EPISODE #341

Hey, builders, before we begin, I have a quick question for you. Are we connected on social media? The reason I'm asking is because as much as I love giving you the podcast episode every single week, I'd love to take our relationship deeper. So if we're not connected on social media, let's connect. I'm on LinkedIn @Robyn underscore Mindsteps. I'm on Twitter at Robyn Underscore Mindsteps. I'm on Facebook at Robin Jackson. Please let's connect so we can keep the conversation going now.

Now on with the show. You're listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast, episode 341. 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 is not my birthday, but it is my birthday week, and at minds, we get to take our birthdays off. So this week, instead of being with you with a new episode, I went back into the archives and I pulled out an episode that I'd forgotten about. And when I listened to it again, I was like, oh, this is so good. People need to hear this now. And I needed to hear it more than anything, because, quite frankly, this is something that I have found myself doing a lot, which is playing defense instead of playing offense, especially now. I mean, things feel so, I don't know, heavy.

And this episode was done a couple of years ago, and things felt heavy then, and they still feel heavy now. And it gave me a little perspective about what's going on now and that I needed to keep my eye on the vision and not let all the other stuff that's happening around me distract me from that vision. Because we're in a phase, a season that where everything is gonna feel heavy for a while. I don't know that this is gonna be an easy and quick fix, but that doesn't mean that you take your Eye off of your vision. And so I really want you to enjoy this episode. Also, couple of things that are coming up. The first thing is that we have for December, for those of you who are in the collective or in Bilgesham University, our December topic is really about reviving and rethink. We do our leadership team meetings, those meetings you have with, you know, the, the.

The instructional leadership team or your building leadership team, whatever that is. Those meetings are often awful. I mean, you go through them every month. You spend a lot of time talking, not a lot of stuff gets done. We're going to fix that this month inside of the Collective and Buildership University. So take. Be on the lookout for that. And if you are not a member of the collective or Buildership University, well, I mean, what are you waiting for?

Go ahead and go to Buildership. You can join the collective, get instant access to everything. All of the masterclasses we've done, we have over. We have what, 13, 14, 15 masterclasses in there now. Playbooks, step by step. You don't have to do any thinking. You watch the masterclass, it's usually about 45 minutes. You download the playbook.

It has all the tools you need to do things, very practical things that are part of your work. It helps you to get stuff done. And so you need to go ahead and go to buildershipuniversity.com collective, join the collective there, and then stay on the lookout. We'll be sending out an email. I'm going to save a couple of tickets to the masterclass. And the collective is growing, so we're having fewer and fewer tickets to our monthly masterclasses, but we still have some tickets available. So stay on the lookout for an email from me about that next week. In the meantime, please enjoy today's episode.

And this is, this is something we all need to be thinking about right now. 

So as you're listening to today's episode, really think about the work you're doing and ask yourself, how much of my day is spent on defense versus offense? And if you don't like the answer, then this episode is going to help you change it. So recently we were inside of Buildership University, we do these things called sprints. So if there's something that we need to build a tool, we need to build a system that we need to build. A lot of times what we'll do is we'll get together and Buildership University, we'll all build it together. So we were looking at, how do we take some of the systems that we have in our school, and how do we simplify those systems to make them work better? And so we got together for two evenings straight, and the first evening kind of showed them how to do something that we call system mapping, to map out what the system should look like, not what it looks like now, but to rethink those systems and to simplify the systems that you have.

And then the second night, everybody kind of went off and did that work. And then they came back the next night and shared what they did. And I was giving them feedback. We were supporting each other and then talking about how to make those systems work, how to actually implement them and install them in your school. So we were doing that. One of the builders in the group shared a system, and she had a system that was really about implementing certain process that they had in her school. But what was really interesting is that the system that she proposed was really designed to deal with something that she was dealing with in the school, which is that not all of her teachers were implementing the system that she proposed. We had another builder who was trying to design a system around discipline policy.

A lot of them were kind of working on their discipline policies because they wanted to create a system that was more, you know, that served kids better, got kids back into classrooms faster, wasn't as complicated, but still addressed issues. And she realized that she was trying to design a system to deal with the fact that when teachers sent kids out of the office, they often didn't have passes. Not all the kids made it to the office or made it back to class. So how can I make a system to deal with that? In both cases, these builders were designing systems that were really about defense. They were trying to defend against something that was happening in their school that wasn't working, rather than a system that was really about offense, which was a system designed to move their school where they need to be. And I see this a lot.

I see this all the time.

