The school year is coming to an end, and in the air there is a sense of everything coming to an end. Testing season indicates that the instruction is winding down. The warmer weather reminds us that summer is right around the corner and a break is on the horizon. We see our exit coming up on this interstate of another school year but we all need to remember this.
Every exit is also an entrance to something new.
The end of the school year is also the beginning of the next school year. So how do great leaders ensure that the next school year is better than the last?
In my 20+ years of school leadership, I have found that there are eight secrets that every great leader employs to ensure that the upcoming school year will yield the best results for kids first and adults second. In my work with schools in, I have personally witnessed great leaders turn struggling schools around with these eight secrets.
1. Excellence starts with Leadership.
Everything rises and falls with the quality of leadership in the organization. In order for excellence to be achieved in any organization, it all starts with the leadership team. Whether you are a central office leader, campus leader, or a teacher leader, the outcomes leaders expect to generate always start with the inputs generated by the depth and detail of the leader’s plans and the execution of those plans. Great leaders establish high expectations for all members of the organization, but they take the extra step by creating high levels of support and communication to ensure that all members of the organization reach those expectations. Finally, they create strong accountability systems to ensure that what gets expected gets inspected and if expectations are not met, then they are corrected.
2. Structural alignment and consistency are the foundation of excellence.
A house built on sand will not stand long; therefore, an organization that does not build strong structures for working and learning will not see a huge return on their investment. Great leaders establish clear and detailed routines, procedures, roles, and responsibilities for other leaders and teachers to deliver strong structure in every classroom. In addition, the health of a campus is directly correlated to the consistency in every classroom in the building. When teachers are on the same page in how they lead their students and respond to their misbehaviors, there’s a greater chance that students, regardless of obstacle or barrier in their life, will improve in both their academic achievement and behavioral expectations.
3. Excellence thrives in a vibrant culture for learning.
The quality of soil ultimately impacts the quality of growth in every plant. If you plant roses in sand, don’t expect the rosebush to live for long. The same principle applies to the growth of students. In order to cultivate a rich learning environment, great leaders create systems and structures to help teachers foster relationships with even the most reluctant students. A vibrant culture of learning is a highly engaging learning environment where students are actively pursuing learning from the moment they walk in the classroom until the moment they leave. Great leaders cultivate a culture of learning by modeling it in their leadership of their teachers. The key to retaining our teachers and support staff is found in the leadership team’s concerted effort to build strong relationships with all employees and then engage them in meaningful professional learning so that not only do they grow, but they also stay with the school and continue to grow both themselves and their students the following year.
4. Strategies for learning accelerate every student’s plan for growth.
The success of any team comes down to the strategies and the execution of those strategies in order to win the big game. The four key strategies to ensure excellence in every school are concentrated instruction, ongoing formative assessment, a system of targeted and prescriptive interventions, and purposeful and empowering extensions. This secret is the most challenging for school leaders, because it requires leaders to be actively involved in all facets of curriculum development and the learning process to guarantee mastery of the curriculum. Before leaders can ensure strong strategies for learning, they ensure that secrets two (structure) and three (culture) are solidly in place. Without secrets two and three, the fourth secret will ultimately be a colossal failure.
5. Systems of professional learning ensure excellence in all classrooms.
In order for learning expectations to be achieved, great leaders realize that there will inherently be learning gaps for every adult in the building; therefore, every learning expectation is accompanied by a professional learning expectation for the adults in the building. Let’s be clear on the definition of professional learning. Professional learning is not an event for a day or two in the summer and sporadically throughout the school year. It is a 24/7/365 endeavor. Great leaders make continuous efforts to train their followers in face-to-face or virtual environments, synchronous or asynchronous events, weekly communications via email and daily interactions with all stakeholders. Great leaders remember that they are great teachers of teaching first.
6. Excellence accelerates with collaboration.
A PLC is a professional learning community, but in order for a professional learning community to accelerate excellence, it must first have access to a professional learning system in place first (see secret 5). Without a system of professional learning, PLCs become LPC’s, lesson planning committees. In order for this secret to come to fruition, leaders should provide opportunities for all educators to collaborate weekly or at least biweekly through formal and informal opportunities. Collaboration doesn’t just have to be teachers who share content or kids. Wherever two or more are gathered, collaboration has a chance to occur. Great leaders see the value in collaboration by modeling it in their leadership so that it can be an authentic or organic experience for all educators. Finally, great leadership team is the model of collaboration for their followers.
7. Individualized excellence plans ensure each individual educator’s success.
The most outstanding athletes in every sport have a personal coach. Even Serena Williams, arguably the best women’s tennis player in the history of the sport, has a personal coach. If the best athletes have a coach, then shouldn’t every educator have a coach? In order to become the best leader or teacher, every person needs someone to help them become better. As the proverb says, iron sharpens iron; therefore, educators sharpen one another in order to become better. The purpose of this secret is not for evaluation only. It is for personalized professional development. Great leaders coach teachers and fellow leaders through observations as well as ongoing coaching conversations. They may all look different, but individualized excellence plans all share one common goal. Their explicit purpose is to grow the person into an even better educator than they already are.
8. Excellence only occurs when accountability is an active part of the process.
How do you know if you are healthy? The answer is not found in how you feel. The answer is revealed in the data you use to measure on an ongoing basis. If great leaders expect it, they also measure it with data. Anthony Mohammed said it best, “data is information, not condemnation.“ Behind every secret, great leaders find a way to gather data in both quantitative and qualitative ways to measure if they are getting closer to or further away from reaching success. Examples of data include: common assessment data, intervention data, attendance data, discipline data, professional learning, feedback, parent and student surveys, questions from collaborative teams, and feedback from individual coaching conversations. The whole point of data is to reflect on the effectiveness of the work that has been done, curate best practices that need to be continued, and revise, edit or discontinue actions that are not yielding positive data. Think of it this way. Data is not the destination. Data is the GPS that leaders use to reach their destination of excellence in every classroom and ultimately excellence in every student.
Here’s a bonus secret
The first step to your journey is not a step. It’s knowing where you currently are located. If you want to be successful, don’t implement all eight secrets at once. Reflect on each secret to evaluate two things. First, what is solidly in place in your leadership and then in your classrooms. Second, evaluate what is missing in your leadership first and then your classrooms second. Based on your evaluation of what’s in place and what’s missing, great leaders formulate a plan to prioritize the secrets in order of importance to make a specific plan to improve the school's success. Great schools do not become great overnight. They become great one day at a time, one secret at a time. The ultimate goal is not to be the best, it is to be a little bit better every day. Great leaders adopt this philosophy and once they get to the top, they don’t stop and rest on their best. They make their best even better.
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