EPISODE #350

Hey, builders. Before we jump into today's show, I need to know something. Are you and I connected on the socials? Because if we're not, we need to be. So connect with me. I'm on Facebook. Obinjackson. I am on Twitter.

Obin steps. I'm on LinkedIn. Obinjackson. Let's connect and let's keep the conversation going. Now onto the show. You're listening to the School Leadership reimagine podcast, episode 350. 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 a 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 can you believe it? We've done 350 episodes. I've got some big plans for the podcast this year. I'll share more about that in the next in the upcoming months. But let's just take a moment and pause. I want to thank you. Some of you have been with me from Episode Episode one. Others of you are just joining us, and I encourage you to go back and listen to the archives. But either way, I just wanna thank you. Thank you for hanging out with me for 350 episodes.

It's been an incredible journey and we're just beginning. Like I said, there's some really cool things happening in the next couple of months that I think you're gonna love. And I wish. I wish that on a 350th episode, I could talk about something, you know, like do a celebratory episode and, you know, all the retrospective, all of that. I've got something really important and serious to talk to you about today, and so this is gonna be a heavier episode. I'm sorry, it just happened to fall on the 350th episode. Can't do anything about that. We'll celebrate later on, but right now, I gotta talk to you about something really heavy because I've been doing a lot of having a lot of conversations with a lot of people lately about vision.

And I am seeing something happening that disturbs me. Now, don't tune out if you think, oh, goodness, here she goes talking about vision again. I'm not. I'm just telling you that in those conversations about vision, something deeper has shown up, and we need to talk about it. And we did deal with it as a profession. And so let's talk about it. You know, I remember when I first became a teacher. I.

You know, I was always inspired by those teacher movies. And somewhere in the back of my head, I thought, one day I'm gonna have my own teacher movie, right? Like, I wanna be that kind of teacher. So I remember, you know, to sir with Love. And what's the one with Cicely Tyson and Richard Pryor where they had the busload of kids? I love that movie. And why can't I think of the name of it? But you know what I'm talking about.

And you know, what's the one with Michelle Pfeiffer in a karate with the kids and Stand and Deliver about Jaime Escalante and the. I don't like freedom writers as much, but you get my point, right? There are all these sister act, all these teacher movies, and they all follow the same arc. Lean on Me. Is it Lean on Me. You know what I'm talking about, right? So they all have the same arc, right, where, you know, this dedicated educator goes into a school that is crumbling and failing, and with their unconventional methodology, takes these scrappy group of students and turns them into scholarship.

We were all fed that same narrative.

And what's happened, I think, over time is that there are generations of educators who have grown up thinking that's what this work is about. We have romanticized student struggle because it allows the adults to be the hero. Told you this wouldn't be heavy. But here's what's happened, right? So every. You talk to every educator. I've got them. You've got them.

We all have the story about the kid who came in, was struggling in school, turned off, angry, tough home life. And because of their interaction with us in our school, they now love school. They now love learning. They're happy every day in school. We made a difference, and we feel like that. Those are the stories when we say we want to make a difference. Those are the stories that are in the back of our minds. But in doing so, and romanticizing student struggle, we've normalized systems that require kids to suffer before they succeed.

That's a problem, right? So a lot of us don't even realize we're living inside of this narrative, right? It's called the redemption arc. We start out, you have a struggling student. There's a turning point. There's a breakthrough that happens after years of efforts. It's emotionally satisfying. It makes the work feel meaningful.

It positions us as the patient, noble, indispensable catalyst for change. But that story, that redemption arc story that I believe is quietly driving our work is that story is shaping the decisions that we're making about kids. Let me tell you what I mean. If you expect struggle to be the norm, if you feel like your job is to take a struggling student and turn that student's life around, what happens is that we accept struggle as the norm, and then we build systems that tolerate student struggles, right? If we expect that the turnaround for kids is going to take years, then we don't feel the same urgency. Our urgency has a longer timeline, and we don't feel the urgency to fix the conditions that produce the struggle. We just feel the urgency to fix the struggle. We never question why kids are struggling in the first place.

We just accept that. That's. We normalize that. And so our urgency is all around fixing the struggle rather than interrogating why the kid's struggling in the first place. And then the third thing that happens is that we define success as, eventually, a kid comes into my school building in first grade, and by sixth grade or fifth grade, we've got that kid turned around. A kid comes into my middle school in sixth grade, but by eighth grade, that kid is turned around. A kid comes into high school, a mess, is a fresh freshman, but by the time they graduate, they are a scholar, right? So we have normalized struggle.

We have normalized the idea that turnaround will take years, which has reduced our urgency to fix the conditions that produce the struggle and instead have created an urgency around, you know, kind of, oh, we only have four years to turn this kid around. We never ask ourselves, is four years too long? Could it happen in a semester? We don't ask ourselves that, right? And then we define success as by the time they graduate, when it could be that we could have. We didn't. We could have saved the kid all four years of struggle and fix it in freshman year.

And that's not like our hearts are in the right place.

The problem is that we have bought that redemption arc narrative for so long that we don't even examine the choices that we make. That redemption arc is driving our decisions. We, without our even realizing it. And so it's an unexamined assumption about how schools have to work. Now, I need to be careful here because I am not saying that kids never struggle. Kids are coming to us with all kinds of stuff happening. And I was just talking to my husband about this recently because we've been doing a lot of work and our, you know, just in volunteering, working with kids who are in the foster system. And so some of those challenges are so profound and the mountain is so high that it just feels overwhelming.

Right? So we know that the kids who are coming into the system are bringing a whole bunch of profound things with them. What I am saying is that we never thoughtfully examine the system into which we're bringing those kids. We just accept that the system that exists is the best that we can do. And I'm not sure that's true. So I'm not saying that struggle doesn't happen for kids. I'm just arguing that prolonged struggle is often evidence that there's a flaw in the system versus evidence that the struggle is hard. And we don't examine that.

You've heard me talk before about productive struggle versus destructive struggle. You've heard me talk about that there's a difference between productive struggle and destructive struggle when it comes to kids learning. I haven't talked about, and probably should talk about more, that there's also a difference between productive and destructive struggle when it comes to helping kids. And a lot of us are caught in a cycle of destructive struggle. We are helping kids in ways that are not helpful. And what I'm arguing today is that the reason that we are doing that is because in the back of our heads, we're making decisions based on this notion of a redemption arc that may or may not be true. So if a student needs three years to finally turn it around, there's only one of two things that could be true. Either the student is incapable of succeeding sooner, or the system wasn't designed to help them succeed sooner.

There's only two options it could be. So we never ask ourselves, hey, is it taking so long for this kid to turn things around because the kid is incapable of doing it sooner? Or is it because we have a system that makes it impossible for a kid to be able to turn things around sooner? And what happens is we default to the first explanation far too quickly because the second one implicates us. It implicates our structures. It implicates our schedules, our grading practices, our pacing, our priorities, the whole kind of system that pays us. And that's uncomfortable. So instead, what we do as a profession Is we mythologize perseverance.

We mythologize the struggle itself, and we turn that redemption arc narrative and to the prevailing narrative of what it means to make a difference. So here's the thing. If we were to really critically examine that redemption arc narrative and how it is affecting and impacting the way we make decisions, how it impacts what we believe is true, then we have to ask different questions. We have to ask ourselves, what if success earlier and more often was the expectation, not the exception? What if instead of accepting struggle as the norm and the rule, we redesigned our school so that success was the expectation, was the norm, was the rule? What if the goal wasn't helping kids recover from failure, but preventing unnecessary failure in the first place? What if the real measure of a school was. Was not its inspiring comeback stories, but how few comeback stories were actually required?

Now, this is not denying outside factors, but it is refusing to use those outside factors as a cover and an excuse for a poorly designed system. So here's the thing. If we don't examine this, what we're doing is we're making a quiet bargain with failure. We're saying we can't control everything, so we won't optimize the things that we can control. We're saying, listen, it has to. The only way that a kid succeeds is if the adults really care. And the adults expend, you know, inordinate amount of time and effort to save a kid. That's what.

You know, that's my problem with freedom writers from that movie. 

She had to go get another job in order to do this thing for kids. Come on. There was no other way. But we watch that movie and we just say, okay, that must be what it takes. You know, a lot of these movies, the adults, the hero of the story, has to spend their own money, nights, weekends, extra time in order to save these kids. But we never ask ourselves, why does the system require this heroic effort in order for kids to be successful? Because that's not sustainable.

And our teachers have been telling us that for years. But we. Because we buy into that redemption arc, we throw up our hands and say, well, there's no other way. What are we gonna do? The kids. The kids. The kids have so many outside factors that are impacting them. And I'm not minimizing them because they're profound and they're worse than they were 10 years ago.

