EPISODE #279

The one question that can make all the difference

You're listening to the school leadership reimagined podcast episode 279. 

Hey, builders, before we begin, I have a quick question for you. Are We Connected on social media? The reason I'm asking is because, as much as I love giving you the podcast episode every single week, I'd love to take our relationship deeper. So if we're not connected on on social media, let's connect. I'm on LinkedIn at Robyn. Underscore mind steps, I'm on Twitter at Robyn. Underscore mind steps, I'm on Facebook at Robyn. Jackson, please, let's connect so we can keep the conversation going. Now on with the show you're listening to the school leadership reimagine podcast episode 279, you announcer, 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 lack of time, money or resources if you're facing those challenges right now, here's 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, Robyn Jackson, and today I want to tackle an issue that's pretty common this time of the year. So the year has started, and you're at the point now where you've you've gotten everybody in, and everybody's working, and you start to see problems. You've may have gotten some preliminary data. You notice some red numbers. You'd like to turn those red numbers into green. And so what we were trained to do, the way we typically handle this as leaders, is that we look at those red numbers and we grab a solution that we think will turn that red number into green. Doesn't get us to 100% success. It just shows us some improvement. It just shows some growth. And then we add that strategy to all of the other strategies that we are already doing. And what happens is, not only are we creating conditions for people to get burned out very quickly, but we work really, really hard for incremental improvement, and a lot of times, the improvement that we create doesn't even match the amount of effort that it takes to get there. 

The second problem is that once we we address that red number, that piece of the data, that doesn't look good, there's another thing that crops up, and then we go grab another solution, and we add that to all of the solutions that we already have in place, and we work really hard to address that number, and then there's another one after that. So we're working really, really hard. We're getting, at best, incremental improvement. At worst, no improvement at all, or we're slipping, and it just keeps piling up, not only that, but the growth is really, really slow. And so we keep telling ourselves, Well, you know, growth takes time, and we're seeing some preliminary improvement, and it'll get better, only it never does. And so what we're doing is, you know, even if we find a solution that we believe will work, because we are already doing the 25 other things that we implemented last year the beginning of this year, we don't have the time or the energy or the bandwidth to make that new solution work, because we are already spread so thin on all the other solutions that that are kind of sort of working, but not really giving us the big bang that we want. We were trained as leaders to a grow incrementally and B to do it in a fractional way. What I mean by that is that we were trained as leaders that we do this initiative for this piece, and this initiative for this piece, and then we do this piece over here, and it's the combination of all those different initiatives and programs that gets us the big growth suffer, it's just not true. What normally happens when we fractionalize our growth is that we end up sacrificing the good for the Great. All of those strategies may be good. They may they may increase things by by a little bit, or maybe even a lot, but we don't have the time, energy or bandwidth to pursue all of them, and so a lot of times around this time of the year, it's the beginning of feeling scattered. It's the beginning of feeling like we're being pulled in a million different directions. It. The beginning of the burnout and so on. 

Today's episode, I want to prevent that. For you, I want to help you to prevent that, and the way that I want to help you is by giving you one simple question that I have been using for years and that builders learn to use to help you to really focus your efforts, because there are a lot of good things out there, you know, there, we all have a bit of shiny object syndrome, especially me. I mean, I'm always like, Oh, that would work. Oh, that would work. And we're grabbing along these, grabbing all these things. And anytime that I have gone down a wormhole or done something that has been a waste of my time. It's usually because I didn't ask this question first, but when I ask this question, it helps give me focus. It helps me to weed through all of the options that are out there and find a solution. A lot of times, when you are facing a challenge or a problem, you don't really know the answer, and then there are all these people out there who are telling you, this is the answer here. This is the answer here. I did it. It worked for me. And it's really hard when you are in the middle of a trying to solve a problem, to figure out what is the right answer. And every time that I've been there and I have not asked this question, I've ended up investing time, oftentimes, money, energy, going down a route that wasn't the right route for me, for where I was trying to get. And so if that's if you're feeling that way right now, I'm hoping that the question that I'm about to share with you today will help prevent that, so that you can spend time really focused on doing the work that matters, doing the work that's going to make the biggest difference. Are you ready for the question? It's a simple question. The question is this, what must I do to make success inevitable? Or another way of asking the question is, how do I make How do I make success? How do I make failure illogical? How do how do I make it so failure so unreasonable? What conditions can I create where failure becomes unreasonable? Okay, now that that may have gone right over your head, like, what? What are you talking about, Robyn, how is that question going to solve it for me? 

