Leading Change Together

Developing Educator Capacity Within Schools and Systems

Eleanor Drago-Severson, Jessica Blum-DeStefano

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781416625001
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

"If we can get adult development right, we can change the world!"

Adult development... in schools? Yes. In fact, understanding and sharing ideas—and implementing practices—that help adults explore experiences and assumptions is a powerful driver of school change. Eleanor Drago-Severson and Jessica Blum-DeStefano share expertise that has evolved from their many decades of research and work with educators and show you how to

• Deepen your understanding of adult development and its role in systemic and schoolwide change and educational improvement,
• Connect theory to practice with developmentally oriented structures and strategies that enhance collaboration, communication, and feedback,
• Support individual and organizational growth with a differentiated approach to leadership and capacity building, and
• Build trust, capacity, collegiality, and sustainability with developmental practices that meet adult needs.

Whether you work in a school, district, university, educational institution, or other learning organization, you'll learn how to infuse leadership, collaboration, communication, and capacity building with a deep understanding of individuals' experiences and capacities—and how they influence our day-to-day work. Leading Change Together explains how you and other adult learners can effect tremendous change in schools and systems.

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Chapter 1

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A Systems Model for Leading Change

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What do children want? What do adults want? And what about principals? Superintendents? I've learned that supporting growth in school systems involves meeting universal, human needs. We all need support in order to do our best work. So what we do in our classrooms, our one-on-one relationships with colleagues, our teams, our schools, and our districts really matters to everyone—and to our success. It's all connected.

—Veteran superintendent

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live.

—Mortimer Adler, philosopher and educator

Up and down the system, teachers, administrators, students, families, and communities are working with heart and love to make schools and other educational institutions safe and brave spaces for growth. And the work isn't easy. Driven by pressing issues of equity, democracy, and social justice—and facing the increasingly complex challenges of their classrooms, schools, and broader society—educators at all levels strive, day after day, to make an even bigger difference in the lives of their students and in the world. Anything less, they tell us, just isn't good enough. "Our kids need more. They deserve more," they affirm. And we wholeheartedly agree.

At the same time, these courageous educators worry that even their most earnest efforts can sometimes feel, well, small against the big, big backdrop of our high-stakes accountability context and the deeply entrenched inequities of our larger educational system. "What can I do?" they wonder. "What can we do together? How can things change?"

As the words from a veteran superintendent at the beginning of this chapter suggest, the work we do in our classrooms, schools, teams, and districts does matter immensely to our students, each other, and the system as a whole. And, significantly, there are core ideas and practices that can help us grow at any level of an organization. After all, even the grandest system is made up of people, and helping people to grow is the heart and soul of teaching, the bread and butter of education, and the ongoing focus of our research and writing about adult development.

Adult development? Yes. As we'll describe in Chapter 2, adult learning and development are linked to student growth in a profound way, and have a fundamental bearing on improved student outcomes and educational experiences (Donaldson, 2008; Guskey, 1999; Leithwood & Louis, 2012; Mizell, 2007; Wagner, 2007). In fact, understanding and sharing developmental ideas—and implementing practices that help adults explore their own and others' experiences and assumptions—is one of the most powerful drivers of school change that we have encountered in more than 25 years of research and work with educators across the system (Drago-Severson, 1996, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2009, 2012a, 2016; Drago-Severson & Blum-DeStefano, 2016; Drago-Severson, Blum-DeStefano, & Asghar, 2013; Drago-Severson, Roy, & von Frank, 2015).

Toward this end, this book is aimed at helping you effectively leverage the deeply meaningful—and profoundly human—work you do with and for individuals and smaller groups to effect broader organizational and systems change, since these different levels are intimately connected. More specifically, this book pulls from the best of what we've learned in our collective decades as university and K–12 educators, researchers, coaches, and professional learning facilitators to offer a comprehensive, practical, and developmental model for leadership and capacity building in and across educational systems. By tapping into what we see as the DNA—that is, the foundation and building blocks—of growth and improvement in individuals, schools, and organizations, this book extends and enhances our prior work to help you:

• Deepen your understanding of adult development and its role in systemic and school-wide change and educational improvement,
• Connect theory to practice with developmentally oriented structures and strategies that enhance collaboration, communication, feedback, and more,
• Support individual and organizational growth with a differentiated approach to leadership and capacity building, and
• Build trust, capacity, collegiality, and sustainability with developmentally oriented practices that meet adults—and help adults meet each other—where they are (in the psychological sense).

Whether you work in a school, district, university, educational institution, or other kind of learning-oriented organization, this kind of developmental intentionality can help you cultivate a common language for talking about and supporting growth (i.e., capacity building) both individually and organizationally—as well as a shared lens for seeing and thinking about leadership and change initiatives. This kind of coherence is especially important in light of the many and mounting reform efforts, curricular programs, accountability pressures, data streams, professional learning emphases, and Big Ideas that educators must juggle, synthesize, and navigate every day. As teachers and educational leaders often share with us, there can be so much going on in their classrooms, schools, and districts that it's hard to know what to pay attention to. Although no one theory or approach holds all the answers (or eliminates the need for other kinds of learning), we have found that looking up and down the system through a developmental lens can bring a new kind of clarity and consistency to educators' work. Relatedly, employing a developmental approach is not about adding one more thing to educators' ever-expanding "to do" lists—but rather about infusing the entirety of our leadership, collaborations, communications, and capacity building efforts with an even deeper understanding of how people's internal experiences and capacities will influence their work on the outside.

As mentioned earlier, we see adult development, growth, internal capacity building, and transformational learning (we use these terms interchangeably) as the foundational DNA of educational change and improvement—whether we're working with individuals, groups, or organizations. No matter where we work, learn, or lead in a system, expanding our internal capacities can help us bring more and different gifts to our relationships, organizations, instructional practices, leadership efforts, and ever-growing network of connections. In other words, when we develop new internal capacities, we add new tools to our toolboxes for supporting growth, leading change, collaborating authentically, and so much more. This, in turn, has implications for the experiences, learning, and development of those around us, because when we grow in our educational leadership roles, we are better equipped to help others do the same—and so on and so forth. From this vantage point, taking a systems-level view may be as simple (and profound) as realizing that, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi (1913), "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies of the world would also change" (p. 241). We look forward to further exploring this and other important ideas throughout this book, and can't wait to dive in.

Next, we introduce our comprehensive model and focus on the principles of perspective taking, collaboration, and continuous learning that, together, comprise its outer ring. We place these guiding processes on the outer ring because, in combination, they help us understand what internal capacity building looks like, feels like, and entails—as well as why it's so important for educators and education today.

After discussing each of these three key principles and how they work in tandem to fuel change and internal capacity building up and down the system, we then describe our model in its entirety—including its five inner, overlapping elements (theory, culture, the pillar practices for collaboration, feedback, and sustainability). As we will explain, these inner elements—each of which is featured in its own chapter—represent distinct but related aspects of supporting adult development. As such, they offer us key insights, strategies, and practices for gently stretching the outer ring of our model to encompass more over time, and to support capacity building systemwide. Finally, we conclude by inviting you to engage with a series of reflective questions aimed at helping you to synthesize, discuss, and apply the big ideas from this chapter to your own learning and leadership. We hope that this structure and information enables you to bring key ideas to your practice—or as we like to say, "to bring your learning home."

A Promising Model for Building Capacity and Meeting Adaptive Challenges

Our world is not—and has never been—static. And, as you know, there are few problems in schools today that technical competence alone can resolve or fully address. We need to be smart, and we need to know our stuff, but the most urgent and adaptive challenges at our doorstep—such as serving all students well, closing the educational opportunity gap, and helping students participate in an increasingly diverse and interconnected society—require something more of us, something different. For this reason, our comprehensive, practical model prioritizes the ongoing development of our internal capacities (rather than, say, a checklist of discrete skills or knowledge items), since we need more complex ways of making meaning, seeing within and outside of ourselves, and relating to and with each other to meet the mounting adaptive challenges of education today.

According to leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009), adaptive challenges present puzzles for which there are no technical solutions. This is because the root causes of adaptive challenges are hard to pin down or identify. In fact, they don't come with ready-made answers (even from experts), and we need to live with and in these kinds of challenges as we are all figuring them out. They also tend to require changes to the less tangible aspects of our work—such as our organizational cultures, our mindsets, and even the essence of ourselves. As decades of reform efforts have made clear, the profound adaptive challenges we're facing as educators can't be solved simply by working longer hours, purchasing new curricula, studying harder, turning up the heat, tweaking the margins, or tinkering with the smaller pieces of the whole. To effect systems-level change, we need something more than expertise. As renowned systems theorist Donella Meadows (2008) argued, "Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality" (p. 170). So how can we do this? How do we build and bring these bigger and better selves to our classrooms, schools, districts, and relationships? How do we grow more encompassing ways of thinking and seeing the world, the work, and each other to effect needed change?

Well, that's where development comes in. Speaking more specifically, development involves expanding the cognitive, affective, interpersonal, and intrapersonal capacities we need to manage the complexities of learning, teaching, leading, and living (including adaptive and systems-level challenges) (Drago-Severson, 2004b, 2009, 2016).

Put another way, growing these vital capacities helps us

1. Take a greater perspective on ourselves, others, and the systems we live and work in;
2. Connect more deeply and meaningfully with colleagues and other stakeholders (e.g., as team members, collaborators, leaders, and community members); and
3. Continue to learn, teach, lead, and adapt as the world changes and evolves.

In fact, these three benefits—which we refer to throughout this book as perspective taking, collaboration, and continuous learning—exist in a kind of chicken-and-egg relationship with development. We say this because they drive the important learning and transformation associated with growth and internal capacity building, yet they are also outcomes—positive results of development, and the fruits of its bountiful yield.

With this in mind, we've positioned perspective taking, collaboration, and continuous learning along the outer ring of our comprehensive, developmental model—where they serve simultaneously as goals and guiding principles for building internal (personal) and organizational capacity. Interrelated components of an ever-expanding and increasingly inclusive process of growth, which we depict in Figure 1.1, these three elements evoke a constant seeing and seeking that never really ends—because we're never finished growing or learning, and we need each other to grow, see, and be more. And this is truly a wonderful thing. In the sections that follow, we dive deeper into the principles of perspective taking, collaboration, and continuous learning as guiding processes for capacity building, and explore why they are so important for educational leaders of all kinds—and to school improvement today.

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Figure 1.1. Guiding Principles and Processes for Capacity Building

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Perspective Taking: Setting Our Sights on Systemic Change

"Wow, I never knew that."

"I never thought about it that way before."

"Everything seems different now."

We've all had these aha moments in which we realize something new about ourselves, someone else, or the world. When they happen, we uncover a previously unknown aspect of the way things are, were, or work (both within and outside ourselves), or we suddenly see things we thought we understood well in an entirely new light. Sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful, mundane, or profound, these realizations are gifts that fuel momentum and the deepest kinds of learning—and they're also what we mean when we talk about perspective taking as a key ingredient of capacity building.

As teachers, leaders, and students—and as parents, children, siblings, partners, and friends—we all see and interpret the world through our own unique lenses, and these ways of seeing influence all that we know and understand, often unconsciously. As David Foster Wallace (2005) famously analogized, fish live their entire lives in water without explicitly recognizing that they are swimming. Water is simply what they know, unquestioningly. We, too, often "swim" through parts of our lives without conscious awareness of our assumptions. Sometimes this unwitting immersion in our individual and collective assumptions can take a real toll, just as breathing in smog day after day affects everyone, even if we can't quite see the pollution in the air around us (Gooden & O'Doherty, 2015; Tatum, 1999). That said, we firmly believe that if we can more closely, critically, and caringly shine lights on the hidden parts of ourselves and our systems—if we can jump out of the water, so to speak, or test the air quality around us—we can bring bigger selves and greater internal capacities to our work and relationships.

Taking perspective on education, society, and ourselves. When it comes to education, it seems clear that we have some work—and perspective taking—to do to better effect change in the system. Despite the hard work, care, and noble efforts of so many educators—and the equity-oriented rhetoric framing most new policies and reform initiatives—too ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. A Systems Model for Leading Change
• Chapter 2. Theory for Understanding and Supporting Adult Development
• Chapter 3. Culture for Capacity Building
• Chapter 4. Pillar Practices for Effective Collaboration
• Chapter 5. Feedback for Growth
• Chapter 6. Sustainability for Individuals and Organizations in Systems
• Epilogue
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright