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The voice of the American Consortium for Equity in Education at ace-ed.org | Host Larry Jacobs facilitates rich discussions with innovative educators, thought leaders, authors and the leaders within the education industry to promote equity, access and opportunity for every student in every school.
I'm David Cicero, and this
is Education Talk Radio.
Across several recent conversations on
this show, I've noticed a common thread.
We've been talking about the trust
it takes for educators to honestly
examine their relationships with
students and their own practice.
We've talked about hybrid schools and
micro schools making small bets on
different ways of organizing learning,
and we've talked about technologies that
could support richer learning experiences
but may require schools to change more
substantially in order to use them well.
Different conversations, but they all
keep leading me to the same question: How
good are schools at changing themselves?
Teachers, of course,
have always experimented.
They try something, see how students
respond, reflect, adjust, and try again.
But some of the challenges facing
schools today require experimentation
beyond a single classroom, maybe with
schedules, assessment, technology, and
sometimes even the basic design of school.
Schools already use a range of
approaches to tackle problems like
these, from Data Wise and improvement
science to design thinking and other
methods that put educators closer to
the work of solving these problems.
My guests today have spent years
studying what actually happens when
schools try to work this way, when the
approaches succeed, when they struggle,
and what has to exist around educators
for meaningful change to take hold.
Jal Mehta is a professor at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
and Max Yarkovsky is an associate
professor at Radford University.
They are the authors of A Chance
to Solve Their Own Problems: How
Continuous Improvement and Design
Methods Can Improve Schools.
Jal, Max, thanks for coming on today.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you.
Jal, this first one's,
this first one's for you.
You spent years studying schools
using different approaches to
improvement and innovation.
What were you trying to understand
that perhaps we didn't already know?
Well, when we started this study, which,
um, was quite a few years ago now, um, we
noticed that there were a lot of books out
there that were written for practitioners
that offered, um, suggestions for how
they should go about, uh, inquiry-oriented
work around their practice.
So some of the most well-known are
Data Wise, Instructional Rounds,
um, Continuous Improvement, also
Design Thinking and, and others.
And so the sort of practitioner
literature on this, when we started
at least, was pretty thick, but the
actual, um, people actually examining
what happened, uh, was, was thinner.
So we, we initially titled the study
Design Meets the Real World, 'cause we
were interested in what happened when
these kind of optimistic ideas about
how you could change things from below
met, uh, bureaucracy, organizational
inertia, race, all the, all the
things that, um, that hit reforms.
I feel like that ties into
perhaps the title of the book,
the angle that you investigated.
The title of the book is A Chance
to Solve Their Own Problems.
Who needs that chance, and why is it
important that the people closest to the
problem have a role in solving it, John?
Yeah.
So, um, I had-- My first book was called
The Allure of Order, and it was about
the, the failings of, uh, top-down
reform, and it argued that education is
a complex contextual practice and thus
trying to change it from, uh, afar was
likely to be quite, uh, difficult and
would, uh, engender, uh, r-resistance and
frustration and all those sorts of things.
And thus, um, you know, most educational
problems, it's sort of like the Catholic
Church principle of subsidiarity.
Like, most problems should be handled as
close to the ground as they can be, and
only higher actors should only be involved
if they provide a particular expertise
or have some, uh, comparative advantage.
So I think we're talking
about, uh, teachers, coaches,
uh, sometimes principals.
And then in a lot of the cases we studied,
there were often, uh, intermediaries,
universities, nonprofits who were, uh,
working with, uh, said educators, uh,
on a particular problem where those
intermediaries were, um, you know,
positioned to take on those questions.
So if, if we're thinking
about those closest to the
work, Max, this one's for you.
The work describes leaders, quote,
"buffering" the people doing the work,
especially during that vulnerable period
when an idea isn't working smoothly yet.
What does good buffering
actually look like?
What did the best leaders you
studied do to help people get
through that implementation dip?
Yeah.
You know, there's this classic idea
in education research about bridging
and buffering, these two strategies
that are important to crafting
coherence, um, developed by authors,
uh, Meredith Honig and Thomas Hatch.
And I think the idea of bridging
gets a lot of play in education,
especially over the past twenty years.
The goal of school leaders is to connect
educators to state and district policies,
to research, to, you know, best practices,
and, and that's all, that's all good.
But I think there is really
important work in the other
side of the coin, the buffering.
Um, and when we saw good examples
of buffering, I think it came
in a few different forms.
One form is leaders consciously
protecting teachers from the parts
of an initiative that they deem to
be, uh, unhelpful or unsupportive.
So, you know, a district might,
you know, earnestly try to, um, get
teachers to, uh, engage, let's say,
in kind of data-driven practices.
They might be more compliance-driven
or accountability-oriented than
a leader might think makes sense.
So the leader might tr-try to
create a space where those aspects
of the reform are de-emphasized.
Um, another thing is district
leaders, um, will often add new things
without subtracting, um, existing
initiatives, um, and that can just
kind of layer on to the challenge.
So, uh, a form of buffering might be
to, if not subtract, to de-emphasize
initiatives or expectations that they
think are maybe less feasible now that
teachers are trying to do something else.
A final thing I'll mention is, you know,
from some of our really good leaders, a
refrain we would often hear is that when
they are interacting with teachers, the
constant question they're asking is, "What
are the barriers that are keeping you
from being able to do this work well?"
And then they're seeing their job
as working systematically to address
those barriers wherever possible.
And that's another kind
of form of buffering.
It's protecting teachers from
any parts of the system that are
keeping them from doing what,
uh, they think is most important.
Those parts, could they be not only maybe
processes, but expectations as well?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Um, I think often what we found is, uh,
in a lot of these districts, you know,
they belong history of reform efforts.
And, you know, it might be that some
initiative or expectation from 10
years ago, um, is still in the minds
of teachers even though it's actually
not enforced anymore, um, because,
you know, there's fear, um, you know,
policies can linger, um, people are
sometimes trapped in their own cage.
So some things that district leaders
can do, uh, I mean, school leaders
can do, is to kind of really help to,
um, work to dismantle some of those
expectations wherever possible, um, and
stress, you know, um, you know, in this
space, you know, we're actually open to
this vulnerability or it's okay not to
fill out this form exactly as you might
have learned about it in some training.
So I think, yeah, a lot of it
does come from, um, kind of
playing with the expectations
that are often taken for granted.
Um, and I'll just say this is
particularly important to the last part
of your question, um, because of that
implementation dip that you mentioned.
Um, this stuff is really complex and hard.
Um, it asks teachers to kind of
engage in technical practices they're
not used to around looking at data.
They are asked to engage in relational
practices they might not be used
to around observing each other's
practice, um, sharing problems,
um, and often, uh, the problems
can be, uh, overwhelming at first.
Um, so I think, um, the efforts to give
teachers and educators protected time and
a safe space to engage in this work is
really necessary, um, especially in those
early months where the challenges of the
work might appear to outweigh the payoff.
Now, Jal, uh, Max essentially
said a moment ago this is,
this is difficult work.
And when we think about, um, from, from
the book You know, a, a big takeaway
that that feels obvious, that different
kinds of problems require different
kinds of approaches to solve well.
And so I'm wondering, why do schools
and organizations so often reach for
the same kind of solutions regardless
of the problem they're trying to solve?
Is it just because it's difficult work?
I'm sure that's a part of it.
Yeah, that's a good question.
Um, I mean, a big theme in our book is,
um, that you need to tailor the approach
to the, the problem that you have.
Um, the risk of getting, like,
getting too academic, there is
this idea from sociology that's,
uh, you know, called institutional
isomorphism, and basically theâ¦
it's just a sort of fancy way of saying,
like, people look around, they don't
really know what to do, so they just do
the sort of same things that other places
do because it looks, uh, legitimate.
So in theory, we have 100,000 schools in
50 states and 14,000 districts and, you
know, you would expect there to be a lot
of variety across that because in terms of
formal governance, there's a lot of, um,
you know, possibilities for variability.
But in practice, like most schools
look pretty similar, and institutional
isomorphism says, you know, people
are not that imaginative, they're a
little conservative and so they look
for the same sorts of solutions that
people down the road, uh, have chosen.
And I think while these practices, you
know, they sound consistent with kind
of the norms of how schools do things,
I mean, schools have been awash in data
at least since No Child Left Behind,
um, what the people who developed the
methods were trying were s- were in
some ways sort of countercultural.
They were saying, you know, "Slow down.
Really examine some
aspect of your practice.
Uh, invite in a- outside experts to
talk and discuss a sort of particular,
uh, arena of work where, you know,
you might be looking for new ideas."
Um, and those are just not things
that are built into the way
that schools usually operate.
So we found in a lot of cases people kind
of took the parts of the methods that
were most consistent with the way that
they already did things, uh, and, uh,
discarded the parts that might have really
helped them that were inconsistent with
the way that they normally do things.
And so if we're, if we're accepting that,
you know, I've got this problem, I need an
innovation, and it's not something that I
mentioned at the top, you know, maybe just
a, a learning experience in the classroom.
If we're talking about redesigning
the school day, um, elevating student
agency across a district or assessment,
when you're experimenting at that
level, what kind of environment
do I really need to create at a
high lever, at a high level, Jal?
Yeah.
I mean, I really think that is,
like, the, the critical question.
I mean, one idea we talk about in the
book is a, a, a relational container
that, uh, you know, schools exist in a
bureaucratic, like, fairly transactional
world where, you know, teachers go to
professional development and people
show them lots of PowerPoints and,
uh, you know, there's a lot of sort of
one-way transmission of ideas which is
not too appreciated by the educators.
And then there's also, you know,
been a lot of, uh, uh, uh, top-down
accountability in the system since
No Child Left Behind, which is its
whole other conversation of, you
know, something that had some positive
intentions going sort of wildly awry.
Um, but I think when you're trying
to learn, you need space for, to
realize that you're not gonna know
all the answers at the beginning.
So for a leader to cultivate a space where
people have the opportunity to, uh, see,
you know, to try things, to acknowledge
that when you try things, not everything's
gonna work, uh, and for that to be okay
to share is, uh, is really critical.
And so, you know, the-- when we saw
people doing this well, they, you know,
modeled it through personal check-ins
and, uh, building, uh, relationships.
Uh, I think one sort of m- message
of the book is that even though these
methods sort of present themselves as,
like, being about, like, you know, run
charts and other sort of fairly technical
things, that there's sort of a huge human
side to this, uh, change effort, and
it's bringing the two together that's
so critical for successful change.
I, I, I really love that answer,
and it goes directly into
my next question, actually.
You know, what you're really talking
about, Jal, is creating an environment
where people, uh, can learn, can
fail, can prototype, can experience
towards a common goal, and we're
all in this, in this together.
And so Max, this one's,
this one's for you here.
Um, in that work, you found that trust
was critical But I, I, you know, I, I read
some of that, and I thought to myself,
"But what does distrust actually look
like inside a school improvement effort?"
You know, who doesn't trust whom, and
what are they afraid might happen?
Can you give us some insight there?
Yeah.
And I, I think that's absolutely right.
And let me just pause on why trust is
critical because it's, it's, it's a
statement that gets said all the time,
and it's easy to take it for granted.
But it is, I think, more powerful
than, than we always imagine
when we say things like that.
So continuous improvement is driven by the
ability to identify and address problems.
If you don't have trust or psychological
safety, if people don't feel like they
can tell you when there's a problem,
when they're experiencing a challenge,
the whole engine of continuous
improvement, um, gets weakened, right?
You're only learning from a tiny
subset of the possible problems.
So I, I wanna just emphasize how
core, uh, trust is to, um, any of
this working as it's intended to.
Um, what does distrust look like?
Distrust looks like leaders or
teachers who are not really listening
to what might be said in a meeting,
but are remembering what has
happened in the past in the district.
So imagine there's a, uh, an
event where teams are sharing the
improvement work they've been doing.
Um, the facilitators or leaders
of the event might be saying,
"Hey, we want your problems.
Tell us what's not working.
Tell us the progress you've made.
Let's lean into the mistakes
and learn from them.
You know, where are you
falling short in the data?
That's really helpful.
You know, how can we support you?"
Distrust looks like when leaders
say, "Okay, you're saying that, but I
know three years ago when I shared my
data and it wasn't as good as it was
supposed to be, I got my hand slapped.
Or when I gave my feedback to some
principal or central office leader, that
came back to bite me two months later."
And I think the challenge is, uh,
trust requires kind of an unbroken
chain of, um, commitment, of doing
what you say you're gonna do, um, and
it only takes one violation of that to
linger and to kind of poison the well
for any given, uh, teacher or leader.
So time after time, you know, we were
in examples-- we were in meetings or,
um, workshops where people were saying
the right thing around trust and safety,
but when we spoke to teachers or leaders
afterwards, they didn't take it seriously
because they didn't actually trust that,
you know, people would follow through
with what they said, and they were
afraid based on things that have happened
in the past about times they've tried
to be vulnerable or go out on a limb.
So, you know, that is so detrimental
to improvement work because if
you don't have that kind of trust,
you're not gonna give feedback to
district leaders or school leaders
about what's working or what's not.
You're not gonna be honest in, in
the data that you're presenting, or
you might present, you know, a better
spin on the data or might not actually
look at the part of your practice
that needs the most improvement.
Um, so yeah, we noticed that to be
a real challenge in a lot of our
cases, um, that had to be addressed
in order to move this work forward.
So, so Max, I wrote something down
while, while you were speaking.
You know, when you think about continuous
improvement formally, I'm wondering, is
the human factor built into that too?
Because what I wrote down here
was accepting that others are
improving constantly and I'm
open to improving too Right.
That sounds like the environment
that, like, in your example, "Hey,
last time I submitted this work, I
kinda got my hand slapped," right?
And people are remembering
the past and not, you know,
thinking about moving forward.
They're sort of still
ruminating back there mentally.
Does, does that continuous improvement
work also, um, pull in continuous
improvement of the people, like
themselves, growth mindset?
That's where my head is going.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, um, there's a, a concept that,
that Jal writes about a lot, um, I think
he takes from, from Richard Elmore from
Harvard, um, called symmetry, and I think
symmetry is really key to all of this.
Um, no one is gonna take me seriously
as a leader if I'm preaching continuous
improvement and I, I am disinterested in
improving how, uh, how I approach my work.
So I think one of the easiest
first steps any leader can take
is to, to model what they preach.
Um, and that sounds easy, and it's
a lot harder when you're actually
starting to get feedback that you're
not used to about the things that, uh,
aren't going as well or the session
you led that actually didn't help
even though you thought it was great.
So, um, I, I think, uh, you're absolutely
right that for this to work, everyone's
got to really, um, value not just
the continuous improvement of a team
or of a teacher but of, um, oneself,
of the organization, um, and, and
acknowledge that that's gonna mean, um,
hearing about things that you thought
were quite good about your practice
that actually could be improved.
I, I wanna hear from
both of you on this one.
Um, Jal, you first.
One thing that surprised me in the
book is that giving people more
ownership isn't always better.
You actually write that too
much ownership can be a problem.
What do you mean by that, Jal?
What does that mean?
So, um, I think the, the context for
that was, um, trying to give peopleâ¦
If you're trying to make a change, say,
at the, at the, at the classroom level.
There was one case where, um, the
leader of the district really wanted
some pretty significant, uh, changes.
This was a Canadian district, and
they were trying to do things around
indigenous learning and, uh, land-based
learning and, you know, really, like,
open up the, the grammar of schooling.
And the teachers said, "We really
appreciate the s- the, the sort of
the green light for this kind of work,
but, like, you need to do more on
your end to help parents understand,
like, what we're doing and why.
Create time and space for us
to network with each other
and learn from each other."
This creates some, you know, unintended
consequences, like the, the kids who
joined a particular program had more
needs than sort of the average kid,
and so they needed more support to
respond to those more needs, et cetera.
So I think it's just sort of thinking
really carefully about theâ¦
There's, there's a role for leaders.
Like, leaders establish the
conditions in which things happen.
And, you know, there are schools
where teachers have a lot of
roles, have a lot of input and
leadership, and that can be good.
But there can also be situations where
teachers just want to, to teach, but
they want the circumstances in which they
teach to be reasonable and manageable.
So that's kind of what I meant.
Like, don't, don't sort of dump onto
the teachers things that really are
not, like, that don't need to be
things that they have to be managing,
unless you've built a structure that's,
like, a, a co-managed structure,
so the, um, which also can be good.
Max, what would your
follow-up to that one be?
Yeah.
Um, maybe building on what y'all said,
um, you know, we wrote this book Out of
a, uh, acknowledgment that, you know,
top-down reforms, you know, like No Child
Left Behind, had a lot of limitations.
But also that, like, totally bottom-up
reforms also ran into a lot of challenges.
Like, we, we did a lot of site-based
management and things that prioritized
autonomy at the very local level, and
those, too, ran into a lot of challenges.
And we see these methods as offering
some kind of middle ground between
the two that we find promising
and interesting in some way.
Um, so, you know, in this particular case,
maybe one thing I'll just add on is that,
um, there were many leaders who believed
that it would be better, all things equal,
if teachers had more, um, ownership over
the problems they were selecting, over
the solutions that they were taking on.
You know, maybe even o- over whether
they wanted to do this at all, right?
Um, the problem is they were working in
a district where there's 15 other things
that need to happen on a particular
timeline, and I think the reality is if
continuous improvement is the one thing
that we say is, you know, only for those
who want to engage with it, then it's
just not gonna be prioritized by anyone.
Teachers who are in a survival mode
often, and same with principals, might
just gravitate towards the priorities
that come with mandates and requirements.
So I, I think there's a
delicate balancing act here.
Um, one role of leadership is to
articulate what the priorities are
and to set, you know, some baseline of
expectations around what we're gonna
be working towards over this year.
So it's really hard to foster, you know,
a, um, a strong culture of continuous
improvement if leaders are not, um,
prioritizing that in their own role.
Um, so th- that, that's what I would say.
Um, teachers often won't appreciate
too much autonomy if they feel like
all that's doing is leaving them to
have to focus on other things that
they're being asked to do Right.
It's just one more thing, right?
So after-- I, I, I really have
been hunting down this line of
thinking on this, on this show
across probably every episode, uh,
but, but for sure the last handful.
Um, we're always exploring this
schools were sort of built for
this, but now they need this, right?
Things are changing and, and
now we're needing to pivot and
do something else really well.
And, and oftentimes we don't even,
we don't even know what we need to do
well, and that has come up, um, in my
discussions around hybrid schools and
micro-schooling and things like that.
Like, what, what, what should
we do well, and what do we need
to get right moving forward?
Um, so I, I'm curious in this context,
after spending-- and this is to both
of you again, after spending years
studying how schools improve and
innovate, what do you think schools
need to be better at now that they
weren't necessarily built to be good at?
Max, can you share your
thoughts on that one?
Yeah.
Um, and it's something that I feel
like I'm probably gonna answer very
differently now than I would have four
years ago before a lot of, you know,
the technological and societal changes,
um, that we've had to deal with.
But, you know, it seems to me that schools
have to do two things, and they're not
great on the whole of doing either.
One is adapting to a constantly
changing world, right?
Um, what does it mean to prepare students
for college and career readiness when
we're not even sure what those concepts
mean anymore, um, given, you know, the
rise of AI and other kinds of things?
Um, so there's this, like, big
innovation challenge where they need
to rethink fundamental assumptions
about what it is they're doing and why.
And then there's this incremental
challenge of no matter what they pick,
no matter where they are, you know,
how do you organize to get a little
better at that every single day?
And I think, um, both those things are
hard on their own, and they're certainly
quite hard to do at the same time.
Um- And I think maybe across both of
those domains, the thing that schools
need to be better at is just learning.
They need to be better about-- obviously
they're pretty good at getting students to
learn or trying to get students to learn.
Um, but at every level up, teacher
learning, school leader learning, central
office learning, system learning about
their context and community, I think
that's where a lot of the gaps are.
Um, they don't have routines or
processes or structures or norms,
um, around how we are continuously
learning from, you know, the communities
we aim to serve and, um, the, the
people who constitute our systems.
So I, I think that's
the big, um, gap for me.
It's how do we build in this culture
of adult learning and organizational
learning at each level of the system,
not just something we expect of students.
Yeah.
Jethro, what would your
follow-up to that be?
What are your thoughts?
I mean, I would say that, um- There's
kind of a, a fundamental reorientation
that, um, would shift schools from,
uh, i-industrial era structures to
kind of modern learning structures.
Um, like, like really concretely, like
my elementary school-aged son goes to a
pretty good public school in his area and,
you know, like kids, kids learn things,
but I wouldn't say that on the whole, you
know, it's like many other, uh, schools.
You know, kids don't come out of it
at 3:00, like fired up about like
what happened during their, their day.
Uh, and then, you know, he went to camp
at the same school, like his camp is
literally at the same place his school is.
So like on Friday, school ended, and
then on Monday he went to the same
building at 9:00 rather than 8:00,
and his teachers were, you know,
counselors rather than teachers.
And just the sort of orientation towards,
you know, we, we're still the ad- we're
still the adults in the situation, but
we're, it's more of a mentorship type
relationship, and the goal is to sort
of unleash your purpose and passion.
So I think there's sort of like a, a
fundamental shift that we need in schools,
and then if, as we're making that shift,
then I think the sort of improvement
work or, and then I think the improvement
work would be really helpful, right?
That like as you are redesigning in a
way that gives kids more purpose and
passion, you discover that like, oh, this
lesson I redesigned works really well
for half my kids, but not the other half.
Like, okay, well, what
am I gonna do about that?
So I think there's sort of a, a kind
of a fundamental institutional change
we need to make, and then sort of as
we do that, it's gonna unleash lots
of sort of learning problems and
questions which we will need to solve.
Do you think that could possibly
extend that thinking to, to
other stakeholders like teachers?
You said, right, we need to
sort of pivot and reposition
ourselves to helping students
unleash their purpose and passion.
That, that's how, how you put
it Could we borrow some of that
and look at teachers that way?
'Cause sometimes I, I feel like we
could use a little bit of that, right?
Think rethinking the teacher
role, you know, how, what that
role should be, helping them, um,
share their passion, what is their
purpose in how school develops.
Do you think ⦠Were you getting at that,
or is that something new I'm inserting?
Y- yeah, no, I think that connects
to what Max was saying earlier about,
uh, symmetry, uh, that y- you can't
expect teachers ⦠Like, I think
one thing we've learned over the
years is that schools are symmetrical
places whether they wanna be or not.
So if you're in a school where the,
the, the leadership is very controlling
of the teachers, the teachers are
gonna be very controlling of the kids.
And if the leadership is empowering
the teachers, the teachers are
more likely to empower the kids.
So symmetry is sort of both a, a
natural property that seems to exist,
and it's a deliberate strategy,
that if you want teachers to teach
in ways that they haven't taught
before, then they need themselves
to have experiences of different
ways of teaching, uh, and learning.
So I don't know, like, we visited a
school in Chicago that has a crew, which
is kind of like a version of advisory
that's kind of much more intentional
about building relationships and helping
the kids learn how to support each other.
And like, you know, at this school, we, we
watch teacher crew, and, like, the ways in
which they interacted with each other sort
of similarly kind of, uh, mirrored this.
So y- yes, I think we, we will
not get there if we don't create
similar space for teachers.
Well, Max, thank you so much
for coming on the show today.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thanks for joining us on Education Talk
Radio, a part of the B Podcast Network.
If there's a topic you'd like us to
tackle or have a guest idea, send me
a message at dciceroedutalk@gmail.com.
Thanks for listening, and
we'll see you next time.