The Way to Inclusion: How Leaders Create Schools Where Every Student Belongs

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Julie Margretta Wilson. Julie is the founder and executive director of the Institute for the Future of Learning. An alumnus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she's the author of The Human Side of Changing Education, How to Lead Change with Care, Courage, and Conviction.

[00:36] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:39] SPEAKER_02:

Julie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:40] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for having me, Justin.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Well, great to speak with you today about a topic that I think is near and dear to both of us and at the heart of our work with schools. And I wonder if we could start by talking a little bit about the work that you've done with schools that resulted in this book, as you've been on the front lines of helping schools transform themselves to better meet their students' needs. What did you see happening that made its way into the book and prompted the need for the book?

[01:07] SPEAKER_00:

Well, working with the schools, I started to notice some themes over time, those themes being related to why is some change sustainable and meaningful and other change is not. And I started to notice a pattern, if you will, with those schools and districts where the change truly took root, if you will, and flourished and other places where it did not. And I kept seeing that pattern repeat over and over again. And I thought, okay, well, let me start writing about this in an attempt and a hope to lessen learning curves and also hopefully to impact policy in some way. There are far too many policies that get handed down that fly counter to what we know that it takes. to really have meaningful, sustainable change take hold in a school or district.

[01:54]

So that's a Trojan horse, if you will, that I'm hoping is an impact as well.

[01:57] SPEAKER_02:

I was working on the kind of concluding chapter of my dissertation recently and looking up some information about the Gates grants that the Gates Foundation made to transform large comprehensive high schools into smaller academies. And I was reading some of the annual reports that Bill Gates, Bill and Melinda Gates have published every year since I think 2009. And in their first annual letter, they said something along the lines of, we discovered that it's harder to change an existing school than to bring those same change ideas into a new school. And I laughed when I read that because I thought, you know, no kidding, right?

[02:34] SPEAKER_00:

It is

[02:34] SPEAKER_02:

difficult to change an existing school. It is difficult to figure out what's going on, what system is causing the results that we're getting currently, and how we can better align that system with the results that we want to get. So Julie, thinking about some of the schools that you have worked with, what have been some of the kinds of changes that they have been working toward, just to give our listeners an idea?

[02:58] SPEAKER_00:

One of my very strongly held biases is that we need to help schools move away from this industrial model of education. So I typically work with schools that are working through a strategic design process to really rethink the outcomes. So when I first started this work, it was interesting that a lot of folks were looking for help with helping kids get better at passing standardized tests. And I would say to those people, I'm not the resource for you. But if you're interested in helping your kids learn critical thinking and creative problem solving and how to collaborate and how to communicate, then I can help with that. And so much of that work came out of my work with adults, where I see so many adults really needing to unlearn what they learn through a standardized system of education and having to build these skills from scratch in their early 20s, even those kids who have, quote, been successful and gone through college.

[03:55]

So that's the kind of school that I tend to work with.

[03:57] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Julie, as you're talking about switching away from the industrial model of education to more of a post-industrial model, I detect in our profession a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity about what we should be changing to. For example, one of, I think, the early pushes, particularly from Silicon Valley, has been this push toward personalized learning. And then we get into the personalized learning systems that schools are trying, and we discover that actually the They have a lot in common with those industrial models. They're just using computers to get kids there. And I think that quest to figure out what we're really trying to change to, or as you might put it in the book, that clarity around what we change to really is a big part of the task. What have you seen as schools try to establish that clarity?

[04:47]

You know, we kind of grew up in this industrial system ourselves. And as you mentioned, as adults, we need to unlearn that.

[04:56] SPEAKER_00:

Adults who come from that industrial system envision something different for their students and then turn that into reality So it's very helpful to bring a community together both folks inside the school faculty administrators students and also folks outside the school the parents community members to really start a conversation from first principles and I've stolen these questions from Dave Perkins. I remember taking his course and Educating for the unknown back when I did my graduate work and it had a massive impact on me. These four questions are what's worth learning? How is it best learned? How can we get it taught that way? And how do we know it has been learned?

[05:37]

And if a community asks themselves from first principles, what's worth learning to help set my child up for success? How can I help them thrive? And what is essentially an unknowable future? What are the skills, knowledge and habits of mind that are important? And anytime I facilitate that kind of community conversation, the same themes keep coming up over and over. Themes such as empathy, how to solve problems creatively, how to collaborate with others, how to manage oneself, how to be a self-directed learner.

[06:09]

And I believe there is a rising tide of consensus regarding these outcomes. Folks such as Sir Ken Robinson, for example, I think over 40 million people have viewed his TED Talk at this point. Tony Wagner, the Global Achievement Gap, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the Hewlett Foundation and their Deeper Learning Network. There's more and more consensus with regards to what's worth learning. The big question that that then prompts is how do we transform a system that was designed for the industrial model to really essentially do a 180 and produce the kind of outcomes that we're now saying that are meaningful.

[06:46] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I think one of the constraints that we're not going to get away from anytime soon, except in small and kind of experimental settings, is the funding is also matched to that industrial model. We can educate students efficiently in that model. And When we try to switch to another model, we're not necessarily given more resources, more time, more space, a different type of furniture, for example, to do that with. Sometimes we get technology, but often the biggest constraints around how we use time and how we use human resources, whether we even call people human resources or have a different way of thinking about it might be up to us. But we don't generally get the luxury of vastly different student-teacher ratios and things like that. So in thinking about that question of how do we redesign an existing system with existing levels of funding or even declining levels of funding, once we've decided what truly is worth learning, what some people might call 21st century skills, we have lots of different ways of talking about what we want students to learn, but how do we design for that within the constraints?

[07:49]

And this is actually something we've been talking about internally here because we're working with a lot of teachers on project-based learning curriculum lately. Dr. Amy Bader is and she's found that their constraints often are what produce the very creative and incredible designs they come up with. So I'm curious if that's shown up in your work as well, that we have all these constraints, we have all these goals, how do we match them up and make some things happen within those constraints?

[08:15] SPEAKER_00:

So much of this work, I think of it as a nested system. So if we're saying that, you know, Kids need to be learning more project-based skills. What we then need to do is to help the adults learn those same skills and to do so in collaboration. And I've seen incredible work happen where you bring a group of adults and students together and you throw out the problem on the table or the essential question and start problem solving. And bringing the community together in that way really helps not only make the changes that you want to see, but also to start to build change capacity. It's not going to be the case that we're going to go through a certain number of changes and then we'll have status quo for the next few years.

[09:00]

It's really shifting a school's capability from running the trains on time to how do we build ongoing change capacity and change resilience. And that's a significant shift for folks to make.

[09:13] SPEAKER_02:

I'm thinking about this issue of sustainability in terms of not just making a change stick, which is often what we mean by sustainability. You know, we've implemented it, we've achieved fidelity of implementation, and now we want to keep that. But you're speaking to the issue of change being something that we don't just push through once and then we're done and then we have the status quo for year after year. from that point, but really something that we need to build capacity for on an ongoing basis so that we can continue to change. Did I get that right?

[09:42] SPEAKER_00:

That's correct. Yes.

[09:44] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Julie, what does it look like in your experience then to build that capacity for change, not just as something we do once and then we're done with it, but as a skill and as a capacity or a property of the organization?

[09:56] SPEAKER_00:

I think of building change capacity as a pretty deep culture change for a lot of schools. Schools are at all different points in their development and what works for one school might not work for another. So for a school, for example, if a principal or a superintendent assumes leadership role and they're inheriting a toxic culture where there's little trust, then they have significantly more work to do than a principal or superintendent who's taking over leadership of a school or district where they are already enjoying high levels of trust and that work is already being done, if you will. When it comes to embedding this capacity, it's really helping folks shift from what I call the 1980s mental model of change management, which is we get a bunch of folks together in a room, we come up with a strategic plan, and then we communicate that down and across the organization and assume everyone will implement with fidelity.

[10:54]

Shifting that to instead of what's our change management plan to How do we mobilize people in this entire community to realize and implement the vision that we have articulated here? And how can we get as many people at this table as possible and give them the support and resources that they need to do the work? And this work is developmental. And I think that's something that is very rarely talked about when it comes to changing schools, which is if Let's say I'm a physics teacher and I have taught physics a certain way for seven years using a particular textbook, having been taught myself a certain way. And you're asking me to collaborate with three other teachers to come up with an authentic interdisciplinary project that's embedded in our local community and maybe even globally as well.

