EPISODE #287

Asking the Right Questions Part 1

You're listening to the school leadership reimagined podcast episode 287. 

Hey, builders, real quick, before we get started, did you know that we had a YouTube channel? So if you ever want to see the video version of this podcast, plus get access to all kinds of other video shorts and trainings, all for free, just look us up on YouTube. We're @MindSteps on YouTube, and I would love to see you over there. Okay, now on with the show. You're listening to the School Leadership reimagine podcast, episode 287. 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 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, Robyn Jackson, and today I thought we would kick off a new series, and I'm not sure how long it's going to last, but I've been doing a lot of writing lately, and also this is the time of the year where, at least for me, I start to kind of reflect on the year and think about the year ahead. You know, my new year, because I'm an educator, is really August, but there's something about as you wind down the calendar year that makes you really start to think about, you know, what you've done, what there's still left to do. And at least for me and my team, we always get together and we do kind of a retreat where we, you know, spend a half a day or full day kind of assessing the year and thinking about some things.

And so as we've been going through that process or as I've been preparing, we haven't had the retreat yet, but as I've been preparing for that process, I've been asking myself some questions. And I started thinking that the quality of the success that you have in your school or in your organization or in any endeavor you have, it really hinges upon a very few things. And a lot of times we spend our time looking for the right answers. But lately I've been thinking about maybe that's wrong, because the quality of our answers is really determined by the quality of our questions. And if we asked better questions, we would get better answers. I'll give you an example. So one that I hear all the time, especially when I'm working with new builders who have just created their 100% vision. The first thing that people want to know is, okay, now that I have my vision, what if my staff doesn't accept it?

What if my staff pushes back? What if my staff says, that's impossible here? And for a long time, I would try to kind of answer that question, well, you could do this, you could do that. But then I started thinking, it's the wrong question, right? It is impossible. The question assumes that what you're doing, right, that the vision, achieving your vision with the school you have right now is possible. It is not. That's why it's a vision.

It is impossible to achieve your 100% vision with the school that you have at the moment that you create your vision, that it's impossible. So it's the wrong question. The right question should be, what does our school have to become? What does our school have to look like in order for that vision to be a reality? The moment you change the question, you change everything. And I think too many of us are walking around saddled with bad questions, and that's why we're getting bad answers. And so over the next few weeks, I want to spend one episode each on just considering a question, a better question, one that you can apply to your school, to your work right now, to help you see things differently, to help open up possibilities that you may have felt were unavailable to you, to help you to get better answers. Because I believe if you ask better questions, you'll get better answers.

And so for each episode that I do in this series, I'm going to pose one question. I'll talk about why the question is important. I'll talk about, you know, what the question can open up for you. And then what I'm going to ask you to do is to spend the week between one episode and the next just thinking about that question, applying that question to your work, and then see what it can do for you. See the value that the right kind of question can create. See the kind of answers that you start getting that maybe you never thought were even available to you before. And then I'm going to ask you to let me know. So there are a couple places you can let me know.

You can send a reply to the emails if you're on our email list, if you're not on our email list. Why? Why go ahead and get on the list? Because we send you the podcast episodes every single week. And plus you get all kinds of other things. You get to be the first to know about anything happening. So you can always hit reply to one of those emails if you're not on a list and you just don't want to be on a list because you just don't want to deal with emails. We also have the School Leadership reimagined Facebook group.

You can reply back there and if you are in Buildership University, just send me a reply in bu Comments so here's the deal. We're going to I'm going to pose a question every week for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to talk about why we need to consider it and then I'm going to ask you to think about it in your own work and let me know what kind of answers open up for you. Just want to see what happens if we start asking better questions. Okay, so deal? Deal. Are we going to talk to each other and let's just do this experiment together as close the calendar year so that we can start the year fresh and have some new answers and get unstuck if you're stuck and create new possibilities for students. So today's question is a question that I have been thinking about a lot as I think about how to build a 100% school.

So I am working on a book and one of the things that I'm grappling with is trying to take everything we do in Buildership University. And some of the things, the lessons that I've learned from working with hundreds of schools over the last couple of years to get to that 100% vision, trying to distill it down to really what are the most essential things? There are some things that I believe we should do, but are those things the most essential? Could you achieve 100% success without it? And what does it really take to do that? And so one of the questions that I've been playing around with and I'm going to challenge you to play around this week is this. What would you have to do that would make failure impossible? Let me tell you why I love this question.