So I'm not minimizing that. But those profound outside factors are exposing a flaw in our system, because doing it on heroic effort alone is no longer sustainable. And if we keep insisting on that we are part of the problem, we're failing our kids. It's time to redesign the system. So here's the thing that we should be thinking, right? It's not that we recognize we can't control everything, but instead of saying, so, you know, what are we going to do? We have to figure out what can we control. The urgency around what we can control is greater.

And until now, what we say we can control has to do with our own individual heroics. But we're missing a big Bohemia thing that we can control, which are the systems themselves. We don't have to continue to operate in the same systems that have always existed. We can change the system. Now, before you tune out and say I'm raging against the machine, I'm not talking about the school system, although that needs work. Because this audience is mostly school based administrators or some district level administrators. Let's be realistic. I'm not telling you to change the education system.

There's a lot you can change in your building that goes completely unexamined every year. I ask principals all the time, hey, why does your master schedule look like this? That's the way it always looks. Is there any reason why your master schedule has to look like this? Well, I mean, we have to have so many hours. Okay, but you can spend those hours a lot of different ways. Is there any reason your master schedule has to look like this? Well, the district says we have to do that.

Okay, but there are a lot of different ways to get teachers with so many preps or this many courses and all of that. Is there any reason that your master schedule has to look like this? And the answer is always no. They never even questioned it though. They never even said, given the confines or the constraints that our district has given us, what else can I do with the master schedule? I talk to principals all the time and I'm saying, why is your policy like this? Well, I don't know. I mean, that's the way.

Okay, is there anything that the district is telling you where it has to be this? Well, it says we have to do this. Okay, that's a constraint. But does it have to look exactly this way? Did the district hand this to you and say, everybody must do it exactly this way every single time? And the answer is no. You have so much control that you are not exercising over the systems in your school. But we're not interrogating those systems because we've accepted the narrative that there's nothing we can do that struggle is inevitable.

That. That what means making a difference is simply taking a tough kid and spending an inordinate amount of time, effort, and energy on that kid so that that kid can turn things around. And that redemption arc feels good. It's sexy, but it's unethical because what we talk about are the kids that got saved in that system. What we don't talk about are all the kids who didn't. We are so good at telling the success stories, but we all have in the back of our minds the wall of shame. The kids we didn't reach.

I think about those kids all the time.

I think about, you know, it's fun and it feels really good. And it justifies the effort that we're doing to talk about that one kid we saved, but the three kids that quietly slipped through the cracks. We don't talk about those kids. Or we just say we can't save them all. You know that starfish story that people tell where the man says, this doesn't make any sense. You can't save them all. And the kids said, but I can save this one. You know, great.

That story sets is a setup because the kids system of running around and grabbing one starfish at a time may feel heroic, but there are all these other starfish that die. The kid took a step back for just two seconds and looked at what was causing the problem. Maybe then the kid could go upstream, solve the problem so that we don't have a bunch of starfish on the beach in the first place, but instead what we do is we go grab one starfish at a time and kill ourselves in the process. And after 30 years, we have a handful of success stories to comfort ourselves in our old age and retirement. And we ignore all the kids we didn't save because we were too busy running around one starfish at a time. Hey, builders, real quick, before we get on with the rest of the episode, I want to talk to you about the 100% collective. If you are interested in becoming a builder and developing that 100% mindset, then the 100% collective is for you. Not only do we have monthly masterclasses, live masterclasses, where I show you how to to take some work that you are already doing, but do it like a builder.

Do it in a way that is more effective, more efficient, in a way that takes the work and stops it from being drudgery and makes it actually something that feels meaningful, that moves you forward. We also have done for you toolboxes with all the tools you need to be able to implement. And we have step by step playbooks that lay out the entire process for you so you don't have to even think about it. You just take the playbook and you can implement it for right away in your schools. And we have a supportive community. So this is a safe place where you can bring your challenges. And there are other people, other builders just like you, who are encouraging you, who are applauding you when you win, and who are giving you their experiences as well so that you can learn from each other. If you are tired of just kind of going through and doing the work the way you've always been doing it and you're ready to stop being a leader and to start building something amazing, the 100% collective is where you need to be.

Join us@brewershipuniversity.com community now. Back with the program. It's got to stop, y'. All, this has to stop because it's unsustainable because the, the outside challenges kids are facing and bringing into schools are more profound and they're not going to be fixed by our heroic effort. We got to start thinking about things at the system level. I am in no way arguing that the struggle isn't real. I am no way arguing that the kids, the kids are coming to us with some really heavy things. Nor am I arguing that it doesn't sometimes take time to turn things around for kids.

Right? I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that we need to examine the system and really ask the system. Does it need to take four years? Does it need to take three years? What would have to change for that redemption arc to happen in one semester? What would have to change so that instead of a comeback story, we set kids up for success in the first place so they didn't have to come back from anything. If you're saying, oh, the kids are coming to us consistently two grades behind in reading, and then we're leaving it up to teachers to try to make it up.

If they're coming to you two grades behind in reading, what could you do the moment that they showed up at your school to mitigate that factor right away so that mid semester, by the middle of the semester, they've caught up or they've made a year's worth of gain in half a year, what would have to happen instead of a kid coming in who's checked out and spends three years failing before we finally reach them to. How could we reach them? And at the very beginning, how could we reach them in 9th grade? What would have to happen for a kid to come to school all over the place, just dysregulated emotions in elementary school. And within a couple of weeks they have some strategies in place to regulate their emotions because a system is set up to make that happen. We are not helpless. And the narrative out there is telling you that you are. That there's only so much you can do.

And you've bought into that narrative. 

And the reason that narrative works is because it's partially true. There's only so much you can do if you're trying to run around and save one kid at a time. There is so much you can do if you start stepping back and interrogating the system over which you have control. When I was in the classroom, I started asking myself why kids had to fail. Why was it that every semester I was putting F's in my grade book and my. My colleagues were all telling me, you can't save them all. You can lead a course of water, but you can't make them drink?

I asked a different question. I said, what would have to happen? What would have to change in my classroom for failure to be the anomaly, not the norm? And then I began changing my classroom until I had no failures. When I was an administrator, I started asking different questions. We had kids coming in for the same thing, repeat offenders, over and over and over, for discipline. And I started asking questions, what has to happen to. There was a group of boys that I was seeing consistently, and one day I was meeting with a parent, and the mother was there and his older sister was there.

And it got tense to the point the boy just kirked out in the meeting, and the sister had to grab him by the neck and push him up against the wall. And everybody jumped. It was awful. Then I had to take the sister out the room because she was trying to choke him. And the sister, I'm calming her down in the other room. We're trying to calm the kid down, trying to figure out what we have to do, how we have to report it, because all of this is happen. Happening in our offices. And I take the sister in the other room, and she's talking, she's crying and she's screaming.

And she said something that changed everything. She just said that he doesn't have a man in his life. And I said, I don't have anything else to go on. Let's try that. We found a mentor for him and a group of other young boys just like him. And the mentor came in and met with him once a week. And in a month we had, in a matter of a month, we had no more referrals from those kids for the rest of the year. We could have said, well, we got to keep working with them and do this and do that in a discipline policy.

But we just went upstream and said, what's causing the problem? How do we stop the problem? And doing that stopped the problem. A lot of the things that you are tolerating in your school right now, you are tolerating because you buy into the narrative. Well, this is the way it's always been. You buy into the redemption arc narrative that says, well, it takes time, and I have to do work, and I have to spend all this heroic effort to try to save these kids. If you just took a step back and looked at the system and found what was happening in the system that was creating the conditions that made kids consistently fail and change the system, you solve the problem.

The hardest thing they have to talk about, you know, when I talk about buildership, because people don't believe me.

Right. I was talking to a group of principals last week, and I said, you know, we were talking about their vision and coaching week, and they were saying they were afraid to say what they really wanted because they didn't think it could happen. And I've been doing this work so long now that it almost makes. I don't want to say it. Sometimes I feel like people think I'm being arrogant when I'm just being factual. Your vision doesn't scare me 100%. Doesn't scare me because I've seen it happen. I've seen principals do it.

The problem is that people think that when I say 100%, that I have to make it happen, when in reality, once you set that 100% vision, your systems make it happen. When I talk about systems, it's not sexy. Everybody wants to be Jaime Escalante. Everybody wants to be Joe Clark. You know, they're not going to make a movie about a principal who is consistently looking at what's happening in the school, recognizing the flaws, putting systems in place to solve the problem completely, and then it just no longer is an issue. Nobody's making a movie about that. Everybody's making a movie about people eating ramen noodles and working second jobs and walking around screaming in a bullhorn with a baseball cap and giving themselves a heart attack. In order to save kids, we gotta stop y'.

