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In this episode, we dive into different adaptive leadership strategies to drive change in a school redesign context. Though geared toward educators in “low-performing” or “turnaround” schools, this episode has practical insights for anyone who wants to make school a place where every student can thrive.
Drawing from the research, host Lindsay walks us through the intricacies of school redesign and change initiatives. She talks about how to incorporate youth and multi-stakeholder voices, capacity building, and community engagement. Mindset Shifts Required There are two common missteps when it comes to leading a change initiative at turnaround schools:
These can be addressed by mindset shifts and understanding what the research says about adaptive leadership and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Why? From the Research Drawing on the work of Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009), adaptive challenges are defined as those “typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.” Understanding that these challenges bring up emotions and deeply-rooted value systems, it makes sense that we need to take a totally different approach than a technical implementation of a new curriculum or program. Lindsay also draws on Zaretta Hammond's insights into student learning power and cognitive justice, underscoring the importance of focusing on students' cognitive development and equitable learning experiences. By centering marginalized voices and employing strategies like capacity building and strategic planning, schools can effectively address adaptive challenges and foster educational equity. What? Action Steps for Change After recognizing first that most challenges are adaptive and, therefore, need a multi-faceted approach, here are some steps leaders can take to implement change initiatives: Step 1: Identify the adaptive challenge. Be open to what the problem really is, digging deeper than looking only at technical issues. This leads to a “disorienting dilemma,” as Mezirow puts it, which is the starting point for real change. Step 2: Have a group dialogue. This disorienting dilemma is uncomfortable—so uncomfortable it moves us to action. Having a mutli-stakeholder group dialogue about the adaptive challenge lets each person be open to new ideas and perspectives to solve it. Step 3: Develop cycles of feedback and co-creation with stakeholder groups so everyone—families, students, educators, administrators, community members—have meaningful say in the change plan. Step 4: Empower stakeholders by fostering ongoing professional development, centering marginalized voices, and building authentic student leadership and family partnerships. Step 5: Enhance school capacity through coaching, providing instructional leaders and coaches with their own coaches. Professional learning and coaching can help everyone develop the knowledge, skills, and mindset to foster connections with stakeholders and collaborate effectively. This is not done in one-off workshops, but ongoing learning. Step 6: Build stronger partnerships with families by authentically engaging them. Ari Gersen-Kessler talks about how this is the difference between “good” and “great” schools. His book, On the Same Team, dives deeper into how and why to partner with families. Step 7: Center the stories of families and students who have been marginalized by traditional schooling, ensuring their voices are at the table and their data sets are what we’re looking at. Step 8: Focus on student learning and learning power by putting instruction and curriculum at the heart of what we do. Learning is the core of education, not the co-curriculars and “extras,” so the focus needs to be there. This includes high-quality instruction materials and the flexibility to develop personalized approaches for each student. Final Tip: Embrace a human-first approach that values the stories and emotions of students and families, moving beyond off-the-shelf solutions to craft responsive initiatives. The resources mentioned in this episode include the following books:
And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 239 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Linday Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. We are jump-starting episode 239 and this one is going to be about kind of quote-unquote school redesign. So if you are in a situation where your school has been designated as quote low performing or in turnaround status, which is what we call it in Massachusetts, this episode is for you. However, if you are not in one of those situations and just are aiming to make your school kind of a place for every single student to thrive and you just want to level up what's going on there, this is also for you. So here we go. When we are thinking about a school redesign approach, my vote is always for one that is grounded in adaptive leadership, in youth and multi-stakeholder voice and a capacity building approach. I will always vote for those three kind of organizing principles. Now, when we are thinking about what this actually looks like, this means being in multi-stakeholder community as a leadership team, having a representative kind of like leadership governance structure with feedback loops to different stakeholder groups, collaboratively making decisions, being just in a mode of co-creation and constant inquiry. That is what is going to lead to the real transformation. So it's going to take time. It is not an overnight. Here we go, but investing in the actual structures themselves and the process of doing things, which is likely going to be very different than you've done before. That's what's going to make the real difference and that's what's going to make actually any change that you would like to make work smoother, better, faster in the future. 