Multiply Your Ability to Influence Teacher Behavior With This One Simple Tweak

You’re listening to School Leadership Reimagined, episode number 45. 

Welcome to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast...

where we rethink what's possible to transform your school. If you're tired of settling for small wins and incremental improvement, then stay tuned to discover powerful and practical strategies for getting every teacher in your school moving towards excellence. Now, here's your host, Robyn Jackson.

Hey Builders!

Welcome to another episode of the school leadership re-imagine podcast. I'm your host Robyn Jackson and today we are going to be talking about the only four ways that you can actually influence teacher behavior. You know, when I was a new administrator, I came into my job Gung Ho. I had been an instructional coach.

I thought, you know what? I'm going to go in here and I'm going to help teachers be better so that we can improve our school. And so I started to go into classrooms. I went through the whole training on how to give feedback and how to script when you were in classrooms and take all the nodes and then come back and CEI J my way into a post observation write up and then sit down with teachers and have those feedback conversations.

The problem was that those feedback conversations struck me as really false.

It felt like more of a scripted, choreographed dance than a genuine authentic conversation, I would say. So how do you think the class went and the teacher would say, I think it went great and kind of tell me why. Even if I didn't think it went great. I say, okay, that's interesting. Tell me more. And I try to ask these thought provoking questions so that teachers could be reflective. And they gave me these very scripted inauthentic answers because how can be reflective in a conversation with someone who holds the power to rate you and and determine whether or not you're going to have a job next year. And it just felt so fake. And what was worse when I went back into the classrooms, I didn't see much of a change. Even the teachers who genuinely engaged in those conversations and tried to make changes, a lot of times progress was really slow or they might make the change right after the conversation, but then a couple of months down the line they've reverted to what they were doing before.

You know, it just felt like a really, you know, it almost felt like I was pushing a big rock up a hill and I'd make a few little progress and then, you know, do something else in the Rockwood slowly roll back down the hill and then I have to push it up the hill again. It's anyone else felt that way about feedback, conversations and changing teachers' practice. You know, you go in, you give them feedback, you, you, you, you're genuine. You want them to do better. This, they're genuine. A lot of times they want to improve too, but sometimes they don't improve. Sometimes they resist your feedback. Sometimes they apply your feedback, but like in a way that doesn't quite like what you intended. Sometimes they apply it perfectly and things look great and then a few months later they're back to norm what they were doing before. And it just seems like this exercise in futility, yes we have to do it and yes we have to be in classrooms, but you know, d how often do we really see big changes from our being in classrooms?

How often do we really see progress happening, you know, staff wide.

And so I just got really, really frustrated and I thought that the problem was me. I thought that maybe I wasn't giving the right kind of feedback or maybe if I asked more reflective questions. And so I got books and I went to workshops and they all kind of told me the same thing. You have to ask these reflective questions. You have to sit down and go through and you give them something, you know, you give them something praiseworthy and then you give them something you know to work on and you end with praise.

And who knows? A friend of mine calls it kiss, kick, kiss feedback. You give them a kiss, then you kick them in the stomach and then you give them another kids and that just didn't feel right to me either. What I wanted was an authentic conversation with teachers. What I wanted was as a result of that authentic conversation with teachers, the teachers and I would partner together to improve what was happening in the classroom.

I wanted the teachers to trust me.

I wanted the teachers to see me as a real partner and to their growth. Though I wanted them to, to look forward to my feedback because it was supporting them rather than feeling threatened by my feedback. I guess it was thought I was asking too much and I was just cause I wasn't getting anywhere. I was doing everything I was trying to do and I wasn't getting anywhere.

And then one day I was in a teacher's classroom and it was pretty awful and the teacher was working really hard. This was what broke my heart. It was awful. But the teacher was doing her best. She was trying so hard to do well with the kids. She knew that I was in the classroom that day. She was giving me her best performance. It just, it just wasn't cutting it. And so I sat down with the teacher afterwards and well before I sat down the teacher, I sat down with my scripted notes and I was going through some things and I was just saying, you know what, what a time I was done, there was this laundry list of things that the teacher is going to have to do to improve. And I thought this is, this is really unfair. There's no way that this teacher is going to be able to make all of these improvements by the time I come back next.

