matthew mccrea

I’ve got a special fondness for the intersection of business strategy and school leadership, also when the Harvard Business Review put up “Six Components of a Great Corporate Culture,” it was a must-read.

The article’s second point was particularly interesting to me. The importance of a set of stated, common values to an organization as an unwritten, vaguely defined set of beliefs is clear – the unwritten set allows us to sort of meander along, claiming that everyone’s on the same page without admitting that we all might have a different interpretation of the language and statements. It’s happens all the time in education circles. How many times have we heard about how important it is to use data in instruction only to hear a different explanation of what that means each time you ask someone new?

The examples in the article were brilliant. A few years into its founding, Google created a set of values it calls “10 Things We Know to be True,” and McKinsey has a long established set of values for their employees. In that spirit, here’s my 10 Things I Know to be True that would form the beginnings of a set of values for my school.

1. All Students Can Learn

Students aren’t inherently “smart” or “intelligent,” and research supports this viewpoint (see Carol Dweck and her book Mindset). Instead, students have what we call a “malleable intelligence” that is determined by how hard they work. If a student doesn’t understand a concept the first time, we don’t blame this on anything wrong with the student, we simply try and try again until the student masters the material. Every student in front of you is capable of learning the material you teach, and it’s our job to figure out how to do it.

2. Adult-Student Interactions are the Most Important Drivers of Student Achievement

Teachers teach, and when they do it well, students learn. There’s nothing that anyone else in a school can do that’s more powerful than the work teachers do with their students. This is where our work will be focused.

3. It’s Best to do One Thing Really, Really Well

It’s great to have an excellent basketball team or a lot of school spirit, but at the end of the day, schools are here to teach students. We can’t allow a secondary focus on these other things to take away anything from our primary job of preparing students for college.

4. Great Just Isn’t Good Enough

This one’s stolen directly from Google’s list. We will always set goals higher than anyone else will think attainable because when we stretch to reach those goals, we might get further than we ever though possible. There’s always room for improvement, and we will always find ways to improve everything we do.

5. Develop One Another

This is similar to one from McKinsey’s list, and it’s two-sided. On one hand, it’s not just the job of the administration to develop the practices of teachers. Everyone should be looking to share their expertise with their colleagues, and conversely, everyone should seek feedback and mentorship from others that have strengths in our growth areas. We are only as strong as the other educators in the building, and we all will take ownership of our collective growth to maximize our impact on students.

6. Think Outside the Box

Sometimes, to solve a problem, we’ll have to throw away conventional thinking and think outside the box. We accept that our new ideas may not work every time, but we believe that when we iterate continuously, we will eventually come to a strong, innovative solution to the problem.

7. Uphold the Obligation to Dissent

Another stolen directly from McKinsey. Being too agreeable in meetings and discussions isn’t good for the students because the best ideas rarely come from keeping your mouth shut. Instead, we know that you must voice your dissent and push the thinking of the group. The original idea may or may not be abandoned, but we know that the group’s decision will be smarter and smarter in the end.

8. Focus on the Student and All Else Will Follow

This is a variant on Google’s first belief. Our primary customer is the student, and as long as they are always at the center of our work, everything else will flow beautifully from that.

9. Data Makes the Invisible Visible

Data may not be the be all end all of schools, but it sure does make it a lot easier to target issues and support. We know of the power of data to make invisible problems visible, and we know that the use of data clears a path for us to act on that data in an efficient way.

10. School Culture Matters

We know that a teacher is at their best when they enjoy their job. Working in schools is challenging, but we’re much more likely to achieve more together when we focus on group achievements and having individual pride in successes that contribute to student achievement. Our job is hard, but with an energized, passionate staff, there’s no limit to what we can accomplish together.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. —Lao Tzu

I’m now in the third year as a formal teacher-leader in my building, with the first spent as mathematics department chair and the last two as science department chair. Looking back on it now, it’s incredible how naive I was. In my mind, my job was to tell my teachers what to do to ensure high student achievement; in other words, I needed to shine a light on the path and expect everyone to walk down on it.

What I’ve found, though, is that the job of a teacher-leader (or really, any school-based leadership) is to shine a light on a spot where the teachers can stand so that they find the path on their own.

Case in point: today I mapped out the rest of the year’s curriculum with the science team. I knew that there wasn’t enough time to cover every last detail of human anatomy (our current unit), because we still had two other units to explore to get the students ready for next year’s topics. To cover the two later units, I knew we’d have to cut down on the time spent in this one. I also knew that this unit is a favorite of many of the teachers, as it lends itself nicely to a good series of activities and it’s an easy topic as far as engagement is concerned.

From here, I had two options:

1. Tell the teachers that they will cut this unit short, ending it within a predetermined time frame. Then I’d let them know that they would have to finish these next two units before the end of the school year, and tell them exactly how the topics would fall into place.

2. Explain the context to the teachers, giving them the big picture. Let them know that there were a certain number of weeks of instruction left in the school year, and these were the topics that needed to be covered before the school year was out. Let them know that because some of those topics weren’t covered last year, the students went into 8th grade without a strong foundation and consequently had a hard time with 8th grade material. Put a calendar in front of them, and then set the goal of deciding what we would cover and wouldn’t cover by the end of the meeting.

With the first option, I doubt I’d get much more than a head nod with little compliance with the plan. The teachers wouldn’t be openly hostile or anything (although I have seen this approach met with open hostility), but as I have little formal authority, they wouldn’t have any reason to listen to me if they didn’t want to. Alternatively, the second option puts the onus on the teacher to make the decision for themselves, which creates an innate drive to accomplish what they decide to do. It’s rarely as easy as it was today, but with a careful series of questions that are designed to lead to the right conclusion, you’ll almost always get there (Socrates was a great model for this).