[11:47]

You're taking me way out of my skill set, way out of my comfort zone. And essentially, you're asking me to be incompetent, which is Me starting off my learning curve and needing to build these skills. And we've got all sorts of sophisticated ways to push back on that. And that starts to reveal itself as, quote, resistance to change. It's a very human reaction to you're taking me out of my known world and taking me into an unknown world, which I may or may not have chosen to enter into. And I remember a summer institute that I facilitated a couple of years ago.

[12:22]

And one of the participants was very eager to start this work. She was planning with two other teachers what a particular project might look like in the fall. And she was super excited the first day, less so on the second. And on the final day, she was really sort of stepping aside from the conversation. And I went to speak with her during a break and asked her how she was. And she said, you know, I was originally excited about this, but now I'm petrified.

[12:48]

And I asked her to say a little bit more. And she said, you know, I have been an excellent teacher for 13 years. I nail my evaluation every year. I'm realizing how much I don't know. And I am petrified of failing in front of these kids in September. And that is so much at the core of this work.

[13:04]

And if we don't provide teachers and leaders with the opportunity to take risks and to fail in a supportive environment, then we're not going to see sustainable change. And when we talk about building capacity for change, we need to build an environment that makes it safe to experiment, to try new things, essentially to learn, which is the ultimate irony because schools should be great places of learning, but too often they're places of perfection where failure is not tolerated.

[13:34] SPEAKER_02:

Julie, I think what you just said is so true and so critical and so easy to miss that when we're asking people to change, we're pushing them from a place of competence into a place of incompetence. We're asking them to do things that they don't yet have the skill set for. And we view that resistance as a bad thing from a hierarchical standpoint. You know, I'm the boss. I've decided on this change. How dare you, the teacher, resist that change?

[13:59]

But I think that's the wrong way to look at it. As you said, this top-down idea, this kind of 80s concept of change, just is not how changes roll out. Even if hierarchically the decision was made at the top first, it's just not going to happen. It's just not going to become a reality. if we don't engage people in that process of navigating that change, of figuring it out. And I think it does come down largely to an information and decision-making problem that as a principal, I don't know what all is going to be involved in developing an interdisciplinary unit among that physics teacher and the other teachers that he or she is collaborating with.

[14:36]

And those teachers have to figure that out, not necessarily by themselves, but they do have to figure it out. And I can't just say, go make it happen, we're doing this. There are actual decisions that have to be made and actual skills that have to be developed there.

[14:50] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And principals and superintendents, no matter how great they are in their role, they don't have the knowledge on the ground, and nor should they. They shouldn't be micromanaging and having the knowledge on the ground of the intricacies of what this is going to take. But they should be able to provide their teachers with the resources and support and the bandwidth to be able to solve these problems creatively themselves. And it's shifting away from a patriarchal or matriarchal model of leadership. to one where you're building other people's capacity to solve their own problems.

[15:22] SPEAKER_02:

And I think that's in such contrast to the hierarchical model where we just simply decide on a change and then tell people to make it work. If you've ever tried that with a building contractor, you know how well that works. Like, I would like a two-car garage added to my house, and it's going to cost exactly this much, and it's going to be done by the end of the week. Okay, go make it happen. You know, that does not work. that world and I don't really think it works in education as well even when we ask people to do things that are even more ridiculous with the resources that we have available so back to your point I think you're absolutely right we don't have to know all of the intricacies as leaders we don't have to personally develop all of the skills that all of our staff will develop or at least not to the same extent but we do have to understand what they're going through and what it will cost and And that's where the construction metaphor came to mind for me.

[16:12]

You know, if I have just a terrible misconception about what the learning curve is going to look like and how much time it's going to take. And again, with PBL, one thing we run into is this expectation that you can just write an entire year-long curriculum in your spare time as you're flying the plane throughout the school year. And we say... No, actually, this is something that many, many people spend their full-time jobs on writing this kind of curriculum.

