Principal Voice: Listen, Learn, Lead

[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 once again by my friend, Dr. Russell Qualia. Dr. Qualia is the founder and director of the Qualia Institute for Student Aspirations and is America's foremost authority on the development and achievement of student voice and aspirations. And we're here today to talk about Russ's new book, Principal Voice, Listen, Learn, Lead.

[00:38] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Russ, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thanks, Justin. It's always good to be back. It's always a pleasure to talk with you, and I think we enjoy our conversations because of the way that I think we both think about voice in schools. You've really influenced my thinking a lot, and your ideas really resonate with me, and I'm very excited to hear that you're now talking about principal voice. You've been talking about student voice and teacher voice for years, as we've discussed previously on the show.

[01:05]

Take us into the new work on principal voice. How does that relate to your previous work on student and teacher voice?

[01:12] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, it's really interesting to me because when I, as you know, when I started doing this work on student voice now over 30 years, which is pretty amazing to myself that it lasted this long. But the more we started working around student voice, what we were finding out or trying to find out is why did some schools promote student voice while other ones didn't? And what we found out is that the schools that promoted student voice were the ones that had teachers with a sense of voice, that they felt comfortable speaking up, they shared their ideas, they took responsibility for them and so on. So we did the same thing. We went to those schools and we tried to figure out and analyze, say, well, if the teachers have a voice and the students have a voice, why do some of those schools have that in place and others don't? And what we found out, interestingly, albeit took me over 30 years to figure this out, the principals are the ones that hold the key.

[02:03]

If the principals feel like they don't have a voice, they're not going to transfer the ability to have a voice to their staff or for that matter, the staff to the students. And the more I talked to principals, and this is the part that surprised me as a former administrator myself, but how much the principals didn't really think they had a voice. And the more I talked to them and the more I watched and the more I looked at the research and the numbers, I came to the realization of saying, wow, you know what? You don't have a voice. And I started reflecting on my own when I was a leader of the school and saying, Man, maybe I didn't even have a voice when I thought I did. So we wrote this book relatively quickly.

[02:41]

Not that it didn't take a lot of thought, but it was just it was an easy right, quite frankly, because I could reflect on on my past and what I've learned and so on. So that's how we ended up with Principal Voice.

[02:51] SPEAKER_02:

Well, it makes total sense. I mean, I think back to, you know, being a principal, being kind of caught in the middle in a lot of ways between state expectations, federal expectations, district expectations, and teachers who have to actually implement those expectations. And often the voice that the teachers are hearing is not my beliefs about education, my beliefs about the best way to serve students, but me essentially conveying expectations from elsewhere. I mean, we're often the conduit for other people's priorities in the principal's office.

[03:20] SPEAKER_00:

Right. And here's the thing. And it becomes this sense of who's responsible to whom. And when I tell people, I go, we're responsible together. I mean, all of us are in this together. And what I share with the principals is, you know, it's not about giving up your voice to give other people's voice, but it's this whole notion of being willing to listen, as I talk about in the book, being willing to listen, being willing to learn, and then being able to lead together to And one of the unbelievable things that we've done with the data, which is really kind of the icing on the cake for me, for other people it's the entire cake, but for me it's kind of the icing on the cake, is we found out when teachers believed the administration was willing to learn from them, they worked three times harder to work their goals than teachers that didn't think administrators were willing to learn from them.

[04:05]

And so I look at data points like that and I say, you know what? That's why you need to have a voice so you can kind of bring out the voices of others.

[04:13] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it makes so much intuitive sense that when people feel like their efforts are not only going to make someone happy with what that person's priorities are, but they're actually going to result in things that matter to you. If you believe that your work is not going to be stymied at the next level, then yeah, that investment just goes way up.

[04:33] SPEAKER_00:

Well, what it does too, Justin, it correlates between the same data we're finding between teachers and students with that of principals and teachers. So when teachers feel valued by their administrators, they're five times more likely to believe they can make a difference. And we see that very similarly with the students when the teachers believe in the students, when they feel valued, when they have the sense of self-worth. And I'm embarrassed. It took me this long to sort of figure out the direction this went. I should have sided with the principals, worked my way down to students, but I sided with the students first and slowly but surely figured out, yeah, the kids need a voice, but unless the principal feels he or she has a voice, it's not going to much matter because the voice of kids are going to fall on deaf ears.

