EPISODE #301

You're listening to School Leadership Reimagined, episode number 301

Hey builders, before we begin today's podcast, I want to tell you about a really cool thing that I'm going to be doing next week. You know, from time to time in Buildership University, we have master classes where we train people on very short, practical, immediately actionable strategies that they can use right now in their schools. Well, we have another master class coming up and this one's going to be really good. It's the one of our most requested master classes inside of Buildership University and it's all about the five in five out method. Now, if you are a member of Buildership University or a member of the Buildership community, this master class is already included in your membership. But if you're not a member and you'd like to join us, I have a few tickets available. Just go to buildershipuniversity.com/master class and grab your ticket right away. Now on with the show.

You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagine podcast episode 301. 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 is where you'll find the answers, strategies, and actionable tips you need to overcome any obstacle you face. You don't have to wait to make a difference in the lives of the people you serve. You can turn your school into a success story right now with the people and resources you already have. Let's get started.

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

I'm your host, Robin Jackson, and today I'm coming to you from inside a Buildership University to share with you a strategy that is probably one of our most requested strategies inside a Buildership University. Now, I remember the first time that I ever took a school through this strategy. It was a high school and I was doing it with the math department and we launched this strategy sometime mid year. And in a matter of months of going through the strategy, the math department experienced a dramatic change. It blew me away. So after launching the strategy, the math department went from a 62% pass rate for all of their math courses. So that meant that 62% of their students passed the state exam at the end of the semester. And in one semester, they went from a 62% pass rate to an 85% pass rate just from using the strategy.

Now, I knew the strategy would work, I just didn't think it would work that well that fast. And since then, every time I take a school through this strategy, they experience the same kind of dramatic results. And so today I want to talk to you about the strategy that I call the five in five out method and how it could dramatically change things for you and why you need to be doing it right now at this point in the school year with your staff. So let's dive in. So first of all, what is the five in five out strategy? It's deceptively simple. It's simply about sitting down with your school and with all of your, your either departments or your grade levels and determining the five most important skills or understandings or concepts that students need coming into that grade level and the five most important concepts or skills students need. And that the teachers all guarantee students will come out of that grade level.

Now, like I said, deceptively simple, but really powerful because what it does is it forces teachers to sit down, comb through the curriculum, look at the assessments that the students face at the end of their time with those teachers, and boil it down to their biggest priorities. So they start out by saying if students came in with these five skills, they will be fine. And they say that these are the five skills or the five concepts that we guarantee every student will come out with and they will be ready for the next grade. Now that is powerful enough. But what makes the strategy even more powerful is then you get the grade levels together. And so first grade meets with kindergarten and kindergarten's 5 outs have to match first grade 5 ends. And then first grade meets with second grade and 1st grade 5 outs have to match 2nd grade 5 ends. And that's where the magic happens because when you do it, you create not only the conversations among grade levels, but you create this vertical alignment that really eliminates a lot of learning gaps.

Now you can do the same thing in secondary. 

So in the 1st, in the example that I just gave you, the math department did it. And so algebra one sat down with geometry, which is the next math course in their sequence. And they did the same thing. The they they looked at the five outs for Algebra 1 and match them with the five ends. The students need it for Geometry one, and then they debated and then geometry sat down with Algebra 2 and did the same thing. So anytime you have students who are coming in in any kind of sequential order, sitting down and doing that and getting a department aligned or series of grade levels still aligned, it's so powerful and it really does a lot to eliminate learning gaps and fixed problems that you encounter every single school year where you have kids who come in and they're not ready. You can even do it among grade band levels.

So your your 8th grade teachers sit down with their their 9th grade counterparts and do the same thing to smooth the transition from middle school to high school. Your, your 6th grade teachers sit down with their 7th grade counterparts to smooth the transition between elementary school and junior high school or 5th grade teachers and your 6th grade teachers. And so this is a powerful strategy, one that is often overlooked, but makes a tremendous difference. Like I said, every time I've taken a school through this process, they have experienced results that have blown me away. In fact, I was just talking to a principal where I did this process with her, her elementary school and they did it in the spring. And so they started about right now in the school year. They worked on it all spring. And then what they did is they used this process to think about what how, how to set up summer school, how to focus on students who are behind.

And in one semester they got they, they doubled the amount of students who were showing growth in I ready and other tools. And the next year they were just eliminating learning gaps left and right. And those it's just when I say eliminating the problem went away, wasn't like, oh, we mitigated it. Oh, they're less, they're more manageable. I mean, it went away. And so I want to talk to you about this powerful strategy today so that you can think about doing it for your school. So the first thing that you have to think about is that that the five and five out process is not just a matter of just kind of getting people together. You really have to facilitate it.

And so sitting people down, first of all, it having them look through and prioritize it. So, you know, there's a, there's a list of things that we use to help people prioritize what it counts as A5 in and what counts as a 5 out. And so it's not just kind of get together and figure it out. It's a really thoughtful process. And that thoughtful process does a couple of things. One is that it gets your entire staff talking about the curriculum and talking about what really matters. It helps people understand why am I teaching this?

What is the outcome that we're really looking for?

You would be surprised at how many of your teachers are going through the curriculum without really understanding the scope and sequence of the curriculum, without really understanding the key parts of the curriculum. And so even though you're going to come out with five insurance and five outs, because the teachers have really combed through the curriculum in this way to prioritize, they walk away understanding the entire curriculum much better as a result of this process. So when you are being intentional about taking them through, not just saying what are your favorite 5 things, things, you know, that's the danger, right? If you just get people in a room and you just say, hey, let's do 5 in some 5 outs, you sometimes people start debating about what their favorite thing is or what the pet peeve is, rather than being very intentional and using the curriculum guides and using the assessments as a guide. So you have to be intentional about guiding people through the process. But when you do, people walk out understanding the curriculum better, understanding the standards, better, understanding how one thing leads to another better in a way that they didn't understand before. And not only that, instead of having teachers operating in silos, you're having teachers have conversations with each other. So one of the things that I hear the most is that teachers often say, well, if the teacher before me had taught them these skills, and I wouldn't waste all this time reviewing all this stuff when I can't even get through my curriculum because the kids are so far behind.

When you have these conversations, you eliminate that excuse. I mean, I'm not calling an excuse. A lot of times that is case and that, but the teacher who came before will say, well, I was too busy making up with the teacher before me didn't do. And so you've got this cascade of problems. But when you do the five in five out process the right way, then what happens is you get teachers talking to each other. There are a lot of times the teachers are preparing students for the next level. At least they think they are based on their understanding of what's going to happen in next level, but their understanding isn't, isn't correct and, or accurate and, and, and so they don't to understand what their next level really looks like.

So these conversations help teachers understand and so the teachers are get better at preparing students for the next level.

So what happens is when you have these conversations, you eliminate learning gaps before they widen. So a lot of times you have misalignment among the grades and that misalignment leads to even greater learning gaps. So students already come to you 2 or more grade levels behind. Then if you don't have this vertical alignment, not only are they going to stay stuck with those learning gaps to grade levels behind, they may even widen. They may leave you three grade levels behind despite all of your best efforts. But when you create this alignment, you eliminate learning gaps so that you can spend your time helping students overcome the the gaps that they came with without creating new ones. And the second thing that you do is that you ensure that students are consistently prepared so you don't have the need for extensive remediation. 

One of the strategies that I really love is when the five in, five out is that once you've identified that you've done not only just kind of identified what are the key priorities, but you've also identified what are the key things to remediate. Because remember, if it's, if you have identified these are the five most critical skills students need coming into a grade level or coming into the next level, then you can remediate and focus on remediating those five skills so that you can quickly get students ready for the next level. You know what they are, teachers aren't guessing about remediation or trying to remediate everything. Those 5 ends are the only things that you're focused on remediating. And then when you are going through the, the grade level, the five outs are the things that you are focused most intensively on supporting and remediating and ensuring that students come out with. That way, you know the kids are set up for the next grade level. All right, second thing that the five out, five insurance and five outs do is that it really reduces teacher overwhelm and it clarifies priorities. Right now, your teachers are trying to teach everything. And so they're spending a lot of time working their way, slogging their way through the curriculum.

And as a result, there are a lot of critical things that that may get glossed over or they may ever never even get to because they're so busy giving everything the same amount of attention. And you know, you've heard me say this before, when everything is a priority, nothing is. But when you do five insurance and five outs, you help teachers understand the most critical components of their curriculum so that they don't waste time, you know, paying attention the same level of attention to something that isn't as important as they do to the things that are most important. And so teachers don't feel as overwhelmed. You simplify things. I remember during the pandemic, we had a builder who whose teachers were really overwhelmed by the curriculum. And what she did is she said, let's just focus on the five insurance and the five outs, especially when they were teaching online and, and, and trying to scramble to create materials.

Let's not focus on anything but the five ins and five outs.

As a result, her school was one of the only schools in her extremely large school district where the students didn't have learning loss. In fact, they gained during the pandemic. She quintupled her math scores and doubled her reading proficiency scores in the pandemic because her teachers were focused on the 5 ends of five outs. So while all the other schools around her were showing learning loss and, and, and, and, and showing bigger gaps, her students were making gains. And it was because her teachers focused their efforts on the 5 ends of five outs. And not only did that help her students and helped their teachers. Because, you know, you all remember how overwhelmed everybody was during the pandemic and how how almost defeated a lot of teachers felt because online learning was very different than in person learning and they didn't feel like they could give the curriculum the attention that it needed. Well, her teachers felt pretty confident going into that online online learning situation because they understood the five insurance and five outs and they just focused on those.

So when your teachers feel pressured to cover too much, five insurance and five outs can eliminate that and eliminate the the burnout that comes with that. And then also when your teachers are focused on the most critical skills, they can see gains and growth with their students, Especially if you have struggling teachers. Imagine a struggling teacher trying to master the entire curriculum. Do you know how overwhelming that is and how impossible that is in the middle of the school year? But if you had five insurance and five outs, you take that and work with your struggling teachers on helping them master the five insurance and five outs, which is more doable and, and you can see greater progress from that. So this five insurance and five outs doesn't just help you prioritize a curriculum for the kids. It really reduces overwhelm and burnout for your teachers. It helps you to really focus your coaching and support with your struggling teachers.

It helps your best teachers to to get more creative and feel like they can have more freedom. Because as long as the kids are mastering the five insurance and five outs, it gives them some latitude there and you can trust that the every single classroom is focused on the right work, even when you're not checking. You see, this is one of the things I love about 5 insurance and five outs the most is that it becomes an agreement. And you know, you've heard me talk about the difference between, between running around and holding people accountable and, and setting expectations versus creating agreements with your staff as because your whole staff is involved in the five in and five out process. Like you're not going to go in and give them their five in and five outs. They have to go through that process. They're learning the curriculum, they're debating with each other. They're they're working and teasing everything out.

They own it. 

And when they own it, remember, people don't tear down what they help build. So once they build it and own it, they will do it and they get why they're doing it. And so you spend less time chasing, checking and correcting, making sure everybody's, you know on the page 34 on day 34 of the Curriculum and pacing guide. And instead you can trust that what's happening in the classrooms is really happening. What you expect to happen in classrooms is really happening. I also love five in five out because it's a great mechanism for building PLCS because and and for doing Co planning. Because if you've identified the 55 insurance and five outs for every subject and every grade level, then when your teachers get together and Co plan, they have a focus.

They're not just kind of saying, OK, what are we going to do Monday? Who's got a lesson? No, instead they can build some really powerful lessons and powerful assessments around the five insurance and five outs. And then they can get latitude to do their own thing around some of the other stuff, which gives the accountability to make sure that kids are all getting the curriculum, but also gives teachers room to be creative around other parts of the curriculum. So Co planning focus only on the five INS and five outs, common assessments around the five INS and five outs, looking at student work around the five INS and five outs. So instead of trying to do it for everything, you can create PLC protocols and work around the five INS and five outs that really give your PLCS focus. All right? The other thing that I love about the five insurance and five outs is that it really creates this seamless pathway to student success.

I mean, that's what it's all about, right? So the nice thing about it is that when students have those five insurance and five outs, they transition from one level to the next much more smoothly. They walk in knowing exactly what they need to do, and they walk in every single year prepared. I love that even when students come to you brand new and you're saying, oh, we got to get them up to speed, you don't have to get them up to speed on everything. You know that you're going to work on the five insurance and five outs. And because everybody has adopted those five insurance and five outs, you have a wealth of materials and resources that you can use to get kids up to speed very quickly. And I love that these these clear priorities means that teachers can focus on kids. If I know the five insurance and five outs and I'm always watching and monitoring where our students are with regards to those five insurance and five outs, fewer kids fall through the cracks because I'm always constantly looking for where they are.

I recognize the signs that a student doesn't have the five insurance and five outs yet. And then I can intervene. And because they're so simple, I have clear interventions at the ready. I don't have to go make them up. I have them at the ready so that as soon as the student shows me that they don't know the five ends or they're not mastering the five outs, I can intervene very quickly and get them back on track very quickly.

And I know at the end of the school year that even if they don't have everything, they have enough to be successful at the next level. 

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.bAnd 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. OK, now back to the show.

One of the most unconventional benefits of the five insurance and five outs, the one once it's not as obvious is that when you do this, you start transforming your culture. Right now, many schools have people in silos. You know, their cliques, their groups, people are, are not working together. I know you probably have PLC's, but if you go into most PLC meetings, they're either compliance exercises that everybody resents, or it's a parallel play moment where everybody's doing their own thing, but just in the same room or it's a gossip session because we don't really do a good job of structuring PLC's. And some point I'm working on a a master class on setting up PLC. PLC's that you'll, and I'm going to be rolling out in the next couple of months. So, you know, stay tuned for that. I'm going to talk about PLC's, but we don't have people working together.

But when you create the five insurance and five outs process, you naturally create a place and a space where teachers are starting to collaborate more. They're starting to work together. It breaks down silos. It creates more opportunities to collaborate around goals, to collaborate around materials, to Co plan together, not just within a grade level or subject area, but among and in between grade levels and subject areas. You know, think about what you're doing when you do five insurance and five outs. You know, one, if you look at a lot of teacher evaluation instruments at that highest level, whatever that is for you, highly effective master teacher, whatever that level is for you. A lot of times the difference between somebody who's proficient and somebody who's masterful is that not only that they are great at teachers reaching their content, but they're great at making interconnections among different levels.

And so when you do the five ins 5 outs process, you are building master teachers.

You are showing teachers how to naturally create connections between 1 double and the next. You get teachers talking to each other and learning from each other. Teachers who may be stronger in one area will naturally begin to support teachers who are still struggling in that area because we're all collaborating around something very simple. And when everybody body understands the priorities, this is one way that you get your entire staff aligned around the work that matters most. You know, I've been talking a lot about staff alignment lately because people are really struggling to get people aligned. And one of the reasons that I think people are struggling to get people aligned is that so many of our systems in our buildings don't foster alignment. You know, we tell people to plan and then they plan individually and then we put them in a room together and say you need to Co plan. But it sometimes feels competitive because everybody has a different priority.

I really want to focus on this piece and this person wants to focus on this piece. So when I Co plan, a lot of times I feel like I have to give up the things that I want to do so that I can do this thing that this other person wants to do over there. And it feels like a lot of compromise when you have 5 in five outs. You don't have that. Because once we agree on that, Co planning becomes a lot easier because we are all understand the priority. So you start to transform your culture. You start to create more staff alignment. Teachers start to see themselves as a unified team.

There's more trust, the morale increases. You even start to see more teacher retention because teachers like working together. The school really starts to feel like it's running like a finely tuned machine. Now, I have to warn you, the process itself, you have to tolerate some debate. You know, like the first time I did this with that math department way back in the day, they almost killed each other. I mean, they got in and they were just debating about because you cannot. You know, the nice thing about the five insurance and five outs, it's not ten. Like it's not 20, it's not 15, it's not 7, it's 5.

Which means that especially as they get closer to finalizing their five, there were some heated debates going on. And you have to create an environment where it's safe to do that. But the, the heated debates weren't personal. It was really about the curriculum. And that's what made it so powerful. And at the end of those debates, they came out of those debates agreeing. Wasn't like they beat some people down. They talked about it, they fought about it.

They, you know, the, the, the, if you facilitate it the right way, you know, there's a process for it. But if you facilitate it the right way, you can get that healthy debate without people walking out mad at each other. And it it took them two months, right?

So this isn't like a process that you can do in a staff meeting. 

This is an ongoing conversation if you really wanted to be meaningful. But at the end of that two months of meeting, you know, every other week and talking about it, they walked out clear about their priorities to the point where other people would come into the department next year and say, well, I want to do this. And like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we, this is what we're going to be doing. And here's why they could explain it.

And so they started to onboard other people to the process and so that it was very clear and it worked. Not only that, but once they finished the conversation didn't stop at, OK, these are our five insurance and five outs. Congratulations. Then they started thinking, rethinking, OK, if these are the five insurance and five outs, do our assignments align with these? Do our assessments align with it? So the first, next thing they did is they rewrote their assessments and they also adjusted their assessment policy because once they had the five insurance and five outs, they said, OK, when students first come in, we need to do an assessment right away to see where they are in the five insurance. And then the first several weeks of school, we're going to focus on making sure that we bolster those 5 ends. So it changed the way that they will work through the curriculum.

The next thing they did is they had they started doing cumulative assessments. So as soon as they taught one of the five outs, they would include a question on every single test going forward on that five out. And, and so the students were encountering that five out over and over and over again. And because it was math, they might explore a concept that had to do with the five out one way. And then 2 units later, they were going to be doing it again. So they kept those concepts going over and over and over every single time on their assessments so that they could judge that and make sure that students had it. Those five outs were solid, and so by doing that, they started assessing differently.

They started looking at student work differently and looking at the barriers to those five outs.

They started giving each other feedback. So you said your 5 outs are my 5 ends. So you you said that the kids have these five outs, but when they came in, they were weak in these areas. When I looked at the five ends, Year 5 outs. And so they started having conversations about how to bolster it. Where was students misunderstanding? They got together, they compared work from last year to this year, last semester to this semester. And it created a new collaborative culture.

It got to the point where that math department was the healthiest department in the school. So much so that other departments started doing their own version of the five insurance 5 outs process because they wanted the kind of unity that they saw at the math department. Now before the math department was all operating in their silos, algebra teachers hung with algebra teachers, geometry teachers hung with geometry teachers, trig teachers hung with trig teachers. But after that, they were truly a department. They worked together. They they started thinking beyond just the 5 minutes and five outs of their direct rate. They started looking at, OK, if I want my kids to get the trig, what has what has to happen before that? What in algebra 2?

What has to happen in geometry? What has to happen in Algebra 1? I did this with an elementary school and the same thing happened to the culture. Whereas before the teachers were burned out and overwhelmed and quite frankly a little cynical. Going through this process helped the teachers start to get excited again because we started seeing the growth and then first grade teachers started talking to 3rd grade teachers and 4th grade teacher started talking to 2nd grade teachers and pre-K teachers and they have this whole old trajectory. Every teacher in the school understands the entire trajectory. It's all mapped out from pre-K all the way to 5th grade. This has also helped the principal when she's had to move teachers from say, third grade to 1st grade.

These teachers understand the priorities. 

They understand how things build on each other. So you got a lot less pushback about teachers moving around grade levels when she had to make changes because of the master schedule. So the culture is different. Everybody body starts to work together. And I guess that's probably one of the most surprising benefits of having a five in five outs process is that you know, you're not, you're not you, your, your culture begins to change because people are coming together and talking about how do we make students successful? What will it take for us to help every child achieve? That's what builders think about, right?

We, we, we think this is hard. And it's hard if you try to do buildership work with leadership practices. But when you become a builder, you rethink everything. And there are all these elaborate and complicated vertical alignment processes. The district creates these binders, you know, this thick full of all of these things that you need to do to get vertically aligned. And it becomes even more overwhelming. But because you're a builder, you stop and you think about this more critically and you say what is really important? What does vertical alignment mean?

What is the value of vertical alignment? And then you use a simple process that not only gets you vertically aligned, but gets your staff more aligned and focused on doing the right work the right way for the right reasons. And that's one of the reasons why I love the five inch, five out process. So I'm going to challenge you that if you haven't thought about it, that you start to think about how can you get your staff more online? And I'm going to argue that this is the time of the year to do it. A lot of people say, well, I'll do it next year at the beginning of the year. Don't forget, next year is being built right now. And if you take your staff through this process during the spring, they leave clear about what they need to do in the fall.

Not only that, you have some immediate benefits because they're thinking about the curriculum. You're getting ready for testing. They understand the curriculum better. There's so much that they can do so that you're not cramming for testing. That really helps them deepen their understanding of what is really critical and important. You get the conversations going. Now you start shifting your culture. Now people get excited about coming back because they want to be a part of what you're building together.

People start getting connected. 

So those good teachers who are thinking about leaving don't leave because they want to stay because they're excited about what you're building. When you think about who needs to be where, you get a better understanding of the curriculum so that you have 5 insurance and five outs for every aspect of your school. Then you know who might be the best teacher to teach in this grade, that grade. Doing it now also helps you and your staff to build something that you can think about for summer. So if you're doing any kind of summer boot camp or you're doing any kind of get ready for the fall kind of thing with the students, then your five insurance and five outs creates the curriculum that you need to do for summer help. It also helps you all think about, OK, where are students? What, what haven't we done and what do we?

So you can still make sure that you get those at least least those five outs done before the end of the school year so that you eliminate learning gaps going into next school year. So I want to challenge you that if you haven't thought about doing something like this, that you seriously consider doing 5 in five outs before the end of the school year. Now, if you're listening to this in real time, I'm doing a master class inside of Bouldership University where I'm going to give you my whole five and five out process. From how to set it up to each step for how to facilitate those conversations, to templates that people can use to fill out to create their final five and five outs. And your whole entire five and five out plan. You also get a quick start guide. I mean, I'm just going to give you everything and talk you through it so that you can implement this process in your school. Now, if you're a member of BU or the buildership community, this was just a part of your membership.

And if you can't make it live, we'll get you the replay. If you're not a member of BU and you want to join us for the master class, we have a couple of tickets available for people outside of BU. Because it's so important. I want to make sure that you get access to it. So you just need to go to my to, I'm sorry to buildershipuniversity.com/master Class. Buildership university.com/master Class get your ticket. It's happening pretty quickly, so make sure you go ahead and grab your ticket to join us for the master class and get the whole, you know that we're going to just give you everything, the playbook, the templates, the tools, everything to be able to set this process up in your school. That's it.

That's all I got. I just, I'm so excited that we are finally getting to this five and five outs. People in BU have been asking me to do this for a while. It's one of the most powerful strategies that nobody's doing, and I don't get why because it's so simple. It's so straightforward when you do it right. It has so many benefits that I am encouraging you strongly to spend some time investing now so that you can set up next year to eliminate those learning gaps and be perfectly vertically aligned in the fall 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, 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 a 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.