Stop Leading, Start Building!

Turn Your School into a Success Story with the People and Resources You Already Have

Robyn R. Jackson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781416629849
• eBook ISBN: 9781416629863
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

You are a school administrator—a principal or maybe a district leader. You're doing everything "right"—poring over data, trying new strategies, launching annual initiatives, bringing in outside trainers. So why do the outcomes you seek still seem so far away? The problem isn't you; it's that you were trained in school leadership, and school leadership just isn't up to the challenge.

Each year, Robyn R. Jackson helps thousands of administrators stop wasting time and energy on flawed leadership approaches that succeed only with the right staff, students, parents, budget, and boss. As they have discovered, it's possible to transform your school with the people and resources you already have. The secret? Stop leading and start building!

In this book, you'll learn to use Jackson's breakthrough Buildership Model™ to escape the "school improvement hamster wheel" and finally create the school your students and teachers deserve. The work involves a handful of simple shifts in how you approach... •Purpose: Instead of chasing tiny gains or the "next new thing" every year, you'll establish and use an ambitious vision, mission, and set of core values to galvanize your staff, keep everyone focused, and create true accountability for achieving your goals.
•People: You'll discover new ways to help every teacher grow one level in one domain in one year or less and, ultimately, develop high levels of both will and skill.
•Pathway: Instead of trying to tackle every problem at once, you'll identify the biggest obstacle standing in your way right now and figure out exactly how to remove it once and for all.
•Plan: You'll learn a new process for solution implementation that is iterative, cyclical, and capable of powering both short-term wins and ongoing transformation, year over year.

When you stop leading and start building, you let go of the idea that you need to work harder to make your school "work better." You no longer settle for incremental improvement when what you really want is dramatic change and better learning outcomes for all. It's time to make the shift from leadership to buildership. Get ready to turn your school into a success story.

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Chapter 1

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Purpose
How to get off the "school improvement hamster wheel" once and for all

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Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar.

A new school year is just about to get under way, and you have a whole slate of initiatives planned for rollout. Some of them are your own, designed to address challenges you've identified. Some are from the district, and you're expected to implement them on top of everything else in your school improvement plan. Still, you're excited. You're hopeful and enthusiastic about your fresh set of solutions. Maybe you're thinking something like this:

• This new emphasis on rigor is finally going to help us see more student engagement!
• Finally, we've got a math curriculum that will help us raise our math scores!
• This discipline program is going to address those long-standing cracks in our school culture.

Now it's midyear, and the enthusiasm has died down. The day-to-day challenges of school demand your full attention, or new needs have cropped up to compete for your focus.

And before you know it, the school year is over. Where did the time go?

Next year, you vow, you'll do better. You spend time over the summer making new plans, identifying new programs, or resurrecting whatever initiative didn't quite get off the ground. After all, what choice do you have? There are students who are not achieving, and you've got to keep pressing or you'll let them down.

Another year kicks off with you pushing harder, pushing until your teachers begin to complain that they are worn out and overwhelmed. You sympathize, but what choice do you have? You must ask them to work even harder because the needle isn't moving fast enough. Maybe what you want is impossible, you think. Maybe the best you can hope for is that some or most of your students do well, and even that seems impossible sometimes. But no—you refuse to give up. You look for fresh answers in another new program, curriculum, book, or guru, hoping that something will work. This year, you tell yourself: This year we'll find what we've been looking for.

That's the school improvement hamster wheel.

Here is what I want you to understand: Without a clear sense of purpose, you'll never escape it. You'll be trapped there for your entire administrative career, always chasing your goals but never reaching them.

There is a way to get off the school improvement hamster wheel once and for all. It's going to sound a little familiar to you, maybe even a little trite. It starts with defining your purpose—figuring out where your priorities lie, and where your focus should be. In order to define your purpose, you're going to need to clarify your vision, mission, and core values.

This really is the only way. I know because I spent far too long on the school improvement hamster wheel myself. Like every new administrator, I was taught that I needed a vision for my school. So I wrote a two-page-long vision statement. I inherited my mission and core values from some past administration, and I dutifully reviewed them each year at our school improvement planning (SIP) meetings. But that was it.

