The LIFT Blog

By Ryan Quinn

My family and I have been participants in a bit of an odyssey. Our children attend Greer Elementary School. A little over two years ago, we found out that Greer was failing to meet some of the standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act. As a result, there was a possibility that Greer would become a “school of choice,” meaning that parents would be able to choose to send their children to other schools. This could lead to more loss of already-scarce resources, and a spiral of worsening performance.

Elementary Turnaround

At this time, a new principal, Matt Landahl, was sent to Greer to turnaround the school. Matt, along with his assistant principal, Lisa Molinaro, and many wonderful teachers, worked tirelessly through two years and many obstacles, to try to bring the educational performance of the school back up to acceptable standards. This summer, the school division made the following press release about Greer:

Greer Elementary School had a 13 percentage point gain in overall reading performance, moving from 78 percent pass rate in 07-08 to a 91.42 percent pass rate in 08-09. Performance by black students at Greer Elementary surged from 59 percent in 07-08 to 85 percent in 08-09. Greer Elementary also posted a 21.5 percentage point gain in reading for economically disadvantaged students, a 15 percentage point gain for Hispanic students and a 25 percentage point gain for students with disabilities in reading performance. Greer reported more than 25 percentage point gains in mathematics performance for black students, students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students.

In his blog, Matt reflected on what made this dramatic turnaround possible, and focuses on five factors in particular:

1. Hard work
2. Staying focused on the most important things
3. Writing
4. Short, two-week assessments of student learning followed by adjustments
5. A staff retreat designed to inform, set standards, answer questions, and empower

Each of these factors would be worth a blog entry in itself. In this, I am going to focus on #4.

Reflecting-in-action

The short, frequent assessments that Matt, Lisa, and their staff made of their students is a wonderful illustration of a concept that Donald Schön [1] calls “reflecting-in-action.” When people reflect-in-action, they pay attention to how well they are performing an activity and make changes in how they are doing it in an effort to improve their performance. for example, in The Reflective Practitioner, Schön gives examples of professionals such as architects and psychotherapists who notice how a blueprint is developing as they draw it or how a patient is responding as they counsel that patient, and who make artful adaptations to what they are doing based on what they notice. When professionals conduct their work in this way, they participate in a “social practice”–a type of activity that a person does again and again, but is its own work of art each time because the person treats each instance of that activity as unique and valuable.

I learned that Matt is capable of reflecting-in-action shortly after meeting him because of a conversation I had with Lisa. Lisa told me about how she and Matt were interviewing candidates for teaching positions. As she described these interviews to me–repetitive activities that they did again and again–she spoke enthusiastically about how each interview would begin in the same way, but that at a different moment in each interview, based on the answer a candidate gave, the tone of voice, or some other subtle cue, Matt would ask a penetrating question that would cut to the center of the issue at hand and reveal the appropriateness or inappropriateness of that teacher for the position. Matt could tell how the activity was unfolding and adapt artfully to each unfolding situation.

The two-week assessments that Matt and Lisa conducted with their teachers were also examples of reflecting-in-action: the teachers, as they were teaching the students, reflected on how that teaching was going and made adjustments to their teaching. As a result, the teachers were more artful and effective in teaching the children.

The two-week assessments are more than just reflecting-in-action, though. They are also a means by which Matt could teach the teachers to reflect-in-action. The teachers were not conducting two-week assessments before Matt and Lisa introduced them. By introducing the two-week assessments, Matt and Lisa created opportunities to help the teachers understand the implicit and explicit standards of the social practice of teaching, and also understand how to apply (and perhaps even improve) those standards in a wide variety of unique circumstances. Through these and other repetitive instances of reflective action, the knowledge of how to teach artfully becomes increasingly intuitive over time.

Leadership

Matt and Lisa’s two-week assessments are a wonderful example of leadership as a social practice. By using these two-week assessments as opportunities to help the teachers become reflective about their practice, Matt and Lisa were engaging in a repetitive activity of increasing the competency of their people and the capability of their organization. If they treated each of these assessments as unique events, then they would have been reflective and artful in the way that they exercised influence. Knowing Matt and Lisa, I suspect that they were.

If leadership is a social practice, then it is something that all of us can improve at. We do this by treating each repeated opportunity that we have to influence others as a unique situation–an opportunity to be artful in our influence. In fact, this is what our book, Lift, encourages people to do by giving people questions to reflect upon in any situation they encounter.

Matt and Lisa practice their leadership by helping others to reflect-in-action. This means that the test scores that they achieved this summer are merely an indicator of a deeper, more fundamental change that is occurring in the school. The more fundamental change is a change in the ability of the individual teachers and the capability of the organization as a whole. It is because of this ever-increasing ability and capability that we trust our children to this school.

[1] Schön, D. A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.