EdFix Episode 11: Public Schools As Agile Organizations
TRANSCRIPT
SARAH BECK:
The primary challenge facing schools today is how do you take what we know about best practice in education and actually get it implemented with high fidelity and systematically across a school.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Welcome to EdFix. I'm Michael Feuer, your host, and this is your source about practice and promise of education. And I'm delighted to have in our studio with me today, Sarah Beck, who is currently the director of student services at Glasgow Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia. Let me just start by saying that Sarah was among other things, the Glasgow teacher of the year in 2015, and has since then been honored with the Fairfax County Public School outstanding leader award. Now, not to mention that Sarah is also an alum of the graduate school of education and human development here at GW, so it's a triple pleasure to have Sarah with us to talk about her work and what's going on in Glasgow. Let me start, Sarah, first of all, welcome.
SARAH BECK:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Great to see you again. I've been getting whiplash following your career. You started at Glasgow as a classroom teacher. If I remember right, this was middle school and you were doing world history.
SARAH BECK:
Seventh grade US history, yep.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
US history.
SARAH BECK:
Yes. It's post reconstruction all the way through to modern day, which is, I always tell the students it's the most exciting because it's where all the wars and all of the civil rights and all the exciting stuff happens. But I tell them not to tell their sixth grade teachers that.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Say a little bit more about who's in the room.
SARAH BECK:
So Glasgow is an incredible school. I stumbled into it right after I graduated here, and got my master's in teaching, and got a job at Glasgow not really knowing too much about the school. It's since become one of the largest and most diverse schools in all of the Commonwealth of Virginia. So we have over 1800 kids. We have 55 different languages from 67 different countries. It's really an incredible mix of kids.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Say a bit about the community where the school is located.
SARAH BECK:
So we're right in Bailey's Crossroads. So anyone's who's local knows what I'm talking about. But you just have a lot of little immigrant communities that have popped up. So everything, we have a lot of African communities, a lot of Middle Eastern communities, a lot of Central American communities. And what's great is they're just vibrant and tight knit. Then you also have like Barcroft, which is a pretty historic community in the area and well established. And then we also have an advanced academics program, so students who test into that program end up coming to our school whether they're in the boundary or not.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So how many of the kids in the class would you say come from homes where English is not the first language?
SARAH BECK:
So we have about 70% of our students where English is their second language. So some of them, their parents are pretty comfortable with English at home and they may go back and forth. But there's another language spoken in home for about 70% of our kids.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
If you had to guess, do you think that there was much diversity in political disposition among the students or their families?
SARAH BECK:
Absolutely, yes.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Really? So say another sentence about that.
SARAH BECK:
Well, a lot of our immigrant communities are fairly conservative and so that's a really interesting group of kids because they certainly don't like the tone around immigrants and the nativism that you hear now, but yet they certainly don't identify with some of the social liberal stances that the alternative candidates provide. And so there's just a lot of where is my space.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Question about the condition of politics in the classroom. A noticeable shift in attitudes, concerns or anything post November, 2016?
SARAH BECK:
Yes, yes. I really do believe that kids are more engaged than they've ever been. Kids believe that politics impact their life now. It's not something that I have to convince them of anymore.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
From your experience at Glasgow, would you say that in spite of the cumbersome, large, somewhat bureaucratic character of the public school system, it is able to figure out how to make change in response to these changes?
SARAH BECK:
Absolutely. The Glasgow where I started is not the Glasgow that I work at now. It is really incredible to see how much change can happen in a relative short period of time. And part of it is the demographics and volume of students that we have. I mean when I started teaching, I think we had 1400 students and now we have 1800, but also just I mean the teacher's willingness to adapt and change, the leadership's willingness to support teachers through that change is all just tremendous. And you have to be incredibly responsive to students' learning needs, to families' needs, to community needs. One thing I think about and reflect on often, especially now as a school based leader, is how can I create the type of organization that is agile enough to be responsive in those ways? Because things do change so quickly.
SARAH BECK:
I'll never forget, it was the day after the election, and I was driving to school and I was having dual conversations. Keep in mind, this is like 6:15 in the morning, right? And I'm having dual conversations with my former principal who was now the principal of the high school and the principal of my current school at the middle school, and just going back and forth and saying, are we going to say something to the staff? Are we going to send out an email to the staff? If so, what's the appropriate tone? What kind of guidance do they need to hear? Some of our staff members had very big emotional reactions to the election. We anticipated some of our students would, and the election results I think caught all of us by surprise a little bit to a certain extent. And so I just remember being on that phone call and thinking, how do we react to this? How do we support our students and our staff through that?