And so I was sitting in the post observation conference with her and I was going through my, you know, reflective questions, how might you have, and I wonder about, and I'm curious, you know, all the things that I was taught to do and I get to see this teacher just get deflated and just feel defeated. And another one was laundry list and she was just kind of, I don't know if she was just, you could just see that she was giving up that she just felt like she'd given me her best and all I was doing was nitpicking at it and I just couldn't take it anymore. I just said, you know what, I'll tell you what all those things really happen. But in reality the biggest, most important thing that you need to work on is this.

If you work on this, all these other things will get fixed in time.

And so rather than kind of, you know, chasing all these other things, just work on this one thing, this I believe is the root of why your class didn't work. And I saw perk up and she said, that's interesting. And I, and so I started talking to her about why and we, she got excited, she got engaged in the conversation. We talked about how we could change that. I said, for now I just want you to work on that. If you just work on that between now and the time I come into your classroom. And a couple of weeks and we can just see improvement on that. I bet that a lot of other stuff would change. Well, she left. That was that morning, that afternoon I was in a meeting and she comes, you know, kind of like she burst into my office and I was in there with somebody who's, Oh, I'm so sorry.

I didn't mean to interrupt. I did it and it worked. I just want you to know. I said, it worked. I got all excited. She said it worked. I did it. It worked, and then she went back to her classroom. That one thing was tangible to her, that one thing actually made all the difference and it gave her the momentum that she needed to start addressing some of the other things that were happening in her classroom. 

And from that moment on, I started getting more and more committed to one thing, feedback.

I started realizing that the more feedback you give a teacher, the more overwhelmed the teacher becomes. And if I could help the teacher figure out what is the one thing that they need to adjust in their classroom in order to improve. Yeah, maybe that would make a difference. So I started giving teachers one thing, feedback and I started seeing a change in the observation post observation conversations because I was giving them just one thing to work on.

One tangible thing. I helped make a case for why that was the one thing and that was the conversation. Why this one thing versus that one thing. So rather than kind of sitting in passively receiving my feedback, now we're having this, this interactive conversation where we're talking about what is the root, what is really going on and how do we address that one thing and how do we improve that one thing? And so teacher started walking out of those conversations, feeling hopeful. HAP is one thing. It had to be the most important thing.

It couldn't be something superficial, it had to be meaningful. 

But when they made progress in that one area, the whole classroom change, all these other things that I were noticing starting to improve and no they weren't perfect yet. But once they got the first one thing, then we, they come back and we said, okay, now that that one things great and settled, here's the next one thing and here's the next one thing.

And it gave them hope and momentum and it made them feel like the changes I was asking of them were actually doable and tangible and achievable. It changed the nature of the conversation. So after a couple of months of giving one thing feedback, I'm feeling really good about myself and feeling like, you know, yeah, I'm making a difference, but here's what I started to notice. Some of the time I would give teachers one thing, feedback and even though they agreed it was something they need to work on, sometimes they didn't know how. And I needed to follow that out with, with more support. I thought the one thing feedback was the be all and end all United solved everything. But you know, sometimes teachers could hear the one thing, but then they needed real tangible support around that one thing in order to improve. Sometimes teachers heard the one thing agreed with the one thing, but then when they left that conversation, they didn't do anything about it.

They needed to be held accountable in some way.

Or not even held accountable. That sounds, you know, that's as to managerial. It wasn't that they needed to be held accountable. It's more that they need, needed help being accountable and staying accountable to the conversation. Because a lot of times they will leave my office fully intending to work on that one thing and then something else will come up or something else would happen and distract them and they, they didn't get to it between visits. So sometimes they needed that. Sometimes I was fighting other battles. Right. Even if teachers agreed with me and the feedback conversation that that was the one thing they need to work on. There were things happening in the culture that prevented them from actually making progress on those one and that one thing. And so I started to notice that the feedback conversations were great, but they weren't enough.

