Leading with Focus

Elevating the Essentials for School and District Improvement

Mike Schmoker

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781416621393
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In his 2011 ASCD best-seller Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, author Mike Schmoker described a fresh pproach to K-12 teaching built on three core elements: a focused and coherent curriculum; clear, prioritized lessons; and purposeful reading and writing, or authentic literacy. Now, in Leading with Focus, he shows administrators, principals, and other education leaders how to apply his model to the work of running schools and districts. In this companion to his previous book, Schmoker offers * An overview of the case for simple, focused school and district leadership--demonstrating its power for vastly improving the work of teachers and leaders.
* Examples of real schools and districts that have embraced focused leadership--and the incredible results for student learning.
* A practical, flexible, and easy-to-follow implementation guide for ensuring focused leadership in schools and districts. All students deserve to learn in schools where educators eschew distractions and superfluous activities to concentrate on what's most important. To that end, this book is an essential resource for leaders ready to streamline their practice and focus their efforts on radically improving student learning.

---

Chapter 1

---

Focused Leadership: Doing Less—and Doing It Better

....................

The real path to greatness, it turns out, requires simplicity and diligence…. It demands each of us to focus on what is vital—and to eliminate all of the extraneous distractions.
—Jim Collins

Jim Collins' book Good to Great (2001) is the best-selling management book of our generation. At its heart is a profound claim: that ordinary human beings can become exceptional leaders. How? By radically simplifying the work of leadership. To succeed, leaders must carefully select, severely limit, and then persistently clarify (and clarify, and clarify, and clarify) the work to be done by those they lead. They must also reject anything that distracts them from their focus. In short, they must embrace simplicity.

An exciting body of research affirms the power of simplicity in any workplace. It is essential to both organizational and personal improvement, and it succeeds because it acknowledges the very real limits of people's time, talent, and concentration. Applied simplicity defines and clarifies precisely what leaders and employees need to focus on—and what they must be given explicit permission to ignore. We do our best work when the scope and focus of the work are crystal clear and limited only to what matters most at any given time (Siegel & Etzkorn, 2013; Maeda, 2006).

Focusing on essentials creates precious time for us to repeatedly and routinely practice and refine our efforts with minimal distraction or anxiety. When both leaders and employees are given a limited, manageable set of clear priorities or strategies and the opportunity to practice and receive feedback on them, both improvement and enhanced work satisfaction are all but inevitable (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).

Clear, manageable expectations reduce friction and misunderstandings between leaders and employees. Rather than limit our capacities, they make us more imaginative, productive, and proficient at what we do (Buckingham, 2005). They facilitate execution and allow us to work both faster and smarter. Clear, focused leadership reduces cognitive overload and confusion and makes work easier, more engaging, and pleasurable (Jensen, 2000). It allows us to work with greater confidence and competence. Simplicity promotes consistently high performance, with concomitant results. In our case, that means more teachers who truly know how to teach essential content and skills effectively.

Decades of research by prominent researchers in both education and industry back up the importance of focusing exclusively on a narrow set of priorities (Goodwin, 2011; Buckingham, 2005; Siegel & Etzkorn, 2013; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Collins, 2001; Jensen, 2000; Maeda, 2006). To succeed best, leaders must severely limit their focus to the most effective actions and repeatedly—even obsessively—clarify their expectations around those actions. If we can simplify (and, in the process, demystify) effective school leadership, we will multiply the number and proportion of ordinary people who become effective leaders.

"Hedgehog" Focus

Success, Collins tells us, is not the result of complex efforts or innovation, but rather a result of simplicity and diligence applied to an extremely limited set of core concepts or actions. His hero is the single-minded hedgehog of Aesop's fable "The Hedgehog and the Fox." The hedgehog knows well enough to repeat the same simple, ancient practice that always guarantees its safety. Rather than innovate, it does what has always enabled it to thrive: it rolls up into a protective ball. In this way, the hedgehog always triumphs against the complex, unfocused machinations of the fox.

A fairly simple formula emerges from Collins and others whose work focuses on simplicity:

• Carefully determine and severely reduce your focus to the fewest and most manageable priorities,
• Emphatically and repeatedly clarify those priorities throughout your organization, and
• Ensure that everyone stays focused on those priorities and fully commits to them through practice, reflection, and refinement.

To maintain focus, leaders must attain "piercing clarity" regarding their selected priorities and their absolute primacy (Collins, 2005, p. 17). Clarifying the organization's priorities is the leader's single most important job (Buckingham, 2005); success is the result of achieving "unbelievable clarity" about what people should focus on and practice (Jensen, 2000, p. 15). As Siegel and Etzkorn put it, "clarity makes for simplicity" (2013, p. 6). Leaders must see that without constant clarification, work will inevitably become more complex. People are easily diverted; an organization's "hedgehog" priorities will only be understood and properly implemented if the leader ceaselessly clarifies which actions do and don't support them.

