Launching a school year in the middle of a pandemic!? Where was this class in graduate school? School leaders and principals have been thrown the curveball of a lifetime, and many of us are struggling to survive, much less thrive, in this challenging time. It’s hard to imagine the authors of School Leadership that Works (Marzano, Waters, McNulty) had a pandemic in mind when they wrote about second-order change. However, their ideas give us a place to start when tackling what is ahead and help school leaders understand how people in our organizations respond in the midst of second-order change.
As an AVID staff developer working with principals, assistant principals, and other site leaders for the last seven years, I have used the guiding principles of School Leadership that Works to help leaders become more self-aware of their strengths and weaknesses. My goal has always been to help school leaders know and understand the 21 responsibilities of effective school leaders outlined in the book. I also encourage them to be reflective about their own practice and to explore areas in which they may need to set growth goals to better serve their learning community. We also investigate the leader’s role in times of change, which will be the focus today.
One of the first things I learned when getting ready for the school year was that I was not going to have all the answers people wanted from me. My innate response to this early on was to find a place to hide and hope people would not seek me out for answers to tough questions. I quickly learned that this was a losing strategy and, frankly, a cowardly approach to my responsibility as a leader. Marzano, Waters, and McNulty identify four core leadership responsibilities that have a negative correlation during times of second-order change. In other words, no matter how hard we try, these aspects of our work will be seen as lacking in the midst of second-order change. I wanted to share with you some ways to use the lessons from Marzano, Waters, and McNulty that help me to jump in while leading second-order change without having all the answers.
We keep what is most important in front of us at all times. This is certainly true of our core values and what makes us who we are as an organization. At Richardson North Junior High, we are becoming Resilient, Resourceful, Creative, and Global. These are our core virtues and what we want to instill in all of our scholars. These virtues will long outlast being a junior high student. They will continue to be important for the rest of our scholars’ lives. As a team, we needed to examine these closely to see how we might refine our work around what these virtues may look like in the virtual classroom. Our teachers did a virtual gallery walk with a shared Google presentation to collaborate and share their ideas. We came back to these slides in our first faculty meeting right after school had started to allow teachers to reflect on their work in these areas and bring them back to what is important.
Early on, I was afraid to communicate to stakeholders for fear that what I was saying may be incorrect or may change in the next few days. What I learned is that lack of communication causes fear and anxiety in some people, and that is the opposite of what I wanted. I learned to provide what I do know and be okay with not having every answer. Instead, practice resourcefulness and find out what you can. Follow through with what you say you are going to do and keep being there for people. Leaders have to be present in times of stress and anxiety. I learned that just being present, being a part of the struggle, communicated more to my team than pretending to have all the answers. Transparency is also critical. Your team needs to see you model leading learning in a virtual context. They need to see you adapt and struggle through the same things they are doing with scholars.
Almost all teachers will do an excellent job if they know what is expected of them, and there are effective systems to support their collective work. One of the ways we provide order in a time of uncertainty at Richardson North Junior High is by taking a familiar system, Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS), and refining it to fit our needs in a virtual school environment. Our PBIS team did a great job of adapting our Viking PRIDE norms for the classroom by developing language that fit the needs of a virtual classroom. The familiarity of our Viking PRIDE standards for students and staff helped us to quickly teach scholars our expectations and has made our transition to virtual learning more successful.
Leaders can quickly become overwhelmed with what is coming at them hour by hour. There needs to be a system by which leaders gather questions and feedback so they will know how to best support stakeholders. At Richardson North Junior High, we developed a Virtual Learning HUB for teachers and staff which created a one-stop shop for resources where everyone can quickly find information, and teachers can add knowledge and resources to help support their peers. We also developed a Campus Virtual Learning Website to support scholars and their parents. These systems allowed us to provide communication, order, and input all in one or two tools.
Leading without having all the answers can have leaders feeling inadequate, unprepared, and fearful. By focusing on some key responsibilities, leaders cannot just survive, but also thrive and make their schools stronger by embracing innovation. At Richardson North Junior High, we used AVID’s WICOR model to help engage staff in learning our systems of support and ensuring we had a way to strengthen our culture, communication, order, and input.