So let me break it down and give you an example. 

So the first time that I really asked myself this question was when I was teaching 11th grade. And 11th grade is the research paper. And every single year we would start the research paper. The beginning of second semester, I would see students start not coming to school. You know, we started having a lot of kids dropping out. Failure would increase. Second semester was a slog, and it was a slog because of the research paper. Now, you might not think that the research paper is a big deal, like, why are we spending so much time on the research paper? If it's if it's so hard and difficult for students, why are we pushing that? I asked myself the same question, and even people in the district used to tell us, you know, you don't really need to do a 10 page research paper. Kids can get it in five pages. And I considered that for a while, because there was nobody making us do it. But then I began to look at my vision for my students, and my vision for my students was to was to help my students learn to be good writers and thinkers. My vision was I didn't want any student to leave my class with with a D or an F. We called them E's back there. But you know, you get my point. I wanted my students to get the standards and to be able to write. And so I wanted nobody with a D or enough, and my mission was that I wanted to give my students more options and help them make better choices about the options that they had. Now, what did that look like on a practical level? Well, I wanted college to be an option for my kids, I knew that not all of my kids would go to college, would choose to go to college, but I wanted it to be their choice, not the the only option that they had. 

A lot of my students were first generation Americans. They were first generation college goers. They would be the first in their family to go to college. A lot of my students were weren't even sure if college was an option for them. They didn't know that they had another that the college they could even go to college and be successful. And when I looked at the data from our local community college and from our university in the area, what they were saying was that a large number of students were not passing freshman composition, and if they didn't pass freshman composition, they often dropped out of college and felt like college wasn't for them. And an even larger number of students weren't even able to take freshman composition because their grades or their writing or their reading skills were so low that they had to do an O level class before they could do a 101, Class for freshman composition. So if I really wanted to make college an option for every kid, that research paper was important. Why? Because what did they do in freshman composition? They did a research paper. So I couldn't let it go. I couldn't shorten it. I couldn't make it a five page thing. I couldn't turn it into a project. My students, if they did not learn how to write a research paper in 11th grade. They were not going to make it. College was not going to be an option for them, so we had to do it. So then I asked myself, Okay, I've got kids who are failing, who don't turn the research paper in, who are dropping out of school because they don't want to deal with the research paper, who hate the research writing, who, after experiencing the research paper, never want to go to college? How do I help them? And so I asked myself this question, what would make it unreasonable for a student not to succeed with this research paper?

And when I started thinking from that lens, everything changed. First thing I did was I said, Okay, well, they're intimidated by its light, so rather than writing 10 pages, let's break it up into smaller sections. Second thing I did is I said, we got to make every part of the read. I have to explicitly teach every part. I can't assume that they know anything. So we did. We had a whole packet where we taught them step one, step two, all the way through. Third thing is I couldn't rely on their ability to delay gratification, so they were turning things in and getting rewarded for each step I went through the entire process. I revamped the entire process for my students, so that as far as I could tell, it would be absolutely unreasonable for a student not to not only finish the paper, but to succeed in creating that paper. And then I set a new vision for the research paper. 100% of my students will succeed with this research paper, but turn one in 10 pages and succeed. And then I did everything in my power to make it absolutely unreasonable, and that first semester, 99.9% of the students turned in a research paper and succeeded. Nobody failed. Everybody had a research paper, a solid research paper, and felt good about the process at the end. Now, the point one student who didn't succeed, there were other issues, and I had her come back and made her do it that fall. I think I've told you that story before, and so she finished it that fall too.

So what? 

