Insights from the Field: Building a Solid Learning Foundation for Both Students and Teachers

Listen to the full interview, and we invite you to read the highlights below where we make connections to RBT’s work.  Use these ideas to deepen your own thinking about the characteristics and actions of successful leaders who create workplace cultures that feature trust, foster courage, and focus on the professional growth of the adults who work there.

David Guzmán:  At our school currently I would say, about 3 quarters of our staff are within their first 3 years of teaching.  I think what you see quite often in a lot of schools is people working in silos and like these basically pockets of excellence. So, you have an amazing teacher who really knows what he or she is doing, and sometimes that teacher can't even articulate themselves what they do so well.  As a school leader. you realize that the day to day is less about kids, and your day to day is more about impacting adults so those adults can have an impact on kids.  I really try to think from a systems level, I don't want to have just that one good teacher or 2 good teachers.  So how? How do we leverage training so that we're all speaking the same language?  For the academic piece, we wanted to build with RBT, so that we're all speaking the same language, and all have this baseline approach … so that you don't just have pockets of excellence, but that you're creating a building where there's a culture where there's a clear understanding of what expectations are, and that we're moving toward as a school.

A successful school adult culture is rooted in trust.  

As Jon Saphier observes, “School leadership literature repeatedly identifies trust as essential for creating high-gain schools — schools where student gain scores are more than one year’s worth of achievement at a given grade level. These are schools that get results beyond what their demographics would have predicted (e.g. Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Easton, 2010). When educators trust their leaders and each other, academic achievement rises. Trust gives school leaders the respect and credibility they need for educators to listen to, collaborate with, and follow them.”  (Saphier, Learning Forward, 2018) 

But how do you build that trust?  David Guzmán says it is all about modeling we’re all on the field together - we are all learners.

David Guzmán: You look for early adopters, you look for people who are okay with putting themselves in the hot seat, so to speak. And that person or those folks don't always have to necessarily be your best. They just have to be the people who are willing to be risk takers and to be vulnerable.

I think sometimes what we as administrators say that teachers should be doing for students, we don't always practice for our staff. We saw a lot of growth in our students when we differentiated, and I wanted to just differentiate for our staff.  We allowed staff to select a topic they wanted to get better at.  When you have a voice, and what you're picking for your faculty meeting Pd, you're going to learn more.   There's going to be a greater buy in, because this is something that you want to learn and grow in.

So what I try to model for all of my staff is that we are all learners. Right? So We should be giving our scholars countless repetitions and opportunities to receive failure as feedback. But likewise we should also be modeling that for the adults.

I think one of the things that I've consistently tried to model is that you have to create spaces where people feel comfortable to learn. 

When I think about my time as a teacher, and now for over a decade, as a principal, there is this paradigm in education, where when Admin comes into your room, someone's out to get you.  For the life of me I've been trying to do away with that mindset and do away with that culture in my buildings. So, I try to model a space where we're doing this for adults to support your growth and development.  And we shouldn't be catching kids like it shouldn't be an ‘ I got you’ for kids either.

As far as coaches and administrators working with teachers, there has to be a relationship there. But not only does it have to be a relationship, there has to be a presence. You have to know what's going on on the field and the field for us is the classroom. So the busy work, the emails, the putting together of collaborative planning that has to be before or after school.  During the day we need to do our best to be intentional about being on the field so that our feedback is meaningful.

So my expectation that I hold myself and coaches accountable to is that we're in the classrooms, and then we're giving feedback.

Sometimes you're dealing with a staff who's reluctant to change. So, to be quite honest, there are certain adults who felt a little overwhelmed, and maybe not so, trusting of myself and my Admin team and coaches and a handful of us who were new to the building.  So you know, that's always a hurdle that you have to get over, but you can only control what you can control and just ensure that people know that the purpose is to build and develop them. 

I guess the ugly side of school turnaround is that unfortunately, even after 3 or 4 cycles not showing improvement we have to hold certain adults accountable, and I feel like I model that, and I try to do it in the most fair, just, and compassionate way that I can. Obviously some people will be on the receiving end of it, don't don't view it that way, but I really do my best to do it in a way that I want to be led, and to follow in a way that I want to be followed. 