[05:13] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and if you think about, I worked in a large district where we had schools all over the performance spectrum, all over the socioeconomic spectrum. And I definitely saw a correlation between how, I guess, how free a principal felt to exercise their platform to speak up to the district, to try innovative ideas. I mean, it was overwhelmingly the schools that were higher performing, that were not a concern to the district, that were not being told what to do. And it's easy to kind of just see that as a correlation and say, well, you know, they have less to worry about, you know, they're not under the same pressures. But I think so much of it does come down to the, you know, the sense of, I don't know if it's about autonomy or just kind of the freedom to really, you know, be heard without feeling like you're at risk.

[06:03]

And I think when the stakes feel higher, when you're in a school that is struggling more and you know that students federal accountability is is breathing down your neck. I think there's a lot more pressure to, you know, to kind of silence that voice and to say, you know, I'm just going to kind of make things happen. I'm not going to speak up. I'm not going to really push on the things that I believe in in the same way. So I and I definitely don't want to make a blanket statement there. I think I've heard from a lot of courageous people across the school spectrum at every level.

[06:32]

But I think we do something to school leaders When their students are needier that we don't do to principals in higher performing schools. It sounds like you're saying we might we might have that backwards.

[06:44] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think we absolutely have it backwards. And, you know, it's it's to me when I talk about this in the book, I also talk about that when I when I meet with different school leaders is I said, you know, one of the challenges we need to do this a better job of balancing is. balancing between what we're doing as important to us to that of what is absolutely urgent. We are driven by urgencies. We're not necessarily driven by what is important. I also think we need to balance this notion between innovation and compliance.

[07:13]

On one hand, I'm saying be innovative, but on the other hand, I'm held accountable to comply. What does that balance look like? And I think you can have a balance. And the last balance I address is the balance between As a principal, personal goals and organizational goals. When those things are out of play, frustration sets in and disparity, quite frankly, between the staff students and the principal. One of the interesting things doing the research for this piece is was there is so much written about educational leadership.

[07:46]

I mean, there are more adjectives in front of the word leader than you could possibly fathom. And I get it, I suppose. And I think they all have some value. Except what I try to do is I try to break down every single one of those types of leaders and say, what do they all have in common? The very best. What are the very best principles have in common?

[08:07]

And what I found is they all listen. They're all willing to learn, and they all lead together. So this model is seemingly simple, listen, learn, and lead. When you really dig into it, it's amazingly complex that listening becomes an action. It's not just sitting there and getting stuff. But listening really shows others your sense of self-worth, your sense of courage, your willingness to communicate, to collaborate.

[08:32]

So I tell principals, you know, this listen thing is all about action. And it's real action. It's not about yapping at a staff meeting or having an alleged open-door policy. It's getting out there. It's tracking people down. It's taking the time and making it a priority to listen to people, not just when the thing's going well, but when things are going well.

[08:52]

Because I think we make a mistake. We listen during crisis issues. If we started listening during success times, I think we're going to be better off. And then that led me to the learning component. Listening is okay, but if you're not hearing, we're never going to change. If we're not learning from what we're hearing, things are going to stay the same.

[09:11]

Hence, this whole learn thing to me deserved a category. So that's why I went listen, learn. And that's about understanding. It's about taking the time and being open to understand.

[09:20] SPEAKER_02:

Well, yeah, take us into that a little bit, because as administrators, we are used to having to listen to people. We're used to people coming in and issuing complaints, making requests, venting. We feel like we do a lot of listening, but I think we often are frustrated by... what we're hearing and, you know, what's actually actionable from it.

[09:44]

You know, it feels like, you know, just a way of collecting more fires that have to be put out and doesn't always translate into the type of leadership that we want to be doing. So what does that look like to listen and then lead based on what we learn?

[09:58] SPEAKER_00:

I think there's two things that jump to me. The very first thing is that listening right now, we do it in a reactive mode. And what I'm telling and sharing with principals and educational leaders in general We need to be in the proactive mode in the sense of I listen to things when things aren't going well because people will use me as a sounding board or complain about things. But if I actively listen and say, why are we so successful? What are we doing right? The whole tenor changes.

[10:26]

And because that learning piece changes when there are issues, that even looks differently. So, for example, when I listen and learn from you, one, I want to hear your concerns. Two, I want to hear your ideas to make things better. And three, and most importantly, I want to hear what you're going to do about it. This doesn't become my issue. It becomes our issue.

[10:47]

And I think that's a mistake we make in the principalship. I think that's a mistake we make in any kind of leader position, quite frankly, even in businesses. It's like your problem becomes mine rather than your problem is really my problem, hence the solution becomes ours. And I think that's the direction we need to go to. And that leads me right into the lead piece is that this lead thing is not about me. It's about all of us.

[11:11]

And a component of lead that we don't talk a lot about is this notion of following. I can lead all I want. But if people aren't following, believing, making a difference with some of the ideas I have and making them better – It's just me again. I'm the king of a fiefdom, and it's not going anywhere. But when we share that responsibility by learning from others and being willing to change, we can see some real change moving forward. At least that's what I've seen in the schools that are most successful, hence what led to this book.

[11:41] SPEAKER_02:

And let's talk more about the connection to teachers because you mentioned earlier that teachers are dramatically more likely – to respect student voice if they see that their principals have a voice, that their voice is respected. So what is that connection that you make in the book between principal voice and their work with teachers?

[11:59] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, the connection I make is first the reality. And the reality is of the thousands of teachers that we survey, 56% of them say that building administration is willing to learn from the staff. Yeah, that's worth repeating. 56% of teachers say building administration is willing to learn from staff. So I say to the principal, as you're working on your voice, you need to let others know that you're willing to learn from their voice. But right now, they don't think so.

[12:25]

And this is even more, I don't know, discouraging, I guess, in some ways, yet kind of reinforces what we're doing. is that 50% of the teachers say building administrations know their professional goals. How could you possibly be a building administrator and leading teachers if you don't know their professional goals? Or let's say I do know their professional goals, but if my teachers don't think I know them, what good does that do? And so I'm just seeing lots and lots of things like that that just kind of resonated with me and said, you know, before we get all fancied out and complicate leadership because we can, let's get back to some basics about listening, learning, and leading.

[13:00] SPEAKER_02:

because the data is telling me we're not even doing that right yet yeah those are not encouraging numbers to hear that you know that only about half of teachers really feel like they're listened to and that they have that that influence with their administrators so as we listen one of the things that i think a lot of us struggle with is how to listen in a way that that shows respect but that doesn't set the wrong expectations about what we're going to do or how much we agree we're With what we're hearing, because, you know, often people will come in and want to bend your ear on something and want to have their way. And, you know, I tend to like naturally smile and nod when I'm listening and encourage the person to, you know, keep telling me what they're telling me. But I realized as a principal, that's dangerous because they can walk out of that conversation feeling like I'm going to go do everything they just asked me to do and that I fully agree with everything they said.

[13:51]

So what are some approaches to gaining that information, to listening, to showing that respect for teachers without taking away the essential role that we play in making some of those decisions and in filtering input from a lot of different sources that often conflicts?

[14:07] SPEAKER_00:

It's a great point. And this is actually really funny to me in an interesting way. Even when you describe that, you talk about the teachers coming in and then leaving the office. And that's the first thing I suggest to administrators is say, you got to get out of this mentality that they're coming to you. What are you doing to go to them? I talk a lot about this and actually write a lot about this.

[14:28]

I said, I'm so tired of hearing you have an open-door policy. I go, it doesn't mean diddly if no one's coming in it. So let's have an open-door policy, but that means you're going to go out of it. It's a really different mindset to think about the role of leaders of saying, I'm going to be proactive in my listening. And then when I do listen, I can't be afraid of what I don't know. This passive listening, there's all sorts of books on listening that is far better than I'm going to get into the notion of listening.

[14:58]

But what I do know is that we need to get away from perceiving teachers as complainers, but recognizing teachers as advocates for change. I think we've got to get away from thinking I'm the boss and I know what's best to the belief that teachers have something to teach me. I think we've got to get away from the notion that staff meetings is a platform for me to control the announcements to this notion of let's share responsibility at these meetings. And I think we need to really get away from this focus on evaluation of our teachers and concentrate more on knowing our teachers' hopes and dreams And in working with them to help them achieve their professional goals. Now, this isn't a bunch of Candyland stuff, because I know it sounds like, oh, God, it goes rust on just as now he's into the principal thing. This is real.

[15:47]

It's real. When I do those things as the principal, my staff is more engaged. They know the goals of the school. They were caught up to reach those goals. They give students more voice. They're even seven times more likely to be creative.

[15:59]

It's a fundamental thing about human behavior that we somehow missed in our ed leadership courses when we were in grad school. And I'm guilty because I used to teach those.

[16:08] SPEAKER_02:

I don't want people to hear this and say, well, Russ is in California and he's kind of a hippie, so he doesn't really believe in teacher evaluation. And feel free to disagree with any of those statements. I'm not sure if you will or not. Yeah. But I think what you're getting at here is something that's very fundamental about human motivation. And I look back on the things that I was really hesitant to do that are very popular in our profession along the lines of kind of telling teachers what they're doing wrong and collecting a lot of data about what they're doing and not really asking teachers, what are you trying to accomplish with this lesson?

[16:47]

How do you feel like it's going? I found that that I would tend to Talk to teachers in a way that handed it over to them to let them tell me how they think it went what they were trying to accomplish and I would very seldom go in kind of looking for something and What I've come to realize in the last couple of months as I've learned more about self-determination theory about human motivation I came across this through Paul Tuff's work and interviewed Paul Tuff recently about his book, Helping Children Succeed. And he introduces the theory from Dacey and Ryan of self-determination theory. Hugely, hugely influential in ways that I had no idea were underlying a lot of the research that we're more familiar with in education. But this idea that autonomy is an enormous motivator, that so much of motivation comes from autonomy.

[17:42]

And yet, what do we do in schools when we want to increase performance? When we want our schools to get better, we ratchet down their autonomy. We take it away and we say, here's what you need to do. You need to do this best practice. You need to implement this program that's been proven elsewhere. And the autonomy goes away.

[17:58]

And we wonder why we can't keep people. We wonder why people seem to be demoralized. And I think it gets back to exactly what you've been saying.

[18:06] SPEAKER_00:

Just for clarity, yes, I look like a hippie. I have long hair, ponytail, and wear Birkenstocks, as you know. But I'm not from California. I'm from Maine, which actually makes it even more bizarre. But, you know, I think to your point, I think you're exactly right. And it's nothing we don't know already about the relationship between, as you point out, between teachers and students.

[18:30]

But the exact same is true between the leadership in the school and the teachers. And part of that is I think it's driven by this notion, this incredible lack of trust. for the people we're working with, and more trust for the system. In other words, we're being driven by a system that we might have doubts about, but it's so black and white, it's easy to kind of fall in line. To believe in my staff and know there's some gray area takes a great deal of trust. And what I found, and again, what you just alluded to, is this notion, the more trust I put in staff, the greater the return is going to be.

[19:06]

And it's not about not holding people accountable. I think people need to be accountable. I just use a different term. It's called being responsible. Here's the difference, Justin. When I'm accountable, I'm accountable to somebody outside of myself.

[19:20]

Could be you, could be the superintendent, could be the school board, could be a bunch of parents, whatever. When I'm responsible, I'm responsible to me. I have high expectations of me. And you know what that means? You can't even have higher expectations of me than I already have. And that's the notion where I think we need to go into schools.

[19:39]

Again, I understand the importance of assessment and evaluations. I get all that. But it's not underpinned by trust and responsibility. It's actually underpinned by this notion of you know, I don't believe you in this notion of gotcha. And I just, God, it turns kids off. It turns teachers off.

[19:57]

And quite frankly, from the interviews we did with the principals, it turns them off.

[20:01] SPEAKER_02:

So we've gotten into the connection between principal voice and teacher voice and how we relate to our staff. And I wonder if we could broaden that and look outward to parents and to community members. What do you see as the link between principal voice and those relationships and even parent voice and community member voice?