At the end of the day, 100% of the students succeeded, just not on my timeline, right? Once I saw that it worked for the research paper, then I said, Well, shoot, if it can work for a research paper, why can't it work for everything that we do? And then my quest became, what would make it unreasonable, unreasonable for a student to fail, what would make failure unreasonable illogical in my class? And then I began to set up everything that I could in my class so that failure was just completely it was harder to fail than it was to succeed. It was unreasonable, illogical, and once we set that up, I got to the point where I had nobody fail in my class. That's a system that I started teaching, and I wrote the book, never work harder than your students, and it has continued even to this day. So the next step was that when I started working with teachers, and I started trying to figure out how to help teachers support their students and become better teachers, I asked what would make it unreasonable for a teacher to fail? That's how I came up with the seven principles of effective instruction. If you do these seven things, it's unreasonable for you not to succeed with your students. That question has driven me from the time I was a teacher until today. 

In fact, even the buildership model is designed based on that question. So my vision for buildership university is that 100% of principals achieve their 100% vision for their school. So every 100% of the principals we support achieve their 100% vision for their schools. And so I had to ask myself the question, what would make it unreasonable for principal not to achieve their 100% vision that became the buildership model, and so the model right now is built on that design. First of all, if you don't have a compelling purpose, you're not going to achieve your vision. So how do we make it so so illogical and unreasonable for you not to achieve your vision? We help you create a vision, a mission, core values and a plan, a simple plan that you that helps you see how you can achieve that vision. What's the next thing that the next barrier where your people may not support your vision? So we built the people component, the feedback system, support accountability culture, that vision story, all of those are designed to get your P. People aligned to your vision, building their will and skill to achieve the vision, keeping them supporting the vision that so if you have a clear vision mission and core values and a plan, and you have people who are aligned to that vision mission, core values and plan, and they're building their will and skill to achieve it, it becomes more and more unreasonable that you won't achieve your vision. The third piece is, well, you need systems in place. So what systems? What are the basic systems? What are the minute? What's the what's the minimal amount of systems that you can create that will help you to achieve your vision? And we put those systems in place. So now that model is built on what would make it so unreasonable for you not to achieve your vision? How do we make it so that what? What conditions can we create that would make it unreasonable for you not to achieve your vision? That question has driven me. That question is has helped me weed through a lot of stuff. 

The Bridge, the original buildership model, have four components. And then we started realizing, if you did this or didn't do that, it wouldn't make it unreasonable. It was a nice to have, but it wasn't the bare bones necessary thing. And so those of you who are with me, earlier this year, when we unveiled the new buildership model, went from four components to three key components, because we keep asking ourselves that question. And so my challenge to you this week is to do the same thing. You have a vision for 100% of your students to be successful. Whatever that vision is. Have you asked yourself the question, what conditions do I need to create and build in my school? So that failure is unreasonable Now you may think, right now? Well, failure's unreasonable right now. I mean, we do everything for the kids, but the kids are still failing. So clearly, failure is reasonable. So what you want to really do is take a hard look. Don't talk about shoulda, coulda, woulda. Look at the kids in front of you. What do they need? What would make it unreasonable if they're not showing up? How do you make showing not showing up, unreasonable? How do you make it harder to not show up than it is to show up in school every day if they're not turning in their work? How do you make sure that that becomes unreasonable? For instance, I remember working with the school once, and the kids weren't doing their homework, and we you know, the school was trying all kinds of things to get the kids to turn in their homework, threatening them contracts, all the stuff that we were trained to do, to help kids turn their homework, and kids still weren't turning in their homework. And so they started to say, they started to blame the kids. And I said, Well, have you talked to the kids? And no one had talked to the kids to find out. And so we did some focus groups with kids, and we found out a couple of things. 

First of all, we found out that the kids were overwhelmed by the homework, so it just felt fruitless to do. 

