Leading for Change

(Cross-posted at Change Agency )

In a recent Education Week commentary, Tony Wagner (Harvard Change Leadership Group, author of "Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools) proposes and discusses 5 "Habits of Mind" for education leaders that can lead to a deeper understanding of the challenges we face as well as more effective strategies for dealing with them.  Wagner proposes that these 5 questions be asked constantly in our daily work as a way to deepen our critical problem-solving skills -- and as a way to model "Habits of Mind" for our students:

• What is the problem we are trying to solve, or the obstacle we are trying to overcome, and what does it have to do with improving teaching and learning?

• What are our strategies for solving this problem, and how and why do we think implementation of these strategies will cause the change that’s needed—what’s our “theory of action”?

• Who (teachers, parents, students, community) needs to understand what, in order to “own the problem” and support the strategies we’re implementing?

• Who is accountable for what for implementation of this strategy to be successful, and what do they need to be effective?

• What evidence (observable changes in short-term outcomes or behaviors) will we track that will tell us whether our strategies are working?

What I like about the questions above is that they ask us to dig deeper into the problems we face in order to truly understand the problem as opposed to just understanding it at a surface level.  Understanding at a surface level frequently results in proposing incorrect solutions because we don't understand the real problem we are trying to address.  I find this frequently when we begin discussing issues, but don't necessarily share the same definition of the issues or problems -- we may be using the same terminology, but for each of us the terminology may have different meanings.  Wagner gives us an example from his work:

Einstein once said that “the formulation of the problem is often more important than the solution.” Too often in education, we start with answers before we have understood the problem we’re trying to solve.

Working with the Small Schools Project in Seattle, I recently advised a talented group of district teams that had been funded by the Gates Foundation to move their systems toward the goal of “all students college-ready.” Most had been hard at work on this goal for a year and a half when we suggested that they make time to revisit their change strategies. We asked them to discuss in their teams what they saw as the most significant obstacles to getting more students ready for college, and then to see how their list of initiatives stacked up to the problems they identified. Many were surprised to find that they did not agree on what “college-prepared”—a key element of college-ready—really meant. Nor had they considered what might be the most significant obstacles to this goal. As they discussed these issues, and then looked at all of their activities, they began to see that many of the latter did not address the barriers they’d belatedly identified.

For a number of people on the teams, the half-day deliberations were as challenging as any they’d experienced in our work together, and this was just a start. Having had these discussions, the teams were now better positioned to consider the final three questions from the list above.

In his example, the teams he worked with did not share the same definition for "college-ready."  They also had issues with not identifying the same obstacles, but I believe many of our problems begin with not having shared definitions of the terms we are using to describe our problems.

How many other terms do we toss around in our daily work without having hard discussions about what those words mean to us?  How do you define the following terms?  Do your colleagues share the same definition?

College-Ready
Achievement
Assessment
Authentic Learning
Collaborate
Student-Centered
Distributed Leadership
Technology Integration
Web 2.0
21st Century Skills
Global
Community/Parental Involvement
Computer Literate
Literacy
Cooperative Learning
School Improvement
Critical Thinking
Problem Solving
Curriculum Mapping
Dropout Rate
Data-Driven Decision Making
Hands-on Activities
Intervention
Rigor

How often are we struggling with solving problems simply because we haven't fully articulated the problem by developing real shared understanding of the problem?

Comments

[Tracy Rosen]

I am not a big fan of Tony Wagner's Habits of Mind or any other approach that places too much emphasis on a problem.

The more time we spend looking for problems the more of the problem we are likely to see.

Really.

There is evidence of this. If you like I can cite some references.

What if we focused on potential rather than problem? As soon as we begin inquiry into something we are triggering a change.

The very act of observing something changes it - it could be a change towards a positive potential. Wouldn't that be fabulous!