People ask me questions like, what do I do about the teachers who are not planning? Or what do I do about the teachers who aren't standards aligned? And then they create all of these systems that overcomplicate things because they're trying to address what teachers are not doing, rather than creating and designing systems that are really about moving your school forward. All too often we play defense, we don't play offense. So we'll design a discipline policy to deal with the small percentage of students who are acting out. We'll design a lesson planning strategy or a PLC meeting meeting designed to deal with the teachers who don't plan. Rather than the teachers who do, we will design, I don't know, like deadlines or accountability measures in our school to address the very few teachers who are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, rather than a system that really serves the teachers who are already doing what they're supposed to be doing. As a result, we design this new system and we make the people who are doing the right work.

We make their lives miserable. We make things harder for them. I remember once when I was a teacher, teachers were kind of sliding in late. And so a lot of times first period would start and their classroom wouldn't be covered. Now, I'll be honest, I was one of the guilty parties. I lived almost an hour away from where I worked and dc the DMV traffic around the Beltway. If we had a lot of traffic, I'd be calling from the car saying, hey, I'm going to be late. But I was called in and let people know.

But there are a lot of people who are late and they weren't letting people know. And so in order to deal with that, the school instituted a new policy that said you had to sign in in the main office by a certain time. Now, most of the teachers were coming in on time. And even if they were late, most of the teachers were conscientious enough to call ahead to let somebody know that they were late to arrange with another colleague to cover their first period if something came up. There were just a few people. So rather than dealing with the two or three people who were kind of abusing the policy coming in, they created a system that punished the rest of the entire staff for what two people had done. And I don't know if it's an egregious example. We kind of know not to do that, and yet we still do it all the time.

I mean, take a look at the policies that you've put in place. Maybe you're thinking teachers are not teaching with a clear learning learning target. So you've instituted a policy where teachers now have to post their learning target on the board. Maybe teachers are not being clear enough to students about what the success criterias are. So you now have a policy where I have to put the success criteria on the board, I have to put the success criteria in my lesson plan. The students have to write the success criteria down in their planner. Is that really what we want? Or do we really want students to understand what success looks like so they know what they're working towards?

We go in and we mandate things and we think we're doing it for the good of our school. 

But what we're really doing is defending against behavior we don't like rather than playing offense. So we design a discipline policy that tries to suppress the bad behavior of a few students, rather than creating a discipline policy that encourages good behavior from all students. We create planning rituals. That's really what they are. Just these are the rituals we want you to go through every single day at the beginning of school. And they're excruciating to watch, quite frankly. But we create these planning and lesson delivery rituals because what we really are looking for is rich, rigorous instruction, purposeful instruction.

And we don't think we're going to be able to get it from our teachers. So we impose what that looks like. We're playing defense. We're defending against teachers either unwillingness or inability to be able to plan and present instruction a particular way, rather than playing offense, which is really about helping teachers develop the will and skill they need to provide purposeful, rigorous instructional experiences for children, learning experiences for children. So we are focused on. People come to me and they say, how do I overcome resistance? As opposed to asking the real question, which is, how do I create a place or a program that everybody will buy into? You know, I can give you strategies that can work to deal with resistance, but that is a band aid.

That is defense. What we should be doing is playing offense. How do I create a space and a program and a process and a plan that actually encourages people to buy in where people are fighting to be a part of it and want to do the work? Too often we play defense and we should be playing offense. So I want to challenge you this week to look at your work and ask yourself this question. Am I playing defense with the stuff that I'm doing, or am I playing offense? You know, everybody's talking about this is a really tough year. And, you know, and it's tough for a lot of reasons.

It's emotionally draining. We have a teacher shortage. You know, I've talked to several builders recently inside of Buildership University who have had teachers kind of resign, you know, in the first couple of weeks of school or resign mid year. Tell them I'm not coming back after the Thanksgiving break. I'm just not coming back. I've even worked in schools where teachers will just quit in the middle of a class period and walk out and not tell anybody. Or maybe on the way out in the main office, they'll say, hey, listen, I'm never coming back. Oh, by the way, My kids are unattended. Good luck and walk out the door. I mean, it has gotten that bad in a lot of places. So administrators are running around trying to get coverage or they're covering classrooms themselves or they're finding subs or they're doing other things that they feel like they have to do. And you're so caught up in the wheeze trying to defend against what's happening that it's hard to take a step back and say, all right, this is defense and it's unsustainable. How do I play offense? How do I put some things in place? One of the schools I worked with early in the history of mindstepps, long before all of this happened, they decided it was a high school and it was, it had a difficult population of students and they decided we're not using subs. They put a plan in place where they never called us up because they felt like subs were disruptive to their building and for their students and they would rather just manage the coverage themselves.

