EPISODE #355

Hey, builders. Before we begin today's episode, I want to make sure you know about the how to Support Struggling Students Implementation Kit. If Tier one is something that's on your radar this spring and you want to either improve Tier one or do a complete Tier one rebuild, you need this kit. It has everything you need to rebuild Tier one and make it work for students. It has all the professional development you need, all the tools for teachers. It has monitoring tools for you to make sure that the program is working. It's a complete implementation kit kit. Now, if you're interested, please know that we are releasing 10, only 10 of these kits for the month of March.

And if you want one of those kits, or if you just want to learn more, go to buildershipuniversity.com Implementation Kit. That's buildershipuniversity.com ImplementationKit. And now, on with the show. You're listening to the School Leadership reimagine podcast, episode 355. How do builders like us make a dramatic difference in the lives of our students in spite of all the obstacles we face? How do you keep your vision for your school from being held hostage by resistant teachers, uncooperative parents, ridiculous district policies, or a lack of time, money, or resources? If you're facing those challenges right now, here is where you'll find the answers, strategies, and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started. Hey, builders. 

Welcome to another episode of the School Leadership Reimagined Podcast. 

I'm your host, Robin Jackson, and this month we are celebrating eight years of the podcast, and we're going to be celebrating all month long. Now, last time, I talked a lot about the how my thinking has evolved and grown over the eight years of doing this podcast. But this week, I want to talk about how the world is changing. And even though it seems like those two things are unrelated, I think that once you see them together, they actually begin to explain each other.

But before I dive into that, I want to let you know that today's episode is sponsored and brought to you by the Entry Plan Intensive. You see, most principals, they start July with a whole bunch of good intentions but no plan. And so by October, they're already firefighting. Well, Danny Bauer has built a program specifically to fix that, and it's called the Entry Plan intensive. It's. It's a 30 day done with you sprint to build your 90 day plan before summer even starts. And you can check it all out at Entry Plan intensive. Com.

Now, keep in mind, applications close March 20, so you need to move fast. And I know Danny personally, I know it's work. This is a great program. I really encourage you, if you are starting a new school this, this year or you are stepping into the principalship, to check it out. All right, so after I recorded last week's episode, you know, I kept thinking about something. You know, last week I was talking about how my thinking has evolved. And as you know, we're, you know, kind of, you know, thinking and looking back and reflecting over the last eight years. But one of the things that I realized was that the shift in my thinking has not existed in a vacuum.

It didn't happen because I just, you know, sat down one day and decided to start thinking differently. It happened because I was watching things change in real time in the schools that I was working in, in the conversations that I was having with principals, in the problems that people were bringing to me. And what I noticed was that the problems were getting harder. Not harder, like more complicated, but harder. As in the old answers weren't working anymore. And I've been asking myself, why. Now, here's something I know about you. If you have been listening to this podcast, whether you've been a day one, and we have a lot of day ones, thank you, day ones, or if you just started last week, you're here because you want to do school different.

You, you are tired of settling for incremental gains. You believe every single child deserves to be successful. And so you're here because you want to have that conversation. You're here because you want to discover how to do that. But the challenge is that you're wanting to do that in a period unlike any other we've ever experienced. There has been no generation of school leaders before you who has ever been asked to do what you are being asked to do at the speed at which you're being asked to do it with the resources that you're being asked to do it with in the middle of everything else that's swirling around you. And so I want to talk about some of those challenges because I don't think we talk about them enough. I think that people have assumed, well, school has always been challenging.

So, you know, what's the difference? This is just the challenge of the day. But I do think that these challenges are uniquely different. Okay, so the first one, and you already know what I'm going to say we are still, five years later, still recovering from, from a global pandemic. The academic disruption from the pandemic, it didn't just create learning gaps. It changed the range of readiness inside of a single classroom. Like, you can walk into a fifth grade classroom right now and you can see students reading at a second grade level, sitting right next to students who are reading at an eighth grade level, and you gotta move them all this year. Not only that, but there's a social, emotional price that I think our students have paid for those years of social distancing and online learning.

They're still learning how to kind of navigate the social landscape. And it's bringing unprecedented social issues into the school. And so the disruption that the pandemic created, it's not over. It's just not in the headlines anymore, but it's still in your building every single day. And some of us even feel guilty for still talking about it. Like, people are saying, like, well, I mean, that was five years ago. Yeah, it was five years ago, but we're still seeing it play out in schools. And quite frankly, we haven't.

