1/ Leading from the Balcony

Great leaders must be involved in everything but you aren’t the doer of the daily details. You’re a conductor, an organizer, a monitorer (yeah we made that one up), an accountability holder, and a motivator. To do this you have to set the vision and then have a written plan for how you’re going to achieve that plan. We spent the last four weeks outlining the key components of successful schools. These should form the backbone of your plan. Now we dig into taking those things and turning them into a plan of action. Once you have a plan that identifies and implements the key levers of change, your role becomes monitoring. You need the right data coming to you in time to make a difference. This sounds all well and good, but operationalizing that concept is difficult…the first time. Read on.

👇️ 👇️ 👇️ — The next section takes you step by step. Ignore it at your peril.

2/ The Roadmap

Great. You’re on board. I’m glad to hear it. Now, let’s create a plan. Let’s imagine that you are a school principal and it’s February and you’re starting to think about planning for next year. I will mention a few things below that hopefully your district has already, but let’s assume they don’t for the sake of thoroughness in this example. Here’s what you will want to do in your planning. Of course, engaging relevant stakeholder groups will be critical.

1. Establish clear expectations for lesson planning, curriculum/content, instruction, assessment, and student management.

2. Establish clear expectations for how time should be spent in each block/period/lesson during the school day.

3. Identify or create high-quality, rigorous common formative assessments. Create your yearly assessment calendar.

4. Conduct a comprehensive data analysis to help highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the school. If this is the first time thinking about this your only data sources may be student achievement data and that’s okay. That’s the most important.

5. Using the data analysis, establish goals for your academic verticals. For most schools, this will be at least reading and math. If you’re leading a middle or high school, it’s appropriate to set goals for every department. These goals will be student achievement-focused.

6. Using any available data, set goals for your other verticals. This should include the following: student behavior, parent engagement, school operations, and human resources.

7. For all of your verticals, determine who is responsible for meeting this goal. Hint: it’s not you! You oversee the system, monitor, provide support, and hold people accountable.

8. With the relevant stakeholders, establish a set of action steps that are going to help you meet your goals for each vertical. Ask and answer, “What do we need to do next year to meet this/these goals?” These are your action steps.

9. For each vertical, establish leading and lagging indicators of success. These can also be thought of as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

   1. Leading indicators - These will measure two things: a) Are we doing the things we said we were going to do (see step 8) to drive positive change? These are process measures. b) Are we making progress towards our goal? These are outcome measures but measured throughout the year rather than waiting until the end of the year to see if you met your goal.

   2. Lagging indicators - These will measure whether you met your goals. These can also include process (at the end of the year, did we do the things we said we were going to do to drive positive change?) and outcome measures (did we meet our goals?)

10. Create a way to gather data for each of your KPIs. For your process indicators (measuring whether or not you’re doing the things you said you were going to do to drive change) these will more than likely be a checklist that’s completed regularly.

11. Establish an expectation for how regularly the KPI data is gathered.

12. Establish a routine for when you check the KPI data. You should be looking at this at least weekly.

13. Establish a routine for reviewing the KPI data with your entire leadership team (monthly leadership meetings?) and in your regular 1:1 check-ins with each vertical lead.

14. Take action when the data raises red flags.