Part I, Supporting the Transformation of School Teams.
I am the Chief Executive Officer of a public inner-city school system in California. We are a charter laboratory system, grades T/K-12, with multiple locations that works in close partnership with a local university. Like nearly 1.5 billion children on earth, our students, educators, and families have found themselves subjected to a radically changed world. While we are known for innovative educational services, the current COVID19 crisis forced us, as it did to every school system on the planet to reconfigure ourselves so that we could continue to do what we do, support the learning and development of our learners. While this has been a challenge, it has also brought about new understandings, called upon us to examine unchallenged assumptions about our practice, refocus on our mission as a learning institution, and address new equity challenges that have arisen. In this post I seek to describe how we responded to this crisis and what we have learned in the process.
To many of us, the routines and rituals of daily life have been disrupted in ways that we could not have imagined just a few months ago. The onset of the global pandemic from COVID-19 has created a paradigm-shattering environment for many fields. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn asserted that paradigms represent groups of practitioners rather than a subject matter. As those groups move through a cycle, from what is considered the normal or accepted model into a series of events that lead to revolutions and changes of paradigm understandings, they will arrive at a new way of doing things.
Figure 1: Kuhn cycle of a paradigm change.
In this way, paradigm-shattering events require us to look at the responsible groups of practitioners, consider the implications to practice, and recreate a practice to confront the new reality. In education, it has been estimated that nearly 1.5 billion children are no longer in brick and mortar schools. This pandemic clearly has far-reaching implications for educational practitioners, students, and families. Each of these represents a series of critical practices that make up the responsible groups that are part of the educational paradigm.
Figure 2: Simple model of responsible group practice for educational paradigm development.
The purpose of this series of writings is to address problems of practice that these responsible groups are facing. While this time may hold great promise for rapid change in education, we must also take into consideration concerns about implications to the responsible groups that represent communities that no longer have shared practice. Research on how communities of practice undergoing change suggest that this will be a process of both learning new ways and relinquishing old ways. Therefore, I present some of the emergent practices that my educational team are working on as society develops a new paradigm for education.
Problem of Practice. The problem of practice facing many school systems is that they are undergoing mass organizational changes in culture, structures, and practice. T/K-12 schools and educators have rapidly moved from organizational cultures that were primarily risk-averse into a situation where they are risk immersed. They have moved from seeking out best practice to seeking out emergent practice. We are seeking a new paradigm to address the present reality as we seek to also see how these lessons might be applied to the futures of learning.
Gone are many factors that have been cited as barriers to the development of new or redesigned school models. For example, we cannot say that teachers are not engaging in new classroom practices; there are no classrooms to engage in practice at all. In many parts of the world, teaching to standardized tests are not required, as they have been suspended. Where school funding in K-12 education has been bound to Average Daily Attendance, there are regions and states that have suspended this practice in favor of evidence of learning and engagement. With nearly all previous governing factors no longer in place, educators find themselves both freed from what was but also in free fall into what is a new reality. Where we had been seeking to perfect a school system that is centuries old, we are now forced to confront who, what, when, where, why, and how of learning with nearly a blank slate.
In our school system, we anticipated school closures and started multiple weeks of preparation. The purpose of this posting is to share some of what we have, and are continuing to do, to prepare our school team members for rapid change. While there was a great deal of preparation for the changes that we continue to face, we like so many are in moving from model crisis to model revolution. What we have sought is to keep a dynamic framework to support our team for change which focuses on communications, resources, risk, and supports (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Overview of a dynamic framework for rapid change.
Communication structures must be heightened. Simply put, social change is a communication process. The act of learning, in and of itself, is a change process. Therefore, as we have so much change that is occurring around us, we need to be in a state of accelerated communications with structures to make that happen. It has been estimated that during a changing environment, communication structures should be high and occupy about 50% of leadership activities. Therefore, communication structures must be heightened so that information is disseminated rapidly through a variety of media.
Consider that the largest disruptions have been to our communication structures. Nearly all previously normalized communication channels have been disrupted. There are no classroom interactions. There are no drop-off/pick-up interactions. No passing conversations, overheard statements, lunchroom discussions, or front office interactions. It is all gone. Therefore, the informal and formal information dissemination channels are gone and have been replaced with new ones.
Consider the following communications practice:
- Daily leadership team meetings at the start and the end of the day;
- Daily teacher meetings by grade spans;
- Virtual town hall meetings;
- Ongoing parental and student updates;
- Online meetings, office hours, and learning sessions;
- Full staff meetings each week for updates;
- Real-time communication text systems such as chat rooms that people can monitor;
- Bulletin boards and asynchronous communications systems such as Slack for coordination;
- Project management systems with feedback loop cycles such as Asana and Wirke to keep things on track and moving forward.
Diminish risk aversion through support systems. To rapidly adapt to the changing needs of students in these environments, we believe that there should be support systems to diminish risk aversion. School systems have quickly been forced from a state of being risk-averse to an environment where they are now risk immersed. Risk aversion creates innovation paralysis; people become afraid to implement new ways and ideas for fear of the repercussions that failure might have on their livelihoods. Therefore, we cannot have a learning institution that can rapidly adapt to change and tell people that failure is not an option. Failure is part of the process of innovation.
In our schools, we have adopted systems such as design thinking to support the innovation process, allowed and celebrated learning through failure, and increased creative thinking about solutions to the challenges that we are facing. However, design thinking is more of an organizational disposition than a process. These dispositions include shifts in mindset that focus on needs definition before problem-solving, abdication of preconceived outcome, being situated toward ambiguity, being human-centric, and having a reflexive process that seeks to increase contextual knowledge using empathy as the basis of understanding. It is an organizational culture that seeks to gather information on human systems, seek out options, prototype and test, and then rapidly scale current solutions quickly while engaging in an iterative and evolutionary process of improvement through new understanding and systems.
The following are examples of support that drive innovative solutions:
- Value appropriate levels of situationally based risk-taking and reward those for doing so;
- Value that the only true failure is not trying;
- Support that failure is something that happens in a learning process – but it should never be an expectation. Do not fire people for failing in an honest and approved effort, celebrate that failure as part of learning;
- Create cross-functional teams with students, teachers, classified staff, and parents to address issues and develop options to test;
- The best way to have a great idea is to have many ideas, do not shut people down in the process of seeking solutions;
- Always seek to question how a problem is being framed. How is it tied or related to other problems? Be sure you are asking the right questions. Keep open to the possibility that in seeking out a solution for one problem you may find resolutions for another.
Reorganize all school resources to confront the new workflow for learning. Within the field of design thinking, we speak about ecosystem design. In our school community, the system design is structured around resource conditions, systems dynamics, innovation and growth, and community experience. What we recognize is that there is a fundamentally new workflow for each of the responsible groups that create the educational paradigm: educators, students, and parents. Rather than an annual process with regular reviews, this becomes an adaptive and iterative cycle that is based upon rapidly shifting needs of the organization.
- Keep a focus on equity-driven resourcing;
- Repurpose positions to new and emergent needs;
- Consider all material assets of the school and where they would most appropriately be located in the interest of our educational purpose – as it is safe, get those assets out of the schools and into the hands of the people who need them;
- Redevelop budgets to appropriately resource the new workflow and confront the new reality;
- It is better to have a plan and not need it than have a need and no plan. Do not underestimate this crisis, be looking at this with a long-term plan;
- Consider what we are learning in this crisis and what implications it has on future resourcing for learning.
Figure 4. Example of design thinking based balanced framework for ecosystem design.
Develop and implement emotional support appropriate to the situation. Educational leaders have a moral and ethical obligation for the well being of their team members. The trauma of sudden career and personal life changes can put individuals under a great deal of stress. This can lead to cognitive disconnection, a state of being where we fundamentally have our sense of identity challenged or skewed. We must consider what support structures may be put in place to support a team as they navigate uncertainty, emotional trauma, and work/life stress.
The following are examples of items that can be considered and implemented to support team members:
- A staff crisis and family support counseling number to address the mental health needs of team members;
- Peer support groups, such as affinity groups, that can meet and discuss strategies for life circumstances;
- Virtual social setting group meetings and lunch groups;
- Regular check-ins from staff members and/or their supervisors;
- Create and send care packages to support working at home.
Final thoughts. While we rapidly develop systems to meet the challenges at hand, we need to remember that there will be implications as we undergo a paradigm-shattering series of events. Even now, we can see that this pandemic is teaching each of us that there are new ways to serve our learning communities. We can not forget that in any educational system design we must have a clear focus on equitable redistribution of resources to support our team, students, and families. We must support those learning communities now while keeping a keen eye on the lessons we learn to address what is next. We should be vigilant in our efforts to ensure that there is a silver lining for schools.
[Guest post by Dr. Shawn T. Loescher, Chief Executive Officer, Urban Discovery Schools]
Annotations / Citations
Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions (4th ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Loescher, S. T., Morris, M., & Lerner, T. (2019, February). An introduction to Design Thinking: Implications and applications in K-12 educational institutions. A conference paper session presented at the Center for Secondary School Redesign annual meeting, San Diego, CA.
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations. New York, NY: The Free Press.
About the author. Shawn T. Loescher, Ed.D., is an active practitioner with over 25 years of experience, both domestically and abroad, in educational innovation and school system redesign. He currently serves as a Chief Executive Officer of an inner-city school system in California. In 2019, Dr. Loescher was named one of 16 worldwide recipients of the TED-Ed Innovative Educators award. He earned his doctorate from the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University with a focus on leadership, innovation, theory, and policy. Dr. Loescher is an American Educational Research Association (AERA) awarded scholarly practitioner in the field of action research and sciences. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, guest lecturer, TED Talk speaker, consultant, and think tank participant. More information about Dr. Loescher can be found at www.shawnloescher.com | www.urbansd.com | www.id8high.com | www.dtecsd.com