Harness the Power of Reflection

Continuous School Improvement From the Front Office to the Classroom

Ron Nash

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781412992671
• eBook ISBN: 9781452237084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

"Anyone in the education field would benefit from reading this book. Ron Nash expertly weaves in case studies illustrating the topic of each chapter. He has inspired me to continue to focus on improvement in my school."
—Jill Broaddus, Principal
Cool Spring Elementary, Leesburg, VA

Elevate your team?s attitude from "whatever" to "whatever it takes"

Seasoned educator Ron Nash shares the results of his visits to schools where "we will do better" has replaced "whatever" as the official mantra. His findings will inspire school staff members to embark on their own continuous improvement journeys and model that experience for their students. This book provides a framework for individual reflection and evaluation of schools? processes as part of a professional development program. Ideally, all staff members will be on board. But even with less than 100% support, each person can make a difference. The results speak for themselves:

Inspired and empowered staff members

• Active classrooms with engaged students who enjoy school
• A customer service-oriented culture where parents feel welcome and valued
• A schoolwide commitment to sustaining improvement efforts

Included are strategies, action items, processes, and examples from successful programs nationwide. From the classroom to the lunchroom, students learn from those around them. By modeling commitment, self-renewal, and persistence in the face of difficulties, we are teaching skills that will serve students well in adulthood.

1

Going Viral With Improvement

Ionce saw a school cafeteria manager who wore a funny hat. The cafeteria manager with the funny hat greeted every student in the lunch line by name. This man works in a school dedicated to continuous improvement. The principal of the school involves her staff in the continuous-improvement process, but the idea of progress is nonnegotiable. At this school, problems are identified, solutions are surfaced, and evaluation comes close on the heels of implementation. All this takes place in the context of a continuous-improvement journey that never ends. Process is king, and the blame game is out of bounds.

I could have begun this first chapter with a classroom-based story; I could have chosen many just from this particular elementary school, Sanders Corner, in Loudoun County, Virginia. In dynamic schools like this, however, progress is not limited to the classroom, and everyone in the school is a player. In terms today’s web-obsessed generation can well understand, when improvement goes viral in a school or district, everyone is involved. In the case of the cafeteria manager with the funny hat, the kids liked the hat and loved the idea that he cared enough to get to know their names. I can also report that this particular cafeteria manager, Nick DeCicco (Mr. Nick to the kids), is constantly working to upgrade the quality of the food and service for the kids in his care. He talked with me about what they were doing in the cafeteria—and he spoke the language of improvement.

DeCicco began his tenure at Sanders Corner Elementary School with several goals: improving efficiency in the areas of the cost and quality of food; building positive relationships with staff, students, and parents; and making the school cafeteria a fun place to be. After many months of making changes and adjustments, DeCicco related to his sister that “something magic was happening” in the school cafeteria. He knew this because he was at the point of sale in the lunch line every day (not in his office), wearing a smile and one of those funny hats—and greeting each student by name. I observed this firsthand one morning, and I, too, saw the magic. Those elementary students love “Mr. Nick,” and I watched their faces light up when he greeted them in the lunch line. With the active support of a school principal who understands there is nothing that can’t be made better, DeCicco set about improving every aspect of every process connected to a system he understood would benefit his primary clients—the students of Sanders Corner Elementary.

Continuous improvement is not a destination; it is a journey that really has no finish line. The idea is to put in place a system that will outlast the tenure of a particular principal. The active components of this system are processes that are put in place to deal with and solve problems that might otherwise impede progress. For example, in the school I referenced in the opening paragraphs, the principal, Kathy Hwang, empowered the faculty to solve the problem of hallways that had become noisy enough to negatively affect learning in classrooms all over the building. The faculty agreed on a solution and then implemented it. They came back together to report on its efficacy, and that process is still in place three years later. I can attest to the fact that the hallways are quiet, and teachers can continue with lessons uninterrupted. The problem was surfaced by the faculty, and the solution came from the faculty; this serves to support the notion that those closest to the problems are often closest to the solutions. This improvement was not a top-down decree from the principal’s office. The faculty invested in the dialogue surrounding the problem, and they bought into the agreed-upon process that ultimately solved it. True to the spirit of continuous improvement, the process is consistently revisited to see if further adjustments are needed to ensure its continued efficacy.

The Very First Thing

We’ll talk later about the whole idea of change, but suffice it to say here that veteran teachers can perhaps be forgiven for being skeptical and even cynical about the latest change initiative passed down from the powers that be. My experience tells me that even the most skeptical and cynical veteran teachers were not always so. Part of the reason for their reluctance to jump on board what seems to them to be the program du jour is that improvement initiatives are often introduced with great fanfare (and often with great expenditure), only to be abandoned after a few months or years. Some of these initiatives die the death of a thousand cuts, as teachers and staff who were not part of the original decision begin to spot the flaws and problems as the initiative unfolds. Administrators at the building level receive pushback that they may, in turn, push back up the ladder, and people in the district’s central office begin to feel the pressure from what could be dozens of schools. At some point, a decision may be made to jettison the program altogether, and scores of believers become skeptics, while scores of skeptics move to the ranks of the cynics. The whole thing leaves a bad taste in the collective mouth of the organization, and another opportunity for positive change and improvement is lost.

This leads us to the very first thing administrators at any level need to do: Commit to putting in place a system of improvement that will outlive you. Too many administrators try to be “the answer person.” By this I mean that when teachers or other employees approach the principal, he immediately provides the answer to their questions. It is as if the principal has a mental briefcase full of answers; all that needs to be done is to find the right answer from the briefcase, and the staff member walks away happy (or not)—but no closer to being able to solve problems on her own or with others in any collegial way. Have a question? Go find the principal. One problem here, of course, is that when the principal leaves, the solution-to-the-problems briefcase goes with him. Everyone on staff then hopes that whatever else the new principal is or is not, he or she has a briefcase full of answers. The more critical problem is that the staff is no closer to being able to build a capacity to solve problems on their own. They have come to rely totally on “the powers that be” for answers and solutions. Any principal about to retire ought to be able to do so without worrying about what will happen to the staff and students. If members of the staff have the capacity to walk confidently down the continuous-improvement highway, the retirement of the principal will not be an impediment to forward progress; the system for steady and effective improvement is in place and functioning.

The best principals I know are everywhere in the building. They observe classrooms, talk with custodians, interact with teachers, and know the names of scores and even hundreds of students. I know principals who read to students, and I know principals who have students read to them. They love what they do, and they have enormous reserves of energy. Most of all, they know how to harness the power of the human beings in the building in the search for progress. Some things may be negotiable for these principals, but one thing that is not negotiable is the drive to improve. Putting in place the mechanisms for continuous improvement requires an understanding that wherever one is as a teacher, paraprofessional, secretary, custodian, school bus driver, or cafeteria worker—there is always a need to get better.

The Role of Leadership

From the beginning of any conscious effort at organizational improvement, everyone from the front office to the classroom to the cafeteria must understand that the continuous-improvement journey has no end, and that is as it should be. As Smylie (2010) reminds us, improvement is not just about change. Something can change for the worse or for the better, so “improvement requires change in the direction toward some valued objective.” He continues,

To be sure, there is progress to be made, successes to be attained, and objectives to be met. But improvement in the sense of continuous improvement is never fully achieved. The valued outcome is the organization getting better and better and better at what it is, at what it does, and what it achieves, ad infinitum. It is the stance that good is never good enough. (p. 25)

This idea of no finish line is sometimes difficult for employees in an organization to understand. “Never good enough” is not something people long to hear, but leaders need to invest the time necessary to help everyone understand that it is not about good or bad, or right or wrong; it is about moving inexorably forward from a baseline— wherever or whatever that baseline is.