You have to figure out how you can push people to make them a little uncomfortable -  that whole zone of proximal development. You have to make people stretch a little bit out of their comfort zone.  

Some of that ugly work of school turnaround, figuring out who needs to be here, who wants to be here, who needs to go? It took 2 years, but now I think the people who remain buy into the vision, and they're on board because they're excited about joining a team that has a certain level of excitement and passion for the work of serving kids in a marginalized community.

As RBT’s blog post The Importance of Personal Relationship Building - Especially Now points out, Personal Relationship Building (PRB) “means that students feel known and valued by their teacher: known means we know a lot about them, their life, their interests, their hopes, their dreams, their struggles; valued means students believe we think they are worthwhile individuals and we want them to succeed. As a result of these conditions and other behaviors (respect, fairness, etc.) our interactions with them are characterized by mutual regard and respect. 

PRB is the foundation of high expectations teaching. When we invest in building personal relationships, students want to meet our expectations. A few driven students, of course, may want to “do well” and get good grades with or without PRB. They want to win the game of school and cross the finish line ahead of the pack. But for students in the middle and, for sure, students at the bottom of the achievement distribution, PRB has a huge influence on their motivation and the effort they put forth. If we build relationships and then convince students they have the capacity to grow their ability in a subject and give them the tools to actualize that belief, wonders can happen.”

Sending these three messages and building personal relationships successfully with each and every one of our students is no small task. As Mr. Guzmán points out, his school utilizes many adults to form connections with students and support them all the time, not just the challenging ones. 

David Guzmán: I think what we find quite often is that we are very reactionary when it comes to students, and their misbehaviors or outbursts. And now that child is only seeing the adult when they are having a down moment. So you know, at every grade level we know who are the frequent flies, or we know who the scholars are who may have more challenging home situations, or they just present more challenges i\n terms of their behaviors. Sometimes I think we always focus on these like 5 to 10 students in our building as opposed to focusing on the other 90. In my previous school, we identified maybe 20 kids to 30 kids tops out of 350 to 400 and assigned them to like 5 different adults who weren't teachers but who were more people who just supported in classrooms and supported with hallway transitions and things like that. These scholars need 2 to 3 touches per day, and when you catch them doing good, I need you to call their parents. We had to be proactive and intentional about connecting with the kids before there was an issue, so that the relationship was there. So that when there was an issue later that week here's actually a connection that I have to this adult because he or she checks in on me multiple times a day.  And having someone else who can take that off a teacher's plate so they can focus on teaching and learning is something that is a little bit more teacher-friendly helps build rapport with the families, and I think trust with the families. But, more importantly, it helps the kids who are outliers to have an adult that they feel connected to.

This mentality, that we have in education that if a child misbehaves that you send them to the Administrator's office, how could we be productive as a school if the leadership is just talking to an 8 year old about why they're crying, and it's not to downplay that at certain instances, of course, as the principal in my AP, are we going to deal with things like that,  but that can't be like the majority of our time.  Our time has to be focused on establishing a strong SEL and strong academic culture, and that only happens when we're intentional about how we spend our time, and it can’t be the  revolving door because someone got into a fight downstairs, and someone's having a temper tantrum upstairs. Then we can never be really successful.  So, hiring these people allows us to have people who can deal with some of the lower level infractions. And then, when it's something that needs to be raised to the Admin level, we'll deal with it. It just gives admin a lot more time to be intentional about what the real work is, which is being in classrooms and focusing on the vision of the school.

New teachers face a host of challenges as they grapple with the realities of the classroom: curricular requirements, instructional demands, student interactions and learning needs, assessments, discipline, and a constant flood of decision points.  For some, the experience is overwhelming.  But it doesn’t need to be. New teachers more quickly gain their footing in schools where a strong workplace culture is in place. In these school cultures, novice teachers find essential resources and support that dramatically improve their odds for success. They routinely have productive encounters with colleagues and learn from coaches, specialists, and colleagues who lend their expertise.  They are led by savvy administrators who understand how the teaching and learning cycle works and protect them from unnecessary or burdensome administrative tasks.  And in these cultures, experienced teachers also find room for professional growth and collegiality. But these work spaces don’t occur by magic – they are hard-won through strong leadership, opportunities for collaboration and learning with colleagues, and a system of teacher support that features productive observations, feedback, and equitable evaluation. 