[20:21] SPEAKER_00:

The first thing is that we absolutely split the difference between parents and community. There are two different sets of groups that we're dealing with. So it's not a matter of having principal voice relating to parents and the community, but it's principal voice relating to parents and principal voice relating to the community. Those are incredibly complex. As a former administrator, I used to say all the time, I want parents in my school until they came. And I'm like, seriously, what are you even doing here?

[20:48]

Well, because I invited them. Interestingly enough, it was never the parents I wanted in my building. So here's the things that we've learned from the principals that really do exemplify their voice with parents. is they're visible. They do things that are not only out of the box, but they don't even see the box. So once a week, they'll have coffee and donuts when they drop their kids off at school.

[21:11]

They don't even have to say hi to anybody, but here's a little something to know that this school is open to you. I think when it comes to the notion of communicating with parents, We need to be way more clever than sending home a flyer or these robocalls that I have a daughter in high school that I get now. And they just quite frankly, they're annoying to me now. We're just going to be more creative. We can't assume everyone has a computer that we can just send them an email. We can't assume that everyone reads.

[21:40]

So we just can't send a newsletter. And we can't assume everyone understands English. So we just can't do these robocalls. So we need to be very creative and part of that is about being willing to listen and to learn to the parents and to modify how we connect with them on an individual basis and how every school is actually different. When it comes to working with a community, I think we shoot ourselves in the foot as educational leaders. We talk a foreign language.

[22:05]

Um, we use acronyms that we don't even know this whole thing. This is actually funny. Just happened last week. I'm in DC. They yapping about ESSA, ESSA. And I said to somebody, I go, do you even know what that means?

[22:20]

Hmm. No. I go, oh, man. So I see us using acronyms with parents. I see us using language that makes no sense to them. And it's not about dumbing things down.

[22:32]

It's just being real. And the very best principles that we saw in action were real. They were in the community. They talked to people. They were transparent. And there were no errors about them.

[22:46]

And the more they acted like that, the more respected they became in the community. And I think that's kind of the piece I see with parents and community. I think that is one of the common grounds is that we just need to be real. And we're not as much as we should be. Certainly some are. But we can do a whole lot better.

[23:05] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Russ, it's been a pleasure to speak with you again. Always a blast. And I'm very excited to learn about the new book, Principal Voice, Listen, Learn, and Lead. Available from Corwin and a pretty quick read. Really appreciate you joining me again on Principal Center Radio.

[23:20] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Justin. Likewise.

[23:23] SPEAKER_01:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[23:27] SPEAKER_02:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Qualia? One thing that really stands out to me is the nature of distributed leadership. And I think often we've gotten it wrong in our profession. We think that leadership is hierarchical. We think that if we're the principal, we're the leader.

[23:46]

But the reality is that leadership is inherently distributed. And that's true even of things that we hold very near and dear, like instructional leadership. And there's been some research from the Wallace Foundation that has found that instructional leadership is distributed or stretched over multiple staff members in your school. And one idea that I'm exploring, and I think Russ's work kind of reinforces this for me, that instructional leadership is distributed not only among staff, but also extending to students themselves. and family members in the community. The work that we're doing on behalf of our students is not just work that's defined by our job category, by our title.

[24:25]

It's work that we're embarking on collectively, that we pursue collectively. And in order to effectively share that leadership, we've got to be communicating with each other. And I've really appreciated Russ's perspective on finding our voice on making sure that we're able to be more than just a conduit for other people's priorities in terms of district and federal policy, but that we can actually engage with the people in our school to make decisions together on what's going to make the greatest difference for our students. So I want to invite you to do something on a regular basis that you're probably already doing to some extent, but to take Russ up on his challenge to have an open door policy, but to use that open door policy not to just wait for teachers to come in, but to actually walk out that door. to go talk to people, whether it's parents at the drop-off line, whether it's teachers in their classroom, whether it's students in the cafeteria and in the hallways and in their classrooms, I want to challenge you to get out there and see that not just as supervision time, not just as a time to give feedback, but as a time to listen and learn.

[25:29]

And if you'd like more information on our free program, the 21 Day Instructional Leadership Challenge, which will give you the time management strategies to actually make that happen, you can sign up anytime at instructionalleadershipchallenge.com.

[25:41] Announcer:

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