Leaders, then, must unabashedly explain, illustrate, and advocate for what matters most. And they must just as doggedly clarify what the organization will not do: "hedgehog" focus can't be sustained in a climate of distraction, with people's time and attention being pulled in several directions at once. Simplicity "demands each one of us to focus on what is vital and to ignore the rest" (Collins, 2001, p. 91). That's simplicity.

If leaders and teachers were to attain piercing clarity about what actions matter most; if we were equally clear about the value and impact of those actions; if we learned and practiced them with "simplicity and diligence" (Collins, 2001, p. 104)—something stunning would happen for our students. To that end, let's examine a small set of leadership actions and principles—a working formula for ensuring the successful implementation of effective elements of good schooling.

A Simple Formula for Effective Leadership

The notion of a "formula" for effective school leadership may sound glib or simplistic—a perversion of simplicity. But as Collins and others demonstrate, there are times when even a fairly simple framework represents our best opportunity to move forward (in Brosnan, 2015).

There are five steps to our formula for effective leadership:

1. Research
2. Reduction
3. Clarification
4. Repeated practice
5. Monitoring

Step 1: Research—Carefully

Leaders' effectiveness depends mightily on what they determine to be what Stephen Covey calls "first things" (Covey, 1989): the best possible actions or practices for their school at a given time. Even if we differ on best practices, it is critical that we make decisions on the basis of good evidence rather than popular appeal. (Alas: schools are not, in the main, evidence-based cultures.) Leaders at every level have traditionally embraced what is popular over what is proven (Corcoran, Fuhrman, & Belcher, 2001; Goodwin, 2011). We see this everywhere. Our bias toward what's popular surely explains our unfounded but steadfast belief in the power of instructional technology (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Fullan, 2011; Cuban, 2011). Or consider popular but wholly unproven pedagogic fads, like insisting that students learn best when grouped by ability or "learning style." (These methods have been roundly debunked: see Goodwin, 2011; Willingham, 2009a; Schmoker, 2010.) The vast majority of fads in education are not based on reliable evidence.

Leaders need to make rational, hard-headed choices about what works. Of course, a problem soon emerges: there are many highly effective, proven practices out there. But if we try to do too many of them, our work will "complexify"—and we'll fail. Why? Because, once again, success depends on how much time we can realistically apportion to training and practicing—and training, and practicing—with new methods until everyone has successfully mastered them and made them a habit. This is an iron law of implementation success. But in case you haven't noticed, schools offer an excruciatingly limited amount of time to train and master new practices.

So to succeed, we have to reduce.

Step 2: Reduce—Until It Hurts

As John Maeda points out, "The first principle of simplicity is: reduce" (2006, p. 1). Once we have done the research, we must select from among various initiatives on the basis of what is most effective for us right now. I'm reminded of how Steve Jobs would ask his best employees to develop a list of their 100 favorite ideas, then discuss them until they had decided on the best 10. Of those 10, Jobs would choose only 3 for the company to actually work on that year (Isaac-son, 2012).

According to Stephen Covey, the most important single leadership principle is first things first. Leaders must focus on their highest priorities before they attend to anything else. Time devoted to "second" or "third" things is time subtracted from first things, which are always starved for time to begin with.

Take the case of curriculum. There is considerable agreement that no method of teaching, however effective, can make up for the absence of a curriculum: a clear guide to what teachers should teach, and the approximate order in which they should teach it, for every course (Darling-Hammond, 2010). No new pedagogy or technology can succeed where the default curriculum consists largely (as too many do) of short-answer worksheets and aimless group activities. In almost every school, there is an urgent need for coherent curriculum; it is a quintessential "first thing." It is foolish to pursue any improvement initiative until work is under way and deadlines are set for completing it.

Success hinges on how much time we can devote to ensuring mastery and successful implementation of any new practice, especially during the early stages. When will we learn that even one new initiative requires far more time for training, practicing, and monitoring than leaders typically allot? This is why Collins, like Maeda, is emphatic on the importance of reduction. His work provides a warning and a promise: don't emulate the fox (whose multiple, complex machinations always fail). Emulate the lowly hedgehog—who executes just one, manifestly proven practice and always triumphs.

Severely limiting the number of initiatives you choose to implement isn't easy. It is difficult to maintain a focus on these alone until they are fully implemented and mastered. But this focus enables us to leverage improvement's most precious resource: the time necessary to exhaustively and repeatedly clarify and train people in best practices.