We don't have the tools, all the tools that we need to deal with that. 

Now, the second thing that's happened, and this is a little bit more recent, but there is a lot of community instability, right? So schools are absorbing the stress of a lot of the broader worldwide issues in ways that I believe are genuinely unprecedented. You know, families, they're carrying things into school buildings that schools were never designed to absorb. There are immigration fears and economic anxiety. There's community tension. I think our society is getting more and more splintered and that's spilling over into the school. And listen, I'm not here to debate any of that.

I'm just telling you what principals are telling me. And what they're telling me is that the stress of this world does not stay outside of school walls. It walks in every single morning with the kids. And that is taking a toll on the kids, on your teachers, on you. And it's changing how culture gets built in schools. And again, we are not given tools to really deal with that. Now listen, schools have always been community institutions, but right now, I think a lot of our schools are being asked to become shock absorbers, not just community institutions. We're still trying to navigate how do we do this work, how do we, you know, everything we do, it's being accused of being political.

How do we still serve kids? How do we still serve our teachers? You are expected to create a Stable and focused and productive learning environment inside of your building, regardless of. Regardless of how unstable things feel on the outside. And that's a lot of pressure. And then the third thing is that there's this financial issue that we're not supposed to talk about, right? We're supposed to talk about schools. And things are great.

But a lot of principals and quite frankly, a lot of district folk that I talk to right now, you're feeling the. The. The tightening of the financial picture, right? So the, you know, the pandemic funding that helped a lot of schools stabilize and invest in new programs, that money is disappearing or it's gone, right? So not only that, because of the politics and other things that are going on, district budgets are shrinking. And I'm not talking about a couple thousand dollars here. I'm talking about millions of dollars disappearing. And districts who are dealing with more profound issues from students than ever before are also having to deal with that, with shrinking budgets.

And so programs that you had a few years ago that were designed to help students, well, now those programs are under review, or you're having to let them go because there's not funding there. You have positions in your school that really helped move the school forward. Well, now those positions, they're uncertain or they're disappearing. You're being asked to deliver better results, but with less margin for error, less time to figure it out, less money to be able to do it. As a result, the pressure is just increasing at this moment that schools are in with greater academic gaps, greater community pressure, fewer financial resources, the old playbook, the old solutions, they're coming up short. Not only are you dealing with these academic gaps, the community pressure, the financial pressure, but the district, the expectation that you are experiencing from your district, from your community, from. From your own conscience is still the same. It.

You're still expected to move every kid. You're still expected to make every kid successful. And it just. I don't know, I think it's kind of bizarre that schools are one of the few institutions that are expected to get stronger while everything around them gets more unstable. And you're expected to do it without the resources. And that's the thing about this moment that I don't think traditional leadership was ever designed to handle. You've heard me say over and over again that leadership is an artifact of the institution, designed by the institution to maintain the institution, but it was never designed to deal with the pressures that you're dealing with today. And as a result, a lot of us are stuck and we're not stuck because we don't care, because we're not trying hard.

We're working harder than ever. 

Right? It's that we are operating from a playbook that was designed for a very different moment. I mean, think about how you were trained to be a leader, right? Your leadership training taught you things like how to manage people effectively. And notice I'm being very intentional about using the word manage, not how to grow, not how to build, how to manage people. But in us, in this moment in time, people don't need to be managed. They need something else.

Your leadership training probably taught you how to build a shared vision. And you've heard me talk about shared vision over the years, how that's a sham. Like when you just put a committee in a room and wordsmith and everybody fights for their own thing and then call it a shared vision. It's not shared at all. But your leadership training taught you how to do that. And that that sham of a shared vision was enough back in the day, it's just because you didn't really need to operate from a vision anyway. But now your vision is more important. And so that wordsmith, beautiful thing that you put on a wall, or worse, stuck it in a binder somewhere, that is not enough to carry you and your students and your staff through this time.

Your leadership training probably taught you how to implement initiatives with fidelity, to go through the process, to follow the protocol and listen, I'm not telling you not to follow the process. The district tells you you have to do something. I'm not tell to say, you know, to take it and burn it up and, you know, viva la re. No, I'm not telling you to do all of that. But I am saying that just blindly following a process no longer serves you. Because that process, without any kind of interrogation or thought, that process may not be designed to address the issues that you're facing right now, or it may be, without any interrogation and thought, vulnerable to the issues that you're facing right now. You just can't follow blindly a process anymore that you have to think carefully about, about how this moment in time is going to impact that very process. Hey, builders, real quick, before we get on with the rest of the episode, I want to talk to you about the 100 collective.

If you are interested in becoming a builder and developing that 100% mindset, then the 100% collective is for you. Not only do we have monthly masterclasses, live masterclasses, where I show you how to take some work that you are already doing, but do it like a builder, do it in a way that is more effective, more efficient, in a way that takes the work and stops it from being drudgery and makes it actually something that feels meaningful, that moves you forward. We also have done for you toolboxes with all the tools you need to be able to implement. And we have step by step playbooks that lay out the entire process for you. So you don't even think about it. You just take the playbook and you can implement it right away in your schools. And we have a supportive community. So this is a safe place where you can bring your challenges.

And there are other people, other builders just like you, who are encouraging you, who are applauding you when you win, and who are giving you their experiences as well so that you can learn from each other. If you are tired of just kind of going through and doing the work the way you've always been doing it, and you're ready to stop being a leader and to start building something amazing, the 100% collective is where you need to be. Join us@bearerhipuniversity.com community now back with the program. Your leadership training probably taught you how to solve problems. Well, I don't think it ever taught you how to solve problems, how to deal with problems when they show up. But if you're not being proactive, if you're not preventing problems, you will be exhausted. So many principals have told me that they feel like they're playing this giant game of whack a mole. Except for the moles are whack.

They're showing up faster. 

And the hammer that you're given to whack at those moles has gotten smaller. And so now you're just, if you just play whack a mole, you will not win. You will just be exhausted. And then your leadership training has probably taught you how to lead from the front. But you can't assume that just because you're a leader, people are going to follow you anymore. People are asking questions, and quite frankly, the leadership playbook doesn't have answers for the kinds of questions that people are asking. And so if you try to follow that leadership playbook and just try to lead from the front and expect people to follow you, you're gonna be out there by yourself.

Because people, they're not just following you anymore. This generation, this time that we're in, people are saying, I don't have to, I can opt out. So you need something more than just your position or your power to make people follow you. So while moving people forward and doing initiatives and vision. All those things are important, and they really do matter. If you notice something about everything that I've named so far in the leadership playbook, every single one of those things depends on you. It depends on you pushing you, motivating you, correcting you, encouraging. In other words, the system works when you are actively driving it, which means then that the results depend on your energy.

But in this day and age, schools are far too complex for results to depend on one person pushing all the time. And that's why so many of us are just tired right now. Because if the only way that your school moves forward is when you're pushing it forward, then the progress is always going to depend on your energy, and that makes it fragile. And what's different about this moment isn't just that schools are under pressure. Schools have always been under pressure. What's different about this moment in this timeline is that the gap between where students are and where they need to be is wider. And the time that you have to close those gaps and the resources that are available for you to close those gaps are shorter and shrinking. So last week, I talked a lot about, you know, the difference between schools that hit 100% and schools that didn't.

I talked about. I talked about, you know, the thing that surprised me the most was that. Not that it worked, but just how uncomplicated it all was, how calm principles were. And even like this weekend in bu in office hours. I don't know. I love office hours. But one of the things that struck me this week about office hours was that the principals who were there, a lot of them have been in BU for a while, and the contrast between who they were when they came in BU and who they are now is so stark. And it's not because they put these programs.

It's because they are so calm. 

When they came to bu, they were stressed, and now they're just calm. They're just like, yeah, I mean, these things are happening, but we're. We're dealing with it. We have a plan. You know, those principals have figured out something very specific. They have stopped being the only one that's driving the results. And they've started building schools that.

That ran on alignment, that ran on systems, and those systems are sustaining them because they figured out something that, I think, that sets them apart. It's something that I think we all need to figure out at some point, which is that if progress in your school depends on your energy, it will not survive your exhaustion. And so in a moment like this one, with everything that you are carrying right now, exhaustion is real, and your school should not have to be vulnerable to your exhaustion. And quite frankly, you shouldn't have to be vulnerable to your exhaustion. I'm telling you, when I was in office hours, I was just, you know, my team and I were talking about this afterwards, the calm, especially because when I, you know, meet principals out in the wild, everybody's stressed out. When I talk to districts, everybody's stressed out right now. This is the stressful time of the year. How are these principals so calm?

It's the same thing over and over and over again. The schools that reach 100% and the ones who sustain it are the ones who making such significant progress towards 100%, especially in the hardest moments, when everything outside is unstable, they're always. They're always being built by principals who made a very specific shift and how they think about their work. And that shift was they stopped thinking about. Thinking about their work like leaders, and they started thinking like builders. And so the world is crazy right now, just to be honest. It really is. And it looks like things are not going to change in the.

In the near term. So I think we ought to acknowledge that. I think that a lot of times, administrators, teachers, we think, well, you know, the world's crazy. So we just, you know, we do what we do. But if nobody else tells you this, I want to say it, that I think that there is something very different about the place we are in this point in time right now. It's different. It's unprecedented. I'm so sick of people saying that, and then I just said it.

But I get why people say that all the time. We've not had something like this before. And so the way that we have been taught to do this work is not set up for helping us deal with what we're dealing with right now. And that's why we're stressed out. That's why we're exhausted, because we are trying to take a set of tools that were not designed for this work and make it work for this work. Okay, I'll tell you a quick story. So in D.C. this year, we had Snowmageddon 2026. It.

Snow. But what was different about this snow? I mean, we've had snow before, but what was different about this snow was that it started out as snow, and then there's this thick layer of ice on top of the snow to the point where I could walk across the snow and not sink in. Right? And so it was. It was really hard to Shovel out. So it snowed.

I know you can shovel out snow, but nothing worked on this snow.

And so what was happening is that everybody, after everything settled and people are trying to now dig their way out. They're taking snow shovels out there, and the snow shovels are not even cracking the surface. So I saw people out there with, like, kitchen knives. I saw people outside with, like, sledgehammers, axes, anything. Because in order to get to the snow, in order to be able to shovel it, you had to break through the ice. And I think about where we are in the world right now. And I think that's what's happening with a lot of principals. I think that a lot of principals you got.

You have snow shovels, you have snow blowers, you have everything you need. But now those things are great for regular snow. They're not right for whatever this. You know, in D.C. we call it snow crete because that's what it was like. It was like concrete. And it took days to dig out where it would normally take. You dig out in a day. It took three, four, five days to dig out.

And then the stuff didn't melt for weeks. A lot of us right now are trying to attack snow crete with snow shovels and wondering why it's not working, wondering why we're so exhausted, wondering why, you know, the tools are breaking right now. It's because those tools were never designed for this moment. And so if you're exhausted, I get it. There's a very real reason why. And it's not because of you or because you're doing something wrong. It's just that the tools you're trying to use, they're not the right ones for this moment. And so I want to kind of.

If nobody else tells you that, I want to tell you that because I don't want you beating yourself up or thinking that it's going to get better if you just work harder. It's not. I don't care how hard I hit that snow creek with a snow shovel. All it did was wear me out and break the shovel was until I went down in the basement and got a gardening tool. A tool that, that, that. That I used to dig holes and, you know, a shovel, a real shovel, like a flat nose and then a pointy nose shovel and get out there. That's when I began to make progr. The point where other people started getting their shovels out.

There was no. There was a run on the hardware store for the shovels. And people are, can I borrow that? Oh, man, could I Use that, because the tools that were designed for snow were ineffective on the snow creek. So if you are right now trying to use leadership tools to deal with this moment in time in school, you're just wearing yourself out. And then you. If you. Then a lot of people are beating themselves up and thinking, if I just work hard or if I just.

No, that's. This isn't. This isn't on you. It's a tool. And so the reason I think that so many builders are calm right now, even though they're experiencing the same thing everybody else is experiencing, is because they have the right tools. And so I'll talk about that more later, but this week, I just. I just want to remind you that if you're exhausted, it's not you, it's the tools. And when you get better tools, you won't be so exhausted anymore because you'll be able to break through and get the progress you want.

So stop trying to beat at these problems and deal with this world the way it is right now with the wrong tools. 

Stop and get yourself better tools so that you can actually make a difference in this time, in this space. Like a builder. I'll talk to you next time. Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at Buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story. Right now, with the people and resources you already have, inside, you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars, and monthly live office hours with me where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now. If you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle and you're sick of tiny little increments, if you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join Buildership University.

Just go to buildershipuniversity.com and get started writing your school success story today. Hey, this is Robin, and thanks for listening to the show. Now, if you really enjoyed the content, would you do me a favor and share it with somebody else? All you need to do is pull out your phone, click on the little three dots next to the show, and you'll see an option there to share the show. Click that, and send it to somebody else who could really benefit from what you learned here today. Not only are you gonna look like a rock star, but you're gonna be helping out somebody else who really could use this information. Plus, I will be so grateful. So just go ahead.

Right now, click on those three dots and share the show. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.