What If I'm Wrong? and Other Key Questions for Decisive School Leadership

Simon Rodberg

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781416629580
• eBook ISBN: 9781416629610
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

It can be difficult to think clearly and deeply when a decision must be made, especially for principals and other administrators barraged with information, questions, and demands on their time. When even the smallest mistake can negatively affect students and staff, strong decision-making skills are crucial. By focusing on key questions, however, school leaders can find a path through the complex decisions they encounter every day.

What If I'm Wrong? and Other Key Questions for Decisive School Leadership guides you past the pitfalls of split-second instinct, groupthink, prejudice, and the rush to judgment. Leadership coach and former principal Simon Rodberg pulls together true stories from his own experience, examples of a range of school issues, and the latest research in cognitive science into a five-question framework for school leaders to ask themselves when facing a decision: - What am I missing?
- What's one small step?
- Where's the trade-off?
- Does it have to be this way?
- What if I'm wrong?

By prompting you to reflect on your own thought processes and cognitive blind spots, Rodberg's approach helps you build good habits of strategic decision making. Learn to navigate both tough dilemmas and everyday challenges as a decisive school leader.

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Question 1

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What Am I Missing?

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Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman trained as a psychologist but won his fame (and Nobel) in the world of economics. He showed how irrational humans are—and how consistent, and therefore predictable, our errors are. He summarized the way we err with the acronym WYSIATI, for "What You See Is All There Is." That is, we make judgments using the information at our disposal, even if the right information is lacking—and we do so by convincing ourselves that we're seeing the complete truth.

That's abstract, obviously. Here's an example. One 2nd grade teacher runs the quintessential tight ship. Her bulletin boards are organized; her students line up quickly; she turns in all her paperwork on time. The other 2nd grade teacher is beloved by students and parents alike. Previous students return to give him hugs; his children run down the hall to greet him in the morning; the opening circle in his classroom resounds with happiness and song.

Which teacher is more likely to improve reading achievement?

The answer is that we have no idea. (Though you might have been tempted to guess, and you certainly have a bias for which teacher you prefer!) None of the information presented is about reading achievement. The scenario creates an intuitive problem, as Kahneman (2011) says, "When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution" (p. 12). In this case, we substitute either "Which teacher has strong classroom management?" or "Which teacher has great relationships?" for the real question of reading achievement.

To stop and reflect, to wonder whether we have enough information, takes time. Yet time is the most crucial resource for principals, and the scarcest. Lack of time leads you, predictably, to a particular kind of error in judgment. It's also covered by What You See Is All There Is: the belief that the inevitably small slices of school life you see are representative of school life as a whole. You see five minutes of class, and you believe you know what the teacher is like generally; you see a student misbehave, and you infer how constant a disruption she is.

Intellectually, you know that these inferences aren't usually accurate. But what we know intellectually, or consciously, has to fight with the judgments we make unconsciously. Those five minutes may have been among the worst (or best) of the year for that teacher, and when we're writing his evaluation that afternoon, we'd better understand that! If we don't, we fall victim to availability bias—when what's easy to think about (more available to our minds) seems more representative than it actually is. My favorite example of this isn't from schools; it's from home. Between you and your spouse or roommate, who does what percentage of the household chores? If we ask you and the other person, each of your answers for yourself will certainly add up to more than 100 percent. Even if you admit the other does more—say, you only do 40 percent—that person will most likely still estimate 80 percent. That's because you remember all the chores you do; cleaning toilets is pretty memorable! But it's harder to bring to mind the chores your spouse does.

The key challenge for school leaders is to know that our information is limited and to ask the first big question: "What am I missing?" Remember what Kahneman describes: without noticing, people often choose the easiest answer that comes to mind, even if it's to the wrong question. It's the "without noticing" that you can train yourself to avoid. Principals can't observe every minute of a teacher's practice or every instance of a student's behavior, and we can't know everything that could factor into every decision we make. But we can recognize our overactive tendency to believe that what we see is all there is—the mistaken assumption that the slices we can see are truly representative of those we can't.

The Wrong Path: The Drunk in the Light

Walking home late at night, I saw a man, smelling of alcohol, scouring the ground under a streetlight. When I asked him what happened, he replied, "I lost my keys."

"Oh, you dropped them here?" I said.

"No," he said, motioning across toward the dark side of the street. "I dropped them over there, but it's easier to see here in the light."

This didn't happen to me, of course; it's an old story. But the equivalent happened to me many times—except I was the drunk, not the passerby. And I wasn't actually drunk—being drunk at school is a very foolish thing to do!—but I did make the same mistake: looking for answers where it was easy to look rather than where the answers actually were.

We do this when we analyze data, when we interview teachers, when we make a big deal of student work displays. We do it whenever we mistake what's easier to see for what we actually want to know: which multiple choice option a student chose for what they were really thinking; which teacher candidate is most poised at an interview table for which teacher will increase student learning; the quality of the student work displayed in the hallway for the work of the class as a whole.

Appearances do matter in education. But we can't just look at what is shiniest where there is light.

It's almost as foolish as being drunk at school.

What Does the Fox See?

Everyone predicts the future. Only some get it right. Business school professor Philip Tetlock ran multi-year forecasting tournaments to find what he calls "superforecasters"—those who accurately predicted outcomes like elections, revolutions, and stock market highs. Pundits and experts weren't always superforecasters. In fact, those with big ideas didn't do well in the forecasting tournaments. "They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates," writes Tetlock & Gardner (2015), "and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions" (p. 68). Tetlock likens these One Big Idea thinkers to hedgehogs, who have one trick, one strategy, and use it to brazen their way through every challenge. They're impressively confident; one CNBC host, an economist known for predicting continual growth, wrote in July 2008 that "we are in a mental recession, not an actual recession" as the economy went into freefall. When you look at their results, these hedgehogs actually do worse than random guessers in the long run.

How can your predictions—that is, your decisions about what will make the future better—improve? The superforecasters didn't have one trick. Instead, "these experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as 'however,' 'but,' 'although,' and 'on the other hand.' They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say, 'I was wrong,' these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds" (Tetlock & Gardner, 2015, p. 68). These open-minded thinkers are foxes; they adapt, draw back, regroup, switch paths, and try again. They know that their first idea isn't necessarily right. They are willing to look again, to reconsider. They know they can't see everything at first glance. And they're the ones who win.

"OK," I hope you're saying. "I get it. Now make me a fox." Just sprinkling your conversation with however or although won't be enough. You need actions that can help you see what you're missing.

Expand What You See

Making a good decision requires knowing the landscape well; to know where to go, you have to know where you are. You can better learn your landscape through regular practices that move you beyond your (often mistaken!) gut—practices that show you why what you thought you saw isn't all there is. Tools for doing so include surveys, focus groups, and stack audits.

How are teacher–student relationships? What locations in your school are hot spots for bullying? Did Back-to-School Night work for parents? You can guess; you can hear from the most outspoken stakeholders, who have important things to say but are usually not representative. Or you can survey. Free tools like Google Forms make it almost negligent not to survey whenever the opinion of a large group matters to the decisions you'll make. If you want to improve relationships, prevent bullying, or have a successful Back-to-School Night next year, why would you not survey? Design your own or use one of the commercially available surveys from groups like TNTP (to survey teacher attitudes), Panorama Education (for student surveys about teachers and school), or Making Caring Common (for school climate surveys). These come with a price but offer comparisons to other schools and easy tools for analysis.

Surveys do take time and effort, especially if you want a large number of representative responses. E-mailing parents a link, for instance, won't usually do it; you'll get a much better response rate if you place tables with computers by the exit. There are simpler ways. I once did a live poll by standing in the cafeteria with a sign scribbled, "Do you feel we're preparing you for college?" and handing out sticky notes and pens for students to write their answer as they walked by. The answers weren't complex, but I did learn a lot.

I am always surprised by how much school leaders merely, and even subconsciously, guess at what's going on with their staff members or students. You can ask them! Focus groups are even easier than surveys, and both children and adults love being asked to participate. They can be two hours or 20 minutes, and, while an accurate sampling (representative according to whatever is important for the questions at hand—demographics, achievement levels, or otherwise) is useful, your thinking will be expanded no matter what. You can even just stop a couple of people in the hallway to ask a question. One principal recently showed me her weekly staff bulletin and asked how I thought it could be improved. I had some ideas, I told her, but my main advice was that she should just ask three teachers what they thought. It would take three minutes, build three relationships, and gain her much more insight. The updated bulletin has more consistent sections, is formatted to be more readable on a phone, and begins with shout-outs so that teachers are excited to start reading. More importantly, the principal shed her reputation for go-it-alone isolation; teachers noticed that she asked, listened, and changed.

Some kinds of understanding aren't best gained just from asking people. How challenging is the homework we assign? Are we communicating efficiently with all-staff e-mails? Are Do Nows in the school a valuable use of time? You can ask around, but adding up opinions isn't the best way to get a global sense of quality. Instead, you can use a stack audit: put every example of something in a stack (including a metaphoric or digital stack), and go through that stack to determine patterns and overall impact. Collect every homework assignment or Do Now for a day. Collect every all-staff e-mail sent over a week. Use a stack audit, unlike a focus group, when you want a truly representative set of data. But they're not as good as focus groups at the why, at probing for the reasons behind the data: Why does all the homework consist of low-level practice? Why do so many people send such a large number of e-mails that are relevant to so few recipients? You can follow up stack audits with a focus group to find out; or sometimes, a focus group can inspire an inquiry through a stack audit. It depends on the questions you want to answer and the amount of time—five minutes from every staff member or an hour from five in particular?—the answers will take.

