By Sonja Bloetner
I am a first generation American born to two immigrant parents who came to this country to give their children a better life. My grandparents, their parents, had only received between a third grade to eighth grade education. Nonetheless, I watched as family members became doctors, teachers, psychologists, nurses, business owners and principals. From an early age, I realized that education could be a game changer for families in poverty if they worked hard enough and stayed focused on their goals.
Everyday for the last 25 years, I have kept this vision of the power of education before me whether I was in the classroom teaching English or Spanish, in the schoolhouse leading the work on collaborative teams or in the central office planning and implementing various strategic initiatives. My mission has always been clear. Empower diverse learners and leaders to maximize learning and accomplish their dream! You can imagine that this journey has not always been easy, but has always been meaningful.
My journey to Education began as a learner. In the University, where I earned my bachelors in Psychology with a minor in Spanish. I then went back and earned a master’s degree in Instructional Systems Design and Development and earned a certificate in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). I had the option to use this degree to move towards a business track or an education track. Initially, I pursued counseling and worked on a hotline to help people who called in with various disorders, ranging from Depression to Multiple Personality Disorders. After working there for three weeks, I realized that I needed to do something that could help others create a solid foundation for their futures, instead of trying to rebuild houses on shaky foundations. With this picture in my head, I chose to pursue the Education track because I believed that I could make a difference to help shape the future and shift educational and economic outcomes for each life that I touched in the schoolhouse.
I remember my first week in the classroom. I was only in my early twenties teaching Spanish at a local high school. I was hired on a provisional certificate and struggled to figure out how to plan out my lessons and keep my 150 students, spread over six class periods, fully engaged and learning for the full 45 minutes during each class period. That year ended badly and I remember crying in the principal’s office when he told me that my provisional contract was not going to be renewed for the following school year. The greatest learning that I took away from that experience was that leaders should never give up on first year teachers and need to lead with compassion and support. I also learned how important it was to believe that learning, while sometimes bumpy, can lead to growth if the teacher is committed to applying theory and practice and is willing to learn from their mistakes. I stayed committed to education because I believed that any failure has a bright side if you learn from the challenge.
I took this learning into my next position as an ESOL teacher in an elementary school in a large urban county, as a long-term substitute and then later began to teach full-time, working with PreK-5 ESOL students. I was lucky to work for an amazing principal that believed in “checking your ego at the door” and serving her people. I learned so much from her about creating a sense of urgency, working in collaborative teams and the power of a common vision. This new opportunity began my leadership journey towards building my vision of what education could do for diverse learners. Later, I became an instructional specialist working on various curriculum development projects and districtwide professional development and led various project teams and cross-office teams to effectively support teaching and learning for English language learners across the district. Later, I had the opportunity to apply for a supervisor position over the ESOL program, PreK-12. I applied and got the position and realized that I had stepped into a political hornet’s nest. At every turn, I found myself in the middle of a power struggle to control strategies to shape the outcomes of English language learners in our district, with the least amount of money possible and the least amount of real change for everyone else.
In my role as a supervisor, I was fortunate enough to work for a great leader who was a master system and strategic thinker. She took the program from a lot of random strategies to a program that was aligned to the strategic goals of the superintendent and built out the work of the program to ensure that all components were aligned to strategic goals for each of the team from identification and placement to instruction, curriculum development, professional development, parent outreach, counseling, interpretation, translation and grant management. We outlined a vision, mission and identified measures that we monitored to measure our success.
By Sonja Bloetner
So Teresa Donner just walked out of a recent items meeting with her boss, Mr. Jennings. She sat in her office replaying the interaction in her head. Today was another day that left a funny feeling in her stomach. She thought about how the meeting began with her boss saying, “So, what do you have for me?” He would listen to her passionately share some of the data that she had been reviewing with the team to create urgency and then shared some of the strategies that she had brainstormed with the team to begin to tackle some of the challenges that they had been facing, but just didn’t seem to get it.
Some of the data that they had been exploring as a team was how well the English language learners were performing on the high-stakes state mandated assessment for reading and math, compared to their language proficiency levels. Teresa had painstakingly been doing research and comparing different data sets and created summary charts about the data to shake up the mindsets of her team and get them to think about how they could approach the work differently.
She reflected back on how one of her specialists always seemed to want to blame schools and talk about all the reasons why they have not been getting results when she said, “They are just not doing the right work and they are not listening to us.” She challenged the team and refocused the discussion around specific examples of how they were not able to shift some of the leadership practices in schools as it related to instruction, scheduling and professional development. The team discussed how important it was for them to believe in the leaders in schools and support them. The team also talked about the fact that it really came down to where everyone was along their learning progression to get to results.
