Introit

Secrets of the Educational Soil

I happen to be an amateur de vins (literally: one who loves wines). I often see relationships between wine and people, meaning that wine is like people.

Imagine my delight when, in the weekend edition of the Financial Times, I read an article called "Secrets of the Soil," in which the author delves into the importance of soil to winemaking. He spent some time with a couple, Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, who perform biological analysis of soils in winemaking regions.

Lydia states that "we [the winemaking industry] are in the middle of homogenizing everything, and that's not what wine is about." Claude adds, "I want to understand the fields and the vineyards, not impose my law on them. We are dealing with something incredibly complex. [...] When you work with a soil, you become its co-creator."

Substitute "education" and "students" (or "families") for "fields" and "vineyards," and it sounds like the independent school perspective on education!

Fore! Measuring the Head's Performance

Heads Speak for Themselves: May 2012

It's May, which means that despite the underlying awareness of all the end-of-year events and unresolved matters, one eye is glancing hopefully at the calendar in search of an opportunity to schedule the season's first round of golf. Meanwhile, the other eye notices with somewhat less enthusiasm the e-mail that has just come across the screen from our Board Chair, reminding me that we need to arrange time for my yearly performance review. I should say at the outset that I embrace the concept of the review. Years ago, in encouraging me to undergo with the proper spirit my first performance review as a rookie head of school, the Chair reminded me sagely that "even though we might be in good health, it's wise to get a physical every year." Yet I am guessing that your experiences with evaluations of your own performance as school heads, like mine, have been as varied as I fear the results of my swings will be whenever that first round of golf comes to pass. In some years, there were no performance assessments done; in one way that was a relief, but also not conducive to professional growth. At other times a process was followed, but there was lack of clarity regarding the criteria on which the assessment was based. A third variety of review entailed exhaustive gathering of evidence, several times during the year, to demonstrate the scope and value of the work I had been doing as head. This approach generated a lot of information for analysis; the difficulty lay in the amount of time involved in chronicling the work on top of actually engaging in it.

Two years into my current tenure, I was asked by the Board leaders to compile a semi-annual portfolio as a key element of my self-assessment. I recoiled at this directive initially, concerned once more about the time it would require and bothered by how tedious and redundant it might turn out to be--given the reports I was already doing prior to each Board meeting. Three years later, rather than being simply a compilation of meetings held, constituents contacted and plans developed, the portfolio has evolved into a “Journal of Leadership Practices.” It is the fruit of any progress I have made in becoming more self-reflective, and of our Board's great care in defining the leadership practices that are required to serve the school's best interests. These include: strategic thinking, pre-planning, maintaining thoughtful oversight of objectives the head and his/her team are pursuing, managing and shepherding the Board to advance the school's mission and vision, demonstrating initiative and focus, serving as the “voice” of the institution and its highest aspirations, and being an agent of positive, necessary changes. Thus, each January as well as June, I consider any relevant examples and enter them into the Journal. The list of entries is not so much a “snapshot” of discrete individual activities, but rather a “video” of a related series of actions which may (and I hope that is the case) or may not underscore a pattern of leadership behavior.

Considering the Journal entries in toto is similar to analyzing clips of great golf swings, something I have been doing with unwarranted optimism during the off-season. Unexpectedly, I've discovered a few interesting parallels between the elements of strong school leadership and what makes for a successful golf shot. We begin with club selection, the choice of the proper resources-- and personnel for the school head-- to make possible all that follows. The approach to the ball, proper stance included, are akin to the leader deciding to take initiative and to act. He or she must exercise foresight, carefully considering the intended goal, just as golfers visualize where they want the ball to wind up, and how to get it there. Proper grip is essential for a great shot, just as the school head needs to have a handle on issues both large and small. The swing is of course the key component, like the action the leader takes or the decisions the leader makes. The swing must occur in the right plane, with the club pointed at the target--and for the school head, actions must be aligned with the school's mission. The head and eyes of the golfer serve as anchors for the swing while the legs and arms turn; they are apt metaphors for the focus and steadiness that the school head must provide. And finally, there is the importance of follow through, whether we are referring to the golf swing, or to our leadership roles.