Now, the principal didn't decide this. 

The teachers did. Because the teachers understood the vision, mission and core values. And they realized that we've been using substitute teachers and in fact that's actually creating some of the barriers to our achieving our vision and living out our mission and core values in our school. So they stopped playing defense. They didn't devise a better substitute teacher system. Leave your plans here or only call these three subs or we're going to vet our subs better or whatever they did, they said, what would happen if we just didn't have subs? What would that mean?

And so they actually played offense. They designed a system where they no longer needed subs because subs were an unknown and an unreliable variable in the work that they were trying to do. And they figured it out and they did it. They were playing offense, not defense. I've been in other schools where instead of saying how do we overcome teacher resistance? The builder in that school has really worked on securing buy in from every single teacher, making sure that the teacher understands the vision, the mission and the core values of the school. And the way we teach vision, mission and core values at Builders Lab is that your vision belongs to you. That's yours.

The mission is shared and co created and the core values belong to your staff because they're the main ones who are going to have to live them out every day. So they're not unanimously non negotiable. They're not really core values. So she did that work and guess what? She didn't have to overcome resistance because there wasn't any resistance. All of a sudden the big naysayers, the main teachers who were kind of fighting her, all of a sudden those teachers were saying, hey, no, that's a violation of our core values. Hey, no, I believe in this mission. Yes, I'll do this work.

Maybe we should do it this way. Because they believed in it. Because this builder, instead of playing defense trying to overcome resistance, she played offense and established a vision, mission and core values that everybody bought into. And all of a sudden, no resistance. Even when she saw some resistance kind of popping up, she would always take it back to the vision, mission and core values that everybody agreed upon. And that would, that would squash it before it even became true resistance. Because she always told her staff, at any point, if you no longer believe in this vision, mission and core values, say so. So when people started, you know, kind of showing early warning signs of, you know, resistance, she would say, listen, that's great.

Either we're going to have to change this behavior or we're going to have to change our vision, mission and core values. And when you put it like that, especially around core values that people have already said are non negotiable people, people get back to where they need to be. They, they, they go back to those core values if they're truly non negotiable to the people who created them. Whenever you point out that a beh ideas out of alignment with that, if they can see that they have a choice, do I still believe this is non negotiable or does this situation warrant the fact that warrant negotiating this core value? And in most cases people are like, no, it's still non negotiable. And so you're not checking behavior. You're simply giving people feedback around their behavior and its alignment to your vision, mission and core values. And they make the decision to adjust their behavior, you see the difference.

Defense, I'm always going to have resistance. 

And yes, I have a bag of tricks. I can show you different things you can say or do that most of the time work in overcoming resistance. But defense, you're always going to be fighting resistance because your only tool is something that you can use. Once resistance shows up, offense says, I'm not going to wait for resistance to show up. What can I do to eliminate resistance altogether? I remember when I first started thinking about how to support my struggling students. Now I had tried a lot of stuff because I had kids who were struggling and I wanted them to be successful.

I mean, I was Doing everything. Like, I was almost basically one on one tutoring kids, you know, during lunch and after school, and, you know, doing all this work to support them and making things so complicated. And then I heard one of my early mentors and someone who I admire to this day, Max Thompson, and he posed a different question. You know, I'm thinking, defense. How do I defend against kids who are struggling? And he proposed an offense idea. What if you prevented kids from struggling in the first place? And he introduced me to this idea of acceleration.

How do you set students up to be successful? We wait, for the most part, until kids are struggling before we do anything. We intervene. We do remediation, but the student has already failed. We're playing defense against failure. What if we played offense? What if we decided, let's eliminate failure to begin with, let's eliminate destructive struggle to begin with. And I went on a quest to do that.

And when I did that, I had no more failures in my class. And when I shared it with other people and they start taking that formula and that system and putting it into place, they had no failures. I mean, imagine that I had 130 to 150 students every semester as a high school English teacher, and none of my kids were failing. Once I put this proactive intervention system in place. I've talked to other teachers, secondary, elementary, middle. And when they put the system in and really work the system, they eliminate failures. You're playing offense, not defense. Think about some of the things that you're dealing with right now.

And one of the things that I worry about for you is that if you buy into the narrative of a lot of schools, you have no choice but to play defense. I mean, you have to do COVID protocols. Sometimes you do have to quarantine staff. Sometimes you do have a staff member who can't take it anymore and leaves in the middle of school year. Discipline incidences are up. Students are presenting really unique sel issues that we've never seen before. Your staff is overwhelmed and tired.