SARAH BECK:
But that's just an example of how, and we ended up drafting up, the three of us together on a Google Doc, coming up with a draft that we ended up sending out to our communities and sharing with the principal's association so that they could choose to adapt it for their needs as well. But that's just an example of how if you are being thoughtful and flexible and proactive and intentional enough in your leadership, you can be really responsive to things that come up. And I think communication's a key part of it, but then also structurally, how have you set up your school to make sure that you can adjust and adapt.
SARAH BECK:
I really have found that the only educators I meet who are really resistant to an agile approach are the ones who either really want to push back and don't know if what you're advocating is what's best for kids, so they're really trying to defend something they believe is not good for kids, or they don't know how to do it. They want some support around it. So I found that if you can clearly articulate why something is best practice and make sure that you're having an open mind like this really is best practice and provide support around implementation, you will find that most educators are very excited about being agile because they love learning. There's no playbook for education. You can have some guidelines, but when you show up in the classroom you don't know what exactly is going to happen.
SARAH BECK:
I mean teaching is probably the original agile field because show up and you have this group of kids and you just don't know what's going to come. And in fact for me that was probably the biggest lesson I learned transitioning into education, coming from business, because I came from a consulting and a finance background and I just, I'll never forget, my mentor teacher sat me down and she said, "You know what Sarah? This is not a spreadsheet. This is not a spreadsheet. You're going to get kids in the middle of the year and your seating chart's going to get thrown off. And if that's the biggest wrinkle in your plans, then you've had a good week." As teachers, you can't control all these factors. And that's part of the beauty and the fun of it is you just, you have to be able to take it in stride and have enough guiding principles to your work that you know how to not get lost along the way.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So there is a certain kind of advantage to having a disposition that keeps you willing and able to have that sort of flexibility. At the same time, there's a lot of pressure on the teaching profession to apply methods that have gone through different kinds of testing or research or for which there is more of an evidence base. To what extent do you think that we're making use of research based input to helping teachers in these situations?
SARAH BECK:
This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. One thing that our superintendent said when he first took over Fairfax County, this was two years ago now at his leadership conference. One thing he said is, "In Fairfax County Public Schools, we don't have a knowledge problem. We have an implementation challenge." And what he meant by that is, is we don't really disagree on what is best practice in the classroom. And I think by and large what you'll find is that that's incredibly true. A lot of the teachers that you talk to, they know what they want their classroom to look like, sound like, feel like. They really do agree that best practice is X, Y, and Z. They know that best practice is inquiry-based. They know best practice is student-centered. And yet it is such a challenge to find ways to systematically implement that across the school building.
SARAH BECK:
So one example I use with my staff fairly regularly just to keep us connected and grounded in our work is I use Fitbits as an example. We all know what best practice is in terms of keeping ourselves healthy. There's not a lot of debate around that. There's not a lot of disagreement, and yet we struggle to actually do the things that we know are good for us. Stand up, breathe, the Apple watch pinging me to meditate or take a deep breath or stand up or stay active. We know what works. We know what's good for us, and yet we still need these structures and these systems in place to help hold us internally accountable to what we say we want. And more and more, I'm coming to believe that that is the primary challenge facing schools today, is how do you take what we know about best practice in education and actually get it implemented with high fidelity and systematically across a school.
SARAH BECK:
So when you take Glasgow, for example, you have 150 plus teachers, you have 1800 kids. How do you ensure that what we believe about quality classroom instruction is implemented every day, every classroom, all the time? And what supports do teachers need in order to get there?
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
So, there's a difference between best practice as might be defined as a theoretical concept and best practice in terms of what's reasonable in classrooms or in settings where you have 1800 kids and 150 teachers.
SARAH BECK:
So to give a really concrete example, in the last two years, three years really, we've made a shift to workshop model at Glasgow. Almost all of our classes are in workshop model. And what I mean by that is, at the beginning of class, teachers will do a 20 minute lesson, a little mini lesson we call it, where they model their thinking around whatever skill or content kids are going to be doing that day in class. So I might show you how I analyze a political cartoon. I might show you how I annotate a nonfiction source. Then I release students into work time with some sort of high level academic task where kids are practicing that skill. And that task needs to have scaffolds to it. It needs to be differentiated so that all kids can access it.
