[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the podcast, Allison Rodman. Allison is the Founder and Chief Learning Officer of The Learning Loop and is an ASCD faculty member. Her work focuses on adult learners, and she's written for Educational Leadership, Education Week's Classroom Q&A, and Edutopia. Allison brings experience as a teacher, instructional coach, school leader, director of teaching and learning, director of professional learning, and school board member. She is the author of Personalized Professional Learning, a job-embedded pathway for elevating teacher voice, which we've previously talked about on Principal Center Radio. And she's the author of the new book, Still Learning, Strengthening Professional and Organizational Capacity, which we're here to talk about today.
[00:54] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:56] SPEAKER_01:
Allison, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.
[00:58] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you so much, Justin. It's wonderful to be back.
[01:01] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I'm excited to talk about the new book, and I wonder if you could start by just telling us a little bit about what you saw happening in the field that prompted you to write this book.
[01:10] SPEAKER_00:
Certainly. So, when the first book, as you noted, came out in 2019, I found that leaders came out in a few different groups, right, in response to that particular work. Some said, this is exactly what we need. We're ready to take it to the next level. Can you start working with our teacher leaders and our building leaders to make them stronger facilitators so we can really put this personalized professional learning work into place? And then others, quite transparently, came out and said...
[01:35]
We fully support this idea of personalized professional learning. We just don't have the learning culture yet to make it happen. We need folks communicating stronger together. We need, you know, better team dynamics. And we also need the adults in our building to recognize that part of their role is to be constant learners and model for our students. So...
[01:55]
That really inspired and sort of prompted this next work, and then, as I'm sure you can imagine, with all of the shifts that we had in the field of education and beyond over the past several years, there were a lot of rewrites and reconfigurations as I continued to kind of keep a pulse on what was happening within our schools, both at the leadership as well as the teacher levels. So, this book came out, you know, just a few months ago, and it's been really exciting to see educators in all parts of the system dig in and really absorb it into their practice.
[02:26] SPEAKER_01:
Allison, you say early on in the book that, you know, we've been paying a lot of attention to student SEL and to different aspects of student development that we often overlook when it comes to the adults in the building. Why do you think that is, that we overlook the needs of adults, and what do you hope that we can start to pay more attention to as a result of your book?
[02:48] SPEAKER_00:
So, one of the things I find somewhat ironic in our field is that we are committed to learning, right? And if you ask most educators why they do what they do, it's for our students. That's what gets us out of bed in the morning. It drives everything that we do. But we also have a responsibility to continue that learning ourselves. And I think sometimes that gets missed in the mix of things that...
[03:08]
Schools should, you know, be a model, not just of student learning, but also adult learning, both within and beyond the field. That other industries should be looking to us as sort of these model learning ecosystems, yet because of the way many of our structures and systems are set up... The adults in our spaces are stretched so thin that there's not that time for their own pause, reflection, and learning along the way. So I think just by default, our tendency has been to focus on the academic skills as well as the social-emotional learning with our students and not pay that same level of attention to the adults for a variety of different systemic as well as bandwidth challenges.
[03:46] SPEAKER_01:
I wonder if we could paint a little bit of a picture of what some of that learning can look like, because I think back to my experience as a new teacher and climbing that very, very steep learning curve that, you know, just even basic competence is a struggle right out of the gate, right? Just getting the... You know, the workload and the routines and, you know, just getting your feet under you as a teacher is certainly a challenge. And there's a huge amount of relief that comes with getting that stuff figured out.
[04:10]
Like, I can really remember just the drop in my stress level as I started to get my feet underneath me as a new teacher. And I think for a lot of people, there is the perception that once you have figured things out, you should kind of settle in. And, you know, obviously that's a very different perspective than you're talking about in the book, but help us think about what development looks like beyond that kind of initial... competence, you know, I'm no longer struggling.
[04:38]
I remember the lurching from one thing to another in my first months and years of teaching, like, oh, this thing will save me. Oh, this other thing will save me. And finding that place of stability was, again, a huge relief. So what does it look like to continue to grow and learn after you've achieved a measure of stability in your career as an educator?
[04:55] SPEAKER_00:
I think there's a need to make a distinction between settling in and stability and intentional pause and refinement.
[05:14]
We wanted to, in the title, communicate the idea that, yes, it's our responsibility as educators to be continuous learners, right, that continue to evolve, to refine our practice, but it's also our responsibility at certain points to stay still and to block out all of the busyness and the multitasking and the constant hamster wheel of movement that can sometimes overtake the profession to be really thoughtful and intentional about the decisions that we make. We work with our students to engage in a lot of reflection, to think about their learning over time, how they've progressed from quarter one to quarter two. And I don't know within the field, because it's so overridden with busyness, that we've given that same space to educators to engage in similar reflection. That, yes, it's about continuing to refine and push your practice forward, but it's also giving yourself those moments of pause to step back and say, you know what?
[06:11]
These practices served me really well five years ago, but we know more about brain science, and we know more about our students' needs, or our students' needs have shifted. Over time. And maybe it's best for me to let some of those practices go, or as Peter DeWitt might say, like, sort of de-implement, right? In the same way that we continue to implement and add new layers to our craft.
[06:32] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, you know, in saying settling in, I definitely had this picture of the kind of colleague that I'm sure we've all had who... figured things out 30 years ago and has not changed a thing since, you know, and definitely we want to avoid that sense of stagnation and, you know, not keeping up with new research and new practices. But on the other hand, one of the things I've been increasingly concerned about in recent years is faddishness and the constant desire to do something new, even if what we're pursuing turns out to not be very good. And I think we're starting to learn that lesson as a profession that You know, if we always jump on the latest bandwagon, sometimes we will choose bad bandwagons.
[07:11]
And you, in the book, talk about five, as you said, practices, or I was almost thinking of them as kind of disciplines for growing without it just being this kind of, like, flavor of the month. Okay, it's a new day, time for a new fad. Talk to us about how you chose these five practices or disciplines for the book.
[07:29] SPEAKER_00:
Certainly, and I love that you brought up this idea of fad or flavor of the week, right? Because I think we make two mistakes in education in that particular professional learning space is, one, we're always switching, as you noted, right? We're kind of, like, going after that next bandwagon or that next shiny ball that's in the profession, or we don't take the bandwagon long enough, right? So we might have picked the right wagon, and we, you know...
[07:52]
present the idea to our staff, but because adults struggle with change sometimes, when things get a little bit challenging, we assume that it was the wrong one, and we sort of abandon that practice before really seeing it through from a place of consistency and continuity. So, you know, there's that challenge, but then also beyond sort of the faddishness of being able to kind of find the next thing, we need to, as you noted, engage in consistent Right? So, to be able to understand ourself as learners, one another as learners, and our learning community in a way that enables us to adapt and respond to changing needs of our students, but also whatever that new thing or new practice that we may need might be. So...
[08:37]
The five disciplines that I outline throughout the course of the book really move from self to team to system, and they don't necessarily need to be explored in a linear fashion, but I wanted to make sure that educators across the system, regardless of their position, were able to sort of opt in or find that discipline of strength as well as one of growth... to continue developing their own practice. And with that, I was really intentional about using the term organization rather than school or district throughout the course of the text because I wanted a leader to be able to envision what that could look like at the district level. I also wanted a teacher to be able to work with his or her team and be able to think about that group as an organization so that they were pushing their learning, not just as a professional, but also at the organizational level.
[09:27]
So the five different disciplines walk through attunement, knowing yourself as a learner and the degree to which you can bring your full self to the learning community. Sometimes we don't know what kind of learner we are and how we engage best with others. So really taking that time to understand our own strengths and growth opportunities. The second is that of alignment, making sure that as educators we have really clearly defined goals, both personally and professionally, and that our day-to-day actions aren't just driven by our inbox, but instead the practices that we engage in and take ...are aligned to that purpose or those goals that we've established.
[10:04]
The third discipline looks at perspective, so recognizing that there are a variety of different viewpoints within our school communities. And if we're going to truly grow as a collective group, we have a responsibility to understand those different perspectives and see how they're playing out in our craft with our students. The fourth looks at collective efficacy, so moving beyond just self-efficacy and seeing that ongoing progress as an individual, but also thinking about how our teams are setting goals so that we can see that collective progress over time. And then, finally, the fifth discipline is organizational learning, really looking at the ways we engage as a learning ecosystem, and as I mentioned earlier, thinking about how our school spaces can truly be models of holistic learning, not just for the field of education, but beyond as well.