All. Heroic effort isn't gonna do it anymore, but there is something you can do, and it's a lot easier than what you're currently doing. And it's a lot more effective, but it's not sexy. The redemption arc is sexy. We wanna tell that story. You know, we wanna sit around and say, yeah, I had this kid, and he was really struggling. And then we get all choked up and. But he now loves school, and it's.

I'm so proud of him. We all have that story. We want to tell that story at parties. Nobody wants to tell the story. You know, my kids were failing, and I. I revamped the discipline system and got a new master schedule. And now nobody's failing. Nobody's telling that story, because it's not sexy. We gotta let go of the redemption arc, and we've gotta decide, do I wanna be a hero or do I want to serve kids and prevent failure?

Do I want to rush in after a kid has already failed, or do I want to prevent kids from failing in the first place? We have got to stop balancing our need to make a difference at the sacrifice of kids having to continue to struggle, because you can make a far bigger difference from your systems that prevent kids from struggling in the first place. So that's what buildership is about. And the thing is, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And so we got some work to do, y'. All. We've got to dismantle this mythology that we've been holding on to, and we have got to start doing things different. Buildership is different than leadership.

Leadership tells you struggle is inevitable. 

Leadership tells you that success takes a long time. Leadership tells you that the only stories worth telling, our redemption stories, buildership, shifts the focus away from heroics and helps you focus on design. Because the results you're getting in your school right now are the results your school was designed to get. Somebody was telling me the other day, my teachers are complaining the kids can't do it. And I asked them a question. I said, well, are they telling the truth? And at first, I didn't want to answer.

And finally I said, can your kids do it? And they were like, well, not right now. I said, so then your teachers aren't lying. Why are you gaslighting them and telling them? Well, you know, the kids are saying the kids can't do it, and you're gaslighting them and telling them it's their fault. You just have to believe in them more. They're telling the truth. Okay?

So we know that. Those are the facts. Your kids can't do it. So what has to change in the system for that to no longer be a barrier to student success? We're not asking those questions. And Buildership is saying it's time to start asking those questions. It's time to stop gaslighting teachers and start listening to them and recognizing the reality that they face, but changing the system so that that is no longer a deterrent to making kids successful. Because when a student has to struggle years before succeeding, that struggle isn't noble.

It's a flaw in our system. It's telling us exactly where the system is misaligned. And the work of Buildership is to listen to that, to pay attention to that, to ignore the redemption arc, to rewrite that, to stop making failure a norm, and to start challenging the stories that we tell ourselves, to excuse a system that is no longer serving kids and then build a system that will. It's not about saying we just have to care more or we have to work harder. We've been telling ourselves that and telling our teachers that for years. It's time to start admitting the truth. We don't need to care more. We care already.

We don't need to work harder. 

We work pretty hard already. We need to design differently. This is not a care issue or a motivation issue. This is a design issue. And so we need to let go of that redemption arc story. We need to stop letting it drive our decisions. We need to interrogate our systems and do the real work to make success inevitable for every child.

Like a builder. I'll talk to you next time. Hey, if you're ready to get started being a builder right away, then I want to invite you to join us at Buildership University. It's our exclusive online community for builders just like you, where you'll be able to get the exact training that you need to turn your school into a success story. Right now, with the people and resources you already have. Inside, you'll find our best online courses, live trainings with me, tons of resources, templates and exemplars, and monthly live office hours with me where you can ask me anything and get my help on whatever challenge you're facing right now. If you're tired of hitting obstacle after obstacle and you're sick of tiny little incremental gains each year, if you're ready to make a dramatic difference in your school right now, then you need to join Buildership University. Just go to buildershipuniversity.com and get started writing your school success story today.

Hey, this is Robin, and thanks for listening to the show. Now, if you really enjoyed the content, would you do me a favor and share it with somebody else? Need to do is pull out your phone, click on the little three dots next to the show, and you'll see an option there to share the show. Click that, and send it to somebody else who could really benefit from what you learned here today. Not only are you going to look like a rock star, but you're going to be helping out somebody else who really could use this information. Plus, I will be so grateful. So just go ahead. Right now, click on those three dots and share the show.

Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.