In fact, I started to realize that the same pattern was emerging over and over and over again. For some teachers it was feedback for other teachers, support, help move their practice. For other teachers it was accountability that helped them move their practice and for some teachers it was really a cultural issue. When I left the school administration role and I became a consultant, I started seeing the same thing happening in the schools that I support it. Where it was these four things that if you worked with work them in tandem. That's what changed teacher behavior. When we focused on just feedback, we made a little bit of progress when we, when we built accountability systems in place. Yeah, we made some progress when we've warded teachers and provided them professional growth and development.

We got a lot of people excited. We got a lot of people trained.

Some people actually implemented and kept it up. Other people fell off the wayside along the way, so it kind of worked and then sometimes there were cultural issues. Then if we address the cultural issues and we pulled the culture together, everybody's now ready to work, but they don't have the feedback, support and accountability that they need to kind of keep that work going. And so I started realizing that if you just looked at those things separately, then you were just kind of randomly putting out fires all the time. Oh, feedback here. Oh, support here. Oh, accountability here. If you practice them in tandem, if you created a process where those became your daily disciplines, then over time, schools transformed in the schools where the administrators practicing these four things consistently and pervasively, the school changed. That's when I realized all of these things are potent in and of themselves, but when they are combined, that's what makes them so powerful.

And so on today's episode, I really want to talk to you about how you combine them, what does that look like and how powerful that combination of these four disciplines can be in helping you transform your school. We're also going to talk about why you may be frustrated right now because you may be trying one or two or three of those things and how you can overcome that frustration pretty quickly. And then we're finally gonna talk about like how do you fit all of these things into your day. They are disciplines. Yes, we know we all need them, but we also have other things we have to do too. So how do you fit them into your day? So we're going to talk about that in just a second. But first I have a couple of reminders.

Reminder number one, I'm working on the new book 

This week was, not a productive week for me. I did not write nearly as much as I should have. So I'm playing catch up now with a book. I'm been doing a lot of thinking and one of the challenges that I'm having right now is that I am trying to capture some of the frustrations that I've heard from administrators over the years around moving their schools. And so I would love it if you have a particular frustration that you're dealing with. Could you just send me a note on Linkedin or on Facebook's? On linkedin? I'm Robyn Jackson. I'm also Robyn Jackson on Facebook. If you could send me just a little note and tell me what's your biggest frustration right now with regard to moving your school? What is, what do you feel is the biggest thing that's keeping you from transforming your school? And for those of you who have schools who are, you know, they're often, you're already doing a great job, but you still feel this kind of sense of frustration because you really feel like your school could be doing better.

I'd love to hear about that frustration too, because a lot of what we do at mindsets is really around helping schools go from being good to great. In fact, some of our ideal clients are our schools that are already pretty good, but somewhere in your heart, you know that your school could be better, and the challenge that you're having is that a lot of people are pretty satisfied with the status quo of your school. You've got some things that are working really well, but people don't feel the same sense of urgency that your school could be even better. You've gotten kind of, you know, stagnant in a way and everybody's working hard.

Everybody does a great job, but you feel like they could be doing such a better job for kids.

And so those are kind of some of our ideal clients. I love if you are in that situation, I'd love to hear from you a little bit more about just articulating that because I think that that's going to be a big part of one of the chapters I'm working on right now.

And if that is you and you are filling that frustration, I also want to invite you to come to builders lab because a of people come to builders lab are in your same situation. We don't really have a lot of people come to builder's lab where their schools are just disasters. They can't get away. They don't have the time. I think builder's lab could help people who are in that situation too. It's just that most of the time people don't usually come to builders lab in that situation. People come to builders lab because they have something new that they're trying to implement in their schools and they want some support around making that work in their schools or they come to builders lab because they have this school that's kind of going okay, but they really want to take it to the next level and they are struggling to find a way to really create that sense of urgency to figure out what do we need to be working on. Right now our school kind of functions pretty well as it is, but I know it can be better, but I just, I don't really have a process for how we go from good to great. 

Those are the schools that that we typically have the biggest success stories with.