[10:51] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Alison, one of the things I wanted to ask about, because we've had so much conversation as a profession about burnout and about feeling kind of disconnected from the work, like we're stressing ourselves out and doing all these things, and we're not sure they're really the right things. You talk in the book about alignment. How do we make sure that we're aligned, and how do we practice that discipline of alignment?
[11:12] SPEAKER_00:
One of the first steps that we need to take is making sure that we're setting really strong and intentional goals, professionally as well as personally. So, you know, we look at student growth objectives and we say we want our students to grow on a particular state assessment, or maybe there's a particular strategy that we want to develop in our practice over the course of a school year. But I don't know that we engage in that process as deeply and as well-defined as we could. Okay, so...
[12:02]
we have now perpetuated this sort of feeling of burnout and never having enough time to engage personally as much as perhaps we do professionally. So being able to establish those strong goals, not just in sort of our circle of doing, right, how we engage as a professional, but also our circles of being, what we need for our own personal care, and our circle of relating, how we engage with others is a really important part of that alignment process, because if those goals are firmly in place, it makes it much easier to then look at our action plan for the day and say, how am I working towards these today, this week, this month, this quarter, in a more intentional and aligned way. But that's hard. You know, we don't typically see a professional learning workshop on setting goals or time blocking your calendar or being able to really set key priorities in a way that is going to be necessary as we look forward to the sustainability of the profession.
[13:01]
We're already facing a retention challenge, and unless we can get to the core of some of those alignment issues, if you will, I think it's going to be harder and harder to keep folks in it for the long game and not just kind of a quick burst. So it's been really fun kind of working with educators in that space and helping them to be a bit more aligned and feel that sense of ongoing fulfillment.
[13:24] SPEAKER_01:
A big piece of that, to me, seems to be what we say no to, right? Like, if we think about setting goals, goals seem like more things on the to-do list, longer lists, more that we can't get to. But if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, this is much more a matter of... Is that the idea?
[13:58] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah.
[14:19]
But instead, be thoughtful about what we're saying yes to and what we're showing up for. So one of the things that I include in this particular chapter of the book are some key prompts and key phrases that are still respectful and professional for educators to converse together, but say, you know, I don't have time for this right now, but I can perhaps get to it next week. Or... There's not space among my current priorities to address that.
[14:47]
What would you like me to stop doing in order to move this into the realm of my actions for this week? So being very respectful, but also transparent about what our capacity is so that we're focused on the goals for ourselves, but then also the right goals for our organization. Because it's absolutely right. A big part of this work is saying no thoughtfully, as much as we say yes and set up those filters for ourselves.
[15:15] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and I think that's such an important skill for people in an organization to be able to say to the people who are above them in the hierarchy, remember, here are all the things that we're committed to, here are all the things I'm doing, and, you know, what do you want me to stop doing, or how does this fit with what we're already doing, because there's a tendency for senior leaders to constantly shop for new things, to constantly identify new priorities, and forget that the work of implementing, you know, yesterday's priorities. In some cases, you know, literally yesterday or maybe the last school year, you know, all of that work is still ongoing for the people on the front lines, even if senior leadership has already written the check. It came out of last year's budget, so it feels kind of ancient history. But as you said earlier, it's not just a matter of choosing the right bandwagons to jump on and being judicious about that. It's about staying on them long enough to see the results
[16:05]
that we're looking for, because often those results are not instantaneous. They really take some sustained work. So help us think about some of these disciplines at the organizational level. And the fifth practice that you talk about, echoing some language from Peter Senge, And his book, The Fifth Discipline, is all about organizational learning. How can we get smarter as organizations about developing people and giving people the conditions under which they're not just constantly lurching from fad to fad, but really can engage in some reflective and sustained development work?
[16:39] SPEAKER_00:
Part of that, Justin, is, as you noted, strengthening the capacity of systems leaders. I can't tell you how many schools I work with where teachers get visibly uncomfortable every time those individuals go to conferences, right? Because they know that, inevitably, they are coming back with whatever the new thing is or whoever the new consultant is, right? And it's just going to kind of shift practice positively, negatively, they don't know, but they know it's going to be a shift of new things of some sort. So...
[17:09]
Being thoughtful with our leaders and helping them engage for the long term. Not to say that we let go of practice, you know, we don't let go of practices that aren't serving us well anymore because we absolutely need to do that. But giving the practices that are in place time to flourish and time to be able to develop. And sometimes that means...
