Innovation vs. Structure: Finding the Balance in Education - Engaging Leadership

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Innovation vs. Structure: Finding the Balance in Education

Episode 309 • 7th November 2024 • Engaging Leadership • CT Leong, Dr. Jim Kanichirayil

It's not a space that is known to have an innovation culture. What's interesting about the K through 12 space though, is that it is chock full of all sorts of ideas on how to better deliver educational outcomes. So it's an interesting contrast that this provides where you have a ton of ideas and idea factory within a segment, but.

you're never really sticking [: 00:01:00

Jeremy olson He's the superintendent of bemidji school district in minnesota. Jeremy is starting his 17th year as a school superintendent So he's seen a few things. He served as a high school history teacher and a middle school and high school principal prior to taking the [00:02:00] role as the superintendent.

t district, which has roughly: 4600

He believes that every leader needs to learn something new each day in order to become a student of leadership, Jeremy, welcome to the show.

[00:02:28] Dr. Jim: I'm pumped to have this conversation. And I'm usually excited about having these conversations in general, but this one is particularly interesting because we're going to look at concepts of innovation, total quality management, and how that can fit in the K through 12 space.

that shaped your leadership [: 00:03:00

[00:03:01] Jeremy Olson: Think some of the things that shaped me early on in my career was really learning from other very gifted leaders. Also learning from some leaders that maybe I wouldn't want to replicate. I made mistakes early on, not understanding that leadership is about people.

And it's really about making sure that people understand that you care about them, that you have their back. I think that's, those are some of the lessons I learned early on. I also think that the philosophy as I moved into larger organizations. So I started off in smaller organizations where you could sit down, you could have a meeting with your 20 staff members, walk through.

What we were doing, why we were doing that. And there was a real intentional back and forth conversation. It was a very intimate setting to now leading larger organizations. And what I've had to learn is leading through people now. So now you're not just leading the individuals on the front line.

ops, the feedback loops. How [: 00:04:00

Why are we making these decisions and making sure there's those feedback loops and those communication loops that really make a strong and healthy organization.

And you hinted at how you have to lead differently. And what I'm curious about is when you're in a larger organization, having primarily grown up in smaller organizations, what were the things that you did to build the skill to be effective in leading through people versus directly leading and influencing people?

Because I knew very, Clearly, what job needed to be done and how to do that. Sometimes I was micromanaging that next group of people, and what I had to learn was to step back and say, okay, I need to lead through philosophy. I need to lead through shared vision versus this is what I did when I was a principal or this is what I did when I was a teacher.

You have to step back and really help. Develop that culture of leadership within your leaders, within your your principles, within your direct reports that gives them both the freedom to act. But then also the freedom to speak to you and to also confront you and say, no, this isn't the right direction or I disagree and giving them that freedom to speak up to push back where necessary actually leads to better decisions.

to. Learn very quickly that [: 00:06:00

[00:06:08] Dr. Jim: That makes a lot of sense. I think one of the areas that would be helpful in fleshing out would be building the space for or creating the space and culture for people to actually be able to push back because I'm thinking about it from the perspective of if I'm the new guy in an organization and I have all of these legacy people that are there, some of them are probably going to be like, Oh, I got to keep my head down and fly under the radar.

So I'm not getting it. Getting whacked the next time the opportunity comes in. So I'll just keep my mouth shut. So how do you break down that resistance and create that environment when people are probably pretty nervous when you're the new person in charge?

I want the best ideas to surface. This is not Jeremy's ideas. This needs to be about what's best for our kids and best for our district. It's one thing to say that though, what you have to do is you have to see it, but then you have to actually live it. So what that means is when someone does push back, you have to really manage yourself, right?

Like I'm, I need to be very careful that I received this in grace, that I thank them, that I show appreciation for the defer, when someone's thinking differently than I am when people are pushing back, because everyone's watching that first exchange, right? Because if you jump on that person, you say, no, this is my idea.

said, Hey, I appreciate your [: 00:08:00

Thank you so much for, even if that idea isn't the idea we ended up going with, thank you so much for putting that on the table and making sure that we had the opportunity to evaluate whether or not this was the direction we should go. I think more than anything else, people are listening to what you're saying, but they're actually more or less.

I believe they're much more intent on what you're doing and how you're living what you're saying.

