Survey Results and Working on the Work

It turns out that the leadership mindsets that have the most resonance for most of us are first TRUST and then LEARNING FOR DEEP UNDERSTANDING, which account for two thirds of our responses. I've been looking at videos from the Phil Schlecty Center and our responses make me think of his assertion that teachers have control over only two things: our relationships with students and the work we design for them. The theme of the professional learning he offers is "Working on the Work" or "WOW" - learning to design assignments that fully engage more students - inviting them to become attentive, persistent, and committed. In contrast, many of our students are currently disengaged or they are merely compliant.

Here are a couple of short videoclips you may find interesting:
Schlecty on Engagement, and Schlecty on Student Work.

Also check out the cartoon on changing schools on the Schlecty Center homepage: The Way Things Are, The Way Things Should Be.

Finally, I want to mention the presence of two of the key concepts in organizational change that I often talk about: social symmetry (my term) and creative tension. The Kaser and Halbert Trust chapter talks more about adult relationships in the school, but the notion of social symmetry, like the symmetry we find in a butterfly's wings, shows that one reflects the other. It is much more likely to find healthy teacher-student relationships in a school where adult relationships are healthy - there are norms of collaboration and shared responsibility. Creative tension, or the pull to excellence, is evident in the points Schlecty makes, in the homepage cartoon, between what we have and what we want, or the current reality and the preferred future.