There is no one—teacher, administrator, secretary, custodian, or cafeteria worker—who cannot improve over time. Customer service in the front office can always be improved, positive changes can always be made in the way the building is cleaned and maintained, improvements in connection with the lunchroom are always possible, instruction can be made better—improvements in all these areas make the school more efficient and productive. A common belief that continuous-improvement efforts are desirable will make the building a more pleasant place to be. Employees who pay attention to their external customers and their internal customers will help move the organization steadily down the continuous-improvement highway.

Whom Do We Serve?

Efforts at continuous improvement often come not as part of some master plan, but as a realization that no matter what our job is in the schoolhouse, there are those whom we serve externally (students, parents, community) and internally (colleagues). Those who greet parents and students in the front office also interact with members of the administration, faculty, and support staff. I have observed front office personnel who treat absolutely everyone with courtesy and undivided attention, and I have seen office personnel smile at parents and then snap at employees, all in the space of a few minutes. Whatever standard of customer service is in place for external customers ought to be in place for everyone else in the building, for the simple reason that a double standard in this area can be detrimental to the organization.

While teaching social studies at a middle school in the early 1990s, I was also the yearbook adviser. Anyone who has held that job understands that a great deal of time is spent after school and into the evening in an attempt to make the book worthy of publication. Working late, therefore, I often had the opportunity to chat with the night custodian. Early in the school year, she sat down and asked me what she could do to make my job easier. I thought for a moment and then suggested some things having to do with what part of the board to erase, furniture placement, and so on. Appreciating that she had taken the time to solicit my feedback, I returned the favor by asking what I could do to assist her. She came up with two or three things that would help in the efficiency department, and from that moment on, we both went out of our way to assist one another. This night custodian understood that I was her internal customer; she was invested in making my classroom a better place for me and my students.

While her efforts on my behalf were laudatory, and much appreciated by me, it was not part of an overall program of continuous improvement in the building. It happened because we both came to understand the supportive relationship between us. After forty years in education, I could mention scores of employees who acted in the spirit of improving how they did what they did on their own, with no direction from above. The problem with this, of course, is that these individual efforts are not part of a system of improvement; they are isolated incidents, and unlikely to move the organization forward in any meaningful way.

Let’s suppose for a moment that the head day and night custodians, along with several teacher leaders, administrators, and other support staff within the building, could be brought together every month from August until May in a succession of two-hour sessions. The expressed purpose of these meetings would be to look closely at what is working in terms of building maintenance and to surface areas in need of improvement. Meetings like that would not be about right or wrong, or good or bad, or about playing the blame game; they would be concerned with where we are now and where we want to go. In facilitated meetings with custodians, teachers, and staff, what my night custodian and I had agreed to as it related to my classroom might very well have been set as the standard for every room in the building. Those meetings—dedicated to how the custodial staff and the other adults in the building could help each other— might have moved us all forward. Monthly work sessions with this same group would have gone a long way toward systematizing the sporadic improvement efforts of a few people in the building—and, importantly, everything decided upon in those sessions would have benefitted the students in our care.

In a profession where the continuous improvement of students is a given, the adults in the building ought to model for students the same methodology for success over time. Students should see teachers and staff collaborating on problem-solving techniques, taking risks on behalf of kids, and accepting inevitable mistakes as feedback—all in the name of moving confidently down the continuous-improvement highway. Modeling collaboration in the name of improvement is powerful.

This brings us to the second requirement for administrators who seek to put in place an improvement system that will outlive them: Involve everyone at every level from day one. Any serious attempt at systemically and continuously improving a school or school district must begin with involvement from those who have a stake in the outcome. Totally top-down efforts and improvement invariably lead to pushback; it then becomes a matter of how much pushback the administrators who introduced the initiative can take before they throw up their hands and call an end to it. If staff is expected to implement reform efforts, they should be directly involved from the start. The whole improvement effort must be utterly, completely, and consistently transparent in every way.

