The Keys to Unlocking Coherence

My first day as an assistant principal was in July. The principal brought me to the boiler room and said, “Listen, there’s going to come a day when you are going to be the first person here, and it is cold, and the boiler needs to be restarted.”

He taught me how to get the boiler going. I am not the most mechanical guy in the world, but I did learn. The next thing he gave me was a ring of keys, and I had to rekey lockers and learn all the keys. And I said to myself, “What did any of this have to do with being an assistant principal or an educator?” None of this was in my graduate coursework.

Just think about what happens on any given school day – all the stuff. There is transportation, healthcare, human resources, and so much more. All these things impact how our kids experience school. It can be hard, but we need to see the school experience through their eyes to truly understand our school ecosystem. Compared to when many of us were in school, we need to consider how many distractions, whether good, bad, or indifferent, are challenging the attention of our kids every moment of every day.

In order to realize desired improvements, we must ensure coherence among all the resources, activities, goals, and supports that exist within our school ecosystem.

In order to realize desired improvements, we must ensure coherence among all the resources, activities, goals, and supports that exist within our school ecosystem. Additionally, we must consider how school is experienced through the eyes of a student. In every school, there are probably one or two things, or more that are not quite working as intended and may be causing disruption or distraction from achieving our primary goals for learning.

The goal as a leader is to ensure that everything that happens during the school day is considered in our efforts to optimize learning. There are three keys to achieving clarity and coherence in how a school operates:

1. Mapping your ecosystem: Map out everything that happens, or that you believe happens, in your school. In this exercise, we often find that people get about 90% of it right. That 10% that you may be blind to or unaware of has more influence than you realize.

2. Crafting user stories: The second critical aspect is to understand it through students’ eyes and experiences. Think about the different types of students you have, and for each one of those, craft a user story. There are two ways to do it: you can shadow them, or you can ask them to write about their daily routine from when they leave their house to when they get back home from school. This entire home-school-home journey affects their attitude and effort in doing homework and other schoolwork. Work through these stories and add them to your ecosystem map.

3. Understanding your context: Now you must understand the context of your institution, the culture of your environment, and the commitment improvement will require. As a school leader and facilitator, you must draw everyone into this conversation – it is a consensus on which problems we are trying to solve. And the next piece of this is culture – identifying which behaviors in a school culture support improvement, which behaviors must change or stop, and what actions you will take.

For real improvement, you must know the genesis of the problem, the evidence you have that it is a problem, and what has to change within your ecosystem. Schools also need stable leadership – leaders need to provide direction, assistance, and support so they can pivot and adjust along the way to truly support educators and students.

For real improvement, you must know the genesis of the problem, the evidence you have that it is a problem, and what has to change within your ecosystem.

A lot of school leaders think, “Hey, we’re getting results. We’ve got it.”  However, achieving sustainable and systemic improvement requires more than results.

Yes, they are getting results, but they have not achieved lasting change. Leaders need to look at those results over time and ensure they can be sustained. Even when you are seeing sustained results, there is still work to be done to truly embed effective practices into the school culture. Often, we see changes go along with leaders when they leave because those changes were not embedded in the school’s practices and culture. “Embeddedness” is the ultimate goal, but it will not happen overnight; it takes time, stable leadership, and universal commitment.

To achieve embeddedness, leaders must focus on:

• Culture: The behaviors you tolerate or support as a leader become definers within your culture and markers of your culture.
• Talent: Schools need the right quality and quantity of talent to do what you set out to do each and every day, because you cannot do it without them.
• Knowledge: Leaders, faculty, and staff need to have knowledge of everything that happens in the ecosystem so they can help effect change when it needs to happen.
• Execution: The whole community needs to be involved meaningfully and purposefully in the execution of improvement efforts.

Cognia knows schools because we are in schools. We have conducted almost a million and a half classroom observations through our observation tools. We have collected so much data about what happens in your schools, and we look at what it is telling us. And there are three factors of a good school that continue to emerge – cohesive culture, productive engagement, and collective leadership.

As leaders, we should not try to achieve perfection –rather, we should simply commit to continuous improvement and give ourselves the grace to fail, learn, and grow.

Scott Hartl is the CEO of EL Education, a nonprofit New York City-based K-8 literacy instruction and English language arts curriculum organization that recently announced its intent to merge with Cognia, where Hartl will serve as chief strategy officer. A lifelong educator, Hartl was a high school teacher and the founding principal of a high-performing middle school in Boston. As an Outward Bound leadership instructor for 14 years, he led major expeditions in the mountains of Nepal, Alaska, and other areas of the United States. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Science from Marlboro College and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Union University.

Mark A. Elgart, Ed.D.,  serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Cognia. Dr. Elgart works closely with government agencies and other leading education-focused organizations to help establish the policies, strategic vision, and actions to propel and transform the learning experience so that every learner is prepared for the rapidly and ever-changing global world. Dr. Elgart provides vision and leadership for a global nonprofit in over 100 countries, 40,000 institutions serving and supporting nearly 18 million students and 5 million educators every day. Cognia is an undeniable force for enhancing schools, engaging students, and driving better outcomes for all learners. Dr. Elgart’s professional experience includes serving as a mathematics and physics teacher; a middle and high school administrator; and a middle school principal. He earned a bachelor’s in mathematics from Springfield College, a master’s in education from Westfield State College, and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts.