"Instead of finding all the bad people and punishing them, what we need to do is find the good practice and exalt it and make it the norm."
Alan Blankstein, the award-winning and bestselling author of Failure is Not An Option, was one of the very first thought leaders in education to promote the values of professional learning communities. He knows and understands schools and how to bring about positive change. In his new book, The Answer is in the Room: How Effective Schools Scale Up Student Success, he offers a very compelling thesis: that within every school and district, even the lowest performing ones, there is great teaching and excellent practice to be found which can be scaled. At a time in education where blaming the teachers is seen as the primary solution for bringing about change, Alan takes the opposite approach. He believes we are wasting valuable time and resources focusing on the negative, rather than finding the positives and building upon those ideas and practices.
Q: The message of your new book, The Answer is in the Room, is that somewhere, within every school and every district, there is great teaching and excellent practice already underway – even in the lowest performing schools. Tell us about why you believe that to be the case?
Alan Blankstein: Well, there are three reasons why I believe that’s the case: one is that it’s been our practice; we’ve been out in the field for more than a decade and that’s what we’ve seen. The second is that, if you talk to any principal or superintendent, they will say almost invariably that someone in the school is doing really well. In particular, someone is doing well with the same kids that others are sending to the principal’s office. I have spoken all over the country and in other parts of the world, and that’s consistently the case. The third reason is that I didn’t believe numbers one and two are enough to let that go as a researcher, wearing that hat, and so I talked with 50 of the top people in North America and the UK on this same topic and to inform the book, and virtually every single one of them agreed with that concept, and that’s been their experience as well.
” … if you talk to any principal or superintendent, they will say almost invariably that someone in the school is doing really well. In particular, someone is doing well with the same kids that others are sending to the principal’s office.”Q: So, as a follow-up to that, every school leader would want to know then, ‘Okay. So how do I find that excellence and how do I scale it so it’s the norm in my school or my district?’
Alan Blankstein: The work that we’ve been doing is helping people to identify what that excellence is, first of all, and secondly, how to identify it once they’ve determined what the excellence is and how do they find it, and then the third is the methods for actually making that the norm. So, in terms of identifying, or defining I should say, excellence, the approach includes having people come together and have a really structured conversation around what it is. So for example, in the case of instruction: What does good instruction look like? What are the elements of it? Where have you seen it? What is ineffective? What is effective? What are the specific techniques of it being used? What kind of preparation goes into it, so on and so forth, so there is a whole lot of specific information that comes out if you asked a structured set of questions. Once they have defined what excellence is, in this case, in terms of instruction, then the second part is identifying where it is: Which classroom? Which teachers? But the important thing here is that the people who defined excellence are the people who are now going to find excellence. So, our process would engage those same people who otherwise would be resistant in defining what the excellence is and defining their needs. Once they have done that, then they are real interested in finding excellence and fulfilling the needs, and that’s the big twist. In other words, the receptivity to having someone come into your classroom goes way up when you’ve been the person who’s defined what it is they are looking for in their classroom. Then, the third part is to scale it, and that’s a natural outgrowth that comes from this, but there are structures and processes that we use that help that along.
Q: There is something very simple and wonderful about leveraging and bringing to scale what is already working in a school because, as you say, it’s an inside-out approach that the school community owns and it can be done for a fraction of the cost of outside professional development. Tell us about that if you will.
Alan Blankstein: Well, the thing is that the big opposition to almost any change starts with people who are saying, ‘I’m already doing that,’ or they are saying, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ or they are saying ‘That will never work here. That wouldn’t work with my kids.’ So, once we realize that excellence is already within the school and the district, then the conversation changes because we are no longer saying, ‘Well that won’t work here.’ Because, ‘Yes it does; it works right next door to you, in the classroom right next door to you.’ And they won’t be saying, ‘Well, why do I have to do that?’ because they are seeing that their peers are succeeding and they too are invited to enjoy in that same success by means of facilitating really good conversations; not the naming and blaming game, you know; that’s ineffective and it’s deleterious to the change. So, yes; the answer is within.
” … once we realize that excellence is already within the school and the district, then the conversation changes because we are no longer saying, ‘Well that won’t work here.’ Because, ‘Yes it does; it works right next door to you, in the classroom right next door to you.’”The challenge has always been: How do we define it? How do we identify it? And then, how do we scale it? Frankly, defining it is relatively quick and easy. Identifying it is a little bit of a challenge because what happens is that there is some pushback depending on how you do this. People will say, ‘Well, I’m already doing that.’ You have to get to the point where people are looking for things they don’t already do and that becomes the new game. So, they put on their investigator hat or their scientist, you know, archeological dig hat, and they are looking for things and it becomes, you know, a discovery. And then the other part is, obviously, making that the norm; and you know, as I said there, there is whole methodology for doing that. But it’s doable. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing for the past decade.
Q: In the preface to your new book, you write, “What I have learned over the past 25 years is that there are very few, if any, bad people in education. There is only bad methodology.” Can you talk about that and specifically what you mean by “bad methodology?”
Alan Blankstein: What I mean is that I worked with W. Edwards Deming, the quality guru who became famous after he helped Japan’s industry rise and start to compete with and beat ours. He said that there are five inputs to any system, and so those are: the methods for doing things, the people that are doing them, the materials that are used (the resources), the environment in which you operating, and then the fifth one is the machines that are being used (the mechanics). Of those five, we think that people are the reason for the majority of the outcome, and in fact, it’s the other way around. People are at the low end of the influence as to what works and what the outcome will be. Method is very high up in that hierarchy; so in other words, if we depersonalize what’s going on in these classrooms and in these schools and say, well, let’s not talk about how good John is or how bad Sally is, or whatever it is; let’s talk about the methods that they’re using.
“They no longer talked about good teachers and bad teachers; they talked about good methodology and ineffective methodology. As a result, people could get over the personal aspects and the personal challenges of change much easier, because they were just focused on what works and everyone was focused on it together.”For example, one of the schools that we worked in (we worked in the entire district in Mansfield, Texas), it had this particular school, Worley Middle School, had 2,000 incidents of in- and out-of-school suspensions a year. After year one of the work, they reduced it to 1,000 and after year two, to 100. So they went from 2,000 to 100 incidents in. What they did was, they looked at what it was that really high performing teachers were doing in those classrooms. I say high performing now in terms of not having discipline referrals or suspensions, and they found that there were certain methods that the teachers would use. Instead of yelling across the classroom to a student who was not paying attention, they would come up close to the student and say, ‘Are you having a problem with this lesson?” and do it in a private way once the other students were focused on other things. Now, that’s one of several things that were occurring in these higher performing classrooms, but the important issue is that they had already laid the groundwork for other teachers coming and identifying excellence in those classrooms, and for all of the teachers being onboard with wanting to scale that excellence – whatever they found, they all wanted to do it. They no longer talked about good teachers and bad teachers; they talked about good methodology and ineffective methodology. As a result, people could get over the personal aspects and the personal challenges of change much easier, because they were just focused on what works and everyone was focused on it together. So, they all started to use the same methodologies and that’s how they reduced the discipline issues from 2,000 to 100 in two years.
Q: You believe strongly that we have wasted valuable time and resources focusing on the negative: trying to identify and blame bad teachers or dumbing down curriculums so they are “teacher-proof,” rather than focusing on finding the positives and scaling those ideas and practices through the school building, district or state-wide. Can you tell us about that?
Alan Blankstein: If we build on what I was just sharing with you, then you can see that if you instead focus on good teachers and bad teachers and identifying and labeling, for that matter, good and bad anything (good and bad students), you spend an awful lot of time sorting and selecting. T his is what we have been trying to get away from in education in general when it came to students. Education used to be about determining which students were going to go on; that was about 6% of all the students at the turn of the last century, and the rest of them weren’t going to finish high school, and that was that. So, this sorting and selecting game is problematic if what we want is success across the board.
“If you look at the other nations, Finland, Singapore, Shanghai … all across the world that are beating us in the international exams … you will see that they have taken a very different approach. They are focused on what’s working and how to make everyone excellent; and that’s the game that’s gonna win.”Instead of finding all the bad people and punishing them, what we need to do is find the good practice and exalt it and make it the norm using a series of steps that would facilitate that. So where do you want to put the focus? Do you want to put it on what’s not working or what’s working? Bad people or good methodology? And so far, this country, unlike our competitors across Asia and much of Europe, has been focused on finding and expunging bad teachers, and also dumbing down curriculums so that we don’t even need to worry about it, whether there is a human involved, practically. We just want people to do what we are telling them to do. If you look at the other nations, Finland, Singapore, Shanghai, and so forth, all across the world that are beating us in the international exams, like PISA, you will see that they have taken a very different approach. They are focused on what’s working and how to make everyone excellent; and that’s the game that’s gonna win.
Q: Creating and building trust within the school community is something you have identified as being critical for school leaders, especially when they want to push reforms or change. Why is establishing trust so important?
Alan Blankstein: I think people know this intuitively, but Bryk and Schneider did some wonderful research in 2002 where they studied schools in Chicago for five years. Those who had low relational trust in year one and low relational trust in year five had virtually zero percent chance of bringing about student gains in math and literacy. Now, the relational trust here is related to the trust that the adults have among and between other adults, as opposed to between and among adults and students. So, that tells us something else that I think we know intuitively: if the adults are getting along, the kids are getting along; if the adults are learning, the kids are learning and vice versa. If the adults stop learning, it’s highly likely that the kids won’t be valuing learning either. So, trust is just fundamental to all other activities. And as you can imagine with this process in particular, where within a year, we’ve really helped schools totally to personalize, say learning walks, so that people make that the norm. They are in each other’s classrooms all the time and they’re learning from one another all the time. That requires a lot of trust, and so that is just one example of where it’s necessary. It is essential for the functioning of a school in all realms.
” … if the adults are getting along, the kids are getting along; if the adults are learning, the kids are learning and vice versa. If the adults stop learning, it’s highly likely that the kids won’t be valuing learning either.”Q: A lot of change that goes on in schools is mandated from outside, such as turning around failing or low performing schools. But sometimes a district that is doing just fine wants to do better. Tell us a little bit about your work with Mansfield Independent School District in Texas. That was a district that was considered pretty good, but they wanted to be excellent.
Alan Blankstein: Right. So Mansfield was already a good district, highly functional as they would say, and now they are a recognized district in Texas. They feel that although their proficiency stayed around 90% for all their students, it went up a little bit over the time that we were there. The functionality of the team went up significantly and they retained, or slightly augmented their proficiency in math and literacy in other areas, in the face of being the fastest growing district in Texas, (one of the fastest in the nation), and the growth was coming from a new student population that was poorer than those who had already been there. So, this district is very forward-thinking and they weren’t really that concerned about No Child Left Behind and they found those tests to be somewhat limiting and distracting to what they really wanted to do, which was defined by them. So if we come back to this model, the first thing is commitment. What have people really committed to? They are not usually committed to what they are told to be committed to – all the research is pretty clear on that. They have to be committed to something that they care about. It might be the same, but they are going to have to define it, and this district did. They were committed to having a real learning community. The found that they were very, highly functioning, but someone in silos and that they didn’t really know each other that well across the whole district. So, schools varied quite a bit in their performance and as they were growing so fast, they didn’t have common language across the whole district as to what grades meant or what anything of value to them meant. So they needed to create that. These were parts of their decisions as to what they wanted to do to grow, and what happened was that they ultimately, as I said, they did as well or better on their exams, but they didn’t focus on their No Child Left Behind requirements; they actually focused on things that mattered to them. College graduation and success in college were among those things. I think that it was progressive of them to just almost act as a buffer to the whole school system when it came to No Child Left Behind, when it came to external exams and requirements and instead helped everyone do what they all really wanted to do for the kids.
Q: Good leadership is a key in all schools, needless to say, whether they are looking to make changes or not. How do you build a leadership team that reflects the entire organization and not just the views of the person in charge?
Alan Blankstein: That’s a really good question. I think that what happens is that it’s likely the case that a leader in charge will pick people that resemble his or her views and values, and it’s important for the leader to know that if everyone else in the whole school or school system is like that as well, then that’s fine, and if they’re not, then it’s not so good. Because, what they want to do is to actually engage the whole learning community, and to do that, they need people who represent that community on their leadership team. That would include naysayers. So, just to take that one piece, there are ways to do that. Obviously, you don’t want any and all naysayers, you won’t have much of a team with that, but you do want some people who are not, I call them cave people, citizens against virtually everything. That’s not really what we want. What we want is people who are skeptical, but willing to consider other information and who can influence those who are a little more hardcore and other naysayers.
In other words, you want people who will represent others who are not on that committee or not on that leadership team, and who can be functional even though they may not be your broad leapers and the ones who are looking to adopt everything early, because if you only have that kind of a team where everyone is excited, early adopters, and so forth, you will get a fantastic lift off that is sabotaged and brought to a halt maybe six months or a year later. Instead, what you want is something that is sustainable, that means having representatives from the different sectors of the community; that means a slower lift-off, a more difficult storming and norming phase, but longevity in the whole process.
“How we really do things around here is your school culture. It’s probably the hardest thing to change and the most important … culture is going to trump structures and policies every day of the week, and it needs special attention.”Q: Finally, you have written about the fact that to achieve success with any kind of change, schools must shift their culture, not just make structural changes. Can you talk about why that is and why it’s so important?
Alan Blankstein: School culture is – I guess simplistically put – how do we do things around here? In other words, do we show up late for our meetings? Is that how we do things around here? Do we say we are going to succeed with all students and then fail a quarter of them and just keep moving on and never address it? Is that how we do things around here? Are all the clocks set for a different time? Is that how we do things around here? The culture is kind-of the non-written portion, and if it is written, it’s most well encapsulated in the value statements. But again, those are just statements. How we really do things around here is your school culture. It’s probably the hardest thing to change and the most important, in terms of the durability of your movement, of your initiatives. It’s very easy to say, ‘Everyone should meet at 9 a.m. and collaborate.’ That’s a structural change. What they do in that collaborative time is your culture and that’s what’s most important to you as a leader. So, culture is going to trump structures and policies every day of the week, and it needs special attention.