SARAH BECK:
While kids are working on that, what I will do is as a teacher, I'm either conferring with individual kids, going around and conferring and making sure they know exactly what they need to be doing next, or I might pull a small group of kids based on need. So I might pull a group of kids that I know needs to work on some content background, content knowledge before they can even access the primary cartoon. So I might pull that group, work with them on a little small group lesson, and then release them back into work time and then go and confer with the other kids. So that's a highly flexible structured way of teaching skills and concepts at the same time to kids.
SARAH BECK:
And it's also a very different approach than how I used to teach and even when you came and saw me teach, I was standing at the front of the room and I had a really highly interactive lecture. I was going through PowerPoint slides and I had really rich primary sources. I was asking really great questions and I had kids turn and talk, but it wasn't flexible. I wasn't able to really differentiate. I wasn't really able to pull a small group. I wasn't able to remediate on missing background knowledge. And as our student population has gotten increasingly diverse, we need that flexibility in the classroom and we know that it works well.
SARAH BECK:
There's not a lot of disagreement among our staff that the workshop model approach would work well for kids. But what we do end up hearing is, "Well, I can't just teach for 20 minutes at the beginning and have them ready to go. Well, I can't scaffold a task and have the kids do it. They're going to be off task while I'm pulling a small group. I don't know how to remediate on that type of skill when I'm in a small group. I don't know what I would do to even get them caught up." So now what you're hearing is not disagreement about what's best practice, it's questions about how do I implement this and what support is needed. So I think it's not that research is showing us things that are not feasible to scale. I think it's that there's a gap between the research and the implementation.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
In your approach to the implementation problem, you've got another example of a pedagogical challenge there, right? So is that also something that you can apply similar principles of whether it's workshop or other forms of experiential learning to the professionals working in the school system?
SARAH BECK:
Yes, that's a great question. So actually this past Friday, I ran a workshop. I ran a workshop for assistant principals in one of the regions in Fairfax County, and it was an implementation workshop. So what I did is I did a little mini lesson on one of the, I call them the essential elements. At Glasgow, we've found that there are really four things that have supported our implementation through every step of the way, and we've done it with a number of initiatives now. And those four things are to really establish clear priorities, to develop common language, to create systems and structures, and then to make sure you're keeping the work human, that you're playing to human nature and how our minds work rather than fighting against it. And so for each of those things, I did a little mini lesson. I modeled my own thinking around how do I develop clear priorities for my work when I'm taking on a new initiative? How do I establish and create common language as I'm starting a new initiative?
SARAH BECK:
And then I gave them work time. I gave them an exercise to do. They had work time to do it. Some of them did it independently, some with others, and I'm going around and I'm conferring and talking with them, and then I pull them back together and we do another mini lesson. And so yes, absolutely. If you apply that workshop model to teachers and to leaders, I think it works really well. The challenge is, and one thing I've seen and experienced firsthand, is sometimes you take classroom strategies and you apply them to adults in a way that is, they call it the double track agenda or it just feels very artificial. It feels very condescending, feels very kiddie. It just doesn't feel good as an adult sitting in those. So I do call it a workshop, but I don't try to make it ... I'm not trying to teach you how to do workshop. I'm just applying what I know.
SARAH BECK:
This is one of the most flexible ways I know to deliver modeling of thinking to another person. So I'm going to use that now and I'll tell you that that's what I'm using, but that's the extent to which I bring that in.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You must occasionally encounter pressure from people who, whether they're saying it explicitly or not, where the message is, okay, that's fine. All that stuff is really cool, but how are the test scores?
SARAH BECK:
Yes. I mean that's a very important part of the equation. It's something that I have lived over the last probably four years at Glasgow. Two years prior to last year, we were accredited with warning so we didn't make accreditation fully in the state of Virginia because of our test scores. You have certain thresholds that you have to hit. In this past year, we did, and we were able to make gains across every content area and across every subgroup, which is something we're really proud of. Listen, we're doing this for every type of kid. We're not doing this at the expense of any one subject area or type of learner. That's how you know you've been doing school improvement in an authentic, holistic way and not in a short term cutting corners type of a way.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
A short term cutting corners type of a way would mean, okay, since we know the test is going to emphasize X, we're going to spend more time on that and forget about some of the social, emotional stuff?