01:59 So let's start with maybe some common missteps. So in my work in the past with turnaround schools and with schools who are just leading change initiatives in general, there are two common missteps that I have noticed and I just want to point them out, because you may be in the midst of leading a change initiative or a strategic planning team, an instructional leadership team at your school or district, like whatever the thing is, and you may be noticing yourself doing these things. One is that when we're identifying a challenge that is a major challenge, a longstanding challenge, we are, you know, disservicing many kids and we're trying to figure out how do we, you know, have educational equity, that kind of thing? Trying to figure out how do we have educational equity, that kind of thing. We are identifying too often challenges as technical and not adaptive. That's number one. The challenges we identify are not adaptive. We're saying that they are technical, so we are misdiagnosing them. The second misstep is that leadership structures are not shared across multiple stakeholder groups. They are held on to, maybe in what research often calls distributed leadership models, where we have admin and educators, but we don't have parents, we don't have students, we don't have, you know, broader kind of community members, families it's just people who are employed by the DOE. Okay, so as we get into these a little bit deeper, I'll reference a little bit of research and a little bit more detail and then we'll move on. 03:35 But just want to say Heifetz, graschau and Linsky they wrote a 2009 book on adaptive leadership that I cite all the time. One of the most common quotes that I use here is that they talk about adaptive challenges in this way. They say they are quote 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 you can imagine having a conversation changing things where we have intense emotions coming up right. That's probably very common in change leadership. You've probably experienced this many times and you can also imagine that when we get really deep down in our root cause analysis, for example, and we touch on someone's values, and that there's a value tension between what we're actually doing and what we purport to value, or we have a loyalty to a particular thing that is inequitable that's what the data tells us, right, or that's what the reality is, that's what the kids are telling us, the families are telling us. Or we get into a belief that needs to be unearthed, examined and reconceived because it is inequitable. Big emotions, big time emotions, and that is going to take a very different approach than than oh, we're going to adopt this new high quality curriculum. 04:46 Here we go, step by step, pd, we're all set now, beautiful school, right, that they're just, they're very different technical and adaptive challenges and almost always a long-standing problem is an adaptive challenge, or there's an adaptive component to it and we ignore that and therefore do not get results. Right, we do not enact transformation because we're ignoring this component. So when we are naming an adaptive challenge, we enable us to have what Mesereau calls a disorienting dilemma. Right, we can facilitate this as leaders, but basically that's a disorienting dilemma is when we have kind of this paradigm shift, or enables, I should say, a paradigm shift for transformative learning, where we have kind of this realization that disorients us, that kind of shakes up our way of thinking and we say, oh wait, a minute. 05:43 I was under the impression that we were doing this or that this was the experience of students in our school. I am now realizing from student stories that they are sharing with us, for example, this is not at all the case. Right Now I need to critically examine all the assumptions that I have, and I am so uncomfortable that I am willing to do that. Right, I am so uncomfortable with this disorientation. I am realizing the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore, and the best way to kind of try on other ways of thinking, according to change scholars, is that you actually can have a group dialogue, ideally multi-stakeholder, so you have multiple perspectives brought in already just from the stakeholder group and you can experience and witness other people's ways of thinking and enable yourself to try on something different. Right, I will link to a blog post where I talk more about this, but I just love this idea of we get to the adaptive challenge by having a disorienting dilemma and then we try on other ways of thinking because we're in a group, right, or we pull in, even if they're not live in the room, the experiences and stories of folks who have been, you know, proximate to the problem or the challenge. 06:53 The second step I just want to touch on is that only teachers and administrators are on the committee for school change. When you are absent from the conversation about creating change in your community, you then need to go down the path of quote-unquote buy-in, and we always talk about buy-in. Buy-in is not necessary when you are part of the creation, when you have an authentic, meaningful, active role in the co-creation right, then I don't need to buy into anything. It's my plan, right? I'm part of the construction and of course, we can't have, you know, 2,000 individuals in a room together writing the words of the plan specifically. But we can create a representative stakeholder structure that has multiple stakeholder groups represented in the leadership team and we build capacity, for which I'll get into momentarily feedback loops from those stakeholder groups, so everyone does feel like they have a role in co-creating. Where we're going and providing feedback on drafts of that plan. Then you eliminate the need for buy-in because you're not forcing a plan on anyone. You're saying we're in this together, we are here for all of you, we want feedback from all of you, we want input from all of you, we want to co-create and be in partnership with all of you. We're not doing this to you, we're doing this with you, right, and so I think that's the big kind of mental shift and the with, not for or to and how to do it. The structure is to create the multi-stakeholder group, to create the structure and support and professional learning for all of those stakeholders to be true representatives and be able to stay connected to their stakeholder groups that they represent and gather feedback regularly. So, knowing that these are the two missteps that challenges identified are not adaptive, they actually are and leadership structure is not shared across multiple stakeholder groups it should be what it could look like. I want to talk about