One of the things that i'm curious about now you've worked In really small districts, and now you're working in a bigger district. And when you think about some of the things that you've done in your [00:09:00] current district, what was the district landscape that you walked into when you set foot in in your current district?

They don't know what you're about. It's easy to say things. Are you actually going to live them? And it takes a lot of courage to make that first step to push back. So I would say that the atmosphere I walked into was one of very strong leaders that, Probably function more like islands and silos versus a unified district.

And so what we've worked on as intentionally as leaders is coming together and making sure that we understand that our decisions, the decisions that one school makes affect all the other schools. We need to work much more. In alignment and together and in unity, we can't be a confederation of schools.

We have to be union of the [: 00:10:00

[00:10:21] Dr. Jim: I listen to what you're describing, something stood out to me, and that was your comment that we're operating more as a confederation of schools or a bunch of silos than an actual cohesive district. And when I hear that, one of the problems that I think of is, okay if I'm The top banana here.

How do I get line of sight into what's important across all of these different constituencies and build a cohesive plan that unifies everybody. So tell us a little bit about what that work look like. And once you had done that work. What did you decide to move forward on?

How do we do that? Realistically, what we're trying to do and what we're trying to build here is really that culture of excellence, so giving people permission to push back. We're setting excellence as our standard. So I don't, one of the things I've talked about is I don't want to hear about good enough.

That's not the standard we're looking for. The standard is excellence. That's what we're really focused on is how do we build that quality and that excellence throughout our impaired district. Some of the other things we looked at we wanted to have a clearly defined vision and purpose. We wanted to be able to articulate the why behind our decision.

defining a strong vision and [: 00:12:00

We're going down this direction. We don't just say we're going down this direction. What we say is we're going down this road because, and then we go X, Y, and Z, and we would lay out the whys behind the action that we're taking. And When we talk about leadership and why we're moving together as a district and why we're trying to have unified practices, we lay out the why because of what it does and the dysfunction it can create within our district.

If one district or one school does it one way and the other school does it another way. So we're trying to have uniform practices, but we don't want to get away from is there is some we're trying some freedom that is needed to have innovation. So we do want our schools being innovative in what they do.

look at how do we scale that [: 00:13:00

[00:13:03] Dr. Jim: What I like about your answer is that you talked about the need for standardization to build cohesion across the district. And one of the things that you get out of a standardized process is that you can identify where the gaps are pretty easily. But what I'm curious about, and I reference this in the beginning of the show, is that when you're thinking about innovation, you need a degree of freedom to be able to innovate.

So how did you marry those two things in the context of the K through 12 space, which isn't known really outside of its own circles for innovation? So what did you do?

You have the same expectations around content. We shouldn't be teaching them. A different type of [00:14:00] American history in one elementary school than we do there's got to be standardization of those processes, but when we talk about teaching practices, that's where we want to be innovative, if so, we have teachers that experiment and look at, okay, is there a better way to teach the contents uniform, right?

So we need to have that uniform product, but how we do that. And how we deliver that product that's where we want to have the innovation. We have teachers that will pilot, for instance, they will pilot a practice. They'll pilot a a way of teaching or how they're teaching interactively. Some of those different pieces, those are the things that we look at and say, is that being effective?

And then we can look at our, if we're going to pilot, for instance, a program, a reading program. We can look and say, how effective is that? And then if that's really effective. So we've been moving in this thing called UFLY in our elementary that was piloted and we started seeing a lot of success.

that innovation and success [: 00:15:00

A standard process of what we're doing throughout the district. So I think on the standard piece, we want to make sure that though the user experience is very standard, but at the same time, like you said, allowing a lot of room for innovation and then scaling up that innovation when we find something that works,

[00:15:38] Jeremy Olson: so evaluation is really critical, right? Because. It's so difficult to evaluate in the educational space because students are not widgets, right? So you have social economic disparities between schools. You have you have different styles of teachers different experience level of teachers. And so it's really challenging to evaluate.

So how do we [: 00:16:00

So are those students growing more than their peers? And then we look at Some of the more nuanced pieces, which is, for instance, we're seeing a lot of success in a school that traditionally has some social economic barriers. That's really a positive thing. So you can't necessarily compare schools, sample sizes to between the schools because you do have some factors that are not uniform.