[16:35]

And if your teachers are going to go through that process, it's about setting the right expectations in terms of how much time that's going to take and how to support that work, what the cost is so that we can do it right. If you want to build a two-car garage, you have to know how much a two-car garage costs and budget accordingly. to, you know, in both time, resources, finances, and things like that to give yourself a reasonable expectation of success. So the book is The Human Side of Changing Education, How to Lead Change with Clarity, Conviction, and Courage. And Julie, as you think about the model and the approaches that you share in the book, if you could apply some of your advice, like fairy dust to our entire profession, you know, if you could kind of wave a magic wand and help everyone everywhere, every school leader who's who is navigating change in their school.

[17:26]

If you could help us do some aspect of that differently or more effectively, what would that be? What would you have us do based on your advice in the book?

[17:34] SPEAKER_00:

One thing that oftentimes gets missed is that this work is developmental work. You're asking human beings to change and human beings to build skills. And ideally, we do this from an inspirational, both head and heart centered place. And Anytime I look at a school or district strategic plan, my follow-up question is, what is the people development plan in order to realize this vision? And oftentimes, schools are pretty good at coming up with strategic plans. They assign resources.

[18:09]

They assign time. Sometimes it's a six to 18-month process. But there isn't the same, oftentimes, care and attention paid to the implementation of that plan. So if I had some magic...

[18:22]

pixie dust. I would love every single principal or superintendent, once they get that plan or that design document finalized, to immediately start thinking, okay, how can I leverage the strengths and talents of every single person here to realize this vision? And what do I need to do to remove barriers to help make that happen? I think if we did that, we would have a tidal wave of change at our fingertips. Because right there, you're starting to engage both the head and the hearts of the people who do this work. And we oftentimes, we don't double down enough on that.

[19:00]

Educators, for the most part, any educator I have ever met is a very mission-centered person. And somewhere along the line, that's been stripped out of, for too many folks, not everybody, of course, but for too many folks in the day-to-day of their work. And a strategic plan document is a thing to be implemented. as opposed to a North Star, that I as a practitioner can move towards, that I'll be able to master my own craft and the pursuit of it and really embark on my own hero's journey in this work. And the Morris School or district can help me sharpen my own saw in work that's deeply meaningful to me, that I can see is helping the kids and that is working on outcomes that we all know matter. Then that's real work.

[19:50]

And any sort of development outside of that too often is an HR form-filling exercise, a huge waste of time and resources and box checking, and ultimately doesn't get us any closer to where we want to go.

[20:06] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Julie, wonderfully said. If people want to learn more about your work at the Institute for the Future of Learning and possibly collaborating with you on a change project, where is the best place for them to find you online?

[20:17] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. If folks visit the website, which is the-ifl.org, that's the-ifl.org. And if you click on the book, you'll get an overview of the book. Plus, there are a bunch of resources there which are available for free download as well.

[20:36]

I've got the Change Capacity Questionnaire, which is a great tool to begin this work. An Individual Development Plan Template, again, another tool for folks. And A downloadable roadmap, that's a great tool. If you're reading the book and just want to capture some notes, maybe bring those notes to a faculty or a leadership meeting. It's just a nice little downloadable tool to help you do that.

[20:56] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Julie, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[20:59] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for having me, Justin.

[21:01] SPEAKER_02:

And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership. So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Julie Wilson about changing education? One of the big takeaways for me is this idea that change is developmental work, and it's work that we need to build capacity for. when we want people to do something new, particularly when we want our frontline practitioners to do something new. So if you're a district administrator, that would be your teachers and school administrators. If you are a school administrator and you want to bring in a change that will require your teachers to do something new and different and challenging, we have got to build capacity for that work.

[21:43]

And if you are leading that work, if you are supervising that work, as Julie said, you don't need to know every detail of it. But as we discussed, you do need to know how much it costs. And when I say costs, I mean in terms of time, in terms of mental bandwidth, in terms of resources. We have to understand the situation that we're putting our frontline educators in. If we want to have success, we need to know the cost in terms of those resources that we will need to invest. When it comes to curriculum in particular, I want to encourage you to invest in building your teachers expertise in helping teachers understand what it looks like to develop high quality curriculum.

[22:27]

And if you are in the midst of some changes around project based learning, I want to encourage you to check out our project based learning curriculum developer certification program. You can learn more about that and get a roadmap for teachers as well as a roadmap for school and district leaders at amybader.com slash certification.

[22:46] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.