that next, what it could be. There we go. 09:04 Capacity building is. I think, first and foremost, our approach to professional learning has to be one of capacity building. Even as a person who you know, my whole job is coming in and getting paid by school districts to support, I want school districts to work me out of a job. I don't. I would love to stay with people forever and and just go deeper and deeper and deeper. And, yes, that is possible to a degree. I love multi-year partnerships. I think we can go really deep there. But I don't want to be employed by a school or district for 20 years Like that is just not helpful to them and it is not the way that your school is going to thrive when you are constantly reliant on external people to say what's going on. 09:47 I think maybe being in an advisor capacity or a hey, let me run this by you capacity, after two or three years that makes more sense to me. But to constantly rely on we need all of the instructional strategies from you, we need the direction from you, we need the like. That doesn't. That doesn't seem ethical and it doesn't seem helpful to me. So here's what I mean we can support all stakeholders, but educators included, because we often talk about PL or professional learning. Through an education educator lens, we can help everyone develop the knowledge and skills to foster and I would also add mindset, to foster stronger connections with other stakeholders in the school community and collaborate effectively. If they can collaborate with one another, they have everything they need, as long as professional learning continues to build those skills and, of course, provide evidence-based information and research. But to be able to be in community with one another and be present for each other's experiences and to like, quote, listen deeply and to be responsive, like that is what's awesome, and Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues work that 2017 research that came out on effective professional learning Like. 10:55 One of those hallmarks is that it should be ongoing. It cannot be a one-off workshop, right. It has to be that the way we do things of professional learning and otherwise is ongoing. We are in it for the long haul, right. We're not going to stop this initiative after our strategic plan is up. This commitment to shared leadership and to unearthing and addressing effectively adaptive challenges that are holding our school back from success are holding our students back from success. Like we're not going to stop after three years, four years, five years, like that's our core. And so I think another note on this is particularly for overworked teachers. Teachers are totally overworked. 11:34 I find it most compelling to actually embed professional learning in the contracted school day and not require teachers to work outside of it, though you need to, for sure, find money to pay them. I also think you know another just nod to the brilliance of educators is identifying those positive deviants the classrooms or places or individuals where students are thriving in these spaces or in connection with these educators and investigating it as a team right and expanding what works. I think that's a beautiful model that honors the wisdom already present in the schools. So, after we have this kind of capacity building approach, we have this mindset going into professional learning and we have it threaded throughout the year and multiple years. I also think the structures of both student leadership and family partnership should really be in place. 12:21 So Ari Gersen-Kessler taught me that research has actually shown stronger partnerships with families is actually one of the five keys to moving from a good to great school or district, and authentic family engagement is one of those keys for system-wide change, and so I would argue that you should go get his book. He has made basically a how-to guide to making this happen in book form. Go get his book. He has made basically a how-to guide to making this happen in book form, and it's called the Stronger Together, I believe, is the name of the book, and it's about his fat teams, families and educators together, and so we can link to that in the blog post. It is excellent. 12:56 But again, structurally we need to know how do we collect information and gather experiential data from families, figure out what's going on in families' brains, what are their wants, desires, needs and work in partnership to get that accomplished. Similarly, student leadership structures should go beyond and I've talked about this ad nauseum. On this I guess I'll make this brief, but they should go beyond the typical student council that plans prom or field trips or whatever the thing is right. It should be connected to the instructional core, connected to school policy, like let's actually co-create and be in partnership around real, meaningful policy and instructional change. Third, and I mentioned this already, lean on experiential, or what Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan call street data. We draw on scholarship that really pulls extensively from street data and also Safiya and colleagues newest book, pedagogies of Voice. I constantly am talking about this, the people I partner with are constantly talking about this. 14:02 But to learn about the experience of students and I would also add, families who have been marginalized by traditional schooling and the designs and policies of traditional systems, like we need to make sure that those stories of people who have not been successful are the ones that we center, are the ones at the table, are part of the kind of data set that we are reading through sorting, through analyzing in making these decisions. That can't just be like an add-on. I think it needs to be central too Because, again, adaptive challenges let's unearth as we explore those stories and experiences, the beliefs, habits and loyalties that we might hold as educators, right, or even as adults that students are kind of unearthing for us, create our disorienting dilemmas through the words and experiences of students right. Fourth, I would say, focus on student learning and quote learning power which comes from Zaretta Hammond and her new book Rebuilding Students' Learning Power, which just came out in 2025. Incredible book Pedagogies of Student Voice actually also emphasizes both of these books I've just been reading, kind of in concert with one another and they both emphasize the importance of focusing our work on the instructional core. 15:18 We cannot do equity if we leave out instruction, if it is not intimately tied to instruction and learning about students' experiences with instruction, not just how they feel at school, although that is incredibly important, but learning about instructional related or curricular related things from and with students and then co-creating with students better instruction, like being in partnership around the instruction. That, to me, is at the heart of what we need to do. Often we bring in students for extracurricular conversations or again like the student council, like what's the fun thing we're planning, but it is separate often from the core of why we're there, which is learning. So Renna Hammond's book has really emphasized and changed my brain around thinking about cognitive justice and making sure that students are kind of getting this coaching one-on-one from their teachers to make sure that students have their own cognitive tools and know their own personal algorithm. I love all the words she uses to help them be better independent learners and information processors. That's real equity. Right. That someone knows their brain and their learning process well enough that they do well, not just in my classroom but next year and the next year and out in the world forever. Right. That they can constantly take in information wherever they are, whether they're reading the New York Times physical paper right or they are seeing a new data set presented in a documentary or whatever it is. That is cognitive justice, and strategic plans should include these goals and measure progress toward them and invest resources in building educators' capacity to do these things well. Measure progress toward them and invest resources in building educators' capacity to do these things well and also not to disserate a Hammond. 16:59 She talks about, you know, letting go of the rigidity of the kind of high-quality instructional materials pacing guide that you might have. While it's important to have high-quality instruction materials right. The rigidity of the pacing guide is something I have always rallied against and that teachers find the most confining in some pretty awesome curriculum that I've seen out there in the world. Like the pacing guide often inhibits its success and when I have helped to kind of coach districts on implementation, I have often coached a prioritization approach where it's like, okay, what is the most important pieces of this, what do my personal students need? So, again, a personalization approach, prioritization, personalization. We have to do this. Well, because we need I often say like one day a week, but we need certainly an amount of time to meet one-on-one with students, to give them individual feedback, to coach them cognitively, to support their information processing, to have a responsive workshop model, for example, in terms of what the individual students need based on their formative assessment earlier this week. Right, we cannot just do things that are laid out by curriculum designers that have no personal connection to the kids in your classroom. They have no student data to base the next decision point on. I have yet to see a curriculum, although I will say that some get close. El education has like a skills block, all block, kind of responsiveness to analyzing the data and then kind of making choices around grouping and instruction based on the data. But, like holistically, there are things that we need to do, to make space for and build into our instructional plans and time and pacing guides to say we need time to just respond to the kids and to give them feedback and to have conversations. 18:52 Now, possible strategic plan components. This is not like a grab and go strategic plan, but just some things to think about as you're building your strategic plan, keeping in mind all the things we just talked about. One we want to build shared leadership structures. So again, this means creating a multi-stakeholder leadership team and also figure out some equitable kind of processes or agendas for meetings that focus on the things that matter. Starting off, you might want to collectively dream the possible. I love the idea of kind of freedom, dreaming as a group. 19:21 I would use a protocol for perhaps like the ones in the book Practicing Futures I think the subtitle is a civic imagination action handbook. So land on clear vision together, connect with stakeholders' hearts and make it easy to remember, and that is going to have that quote-unquote buy-in right. Research has shown that we're going to have people be more committed, have more pride in and clarity around that goal and the vision and what we need to do to make it happen. Next, I would design and facilitate capacity-building workshops for student leaders, families and educators. So build capacity for street data collection and feedback loops so stakeholders can truly act as connected representatives of those groups. Action research for learning what's right and wrong and like what people's experiences are and making changes as a result. So the process of the structure is stable, but the actions that we're taking should not be set in stone. 20:24 This also might include like helping people design multiple formats for stakeholders to engage and give feedback. So it might be that some people can meet and prefer to be in person. Others need something digital or like on Zoom. Other people might need something asynchronous right Zoom. Other people might need something asynchronous right. There might need to be different access points for people. 20:41 And also build facilitator or administrator capacity whoever's actually doing the facilitating of these groups to identify narratives that are popping up in these conversations that are highlighting adaptive challenges. I think, similarly, if you're doing a root cause analysis, clarify the parameters of what truly is a root cause. I would argue in an adaptive challenge it's something that identifies a deeply held belief or loyalty that's inhibiting transformation and also that's in your locus of control. No blaming of other groups or structures, right, like what's in our locus of control. And what is that deeply held belief that is inhibiting our progress? Let's name it and then let's tackle that held belief that is inhibiting our progress. Let's name it and then let's tackle that. 21:22 Okay, the second big kind of overall piece I would have is to build internal capacity for instructional coaching. Give instructional coaches and leaders their own coach. Even if you, as the principal, are the coach, you don't have a separate instructional coach, or maybe it is a department lead. Those folks should have their own coach. Right, coaching is amazing at all levels. And also conduct learning walks with students and ideally, families, if you can like multi-stakeholder learning walks where we're co-developing and using an observational criteria tool that centers on student learning what are the students doing? And saying, not, what is the teacher doing. Then identify trends from there and develop a professional action plan to support the needs of teachers. Right, so we're building capacity. All the time we are learning what's going right in instruction, finding the positive deviance uh, you know, investigating how that was created and expanding that, noting what needs to be supported, supporting it, but constantly collecting data and getting coaching and building our instructional coaching capacity. 22:18 Number three launch and maintain a practice of reviewing student work and cognitive apprenticeship practice PLCs or department meetings or team meetings, whatever you call them. Teacher teams should look at student work. For sure, I adapted DESE Massachusetts DOE looking at student work tool and I like to use that. But whatever the clean, simple process is, use a simple tool that you can reuse again and again to align on standards-based kind of grade level expectations plan for instructional adjustments based on that student data. You know, co-draft, a definition of instructional success, observable criteria, list all the things and, of course, get feedback from multiple stakeholders on this draft as well. And what I love about Zaretta Hammond's book is she talks about how PLCs are a great place to simulate and practice the one-on-one kind of coaching conversations or cognitive coaching conversations with students. So practice the language of information processing, practice being responsive in the moment to students. That takes practice and this is such a beautiful place to practice. So I would use PLCs for those two pieces. And then, of course, to offer instructional and pedagogical support workshops as needed, to those teams as they are defining what the instructional next steps for them are, based on that student data. 23:36 I would also make sure it is so hard right, I think about the adaptive leadership idea of resistance. Is loss right? Resistance to change is actually a loss of potentially like an identity, for example. I would frame a lot of these discussions with appreciative inquiry. So, for example, I think there's a SWOT analysis that people usually do for strategic planning or other business things. I prefer SOAR. So, instead of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, it's strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results. So it's all kind of in the positive. We don't need to just say here all the things are terrible, but here are the things, where do we want to be? And let's focus on that and let's get there right. And also, you know, determining processes for highlighting and studying examples of positive deviance, as we mentioned. 24:24 Okay, the fourth and final piece of this list, I would say both capacity to collect student experience data. So, again, identify students at the margins, generate key questions to ask, design and facilitate data collection workshops for all those stakeholder groups, so everyone has the capacity to collect data. And also noting that everyone should have their own coach. Give family and student leaders their own coach too. The fact that we think, you know, we know, I think we know in education that every teacher is better with a coach, every instructional coach is better with a coach, every admin is better with a coach. Like, how would we put family and student leaders in these roles and not coach them right? I think we also wanna give coaching to them and ideally, as much as possible, use our professional learning budgets to be expansive. In our thinking about who gets professional learning, it should include families and students. Okay, this has been a long episode so I'll just leave you with some final tips. 25:18 Community created should be a hallmark of this right. These strategic plans should be community created. And, again, co-creation decreases the need for quote buy-in. It should be human first, connect with educators, family members, leaders, students, hearts and invite stories. Members, leaders, students, hearts and invite stories. 25:41 Often change initiatives fail because we don't connect to emotion and be responsive. Yes, evidence-based is important, but off the shelf and straight into implementation mode just doesn't work. There are too many considerations that we often ignore that end up making the initiative fail, whether it's a curriculum or otherwise. So, yes, evidence-based and then personalize it. Be responsive to the needs of your community and truly, deeply like be present for it. 26:09 I want to say listen, but I'm trying not to use ableist language Like take in the stories and the experiences of students and families, particularly ones that we have underserved in the past, and be responsive to those. If you are currently in a state of turnaround or redesigning a school, I would love to know what is working for you, what challenges are coming up. This is an area of deep passion. I've kind of got away from it for a while, but, noting that my scholarship initially started in leadership and changed leadership, really want to go back there. So please let me know, reach out and let me know what else you would want to learn about on a future podcast episode related to this topic.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
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