[17:29]
Being that support system or that thought partner for systems leaders to reassure them, you know what, your staff is in the storming phase right now. It's just related to the shift or the change we're asking them to make. We need you to stay consistent, and we need you to stay with this. Part of it is working with leaders around communication norms for their organization or their district, helping them better use calendars, be thoughtful about the emails that they're sending or not sending, and what the subject lines look like, who's copied, who's not, right? These sound like basic things, but they have a tremendous impact from district to school and then to teacher on the ways in which we operate effectively or ineffectively together. And then, at an organizational level, once some of those foundational and core pieces are in place, being able to be thoughtful about the degree to which we're developing people to be deliberately developmental organizations, that we're not happy with just the status quo,
[18:30]
Right.
[18:49]
I was talking to a family member over the weekend, just even in the ways that basic things like grocery shopping have changed over time. I mean, I remember going to the grocery store and needing to write a check for my groceries because it was that or, you know, a credit card. We didn't even have debit cards at that point. And now I share an app with the same login with my husband and our kids, and we all add to the grocery list, and then once a week it gets delivered to the house, right? So that's a place we never could have imagined being in, and that's very much the case for education, that we've got to be willing to consistently dig in and ask those what-if questions at the school and district level to make sure that we're preparing our staff members as well as our students for what's next.
[19:30] SPEAKER_01:
I love that phrase you used, deliberately developmental organizations. And I think about what has shifted in our profession and in our society over the last couple of decades. from a world in which teachers and leaders were prepared through perhaps university programs, and then everybody arrived, you know, with, you know, at least a somewhat predictable set of skills and dispositions. Maybe not ultimately where we want people to be, and certainly there's always been a need for development, but I think the world is so different now in the sense that people do not necessarily come into the profession with any professional training. We have lots and lots of different pathways into various roles that people can, uh, you know, can serve in. And I feel like that has big implications for how we lead our organizations as needing to be developmental in a way that perhaps we didn't see them as developmental in the past.
[20:25]
What have you seen change in the composition and the ways that people enter the profession? And what implications do you see that having for the work we do in those organizations?
[20:34] SPEAKER_00:
One of the things that continues to surface in my conversations with colleagues is that, as you noted, a lot of our teacher preparation programs and then subsequently new teacher induction support has really centered on perhaps an outdated profile of what Newer teachers in our spaces look like. So, in the past, many of those individuals stepped into teaching as their first job or their first career. And with that, there were some executive functioning skills we needed to help them develop alongside with the pedagogical skills to be successful. And what we're very much seeing in this space right now, and I'm quite excited about it, to be honest, is a lot of individuals either shifting careers or embracing teaching as a profession who have a professional past, right? Who have a set of skills that they bring to the profession that may not necessarily be in that pedagogical realm, but they're incredibly valuable.
[21:34]
And what I don't see in the professional learning space are those new teacher programs and support systems transitioning to meet that profile of new teacher. And because of that, they're not feeling the sense of investment that we would hope and that will be necessary to retain them over time. Because in some ways, those previous professional skills that they bring with them aren't valued and aren't recognized in the space. We're assuming that they kind of come in As those first profession folks, and there's a real need, as you kind of mentioned, to think about the ways in which our teaching staff looks right now and what they need in terms of support. Within that discipline of organizational learning, there are sort of three different ways that leaders can respond to some of these shifts. A lot of our work is addressing technical problems, right?
[22:26]
We don't have in-person schooling. We need to figure out how to get everyone a device and get them on Zoom, or I don't have staff to cover this class, um, tomorrow. I need to figure out what my teacher coverages look like, right? Those are technical problems. Then we often see sort of adaptive challenges that arise, where there's an opportunity to sort of flex or respond to changing needs that might arise within our students or our teaching staff. But where I think leaders as a whole aren't sort of catching up, if you will, is embracing some of the generative opportunities that lie before us in the field.
[23:03]
Um, you know, we had some of those key phrases, like, let's not return to normal, and, you know, let's kind of shift our practice. And that's great, that's a tagline, but... Learning is changing quickly, and the ways in which we continue to be defined by bells and time blocks and master schedules, I don't know that is continuing to sort of embrace some of the generative opportunities in learning that lie before us to really meet learners across the system where they are and subsequently push them forward.