In So Much Reform, So Little Change (2011), Charles Payne found that our tendency to pursue new initiatives means that there simply isn't enough time for us to accurately convey essential information about any of them. As a result, misunderstandings multiply, implementation fails, and faculty experiences "social demoralization" (p. 30). If we want better schools, we must embrace economy and focus. We must also revere clarity—indeed, we must be so clear about our highest priorities that no one could possibly misunderstand or improperly implement our most essential and effective practices.

Step 3: Clarify—Obsessively

If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.
—Marcus Buckingham

The field of education has not historically made clarity a priority. Surely we know this. We seldom explain, train, and reiterate the most essential practices with sufficient depth and intensity for everyone to achieve at least minimal mastery (Payne, 2011). The cause of clarity hasn't been helped by the fact that our profession routinely traffics in what one observer called "mendacious babble" (Mitchell, 1981, p. viii). Leaders should shun the jargon of academic educationism. Some of our most popular terms never acquired a clear definition in the first place and can thus mean almost anything to anyone (e.g., "metacognition," "balanced literacy," "active learning," "differentiated instruction," "student-centered," "learning styles"). The use of such terms wreaks havoc on the clear communication that is essential to improved practice. Our sloppy imprecision is evident in the tortured formulations of many of the Common Core standards and in our unconscionably muddled, jargon-laced teacher evaluation templates (see Chapters 3 and 4). Lack of clarity is far more consequential than we know. To be effective, schools must develop a clear, common understanding of essential professional terms (DuFour & Marzano, 2011).

An old friend of mine with an extensive business resumé (executive with Procter & Gamble, global head of marketing for Pepsi, chief operating officer of eBay) once told me that the most important early leadership lesson he learned was the need for clarity. He learned the hard way that to bring out the best in employees, leaders must meticulously craft every communication—every goal and directive—and then check with employees to make sure that they properly understood the message. Clarity is essential to productive action.

Perhaps nothing could be more important for educators right now than clarity—about their work, priorities, and practices. For decades, I've seen how average educators aren't sufficiently clear on the most fundamental concepts of schooling (curriculum, literacy, and effective teaching). In the words of management expert Tom Peters,

communication always sucks…. It's the human condition…. To make communication even halfway decent, even half the time, you've got to work like hell at it…all the time. (quoted in Jensen, 2000, p. 24)

Leaders need to "work like hell" at clear communication. All teachers need and deserve leaders who make strenuous efforts to clearly and continuously communicate the most essential concepts and practices. They need leaders to do this with precision and—just as important— repetition (more on this in a moment).

Why haven't most educators mastered the most fundamental elements of good schooling? Because we haven't made clarity a priority. To achieve such clarity, leaders must ensure that someone on their staff explains and teaches and models critical concepts and practices multiple times, with follow-up and reinforcement, probably for the length of teachers' careers. Such focused clarification, modeling, and practice are hardly typical of most professional development, which is typically cursory, shallow, and imprecise. That's because precious time, so essential to achieving "piercing clarity," too often gets shifted to other, ever-newer initiatives. And so our training only leaves traces of true understanding. The result? In the great majority of our schools, students are routinely deprived of the game-changing power of best practices (Odden, 2009; Hirsch, 2009; Marzano, 2007).

The successful schools and districts I describe in this book were exceptionally aware of the critical connection between a reduced, "hedgehog"-style focus and the opportunity for teachers to achieve "piercing clarity" with respect to their priorities. At these schools, it would be difficult for practitioners not to know—or to forget—what was expected of them. But clarity also requires something else: practice. We don't really, deeply understand effective instruction and implementation until we do it. Practice—repeated, even "guided" practice, with feedback—is integral to clarity.

Step 4: Practice—Repeatedly

Teaching is a performance art; it requires hands-on training and practice (Pondiscio, 2014). The same is true of properly implementing curriculum and establishing effective literacy practices. We can only attain mastery in our performance of these core elements through repeated practice.

We need plenty of time and multiple opportunities to practice what we learn about the essential components of a good lesson—about how to teach students to analytically read, discuss, and write about various texts. None of the steps involved in mastering these elements is particularly complicated—in fact, they beg to be simplified. But they must be practiced. Repeatedly. Until teachers master their essential moves. This is where operative understanding takes root.

We simply don't engage enough in repeated practice. Institutionally, we never have. Our professional development days, faculty and department meetings must include and be followed by practice sessions as a matter of course. In every training, practitioners need opportunities to actually attempt to employ each major element of a good lesson in small or class-sized groups of their peers—with guidance and feedback—until it is apparent that all have mastered essential practices. If some don't, they need to be given additional time and opportunities to do so.

How important is repeated practice? Consider John Wooden. Perhaps the greatest college basketball coach of all time, he coached UCLA to 10 national championships—7 of them consecutive. Wooden was obsessed with repeated practice of basketball fundamentals. His recipe for success was old fashioned and simple. As he put it: "I created eight laws of learning, namely, explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, and repetition...