For the past four years, Teresa had been sharing updates about the work of the team, shared reflection about the collaboration taking place with other teams across offices and lessons learned from the innovative projects that they had taken on around curriculum development and professional development. Mr. Jennings would listen and offer very little feedback and often try to shut down projects and put Teresa on the defensive.
Teresa came back to the present moment and thought about all too often how the churn in her stomach was a constant state every time she left one of her items with her boss. It had been difficult to put her finger on what was wrong because she always wanted to believe the best in everyone. It was only when she went back and analyzed her items meeting notes and realized that most of the innovative projects that she had taken on with the team were shut down by her boss; she was strung along for several months every time she would bring up a problem that needed to be solved; and she was always on an emotional roller coaster because one meeting was positive and the next one was negative. Over the course of four years, this pattern and trend happened over and over again. Eventually, most of the projects came to a standstill and her boss began to undermine her work with his superiors and other offices.
Either Mr. Jennings was dealing with a personality disorder, was insecure or was intentionally creating the conditions for failure. At the same time, he liked to talk about Equity and Innovation. However, every action that he seemed to take was micromanaging and controlling the actions of everyone that he supervised, which led to shutting down everything unless he was the decision maker. At the same time, he seemed to not trust himself as a leader and seemed to have a difficult time trusting his own judgement so that led to him never making a decision, not communicating effectively and refusing to strategically plan the work of the team. Teresa began to wonder if she was on the right team and began looking to work for someone else who was a stronger leader who knew how to encourage and empower his people. It seems that Mr. Jennings did not understand how leading progress on his team would create the climate and culture needed to shift the learning outcomes for all students and ensure that the team was innovating to solve real problems that the organization was facing to get to better results.
Teresa Amabille calls this concept the ‘Progress Principle’ and highlights how important motivation, personal sense of challenge, positive emotions and positive perceptions that teams need to have in their work life. She also noted that people are more likely to be more creative and come up with innovative strategies when they are happier in the workplace. She talked about how the single most important motivator for employees is the feeling that they making progress in their work on a daily basis. The leaders in organizations with very effective managers utilized catalysts to help employees feel valued and supported. Some of these catalysts included having clear goals; autonomy on how to solve their problems; removing barriers and getting support from other groups; protecting the team from distractions; top managers encouraged the team members in their work and helped them know how important their work was to the organization. Additionally, the leader worked hard to build meaningful relationships with the team.
By Sonja Bloetner
“It is all about cultural proficiency and race and equity…..so I want you and Martha to coordinate the work around a districtwide literacy plan,” said the Director of K-12 Instructional Programs, Mr. Justice, to two of his supervisors. Over the course of the school year, the Science supervisor had watched the districtwide literacy plan get implemented and had involved so many specialists across multiple teams, including math, science, social studies, English, ESOL, special education, and the gifted & talented groups. Everyone in the department was hopeful that we would finally be able to improve learning outcomes for diverse learners who had been lagging behind in achievement for several years.
As Nina Maddy, the science supervisor, considered the messaging around the importance of equity and the coordinated support that were being discussed in several leadership team meetings, she was hopeful. For years the district had been led by another supervisor who seemed to look the other way when kids were failing and ignored the complaints of diverse parents who had been sharing concerns about how their children were just not getting their learning needs met in schools. Mr. Justice made a bold move when he hired two black supervisors in key positions in both Mathematics and Science. Nina felt that her director had her back and really wanted to make a positive difference to positively shift outcomes for diverse students who were underperforming. In fact, the strategic goals for the team focused on:
Eliminating the achievement gap for African American and Latino students.
Increasing the literacy rates for African American and Latino students.
Increasing graduation rates for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students and other diverse learners.
These strategic goals were front and center on the department strategic plan and led to key messages around planning rigorous instruction, being culturally responsive in content classes and all teachers being teachers of language and literacy.
However, Nina was disheartened when she thought about the unfolding of recent events that seemed to contradict everything that these messages seemed to stand for. The challenge was that the words and actions were not in congruence. While the talk was that “all students need rigorous instruction,” the walk was all about trying to figure out how to get around the law and the mandates from the state and not enroll all students in Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Instead, he wanted Nina to “find a loophole” for the district to get around this mandate.