Schools that are stuck in that, you know, white underneath greatness, you know that you know, it just takes just a little thing to push you over the edge and you're not sure what that thing is. Well, I'm here to tell you that builder's lab is that thing because three days we work together. We take a good look at this school that you have right now and the builder's blueprint is this super powerful tool that we use to kind of map out what your best next move should be. And a lot of times people come and they're like, oh, that's simple and I don't really need that.

But then when they sit down and they go through the process, they realize that there are all these things under the surface that they hadn't been paying attention to that are huge factors in, in, in what their best next move is going to be. They start to understand why they're stuck and then they have a pathway to get unstuck. They also learn these disciplines. So we're going to be talking about today and I'm getting a lot of feedback from people that build this lab right now who are starting to apply their disciplines, these disciplines in their schools at the beginning of the school year. And they're already reporting about what a huge difference it makes when you practice these disciplines. In tandem, so if you are interested, we have one more builders lab this year and you need to be there.

October is a great time to come because you have been in your school for a month or two.

By now you kind of know what your challenges are going to be. You know what your role, your goals are for the year and so coming and taking some time out at the very beginning of this school year to sit down to map out your, your pathway to figure out how to overcome some of the challenges that have started bubbling up so that you can see a dramatic difference this school year. We think about it. You could be sitting in your office six months from now at the end of the school year and he could be looking at your school and saying, Oh, I didn't think we could do it, but this is an amazing, this surpassed everything that I thought we could do this year. You could have this amazing success story, so I'm inviting you to join us at builder's lab and to get your tickets. Just go to mindsteps INC com slash builders dash lab. That's mindsteps inc com slash builders dash lab and you can also give us a call in the office at (888) 565-8881 that's 188-EIGHT-FIVE-6 five, eight, eight, eight one.

Okay, so now let's talk about these four disciplines. 

Now I've done episodes on the four disciplines before each one individually. I've done episodes on feedback, I've done episodes on support, I've done episodes and accountability. I've done episodes on culture and I'll make sure that I link to those episodes in the show notes, but I want to talk today about how they work together. You see when you give a teacher feedback, you go on a teacher's classroom, you look at what's happening, you give the teacher one thing, feedback that helps the teacher focus on what do I need to be doing right now to improve what is the root cause of why my classroom is either working or not working.

It doesn't matter whether the teacher's effective or not. You always want to give them root cause. One thing, feedback and then based on that one thing, feedback. This is the thing I need to be focused on right now, but that's not enough. Just giving them that feedback gives them information. Maybe they're able to apply that information to improve their classroom, but in most cases, yeah they need something else. So after you give them that feedback, you need to follow it up by giving them support around the one thing. Feedback, so not generic support, not just sending everybody to the same PD, but really focusing on what support does that teacher need in order to address the one thing that you told them that they needed to address and that one thing, feedback. So now not only are they giving, are you giving them the feedback, this is here's where you need to work.

You're also setting them up to be successful in that area by giving them the appropriate support.

Now your support needs to be differentiated. You can't just, you know, kind of throw the same support at everybody. You need to look at where the teacher is and figure out how to best support the teacher, where the teacher is. But you give them that support. Now after you've given them the feedback so they know what they need to work on and you've given them support. So now they have the ability to implement better in the classroom. The next thing they need is accountability. And by accountability I don't mean chasing and checking and correcting. That is crazy. Making that is going to keep you completely tethered to your desk and paperwork and running after teachers. No, that's not what I'm talking about. True Accountability means that teachers do the right thing even when you're not looking.

So how do you set it up? So the right thing becomes the easiest, most automatic response to the work. So what systems can you put in place so that teachers can be accountable to improving in their classrooms? And you don't have to chase and check and correct. They're doing it automatically. There are systems that you can put in place and you can listen to that accountability episode and hear that. So you give them the, so they know what they need to work on. You give them the support so they can work on it and be successful at it. You give them the accountability so that they can keep it up and continue it even when it's hard, even when you stop checking, even when there are other distractions going on. And then finally you create a culture that contains, that provides another layer of support where everybody is improving and everybody's committed to improving. You don't have people who are saying, I don't need that.

I'm already a good teacher. 

Your best teachers are committed to improving and you don't have people who are retired on the job and just sitting and waiting it out until they can leave. No, even your worst teachers are improving. The culture creates a pull towards everybody continuously getting better and better and better and better. When those four things work together, it's so powerful. The challenge is that a lot of times we pick and choose which one we that we were working on. So, you know, we pick something like, oh, I'm going to get into more classrooms. And we focused on getting into classrooms and we give teachers feedback. But then we don't follow that out with the support and accountability to help them act on our feedback. Or we say, you know, we're going to give teachers more support this year.

So we bring instructional coaches into the building and instructional coaches are working with teachers and they're there supporting them. Or we bring PD into the building and pay a whole bunch of money for PD. Or we do book studies and we provide all the support. But then teachers are never really expected to apply that support consistently in our classrooms.

There's no expectation that they're going to change their behavior. 

And so the teachers go through the PD and, and after the PD is done, then we're on to the next professional development. So last year we worked on rigor. Okay, great. Yay, rigor. And now next year we're working on project based learning, Woo. Good project based learning. And then next year we're working on culturally responsive practices and Oh, Yay for that. And then we just jumped from one thing to the next each year where we're not holding teachers accountable or sometimes we put accountability in place when we, we are so focused on accountability that we're just chasing teachers and checking them all the time and correcting them and writing them up and running paperwork.

And we're never helping teachers be accountable to themselves accountable to their commitment to our students. And so we are running ourselves ragged trying to check them on teachers and go into classrooms with our clipboards and our checklists and we are not helping teachers be accountable themselves, which means that even if they apply what they've learned, they're not doing it in a genuine, authentic way. And the moment you stop checking, they stopped doing or we work on our culture so we get our culture, everybody kind of focused on the right thing and, and, and committed to doing the right thing for kids in the right way. But we don't set the culture up for success by providing the support mechanisms or the accountability mechanisms in the culture so that we can sustain what we'd done in the culture. You see. If they don't all work together. If you're doing one, okay, why did this, while you know, I try giving teachers feedback and it didn't work. 

Maybe it didn't work because you just tried feedback. 

Or I give teachers all the support and they don't do anything. They never change. Maybe they're not changing because your support isn't coupled with accountability. Or I try to hold my teachers accountable and this created this toxicity and everybody's fighting me all the time. Well, maybe because you're giving them accountability, which are not also giving them the feedback and support that helps them to be more accountable. Or maybe you're working on the culture and everybody you know gets along, but nobody's doing anything. Everybody's nice and happy and we don't fight anymore, but you know the instruction still not improving. Well, maybe that's because you didn't couple all of that with the feedback and the support and accountability that will sustain all of that culture work you're doing.

You say if you don't do them in 10 of all four things together, if you're not practicing these disciplines as daily disciplines, then they're not going to make a significant change in your school. I've seen it. I've seen people do one thing or focus on this thing or that thing and they're not practicing all for it. They don't have systems in place to support all four. They're not consistently looking at, okay, how do I need to give them feedback?

Okay, now that they've forgotten the feedback, what kind of support do they need? 

People aren't kind of tracing this all the way through for teachers. And when you don't do that, that's you're not going to change teacher behavior. The only way that you can have a significant impact on teacher behavior is you have to practice all four and you have to make them disciplines.

So here's what I mean about disciplines. A lot of times we say, yeah, I need to get in the classrooms more. And yeah, I'm putting almost governor next week and I'm gonna try to get to it. If nothing else happens or you know, we have, we really need to do support. So I know we've got two PD days a year, so I'm going to try to schedule some people to come in or you know, maybe we'll do a book study once a month at our staff meeting or, you know, yeah, I know we've got to do some accountable systems in place where we've, you know, like had to make sure I don't run a foul or the union or, you know, yeah, I know we need to do some things for the culture, so maybe I'll get some doughnuts on the first day and then that's it for the whole year.

We can't do these things haphazardly. They have to be a part of our daily discipline. 

