100-Day Leaders. Robert Eaker
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that your school already has in place. The list is always longer than you think it will be. Take an initiative inventory of everything on your plate. Ask teachers and staff about their perceptions of the initiatives. Two key questions leaders should ask are, “To what degree is each initiative actually implemented?” and “If the initiative is implemented, what is the impact on student achievement and other organizational goals?” For example, we have observed a school system purchase online curriculum resources with the assumption that teachers would use the program to link standards, curriculum, assessment, and teaching. But when we simply asked, “Is anyone really using this?” we found fewer than 1 percent of teachers had even accessed the program. This is not an isolated example, as schools are inundated with programs for data analysis, formative assessment, and literacy interventions that are delivered but never or rarely used (Reeves, 2006). Leaders should be assessing the degree to which a particular initiative is having the desired impact. Simply asking the question about degree of implementation will reveal the binary fallacy—that is, the assumption that an initiative is either implemented or not implemented. But human performance is almost never binary, but rather takes place on a continuum. On one end of that continuum is delivery—teachers attend a workshop, receive workbooks, and perhaps log instructions for a technology-based tool. The second level of implementation goes beyond delivery, but includes actual evidence that teachers are using the initiative. The third level includes not only the use of the initiative but also evidence that these new professional practices have a positive impact on student results. The fourth level includes not only student results but also evidence that successful implementation is replicated by other educators and leaders in the school. In other words, saying “We have the program” never tells a complete story of an initiative’s implementation.
Step 3: Make a Not-to-Do List
Prior to embarking on new plans, leaders must establish a clear and emphatic not-to-do list. Before you set goals for the next one hundred days, identify in specific terms those tasks, projects, priorities, and initiatives that you will not do. Make the list public. Before you ask your staff to implement the 100-day plan, tell them what they can stop doing.
Step 4: Identify 100-Day Challenges
Identify your top-priority challenges for the next one hundred days. Be specific. They might relate to reducing student failure or improving discipline, parental engagement, attendance, or staff morale—you decide. But you must set specific and measurable goals with which you can make an impact in one hundred days.
Step 5: Monitor High-Leverage Practices
Identify specific professional practices that you will implement immediately. These need not be major changes, such as adopting a new curriculum or assessment system, but practices that you and the staff can apply immediately, such as the following.
• Effectively monitoring collaborative team meetings within the PLC
• Changing a schedule to allocate more instructional time to areas where data suggest students need more help
• Shifting staff meeting time to allow for collaborative scoring of student work
• Scheduling three common formative assessments in the next one hundred days
In other words, select short-term, achievable goals whose implementation you can clearly observe.
Step 6: Specify Results
Finally, identify the results that you will measure. Consider how to display these results in an easily understandable visual featuring before-and-after data. Examples of results include the following.
• Reading comprehension
• Writing proficiency
• Mathematics proficiency
• Attendance
• Parental engagement
• Consistency of scoring
• Student engagement
The six steps are a process of identification, measurement, delegation, and elimination that makes way for aligning focus on the greatest priorities of the system.
Part 1 closes with a description of the six steps in action. The appendix contains a template to aid in creating your 100-day plan (see page 126).
Part 2: Creating the Environment for Success
In part 2, we consider the environment for success for 100-day leaders and the educational systems they guide. The primary organizing structure for effective educational systems is the PLC. Consisting of collaborative teams that focus on core questions for student results, PLCs allow all people within the system—teachers, paraprofessionals, students, parents, leaders, and community members—to understand how they can personally support the system’s goals. The Collaborative Team Rubric in the appendix (see page 128) provides scales for use in assessing PLC practice within teams.
Putting It All Together
We conclude this book with a focus on accountability and resilience. There are times when leaders must, in our vernacular, “put their stars on the table.” That expression stems from the occasions in which military generals must honor their principles and values above the political demands of the moment. By relinquishing their stars, they express a willingness to lose their authority, position, and professional security in order to establish the primacy of integrity over obedience. We believe that the heavy emphasis on test-based accountability in the first two decades of the 21st century has amounted to an exercise in frustration. While student scores are certainly important, those scores tell only a fraction of the story of teachers’, administrators’, and students’ hard work. Our view of accountability, framed by the work of Richard DuFour, Douglas Reeves, and Rebecca DuFour (2018), is holistic and includes not only what students produce in terms of literacy, mathematics, and other scores but also what causes those scores. We therefore consider the accountability variables that teachers and leaders can control—the measurable and specific actions in the classroom, school, and district that lead to the results teachers and leaders seek to achieve.
Resilience refers to how 100-day leaders persevere in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Some change literature has claimed that systemic change occurs only after five to seven years (Fullan, 2011; Kotter, 1996). Imagine that you are the parent of a kindergarten student and you hear that effective change in literacy instruction will happen when your child enters middle school. An anonymous friend of ours has said that school change happens “one funeral at a time.” We are unwilling to accept this cynical view, and therefore claim that history and experience show that change can happen much faster—in one hundred days.
If you don’t believe us, believe Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. As you shall see, educational leaders around the world have proven that 100-day leaders can make a remarkable and enduring difference in a very short time.
PART 1
EXPLORING 100-DAY LEADERSHIP
CHAPTER 1
WHY BEFORE HOW: THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF LEADERSHIP
ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS credited with saving the Union and emancipating the slaves. But as any student of history knows, achieving these goals came at an enormous cost in blood and treasure, and success was not at all certain during the dark days of the early 1860s. Although the Emancipation Proclamation is, in retrospect, regarded as a great victory for the advancement of equality and the pursuit of the Declaration of Independence’s noble goal that “all men are created equal,” even the Northern states did not have consensus on this when the Proclamation was announced. Lincoln faced opposition in his cabinet, in Congress, among many governors in states that had not joined the Confederacy, and, most notably, among the generals leading the Union army.
Presidential