You see, a lot of times we ask the question what do I need to do to achieve? Or how do I avoid failing? And both of those questions come from a place of lack, fear and want. If you're saying what do I need to do to achieve? You're looking for something else to do and you keep that's why we pile stuff on our plates. That's why so many of us get overwhelmed. That's why so many of us are doing things that don't matter. I find myself doing this a lot, you know, like, if I.

If there's a problem, I want a solution right away. 

And so I'm like, okay, what can I do? And that doing it makes you feel better because it create, you know, you're acting and action makes you feel like you're, you know, if you're doing something, then maybe you'll fix it. And sometimes all you're doing is creating more problems or creating more work. I found myself in this situation at the beginning of the year. I was stuck. I had done some things and gotten some initial success on them, but then I hit a plateau. And then I started to decline, because if you're not growing, you're declining.

And so I had stopped growing. And then, of course, very shortly after that, I started declining. And then in order, you start to panic because things don't, you know, they look like they're declining. And so I started panicking and started doing stuff, you know, what else can I do? What else can I do? What else can I do? And I was trying all this stuff and frankly, wasting all this time, energy and effort on things that weren't going to move the needle. And what I needed to be doing instead of doing more stuff was I needed to take a step back and say, you know, rather than like, what else can I do to stop the decline?

What can I do to make the decline just irrelevant? Just. It doesn't happen. There is no decline. Right. The other thing that we do is we often, you know, we try to avoid failure. And so this question is different than how do I avoid failure? Because a lot of us are so busy avoiding failure that we're not focused on success.

And so if you are worried about not losing, like some of you have mandates with your district, you know, you have to hit a certain level or you don't want to lose test scores. And so I remember working with the principal once, and she was so worried because her. Her school was declining that she got into this very defensive posture. And as a result, she was scrambling and playing not to lose and lost sight of her vision and her mission and her core values and was just doing stuff to try to plug holes. That is not only exhausting and emotionally draining, it's ineffective. You have to stay focused on your vision. So this question is not, how do I not lose? The nuance is very important here.

The Question is, what do I need to do to make failure impossible? And when you're thinking about it that way is, how do I set things up so that they don't fail? I remember the first time I did this was in my own classroom as a teacher. I was trying to figure out, you know, I didn't want anybody to fail. And so I was trying to figure out, what else can I do to help this kid and that kid and this kid, and how do I get more kids to succeed? And I was scrambling and doing a lot of work and creating, quite frankly, a lot of systems that were. There were a lot of work, and they were providing very small gains, sometimes no gains at all.

So I was wearing myself out as a teacher trying to help more and more kids succeed.

And one day, I think a mentor may have even posed a question or something that made me think of the question. And I started thinking about, how do I make failure impossible in my class? And then I just started brainstorming. You know, I could give the kids the answers, but that doesn't make failure impossible. Right. They could still fail, and they could fail even after they leave my class, because they didn't learn how to. I was an English teacher. Didn't learn how to write.

They didn't learn how to think for themselves. So that didn't make failure impossible. That just delayed failure. I gave them the answers now, but at some point, they would face something where they needed those answers and didn't have them, and they would fail. Okay, I could make my test easier and dumb them down so that they don't fail. But then again, that's another thing. I'm just postponing failure. I'm just making sure they don't fail on my watch.

Right? So I didn't want to do that. So how do I set students up to think about that so that failure was impossible? And in order to answer that question, I first had to ask myself, what is failure? And in my case, failure was students not having the skills to be able to think and write clearly, to be able to read and understand what they're reading and think for themselves around the reading. That would be failure. And so then I said, okay. So rather than just trying to look at all the lofty goals that I had, I started with the floor.

What's the floor? And I feel like mastery, at least for students, is not a set point. It's a range. I wrote about that in never work harder than your students that you got to set the mastery threshold. So the mastery threshold is the line between success and failure. And I never thought about that line before. And because I never thought about that line, I really wasn't doing things that would help students stay on top of the line.

And so the first thing I started doing is I just understood that line and then I watched the line.

So for me, the red flag, the thing that was clear about that line was that any student earning anything less than 80% in my class had mastered what I needed them to master yet. And so 80% became the line, 80% became that threshold. And then instead of just kind of, you know, randomly hoping kids would succeed and doing all these things to support, my support got so laser focused on making it impossible for students to fall below that threshold. And if they fell below that threshold, grabbing them really quickly and getting them back above the threshold as fast as I could so that I could keep kids through there. And so my focus changed. And as a result, the student success changed the way that I taught change. And it was less about, you know, not wanting to fail and more about trying to make failure impossible. And so that success became the norm in my class and failure became an anomaly.

