Learning While Leading: My Lessons as a Site Administrator Working with Lead by Learning
At the start of the 2020-2021 school year, I had the pleasure of joining the El Cerrito High School staff as an Assistant Principal. My first experience on staff was a zoom meeting with 15 other teachers and administrators that comprised our Instructional Leadership Team (ILT). Everyone had the same question, “What do we do for our departments?” Amidst the stress of the pandemic and shifting a school online, my inclination toward servant leadership felt like it would be of value.
After two months of providing scripted agendas and PowerPoints for department meetings, teacher leaders were still stuck and asking for help. I too was feeling that what I was trying was not working, but also was not sure where to go next. My Principal at the time hired Lead By Learning as a consultant to support our ILT and build a Design Team that functioned as a space to collaboratively brainstorm the needs of our staff and departments. I had apprehension about how a consultant without the context of the school could positively impact a team. This is where I learned my first lesson:
Listen and Leverage the Assets in the Room
From the beginning, Lead by Learning encouraged our Administrative Team to invite 3 teacher leaders to join their distributed leadership structure, a Design Team. This team met monthly between each of our ILT meetings with Lead by Learning. During this time, they created space for our teacher leaders to really voice what they needed and for us to unpack their feelings of being stuck. I learned quickly that creating the scripted agendas and PowerPoints were stripping my teacher leaders of their agency to problem solve on their own and therefore the problems persisted. I was “doing to” my teacher leaders not “doing with” them. That year, our ILT focused on teacher leader identity and agency as an ILT and we used the Public Learning protocol to vulnerably share what was working and not working and help each other name the next steps.
As the year progressed we took this lesson of listening and leveraging the assets in the room with us as administrators. Our faculty had a healthy mix of veteran teachers and new teachers straight out of college. Understanding the inherent value and experiences all of those adults bring to the room is a strength that guided our growth and development for that year online. Shifting forward to the 2021-2022 school year and the return to in-person learning, while we didn’t think it was possible to be more stressed than the pandemic, in-person learning brought COVID-testing, contact tracing, and collective generalized anxiety from our students and staff that no one was prepared to deal with.
Our Design Team took on this challenge and through intentional listening and Public Learning, we determined an area of instructional focus that would reconnect us to our WASC goals: academic discourse. On paper, everyone appeared on board with the idea that engaging in discourse would help move past the awkward isolation so many of us had experienced in distance learning. Our conversations became more fruitful, but they still lacked the instructional focus that would help us identify corrective instruction. Therein lies the second lesson of my leadership journey:
No One Is Above the Work, Even the Admin
Every ask for teacher leaders to bring data to our meetings felt like a false-positive COVID test. It became clear that we needed to spend time debunking this four-letter word, data. My data-driven mindset was not something shared by the staff and in many ways in conflict with staff’s feelings based on previous experiences with data. Lead By Learning supported our team in expanding their traditional definition of data (grade, state test scores, attendance) and analyzing different types of data grounded in student voice and experience. While teachers gained clarity about what kind of data they could bring to our ILT meeting, there were concerns about the workload and feasibility. I jumped in to help teachers gather the data whether that was to film a lesson, complete a rubric, or gather and save a few pieces of student work. By the second semester of our second year working with Lead by Learning, we were working with real student data every month in ILT!
Simply giving staff a directive will not succeed if the staff does not see the leader’s investment. To this end, I lead by doing. Every person that works in a school is essential and supporting their role means getting on their level to complete the tasks that provide our students with a meaningful education every day. This builds credibility, belief, and purpose in the work. When adults believe in the purpose of their work, that increases the collective efficacy of the organization and we’re more likely to sustain the work. This is the final lesson:
Time is an Asset Administrators Often Undervalue in Change
Leading by example helps establish the relationships necessary to build social capital to lead an organization. Just as it takes time to build those relationships, teacher leaders need time to learn and implement leadership moves. By the 2022-2023 school year, we had established the necessary credibility and vision with ILT to put a big ask on the table: Common Department Assessments. This too was a WASC goal set before the pandemic and one we wanted to return to. Teachers nodded in agreement as they now knew that, through our work together over the past two years, it was an important step to creating equitable student experiences. Something that three years ago caused bristling now inspired curiosity. Our comfort with the Public Learning protocol gave space for teacher leaders to ask questions about how they were going to lead their departments rather than question the task and the Supportive Challenge framework enabled them to push one another with care to meet this high expectation for one another.
As an instructional leader, I sat with the Math Department for several meetings to get in the weeds about the new curriculum they agreed on. Historically, this focus on curriculum divorced from student experience would be viewed as an equity distractor, but our goal was simple: how can we agree on a common assessment to ensure that we’re able to measure instructional proficiency across classrooms? Because of our work of centering the student experience previously, this focus on curriculum and planning was not a distractor but the right next step conversation in our process. That year the department was able to establish common assessments and curriculum for the Algebra I classes and were ready to move to Geometry next. The time was well spent and deeply focused.
By the end of the 22-23 school year, each department had a common assessment and some were already implementing it with students. I didn’t design the assessment. I helped guide the experience in the room to focus their instructional knowledge and experience into something that’s relevant and rigorous for students. At our final staff meeting of the year, teacher leaders proudly shared about the accomplishments of their department and our instructional alignment was clear. Our school was aligned and we were feeling a greater sense of buy-in and collective efficacy.
My Next Steps as a Leader
The greatest privilege of being an administrator is deciding how to spend your day. Sometimes we get pulled in several directions at once, but our charge is to monitor and support instruction to ensure that every child has access to a high-quality education. I tell teachers that I’m most happy in a classroom. As a former Special Education teacher I had the privilege of working in dozens of classrooms. There’s endless possibility in our classrooms, but administrators have to have the courage to listen to our teachers unconditionally and manage with precision to ensure that the support we provide is driven by a value of equity.
I’m now embarking on the next step of my leadership journey as a new high school principal. Moving forward I’m leading with the question, “How am I centering my values within a framework of distributive leadership to empower design thinking and sustain equity in service of students?”
Jacob Gran is the new Principal at Archie Williams High School in Tamalpais Union High School District. He’s worked in high schools for 10 years as a Special Education Teacher, Instructional Coach, and Assistant Principal. Currently, he is pursuing his Doctorate with USC’s Rossier School of Education. He has a deep passion for understanding how systems and team dynamics create equitable and sustainable outcomes for our schools. When not at school, you’ll find Jacob with his family and dogs enjoying some sunshine in their garden.
Interested in working with Lead by Learning to support professional learning for your self, educators and site leaders? Connect with a member of our team to learn more about our partnerships.