Out of the Box: State & Systems Leadership

Jean-Claude:

Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the session on state and systems leadership. We have two amazing leaders here with us today, and you’ll be hearing from them throughout the course of the next 39 or 40 minutes or so. As you can imagine, these two folks are the forefront of systems change. We’ll be talking about how they think about their near-term responsibilities and the future of K-12 schooling, what they see as opportunities and barriers to modernization, and the adoption of innovative learning school models. So I want to welcome Dr. Julie Murgel and Dr., I’m going to call him Bill, Dr. Bill Hite to this conversation. I’ve known Bill a long time and I’m really happy to have met Julie in the last couple of weeks. Julie is the Chief Operating Officer at the Montana Office of Public Instruction. Much of our focus has been on the state systems within that particular construct.

And as you all know, Bill, he’s a former Superintendent for [Philadelphia] schools and [is] now the CEO of KnowledgeWorks, doing an amazing job, both of these folks doing an amazing job in education. So let’s just jump in and let me provide some context first, perhaps, on the first couple of questions. As you know, the paper argues that there are two types of systemic inertia getting in the way of transformation to innovative learning school models, one of which is that systemic inertia is rooted in stakeholder mindsets and power dynamics. The paper also argues that it’s not easy for school and district leaders to change because it is often viewed as overwhelmingly laborious or inherently risky;

That leaders may have themselves been successful educators within the industrial paradigm; that teachers may their autonomy in order to implement models that they did not create, and as a result, may feel like going back to square one. I personally have argued in the past that redefining success for students requires coordinated efforts from the classrooms to the school, to the community society at large. So, first question to both of you, what have you done in the past to attempt to change the hearts and minds of others, and how do we overcome the system inertia? Julie, we’ll start with you.

Julie Murgel:

Thanks, Jean-Claude. So prior to returning home to Montana, I was in Denver Public Schools and did implement a middle school math program, Teach to One, [created by] New Classrooms. And as I was thinking about your question, Jean, there’s lots of things that we’ve done to tweak the current system, the current industrial model system, whether it was from the way we did professional development to the way that we set up the classroom, created a big, large learning space, or changed the master schedule to 90 minutes and put a team planning time at the start of the day. But there’s lots of things that we did to tweak the system, but I think the things that resonate with me the most, there were a couple that I think about. One is about our students and their view of [themselves] as learners. We had to really undo what we taught them to do.

The way they showed up in the space, they did not have learner agency. They didn’t know how to engage in a problem. They were so used to things being so scaffold[ed] for them that they were just waiting for the teacher to tell them, “this is what you do next.” There were some students who thrived on getting that opportunity to engage in learning that was personalized and met them right where they needed to be. And there were others who just said, “Let’s go back to the way we did business before. I figured that out, basically. I knew how to operate in that system. I knew how to hide in that system. I knew how to cope, and you’re now asking me to think and I don’t know how to do that.” So that’s one thing that stood out to me when I thought about your question.

Another piece was really kind of difficult was this whole notion of you had to teach this curriculum to grade-level standards, and we were going to be held accountable with the summative assessment that was going to come at the end of the year. And what data did we have to prove that our kids were going to be prepared and perform on that assessment? And the district, like Assistant Superintendent level position, I had to spend so much time just convincing them, [to] let it work. And he was like, “Nope, we need to implement once a week. We need to have some time when we have everybody on grade level content, and be practicing for that test because if we don’t, the consequences of that are not good.”

So those were just two things when I thought about that model about the inertia for change, I was thinking in particular about the students themselves. And so we had to spend a lot of time on teaching the kids, okay, this is what it means to learn, this is what it means to monitor your own learning and to engage in your learning and to question. And I had to spend a lot of time as a school leader fending off the, “what if it doesn’t align to grade level content?” The consequences of that are going to be severe.

Jean-Claude:

[Bill], before I go to over to you, Julie, just thinking about your position right now at the state level, what you said resonates completely. How do you get that to actually happen from your position? Thinking about you’ve got Superintendents, you’ve got school Principals, you’ve got Teachers, all these layers between where you are and where the kids are, how do you operationalize that?

Julie Murgel:

So, I guess that would be part of the motivation in wanting to really join the State Superintendent on her initiative to innovate in assessment and pursue a state grant from the Department of Education to say, can we redefine how we do assessment for the summative model? So, we were awarded that grant and we’re doing a through-year course assessment model that we’re piloting here. And so going out to our district leaders and our teachers and our communities, the Superintendent has really been adamant about, hey, this isn’t just also about, while we’re thinking about innovating in assessment, that means we also have to be innovating and learning at the same time. And so what does that mean? So I think it’s really identifying, Jean, those high levers at the state level to say, where can we help support innovation? And I’m fortunate enough to work for an individual state leader who really does want to see that assessment and that accountability system is not disconnected from the learning. And so within this system, how do we start knocking on the door to say we got to change it?

Jean-Claude:

Awesome. Thank you. Bill, what about you?

Bill Hite:

Yeah, Jean-Claude, thank you. Thanks and thanks for having me here. And Julie, thank you for the work that you’ve done both in Denver and now in Montana. I think the question, Jean Claude, and we’ve all been in leadership roles at the district level, now Julie’s at the state level, and we all understand how using organizational efficiency in order to scale certain strategies and actions, works counter to actually creating learner-centered approaches. So we have this model that we’re using simply because of efficiency, it’s easy to do everything for everyone. Julie just talked about children who may or may not be on grade level in their content, and this is the system that has practiced this for the better part of a couple hundred years. So we’ve practiced taking things to scale, and now we also understand a need for [having] a more learner-centered approach where we’re able to individualize the work or the needs of young people and be more responsive to them, but specifically to your inertia.

And what we did, and I think the key term to your question was “attempt.” What did you attempt? And we attempted to create opportunities for innovation by lifting structures and systems outside of the overall system, if you will. So we tried to create opportunities for innovation by moving individuals outside of the system that was stifling the innovation. But guess what happened? The inertia of the system, the state practices, the state policies, the assessment, all just beat the innovation back into that industrial paradigm. And what we tried to actually create as the set of learner-centered approaches actually became just a different term for a industrialized approach. It just became a happy term for it, the innovation. And what I have found is when that was done best, and Denver did a lot of good work around this, you did some work around this in Chicago.

I mean, what I have found was those successful models were actually models that operated and were able to operate outside of current state policy, particularly around, in Pennsylvania, their seat time requirements, their days, their hours, their credits, their assessment requirements regardless of what approach you take. And so we had one high school that was doing some incredibly unique types of things that they wanted to do around competencies, but they could not cross-walk the competencies to the requirements of the state and actually had to work for several years in order to create something that was evidence of mastery, if you will. And so I think as we do this work moving forward, we have to think about, how is the system structured to create the conditions for a learner-centered approach to occur?

Jean-Claude:

I mean both of you are beginning to bleed into my next question around sort of high-level barriers. Reminds me of one of my favorite Michael Fullan articles where he talks about the three stories of school reform, the inside story, the inside-outside story, and the outside-inside story. So can you both talk a little bit about the interplay that has to exist and when you think about schools, school systems, state systems, in fact even the federal system, for a learner-centered approach to actually take root and take hold, what must be in place? You’re both beginning to touch upon some of the key challenges, but what kind of interplay must actually exist between all these systems?

Bill Hite:

So I’ll start Jean-Claude if that’s okay with you, Julie? So I think one thing we’ve always thought about the system as having the sole responsibility for creating these structures, which means that it was always incumbent upon the system to come up with whatever the solution was or is. And I think that as we think about those things that have been successful, there’s also been a lot of work outside of the system that is aligned to what we all want to see in terms of a profile of a graduate or a profile of a learner. And whether that is a business that’s providing internships, a college or university, or an afterschool program or out-of-school time opportunity. There are multiple places for young people to engage in the type of learner-centered approaches that we want. But we have to coordinate, and in my opinion, we have to begin to coordinate and align many of those systems.