Just as effective teachers understand the importance of balancing comfort and challenge in the instructional tasks they ask students to complete, so too do leaders understand that some level of productive struggle is to be expected as teachers work to expand their instructional repertoires and develop new practices.  When appropriately calibrated and supported by instructional leaders,  this “struggle” not only reveals to teachers what to learn, but also provides them with valuable experiences in how to learn. Most importantly, this process of continual professional learning increases teachers’ ability to impact student learning.

David Guzmán shares his approach for developing a culture of support along with accountability for student learning.

David Guzmán: I think I tried to use the same mantra that we use for kids right, like if a kid struggles on an assessment, we don't penalize him and send them off.  If a teacher struggles with their data, we need to figure out how to support that teacher until we've exhausted that. And then, as I said previously, there may need to be more different talks around accountability.  But right now I'm doing my best to really try to figure out how to motivate and inspire teachers.

Some teachers are reluctant, and some teachers don't want to hear that only 3% of their students are performing at grade level, and then I give one of my basketball speeches, and I say, well, you can't coach the game if you don't have a scoreboard to look at .  Like if it's the fourth quarter, and you're winning by 10 points for 10 min you're working very differently than if you're losing by 10. So you have to know. Some of my teachers don't like that I post the data throughout the building and there's a lot of red on those bar graphs.  But you can't be ashamed of who you are. That's one of the most powerful things you do, because I noted that in one of these little write ups here that the data has to be public, and at the same time not used to shame people, but to inspire them.  And if it isn't public you can't do that.

We actually did cycles of walks where we just didn't pop in for small groups, but we went to teachers, and we said, We're not expecting to be a savant at this. We're not expecting you to be great. We just want to see a baseline. So myself, my 3 assistant principals, and my 3 coaches, we went into every single teacher's group over like a 3 to 4 week period to see 20 to 30 min of their small group. This helps us identify who knows what they're doing. Who may need some tweaks? Who really needs a lot of help, and who needs to be held accountable? But just by doing that, it gave us insight to who are the people in our building who are strong that can potentially lead this work with some of their colleagues or observations,  but we did it in a fashion that at least I would hope that was non-threatening, non invasive by having them tell us the day and time over the next 3 to 4 weeks.

We’ll be mapping and connecting people, and then doing a new cycle of peer-peer visits and micro-teaching where we can record folks that can be observed by the entire staff as well.  I think [by] creating that awareness and intentionality around that, we'll get people to think about how they can get better, and when they get better, I think it's a no-brainer that scholars will reap the benefits of teachers being a little bit more intentional around meeting individual needs.

As we all aware, we are still feeling many impacts from the pandemic, one of which is a nationwide teacher shortage.  Paradoxically, as David Guzmán points out, we are also seeing unprecedented funding in the field.

David Guzmán: It's a really challenging time for school leaders like, you know, you're walking into a school year with expectations to move data. And I think sometimes you feel like the elephant in the room is like, there's some schools that have double digit vacancies. The thing that people aren't talking about like for the first time that I can recall, education is being funded at a level that I'm like, Wow, we can actually do some things. But the catch-22 is that right now we don't even have the bodies to put in front of the students, and it's kind of sad and heartbreaking as someone who's been in education now for a little over 2 decades. I'm not one that likes to make excuses, but you can't win the game if you don’t have the players on the field.

Given the teacher shortage situation, we are urgently trying to fill positions - to get a body in the seat in front of students.  However, we must continually return to these four pillars of adult professional culture to ensure that we provide the foundation for these new teachers to grow and thrive rather than burn out and leave the profession.

1. Forming a common language and shared expectations
2. Developing a culture of trust
3. Believing in all students and being intentional and proactive about meeting their needs
4. Building capacity from within - support with accountability.

If we prepare our school leaders to build this foundation, our educational structure will be able to support teachers and the students it serves.  This work is not easy, but it is important, and we can’t give up on it.