The second thing we found out is that a lot of our students, a lot of the students were when they went home, there were not conditions at home for the homework. So I started asking the teachers, why do you want the students to do the homework? And a lot of it was that they couldn't finish all the work in class, so we started restructuring class so we could finish it in class, and then we reserved homework for only two things, practice and preparation. Either the students were doing homework to continue to practice something that they learned in school to reinforce it, or they were doing homework to prepare for the next day, like, you know, background knowledge, that kind of thing. Then the second thing we did is we said, how do we make it so unreasonable that the students don't complete their homework? So we started setting up things like homework hotlines, so that the students, if they got stopped, there was a place they could go. We had a hotline for parents, and the parents were helping students with the homeworks that they could call, we lower reduced the amount of homework they did, made the homework more intentional, put supports in place to help students do homework. We had a break glass strategy so if a kid got stuck, they could just stop right where they got stuck, explain why they got stuck, turn the homework in. We would get them unstuck in school. We created homework club and before school and after school, so kids could get homework done at school, so if their home life wasn't right, they could get the homework done and completed after school, before they went home, so they didn't have to worry about it. We did all of those things so that it was absolutely unreasonable for kids not to do homework. Guess what happened? They all do their homework. Same thing is true for teachers. We had some teachers who were not turning in their lesson plans every single day, and it was driving this administrator crazy, and so we again, we said, Okay, first of all, why are you asking teachers to turn in lesson plans every single day? But I need to know what's going on in the classroom. Okay, but are lesson plans the only way to do it? You all know me. I'm not a big fan of daily lesson plan submission. 

I think you submit a unit plan that is CO created with everybody on the team or the grade level. The unit plan lays out what's going to happen if I'm going into classrooms if I can't find you on the unit plan within the first five minutes. That's a problem. I need to give you some feedback and support around that. So we shifted from daily lesson plans to unit plans, and they still were struggling to get them turned in. So then we started having them co create them as a team during their planning periods, and using planning periods to actually plan. We started giving them coaching around that. Guess what? Started submitting unit plans, not only that, but the unit plans, because of the way that they were structured, helped teachers get better at designing day to day lessons. Lesson planning became so much easier. It was unreasonable not to create a lesson plan after you had the unit plan, and so the after effect of just shifting from lesson plans to unit plans is we actually got better lesson plans. Teachers were asking for support. They got used to using their planning period to plan lessons. We protected that planning period. We gave them the support that they need, we gave them the feedback that they need, we helped them to be accountable to their unit plans, and we created a culture that was really focused on instruction, and as a result, not only did they do the unit plans, but they got lesson plans again. We could have done a lot of different things. We could have, you know, done everything that the principal is doing beforehand, have a deadline, send out reminders, use a lesson planning format. 

Do you know what most people were doing? They were just putting one thing on a lesson plan to appease the administrator and teaching something else in a classroom, we even had one teacher who wasn't turning their lesson plans, and the administrator said you can't leave until you turn your lesson plan on Friday. So if you don't have your lesson plan on Friday, then you need to stay after school until you get it done. But guess what that meant, the administrator had to also stay after school until the teacher got it done. So the who was getting punished the teacher or the administrator. So what we did is, once we started asking different questions, we got different results. 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 on 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 gonna love you. Secondly, you're gonna feel good because you're gonna get the word out about buildership and start building this buildership nation. And third, you will get my eternal gratitude, 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 who's dealing with this same issue, someone you think would really benefit. And now back to the show.

And so that's my challenge you this week. 

If you are trying to achieve your 100% vision, instead of saying, What can we do? What else can we do? Can we do this? Can we do that that leads to a lot of overwhelm, that leads to you spending all your time and energy on stuff that's good, but it's not great, and then when you run across something that's really great, you don't have any time for it. You're overwhelmed. I talk to people all the time who say, I know I need builders from university, but I'm too overwhelmed, and I'm thinking, Well, the reason you're overwhelmed is because you're not doing buildership. You don't you're not going to get less overwhelmed and find time to do buildership. You do buildership to get less overwhelmed. So a lot of times, instead of adding something new or being overwhelmed, what you're doing when you do that is you are sacrificing the good for the great. You are spending all of your time and energy on something that's good has worked in the past, maybe giving you some tiny, you know, little gains. But you don't have time to work on a thing that will give you the big results, the big gains, the huge and definitive victories. So instead of doing that, what I'm going to challenge you to do this week is to sit down and spend 20 minutes asking yourself this question, what would make it unreasonable for my students or my teachers to fail? What would make failure so unreasonable? And then I want you to just dream, if you're a writer like I am, write it out. If you're just a thinker and you stare off into space, just imagine it. If you need to talk it through with somebody, get a thought partner to do that and give yourself 20 minutes. That's all to just dream about. What would make failure unreasonable, and don't judge it. Just dream it so you might say, well, you know, like I remember talking to one superintendent. He said, Well, the only thing that would make failure unreasonable is if we adopted all the kids and took them home with us. And I said, okay, and I wrote it down. He said, What? What? No, no, we can't do that. I said, I'm just writing down the idea. 