So that's the first time I did it. And then after that, I started becoming an instructional coach. And yeah, I had uneven results as an instructional coach because I didn't get any training. It was just like, you're a good teacher, show somebody else. And so the first thing I did, you know, I thought I did, I made all the mistakes, right? I showed up with a bag full of resources, hoping that people would let me their classroom because I had something cool to share with them. I tried to show them how I did it. You know, I did all the things that we do when we are instructional coaches because we don't, you know, people don't have to listen to us because we don't have the positional power.

And a lot of times we are just trying to sell our services and get people to accept our help. And a lot of times the people who work with us as instructional coaches work with us because they have to, not because they want to. And a lot of people don't want to work with us because they feel that that is failure. When you know that you have to get a coach, it means that you're doing something wrong. So I struggled there and then before, I had some pockets of success, not some pockets where I wasn't as successful. And then after that, I went to being an administrator. Now as an administrator, success or failure changed for me. I was still focused on the students success and failure.

But in order to make a difference, instead of working with kids directly, I had to work through other people. So my question became, how do I make failure as a teacher in this building impossible? Now, think about that for a second. We probably have never considered it that way. We believe that teachers have to sink or swim. And we look at the failing and struggling teachers, and we're saying, oh, how do we help them if we like them? If we don't like them, we think, how do I get rid of them?

I know I'm not supposed to say that part aloud, but let's be real.

A lot of us operate that way, and we're trained to operate that way, quite frankly. But if we asked ourselves what would need to happen in our school so that it would be impossible for a teacher to fail, think about how you might do things differently. So the first question always, again, is, what does it mean for a teacher to fail in this school? And if you are a builder, failure for a teacher is not helping 100% of their students reach whatever it is that they need to reach for you to achieve your school vision. That's failure. So how do we make it impossible for teachers not to reach 100%? What will we have to put in place? And this is where it gets really fun.

Now, those of you in bu, you have some of these tools that will help you do just that, right? So there's four things you can do to impact a teacher's success. There's feedback, support, accountability, and culture. That's it. That's all the four things you can do. So how do I give teachers feedback in a way that helps them grow and makes it impossible for them to stay where they are and. Or to drop? Right?

So how do I give feedback to teachers who do that? So the first thing I have to think about is, okay, if the teacher doesn't understand my feedback, they can't act on it, and then they stay stuck. So how do I give them feedback in a way that they can understand it? And then the second thing I have to think about, okay, now that they understand it, how do I have to give them? I have to give them feedback in a way that makes them willing to do what I tell them to do? So how can I give them feedback in a way that they not only understand it, but they can't unsee it to the point where that becomes the new reality for them. And then anytime they do something against that feedback, it feels weird and it's easier and more gratifying for them to act on the feedback than it is to stay stuck where they are. And so that's why we have created all the feedback resources that we have.

You know, we talk about one thing, feedback, one thing, feedback. If you sit there and look and say, this is the one thing that you need to do that will turn this lesson from unsuccessful to successful, the moment you do it, then it's hard for the teachers to ignore that feedback because they can. If you give it to them in a way that they can, they can see it. It's hard for them to ignore it. And then, and then if you then follow up with support to help them do that one thing until they do that one thing, then they're going to get better. It's hard for them. It's harder for them to stay stuck where they are and not get better than it is for them to improve.

So people go with the path of least resistance for the most part.

So when you give them that kind of feedback that, where they can't unsee it, that makes how to grow so obvious and makes so much sense that it seems nonsensical to continue to do things the way that I've been doing it. People will listen to your feedback, people act on your feedback, and people will grow. Then if you follow up with just in time support tailored to their needs, you don't let them slip. You give them the feedback, they make the initial assent, yeah, I probably need to do that. You give them the support that makes it easier for them to act on your feedback than it does for them to stay stuck where they are. Then you catch them right before they can fall and you keep them moving. And then if you follow up with the right kind of accountability, not chasing, checking and correcting them, that puts accountability on you, but putting accountability on them and help them to be accountable for getting better and seeing better results. It's hard for them to go back to the way things, the way they were doing things before.

And then if you build a culture where everybody is doing that again, it's almost impossible that a teacher won't improve. Now, I need to stop here and say this. Every time I say that, there's somebody who says, but you have not met. And then they show me the worst teacher in their building. You know, they say, oh, you think that's, you think that that's true? Hold my beer, I've got a teacher for you. And you may be feeling that right now, but my question for you is, have you ever done it this way? Because I have, you know, spent a lot of time in a lot of schools.

And when I go to those schools, the principals are not always eager to show me their best teachers. They want to show me the ones that feel impossible, the ones that they are struggling to help. And I will admit, I have seen some pretty bad teaching. I have met some teachers where I have felt, you know, just initially, this one may be the one that breaks me. This one may be the one that breaks my theory that any teacher can become a master teacher with the right kind of support and practice. So I get it. Some of you are working with teachers who refuse. Some of you are working with teachers who hide or lie or obfuscate the skills and put up all kinds of barriers.

And again, the question becomes, what do I need to do in this building to make it impossible for a teacher to fail? And that includes the ones who do all the stuff that whatever teacher it is you're thinking about right now is doing. How do I make it impossible for that teacher to fail? Hey, it's Robyn here. Real quick. I just want to interrupt this episode for just a second, because if you are enjoying what you're hearing, then would you mind sharing this episode with somebody else? So all you need to do is just go to your phone, if you're listening to your phone or your podcast player, and then click the three dots next to this episode, and it'll give you the option to share the episode. Now, if you do that, three things are going to happen.

First, the person that you shared with is going to think you're a hero, especially if they're struggling with what we're talking about right now. They're going to love you. Secondly, you're going to feel good because you're going to get the word out about buildership and start building this buildership nation. And third, you will get my eternal gratitude because. Because I really want to get this out to the world. And you'd be helping me out. You'd be doing me a huge favor. So please share this episode with someone right now who's dealing with this same issue.

Someone you think would really benefit. 

And now back to the show. You know, when we designed, we used to do a lot more teacher workshops at Mindsteps. And whenever we designed a workshop, we would say, okay, we've got a workshop. It looks pretty good. And then we would say, all right, now let's apply the blank test. The blank being the name of the worst teacher I'd ever seen in my life. And we applied the test.

Would that teacher be successful in that workshop? And if the answer is no, then we would go back and reconfigure the workshop and rework the workshop until we believed even that teacher would be able to walk out of that workshop and implement in a classroom. And then once we did the workshop, we'd pay attention. Who wasn't getting it? Sometimes a lot of people weren't getting it because they didn't want to be there. They did not want the pd. They were trying to find a million and one reasons to not do what I was training them to do in the pd. And it had nothing to do with me.

They were mad at their administration or they were tired, or they had other issues. And I'm walking in and doing a workshop for one day or two days cold, and then I'm leaving. And they know I'm leaving. So there's no incentive for them to do what I'm teaching them to do in the workshop. So what? So then, you know, even though that feels impossible, we had to ask the question, what do I need to do to make sure that make it impossible for people not to come out of this workshop? Different change, seeing things different, doing things different in our classroom. And you just keep, keep working the workshop until you get there.

And here's the thing. You may not get there on the first attempt, but thinking in that way helps you solve problems, helps you get better answers. And that's all the question is designed to do. So if you are open to considering that question, what do I need to do right now? What could I do right now that would make failure impossible? If you're open to considering that question for the teachers you serve or the students you serve for the work you do, and if you ask that question, you can come up with all kinds of things.

I'll give you a couple of examples. 

What if you are, you're trying to sit there, you know, you're trying to. Your vision is 100% of students will be at or above grade level within two years of being in our school. Right? Right now you've got kids coming two, three years below grade level. So you've got to make up time and you've got to do more work. What do you need to do? What will it take? What would make it impossible for students not to grow more than a year's worth of growth every single year? What would it take to make it impossible?

No matter who the kid is, it would make it impossible for that student not to be on grade level after being in your school for two years. Would it mean extra time? Would it mean spending time? Would it mean shifting the way that you're teaching so that you're spending more time circling back to foundational skills and then building on those foundational skills and then circling back and building so doing this kind of spiraling kind of instruction to make sure you're looping in the kids, no matter where they are, and growing their skills, but also advancing their skills. Would it mean focusing only on power standards? Would it mean smaller class sizes? Would it mean a supplemental one on one help? What would it take?

What would it take to make it impossible so it's not about something else you want to do? You're thinking about what does failure look like? And then how do I make that impossible? How do I eliminate the possibility that somebody could fail? If you're asking yourself, what would I need to do to make it impossible for a teacher not to grow every single year, then you start thinking about, how do I need to give feedback differently? How do I need to give support? How do I need to build accountability in that teacher so they take on the ownership of their work instead of me always being the one pushing. How do I build a culture where everybody is growing so that nobody comes into the culture and takes our focus off of serving every single kid?

And then as you begin to really think about that question, I guarantee you're going to come up with ideas, with solutions, with things that you haven't considered before because you've been asking the wrong questions. I remember asking this question of our superintendent once. He was struggling. Kids were, you know, the test scores were just in the toilet and, you know, kids were not performing the way they needed to perform. The teachers were not performing that way. He was having issues with the union. They were all, all kinds of stuff happening in this district. Lots of poverty, highly impacted by drugs and crime in the community.

And I asked him the question, what would you have to do in order to make student failure impossible in your district? And at first he looked at me and he said, I'd have to bring all the kids home with me and adopt them all. And he thought that was going to put me off. And I said, tell me more about that. What do you mean? He said, well, a lot of these kids, because this district was really highly impacted by the drug epidemic and opioid epidemic. And so parents were.

There were a lot of kids who were really growing up in some really shattered homes.

Parents were oding. Parents were often not present. And so the students didn't have a parental presence, a parental advocate. You know, their home life was Chaotic and that impacted their schools. So he was saying that he couldn't overcome that and therefore he wasn't going to ever be successful. And I said, well, what would happen if you did adopt them? He said, what you mean like I'm just going to adopt 100 kids? I said, well, no, is it really 100 kids is impacting or is it a swath of kids?

And he said, it's a group of kids. So what would happen if you opened up a boarding school for those kids where they could have some stability and their parents, you know, they could, they could have, you know, a place to go and he. And be safe and be able to be successful in school. And he thought about it. He says, you know, I'm already feeding them breakfast, lunch and in some cases dinner anyway, and I do have a building. And before long, what he started looking at was building this public boarding school where the students who were really highly impacted could go and be, and get the support that they needed. Because he was, you know, he was keep. There was a certain group of kids he was keeping till 6 and 7 o'clock at night anyway.

So they fed him breakfast, he fed him lunch, he fed them dinner. They did tutoring, they did it after school, they did homework. So they were already doing a lot of the supervision after school anyway. So it was a short leap towards creating and getting funding and doing an experimental boarding school to help those kids be successful. So when you start asking the question, what would it take to make failure impossible? In this instance, you change things. I was working with another school recently and we were asking ourselves a question. They were struggling with students, they were struggling with students getting kicked out of class a lot.

So failure was students not being able to be able. The teacher not being able to handle what was happening with the students in the classroom and students not behaving in a way that didn't impact or interrupt the learning. We started asking ourselves what would need to happen in order to make failure in the classroom impossible? Failure being misbehaviors, acting out, that sort of thing. And we started thinking about, okay, so what happens the moment before students go out of control? And usually it was when students got frustrated or when students got bored. And a lot of times. So we started thinking about what needs to happen before students get bored, right?

How do we create more engaging lessons and get kids engaged right away? And then, then how do we handle frustration so we can let some of this before students, the valve gets so high that they just explode in class and so that be instead of teaching classroom management one on one to teachers or fussing at teachers because they were referring to when he gets down to the office. We started supporting teachers to create more engaging lessons and to recognize the signs of frustration and to de escalate frustration before it got out of control. And before long, referrals dwindled down to little to nothing. More kids were staying in class, more kids were staying on task, more kids were doing the work. It didn't happen when we said, hey, we've got too many referrals. How do we cut the number of referrals? It didn't happen when we asked the question, hey, we got too many referrals.

How do we get teachers to be to understand the referral protocol so they don't just refer kids out right away? 

We only came up with the answer and were able to target the work when we asked the question, what would we need to do to make failure impossible? So my challenge to you this week is this. I want you to ask yourself that question. Think about something that you're failing at right now as a school and then ask yourself the question, what will we need to do to make failure impossible? And then pay attention. Look at things. Look at things through the lens of that question and see what you come up with and let me know because I promise you that you will get better answers when you ask better questions.

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, 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 incremental gains each year, 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, real quick before you go, if you enjoyed today's episode and you know someone who would really benefit from what you heard here today, maybe they're struggling with the thing that we talked about in today's episode. Would you take a moment and share this episode with them? You see, not only will it help us get the word about buildership out to more people, but you're going to look like a rock star because you're going to give people something they can really use to help them get unstuck and be better at building their schools. Plus, it would mean the world to me. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.

Thank you for listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast for show notes and free downloads visit https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com/

School Leadership Reimagined is brought to you by Mindsteps Inc, where we build master teachers.