SARAH BECK:
Or even worse, we know these kids are going to be tested and we know those kids aren't because they're exempt. So we're not going to remediate those kids and we're only going to remediate these kids.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And you've been able to avoid those temptations?
SARAH BECK:
Yes, absolutely. And we did have to have some tough conversations as a leadership team, including folks outside of our building and say, "Listen, we are in this for the long haul." The way that my principal would say it, he would say, "I can get you a point or two gain here and a point or two gain here, but if you want to see systematic improvement for all kids, then give me two or three years and you're going to see these scores really pop." And sure enough, that's what we started to see and what we've seen over time. Virginia just recently changed their standards of accreditation. And so now it's just, it's not a flat pass rate anymore. Now you have to hit certain thresholds for your subgroups. So from my perspective, what's going to happen is a lot of schools who previously haven't had to pay a lot of attention to their subgroups are now going to have to.
SARAH BECK:
And I don't want to make it sound like a Cinderella story. Glasgow certainly has areas that we need to get better at and we need to grow in. And when you look at where we're performing relative to other similar schools, we could do a lot better. We know it's possible to do better, but it's really not about perfection. It's about always getting better and doing it in a way that benefits all kids, all staff. We've also had our employee engagement scores go up every year. They just keep going up, which tells us we're doing it in a way that empowers our staff, gives them a voice. They feel efficacious, they don't feel demoralized. One thing we keep telling our staff is we can't work any harder. We work really hard, so we have to work smarter. So how can we work together better on behalf of our kids?
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Just say another sentence about when you made the switch from the life of a consultant in a business environment to the life of a teacher and educator.
SARAH BECK:
Why did I decide to make that shift?
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Yeah.
SARAH BECK:
So when I was an undergrad, I-
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And where was that, by the way?
SARAH BECK:
So I went to Stanford. I'm from California. I studied comparative studies in race and ethnicity, which-
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This was a major?
SARAH BECK:
This was a major.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Comparative studies, race and ethnicity.
SARAH BECK:
Yes. Yes. And I loved it because I got to kind of make it up. You had to take certain classes in certain places, but it was an interdisciplinary degree. And my focus was on youth in education. So when I came into consulting, it almost felt like a little, that was the bigger switch. My dad is an investment banker by background, but he loves education, very passionate about education, still very involved in education. But he always gave me the advice of go into business right after you get out of undergrad. You're going to get a skill set, a way of thinking that will benefit you no matter where you end up. It'll broaden your horizons and you can always go from business into pretty much whatever you want to do, but it's hard to go from something else back into business.
SARAH BECK:
So I took his advice. I applied to investment banking and consulting firms and just ended up finding a really good fit with Bain. Bain & Company is where I ended up and loved it, loved everything about it. It's all just very problem solving and challenges and a great team of dynamic smart people. And I learned skills that I use every day now as an educator there all the time. The hard thing about being a consultant is you don't have much control over your life at all. So you might have control over your work, but you're on call all the time for clients. And so when I decided, I think I might want to go back into education eventually one day, my husband, when he moved out here, was like, "Why don't we look to move? Why don't I apply to jobs? Why don't you apply to graduate schools, and we'll make the shift and we'll do this jump now." And so I did and I've never looked back. I love everything about it.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Say something about that tension between the structuring of the work day for your folks and the sense of giving them a chance to figure some of it out.
SARAH BECK:
I mean this really goes back to how do you create an agile organization. In order to be agile, you have to find this exact right balance of structure. And I think it's true of schools especially because of all the complexity that they have. But I think it's true of really any organization. So one thing that we say to our staff all the time, and we say it explicitly, we have a slide that says it visually, is we say, "Too much structure is stifling, but too little is just as crippling." And it's very true in your experience, if you think about this. If you're handed a scripted lesson plan, that's stifling. That doesn't give you room as an educator. You know your kids best, you know yourself best. You know what you need to do in order to make sure you're really meeting the needs of the kids who are in your room on a daily basis.