Every year, our school leadership team would sit down and look at our data and try to come up with a new initiative to solve the problems we discovered. Every year we'd start out of the gate excited about our plans. And every year, we'd quickly lose focus somewhere around November. "Oh," we'd tell ourselves, "we'll get back on track after the holidays." And sure enough, we'd come back to school in January with a renewed hope that we still had time to salvage the school year. But it never lasted.

There was always another fire to put out, always another district mandate that competed for priority, always another challenge cropping up. It was hard to stay focused. We usually just ended up dealing with whatever seemed most urgent at the time. Our lofty plans for where we wanted to take our school had to take a back seat to the immediate demands of our jobs.

Finally, we'd had enough. We were tired of ricocheting from one initiative to the next. We were tired of asking our teachers to do "one more thing" on top of all they were doing already. We were tired of dealing with the same challenges year after year without seeing any progress.

So we decided to focus on purpose. That meant we took time to redefine our vision, mission, and core values. We embraced a new vision: all of our students would successfully make the transition to high school with the academic and social-emotional skills they needed to excel in high school (and we outlined specifically what those skills were). Our new mission simplified and distilled what was previously several paragraphs of vague but aspirational language. We committed to implementing an instructional program that fully aligned with the middle school model so that students could develop academic independence, become self-advocates, and develop healthy relationships with themselves and others. And we agreed upon a set of core values that we considered non-negotiable if we were to achieve our vision in our school. Every single teacher in the school committed to demonstrating a passion for learning, sustaining and nurturing a respectful environment, and honoring diverse voices. We also spent time clarifying what each of these core values meant to us as a school, so that everyone walked away from the conversation with the same understanding of how these core values would guide our work together.

I'll be honest: it was grueling. We were in the middle of the school year. We still had all those fires to put out, all those things competing for our time and attention. What's more, our teachers weren't interested in talking about vision, mission, and core values. They were already overwhelmed and complained that the time we were taking to go through what they thought were meaningless exercises could be better spent planning, grading, and learning the new curriculum.

We sacrificed the time and saw the process through. Sure, we felt better at the end and we were more united as a staff, but our challenges didn't immediately evaporate, and the demands on our time didn't suddenly go away.

But something did change, at first imperceptibly. With our new sense of purpose, we were better able to prioritize our time. Now, when a new and much more stringent grading and reporting policy came down from the district, we didn't panic. We also didn't implement it right away. Instead, we sifted it through our vision, mission, and core values to figure out how to implement it in a way that would help us achieve our goals and not disrupt the good things we already were doing in our school. Instead of overwhelming our teachers with one more thing, we actually took some things off their plates so that they could focus more on what mattered most. Instead of dreaming up new initiatives each year or looking for new programs that might hopefully solve our problems, we developed a simple plan to eliminate our biggest obstacles and stayed focused on that plan for an entire year. The moment we developed a clear vision, a meaningful mission, and core values and used them to drive every decision we made as a school, we got off the school improvement hamster wheel and started writing our school success story.

The very next year, we had not only made huge gains, but our staff was more unified, our time was better spent working on what was important instead of on what was merely urgent, and our students were thriving. In fact, the following year, our school won the state and national Blue Ribbon Award.

It all started because we got off the hamster wheel of change for change's sake and invested our time and energy in clarifying and living out our true purpose.

Now perhaps you were trained to cast a vision, mission, and core values in the past. Maybe you even brought in a consultant to lead you and your staff through the process. I'm guessing you already have vision, mission, and core values statements for your school or district on some piece of paper, some web page, or some wall in your school building right now.

Box checked.

But unless you are using them to drive every decision in your school, unless you are sifting every new initiative or program through your vision, mission, and core values, you are missing out on their power and the opportunities they will open up for your school.

It's time to get off the school improvement hamster wheel and unlock the true potential for your school. It starts with developing your vision, mission, and core values the right way.

Three Questions Every Member of Your Staff Is Asking

A few years ago, I heard a man named Donald Miller speak at a conference. Miller is a successful author and the founder of a company called StoryBrand, which shows businesses how to use stories to make their messaging clearer to their customers. His talk was on how to grow a thriving organizational culture. He said that every employee in your organization comes in with three critical questions, and if you don't answer these questions for them, you will not have a clearly defined direction for your organization, nor will you have a healthy culture.

First, everyone in your organization wants to know "What are we building?" They need to understand what the most important work of your organization is.

Second, they need to know "Why is it important?" What is the compelling reason behind why your organization is building what it's building?

The third question is "What's my role?" In other words, your people want to know what role they must play in order to build what you are building together.

I saw Miller's presentation at a time when I was trying to find a simple way to explain the difference between vision, mission, and core values. When I heard his breakdown of these three questions, I thought, That's it!

Your vision answers the question "What are we building?"

Your mission answers the question "Why is it important?"

Your core values answer the question "What role does each of us play?"

When you think of your vision, mission, and core values this way, you begin to create a cohesive narrative that clearly defines school purpose for both your staff members and those you serve. Plus, thinking of your purpose this way helps you create a vision, mission, and set of core values you can use to drive every decision you and your staff make in your school.

Vision: What You and Your Staff Are Building Together

When I first began administrator training, I was told that I needed to develop a personal vision statement. So I dutifully crafted a manifesto that supposedly told potential employers what I stood for and what I believed education should be. I wrote passionately about how I wanted every child to be successful and meet their full potential. It was lovely.

It was also a work of fiction.

Truth is, I had no idea what my vision was. I wasn't even assigned to a school yet! Sure, I aspired to be a certain kind of administrator, and I had idealistic hopes for students, but that doesn't amount to a vision for the kind of school I wanted to create.

What's more, when I was finally placed in a school, it already had a vision. I can't remember it exactly now, but it was something about helping students become lifelong learners of good character in a global society. I read it, checked it off my "Things to Do as I Settle into My New School" list, and moved on. I never looked at it again.

I find this to be true of most school administrators. Either we write a vision that ticks all the boxes in terms of what we were taught a vision should look like, or we inherit a vision from our predecessors. Rarely do we craft a bold, personalized vision that excites us and drives our work. The reason is simple: we weren't taught how create a true vision for our school.

Most of us were trained to write aspirational visions with vague but worthy-sounding goals. They sound great but mean little, and we have no practical way of measuring how close we are to achieving them. Some of us were trained to cast a vision in terms of SMART goals—based around goals for student achievement that are specific, measurable, actionable, real, and targeted. At least these are visions we can measure progress toward. But often SMART goal visions sound something like this: In two years, we will increase student proficiency in math and reading by 5 percent each year. Or, In five years, we will be at 65 percent proficiency in math and 75 percent proficiency in reading.

While these goals meet the SMART criteria, what they are really saying is that in two years, we will be failing 10 percent fewer students, or in five years, we will only be failing 35 percent of our students in math and 25 percent of our students in reading.

Remember, your vision communicates to everyone what you are building together as a school. If your vision doesn't deliver a benefit to 100 percent of your students, what you are building is meant to serve only some students, not all. And if you are not building something that will serve all your students, then why are you even in this profession? Do you hope to galvanize your entire community around a vision that looks to fail fewer students each year? Is that really your rallying cry?

How Builders Cast a Vision

Whenever I teach that a vision statement should include 100 percent of your students, people start getting nervous.

It's not that they don't buy into the idea. Philosophically, it makes sense. But practically, it's daunting, especially for someone leading a school that is struggling to make even small gains each year or a school where growth over time has plateaued. This is why many leaders settle for smaller visions that seem more doable. Some compromise with vague visions that are difficult to measure, allowing them to feel good about setting high goals without being accountable for meeting them. Builders are different. There are two things that sets a builder's vision apart: it includes all students and it is inherently exciting.

The 100-percent vision

Builders create visions that see success for 100 percent of their students. The reason is simple. They recognize a vision as the promise they are making to students and their families. A vision says, "If you join this school community, here is what you can expect from us." Any vision that doesn't include 100 percent of students is saying, "Our plan is to let certain kids fall through the cracks." It's saying, "Some students will not succeed here." How can you look a family in the eye and make that promise? How can you look students in the eye knowing their f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction: Why you haven’t made a bigger difference in your school (and why it’s not your fault)
• Chapter 1. Purpose: How to get off the 'school improvement hamster wheel' once and for all
• Chapter 2. People: How to have an entire staff of master teachers (without having to 'get rid' of anyone)
• Chapter 3. Pathway: How to stop tackling every challenge and focus on what matters most
• Chapter 4. Plan: How to knock down your biggest constraint in the next 90 days (even when 'life' gets in the way)
• Chapter 5. Putting It All Together: How to start writing your success story right now
• Conclusion: Why shifting from leadership to buildership will make all the difference for you–this year and beyond
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright