EPISODE #303

You're listening to School Leadership Reimagined, episode number 303

You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagine podcast episode 3 O 3. 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, Robin Jackson, and I'm really glad you're here. I'll tell you why March is a tough time. In fact, if I'm really being honest, March is my least favorite month. The weather is really weird. You know, by now you're we're all tired of winter. March doesn't have enough big holidays in it. So there's it's just, I know that it's the, it's, it's the beginning of spring, but there's just a lot of rain and a lot of wind. And I still remember as a teacher and as an administrator, March was the hardest month to get through.

In fact, I've given it a name this. Between winter break and spring break. I call it the spring slump. And today I want to talk about how why it happens and how we can overcome the spring slump so that instead of just kind of holding on until spring break, we can actually achieve some momentum towards your vision, your mission, your core values for your school. You see, the the spring slump is predictable, right? Energy naturally dips about this time of year. So after months and months and months of pushing teachers and students and you, we're all tired, right? The urgency at the beginning of the year is gone.

The New Year's resolutions that we make in January have already worn off. Summer is still far away and so it's, it's natural that this is the time of the year that we slump. And then the other thing that happens is that usually testing season is right in front of us. So we, we're feeling a lot of extra pressure and it kind of hijacks our focus. We're, we're starting to feel like, you know, we got to get things ready for the test and everything becomes about test prep instead of about making steady movement towards our goals. And so for the teachers, they feel like, you know, they're feeling the pressure, the kids are feeling the pressure, we're feeling the pressure. We only have X number of weeks or X number of days left until testing starts. And you know, this is the, this is where the rubber meets the road.

This is where all those plans are made in the summer. We're going to find out if they actually worked. And that, that creates a natural amount of pressure. And So what can often happen is that we get stuck in survival mode, right? We've got a lot going on. You start to feel like you're just putting out more and more and more fires it. It's hard to be proactive during this time of year.

And if we're not careful, this lump this spring slump becomes the default.

I mean, think about it year after year after year, we always reach this point and it's always a pain. And yet we just accept it as well. This is part of the school year. There are ebbs and flows in the school year. We're in an ebb right now, and I just want you to know it doesn't have to be this way. You have a choice, and the spring slump does not have to happen. And so let's talk about how you can avoid it and overcome it and how you can prevent it from ever happening it again. Let me tell you what not to do first, right?

So your leadership training is going to kick in right about now. And so you see the slump, you feel it yourself, you see it with your teachers and your leadership training is going to tell you that all you have to do is push harder. All you have to do is just get focused. And so you start having more accountability meetings. You, you, you start sending those hey guys, you know, let's stay focused emails. You start putting more pressure on your yourself and on other people when you're already tired and when they're already tired or your leadership training is going to tell you that you need to do more to motivate your staff. So you start trying to look for incentives and pep talks so that you can get some sort of short burst of enthusiasm. But that little, that little tweak, as fun as it might be that you do for your staff, it doesn't result in long term motivation and momentum.

It doesn't overcome the fatigue that people are feeling or the disengagement that people are starting to feel in your school. So yeah, sure, make people pancakes. Sure, get them some swag. But just recognize that that is not going to solve the spring slump. Now, maybe your leadership training is telling you, you know what we need? We just need more structure. I, I talk to principals all the time and they love, you know, when I talk about how in BU we help you build systems And they're like, yeah, that's exactly what I need. I need systems.

But slow down. Be careful because just adding more structure just saying OK I want all teachers using this Lesson plan or I want all teacher all PLC meetings to run the same way or start you start doing more walkthroughs and with more checklist and more check insurance. That structure without any kind of foundation and a bigger vision, mission, and core values just feels like you are trying to control people and people. It's what it does is it makes people feel more more resentful because you're enforcing the structure on them when they're already tired. It makes them feel more drained because now, in addition to everything else they're struggling with, they have to now learn or get reacquainted with a new structure. And you'll find that most of the time that extra structure you impose is not giving you the results that you're after. And then, but that doesn't work. Your, your leadership training will say what?

You just need to throw more PD at the problem. 

And that is based on the assumption that teachers just need more strategies, when in reality, they don't need any more strategies. They, they have enough strategies, they're either not using them or not using them effectively. So just giving them more PD doesn't overcome the slump. It in fact exacerbates the slump. I remember when I was doing a lot of teacher PD me, I hate it this time of the year, right? Because everybody was calling me, you know, end of February, beginning of March before spring break to give everybody an extra boost before the test. And because I did a lot of work around rigor and supporting struggling students.

They would call me and want me to come in and in one day magically overhaul their teachers entire planning process and student support process so that they could magically achieve the 5% gains that they promised that they were going to achieve in strategic plan at the beginning of the year. And it got to the point where I just stopped doing one day engagements because we all know that one day of PD is not going to create that kind of magic. I mean, I was good. I was not that good. I don't think anybody is that. If PD is not an ongoing conversation, just injecting it here to try to overcome the spring slope of the slump is not going to matter. All right, so then we say, OK, you know, we need to do, we just need to push the kids a little harder. So you start saying things like to the kids like the test is coming, you got to be ready.

You need to learn this. This is going to be on the test. This is your last chance. That stuff doesn't work. And all it does is it creates pressure. It makes the kids think that it's not about learning, it's about testing. And so all of these leadership strategies that we normally use this time of year, they're not fixing the problem. They're making the problem work.

These traditional responses assume that people are just lazy or they just need to push. And So what we do is we double down on trying to control things. And it's less about our teachers and more about us and our because we're feeling the slump too. So we just, oh, I just got to get just tighten things up when we don't feel like doing the work either. You know, this is one of the times when, at least for me, I have the lowest amount of energy. I just, you know, I would find myself, if I wasn't careful, I could find myself kind of phoning it in, you know, like this is the, this is the slog portion of the school year. And so then I would feel guilty about phoning it in or just not feeling like I wanted to do anything. And I say, OK, I'm going to tighten up.

And then I try to tighten myself up and, you know, get into more classrooms and do the work. And all I was doing was just creating more pressure on myself and creating more pressure on my teachers and thinking that just tightening things up was going to fix my motivation and fix their motivation.

It never does because the problem this time of the year is not a motivation problem. 

The problem is that you've been going through the school year up until this point and some habits have crept in that are not aligned with your vision, mission, and core values. Some strategies have crept in that are not aligned with your vision, mission and core values. And it's really easy to lose focus at this time of the year. And the more out of control you feel and the more of the spring slump you feel, the it's a sign that you are out of alignment. It's not a system problem, The spring slump, it's not a motivation problem either.

It's an alignment problem. And it's not about getting your people alive. It's about getting the work aligned right. So this is what builders do instead. So instead of trying to motivate teachers and give them the pep talks and, you know, do all those other things that we think are going to boost morale, what builders do is they use this is an opportunity to re anchor in their vision. So they are like they're looking at the work that people are doing right now. When they're going into classrooms and they're sitting in meetings, they're asking themselves always this question, is this the right work right now? Are we?

Is this where we need to be focusing right now? You see, the slump often happens because teachers feel like they're grinding away at tasks that don't really matter. And a lot of cases they are. So what builders are doing is we're saying, you know, we understand it. This is not a motivation problem. This is an alignment problem. If people are not motivated, it's because we've gotten misaligned somewhere. So they're looking for where we're misaligned.

And instead of asking teachers to do more, we're helping them focus on what actually matters most. So this is an opportunity for you to start doing some vision checks so that teachers can filter out the non essential work. You know, normally one of the things that happens during the spring slump is we look up and we realize that we are no longer building. We're no longer doing the work. We're just doing a whole bunch of chores and the chores are chipping away at our motivation. And this is an opportunity for us to kind of audit the work that we're doing and that we're asking other people to do and saying, are these chores or is this the work? I'm going to link to the chores versus work podcast in the show notes. Because if you have not listened to that podcast, now's the time to listen to it.

Because this is when you're stuck in a lot of chores and you don't even realize that you're just going through the school year. One day you look and you're like, wait a minute, when did I start doing all of these chores? It happens to all of us. I even had to do a vision check this week because I was getting caught up in a chores. And I know why we do that, right? Because a lot of times when you're in a slump, you feel like, you know, you start beating yourself up. I'm not being a productive enough.

And that's what was happening to me.

