I stayed in a group with the folks from Rhode Island, team from Rhode Island. At the end of the session Rick asked me a question: What does this really look like? You know, if you really built a state system like this—which is what I talked about this morning—how does it actually function. When you put together a theory of action, put together some strategies, and you create an agency that is going to do this work. What does it look like?
The honest answer for me is, I don't know. This is what we are gathered here to do today. This is where we are in our field right now. We've developed a new, much more potent state role in our theory of action about how to educate all children to high levels. You folks are caught up in that ride.
We have not prior to, and I include myself among policy people who've thought about this a lot, we've not fully conceptualized what that role is—we don't have any existing examples, at least that I can find looking around the country of state education agencies that are doing this work at anything like scale. And I feel as though we're all in a developmental process, an exploratory process—a process of discovering knowledge, of discovering skills, of discovering practices, and ways of organizing ourselves in order to do this work. And from our joint knowledge in being engaged in this work and then taking the time to do what we've done today, to reflect on it—then we begin to move closer to field leaders in doing this kind of work and then, ultimately, real normative models as to what it ought to look like. So I think we're all in the middle of being engaged in it and that's the sort of largest framing theme I'd say about the work that we're doing together today.
Secondly, in a lot of the conversations that I participated in, there was sort of a dichotomy between on the one hand talking about issues of structure, and on the other hand talking about issues of substance or talking about the work itself. We had a session right after the morning session in which we really spent the entire time, I noticed afterwards, talking about the way in which our agencies structured themselves to do this work. Was everybody at the table? Who played which role, which jobs were involved, who worked for who, what was the district role, what was the state role, how did we embed people, how did you keep everybody on the same page, who had which kind of authority – sorts of issues that people comfortable in organizations, comfortable with policy, comfortable with those kinds of questions commonly talk about.
We did not talk much about the nature of the work itself, about those components of work that I talked about this morning. In fairness, that was partly the way this particular conversation was designed to go anyway, but it illustrates a tendency that I think we have, that is like a tendency that you would see in a typical school, that, unless you have somebody who is guiding discussion in faculty meetings about issues pertaining to instruction in classrooms, to teaching and learning, you're liable to drift off topic, or drift off the core work, and be talking, you know, about discipline problems, or parking issues, or scheduling issues, or what's the latest directive from down town, or a whole host of things which may not be unimportant, but really aren't about your core business and purpose.
So, I think we have to strike balance. Structural issues are real issues. They're particularly real issues because as we think about our own agencies and our work in those agencies, these structural issues typically attach to people's jobs – where they live professionally and what they do.
So to create a theory of action that says we should never talk about structure is really all about the substance of the work and is probably unrealistic. But we've got to put that structural discourse in context, and it really should follow the nature of the work that we conceptualize. We should be structured and organized and have capacity to do the work that we think is important to do.
And the work is—what's the theory of action that we're working on? For example in our group today, in the Rhode Island group, they wound up spending a lot of their time talking about: we think teaching and learning is the most important conversation to have – how do we use our influence as a state education agency to generate and focus this kind of conversation in the districts that we're interacting with.
How do we leverage that and do it in a respectful way. That was the essence of that conversation. Whatever the strategy is that you settle on that you want to work with, whatever the theory of action is, then looking at the strategies that you put together and how you take them to scale or how you operate them in a particular context.
I made a list of a few of the kinds of substantive work challenges that I heard most about today—and they were things like diagnostics: How do we figure out, in any given situation, what we need to do in that situation, and how do we go about differentiating our work from one place to the other? You're not just going out with a template that we're going to apply in the same way to every district that we encounter, that we recognize that this work is contextual.
And we have a differentiated strategy, but we have certain diagnostic instruments and ways of working, ways of – we talked a lot in the Rhode Island group—ways of listening to figure our what's going on on the ground here. Not only substantively—what does the data show us, but what do we know?—if you go back to that PELP diagram that I put out this morning , what do we know about the environment, what do we know about the constraints, under which leadership in this district is operating? And one of the things that we talked about in several of the groups today was: Whose leadership by the way?
A lot of talk about unions, and I'm a big one for suggesting that union leaders ought to be part of the cabinet – they ought to be at the table. And that isn't the natural practice in a lot of the districts where we have a timeworn culture of thinking of unions in an adversarial way so we don't invite them at the district level to the table and therefore they feel like the strategies are being done to them, not with them, and that decreases the probability of success with them, particularly if what we're ultimately talking about is success in the classroom.
