In part I of this series, I spoke a little about how results and outcomes can be manipulated to prove one’s point. In this blog, I want to discuss how to start looking beyond simple results and outcomes and begin moving a culture towards learning and continuous improvement. While this is my journey, I believe that it can be adjusted to fit the needs to most divisions…the desire and follow up commitment just needs to be there.
When I took over as Superintendent of Schools of the division in 2009, the culture was fairly toxic. There was tension between school administration and senior administration and the lack of trust throughout the system was more than evident. Some parents and especially school council chairs had little to say positive about the division as a whole and board members were typically on the defensive anytime in public. Let’s be clear, this is not a finger pointing exercise as everyone in a division owns the culture.
One other piece of history is that the division (like many others) was highly focused on Alberta Education’s Accountability Pillar Summary Report with special attention given to Provincial Achievement Tests at grades 3, 6, 9 and Diploma Exams in high school. Because of the poor relationships throughout the division, my mandate from the Board was to certainly build better relationships while still maintaining or finding ways to improve overall results.
I’ve written about this before, but I can’t stress enough about the importance of “presence” in building trusting relationships. Getting out of my office and into schools, meeting with school leaders and all staff and simply listening was the first step in building a better culture. Schools held the perceived notion that mistakes were never to be made and certainly not shared with the “higher ups” and their only measuring stick were standardized tests. Even though as professionals we should be always looking at ways to improve ourselves, continuous improvement was seen as a swear word!
After building some relationships in the division, I had two main hurdles to overcome moving forward. The first was to work with a willing Board of Trustees to redefine student success beyond simple achievement and move them to a better understanding of learning and the importance of the 7 Competencies for learning and leading. My work with C21 Canada and the document Shifting Minds 3.0 was extremely helpful in broadening their perspective. However, one of the most powerful exercises was when the trustees looked at two anonymous accountability pillar summaries (one with high standardized test results and one with only average results) and had to choose which school they wanted to send their own children to? Common sense (given only that much information) proved right in that trustees chose the school with the highest results. However, when I provided the names of the schools, most of the trustees changed their vote because the “average” school had far greater student and parent engagement, more innovative practice and a much stronger standing in the community. What this illustrated to the trustees and should be evident to governments and the general public is that looking at achievement scores alone is often a poor predictor of overall school success and student learning.
The second hurdle, which was far more difficult in the beginning to get over, was removing the pressure of results and allowing teachers and schools to begin to focus on overall student learning and success. In multiple communications, I told our staff not to worry about exam results and focus on teaching practice. An example of one of my messages is below:
“I truly believe that the more intellectually engaged our students are, the more student learning will occur. I’m all about student learning! We need to be able to measure where students are currently (benchmark) and where they need to get to (outcome). We need to measure improvement. We need to measure learning on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis and we need to celebrate that learning. There is no possible way that PAT’s written every three years can measure the learning we need to measure in education. We need our teachers to recognize and eliminate mythical barriers and provide them with freedom to explore opportunities.” – Mythical barriers to transformation (April 2012)
This work continued throughout my tenure as superintendent and I’ll share some further strategies in future blog posts on working with results and outcomes to support a culture of continuous improvement. I would be remiss however if I didn’t share my two great advantages in this work. The first was a Board of Trustees who believed in my work and a more holistic definition of learning and student success. The second was the trust extended by my staff and especially our school leaders to walk alongside me in this journey.
Stay tuned for Part III…
