reality?
[13:38] SPEAKER_01:
That school had a reputation for having a long time staff, you know, it was, and it was late nineties, early two thousands. So just, it was a little bit of different culture in terms of teacher. And, and because when that school was built, it was practically a rural school. The rest of the Metro grew up around it. Um, so it was just that kind of school. And in fact, when I got my job there in 1998, somebody joked to me, someone else in the district said, you made it on to Mount Rushmore.
[14:03]
Okay. As in, as the, that same group of people has been there forever. And then it was me and somebody else. So as you can imagine, when a principal that started saying, we're going to do things really different and we're going to have to, because we now have these tests and things that was met with a lot of resistance. Okay. That the veteran staff did not necessarily like being told they were going to substantively have to change how they do what they've done for a long time.
[14:29]
Uh, and he had to sell that. So, uh, that's what, that was a challenge to the culture, but you're exactly as you said, it is, um, uh, we were trying to change the way we did things around here. Okay. Uh, and make it a cultural thing and not just an imposed thing. Uh, so we had to be very careful about how we went about that, but I think the methods we chose, and this wasn't the Academy necessarily, but another, team that's described in that book. It's called the Continuous School Improvement Team.
[14:57]
We figured out early on we had to really involve the rest of the staff when it came to when we, for instance, when we prioritize, these are the three things. We had a three-pronged mission basically every single year. And all we wanted to do was choose one school-wide action per year that we could all sell out on.
[15:14] SPEAKER_00:
Oh, that's, that's definitely wrong. You're supposed to do 10 things at once, right? Every year, 10 new things, right?
[15:21] SPEAKER_01:
And I've, I've, I've seen that I've, uh, in my, in my consultation work and things like that, I, I've been to many principal's offices and they'll point me to the bulletin board of these are the things we're working on right now. Okay. And they'll have them neatly prioritized and it'll be literally 12. I mean, I've seen 12. I'm like, you cannot be working on all these simultaneously. Like, I'm sorry.
[15:46]
Like, when everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. That was kind of one of our big kind of bailiwick or, you know, red letter sayings. You know, we had to prioritize some things and we had to make them as actionable as possible and then sell them. You know, when someone didn't get their preferred choice as this is what we want to improve, it doesn't matter. Like, as a building, this is what we're doing. Maybe it comes up again next year.
[16:09]
And I must say, and I think there's a lot of quotes in the book of people At the school still, and I'm not there, but look back on that time fondly. What did I say? Once upon a time, we did get more of a say in this. Once upon a time, it felt like we were more together on these types of improvements, and I felt like that was a great pat on the back of the culture we created.
[16:32] SPEAKER_00:
And you said there were three priorities for the year, or how did that work again?
[16:36] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, well, the mission... that we always say we, and I don't have the exact wording in front of me, but our mission was, you know, we wanted to help kids become better academic learners, wanted to help them be better citizens, and we wanted them to work toward their personal fulfillment in some way. Okay, so we would try to translate those into, and every single year those were the three. So opposed to, as opposed to current school improvement plans that I've seen, worked on, helped work through, you know, for the state and things that will be like, you must articulate a reading goal.
[17:09]
You must articulate a math goal. It was like, Nope, our three priorities are this, this and this and attaching a very specific action to each. So one year, Uh, uh, we instituted a building wide reading initiative and time during the week when kids would, would just read more pages with the sole goal of increasing their reading volume per year. Okay. Seemed like a small thing, but it was like moving mountains. There were people who were, you know, teachers who said, there's no way I'm making time for that.
[17:38]
There's no, and it's like, that's going to be the expectation. We voted on it. You know, and another one that when I talk about the building wide, no locker pass policy, that was the citizen one. OK, one year, all year, we're going to, you know, link arms together. And this is something we're all going to do. And it doesn't work if I enforce it.
[18:01]
But you don't. Can we agree on that? Yes. OK, now how are we going to make it work? So simple policies one at a time. that sometimes felt small, but I think really had a, one, it had a huge impact on the learning culture.
[18:15]
So students, we were able to uniformly raise certain expectations for kids, but then it also created this professional culture of, heck yeah, we got to say what we wanted to improve on and could work together to improve on, as opposed to the district says, We're going to be, you know, everyone must do more math in their classes, even if you're a social studies teacher, because we have a math goal, you know, which is and I've literally seen that kind of improvement strategy or goal attempt to be rolled out. And so, no, we had to figure out ways to make it things we could all do and get better at together. And then moving on to the next year, the the the assumption is those the three things you improved on last year. We made them permanently part of the culture. And then we just stacked the next set of three and so on and so forth until we kind of have a way of doing things.
[19:09] SPEAKER_00:
And that's how you build culture, right? One piece at a time. It's like building an institution. And really, yeah, I love that stacking idea. It's funny years later to think about a time when everything was not so driven by these accountability goals. And sometimes it feels like the goals that we have, we're going to improve this particular test score from 78% to 84% or whatever.
[19:34]
Those specific quantitative goals often feel like of magical thinking to me you know and i i think it's great to have things that we can measure so that we can see what progress we're making but in terms of setting it as a goal knowing that we don't directly control test scores you know like i can have a goal of you know going to the gym every day this week and i can actually control that um but you know test scores are the results of the things that we can do so i love that before the time of those quantitative goals, your staff was so focused on getting clear on what the priority was and taking action and then stacking those actions over time. So take us a little bit more into the academy, if you would. So there was a recognition that students were getting off track early on in their career.
[20:24]
So they started at 10th grade and there were early warning signs, among students who would ultimately not graduate. How did your school identify what those warning signs were and find the right students to provide those extra supports to?
[20:40] SPEAKER_01:
Right. Good question. And we go into that a lot in the book is nowadays and Minnesota has one. I know Texas has one for sure. And I think it's fairly common from state to state, like some sort of early warning system that that has, you know, I mean, robust data that includes things like demographic features. So like kids who are from a single parent household, kids who are below a certain income threshold, all that.
[21:04]
We had none of that. We basically had a very holistic system for doing it. It was quantitative. It was half quantitative and half holistic. We had a dedicated counselor that was working with the academy. And so we could let her drive on a lot of that.
[21:20]
Our would harvest the kids MCA results or our state test results. So that was our one kind of measure of academic progress. We'd have that on one hand, and then we would basically send a dragnet out to our feeder junior highs and say just very, very broad questions to counseling staff and teachers. Who do you think is going to struggle in high school? So looking at your kids, who do you think is going to struggle? We get that list of names.
[21:48]
And they had very short descriptive pieces of why. I mean, everything from the idea of not falling through the cracks. This student seeks the cracks. The student wants to hide from you, does not want to engage. The big high school is going to swallow her up. This other student has arrived to school drunk three times this year.
[22:12]
I mean, it was this wide range of things. And then the four of us, five of us, if you include Jackie, our counselor, would kind of lay those academic results on top of those more anecdotal and holistic descriptions of kids and eliminate some. For instance, we'd say if someone was low enough, they were supposed to, low enough score wise, they should probably be in some sort of academic intervention, maybe even screened for special ed. So it was also a way to kind of triage a little bit of that. And then the profile of kid that we looked for, it was all over the place. It was from tons of absences to the, the damagingly quiet kid to the, to the kid who gets in a lot of fights too.
[22:57]
And so it made for a really interesting group every single year. And we went, once you, once we had the secret sauce, we basically had two sections available to us like scheduling wise. And so that meant around 50 kids per year, which again, wasn't enough, but like I say, it wasn't meant to change the entire school. It was a targeted intervention at kids who were, like invisibly at risk. Like, like if they don't, if they don't get certain amount of credits on paper, it's almost a lock certainty that they won't graduate on time or, or we'll drop out. So we knew that was about 200 kids per year.
[23:33]
And if we could accurately identify 50, you know, I just given what we had, that was where we were going to start. Um, so As for that group, like I say, it was using that holistic method. I don't think there was a single kid in four years of doing it who was poorly placed. I won't pretend that it was the most data sound way of doing things. At the same time, those kids all really did need Some extra support. And I didn't I wasn't able to talk to all of them or anything like that.
[24:03]
They're all over the country at this point of their lives. They're all like, you know, 29 to 30 years old. But I was able to talk to quite a few and survey quite a few more. And they all point back to that experience like that was a fairly. important and crucial time for me um and and again that was kind of holistic or qualitatively gathered uh information there but but too when they look back on it they can recall fondly just how crazy we were i mean we were crazy and it was a volatile environment uh sometimes it was a adorably apathetic environment uh we just there were all we had lots of peaks and valleys the book describes quite a few of those sorts of things that we had to manage
[24:45] SPEAKER_00:
So I'm struck by the extent to which this environment or this academy was designed for this particular group of students that you identified. You recognized that a large, comprehensive American high school is kind of its own beast. It is its own, you know, it functions in certain ways. And for a lot of kids, that environment does not set them up for success, right? So you develop this academy working together, you know, not driven by a lot of the accountability systems or the reform practices that we have today, but just as educators looking at the available data, looking at what you knew about students and what they needed, you designed an environment that you believed would be more supportive for them and more conducive to getting them to graduation.
[25:38]
And then that kind of served as a design lab of sorts for the school as a whole. Is that right?
[25:43] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And that part I don't think was intentional. There were two of us that happened to be both Academy team members and then we're on dr. Bob's continuous school improvement team as well. Hi and whenever and I mean the two of us and to The two of us got a little jaded I suppose in that PLC movement was also coming in at this time Okay, so we were going to have to formally meet together all these things. I Got spoiled forever on PLC because I had the Academy It was the greatest.
[26:14]
It was the mother of all PLCs in my life. Nothing has ever come close. My English teammates could never provide it. God love them. You know, like, but talking about kids in that way and designing actions, it was the most productive, great PLC ever. Anyway, we took that same jadedness that we had against PLCs into the CSI planning.
[26:34]
So when we started discussing like whole school things and we would inevitably, you know, we go down some of the similar roads of behavior and academic habits and things like that. um, uh, the two of us would inevitably say, well, you know, here's something we do with our 50 kids, but you wouldn't believe, you know, how that transformed things, you know, uh, and, and sometimes that would punch out into the larger environment. Uh, sometimes the things we were doing were just, nope, we can't do that for the, for an entire school. And, uh, but, uh, so it was inadvertent. I don't think that was ever, uh, um, And two, had the two of us not been on both teams, I don't know that they would have surfaced. But we were just very, I don't know, proud of the stuff we were putting together.
[27:20]
And it often translated to a wider school effect.
[27:26] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. Well, and I think it's no accident that the agility and the willingness to experiment were located in that smaller, you know, kind of more nimble group. You know, you've only got four faculty members, 50 students. You can pivot. You know, you're not a cruise ship trying to turn on a dime. It's a much smaller group out of, you said, 2,000 students total?
[27:45] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, I love to bring that up just because, like, importantly, and I say this a lot in the book as well, and this reflects my own experience, like, in school improvement work since. It was important that the things we were trying to make more school-wide or that began to be school-wide were things that we could point to, we could point our colleagues to as happening with kids in this school, not some abstraction of something that worked before. you know, in, in Portland, you know, or, or, or somewhere in, you know, in Arkansas, like it wasn't, it wasn't an abstract case. It was like, this succeeds with kids who are here and we could tell you so. Uh, and so that's not in, in no way is that, um, an advertisement for not using evidence from elsewhere. Cause I'm all about that.
[28:31]
But I think teachers are, often very skeptical of improvements that come from outside the local context. They'll say, well, that may have worked there, but that can't work here. Or look at the kids in that instructional video. They're all private school kids, obviously, and they'll dismiss many things out of hand. This is a way to say, nope, these are our toughest kids responding to this stuff here.
[28:56] SPEAKER_00:
Let's talk about that issue of having, you know, what we would consider kind of no excuses expectations. And you used a phrase that I think is our hope, but we fear that it might not be true. The idea that students will rise to the occasion. I think as educators, we naturally fear that if we set a high bar, if we hold students to a rigorous standard, one that might even feel a little bit mean in some cases, we have this fear that that they will not rise to the occasion and that they will see that high bar up there and decide not to even jump for it. How do you think that fear was or was not present in your team? And how did some of those concerns kind of shake out, you know, if you've got students who potentially, you know, definitely have the potential not to rise to the occasion, um, how did you, how did you deal with that, with that fear and that tension that maybe, uh, you know, is this the best way to set kids up for success?
[29:55] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. Um, well, I, I certainly had it. I mean, I didn't, I was one of the more permissive members of the academy. I'm bar none heading into it. Uh, I had, and again, It's one of the reasons that I really wanted to write about the Academy because I'm very fascinated with how professionals grow and how they might change their minds, what it takes to change their minds, because I had my mind changed by my colleagues. I didn't know maybe how much kids could do until I was, one, convinced to do it by colleagues I trusted and people who would hold me up in doing it well as I struggled.
[30:32]
Uh, when I was starting to cave on, Oh, but you look like you really need to go to the bathroom. And I'm like, no, you're going to stay, you know, or, and then I might run to one of my two less permissive, sorry, less permissive colleagues and say, how do you navigate that? Okay. Like how, what, what do you say? You know, or, or, and it would give me tips for that. So one, I wasn't completely just raising a bar and then leaving it there and crossing my arms and saying, that's, that's now the bar kids.
[31:02]
Um, So I think that's one side of it is, is professionally, do you have the support to help you, you know, hang on to the bar? Okay. And stay where you need to. Okay. With it. Uh, two, there's the other side, which is, uh, uh, I don't know that you can necessarily, and this is my, just, this is experience talking.
[31:22]
There's no research or anything. This is my, it's my take. I don't know that you can raise that bar until you've convinced the kids how much you love them. You know what I mean? Like, like our kids knew, uh, you're doing this because you care about us. Okay.
[31:36]
And they, I think they doubted it or sorry, like, like not even a bit, like unequivocally, they knew we think this is good for them. And we were able to frame it in a way all the time. And we were very careful about our messaging. Like, this is why we're doing this, you know, not just because we love you, because I think that that can ring hollow. Okay. But, but try to connect it to the habits you'll need someday.
[32:01]
And because I care about you, I need you to, to sharpen these habits, you know, or at least know what's going to be expected and be able to operate within it. So, so it's a two way thing. Like, are you supportive with your colleagues? And then, uh, uh, Do the kids know you love them enough that you can pull off a heightened expectation?
[32:19] SPEAKER_00:
I'm so glad you mentioned that. The caring, the personal regard, the relationship having to be there in order for the high expectation to be effective. Let's talk a little bit about academics, if we could. So what were some of the discoveries that you made about what made a difference for students academically? Students who had not had a great track record academically up to that point were at a high risk of not passing core classes. What did your small team within a large high school do and discover in terms of academic support?
[32:52] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I won't pretend that we made A students out of D students or A students out of F students. or A students out of kids who had 50 absences the year before. That sort of realm is not necessarily going to get built in a day. What I did see, absolutely, was a distinct change in habits, a distinct change in self-belief.
[33:18]
Back then, we had the basic skills writing test, which was in Minnesota, the kids had to sit for a writing test. That test is now off the boards in Minnesota. But I had one group where every single one of my academy kids passed the basic skills writing test on the first try. I'd never gotten that at that point, like eight years of teaching English. I'd never once achieved a 100% passage rate. But I will not pretend that that's because they went from not smart to smart.
