It was a warm fall day. The teachers were slowly trickling into the 4th floor Art room. It was our biggest room to fit us all and tables to host discussions. I also picked this room for the art on the walls. My art teacher was such a hard worker. A bit hesitant to trust others, especially me who was her boss. She wanted to be great at her work but feedback was always a struggle to receive.
I just spent two years trying to set the culture of the school. I had entered a chaotic environment. For instance, my first day on the job with a mid-year replacement situation, almost half my teachers called out and the fire alarm was pulled 7 times. I may be exaggerating the number of teachers who called out but that fire alarm number was a definite 7 because after 6 I thought we were done. Number 7 almost broke me.
When the staff got settled in the art room, I took a last look at my hour agenda of professional learning. Then it happened. 45 minutes got converted into a venting session. Now, with my wisdom of today, I would never let complaining happen during my planned meeting. I learned the power of norms and protocols. Regardless, we spent 75% of my meeting talking about how out of control the students were and that teachers couldn’t do their jobs.
In my mind, we had solely focused on discipline and culture for two years (technically two and a half), how can we still be talking about this? In addition, the school was in a much better place. Yet, the complaining came at the same rate as the last 2 years. I was convinced there was no way to end this topic. That’s because I believed my teachers. What leader wouldn’t listen to their people?
As I reflected on our staff meeting, one question kept coming up, “How bad is it?” I realized we had no metric besides qualitative feedback from teachers. It would take me a while, but I realized we needed to build a system to find out how “bad” it was.
So we did. We ended up requiring all discipline issues to be recorded online. I know I say this with ease. It did take some work to get people to be consistent with recording and non-bias in their write-ups. By the time the system ran well, we had something that I learned was critical to any school issue. It was data. We had data. We had data on incidents, consequences, which teachers were removing which students, and so much more.
I learned that some teachers who have bad days like to vent. Some love venting in a public setting, especially when they can easily win the audience. I also learned that focusing our attention on students and not on instruction, teachers can keep using ineffective routines and strategies without changing a thing. Blaming your instructional problems on students or even external issues allows teachers to avoid reflecting on what they can do differently. That is where strategic teaching lives, between execution and reflection. Teachers will never get better if they are never looking at what they can do differently.
In the end, we learned that the discipline problems were not across the board. It was a few teachers and only several students. It exploited the bad teachers even more and it gave us perspective on how we could further support our students. When we learned that certain teachers or certain subjects triggered behaviors, we could develop specific remedies or interventions to get students engaged with learning.
Data-driven instruction changed my pedagogical practices. Data-driven decision-making changed my life, especially as a leader who wanted to make sure his followers enjoyed coming to work. When you can identify the specific causes, you can be strategic about solutions. Teachers are not growing? Are you collecting observation data intending to measure growth?
When we do not use data to measure the impact and adjust, lingering issues linger or even evolve into fires. This means we remain in the position of putting out fires versus preventing fires. If constituents do not have a clear lens of the current state, then problem-solving and solution-seeking are impaired. Practices, methods, and systems stay stagnant. Leaders need to prioritize matching initiatives and diagnostics of an issue to a metric. Time needs to be set aside to analyze that data. The analysis and solutions must be shared with all constituents. It’s time to nip the lingering issue in the bud. Be proactive by finding the metric, collecting that data, and strengthening your actions with evidence-based decision-making. Good Luck!
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