In other words, whenever you go to work today, you need to figure out who needs feedback and how can I get it to them, who need support and how can I provide it? Who Needs Accountability and what system can I put in place to create a more accountable culture and then what's happening in the culture and how do I make sure I keep the culture focused on the right thing every single day. What we do is we try to squeeze these things in as we can when there isn't a discipline problem or when there isn't paperwork being bets do or or when I don't have a parent coming in. No, these things go first every day. When you're looking at your day, what's a successful or not successful? The only way you know is did you spend some time today working on getting teachers the right kind of feedback?

Did you spend time today getting support to teachers? Did you spend time today being accountable and making sure that you have systems that help other people be accountable? Did you spend time today working on nurturing a healthy culture? If you don't do these four things every single day, if these four things are not at the top of your agenda every single day, they will fall by the wayside and will these four things fall by the wayside. You lose your most powerful tool for influencing teacher behavior. Cause let me tell you what doesn't work. Writing teachers up after the fact, they didn't get the feedback. Support, accountability. You didn't do anything about the culture and then you're just frustrated with them because they're not working and so you write them up or have you done your part?

Have you done everything that you could do to help that teacher be successful before you wrote them up?

Here's what else doesn't often work if you don't have these things in place. Forget about putting a teacher on a performance plan because guess what? The teacher is going to do what the teacher does to improve so that they can get off the performance plan and then the teacher is going to revert right back to what they were doing before because you didn't do the real work of changing that teacher's behavior. You say we've been taught to do things that are bandaids, they don't actually fix the problem. They, they sweep the problem under the rug or they mask the problem or they create more paperwork so it feels like we're doing something about the problem. But if you really want to solve the problem, the only four things you have available are feedback, support, accountability and culture and you can't just practice them when they feel good or practice them when you have time.

They have to be daily disciplines. Let me tell you about a couple of schools that I've worked with who've actually done this where the leaders actually made the shift from kind of haphazardly applying these things to making them daily disciplines. One principle that came to builder's lab went back and set up systems in place, systems to get into classrooms every single day and that random classrooms, he had a system for which classroom he was going to get into and then they created a spreadsheet. So we give you a template, a builders lab that creates a spreadsheet so that you can keep track of where every teacher is, what feedback are giving every single teacher in your building, what support you're giving that teacher, what kind of accountability is in place. And then we also give you a spreadsheet to look at what can you be doing for the culture?

What are you putting into the culture to make sure the culture supports continuous improvement. 

And so he applied this spreadsheet and at his admin team meetings, every Monday his admin team sat down and they went through that spreadsheet. Every single teacher, okay, where's his teacher this week? What support is this teacher getting? What feedback is this teacher getting? What accountability, how, what systems are we doing in place to make sure that everybody's being accountable? Cause it goes both ways. How are we being accountable to the teacher and how are we helping the teacher be accountable to herself? And then what are we doing to feed the culture? What's happening in the culture? And so every Monday at his admin meetings, they went through the entire staff. They went through the spreadsheet, they had their marching orders for the week. Okay, so this teacher, the support isn't working or we need the coach to get in with them.

This teacher they need another system to be accountable because what they're doing right, what we're doing right now, it's not working. Okay, we'll work with that teacher. This teacher hasn't gotten feedback in a while. We need to go and check and see how that teacher's doing because she's working on this and we wanna make sure that she's making progress or series and things in the culture bubble up. Okay, so what do we need to do at, well, let's send out a memo or let's, let's sit down with the teachers at lunch or let's, you know, the teachers are feeling a little overwhelmed way now. What can we do to kind of support that? They were doing, having those meetings every single week and they were making decisions that supported all four. And then every single administrator and coach who was in that meeting, they had their marching orders every single day.

They had to say, okay, what are we doing around feedback? 

What are we doing with support? What are we doing with accountability? What are we doing in the culture? And every single day they sat down, they had a weekly meeting to kind of said, okay, here's our game plan and here's what we're working on. Then every single day to say, okay, what did you do today around feedback, support, accountability, and culture as a 15 minute meeting, they called it a daily stand up every single day. They reported on what they did around those four disciplines, because they did that in the space of one school year. They saw dramatic growth. This is a school that was a c school, so they had already kind of made some changes to get them out of failure into c, but there were, they didn't want to be an average score. They felt there could be better and so within one year they went from being a c score to being an aim minus school. Let me tell you what else happen. 