[33:47]
They were already smart. The difference between, I think, themselves in 10th grade and 9th grade, is they were actually taking their teachers seriously and then putting into motion what they've been taught. That's it. I think that was the big difference. And also, frankly, we did not collect the type of data at that time because I was not expecting to write a book, and I can't necessarily go back and find their GPAs and all those things. I tried to get some of that information out of them in the survey, but they're like, man, I haven't been in high school for 12 years.
[34:17]
What are you talking about? So anyway, but I can say, I did see some uniquely promising results. And the best part that I do like is, or that I can remember from that time is all of a sudden kids who were thinking about maybe school wasn't for them. We're starting to think about school completely differently, like coming to me and asking things like, okay, you know, maybe I don't hate school so much. Do you think I could take AP next year? Okay.
[34:42]
And having that conversation with the kid that You know, when I first met them, it was because on paper, they looked like a train wreck heading into high school. And now they're asking me, how can I do stuff that will push me even more? I mean, to me, it was more the attitudes that we spent the year changing that I think led to better academic results, just because it put them in a better headspace as regarding school, if not hugely academic turnarounds. And I can't pretend that I have the data on that anyway.
[35:13] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. Eric, throughout the book, you talk about kind of building the school that you want to work in or building a school that students want to, you know, to do their work in academically. How do you see that concern present or absent today? You know, looking back years later at what it was like to have a voice and have a stake in constructing the kind of school that you would want to work in. Are we off track as a profession today? What do you see happening in our profession relative to that?
[35:44] SPEAKER_01:
I feel like and this is what I just pick up from and I'm all over the country and talking to people on social media all over the country, things like that. I'm seeing a lot of people who still love teaching. OK, they still believe it's like the right thing to do. But I think they've really been lulled into maybe a deeper sense of this too shall pass than has maybe ever been seen, because I think kind of like the way initiatives do come in. and kind of take over our lives and erase the previous thing you might have liked to work on or deprioritize. That sort of thing has really worn us down, I think, as a profession.
[36:23]
I don't think anybody working in it doesn't believe it's important work and worthwhile work, but I think we're a little tired. And again, the book does not argue for, here's the answer is we got to give schools their autonomy back, because I know that's also loaded a little bit. At the same time, I think there are ways to build as a team together that make a lot of sense, that can actually make people feel like they're in on what we're improving on and not just always having the improvements done to them. Because I do worry for the long-term health of the profession when somebody way above them keeps coming up with, this is the thing that's going to change everything. And then wait, no wait, this is the thing that's going to change everything every few years. and they have no say in it, I can't imagine that's going to be good in a long-term way, even for the most dedicated people.
[37:15] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, the pendulum swings are fascinating to look at what was being done in the 1980s and then see the swings away from that and then the swings back. Anytime you've seen mastery learning become popular and unpopular and popular again, And for any of our listeners who are younger educators, if you are under 35, you might have come in in the middle of one swing and then we're a couple swings later. But I think being able to be a little bit transported back in time a bit to see what was happening. As younger people, we get the idea that every intelligent idea has happened in the last five years, and everything that people were doing before that was just terrible and everybody was stupid. And it's so refreshing to, one, know that almost everything that we're a part of
[38:09]
in education has been around a long time. Maybe it was hidden by pendulum swings, but there has been a core of wisdom in our profession for decades that in a lot of ways, despite all those pendulum swings and despite all the additional insight that we've gained over the years, has not changed too much. So the book is What the Academy Taught Us, Improving Schools from the Bottom Up in a Top-Down Transformation Era. Eric, if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about your work, where's the best place for them to find you online?
[38:43] SPEAKER_01:
It's just at ericglens.wordpress.com.
[38:45] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Eric, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[38:48] SPEAKER_01:
Thank you, Justin.
[38:49] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