This issue about who we have at the table deserves a second thought in some of these things, and states by virtue of who they cause to be invited to various gatherings that you convene can send some powerful messages on things like that.
So anyway, diagnostics are, and adaptations to local contexts are, a big part of the substantive challenges. Theories of action, that is, how you organize your own work – what are the principles that operate that are most important to you, and what are the causal arguments that rationalize the strategies and actions you take behind a particular theory of action? How you align those strategies with one another.
And finally, I heard a lot of talk about measurement of impact, what are the benchmarks—how do we not only, as we talked about his morning, for purposes of making an argument about the importance of this work so we can garner the resources necessary to do the work—but also so we know ourselves, so we engage in that same kind of reflective practice that we urge others to engage in. What kind of data, what kind of benchmarks do we look at that tell us that our theory of action is on the right track, our strategies are doing what they purport to do, that we're actually making some progress–or not! And if not, how do we change action and select a new set of strategies.
In terms of structural questions, lots of questions obviously about resources and challenges in the area of resources. In terms of organization, I heard a lot of conversation back and forth about what's our appropriate role in this new work at the state? We are the authorities in the accountability system; at the same time, we're here to help. How those roles sometimes get in the way of one another, and how do we modulate those and, again, interact respectfully with districts, having a theory of action of our own, but willing to be open minded and listen to what the context of the work is there.
How centralized are we in the way in which we operate, how do we break down the silos that exist within our respective departments and have lots of people at the table but do that with some degree of efficiency, so we don't have interminable, enumerable, continuous, meetings, and we actually get out in the field and get something done, but those kinds of issues. How do we integrate the work of our respective departments with all their respective interests and history in each of those areas – that was an another important thing.
Mary Beth at one point said, "Well this reminds me of the work of Ron Heifetz, who thinks about leadership as both adaptive and technical in nature." There's certain number of technical questions for which we can have technical solutions – maybe fewer in our field than in some other fields. But there are technical issues, about which all of you have garnered a fair amount of knowledge through your experience working in schools and with a variety of districts. Technical knowledge about what works, about which strategies are effective, key components that you think are absolutely essential to a state system. What key components that you think a district absolutely has to have in place in order to be effective. There's technical knowledge about figuring out how to bring all this to scale. That's knowledge that I don't think any of us really have at the moment, but it's knowledge that we're working on, that we're in the midst of developing.
But, more importantly I think in this work there's a lot of adaptive work that needs to be done, taking into account where all these district are, what their resources are, what their politics, what their history are, what the strengths of their leadership—what that local context is, and I feel like we're about the business now, at least first and foremost, of developing field leaders in the districts to do this kind of work to improve the quality of instruction to such a level that all students arrive at proficiency. They have certain resources and assets, and they differ from district to district, that will enable them to meet that challenge. Each of them is going to have a different set of gaps in terms of the kind of help that they need. And part of our work at the state level is to diagnose what that gap is, and make our contribution as best as we can to filling that gap or to helping them find others with the expertise and the resources and the skills to help fill that gap.
If we're successful at that, we may just one day get to a point where we have developed a handful of real field leaders in terms of doing this kind of work, and we will have played an important value-added kind of role in contributing to that success, and building on that success we then migrate toward a normative model of what a state-wide system of support is for this kind of work.
That's my take on where we are in terms of being in the middle of this kind of work. It's not really comfortable to be along the pathway and not really have a clear sense of where you're going. It's kind of entrepreneurial work. I'd submit that through the fog you can see the outlines – you can see some of the pillars, we know some of the things that are really needed and we know some of the kinds of skills and knowledge we have and we know something about what we need to know in order to get where we're going. But there is a certain amount of uncertainty which both makes it uncomfortable at one level and at the same time I think makes it very exciting, new kind of exploratory discovery work that hasn't always been the case, particularly in some of our agencies where we did much more routine kind of work in the not-so-distant past.
So I think it poses a very interesting set of exciting challenges that make for interesting jobs for people doing the kind of work that you're doing. I commend you for the work that you're doing and engaging in this. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today, and for you to listen to me about this kind of thing, and I welcome going along this pathway with you in the future. Thank you very much. [applause]