But you have to, can trying to control for those was, did we get a better outcome based on those standard? Scores and also the formative assessments. And we also talk to, we try to go in and see, okay, in the classroom, is this being effective? What's the teacher reporting it? Are they having an easier time delivering content?

rasping the content quicker? [: 00:17:00

[00:17:09] Dr. Jim: What's interesting about what you describe is, I'm sitting in the space between. What's tried and true and let's try something new and those two things can often be in opposition with each other and if you're trying to meet in the middle, it's really difficult to build something that has the right balance and you reference balance and what you were talking about earlier.

So what were the steps that you took? To build the capacity to continue doing what works, but also innovate within a framework as well so that you can continue to get better. Tell us about how you managed to pull that off.

So I just want to reference that first of all how do we fit in within that space? That's a real challenging dynamic. What we try to do is. We need to be tried and true because we have so many fads within education that we jump from bandwagon to bandwagon.

If you were to take a survey of my staff right now, they would say, please, not one more thing, right? Because what ends up happening is we throw so many different pieces at them that they never actually get proficient. At all the different pieces. So we keep switching this up time. We even do this in the state standards and with state assessments.

We keep switching things up on our teachers. And then we wonder why are we not having the success that we're hoping to have. And so I want to be really careful with that because we absolutely always need to leave the door open for innovation. Our teachers. Want to innovate. They like innovation. But at the same time, we also need some consistency so we can evaluate whether or not those innovations are being successful or not.

this pendulum swinging thing [: 00:19:00

Because if you keep throwing everything out all the time, how in the world do you measure whether or not the innovations are making are actually creating better teaching environments? And it resulting in better student outcomes. And so that's the space that we're trying to navigate.

What did that process look like?

So we're all going heading down the right road. What we've been trying to do is say, okay Our focus right now is on reading and math instruction. That is our focus. That's what we're trying to be laser focused on going back to some of the things we just talked about We've had pendulum swinging happening so much in reading and math instruction.

're also looking at our math [: 00:21:00

There's multiple different ways to get the same answer, which is completely true. But then we started finding out that their basic skills were lacking. All right, some of those basic skill and drills that we were doing that we threw out when we threw everything out, we also throw out some really great things.

So trying to find and strike that balance is really challenging. So when we talk about keeping people on point, when people come with ideas, we want to listen to them. We want to look at and evaluate, is this helping us? innovate? Is this helping us move forward? Is it actually creating a better way to educate?

Or is this a distraction? Is this a separate, is it separate from where the direction we're going right now? Because we can't have this scattered shotgun approach to education, because if we do that, we're not going to be consistent and students lose out. So trying to keep that narrow focus. So when people come to us with ideas, we're looking at, is this actually taking us down the road?

And does this help us [: 00:22:00

[00:22:02] Dr. Jim: So there's an interesting aspect of your answer that I like, where you're asking a couple of key questions from your perspective to frame out what's the path forward that you want to take. What I'm wondering is. These conversations first have to go through whoever is the building leader.

So what were the steps that you took to equip your building leaders to take that measured approach and train them up to have these sort of conversations versus just, no, there isn't a versus just three, two, one. So one of the things that I'm wondering is, you're talking about what the overall district should be doing. Now, part of this from a. Communication chain perspective, a lot of these things get surfaced at the building level. So what were the steps that you took to get your building leaders better equipped to handle these conversations and navigate them in a way where people's feelings don't get hurt because their idea doesn't move forward.

I think that was something that as we started having conversations as leadership about where we need to go as a district. And if you hear any noise outside, they're working on the outside of our building here. If you hear anything, that's what's going on. But we as a district came together with principals and leadership team and determined that there was some real major issues with consistency that there were some real major issues with this fad jumping that we had seen so often.

that, that direction in our [: 00:24:00

[00:24:16] Dr. Jim: So I like that. I like the the collaborative engine that you're building, where you're talking about getting everybody together and then taking whatever the findings are back to the buildings. But again, you're still facing this issue where you have. Maybe four or five, six different building leaders.

They all have things that have been bubbled up to them. How do you decide what was the process in deciding which one of these innovations are we going to pursue that's relevant to the building that's being discussed, that's going to serve the broader the broader district if we decide to scale that up.

So what we've tried to do is stay real disciplined around. And again, I want to be careful here because I don't, we don't want to just have this top down. This is the, all we're going to do. And then we impede that innovation we were just talking about. But as far as direction and where you're, we're heading to avoid the shotgun approach, we embedded in that strategic plan and the strategic direction.