The other great thing about Option 2 is that it builds teacher capacity for reflection. If I’m always telling teachers what to do, I’ll have a great department full of sycophants, which does no good in the day-to-day running of a classroom. Teachers will get better if I tell them what to do, but they’ll get better much, much faster if I lead them through the reflective process enough times to the point where it becomes second nature to them, and they start to improve their practice and planning on their own.

Video Link – Numerator and Denominator of a Fraction

Seemed like a fun place to start. Having taught 7th and 8th grade math, I know what kind of deficiencies my students come in with, and fractions sits high on top of that list. I’ll jump right in here. My improvements will be in bold.

• Video starts out with identifying the numerator and denominator of the fraction 3/4. Could do a better job here with a motivation for vocab here. Why don’t we just call it “the number on top” and “the number on the bottom”?Saying something like this in a class will get a glazed over look from students that’ll result in no one remembering the vocab.
• After the numerator and denominator are identified and the vocab introduced, Sal goes on to show a visual of 3/4, going with a square area model and then a circular (pie) area model. Because of examples like these (area models of fractions), students often have a hard time thinking of fractions in other contexts. One of those is parts of a set. Think of five sheep lined up. Two of the sheep are black. What fraction of the sheep are black? Another would be volume. Let’s say you’ve got a jug that holds 1 L. The bottle is marked off every 100 mL and water is filled to the 900 mL mark. What fraction of the bottle is filled with water? What fraction of the bottle is empty?
• Video ends after the second model of 3/4 is drawn. One example is almost never sufficient. Give a few more examples.

Where am I right on this? What else could be changed in the video?

Readers of my blog know that I’ve always been a supporter of the Khan Academy, that I’ve used it in my classroom, and have gotten myself into a few debates on its pedagogical usefulness. I won’t rehash here other than to say that I’m still a believer in a fundamentally different math classroom driven first and foremost by each individual student’s needs with a heavy dose of collaboration and project-based learning thrown in. I also know that the Khan Academy isn’t perfect and Sal Khan himself is way overblown as a savior of education, partially through his own statements but mainly through the statements of others. Despite this, my favorite part of Khan is its free and open access model and a constant eye to improvement, which has been vast in the two years since I started following its path.

In the last few months, there’s been a powerful movement in the math ed world that was kicked off by the Mystery Teacher Theater 2000 video posted to Youtube. From there, it was picked up by the more popular bloggers, including my friend Dan Meyer, who then started the MTT2K prize, which produced a dozen or so videos critiquing Khan Academy videos from the pedagogy viewpoint. Personally, I thought the original MTT2K video to be a bit too snarky for my tastes, but I understand what I hope to be the underlying point to the contest, that by leveraging the incredible pedagogical knowledge of math teachers out there, we can start to provide constructive criticism to Khan to begin to improve the quality of these videos. Granted, I’m aware that delivering instruction via video isn’t always ideal, but I’m also a realist in that this will be used no matter what we do and an idealist in that I think that Khan is really on to something, and what we can do together will inevitably give us something far better than what Khan can do on his own.

To that end, as often as I can get around to it, I’ll be picking a video and offering a set of constructive criticisms from a pedagogical point of view. Again, I won’t be perfect in this, and I’m sure I will miss other things, but two weeks after each post, I’ll take the final “deltas” for each video and synthesize them in a post edit (clearly marked as such). If you’ve got something, please put it in the comments, and let’s duke it out to make the best video we can out of this. In this, anything is fair game except a critique of the fundamental value of the Khan model – take that elsewhere. Comments in that line of thought will be deleted on sight.

As a last note, if you ever notice that the video’s been changed, put a shoutout to it on here, and I’ll keep a running log myself. Let’s have some fun here.

So, it’s been a while. We’re in a new year, and my focus has shifted from the classroom to school leadership. For the time being, I’m still teaching, and I’ll continue blogging about that (probably more at the National Teacher’s Alliance blog, where I’ve been asked to blog about my use of educational technology, primarily tablet use), but more interesting questions and experiences have begun to present themselves in a new sphere, so my focus on this blog will shift accordingly.

An interesting conundrum teacher-leaders of a school (department chairs, instructional coaches, lead teachers, etc) can run up against is getting teachers to accomplish a task with a deadline, whether it’s something small like coming to a meeting on time or something bigger like turning in a unit plan. We’re not principals, so there’s often little formal ability to hold teachers accountable, and in fact, some arrangements often strongly discourage instructional coaches or teacher leaders from going to the administration about a teacher not accomplishing a task like that if it’s not explicitly laid out in the teacher’s contract. How is it then that we hold teachers to doing these things, especially when it can have a strong impact on student achievement (as is the case with long-term unit planning)?

What’s worked for me has been showing them the benefits and incentivizing behavior that is positively correlated to student achievement. If I can’t come up with a student-centric and a teacher-centric reason for having teachers do a task, it may not be worth their time (very rarely have I run into tasks that are student-centric that don’t also help out teachers) For instance, the unit planning is pitched to teachers as some up-front work that lessens the work down the line instead of just another thing to do, it’s been much easier getting unit plans turned in from them. The incentive in this case was increased support throughout the unit. Since I knew what was coming up in their lessons, I was able to pull in more resources for them and plan informal observations and support for more daring, student-centered lessons.

Of course, providing planning time for the explicit purpose of accomplishing the task you want the teachers to do also helps, but this is rarely practical and even for schools lucky enough to have funding to pull it off.

Thoughts on this? How else do we get teachers to do things other than just teach that increase student achievement?