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11/22/2021 LfJ Series: Normalizing Critical Reflection: An Adaptive Leadership Approach to Data AnalysisRead Now
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We’ve talked about the benefits of shared leadership, how to measure stakeholder perceptions, and how to set up a sustainable multi-stakeholder governance structure. Now, let’s talk about the inner workings of structures once you’ve set them up. Shared leadership is best suited for tackling adaptive challenges. Adaptive leadership scholars contrast adaptive challenges with technical challenges. Whereas a technical challenge can be addressed by a straightforward solution (e.g., providing training on a tech tool or new curriculum), adaptive challenges require much deeper work. The essence of adaptive challenges can be captured in this sentence of Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky’s book: “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,” (Loc. 1283). Adaptive challenges can take one or more of the following 4 types: our actions do not line up with what we say we value; we hold competing commitments; some things are deemed “unspeakable;” and we divert attention from the problem or displace responsibility onto someone else. At its best, shared leadership practices identify and dig into these adaptive challenges. How to tackle adaptive challenges in policy and practice. In stakeholder group or leadership team meetings or via data collection methods like surveys, interviews, or focus groups, we can ask each stakeholder the following questions:
Once you have gathered all of this information, you may want to identify common points of connection across stakeholder groups. Heifetz and colleagues call these “hidden alliances” as groups who may initially seem in opposition to one another’s proposed solutions may have a shared value or desired outcome that when illuminated can help them work together. How to tackle adaptive challenges in data analysis. When we analyze data, we often jump to conclusions. The ladder of inference, first proposed by Chris Argyris, details how data is interpreted, assumptions are formed, and actions are taken based on those assumptions. (This site explains the ladder in more depth using a visual and several guiding questions to support thoughtful interpretation of data.) At the bottom of this post, you can also grab my newest free resource, a worksheet that provides guiding questions and sample responses to support thoughtful data analysis. Strategic planning conversations are a fantastic opportunity to name and confront long-standing adaptive challenges. However, we usually miss those opportunities. Too often, strategic planning committees shy away from challenging our long-held beliefs and loyalties, which prolongs the problem and keeps us from getting 100% of students to succeed. As a result, we complacently suggest success looks like 80 or 85% of students succeeding. That’s unacceptable. On an earlier episode of the podcast, I spoke about how to effectively conduct a root cause analysis with the aim of surfacing hidden adaptive challenges. (You’ll find another free resource linked at the bottom of that post.) The key takeaway from that show is using Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky’s call to identify the habits, beliefs, and loyalties we are holding on to as a check for a true root cause. If we can identify and address those underlying habits, beliefs, and loyalties that need to shift, then the technical fixes we love to put in our strategic plans will actually have a chance to work their magic. Structures that Facilitate these Practices Engaging in critically reflective data analysis requires a clear and sustainable multi-directional flow of information as well as a mutual sense of trust and partnership. Facilitators who lead team meetings should be supported to create the space for generative conversation. (For more on this topic, check out Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick’s ideas on creating the space for discourse and the related notion of safety in this episode.) Another structure that can remind stakeholder groups and leadership teams to routinely examine data and identify adaptive challenges is having a shared agenda template for all team meetings. This can be a loose outline of activities including prompts for data collection, analysis, and decision-making. The key is to have all stakeholders routinely practicing and honing these skills, which will ultimately help individuals and the larger community flourish. A Call to Leaders In Season One, Dr. Lejla Bilal spoke about adaptive leadership by saying: “It's engaging in a collective process of identifying value that others bring...Once we can lay down our egos, our experience, our authority, anything that creates power, and this distance of expertise, then we can have a real conversation about what truly are the challenges we're facing here and what sort of learning is required to even tackle these challenges.” Leaders, this work is essential. The processes through which we reach important decisions are just as important as the final decisions we make. In fact, research tells us a change in process will influence the decisions made for the better (Kusy & McBain, 2000). It requires humility and a dedication to growth, but if you can develop and nurture shared leadership structures at your school, the results can deliver a future we can’t even imagine on our own. Thanks for reading! Continue the conversation below in the comment section and join our community of educational visionaries on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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11/15/2021 LfJ Series: A Justice-Centered Process for Justice-Centered Policies: How to Create Shared Governance StructuresRead Now
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A Justice-Centered Process for Justice-Centered Policies: How to Create Shared Governance Structures This month, we have been talking about the value of sharing leadership with stakeholders, particularly students. We have also talked about how to measure student perceptions of things like leadership opportunities and feelings of belonging at school. Today, let’s take a look at what shared governance could look like in practice. Specifically, we’ll talk about structures to put in place to systematize shared leadership and school decision-making. Structures support sustainability. Shared leadership will not work as a one-off initiative. If each time a policy is created or changed, parents, students and teachers are part of the process, the school will make better decisions and simultaneously reinforce that stakeholder voices are truly valued. The Principles Research has highlighted a number of practices to bear in mind when setting up structures of shared leadership. Here they are: Embrace radical collegiality. Fielding (2001) defined this term in relation to students, but it’s useful for our work with families and caretakers as well. It refers to the idea that educators learn and become more effective when they see students (and families) as partners and they share responsibility for student success. Educators have to see students and families as partners, fully capable of making thoughtful decisions about student learning. If we can’t do that, shared leadership will never work. Build a representative leadership team. Research has found groups larger than about 15 members can become unwieldy and ineffective (Calvert, 2004; Pautsch, 2010). As much as possible, stakeholders should be represented equally, with a slightly higher percentage of students to reduce the ratio of adults to students, which has been known to overwhelm and thus silence students (Osberg, Pope, & Galloway, 2006). Clarify the governance structure. Be very clear about how and to what extent power is shared. Identify which types of decisions will be made solely by the school’s administrator(s), and which types of decisions will be shared. Clarify what is needed to move forward with a decision (e.g., majority vote, consensus using a fist to five protocol). Also, determine leadership team members’ responsibility to communicate with the stakeholders they represent (e.g., weekly, only to get feedback on major policies). For example, the leadership team may draft a new policy and want to get feedback within one week from all stakeholder groups so they can vote to approve the policy the following week. Use stakeholder research to inform decisions. Decisions made by the shared leadership team should be based on data. There are all kinds of data streams. Perception data (collected via surveys, interviews, or focus groups) is often overlooked, but it’s incredibly valuable! It’s this type of data that tells us about stakeholders’ experience of the school (e.g., their sense of belonging or the extent to which they feel their voice is valued). Pedagogy. Scaffolding learning experiences such as learning research and leadership skills so that all stakeholders can practice and improve their leadership competencies is important both in a classroom and beyond. Members of the leadership team should receive the support needed to enable them to communicate regularly with the stakeholders they represent. This could take the form of tech tool training so all members are able to create and send out a survey using Google Forms or to communicate asynchronously using an app like Voxer or an LMS like Google Classroom. Meet consistently. Meetings should be held consistently, at the same time and in the same place (whether that’s the same physical location or the same virtual room) if possible, to avoid confusion that may exclude members from participation in the meeting. Many shared leadership initiatives have failed to thoughtfully involve students or families because meetings were held during school hours when classes were being held and family members were at work. Case Studies These principles can be developed and sustained in a variety of ways. I’d love to highlight a few examples of how schools and districts are putting these principles into action. Superintendent Darcy Fernandes of Massachusetts’s Althol-Royalston district called for all stakeholders (including family members, students, teachers, and community members) to join sub-committees for the district’s upcoming 5-year strategic planning process. You can hear directly from Superintendent Fernandes on this episode of the podcast. A high school in Pennsylvania offers constitutional courses in ninth grade. (Often, government courses are offered as a twelfth grade Social Studies course.) They do this so that students are able to fully engage in school governance. The school’s system of governance is modeled after the three branches of the United States government, with an executive branch composed of school staff and the legislative and judicial branches composed of a mix of students and staff. You can read more about this school’s structure here. As a principal, Taryn Givan used the Leader in Me framework which involved stakeholder-specific “lighthouse teams.” The student lighthouse team was made up of 3-5 representatives from each grade team (selected by the students), staff had their own lighthouse team, and families had a lighthouse team of their own as well. The program emphasized building individuals’ leadership skills as they navigated their roles in the lighthouse teams and the larger school experience. You can hear directly from Taryn Givan on this episode of the podcast. On an even broader scale, Boston Student Advisory Council (BSAC) is a student body that advises the Boston School Committee and works with school leaders on 3 priority issues: environmental justice; student rights and student voice; and school climate & culture improvement. Every BPS High School has at least 2 students on BSAC. Page 3 of this document highlights Boston Public Schools students’ roles in governance at the