[23:31] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, it's interesting because we do have older people with other professional experience coming into the education profession, and they're not, you know, fresh out of college, they're not 21 or 22 years old, as I was when I started teaching, and they do need to be thought of in different ways as, you know, as people who are in a different place on their developmental trajectory. And then, I think... A parallel issue that I'm seeing is that I think we also have people coming into the profession with very different expectations about workload, about professional responsibility, and we're having to juggle both the need for, you know, I think understanding that we're working with older adult learners with maybe a wider range of professional skills, and in some cases, people who maybe are not coming with the same commitment level. And that's a delicate issue and one I wanted to get your perspective on because, you know, I think we always want to assume the best and to hope the best, but sometimes we find, wow, our previous generation of teachers really had a commitment to working hard and to being dedicated that we're not always seeing with the people who are coming into the profession now.
[24:40]
And I'm not willing to abandon hope on that. I'm not willing to just throw up my hands and say, well, I guess, you know, times have changed, so we're just gonna have, frankly, more lazy people from now on. But, like, help me think about this problem, because in some places, it's seeming really acute to me, where you have very dedicated people, and you have other people who just seem to, for whatever reason, not be dedicated at all. And I, again, I have mixed feelings about that, because I feel like part of the dedication, you know, the downside of that extreme dedication is sometimes gross overwork, right? We definitely have needed to make some shifts, but I don't want this to be a pendulum swing from working too hard to working not hard enough, and being too committed to not being committed enough, so...
[25:21]
Given the frameworks that you have in the book and your full collection of tools and wisdom, how would you help us think about that issue, especially for people who are responsible for developing people who have such a huge range of different needs?
[25:35] SPEAKER_00:
When we think about that challenge of commitment, I believe that it's sort of that distinction between showing up and being truly invested. And one of the responsibilities of leaders as a way to build that investment is to, first off, have a very clear vision. Right? So, as a board member, it's incredibly important to me, in collaboration with the other board members, as well as with the superintendent, that we have a clear vision that drives not just the systemic decisions that are being made, but also the day-to-day ones. to be able to say, you know what, this bubbled up as a challenge, but it's not aligned with our vision, we're, we're gonna let it go. Um, because I think it, it helps folks be more committed if they see the vision is clear and we're staying true to that north star, right?
[26:25]
Being, being able to not just kind of waver and, and go with whatever the, the next thing is, but stay, stay the course. And then with that vision, we also need to develop trust with our staff. And trust is often sort of that juxtaposition between strength and vulnerability. So being able to show our progress over time from a place of strength to say, this was our vision, this was our North Star, look how we have already progressed from point A to point B. I fully believe if we dig in and we work together, we can get from B to C and so forth. But that trust is also built through vulnerability.
[27:21]
How can we bring others in so that we're continuing to stay true to that vision, but then also see our collective progress over time? And through those two things, the vision and the trust, I truly believe that that commitment develops organically and deepens over time. But if we're continuing to kind of, you know... Go with the flow and just sort of, like, move from one thing to the next.
[27:43]
I don't know that that commitment is always going to be there, right? People are going to see the profession as nothing more than, you know, just a regular desk job in some ways. When, as we all know, this work requires so much more than that. And that's what makes it incredibly hard, but it's also what makes it incredibly joyful.
[28:02] SPEAKER_01:
Alison, I really appreciate what you said there about kind of as organizations earning that trust of having the vision, the discipline as an organization to show people, like, when you are committing to this profession and to this organization, you're committing to something that's coherent and that has a long-term plan and is not going to just kind of you know, jerk you around lurching from priority to priority, which, yeah, who would want to commit to that? So, I appreciate the system-level thinking and responsibility there. So, the book is Still Learning, Strengthening Professional and Organizational Capacity. And, Allison, knowing that a lot of this work is context-specific and developmental, what are some of the best places for people to get in touch with you if they're interested in talking more about working together?
[28:45] SPEAKER_00:
One of the most exciting components of this book that I really worked in partnership with ASCD to develop is that embedded throughout the text, there are QR codes that lead you to a bank of downloadable and editable resources so that, recognizing the differences in context, you can pick the pieces that are most salient for you and your learning community and be able to dig right in and get the tools as you need them. Other individuals are welcome to check out my website, www.thelearningloop.com, as well as follow me on social media at The Learning Loop.
[29:20] SPEAKER_01:
Well, Allison, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[29:24] SPEAKER_00:
Thanks so much, Justin.
[29:25] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
