Kelly Hastings, founder of Enlightening Leadership and author of Leading Change That Lasts shares thoughts on school leaders planning backwards from desired student outcomes to leadership actions. How do leaders involve and empower teachers in the process? What role does evidence of progress, with cautions around “fidelity,” play in supporting an implementation.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.340] – Steve [Intro]
Welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. As instructional coaches and school leaders, you are tasked with guiding continuous teacher growth to create student success. This podcast looks to support you with strategies from experienced guests, as well as my own insights that I’ve gathered over the years. I’m thrilled to have you with us. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:00:29.960] – Steve
Scale-up Leadership Production Behaviors. The founder of Enlightening Leadership and the author of, “Leading Change That Lasts,” Kelly Hastings, is joining our podcast today. Kelly has served as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal in public schools and created Enlightening Leadership, an organization that supports school and district leaders who are doing the real work of change – change that lasts. Several years back, Kelly, then a principal of a junior high school, joined me on a podcast where we explored the difference between school leaders involving teachers versus leaders empowering teachers. Involving teachers generally means getting their input before a decision is made. Empowering teachers is a greater engagement step where teachers are making and thus owning decisions. That’s a direction that I’ve always seen as being critical for PLCs to have their greatest impact on student learning.
[00:01:46.960] – Steve
Kelly recently contacted me to share a model she was designing to assist school leaders in planning and implementing change that impacted increased student success. She calls it the SCALE model, S-C-A-L-E model. As Kelly and I exchanged our thinking, we entered into some reflection and insights that we thought might make an interesting podcast conversation. We hope that you find that to be the case. Kelly and I would love to hear insights that might emerge for you as you listen in. Welcome, Kelly.
[00:02:30.120] – Kelly
Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:02:31.820] – Steve
Well, I’m so glad that you reached out to me again. It’s great to reconnect. So for starters, would you describe what led you to looking to create the scale model? And after you’ve done that, then kind of walk us through the elements of it.
[00:02:51.200] – Kelly
Sure. So I retired from being a middle school principal, and I was invited to this workshop. And so I thought, yeah, let me go. So it was about implementation. It was with Janice Pizzuto, and she has written a book about implementation, and she’s brilliant. She taught me about implementation science, and I thought, where has this been all my career? So what she does is develop really the how to implement, which is brilliant. And so what I kind of latched onto is the leadership piece that it takes to build that implementation. So that’s what the scale model is, a very brief implementation model. But what is more powerful, I think, about it are the leadership steps trying to make the leadership more visible on how to actually make change happen. And we know as leaders that the teachers do most of the work. And if you’re a leader and you don’t know that, you need to know that. So empowering teachers really does make the biggest difference. Anyway, back to the SCALE model. So basically, the S in SCALE is set the vision in the team. You get a team around you, a guiding coalition. The C is create clarity.
[00:04:12.930] – Kelly
So you’re going to create a plan and make sure that it’s as clear as possible. And you’re going to build that plan with your team. So you get other perspectives in there. Because sometimes what you think is clear is not clear to others. So that helps build that clarity. And then the A is act and communicate. So only then do you actually implement whatever your initiative is. So you’re going to get the team together, you’re going to talk about your vision, set the vision, create a plan for what you see with the guiding coalition, teachers on that guiding coalition for sure, and only then do you act and communicate your plan. And then the next L is learn, listen, and linger. So that’s really the continuous improvement model, going into classrooms, making sure that you are – you know what’s going on, you’re gathering evidence. And then E is empower and elevate and celebrate what those teachers are doing. Celebrate the risk-taking, celebrate the progress. You are going to get that sustainability if you follow all those models is what it looks like is happening in schools. So it’s great to see that.
[00:05:32.230] – Steve
There’s a piece that jumped out just now as I was listening to you go through the sequence again, and that is that often leaders go through that, all the critical thinking that’s necessary to create that plan and then miss the fact that the people they’re trying to take the plan out to haven’t gone through the thinking. So that what initially, I think, looks like disagreement or resistance is actually that they didn’t experience what you experienced. And so often what I find leaders need to do is when they reach that that they think they know where they want to go, they really need to back up and take a group through the same process that they went through. Is that connecting there?
[00:06:35.030] – Kelly
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And you brought that to the surface. And thank you, because that critical thinking piece that leaders go through, they have gone through it and they have come to a conclusion. And then everybody else is way behind them going, you know? And I really think teachers want to be supportive. Teachers want to make a difference for their kids. And we as leaders need to make them a part of the solution in figuring out what that is because they’re the ones doing the work.
[00:07:08.720] – Steve
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I’m working with a high school principal now, and we just finished 2 years of working together. We’re setting up the plans now for year 3. And he’s brought a team of teachers along through the process with him. And so it’s so key now to see that the voice of those teachers who came through the process with him is probably stronger than his voice as he moves it out to the rest of the staff. And in the same district, another project is happening at the district level, where the leader of that project took the same approach. So you’re seeing these teacher leaders develop that are, in effect, key leaders in the change process.
[00:08:05.560] – Kelly
Absolutely. Teachers make the biggest difference, and they have more influence over other teachers than leaders do. And when you come to that realization, it doesn’t make sense not to build up teacher leaders. They want leadership training. They want to grow in most cases. And so that’s what we need to provide for them. Give them some leadership training and voice. Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:08:34.040] – Steve
Well, I just finished facilitating a leadership development piece for new principals this summer, and I built into that an exploration of value affirmations. And I noted that in your plan, you had a spot for leading and acting through values. And I wondered if you’d talk a little bit about how that plugged in.
[00:08:57.290] – Kelly
For sure. So the values really help guide everything that you do because it’s who you are, right? So you’re going to use it to guide. You’re going to use it to learn. You’re going to use it to see the actions that you’re making. And it’s going to guide the improvements that you make. It also allows you to really make adjustments along the way based on your values. So those values, I mean, they permeate everything that we do, whether we like it or not. They’re who we are. And so using those values for good and making them visible as well and being, this is what our values are. I think that going through the values kind of process and seeing what maybe your top 5 values are can really guide who you are and who you are as a leader. It’s great to do as teachers as well, because when disagreements come up, then you see, wow, so this is important to you and this is why you’re upset. I get it now. And so it helps take the emotion out of it. I just read an article from Harvard about feedback on how you have to take emotion out of that.
[00:10:13.020] – Kelly
So you really have to have trust and know that people are doing the best they can. This is who they are. And it really is on the leader to make sure that the teacher’s needs are being met. Leadership is a big responsibility. It’s not just leading, it’s bringing people along and helping support them. It’s a big deal, in case you didn’t know that.
[00:10:43.880] – Steve
[laughter] I find out that schools lack conversation around values. It’s jumping out at me that when I go to a school and for the first time I’m introducing peer coaching to teachers, and when I’m prepping them for having their first pre-conference with a colleague, I’ll have them listen. And I don’t even use the word values. I just use the word about things that are important to your colleague. And the number of times that I’ve been doing that activity and have someone tell me that they’ve been on staff with this person for years, and in this little workshop activity this afternoon, they discovered that that person has an effective value or belief that matches deeply with one of theirs. And they’ve worked together this time, but that never made it to the surface because it’s never built into the opportunity, basically, to have the conversation. I think we assume other people’s values, make guesses off of their behaviors back to their values. And I think that getting into a critical conversation around them is important.
[00:12:07.150] – Kelly
Absolutely. I mean, I think we make a lot of assumptions in education. And so let’s try not to make assumptions. Let’s get to the evidence, get to know what people really believe, and everybody move in the same direction without that emotional piece. It takes trust, right? So building that trust and the leader asked to start that process.
[00:12:32.590] – Steve
When we were looking at a model for change, I described to you the backwards planning model that I use of beginning with that bottom line for students of an outcome and then working backwards to what behaviors students would have to take on for that to happen. And then what would teachers likely do to cause that. And in effect, when you plan backwards for school change, you actually get to the principal last. But now that it’s time to implement, the principal has to go first. So I describe backwards planning as from the top of student outcome, working down the list to the principal, and then implementing from the bottom up. As I shared that, you said that it reinforced and triggered some insights for you. So why don’t you share some of that?
[00:13:33.630] – Kelly
It really did, because we say that it starts with leaders. But what you helped me better understand is how. And it does, because the leader has to start that process. Like you said, the backwards planning. The real work comes with the kids doing the work, right? But what it takes is the leaders to set that vision, create the trust, the clarity, make sure that the focus is maintained, talking about monitoring implementation integrity, creating feedback loops so that things happen and people are accountable, and then celebrating the progress. Those things are what the leader really has to start with. It is what it’s looking like in my research. It also helped me really understand not to use fidelity, but to really talk about integrity. It has a whole different connotation about that when you’re talking about the integrity, because to me, then you step up to the plate if it’s your integrity we’re talking about. But it really is the integrity of the implementation, not the fidelity, because that’s, to me, fidelity is more compliance. Integrity is more about really who we are and what we want to do. So to me, it’s more the why.
[00:14:56.920] – Steve
It’s really interesting. I was in a conversation yesterday that’s actually setting up a future podcast I’m going to do. And the gentleman writes about dignity and the role of the leader to promote and protect teacher dignity. And we backed into the fidelity conversation that in effect, fidelity interfered with – the word fidelity interfered with the dignity of the teacher because it came across more as a policing term.
[00:15:37.690] – Kelly
Yes, absolutely.
[00:15:41.360] – Steve
In my backwards planning design, and it took me a long time to finally come up with the word or the phrase – the key phrase that I landed on after a whole bunch of years was, “student learning production behaviors.” So I said, okay, so when you’re planning backwards, the phrase I go with is teachers don’t cause student achievement, students cause students’ achievement. It’s what the student does that produces the learning. Now, the task of the teacher is to create those student learning production behaviors with the student that leads to the learning. When I walked you through that, you came back with a thought that we needed to consider what you then labeled as, “leadership production behaviors.” So what are some of the actions that build leadership that impacts – initially, it’s staff to me, but then you got me thinking further with students and parents. So talk through a little bit about what you think those leadership production behaviors are.
[00:16:55.000] – Kelly
So I think this is where the vision comes into. It’s the alignment of vision into everything that you do. And those are the things that I mentioned earlier is we have a responsibility as leaders to create that clarity, to build the relational trust, to maintain focus on the implementation, whatever it is. So, you know, in September, August, whenever your school starts, you’re in it. Here we are. This is what we’re going to do this year. And by December, it’s like, what was that again? So maintaining that focus on what the goals are is leadership’s job, but that is also where teacher leaders can come in. And when you empower teacher leaders, they can help maintain that focus. Teachers have fires they have to put out too, but if you have more people focused on that initiative, it’s more likely to result in success. So teachers can play a huge part in that. And monitoring the implementation integrity also is that something that teachers want to do what’s they’re asked of them. They wanna improve student success, right? But you’re right, the kids have to be the ones to do the work. So, but it’s the leadership’s job to be in those classrooms, to be in the PLCs with teachers, supporting, making sure that the implementation integrity is kept, and holding each other accountable.
[00:18:29.180] – Kelly
It shouldn’t be just on the leader. It’s the teachers building that trust, holding themselves accountable to what they say they’re going to do in PLCs, make sure it happens in the classroom. And what that means is you have those feedback loops where you come back and you say, this is what I did. This is how it worked out. I also love your idea about hypothesis, because if you talk about hypothesis, it’s kind of a neutral term, right? You do take the emotion out of that. And so thinking more about what you said about the hypothesis, they can say, we think that, for example, if we use exit tickets, we can see better what the kids are doing and be able to to do something quicker, respond more quickly to that. Well, in a PLC, you decide you’re going to do that, but before you leave PLC, you make an agreement that we’re going to bring this back on this date to talk about how it worked. And so that holds everybody accountable. I’m going to try the exit tickets. We might not do it well, we might not get out of it what we want, but we tried it.
[00:19:40.570] – Kelly
And you come back, you stay in the PLC what we’re going to do and when we’re going to do it. And then you come back and you do it. And so that creates that accountability that you have as a team. And seeing that, that really helps with the fidelity – whoops, bad word – with the integrity of what you’ve got to do.
[00:20:05.200] – Steve
[laughter] The key word there for me to make that all work is it’s a partnership. So once you roll out a change, as a leader rolling out a change, you’re in effect, asking the people who are looking at the change to be a partner, which means as a partner, they’ve got the integrity to carry it out. But as a partner on your end, you’ve got the commitment to listen in, openly. That’s really what took me to that word hypothesis. If we implement a change and we don’t see it as a hypothesis, we’re saying the people who made the decision have already made the decision and know that it’s going to work. And so now they’re handing it off to you who often as a teacher had no voice in the decision, and now you’re being told that it has to work. And so if I take that back to the use of the word dignity, I think that that’s a dignity loss right there.
[00:21:19.570] – Kelly
Absolutely. And I love that terminology, dignity. Yeah, I can’t wait to dig into that a little bit more. I love that. Yeah.
[00:21:30.570] – Steve
So how about we just, as you and I just had that conversation now, what you shared back was staff. How do you see students and parents plugging into a school’s plan for change?
[00:21:42.700] – Kelly
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s all about students, right? And if we see what they’re doing in the classroom when they find success, then everybody’s happy. So how can we extend what we do with teachers about listening to them, giving them a voice, trusting them, building that trusting relationship? If we do that, if teachers do that with kids, the same thing happens. They feel empowered. They take ownership, which is what we want. Because what the old saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink, right? This really helps the whole process. So actually with an elementary team lead, team leader meeting yesterday talking about this, and the teachers lifted that up and said, wow, because this principal has also, she has worked with these teacher leaders for 3 years, and they’re at the point now where they trust her, they believe her. She is getting their input and making sure that their voice is loud and clear. And that’s a process. Sometimes leaders don’t believe you, or teacher leaders don’t believe you. You have to make believers out of them. So a teacher lifted up that if we – here we are doing this, we do this with our kids.
[00:23:06.970] – Kelly
And I was like, yeah, so they’re seeing those connections and it’s beautiful. Thank you for bringing that up. And then of course parents want their kids to be successful. If they see their kids taking ownership, liking school, succeeding, who’s not going to be happy, right?
[00:23:28.670] – Steve
Yeah. Another issue that we talked about as we looked at your model was tracking what I’ve been calling evidence of progress versus very often, when people build improvement plans, they tend to look for evidence of success. And in almost all the instances that come to my mind, success is further down the road. And so if you’re waiting until you can measure success, it’s almost too late. You know, I describe it as we just, we decide at the end of the year that the new program wasn’t successful and we could have known back back in October, it wasn’t being implemented. [laughter] So if you think about a backwards plan to how the changes should happen – so if I plan backwards, then I get to administrators last, but now we implement administrators got to go first. So the first evidence we ought to be collecting is that the leadership group implemented what they were supposed to implement, and then what what payoff was that supposed to have with teachers? So now we’ll pick up and notice that that’s happening with teachers. And whenever the evidence of the next step or evidence of progress isn’t there, then it means we know we need to back up and do something now.
[00:25:02.590] – Steve
So I think the ability to get people focused on progress versus only the end result that you certainly want to get to the end result and get excited when you’re getting closer, but it’s learning along the way that becomes important.
[00:25:20.000] – Kelly
Well, and as leaders, again, leaders have a huge responsibility. Their job, if they have to get in classrooms, they have to know what’s going on in PLCs. But that’s where you see, is it happening? And then what did I do? What do I need to do differently as a leader? And usually it’s that clarity piece. You may need to provide clarity, give better examples, let them see it somewhere. But that is usually where the breakdown is, especially initially. And then, like you said, the evidence of progress. You have to raise that up so everyone sees that evidence. And you may not see that in your classroom, but this teacher is doing it and this is the evidence. So it gives teachers, okay, well, this can be done. And look at this teacher. They’re doing that. And just that’s celebration piece comes into. You have to celebrate the progress. Who’s trying this? Celebrate that. So again, those small wins along the way sometimes get forgotten. But these are the leading indicators. You’re in classrooms and you’re seeing what’s going on. That’s telling you, is it working or is it not working?
[00:26:32.450] – Kelly
And it’s not the teacher’s fault. Go back to yourself as a leader and what do we need to do differently so that teachers can really have the tools they need to be successful. But then, as like you said, those lagging indicators, that’s at the end of the year. It might work, it might not work, but make sure you know, like you said, in October, so you don’t wait until May or June to find out if this really worked or not. And that’s something in the SCALE model, you have the implementation team, your guiding coalition, you meet regularly. You meet maybe at the beginning of the year every couple weeks, but at least once a month to talk about this and get that input from teachers. What is their perspective? Now, as a leader, you should already know that if you are in classrooms, if you’re in PLCs, but something else could be lifted. Give them opportunities to share what’s going well, what is not, what do we need to do differently, and really listening to the teachers. So that is part of that scale model. It’s not a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
[00:27:44.320] – Kelly
It is reiterative that you have to – or iterative rather, that you have to go through the model again. It’s not a check off the box kind of thing. It really is living the initiative and living that we’re doing this together. I love your terminology as a partnership. If you view it as a partnership, the relationship totally changes, right? If you are a true partner as a leader, if you’re partnering with your teachers, you’re listening to them. You are really respecting their input and listening to what they’re doing. Taking their input and applying that input into what you do. So I love that you said partnership because that’s a whole new way of looking at a leader-teacher relationship.
[00:28:38.080] – Steve
So the other piece that jumps out then with partnership is common goal. Because as I was listening to you describe that leader-teacher partnership, it is actually what I’m looking for in the classroom is that teacher-student partnership. And what makes that a partnership is that the student knows and buys into, and the teacher knows and buys into a common goal for student learning.
[00:29:10.260] – Kelly
Absolutely. So that means the student has to have a say in what that goal is. Yeah, right. You can’t tell them this is your goal. They have to have a say in that. And so if the leader does it well and really teachers understand, that’s going to translate into classroom practice. And lift it up, make it transparent. This is what we’re doing. How can you use what we’re doing with our teachers and our teacher leaders with your kids? They’ll have great ideas.
[00:29:40.900] – Steve
So I’m thinking that as we focus on the thought of leadership production behaviors. It’s really something we’re looking to building throughout the schools so that, in effect, a school becomes leaderful. More and more people can practice that set of leadership skills.
[00:30:05.910] – Kelly
Absolutely. And I love that terminology, leaderful. Yes. We know that leaders can’t do it all. Principals cannot do it all. And so when you build that capacity throughout the school, that momentum is going to be moving so much quicker, and it’s going to reach kids and help them be more successful. But I think especially with our teachers are not staying in the profession. So let’s give them a reason to stay in the profession. They have great insight, great knowledge. Let’s give them some voice so that they feel their value and want to stay. I think this is one way to do it.
[00:30:52.150] – Steve
Yeah. Well, anything, any other thoughts you want to put out here, Kelly, before we close out?
[00:30:59.440] – Kelly
Really just the leaders thinking about the evidence piece. That is something. And how clear you are making things. And so getting that feedback from teachers gives you that, am I clear? Am I providing that clarity? Before that, you have to build trust, and they have to trust you, or you’re not going to get the feedback that you want and need. So just being there, having the responsibility that leadership takes, and thinking about those leadership production behaviors, teacher production behaviors, student learning production behaviors. It all aligns and can really improve schools.
[00:31:45.910] – Steve
Well, you just caused one to jump into my head that I’ll lay out here as we close. Your issue of clarity would be a great piece for a principal to pull an instructional coach or other teacher leader aside and request coaching on. You know, for the administrator to say to the instructional coach, as we roll out this change process, clarity is going to be critical for me. And I’d love to know that every other week or so we could pull 10 minutes aside and you could give me feedback on where you saw that clarity and any indications that you’re picking up that the clarity may not be there. It could be awesome leadership modeling for a principal to step into that role.
[00:32:37.160] – Kelly
That is a really great point. Absolutely. That relationship that you have with your instructional coach is beautiful, and it has to be beautiful because they will tell you things that you may not see or may not hear. So yes, absolutely.
[00:32:51.070] – Steve
But you have to ask.
[00:32:52.920] – Kelly
You do.
[00:32:55.000] – Steve
You do. Yeah. You have to make that as easy as possible for an instructional coach to play that role. Well, Kelly, thanks again for reaching out to me and then deciding to join me here. What’s the best way that listeners can follow up and follow the work that you’re now doing with Enlightening Leadership?
[00:33:16.900] – Kelly
Yeah, I have started doing a lot of social media posts on LinkedIn and Facebook. So follow Enlightening Leadership. I have a website, enlighteningleadership.com. And anybody can email me, kelly@enlighteningleadership.com. And I’d love to just talk through some things that schools are doing and help them with an implementation if they need some support. So, yeah, I would love to.
[00:33:47.160] – Steve
All right, well, we’ll stick the link to your website in the podcast lead-in, make it easy for folks to find. Thanks again.
[00:33:55.300] – Kelly
Thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:33:59.680] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn @SteveBarkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
