The final lesson in John Manning's book, The Disciplined Leader, is about the importance of giving back. Once we find success, it is important that we find ways to give back. Giving back has been a big theme to my year this year. In collaboration with others, I began the exciting endeavor of starting a food pantry for our students and community this year. What started off as a school food drive, ended up with a whole room filled with canned goods, clothing, and toiletry items for us to disperse to students and families in need. Although we are still working to make ourselves known as an organization, our food pantry, Hoosier Helpings, has been able to help over a dozen families since opening this past winter. We have some big next steps, such as aligning ourselves with a local food bank, building a website and formalized process, and offering mobile deliveries to families who live outside our immediate area. I am so excited that our school is developing more wrap-around services, such as Hoosier Helpings, in order to make our school and community a better place.
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Ethics is not always a black and white subject. What I believe to be ethical does not always match what the person across from me believes. This can make for some tricky decision making in the workplace. This murkiness is exactly why I really love that John Manning suggests in his book The Disciplined Leader, that a great place for a business to start in upholding ethical practices is with the organization's core values, mission, and vision statement. Manning writes, "The company values are the moral compass for your employees and organization. They should guide ethical decision making for all employees..." (239).
I've written before about the process our school followed to recently create new core values, a mission statement, and a vision statement, and I love the idea that our school and its employees can now use those as ethical guidelines to make decisions. Before decisions, our staff can now ask--is this what is going to ensure success for our students? Is this aligned with our core values? Even during our recent testing window, I have seen this in action. We wonder--is what we are going to do in the best interest of the student? I am really excited that we are looking to these values as a way to guide our decision making and to best serve our students! Manning, John. "Keep Ethics Strong'." The Disciplined Leader: Keeping the Focus on What Really Matters : 52 Concise Powerful Lessons. Ed. Katie Roberts. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2015. 239-241. Print School choice has done something interesting to the field of education--it has made schools compete. Prior to school choice in Indiana, parents just sent their children to whatever school was assigned to them, unless they were of the circumstance and desire to pay a hefty tuition at a private school. More access to public school options, like Hoosier Academies, though, has changed the way people think about school. Schools now have to compete with one another, and to offer a product worth pursuing. You can't just offer an education now--you have to have something to make you stand out.
At Hoosier Academies, something that makes our school stand out is the virtual component to our school. Virtual education can allow more flexibility for students, as well as a more personalized experience. That makes our closest competitors other schools that can also offer those things. Beyond their names, though, I have to admit that I don't know much about these schools. I don't know how they are different than us, or what they offer that we might now. I do, however, recognize that it would be a good thing to know. I will make it an action item to learn more about these schools, so I have a better understanding of the competition. "The decisions you make are a choice of values that reflect your life in every way" (Alice Waters)4/29/2016 As part of the School Improvement Team this year, I was tasked with analyzing data from stakeholder survey responses. We surveyed staff, parents, and students, to determine what works well in our school, and what some areas of improvement for us to focus on are. These surveys were, in many cases, very illuminating. Parents and students have a very different experience sometimes than what staff does--they bring in a totally new perspective. It is important, therefore, to always consider this perspective when looking at making institutional changes or decisions. With our core values incorporating working with parents and families to ensure success for every student, it is important that we ask for their input when making changes. This was not always done in the past. This year, though, it was a really positive experience bringing parents in to share their stakeholder feedback for our School Improvement Plan, and also bringing parents in to FLA to review our mission, vision, and core values. Allowing all stakeholders to have a voice in these decision making processes helps everyone to be more invested in the decisions and to support the school.
Without our parents, our school doesn't work. Any school needs parent input and support, but Hoosier especially needs that element to ensure that our students are succeeding. Parents and/or learning coaches are responsible for guiding learning in a virtual setting in a way that they do not have to be involved in a traditional schooling program. We need our parents to understand the inner workings of our program in order to best support student learning from their home classrooms. This reliance on the partnership with families really makes it especially important for us to listen when they have questions, concerns, or suggestions. We must be open to their feedback, and, in fact, I believe we should seek it out. Parents and families are not, most of the time, just looking to tear us down, but are in reality providing their feedback in hopes that things improve. Do we not have the same goal? Of course we do--we all want to build towards having the best educational opportunity for our students. In order to do this, we must work together, listen to what our families have to say, and act upon their suggestions to work towards becoming the best we can be.
As I mentioned in my previous post, we have an issue at this school of sticking with our decisions. When new ideas pop up, we tend to flip flop to try new things. I think new ideas and trying out different approaches is awesome. John Manning calls this approach "Flavor of the Month Syndrome." Picking a new focus or new approach too frequently can make it hard for people to feel committed and dedicated to the initiatives. This is why I love Manning's plan to "Have a written, documented strategic plan that clearly articulates the organization's core strategies" (226). I am really excited, therefore, to have joined our School Improvement Team this year. A big goal of this team is to do just this--plan out how we will improve our school, and exactly which resources are needed and steps need to be taken to ensure we are successful. We have struggled with the "Flavor of the Month Syndrome" in the past, but I feel that we are on the road to improvement with the formation of this team and our plan for growth and improvement.
Manning, John. "Avoid the 'Flavor of the Month Syndrome'." The Disciplined Leader: Keeping the Focus on What Really Matters : 52 Concise Powerful Lessons. Ed. Katie Roberts. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2015. 223-226. Print There are lots of good ideas floating around. The problem, though, is making these ideas come to fruition. Many times, I think the reason that the ideas we have at our school is that everyone is so eager. We are so excited and so willing to try anything to succeed, that sometimes we are building the plane at the same time we are trying to fly it. We just take off running without ever really taking the time to stretch--think through our ideas, plan, build the time and resources necessary to be successful. This often also leads us to abandoning these ideas quickly with the assumption that they didn't work. Maybe they didn't work, though, because they were not given the opportunity to succeed.
I do think we are doing a better job with this. We have had more stakeholder input this year, more opportunity to share ideas, and are moving in the right direction. I still think, though, that we need more of this--more well-rounded input from all stakeholders, more time to see if a new idea works, and more control to say when something works really well and should be adopted, or vice versa. In a school with 13 grade levels, we have a lot of challenges and issues. We have a large staff, a large student body, and a lot of moving pieces. One thing that can tend to get lost in all of the daily goings-on of the school is that we must pick our battles. Some things are big, immediate issues that we need to tackle with our full forces, some things are items that can be problem solved through on a smaller scale, and others are things that might be looked at in the future, but just aren't a top priority.
We all feel passionate, and in a society where everything is pretty instantaneous, we are often looking for immediate responses and solutions to our concerns. Often times, though, an organization has to prioritize and carefully choose which items to tackle first. I love the idea of working together as an organization to vote on priority issues. If everyone sees the process by which an organization chooses its biggest challenges, I think there would be more investment and understanding. One of my predominant reasons that education calls to me is that I love learning, and what is learning born from, if not curiosity? I love to learn knew things, grow in my profession, and have new experiences! This curiosity is most dominant in my professional life. According to John Manning in his book, The Disciplined Leader, "People take notice and appreciate it when you are authentic about your interest in them and what they say, Be 'real' about your curiosity, not just going through the motions and making small talk, and this will communicate your goal is not just to know them better but learn from them, too"(211-212).
I love the point that Manning makes here--it is so important to be genuinely engaged and interested in others, particularly those that we lead. Genuine interest leads to a more authentic relationship. In order to really be able to learn from one another, and share in common goals, we must be genuinely engaged with those we work alongside. Manning, John. "Cultivate Curiosity." The Disciplined Leader: Keeping the Focus on What Really Matters : 52 Concise Powerful Lessons. Ed. Katie Roberts. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2015. 211-213. Print One of the most powerful and productive things I think we can do is to ask a simple questions--why? A lot of resentment and confusion builds when we are afraid to ask this question, but it is an important step to understanding and coming to a shared vision. When a new idea comes out, or a new policy is put in place, people are often resistant. Would they resist as much if they knew why the change was coming? I don't think they would.
I am a big believer in transparency. I believe that if we can explain our motives and reasoning, people are more likely to accept and share in the ideas and initiatives put forth. As leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure that we are asking why, and that we are prepared with answers when those we lead ask the same question. |
AuthorLacy Spears is an instructional coach at Hoosier Academies school in Indianapolis, IN. Archives
May 2016
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