The culture dramatically shifted.

Well, we went back to do focus groups with the kids. The kids said, I don't know what's, what's happening this year is just different. He, we're learning so much more. We want to be in class. The teachers, when we did focus groups with the teachers, the teachers were excited about their work. They were excited about improving test scores were going up. Innovation was happening in all the different departments in this massive high school. The school was on the move because they practiced the discipline. They didn't do all these kind of bandaid fixes to try to move their school up in status or raised test scores. You know where you work really hard for a little bit and then you see the gain and then as soon as you start working, the game drops. These gains were permanent and guess what else happened? Every teacher in this building went up one level on their evaluation instrument in a target area that year. 

Every single teacher saw progress. 

Now people think that's unheard of when I tell that story, but that story is repeated time and time and time again. When you practice these disciplines, it's not one thing or this thing we're wearing ourselves out because we're only focusing on one or two or three. It isn't until you bring all four together that you really see the dramatic gains. So my question to you is this, what are you going to do this year to make disciplines, daily disciplines in your practice? Are you going to start the day and go into work and say, okay, before I do anything else, what can I do around feedback, support, accountability and culture? Are you going to get together with an admin team and each week really focused on what did you do last week that worked?

What do you need to do this week with regard to your staff? 

And then every single day reporting, where are we making progress on this? If you're just by yourself, what are you going to do each day? How will you arrange your schedule? In fact, you should be blocking off time on your schedule every single day for feedback, support, accountability and culture every single day. And then when you get these interruptions, they have to wait because you have to do this work because this is the most important work that you do. You know, one of the challenges of being an administrator is that when you're a teacher, you have direct impact on students' performance. When you're administrator, you have indirect impact. You have to get things done through other people, and we're wasting our time trying to chase and check and correct people or force people or drag people to the goal doesn't work.

The tools that we have as leaders don't work, they don't change behavior. They create a lot of distrust. They create a lot of paperwork for us. They just don't work. What works instead is that you are consistently practicing these four disciplines every single day, all together, making them work together. Because when you have one thing, it may be powerful, but when you put them together so that they're four things that you're doing consistently and pervasively, you magnify the power of that tool. You make it so much more potent and amazing and strong. So I want to challenge you this week that as you're looking at your week, as you're thinking about your day, what could you do today to give people the feedback they need? What could you do to provide the right kind of support for people?

What can you do to be more accountable or help others be more accountable?

And what can you do to feed the right culture? You practice these things every day and I promise you you're going to see a change in your teacher's behavior this year, but you have to do them together. You can't just pick and choose, I'm only going to do feedback today. No, you have to practice them together every single day. And when you do, you all start to improve and change teacher's behavior because you're not just going in and randomly applying strategies. You are practicing real discipline and you're doing it like a builder. All right?

That does it for this episode, 

but I want to remind you to get your tickets to builders lab. If you're intrigued about how you practice these four disciplines, what you should be doing each day, how you kind of bring it all together. We teach you how to do that, our builders labs, so when you leave you actually have the system that you need to bring all these four things together, these four disciplines together and practice on a day to day basis and you can get your tickets for builders lab at mindsteps INC com slash builders dash lab. That's mindstepsinc.com/builders-lab. He can also give us a call at (888) 565-8881 if you want to order tickets. All right, let's talk about next time. This season we're talking about the basics of Buildship.

Next time we're going to shift.

We've already talked about purpose this time we've talked about how do you get your committed people and next time we're going to talk about a pathway. We're going to talk about why it's really important to have a pathway and how to keep from working on the wrong thing. Because what I find when I'm working with people, a lot of times I'll pick an improvement measure or something they're going to focus on for the year and they've actually picked the wrong thing. So next time we're going to learn how to pick the right thing to work on at the right time, and you're going to learn how to do it, how to choose your pathway like a builder.

I'll talk to you next time.

Bye for now. See you next time. 

Thank you for listening to the School Leadership Reimagined podcast for show notes and free downloads visit https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com/

School Leadership Reimagined is brought to you by Mindsteps Inc, where we build master teachers.