school, district, and state levels. Facilitating Partnerships It is a daunting task to bring hundreds if not thousands of voices together to make important school decisions. A 2016 Center on Education Policy study found that nearly 50% of teachers said their input is not considered in school-wide decisions and that they feel frustrated and excluded. Students who have historically experienced exclusion from school systems and their family members who may have been excluded from their children’s school and/or as students themselves, may be understandably skeptical of the idea of seeing school leaders and teachers as partners. Establishing trust and a sense of multi-stakeholder partnership will take time and effort to build, and it is well worth it. According to researchers Carson, Tesluk, and Marrone, shared leadership thrives when members share a commitment to a common goal, receive emotional support from one another, and feel their individual voices are valued. Furthermore, they found “When team members feel recognized and supported within their team (social support) they are more willing to share responsibility, cooperate, and commit to the team’s collective goals” (2007, pp. 1222-1223). To help you get started, check out my free worksheet: Setting Up Structures for Shared Leadership. Thanks for reading! Continue the conversation below in the comment section and join our community of educational visionaries on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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This is the second episode in our 4-part Leading for Justice series. In the last episode, we talked about the impacts of shared leadership and the research on why we should invest in this approach to leadership. In this episode, we're talking about how students experience school and how we measure student perceptions and experiences. We have to ask our students how they experience school instead of assuming we know what the students are thinking or experiencing. What do you want to measure? First, it’s important to consider the constructs you want to measure as you select a survey or design your own. For example, how do you take the construct of belonging and actually turn it into a scale (i.e., a series of survey questions) that accurately measures a student’s sense of belonging? It's far more accurate to have 3-5 questions that ask about different aspects of belonging because asking just one question like, “Do you feel like you belong at school?” could lead to students interpreting “belonging” in different ways and just responding based on one aspect of belonging. Let’s look at an example. Panorama has a great student survey (it’s available on their site for free). Within this survey, they have several scales (topics), one of which is belonging. Their belonging scale consists of 5 questions that they asked that all measure belonging. Here they are, in order:
The survey builds a more complete understanding of what belonging is through this series of questions. It also enables us to look at the results and see differences in specific aspects of belonging. For example, I’ve worked with a number of school districts whose students reported feeling connected to adults, but not feeling respected by students. So, define the construct(s) you want to measure. If you’re creating your own survey, I find it helpful to do some research. What does the research say? What are the pieces of each of these constructs? How do researchers define it? Scholars have already gone through the process of curating all of the theory and research that's out there in their literature reviews. This makes them good sources of thoughtfully detailed, yet succinct definitions. Curate Scales from Existing Surveys If you are thinking about creating your own survey, you can borrow from existing surveys. I would pull complete scales (all items that measure a topic), rather than picking individual questions you like. To start, you can see if you want to borrow one or more of my scales (the personal, interpersonal, or organizational student leadership capacity building scales which you can get for free at the bottom of this post) or use one or more of Panorama’s scales. I definitely encourage you to add a few open ended questions too. While they are time intensive to sort through and analyze, open-ended questions are a great way to ask students for more detail about their item/scale responses or to invite them to share what actions the school could take to improve in a particular area (or what the school is doing well!) These are great questions to create on your own as you can personalize them for your context and the things you specifically want to learn about. Principles of Survey Design Now, let’s briefly talk about how to choose a quality survey or design your own quality survey. I’m going to walk us through some principles of survey design. Of course, you can use research reports which should include statistics that reflect how reliable and valid the survey is. However, reviewing some general principles feels more immediately practical than advising you to dive into the research data for each survey that’s out there. Panorama Education’s research team, under the leadership of Dr. Hunter Gehlbach, has created a wonderful survey design checklist. I’ve highlighted a few of their recommendations and added some thoughts of my own below. Survey Items (i.e., Questions) The survey should use scales, not single items to measure a construct. This means students respond to multiple items on the same topic instead of responding to one question on a topic. Avoid negative wording. A negatively worded question is one in which a response that “disagrees” is a positive thing. For an item like, “I rarely feel like I belong” we would say it’s a good thing for students to “strongly disagree.” However, it’s cognitively challenging for respondents to switch gears like this, and it’s harder to compute a score for the scale or survey because you will need to “reverse code” responses to these types of questions. Response Options Students should be asked to respond using a continuum of answers. This is ideal because you can then measure a more precise degree of favorability, agreement, or frequency (whatever it is you’re asking about). All response options should be labeled with words. Asking students to respond on a scale from 1 to 5 without saying what each number means is going to result in imprecise data. Survey Length and Question Order Keep it short. I aim for the survey to take no more than 10 minutes to complete. Ask the most important questions early in the survey. Survey fatigue is real. Make sure the most important questions are asked up front. Do not put demographic questions at the front of the survey; they should come at the very end. It’s important to ask about the survey topic (i.e., belonging, leadership opportunities) immediately, but you also want the survey to flow like an engaging conversation. Implementing the Survey Communicate the importance of the survey (i.e., it will help us improve your experience at school—and back it up by taking action on the results!). I suggest using the introductory/consent page of the survey to highlight why this is important and how you plan to analyze and take action based on the resulting data. Dedicate time within the school day to take the survey. If you’re surveying family members, dedicate time or space during an open house night to invite families to complete the survey. Finally, remind stakeholders to take the survey a few times during the “survey open” window. Many schools wonder how often to give out a survey (especially as they seek to measure growth over time). Survey stakeholders as often as you are able to take action on the results. That might look like once in the fall and once in the spring. We don’t want to survey students every month if we're not thoughtfully analyzing and taking action on that data every month. Asking students to fill out a survey and then never acting on the responses is just as bad as never giving a survey in the first place. Those are the basics of survey creation/evaluation and implementation. I'm so excited to see the survey you select or create and the data that you get from it! Please feel free to share in the comments below. Next week we're continuing with the series with an episode on how to create shared governance structures. The following week, we’ll be talking about data analysis through an adaptive leadership lens! If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, now’s the time to do it, so you don’t miss the rest of the episodes in the series. Thanks for reading! Continue the conversation below in the comment section and join our community of educational visionaries on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
I am so excited to welcome you to the Leading for Justice mini series! This is going to be a 4-part series where we explore the research on why shared leadership should be an area of focus and how to set up structures for shared leadership in our educational contexts. This episode provides an overview of the impacts of shared leadership, reviewing the existing research with a specific focus on the benefits of providing opportunities for meaningful student leadership. As a quick preview of the mini series: the next episode will focus on how to measure the constructs we will discuss today; in the third episode, we will look at specific structures that amplify and sustain student leadership (as well as what this actually looks like in schools and districts); and the last episode will focus on how to analyze the data you’ve collected through an adaptive lens to finally tackle long-standing challenges. Let’s dive into the research on how shared leadership practices impact a school and its stakeholders! Advances Equity To me, the first step to addressing the question, “How can we improve educational equity at our school?” is to implement shared leadership practices. A quick note on how I define shared leadership as different from the term “distributed leadership”: shared leadership is inclusive of all stakeholders (students, families, staff, teachers, administrators, community members) whereas distributed leadership has historically been about administrators sharing power with teachers. To address the needs of your specific community, you want to ask the various stakeholders in your community: What needs to change? Especially when we’re trying to address entrenched equity challenges, we can no longer look to the same group of people who have always been making decisions to come up with a solution that will work. It has to be a community effort. Shared leadership asks us to listen more than we talk, to collect data—including perception data (we’ll talk about this more in the next episode)—before rushing to take immediate action. Not A One-Time Initiative Shared leadership practices are also inherently sustainable. We can’t have a one-time conversation about policy and call it a day. Sharing leadership enables us to have ongoing conversations about policy and practice. Problematic dress codes, punitive discipline policies, how students are graded, all of this can be regularly reviewed and discussed within a shared leadership governance structure. Improved School Outcomes Research has found that organizations actually make better decisions for the organization when multiple stakeholders are involved in the decision making process (Kusy & McBain). If we want better outcomes for our schools, it's in our best interest to include student and family voices—who historically have not been part of the conversation—to make better policies. For example, working with students, families, and teachers to create a feminist, antiracist dress code will likely decrease the amount of lost learning time due to dress code violations. Improves Student Belonging Equity is closely tied to belonging. “School belonging is associated with a range of positive educational and developmental outcomes, including psychosocial health and wellbeing, prosocial behaviour and academic achievement, and transition into adulthood. However, an increasing number of students worldwide report not feeling a sense of belonging to their school. There is growing research evidence that strong student–teacher relationships can promote school belonging...Students who lack a sense of belonging are more likely to engage in problematic behaviour, suffer from mental illness, and experience low achievement. The most at-risk students are the ones who are already vulnerable, and these effects can continue into adult life.” (Allen et al., 2021) In short, belonging is positively correlated with good outcomes and negatively correlated with bad outcomes. Yet, there is a worldwide trend that perceptions of belonging are decreasing for students. That is concerning. The 2021 paper used data from before the COVID-19 pandemic, and I imagine this trend has only intensified since that data was collected. Additionally, this research found student belonging was linked to increased academic performance and motivation and a decreased likelihood of risky and antisocial behavior, school drop out, substance abuse, truancy, and depression. Belonging is critically important! Improving Belonging is Especially Critical for Students Who Have Been Marginalized On average across all 67 countries whose students completed the survey, researchers found socio-economically disadvantaged students were 7.7% less likely to report belonging. This difference was substantial in the United States and 11 other countries. First generation immigrant students were 4.6% less likely on average to report belonging. Girls were less likely to report belonging than boys. (Note: No data was reported for non-binary or gender non conforming students. I'm not sure if that was because they didn't ask for it, or they didn't report that data in the summary.) This difference of girls being less likely to report belonging than boys was particularly large in seven countries, of which the United States is one of them. Again, these are concerning trends. Certainly, there are a lot of different things that we can do. On an interpersonal or classroom level, we can nurture positive student-student and teacher-student relationships. At the school level, we can amplify student voices in a meaningful way to show students’ their experiences and ideas are valued and they are full, decision-making members of the school community. Youth Development and Academic Benefits Individual students who engage in meaningful leadership activities demonstrate improved peer and adult relationships (Yonezawa & Jones, 2007); positive self-regard, feelings of competence, engagement (Deci & Ryan, 2008) and academic performance (Mitra, 2004). When students act as representatives of various student groups, that also energizes other students that may not have a formal role or aren't engaging in that leadership opportunity, but they identify with the students who are. Feldman and Khademian (2003) called this “cascading vitality.” Essentially, student leaders who have historically experienced structural, political, and/or social marginalization inspire other students with similar identities and experiences to see the possibilities for themselves to lead as well. Preparing Students to Be Civically Engaged...Now and Later Baumann, Millard, and Hamdorf (2014) tell us “preparation for active citizenship was a foundational principle of public education in America from its beginning.” This is a really powerful reminder that the goal of education is to prepare our students for active citizenship, and active citizenship is partnering with others and leading change in our communities. At least, that’s what I think of when I think about civic engagement. We often try to prepare students to be future leaders after graduation. It's also really important both for the time students are in school as well as later in their lives that they have authentic opportunities to be civically engaged while they're still in school. What’s Next? The next question is: How can I create these opportunities for my students? What does this look like in practice? That’s what the next several episodes in the mini series are going to be about! But the first step is helping adults (and families students) see the benefits of shared leadership. All stakeholders need to see each other as partners, capable of making thoughtful decisions about student learning. As you prepare to implement the ideas and practices we'll talk about in the next 3 weeks, ask: Why are we doing this? What are the possibilities? This episode was created to give you the language and research to be able to share with stakeholders who may be hesitant to jump into a shared leadership approach. Feel free to share the episode directly with colleagues and families. The free resource for this episode is a research one-pager highlighting the key ideas from this episode. So, if it's easier to share a short fact sheet with stakeholders, grab that resource below! There’s a lot of different ways that we can make shared leadership possible and we’ll explore several case studies in the upcoming episodes. For example, student leadership skills can be built during academic courses or by training students to serve as members of youth court or be peer mediators. It could look like passing a student Bill of Rights like this one that was published by students across the United States. Don’t miss the next 3 episodes in the Leading for Justice mini series! If you are not currently subscribed to the podcast, subscribe today so you don't miss an episode. Thanks for reading! Continue the conversation below in the comment section and join our community of educational visionaries on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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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
August 2024
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