Once you've gathered information, the challenge is to keep it all in mind. Remember the availability bias: what's easy to think about (more available to our minds) seems more representative than it actually is. So a particularly well-articulated statement, or an unusual expression, will stick in your mind, but that doesn't mean that it's the one to listen to. One student who says something outlandish in a focus group makes for a great story but not for a great sense of the overall opinion in the group. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who taught us about availability bias, also warns us about the peak-end rule: along with outliers, it's easier to remember the end of an experience than the rest of it. If you do classroom walk-throughs, for instance—a great form of stack audit—you should know that the last classrooms you saw, along with the best and worst, are much likelier to stick in your head than the earlier and more typical examples. Don't sit down after a walk-through and immediately write down, or even talk through with others, your conclusions. Expand what you see by taking notes or ratings along the way, then review them afterward before you analyze the whole picture. This is what's called a memory prompt: when you know about the peak-end rule, you can prompt yourself to remember the rest of what you've seen. Memory prompts enable you to see the whole landscape for your decision.

Expanding What You See About Race

Some things you miss aren't just because of availability bias. You miss them—I certainly miss them!—because of deeper, longer-lasting blind spots. These blind spots stem from our identities. When we accept and recognize that who we are limits our perspective, we can expand our vision, better understand our world, and make better decisions for our schools.

What am I missing? The I part is crucial, and one area where school leaders need to be especially self-conscious is race.

The teacher in my office is named Sergio, and he's exasperated with people (other teachers, even school leaders) getting it wrong. Sergio, with the g pronounced as English would pronounce h; and not Santiago, the name of another Latino man at the school. "And we don't even look alike!" he says. "You have no idea the number of microaggressions I am subject to on a daily basis at this school." I don't. But at least he's telling me.

Race screws up vision. It creates biases, stereotypes, and blindness. That the infinite variety of human skin colors can be divided into categories that have anything to do with intelligence, morality, or capability: what a crazy, incoherent, irrational idea!

But in America today, no matter the good intentions, not seeing race screws up vision more. Race matters. Race matters to our children, our families, our teachers. Serving our students here, now, means accounting for and fighting racism. We can't teach our students of color without accounting for racism, and we can't prepare white students for a better world without an anti-racist approach in the work we do. Race is a social construct and also real; we can't get past racism without seeing race. As educators, we believe in individual success and autonomy. We have to believe that each student is a unique and powerful individual. (If not, what are we doing?) But we also have to recognize that the ways we want to see the world are not the ways we actually see the world. Studies of implicit bias, led by Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji, reveal that the majority of white people have more positive subconscious attitudes toward white people than toward black people, and even a third of black people have a similar preference for white people (Project Implicit, n.d.). This is hard to accept if we are believers in anti-racist fairness. But we must be conscious to combat our own unconscious.

Even if we are among the minority of people who do not have this implicit racial bias, we must constantly struggle against the bias faced by our students of color. It starts by preschool, where teachers are more likely to see black children as misbehaving even when doing the exact same behavior as white children (Gilliam, Maupin, Reyes, Accavitti, & Shic, 2016). We are primed by our society to expect bad behavior from black students and similarly primed to expect less of them academically. Confirmation bias—the psychological phenomenon where people more easily find evidence that confirms, rather than refutes, what we already believe—literally makes us more likely to see the faults in black students. While research is less advanced for the effect of implicit bias on other racial groups, our view of children is influenced by the (false) stereotypes we all hear about them—criminal Latino boys, studious Asian children, innocent white girls.

Individual psychology, and the effects of bias on those of us in schools, aren't the only reasons we need to be conscious of race. Race matters in our society. From segregated cities to racial profiling by police and ordinary passersby, to the massive black–white wealth gap, our inheritance of racism continues to structure the different lives we live. The history of race means that we are not starting from scratch. Our youngest schoolchildren arrive with their lives already shaped—not determined, shaped—by that history. As school leaders, we need to know this history and these structural realities. As scholar Richard Milner (2015) writes, "It is difficult to have substantive conversations about race regarding individual students and their parents and families without thinking deeply about the broader collective, societal systems that directly impact the individual" (p. 10). We cannot understand lived experience in America, especially Americans of color, without understanding racism.

Leaders of color know how to do this; they've had to see racism their whole lives. White school leaders, being white, are particularly susceptible to racist biases and failing to counteract them. Even when we want to not be racist, we tend not to have personal experience with racism, so it's harder for us to see. We are also the heirs to centuries of prejudice, and to biases we would rather not have. White principals need racial humility: to accept that we may not see manifestations of racism that really are there and that different perspectives, including those that disagree with or attack us, really are important. We need to see the points of view that tell us we are wrong, including those that tell us we are racist, as painful as it is.

If you are white, accept and expect that people of color think about and see race more than you do—and they're probably right. Race is active in your school, and people of color have had to be more conscious of race than you throughout their lives. Their sense for it is better, and in general, they w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: It's Hard to Decide
• Question 1: What Am I Missing?
• Question 2: What's One Small Step?
• Question 3: Where's the Trade-Off?
• Question 4: Does It Have to Be This Way?
• Question 5: What If I'm Wrong?
• Conclusion: You're Not Alone
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright