Hi, I hope you’re well. Thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter, you rock. This Coaching Letter is your annual list of reminders about how you should think about planning—school improvement plans, strategic plans, equity plans, any kind of plan. These reminders are drawn from several sources, including but not limited to The Strategy Playbook, which I co-authored with Jennie Weiner (currently on sale from the Routledge web site); “An Improvement Plan is Not Enough—You Need a Strategy”, an article in the Kappan which is probably my favorite article and functions as a kind of prelude to the book; Instructional Rounds, especially chapters 1 and 2 on the instructional core and theory of action, respectively (the book is grounded in the work of superintendents’ networks, including ours); Coaching Letter #170, which was last year’s set of reminders, focused mostly on goals. Long-term readers of the Coaching Letter and consumers of our workshops will encounter many things that they have heard from me before.
Goals are not as powerful as they are generally thought to be. Goals are not as important as the strategy required to achieve them. And yet, when I ask coaching clients if they have received feedback on their plans, I almost always find that the only feedback they get is on their goals—they must be appropriately ambitious, and they must be SMART. But these features are meaningless by themselves—like judging the potential of toothpaste to keep your teeth healthy by whether you like the taste. Goals matter when they direct attention, communicate purpose, marshal resources, and enable measurement. But very few plans that I look at lay out a strategy for improving achievement that has a hope of making a difference for equity and achievement. Because…
The plan is only as good as the strategy. Frequently, a ton of energy goes into creating plans. Too often, the energy is expended on the wrong things. Those wrong things include: making the plan look pretty, long lists of action items, wordsmithing, generating strategic objectives, and benchmark data. But none of that matters unless you implement a strategy that will improve student achievement, and almost always the only way to do that is to improve instruction, and almost always the only way to improve instruction is to increase the capacity of teachers. (The most useful resource I have found on this lately is the book Systems for Instructional Improvement, and, usefully, the next session of our book study series is about the Teacher Learning Subsystem, i.e. what the researchers learned about improving the capacity of teachers to deliver equitable and ambitious instruction. More details below.) Here is my coaching technique for having a conversation that gets beyond goals to strategy. I ask clients for their plans, then I copy and paste just the goals and the action items onto a single sheet of paper—usually they only take up one side of the paper, because most of the length of plans is typically taken up by the formatting. Then I hand the paper back to the client and say, if you do everything that’s in this plan, will you reach the goal? The answer, so far, has always been no. So then we can have a real conversation about what would actually get them to the goal—this usually involves creating a version of a flowchart on a big piece of paper. My experience is that people’s thinking is very much constrained by the format of the typical improvement plan, and we should ditch it, at least as a tool for creating strategy. It works OK as a communication tool.
At the time of writing the plan, you are very unlikely to know everything you need to know to meet the goal. Multi-year plans are almost always very weak. If you look at the action items, there is almost nothing that would take more than 12-18 months to execute. But even year-long plans are probably too far in the future, for several reasons, only one of which I’m going to talk about here. We talk about cause and effect in education as though it is deterministic: one thing leads to another, predictably, and not to anything else. Like a clock. But a clock is an almost closed system—the only input is the energy created through winding it—and classrooms are not at all like that. Classrooms are more like weather patterns—you can make some predictions about which conditions will create what outcomes, but you are always dealing with probabilities, not certainties. Very small changes in initial conditions can lead to large changes in outcomes. They are also full of feedback loops—as Octavia Butler says, whatever you touch you change, and whatever you change changes you. As a general rule, the more the system is about people and not things, the less predictable it becomes. So your best bet, when it comes to improving instruction, is to collect data about improvement in student learning, formulate a hypothesis about what you predict will cause improvement, try something small, immediate, and low stakes, collect data about what happened, revise your hypothesis and/or what you tried, and try again. Under these conditions, you can’t plan more than a week ahead. The Matrix: No one can see beyond a choice they don’t understand. Robert Burns: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men | Gang aft agley. Both Eisenhower and Churchill: plans are worthless, but planning is everything. We need to stop claiming that we know everything that needs to be done to achieve our goals, because if we did we’d be doing it already. We need to get serious about the process of improvement.
For this last point in particular, big shout-out to my colleagues Tom, Andrew, and David, who have been doing a ton of reading and thinking about complexity—in David’s case, for quite a long time—and I am very grateful for the help in thinking through these ideas. More next Coaching Letter. In the meantime, if you are looking for things to read, you might try Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity, Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why, Nate Silver’s On the Edge, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, or Meg Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science—actually, any of her books.
I have two fridge magnets on the side of my computer tower that sits on the corner of my desk. (It’s actually my son’s computer and my son’s desk—I know that doesn’t matter but I have this overwhelming compunction to be accurate even when it’s completely irrelevant.) One has an unmentionable word in it. The other says “Every dead body on Mt. Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe calm down.” I project onto it the meaning that educational leaders who judge others according to some moral urgency scale benchmarked to their perception of their own hard work and commitment should take a beat. Think about it this way: people are doing the best they know how to do, and if you want them to do something different, they need to know what that is and they need to know how to do it, and if they don’t know either of those things, that’s your fault and not theirs.
Some other advertising:
We are running a book study on Systems for Instructional Improvement. I cannot overstate how useful this book has been. The basis of the book is research on improving math instruction in middle school, but the implications for instructional improvement in general are profound. The third session will focus on the Teacher Learning Subsystem, which is the subject of Chapter 4 of the book. It will be held on October 7, 2024 from 3:15pm - 4:30pm EST on Zoom and will feature Professor Kara Jackson from the University of Washington. Register here, which will also put you on the mailing list for future sessions and give you access to the website with the recording of previous sessions.
Last school year we ran two wildly successful workshops multiple times: BTC for Coaches and BTC for Leaders. In the spring we are going to run the Next Gen version: Next Level Instructional Leadership. We’re taking what really landed with people in the first iteration and combining with what we have learned since to put together a 2-day workshop that we will run 3 times in three different locations: February 19 & 20 in Rhode Island, March 6 & 7 in Fairfield County, CT, and April 28 & 29 in northern CT or MA. Mark your calendars!
As always, if there is anything else I can do for you, please feel free to reach out. Best, Isobel