But I think that all starts with coming up with a localized or a community-based profile of a graduate or a profile of a learner, however we want to call it, so that it is based upon the things that are inherently unique to those communities. Now, I will say this, I will add this Jean-Claude, that the profile just can’t be narrow to that community, it also has to include a set of standards that we want to see all children achieve. But if in fact that there’s a need for computer programmers in one place and flight engineers in another place and electricians in another place and carpenters or some other type of web-based security expertise, I think it has to be coordinated and aligned with the aspirations from that community, not just from the sole entity which has historically been the school system.

Jean-Claude:

Yes. How about you Julie?

Julie Murgel:

I think just building on some things that Bill was saying, Jean, I think is that just the notion of this dynamic between the state being sure that we’re providing and alleviating policies that are barriers, we also have to really change what we hold them accountable for. I mean that’s really, really important. So we recently, and we’re still kind of in it, in the state of Montana, when we’re thinking about the state accountability of what we hold schools accountable for, we’ve really started to step back and say, do you have a graduate profile? Have you gone to your community and developed one that does align with local aspirations and is inspiring for the youth in your community? Because we’ve even, Montana’s done a great job of addressing some of these policies to say, how do we get towards more a proficiency based model? So they have it in there, they’ve addressed some of these seat time matters, yet we don’t see schools taking advantage of it or school boards taking advantage of it or leaders taking advantage of it.

So to be able to say you can offer a course equivalent and a school board can improve a work-based learning opportunity for these required credits, these seat time things, that’s in place in the state of Montana. Yet, the desire for them to get there I think partially is due to, one, what we hold them accountable for. We can’t say we want to incentivize this and then not actually align that with the accountability. And then Bill, you said one other thing that I wanted to connect to that I think is really important. When you talk about the alignment of the systems, and I think about how we prepare our educators and our school leaders. It is counter to what we are asking of them in a learner-centered system. So they don’t even experience that firsthand in their preparation program. So we’ve built this great residency model and we’re trying to really encourage in this residency model to say, we just don’t want to put you back into a system for you to be learning for a whole year in your residency the same industrial model.

How do we also be sure that they’re getting infused with some new thinking and new learning firsthand that the approach they’re getting is competency based themselves? So that they’re demonstrating that competency and putting that to work, and so that when they’re out as residents in the school systems, that they’re also starting to rethink about how we redesign that role. So I think we’ve got to hold our schools accountable for what will drive a learner-centered system. I think we do, I agree with you Bill, we’ve got to start thinking about all of those systems that are aligned to this from the time they’re prepared to the time they’re employing it. And that we can’t require the system in and of itself to figure this out by itself, because if it could, it would’ve already and it would’ve been sustained.

And then I think… What was the last thing I was just thinking about? And I do think that we have to redefine the role of educators. If we continue to use the model that we’re using, one teacher, one classroom to everybody, it’s a design issue. How we have them put in that, it’s just a design issue overall, and I just don’t think that we can expect the system itself to redesign itself without some level of support outside of it.

Jean-Claude:

Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a design issue, it’s an expectation issue. It’s how we define success. This idea of a profile of a graduate I think is a fundamental thing we have to push. But in doing that, we also have to understand what we are defining as success in so many places. It’s a myopic definition, frankly, of success. So you both have talked about this idea of learner-centered, right? This idea of competencies, right? So in my prior lives I’ve seen kids being forced to completely retake a class again that they may have failed, but can necessarily demonstrate that they have most of the competencies, but one perhaps is missing. So the work on assessment I think has to be a part of that, but what you brought up particularly really, really well is that there’s got to be an interplay. One system depends on the other.

Last thing I’ll say on this is my friend Michael McAfee, who runs PolicyLink often pushes to me when we talk about systems change, is “at what altitude?” for systems change. I guess in our case, we were talking about perhaps district and state level systems. Let’s shift a little bit and get to perhaps some of the concrete barriers that we know exist around policies and practices. We notice a lot of these that surround, for example, the adoption of instructional materials. We talk about assessment, but let’s get into the curricular and instructional stuff. So many states and districts have extensive regulations and processes centered on the procurement of textbooks and related instructional materials.

The paper also argues that these processes are also often centered under the degree to which materials are aligned to annual grade-level standards, a fixed design element of the industrial paradigm. Of course, as a result, we learned that we see that innovative learning models that prioritize a broader set of cognitive and non-academic outcomes who are designed to meet students’ individual needs in service of their long-term acceleration and success, can often be viewed as incompatible with these policies. So what are your thoughts on solving the systemic barriers perhaps around state and local policies? Perhaps you may want to focus on the adoption of curricula and instructional materials, for example.

Bill Hite:

Julie, you want to take this one first?

Julie Murgel:

I can. Sure, Bill. Oh, what a great question. Right? So think about the cycles that lead to that curriculum adoption, everything that even comes before it. Right? So we think about we’ve got our cycles of standard revisions and when we review them and then when we adopt them, and then how long we give school districts time to adopt curriculum that align with that and what’s really available. And then implementing it, right? Then we start talking about how do you implement it with fidelity and going through this whole cycle. Right? And at what point in that entire conversation did we say anything about learners? Right?

Jean-Claude:

Right.

Julie Murgel:

Okay? There are these huge systems that are built to basically filter kids into, everybody should fit in this box in this way. And that’s just not how learning goes. It is not this. And so even how we define learning. And so when you’re talking about the content and the standards in these curriculum, I mean it doesn’t matter which of these curriculum tools. You could do A, B, or C at the end of the day, I would argue, but if you don’t have somebody who actually can be a facilitator of the learner and help a learner have that self-identity and have the agency and marry those two together, that third part of the arm, I’m just thinking about the instructional core, the shift from student to learner, from teacher to facilitator of learning, to then “how do you marry the relationship between these two?” So if you’re not at the same time addressing how you help kids with the process of being learners and addressing the issue of how you facilitate learning, and you keep going with the same model, it doesn’t really matter what curriculum you plug in there.

And what they’re going to do is they’re going to continue to publish what they can scale and deliver on, across multiple arenas. But I’m not so sure that our curriculum in and of itself is addressing those other two legs of the stool of saying, “how do you actually deliver this instruction?” How do you actually engage learners to be learners in the process so that when they’re interfacing with this tool that it’s going to work for them. But if we really think that the same tool is going to work for every student, I think that’s what gets really difficult. And I think that’s what I loved about New Classrooms, I just want to say this, was we are expecting teachers, then, to differentiate at a rate to individualized students in a way that is impossible to do on a daily basis. To take a curriculum and say, “I’m going to differentiate this for every one of my students so that they can meet their needs and grow and make progression and growth with these standards.”

But that system, every day, differentiated and said, these are the different modules you’re going to do and this is the way you’re going to do it. So I think we’ve got to think smart, Jean and Bill, about technology. How are we using technology thoughtfully to differentiate that curriculum and really be personalized? And so I think it’s going to take more than one curriculum tool, and I don’t think it’s just a technology-based thing in and of itself, but I think in education, we got to learn how to use technology tools to be smarter and faster.

Jean-Claude:

Julie, we can spend all afternoon talking about tech-enabled teaching and learning. That is an area I’m passionate about. I’m not sure we’ll have time to do that, but thank you for all of that. Bill?

Bill Hite:

Yeah, so then I’ll just build on Julie’s point, Jean-Claude, and I think that number one, so here at KnowledgeWorks, our work and our mission is aligned to New Classrooms’ work and their mission. In fact, we do a lot of cross pollination and collaboration around that work. But I do think, and this goes back a little bit to the question, the prior question that you asked, and I think as we think about this work, and I couldn’t agree with Julie more, that the curriculum, we default to talking about the curriculum when that becomes more of a symptom of something and of the type of instruction a child is receiving than anything else. And to Julie’s point, one set of resources for every single child, understanding their individual needs is just kind of silly. And then we ask teachers to make the decision and we haven’t prepared them to do that.

But I want to go back to the prior question when you talked about some of those barriers. And I do think that in the paper it talks about just kind of the work that we were asking teachers to do and talking about a different type of educator and changing the teacher, rethinking the teacher development model. But I think we’re asking them to do this and to be innovative and even giving them the opportunity and saying, “Hey, you have some autonomy to do A and B, but you don’t have…” But for everything else, it’s like all of these rules are here. But that’s why I want to come back to, like a lot of the things that we found in Philadelphia…

And I’ve always said, Jean-Claude, that we found the enemy, we discovered the enemy, and it’s us. And it was us through our policies, it was us through our practices. And I was just at a state talking to a group of Superintendents, and I’ll keep the state anonymous, when individuals talked about the ability to move children to where they should be with respect to their grade level. And in some cases they had the opportunity for middle schoolers to take a certain level of math, but the state requirement was that, that assessment for that particular math could only occur in a certain grade.

So that in and of itself then hampers the ability for the system writ large. And so the district could give all of the innovation in the world, but then the rules, then it actually forces the structure to work within the bounds of said policy, the said practices. And that’s why at KnowledgeWorks we’re working more from a systemic level with partners to focus on those systems, that if done well will create the conditions for learner-centered agency. And so I do think, and then instructional materials just become a byproduct of that. It’s not the product, it’s a byproduct of what you want that’s in response to what a learner needs.

Jean-Claude:

Bill, that’s so well said. So we build a box and you can only innovate within that box. The question is, how do you break out of the box? But to do that, to your point, you need the kind of systemic support and enablement to actually make that happen. If the assessments of myopia are now a focus, there’s currently only so much you can do. One more thing I’ll add is that I was on the board of a large publishing company, large edtech education curriculum company. And I’ll tell you, they want to innovate, they want to do amazing things, but they also beholden to the procurement and the purchasers. If the folks at the state level or the district level are buying things or demanding certain things, they can’t go too far outside of that as well too. So the interplay has to be, I think, universal for that kind of work.

Bill Hite:

And Jean-Claude, they’re also responsive to the fact that there’s an assessment in grades three, four, five.

Jean-Claude:

Yes.

Bill Hite:

So they’re also responsive to that point. And I’m not suggesting that we get rid of assessments, just saying we have to rethink those to be flexible enough so that the demonstration of mastery doesn’t necessarily have to be at a certain point in time or at a certain grade level, but it could be some sort of mastery-based standard or proficiency that a young person is doing on a job site, for instance.

Jean-Claude:

Yes. And I’m watching now some development around funding for the future of assessment, to redesign assessments, which I think is long overdue. And there are folks who actually are working on this, and then we can talk about this also ad nauseum, the ways in which we are actually measuring learning is so myopic and one dimensional that it prevents the kind of work that we see happening at Transcend, for example, or New Classrooms. So lots of work we can do there. So Julie, earlier you talked a little bit about, so did Bill, going outside the system. So Julie, in the case of Montana, you leverage your ESSA and ARP funding to design something called the “innovation zones.” How do you see this work lifting our districts and schools from the constraints of the industrial paradigm? What does it look like in Montana, and what can other state leaders learn from this approach?

Julie Murgel:

So Jean-Claude, that’s a really good question. And we’re getting ready to launch out there with our math innovation zones, and try to also work with the places that we know have already shown signs of wanting to innovate. But we’re kind of doing it at a twofold process, and we’re thinking about it from both like a technical assistant provider and a model provider [perspective]. So that we would have a technical assistant provider working with the community to first say, “how do you have to prepare your system to implement this innovative math program?” And a rubric that says, these are the indicators of what we want this technical assistant provider to help you get to. And then once you get there, then you can begin looking at a model provider. But you’ve got to have strong communication, you’ve got to have your stakeholders engage. What are those indicators that say you’ve readied the system so that you can begin to innovate? And I think one other piece that we’re really going to be pushing on in this process is, we haven’t normally held technical assistant providers accountable.

And so we get consultants and vendors all the time, but we want technical assistant providers who we’re going to hold accountable to say, you need to get our schools to this readiness stage. And if they’re not ready, you need to help them understand what they need to do to get ready. Because the system in itself needs that support to be able to work within its ecosystem too. And so you can’t just turnkey everything, especially in the state of Montana. You guys, we have 80 one-room schoolhouses, which is almost this beautiful thing because if you think about a one-room schoolhouse model, you’re more likely not to be probably so structured on grade level. You got less than 10 kids. So I want you to think about, there’s that, to our tribal land schools to more of our towns where there’s bigger places in Montana that have larger school districts.

Each of these look very different when you’re talking about the amount of school systems that we have in Montana, we have 400 districts in this state, and we have 800 schools. So we are really vast. And so we have to acknowledge where this school is situated in a community and the role that it plays in that community, because it’s really dynamic and diverse here. And so we need some technical assistant providers who are going to come in and say, we’re working on shifting the system and redesigning the system with you, not for you, and we’re not going to tell you how to do it, but we’re going to tell you when we think you’re where you are to begin working with a model provider. And then go for the math innovation zone. Because if we focus in on the model provider right away, that doesn’t address all the things around it that are going to be at play. And it’s got to be iterative. It’s got to be communicating back and forth with that technical advisor. So that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

Bill Hite:

And Julie, to your last point, if you focus on the model, it also becomes a model-centered approach versus a learner-centered approach. And I think if we, just changing the dialogue and the language around this work, and if we’re truly thinking about every learner, then we would be truly thinking about these systems very differently right now. And we would think about time differently, we would think about assessments differently, and we would think about where learning occurs differently as well. And so, I think to Julie’s point, thinking about the learner as we talk about partners and the providers, is extremely important.

Jean-Claude:

Julie, Bill, thank you. Just Bill, staying with you for a bit. Thinking about your life in Philadelphia, what would you have wanted from the state to be able to get this work done? And if you tackle the second part of that question, with KnowledgeWorks, what are you doing to shift the world?

Bill Hite:

Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll hit the first one very quickly. And so when I talked about the competencies versus the mastery approach, and… I’m sorry, the mastery versus the standards and the grade level standards that had to be done at certain grade levels, then having a state that was more nimble and had more flexibilities around how we could measure learning, I think is very important. And especially the use of time and how time was recorded and how it is utilized. But I think, and they sound very simple in nature, but become extremely hard and extremely confining to systems that are trying to innovate. Or subsystems that are trying to innovate. We didn’t try to innovate the whole system, we were just trying to do it school by school. And some schools had to do it, but they had to lift themselves literally outside of that model.

The second, to your point at KnowledgeWorks, the thing that I talked about earlier is we’re working with systems, either districts, states, other organizations, to really look at “how do you build the conditions, and the components that support those conditions, for personalized competency-based based learning so that every learner is seen, heard, engaged, and that they have agency. And so that’s the work that we’re doing at KnowledgeWorks. And I know we’re running short on time, so I’ll stop there.

Jean-Claude:

Yeah. Let’s say this is a beginning conversation. I think the paper does an amazing job of teeing up quickly what we need to be talking about. I think both of you have done an amazing job of talking about the interplay within systems. You can’t just do this in a one-dimensional myopic way. You’ve got to take a look at the 360 degrees that is systems change. Really want to thank you, Julie and Bill, for your time. This has been a terrific conversation.