Basically, what you're saying is that. If the students lived with you, you think they could be successful? And he said, Yeah. They said, why? Says, well, we would, and we'd give them a stable environment. Okay, we would make sure they did a homework every night. Okay? We would feed them nutritious meals. Okay? We'd get them to bed on time. Okay, all right, okay. Can that happen? Do they have to live with you for those things to happen, and it started us thinking about other ways to make that happen, and it unleashed the creativity to help the school district to look at solutions that they had not considered before. You see, when you are trying to solve a problem, a lot of times the questions that you ask determine the solutions you come up with. And we were not trained to ask good questions. We were trained to say, what do I need to do? What programs exist? What are other people doing? What does the research says? And those aren't bad questions, but they're not the only questions we should be asking ourselves. And when you ask yourself the right question, it unleashes the creativity to solve your problems. So I love this question, what would make failure unreasonable? And when you ask the question that way, it flips everything on its head. You're not looking for another solution or a program, you're simply asking what would make failure unreasonable for me, with my students, with a research paper, the first thing that said, if they had a structure that they could follow, they didn't have to think about every single day they came in and the next step was in front of them. So now they don't have to think they can just follow the process. That would make failure unreasonable. 

Guess what? It worked when I said, if we break it down into smaller parts, and they get a reward for each part that gives them that dopamine hit, so they're coming in every day. It doesn't feel like a slog. That would make failure unreasonable. Guess what? It worked when I started working with teachers, and I started saying, Okay, if teachers were given timely feedback that really focused on the one most important thing that they need to be doing right now to be successful, and they did, and they responded to that feedback and got that win, and then did the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, failure would be unreasonable. Guess what we did that? We designed a feedback system that does that. And guess what? The teachers who go through that system, they grow. They grow in ways that blow your mind, and failure is unreasonable. If teachers do that, they will not fail. And when the same thing with the buildership model, when we said, Okay, if a builder has a clear vision mission and core values, and gets people engaged in building that vision mission and core values, and then equips people their will and skill to be able to build that vision mission and core values, and they put systems in place to to to make building that so much easier and efficient, and to give, keep and maintain the focus, they will not fail. And guess what? We have builders right now who are achieving 100% success, and we've got more and more developing that and building that every single day. 

So I want you to do that. 

I want you to take 20 minutes and just ask yourself, what would it take to make failure unreasonable? And then, once you finish, take a look at what you have. There are going to be some ideas there that are going to feel big and scary, but those are probably the ones that are going to be the biggest ones. And we know what else you're going to figure out. You're going to figure out all this stuff you're doing that doesn't make failure unreasonable, which then begs the question, why are you doing it? And so it'll show you what you can cut. It'll show you where you can make room to do the things that really matter. And so if you're in BU, then I want you to ask the question, and then in bu comments, I'd love for you to post some of the ahas that have come through asking that question, and then we'll kind of play around and build and bu Commons and join office hours to kind of help you start refining some of those ideas so that you can begin pursuing them as quickly as possible. And if you're not in BU, I still would love to know we have a Facebook group called school leadership reimagined Facebook group, but I'd love to see your answers inside the Facebook group as well and and that way we can start to share with each other and inspire each other, so that we can stop wasting time on stuff that gives us that incremental growth but also creates a lot more work, and start focusing on the things that really, really matter, so that we can make failure unreasonable like builders, 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. Says 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 buildership university.com and get started writing your school success story today.

Hey, it's Robyn here, and I want to thank you for listening to today's episode. Now if you have a question about today's episode, you just want to keep the conversation going. Did you know that we had a school leadership reimagined Facebook group? All you need to do is go to Facebook, join the school leadership reimagined Facebook group. Now they're going to be a couple of questions that we ask at the beginning, because we want to protect this group and make sure that we don't have any trolls come in, and that it really is for people who are principals, assistant principals, district administrators. So make sure you answer those questions, or you won't get in but then we can keep the conversation going. Plus, we do a lot of great bonus content. I'm in there every single weekday, so if you have a question or comment about the episode, let's continue the conversation. Join us at the school leadership reimagined Facebook group, and they'll talk to you next time you.

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