SARAH BECK:
A structured lesson plan, a scripted lesson plan is too structured. But if you've ever sat in a team meeting where there's no agenda, no clarity around the expectations for your work, no agreement upon what the outcomes would look like, no vision for where you're headed, you know how crippling not having any structure can be. So one thing we're constantly trying to navigate as a school of 200 adults and 1800 kids and then all of their families and all of their backgrounds that come into it, is what's the right level of structure. So it really does go back to what I was saying earlier, which is how you do these things matter. We know that having a lesson plan is a best practice, but you can implement it in one way in one school in a way that completely erodes morale and really lowers the level of instruction happening and you can have the exact same strategy employed in a school in a way that raises teacher efficacy and the level of instruction.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
The importance of appreciating this balancing act that you have to do as a professional educator and the pursuit of the so-called best practice in an environment where you sometimes have to probably make some choices that will be good, but maybe not always exactly the best and to figure out how to impart to future educators. Am I right that you would encourage that as something that we should be preparing educators to cope with?
SARAH BECK:
Yes, absolutely. And from my perspective, I think being able to talk about the difference between technical and adaptive problems is really important for educators. Technical problems are things where there's a formula that works for it, a checklist and that if you're just really organized and systematic and just check, check, check, check, check, you're going to get it done well. Registering students, placing them in classes, those are really technical problems, or establishing a master schedule. Adaptive problems, it doesn't mean there's not a right answer. It doesn't mean there's not best practices, but the application of best practices is going to have to look different in different places. So there's not one solution that makes sense across all contexts.
SARAH BECK:
And coming from the business background and now having been in school leadership for the last four years, I'm realizing that we do not do enough to support adaptive thinking in our schools and supporting the problem solving of adaptive issues in our schools. And instead we tend to over apply technical responses to problems that are really adaptive. And so I think being able to equip the next generation of educators just with that willingness to say, "Here's how I'm going to solve this problem. Here's how I'm going to evaluate what type of problem it is. And here's some modes of thinking that I can use to apply it." I do really keep coming back to those four pillars. We call them the essential elements of the clear priorities, common language, systems and structures, and humanizing the work.
SARAH BECK:
I gave an example to this group of assistant principals I was working with recently of you have to think of your school or your team or your department like a Rube Goldberg machine where you have the marble rolling down and it hits the spatula and it knocks the toast into the ... It's this whole gerrymandered thing, this really elaborate way of getting a simple thing done. I said, "But you have to think about where are things getting stuck? Where's the ball dropping? Where are those pain points in your organization where your work and the change that you're trying to get done is not going all the way through?" And you as the school leader, it's your job to identify those and provide systems and structures to support it.
SARAH BECK:
We don't do a lot of that training. We don't do a lot of that talking about that type of thinking as leaders in education. Business leaders do it all the time. It's very comfortable for them. So I wish that what we were taking more from business instead of this idea of measuring outcomes in the exact same way, was that we were taking that way of thinking of solving adaptive problems and bringing that over into educational leadership.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I kid about being a congenital optimist and in the world of education, and it has become harder these days just because of so many things that are happening in the world, but you have restored in me once again an immense faith in the public school system. And it's just been great to have this conversation with you.
SARAH BECK:
Thank you.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And I have a feeling that listeners to this episode of Ed Fix are going to want to know when can they come to Glasgow to watch this up close and personal.
SARAH BECK:
Please do.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I'm not going to encourage bus load, but on the other hand, maybe there are ways for people to stop by.
SARAH BECK:
Absolutely. We love learning from fellow educators and people who are thinking about education. We love people reaching out, so don't be shy. Come on over.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Don't be shy. Well, this has been terrific, Sarah. Thank you so much for coming and talking to us today here in the Ed Fix studio. And folks, if you've enjoyed today's conversation, then you can subscribe to the Ed Fix podcast, which is on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Player FM, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And for more information about this podcast and about our prior guests and upcoming episodes, we have a website called EdFixPodcast.com. Sarah Beck, thank you. Go back to work.
SARAH BECK:
Thank you.
MICHAEL J. FEUER:
And make public education as great as it can be.
SARAH BECK:
Thank you. I will. I appreciate being here.
EdFix: A Podcast About the Promise and Practice of Education
Hosted by Michael Feuer, Dean of GW's Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD), EdFix highlights the effective strategies and provocative ideas of researchers, practitioners and policymakers on how to improve our education system. Listen in as Dean Feuer connects their worlds to take on some of education's most complex issues.
From preschool to postsecondary, get your fix with EdFix!
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.