All of these elements and others must be in the mix in order to put together a beautiful swing or successful leadership. Watching the video reveals to the golfer why his or her shot was so good--because the golfer can pause the action, see the component parts of the shot, and then admire how well they flowed together. The process inspires the golfer to maintain and perfect those components to the point where they become habitual, routine, embedded in muscle memory. In the same way, by considering the inventory of leadership practices through the portfolio process, I have become more aware these past several years of the components or “stuff of school leadership,” to the point of noticing when I am engaged in those practices, and seeking to replicate them in a variety of circumstances. That is the ultimate value the “Journal of Leadership Practices” portfolio has had for this head of school.

Good luck with your own review process, and best wishes for a successful home stretch!

Richard J. O'Hara is President of John Carroll School (grades 9 to 12, Bel Air, Maryland). He can be reached at rohara@johncarroll.org.

The Most Important Skill

Q: What is the most important skill that you can have?

A: The ability to keep acquiring new skills.

Manage for Innovation

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, co-authors of The Progress Principle (look under my book reviews, in the category list to the right), recently published a useful blog post on innovation and creativity for the Harvard Business Review blog.

I've been writing a bit about innovation recently--if not directly, then indirectly. Innovation in schools is challenging, there's no doubt about it. Everyone has to be involved, and impediments (i.e. too many parameters and rules) have to be removed, if it is to flourish.

Amabile and Kramer focus on the issue of innovation through the lens of management, which is a structure we usually identify as anathema to innovation--or, at the very least, some sort of impediment to it. As the authors say, however, "You really can manage for innovation, but it starts by knowing what drives creativity in people who generate and develop the new ideas that, when implemented, will become tomorrow's innovations." This phrase should garner the attention of school leaders.

They identify four factors that savvy managers can balance in order to motivate creativity and innovation:

1. Goals -- strategic direction toward a worthy purpose, neither too loose nor too constrained. "Intrinsic motivation and creativity wither when people are told exactly what to do and how to do it; they need the autonomy to apply their own specific skills and talents."
2. Evaluation -- the crucial balance here involves "a great deal of frequent, work-focused evaluation and feedback that is truly informative and constructive. Ideally, these evaluations involve peers (as well as supervisors) openly discussing the work. To perform at their creative peak, people need to know that every idea will be respected enough to merit thoughtful consideration." In other words, strong evaluation pressure doesn't work, and neither does loose evaluation. "The best managers [...] accepted [...] failures as a necessary part of doing creative work and helped employees search for lessons and opportunities in those failures."
3. Reward -- "Creativity flourishes when employees know that rewards and recognition will follow from good, creative efforts--without being told constantly about exactly which rewards will follow from which actions. [...] Some of the most positive rewards are not monetary." One person they interviewed stated that, "part of the reward is having your managers listen to what you have done. Having access to your supervisors increases internal motivation, so managers should be available on an informal basis."
4. Pressure -- "Having the positive pressure of an optimally challenging assignment--being given an important problem to solve that no one else has been able to crack--can supercharge intrinsic motivation and creativity." Conversely, being told to do a particular job "in a particular way, with no tolerance of failure, little expectation of recognition for success, and extreme, arbitrary time pressure, can kill anyone's creativity motivation."

Of course, this is all lovely, in theory. In practice, how does it work in the real world, boots-on-the-ground in schools? This approach would work well in a number of schools I'm familiar with, but I also know of schools where the management culture would never be open to this kind of management (and the teachers know it).

Another important question: for the Head of School to manage in this way, how would the relationship between Head and Board Chair (+ entire board) need to look? Is there spill-over into governance, inasmuch as this is an internal management issue? For a Board that is not accustomed to having a Head exercise this kind of management approach inside the school, how might the Head educate the Board on its worth?

