Passionate Leadership

Creating a Culture of Success in Every School

Salome Thomas-EL, Joseph Jones, T.J. Vari

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781544345697
• eBook ISBN: 9781544345673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Reignite your passion for serving children!

Have you fallen into a rut? Has your position become simply a "role" or a "job?" The authors of this book will remind you why education, the most important profession in our society, demands passionate leadership.

Passionate Leadership is an aspiring call to action for teachers and principals around the world to recommit to passionately serving children, building the communities children deserve, and celebrating our successes. Take ownership, push to new heights, and break old boundaries by following the strategies in this book. Discover

• Practical ideas and suggestions for how to serve as a beacon of hope in the field
• First-hand experiences from enthusiastic leaders modeling what passionate leadership looks like
• Charts and graphs that will help you assess your strong points and identify areas you can improve on

Student success and growth begin with leaders who commit to taking courageous action!

Part I Inspiring to GrowA Culture of Strong Relationships

“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘you can’t paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”

—Van Gogh

Our strengths come to bear when we are thriving within a school culture, among a group of educators who are fully committed to their own growth and who seek out opportunities to become better. Passionate educators take full responsibility for their own development, and they seek to learn and grow each day for the betterment of their students. They embrace the mantra that Today I will grow by challenging myself to be the best I can. They know that within a diverse and challenging environment, every single day holds new situations with the promise that they truly can make a difference in the lives of children. Challenging ourselves means seeking out new horizons, reaching for new ideas, uncovering greater possibilities for discovery and development. This runs counter to a culture that stifles new meaning and which fails to recognize our infinite potential to experience growth. Because the ultimate goal is for all students to succeed, all educators must be willing to master their craft, pursuing their expertise with a fervor to excel and to implement the best teaching practices in a supportive, growth-oriented culture. It’s the stories we tell, like the one about Principal Cynthia Jewell, that reinforce our work and remind us that change is difficult but achievable. When a passionate group of committed adults rally behind a noble purpose, success is inevitable.

Results Through Passionate Leadership
Inspiring Change and Reaching Goals Through Data Consciousness and Difficult Conversations

Principal Cynthia Jewell, Stockbridge Elementary

Stockbridge, Georgia

We live in a society that relies mostly on using assessments and test scores to measure and report how well our schools are doing. Whether we are looking at state, national, or international assessments, they all are commonly used to rate, compare, and assign a grade to our schools. Much of the standardized assessment narrative is that schools aren’t doing well, and Stockbridge Elementary found itself in this same boat. Interestingly, at one time, the school was performing very well and receiving tremendous accolades. However, as the state test changed, and rigor increased, scores did not. Stockbridge was left in need of revitalization with the ultimate demand to overhaul their practices.

Even though state assessments are only one indicator of performance and aren’t always the right reason to react with sweeping changes, they do indicate student performance on the standards and can’t be ignored over time. For Stockbridge, the numbers were low and stagnant. As administration changed, the new principal, Cynthia Jewell, came to the school with a fresh outlook. She wanted Stockbridge to excel academically, in all areas, and she was eager to build a community obsessed with student achievement.

Quickly in her tenure, Principal Jewell identified groups of students who were not doing well. She dug into the data and realized that her response to intervention (RtI) Tier 2 and Tier 3 students stood out as not making the necessary gains toward proficiency. Knowing these students were already receiving assistance within the school, she questioned what else they might be able to do to solve the problem. Identifying the students who are in need is actually the easy part; figuring out what to do to solve the student achievement puzzle is the true challenge. As a result, she realized that to make a difference, the faculty had to accept that the scores weren’t necessarily a student issue, but rather one that everyone needed to own. The staff had to take full responsibility for student learning. She asked the question, “Are we satisfied with our current practices and how poorly our students are doing?” One major conclusion they made was about lesson planning. Although efficient, the grade-level teams used group-made lesson plans that divided up the subjects by content area and then shared them prior to teaching the particular lesson. The lessons were aligned to the standards, but this divide-and-conquer approach left teachers without clarity on what they were teaching and the lessons were not instructionally responsive to all students’ needs. The plans were too generic and lacked input.

As a result, Stockbridge embarked on a new journey to improve how teachers collaborated, to institute formalized professional learning communities (PLCs), and to implement an aggressive reading initiative. Principal Jewell emphasized to everyone, “If the students cannot read, they simply cannot learn.” They underwent intensive professional development, which was then reinforced in PLCs and during walkthroughs. Frequent visits to classrooms were conducted by the administration and the instructional coach, specifically designed to see the initiative in action and how well the teachers were doing. The first year had its challenges, but they knew going in that change always takes place after conflict.

During the second year, the initiative started to take hold, and teacher buy-in spiked. They began to take real ownership of the new student learning targets. They reimagined the importance of their instruction, their ability to connect with kids, and their enthusiasm for the work. Of course, as with all change initiatives, it wasn’t easy, but the only alternative was accepting failure. Instead, they pushed forward; formative assessments were used throughout lessons and within units, aligned to benchmarks to determine ongoing progress. They saw results. Students who were once unsuccessful were growing and, and in some cases, exceeding their goals.

Unfortunately, new endeavors are often riddled with challenges and resistance. For many, change is difficult and creates discomfort, which in Stockbridge’s case, led to a 40 percent teacher turnover by the end of Cynthia’s second year with the program. This exodus could easily be misconstrued by placing blame on Cynthia for alien could easily be misconstrued by placing blame on Cynthia for alienating her staff, ignoring the need for strong relationships, and demonstrating poor leadership. Cynthia herself could have doubted her decisions, questioning her actions. However, the reality was that the changes were making a difference, and some of the turnover was a good thing. PLCs were starting to function well, and teacher leaders were stepping forward to make contributions to the changes with a revived sense of purpose and passion. Those who weren’t willing to change felt the pressure of what it means to hold onto the past when everything around you is transforming. Fortunately, the turnover was an opportunity for new people to shine, and it gave liberty to Cynthia to hire teachers, fully committed to student success, with the mindset that as professionals they too will learn and grow every day.

Teachers who know that their impact is making a difference coupled with improved student outcomes creates a culture where everyone is learning together. With energy, passion, and excitement, the teachers were now willing to be coached, visited by other teachers, and engaged in a cycle of growth. The school continues to experience gains, and the teachers are now leading the way. Cynthia’s new goals take into consideration even higher levels of student performance, and she knows that it means doing even more than they have so far, in new and different ways, with growth opportunities for everyone.

Cynthia is intent that Stockbridge will continue to succeed, and as the community continues to change, they will be ready to meet the needs of everyone who walks through their doors. She is creating a culture that champions the students and their success, regardless of their background or economic status. She ended the interview with resolve. She said that despite the school being high poverty, “how a child eats [free-and-reduced lunch] will not determine how well they learn.” What we love about this story is Cynthia’s commitment to building a learning culture for both students and staff. It’s clear that under Cynthia’s leadership everyone came to accept the importance of their own growth. A committed staff who takes ownership of student success through unique contributions and a strong commitment to learn and grow is the essence of passionate leadership.

1 A Learning Culture, Not a Teaching Culture

“The culture of a workplace—an organization’s values, norms, and practices—has a huge impact on our happiness and success.”

—Adam Grant, Originals, 2016

Everyone Works to Learn

A model learning environment is a space of contentment, comfort, and value with an extreme focus on learning. It’s vibrant and radiates positive activity grounded in an emotional connection between the students and teachers. When students are actively engaged with the content, one another, and the teacher, it’s literally palpable. A model learning environment is one where the students direct their own learning within the context that the teacher created, and the teacher facilitates as a guide and a coach. In classrooms where learning is taking place at the highest level, teachers move around purposefully, offering feedback to students, clarifying misconceptions, checking for understanding, and asking students to think deeply. Perhaps a supervisor is even in the room, observing the nuances of the class, identifying high-leverage strategies that should be praised and reinforced, uncovering opportunities for tweaks and adjustments to the lesson with specific feedback to improve performance. Everyone is working to support the learning that is clearly taking place.

The classroom described above is a model to support a culture of learning. It is alive and filled with passion that can be felt by everyone in the room, and it distinguishes the various roles that each person plays, whether they are a student, teacher, or supervisor. Although the roles among those in the classroom may differ—students learning, teachers teaching, and supervisors observing—each individual contributes to the overall achievement taking place. The student, teacher, and supervisor each focus on learning, growing, and using best practices in various ways to support one another. It means that students are taking responsibility for their own learning and growth, teachers are working toward student mastery, and supervisors are supporting the learning process for everyone. This is how great classrooms function and it’s what the larger school community recognizes as excellence from their schools. We all want classrooms where student learning is recognizable, where risk-taking among students and teachers is encouraged and rewarded, and where expectations are rooted in accountability and support. Just like the classroom we describe, schools and school systems need to operate in this type of ongoing support and collaboration among all involved to develop the “collective capacity” for improved student achievement and increased levels of learning (Fullan, 2011b). It has to be true for the students, true for the teachers, and true for the leaders.

The reality, though, is that it takes many different people and organizations within the broader context of education to work to achieve our desired results in schools. The first question, then, becomes whether or not we know and understand the “best practices” necessary for success and even whether or not we fundamentally agree on them as practitioners. And, when we’re not reaching our desired outcomes for students, the second question simply becomes: why aren’t these agreed upon best practices a more common occurrence? To understand the reasons why these questions arise, we need to explore how education gets muddy and how many viable practices are slowed down and rendered ineffective. One reason is that education gets messy when we become entangled in what we call the instructional-ations—stipulations, articulations, regulations, and legislation. On the surface, these teaching and learning efforts are not a bad thing, and many are well meaning, intended to solve real problems, but too often they interfere with our focus.