And so I was beating myself up and saying I'm not being productive enough. And so I started focusing on being more productive instead of moving the work forward. And chores make you feel productive. You get something done. You can cross it off your To Do List, no matter that it may not be the thing that you should be working on right now, the thing that's really going to move you closer to your vision. That satisfaction of crossing it off your To Do List feels really, really good. It makes you feel like I'm doing something. I'm not as much of A slug or a laggard as I thought I was.

But if you're, if it's not the right work, it doesn't matter if you've accomplished it. And that is a very temporary boost. The same thing is true for looking at the work we're asking of our teachers. Are we asking our teachers to do a bunch of chores, or are we asking our teachers to do the work that really matters? Making sure that we have an explicit connection between teachers, daily work and the bigger, larger purpose. Your vision, mission and core values will help people become re engaged in the work. And it's going to have a greater impact on your students because when your teachers are just logging through and you're just logging through, then it impacts our kids. They, they start to disengage as well.

And they're not doing it because they're lazy. They're doing it because on some level they know it. They get that what we're doing right now is not connected or aligned with that vision, mission, and core values. That we are just dragging them through the chores with us, and that helps them feel like they're just jumping through hoops and that school doesn't have the same kind of relevance. So we have to make sure that the work we're doing is aligned with our vision, mission, and core values. Not just so that we can keep our teachers motivated, but so we can keep our kids motivated too. Because when you're dragging through the chores, it turns them off that it immediately impacts their motivation. It immediately impacts their engagement.

But when that work is realigned to that vision, mission and core values, that's what gets the kids to reengage in the work naturally. And you don't need any pep talks. You don't need any incentives because the work is meaningful, It's purposeful. It makes sense. Now, the next thing that that builders do is that instead of pushing harder as our kind of default, the first thing we do is when things are feeling off and sluggish, we look to see where we're misaligned, right? So the spring is a weird time because it's when most schools have the biggest gap between what they said they wanted to achieve in the summer and what they're actually doing. You know, we get the momentum of the beginning of the school year.

We ride that right around the time, you know, I call it the October Surprise.

Then we, you know, the October Surprise happens. We get off track, but then we like, we got to get back on track and we try to, you know, push, push, push until winter break. Then after winter break, we come back and we've, you know, spent the break thinking about all the things we still need to do. We still have a whole semester left by about March. We are looking up and we're saying we're starting to satisfy us. We're starting to realize we didn't get everything done. We thought we're going to get done this year, and it starts to feel almost like it's too late. It's not too late, right?

So the thing that will help you make it to the finish line and still show results this year is not by pushing harder, but by really focusing on the work that matters and only the work that matters. So instead of pushing harder, what you need to do is start looking around and saying where are we misaligned? Where is where are we working on work that does not matter? And when things feel like they are harder than they should be, the answer is not to work harder. The answer is to pause. Check where your work is out of alignment with your vision. Remove the work that is out of alignment so that you can focus only on the work that is moving you towards your goals. You see, misalignment creates extra work, and the moment you fix it, the work becomes easier.

It becomes more sustainable because you are doing only the work that really, really matters. 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. OK, now back to the show. So here's the third thing that builders do, right? Instead of, you know, forcing follow through and, and, and feeling like, you know, we're in the slumps, I need to double down on control over my teachers. What builders do is we build more ownership, right? So a lot of times our teachers feel like they are cogs in the machine, right? They were always tell them what to do. We don't allow them to make their own choices in many cases.

And when we start feeling the pressure, we immediately transfer their pressure to the teachers and that's not fair. 

What we should be doing instead is that when you feel like you're in the slog, now is the time to look and see. Instead of trying to take more control, it's a time to to to make sure that you're building ownership and teachers. Because if you're pushing, then you're responsible. But if they are pushing themselves, they are responsible. So this is a time to get teachers engaged in auditing their own work and, and, and, and connecting everything that they are doing and that they want to do with your vision, mission, and core values. This is time for your teachers to, to, to stop being in compliance and you to stop having compliance conversations and get them recommitted to the vision, mission and core values. Because when they feel like they have a choice and when they feel like the choice that they have is really a meaningful choice, then teachers can begin to take ownership.

Then teachers can begin to self assess and take responsibility for their work. Right when you create autonomy and ownership, you create accountability and people will be more engaged when they feel like they have more ownership. And the bonus for you is you don't have to spend all of your time running around chasing, checking and correcting everybody in order to ensure that things are working. Now, the last thing the builders do is that they don't fight the slump. Remember, I said the beginning, this, the slump is a natural. This is the, you know, the time of the year. We're all feeling a little bit of slump right now. So don't fight it.

This is an opportunity for strategic reset, right? This is this is an opportunity to, to, to revisit and re energize everybody around your vision. One of the mistakes that people make is they share their vision once and then they put it on some stationary and they don't talk about it. Your vision is a living thing. It's a living thing that that you have to nurture and feed. So the thing I tell people inside of BU all the time is you want to be a broken record telling that vision story over and over and over again, updating the vision story depending on what's going on with your people at that time and connecting their concerns, their challenges. And their desires to the bigger vision for your school, right? So you want to really take this as an opportunity to double down on your vision and mission and core values, and also to audit the work that you're already doing.

So this is the time to, to build into the work that you're doing to start asking yourself, what do we need to cut out? We've been trying a couple of things all year.

What do we know isn't working? 

Let's cut it out so that we can focus on the work that truly matters, what has worked amazingly well and we should double down on. And if we cut out this nonsense over here, we can focus on this thing that we already know that works so that we can have a a huge victory this year. What are the small shifts that we need to make right now to help us finish the year strong? And having those conversations helps get you out of the slump and get you strategically thinking about how to do the rest of the year. So don't resist these natural dips in energy.

Use them to refocus you and your team on what matters most. You see, the spring slump is real, whether you want to admit it or not. We all have felt it before, but it doesn't have to be this time of of of underproductivity and increased pressure and, you know, defaulting into survival mode and letting those leadership habits that are so hard to shake start to creep back into our practice and just holding on till spring break. It doesn't have to be this way. The spring slump where we net our energy naturally dips is a great time for a reset. And so I want to challenge you this week to reset to, to, to, to recognize that you're dealing with or going into a spring slump and then take the, the, the four strategies we talked about today and implement them. Doubling down on, on your vision and giving people more ownership and, and, and using this as an opportunity for a reset and really going through and looking, doing that audit of the work and finding out those areas of misalignment. If you do that, then you can leverage the spring slump instead of just just surviving it.

So that's kind of what you do for your school. But now I want to talk about what it does to you because the spring slump is impacting your school. But what we often don't talk about is how much it impacts you because in many cases, you're going through the spring slump all by yourself. You feel like you're the only one who can is, is keeping things moving or can keep things moving. Everything's falling on you and you're the only one that's still trying to reach your goals this year where everybody else has started to mentally check out. And so if you're feeling that way too, then first of all, I want you to know that that you're not alone. And second of all, that's not a sign for you to push harder. It's a sign that you need to take a step back and get yourself back into alignment with your vision.

Remind yourself about your mission and why this is so important. Remind yourself of those core values and why they're non negotiable for you. Don't carry all the weight alone. That's that's not required of you, right? Instead, recognize that there's a spring slump, do things to encourage yourself, and then put things in place so that you can intentionally work through the spring slump. And your staff takes ownership of their work so that the work sustains itself. You see, the difference between being a leader and being a builder is that leaders rely on their own motivation to push through. They rely on their own motivation to carry other people.

And your own motivation is feeble, right? 

Builders create a structure and a community that helps people stay engaged naturally. So even when you don't feel like it, when you put the systems and structures in place, they will not only encourage other people, they will encourage you. So traditional leadership is telling you during the spring slump, well, you just need to push yourself harder. You just need to push your other people harder. But what buildership is saying to you is that you need to remove the friction, the things that are slowing you down, and get everybody realigned to your vision, mission, and core values so they carry the work. It's not about you pushing. It's about you creating conditions so that people can survive and thrive even in the middle of a spring slump.

Now, here's the thing. This is not just a way to survive March. This. This is how builders operate all year long. You see, when your school is truly aligned, you don't have to push so hard. You don't. You don't have to fight for motivation. Instead, what you do is you create a school where students and teachers stay engaged because the work itself makes sense.

The work itself has meaning. And this is how you build a school that begins to start to run itself. So if you're feeling the slump, first of all, know that you're not alone. This is the time of year and it's it's easy to start thinking, you know, it's just me and my the only one who's still trying. I want you to know that you're not, but also know that the spring slump isn't just a season. It's really a symptom. It's it's what happens anytime a school drifts away from what really matters. And if this is happening every single year to you, that's a sign that something deeper really needs to shift.

And that's a sign that you got to get your school into alignment. Now here's the good news. You don't have to keep pushing through on your own and you don't have to white knuckle your way to the finish line either so that you can just get to the summer and then you know, before you even had a chance to get your breath, your back up at it all over again and having to do it all over again next year. You don't have to fight against the slump either, right? What you do is you just fix what's causing the slump so that you don't have to deal with this every single year. And one of the reasons that we have Buildership University and this podcast and the Buildership community is because you're not getting this message out there, right?

Nobody else is telling you this. 

And I just want you to know that it doesn't have to be this way. You don't have to survive. This is the spring slump. You can make the spring slump serve you and move you closer to your goals. OK. So I hope that was helpful for you today. I do have one more thing I want to tell you before we go today and that is I want to talk to you about the Buildership community because I've gotten some questions. There's a lot of curiosity around it. Now we are officially launching the community on March 24th.

But right now before we launch, I don't, you know, we do we have a landing page. I don't, you know, we're working on it. Do we, you know, have all the pieces in place? No, but if you want to get in early before everybody else and get in at an early bird rate, then you need to go to buildershipuniversity.com/community. One of the things that makes the community different from Buildership University is Buildership University is a mentorship. So it's much more intense, lot more kind of support and feedback and you're working through kind of a structured curriculum and there's on demand training and accountability and a lot of intensive support and, and feedback. And that's great for a certain kind of person. But for some of you, you know, you're not ready for a mentorship right now, but you do want to get access to some actionable training that can help you start to implement the buildership model right now that can help you to start to solve some of your bigger challenges.

And that's why we created the Buildership community. Inside the community, you get 3 things. The first thing you get is you get actionable training. So this is not the buildership curriculum, but these are one off master classes, all designed to help you do something very specific. So we just did a master class about the five in five out method. We have a master class coming up about master scheduling. We have a master class in there about how to hire in next to AP Very, very specific actionable training. Not only do we have the master classes, this is my favorite part.

I didn't realize it's going to be my favorite part, but we created a series of playbooks that take you step by step through specific processes. These playbooks, you know, we shared them with some people already and it's just blowing people's minds. The playbooks and the tools, step by step playbooks that walk you through a process how to have a one-on-one with a team member and so you don't have to figure it out by yourself. Not only that, with all the tools that you need to do that process. So the five and five outs, we've got all that. We have a playbook, we have the training, we have the tools, everything you need inside of the community. So you get the playbooks, you get the training, and then the last piece you get is the community itself being around other people who are builders. So you don't ever have to feel like you're alone.

You can ask questions and share your wins. 

And unlike your colleagues who may be a little jealous of you inside the buildership community, you people who are cheering you on, this is not a Facebook group. This is unlike anything you have ever experienced before. This is a place where you can go if you are a builder and get some support and get actionable training and resources and tools so that you can implement the buildership model wherever you are. Again, the early bird bird rate is available until March 23 and then it goes away and then the and you can still join after March 23. Just can't get the early bird rate. The nice thing about the early bird rate is you lock it in for life. So if the membership price goes up, you don't, you still pay the early bird rate.

And we have people who join BU and they are still paying the early bird rate for BU and BU is worth 1000 times more now. So, and I'm, I'm not, I don't think I'm exaggerating. I'm close maybe 800 times more than what they're paying, but they're still paying it because when you lock in that rate, we mean you lock it in for as long as you remember. If you want to grab the early bird rate, go to buildershipuniversity.com/community Buildership university.com/community. So let's just get back to the spring slump for a second because I have my challenge to you this week is this. If you are feeling the spring slump yourself or you are seeing other people start to feel it, try to resist the urge to to default to the leadership training because it's not working. I mean, if it worked, you wouldn't have a spring slump every year. You wouldn't.

It wouldn't feel like a slog. So that's not working. My challenge to you this week is that instead of of surviving the spring slump or trying to motivate or drag people through it, why not take a look at the real problem? Because the reason you're feeling it is that something in the work is misaligned. And then get the work back into alignment so that you can overcome the spring slump like a builder. I'll talk to you next time. 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.