EPISODE #290

Asking the Right Questions Part 4

You're listening to the school leadership reimagined podcast episode 290. 

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Hey builders, welcome to another episode of the School Leadership Reimagined podcast. 

I'm your host, Robin Jackson, and today we are continuing our series on questions worth asking.

And today's question is a very simple one. What is your 80-20? Now, we've probably all heard by now the Pareto Principle. It's a principle that says that 80% of the results come from 20% of our efforts.

It was discovered by an Italian economist named Pareto. And he first noticed that about 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. And then he started seeing the 80-20 everywhere.

Like even in his garden, he noticed that 80% of the peas that he was able to produce came from 20% of the plants. And as educators, we've probably heard the 80-20 principle a lot. We all know that 80% of the disciplinary issues come from about 20% of our students.

We also know that about 80% of our staff headaches come from about 20% of our staff. So we are familiar with this principle, but have we really leveraged it to help us to achieve our 100% vision? And the answer, unfortunately, in most cases is no, we haven't. And so in today's podcast, I want to talk about the 80-20 principle and how you can start using that to prioritize your work.

Because a lot of us are working really, really hard and we're not seeing the results that come from that work, which is why we're tired, we're overwhelmed, you know, we always feel like we're behind. We don't really understand what work really matters. And because we don't understand that, we're doing all the things.

And the beauty of the 80-20 principle is that once you understand your 20, the 20% of the work that is yielding 80% of the results, you can prioritize your time and you can accomplish more with a lot less effort. What we do is we give equal effort to everything we're doing. And that is a recipe for exhaustion and overwhelm.

What we should be doing is taking a look at all the work we're doing and saying, okay, what's the 20% of the work we're doing that really is making the biggest difference? And let's put our energy there so that we can see results more quickly. It's one of the reasons why when people first become builders, they see these huge gains really quickly because part of being a builder is you understand the 80-20. You focus your energy and efforts on the work that's going to give you the most outsized results and you deprioritize all that other work that you're working really hard on, but it's not giving you all the results that you need.

Now, a couple of caveats before we jump in today. 

First of all, the 80-20 is a principle, it's a theory, but it's not a hard and fast rule. We're going to do some things today to play around with the numbers in order to help us prioritize.

But I don't want you walking around with a calculator dividing things and, oh, that only gives me 72.5% so I need to go find the 80. It's a rule. It's a principle.

It's a guiding way of thinking of things, but it's not a hard and fast, you know, this is a scientific fact. So that's the first caveat. The second caveat is that the process is more important than coming up with an exact outcome.

So understanding where your priorities are is the whole point of this exercise. So let's not treat it like gospel and, you know, follow it to the T. It's really just an interesting way of thinking about the work that you do so that you can prioritize the work that really, really matters. So let's talk about some other ways that 80-20 shows up in education.

So I talked about some of the negative things, you know, 80% of your disciplinary issues come from 20% of your kids, same thing true with your staff. But let's also talk about the opposite because the opposite is also true. There are about 20% of the work you're doing is responsible for about 80% of the results that you're able to achieve with your students.

If you understand that, if you really, really understand that, you can, you can, there's some gold missing, there's some gold hidden in your school right now. There are some things that you are doing that are giving you the big results. If you understood what those things were and you doubled down on those things, you could have even more results.

And more importantly, you can stop doing some of the stuff that's not carrying its weight. That's not giving you the results that you really want.

So the first thing you need to do is you need to look for the 80-20 in your school.

And there are a couple of places where you're going to see 80-20 going up. I've already mentioned twice that there's a people 80-20. But even though we kind of lamented, if, if that's really true, if 20% of the kids in your school are causing 80% of the disciplinary problems, then shouldn't we take that information and use it to our advantage? If we know that, then why don't we identify the 20% of the kids who are causing 80% of the disciplinary problems and be proactive with those students, help those students, do some things, interventions, put them in place so that you help those students make better choices so that they can stay in class, so that they can learn, so they don't disrupt other people's learning.

If we already know that we don't have to live with it, let's, instead of overhauling your entire disciplinary system, maybe the answer to a lot of your disciplinary issues is simply looking for the 20% that's causing 80% of the problem. It's a very simple thing to find out. Go take a look at all of the referrals you've had over the last month and see, just take all of them and then pull the top 20, the people who are creating the most referrals, pull down the names of those students, or in some cases, those teachers, and then spend time working with those students.

It doesn't mean you're going to completely eliminate the disciplinary referrals, but if 20% of the kids are causing 80% of that problem, you can make a huge impact on discipline by, instead of focusing on everybody, just focusing on those 20 kids, those 20%, not those 20 kids, but the 20%. I'll give you an example of this. Early in the work that I was doing at MindSteps with consulting, I started talking about this idea of being proactive and doing a lot of acceleration with students.

And a school did this, not with discipline, but with students who were really failing. So they looked at the kids who, you know, a lot of times 20% of your kids are responsible for 80% of your Ds and Fs in your schools. And in this case, they found that 20% of kids, and what they did is they started doing proactive intervention just with that 20% of kids.

And it wasn't subject specific or grade level specific. They pulled the kids together and they created an acceleration program for those students. Now they had to get really creative with the schedule because they didn't have time, it was in the middle of the year, so they couldn't like rehire staff and what they did.

So they found at the community college, some students who were studying in education and track coach athletes, and they started a before school running club. And on the days that those students would normally have PE, those students came before school, they did a running club, so they still got their physical activity with these volunteers. And then during PE time, those students were pulled, they didn't do PE with the other students.

And instead, all they did was they had a teacher who worked with them, and that was a special educator and the special educator will work with their teachers and say what's coming up in the next week. And then the special educator would take what's coming up, they would pre-teach the vocabulary, they would pre-teach the study skills and they would give students graphical organizers to help them take notes. So the students were going to be taking notes in a particular class, the teachers say, okay, they're going to be taking notes.

So the special educator would create a graphic organizer to help them take notes or take the notes from the teacher and blank out everything and create the outline and then give students that outline so that they could take notes in the outline and fill in the blanks. If the students were going to be reading something, the special educator would go through and pull some of the key vocabulary and pre-teach. She wouldn't read it with the kids ahead of time, she would just teach them the vocabulary.

Or if they were going to be reading a chapter in their book, she would go through the chapter in their book and do create like a, to understand is it like cause and effect or is it sequential, you know, understand the underlying text structure of that chapter. And then she would create an outline that the students could follow so they keep up with the chapter as they were reading. And the outline was more about helping them understand the underlying text structure than the information.

So she'd create an outline with that text structure and the students would fill in the information as they went through the chapter and it helped keep the students from getting lost.

That's all she did. 

And she only did it with the 20% of the students who were the top failures. In the space of a semester, none of those students were failing any classes. The lowest grade that any of those students were earning was a C. And all of a sudden, the student, the whole, you know, you, you have 20% of the kids are responsible for 80% of those student failures in the school. By focusing on those 20%, they eliminated 80% of the failures in the school in one semester by just understanding the 80-20.

So the 80-20, if you have a group of students who are creating most of the 80% of your disciplinary problems, you have 20% of kids who are responsible for 80% of the failures. You have 20% of the kids who are responsible for 80% of your absences. And if that's a goal that you want to attack, rather than doing these generic, broad, you know, kind of things that, that don't make a lot of impact because you're doing too much, just focus on the 80, the 20% of kids who are responsible for the 80% of those results.

Work intensively with those students and you can see results very, very quickly. Same thing is true for your staff. You know, you may have 20% of your staff that's responsible for 80% of the referrals that come to your office, or 20% of your staff that's responsible for 80% of the drama in your school, whatever that is.

Then understand that, know who those people are, and really focus. Don't stand in front of the staff meeting and scold everybody about referrals. Really focus on doing some work with that 20% of your staff so that you can help them get better at it, develop new skills, and you immediately eliminate 80% of the headache.

All right. So that's the people piece. But then there are other parts where the 80-20 rule can be really important.

You can take a look at all of the initiatives that you have going on in your school right now. You probably have a ton, but when you think about your 100% vision, what, if you look at those initiatives, let's say you have five initiatives, and then you look at the impact, and right now it might just be the potential impact, but what is the impact of each of those five initiatives on your school's ability to achieve your 100% vision? And then you go through. Out of those initiatives, one of those initiatives is going to give you about 80% of the results.

The other four are going to be great, nice to have, but they're not giving you 80% of the results. So when you do that, when you go through that list of initiatives and you really start thinking about either the current impact or the potential impact of each of those initiatives, find the one that you believe is going to give you 80% of the impact that you would have on your 100% vision. That's the one you're going to put your energy in, and then you're going to question whether or not you even need the other four.

So think about that. Think about your day. Think about how all the tasks that you have in front of you, and think about, just list all the tasks, and then ask yourself, what is the impact of each of these tasks on my ability to achieve our 100% vision? Now, normally when you ask administrators this, they all say the same thing, being in classrooms, I need to be an instructional leader.

But is that true for you right now? 

That in general is a good starting point, but do you really need to be in classrooms? You have to really think about that. Will being in classrooms give you an 80% impact for the 20% effort? In other words, if you had to do one thing all day, and it was just being in classrooms, would that get you 80% to your vision? Or should you be doing other things like creating better systems for teachers? Hey, Robin here, and I just want to break in real quick to ask you a huge favor. You see, I want to get the word out to everybody about Buildership, and I could use your help.

If you're really enjoying this episode, would you mind just going to your podcast platform and leaving a quick review? You see, the reviews get the word out. They tell other people, this is a great show. Other people who have never heard of School Leadership Reimagined before can hear about it.

And you'd be sharing the word about Buildership. So would you mind just leaving a quick review? It would mean the world to me. Okay, now back to the show.

So it shifts and changes, right? Once you get the systems in place, maybe then you can be in classrooms. But right now, if you don't have the systems in place, your being in classrooms may not help. Let me give you an example.

Suppose you don't have a good support system in place, a way to track whether or not teachers are growing. For those of you in BU, you know that's your teacher dashboard. But suppose you don't have a teacher dashboard in place, and so you're spending all this time getting in classrooms, and you're giving teachers all of this feedback, but you never follow up because you're just handing out this feedback.

And every time you go in a classroom, you're starting from scratch, giving them a new piece of feedback, instead of following up on the feedback you gave them last time, and you're not tracking it. So even what classrooms you get into every single week is really random. Are you going to see the instructional growth that you really want to see? Or would it be more important for you to first create a system for following up and spending time putting systems in place, not just for following up, but giving teachers the resources they need, getting them the help they need, connecting them to the resources so that you're not the only person providing them support once you've given them the feedback? Would it make more sense to do that first? Because then when you go in and give feedback, it accelerates your feedback and makes your feedback so much more powerful that you now are getting more out of your feedback.

That's the question. 

And that's why it's really important to think about the 80-20. We kind of blindly go and do stuff because we're told it's important without really understanding whether or not it's important right now or it's the most important thing right now.

And so our prioritizing is based more on research-based practices or what we've been trained to do or what we've been told to do, rather than prioritizing what's going to have the biggest impact on my students' success. So just look at your day. Look at all the things you could be doing.

And for each of those things, compare it against the other. So if I did this, would this give me more impact or should I do this? And you understand that on your list of all the things you could possibly be doing are only approximately 20% of that list are things you actually should be prioritizing because that's going to give you the biggest impact on your vision. And don't guess.

Test it out. So if I spend my time doing this, how does it help me achieve my vision? And if you can't answer that question, why are you doing it? And don't tell me because the district requires it because you can leverage. If you really understood the 80-20, you could take the district thing that the district is telling you to do and leverage it in a way that helps you meet your 80-20.

I'll give you an example. Something happened recently to one of the builders in BU. We were in office hours and he was talking about how the district was mandating that they had to do something.

And it was taking time away from the thing he really believed would have the biggest impact on his vision. First of all, he understood what would have the biggest impact on his vision because if you don't know, then all work is good work, right? But he understood that, but he was frustrated because the district thing felt like they were spending all this time doing that and not doing the thing for the vision. But once you understand what is going to have the real impact, you can take the district mandate and make it work.

And so we talked about the district mandate. We talked about what the district required, and then we said, how can we turn this district mandate into something that serves the thing he really wants to do? And after a few minutes conversation, we realized that what the district was asking him to do would directly help him do the other thing. So the district wanted him to, I don't even remember now, I think it was something like PLCs, that the district was really doing a big PLC initiative.

But what he wanted teachers to do is spend time looking at student work. But they were so busy trying to organize PLCs and do PLCs the way that they were trained to do it, that they weren't spending time really looking at student work and finding ways to take the feedback from the student work that they were getting and use it in their planning. And then we thought about it and we said, why can't you do that during your PLCs? Why can't you leverage the PLC mandate from the district to do exactly that? They're not separate things.

They're all together. But because he understood where his 20 percent was, the thing that was most important right now, we could take that district mandate and make it work so that in fulfilling the district mandate, he was also moving his school towards his vision. But if you don't know what your 20 percent is, it's all the same.

So it's really, really important. 

So we talked about understanding 80-20 to, you know, help you with your people, your students and your staff. Using the 80-20 to prioritize your time.

And now let's talk about using the 80-20 to prioritize your other resources, not just your time, but your energy, your effort, your budget even. Do you, if you don't understand your 80-20, you're just spending budget by habit. You're just allocating resources by habit.

Or maybe the squeakiest wheel gets the grease. But when you truly understand your 80-20, you can allocate resources to the 20 percent that's going to give you the 80 percent results so that you can make sure you're being the most efficient you can about how you use your resources. But again, you don't know you're at a 20, you can't do it.

So the question I always get is, well, how do I find my 20? Now, those of you in BU, you know, we have a couple of things. One is your one plan. You know, your one plan really helps you to prioritize and you really get it down to that one thing.

Right. And so we have a whole process. We use a process called micro slicing to figure out what the one thing is.

And then we create the one plan. So that's one way of doing it. But if you're not in BU, I'll give you a really simple solution for anything that you're trying to find the 80-20.

Take everything you're doing, put each thing on a, you know, you can do it on a list, you can do it on sticky notes if that's how you think about it. Just list each thing, then go to your 100% vision. And you just for each thing, you want to ask yourself, if I just did this, would this be enough to get me at least 80% of the way to my vision? And if the answer is yes, then it's a candidate.

And you keep going down. So look, if you have five things, 20% is one. Now, my math doesn't always math, so check me.

And I'm not going to even expand it. I'll just say this. If you have 10 things, two things are going to be your 20%.

So just having that 80-20 becomes really, really just a very clean way of prioritizing. If you know that if you have a list of 10 things, only two are going to really matter, it changes things. And you can do the same thing for not just your task or your people, but your teachers can be doing that for the curriculum.

One of the reasons why I love 5-in-5-out is because that 5-in-5-out represents usually about 20% of your curriculum. And the idea is that if you focus on the five most important things kids need coming in and the five most important things kids need going out, and you really prioritize that, that's going to get you 80% of the way there. So focusing on those priority standards or that 5-in-5-out really helps you understand each of your teachers understands the 80-20 of the work they're doing.

So it can help your teachers prioritize how they're doing their time. You can do it for the task that you're asking teachers to do. You can do it for the curriculum.

You can do it for prioritizing. 

You know, let's say you don't have enough money for all of the extracurriculars, which of the extracurriculars that you currently have are giving you the biggest impact or having the biggest impact on the most of your students, that helps you prioritize. So this work, this 80-20 work is critical to help you really think through how you do everything and it helps you to prioritize.

It helps you to show where you spend your money. So this week, my challenge to you is very simple. Do you know your 80-20? And if you don't know it, I'm going to challenge you to take some time, sit down, do it by yourself first, and then get your team involved, but just sit down and take a look.

Start with how you spend your day and figure out what's the 80-20 of your day. I just did this recently and I was surprised because I compared the 80-20 of how I should be spending my day with how I actually spent my day and I realized this is why I often feel so stuck because I am spending the majority of my day on work that's not in my 20%. So it's no wonder I'm not getting the results I'm getting.

I have no reason to be frustrated. All I have to do is change my behavior and really prioritize that 20% of those tasks that give me 80% of the results. And I see a difference.

And since I've been doing that, I've seen an immediate change in the impact that we can have. So if you do nothing else, just take a look at your day and find the 80-20. But then, and this is really cool, sit down and look at your organization.

You know what your a hundred percent vision is. Take a look at all of the initiatives and things you have going on right now that you do as a school, and then ask yourself, what's the 80-20? Take a list. And then I like to just be arbitrary.

Okay. So if I have a list of, okay, I'm about to mess up this math. Um, but if I have a list of 20 things that we're doing as a school, then I know four of them represent 20%.

That's so hard because if I'm doing 20 things, I think all of them are important. I, you know, why else would I be doing 20 things? But when I force myself to pick only four, it really helps me to prioritize. So it'd be really interesting for you to do this on your own, and then to maybe sit down with your leadership team and do it, or your admin team and do it.

And just say, okay, we right now we're doing, oh goodness, I'm about to really mess up, um, we got 30 different initiatives and of those 30 initiatives, only six of them are going to give us the 80% of the results we're looking for. What are the six? That conversation is going to be so interesting. And this is a really good time to do it because, um, we're winding down the school, you know, the, the, the calendar year, and you're about to go into break.

So this is time for introspection. A lot of people are being introspective right now. And this is a really good question to kind of ask yourself, but it's also really important because as you are planning for next year, so when you get back in January, January on is start time.

It's time to kind of plan for next year. 

So you can start, you know, you can have a theory of what your 80, 20 is. You can go back in January, start observing it when you start doing your master schedule and your budget and all the things that you have to turn in for next year, you can reprioritize based on your 80, 20, when you're thinking about staffing and all the other things that we're going to start thinking about next If you know what your 20% is, you can begin to prioritize things differently and set things up so that you are maximizing the 20% that are going to give you the 80% of results.

So my challenge to you this week is if you do nothing else, figure out the 80, 20 for your own day. But then even more start thinking about the initiatives you have going on as a school and what's the 80, 20 of that, and then take it to your teachers and see if your teachers understand the 80, 20 of their curriculum, of the standards. Again, we're going to be doing a five in five out training sometime in January.

So you want to look forward to that so that if you want to take your teachers through this process, you can do that as well, but whatever it is, it's really, really, really important for you to understand and know your 80, 20 so that you can prioritize your time, your resources, your efforts 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 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, 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 going to look like a rock star, but you're going to be helping out somebody else who really could use this information. Plus, I will be so grateful.

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