21st-Century Leading and Learning

Historian David McCullough reminds us that history did not need to happen the way it did. The future is never predetermined. Indeed, we know that the lives we live today have been shaped by many events, good and bad, but that much of the good we’ve known we owe to great leaders who have led us in times of peril and adversity. Churchill and Roosevelt saved the world from darkness when they turned the tide of World War II. Gandhi liberated India. Nelson Mandela ended South African apartheid. The optimism that America, and much of the world, presently feels rests on the leadership of one man who has encouraged us to believe in the “audacity of hope.”

In our schools, of course, nothing is predetermined. Leadership matters, too. Independent schools have placed a high premium on leadership to date, thus creating conditions favorable for growth and expansion during relatively stable and prosperous times over the past two decades. But now times are tough, and we need to ask what form our leadership must take in order to deal with the multitude of present and near-future challenges. If we want to survive — or dare hope to thrive — in the new landscape, schools will require leadership that, first, needs to get out of the habit of leading schools as usual, and, second, is eager to decipher and explore “adaptive challenges” — that is, the new imperatives and possibilities — imbedded in our current economic crisis.

To these two ends, the complementary concepts of “change leadership” and “schools of the future” may well be the powerful catalysts we need to envision and then create schools that have the capacity to equip all students with the new skills necessary for success in college, careers, and citizenship, and to help schools become the sort of learning communities that will help develop the next generation of leaders who, in turn, will make positive world-altering decisions for all of us.

Reframing the Problem
The concept of “change leadership” comes from the Change Leadership Group (CLG) at Harvard Graduate School of Education, co-led by Tony Wagner and Bob Kegan. As they and their colleagues at CLG have written in Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools, the problem of changing schools is “not a lack of hard work, good intentions, or initiative.” Rather, it’s the need for school leaders to improve their leadership capacities on two fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, “leaders need to see more deeply into why it is so hard for our organizations to change.” On the other hand, “leaders need to see more deeply into why it is so hard for individuals to change.” It’s hard, they add, even when change on both fronts is so obviously needed.

And, clearly, change is required today. Wagner and Kegan emphasize that the future of our economy, the strength of our democracy, and even the health of our planet’s ecosystems all depend on our educating future generations in ways that are very different from how the vast majority of us were schooled and how most schools function today.

Leadership Practice for Schools of the Future
Wagner and Kegan and their colleagues at CLG often imagine the anticipated outcome of their work as a “picture of goodness.” For independent schools, our picture will need to integrate the practice of change leadership with a clear vision of what students will need to know and be able to do in order to thrive in our rapidly evolving culture. To borrow from leadership guru Jim Collins, our aspiration should be to build capacity for dynamic growth that will transform schools from “good to great.” To this end, let’s look first at the concept of “leadership practice communities,” as applied here at the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools (HAIS) in a project we call the Hawaii Change Leaders Project (HCLP).

Funded privately over the past four years by the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation and Kamehameha Schools, this project includes 21 public schools serving over 10,000 students, led by both a CLG faculty and a Hawaii-based faculty, with a mission to demonstrate how the principles of change leadership might drive school transformation. Why would an association of independent schools get involved in public education? Interestingly, our association has a long-held commitment to participating actively in the broad educational dialogue of our community, with public education efforts administered via our affiliated nonprofit, the Hawaiian Educational Council. In the case of HCLP, our largest effort to date, we believe we are providing evidence that public and private school leaders working together is an efficacious model for the 21st century. Why not create a PK–12 academic culture in our communities that benefits all children?

The key concept at work in the HCLP is the Leadership Practice Community (LPC) — that is, teams of school leaders who make a commitment to all the children in their district, to one another’s professional and personal growth, and to a process of collaborative inquiry in which each member of the group has an opportunity to regularly bring “problems of practice” for colleague consideration and comment.

The framework we use to facilitate the mastery of core change-leadership skills is improvement in three dimensions of school life: school culture, the competencies of faculty and staff, and the conditions that exist in the school architecture and physical design that contribute to enhanced teaching and learning. Unlike the theoretical study of leadership found in most graduate schools of education, CLG’s approach is to engage participants in a reciprocal and relational social-learning process much like the “rounds” that medical residents use for their advanced training.

The work of an LCP is rigorous. Instead of working toward incremental modifications to existing school purposes, programs, and structures, we encourage members of our LPC’s to work “adaptively” to achieve transformation. To this end, the work of Ron Heifetz is instructive. As Heifetz puts it in Leading Boldly, “Adaptive leadership achieves positive change by provoking debate, encouraging new thinking, and advancing social learning. It mobilizes the parties toward a solution, rather than imposing one. The goal is to encourage shifts in mindset and provide incentives for stakeholders to invent their own solutions.”

Many school leaders, public and private, are accustomed to working in isolation, and find the cultural and social adjustments necessary to participate actively and effectively in an LPC to be frightening, but liberating. Shifting mindsets from working primarily with office-related matters, to engaging in more frequent and better quality instructional leadership strategies has also been tough. With these challenges in mind, the CLG faculty members for three years have served as “coaches” to the Hawaii-based faculty, building capacity for facilitating LPCs.

Long story short, after three years and an investment of $2.5 million, we have evidence that the use of LPCs has the power to catalyze school change. We also discovered a new dimension requisite to a high-functioning LPC: the absolute need to focus on the question, “Leadership for what?” We needed to know much more about our preferred educational destination for leading in the 21st century.

Hawaiian culture provided some of the “island wisdom” we needed to answer this question, as did the publication of Tony Wagner’s new book, The Global Achievement Gap. Together, they helped us navigate a much clearer course to a defined destination, thus creating an even higher purpose for our LPCs and a more vivid and compelling “picture of goodness.”

Nainoa Thompson, legendary navigator of the ancient Hawaiian double-hulled sailing canoe, Hokule’a, shared with us that when training his sailing crews to use celestial navigation for long-distance, deep-ocean voyaging, his final exam has been to stand with his students on a beach in Hawaii and ask, “Can you see Tahiti?” Island wisdom equips its navigators to “see” their destination prior to departing on a voyage.

In The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner provides a new educational goal for 21st-century leaders by explicitly outlining the new survival skills that all students will need in order to thrive in the coming decades (see sidebar below). When Karen Aka, co-director of HCLP, and I first read a prepublication manuscript of Wagner’s new book, we discovered the new knowledge we needed to enhance the work of our LPCs: the “seven survival skills for teens today,” along with “a bold new plan to teach and test the competencies that matter most for the 21st century.” In the field, working with four LPCs comprising about 28 school principals and district superintendents, Aka immediately set about to integrate Wagner’s “bold plan” within the center of our work. Now, a year later, we have shifted our mindset to allow our LPC principals to “see” an educational outcome inclusive of, and defined by, the new “core competencies,” and we are beginning to pilot performance-based assessments designed to replace traditional content-based paper-and-pencil tests that only measure knowledge of content.

The World We Live In — and The Need to Change
With that one shift, our “picture of goodness” changed, and momentum increased in our “change leadership” journey, allowing us opportunities to shift toward a more intentional effort to create 21st-century leading and learning.

At the same time, beginning in January 2008 — and inspired by an October 2007 lecture by NAIS President Pat Bassett to Hawaii independent school trustees on emerging trends — HAIS was invited by Hawaii Community Foundation (HCF) Vice President Chris van Bergeijk to collaborate on the design of a five-year, $5 million investment in the application of advanced technology in Hawaii’s independent schools. As the planning evolved with the participation of numerous curriculum and technology experts from HAIS schools, what emerged, and was subsequently approved for funding, is the HCF/HAIS Schools for the Future initiative.

Over 300 independent school educators, comprising teams from 47 schools, gathered in October 2008 to hear Tony Wagner share his vision for “new survival skills for all students,” then worked for several hours to begin to design a “schools of the future” project for their schools. Schools receiving annual awards of $20,000 to $75,000 will have five years to implement innovative ideas focused on changing the way teaching and learning occurs in classrooms, aligned with 21st-century core competencies.

This initiative, using Wagner’s new skills as foundational values, also obliges participating schools to acknowledge the necessity for using applied technology to create new learning environments that resonate with the way young people learn today. This includes incorporating the use of podcasting, blogging, video games, virtual worlds, social networking sites, Skype, mobile media, and other multimedia venues — taking into consideration the way today’s students process information and communicate with others. And, to help make this happen, participating schools are required to have student members on their teams.

While piloting “performance measurements” to drive curriculum away from content, toward mastery of competencies, we also aim to leverage a Daniel Pink-like conceptual framework of storytelling, using videotape to capture the learning journey of some of the experimental projects, and cataloguing these in a Schools-of-the-Future electronic library¹.

Working Through Resistance

We now realize that LPCs may be the catalytic force HAIS-member schools need to power their journey. And we are learning a great deal about the kinds of assistance our independent schools will need along the way in order to realize sustainable change within their school cultures and programs.

As hopeful as the newly launched project here in Hawaii is, we are encountering deeply held resistance to change in quite a few of the participating schools. We anticipate that the “adaptive challenges” will be significant, and hope that creating and facilitating LPCs for the team leaders from each school might be the best strategy to equip school teams with the change leadership they need to bring about sustainable transformation.

Three HAIS team members — Diane Anderson, Phil Bossert, and Kelsey Matsu — spent several months during the fall of 2008 visiting participating schools, and leading the program design process. Their findings included the following concerns:

The teams we have talked with subscribe to and support the kind of 21st-century goals that Tony Wagner talks about, and most are genuinely excited by the “vision” they are working with; however, in our opinion, most of the people we talked with do not understand how this vision and these goals can be translated into concrete action and results. In almost every meeting, we had to ask the team members, “but how does any of this change student work — what might student work look like at the end of the five years?” In about half the schools we visited, only the project team was truly involved with, excited about, and working on the program; many thought it would be a hard sell to get everyone involved. We did not come away with the impression that very many teachers foresee any changes in the way they will be teaching in the future, and we have seen no instances of any administrators willing to consider changes in scheduling, design, and use of facilities….

Just as we learned with HCLP that LPCs lack direction without an organizing vision for what students need to know and be able to do in the 21st century, we are discovering that our new Schools of the Future initiative, inspired by and committed to Tony Wagner’s vision for the seven new survival skills, will likely not achieve its goals without building and sustaining leadership capacity at each participating school via the facilitation LPCs. In short, to succeed, our initiative will require “change leaders” at each school.

Lessons Learned and Recommendations for Independent Schools
The first lesson is that LPCs have immediate applicability to independent schools (see schematic at right of one way this might work).

Supplementing the NAIS pilot project to provide “executive coaching” to emerging and new school leaders, the LPC is a proven vehicle for nurturing new approaches to the “professional practice” of independent school leadership, with characteristics that seem to us to be aligned with NAIS values:

• a commitment to the collective focus of the group;

• the development of shared values and norms;

• the cultivation of honest communication characterized by inquiry and dialogue;

• equity in participation;

• openness among participants to observe, discuss, and reflect upon each other’s work; and

• sharing of data that informs the study and improvement of teaching and learning.

Second, the NAIS call to action concerning schools of the future, may require both an organizing vision for what students need to know and be able to do in the 21st century, and the catalytic power of LPCs to drive change in school cultures that are typically more traditionally oriented and resistant to change. Using any and all means available, schools need to create a sense of urgency around this matter.

Third, new approaches to the assessment of student work will need to be developed, tested, and shared broadly. Schools of the future will require the ongoing commitment of NAIS, along with its Commission on Accreditation, to ascertain new standards and criteria for excellence, along with new performance-based measurement tools such as the College and Work Ready assessment currently being piloted nationally by NAIS, and in Hawaii within the context of HCLP.

Fourth, we will need to develop strategies to include our school trustees within our conceptual framework for “change leadership.” My colleague Peter Cobb wrote recently that “what Pink and Wagner are suggesting will require some fairly substantive and dramatic redesign of how we conduct school business. They challenge orthodox thinking about educational outcome and the implications of that for curriculum, pedagogy, and the architecture of schools. While we may not all embrace all of what they propose by way of preparation for the ‘conceptual age,’ I know that many of us think their ideas are not just intellectually stimulating but deserve full institutional exploration and experimentation.” In a recent meeting with the trustees of Mid-Pacific Institute, we explored the essential role that independent school trustees will be able to play as they reexamine missions in light of the opportunities presented by the current economic crisis. In short, for those schools with resilience, this is the perfect time to question assumptions, beliefs, and values, and explore new possibilities.

A focus on change leadership and a vision of schools of the future simultaneously call us to action in our efforts to move schools from “good to great.” Adverse world conditions have created the sense of urgency we need to move toward exploration, experimentation, discovery, and the creation of the new knowledge that we will need to arrive at our desired “picture of goodness,” a future worthy of the children we serve.

Robert Witt is the executive director of the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools.

Note

1. For more information about this new project, and to track ongoing school projects, you are welcome to join our NING at futureschools.ning.com, designed and maintained by HAIS team members Mark Hines and Diana Oshiro.