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In this episode we are talking about how education is adaptive—all pieces of it! Whether you’re talking about leadership, curriculum, or something else, education is an adaptive process. This is something to celebrate and embrace in our educational practices.
Here we’ll walk through the theory of adaptive leadership, specifically looking at what adaptive challenges are and how we can confront them in our educational environments. Why? According to researchers Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky (2009), adaptive challenges are “typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.” This is starkly different from a technical challenge that has a clear solution. Adaptive challenges are ongoing and require examining our own beliefs—they don’t have clear solutions. Educators face adaptive challenges daily. For example, each year most educators plan at least the first unit without knowing our students. As students respond in a particular way, we need to shift in response to them… and then keep shifting and shifting! So how can we prepare to be adaptive? There are a few things educators can focus on. 
What?
Preparing to be adaptive—to make decisions, shifts, and pivots in the moment—means taking a few preparatory steps. Educators can incorporate the following practices: Step 1: Get clear on what really matters First and foremost, we have to be clear on what truly matters to us—as a school community, but also to ourselves as individuals. Try breaking it down this way:
Step 2: Develop reusable frameworks & processes Ultimately, we want to spend less time planning and more time doing the important work. If you spend time upfront creating reusable frameworks and processes—aligned with your values and priorities—you can stop reinventing the wheel all the time. Teachers may focus on developing a unit arc with key protocols and text, while leaders may have a data analysis tool so you are always using the same process to look at any data. Step 3: Utilize decision-making tools It can be so helpful to have some tools, frameworks, or steps in place to make decisions. What you use will depend on the type of decision. For example:
Step 4: Practice being adaptive with intentionality Being adaptive can take some practice and you may need to build your capacity in this area. Here are a few practices educators can try:
Step 5: Design flexibly If you go into your lessons, meetings, or conferences with a flexible plan, you’ll be able to adapt and shift as needed. There are many options for flexibility, but here are two to try:
Final Tip This is difficult, challenging work and I’m still deep in the middle of learning this. Adaptive leadership is a lifelong pursuit, so give yourself grace in the process. Sharing space with kids keeps us on our toes! Embrace that as a gift, trying to change the dynamic from frustration to gratitude. To help you build your capacity for adaptive leadership, I’m sharing my Leadership Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 195 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to episode 195 of the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm super excited about this episode because its origin was so organic. I was talking to fellow coach, cara Prennikoff, and we were talking about how education is so adaptive, just everything, all pieces right. I was thinking about the leadership lens of adaptive leadership and how we just constantly have to be ready to pivot. And you know, even from a curriculum planning standpoint and CARB was just like no, all of it right, like you plan something and then you get in front of your students and your students do this thing or they respond in this way, and then you just got to like scrap the plan and go for it and it is so adaptive and it's something to celebrate, first and foremost. Wow, teachers, amazing. I was actually listening to someone on a podcast just today at the time of recording this is in early October here but I was just listening to someone who was a teacher and a leader and they were like well, I don't make a ton of decisions as a teacher, but as a leader, and I'm like wait, wait, the most decisions I've ever made, probably in a day, was as a teacher. You were deciding constantly how to respond to this student, how to respond to this student. Okay, now, five students just did this thing. How do you respond? It is exhausting, and so kudos to teachers, first and foremost right Amazing. And educational leaders as well. I mean just all of it. Responding to kids and being in dynamic relationship with people, with humans, with so many humans, is so impressive. So, number one celebration. And now thinking about this idea of adaptive challenges, I'm just going to kind of couch this conversation. In the research and the theory of adaptive leadership, I draw a lot from Heifetz, graf, schau and Linsky's 2009 book on adaptive leadership, and specifically this quote, which is my favorite and you've heard me say it before, most likely quote adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs and loyalties rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis. End quote. So think about all that stuff. This is deep stuff. So, when we confront an adaptive challenge this is a longstanding problem that does not have a clear solution, right? It requires us to examine our beliefs and to co-create with fellow stakeholders the way forward. That is a tough thing. It is not a technical challenge where it's a clear solution and we do this thing and now we're done, right? Oh, we don't have computers, we get computers. Now, this particular problem of getting onto the internet is solved right, like it's not. That it is adaptive. It requires us to interrogate ourselves, which is often uncomfortable, to collaborate and co-create with many, many stakeholders, which is hard right. And so, as educators, right. As educators, wherever you are in the system of education perhaps you're a teacher right, you plan for at least unit one, without even knowing your students. On a daily basis, you plan a lesson, students respond to it in a particular way, and then you need to shift in response to that. Like it is all adaptive. So, regardless of where you are, what I want to offer in this episode is a way to prepare to be adaptive. Like, how do we prepare for those moments where you just have to figure it out on the spot, right, and so on? Its kind of surface level interpretation of that scenario. It out on the spot, right, and so on, its kind of surface level interpretation of that scenario of responding on the spot. You wouldn't be able to respond on the spot, right, but I'm going to share some things with you today that will hopefully get you ready for that moment. Okay, first and foremost, we have to be clear on what really truly matters to us, to us as a school community, but also like to us as a person. So right now, for the purpose of today, let's just think of you as an individual. Right, your values, what are they? My top three? Justice, efficiency and transparency. I know that about myself. They may evolve, but I will always check in with them and see if these are the top three. So right now, I am justice, efficiency and transparency, and those three things are really important to me. Importantly, I have noticed as well which one. Those are not necessarily in order. Justice is number one, but I might say transparency is two, and three is efficiency, because I will sacrifice efficiency for justice, right? I know that about myself too, so I think that's another piece like order them. Okay, I also want you to get clear on your top priorities as a human. Again, these evolve and shift in this moment. What are they? So right now? Number one for me is wellness. So this includes, like, my personal health and wellness, and it also includes kind of my family's wellness and my wellness and experience with my relationship to my family. So maybe this is four instead of three categories under the wellness. Next is are my clients. I just want to be super responsive and supportive to the educators and educational systems I'm working with. I'm really excited about that. And next is really just making sure that I help educators and the field of education more broadly, so even those I'm disconnected from, wanting to make sure that, like I can still support folks. And then I guess, if I were to add a fifth, I would say that five is making sure that I personally I guess this is connected to wellness, but can tap into my creativity I'd really like to create and I feel like I'm at my best when I am able to create. So that's five. I recommend closer to three if you can, but, as you can see, it's hard for me. So, thinking about what your top priorities are and again ranking them to say like, okay, my health comes first, like my family's health comes first, and that just has to right. And so naming like what they are in order will help you when we get to the decision making part later. And then also, if you are teaching or you are leading your staff, like I'm going to use a teacher example but you want to get clear on the key understandings or skills that you are building within your community of either students or staff. So for a teacher, this is a little bit more specific. So we'll use that as an example. Identify five skills that you will assess throughout the year. I've talked about this from a curricular lens. This is helpful also from an adaptive lens, because if you have to adapt, it's like okay, students are really interested in this side conversation. We're kind of like going down a rabbit hole. Is it worth it? Does it support a key understanding of this course? Does it support this particular skill? So what are your five skills that you measure throughout the year? What are the key understandings that you come back to again and again, regardless of the specific content you're teaching? That are just key understandings of your course. I recently heard Dr Gloria Ladson Billings on the Street Data Pod, which I love and I've been listening to a lot lately, and so this is not a direct quote but paraphrasing her. She was just saying all disciplines have key ideas and we have to identify those key ideas. If you're not doing that, you're just teaching minutia. I think that's so powerful. You're just teaching minutia If you are not identifying the key ideas. I think she made a reference to a colleague she had worked with who said you know, if someone, if anyone, everybody knew that actually physics was just like a few, a handful of key principles, like everyone would realize how easy physics is, right, so just like the idea of they're constantly just coming back to these key ideas. Those are the things we want to teach, not the litany of dates in a history class, right? Not the litany of names in a history class. Like, what are the key ideas? So, again, just getting clear, and it ultimately helps you to simplify, to make decisions, to be adaptive. So your values, your top priorities as a human and your kind of key understandings and skills that you're working to build. Next, I would also make sure you have a few reusable frameworks and processes so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel. So you spend less time planning, more time doing the important work, and so for teachers, this might be a unit arc with key protocols and key texts that are, like, really essential, and then the rest can be kind of co-created with students, leaders. This might be a data analysis protocol. So, regardless of what data you're looking at, you're constantly doing the same process. You're not reinventing that, spending time planning for each meeting, each data set. It's just. This is the way we do things. Again, I would also identify and practice like those. What are those key human and pedagogical skills that you constantly want to support teachers with, or teachers wanting to support students with, like? What are those like frameworks? What are those processes that we use to practice those skills? Step three have some decision-making tools or steps. Based on certain types of decisions, I have different ones. So, for example, if I'm co-creating with students, my guideline is usually I will adapt to any student ideas until it negatively impacts student learning or it violates justice in some other way. Right, I think it's a violation of justice to negatively impact student learning, but literally any violation of justice. Violation of justice to negatively impact student learning, but literally any violation of justice. So I will generally default to what the students want to do, unless it hurts their learning or imputes justice Policy decisions. I want to similarly default to the people experiencing the most pain. I get this from Ayanna Pressley, whose mom always talked about. You know, the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power. Like, if I have a different idea with the people who are experiencing a pain point around a certain policy. Usually this is the students right, what? What do they say what do they want? And sometimes, on the surface, like what they say they want may be to like uphold an oppressive system, or like a contingent of students want to do that. So I think, of course, digging into that a little bit, but to if, if truly, all cards are on the table and students are like no, actually, this is truly like what is in our best interest and like that is, it truly is like yes, there you go, let's do that, We'll make it happen as much as we can. Instructional decisions. My guide is usually the question is this lesson, activity or assessment, deepening or practicing one of my five key understandings or skills? Right, and so again, going down that rabbit hole in the discussion, great, like we're going to go there because it's developing this key understanding, it's practicing this key skill. I can make the decision to go there in the moment versus. This is a rabbit hole that has nothing to do with a key understanding and we're barely practicing this important skill. Let's like we're going to come back and we're going to do the lesson as planned, or we're going to deviate for two minutes and then we're going to come back and reflect together on how that actually wasn't a helpful deviation to continue. And finally, you know we get so many opportunities, there are so many asks of us, either from colleagues or from students in an educational environment. I think it's important to have a decision-making tool for saying yes to an opportunity or no to an opportunity, and so what I would do there is reflect again you can see how these really connect to that step one, identifying what really matters, getting that clarity, because if I should say yes to an opportunity, I have to first run it through my top priorities. So does it support my top priorities? Does it support me you know supporting educators Does it allow me to contribute to the field of education? Does it actively build my understanding that will contribute to a client's school district you know their wellbeing or does it contradict any of them? So, for example, if I take this opportunity, will it negatively impact my health or my family's wellness? Okay, so then that's, since that's a higher priority right, that maybe loses. So I think it's really just a really important thing to be able to have these decision-making tools and kind of guidelines so that you can expend fewer resources, time, emotion, energy into making them in the moments and you'll just have these to kind of go back to lean on. Okay, step four. I think you really want to practice with intentionality being adaptive. So here's a few ideas Anything around like adaptive challenges, adaptive leadership, the kind of that deep work practice. Those have a few ideas. So here's one Practice identifying the underlying values, beliefs or loyalties that might make you resistant to change or, if you can, what may make others resistant to change. So in conflict resolution, this works too. If you have a conflict at home with a partner, with a family member, with colleagues, when you're facilitating sort of conferences between student to student conflict, when you are maybe engaging with stories, books, tv movies, when you are witnessing political discourse like identify what is the underlying value that is at play here, for example, debate about Second Amendment rights Regardless of where you stand, you can probably identify the folks who are like we need gun control. This is nuts, are wanting safety for themselves and their students I'm thinking about school shootings and like safety is a core, core value there. Right, we want to reduce gun violence, we need safety. Safety is important, right, and I think everyone can agree that safety is actually a goal as well. Perhaps someone who wants gun ownership to defend themselves in case of a home invasion would also say that safety is actually a goal as well. Perhaps someone who wants good ownership to defend themselves in case of a home invasion would also say that safety is a core value. So we actually share the same underlying value. We disagree on approaches to get there and we can dig into the research et cetera, et cetera and go down that path, but we can at least come together around the underlying value. Or perhaps actually it's about freedom, the freedom to do whatever right, and so then we have a competing value of safety and freedom. I bet both folks would say that those things are both important. Freedom and safety are key to a healthy life Right and a healthy society. We need both. The disagreement comes in how we live them out or perhaps what the balance is Right. And so then you have identified the values. You can have that jumping off point. So just identifying those underlying values, beliefs, loyalty that is gonna be critical to being able to then identify them in the moment. Identify when you have an adaptive challenge. Facilitate really effective, healthy conflict resolution, all of that. Another piece to this is I would seek out and participate in conversations about important topics that generate high emotions, where disagreement is either present or possible, where you can't predict. But you could possibly say like, oh yeah, there's going to be some disagreement here. Often you can find that within the school building you know around policy or around a particular topic, you might do this in like a policy forum. You know a local governance body, wherever it is like it might be around the kitchen table, I don't know. So think about where you can participate and just practice engaging in those conversations and then, within it, right, being able to identify those underlying values. I'm not saying this is easy, I am not great at this, but I know this is a place where I can practice and so I'm going to try to at least make a concerted effort to do so. Also, this is a little lighter, but thinking about the responsiveness, the responsive nature of responding in a moment, first of all, I think, just tell yourself you don't have to immediately respond. You, in a moment, first of all, I think just tell yourself you don't have to immediately respond. You can always come back and say like, hey, I see, for example, in a class of students, I see we're really interested in this piece. I didn't plan a lesson around this and I'd love to do some research and let's come back tomorrow. If you are a leader facilitating some family meetings and families are saying, hey, I'm really concerned about this thing and this policy, and you're like, okay, I don't actually have the research on that, I will come back to you, I will make it a point to get back to you in our next meeting or I will follow up with you later this week. Right, you can always come back, even on a shorter note, like you can say I'm not thinking about that for like 10 seconds, take the silence and think about how you want to respond, even if it's just coming up with that sentence of I will get back to you on this. I'm not sure, but knowing that, that's okay. If you want to be more responsive in the moment, you can do something like improv. Right, take an improv class or do some sort of game that requires you to respond and react to other people dynamically. That will just improve your confidence in being you to respond and react to other people dynamically. That will just improve your confidence in being able to respond to a lot of things absurdity in the moment, all right. And the final step I'll share step five, I think, or idea five is really to design flexibly. If we go into any sort of planning for an event, for a meeting, for a conference with students, for a lesson, you know, whatever it is, if we go in knowing that it's going to require us to be adaptive, that this could be kind of our plans can be derailed, and that there actually might be a more fruitful direction to go based on the participants, I think we design more flexibly, we are less surprised and we are more agile and nimble and adaptive in the moment. So I always try to design with flexibility in mind. That could look like creating space for participant voices students, families or staff. It could be that you prioritize in your planning asking questions over sharing information or generating questions from participants so you might share in, for example, a launch of an inquiry cycle. Here's this key concept and here I'm going to give you an opportunity to generate some questions. That's a great structure. You can also embed choice time. This could be workshops, conferences, a choice board, kind of like student to student or staff to staff grappling with a concept. Like embed that space for discussion, for meaning making, for choice and pursuit of what is interesting into your plans and then you automatically have a bit of co-creation there, because they're leading the process, they're choosing what they want to engage in. That was a whole lot of things, and so, as a final tip, I just want to remind you to give yourself grace in this. Adaptive leadership is truly a lifelong pursuit. I have said multiple times in this episode, I am still really deep in the working of this. I do not feel like I am here at a place where I have arrived, and I think so much of this work is that it is constantly responding to reflecting on your needs for growth and pursuing that intentionally. I also think that we have such a lovely opportunity in educational spaces where we get to live in space and live in community with children who keep us on our toes. I mean that is awesome, and so I do think there's a bit of a mindset shift here that will help us embracing that as a gift, as opposed to oh my gosh, this is exhausting, which it totally is. I think it's a both and situation. It is exhausting and it's such a gift. I have felt that as a parent. It is so exhausting, and anyone who is like it's not exhausting you are a liar, but I think it is exhausting and such a gift that I am around this person who constantly is just like do better, like grow. Here's a growth opportunity for you, mom, right, like here is your opportunity to rethink your approach to this. Here is your opportunity to get better quick, because I need you to get better quickly and I need you to be adaptive. And so, just personally, seeing that as a gift, as opposed to this like very large burden, opposed to this like very large burden, I think we changed the dynamic from one of frustration to one of immense gratitude and, if not all the time, at least we tip the scales a little bit in that direction. To help you build your capacity for adoptive leadership, I am sharing my leadership playlist with you. You can get that at today's blog post for the episode at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog slash 195.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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