It was bad enough that this was happening in Science, but it didn’t stop there. Nina had heard from the math supervisor that the director was also trying to find another loophole around enrolling all students in a math course each year and wanted to find a way around students not taking Geometry. She had also heard from the ESOL supervisor that the director was trying to find a way to not have ESOL students taking ESOL courses, to acquire the academic English needed and instead wanted to see if putting ESOL students in sheltered classes without professional development and language supports met the federal requirement. She had also heard that he was trying to route 16 year old ESOL students into a program that did not provide them with a high school diploma, taking them off of a graduation track intentionally.
As she pondered her dilemma, there were so many other examples of how he tried to silence the voice of his leaders of color, he tried to have one of his supervisors hide the work that was being done to improve the curriculum. He eliminated positions to various departments who had few supports and, in some cases, half time positions, but the work never seemed to go away.
Nina thought back to some of the work that she had done before moving under this director. She remembered how she had effectively shifted the outcomes of diverse learners when her associate superintendent and director had aligned the strategic direction of the district outlined by the superintendent. It had been quite a journey! She had watched the performance shift for the district as the superintendent, Dr. Deeny outlined the strategic vision for the district in teams that included executive district leaders, central office leaders, school leaders, community members and parents.
Dr. Deeny had outlined a vision, mission, core values and strategic goals with objectives. Every strategic goal touched every office, every school and every student. Everyone knew where their work fit into the larger picture. He also had measures for each strategic goal and the district had momentum to shift the district in the right direction. These inputs created the right outputs that increased outcomes on every measure from kindergarten to Grade 12, as evidenced by our data. The superintendent created positive narratives by tracking a cohort of students called “Ms. Deeny’s kids” and helped others believe what was possible by monitoring their growth. Nina learned that the measures mattered and noted that leaders have to plan the inputs if they want different outputs.
By Sonja Bloetner
“I believe that all students can be successful...Let’s look at some data about how we are doing as a system...I notice that there is a lot of variability...let’s look at how we are using our resources...who are the teachers of record...we need more teachers directly in in front of students...why are we pulling teachers and principals out of school for professional learning....why do we need all of those teachers supporting staff...what are they doing,” were just some of the comments made by Mr. Doblar after examining the work of the district when he took the helm at the beginning of his term in office several years ago. Ms. Reely listened and was hopeful. It seemed that Mr. Doblar was going to be the superintendent that would begin to move the district back to its envied seat of high achievement for all groups of students, at the head of the pack.
The district had just been through a series of shifts and ‘changing of the guard’ as it had gone through three different superintendents and was now moving into a new phase with a new superintendent. Around three years had passed with Mr. Doblar at the helm. He had lots of ideas and had spent half a year, before taking office to study the data of the district.
However, Ms. Reely had been talking to principals and had heard that they did not believe that he was doing a great job communicating his vision to his principals and other leaders. Many of the principals were feeling disconnected from a common goal and vision. Even though they felt this way, many of them were afraid to voice these concerns because they were afraid of retaliation. As a result, the district had been bleeding great teachers and administrators for the past two years, losing them to other districts in the local area.
For several years, the district was outperforming most districts around the country. The district had become a Flagship among many other districts and many university leaders and other district leaders would come and visit to learn at the feet of the district’s leadership team. As a result of the varied changes that had pulled the district in so many different directions, the engine in the great machine that had consistently been outputting high level results began to decline and had brought this great giant to its knees. The current leadership team struggled to figure out what their challenges really were and figure out how to halt the devolving institution.
However, the district had not always been that way. Back in the early 1990s, Ms. Reely remembered that the district did not have any curriculum, only 9-Week Planners. At that time, every grade-level team would use these planners to build a curriculum plan and lessons for their students. Needless to say, that meant that every school had its own curriculum and it was more a system of schools than a school system.
Then, Mr. Montes had taken the helm, after this time, and had transformed the district into a data-driven machine with strong leaders that had built a systemwide plan that had driven the success of the district. Over the course of ten years, he fired and rehired everyone in the central office and recruited a team that built world-class curricula in all subject areas, established an efficient and effective learning machine for adults and children and later received a national award of excellence for visionary leadership and business management. Mr. Montesl was explicit in his vision and put race, as an issue, on the table for his teachers and leaders. He invested in professional development because he understood that you can only move a system if everyone understands how to be excellent at their work. Not surprisingly, he also created communication systems to get information out to schools about his vision, identified employees that were aligning their work to his vision and kept a pulse on the work that was taking place at every level in the system. He was masterful in his ability to align a system to coordinate their work around his vision all the way down to the classroom. He also established a variety of data sessions, cross-office central office team meetings and professional learning communities among teachers and school leaders to ensure that collaboration was the way of life.
Ms. Reely reflected on the way that things used to function and considered how the current leader, Mr. Doblar seemed to say all of the right things. However, she noted that his say and do just did not align. He would say, “Success for Every Student”, but his actions would consistently eliminate resources to black, brown and poor children. Interestingly, he had also lessened the focus on race and looked the other way when leaders below him eliminated programs that could close the opportunity and achievement gaps for the most vulnerable students of color who were currently being marginalized in the school system. In fact, he had been heard making disparaging comments about “these children” not needing highly-qualified teachers.
By Sonja Bloetner
“We are going to have to change the instructional model to co-teaching for our English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)...things are just not working...we have to change now,” the ESOL supervisor, Mr. Marney squirmed in his seat as he listened to the messages that his Associate Superintendent, Ms. Penni, was sharing in a meeting with other executive leaders. The most frustrating moment was hearing these messages when discussions had not taken place and no plans had been made to manage this huge change for this growing student population at the secondary level.
Earlier that year, the director, Mr. Dimes had tried to have ESOL students that were in Advanced ESOL courses take English formative assessments every quarter. Mr. Marney and Mr. Dimes had discussed this approach at length and agreed that engaging ESOL students with grade-level standards, curriculum and assessments were important. They discussed that this would not be an issue for ESOL students that were dually enrolled in ESOL and English courses. However, Mr. Marney had shared several concerns for ESOL students that were not enrolled in English courses and had not had exposure to the grade-level English curriculum.
Regardless of concerns that were brought to Mr. Dimes attention, he refused to listen and pushed a recommendation through to a central office committee and made the decision without sufficient stakeholder input. Mr. Marney informally had some conversation from ESOL lead teachers to get their input and several of these leaders shared the same concerns that had been shared with Mr. Dimes. Mr. Marney shared these concerns with Mr. DImes, who just dismissed the concerns and began to spin how things needed to be “messaged” to stakeholders. The snowball of concerns continued to grow and some of the ESOL lead teachers reached out to the Teacher Union and Board of Education. Some of these leaders talked with the Chief Academic Officer, Ms. Nickels.
She listened to the concerns and called a meeting to discuss how the Mr. Marney and Mr. Dimes would be addressing them. Ms. Nickels made it clear that the decision needed to keep moving forward and discussed what curriculum resource and professional development was going to take place. Mr. Marney shared his implementation plan for assessment and curriculum resources.
Mr. Marney also outlined his plan and timeline for how professional development would be provided to teachers and teacher leaders so that they would be ready to implement the formative assessments in the fall and spring of the current school year. Some of the greatest concerns that were raised by school staff was that the decision was made in July and was shared with school staff in August when they began school and there was no provisions that were made to ensure that this decision was informed by stakeholder voice, including principals, teacher leaders and teachers. To make matters more interesting, the Office of Testing and Research was too overwhelmed and busy to help Mr. Marney pull data to help him analyze the effectiveness of his programs. However, it was not too “overwhelming” for Mr. Marney to do it by himself and bring it back to the committee in less than a month. Of course, while the Executive Leader, Associate Superintendent and Director all wanted to see the data, none of them had any time to support the data analysis, provide support in the data collection process or join the ESOL supervisor to discuss qualitative data or visit schools.
Needless to say, teachers and teacher leaders felt frustrated with Mr. Marney and other leaders in the central office and wondered…”who are all of these crazies in central office that keep shoving new things down the throats of schools without communicating or providing support in a timely fashion.” Mr. Marney thought back about the events of the year and felt so discouraged because it seemed like his leaders were deliberately setting him up for failure and was taking strategic action to ruin his reputation. This was extremely frustrating because every decision that had been made in previous years were always well-thought out and were centered around strategic goals to improve learning outcomes for ESOL students in the district.
Well, here he was again sitting in a meeting with executive level leaders from other offices and his Associate Superintendent was dropping the plan to disassemble the ESOL program and remove resources from secondary schools at the same time when they were already struggling to move the data for their ESOL students to get to success.
Mr. Marney tried to delicately share his perspective in the meeting and shared, “We have been doing a lot of work to align curriculum resources for secondary schools...We have replaced curriculum resources for all ESOL Level 3-4 students at the middle school level...the plan was to make this shift at the high school level...However, we were told to put this project on hold.” Meanwhile, Mr. Dimes shared how important it was to move the work at the high school level because it was a “priority”.
Of course, he failed to mention that he had shut down Mr. Marney’s request to convene a multi-stakeholder group in November, had shut down the implementation of grade level resources in January and had just refused to allow Mr. Marney to do a pilot for high school ESOL programs the day before. Ms. Penni insisted that Mr. Marney find some schools that could pilot a co-teaching model. The only thing that Mr. Marney could think about was how important it was to effectively manage change to get to the desired results. The leadership in the district did not even seem to understand how to move the organization with a deep understanding of the change process:
With all of the ups and downs in the organization, Mr. Marney had begun to study about change management to better understand how to improve the culture in his organization and make sure that his people felt valued. He learned about the ADKAR Model, by Jeff Hiatt, and realized some of the biggest challenges were that the team wanted to jump straight into implementation. Other than the ESOL supervisor, none of the other leaders wanted to take the time to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data; and discuss these data with teams to create urgency to get to Awareness level in this model. They refused to articulate their core values and understand the core values of their teams; and seek to understand what motivates their people to get to the Desire level in this model. They refused to observe instruction; gather feedback data; examine research; and benchmark their practices against other districts to get to the Knowledge level in this model. They refused to figure out what skills and professional development would be needed to move the organization in the direction that they want to go to get to the Ability level in this model. Finally, there was no way that anything that was being implemented was attainable or sustainable so they always felt like they were on a treadmill going nowhere really fast. Mr. Marney struggled with how he could manage up to help the leaders above him really see the real issues behind the failures that seemed to keep impacting the district. There had to be a way. He knew that everybody sitting at the table wanted the same thing. If everyone sitting at the table wanted success, why was it so hard to get to results?
By Sonja Bloetner
“Welcome everyone. Welcome back to another school year. As you know, our data has been telling us that we have a lot of work to do. Our English language learners at the elementary level made a 20% gain compared to last year. It was great to see the number of students that exited the program in Grade 3. Our English language learners at the middle school level made a 10 % gain compared to last year. We are still worried about the number of our students in the program that are not exiting the program in Grades 5, 6 and 7. We need to figure out what programming strategies that we need to put in place to reduce the number of Long-term English language learners in our district. Based on our data, we realize that these students lack of progress in literacy is the real issue. We will need to dig deeper into our data to better understand what instruction needs to look like to meet their needs. Our English language learners at the high school level has grown around 15% compared to last year. This is promising news for us. However, we need to consider what we can do to increase our graduation rates.
As you know, our graduation rates are around 50% and we know that many of our high school students are struggling when they take the Social Studies and E/LA state assessment and need to receive tutoring supports and complete projects. We now have six strategic goals that we drive everything. We have to make sure that everything is aligned to these goals. I expect that you will write curriculum, develop professional development for ESOL teachers, develop professional development for content teachers, professional development for administrators, purchase new resources, support schools….” Ms. Carrey’s head was spinning as she thought about all of the work that was behind each of strategic goals that were being shared by her director, Ms. Pulley.
The previous year had been overwhelming, Ms. Carrey’s team had been constantly pushing hard on multiple directives from her director to address the data that continued to slip and slide in the wrong direction. In addition, it did not help that the district office was eliminating resources to the team at the same time that they wanted all of this work to be done to improve academic outcomes.
Earlier that year, Ms. Pulley had been sharing data with the superintendent about the challenges that the district was facing due to the enrollment of many older English language learners that had come to the district without parents. In some cases, they were court ordered to attend schools when they were sent to a guardian after crossing the border illegally. The leaders in the districts had a difficult time wrapping their minds around this change and it took several video clips at the international office with parents lining the hallways and lots of data being shared with Board of Education members and executive level leaders. The associate superintendent regularly blocked the director from meeting with principal audiences and sharing updates about the work that needed to be done to improve academic outcomes for English language learners for schools at all levels. It seemed counterintuitive to expect that the data would improve when effective communication and collaboration was not taking place and the district was not sufficiently investing in the professional development and other supports needed for this population that had a history of being at risk, compared to other students.
Ms. Carrey went back to her office and sat down at her desk. She looked out the window at the community garden that members of the team tended to every day. The more she thought about the work, the more that she realized that she had to come up with better systems and processes to get the work done and had to keep working on retooling her small team to become more efficient in their learning so that they could develop stronger strategies for schools.
This was the work that she decided to roll up her sleeves and learn with her team to develop strategies that could move the students, schools and the entire district to better results. She knew that it was not going to be easy but she was committed to doing this important work.