And we really Tried to hone everything around that strategic direction so that we aren't moving in several different things. Have people been upset because they were told, no, absolutely. But again, we need to stay disciplined because if you don't stay disciplined, you and your end result actually gets worse.

[00:25:57] Jeremy Olson: So there was a couple of different [00:26:00] things. One is as, as we listened to our staff which I think is a big thing for any leader when they come in is to make sure that you listen intently, have those intentional conversations, do some intentional listening with your staff, with your leaders about what their concerns are.

And what kept coming up over and over again was this idea of. I would say initiative fatigue was, I think the term that was used most often jumping from fad to fad jumping on bandwagons, those types of things, and then not being consistent as schools and not functioning as a unified district, those are items that were brought up.

Real initially, and we started working on as a team. I think a huge hindrance in education, not only in our district, but in education is the jumping from fad to fad. So we tried to stop any new initiatives from going forward because we really wanted to focus our energies on the things that really mattered.

initiatives. We're not going [: 00:27:00

And we just started putting all of our focus on the instructional plan and then brought the principals together and heard from them and they were able to help. Change the instructional plan to some degree, to edit it, to make it a much stronger plan. And so we had a lot of conversations and those are hard conversations because when you have principals who are all generally type A personalities and all want their thing to, to carry the day, as we started to walk through that, we understood that we had a lot more similarities than we did differences.

r all these great ideas from [: 00:28:00

And those are the things that we spent our energy on.

I think the big thing that you have to have in place is a framework that's defined by some core principles that you're going to embed across. And I think that's the big thing that you have to have in place is a framework that's defined by some core principles that you're going to embed across. Your organization and then through the collaborative exercise, you can build a bake innovation in within reason.

're speaking to that leader. [: 00:29:00

[00:29:20] Jeremy Olson: I think when building a culture of excellence, it's really important that we give people permission to push back to be innovative to also disagree with you. I think that oftentimes leaders are so worried about their egos that they get in the way. And so I think first of all, you have to give people permission to push back.

There's great ideas out there. Develop your values. Input loops, how are you getting input from people that are your teachers, your paraprofessionals, your principals? How are you getting that input to you? So you can make strong, good decisions based on that input, based on the concerns that are out there.

ommunication plan look like? [: 00:30:00

Those are that's when you start really getting buy in and that's when people start moving towards excellence. I think you have to lean into the concept of teaming. Of developing strong committees to provide that input to make some of those decisions because not all decisions need to be made at the at that top level.

We need to make sure that decisions are made it at the lower levels of the organization because those decisions often are the best, but that they're informed by Based on a strategic direction that is set at the district level. So I think those are things that are really important. And then I think you have to celebrate your successes with your people.

hat momentum starts to build [: 00:31:00

And then as a leader, you have to take responsibility for when things don't go well. You have to own that. You have to Apologize or whatever the case may be. You take all the responsibility when things don't go well, and then you celebrate the successes of others and really make sure that the credit goes to those people that are so well deserving and hard, hardworking throughout your organization.

And then you have to stay focused and disciplined. So those are the aspects that I think build a culture of excellence.

[00:31:45] Jeremy Olson: You can certainly give me a call on my cell phone. My email address which I think can be provided and certainly reach me that way would love to have conversations. I love talking about all things, education and leadership. I'm constantly learning constantly making mistakes and [00:32:00] trying to get better each and every day.

You were talking a lot about excellence, building excellence and embedding excellence throughout the organization. And that phrase came to mind and it came to mind in a couple of different ways. Now, when you think about creating the right balance between structure and innovation, it's really weird a gardening concept that came to mind, like in order for you to have a good garden, you need to have some fencing and border that's in place.

gs that are important to the [: 00:33:00

And that's what I gathered from this conversation. So for those folks. Who want to have the best of both worlds. I think what you do did really was communicate the core principle that everything is informed by and that provides structure. You built a collaboration engine that allows people to bring forward ideas.

And then from that collaboration exercise, you're going to pick the things that most aligned. With the structure that you'd already built that gives space for experimentation. So I think from a general principle perspective, if you can apply those concepts, the, that really sets you up well to pull this off within your district.

ights that help them build a [: 00:34:00