Those Closest to the Problem

One important role, then, of building leadership is to work to set in place processes (the monthly meetings we just described, for instance) dedicated to building the capacity of the adults in the schoolhouse to identify and solve their own problems. It is not the job of the administrators to simply provide all the answers or even to ask all the relevant questions. Those monthly meetings should continue even if the principal retires or transfers elsewhere in the district. Even in the absence of the principal, those in attendance can ask the right questions and seek corresponding solutions. Process-improvement teams should be empowered to make decisions when possible, so that the good work goes on no matter who is principal; there is always work to do because there are always problems in search of processes, and there are always processes in search of improvement.

Anyone who wants to find out what is right and wrong with a school from the viewpoint of faculty need look no further than the faculty lounge or the parking lot. To the casual observer, a school may appear clean and well run, but every organization has processes that break down in practice, attempts at communication that go awry, inefficiencies that are clear to everyone, complaints in search of an outlet, and problems crying out for solutions. To this extent, schools are no different than any other organization. As in any organization, the people who are closest to the problems may be in the best position to surface ideas and solutions. When it comes to improving the school in order to better serve its primary customers—students, parents, and the community at large—a building principal has an important and perhaps unique perspective, yet it is one perspective among many in any potentially effective improvement process.

Of one thing I am certain: Concerns, problems, and outright complaints will surface in the school building. The question is, will they surface in a controlled way, as the result of a systemic approach to problem solving, or will they surface at random wherever teachers gather in the parking lot, or chat on cell phones or at computer keyboards? Great principals regularly surface concerns and then enlist everyone’s help in dealing with those concerns or solving those problems. Effective principals involve staff in the decision-making process. Top-down improvement efforts instituted without buy-in from those directly affected may flounder down the road, and this is true with any organization.

A Matter of Perspective

A business acquaintance and I were once discussing the whole issue of continuous improvement, and he told me of a bank whose upper management team decided they would improve customer service by installing a very efficient telephone-answering system to replace the person who had always answered the phone and transferred the calls. The problem, of course, was that customers really liked talking to the wonderful lady who used to answer the phone as the first point of contact. Unfortunately for the bank, no one thought to ask the customers about this before the system was installed and before the (considerable) expenditures had been made in support of the new system. The outcry against this change was so loud and widespread that the bank was forced to scrap the new, efficient telephone-answering system, and replace it with the nice lady who loved talking to customers. The higher management of the bank, of course, put efficiency above what the customers loved—and never sought feedback from them or from the employees at ground level in the bank. At the upper managerial level of a bank, efficiency may be of primary concern; to customers— and to the employees who have to deal with those customers on a daily basis—the personal touch, a smile, and a bit of light banter might well be what customers want. In short, management simply thought like management and not like customers; this lack of empathy led to disastrous results.

For years I facilitated workshops on customer service for school-district employees, and I asked the following question: How many of you would prefer to have a person answer the phone when you call a company, rather than a machine? In every single case, almost every hand went up. Almost every hand, every time. Hardly scientific, I know, but telling nonetheless. Every reader, I suspect, has a horror story about being on hold for an inordinate amount of time, waiting to speak to a person. My personal record is twenty-three minutes— twenty-three minutes I’ll never get back. Imagine being the person who sits there all day long, answering the phone for customers who have spent a good chunk of their lives waiting to talk to them.

If organizations, including schools and districts, were to conduct surveys of parents (customers), businesses (customers), and other community members (customers), those organizations might come to the conclusion that stakeholders might prefer to have a happy, attentive, alert person actually answer the phone, rather than have to punch buttons and deal with an unnecessary rise in blood pressure. Decisions as to how to treat members of the school community (teachers, paraprofessionals, classified employees, parents) might best be arrived at with the help of those very people—stakeholders all. Decisions made by one or two people in an administrative office—the product of one or two sets of eyes—may not be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Prologue
• Dedication
• 1. Going Viral With Improvement
• 2. Change and the Status Quo
• 3. School Environment as Accelerant
• 4. Classroom Environment as Accelerant
• 5. Systematizing Process Improvement in the Classroom
• 6. Facilitating the Long Haul
• 7. Not Waiting for the “Go!”
• 8. Asking Questions and Getting Started
• Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• References
• Index