I use the term reflective to generate the action phase that leaders should promote within their organization. Purposeful reflection is a well-established habit of many successful leaders. Richard Andersen, the former CEO of Northlands and the former superintendent of Joe Robbie Stadium, explained to me that one of his best strategies as a CEO was to build time into his schedule where he did nothing but purposefully reflect on his challenges ahead. Following his lead, I have run my company with a strategy of deliberately positioning signs and artifacts designed to remind me of the major objectives I need to attend to on a consistent basis. Keeping these objectives within my line of vision is incredibly helpful. Clearly, the steps you take as a leader to organize yourself, to improve your own learning, and to create conditions where you’re enhancing the learning of others make a substantial difference as you serve.
Strategies for Today: Leading for Excellence and Fulfillment
Who wouldn’t want leaders who can support learning and make everyone around them better for it? While this concept is simple, putting it into action certainly isn’t. Furthermore, it is a never-ending job. The strategies I recommend in this section will serve to enhance the development of reflective leadership in your school. Any one of these approaches will help. If you do all of them, it certainly puts you in a position to more quickly develop in this area.
Hire With Teacher Learning in Mind
Although there are many criteria for hiring new teachers or staff members, one of the most important questions you can ask during the interview is what new learning skills or abilities these new hires will bring to your school. What can they teach you? Furthermore, what will their individual learning capacity do for the collective learning capacity of their department, a particular set of teams they might be on, or the school as a whole? Gaining a perspective on a new candidate’s willingness to continue to learn and grow will be a great help in clarifying if he or she is right for your school.
Supervise for Learning Versus Doing
While most states are implementing annual teacher evaluation systems that are increasingly standardized, it’s still important to frame the supervisory process around what’s being learned as opposed to what’s being observed. This is perhaps more easily said than done. Having met with a number of teachers who thoughtfully reflect during supervisor check-ins, I have observed that, in many cases, the conversation revolves around a specific supervisory artifact, some nuanced aspect of the instrument, or some hairline differentiator between rating points. While these are worthwhile professional conversations, attention to that level of detail at the expense of the wider picture can drag even a good method to a halt.
The supervisory process is a rare opportunity for principals to connect with teachers while navigating this challenging journey. To ensure broader communication and reflection, a principal may consider asking the teacher what he learned from the experience, about himself, or about his profession since the last evaluation cycle. This may sound like a relatively minor shift, but in general, the evaluation process tends to be rather intense; if you can shift the focus and ask the teacher to become a more reflective learner in the process, you will send the message that this is indeed an important skill to master.
Create Virtual Professional Learning Communities
Virtual professional learning communities (PLCs) are starting to develop, but at this point, we underutilize this powerful resource. Virtual PLCs take advantage of the wider community using technology as an accelerator, such as blogs, forums, and social media. Most of us are part of some formal or informal learning community that we connect with on a consistent basis. As a leader, you can demonstrate growth in this key concept by encouraging everyone in the school to join a virtual PLC team in which the members connect with one another and help develop each other’s professional learning capacity.
Many of your teachers may already be doing this. Learning from others outside of the school can allow your teachers to harvest ideas and bring them back to share. This strategy also teaches your staff that learning is continuous and expands well beyond the confines of just your building.
Seek Learning Outliers
Outside of PLC teams, you can still take advantage of the wider community of learners. Using either virtual means or a face-to-face interaction, seek out teachers or staff members from your own school or other schools who have some sort of unique learning capacity, and ask them to share that capacity. You can do this in small or large groups, and the presentation doesn’t even have to be terribly formal. Maybe you and a neighboring school can make a learning agreement to share intellectual capital with one another. If talented English teachers in a neighboring school have a certain expertise, for example, perhaps they would be willing to be guest learning facilitators, sharing expertise and expanding learning power.
There are pockets of excellence in terms of learning in every school. To encourage more, call attention to such behavior whenever possible. You can establish ongoing recognition or quietly call this inspirational skill to the attention of the staff member demonstrating it. Finding someone who can serve as a good role model could pay dividends and be an inspiration to a number of staff members.
Assess Learning Readiness
When engaging in one-on-one conversations, it is important to consistently investigate learning readiness with colleagues. By learning readiness, I mean the overall awareness of where an individual stands in terms of what he or she already knows and what he or she is ready to learn. Openly discussing future learning objectives and other learning aspirations with those around you sends the message that learning is important and that you see the connection between the desire to learn and express oneself and the desire to serve and support the needs of the organization.
It’s also important for you, as principal, to step up and ask teams or groups about their learning readiness. This can take a bit more time and conversation because groups aren’t always collectively aware of what they know and what they are ready to learn. Be patient with this conversation, because in many cases, this is an entirely new proposition for groups to consider. By starting the conversation, you’ll put them in a position where they can begin to more consistently recognize some of the learning strengths of their colleagues.
While there will always be a myriad of groups working in different configurations throughout your school, it’s important to remember that your school has its own collective learning capacity. Some of the best questions a leader can ask of his or her staff on a consistent basis are:
How well do we learn new things?
As a staff, are we good at taking on new learning challenges and embracing the opportunity to learn and grow?
What can we do to improve?
This can be a challenging conversation, depending on the size and complexity of the group. There may be an initial tendency for blaming and distractions as topics other than learning power are addressed. Don’t give up on the conversation. Instead, continue to bring up phrases like learning power, and recognize the wonderful learning capacities that exist in the school. If the collective learning power in the school is appropriately harnessed, there will be more examples of creativity, excellence, and fulfillment.
Construct Super Learning Teams
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