Living the School Mission: A Haitian Experience

"Heads Speak for Themselves" - April 2012 installment

Recently, I spent five days in Haiti with our Lower School Chaplain, Modern Language Chair, and Maintenance Manager, who is a master carpenter.  The four of us traveled there over spring break to start our official relationship with a partner school, St. Mark’s, a K-6 school of 200 + students in Cerca, a village in the mountains of the Central Plateau. Our primary focus was to learn how we might be helpful to them and how their lives might inform ours.

The idea began at a board meeting for the National Association of Episcopal Schools (NAES) that I attended in January.  I joined the board a year ago, and, at that meeting in New York City, several school heads were clearly moved by their recent visits to their respective Haitian partner schools.  I listened intently as they described the great spirit and dedication shown by members of the Episcopal Church and clergy who serve in Haiti (10% of Haiti’s population is Protestant, and Haiti has the largest Episcopal diocese in the world with nearly 250 churches and schools) and of their need for financial assistance and service needs. As one of the largest and most affluent Episcopal schools in America, and because I believe it is important to connect The Episcopal Academy to the wider world, it made great sense to me to join the Episcopal partnership program in Haiti. We already support and work with St. James the Less Episcopal School, a start-up middle school for neighborhood children in the West Allegheny section of Philadelphia (PA), so why not expand our connections a bit further afield?

When we arrived, we were met by a retired Episcopal priest and former school head who now spends a few months in Haiti each year connecting American Episcopal schools with their Haitian counterparts.  The priest, Roger, drove us in a rented jeep through gridlocked traffic, past tent camps for some of the thousands still left homeless after the devastating earthquake of 2010.  More than two years after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck near Port au Prince, much of the city still looks like a war zone. The Presidential Palace remains in ruins, the main Catholic and Episcopal Cathedrals have only a few walls still standing, and a large number of federal buildings and much of the Central Hospital still lie completely destroyed. We eventually crawled our way out of Port au Prince and made our way to Mirebalais, the main city of the Central Plateau.

After spending the night and meeting our host, Père Jeannot, who is the Priest-in-Charge for 16 different churches in the district, we set out with him for the journey to our partner school.  We drove down bone-jarring roads for nearly an hour to the spot where our trek on foot began.  After donning sun hats and applying lots of sunscreen, and loaded with gifts for our counterparts at St. Mark’s, we began our hike.  All told, we were a party of about 20 people and several horses.

We hiked 45 minutes up a gentle slope to a wide river crossing where we were rowed across in dories.  The horses were unloaded, swam across, and all of us set out again up a steeper track this time.  Some two hours later, about six miles from where we set out, we straggled in to the village of Cerca, exhausted, but warmly welcomed by our new friends.

We spent a day and night with the people of St. Mark’s, met with the principal, observed classes, played and danced with the children, attended mass, observed a flag ceremony, talked extensively with Père Jeannot, and began to form some ideas about what support we might be able to provide our new partners. Please see the photo below of the students at St. Mark's:

We are, of course, still in the very early stages of forming a long-term plan.  We know we would like to have a group return to Cerca at least once each year, and we would like to have a handful of Upper School students with us for every visit.  We know that anyone who has the opportunity to travel there will be forever changed.  That is what they will give to us.  When we departed they presented us with wild chicken eggs (for which they had hunted for all over the mountainside), giant yams, bananas, coconuts, and colorful baskets: incredibly generous gifts from those who have so little.  These material items, however, were not the most important gifts we received. The most important gift was being able to live our school mission in a real, tangible, and truly effective way – and the excitement that comes with imagining our students having this very same experience.

I close with several lines from a book handed to me by one of our parents just before I headed to Haiti.  Entitled Create Dangerously, by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, it is the “Philadelphia Reads” book this year.  In her essay, Our Guernica, she writes, “Haitians like to tell each other that Haiti is ‘te glise,’ slippery ground. Even under the best of circumstances, the country can be stable one moment and crumbling the next.  Haiti has never been more slippery ground than after the earthquake, with bodies littering the streets, entire communities buried in rubble, homes pancacked to dust. Now Haitian hearts are also slippery ground, hopeful one moment and filled with despair the next.  Has 206 years of existence finally reached its abyss?  We wonder.  But now even the ground is no more.”

