The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders

Principles and Processes

Isobel Stevenson, Jennie M. Weiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000260632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This how-to resource provides leaders with a concrete framework for a strategic improvement plan, helping educators link the "principles" to "processes" of planning. Packed with key takeaways and additional resources, this book provides the concrete tools to design a strong strategy for improvement and enables educational leaders to think constructively about why we plan, what an effective strategic plan should contain, and how to create meaningful dialogue to support plan development, implementation, and monitoring for continuous improvement.

The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders provides superintendents, central office staff, principals, and teacher leaders with the opportunity to reframe the process of their strategic planning and breathe new life into the activity.

Part
1

Setting the Stage

1

Strategic Planning for Continuous Improvement

Welcome to the Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders! We are thrilled to engage with you on this journey. The purpose of this book is to provide a better way to do strategic planning for continuous improvement and to offer concrete tools for participation in this process.

In our 50 or so combined years of work as coaches, researchers, district specialists, administrators, and teachers, we learned a lot about how schools and districts might think and plan more efficiently and effectively. We want to help you in your planning efforts by suggesting guiding principles and processes for developing plans that put more emphasis on the thinking behind the strategy and less on compliance. In other words, we want these plans and the process of creating them to work for you!

In this opening chapter, we introduce the big themes of the book and what makes our disciplined planning principles different from what you have likely experienced in the past. Specifically, you will see four big principles of disciplined planning that we will return to again and again:

• Equity
• Logic
• Capacity
• Coherence

These principles undergird our approach to planning and our subsequent recommended processes. These processes are introduced in Chapter 3, as is our tool to keep all your thinking organized: the Disciplined Strategy Map. To aid in understanding these principles and processes, each chapter includes a case study drawn from our experiences of working with districts and schools as they endeavored to take an approach that went beyond tinkering or compliance to systemic redesign for continuous improvement.

In the following vignette, we introduce our main protagonist, Superintendent Maria Jenkins. She is not a real person, but she is modeled closely after strong superintendents we have worked with. She is well versed in the principles and processes we will explore in this book, and is about to engage in another year of planning using this knowledge. We will follow the story of her district’s planning process throughout the book as a means of anchoring the process of Disciplined Strategic Planning. In future chapters, we will begin with Superintendent Jenkins’ and her district’s experiences to help anchor the conversation in practice.

Introducing Superintendent Jenkins

Superintendent Maria Jenkins sat down at her desk to start thinking about the design of a strategic plan for her district, Ashburn. She was in her first year as superintendent and wanted to get this right. While she knew this process would be time consuming and sometimes challenging, Maria was also aware that she was well positioned to engage in this work. Her board and community were behind her, the school administrators were a strong team, and she was pleased at the way things were going in Ashburn since her arrival.

From her experience in her previous district, Maria knew any changes she wanted to make would be much easier if she could justify them by saying she was responding to community and/or staff requests and/or concerns. She was therefore happy to spend her first few months listening and learning, as she was confident people who lived and worked in the district would have a great deal of insight into what was working and what should be improved. She also knew it was really important for the board to feel they were fully informed, consulted, and involved in her thinking, so when the chair of the board suggested it would be a good time for them to revisit the district’s strategic plan, she was glad to do so.

Enrolling approximately 20,000 students and comprising nine elementary, four middle, and three high schools, Ashburn is a growing community. One of the state’s poorest cities, Ashburn serves a diverse group of families across several demographic variables. This diversity is reflected in Ashburn’s schools. While access and outcomes among different groups of students (Black, Latinx, English language learners, special education, etc.) remain an issue, differences in assessed areas are smaller than state averages. At the same time, there remains variability across schools in terms of their overall performance, school culture, and relationships with family and community.

Maria was responsible for creating strategic plans in the past, first as a principal and then as an associate superintendent in her prior district, and she found these plans less than helpful. Her experience with district and school improvement planning was that it was more about templates, “wordsmithing,” and compliance, and did little to shape the daily work of administrators and teachers.

Maria knew she had to think about several things to start with, and there could be other considerations related to the planning process that hadn’t occurred to her yet. She started making a list:

1. Need a process that includes all stakeholders but that isn’t unwieldy and doesn’t end up as a 70-page document that nobody ever looks at!
2. Need to focus on instruction—won’t reach aspirations for students unless their experience in classrooms every day is a match for those goals.
3. Need a document that makes it easy to see how the work that we plan to do leads to improved outcomes for students—an infographic? Chart? Something that fits on one page but that is actually useful?
4. Find a way to connect the work and the plan without creating unnecessary bureaucracy/driven by compliance.
5. Capacity building has to be included, not a separate thing.
6. Need a plan to create the plan!

She decided to take this list to the administrative team and ask for their help to create a proposal to take to the board regarding what the process and the resulting document should look like.

Why This Book?

Long before the idea for this book was hatched, we independently spent many years in various roles supporting schools and districts in strategic planning: Isobel as a teacher leader, principal, central office administrator, coach, and consultant; Jennie as a coach, consultant, state turnaround specialist, and university professor. As a result, each of us concluded that even with well-intentioned people doing their best to make it work, planning as implemented in schools and school systems was, on the whole, a colossal waste of time.

Rather than an opportunity to reflect and strategize for the future, plans were often made at the last minute and in isolation from the real work of the school. There was no sense of continuity from one year’s plan to the next, and these plans often lacked benchmarking tools or useful outcome measures to ensure appropriate movement of students and adults toward the goals. Interventions often appeared to be driven more by state and district mandates than by students’ and teachers’ needs.

People tasked with creating these plans also seemed highly stressed, often having been asked to produce a plan in a matter of days or without knowing the state or district’s goals or the resources available to support their efforts. In the end, much of the activity became what Meyer and Rowan (1977) would call “myth and ritual”: a grand show, more for the benefit of outsiders than to truly promote improvement. The plans then tended to sit on a shelf, brought out for accountability purposes and little else.

Does this sound familiar?

With such patterns repeating themselves as we worked in different places, we were frustrated. In addition to seeing hardworking people expend their most valuable resource—time—on an activity that seemed to bear little fruit, we both believed that strategic planning, when done right and in a disciplined way, can be really helpful. We wanted to help those engaged in planning feel less like Sisyphus and more like Odysseus (it’s hard, but he makes it back!).

At the same time, neither of us had a strong sense of why folks were having such a hard time with planning, or specifically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• eResources
• Part 1 Setting the Stage
• Part 2 Getting to Business
• Part 3 Monitoring and Continuous Improvement