And so every day when you go to work, you have a full day of defensive measures.

Up. We have another class that's closing. What do we do now? Up. The sub didn't show up. I'll go cover the class. Up. This teacher called out, is he ever coming back?

I don't know. So we gotta find another teacher. How am I gonna find a special education science teacher in the middle of the school year? Up. These kids are acting out. We need to do something about it. So your entire day is a giant game of whack a mole. And when you go to work like that, and every day, you have no idea what's gonna pop up.

And so you just stand there, read that With a big giant club so that any new challenge that pops up, you just beat it with a club. That's no fun. And how are you moving your school towards achieving your vision in the next three years when all you're doing is whacking at the moles that show up every single day because of the challenges that you're facing in your school? Now, I know it's hard. I am not diminishing at all the challenges that you're facing. A lot of times when I say stuff like this, when people hear it, it causes this kind of cognitive dissonance. There's used to that leadership paradigm of playing a good game of defense that when I proposed to them that, okay, you don't have to play defense, you could play offense. They think I'm out of touch.

I remember a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a group of principals about playing offense around, how to help every teacher grow one level and one domain and one year less. And this principal said to me, listen, Robin, I get it. I think this is really valuable. But you have not been in a school since COVID and you don't understand what we're dealing with. And I conceded the point because I have not been a principal of a school during COVID But it doesn't mean that I am out of touch, because instead of being in one school where I'm just focusing on those one issues, I've been in hundreds of schools since the. Since COVID has happened, I've been supporting hundreds of administrators dealing with these problems. I've seen what works. I've seen what doesn't work because I've been in so many schools.

So when I'm telling you that this. I don't want you to think I'm being out of touch. I don't want you to think I'm even beating you up. Listen, you're doing the best you can, and you were trained to do that this way. This is leadership. Leadership. Most leadership strategies are defense. I mean, even think about the way that we do our SIP plan, right?

What, every year, what do we do? We look at last year's data. We try to find the leak in our data. We call it root cause analysis. What we're really looking for is, all right, what didn't work last year. And then we create a sit plan to address the problems of last year, this year. So that we can make progress. That's defense.

You know, when you come to Builders lab, we're going to show you offense. 

We're going to talk about the builder's blueprint. The builder's blueprint is not about defense. What happened last year and how do we address those numbers this year? How do we get those last year's numbers up this year? The builder's blueprint is about saying, here's where we want to go, and if we're going to move forward to where we want to go, what's the biggest obstacle that we have to get out of our way so that we can make forward progress? Notice the difference. Offense.

It's about a plan going forward. Defense is about dealing with the problems that have already happened and trying to do better. So we were trained to think defensively. That is a leadership stance. It's really hard to recognize that you don't have to play defense, especially when so much is happening. Right now you're being bombarded with so many things, and every day you're just kind of blocking all of the things that are being thrown out at you. It's hard to realize that you can step away and play offense and move forward and you don't have to play defense. So I get it.

I get the resistance. And if you're feeling it right now, then, you know, I don't want you to feel attacked or feel threatened. I'm just saying that when you're ready, there is another other way. And for every problem or challenge that you think is intractable right now, if you think about it offensively rather than defensively, it opens up new ideas. So I started out by talking about two examples of builders who were in our sprint and how they were playing defense. Let me tell you how we started playing offense. So in the first instance, we had a lot of teachers who weren't implementing their. Not even a lot.

I mean, it turned out to be not as many as we thought, but teachers who weren't implementing a certain system or plan that they wanted, wanted the teachers to implement. And so the first plan was defense. Okay, they don't do this. We're going to check here. And I said, nope, that's more work for you, because now you have to chase, check, and correct teachers who aren't doing their jobs. It doesn't solve the problem of teachers not doing their jobs. It just puts more pressure on teachers and it creates more work for the teachers who are doing their jobs.

So what is in the way?

And one of the things we realized that there Was really no trigger for this system. The system was in place. Everybody kind of assumed it was happening, but there was no universal trigger to get the system started. What we did is we played offense. When do we want people to do this work? How do we create a space and environment that the work moves forward every single week? We redesigned the system, and now we're going to be implementing it. And I believe strongly that it's going to work better.

For the second principal who was worried about creating a discipline policy that would give kids better passes so that you could make sure they left the classroom and got to the office, we started digging deeper and we said, what do you really want the discipline policy to do? What you really wanted to do is for students to learn from their behavior as quickly as possible, to de escalate situations that are rising, and to give students a really meaningful way of re entering the classroom and getting back to work as quickly as possible. Once we understood what we wanted, not what we didn't want, we weren't designing a system to prevent what we didn't want. Defense. Instead, we said, what do we want? And how do we design a system to make that behavior more likely? That changed the whole narrative around what function the discipline policy played in that particular school. And she is working on now creating a system that is focused on offense, not defense.

She's more excited about it because anytime you're playing defense and you're trying to change a system, you're going to get a more intense, glorified version of whatever it is you were doing before. When you play offense, you start to see opportunities where before you only saw problems when. When you play offense, you're focused on your goal, which is less stressful than focusing on. On your failures. So when you play offense, you are pointed forward. You are worried about how do we make progress versus defense, where you're worried about how do we stop losing progress. You know, the big difference between offense and defense is are you playing to win or are you playing not to lose?

And as human beings, we tend to thought to default to something.

I wrote something down the other day that it was saying that, you know, we play defense because we can quantify what we have to lose and not what we have to gain. And so we play not to lose rather than playing to win. And it's why so many of our schools are stuck right now. That's why, you know, when I talk to people about 100% vision, they get really nervous because they're worried that if I put 100% down, I may not get there. Rather than thinking about, how do I win? They're thinking about, how do I not lose face, how do I not lose ground, how do I not lose? You know, the respect of my colleagues. We play to lose.

We play defense. We play not to lose. We play defense because we. We can. We can easily see what we have to lose. And we don't often think about, what do we have to gain? One of the reasons why everything we do here at Buildership University is really focused on starting out with your vision, because you need to know what you have to gain. You need to have that so clear.

You have to be so passionate about it that you're willing to do the work to get there rather than worrying about losing. Most of us don't have a clear vision. We don't know what we have to gain. We haven't really thought about what that would mean for our schools if 100% of our kids were successful in some way, and what our schools would look like and how we could design that school and what it would feel like to work in that kind of environment and what it would mean to the lives of our kids. We don't spend nearly enough time thinking about that. We're always thinking about, oh, my goodness, if I do this, then I'm going to lose another teacher. If I do this, then I won't have enough subs. If I do this, then my suspension date is going to go up.

And so we are playing not to lose. So this week, I want to challenge you. You don't. If you're not ready to start thinking offensively yet, I just want you to just pay attention to whether or not you're playing defense or are you playing offense and the work that you're doing. How much of your day is spent playing defense versus playing offense? Then when you're ready, when you're ready to play offense, you don't have to figure it out by yourself. One of the things that we are really good about doing at Builders Lab and Buildership University is that we are really good at helping you see offense, helping you see the opportunities, helping you turn the challenges that you're facing into opportunities, helping you look at your challenges a different way so that you can find a solution that actually moves you closer to your goal goals rather than further away from your goals. So when you're ready, come to Builders Lab or join Buildership University.

We'll show you how to do that. 

But for now, I just want you to pay attention, because I bet, I bet you're going to realize you're playing defense more than you think you are. I'll tell you this last story, and then we'll close the episode for today. I remember I was sitting with a group of people who were, in many ways, I felt, were smarter than I was, more successful than I was. And we were sitting around talking about, you know, where we wanted to go, our visions for the work that we were doing. Halfway through the conversation, I'm hearing them talk about all these opportunities and all of these things that they wanted to do. And I realize these people are playing offense and I'm playing defense. That's why they're more successful than I am, because these people are not playing not to lose.

They are playing to win. It was a watershed moment for me because I didn't even realize how much I was thinking defensively. And there's a friend of mine, always says, scared, money doesn't scale. And he's right. Whenever you play scared, whenever you're playing defense, it's really hard for you to make progress. Yeah, you might stop the bleeding or the leaking or slow things, slow the decline down, but is that really what you get out of bed every day to do to slow the decline of your school? No. You want.

You want big things for your school, you want big things for your students. You want to make a meaningful difference? Well, first step is you've got to stop playing defense, start playing offense. And I want you to know that when you do that, when you think that way, things change. Instead of being stressed, you're excited. Instead of seeing problems, you see opportunities. Instead of. Instead of playing a giant game of whack a molecule, you go from whack a mole to chess, where you are making moves, you are being strategic, you are moving forward.

So this week, how often are you playing defense? And if you want to play offense, let me know. You can reach out to me on Facebook, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and we can get you in the right place for you to start thinking offensively about your work. Stop playing to lose. Start playing to win. 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 the thing that we talked about in today's episode, would you 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.