Pipe Dreams?

Let’s dream for a moment.  I am talking about those big dreams that we are waiting for “someday” to kidnap and take hostage and finally conquer.  Those what ifs without the yeah buts.  What if we had a school where the walls became quantum tunnels that teachers, students, leaders etc.  could see and walk through to collaborate with whatever was going on on the other side of the wall.  What if, everyone worked together?  What if everything was in alignment yet still respected discretionary space?  What if staff and students surrounded themselves with support through human contact, conversation, reflection and professional learning?  What if student’s learning was infused with passionate and authentic academia and ways to show up for themselves at an early age?  What if teachers learned how to show up for themselves and become their best version every day?  What if leaders led by example, modeled their own learning, and were more visible?  What if everyone was happy?

Now let’s stop dreaming and starting making a plan to make this Quantum Culture exist.  These were all dreams that I believed in but never really did anything about because I was afraid it was too hard and too lofty.  I picked the easy things to do first just to check them off my list only to look back at my list and realize that I checked one thing off but then just added another easy thing to do on my list.  This was going on for too many years and I was spinning in circles.  Sure I made some baby step progress but the progress wasn’t moving forward it was just getting traction.  I needed to take massive action and I needed to stop procrastinating.  First, I educated myself by reading books, listening to podcasts, and exploring professional development. Rachel Hollis, Ed Mylett, Sandra Herbst, and Matt Glover were a few of the experts that I have studied in this field. They gave me so many places to start as well as presented evidence that it worked that I had no excuse not to begin. Here is what I learned. I decided to start with the hard things because that is what high performers do.  They dig in, fail, spin out, and then after consistent hard work and time they finally get traction to actually start moving towards their goal.  I had to show up every day especially if it was hard.  My end goal was to build schools into Super Schools where all the ‘what ifs’ were transformed into existence. 

In order to change the conversation of a school, a leader must have a plan.  I decided that is where I would begin.  I made myself as visible as possible and walked the halls and the classrooms and listened.  I would write down everything I heard, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Then I picked three goals that would absolutely change the culture of the school.  I wrote the goal to work on first.  That goal was time.  The second goal I chose was Vertical and horizontal Alignment, The third goal I chose was support.  The final goal was building capacity and teacher/leader growth through a pedagogical and wellness lens.  These are all very hard things to accomplish and so I must start with them because all good things come because of the hard things.  We had to embrace it all and we had to do it every day, even if we miss.

Next, I went through each goal and brainstormed the steps for how I would achieve that specific goal.  For example, with the idea of time, I wrote:  “not enough time…”  Then I brainstormed and wrote everything that came to my mind. I wrote: weekly team time, monthly vertical team time, module on time management in professional and personal life, professional development within a school day with the kids, presenting more opportunities to learn throughout a school day with and without kids, making staff meetings more effective and filled with professional discussion, learning, and work time, making sure we are using our time effectively and providing the most opportunities to learn possible in a day/week/month/year, etc. 

The point was to dump the excuses once and for all because we were missing the opportunities that were already there.  We could do this!  We could make time work for us instead of waste it.  We realized we had the time, we were just using it to build up obstacles instead of climbing them. Of course, it was going to be very very hard but all things that are hard are worth fighting for.  Next, we went all in.  We chose one thing and made it happen immediately.  Once we conquered it or at least got it rolling, we hacked away at the next idea on my brainstorming using the same strategy.  Once we approached the end of the to do list to create more time and space, we had reached our first mile. We had finally made some progress toward moving our culture to use our time to create more opportunities to learn.

The next mile was creating vertical and horizontal alignment and we followed the same strategy and took action immediately with a gentle urgency. We have to do this every day and we have to be relentless through the thick and the thin or we will never make change. Baby steps every day makes a world of difference because after all we are influencing the people who will change the world some day. Our idea is that we better model how exactly they are going to do that by making a plan and making it happen.