One of the major challenges that school systems face is in how the typical changes trickle down to the people on the frontlines—teachers, specialists, paraprofessionals, and administrators. Too often, by the time the “new ideas” are presented to the staff, even with a solid rationale, it is often perceived as just “one more thing,” and it’s reduced to a directive from on high. We recognize that change is common and should be positive, with many efforts designed to improve conditions, but that change initiatives in schools are generally negatively received. This perception isn’t wrong or even unique to education. The health care industry is a great example of a system that has significant oversight from government regulators, including agencies such as the Department of Justice, the Office of Inspector General, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, all of which are in place to “protect the public.” As a result, the health care industry, and its various components, are constantly subject to regulations and change initiatives beyond the immediate control of the people doing the work within the industry.

Many of the intended reforms fall into what Fullan (2011b) described as “wrong drivers.” These reforms include “punitive accountability versus capacity building . . . or ad hoc versus systemic policies” (Fullan, 2011b). To break this down further, the issue that schools often face is that the “regulatory” changes directly impact the classroom without additional support or resources for implementation. Over time, increased mandates without support, along with a negative narrative that schools are failing, can reduce the excitement and passion among those in the field. To exacerbate the problem, these changes are piled on top of one another so rapidly that the people in the trenches don’t have time to fully grasp the true intent of the reform efforts and, therefore, cannot successfully implement the new ideas with fidelity. In an industry where the practitioners rely on passion, combined with expertise, the changes inadvertently restrict and constrain the work. The real detriment when this happens is that the passion and fire within the educator can slowly extinguish. The teacher becomes someone who dreads meetings and visits from district office personnel because the information and messaging are essentially the same: “What we’re doing is never enough.” Whether it’s introducing new regulations and mandates, unpacking new or additional state assessments, reworking how the school can improve to meet new targets, or affirming additional responsibilities beyond the classroom, the changes blur together and feed a level of hopelessness that reduces the commitment toward the changes to compliance and an attitude of just “tell me what I need to do.” At their worst, the instructional-ations erode educators’ sense of professionalism to the point that they devolve into automatons, delivering a program while feeling personally devalued. The fact is, the opposite should be true. Educators should be passionate people who are held in high regard because of their unique expertise to teach children and shape the future generations of our workforce. And when we’re all not working together to support the learning culture in our schools, students suffer.

Unintended Consequences

So much work among well-intended reformers has been done to elevate expectations, increase rigor, and provide guidance throughout all of our schools. These efforts illuminate areas of need and increase the cry for all children to receive the very best education that can be provided. In the wake of these efforts, though, exist people who don’t perceive themselves as part of the equation in their creation, the success they boast, or the solutions they propose, but rather a part of the systemic educational problems that they highlight. We don’t foresee this style of reform changing—nor will its consequences. Actually, it’s better to be accepted as the new normal and for educational influencers and school leaders to do everything in their power to instill passion as the fuel for fervor and commitment to a learning culture so that we can thrive in a system that is constantly changing. When combined with technical expertise, passionate leaders create incredible learning environments for teachers and students to reach new heights. Outside the walls of the school, there are also a number of efforts designed to create a better system, but both internal and external efforts need to be in sync for either to be successful. Unfortunately, this is too often not the case. However, to realize the desired results, schools must be empowered and given a solid foundation of support through professional learning experiences and quality feedback to improve practice. In a learning culture, growth is the only mechanism to battle constant change, and many school systems are beginning to get it right. The unintended consequences of the outside-in reform efforts can only be mitigated through professional growth and a desire to improve the system from the inside out to meet each and every new demand placed on schools.

Due to competing efforts and initiatives, school leaders must view leading their school system through bifocal lenses. The first, an internal lens, drives progress and change based on key data that the school and district leaders have available and kno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments and Dedication
• About the Authors
• IntroductionFueling the Passion in Our Schools
• Part I Inspiring to GrowA Culture of Strong Relationships
• 1 A Learning Culture, Not a Teaching Culture
• 2 Developing the Desire for Change to Grow Faster
• Part II Everyone ContributesNo Passengers Allowed
• 3 The Wonder of a Work Ethic
• 4 Stronger Backs, Not Lighter Loads
• Part III Positivity Fueled by CelebrationsBeyond the Basics
• 5 Committing to a Culture of Celebration
• 6 Positive Educators Ignite the System
• ConclusionA Blueprint for Sustaining Passion in Our Schools
• References
• Index
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