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Director at the American School of Warsaw
Leadership, Teaching/Learning

NCLB Under Scrutiny

For those of us in education, a lesson in leadership and its impact on policy is underway right now in Washington as hearings proceed on NCLB impact in advance of re-authorization sometime in the coming year.  Of particular import for leaders is the implications for the improvement of teachers, a key component of the legislation that called for Highly Qualified Teachers (HQT) in the classrooms of America’s schools.  Susanna Loeb, Stanford University is attributed as the key professional looking at this dimension and the summary slide from her presentation is instructive for leaders:

Susanna Loeb's reflections on NCLB impact and forward thinking views.

Clicking the image above will take you to an Evernote link and you can also click through to her entire PPT with the data to support her conclusions.  What’s most striking about this is the clear reference to teaching quality being in the hands of local authorities and the perception that quality cannot be adjudicated from the federal level.  This is consistent with most leadership studies and team development principles in the information age and consistent with the ongoing development of professional learning communities in our schools nationwide.

This presentation also highlights the ongoing challenges of the achievement gap between the richest and poorest districts and provides research summaries that confirm that HQTP, while effective in improving general teacher effectiveness is not closing the most important gap and a main goal of the legislation.  As pointed out, it does not address the issues of appeal when looking at difficult-to-staff schools.

More links on this topic:

JZ

Leadership

Complexity Leadership Theory

A tidbit of a new concept under reflection:

emergence

Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298-318.

Leadership

A leadership tidbit…

Warren Bennis (1985), an expert in contemporary leadership studies, stresses the need for self-knowledge as a prerequisite for leadership effectiveness. He wrote:

I am dismayed by the number of men and women I interview who have retired from leadership positions decrying their failure to take time for personal reflection while they were active in their posts. They have assumed positions in organizations that they did not found, and rather than initially considering the impact they might make on the organization and proceeding from a foundation of values, they have defined themselves as they went along. First, they accepted the old tenets of the organization, and then only gradually discovered what was important to them personally. This trial and error method of leadership results in an inconsistent message and a lack of commitment by those engaged in the enterprise. Leaders who make the transition from an old set of dominant values to a set that reflects their own beliefs make a substantial mark on the organization.

Bennis, W. (1985). Leaders: The strategies for taking charge. New York: Harper & Row.

Farside, Leadership

Quotation

While rules are always important, they are not the most critical things in life. In fact, it is the exceptions that excite us, empower us, and stretch the boundaries of our imagination.

Leadership

Team Leadership

dysfunctionLencioni (2002) paints a wonderful picture of the development of teams that captures a valid representation of team renewal that also serves as a reflection on the key components of ongoing team development.

At the foundation and consistent with my own beliefs is the critical need for trust at the base of a team’s pyramid.  But, as Lencioni points out, these layers of concerns must be seen as interrelated in order to get at the core of team development.  Trust, by itself, is insufficient for achieving the kind of team dynamics that result in accomplishment beyond expectations, which serves as the definition of a high functioning team.

The purpose of this blog entry is not to recount all aspects of this model of team assessment.  In my own recent experience I have been involved in two ways with teams that provide diametrically opposite examples of teams at their best and worst.

As a member of a larger logistical team, I have been both frustrated and frustrating because of an absence of the foundational trust aspect that is required for team development.  While I value that I have a role to play in this team’s success or lack thereof, it seems outside my power and control to initiate actions aimed at resolving deficiencies at multiple layers of the pyramid.  At the core, this team has little trust due to a top-down management style that is inherently paranoid.  With many demonstrations of a sincere lack of trust, it is clear that what follows is a general fear of conflict and a generative focus on individual well-being.  Thus, few members of the team have the ability to commit to the team and half of the team has tendered their resignation.  This act of exasperation is the ultimate demonstration of avoidance and, by virtue of this, despite commitments to the contrary, there is no clear indication that results are in anyone’s conscious focus.

Interestingly, however, I also serve as a leader on a more local team that is one step removed from the higher leadership team.  Similar to Lencioni’s example, this departmental team is functioning well within its own context.  As a leader of this team, trust was a critical component of our initial stages of development.  As noted in another text, Katzenbach & Smith (1993) define a leadership style that is effective at addressing the team strategies denoted by Lencioni.  Development of trust is often associated with a leadership attitude that inspires team members.  Leaders must often be seen as vulnerable in order to illicit contributions from other members that develop out of concern for the well-being of the team and organization — and each other.  Thus, this focus satisfies three areas of the triangle – trust, commitment, and results.  Accountability and conflict emerge in the processes once team members are engaged.  Thus, we get a self-perpetuating cycle of commitment and accountability.

As Katzenbach & Smith point out, each team is unique in defining the skills needed to lead.  While in one instance, a leadership style applied as highly management oriented fails, in another example, honest servant leadership leads to distinct gains.  This should not be used as an argument for a more lenient leadership style.  Quite the contrary, this is just a cautionary tale that reinforces the fact that each team of experience needs to be uniquely addressed as to its respective strengths and weaknesses.  The dynamics of team development continue to emerge as unique and interesting in the realm of leadership research.

China, Leadership

Grand Champions


Grand Champions

Originally uploaded by chinazurfluh

Shared leadership is tremendously enjoyable when you have people so focused on making it a special event for others. This year’s Pinewood Derby was an example of like minded people coming together to serve the enjoyment and fulfillment needs of their sons. It was a day for the family as almost 100 boys competed in a racing competition with their personally crafted wooden cars. It’s impressive to watch this unfold and with 4 years under my belt, it was especially powerful to see how it has developed over the years to what now exists.

My thanks and appreciation to my com padres on the Derby Committee. It was a powerful team led by Mr. Russ Porter. He is settling into his new leadership role quite nicely and we can feel confident as our boys transition to Boy Scouts, that we are leaving the pack in good hands.

Farside, Leadership

Star Trek, CNY, Noah’s ARK, & Leadership

Three interesting events linked in my consciousness and have driven me into inspiration.  Stay with me while I meander through my thoughts.

Celebrating the Chinese New Year for the 10th time in Asia has caused me to look deeper into this phenomenon with each passing year.  The fireworks, the chaos, the calm and the almost surreal intermittent quiet that descends on the city drives one to ponder in more interesting ways about looking both forward and back.  The almost constant fireworks for 15 days and the non-stop celebration bring special focus to the year – more so in many ways than the calendar based version of the “western” New Year.

Stay with me now – while listening to the reverberations of crackling explosions, I remembered an episode of Star Trek entitled “The Return of the Archons” — an a often forgotten scene where computer controled minds of a civilization are regularly released for 12 hours  allowing a rampant expression of destruction and “celebration” by the population – an escape valve that balances against close control and monitoring.  Roddenberry’s depiction of the essence of humanity is played out in this way – under control and conformity of mechanistic intervention “the body dies.”  Human spirit – creativity and inspiration – are the key to life.

Follow on this with an email from AISH ala Bambi Betts:

From Peter Drucker, management guru extraordinaire:

“What is the manager’s job?  It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite — and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.”

More accurately, the allocation of resources might be described as going to the status quo in yet another attempt to maintain equilibrium.  Deviation from conformity drives us all to naturally steer the offender back on course through layers of bureaucracy and the subtleties of long standing paradigms.  These limiters provide a powerful lid to exactly the innovation and powerful deviations that are most needed in an age of economic meltdown and global disaster on our very doorstep.

So what does Noah’s Ark have to do with this.  My guess is we are all looking to a higher power in a time of fearful contemplation.  I am not really suggesting a religious theme of Armageddon here.  In the midst of the above musings, I settled in to watch a humorous film (Evan Almighty) on a modern day Noah and his Ark.  The character playing God (Morgan Freeman) in this popular movie posed some particularly thoughtful questions part way through the drama.

“Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?”

“How do we change the world?”

“One single Act of Random Kindness at a time. (ARK)”

So how does this connect, you ask?  The theme here is ultimately about breaking down the barriers of conformity. It’s about letting creativity and its random spirit spur us to create that which is not yet conceivable.  The human spirit is about randomness.  Chaos theory reigns supreme when you want to accomplish something beyond the status quo – and this is most certainly true when many fearfully cling to a narrow view of what is right, acceptable, and sustainable.

A complex world with difficult problems requires significant out of the box thinking.  Are we ready to initiate the “Red Hour” to solve them in the most creative way possible?

China

Christmas Letter 2008

A short missive with a family update. Leadership is about balance and family is an important component of that balance.

Christmas Letter 2008

As the letter states:

May you spiritual life inspire you, your work life fullfill you, and your family life sustain you.

Blessings for 2009 and beyond!

Leadership, Teaching/Learning, Technology

Alan November – He Gets It

During the EARCOS Conference now in play in Malaysia, Alan November presented a keynote presentation followed by two breakout sessions on Sunday last.  As always, I was impressed with the way in which Alan understands and generates that understanding in others.

While some may have walked away from his keynote scratching their heads, I was very aware of a purposeful lack of structure to his presentation.  While I cannot confirm my suspicions, I am aware that his methods were likely directed more toward modeling rather than the typical format of bestowing knowledge from the podium of vanity that is more often the standard of typical conference keynotes.  Alan attempted a “conversation” with an audience of 500+ and I applaud his efforts.

Ultimately, two things occurred as a result of his efforts:

1) Many left asking questions that inspired very competent conversations.  This is the product of a good keynote: creating a degree of tension in the audience that inspires dialog and discourse well after the presentation.

2)  Many left scratching their heads wondering what they just did.  Despite that, it is clear that as time allows the example of his performance to sink into gray matter, many will look back on their experience in an unpredictable “Ah-Ha” moment and realize the import of what they experienced.

Technology integration will have to follow a path like this to really achieve what its potential purports.  We need competent examples (exemplars) of integration and observers must walk away under inspirational moments to apply those skills in their own classrooms.  I remember in my own teaching career that the most effective staff developments were the inspirational and engaging speakers that brought information and emotion together into that critical tension that engenders both motivation and deep understanding.  Staff development and learning in general has to reach into your soul if you expect it to convert daily realities into visionary change.

So, thank you Alan for changing me.  Either intentionally or unintentionally, you brought new insight to how I might choose to achieve our common goal of preparing students for the world in which they will eventually thrive.

Leadership

Good to Great, Pt. 1

As part of a series on summer reading, I offer a synopsis of thoughts on Jim Collins book, Good to Great. His research solidly uncovers some key concepts on organizations moving from being good and capable organizations to something that is far beyond just being in maintenance mode.

Jim’s research uncovers 6 core concepts built under 3 unifying themes:

  1. Disciplined People
    1. Level 5 Leadership
    2. First who…. then what
  2. Disciplined Thought
    1. Confront the Brutal Facts
    2. Hedgehog Concept
  3. Disciplined Actions
    1. Culture of Discipline
    2. Technology Accelerators

Level 5 leadership provides insight into how great companies cultivate leadership and nurture it internally.  In a time when many companies look for CEO’s with name recognition and corporate pedigrees, this research contents that there is less about ego and more about lack of self-interest at play in great leadership.  A distinction is created here between the majority of leaders that live at Level 4 and the more elite Level 5’s who…

Build enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

Humility + Will = Level 5

Level 5 leadership is also about unwavering resolve to do what is "right" and in the best interest of the organization.  It’s about leading with a core belief in the work of the organization and what is best for it’s growth and success. 

Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce results.

Consistent with the unique blend of humility and will, Level 5 leaders seldom attribute success to their own actions and conversely look inward when challenged by poor outcomes.  How many of us are capable of that kind of introspection when boards and stakeholders turn away from their normal distant role toward micro-managing tactics due to their perceptions of failure?  Isn’t it more often the case that the leader instead seeks to find fault elsewhere or with the constituents themselves?  How many leaders actually accept responsibility for their shortfalls?

Evolution, Leadership

Response to the Evolution Debate: Memes

Susan Blackmore uncovers a new concept about the development of thought and ideas as she characterizes them as similar to viruses of thought.  She extends on this core thinking and presents a new concept:

"Temes" = technology generated memes.

 

So, here is conjecture about the concepts and their application to education and administration:

1.  Static and unresponsive curriculum is the antithesis of memes/temes.  We saw an example of this in an ASCD article about the absence of quality material representing Asian and Middle Eastern cultures in our textbooks according to a recent study.

2.  Instructional practices that focus on product without attention to process are grossly disconnected from memes/temes.  While the expression is to be considered important, there is an essential attention that needs to be driven to the process of how memes – conscious and unconscious – develop in the brains of children inside and outside of the traditional classroom.

3.  Technology, especially, is likely emerging as the primary method for developing conceptual processes that are self-generating and "infectious".  Consider examples like Digg, Facebook, and the like.  With this understanding we change from a focus on intelligence to a focus on Susan’s concept of replications.

So, in response to the evolution argument elsewhere in this blog, it’s not about evolution in the Darwinian sense, but is instead about the iteration of replicators that we are currently engaging.  Digital natives are at a higher generation of teme replicator than the immigrant generations before them.

So, the question for all of us in the administrative world is guessing at the temes that will "survive."  Ultimately, these "temes" will best prepare our students for the concepts they must "inherit" in order to lead a productive and successful life.  How we spend our educational dollars to support this process is an essential discussion.  While we resist trend temptation and early adoption, it is this kind of consideration that is, in fact, critical to replication in a fast paced information oriented world.  Can we avoid it when kids are plugged into this at home – or more accurately when they are away from both home and school either physically or virtually?

I don’t think so.

Conferences/Training, Farside

Dashboards in Schools

I recently had a verbal and email dialog with a colleague on the transplanted Business Intelligence concept of Dashboards.  Essentially, this concept revolves around how to keep leadership informed on key elements of organizational success so that strategic decisions can be made in a timely and efficient manner.  In schools, the focus shifts more to keeping elected or perpetual board members informed of school “status” with regards to all of the metrics we typically use to describe finance, learning, and accomplishment of strategic initiatives.  This email is my online brainstorm of the data side of how we change the face of school management and the measurement of stakeholder satisfaction.

My thinking has been around translating the corporate model of dashboards (see Business Intelligence) into something that might work for education.  I’ll explain a little bit to see if we are on the same page and then you can help me push the envelope.  I’m, of course, also thinking about this from the technical side.  I don’t have a specific engine yet, but the theoretical models are forming and my database people assure me that they have code ideas to back this up.Here’s what I’m dealing with relative to my board and why I’m looking at this to answer their questions and keep them informed as we grow.Budget – I’m trying to get my board to see the big picture on budgetary concerns, so I see models for broad brush looks at budget and expenditures.

Broad based totals in simple mathematics – I’d also like to converge this with a timeline function so that historical data is available.  E.g. – I see a drop down list to select a month and have expenditure bars grow or shrink according to the budget year.  Thus, capital expenditures will likely show early expenditure vs. salary which is pretty even vs. supplies which will likely be somewhere in-between with a bit of frontloading.  For each stage in the process, there would be trendlines that would then adjust based on the most recent data.  This trend can also be based on encumbrances if your financial system supports this.  For far reaching examples of data/time analysis, you should look at http://www.gapminder.org/world/ data – Think of this example using admission data.  Again, I’d like to look at trend line data like the gapminder example.  With current database information from our student records system, it shouldn’t be difficult to develop a similar interface.  This would show grade level and gender components with overlays for nationality and other factors – all generally available depending upon how you do your archive data.  It looks like Google bought this engine from them.  It’s called Trendalyzer.  Also, look at www.swivel.com for another example of live charts.

[New note:  Power School (Pearson) has a dashboard component for their school management software.  Very nice widget oriented approach.  According to sources it was just released recently as part of PS Premier 5.1.2 – (info & here).]

Engagement data – based on scheduling components. I’d like to show engagement data that identifies staff contact time with students.  So for any moment of the day, you can see what percentage of staff are engaged in scheduled activities.  This is an important one for my board as they have high expectations for this.  Besides a time based method, there would also be totals and summary methodologies. 

Project data – this is a Gant style, but it shows summary positioning on action plans – this would be RSS style with percentage complete and upcoming milestones.  These would update on daily or weekly basis and could be linked with any flavor of project management methods or just regularly updated static data.  Milestones and statements of progress could be simple blog style posts.

Satisfaction data – student/parent – We have been moving toward more online survey data collection recently and I have been considering that single event data collection seems inadequate to guage progress over time. Recently, I went through immigration at Shanghai airport and found that they had installed customer satisfaction data collection units at each passport processing counter.  The unit flashes for individuals to offer their feedback to the officer in the form of smiley face options.  You’ve probably seen these.  Although I’m not interested in mounting these on the teacher’s door (although that’s an interesting thought), I have been conjecturing about more regular single or small “dipstick” survey opportunities on our parent website and via email polls.  This process can be automated based on random selection at login or randomly sent emails so that data collection for randomly selected segments of the stakeholders is relatively constant and ongoing.  Where the dashboard comes in is relative to real time updates of this data based on submitted results.  A thermometer, if you will, of sentiment.  The data and questions could be focused around various aspects of school operation.  It could be grouped or sourced from all stakeholder groups.

Assessment data – this one is trickier, but could work based on compilation of assessments if a scale score can be derived, or if some other type of norm referencing is used.  This could also be centered around criterion referenced tools.  Summary data would show trends, again, over time.

I’m still thinking about other metrics that can be gathered over time more or less automatically.  We always seem to have a wealth of data, but we’re never sure where to put it.

The work on the website components for this likely exist in a combination of open source projects (about 20 of them in current development on Sourceforge) and a variety of BI off the shelf packages. 

Here’s one example of an open source option:

http://spagobi.eng.it/ecm/faces/public/guest/home/solutions/spagobi

There are many others.

That’s what I have.  I’m interested in this, but I’m time crunched right now.  Lot’s happening here, but I do have some people to explore this further. I’m looking for cost effective solutions (read – free) to turn the data into something usable.  I’m still forming my thoughts on this a bit and continued dialog might help push me down a certain path.  I could also see EARCOS playing into this for regional based data warehousing and cross organizational trend analysis.  I am also trying to think of options for the Learning 2.008 conference that might start a more productive dialog on this topic.