The most important thing now, I believe, is to continue on and to follow through and deliver on our partnership.  The people of Haiti have endured too much hardship and I would hate to disappoint them again. I want us to do our little part to keep their hope alive with a gift of tangible faith and mission in action.

L. Hamilton (Ham) Clark is The Greville Haslam Head of School at The Episcopal Academy (Newtown Square, PA). He can be reached at clark@episcopalacademy.org.

Goading the Stodgy Middle

Excellent article on talent in the April 17 (2012) edition of the Financial Times. Philip Delves Broughton is brave enough to call out what so many managers are afraid to admit in public: "managers spend more time managing mediocrity than they do searching for excellence" (10).

In independent schools, we are obsessed (rightly so) with the notion of excellence, but as Broughton points out, "it is a mathematical fact that most of us are average. [...] Our managers, who are mostly thoroughly average themselves, know it. And those below us in the pecking order certainly know it." Doubtless these are inlammatory words to some, yet I submit that it is worth forcing one's self to read the remainder of his column. At the very least, it can serve as a "check" for our thinking.

Regardless of the independent school gathering/conference, we tend to hear the same message: it is important to attract, develop, and manage top talent. We prattle on about how everyone can be innovative and creative, dull or brilliant, and still be an A-player, to use a known mantra of excellence (10). However, Broughton proffers, "most management involves goading the stodgy middle."

Can everyone be innovative and/or creative, however? Broughton cites none other than Clayton Christensen, the guru of innovation at Harvard, who, in a recent issue of Harvard's alumni magazine, states, "I think about 40 per cent of people just are not going to be good at innovating regardless of what they do." Furthermore, he adds that [only] "5 per cent are born with the instinct," which leaves some 55% who comprise the stodgy middle, i.e. who could learn to be innovative, if led properly.

Broughton goes on to draw a parallel between the 40% who won't be good at innovating and the stodgy middle of any group that is faced with change: "you are never going to change them." Yes, you might choose to invest plenty of resources in these folks (think: professional development), but it becomes a manager's job to find a place where these folks can be useful within the organization. Broughton says that "managing the middle is best done with what might be called the Serenity approach, after the prayer [...] "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change / Courage to change the things and I can / and wisdom to know the difference."

He does underscore, though that the 55% of folks, the middle, is indispensable. Organizations need them.

So, I pose a question to readers: in regards to the "middlers," do they benefit from better management or from better leadership? Should Broughton have explored the notion of leadership in addition to management? Other thoughts? I will publish your remarks in the "comments" section.

News Flash: Online Learning is Mainstream

Can we please stop talking about online learning as if it's something new?

At this point (April 2012), online learning is not innovative, as a concept. There might be inventive ways of handling teaching and learning via the digital medium, but we've long since passed the stage where we could label it "innovative." The first online class for higher education was offered over twenty years ago (University of Phoenix), and public schools began using online coursework around fifteen years ago.

Online learning is decidedly mainstream. It is a viable option, there are quality providers (and those that lack quality), and there are different methods involved with the classes.

Independent schools are still trying to determine whether to award credit for online courses, whether to allow online courses when the same face-to-face courses exist already, whether the quality is as good as what an independent school would expect normally within its walls, and so forth.

But it's not innovative any longer. Rather, it's a question of to what degree a school will assimilate online coursework into its repertoire of course offerings.

Therefore, when we look at the "growth curve" for online learning, we need to understand that this curve shows the degree to which online options are offered and taken; it is not showing any degree of innovation. This is an adoption curve, not an innovation curve.

From this point on, any "growth" in the online learning market place is akin to "growth" in a mature industry. Consider Coca-Cola, IBM, 3M, and so forth: they are still trying to grow, but their growth is incremental because many of their products are already mature. To be sure, they put much time and money into their R&D departments in order to innovate, and these products do produce growth, but the "growth" of their core products tends to occur as a result of adoption in new markets.

Online learning--a core product of the world of teaching and learning--has a place in independent schools. That should be self-evident by this point, and we should stop saying "Wow! Look at the shine on that!" everytime we hear someone talk about it. We will spend (waste?) the next three to five years figuring this out, then realize that we've been smitten so much by online learning that we've forgotten to pay attention to other innovations. Schools won't have money to invest in creating/seeking innovative products that enhance teaching and learning because we will have been so busy implementing "innovative" online learning...that is now entering its third decade of existence.

Third decade?! That sounds as if we're behind the curve. Not in front of it; not riding the crest of the wave. Behind.

Likeliest Organizational Changes in Education in Next 3-5 years

One of the things I love to do is to read what industries other than education are doing to advance themselves, as industries. The November 2011 issue of McKinsey Quarterly features an article entitled, "How social technologies are extending the organization." In that article, the authors undertake a deep dive into their data, gathered by over 4,000 respondents; their findings are meant to correlate with the degree of social media usage within the industry.

One of the most interesting data pieces deals with "likeliest organizational changes in next 3-5 years, without constraints." This post is not about prognosticating what technological developments will occur; rather, it's meant to be more holistic, in the sense of looking at an entire organizational system.

Here are top five (i.e., most likely), in descending order of likelihood:

1. The boundaries between employees, vendors, and customers will blur
2. Teams will self-organize
3. Decisions will be based primarily on data rather than opinion/experience
4. The organization's formal hierarchy will become much flatter or disappear altogether
5. Data used for decision-making will mostly be collected through experiments

Here are the bottom five (i.e., least likely), in descending order of likehlihood:

1. Individual performance will be evaluated by peers rather than by managers
2. Employees will have much more discretion in choosing which tasks to work on
3. Employees will play a much greater role in selecting leaders
4. Large companies and/or business units will disaggregate
5. Compensation decisions will be made by peers rather than by managers

Do these likelihoods have any corollation in schools? I think the answer is "partially." Following are some thoughts:

1. Teams will self-organize, if teachers and administrators become more savvy with social media
2. Decisions will be made on the examination of data, if we learn which data to collect and how to analyze them
3. The formal hierarchy of schools will become much flatter...highly unlikely. Perhaps they will become more complex first, then flex to a flatter model.
4. Data used for decision-making will mostly be collected through experiments...only if "bold schools" (as Will Richardson calls them) are willing to be intentionally experimental.
5. Individual performance will be evaluated by peers rather than managers...no, managers will continue to have a place, but more peers may be incorporated by those "bold schools".
6. Large business units (think: divisions) will disaggregate...highly unlikely, although there may be a "bold school" that is willing to experiment with boundary-less divisions. 

What do readers think about these data points from McKinsey? Please post a comment with your thoughts.

Who's In Charge of Innovation?

Who is in charge of innovation at your school?

This is a question I've been mulling over for some time now. Should it be one person, someone who "conducts" the innovation happening in the school? Who is your chief articulator of innovation? Who spells out what is going on, who is doing it, and what the benefits to teaching and learning are?

Arguably, it's the Head of School. Yet, the Head is busy doing plenty of tasks. Should the Head, then, delegate the responsibility of fostering innovation to someone? If so, to whom?

Are the traditional "line positions" [division head, directors, etc.] malleable enough so as to incorporate this responsibility? If we look to the business world, we see that they have carved out some new roles. The two principal roles are Chief Learning Officer and/or Chief Innovation Officer. When you dive into these job descriptions, you note something interesting: some of the more traditional line position responsibilities have come into these new roles, as "innovation" or "learning" touches multiple "traditional" areas of operations.

As schools, we talk often about innovation; we desire to be known as "innovative." Yet, will we consider re-thinking our structures in order to better align with the spirit of an innovative culture?

I submit this post as a general query to the readership. I would welcome your thoughts!

Social Media Explained

If social media are overwhelming, consider the following image (click here for source) as a tool for understanding them. Enjoy!